Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Sunday, Mar 26, 2017 - 19:46 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Freedom's Due

"[Yee's] prosecution, detention and general maltreatment at the hands of the Singapore authorities constitute persecution on account of Yee's political opinions. Yee is a young political dissident, and his application for asylum is granted."

- The Honourable Immigration Judge, Samuel B. Cole

"The right to free speech is sacred, even when such speech is considered offensive. The decision timely underscores the vital need for an independent judiciary in a functioning democracy."

- Yee's lawyer BURNS the Singapore courts


Make Amos Great Again

It behooves us to first salute the world's foremost guardians of liberty and democracy (well, most of the time, anyway), the United States of America - and, by extension, the TRUMP administration, who have wisely pivoted to letting in the right kind of asylum seeker - of conscience, not of economics.

Unfairly vilified, physically attacked, and even imprisoned for his devotion to open discourse and the sacrosanct right to state objective facts without fear or favour, the tireless human rights campaigner Amos Pang Sang Yee has finally been emancipated from a now-chastened regime of petty tyranny, who have consistently disallowed freedom of speech under the rubric of "hate speech". This righteous judgment was delivered to broad acclaim from Yee's international community of supporters, and Singapore will be the poorer for the loss of yet another of her courageous sons, who dared speak truth to power.

No BS, not anymore, the new Great American Way!
[N.B. Seriously - he's right, yet again, you know.]


Amos has however, somewhat disappointingly, mistakenly blamed TRUMP for his initial predicament, but he can rest easy - the GOD-EMPEROR is great-hearted and magnanimous, after all (unlike certain High Kings of Skyrim). Now starting to be addressed by his proper Imperial title on national news, TRUMP is heaping achievement upon achievement, the latest of which includes laying the foundations for a Mars colony, in fulfilment of his foretold destiny. Ever so slowly, the brainwashed left is yielding, inch by painful inch, to the non-politically-correct but true realization that TRUMP is right.


Bubbles & Hidden Daggers

For one, FiveThirtyEight has belatedly admitted one of the most obvious of observations - that their mainstream media had been existing in a liberal bubble (i.e. was biased, relative to the aggregate political leanings of Americans as a whole). Against this nigh-insurmountable cartel, it would take nothing less than a GOD-EMPEROR of exquisite skill to prevail.

Oh, they're still at it, of course - a Stanford Ph.D. candidate has just put out a hit piece utilizing latent semantic analysis (a neat machine learning technique especially useful in natural language processing) on the Great Meme War heroes of r/the_donald. As expected, the Meme War veterans weren't about to take it lying down, and promptly demonstrated using the same method that the Crooked Hillary subreddit had substantial overlaps with socialism and anarchism. At the same time, Scott Adams has unmasked Bloomberg's Fake News tactics, an excellent case study in dissecting how Big Media invisibly manipulates public opinion.

To top it all off, it's looking increasingly likely that the TRUMP transition team was indeed wiretapped, according to the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Oh, it was supposedly only incidental, but put it this way: if someone places a hidden camera in a public washroom, and after being caught claims that they were targeting another person, and only incidentally took a video of you in a state of undress... how relieved should one be expected to be?

And, in the other direction, some rational examination should yield the reasonable conclusion that the outrage over suggestions of Obama's involvement are patently ridiculous - as popularly recognized, it is on the record that Obama had wiretapped Merkel and other erstwhile "allies" (here, observe some of the most blatantly misleading Fake News I've ever seen, where the very first photograph in an article entitled "Donald Trump refuses to shake Angela Merkel's hand as key meeting gets off to frosty start" shows... TRUMP shaking Merkel's hand), as well as international journalists; why exactly is it so unthinkable that he might have done the same to a political rival? It absolutely boggles the mind.

In this vein, it's quite incredible how the left-liberal set in Western countries are converging on Russia and Putin as a bogeyman. Yes, they may not be the most progressive of places, but seriously, blaming them for Brexit, Crooked Hillary losing, and now the Dutch, French and German elections?! It's almost as if they are unwilling to confront their own failings...


Smoking kills more people than Obama, although he kills a lot of people.
Don't smoke, don't be like Obama.
[N.B. Russia's troll level is improving, they may be approaching 4chan soon!]
(Source: dailymail.co.uk)



A Fork In The Code

Well, the Bitcoin Unlimited FUD is continuing to be played out, with price levelling out about the expected US$900 minimum, as, surprise, surprise, they released yet more buggy software... then responded by releasing a closed-source patch (which, by the way, goes entirely against Bitcoin's trustless tenet, not that they have shown themselves to care much about that)... which was then leaked anyway. It would be laughable, if the Unlimited backers didn't seem to actually believe that they are qualified to take over the development of a multi-billion dollar network.

They've now truly jumped the shark by accusing the longtime Core dev team's refusal to incorporate half-baked solutions as "censorship", as it becomes more and more apparent that the whole shitshow was purely a power-grab by miners. As many bitcoiners observed, as we have back in 2014, most users interact with a secondary layer in the form of exchanges already - many of which offer derivative products - anyway, which makes the Unlimited side's objections puzzling.

The stakes are certainly being raised, and as hinted at last week, an old-timer has raised Ver up to a hundred and thirty thousand Bitcoins - over a hundred million US dollars - which seems to have given even the Bitcoin Jesus pause. More belligerent Core supporters are angling for a user-activated soft-fork, up to and including a proof-of-work algorithm change as a last resort - which would almost certainly sow chaos, but definitely tank the miners, but obsoleting hundreds of millions in specialized hardware and infrastructure, at one shot.

And, just to remind the mostly China-based Unlimited mining holdouts of the possibilities, information about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre has been indelibly embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain, which could mean that Bitcoin is technically illegal within the Great Firewall, rendering their investment worthless. Of course, one suspects that the relevant authorities will turn a blind eye this time, all the more given not-unfounded suspicions that state actors are behind the takeover attempt...


[Enlarge image]
Largely accurate, I'd say
(Source: twitter.com)


These, as it happens, are the wages of decentralisation, and thus, freedom - with nobody in full control of Bitcoin, this by design from the very beginning, I hasten to add - any big updates to the protocol have tended to be extremely hard to push through.

Just as it should be.

As it is, Unlimited definitely (and correctly) isn't winning in the marketplace of ideas, by any measureable metric. While blocking segwit could make some short-term sense, particularly if your intention is to milk as much fees as possible, it's pretty self-defeating in the longer term, as other miners seem to have realised from the latest price dip. Hashpower has tipped back over to the segwit side, with some going as far as to support a soft fork, exchanges, wallets and nodes are all leaning heavily towards segwit, and apparently even the Chinese locals are losing their patience, along with their net worth.

That said, while Bitcoin was created to be free of centralised control, it is still possible to hold outsized influence over the system, particularly in blocking changes - which is not wholly bad, mind. For now, a speedy resolution seems to lie in the hands of just two players, Wu and Ver; were they to flip their stance, there doesn't seem to be much that would prevent a segwit upgrade soon afterwards.

Unfortunately, acknowledging that one had been mistaken has always been one of the hardest things to do, and while Wu appears to at least not have completely taken leave of reality - he realises that Core's dev team is superior (more precisely, he gives them 90 marks to Unlimited's 60, though I'd say that's still very generous to the latter), he's still insistent that Unlimited's big block vision is far better, while drawing inspiration from Taobao's defeat of eBay (ironically, given how Chinese Internet firms tend to beat the global giants, i.e. certainly not due to better tech. But again, I can't really blame them too much, for being protectionist in this area [CIA])

Let's just hope he hasn't overplayed his hand badly here...



comments (0) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (0) - trackback url


Next: It Cannot Wait


Related Posts:
The Third H.L. Ham AGM
Men Against The Machine
7 Reasons Why TRUMP Will Be The Next POTUS
War Of The Worlds
Pregame Entertainment
Back to top

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.