I'm not sure how this article would be any different if Culdesac had written their own "journalistic" article about itself and paid The Guardian to publish it.
If our current scientific understanding of cosmology, quantum mechanics, biology, etc. doesn't fill you with awe and humility, I don't know what will.
If it doesn't fill you with gratitude that we have even the slightest ability to exist, and to experience and understand any of this, I don't know what will.
There are many dimensions by which to compare healthcare systems (e.g. availability of care, cost, quality, speed) and different samples and statistics to consider (means, medians, 10th-percentiles, different demographic groups e.g. different races, different worker groups e.g. tech workers).
It's complex, but overall the US system is better than Canada's. It's not as clear cut comparing the US to some European countries, but with Canada it's mostly clear cut. And it's especially clear cut for tech workers. If you work in tech, you're highly likely to have very good coverage through your employer, you will almost surely experience much better availability and speed of care, probably better quality, and the extra out-of-pocket costs are absolutely dwarfed by the superior pay in the US.
It looks at some recent time period (roughly, during COVID) and breaks down the growth in money spent by where it goes (e.g. company profits, labor, etc.) and how much of it is due to real growth in output vs. being due to purely inflationary price hikes. It aims to show that a disproportionate amount of the excess money spent, beyond that accounted for by real growth, went to company profits.
There are two problems with the approach in this article.
First, its choice of time period is somewhat arbitrary. Over the course of this particular 11 quarter time period (Dec 2019 - Sep 2022), corporate (+38%) and small business (+30%) profits grew much more than labor expenditures (+17%). But just from the data presented, over the final 8 of those 11 quarters, growth in corporate profits (+22%) and labor expenditures (+18%) were comparable, and growth in small business profit (+7%) was much less. This article doesn't present the data, but what would happen if choosing a longer time scale? Quarter over quarter we see business profit growths are very volatile, sometimes growing, sometimes shrinking (negative growth). So unless you're looking at longer time horizons like decades, you can probably find runs of 8-12 quarters showing any narrative you want.
The other problem is how this article tries to determine how much growth in each component was real vs. purely inflationary. The problem is it assumes the real growth of each component was the exact same (about 6.5%). After observing 38% nominal growth in corporate profits and 17% nominal growth in labor expenditures, it simply assumes the real growth in each (due to real growth in output) was the same 6.5% for each of those categories. One implication of this presumption would be that over any time period, the real output growth of corporations and the real output growth of small business would always be the exact same, percentage-wise. This is definitely a completely flawed presumption. And it's doing most of the heavy lifting in the paper's overall argument.
First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem.
Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." However the conclusion of the very paper he references says, "[t]he findings of this field study indicate that downsizing can improve an organization's financial performance but not in the near-term.... [R]esearch strongly suggests that it likely will take three or more years for organizations to be able to truly see the financial benefits of downsizing." If you look at all the graphs in the Results section of the paper, it shows that companies who downsize started out being weaker performers than those who weren't downsizing, but a few years after downsizing they were largely able to close that underperformance gap.
The content producers (NHL) and publishers (Rogers) neither own nor operate the content distribution networks (ISPs). However they make commercial terms with each other to give one party exclusive rights to distribute the other party’s content via the ISPs, implying a restriction on how any other party (eg ordinary citizens) can use the ISPs. Since they don’t actually control the ISPs, they’re having the government enforce the terms of their commercial agreements against parties that weren’t part of them.
Doesn’t seem like this should be the role of government, but not surprising for Canada. On the spectrum of irrational distrust of government to irrational trust of government, any population is going to have a distribution. Canada skews towards greater trust of government, with more broad and intense irrational trust in government in the last few years than I’d ever noticed in the decades prior.
You are incorrect. I’m going to assume you are not Canadian? Every Canadian knows that Rogers is an ISP, and so is Bell. Heck Rogers and Bell even have stakes in professional sports!
They are the 2 major telcos of Canada that all Canadians love to complain about.
Might be a quibble but Rogers doesn't own the leafs. They own the jays. MLSE owns the leafs. Rogers has a partial ownership of the MLSE. Not sure stake but its not large
True, Rogers indirectly owns part of the Leafs. But, when it's time for the team to make a decision on media, that'll generally be enough to swap that decision.
Was curious about ownership stake and it's much larger than I remember. So I stand corrected on that aspect. Looks like BCE and RCI basically co-own the leafs at 37.5% respectively [1]
You're right about the first part. I actually am Canadian, though haven't lived in Canada for over a decade. Absolute brain fart on my part. If you asked me outside the context of this article what Rogers does, I would've listed cable, Internet, telephone provider before any of its media/publishing stuff, but got tunnel vision in the context of this article.
I forgot about the degree to which Rogers is vertically integrated (ISP, cable provider, landline and cell provider, TV stations, radio, partial ownership in all major sports teams, etc.) and the degree to which this is a duopoly with Bell in Canada. But it's no wonder they can get the courts to issues these orders against themselves (and their smaller competitors) to legitimize actions that protect their broader interests.
It's all good. You should come back and visit :) You will definitely not find a shortage of people that do not like how Rogers operates. You then probably missed out on the whole Rogers fiasco where Edward Rogers was infighting with his own family in trying to regain control. It just turned everybody off.
Rogers and Bell are the two ISPs that between them control the Canadian ISP market. They also own the content publishers (the streaming services and networks) that send bytes over those cables, wires, and allocated public radio spectrum provided by the ISPs. They also own many of the Canadian sports teams that provide the content streamed by those bytes. The NHL is owned by the teams, hence controlled by Bell and Rogers.
What's going on is that the vertically-integrated entertainment/communications cartel is refining its regulatory capture through the judicial branch of of the Canadian government in order to launder artificial restrictions on competition at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. It's how they pay me my big fat dividend checks so I can contribute their massive quarterly profits through my taxes, since I don't watch sports.
Rogers itself is an ISP. This order is Bell(also and ISP) targeting all other ISPs in the country.
Finally, I don’t get what purpose your final paragraph adds to the conversation? This is a court order. It has nothing to do with executive action from the government, rather a judge ruling that the ISPs must block pirated sports.
Let's not be naiive here. The courts and the government are not totally disconnected. Everyone has at some point observed court rulings that they thought to have been impacted by political discourse. Instead of indulging myself into a loquacious sesquipedalian treatise on the nature of ethics and origin of judicial and political systems, I will, paraphrasing Hemingway, let go of my dick and just tell you what is there. The system is man-made and man controls every aspect of it. It is corrupt and everything is connected. This is obvious to anyone willing to step away from their ivory tower and just apply common sense.
I believe that last paragraph to be an observation that is obvious to most people.
The person made a false assumption in their first paragraph, and then linked that false information to his second that is really not that relevant here.
If you read the article, it even states:
6. That didn't stop Bell, Rogers, and Quebecor, who went straight to the Federal Court in 2019, asking for an order against themselves to block a streaming service called GoldTV. They also asked the court to order other ISPs to do the same, including TekSavvy.
In addition, they have tried this twice before, through the Federal Government, and it didn't work:
2. For years, media companies in Canada have asked the government to use Internet filtering—or "site blocking"—to help enforce copyrights. In 2017, through a coalition called FairPlay, they asked the CRTC to create a site-blocking regime. They lost. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2018/2018-384.htm
3. They made a similar pitch to the federal government committee reviewing the Copyright Act in 2018. I was there to oppose it. In its report, the INDU committee recommended studying a limited, copyright-specific injunction that balanced interests. https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/INDU/Reports...
So to write that ALL IS CORRUPT and the Government is the baddie is unnecessary. These corporate people, and I certainly am not on their side, are just trying the numbers game. They will keep asking their lawyers to keep trying in order to restrict their product/service so they "make more money". I certainly don't agree with Rogers and Bell, but let's not mislead people here.
I'm saying that the entire original comment was misleading since it was based on a false assumption which lead to a false conclusion. The government has said No to this twice already! I do not believe the person who made the comments is malicious, it's just a simple error and I hold nothing against the person. But then another commenter jumped on board and continued on that false premise.
I went fishing for marlin but we accidentally caught an endangered _loquacious sesquipedalian treatise_ and had to throw it back before the fish and game officer saw it
> Canada skews towards greater trust of government, with more broad and intense irrational trust in government in the last few years than I’d ever noticed in the decades prior.
I mean didn't they just decide that the constitution not applies and start freezing bank accounts and detaining people for political speech the government didn't like?
Discriminating based on race/sex is racist/sexist. It’s sad today that many people (racists and sexists) staunchly believe the opposite of the above when discrimination is going against the race or sex who “deserve” it, going so far as to call this kind of racism “anti-racism”. Worse, though, is that many others lack the moral clarity or courage to admit that they understand that discriminating based on race/sex is racist/sexist, and thereby allow this kind of racism/sexism to perpetuate.
I’d be interested in seeing the program that OP’s colleague has to see energy consumption per device. I want this for electricity, gas, and water. The utilities are starting to get into smart metering, but they’re not up to what I’m looking for yet, at least not my providers.
> The most important takeaway is to avoid new tokens that haven’t undergone a code audit. Code audits are a process by which a third-party firm analyzes the code of the smart contract behind a new token or other DeFi project, and publicly confirms that the contract’s governance rules are iron clad and contain no mechanisms that would allow for the developers to make off with investors’ funds.
But how do you know which third party auditors to trust?
What DeFi projects are laying bare is that it’s an absolute marvel that we have functional societies at the scale we do today (USA, EU). Most people can live their lives intuitively knowing which instructions to trust (financial, groceries, restaurants, medical, you name it). All of it is ultimately backed by laws, systems, real people who can be held accountable, and government monopoly of force. Furthermore we rarely have to see that stuff for the system to work and that monopoly on force is rarely abused.
It could be a meaningful technological shift if a lot of the financial infrastructure goes decentralized, digitized/programmatic, and open source. But I’m dubious the mainstream person’s day to day experience will change much, the stability and peace of mind afforded by the structures of our current society are pretty amazing and I don’t see them being replicated in a purely digital and decentralized form.
> It could be a meaningful technological shift if a lot of the financial infrastructure goes decentralized
It's important to note that “DeFi” is more centralised than our existing financial infrastructure. (Also, our existing infrastructure mostly uses open, public, well-known standards with many implementations; most DeFi stuff… documents how it currently works, I guess? Though it's hard to find that documentation.)
If you know where the documentation for the most popular DeFi system, Bitcoin, is, then by all means share it.
• What does the peer-to-peer network protocol look like?
• How do I make a transaction / mine a block?
I know how to do this using end-user wallet applications, but the open protocols are so very well documented that I'm sure you can find this information easily.
The pages that show up in search results[0][1] don't really have this information. It gives me a high-level overview, tells me that it uses TCP and which port it uses, and gives the structure of the TCP packets (with some examples), but there's a whole load of stuff that's just never defined. To actually understand what's going on, I then have to read the source code.
And… making a transaction?[3] Mining a block?[2] No chance. I know it's “double SHA256” and that's about it. (I can look at the source code to find out, sure… but an open standard? Open secret, more like. The flaming whitepaper[4] is more useful than these docs.)
This is Bitcoin, the best-known, most-popular, (presumably) best-documented DeFi system on the 'net. Ethereum has… a blog post, an onlinelibrary.wiley.com book and an academic article. I don't even want to know what other stuff has. Most DeFi garbage barely has a whitepaper.
Calling Bitcoin defi slightly stretches the definition. Typically defi relates to smart contracts - of which there is plenty of documentation, and which is vastly -not- built on Bitcoin. Saying “Bitcoin is defi and look, no defi docs!” is ignorant and best and aggressively disingenuous at worst. Yes BTC is decentralized finance, but it’s not the same as “DeFi” strictly speaking.
You appear to be enraged that a specific open-source project you chose doesn't have good enough documentation for a specific feature you want, which is not the main aim of the project. Not sure I can help. Additionally, all the answers to your question are contained in my first comment.
I don't intend to appear enraged; that's certainly not the case! (I'm amused and sarcastic, if anything.) I know it's a tangent, but if you could explain why you have this perception, I'd be grateful.
> that a specific open-source project you chose
It was but an example; I assert the rest are also like that. I chose Bitcoin because it is the biggest, but I could just as easily have chosen Ethereum (as I have already said).
> doesn't have good enough documentation for a specific feature you want, which is not the main aim of the project.
If not making transactions, blocks, and mining, what is the main aim of Bitcoin?
> Additionally, all the answers to your question are contained in my first comment.
You provided a link to the documentation for Solidity, one of many high-level languages over the Ethereum VM. While it provides a little documentation of Ethereum bytecode, and a high-level overview of how Ethereum is used to handle smart contracts, this isn't Ethereum documentation. The answers are not to be found there.
(And I don't expect you to help; I'm aware that the answers aren't easy to find. That's my whole point!)
"How do I make a transaction / mine a block?" that's a "how does it works ?" kind of question, you need to know how all the small parts work to explain the functionality.
Yes, some aspects you need to look at the code, others you will find documented
i would recommend https://learnmeabitcoin.com/ which has very in-depth resources but it seems to be down at the moment
collect a load of transactions (somehow): by this you mean the mempool. the implementation is client dependent, it uses the p2p network to receive new txs, thats what you need to look at to know how to "get txs from the network". some implementations have better documentation. if you need to look at code i would recommend the go implementation https://github.com/btcsuite just because it looks cleaner to me.
validate them: your best resource for this is code. your client needs to keep old consensus code around and use it to verify block under the older rules (your client will do a full sync at some point)
rules for formatting a transactions and blocks (and a byte by byte explanation) can be found on https://learnmeabitcoin.com/ as mentioned (probably will be up soon)
keep changing a certain bit of the block until SHA256(f(SHA256(block))) is low enough (with some f: digest → bitstring): yes. you set the block nonce to mine. finding a block means that the hash256() operation (sha256(sha256(block))) returns an hash with at least D (either left or right most, can't recall right now) bits set to 0, where D is the current difficult, which is adjusted by the network to make the 10min/block average time
Ah, so “you have to look at the code” is a feature, not a bug. That makes some sense, I suppose.
> finding a block means that the hash256() operation (sha256(sha256(block))) returns an hash with at least D (either left or right most, can't recall right now) bits set to 0, where D is the current difficult, which is adjusted by the network to make the 10min/block average time
This is a lies-to-children explanation. Bitcoin actually uses less-than a certain value (source: [0]). The tricky part is that a SHA-256 digest is a 256-bit number, and the SHA-256 function's input is a sequence of bits; the SHA-256 specification explicitly declines to specify a canonical representation of that 256-bit number, so it can't be used as the input to SHA-256 without explaining how it's being used. I can't find anywhere what this intermediate function (the one I called f) actually is. There are only half a dozen obvious possibilities (bits from most→least, or least→most, and the four normal ways of doing ASCII hex digests) so it's not that hard to guess, given an example… but still. It's the principle of the matter; it's all under-documented.
(Thanks for the rest of the info by the way. You've given me leads I wouldn't otherwise have been able to easily find.)
Seems super unlikely that somebody with a HN account can't find docs for defi projects that in most cases have github accounts with available contracts and api docs, doesn't it?
And not to mention that by definition, those DeFi contracts are readable. The actual code, itself. Sure, there might be (and probably are) bugs, and we need auditing tools, the list goes on, but at least it's not a black box.
A lot of DeFi scams claim that an auditing company has audited their code. There's also scam auditing companies too that work with these DeFi scams to add to the false legitimacy.
Although smart contract audits are pretty much security theatre where the auditor charges $10k-$30k to run your code through a program, rug pulls are way more common just through simple methods.
A few common ways:
1. Use your admin privilege to withdraw or upgrade the smart contract to drain the funds
2. Withdraw all liquidity for your token and disappear
3. Sell the entire token supply all at once, which is functionally equivalent to (2)
4. Pretend to get "hacked" and lose your private key
5. Program a backdoor into the smart contract (the least common way). Some of these are economic in nature (e.g. frontrunning), which can't necessarily be found in an audit
groceries -> couldn't buy toilet paper at the start of the pandemic, still some lingering supply issues, prices going up
restaurants -> many not open reliable hours anymore, many closing
medical -> costs way too high and continue to rise, hospitals oversaturated with patients from time to time, nurses quitting
All of it is ultimately backed by laws, systems, real people who can be held accountable -> maybe if you are rich
I can't fault the average-income (or slightly higher/lower) person for having the point of view that these are starting to fall apart and aspects of DeFi becoming attractive, even though the practicalities have a long way to go before they would become anywhere near as foundational.
What aspects of DeFi look attractive exactly? Yield of some digital coin which only has value relative to a fiat currency?
Your local bank at least complies with regulations that cap transaction fees for your chequing account. Meanwhile, ETH gas fees are completely unpredictable, and can easily be higher than the amount you're transferring.
I mean more like, you can generally eat food from grocery stores and restaurants and trust it'll be pretty safe. You can get medical operations and pharmaceuticals, and generally trust them. There are actually extremely large problems here, e.g. Purdue and fentanyl, but even there Purdue has been fined to death by the government. Still, there are huge problems for sure. The problems need to be addressed, but I think if you look to narrowly at some of the problems, you think the whole system needs to be overthrown. Sure that sentiment is increasing, but more pushed by well-off elites than a genuine grassroots uprising. This is one of the biggest problems we face today IMO.
I don't think DeFi helps with most of the problems you're talking about. Supply chain issues, COVID-related business restrictions, health care prices and the role of insurance providers, none of these are caused by centralized financial systems.
