Charlottesville police inserted themselves into an election for prosecutor with a last-minute arrest of a candidate.
Month: October 2017
Legal marijuana is saving lives in Colorado, study finds – The Washington Post
Source: Legal marijuana is saving lives in Colorado, study finds – The Washington Post
Researchers say the trend is worth watching in other states.
Also: Ex-DEA agent: Opioid crisis fueled by drug industry and Congress – CBS News
Whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi says drug distributors pumped opioids into U.S. communities — knowing that people were dying — and says industry lobbyists and Congress derailed the DEA’s efforts to stop it
The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare | Fast Company
Source: The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare | Fast Company
Why did Casper sue a mattress blogger? A closer look reveals a secret, multimillion-dollar battle to get you into bed.
a look at a little-known and hugely lucrative annex of e-commerce, one where the relationships can often get a little too comfy—until they’re not
Fiat Is Effective
Source: Fiat money is very effective, a minitalk for the Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup, by Steve Randy Waldman, 2017/10/08
For now, in my view, the fiat currencies of major economies beat every existing form of crypto hands down on effectiveness
- We want a unit of account that helps us to solve the economic calculation problem, that helps us to reason about our future receipts and obligations
- We want a unit of account and store of value that hedges our risk, inherent in the fact that our contractual obligations and the prices of goods and services we require may fluctuate over time and leave us unable to meet our obligations.
- The unit of account that we choose will sometimes form the basis of our assets
- we will hold or contract for claims on this unit
- But it will frequently form the basis of our liabilities!
- we will contract to make future payments in this unit
- It will not be desirable for the value of this unit (in terms of actual goods and services) to unexpectedly collapse, as that inflation would devalue our assets
- But it will also not be desirable for the value of that unit (in terms again of actual goods and services) to unexpectedly spike, as that deflation would cause the burden of our liabilities, our debts, to balloon!
Money is defined by the unit of account in which obligations payable into the future get denominated
Fiat prices are stable because they are actively managed to be stable.
- Price stability is about managing valuation risk, and makes a money useful for economic calculation and hedging the risk humans face of finding themselves unable in the future to afford the real goods and services they require
- Fiat money banking systems also enable effective means of managing counterparty risk. Most obviously, payments are often reversible.
The management of fiat provides state actors with incredibly powerful, ultimately discretionary, tools which significantly affect who wins and who loses and how equal or unequal a society is. Fiat money and associated banking systems are the technology that enables the finance of war on scales that would have been unimaginable a few centuries ago. Price stability, the primary advance fiat offers users over other forms of money, is often purchased at the expense of workers and the unemployed, on behalf of those who have the luxury of worrying about economic calculation for their businesses or hedging with their savings horde
Q&A With Alan Jacobs, Author of ‘How to Think’ – The Atlantic
Source: Q&A With Alan Jacobs, Author of ‘How to Think’ – The Atlantic
Maybe it’s inevitable that today’s hyper-partisanship and lightening-fast news cycles have left the open-minded Jacobs frustrated with America’s low tolerance for disagreement—a political order characterized by “willful incomprehension [and] toxic suspicion”
In a pluralistic society, people struggle to deal with difference. One of the ways in which we typically deal with difference is by drawing really clear lines of belonging and not-belonging.
Green: Do you think people are obligated to engage with an opposing viewpoint if enough people hold that view?
Jacobs: I do think that’s true. When a position is really widely held, it’s not really a safe option to deem it out of bounds.
I want to be generous, and I want to be civil, and I want to be kind. I want to listen to people who are very different from me. I want to keep doing that, even if I don’t make things better. I also want to be aware of the ways in which a plea for civility can be a way of consolidating power. It’s pretty easy to be me in America. … I want to remember that and not chastise people for being uncivil when they have what Martin Luther King Jr. called “legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” I do want to promote civility, but I want to promote it more by example than by lecturing people on how they can be more civil.