Besides that I’m really unsure why you think that more military power would have helped. I really do believe that in a general sense this is true: since WWII the US has won every battle but lost every war. And that’s not down to an inability to be tactically extremely successful. It‘s down to taking on war aims that are impossible to achieve or at least extremely difficult and (most notably currently) being strategically totally lost.

That also substantially weakens any leverage the US has.

A mere slight increase in gas prices and slight threat to the economy can already substantially weaken US will to fight …

You can’t just say “but this is doxxing” and expect people to know what you are talking about and also attach the same negative label to it as you do the same way you would when you call out murder or theft.

I personally don’t find “doxxing” that useful as a concept and as a guidepost to what I consider ethical or not. People who use the concept tend to be extremely zealous with at, to a point where anything identifying anyone is doxxing (and doxxing is to those people self-evidently unethical) and that just doesn’t seem useful or practical to me at all.

As to this particular case: if you create something as corrosive, destructive and powerful as Bitcoin society should know you. You don’t get to hide in anonymity at all.

Obviously all actions the US takes have knock on effects elsewhere but those effects tend to become quite unpredictable and also weaker the further you are away from the place where the action happens.

We could talk for days about the knock on effects of the Iran war and sort through them and how all the different actors in the world will react and whether that’s on balance good or bad for the US … but it’s all a bit cute, right?

As always with any kind of film festival you are exposed to the bleeding edge - so yeah, you are going to see some bad films. That’s part of it. Though I noticed that even bad films – especially well made ones that I think are totally misguided in the ideas they express – help me broaden my horizons, understand myself better and maybe also understand the world better.

So yeah, long story short, I don’t think film as an art form is dead and it also won’t be in the next century or so. Maybe certain films won’t be made in the future – I’m currently mostly sad about practically no mid-budget films being made – but I’m totally certain that there will always be great films.

Also, might I recommend looking at the way the world is, not the way the world might be. This is one of the ugly AI tendrils this disgusting industry is putting into everything, bringing ruin to the world. This is the actual reality of it, making the world a dumber, less interesting more stupid place.

Obviously free (and not merely democratic societies) need strong protections of minorities and broad freedoms, but I don’t see free speech implementations in Europe broadly infringing on that.

I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything.

Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewhere in terms of relatively low value things nobody built before because it just wasn’t worth the time investment – but those things are necessarily relatively low value (or else it would have been worth it to build it) and as such also relatively limited.

Software has amazing economies of scale. So I don’t think the builder/tool analogy works at all. The economics don’t map. Since you only have to build software once and then it doesn’t matter how often you use it (yeah, a simplification) even pretty low value things have always been worth building. In other words: there is tons of software out there. That’s not the issue. The issue is: what it the right software and can it solve my problems?

Zero trust age verification means both sides don’t have to learn anything about each other beyond old enough yes/no. Should mean that.

I’m fine with age verification if it fulfills at least the same criteria that offline age verification does. When you show your ID card in a supermarket to buy alcohol or cigarettes or whatever then the government doesn’t learn anything about what you did and if the cashier doesn’t memorize and write down anything on the card the supermarket doesn’t learn anything about your identity. Here the digital solution can and should do better and close that theoretical deanonymization vector.

But yeah, that‘s the ideal to aspire to.

It’s simple really: zero trust age verification should be a strict requirement of any such law and anything else illegal for age verification.

That to me is what has to happen and it’s important to me. That’s my perspective on this – not that‘s never going to happen anyway, so no point in trying to.

In fact, if these laws make the requisite infrastructure (ID cards that offer that functionality) a hard requirement then creating an anonymous web that nevertheless has age checks easier, not harder.

What you basically want is an ID card where you as the owner can decide what you want to share with the private business. And for age verification that’s basically just requirement fulfilled yes/no.

So if the law is well written then this could be an advantage, not a disadvantage. Preemptive cynicism isn’t helpful here.

Economical co-dependency is a good tool for increasing the price of going to war and making it irrational. It’s also not a zero sum game and tends to profit both sides. However, it can suck if you do it with non-democratic regimes and autocratic rulers who trample human rights.

So between France, Germany, Poland and all the other EU members it‘s keeping the continent at peace and generally does not suck because it‘s between broadly democratic nations. It also benefits each one massively and makes things possible like a common electric grid that increases reliability in general. So nearly all upside.

I do think economic cooperation with the Soviet Union and later Russia - much, much more limited than between EU members - was helpful in cooling tensions and making the world a bit safer, sure, but Russia has clearly behaved in a way that makes that no longer a good idea.

This does not apply to opinion questions that show huge differences (not single digit percentage point differences), though there validity, not reliability is a bigger concern, especially since there exists no voting benchmark you can measure against.

Still: I think it’s awfully convenient to just wholly discount actual empirical evidence whenever you feel like it because it might not be perfect. Why exactly do you think your gut feeling is better?

The issue is the US burning up that earned mutual trust. And at some point you have to sadly abandon ship. Cooperation is great, trade is great, but not under all circumstances and all the time.

That seems like a wild and weird take to me, contradiction everything I know about how the world works. But if that is your hypothesis then I don’t know how you can answer ist without actually engaging closely with those who you say are disconnected.

I merely would have expected some humility when you characterize the work of other scholars from the outside without even talking to them. (Outside here is relative. Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside.)

If those scholars don’t want to talk to you, fair enough, probably no humility needed. If you don’t want to talk to them (which, fair enough, not everyone is cut out or wants to do journalistic work) you better be humble and maximally charitable, though.