Because international commodities don’t work that way. They’re priced according to supply and demand, with cost of production and transportation as a limiter on supply. The supply of middle eastern oil has been drastically reduced to Europe, which means there’s more demand for the oil you do have, one major supplier being Norway.

Ramping up production in response to high prices is slow, expensive, and risky. They’ll likely slowly increase production if the state of affairs continues for a long time, but it’ll be like the situation when sanctions on Russia began

Y’all get cubicles‽

I’m rooting for the civilians

Alternatively ethical defense lawyers often do so because even the horrible and unsympathetic people deserve the fundamental protections we all are entitled to.

I hear family law is particularly brutal though as the saying goes criminal law is bad people on their best behavior and family law is good people on their worst behavior

A good lawyer always tells the truth professionally. At least in common law countries like mine. I’m going to generally speak USian, but our northerly neighbors are likely similar as are the brits, kiwis, and aussies. I’m not certain a prosecutor in my country could do well without lying at all, but that’s an entirely different problem of cultural collapse.

A defense lawyer defends both innocent and guilty as their zealous advocate. Their job is to poke doubt in the prosecution’s narrative and possibly provide a counter narrative, but generally challenge everything the prosecution can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt. They may also just be pleading for lesser sentencing. That’s part of how plea deals became so common here. They also don’t say the client is innocent, they state that the client is pleading guilty or not guilty. People can be not guilty and have done it as well, so long as they either have a lawful reason to do the action, or are incapable of legal guilt such as by insanity. They also have a lot of things they aren’t allowed to speak on and are supposed to just say that instead of lying. Copaganda has attempted to convince the masses that these people are lying scumbags who get bad guys on the streets instead of defenders of liberty who force the government to actually prove people did what they claim they did.

A prosecutor’s job is to take the evidence and build and reinforce a narrative that can withhold the defense’s scrutiny. It should be wholly truthful to the best of their knowledge. The goal is to convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty and then advocate for a sentence they feel is fair.

Then you’ve got all sorts of other lawyers. Cause lawyers like human rights and environmental lawyers largely argue over interpretations of laws and whether actions violate them. These people ought to believe what they say. Business and corporate lawyers don’t even have room to lie, they’re just building contracts and such.

Exactly, a huge portion of a defense lawyer’s job is basically saying “prove it harder” and sowing doubt. They have the lesser standard, they only have to prove that there’s reasonable doubt

Yeah I’m totally in favor of inventing things for the hell of it. But i don’t think that hating a technology because of how it was pushed on society is necessarily bad until it develops a legitimate use case. I dislike them because I still see people thinking “this cool technology must have a problem that it solves” rather than looking at problems and asking what technology could solve them. But at the same time it’s also been a serious case of tech lovers not caring to understand the problems they wish to use tech to solve. That was annoying a long time ago, but now I live in a society that’s been made worse and worse by that specific problem over the past 20 years.

Yeah, blockchain adds nothing to an existing economy. It could be useful as a means of distributed public records between anarchist communities, but it is documentation, not ownership. Ownership is an extension of political power and grows from the same barrel of a gun

It’s like, the public record, but without the government to enact or enforce and on your computer

Ok I think I need to reframe what authority means here. An authority is a government or an organization or individual that a government authorizes to act on its behalf. It is the decision maker when it comes time to physically remove a claimant from the premises.

A blockchain is a leger, a document. What you’re proposing sounds to me like legally defining it as the final say in ownership. To do that is more or less a complete rewrite of property laws in a way that would have far reaching effects, especially on marriage, government enforcement, and lending. On lending this would basically eliminate the capacity to use your house as collateral without a full conditional sale, and in that case I really hope you trust your banking institution. For government enforcement, this would eliminate leins as a means of compelling payment of owed money, which means other methods would be required (this is especially an issue in contexts like child support, where debtors can be particularly hostile). And for marriage this will really screw with inheritance and divorce proceedings. The fact that you can’t cash out and sell the house asap when your partner requests a divorce is something I personally think is good.

Additionally, in every democratic nation to my knowledge, the existing registry of land is public. Public of course when referring to ownership by the collective of citizens, something the blockchain is less so. But it’s also publicly visible, just like the blockchain, except instead of having to download it you go to the appropriate store of public records and request to see it or to obtain a copy. At the very least in my country there’s a ton of information you can get in such places for asking. Property transfers, court records (unless a judge has sealed them, usually because sensitive information is contained within), building and digging permits, birth and death certificates… Most people only get what’s relevant to their life, but some people (like investigative journalists) have to look through public records for a living. Could it be valuable to digitize it all and upload it? Yes but not without risks, which also apply to blockchain here.

So yeah. This leads into a famous question: What is Property? And ultimately that’s a fairly deep rabbit hole, of its own. So what is ownership? The ability to direct the state to utilize its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in defense of your right to control something. No ledger can confer that. A state can declare a ledger the ultimate record of ownership, but it can just as easily take it away.

Yeah, it also needs to derive its value from somewhere. Any stable nation’s fiat derives its value from the fact that the government is believed trustworthy in matters of printing money and that in order to deal with that government you have to use that currency. An Australian could do all their financial life in etherium assuming everyone takes and offers it, right up until tax time where they have to convert a lot of ETH values into AUD, then trade some ETH for AUD in order to pay taxes. And if they receive any money from their government you bet your ass they aren’t being given ETH. If they trust the Australian government even a little they’re probably not jumping through those hoops.

To preface: I’m not a gold nut and I believe that it’s generally wiser for stable developed nations to use fiat currency to enable them to operate in a generally Keynesian approach with controlled inflation.

That said while I agree it’s unwise for nations unable to do that themselves to back their currency with a stable fiat currency from a different country, I don’t think crypto is the solution. Coinage is. And I’m talking old school coinage where the government isn’t backing it with metals, they’re making it out of them. Probably something like silver.

A backed currency is because a government can’t be trusted not to overinflate. If you want to bypass trust, the answer isn’t another currency in which all value is theoretical, it’s currency in which the value is in your hand and verifiable, with the government acting as the one setting units, assuring proper valuation, punishing devaluation, and publishing means for institutions and people to confirm valuation, such as physical properties, alloy percentages, and the easiest tests.

My favorite bit was how basically none of the NFTs included copyright ownership. Like, if it was a quick and easy way to publicly deal in copyright ownership, maybe pointing to a .gov site showing the transfer of ownership to the holder of that specific nft then it would actually be useful and maybe even worth something. But nah, they were treating digital assets like physical paintings and hoping rarity of an infinitely copiable object was value.

That feels wildly unlikely. I’ll use two transfers of property to argue my point: car titles and house deeds. In both cases it isn’t possession alone of the document, including signature of transfer that legitimizes it.

I have to go to a government office in order to complete the transfer a car title. It’s not expensive, with the American state I grew up in charging either $100 if you use the fast and privatized version, or $2 if you file through the government office. This can’t be replaced by an NFT because it includes government inspections and requires a notary confirm the seller’s signature.

House deed transfers on the other hand, are a massive expensive pain in the ass. Why? Protections. Houses are expensive, they’re the largest asset that the average person can expect to hold, and in addition they’re a residency that can be bad. If you can con someone on either side of that transaction, someone has, and many methods are now protected against. Furthermore, because of this dual nature of a house as a residence and a particularly large financial asset, people not on the deed may have rights to it whether by marriage or through financial vehicles like leins. Additionally, the house sits on land which the government registers ownership of as one of the core duties of governance. The deed transfer is expensive because it has to be audited to ensure you don’t find out later that the seller wasn’t allowed to sell the house in the first place.

So now, let’s compare this to a transfer on a blockchain. The blockchain ensures trustless (except of the system and that the system is acting with authority that extends into meatspace) verification that a transfer occurred from account a to account b. It does not ensure that account a did so willingly. It does not ensure that the legitimate owner of account a is the one to do it. It does not ensure that account a or b are able to ever access their account again. It does not ensure account b consented to receipt. It does not have a means to verify unnamed stakeholders. It does not give half a shit about the law. It does not contain an escrow period in which everyone can walk away. It more or less functions like a notary, but better in some ways (trustlessness) and worse in others (notaries actually check that you are who you say you are).

I guess what I’m really saying here, is that if my government would be so foolish as to make house deeds nfts which contain the full legitimacy of the transfer process, then I’d be demanding my credit union offer a service of taking care of that for me, because the last thing I want is to be hacked out of my house, or lose my right to the land my house sits on in a fire or robbery, or forget the password to owning my house. All of these are ways in which people have lost a huge amount of cryptocurrency.

A good scam is all about finding a way to bypass bs detectors. Appealing to greed or fear while adding a sense of urgency are the classic ones for good reason. But you’ve got others like appealing to in group/out group dynamics, distrust of institutions, ego, desired self image, laziness, carelessness so much more. You’ve also got those selecting to trigger anyone with a bs detector to only spend time on those without one.

Oh, I’m finally an old and out of touch member of the community

Back when I was young I was just glad I was hard of hearing.

That’s one of the greatest acts of friendship y’all keep offering us. It’s always been appreciated

No and anyone who says no is suspect. Fluid bonding with a hookup is stupid. It’s a kind of stupid that’s common, but there’s a reason experienced nonmonogamists will often either demand a recent clean test with no new partners since it or protection. And he doesn’t know you’re clean.

Also if you aren’t prepared for an abortion or a kid it’s generally a good idea to use two contraception methods before having potentially reproductive sex

It’s a bit old fashioned and I’ll admit, I do associate it with a big red dog from some children’s books. That said, I like it and I think it’s really cool when folks’ English names are uncommon