As a visitor to many Western Europe / rich Asia cities, this is a fair point.
Being in the business district / rich residential / fancy shopping districts, you'd be hard pressed in most of those cities to actually walk into a "bad part of town".
In NYC and a lot of US cities, things can vary from block to block. You could live in Manhattan in a $3M apartment and the nearest grocery is the same one that NYCHA residents use. I'm not saying being poor makes you do crime, but if you are someone who is in a gang and doing crime, you are more likely to live in NYCHA than in the $3M apartment.
It's pretty normal in neighborhoods like UWS, Chelsea, LES/East Village, North Brooklyn to have block to block variance like this.
My subway stop has had 2 drug/gang related murders in the last 2 years, and it's also the first stop into Brooklyn from Manhattan. You'd not expect that.
So yeah, I think we also hide the problem less in our cities than Europe.
You’re probably right about this issue. BTC is a bearer asset and is inherently difficult to store right- someone has to know the private key, and that someone could always irreversibly steal the funds (hopefully it’s multiple someones with a multisig). Especially with such a large pot of money all state backed hacker groups are going to be actively hunting for vulnerabilities.
There’s a very small number of mining pools that control Bitcoin. All the USA has to do to force a hard fork is order them to run alternative mining software.
> bond-buying and tax-paying are the exact same thing, real consumption forgone by current workers
No. US Treasuries are one of the most liquid and easy to borrow against assets in the world. When institutions buy Treasuries, they use them as collateral to borrow against with new money created by the banking system. This money is then spent in the real economy. That’s very different from taxes.
I’ve received so many of these scam calls from fake authorities that I used to just hang up (now I don’t answer calls ever). One time I didn’t hang up because something felt weird. Turned out it was legit and I owed a $20 traffic ticket from years ago. I’m pretty certain it wasn’t a scam, maybe it was.
Worth considering in light of Vitalik’s recent essay “Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again” which addresses how blockchains lost their original cypherpunk roots to financialization and the accompanying statist interventions.
Neither is working for a multi billion dollar multinational tech firm designing ways to spy on users, get them addicted and manipulate their worldviews, but that doesn't stop most of the people who do from fantasizing and larping.
Idk, having a day job so you can fully engage in your passions without having to compromise the thing your passionate about for commercial concerns, while maybe not ideal seems at least consistent with the ideals of punk.
Having a day job is not the issue. There are plenty of day jobs where you don't have to sell out your supposed principles to pay the bills so you can spray graffiti at night. Have you seen what's happening around us? The effect of these day jobs are the thing they're supposedly fighting. They're the ones making the world worse while they call themselves the resistance. I just hope the money is worth it.
Don't get me wrong, that's great, but what exactly are we saying here? Fundraising for a good cause is all that is needed to make something punk? Are church collection plates also punk?
Punk rock was very simple but it still required a skillset; most punk rock fans probably hadn't invested the time and effort to be able to participate past supporting those that did.
Punk movements seem to have always suffered from this sort of unacknowledged lack of unified or organized abilities.
And their aversion to the mainstream and anarchic tendencies often leave them and their goals in absolute limbo.
Punk rock at least had the benefit of "if you can listen and agree, you're in" though. To be remotely included in cypher/cyberpunk practically requires an education of some kind, especially in the post-"mobile OS is all I need" world.
Berlin was the spiritual center of the cyberpunk movement back in the 80s.
Berlin has changed so much since then. It was a divided, post-apocalyptic city, “occupied” by two foreign powers. Lots of soldiers, draft-dogers, musicians, communists, and ex-Nazis.
Now it’s a pretty boring capital city, just like Bonn was back in the day.
I’m glad to see it’s still doing cyberpunk type stuff, like having bitcoin markets.
Kind of, it depends on your ethnicity. Koreans tend to treat white people pretty well. There’s a lot of anti Chinese sentiment, and some anti Japanese. If you have African ancestry they won’t mistreat you but they have very strange stereotypes. There’s currently a “crisis” regarding South East Asian illegal immigrants plus drug smuggling, so if your ethnically from that region keep that in mind.
Korea is not as open to foreigners as for instance Thailand. It’s similar to Japan, being more easy to make friendships but having less State services that are foreigner friendly. Most documents are available in English, and most freeway signs are in both Hangeul and English.
Just keep in mind that the financial system is very locked down in South Korea. Foreigners have very limited access to Korean bank accounts while crypto exchange accounts are completely banned even for permanent residents.
Paying rent by credit card is common in the civilized world. The only exception I know is the US, where I had to use paper checks, as if we're still stuck in 19th century...
