I agree and there will always be bias in news, intentional or not.
There is the argument that if people were equipped with the skills to identify bias in reporting themselves then these news sources would not be able to operate as effectively and with as much influence as they do today.
For example, in Swedish schools children are actively taught to identify and evaluate biases in news sources as a way to filter false reporting [1].
It we start giving children the toolbox required to live in our (real) world of imperfect reporting then the impact of biased news sources might be neutralized in a generation.
Crytocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are legitimate stores of value and have been compared to the use of other finite stores of value such as precious metals.
The market capitalization of gold currently stands at 7.5 trillion USD. All cryptocurrencies combined currently stand at a market capitalization of 87.6 billion USD (1.14% of the market capitalization of gold).
Cryptocurrencies with a finite supply can supplant other finite stores of value and actually provide a number of benefits over existing finite stores of value (instant exchange to sterling currencies, improved transactional ability, traceability and general liquidity). It is likely we are just getting started.
Calling any legitimate store of value a Ponzi scheme is missing the point.
>Bitcoin and Ethereum are legitimate stores of value
What does legitimate mean? The only difference between monopoly money and bitcoin is that people right now believe in bitcoin. But that belief could easily falter.
The same could be said about gold, but gold a very long history and has somewhat strong demand for use in jewelry.
At this point in time, essentially all demand for cyrpto is for speculation purposes. There is some use for illicit markets but it's very minor.
I wouldn't call it a ponzi scheme because those are intentional. But the current pricing for cryptos is definitely an embodiment of the Great Fool Theory of investing.
Neither agreeing nor disagreeing with your general point about legitimacy, but there are a few big differences between monopoly money and bitcoin. I could fairly easily and cheaply buy a decent printer and print my own fake monopoly money that you wouldn't be able to tell apart from the real thing. Also, even genuine monopoly money could be easily printed in vast quantities by the makers if it ever actually became valuable enough to give them a reason to do so. You can't do the same with bitcoin. There is a known, genuine supply of bitcoin, a known schedule for creation of more, and forgery is impossible (at least not currently discovered to be possible).
If you have invested in gold or bitcoin at $1000 per unit, does it matter if the price after the faith in its value goes away is $0 or $10?
The vast, vast majority of the price of gold is the same "it is scarce and other people value it so I too value it" that composes bitcoin or usd or any other thing you consider valuable.
By comparison, a lot of metals like aluminum have relatively low portions of their valuation wrapped up in stores of wealth.
We really should strive to replace gold with crypto. All the gold reserves in the world could be put to much better use than sitting in a vault as bricks. The artificial price inflation caused by the use of gold as reserve has inhibited its use in many practical applications due to its dramatically higher price per gram compared to many other metals in similar problem domains.
OP isn't calling cryptocurrencies a Ponzi scheme, but specific contracts (e.g. in Ethereum you could make a "smart contract" that acts as a Ponzi scheme).
What is difficult to argue against, and I'm surprised isn't mentioned in this article, is that Apple have completely eliminated market competition from happening around web standards on the iOS platform.
It is impossible to ship e.g. Chromium on iOS right now. We just collectively buy the arguments put forward by Apple to support that position without appreciating the ramifications of not allowing market forces to drive healthy, competitive development.
In that process we made Apple the gatekeeper of web standards development. They can ship whatever they want, when they want and there is no way to build or work around it (e.g. 'Download this alternative browser!').
All we can do is wait, hope or complain. Apple knows the power it wields. I figure Google understands that too hence their position wrt Pointer Events.
> It is impossible to ship e.g. Chromium on iOS right now. We just collectively buy the arguments put forward by Apple
No. Some people buy androids too. Quite a few, last time I checked.
Developers limiting themselves to support apple's modern msie are not allowing the market forces to drive healthy competition.
What? When androids browsers were lagging, locking them out from websites en masse was OK. By the same standards we should be locking out apple laggards this time around? Or are we going to be hypocrites about it?
That's not how the Sherman Anti-Trust act defines monopolies, and that's the law they'd have to be prosecuted under. A republican congress probably isn't going to pass laws designed to sanction the most valuable country in the world.
To be really fair, out of the four biggest browser vendors (MS, Apple, Mozilla, Google) only Google makes it possible to use the other browser engines on their mobile platform.
Preventing other browsers for technical reasons is very different than doing so for policy reasons. iOS prevents other browsers in both ways. ChromeOS (and FirefoxOS, and others) might limit you technically, but do not limit you by policy.
When the limitations are just technical, you can try to work around them, but when they are a flat policy, like Apple does, there is nothing you can do.
Not realistically. The NaCl APIs to support dynamically-generated code have to revalidate every time, so they're too slow to support the heavily self-modifying nature of compiled JavaScript.
Why is it impossible? If you want JavaScript support you have to use Apple's JavaScriptCore, but I don't recall any rule that prohibits using a custom web rendering engine paired with JavaScriptCore.
So if anyone wants to build a version of Chromium that uses JavaScriptCore instead of V8, you could presumably ship that.
Huh. I haven't actually read through that document in a while. I thought it just had the prohibition against scripting languages other than the iOS JavaScriptCore (i.e. WebKit Javascript). I wonder why it now states that you must use the WebKit framework as well?
Here is a link to the 3d web compass I built and submitted to Hacker News 3 years ago [1] (direct link to a demo @ [2]).
I also released a JavaScript library based on that research that may help others use web device orientation without needing to understand all the math involved [3]. That in turn is based on a primer I made for web developers @ [4].
I hope this helps others who want to use device orientation on the web to build web-based compasses, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experiences!
