Bitcoin is a deflationary asset. You already have a big chunk of the float in the hands of a very very few people. If they were serious about replacing fiat, you’d come up with a currency that’s inflationary and one that tracks pace of innovation. USD derives most of if not all of its entire value from...US military. No one is going to go to war to save bitcoin. NO ONE.
Think one of the key advantages Japanese (and other East Asian) companies have over the US/EU counterparts is that they have very strong national sentiments. You saw this with Nissan debacle. Same with a couple of Korean companies. All the more reasons to believe that the Chinese market is simply a mirage for Western companies.
The other comment in response covers it, mostly. To your second question: the first thing that comes to mind about China is “did it happen in modern China or Nazi Germany?”, not “oh noes whites are not in charge there!”
3. China has threatened military action against western allies, like Taiwan.
4. China has repeatedly violated promises that its made, like the Hong Kong handover.
5. China steals sensitive technology and manufacturing plans from foreign companies. It has mandated that foreign companies establish joint ventures with Chinese companies to do business in China, with unrestricted access to all internal company documents and systems of the foreign company.
I suspect a comment above you spelled it out: corporations value stock price too highly.
When stock price is all that matters, cutting costs wherever they think they can get away with it is the end result (over a long enough period, I'd assume this will always happen as execs cycle through)
As things (engineering, components, design, UX, etc) are cut, customers notice - and switch to brands that they percieve as having cut less. One example of this I'd assume is Apple.
That’s an interesting take, but I was making a different point. Corporations will always do what’s necessary to thrive, and what they need to thrive is largely a function of what society demands. If the corporations are taking down their nationalist trappings, then it’s because we no longer demand them. As far as my globalist politics is concerned, that’s good and well.
This guy is arguing that we've been straying from these (his) ideals, and corporations that don't stay domestic are part of a larger narrative of cultural decline.
What? Are you suggesting that a lack of fealty to corporations is a result of the rise of feminism and marxism? Could you give more detail on these connections?
Is that necessarily a good thing though? Sure you'd want to co-opt a national identity, when it's suitable. But imagine if all the Silicon Valley era companies doubled down on their national identity at any point in their history...
I certainly don’t believe it’s good or bad. It’s more of a cultural phenomenon. US is also a cultural melting pot and they benefit a great deal from being open commercially as well.
Eh, maybe in the past but not so much today. Sony is being effectively run from California, which means that their standards for appropriate game content are being decided according to San Francisco, and not Tokyo, values. The PS5 is doing worse than any previous Sony console in the Japanese market as a result.
It's actually been a long standing trend since the start of the PS3/Xbox360 generation. Iirc Sega had to merge with Sammy to weather the storm. Especially after losing so much money in the previous generation on the Dreamcast.
In that period, the Japanese videogame market shrunk a great deal, and many Japanese developers either went out of business, merged, or courted western publishers.
PS5 is really hard to buy in Japan, maybe same as all other countries. The rumor is that SIE reduced selling units for Japan and increased for US/EU. It seems reasonable because anyway Japanese non-core gamers won't buy Xbox Series S/X.
Actually, PS4 launch in Japan was delayed 3 month from US/EU so the PS5 situation is a bit improved, but still complained.
Another complain for PS5 (and SIE US) is that they changed ○/×/△/□ button meaning. Previously ○ was assigned to OK and × was Cancel that's opposite to foreign edition. Now on PS5, its assignment is same as foreign edition but it feels very strange use of symbol for almost all Japanese people. It should be PSX's initial design failure.
From what I see on my Nintendo switch they are interested in different types of games. PC and consoles games seem to be more action. Nintendo has a ton of more old school types of games like JRPGs and platformers. There are also some creepy Japanese games I see, not sure what’s the game play is like. I can’t even describe what they are other than having flirty Anime type girls.
Eroge make up a large part of the market in Japan, like it or not -- and SCE in California are committed to eliminating toxic masculinity from their platform, even if it means leaving yen on the table.
I did some quick Google searches for the best-selling PlayStation 1, 2, and 3 games in Japan as those consoles were spearheaded by Tokyo. [1][2][3] I didn't see very many Eroge games. I do agree that they're a notable market, especially compared to the west, but they strike me as more niche than a cornerstone genre like action games.
> SCE in California are committed to eliminating toxic masculinity from their platform
I'd love to understand what you mean a little better here. I think I might have an impression from the themes of the God of War reboot, but I was curious if there's a Sony policy you might be able to reference and how that's influenced their first-party production. I'm having trouble understanding the overlap between anime-styled erotica and western depictions of masculinity.
You can run that pseudoscience yourself with Zokrates. They have really good documentation, which makes it a lot more concrete. I didn't get zksnarks at all but that cleared it up for me.
The basic idea is that you have functions with both public and private parameters. You can do two things:
1) Pass in all parameters, get back the output and a proof that the output is correct.
2) Pass in just the proof, the output, and the public parameters, and get verification that the function ran correctly; i.e. that the public parameters and some private parameters you don't know generated that output.
So on chain, you can skip storing all the private parameters, as long as you store the proof, and have a contract verify the proof before storing the public data.
Not sure about pseudo-science, but I have found blockchain writings to be on the abstract side. Try this interpretation:
The Ethereum blockchain hosts serious money. However it has poor cost and performance characteristics for many potential use cases. One approach to work around those is to move money temporarily from Ethereum to another blockchain (let's call that the secondary chain) that's cheaper/faster; shuffle it around there as much as you want; cash in the money back on Ethereum when you're done shuffling it. "Rollups" are a way to pull off that trick (there are other ways). Rollup means (to me at least) that you arrange to publish a kind of checkpoint of the secondary chain state at some point in time, to Ethereum. This checkpoint operation is relatively cheap to do because it's just a "put" of some small number of bytes. Where this comes in handy is when someone asks to withdraw their money from the secondary chain to Ethereum. If they were able to just say "give me my money", there would be the potential to steal funds. There has to be a way to know that a) they owned that money on the secondary chain and b) they didn't spend it already. This is achieved by making the withdrawal request of the form "give me my money because ... this rollup says I legit have that money". Absent the rollup, or some equivalent scheme the Ethereum contract deciding whether or not to give them their money would need to look at the entire history of the relevant transactions from the secondary chain. That's hard-to-impossible. Then, having invented the rollup concept there are two subspecies of ways to tell if the withdrawal request is valid or fake : 1) by holding off on giving the money for a while during which anyone who is interested can call foul on the validity (and get a reward for doing so) or 2) by means of ZK-proofs, which are a real thing but may be impractical to use for various reasons so it's always a good idea to ask for running code whenever anyone invokes them.
Fwiw I disagree that the "data availability" concern is real. My take is that anyone with an interest in having some data will go ahead and store that data. If data integrity needs to be preserved under consensus then publish a hash to a blockchain. Possibly we're actually agreeing on this in your use of "essential"?
By "essential" I mean all the data required to recover complete state.
Holding the data you need yourself might work ok for your own personal ETH balance, assuming you have some way to prove the absence of any outgoing transfers. In fact, that's how one variant of Plasma works.
But with smart contracts, it gets a lot more complicated. It's way simpler if you can just know that any data you need will be on the network.
Why? States have known since this summer that a vaccine was coming, likely by the end of the year, and somehow they have all neglected to prepare.
We've got what is by all measures a modern miracle, an answer to the most horrifying global event of the last century, given to us by a bunch of scientists who have been working nonstop for the last year to give it to us, and state health workers are doing things like taking weekends off and only opening a single vaccine site.
And then they also seem to concerned about fairness WRT to the vaccine distribution that they are willing to simply let this literal miracle go to waste on a shelf, rather than accidentally give it to somebody who didn't deserve it.
The way that almost every state seems to be treating these vaccines are not in any way in alignment with what I would expect from the worst pandemic in the last 100 years. It is infuriating.
"Specialty distribution is not something you can easily scale in a short period of time."
You admit distribution is something that can increase over time, so it should be plainly obvious that capacity will increase as time moves on (as opposed to staying stagnant or slowing down), especially considering everyone involved in the process has explicitly stated it will.
The additional vaccines that are close to approval give us further reason to expect the rate of vaccinations to increase significantly.
We have no reason to believe the current rate of vaccinations will remain stagnant or slow down, and many reasons to believe it will increase significantly in the coming months.
> Specialty distribution is not something you can easily scale in a short period of time
That doesn't mean that you can't scale it at all, and one would assume that scaling over a super short period of time (like, weeks) is harder than scaling over a slightly longer time span (like months).
On that basis, is it not fair to assume that there'll be at lease some non-linearity in production and distribution rates over the next year or so?
Yes, it seems like ultimately the distribution problem will come down to communicating who can get vaccinated and when. Like right now I have been hearing scattered reports that there are places where doses of the vaccine are available and not being used. So if I wanted to go get one could I? I'm certainly not in any demographic that should be prioritized, but if it's just sitting there then someone should use it.
