The binary perspective gives an excuse to give up.
The reasonable perspective does not. It demonstrates that though agency is limited it does exist.
Our life outcomes are connected to our actions. For many their circumstances make this an unpleasant thought, thus binary thinking protect their self-image. For some that's all they have left.
I too am baffled by the prevailing sense of doom that many young people have. They certainly get a lot of messages about how hard things are, and of course, one’s circumstances have a big effect on one’s future. I am often asked in my job as a professor: “if I fail this test am I doomed forever?” which strikes me as so miscalibrated with reality that I struggle to respond.
Humanity’s initial circumstances, by modern standards, was pretty poor! What is lacking from the modern day doom and gloom is any notion of agency. You can change an awful lot in your life if you identify a goal and then ask yourself “what do I need to do to get there?” The common objection to this line of argument is “well there are people who cannot change their circumstances” and maybe that’s true. But I doubt that’s true for most people, and it certainly was not true for me. My life is dramatically more interesting and comfortable than the one I started life in. My main advantage over others is that I had loving and supportive parents who encouraged me to dream, and maybe that is a big advantage, but what we did not have was much money.
The recurring thought I have is that, where I live in the Eastern US, most of the houses, which were built in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s, were built with what we would now think of as primitive (and affordable) tools. That did not stop people from building beautiful things. I have learned to use those tools, and while they are slower than modern ones, they work fine. It’s hard not to get the sense that, for all of the complaining about “I will never be able to afford a house,” etc, there is also not much effort invested in seriously considering how one might acquire one with limited means. I bought what used to be called a “fixer-upper,” a house that sat on the market for years because of its problems, and turned it into a comfortable and pleasant home. I had to sacrifice nights and weekends. For years. But I made it happen, and eight years after I bought it, my mortgage (which was small) is nearly paid off.
Was I lucky? Maybe. But I also coupled that luck with the motivation to actively change things. I would love it if I could somehow convince people that they really can have fulfilling and even happy lives if they are willing to work toward that goal.
Inequality is increasing and we’re anxious about being on the wrong side. It’s just standard (and justified) economic anxiety. We’re correct to see that the standard path through life is increasingly precarious and there’s no safety net. On the other hand, successful people are more successful than ever.
Your students who can’t graduate will have to reevaluate their entire lives. If I didn’t become a software engineer I would have to move across the continent and choose a new career. I already had to leave all my friends and family behind and I’m one of the success stories. Sometimes there is a solution but it’s not worth the trade offs and that’s typically when pessimistic thinking is helpful.
If you live in a low cost of living area then I have no idea though. Those people really are just whining.
Feel like binary perspective is a motivation to not fall into hell. If I lived in certain places in Western Europe or my family was in a developed part of the United States I would be fine being a tradesman or simple office job.
Ethereum name service, more commonly known as ENS.
In ethereum address appear like 0x233eb...042, ENS let's you associate a human readable name like nick.eth with that address.
Works similar to DNS, turning IP addresses into something we humans recognize.
What's the pro of using a smart contract? (DNS works without one).
With a smart contract you can have immutable data store (assuming ethereum continues) that can give you ownership over your name, like nick.eth.
What's the con?
It's immutable which means people can own names they shouldn't with no mediation process possible.
Like a lot of things in life the system is good as long the system works for you, but not everyone is lucky enough to exist in a system that works well enough.
I posted the sibling comment basically dumping on smart contracts, so I wanted to thank you very much for posting this - it helped me understand smart contracts better in my mind and helped crystallize places where they could be useful.
I knew vaguely about ENS (primarily just by seeing .eth addresses), but your comment led me to dig in to how it works. I think the bit of "eureka" moment I had is that smart contracts are really only useful for shuffling around ownership of "pure data", and then it's up to everyone else to interpret what that data actually means.
That is, for an eth name, it's really just storing an association of the name with another piece of data, and putting a mechanism in place for who gets to control that association (i.e. how bidding for a name works). It's then up to other people to decide how (or whether) they want to "interpret" that association. In my mind it's quite similar to NFTs. All NFTs really store is an association that says "this person 'owns' this other piece of data called X, and that other piece of data X actually refers to this shitty digital image of a bored ape." But, of course anyone else can copy the bits of that shitty digital image and do whatever they want with it - it's only if enough people agree that "yes, that NFT really does mean that shitty digital image" for it to be worth anything.
It also helped me because with most contracts people think about how "things in the real world" need to be verified in order to determine contract performance (did the price of wheat go up, was the vacation rental as advertised), but smart contracts really are quite useless in those examples. But there are some examples where you're just storing pieces of data and you do not care about what happens "in the real world". Thus, I still feel smart contracts are often greatly oversold (and often misunderstood) by their boosters, but there are specific "data-mapping" use cases where they make sense. I also appreciate that you pointed out the downsides of not having a mediation process, which I think many crypto boosters think of as a feature but many people feel is a bug in the real world.
Anyway, you really helped me think about this more clearly, and I appreciate it.
Thanks, much appreciated! I wish I could enjoy it more, but something about the attitude that got me here keeps me moving forward. I'm the kind of person that always needs to be doing something which I consider of value, or else I feel like I am wasting my life.
>>how does a decentralized coin implement KYC for a wallet-to-wallet transfer like you mention?
>the KYC comes during off ramps back to the fiat system
And here we have your answer. It doesn't. In fact using your own logic, I could argue Tornado Cash is KYC'd 'because at offramp' which of course is absurd.
Now that you've made it crystal clear your use case does not include dai implementing KYC, I return to my thesis: DAI is imminently dead by .gov pulling a Tornado Cash on all the underlying centralized collateral locked up in DAI.
I hope you're right, but we seem to be sliding further into the dystopia, not out of it. Notice as time marches on the shrinking number of 'blacklist' FATF countries and the end of non-KYC/AML finance world-wide. IMO dai will go the way of bearer bonds and shares. The fact that all that underlying capital is in real-world bonds/paper/notes means cooperative financial task forces have these stablecoins by the balls and soon they will start squeezing.
