in light of recent events, was thinking about how crypto provided this fascinating window into a libertarian society without banking regulation/oversight/enforcement and what a horrifying dystopia it would be

it turns out "if your bank's CEO drains everyone's account and tries to disappear, a squad of people with guns will show up at their last known location" is a load-bearing pillar of society

Bitcoin haters are missing the point. People don't use it (solely) because they're stupid or love risky gambles. The banking system is so broken — so tedious and costly even for a simple bank wire, so heavily regulated against anything that might be sexy to someone somewhere — that you're often better off with silly volatile easily-stolen Wild West crimes money.

That said, I like regulation: it's nice that I can have some safe-but-tedious money and some PvP-enabled money, instead of the latter being the only option.

gotta be honest my experience transferring money with my bank (actually a credit union fwiw) is that it is both free and easy

Bitcoin sucks but they have part of a point; the only actual useful economic niche that anybody ever found for crypto - the whole thing about it being an alternative mainstream currency was never going to pan out, because a given coin isn't backed by anything except usage and speculation, and so always can be outcompeted by new coins - was that, due to being unregulated and somewhat anonymous, you could use it to trade illegal black market goods.

Lol.

The Bitcoin is good because banking is broken argument applies, just not to USAmericans or anyone else living in a WEIRD nation.

It applies to Nigeria, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

(other honorary mentions include Peru, Brazil, Columbia, Argentina)

It's kind of tone deaf to shit on this technology just because you happen to be in a country where your banking system works and putting your money in the bank doesn't run a risk of losing it forever. It's popular in places where stashing cash under the mattress is still safer than bank deposits or government bonds.

Like yeah, pretty much all Americans using crypto is either a scammer or about to be scammed, but this isn't universally true worldwide. You may want to use Bitcoin for remittance. You may want to use it to invest because the country you're in does not have deposit guarantees! You may want to convert your retirement nest egg to crypto so the Prime Minister can't steal it to make crappy movies.

(and alas, USAmericans still hold the most wealth in crypto, but that's kind of from being a rich developed nation. 5% of your country using the thing can control more wealth than 30% of Nigerians using the thing)

i think the other missing piece here is that even accounting for the current bout of inflation, the US dollar is actually quite stable, and so crypto looks (and is) wildly unstable by comparison

but if you live in a place that is occasionally subject to hyperinflation, bitcoin looks alright by comparison

anyway i think it's still fair to say bitcoin does a very bad job of being a currency when compared to the dollar or the euro, but if you live in a place that doesn't have this:

it has a decent chance of being better than your alternatives

I think a key point here is that the argument above is for an accessible alternative financial asset that can be bought/sold digitally, and there is no reason why that has to be cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency isn't anything particularly special; people call it a "technology", but that makes it sound like there's innovation beyond blockchain, which there really isn't.

What you actually have is blockchain, a sort of niche concept for an immutable data structure, and then a lot of overhyped finance apps built using it. Through their insistence on being decentralized/proof of work/operating on a "gold brick" hype model, those apps can only ever be unwieldy, leak value like water through a sieve after an initial hype phase, and be horrifically wasteful energy sinks.

Crypto isn't used as an alternative financial option because it is good, it's used because it's there and it's accessible, having been buoyed up by the efforts of its primary holders, first world investment types and scammers. The fact that people have found some utility in siphoning crumbs from that table doesn't retroactively make it a worthwhile endeavour, its just an indictment of how much a shitty idea has been able to grow. The solution here is to develop a better banking alternative for the regions you mention, not to keep using crypto as-is carte blanche, because the way it's built means it's pretty much guaranteed to fail sooner or later, taking most if not all of its value with it. That's not to mention what happens when crypto becomes established enough that governments do try to clamp down. If there's any use for blockchain finance products then I don't feel like a decentralized, coin-mining model is the answer.

I feel that this is all true even taking into account countries where crypto is a viable (or potentially even a politically endorsed!) banking alternative at the moment, although if you're saying that the mass adoption of crypto in the countries you mention is all sunshine and daisies then... well, I doubt it's quite so simple, but I'm not really the expert on that. @ericvilas, your thoughts on how cryptocurrency in Argentina has been going?

Oh hey! Your local "person who lives in a country with a 100% inflation" here!

The peso is not trusted at all, so everyone wants to have reserves in US dollars. To stabilize it somewhat, the government put in restrictions on currency exchange markets, and you can only legally buy 200 dollars a month. And if you have dollars and want to sell them, then going through legal means is gonna make you lose money - you can get twice as much bang for your buck by going through the incredibly easily accessible black market.

Or, you can skip all of that and just use stablecoins.

The stablecoin of choice for Argentinians is the DAI, one of the many ETH-based stablecoins. So yeah, in short, the only thing crypto is good for is to obtain illegal goods or bypass regulations. It just so happens that the illegal goods in this case are actually US dollars.

So, basically, crypto is very good at bypassing the regulated financial markets.

It's bad when the financial regulations are protecting you from all manner of scams and shenanigans

It's great when the financial regulations (e.g bad government currency controls, US sanctions) are absolutely fucking you over

easily the funniest single letter typo is p to o. why he ourple

when theres an ouppy 🥺

When I was 18 I took a ballet class at college and every morning our beginner adult class started just as the Ballet Majors in the studio next door took a mid-class break.

Many mornings they would gather in the doorway of my classroom and watch us struggle through our bar warmups or jumble up a new technique while they smiled and whispered to each other.

And every morning I dreaded seeing them there because I knew they were making fun of me.

I had other classes with some of them, and I was always embarrassed when ballet came up, and it always did, them being ballet majors, because I loved to talk about it but knew they’d seen me dance, and I was sure they thought I didn’t belong in the conversation.

At the end of the semester, our instructor announced that she’d like to invite the dancers from the next door studio to sit in on our final performance as an audience, and everyone in my class hesitated. We’d worked so hard, we wanted to celebrate our progress during our final without being judged. Most of us left class that day suddenly more anxious about the final than we’d ever been.

The next morning, in one of my other classes I had with the ballet majors, one of them approached me, and as if she’d been reading our minds the entire semester, she said

“Hey. I just wanted to say that I know we watch you guys dance a lot, and I wanted to make sure you know we’re never laughing at you. When we watch you guys learn the basics…..it reminds us of when we first started when we were younger. It’s like…looking at ourselves when we first fell in love with dancing. That’s why we love watching you guys.”

It shocked me. I felt awash with relief and utterly stupid all at once.

Here I had spent an entire semester assuming the worst of people who had otherwise been nothing but nice to me in every other setting, and I had no one to blame for that but my own insecurities that I’d allowed to rule me for months.

I’d been so unfair to these girls, because I was self conscious. I was so worried about being judged that I’d judged all of them.

Here I was worried they were laughing at me, and all along they were looking at me with nothing but absolute delight, even envy for what I was getting to experience.

This encounter changed my entire attitude, permanently.

It made me realize that, yeah sometimes people are jerks for no reason, but more often than not, people really are just….Good.

Since that day, I’ve started giving everyone the benefit of the doubt until they prove me wrong, for their sake and for my own.

And I’ve learned that the world becomes a lot better and life becomes a lot easier when you accept that maybe not everyone is judging you. Maybe you’re the one who’s hardest on yourself.

Let yourself be. Let yourself exist and breathe and be happy.

The world is a much better place.

Trust me you do not want them to be in any other condition. If they were covered in blood then there would be no way for your body to effectively circulate that blood, leading you to bleed out. As for them being wet, I personally would not want to experience dry friction on my organs so I am more than okay with that

Also just to clear up any further confusion, cerebrospinal fluid (as the name implies) is contained to just your brain and spinal cord. The rest are protected by mucous

Small correction to my original answer: your organs are not covered in blood unless you are bleeding internally or happen to be a bug

Reblog and put in the tags how often you “clean” your tumblr account, deleting old posts.

Tumblr actually has an auto clean function! Where the search function immediately forgets tags and posts making them un-findable

alright. in my tepidly professional opinion* here are the actual major red flags with the titanic submersible

first, stuff that people are clowning on that isn't actually a red flag at all

using starlink satcoms for their overall [surface] communications

the stupid game controller to steer

that being said. here is the fucked up design stuff that i notice

Where The Fuck Are The Chairs

they have had known issues with communication

[source: the independent]

[source: the independent]

in a power failure situation, they would have been SOL

[source: the independent]

something weird going on with their pressure hull

[source: nbc]

while it is "normal" for structures that are exposed to regular massive changes in pressure to have fatigue (imagine bending a piece of metal in and out over and over, eventually it will break-- you want to catch and replace that before it happens), it's weird to me that

they obviously have no "black box" system or any way to locate a missing vessel

[source: nyt]

Company Culture Is The Killer

complete disregard for safety is really what killed these people

[source: the independent]

obviously if this is your CEO your company culture is totally fucked. beyond saving. you do not have a regard for human life.

for reasons unknown they didn't flag the authorities that the vessel was missing for hours and hours

[source: the independent]

not that it likely would have helped to save these people if they had been alerted earlier, but it shows a desire to cover up mistakes

and like. obviously. you should get your shit inspected. nobody taking paying passengers anywhere should be allowed to be their own safety inspection authority.

the original sinking of the titanic was what led to SOLAS (safety of life at sea) rules being instituted. they've been updated several times since then, but they don't yet cover submersibles like this, since they are relatively new. it's likely that this incident will cause a new interest in updating the rules. as they say: every regulation is written in blood

*i'm a mechanical engineer who works in the maritime industry, but not like, a particularly related section of the industry-- i do shit with cargo containers mainly. no further info on my credentials will be given since i have no desire to doxx myself on tumblr dot edu. i've tried not to say anything too wrong or out of my depth in this post but my opinion is "guy with an engineering degree who reads news articles" level of informed. so take your maximum grains of salt

It’s amazing how on the internet I’m like hey here’s a thing that helped me. Maybe it will help you.

And then someone is always like if I do that thing though it will kill me.

Probably don’t do it then. Idk what you want from me, man.

If I’m like adding tomato to your sandwich is yummy and you’re like “but I’m deathly allergic to tomatoes what am I supposed to do”

Idk dude. Not eat tomatoes I guess.

I’ve got this old post where I was like hey sometimes it’s fun to try to get a chore done while you’re waiting for water to boil or something. Might help if you have adhd. It’s free deadline.

And I still get people commenting on that post like uhm no some of us have anxiety so bad that we’d pass out if we did that.

Like. Probably don’t do that then?

Tumblr has trouble with the concept that there's a huge range of options in between "forbidden" and "compulsory."

in light of recent events, was thinking about how crypto provided this fascinating window into a libertarian society without banking regulation/oversight/enforcement and what a horrifying dystopia it would be

it turns out "if your bank's CEO drains everyone's account and tries to disappear, a squad of people with guns will show up at their last known location" is a load-bearing pillar of society

Bitcoin haters are missing the point. People don't use it (solely) because they're stupid or love risky gambles. The banking system is so broken — so tedious and costly even for a simple bank wire, so heavily regulated against anything that might be sexy to someone somewhere — that you're often better off with silly volatile easily-stolen Wild West crimes money.

That said, I like regulation: it's nice that I can have some safe-but-tedious money and some PvP-enabled money, instead of the latter being the only option.

gotta be honest my experience transferring money with my bank (actually a credit union fwiw) is that it is both free and easy

Bitcoin sucks but they have part of a point; the only actual useful economic niche that anybody ever found for crypto - the whole thing about it being an alternative mainstream currency was never going to pan out, because a given coin isn't backed by anything except usage and speculation, and so always can be outcompeted by new coins - was that, due to being unregulated and somewhat anonymous, you could use it to trade illegal black market goods.

Lol.

The Bitcoin is good because banking is broken argument applies, just not to USAmericans or anyone else living in a WEIRD nation.

It applies to Nigeria, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

(other honorary mentions include Peru, Brazil, Columbia, Argentina)

It's kind of tone deaf to shit on this technology just because you happen to be in a country where your banking system works and putting your money in the bank doesn't run a risk of losing it forever. It's popular in places where stashing cash under the mattress is still safer than bank deposits or government bonds.

Like yeah, pretty much all Americans using crypto is either a scammer or about to be scammed, but this isn't universally true worldwide. You may want to use Bitcoin for remittance. You may want to use it to invest because the country you're in does not have deposit guarantees! You may want to convert your retirement nest egg to crypto so the Prime Minister can't steal it to make crappy movies.

(and alas, USAmericans still hold the most wealth in crypto, but that's kind of from being a rich developed nation. 5% of your country using the thing can control more wealth than 30% of Nigerians using the thing)

I have had it with this likescolding. “Tumblr doesn’t have an algorithm so likes don’t actually do anything” motherfucker I am not clicking that heart to give some post better ~algorithmic visibility~ I am clicking that heart to help my internet friend microdose on serotonin as god fucking intended

my knitted forest buddies

"Private submarine carrying several billionaire tourists goes missing while surveying the wreckage of the Titanic."

Well, it had to happen eventually. This is where big-ticket extreme tourism and shooting untrained assholes into space and such was always going to lead – frankly, it's surprising that it took this long for a major incident to crop up.

"One of the missing passengers is the president and CEO of the company that owns and operates the submarine."

Huh. Well, points for putting his money where his mouth is, I guess. I wonder if–

"The missing CEO's name is Stockton Rush."

Oh, bullshit. That's not a real person – that's the name of a guy who builds an inexplicably 1950s-themed underwater theme park and then gets eaten by a shark in a cautionary tale about the perils of libertarianism. That's the name of a guy who carries off an oceanfront real estate scam that somehow ends with Superman fighting a telepathic squid. Fucking "Stockton Rush". Unbelievable.

At this point I'm half-expecting the next article I read is going to reveal one of the other passengers is a self-styled "explorer" who has strong opinions about the continued geopolitical relevance of the British Empire OH WAIT

Living alone is awesome cause earlier I spilled water all over myself and the floor doing my dishes and I just took my pants off and used them to sop up all the water and nobody was around to say Seryozha I wish you would not do that

btw. your search for the most morally upright and ethical piece of media that has the most correct “representation” will destroy your ability to find the most profound and beautiful and human of stories. and may even destroy the stories themselves before they are created. if you even care.

I would like to tell you about a time when my mental health was absolutely trash and I developed a sort of code with a few friends, in case anyone else might benefit from it.

There is a type of task which I would call "washing a dragon." There were a variety of specific things that would fall into this category but broadly it meant something like, I need to do this thing and I have been putting it off because it will be hard but the longer I put it off the harder it actually becomes.

Like if I really need to wash a pet dragon, well the dragon doesn't really like to be washed so it's hard to fight with the dragon to get it washed but also the longer I put it off, the dirtier the dragon gets and so the harder the washing and fighting will be once I do it.

And for a real life example, I needed to email a professor whose independent study I was in, to tell him I needed to drop it or find some other solution because it was going to be so hard to catch up because we hadn't met or worked in weeks, but this was a hard email because I was embarrassed and I wasn't sure what the solution was going to be, but obviously the longer I put it off the harder the problem is to solve and the more embarrassing the email was going to be.

Washing a dragon was often something of this form, asking for help on something where the longer I wait the more help I need to ask for and the more embarrassing it is to admit I need it. But there were also other kinds of dragons to wash. And since they often had some amount of embarrassment to them (it's embarrassing to leave the dragon unwashed for so long) it is hard to ask someone to help hold me accountable for finally doing the thing, or to ask them to make me sit with them until I do the thing.

But once I had this code in place I could just be like "hey I need to wash a dragon" and I didn't need to say what the dragon was but a friend could say oh okay I will now pester you about washing the dragon multiple times a day until you do it, or I will make you sit next to me with your laptop until you have washed the dragon, if the dragon washing is a laptop-based task (forms, emails). This was very helpful. I washed a lot more dragons when I could have my friends hold me accountable, and I was more willing to do that if I didn't actually have to tell them what the dragons were.

"Glimpsing at the seabed through the water and the complexity of the light within, at a soothing southern sea." By Shigeko Inoue (2002).

Born in 1945, Inoue studied traditional Japanese and Italian woodblock printing. Her work focuses on nature, transparency and the movement of water.

Okay so I ecently used the men's room as an openly transmasc person for the first time

The line for the stalls was crazy long and not moving so I asked what was up- buddy next to me was like "someone's doing drugs in the back stall"

So I went (security guard mode) "?? Has someone checked on him? Is he concious and responsive??" Getting ready to bust in, right?

And the guy asked if I was a cop

So yeah I didn't get gender policed but I did get police gendered

Scientific fraud is the most baffling thing ever to me like do they think they're just going to make a huge breakthrough and no one will notice that it's fake by trying to replicate their results

Yeah actually I just discovered how to turn plastic into gold. Oh you want to know how I did it

Starts running away cutely

looks at you

looks at you

@bettsplendens i'd just like you to know that this is my favorite comment on this post and i'd like it to be memorialized

I've survived my first day on Tumblr

Achievements:

Oh boy oh boy you're gonna get a Rare achievement for this one

Containment Breach