Stive Pesley

I'm in Berlin and I think NML might have signed for Hertha...

1 hour ago, NottsRam77 said:

And cash isnt king in the underworld ???? Lol

I work for a financial institution and even jo public who arnt part of the shady underworld pay in thousands and thousands of pounds collectively in cash for side line hussles that should be taxable events but they try to sneak under the radar.

Oh absolutely, I never said it wasn't - I just said that BTC is no better

1 hour ago, NottsRam77 said:

Kyc is becoming a bigger thing in btc circles as the financial world reluctantly accepts btc is now here to stay 

Agree - I just opened a new savings account with a better rate of interest than my current one. Different Building Society, but one of the questions was to confirm that the money wasn't coming from Bitcoin!

1 hour ago, NottsRam77 said:

You bitcoin holding will be measured in sats … and theres plenty of them to go around

But it will end up being scraps the way things are going. If you feel like you have done well off a few sats - that only confirms quite how stacked the odds are in favour of those who hold millions of actual full bitcoins

32 minutes ago, cstand said:

My favourite film as a Gen X kid was Back To The Future, but I recently read an article about how, when you take it apart, there are about 5 different blatant sex crimes integral to the plot! 😂

On 27/07/2024 at 08:11, NottsRam77 said:

Bitcoin is an open source public ledger…. Anyone anywhere on the planet who has a phone can view what moves where 

Cash is as shady as hell and until it hits bank account has zero tracability

Slightly disingenuous. If BTC was so utterly transparent, it wouldn't be so heavily used by the criminal underworld.

Yes the block chain is visible, but the addresses are anonymous, so it's very difficult to link a specific transaction to a specific individual

Add to that the increasing popularity of decentralized tumblers which deliberately mix up transactions to make it almost impossible to trace the original transaction path.

Whatever form currency takes, FIAT or crypto - those with power have a vested interest in making it untraceable

On 27/07/2024 at 11:56, NottsRam77 said:

I mean, just because the heavyweight corps are hoovering it up .. doesnt mean that joe public cant either.. its open source 

we can buy as much as we want / can afford its not a closed shop

Again - not the whole story. Yes anyone can buy it but not at the level of the finco whales. To own one bitcoin Joe Public needs to have ~$60k sloshing around his change jar. Compare that to Blackrock buying 200,000 BTC or the link above about the US wanting to buy a reserve of a million BTC. And once they have that much, they can manipulate away

And it literally is a closed shop when there is a finite number of BTC! Once they are all being held. What then?

On 25/07/2024 at 18:07, Jubbs said:

https://x.com/David_Leavitt/status/1816318314605338793

I'll link this tweet (won't embed as it contains the n word), which adds up with what the API seemingly says.

But the platform does apparently monitor tweets for hateful slurs

Here is the drummer from The Fall discussing an album with ex-presenter of Channel 4s The Word Terry Christian

(apparently "cracker" is a disparaging US word for stupid, white rednecks)

3 hours ago, therealhantsram said:

Shrinking is Apple isn't it? Or has it moved?

D'oh - yes of course. As you were. I'm an idiot

GREETINGS!

29 minutes ago, Srg said:

It's naive to think that Musk bought it and has immediately gotten worse, and not only that, has aligned itself with his personal politics, and think it's just an an algorithmic coincidence. I have been on Twitter since 2009, I am aware of what it's been like, and I'm fully aware of what it's like now.

Absolutely - and it shows a general ignorance of how algorithms work. They do what they are told to do!

39 minutes ago, cstand said:

Grim reading for the EUs rival to Starlink. Its in complete disarray.

Behind schedule, way over budget, disputes between EU and industrial titans, some are threatening to pull out of the project altogether.

Boeing starliner grim reading as well, littered with problems over the last few years.

No surprise with their problems today.

Almost as if it *IS* rocket science 😂

47 minutes ago, Alph said:

Isn't there a convicted rapist competing at the games too?

As if whipping the poor horse wasn't bad enough...bestiality is beyond the pale

2 hours ago, Bob The Badger said:

I'm so tempted to sign up for Disney to watch that, but they have literally nothing else I want. They are weirdly off-brand with this one show. It would be like ITV making a fabulous sit com.

Yeah it's very odd. We signed up for the kids as they have all ten billion episodes of the Simpsons, all the Star Wars and Marvel stuff and we didn't watch anything on there for ages

Now we've watched a fair few things

The Bear

Only Murders In The Building (quite silly by Martin Short & Steve Martin are excellent comedy spoils)

Shrinking (still can't recommend this enough - comedy about a therapist trying to put himself back together after his wife dies. Harrison Ford is amazing in it)

Dave (if you like your comedy on the slightly gross side at times)

What We Do In The Shadows (it is a couple of series ahead of what's been on the BBC)

But otherwise, yes it doesn't seem to have the amount of new content as the other streamers. LOTS of old classics though (24, Prison Break, My Name is Earl, Lost , The Americans, X-Files etc etc)

Just finished season 3 of The Bear. Fair to say that it continued in the vein of the first 2 series by delivering some incredibly stressful episodes, but to then finish on a cliffhanger with none of the main storylines resolved is pure audience torture 😂

18 minutes ago, GboroRam said:

I still don't get how bitcoin saves any of the above. 

A economy based on bitcoin avoids inflation because they can't create new bitcoin like they can magic up new fiat. 

So new projects don't get approved and build, because there's no money available. 

And there's nothing preventing insider bungs being made in bitcoin. You can still approve your mate to get the contract at vastly inflated prices. 

The idea that bitcoin will fight corruption flies in the face of everything we've seen from crypto. It's slap bank in the middle of plenty of corruption. 

See my comment above about huge quantities of FIAT money being created and it all sliding down the table into the pockets of the already super rich. Nothing we've seen so far suggests that BTC will be any different. We already have all the mega financial corps hoovering up as much as they can get. It's the new game in town. And of course then you have the huge amounts of BTC held by the criminal underworld. I know that the model is supposed to solve all the "old problems" (and on paper it does), but where money is concerned, it's just a matter of time before people work out how to exploit the model to benefit themselves and sod everyone else

3 hours ago, Jubbs said:

 

Shock, Elon "Free Speech" Musk allows certain users to be racist and go against their Terms of Service. This was never for profit, or free speech, this was always for political influence. 

This tweet about the API seems to have a lot of responses claiming it as fake, but I'm interested in this new "stay informed - manipulated media" label that they have. I wonder how successfully that will be applied across the board? Who has decided that it's definitely fake, and how?

2 hours ago, NottsRam77 said:

its no secret countries like the US and UK are in massive debt and theres no money left

Depends on how you look at it. We control the money supply. The US has created trillions of dollars in the past 5 years. Where is it all? Money doesn't just disappear. It's just ends up in the hands of the wrong people 

Somehow we managed to not quite qualify 😞

https://olympics.com/en/news/team-gb-s-olympic-hopes-dashed-despite-big-english-victory

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c80xwlgpwxjo

New annual report from Kick It Out 

Quote

Reports of sexism and misogyny rose 44% from 80 in 2022-23 to 115 last season, having already previously increased by more than 400%.

Analysis of the language used in that form of discrimination found 64% questioned the place of women in the men's game.

People like Barton simply empower others to act like this, so it's not harmless

Again - it's perfectly fine to have an opinion on the matter but consider what the intent is when you're tagging women into your comments online, or yelling it at them on the park on a Sunday morning from the touchline. What are you intending to achieve?

Funny to see people still trying to defend it when it's so objectively and obviously worse than it was in its heyday

Changing it for the worse and then saying you just need to try and spend time experimenting with your settings a bit and maybe pay a monthly subscription to get it back to how good it used to be? Yes that's definitely business genius 😂

It's worth noting, for those saying "blimey they'll arrest you for having an opinion these days"

The Malicious Communications Act specifically covers:

The offence of Sending Letters, Electronic Communications, or Articles with Intent to Cause Distress or Anxiety

So he is not in trouble for having an opinion. He could have just tweeted his opinion and people would be free to ignore. He has actively tagged her in tweets - that's the malicious part. He didn't need to do that, but he did it deliberately so that she'd see it AND to ensure that the message was amplified. 

Whether you agree with his opinion or not is immaterial - ask yourself what you think his intent was? 

1 hour ago, Srg said:

Andrew Tate tweeted someone the N word with the hard R the other day, for example

If you search his account + the "N" word - he uses it on a frequent basis. I think it's a deliberately provocative move, because his father was black (even though Tate himself appears to be pretty fair-skinned)

21 minutes ago, Normanton Lad said:

Things that were not bad before are probably not bad now.

Really?

Slavery for example?

26 minutes ago, BaaLocks said:

The issue is when someone digs up the quote / video and then decides to be judge and jury on whether it was ill intended or not. Take the Jason Lee / David Baddiel one, he was asked to comment and made it clear he no longer thinks that behaviour is appropriate. That doesn't mean it is the end of the matter but it is the first point, the first point is not someone saying "look at how racist David Baddiel is".

Fortunately, the old 'I wasn't being racist, some of my best mates are black' argument no longer stands and the ultimate arbitor is the recipient of the statement. You may not think you are being sexist telling a girl she has a nice bum, but if she thinks you are then you are. That is the premise of institutional racism, it is so prevalent that even those who deliver it are not aware (same at the point of growing up in a rural village).

What I find interesting are the two approaches to "offence archaeology"

You mention Baddiel - holding his hands up and admitting that he now realises it was wrong. There are numerous famous people who have taken that same approach. The most perfect and succinct example being from the late Beastie Boy MCA, when asked about the sexist lyrics on the first LP being at odds with their later championing of women's rights -  he apologised and said "I'd rather be called a hypocrite than be the same guy forever"

Nobody who apologises and take the time to show that they have grown as a person should ever have to worry about being "cancelled"

The other approach is the more problematic one - where someone immediately gets defensive and starts to simply attack the idea of being attacked for something they said or did a long time ago. As if it shouldn't be allowed to question a person's past actions

If you're doing that instead of apologising and owning your  mistakes then it very much suggests that you are still the same person - you just don't want to admit it

39 minutes ago, Crewton said:

I've racked my brains but I can't immediately think of an example of this, but I'm guessing you must have something in mind?

I assumed he was referring to Universal Basic Income type approaches, but that wasn't what I meant

19 minutes ago, cstand said:

Looking back at history the forced redistribution of wealth has just lead to poverty because no one has any incentive to work any more.

You obviously think it will be a success, I actually think any temporary success will lead rapidly to complete failure.

We will both never change our minds on this particular subject so its best to agree to disagree.

I'm not trying to change your mind, and I'm under no illusions that it would automatically be a success, but it does seem a glaringly obvious solution that - faced with the amount of debt in the global monetary system - we should at least try and do something about the way the system is rigged. Having several thousand multi-billionaires who just keep on hoovering up more and more of the money while the rest of the world crashes can't be right on any level. It's a deeply dysfunctional system

36 minutes ago, cstand said:

Its either cut government spending or tax rates going to extortionate levels.

Of course the third way of forcing redistribution of wealth (which I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the world's population would have no issue with, if the alternative was societal collapse, starvation and death) is somehow unspeakable

I get your point about investing in wealth stores as a hedge, but I don't think it will matter how much gold or BTC you have if society collapses