But assuming they indeed want the "freedom" to have unrepairable cars, what about my freedom to want a market that offers them. Same with a market for cars that are not surveillance devices etc. Are their needs more important than mine?

Political extremism turns people into ugly entitled morons. Alas its not a sad circus to watch from afar. They are taking society down to their sociopathic dark world.

* what can be repaired by the owner using spare parts, instructions and common tools

* what can be repaired by an independend third party

* what must be repaired by the manufacturer

* when must something be junked and how much of it can be recycled

These are not "opinions". At some point we need to start calling out the criminal indifference of vested interests (and their shills) to the sustainability question

"Interestingly, there is in fact a noticeable downward slope in average sentiment over time for those topics as well"

I would speculate total sentiment on HN is trending down. Its the disillusionment with tech.

here is the next win for common sense: a repairability index. invented in france where they know a thing or two about revolutions

https://grist.org/climate/why-frances-new-repairability-inde...

I wonder what is the dynamic behind that longevity. Music hasn't changed ofcourse but on tech side I would think there are significant new possibilities.

Is it something related to the difficulty of implementing low level algorithms (famously a lot of linear algebra stuff goes back decades and rests on C / Fortran libraries). Is it that there isn't enough interest to justify new efforts or are those systems already near "perfection"?

Such a higher level macro system must make tradeoffs between sufficient control and conciseness (though its typically possible to insert low level code in between the macros since before any macro can be executed, rendered etc. it must be converted to the lower level anyway).

Developing such a system is probably a task for tech-savvy musician rather than a music-savvy techie. Its value proposition would be precisely to crystallize composition "invariants" that are expressive and versatile enough to enable people to compose genuinely new things.

But you should keep in mind that all LaTeX papers look a bit alike :-) (though much better than Word papers).

Who knows, maybe one day such a "visual space" inside a browser would be interactive, a Google Earth type of thing as far as navigation goes, but with data queries that allow on the fly to populate various widgets. An expert could livestream a story or "save" it for later publication.

Me curly brackets, you no curly brackets. Etc.

Today is not that day.

There are at least three distinct elements and largely unrelated to core banking: payments infrastructure / gatekeeping the private/public monetary system, managing interest rate risk (which is what you describe) and managing credit risk.

Add to that countless "non-core" intermediation activities which nevertheless, depending on the type of bank can be major revenue sources.

Maximazing social utility is indeed the key question but how to do it in a sustainable and future proof way is hardly ever seriously asked.

Separating the issue of private money from providing commercial credit risk insurance (ala CDS) should be possible.

Banking is in a deep, existential crisis for decades now and the march of digitization only increases the pressure to find a way forward.

In response techno-solutionists imagine all sorts of replacements, whether it is "fintech", or "banking-as-a-service" or "crypto" but all are hopelessly shallow and incomplete, almost insultingly crude.

What is entirely missing from these neobanking movements is any straight definition of what is the purpose of banking and bankers. What is their irreducible value proposition that cannot be delegated to machines and algorithms. What is their role in society. Are they allies or enemies of surveillance capitalism? Are their users clients or products? Can there be an honest relation with the sovereign monetary system and the lender of last resort or is private banking a scheme to privatize profits and socialize losses? Last but not least, what role, if any, should they play towards environmental sustainability.

The questions and challenges are pilling up and there are no breakthroughs worth mentioning. In a parallel universe we might have something like BN (banking news), where all sorts of individuals, teams small or large, would pimp their blogs, radical ideas, open source solutions or fancy software products, but above all a positive, forward looking vision for a crucial sector.

Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.

In contrast, while digitally reproduced crap is also fundamentally finite, it can be replicated gazillion upon gazillion times more without any effort or sacrifice.

This is the so-called zero-marginal cost of (re)production [1]. Some people think its a blessing, some people think its a curse.

With AI algorithms it gets even worse. You don't only have infinite copies of the original, you also have infinite variations of the original.

Interesting times.

[1] https://books.google.nl/books/about/The_Zero_Marginal_Cost_S...

Expecting others to enter a bubble and trading accordingly can be a perfectly rational calculation following observations of behaviors in a given market context.

[1] https://theconversation.com/tulip-mania-the-classic-story-of...

strange but true, scarcity comes in different sizes. Is the infinity of NFT's the same as that of paintings? How many types of infinite junk are there? Or is this infinite itself?

The role of scarcity is something interesting to consider as input. Scarcity (perceived or actual) is more natural with tulips or anything that is a tangible, real object.

NFT's tortured way of creating "digital scarcity" sets them, imho, apart from other bubbles. Given how much of modern life revolves around digital they are probably the forerunner of much worse to come.