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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Well, their interpretation is at odds with reality, and they should reconcile that. Regardless of what they told or what they believed, they paid into a system where they were forced to subsidize current recipients, while the system itself could be revoked at any point, leaving them high and dry, and not running into 14th Amendment issues or anything like that. See Flemming v. Nestor, 1960 - quoting Wiki:

    Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603 (1960), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of Section 1104 of the 1935 Social Security Act. In this Section, Congress reserved to itself the power to amend and revise the schedule of benefits. The Court rejected that Social Security is a system of ‘accrued property rights’ and held that those who pay into the system have no contractual right to receive what they have paid into it.[1]

    Note that I’m not saying anything “should” be one way or another, besides that people should be fully aware how the current system works in law.



  • dx1@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldEtherium logo finally makes sense
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    4 days ago

    What do they “make”? They control for the risks in social economic interaction with potentially adversarial parties. Ethereum is proof of stake, it doesn’t burn up tons of fossil fuels. And the contracts aren’t subject to human interpretation after being authored, they’re deterministic at the protocol level (save for the entire network deciding to revoke the contract).

    Why are you making fundamental mischaracterizations of the technology while acting like an expert? What you’re doing is dishonest.


  • Social Security’s “trust fund” is an empty pit of debt obligations. Benefits to current recipients are paid with incoming payroll taxes. Any difference is made up with additional taxes or monetary inflation, by way of Treasury bonds. They “reinvest it in the economy” if there’s ever a surplus, e.g., through military contractors. It finances the national debt.

    Putting aside the quirks of that setup, the basic function is that the taxes you pay in now are not an investment in your own future, you’re basically just paying for the retirement of older people now. The expectation is that someone down the road will then pay taxes to finance your retirement. Hence, how SS was able to start paying benefits almost immediately (3 years) after payroll taxes started being collected.


  • What is your prediction for what will become of it, though. GDP growth stops and people start bursting into flames? You know we’ve actually observed this before, right?

    Now, if you do mean “capitalism” not in the plain definition of “an economy based around private ownership”, but the more specific version where control of capital is highly centralized - there’s some truth to the idea that economic decline can cause people to start looking to reform that system. True of any system, really, because people generally don’t want to see their quality of life decrease. But that’s very different than an economic system “requiring” it to function.




  • dx1@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldEtherium logo finally makes sense
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    6 days ago

    Yes, work. Smart contracts are designed, programmed and, if they’re done right, rigorously audited for correctness. Then you have user-facing interface and everything surrounding that as well. Look at the documentation of AAVE, for one example.

    And this isn’t even getting into the protocol level (L1 or L2) work either. Bitcoin was relatively simple, Ethereum is not. They’ve spent years crafting these systems to function for PoS, L2 support, sharding, rollups, etc., at scale.



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    6 days ago

    Yes, for the limited subset of ERC20s or whatever you describe as “ponzicoins”. Things that actually do nothing, particular not doing anything more than L1 cryptos but “this is yet another token”, are not really adding any value. But I would be really surprised if you can name any more complex contracts than ERC20s (or ERC721s), which is where the work in the space actually goes.


  • I reckon most of that already is. A real estate escrow smart contract is maybe 200-300 lines long in Solidity, depending of course on what it supports (contingencies and such). You may want to actually go look around, because there’s I don’t know how many millions of lines of Solidity already written. It doesn’t all get as much publicity as NFTs.



  • Also they have some smart contract capabilities which I suppose Ethereum people think are important. But I’ve never seen any practical use for that stuff.

    Anything you need complicated multi-party interactions for that you want guarantees on. Real estate escrow comes to mind first. Depository accounts with yield. An immutable archive of records. Multi-signature corporate treasuries. Whatever. It’s programmable money. It’s not even necessarily monetary, because smart contracts can just deal with arbitrary data.

    Never impressive to see a technical audience shit all over Ethereum for internet points. By far the least scammy crypto people have actually dedicated years into building something real on.





  • Taking just the “solution” of reintroducing predators - it’s still not the same. Predation specifically targets old, weak, sick members of a herd. What do hunters do? It’s what, a tag limit and age limit, and that’s it.

    This whole conversation always seems so disingenuous. People doing hunting claim these altruistic motives, but have every adverse incentive that has nothing to do with those motives, from stocking their freezers to just bragging about what they hunted. Let’s be for real here, you’re not scientists or veterinarians carefully monitoring and managing a population, what you’re doing is taking the first justification you can find for what you already wanted to do.