I dunno man. He seems pretty cogent to me. Even if I don’t agree with him.

Their beliefs affect millions of people, and they have the money to fund ventures that are in line with their shitty beliefs.

greed is a mental illness. that guy has a mental illness.

Fair enough.

It's hilarious in a way that Thiel, one of the billionaires who triggered a liquidity crisis that sunk SVB, is off proposing to fill the gap that he created. It's also entirely fitting with the conspiracy theory of the tech bro fascists wanting complete autonomy to setup electronic fiefdoms.

I don't really get how this would work though, in more practical terms -- as a lot of the crypto stuff is just antithetical to the banking industry. Like even the whole schpiel the crypto bros often go on about how you can send money quick from wallet to wallet, with the old "OMG we did it! How can banks be so stupid and slow!". It's largely due to regulation. Like anti-money laundering regulation, where countries don't want citizens funding things like foreign terrorist groups with untrackable/unblockable wallet to wallet money transfers, so they tell banks they gotta scrutinize every transaction quite a bit, under threat of hefty fines -- and where the govt can overtly tell banks to block payments to unfriendly countries (eg. Iran).

Meh, it's clear they won't care about the fundamentals at all, nor do they care to understand how the industry works. They'll likely use the bank to undercut existing players, while propping it up by manipulating the stock / piling in their billions. The regulation comment is a misdirect, alot like claims of wanting to be regulated were a misdirect back with FTX -- these guys are far more likely to aggressively lobby for / pay the republicans to dismantle regulations in their favour, changing the landscape to their personal benefit. After the competition starts crumbling / they start moving towards a monopoly, they'll either turn it into a regular bank in terms of service (but under their control of course), or they'll intentionally tank it to gobble up whatever reserve/insurance funds exist, shifting that wealth into the billionaire's pockets too, and leaving people with few options other than "under the mattress" for their savings. That'd make people almost entirely dependant on maintaining a regular working income, completing the tech bro fascist wet dream of having indentured slaves that can't push back against any of their bullshit.

Y-yeah.

I'm sometimes having conspiracy theories that some of such people are not just scammers, and were purposefully planted. Lots of people had unpleasant (for corps and states) ideas about crowdfunding, self-organization, libertarianism, or maybe anarchism, whatever. Cryptocurrencies too are not all bad, they have their uses. Living in the USA you might not see those clearly. Crowdfunding is a good model (when you can sue the living hell out of scammers).

It is an existing strategy, highlight your own mule as a leader, let them siphon the sympathizers of an idea to them, then let them loudly fail. You discover those people and their potential mechanisms which could have stayed hidden, and you undermine trust. Repeat until the field is clean. And by weeding out supporters of unfavorable ideas this way in portions, you gradually reduce those possible to act from people opposed to you. So it's a working strategy for building a totalitarian state (that's what they did in Russia), for creating a monopoly (that's what we had in the last 20 years in the web ; even FB, Google etc would initially play as supporters of some free and interoperable Internet, if you remember, they'd support XMPP and RSS here and there and put on nice faces ; then after siphoning the energy that could have went into building a working decentralized IM infrastructure or working decentralized social infrastructure, they'd stop being nice), for basically everything.

I thought at some point that Russia's regime is some scourge Russia alone was subjected to, until I saw that it was actually one of the first to show signs of a global change. Probably because it had less inertia due to being weakened after USSR's breakup.

Lol, wut? I was really just saying we shouldn't trust Palmer Lucky.

Well, it's a tendency. I just remembered the time when I was hearing about Oculus Rift often.

Lice-ladder

All American oligarchs are involved in large scale fraud, corruption and organized crime activity. Not to mention many of them are involved in enabling mass scale killings/deaths.

We need judicial and criminal justice reform (Americans specifically, but this is a broader issue) that would allow for independent judicial proceedings, meaningful incentives to avoid a life of crime and real world rehabilitation.

Incentives should include any scheme with more than X10 annual median salaries would requireing full asset seizure (everything, every last cent) a mandatory 20 years live-in community service in positions such as junior janitor at an infectious disease hospital, junior de-mining specialist, junior assistant at a waste site renewal project.

IT access outside of work channels would be restricted. One wouldn't be allowed outside of the location of their community service program outside of perhaps grocery and a trip to the library.

No one should be forced to do this. If they don't like the terms, they are free to do 40 years in prison instead.

To make sure that there are no "schemes" to avoid asset seizure, all family members, business partners or comparable persons of interest would be required to sign affadavits stating that they understand that if it is ever found that they aided in helping/not reporting such schemes, they will have all their assets seized, be required to do 20 years community service (or 40 years in prison) and all their family member and business would be required to sign similar affidavits.

This is only for large scale fraud and corruption. Crimes around enabling mass killings/deaths (e.g. Zuckerberg and other FB executives enabling genocide of Rohingya people) would be best dealt with a public execution via guillotine.

I like your proposal. Actually I would also add certain other jobs like daycare worker (after a thourough background check including checking their computers and phones for child porn), certified nurse aide or farm picker. I can speak about the great need for nurse aides. We have a massive shortage of healthcare workers, and it’s even worse at the nurse aide level because the work is tiring but pays so little. Why should immigrants be funnelled into these jobs to make up for the labor gap in the healthcare sector? We need born citizens to also pick up the slack, and learn how to care for their fellow man.

Wasn't this the guy who stole all tech for his VR headset from another company?

Until there is no more money to grift. Which even at this impressive rate of grifting and corruption, is still going to take a while, because there is a lot of wealth in the US to pilfer.

So jail them on funding those ventures. Thought crimes are a bad thing, no matter who you direct them at.