I can't seem to find an actual currency estimate of how much privacy is actually worth. I see a ton of articles talking about why privacy should be worth more to people or what people would pay for privacy services or how much people would sell their privacy for, but I don't see anything that gives a value for the privacy industrial complex, so to speak. Like if you take every company and non-profit and everything else and throw it all together, how much is the privacy industry actually worth?

Edit: It's worth at least $2.8 billion US dollars because that is the market cap on average of the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero.

Edit 2: If you put Monero, Zcash, and Dash together, you come up with $3.4 billion US dollars.

Edit 3: All the above plus Signal, Proton and EFF bring it up to 3.5 billion.

"That’s why, while almost no one pays for coffee with bitcoin, many use the privacy coin monero (XMR) to buy this or that"

https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2024/06/14/mass-adoption-would-ruin-crypto-keep-it-a-niche/

cross-posted from: https://social.hai.haus/objects/ed94b6d5-d8c9-4788-8909-6688c5fdc4ac

@[email protected] Did startup Flow Computing just make CPUs 100x faster?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/11/24176304/flow-computing-startup-parallel-processing-accelerator

So it seems to me that things like tortured poets department and midnight have been more mellow than her previous albums such as 1989 and reputation. Personally, I don't like them as well. They are still good. There's no question about that, but I prefer the more upbeat style she used in reputation, especially.

Edit: Pretty sure my favorite song from Tortured Poets Department is probably "Down Bad".

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16569040

There's a lot of talk about inflation and its causes. Is it corporate greed? Supply chain issues? One clear base cause of inflation less talked about is having an inflationary currency supply. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that. Fiat inflationary currency is a rather new invention in terms of the human timeline. In the US, Nixon is the start of it. Central banks aim for 2-3% inflation in "good years". The money supply expands, the portion of that supply a single dollar represents, and therefore its value, decreases. This isn't a conspiracy, it's government policy, and both parties gleefully support it because it benefits their rich donors.

Think of it: in the last 50 years, everything has gotten cheaper to produce thanks to increasing mechanization, outsourcing to cheap labor/low regulation countries, and extremely efficient supply chains. Yet so many things "cost more" than they did 50 years ago. Even basics like bread. What used to be 5c in the US in the 50s now costs $5.00. How is that the case? Shouldn't it cost less? Where is that "extra efficiency" going if not to lower prices? The answer: bread is the same value it's always been, the money has gotten less valuable. This is how they keep working class people running on a treadmill, never able to achieve economic mobility.

Inflationary currency devalues the currency you worked hard to earn by increasing the supply. It hits the middle class the worst because they have more of their net wealth in cash, often in the form of emergency funds, savings, and putting together enough money for a down payment on a home. Rich people have their money in assets which aren't harmed by currency inflation. Actually, even worse, it inflates the value of those assets! If the dollar loses value (all other things being equal), it takes more dollar to buy a share in Amazon, just like it takes more dollars to buy a loaf of bread. Poor people live hand to mouth, so their net wealth is not impacted much, but inflationary currency prevents them from saving and "moving up". If you want to identify the causes of increasing wealth disparity, the inability of people to save money and theft of value from the middle class via money supply expansion is a major one.

This isn't directly t-mobile related, but it is more of an adjacent area. But still good information to have.

Welcome to this month's speedtest megathread. Yep, you heard that right, it's time to show off your speeds.

Format

Location (city, state), Downlink, Uplink, Device, Notes. An example would look like this: "Minneapolis, MN, 554 down, 31 up, Google Pixel 7a, taken in downtown".

Rules

1. No screenshots. They take up valuable server space, require more bandwidth, and are not accessible to screen reader users.
2. If you live in a small town or rural area please fudge your location a little. As an example if i lived in Olive Hill, Ky (population 1580) I might use Grayson, Ky (population 3834) instead.