ew you drive a car 🤢

what's techbro culture?

unfortunately i can't, and it's unrealistic that any government would force them to do so, that's why bitcoin came around, and even if they did publish it, there is no way to make sure they're actually using this very protocol to exchange transactions, plus it doesn't eliminate transaction censorship and surveillance

Visa does it in a secure and centralized way.

visa uses a proprietary protocol, and we have no idea what's going on in reality, security through obscurity has been shown times and times again to be shit

Your placing value in decentralization. Why? Because you’ve deluded yourself into thinking that this will somehow trigger revolution?

no, as i mentioned, as bitcoin is not controlled by one single entity, it can be used by people/countries somehow excluded from financial relations by use of sanctions

decentralization does not provide any inherent value, on the contrary actually, implementing decentralized protocols of any kind is always less efficient and much more complex, but with the current uncontrolled state of the financial sytem bitcoin provides a workaround for people/countries in need of such technology

well yes, bitcoin does have flaws in its design that not only result in high fees, low throughput etc, but comparing it to visa is unfair, because visa "transactions" are analogous to simply changing two numbers in a spreadsheet, while bitcoin is obviously trying to do this in a secure and decentralized way

it does use a lot of energy, but imo it's a fair price to pay for the opportunity for countries to, say, evade certain sanctions and work around the dominance of the US dollar and all the accompanying negative consequences, but there are so many inefficiencies in the way human society works that provide literally no value and use vastly more energy, that i would say that bitcoin is worth it

if bitcoin successfully paves the way for the workarounds around the current dominant financial system, governments and users can and likely will adopt coins with a more fair and less energy wasteful PoW or switch to coins that use PoS

lmao watching already pathetic US public transportation getting further murdered by greedy billionaires and companies is officially my new hobby

i in turn see where people criticizing navalny on chapo are coming from, but i suspect that most people's knowledge of the situation in russia is distorted, at least partially, in particular, i don't think people realize how much of a capitalist country russia actually is (or at least the class disparity present here), or the level of corruption that is present here: the ruling class of billionaires (with a little bit of millionaires sprinkled in the lower positions), who got rich in the chaotic and unlawful privatization of the 90s, who completely control the press, media, judicial system, who repress people for their political views, who remove funding from welfare programs... people's life expectancy, income, happiness, access to welfare are consistently falling

this is basically ronald raegan and margaret thratcher on steroids with a sprinkle of remnants of the soviet union, in the sense that russia's ruling class doesn't even need to pretend that they're trying to serve it's people..

most members of the opposition are particularly opposed to 90s economic system, that is, they opposite the unlawful privatization of massive previously public manufacturing plants, corruption among oligarchs and state-owned corporations, which is basically how basically all russia's billionaires were created and the leading cause of problems in russia; navalny and the opposition's views are social-democratic, you are mistaken if this is what you took from analyzing their political agenda...

this is not that relevant here, navalny himself isn't that involved in the political process per se, as in he doesn't run for state duma or for other legislative bodies, because it's very unlikely he will be let to participate, especially so looking at the recent developments, but he and the fbk are "brewing" a lot of other candidness for various legislative positions, that is FBK supports them in various ways: helping promote them, offering legal help, helping to collect signatures to participate in elections etc etc

he himself may not be popular with the general population, but the majority of russians are fed up with their living conditions, which is shown by the declining rates of support for united russia (the current ruling party), and as a result people are ready to vote for literally anyone else besides united russia members, which is where the aforementioned candidates come in, who have a solid program of action etc etc, and this is for whom people do actually vote

the presidential role is not that important in this case, in the sense that the opposition in russia is focused on occupying and controlling smaller scale, more local government positions, which would in turn allow them to work up the chain so to speak by having more control over making sure the elections are fair etc etc

i'm more concerned with putin's internal politics, which are absolute crap

i would much rather choose to eliminate suffering of tens of millions of russians over stopping aid to iran or some other country...

well, i am russian, which would mean that the political situation in russia is something tangible to me, as it concerns me directly, and as much as i dislike the us, i would much rather have decent healthcare, housing, freedom of speech, judicial system, welfare at the cost of having a us allied government

i know it's hard to compromise, and yes, navalny does hold controversial nationalistic beliefs on many issues, but it's the best option we have at the moment

why do you think that navalny is equally as bad?

aah yes, simping a far right fascist to flex on libs, the ultimate move

was is premeditated or accidental?

thanks :chavez-salute:

no idea, looks like a crude early prototype of Libya's flag

by the way what is this local marxism-themed stickers set or whatever? (i'm new to this website)

i literally fainted from lack of b12 while reading this, too complicated ыыы

edit: anyway, i took my b12 supplements, anyway, i believe this encapsulates a much broader question of how the human mind perceives and adopts foreign ideas and addresses inconsistencies that emerge from contradicting beliefs; i found jonathan haidt's "The Righteous Mind" book shining an interesting light on this issue

tldr of the book: people are scared of foreign stuff, and other people gaslighting their beliefs onto them while appealing to their emotions seems to be the most effective strategy to convince someone

disclaimer: the author is probably a lib, but the psychology component is interesting

no one is going to heaven now wuahahahah :)

it is, older trains are a bit too loud for my sensitive ears, but aside from that it's fucking beautiful, trains are very frequent, pretty cheap (~5 usd per month for students), soviet aesthetics UwU

but alas the city government is trying to fuck it up: newer trains, although more spacious and in general more comfortable, have fucking tv screens that show ads, older trains are starting to get more and more poster ads, when going down/up the escalator you are subjected to like 40 giant (3 by 2 meter) ads, the fares have more than doubled in the last ten years, newer stations look meh, there are facial recognition cameras on every terminal on most stations, there are cops on every station enforcing that everyone buys a ticket etc etc

with all that, public transport is just one component, although significant, needed for proper urban landscape, and moscow fails in almost every other component