The last few years of BTC, ETH, and DeFi all collapse quickly if the USDT peg fails.

How much crypto is borrowed on platforms like Compound against USDT? That collateral takes a 5% haircut, we’ll see painful liquidations. 10% or 20%? Fire sale everywhere.

> How much crypto is borrowed on platforms like Compound against USDT?

Close to zero. Compound, Aave, Maker - none of them allow folks to use USDT as collateral to borrow against. You can lend it for yield, and borrow it from others, but you can't use it as collateral.

There are some riskier protocol that allow it (rari, cream) but those are much smaller.

Pick a few features and make them the free tier. Upsell some premium content, or have a “first three goals are free” model, unlimited goals in the subscription.

Anything but paying up front for a year.

If there was a free tier I’d download and try it.

Elinks could render to SVGAlib well enough to browse sites that weren’t loaded with JS, no X11 needed

Elinks? I think it's links+, which support{s,ed} SVGALIB and Framebuffer.

But back in the day you could browse without images perfectly fine, as the important ones where under galleries with custom links and downloading them was really slow.

Also, read the prospectus of any ETF you already own, and you’ll get the gist of APs, enough to understand why your fees are so low.

There's also securities lending (to short sellers), many ETF sponsors retain all proceeds from securities lending for themselves. This is similar to how many brokerages earn most of their revenues by taking a spread on cash balances, so they can charge very little on transaction costs (i.e., they pay you less for unused cash than money markets pay them). After all borrowing money is the same as shorting cash, so there's nice symmetry here :)

This has got to be Taibbi click-baiting pro-Trump subscribers. He buries his admission that Trump's Biden/Burisma narrative is a lie so deep in the piece, you really have to trudge through a lot of hand-wringing drivel to find it. You can read 90% of this piece thinking that Taibbi is clearly sympathetic to the Republican narrative, and he gives no indication otherwise!

I didn't get that vibe at all. To me Taibbi sounds like someone like me: a resident of the Democratic party who is willing to criticize the ends as well as the means of both parties. This sort of conviction is not looked upon very highly by our "free" society.

"The other side is worse!" cannot be perpetually be the answer or response. Politics is not everything; at some point we have to understand that politics does not make a society, a society makes politics.

Ask yourself this: if these same mechanisms, that again are used by autocratic governments, get taken advantage of by a future administration and we somehow defeat them will you be willing to admit accountability and culpability for the outcome? If not, then walk cautiously, because this future is very real and discounting people that raise the flag does not age well.

It's not a surprise that you can't understand Taibbi if your only lens of analysis is Red Team vs. Blue Team.

Unfortunately I think this really nails why the content of the laptop is so difficult for many people to come to terms with.

We all know corruption happens at all levels in Washington, but if the contents of the laptop are true, it means a serious loss of ground in the culture war (potentially game over). It can’t be true and must not be true. To keep the game going we need to shut our eyes and wait to be rescued by a comfortable escape hatch narrative.

This is something he does in all of his recent political writing, to the point that I had to go and search for articles where he’s unambiguous about his political stances. Even after finding those, I never quite felt like I’m looking at the same political reality as him, and ended up unsubscribing. I’m sympathetic to the substance of his writing, so maybe that’s just what non-partisan writing looks like and it’s too strange to read in this media environment? I don’t know, but if anyone has more thoughts on this, then I’d like to hear them.

"maybe that’s just what non-partisan writing looks like and it’s too strange to read in this media environment"

This.

One must get beyond the idea that one team is unambiguously worse. In a way, Taibbi writes almost exclusively about the tendency of Americans to ignore the misbehavior of their own side and exaggerate that of the other.

There are lots and lots of articles informing the rank-and-file how to interpret contemporary events; how to discuss the Bidens' corruption, for instance (usually: bring up the Trumps' corruption, but often outright denial and shaming anyone who discusses it)

People who appreciate Taibbi are those who can hold at least two narratively contradictory facts in mind at the same time; eg that both the Bidens and the Trumps are corrupt; without leaping to defend one or the other.

I read the whole article, though.

Firefox is down for the count with the recent layoffs. It’s Google’s web to lose in the near future.

Some days it really feels like there is nothing new under the sun.

I rent a Shadow instance for $35 a month, and play my entire Steam library on a MacBook Air. New games, old games, whatever. It just works, given good broadband and an Ethernet cable.

I think the future of "cloud gaming" looks a lot more like Shadow than Stadia.

Don't underestimate the importance of marketing. History is full of very successful products that are dogshit compared to competitors but have flashy marketing and celebrity endorsements.

He who holds the keys holds the coins.

Bingo. Because the keys are the coins.

Counterparty risk is through the roof.

I tried moving some prediction market contracts on US Election Day, couldn’t trade anything due to traffic volume. This feels familiar.

Decades of technical and legal work went into our stock exchanges, the bitcoin bucket shops are a few generations behind. It doesn’t matter until suddenly it does.

This will help when CME and CBOE get their contracts launched, right? They can handle the real life traffic for such thing as crude oil. I do not think the bitcoin volume would phase them very much...

Bit coin is a tiny market compared to real markets.

Exactly why it will work much better when the real boys come in to town :)

Serious question, what was the complaint against xrange?

I don’t recall it ever surprising me or behaving poorly.

The issue is that "xrange" does the right thing, but the seemingly-more-correct (unless you happen to know about "xrange") "range" does the wrong thing (create a list rather than a generator, which is inefficient). Same thing with "raw_input" doing the right thing, but "input" being completely wrong (and an attack vector because it's just a glorified "exec").

And instead of behind-the-scenes lazily creating the range, so you have a generator that reifies when its modified and has a nice __str__ etc they go make incompatible changes; got it! ;)

I know rather too much about how CPython and other VMs work under the hood and am in no mood to try and save the day any more. I still use python, but the latest stuff around MyPy and async io just make me despair frankly. I think rust+go will probably pick up a lot of people who used to care deeply about python. So it is.