shortwavesurfer
@shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws 2 days ago:
What gives any currency any value other than human belief in it? After all, when fiat currencies become valueless, we as humans end up back at gold, which has been in use for millennia.
- Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws 2 days ago:
Ah, okay. See, we are exactly the opposite in that case, because I have lost all faith in governments, and therefore have lost all faith in what they call money.
- Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws 2 days ago:
Fiat currencies are money by decree of a government. If you have lost trust in your government or your government is not trustworthy to begin with, then the Fiat currency is not worth the paper it’s printed on or the digits in your bank account. Your access to your bank account can be restricted at any time for any reason with just a simple push of a button and you have extremely small or no recourse to such an action. Cash is better in that regard, but even so your government or central bank purposely says they want to devalue your cash and other currency by a set target per year. Therefore making you have to work harder or become poorer. As an example, the U.S. Federal Reserve targets a 2% inflation target per year, which means if you put a $100 bill under your mattress today, in 2035, it would only buy you $80 worth of goods. I’m not that old, and yet, when I was a young kid, a $500,000 nest egg would work extremely well for a good retirement. Now, that is absolutely not the case. Not because of the goods getting more expensive, but because of the currency depreciating in value as you work for it.
- Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws 2 days ago:
Money of course. I have been paying my bills with crypto since 2023.
- Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws 2 days ago:
To be fair I’m not a huge fan of pure proof of stake because it makes validation more difficult because you have to have code for slashing somebody’s stake if they are malicious or bad and a malicious entity could just buy up a bunch of your tokens and tank them. Admittedly, not a lot of people would do so, but I could totally see a government buying up a bunch of tokens on a network and purposely crashing the network in order to rid themselves of a nuisance and calling it justified. Proof of work makes that much more difficult. Still doable for certain, but much, much more difficult.
- Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws 2 days ago:
That’s true. And personally, I stay away from all of that mess. And anybody I introduce, I take great pains to explain why I stay away from all that mess. But if they want to make their own mistakes, then that’s on them.
- Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws 2 days ago:
My first question to you would be, how much energy does the banking sector use to run bank branches, haul physical money back and forth, bring employees to and from work, etc?
Next, not all blockchains require extreme levels of computation power for proof of work. Take Monero, for example, which deliberately makes ASIC chips impossible to use and is therefore mined only on CPUs, which are extremely common.
- Comment on Buying a $250 Residency Card From a Tropical Island Let Me Bypass U.S. Crypto Laws 2 days ago:
I’d say you’re right for 99% of it, but there is 1% that’s genuinely useful.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
Jesus. Lemmy ftw
- Comment on Nokia to deploy the first cellular network on the Moon 4 days ago:
Meahtastic on the moon… Moontastix!
- Comment on Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos 6 days ago:
Not on mine, it doesn’t. I don’t use the Play Store. I don’t have Google Play Services. And I don’t have Google Apps installed. And I’m running Lineage OS. So, fuck you Google.
- Comment on Dow drops 700 points for worst day of 2025 so far on new fears about economic growth: Live updates 1 week ago:
Wow! A 1.7% drop. Run for the fucking hills.
- Comment on Audiologists raise concern over headphone use in young people 2 weeks ago:
I had a pair of noise cancelling headphones when I was in like seventh or eighth grade, but when they broke, I just never ended up replacing them, and I’ve never had noise cancelling headphones ever since.
- Comment on Trump tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO 2 weeks ago:
Duplicate of feddit.nl/post/28948680
- Comment on Trump tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO 2 weeks ago:
That 10-year time horizon is a very good point. And it’s not likely that the tariff would stick around that long since every four years has a changing administration who can do whatever they please in those regards.
Personally, for me anyway, I am a Monero holder and am seeing prices fall fairly rapidly. For example, a thing of beard oil in October of 2024 was 72.9mXMR and is now 61.11mXMR (-16.2%).
- Comment on Trump tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO 2 weeks ago:
LOL, just goes to show. I don’t keep up with processors close enough, apparently.
- Comment on Trump tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO 2 weeks ago:
I’m not totally sure how those lease programs to companies work. Once the laptops are replaced, I know some of them will obviously be unusable and have to be destroyed. But there should be laptops that are in perfectly fine condition. And what happens to those if they get put on the second hand market you could buy them from their and the company paid the “new” tax. Now to make up for that, the company could either raise their prices on their items or if they don’t want to lose sales, they could eat it.
- Comment on Trump tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO 2 weeks ago:
That’s a fair point. The way I see it, it’s similar to buying a car. If you buy a new car, as soon as you drive it off the lot, it loses $3,000 in value and depreciates quite a bit within the first year. If you buy a one-year-old used car, it’s still in pretty good condition and has had the “new” tax deducted already.
- Comment on Trump tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO 2 weeks ago:
If they cost more, it would also disincentivize spending on the laptop unless it’s necessary. So theoretically fewer laptops should come over. If you don’t buy a laptop because your laptop isn’t really in need of replacement, then you just saved 100%. Or you could also buy a used laptop that’s newer than the one you have from somebody else in good condition and save some percentage of what you would have paid for the new one anyway.
Just as an example, I’m rocking a laptop from 2014 with an Intel 3rd generation Core i7. Obviously the newest Intel is the 13th generation, but you can find Intel 7th and 8th generation laptops which are much newer than mine for decent prices.
- Comment on Trump tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO 2 weeks ago:
How exactly does this hurt the planet? If the United States imports fewer laptops, then that means there are less laptops coming over on ships from China which saves fuel. If tariffs cause a rise in US production, then the production of the product is closer to the end consumer, again saving fuel.
- Comment on Awesome Privacy - A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy 2 weeks ago:
The police want you to think they have managed to trace Monero, but what they have actually done is used other methods such as tracing the Bitcoin that people swapped for Monero and then back into Bitcoin almost immediately, or other such methods.
- Comment on Awesome Privacy - A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy 2 weeks ago:
I had to make sure that Monero was brought up and sure enough it was.
- Comment on New thermoelectric generator converts vehicle exhaust heat into electricity, boosting fuel efficiency 2 weeks ago:
I doubt regenerative braking will be ever useful at all because Lord knows you’re not going to get the same energy back that you took out while driving. /s
This is just to increase efficiency.
- Comment on FOSDEM 2025 - MapTCHA, the open source CAPTCHA that improves OpenStreetMap 2 weeks ago:
As a legally blind user, this is really, really bad.
- Comment on Is it time to ring the alarm on internet door cameras? 3 weeks ago:
If I don’t control it, I won’t install it.
- Comment on It’s Time To Rethink 6G. 3 weeks ago:
You know, I totally see where this article is coming from. My current fiber provider gives me 500 symmetrical for $55 per month. And if they offered a 250 plan for $27 a month, I would downgrade in a heartbeat because I don’t need what I’m getting.
It’s like owning a super fast sports car. Sure. You can drive at 300 miles per hour. But when are you ever going to get the chance to do so?
As for cellular speeds, they don’t really need to improve to give a single individual enough bandwidth they need to improve to give a bunch of people a decent bandwidth in a crowded situation such as stadiums, concert venues, protests, etc.
I could step outside my door right now and run a speed test on my $15 per month phone plan from T-Mobile and get 250 MBPS which is great. Now what would happen if my entire city lost power and that was the only operational service provider? That’s where the question would come in.
- Comment on Japan's Seven Bank Starts ATM Service Using Face Recognition 3 weeks ago:
Pass
- Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3? 3 weeks ago:
I use a combination of mp3s and opus primarily but I can’t remember if opus is the open format ogg or not.
- Comment on Those YouTube ads everyone hates made $10.4 billion in just three months 3 weeks ago:
Google has plenty of money. That’s the way I see it.
- Comment on Those YouTube ads everyone hates made $10.4 billion in just three months 3 weeks ago:
Those poor suckers. I don’t think I’ve seen an advertisement on YouTube in something like five years.