So you’re the tailgating truck driver in this meme?

Rude, safe, who’s to say.

I find that people driving in the middle when the right is clear are often just anticipating an upcoming on/off ramp where they know that things can get bunched up if there are cars that don’t need to be there.

“Never be the fastest car on the highway” is a pretty good rule for avoiding state troopers.

But for real, if someone is tailgating you at speed the right move really is to ease down slowly. Because if you have to stop quickly at speed, they’re going to catastrophically rear end you. Slowing down steadily lowers the stakes and may induce them to pass you and harass someone else.

Are you implying that you break the speed limit just to pass people?

10 MPH over the signed limit on the highway is very typical here in the US. And yeah it’s not great, lots of car fatalities here.

Exactly. There’s a difference between ideal operation and practical reality. In reality, three-lane highways induce three lanes full of cars. And if I’m going 80 in a 60 in the left lane, the guy behind me going 90 can fucking relax. Likewise I’m not getting bent out of shape by the guy in front of me who is also going 80. We’re all going really really fast, as is.

The fact that Microsoft refers to the application suite that makes Windows marginally useful as “toys” should tell you everything you need to know about their OS philosophy. I prefer an OS that takes my use cases seriously.

Excuse me but what did I write that’s misinformation? I wasn’t describing Taler, I was describing bitcoin / crypto. Nothing I said was incorrect, and I was correcting your own misinformation (Mind you it’s not your fault that you were misinformed and I don’t think you were doing so intentionally, it’s easy to pick up misinformation about unpopular subjects because people are more likely to take facts at face value).

Regarding mixers, I have a friend in US gov that says they’re not immune to targeted investigation. You can hide in them only until you catch institutional attention, wherein they have a big enough database of inputs and outputs to simply know who you are. However apparently Monero is truly a pain in their ass.

And saying “a ledger is public doesn’t protect it from illicit use” is kind of silly seeing as you can use any currency for illicit use if you want. What matters is if you can be caught, and its extremely easy to be caught doing something illicit if you do it with bitcoin as the transaction history is right there in front of the world.

The first claim is the most incorrect, as bitcoin is a single permanent public ledger where all transactions are verifiable by anyone, and on/off ramps are almost 100% regulated. I would argue that it’s actually the hardest currency with which to evade taxes, though in the early days where onramps didn’t do KYC and government wasn’t as aware of it, that would have been more true. Physical fiat or Monero (A crypto that anonymizes sender and receiver) are probably the easiest currencies with which to avoid taxes.

The third claim is conditionally incorrect. Bitcoin transactions all have a clear sender and receiver party. Though I figure maybe you refer to some kind of regulatory tax assignment, in which case that would happen outside of the protocol and is up to the local government to decide.

The second claim is just kind of … Hard to parse? I’m not sure what you mean by centralized exchanges. Exchanges of any type are almost always private entities that are themselves a centralized organization, and most currency exchanges process both fiat and crypto. Guessing I just need more context for this one.

Anyway, hopefully that had some new knowledge.

I’m not interested in defending bitcoin, but that is mostly misinformation. If you want to truly condemn bitcoin you should target it’s actual harm, the fact that it’s accelerated low-friction financialization of capitalist money, so therefore immiserates the working class faster than fiat. Come at it with the good old Marxist critiques of capital, because that’s all it really is. If you argue against it with flimsy falsifiable claims like you just did, a true believer will make you look like a fool.

We’re referring to decentralized management, not decentralized distribution. Fortunately I don’t think anyone in this thread is pretending that any kind of money is going to make the world better.

Yes I agree with this completely. Ethically-minded libertarian capitalists who have convinced themselves that bitcoin will neuter the ability of the state to commit violence are either fooling themselves or haven’t bothered to step back a bit to examine the nature of power. I was just pointing out that bitcoin does provide a way for a money to be managed in a decentralized and automated fashion. That’s the actual technological novelty that a blockchain enables, and IMO that is the only novelty is can or will provide. As all money does in capitalism though, yes it will continue top concentrate and cause harm.

Well then hell yea, it’s likely you won’t be coerced into it’s use. Though sticking to my original prediction, that means you won’t be the demographic it gets marketed to or pushed upon.

No.

Productive or intelligent for whose benefit? If it’s so that you can perform better under wage labor conditions, that’s coercion.

Obligatory All Tomorrows mention, one of the most existentially terrifying works of speculative scifi I’ve ever read, drawn by the same paleo artist.

Are there new illustrations out there based on this? I wanna see the chub dinos!

Why would a brain implant allow me to live indefinitely?