where else are you supposed to ride eScoooters and bicycles?

On the road.

I agree that some people will get scared of being on the road with cars, but that’s where they belong if there are no bike lanes. The catch-22 is that you can’t get enough traffic to justify bike lanes until you have bike lanes. It takes someone to make the gamble that “if you build it, they will come”. And, even then, drivers are going to be extremely dangerous. In the Netherlands, drivers largely aren’t, but in North America there’s a combination of drivers not expecting bikes, so making honest mistakes that get bikers killed, and drivers being evil assholes who don’t think bikes belong near them and will drive dangerously and kill people.

Netherlands has reached a state where bikers feel safe because everyone bikes and it’s safe. That means drivers always expect bikes. That makes biking safer, so more people are willing to bike.

Still, fundamentally, until there are bike lanes, bikes and scooters need to stay off sidewalks. Scooters and people who aren’t experienced cyclists probably shouldn’t ride on major roads either. Drivers are just too dangerous, and the speed difference between the two is too big. But, on smaller roads where the top speeds are about 30 km/h, the bikes and scooters will be going similar speeds to the cars. That’s not that fast for a vehicle, but it’s way too fast for the sidewalk.

No, the company was based out of the Bahamas. He’d been living in the Bahamas for years.

He probably didn’t make a run in the beginning because he had convinced even himself that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he’d just been aggressive and sloppy. Then he probably thought that he might be accused of something, but that his money and connections would help him stay out of jail. By the time he was arrested in the Bahamas, it was probably too late. He was too high profile to just slip away.

If he’d been a bit more paranoid, he probably could be on the run today.

He had access to billions. Even if getting it all liquid would have resulted in a 90% loss, that’s still hundreds of millions. With that kind of money, you can find a country where you can get a new passport under a new name, and probably get away with faking your own death.

The problem is that to do any of that, you’d have to work with other people, and there would have to be some trust involved. If he wanted to keep the money in a bank, there would have to be some mutual trust with a bank / banker. If he tried to walk around with millions in jewelry, he’d have to avoid getting mugged. If he hired private security, he’d have to avoid getting mugged by his private security. If he tried to use his money to get a passport in say Myanmar, he’d have to have some trust that they wouldn’t just imprison him and beat him until he gave him the rest of his money. If he had tried to work with a lawyer who was only slightly bent, he’d have to trust that the lawyer wouldn’t turn him in. If he had tried to work with a very bent lawyer, he’d have to trust that the lawyer wouldn’t have him tortured until he gave up his money.

While he was definitely a criminal, he was a white-collar criminal from a very white-collar family. He probably had zero connections to underworld figures. So, risking his life going on the run might have seemed like less of a risk than risking that his money and his connections could help him avoid prison time if he didn’t run.

He also called SBF’s trial a lynching.

He didn’t flee. That’s where he was living. That’s where the company was based.

On one hand, the scooters were a pain in the ass. They dumped scooters all over sidewalks blocking the way. People often rode them on sidewalks posing a danger to people walking.

On the other hand, it was a low-pollution way of getting around a city without needing a car, and people actually used the scooters. If we’re going to keep the world from melting, there need to be fewer cars. Not just fewer internal-combustion cars, fewer cars in general. If we just replace gasoline engines with electric motors, it’s not going to solve the climate crisis. Cars also just make cities awful to walk, bike or use a scooter in. So, even if they were all electric, it would be annoying.

Personally, I always liked the bike sharing options a lot more than the scooter options. Whenever I was a tourist in a city that had those bike share programs, that’s always how I preferred to get around. You see a lot more, you can stop anywhere and take pictures, and when you’re done you can just plug the bike into the nearest available bike storage stand. But, scooters could be part of the solution. There are probably people who would ride scooters who wouldn’t use bikes, even e-bikes. If anything reduces the number of car journeys people take, it’s probably a good thing.

there needs to be admin tools to restore the NFT to the proper owner.

The whole point of the blockchain technologies is that they’re (supposedly) immune to state interference. What’s on the blockchain is the “truth”. The state wouldn’t have any power to restore the proper owner of the NFT / house because they chose to trust blockchain instead of having control over the database.

If states can “restore ownership to the lawful owner”, they can also seize people’s cryptocurrencies.

That’s why no state would ever have house registries on a blockchain that they didn’t control. And if they did control it, there’s no point in using a blockchain when they could just use a traditional database.

Most people don’t remember this, or weren’t alive at the time, but the whole Colin Powell event at the UN was intended to stop the weapons inspectors.

France (remember the Freedom Fries?) wanted to allow the weapons inspectors to keep looking until they could find true evidence of WMDs. The US freaked out because France said it wasn’t going to support an invasion of Iraq, at least not yet, because the inspectors hadn’t found anything. That meant that the security council wasn’t going to approve the resolution, which meant that it was an unauthorized action, and arguably illegal. In fact, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said it was illegal.

Following the passage of Resolution 1441, on 8 November 2002, weapons inspectors of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission returned to Iraq for the first time since being withdrawn by the United Nations. Whether Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction or not was being investigated by Hans Blix, head of the commission, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Inspectors remained in the country until they withdrew after being notified of the imminent invasion by the United States, Britain, and two other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_and_the_Iraq_War

On February 5, 2003, the Secretary of State of the United States Colin Powell gave a PowerPoint presentation[1][2] to the United Nations Security Council. He explained the rationale for the Iraq War which would start on March 19, 2003 with the invasion of Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell's_presentation_to_the_United_Nations_Security_Council

The whole point of Colin Powell burning all the credibility he’d built up over his entire career was to say “we don’t care that the UN weapons inspectors haven’t found anything, trust me, the WMDs are there, so we’re invading”. Whether or not he (or anybody else) truly thought there were WMDs is a bit of a non-issue. What matters was they were a useful pretext for the invasion. Initially, the US probably hoped that the weapons inspectors were going to find some, and that that would make it easy to justify the invasion. The fact that none had been found was a real problem.

In the end, we don’t know if it was a lie that the US expected to find WMDs in Iraq. Most of the evidence suggests that they actually thought there were WMDs there. But, the evidence also suggests that they were planning to invade regardless of whether or not there were WMDs.

Relevant:

Criminals will start wearing extra prosthetic fingers to make surveillance footage look like it’s AI generated and thus inadmissible as evidence

https://twitter.com/bristowbailey/status/1625165718340640769?lang=en

Twitter is just burning money every minute as it is. Even if the EU only fines them a symbolic 1 Euro, it’s going to keep losing money. The important thing is that the fines / punishments will probably get bigger if Twitter continues to break the rules, so it’s likely going to stop.

How’s it going to stop? A responsible, intelligent company would hire moderators and chase off the Nazis. But, Musk will most likely just make Twitter unavailable in Europe. That will just accelerate the doom spiral.

You claim that “governments order companies to do stuff all the time”, but how does that apply to an entry in the blockchain, which we’ve agreed is the authority on who owns property. The hint is: a company couldn’t change an entry in the blockchain, even if the government ordered them to do it.

Historical fun fact: this is why Hitler was rejected from art school in Vienna.

And what’s your argument?

Or to both downvote the same things, or to comment twice on the same post in a way that makes it seem like it’s 2 people. Basically if both show up in the same space and you pretend that each is its own person, that’s probably sock puppeting.

Oh the other hand, it’s not sock puppeting if the two identities are active in different spaces. If you use one account to comment on PornHub and a different one to post on LinkedIn, nobody’s going to say that’s sock puppeting.

But sockpuppeting isn’t bad per se. Lots of people (me included) do it

Do… what?

Sock puppeting is when you have an account that you pretend is an independent user unaffiliated with you, and you interact with your own posts or get around restrictions with that account. It’s called sock puppeting because you’re in control of the puppet, but you make it seem independent.

If you personally are banned from a service and use another account to get on, that might be considered a sock puppet, but only if you’re interacting with the same people / communities you were banned from talking to.

If you just have multiple accounts that you use for different things, that’s not sock puppeting, that’s just having multiple accounts for different uses.

Ok, so who’s the government going to order to change the blockchain?

Because sometimes even criminals need to buy things that aren’t illegal

Money has value basically because people need to pay taxes. The shop owner sells things for Euros or USD partially because eventually at the end of the year they need to turn over Euros or USD to the government as taxes. If they sold things for bitcoins, they’d eventually have to convert those bitcoins to USD to pay taxes.

Other than speculation, the only reason bitcoin has any value is that sometimes people need to pay ransomware ransoms. That means they need to buy bitcoin somehow. And, even the criminals who receive that bitcoin will launder it and change it back into real assets because it’s not useful to them as bitcoin. Eliminate ransomware and suddenly the only value for bitcoin is people who hold it hoping there’s a greater fool out there who will buy it from them for more than they paid.

Those are the transactions that are actually happening.

I’m sure there are lots of transactions that aren’t happening because people have given up, and decided that a 99.9% loss in value is basically a 100% loss in value, so they’ve just walked away.

The only way to guarantee that is to change the law that deeds of houses can only be an NFT.

Which means that sovereign states would have to agree to no longer be the authority of who owned property, instead they’d just have to hand over all that authority to some distributed database. What’s in it for them? What’s in it for the people?

If the authority on who owns a home is a blockchain, then what happens if someone shows up at the police station, bruised and bleeding, and claims that they were tortured until they agreed to sign over the deed to their house. In the real world, the police (or at least the courts) would have authority over that deal, and if their investigation proved that someone was in fact tortured, it would mean it’s not a legitimate sale, and the ownership reverts to the original person. But, if “blockchain”, the police and courts have no authority. What’s on the blockchain is law.

Blockchain in general is a solution looking for a problem. Blockchain is just a terrible database that burns mountains of coal. In almost every case when someone suggests using blockchain for something, the simpler solution is to just use a standard database.