Right... but the question is which is greater, the number of people who stop playing because of ads or the number of people who would just copy the app (as scaled by profit/customer of ads vs. selling).
Does Apple ID3-tag the songs with some info about the buyer or implement some other nefarious scheme?
I believe they embed your name in the song in plain text. But I don't see that as anything wrong. "You mean you're going to put an anti-piracy protection on the my music that doesn't interfere with my ability to use the damn thing?"
Well, Pink Floyd has the third best selling album of all time, and another album in the top thirty. Those two albums alone sold over 75 million copies. But you're right... imagine if they had let people play singles!
And Pink Floyd care for artistic, not commercial reasons. They want their work to be respected, and they consider that disrespect. If you don't need the money, great.
I would love nothing better than to be able to say that some of my customers don't deserve my work... because they don't. But they can afford it, and I need the cash.
One might say "can't you just do it for yourself?" To them, I say "nope! I simply cannot." I have tried and whatever ability others may have, I simply do not possess. And the moment I accepted that fact, the less I hated myself.
You probably can. I have controlled my wakeup time before, but I usually rely on an alarm clock... as poorly as you do. But it's not that you cannot, it's that there's a far better solution than expending the effort. Hell, if there was a pill that made people perfectly fit, I'd imagine that with few exceptions even people who currently work out would take the damn pill and instead do something else with that time. And that's a good thing.
If your alarm goes off, and you have time to hit the snooze button without it mattering, stop setting the alarm early. The fact it's an alarm means nothing if people can say "oh I can wait 10 more minutes".
It's not that the 10 minutes doesn't matter. It's "I feel tired enough that I can justify getting in trouble for being 10 minutes late(r)". Possibly multiple times sequentially (much like *1* ice cream sandwich won't make you fat, saying that every time you want one *will* make you fat).
so to answer your question, it matters. Maybe you skip breakfast/a shower. Maybe you speed to work. Maybe you're late. The point is, you want a device to help you get up/start moving when you planned to. You purchased it. And it has this horrible flaw that lets you trick yourself into thinking the time is flexible.
I am not am not an expert here, but my understanding is Goldman-Sachs was the first bank to repay TARP (a year and a half ago), and the govt. made 23% interest on it.
I'm not sure why that's really relevant. The assistance the government provided was worth far more than 23% interest. And the SEC let them off with practically no penalty for scamming their clients (maybe that's a bit harsh, but then again, the way they sold investment vehicles that they had a financial stake in seeing fail seems like a majorconflict of interest. Maybe someone can explain why it was okay?).
Add to that the fact that the top 5 banks have gotten bigger, instead of shrinking them away from being too-big-to-fail.
I'd rather see long-term regulation than 23% interest, because all this set up was the probability that it happen again. After all, why not risk the company if the government will finance one more bet. And what are the odds two bets fail in a row?
Of those who still game, you have fragmentation among their preferred platforms and then fragmentation among the games they invest their time in.
Local co-op play fixes the system fragmentation, and most games' gameplay isn't prohibitively complex or unique.
But I would rather play some game I am lukewarm about with friends than some game I care a lot about with those same people on the internet. Even if they are my friends in real life, I don't find it the same experience.
But local play works when you have people over to socialize, and gaming is one activity.
Then, you get to lug some hardware around and rearrange furniture.
Only because it's so rare. Look, maybe you have one of those uber-gaming chairs in a cave. I have my system in front of my couch. You're right that split-screen coop makes no sense for hardcore gamers. But it does for everyone else. Just like NBA/NFL players probably don't play basketball/football against random friends, but a bunch of 45 year old out of shape guys can play a pickup game of basketball, football or soccer just fine. That doesn't mean there's no room for competitive players.
I think the machines run a lot of their software on the human hardware. Queue misinterpretations about using 10% of your brain here. But the idea that it would be better to run your software on a human nervous system instead of silicon hardware may be accurate.
They should have done something that at least has a chance of verifying physical access to the machine - like making the password a derivative of the serial number.
Hell, just making the account name or password the serial number would work wonders. I mean, in general, physical access trumps all anyway.
Actually, is there any reason to seperate username and password for a backdoor superuser account. I mean, the username could be secret and the password null or the username could be well known and the password hidden, and it would be just as secure. The reason to separate the two is because other people need to manipulate the user but not know the password. If it's a backdoor account, than the only person that can modify the account is the superuser, so the two types of information don't exist.
But I seem to remember some kind of blatant violation of the laws of thermodynamics played an important part in the story...
Only in the movie, because movie-goers are stupid, just ask any writer. In he source material, it humans had their nervous system harvested. Which might actually make sense. Although I tend to think they could grow just the nervous system with a bit of genetic engineering.
Google's promoting of Chrome OS makes the advantages clear: you can access your documents from anywhere, you don't need to worry about your current device getting lost/stolen/damaged/corrupted, because all your important data has been copied off of the computer. No need to worry about installing applications or keeping them secure and up-to-date, since web-apps take care of that for you. And so on...
I can access my documents from anywhere because I bring my laptop or a USB drive with me. It's not like I'll trust a computer to attach to my webdrive with everything but not my USB drive.
True, backups are a bitch. I'm wondering if it might make sense to put a NAS on my parent's internet connection. I wonder which is less secure, Google's ownership of my data, or a well secured NAS (assuming that I can deal with temporary downtime but not exposure/deletion/corruption.)
Applications automatically updating is a big negative for me. Sometimes I update, and sometimes I don't, but usually I find it a tradeoff. For instance, I won't use Word 2007, but like Word 2003.
I tend to agree that offsite storage would be great. And I was serious about hosting a NAS on a buddies internet connection. Anyone have any experience with that?
Given the amount of places in the world, I don't see this as being a problem.
They are unequal. I mean, in NYC it's really really unequal. Population density is positive in that case. There are a finite number of beautiful secluded places as well.
Most likely it would already be built, due to houses having certain specifications.
What does that even mean? There's a house. If it doesn't exist, I want to create it. If it does exist, it may not have enough bedrooms, or a workshop, or whatever I want to customize it to have. And a house means that on that entire parsal of property, there's a clearly more valuable location.
Governmental corruption, widespread greed, and the existence of currency.
COrruption and currency are both functions of greed (well, the currency serves other purposes as well, but its a function of capitalism, which runs somewhat on greed). So your entire point is that without greed, good things can happen. *slow clap*
Most likely due to the factors that I just listed. Not to mention that the 'change' was forced, not a decision made by a majority of the people.
YOu can sya that, but you are just wrong. Empirically wrong. Did not do any research wrong. Corruption and currency free societies of self-selected members with purely optional membership have been tried in a lot of places. It works for a while, until it gets too big. Or some groups consider monogomaous relationships to akin to private property. Or someone wants a bit of private space with their wife. Or any of a hundred things.
It something can (theoretically) only be done a certain way, and someone fails to do it in that way, then it really wasn't the same because it wasn't even implemented correctly (not that I'm assuming this could work for sure). In other words, I'm commenting on the method that they used to try to construct such a society.
Do you now what the No True Scotsman fallacy is? It is exactly that. Communism works, but I've tightly defined it such that each person who has tried communism failed in a minor detail of implementation. That's what you are saying. You further say that by eliminating the symptomes of greed and laziness, it would work. But your causation is backwards. The symptomes presence is evidence that you haven't removed greed or laziness. And you just assert both are learned and not innate. But people have asserted that for a hundred years. How will you succeed in altering people when they have failed. It especially hurts your argument that apparently you are completely ignorant with regards to past instantiations of communism.
Due to the focus put on developing new technology that more effectively allows us to manage resources and the smaller population. Money is the limiting factor now. If something that helps the environment is not profitable, it most likely won't get done until it is too late (or not much effort will be put into it). Planned obsolescence just makes this problem worse.
We could use capitalistic pressures by charging for pollution, making developing and using cleaner technologies a capitalism driven choice. Similarly, we could mandate terms that make planned obselecense less valuable.
Lack of ownership means that we don't need to keep wasting time and resources building things that we already have just so a different person can 'own' it.
Except it doesn't. See, I want to use a hammer. If there is only one hammer, I have to wait. If I produce a new one, I do not. So the number of hammers will grow to meet peak usage. But wait, it's really inefficent to send a hammer from Sibera to me, so we'll have to geographically locate them. And I would rather use a new hammer than one that Bob used, because he ate sticky things and never cleans the hand
Technically it isn't, and you won't be building the houses.
Technicalities aside, long term possession is indistinguishable from ownership... both by those doing the possessing and those who are denied its use. And why wouldn't I build a house? Who the hell wants to live outdoors?
Closer, maybe, but definitely not the same. If it used currency, had a restrictive government/environment, or had widespread corruption and greed, then they are far from the same thing (maybe closer, though).
I don't know why its not the same. IT's a whole country that tried what you are proposiing. All of it. The change in human behavior, the elimination of money. And it failed. There was widespread corruption because trying to build that system with human nature leads to corruption. There was currency to allow people to customize their lives.
It failed. You cannot say "but if hadn't reached these incremental steps towards failure it wouldn't have"much like my gmabling strategy of "just pick the horse that will come in first" fails only when people choose the horse wrong. I mean, how is it not a "No True Scotsman" fallacy?
Do you truly believe that wasting as many resources as we do, waging as many wars as we do (very destructive wars), and generally treating the environment as a play thing can last longer than not doing those things
You're presuming facts not in evidence. Namely, that even if such a society as you are proposing could exist, you don't show why it would be intrinsicly more likely to avoid waste. I belive that a society set up our way will overall achieve less waste than what you propose. Lack of ownership leads to overutilization of common resources. That's why efficency improved once the common grazing land was privitized. Now, if you want to claim that we need better recouping of externalities such as pollution, I concur. But that's a capitalist solution.
Pretending to know the future isn't helping your case.
It's not the future. People have been trying this for a hundred years. It actually works for small communes... at least for a while. It tends to be worse for the second generation. You are proposing something that has been tried without knowing the past. Empiricism, etc.
Yes, I suspect it is difficult to suppress greed and corruption when it is so prevalent. The intention is to rid ourselves of that mass corruption and greed by eliminating the factor that likely causes most of such behavior: currency.
Currency isn't a cause. It's a tool because people are greedy.
First come, first serve? I don't know, but this isn't a major problem.
Right, and then I let my kids sleep there, and build a house, and before you know it that land is "mine".
asked valid questions as to the conditions of the Soviet Union and stated the fact (it is a fact) that no such society has been implemented as of this time (or even tested).
Societies have existed on a contiumium for a while. It's not that hard to extrapolate that the Soviet Union is closer to what you're proposing than many other societies, and therefore serves as a basis for comparison.
It wouldn't 'implode' society if it wasn't forced, I suspect.
It wouldn't happen at all if it wasn't forced, because the non-participating portions of society would take advantage of the group that tried.
Neither can the current system (for long), as I've said previously. It's a bit early to be making such a bold claim, isn't it?
Not really. The current system has lasted hundreds of years. People have been trying to implement your system for a hundred years. It fails once the population gets over a couple hundred.
So, you don't think behavior can ever be changed? At all? You believe a selfish person can never become generous, or a generous person can never become selfish? If not, then why do you believe it only applies to certain behaviors but not others?
I believe habits can be formed and changed, but that it requires intentional (but maybe subconscious) effort to form habits that aren't in one's short term interest. Most people are really incapable of growth. And to grow in a way that changes one's base motivation seems impossible absent trauma (need the motivation to do so, after all).
There is some spot on the world that is "the best place to sleep". Or maybe there are several but then there would be more people in the world then you and me. I want to sleep there. You want to sleep there. How do we decide? Can I just hit you if you get close? Do we alternate? What if we agree you get to sleep there 4 nights out of every five if you fan me on the fifth night?
What about if that place is in bumbfuck nowhere. Do you have to help me get there? Even if it makes your life worse?
I'm not going to let you get away with a No True Scottsman on communism, either. A society like that never was truly implemented because the act of transitioning to it implodes the society. Because it cannot work. Because its assumption is that you can change human behavior in a specific way that no one has demonstrated you can, and in fact studies have shown are improbable.
We manage to ship most of our children off to public schools, I think we could manage to extend it to local military organizations at age 19
I don't have a real problem with forcing people to serve; I do however have a huge problem with the other aspects military (and presumably some pacifist option) turns into:
Compulsory collection of fingerprints/DNA
Mandatory indoctrination into a method of thinking.
A bunch of people who will drag down the effectiveness of military units (hint: we no longer need huge amounts of cannon fodder), esp. if they're only in it for a year.
I respect anyone who served, but I don't think everyone needs to.
No, what I'm referring to is the fact that land is unequal. Some land is simply better than others. Swampland simply isn't as good as mountaintops or beaches. People will always want to live in nicer places, given the choice. Since there is a certain number of people who can live in any space, there's some priority given to some people and not others. How could this be handled?
I threw in NYC because the closer you get to the core, the better land is.
It's more like unintentional indoctrination. It's powerful because it's extremely widespread. If preschool kids (and everyone else) grow up in a society that believes that money is extremely important, a society which greed and corruption thrives in, it is likely that they will inherit these traits.
This is what Marx said. The Soviet Union tried for three generations and weren't able to remove those traits. Do you have any studies that suggest you can?
Which is why there are lawsuits in California over beach ownership? Which is why an apartment in Manhattan costs more than a mansion somewhere else? I mean, yes, there's some space that you can live on. But land is not created equally.
In certain aspects we may have instincts, but most behaviors can be changed. The environment right now is largely what likely makes people desire more than what they need currently
I think greed is pretty embedded. I mean, preschool tries really hard to get kids to share toys. They try to have that culture. So does Seaseme St. Are you really claiming that there's a bias given to these kids that's more powerful than intentional indocrination, and yet can somehow be eliminated?
So halfway between a post-scarcity economy and a communist economy? It seems to totally ignore that not all resources are capable of existing post-scarcity (e.g. land). But it really requires creating a "new soviet man", that is getting rid of certain aspects of human nature.
if of course of you have that kind of microscope - which NASA does
NASA has microscopes?
Hey jerks, we gave you that money to build telescopes and send people to Mars. Go work at the LHC if you want to look at small things.
I mean, clearly, our well-informed political leaders, in their wisdom, decided that some money should be spent on small close things and some on far away things. Stop second guessing them and screwing up the budget. No wonder we have a deficit.
How would any barter system not have the same effects as using currency? You say "the system", but it's hard to imagine any trade ever occurring then. Every system requires trading.
You're right, I couldn't find a link either. I should note that while the DMZ land mines are South Korea's, the treaty would prevent the production of land mines to sell to South Korea.
I found the self-detonating mines to be a great step forward, even if mines are still be used.
There has been a strong demand for a landmine ban from a lot of the world for some time, but they have been unable to get US backing. Now, the US is pretty responsible with its landmines, but the failure of such a major nation to agree to treaties bannning mines has resulted in many less responsible nations refusing to do so either.
The US has offered to agree to the treaties if an exception for the DMZ is written in. I personally think it's a reasonable exception.
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Right... but the question is which is greater, the number of people who stop playing because of ads or the number of people who would just copy the app (as scaled by profit/customer of ads vs. selling).
I believe they embed your name in the song in plain text. But I don't see that as anything wrong. "You mean you're going to put an anti-piracy protection on the my music that doesn't interfere with my ability to use the damn thing?"
Well, Pink Floyd has the third best selling album of all time, and another album in the top thirty. Those two albums alone sold over 75 million copies. But you're right... imagine if they had let people play singles!
And Pink Floyd care for artistic, not commercial reasons. They want their work to be respected, and they consider that disrespect. If you don't need the money, great.
I would love nothing better than to be able to say that some of my customers don't deserve my work... because they don't. But they can afford it, and I need the cash.
You probably can. I have controlled my wakeup time before, but I usually rely on an alarm clock... as poorly as you do. But it's not that you cannot, it's that there's a far better solution than expending the effort. Hell, if there was a pill that made people perfectly fit, I'd imagine that with few exceptions even people who currently work out would take the damn pill and instead do something else with that time. And that's a good thing.
It's not that the 10 minutes doesn't matter. It's "I feel tired enough that I can justify getting in trouble for being 10 minutes late(r)". Possibly multiple times sequentially (much like *1* ice cream sandwich won't make you fat, saying that every time you want one *will* make you fat).
so to answer your question, it matters. Maybe you skip breakfast/a shower. Maybe you speed to work. Maybe you're late. The point is, you want a device to help you get up/start moving when you planned to. You purchased it. And it has this horrible flaw that lets you trick yourself into thinking the time is flexible.
I'm not sure why that's really relevant. The assistance the government provided was worth far more than 23% interest. And the SEC let them off with practically no penalty for scamming their clients (maybe that's a bit harsh, but then again, the way they sold investment vehicles that they had a financial stake in seeing fail seems like a majorconflict of interest. Maybe someone can explain why it was okay?).
Add to that the fact that the top 5 banks have gotten bigger, instead of shrinking them away from being too-big-to-fail.
I'd rather see long-term regulation than 23% interest, because all this set up was the probability that it happen again. After all, why not risk the company if the government will finance one more bet. And what are the odds two bets fail in a row?
Local co-op play fixes the system fragmentation, and most games' gameplay isn't prohibitively complex or unique.
But I would rather play some game I am lukewarm about with friends than some game I care a lot about with those same people on the internet. Even if they are my friends in real life, I don't find it the same experience.
But local play works when you have people over to socialize, and gaming is one activity.
Only because it's so rare. Look, maybe you have one of those uber-gaming chairs in a cave. I have my system in front of my couch. You're right that split-screen coop makes no sense for hardcore gamers. But it does for everyone else. Just like NBA/NFL players probably don't play basketball/football against random friends, but a bunch of 45 year old out of shape guys can play a pickup game of basketball, football or soccer just fine. That doesn't mean there's no room for competitive players.
In fairness to the GP, most of twitter's posts are banal. The fact is these aren't randomly distributed.
I think the machines run a lot of their software on the human hardware. Queue misinterpretations about using 10% of your brain here. But the idea that it would be better to run your software on a human nervous system instead of silicon hardware may be accurate.
Hell, just making the account name or password the serial number would work wonders. I mean, in general, physical access trumps all anyway.
Actually, is there any reason to seperate username and password for a backdoor superuser account. I mean, the username could be secret and the password null or the username could be well known and the password hidden, and it would be just as secure. The reason to separate the two is because other people need to manipulate the user but not know the password. If it's a backdoor account, than the only person that can modify the account is the superuser, so the two types of information don't exist.
Only in the movie, because movie-goers are stupid, just ask any writer. In he source material, it humans had their nervous system harvested. Which might actually make sense. Although I tend to think they could grow just the nervous system with a bit of genetic engineering.
I can access my documents from anywhere because I bring my laptop or a USB drive with me. It's not like I'll trust a computer to attach to my webdrive with everything but not my USB drive.
True, backups are a bitch. I'm wondering if it might make sense to put a NAS on my parent's internet connection. I wonder which is less secure, Google's ownership of my data, or a well secured NAS (assuming that I can deal with temporary downtime but not exposure/deletion/corruption.)
Applications automatically updating is a big negative for me. Sometimes I update, and sometimes I don't, but usually I find it a tradeoff. For instance, I won't use Word 2007, but like Word 2003.
I tend to agree that offsite storage would be great. And I was serious about hosting a NAS on a buddies internet connection. Anyone have any experience with that?
They are unequal. I mean, in NYC it's really really unequal. Population density is positive in that case. There are a finite number of beautiful secluded places as well.
What does that even mean? There's a house. If it doesn't exist, I want to create it. If it does exist, it may not have enough bedrooms, or a workshop, or whatever I want to customize it to have. And a house means that on that entire parsal of property, there's a clearly more valuable location.
COrruption and currency are both functions of greed (well, the currency serves other purposes as well, but its a function of capitalism, which runs somewhat on greed). So your entire point is that without greed, good things can happen. *slow clap*
YOu can sya that, but you are just wrong. Empirically wrong. Did not do any research wrong. Corruption and currency free societies of self-selected members with purely optional membership have been tried in a lot of places. It works for a while, until it gets too big. Or some groups consider monogomaous relationships to akin to private property. Or someone wants a bit of private space with their wife. Or any of a hundred things.
Do you now what the No True Scotsman fallacy is? It is exactly that. Communism works, but I've tightly defined it such that each person who has tried communism failed in a minor detail of implementation. That's what you are saying. You further say that by eliminating the symptomes of greed and laziness, it would work. But your causation is backwards. The symptomes presence is evidence that you haven't removed greed or laziness. And you just assert both are learned and not innate. But people have asserted that for a hundred years. How will you succeed in altering people when they have failed. It especially hurts your argument that apparently you are completely ignorant with regards to past instantiations of communism.
We could use capitalistic pressures by charging for pollution, making developing and using cleaner technologies a capitalism driven choice. Similarly, we could mandate terms that make planned obselecense less valuable.
Except it doesn't. See, I want to use a hammer. If there is only one hammer, I have to wait. If I produce a new one, I do not. So the number of hammers will grow to meet peak usage. But wait, it's really inefficent to send a hammer from Sibera to me, so we'll have to geographically locate them. And I would rather use a new hammer than one that Bob used, because he ate sticky things and never cleans the hand
Technicalities aside, long term possession is indistinguishable from ownership... both by those doing the possessing and those who are denied its use. And why wouldn't I build a house? Who the hell wants to live outdoors?
I don't know why its not the same. IT's a whole country that tried what you are proposiing. All of it. The change in human behavior, the elimination of money. And it failed. There was widespread corruption because trying to build that system with human nature leads to corruption. There was currency to allow people to customize their lives.
It failed. You cannot say "but if hadn't reached these incremental steps towards failure it wouldn't have"much like my gmabling strategy of "just pick the horse that will come in first" fails only when people choose the horse wrong. I mean, how is it not a "No True Scotsman" fallacy?
You're presuming facts not in evidence. Namely, that even if such a society as you are proposing could exist, you don't show why it would be intrinsicly more likely to avoid waste. I belive that a society set up our way will overall achieve less waste than what you propose. Lack of ownership leads to overutilization of common resources. That's why efficency improved once the common grazing land was privitized. Now, if you want to claim that we need better recouping of externalities such as pollution, I concur. But that's a capitalist solution.
It's not the future. People have been trying this for a hundred years. It actually works for small communes... at least for a while. It tends to be worse for the second generation. You are proposing something that has been tried without knowing the past. Empiricism, etc.
Currency isn't a cause. It's a tool because people are greedy.
Right, and then I let my kids sleep there, and build a house, and before you know it that land is "mine".
Societies have existed on a contiumium for a while. It's not that hard to extrapolate that the Soviet Union is closer to what you're proposing than many other societies, and therefore serves as a basis for comparison.
It wouldn't happen at all if it wasn't forced, because the non-participating portions of society would take advantage of the group that tried.
Not really. The current system has lasted hundreds of years. People have been trying to implement your system for a hundred years. It fails once the population gets over a couple hundred.
I believe habits can be formed and changed, but that it requires intentional (but maybe subconscious) effort to form habits that aren't in one's short term interest. Most people are really incapable of growth. And to grow in a way that changes one's base motivation seems impossible absent trauma (need the motivation to do so, after all).
There is some spot on the world that is "the best place to sleep". Or maybe there are several but then there would be more people in the world then you and me. I want to sleep there. You want to sleep there. How do we decide? Can I just hit you if you get close? Do we alternate? What if we agree you get to sleep there 4 nights out of every five if you fan me on the fifth night?
What about if that place is in bumbfuck nowhere. Do you have to help me get there? Even if it makes your life worse?
I'm not going to let you get away with a No True Scottsman on communism, either. A society like that never was truly implemented because the act of transitioning to it implodes the society. Because it cannot work. Because its assumption is that you can change human behavior in a specific way that no one has demonstrated you can, and in fact studies have shown are improbable.
I don't have a real problem with forcing people to serve; I do however have a huge problem with the other aspects military (and presumably some pacifist option) turns into:
I respect anyone who served, but I don't think everyone needs to.
No, what I'm referring to is the fact that land is unequal. Some land is simply better than others. Swampland simply isn't as good as mountaintops or beaches. People will always want to live in nicer places, given the choice. Since there is a certain number of people who can live in any space, there's some priority given to some people and not others. How could this be handled?
I threw in NYC because the closer you get to the core, the better land is.
This is what Marx said. The Soviet Union tried for three generations and weren't able to remove those traits. Do you have any studies that suggest you can?
Which is why there are lawsuits in California over beach ownership? Which is why an apartment in Manhattan costs more than a mansion somewhere else? I mean, yes, there's some space that you can live on. But land is not created equally.
I think greed is pretty embedded. I mean, preschool tries really hard to get kids to share toys. They try to have that culture. So does Seaseme St. Are you really claiming that there's a bias given to these kids that's more powerful than intentional indocrination, and yet can somehow be eliminated?
So halfway between a post-scarcity economy and a communist economy? It seems to totally ignore that not all resources are capable of existing post-scarcity (e.g. land). But it really requires creating a "new soviet man", that is getting rid of certain aspects of human nature.
NASA has microscopes?
Hey jerks, we gave you that money to build telescopes and send people to Mars. Go work at the LHC if you want to look at small things.
I mean, clearly, our well-informed political leaders, in their wisdom, decided that some money should be spent on small close things and some on far away things. Stop second guessing them and screwing up the budget. No wonder we have a deficit.
How would any barter system not have the same effects as using currency? You say "the system", but it's hard to imagine any trade ever occurring then. Every system requires trading.
So you also oppose all contract law?
I cannot understand how any system would exist.
You're right, I couldn't find a link either. I should note that while the DMZ land mines are South Korea's, the treaty would prevent the production of land mines to sell to South Korea.
I found the self-detonating mines to be a great step forward, even if mines are still be used.
All your points about "artifical currency" seem to apply equally if shiny hunks of gold were used. Or wheat if you want something that's useful.
If gold certificates are counterfeitable, what about contracts? Can I create a contract I proport to be between me and you?
The US has offered to agree to the treaties if an exception for the DMZ is written in. I personally think it's a reasonable exception.