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This started out interesting but then the red flags started to pop up. Going to jail in Europe for posting memes, gold standard, salivating over doing something

• wahnfrieden 2y ago
  It's geohot Leading with a Curtis Yarvin citation as supporting material
  • DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    Genuine question: Is George qualified to be making statements concerning economic outlook?
    • braiamp 2y ago
      Think about this: in a complex enough information system, there's almost no one that understands all of it, therefore you need teams to take care of certain functions and processes. Multiply that by 3x10^33 and you have a economic system. Creating a representative of society like the state and the state creating institutions responsible of education, housing, finances, security, food production, etc. is why countries advance as a collective of individuals. No individual, other than setting up lofty but ambiguous goals like reducing hunger/malnutrition, understand how or why certain goals should or not be set for certain sectors and why the processes are what they are to accomplish them.
    • hermitcrab 2y ago
      It does say at the bottom of the page "A home for poorly researched ideas". So I don't think even he is very confident in what he is saying. I assume they are just trying to be provocative. Judging by the number of comments here, it worked.
      • ZeroTalent 2y ago
        This is called lamphshading. Lampshading is when someone acknowledges a flaw or controversial aspect upfront, often humorously or ironically, to deflect criticism or give the appearance of humility or openness. Saying something like "A home for poorly researched ideas" while actually propagating extremist, controversial, or misleading content is a tactic intended to: disarm critics, avoid accountability, and create plausible deniability.
        • EncomLab 2y ago
          i.e. the "geohot method". Why this guy still pulls so much traction is a mystery.
          • red-iron-pine 2y ago
            lotta good cracks back in the day some of his "watch me program" vids are also pretty popular. I learned a lot from watching his workflow. but I'd never trust him when talking about economics or politics, or even where to go for dinner.
        • dudefeliciano 2y ago
          Joe Rogan does this all the time "Well I'm just an idiot who don't know nothing about nothing, but let me proceed to divulge the following BS to hundreds of millions of people as if it were an uncontroversial fact. When I get fact checked we can laugh it off together."
        • hermitcrab 2y ago
          I guess similar to when people (often the 'alt right') say something abhorrent and then claim afterwards they didn't really mean it.
          • ZeroTalent 2y ago
            "it was just a prank, bro!"
• rco8786 2y ago
  Yea I had the exact same experience reading this.
  • coldpie 2y ago
    Yeah same. I'm not an economy understander, the article had lots of upvotes, seemed like kind of interesting ideas at the start. Then he wrote "jailed for memes" and oh, it's just another crank who escaped confinement from Elon Musk's X. I come back to the HN discussion and sure enough he has no idea what he's talking about.
• dudefeliciano 2y ago
  is there any reliable source for that "going to jail in europe for posting memes"? I keep seeing this argument in online arguments, but can not find a credible source
  • Clubber 2y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 https://www.cheshire.police.uk/news/cheshire/news/articles/2024/8/men-jailed-after-posting-racist-messages-on-social-media/ https://www.cheshire.police.uk/news/cheshire/news/articles/2... These things seem abhorrent to Americans who have nearly unlimited free speech protection.
    • boesboes 2y ago
      Lol, nearly unlimited my ass. Not anymore anyway, under the new regime
    • dudefeliciano 2y ago
      I mean that glasgow guy was sentenced 800 pounds, went viral from those videos, and now has a huge youtube following...seems like a great deal About those second 2 guys, what's that phrase that americans like so much? Fuck around and find out. I think the US, even in their nearly unlimited free speech, has similar laws in regards to inciting violence. Defamation, slander, fighting words, are also not protected by free speech. So really, the only difference between the US and UK is that the UK does not allow hate speech. Germany has some more regulations, but the real significant difference seems to be about not being allowed to display nazi symbols or denying the holocaust.
    • sgt101 2y ago
      The two UK cases: - Nazi pug man got a fine of £800; no jail. - Cheshire people; in the context of rioting and the consequences of rioting. For the record I think (personal view only) that the Nazi pug man should never have been prosecuted, I personally find it grossly offensive but I think that the harm of stopping people saying these things is greater than the harm of the idiot saying them. The Cheshire thing I find much more serious, it seemed to me that this was about people calling for other people to get hurt and killed. Is it really the case that it's ok to threaten people or to call for violence against a community in the USA? Also, what about folks like Snowdon and Assange? I mean if freedom of speech is absolute in the USA why can't they just tell the CCP about USA nuclear control?
• jmyeet 2y ago
  It didn't even start out interesting. The main product of the US is weapons not "the dollar". Electricity generation is a metric for what exactly? China's popoulation is rapidly urbanizing. That's all that shows. But the killer is the gold standard. The author seems to be confusing this with fractional reserve banking. Interestingly, they're anti-crypto, which is kinda odd because most gold bugs became crypto bros. China's foreign policy is very different. China invests in creating infrastructure in countries to help make them future customers for Chinese products. US foreign policy is simply to loot the Global South and to use foreign aid as a form of economic imperialism.
  • netsharc 2y ago
    He doesn't even see that the value in gold is what we assign to it. Almost no different to the value of cryptocoins. He doesn't notice the contradiction: > Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto) Gold is worth so much in dollars because everyone thinks everyone else also wants it. Sure you can process it for some industrial use, but most of the worth is because "Someone else will also find this worthy"). I have a 100 trillion dollar note (Zimbabwean) in my wallet, is it worth anything? Just the novelty value. Is the $100 (US) note worth anything? Well I can buy $100 worth of groceries, which at the moment is probably 20 cartons of eggs, but the way Musk is doge-ing the nation, it could be only 4 cartons in the near future...
    • jmyeet 2y ago
      To be fair, you can't just manufacture more gold. I mean you can dig more up or buy more but you're limited to how much gold there is. That's the argument used. There seems to be over 200,000 metric tons of it ever mined. What many gold bugs and crypto bros don't seem to understand is that: 1. The US dollar was never 100% backed by silver (originally) or gold; 2. What really backs the US dollar is the US military. This was true with the gold standard and it's true now; 3. The ability to manufacture more dollars and thus control the money supply is a feature not a bug; 4. Fractional reserve banking is so stunningly successful, it's impossible to ignore; and 5. A lot of the problems detractors point to are really symptomatic of unfettered neoliberalism, not abandoning the gold standard.
• rachofsunshine 2y ago
  There's this piece of product-management wisdom that I've been thinking about lately, which is that users almost always understand their problems better than you do. If the metrics say things are going well, and your users say everything sucks, your metrics are probably wrong. But the complement to that is that users mostly suck at solutions: you understand the constraints and difficulties of your product better than they do, so they tend to suggest things that are infeasible, overly specific, or prohibitively difficult to build. When the public gives (or random bloggers give) give a damn about economics, it's a sign the economy isn't working. Of course they don't have useful solutions - they're not economists - but that feels a little beside the point: you don't have to be a plumber to recognize that your house is full of sewage. And since no one can be an expert in everything, life demands the ability to identify and call attention to problems you cannot personally solve. An article like this is the equivalent of your roommate going "oh, damn, the living room is full of sewage, we better do something about that!" Of course you'll vigorously agree at first, because you're talking about the problem (which is clear to everyone). But then your roommate suggests fixing it by dropping dynamite down the drain - i.e., talking about the solution - and you're a lot more likely to disagree.
  • CraigJPerry 2y ago
    I really like this framing. Thanks for sharing. There’s quite a few (hard) problems end up following this pattern.
  • econ 2y ago
    The best person to implement or flesh out a solution is also rarely the one who came up with it.
• wolfcola 2y ago
  “When I said on Lex”
• agentultra 2y ago
  I dunno if he’s far-right MAGA but these red flags are all far right talking points. No one who understands modern economics wants to bring back the gold standard. Seems like geohot should stick to jail breaking iPhones and mocking programmers and CTF challenges… and maybe read a few more books and attend some lectures if he wants to continue deepening his understanding of economics and political science.
  • dijit 2y ago
    I really hate this idea of "far-right talking points" and "far-left talking points". It immediately frames questions as "us vs them", if there's a talking point you hear come up frequently and it's easily dissolved: learn how to dissolve it. The fewer people walking around with incorrect ideas about things the better we all are. If people rebuff you, maybe they had a point the whole time? If they change the subject or resort to ad hominems, then it's clear to everyone listening that the talking point was bogus. You might not change the persons mind, but it can help others.
    • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      No, it's a useful framing. I might have time for reading an interesting take on economics. I can learn from that, even if I don't agree with the overall position. (That was one of the beauties of HN 10 years ago - you learned from people you disagreed with. You could even wind up upvoting posts you disagreed with, because they had an interesting point that made you think.) If something is a collection of far-right or far-left talking points, I don't have time for it. Either way, it's too little reality and too much zealotry, propaganda, and shilling. I don't have time or patience to wade through it and dissect all the problems and issues and just general falseness of it all. Now, that framing can be used as a general pejorative ("I don't like that"), or even as an attack from the other side (far-left labels normalcy as far-right, far right definitely labels normalcy as far-left). But, honestly given, it's useful to know something is far-right or far-left, just to avoid wasting my time and sanity.
    • zero_shift 2y ago
      We have a limited amount of attention to give and trust to offer, so we filter ideas with heuristics. One of the heuristics is that if someone says something very left-field, does not qualify why it falls out of consensus, and it appears the same as arguments made by politically motivated actors, we trust it a lot less. Especially when that person has no expertise in the area and is mostly famous for a completely different thing.
• JeremyNT 2y ago
  It tells you a lot about hn that a political rant by a confused hacker can hit the front page, while actual reporting on what the government is doing is flagged to oblivion. Success in one domain should not imply competence in another.
• simgt 2y ago
  You forgot the part where Trump's America apparently becomes socialist... > Protectionist America is a boring place and not somewhere I want to be. It kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum…