Cryptocurrency is the ponzi scheme for tech people.
Because the cryptocurrency ecosystem does not do investment -- likely in very large part because no one can buy anything legal with cryptocurrency -- returns for coiners who cash out must, by definition, come from later investments.
Paying earlier investors with the investments of those who follow is the definition of a ponzi scheme.
By the beginning of January, the termination of pandemic-related economic supports is expected to put 19 million Americans at risk of homelessness, and make 11% of the US population unable to afford to put food on the table.
The longer-term picture is that the millennials (born 1980 or later) will be the first generation in a very long time to have a lower standard of living than their parents did.
These are the kinds of problems civil unrest is made of.
The role of fact checking is not to strive for partisan balance but rather to identify public comments that are untrue.
American conservatives would fall afoul of fact checking far less frequently if the conservative worldview wasn't wedded to talking points that are not factually accurate. For example:
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. There is no evidence of ongoing large-scale voter fraud in US elections. There is no evidence that the incoming Biden administration intends to end capitalism. There were no 'convoys' of migrants preparing to violently storm the US-Mexico border prior to the 2018 midterms. Barrack Obama was not ineligible to serve as President. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is detaining children in the basement of a pizza parlor. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is run by a cabal of pedophile cannibals. Etc.
A fact checker who does not point out the fact-free basis of these, and other, deeply-held conservative talking points is simply not doing his/her job.
If the weight of fact checking falls primarily against conservatives, then conservatives can fix that problem by lying less frequently.
What do you do when the Republican fact checker repeats what the leader of his party tells him to say even though it is fact-free?
A majority of Republicans believe Trump won the election (!) because that's what Trump is saying. There is little reason to think a Republican fact checker would contradict Trump. Indeed, any fact checker who did would be ostracized as a RINO, much as has happened with Fox News since they acknowledged the outcome of the vote.
Partisan fact checkers would only give the Republican party a safe space to continue to lie about matters of objective fact, such as who won the last election.
Frankly, the fact that 'what is truth' can be framed as a partisan issue in America speaks to much, much deeper societal problems than organized fact checking can fix. This is an attitude that is much more in keeping with that found in countries like Albania or North Korea rather than in another advanced democracy.
> There is little reason to think a Republican fact checker would contradict Trump. Indeed, any fact checker who did would be ostracized as a RINO, much as has happened with Fox News since they acknowledged the outcome of the vote.
Those two sentences contradict each other. And the second makes my point. When Fox News says that Trump lost, you can probably trust that particular fact-check. ("Confirming testimony from a hostile witness", in law-speak.)
Since Fox News started fact-checking Trump, Trump's followers have stopped treating Fox News as a reliable source and are voting with their feet towards OANN another very far right sources. They're clinging to lies (politely: disinformation) even in the face of evidence to the contrary from a source that they formerly considered reliable.
That is my point.
Conservatives (or, at least, Trump followers) will turn their backs on sources of information that they considered trustworthy if those sources contradict the leader de jour.
This is inaccurate. Go read the report, or at the very least read the Wikipedia summary.
The conclusion was that a conspiracy between Trumpworld and the Russian government could not be proved because the potential suspects on the US side hid, or destroyed, evidence and lied to investigators.
What were these people covering up -- at considerable risk to themselves for prosecution -- if there was nothing to hide?
Disinformation is dangerous because too many overly credulous people are all to willing to believe in alternative facts even if contradictory primary source materials are available.
If and whether anyone impeded the investigation is beyond the point -- there is nothing in the Mueller report about,
- money laundering through Deutsche Bank
- quid pro quo for a Moscow tower development
- secret mail servers
- Trump as a "Russian agent"
- incriminating piss tapes
And many other topics which don't immediately come to mind but can be easily googled. For two years, these are the stories we were all told were just about to drop.
If for those years, the claim had been "Trump and Russians may have worked together to take out Facebook ads, push bogus articles through troll accounts on Twitter, and phish Clinton aides" nobody would have given a shit. Yet even this set of underwhelming claims probably exceeds all that the Mueller investigation suggests could allege to have taken place at maximum.
You're shifting the goal posts from the question of a campaign conspiracy (coordination) to a broader question of inappropriate connections between Trump and Russia.
Further, the purpose of the Mueller report was not to investigate any of these issues. The Mueller investigation was very narrowly focused on whether the Trump campaign conspired (not 'colluded') with Russian entities during the 2017 campaign.
The additional issues you raise were outside of Mueller's remit. Those questions were supposed to be answered by a separate counterintelligence probe conducted by the DoJ. This separate investigation has vanished without a trace[0] and appears to have been killed or suppressed.
Leaving aside the conflict of interest issues inherent in the Trump DoJ investigating Trump, why would this investigation disappear, given how eager Barr would be to exonerate Trump if the outcome of the investigation would give the DoJ the slightest figleaf of justification to do so?
This the finest special pleading, and exemplifies exactly what I'm talking about. It's fine for you to insist on this very narrow and technical view of the situation, but that's absolutely not how the case was presented in the media day and night for years, and I have no desire to engage you on these minute points.
I'm not going to argue with you about these specific facts, because the correctness of facts composing your take does not even matter for what I'm saying. You want to argue about the specific gastronomic precedents of a shit sandwich, whereas I'm telling you that the problem is that everyone was told for years that a gourmet hamburger was on its way. It doesn't seem like you have anything to say about this state of things, which is why you keep dragging the conversation down into how many kernels of corn did the sandwich contain, and of which variety.
The Russian conspiracy story did not materialize anything remotely living up to the fantastic sizzle -- a fact made all the more amazing by the staggering abandonment of journalistic principles undertaken en masse by establishment media in promulgating that story. Nobody can be taken seriously who thinks these same people are arbiters of fact.
There is very little evidence that fact checking actually works to reduce the impacts of disinformation. See e.g. this study of the impact of Twitter warnings on belief in disonformation:
Quoting from your downstream posts for which HN is blocking replies:
> The job is in fact risky, which is why the profession is so highly regarded.
Police work doesn't even break the top ten most dangerous careers in the US. Landscaping workers are more likely to die on the job than police officers.[0]
This seems like an unreasonable criticism. Seeing a problem without a good solution and creating a solution to it seems to me the very essence of hacking.
I would agree with that if this was a "explain how we fixed X" style of blog post. It instead starts/reads like a general problem domain informative post, but then it only proposes their solution. If the title was e.g. "How Boomla fixes the database/filesystem problem" or similar that'd be more fair.
Because the cryptocurrency ecosystem does not do investment -- likely in very large part because no one can buy anything legal with cryptocurrency -- returns for coiners who cash out must, by definition, come from later investments.
Paying earlier investors with the investments of those who follow is the definition of a ponzi scheme.