Keep in mind that medicine in the US is another industry that suffers from extreme price distortion due to various sorts of government intervention (such as excessive regulation, excessive education requirements, an artificially limited supply of practitioners, mandatory insurance that encourages excessive billing, and so on).
Your entire post represents perhaps the most gigantic misunderstanding an/or willful misrepresentation of facts about health care I have ever read, and I've been discussing the matter for several years with people here and elsewhere as someone who works for the public health care sector of Finland.
Let's get something clear: 1. The US health care system is the most privatized model in advanced economies, you're the only OECD member state that still doesn't have universal coverage 2. The US model is the most expensive model on the planet per capita, The combined tax+private spending is about 2-3 times that of most western economies, and even that's an understatement, because the per capita cost in your case divides the sum of total costs with all Americans, that is, including those who do not in fact have coverage. Therefore the total cost per citizen actually covered is even higher.
We can, however, look at how pricing in these industries would react if the government intervention causing the current pricing distortions was to be removed. Healthcare costs would drop significantly due to increased competition and decreased overhead.
You have it entirely backwards. It is the lack of universal public insurance model that's causing the costs to skyrocket. In here, the government has a vested interest in making sure the system is cost-effective, because it ends up being paid for by the tax payer in most cases (well, we do have private clinics and insurances but those are used only by a tiny fraction of the wealthy for mainly non-urgent procedures). For the government, health care is a cost, like the police and the fire department. The government also suffers if people are not treated, because high levels of untreated people lead to increased unemployment, loss of productivity and tax income.
The current center-right government has been trying to open up our model and move it more towards the direction of an american model but maintain the universal nature, so that private hospitals could provide basic healthcare and the cost would be paid by the tax payer as it is now. The claim is that increasing private presence on the production side would increase efficiency and hence decrease cost, but this is blatantly false, which is why the bill has been slammed by every single expert analysis because data from the world, especially the US is clear that such a change will only increase costs as the private chains will start to charge overheads, which the public system obviously does not do, and because health care demand is inelastic. That is, increasing supply will not affect the demand, so building more (private) infrastructure to partially compete with the public one will only raise the costs for both the private and the public side, as each instance now treats only a part of the patients while having equal fixed costs. I wrote more about this and gave an actual example of how the inelasticity makes an entirely private market highly inefficient in keeping costs down for example here.
Healthcare is one of those subjects in which the political discussion is often entirely detached from the scientific data we have on performance and cost-effectiveness. Again, all western nations besides the US have been running universal models - some based on a single payer model like here in the Nordics, others based on a mix of public and private insurance like in Germany - for over half a century and we've been doing so consistently with lower costs and equal or better treatment outcomes to that of the US. People live lon
It's like they're printing money trying to stimulate demand in a consumer economy, but it gets snatched away by corporations before it ever gets to consumers.
This is largely the case bacause the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth.
Piketty's Main Claims 1. The Return on Capital is Greater than Growth. Piketty claims that r, the average annual rate of return on capital, is in the long-run greater than g, the growth of the economy (i.e., the annual increase in income or output).
r > g (1)
And, "If . . . the rate of return on capital [r] remains significantly above the growth rate [g] for an extended period of time . . . , then the risk of divergence in the distribution of wealth is very high." [pg. 25] 2. Inherited Wealth Grows Faster than Income. If r > g, then inherited wealth grows faster than output and income. The reason? "People with inherited wealth need save only a portion of their income from capital to see that capital grow more quickly than the economy as a whole." [pg. 26]
Piketty's Pessimistic Conclusion: patrimonial capitalism. If the above conditions hold, then capitalism will lead to a distribution of wealth that resembles an aristocracy. Such a distribution is incompatible with the values fundamental to modern democracy
"Under such conditions, it is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetimeâ(TM)s labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels - levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies." [pg. 26]
-Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century
I remind you as a non-American that while wealth inequality and its continued rise is an issue faced by all advanced economies, the US is at a level of its own in this regard because nowhere in the world is the inequality as massive as it is in the States. The top 1 % owns nearly half of all national wealth and the rest is held almost exclusively by the following 9 %, because the bottom 90 % doesn't own much besides their residences. The bottom 90 % also owns almost 75 % of all privately held debt. (source)
And the trend shows no sings of stopping, in fact the current republican 'tax reform' is a massive handout to the ultra-rich at the cost of the bottom 90 % in the long term.
With these stats in mind it is exceedingly hard not to call the USA in its current socio-economic state an oligarchy. And the system they have setup to protect themselves ideologically speaking is massively effective. You had 1 left of center candidate in the presidential primaries that took this issue with any seriousness, and Sanders was labelled a lunatic and a 'communist' for merely talking about introducing systems that are already in place in many western societies like universal health care and education.
This just goes to show how effective of a grip the ruling class has on the society overall. The 2 party system, the primaries and the electoral college all appear to me as an outsider to be things which do not serve the interest of the general public but rather the interests of the above mentioned oligarchs in that they allow for a great level of control over what options are given to the american people in national elections especially.
How is it not functionally a currency if I can buy things with it?
You missed the point he was making.
A currency =! a functional currency. The Venezuelan bolivar is functionally a currency, but because of the hyperinflation that has made it worthless it's not a functional currency and the people have by and large transitioned away from it and are operating using other currencies, mainly the dollar.
Bitcoin is certainly in a similar situation but for different reasons (not inflation). The amount of actual vendors (outside the dark/grey market(s) in Tor which constitute the majority of BCs current usage) is so tiny that it's de facto impossible to buy nearly anything with BC in the real world. It's a currency still, but because of the low amount of practical uses, the highly unstable value and the insanely slow transaction speed (and cost), it's a very very dysfunctional one.
I couldn't buy a carton of milk with BC from a store even if I wanted to, and even if I could there's no benefit for me in doing so as compared to using regular cash.
If people stop buying BTC it will not matter because there will always be some level of trade where people are buying things with BTC
This is massively incorrect for 2 reasons. Firstly, If people stop buying BC that means BC will lose its market value which means there's no reason for anyone to accept BC as a payment. If no-one's buying or selling bitcoin, there's no reason why anyone will accept it as payment for actual goods because there's no guarantee whatsoever that you will be able to get anything with the coins you receive as payment. Imagine if I wanted to buy your car with BC. Say your car's worth around 15 000 $. Okay, with current BC market price that means I could, if you agree, pay you about 1 bitcoin for it and it'd be a solid deal for both of us. However, in 10 years if no-one's exchanging BC for real world currencies you'd certainly not agree to the trade with just 1 BC. Would you agree to it at 100 BC? 1000? How do you measure the amount of coins you'd need for the trade to be fair? You can't. For any trade to be feasible, you have to have a market value measurable in other currencies, because without it just saying. "I will pay you N bitcoins for your car" is a meaningless statement that doesn't convey how much value is actually being transferred to the seller.
Secondly and more importantly, if no-one's buying or selling BC the mining infrastructure will collapse making BC transactions impossible. Running the mining operation is insanely energy intensive and only gets more intensive with time as the calculations required to maintain the blockchain get increasingly complex. Right now people are doing this because the value of the coins they receive as payment for mining are worth several times more than the electricity/hardware costs to run the operation. If the market collapses or BC price drops significantly, the mining will become unprofitable, ie. running the mining will cost you more than you get out of it as a reward*. The moment this happens there's no economic incentive for anyone to be running BC mining, which will make any transactions impossible,
*=This is already actually the case with home PC mining. Running the mining on standard machines will currently cost you way more than you get out of it because of the increased complexity, which is why the entire mining industry is now de facto centralized to the hands of large commercial operators mostly in Asia.
There is a place for charity- but the state should not be apart of it
This is a fundamentally flawed idea for multiple reasons, but I'll focus on the most apparent one explained through the concept of the veil of ignorance by the American philosopher John Rawls.
Thing is, none of us get to choose the conditions we're born into. We don't choose our parents or the community we're born to. The point of the veil of ignorance is to highlight that in light of this fact societal systems should be designed with that in mind. Ie. what kind of a society would you desire if you had no idea who you're going to be, whether you were going to be born healthy, sick, to a rich family, a poor one, an orphan, etc. From that perspective charity by private instances has a major flaw: it's not guaranteed.
For the sake of argument I'll grant you that my parents may have been better off themselves without socialism (although I disagree and your figures on taxation are way off btw but that's irrelevant for this argument). Let's assume the best case scenario and say that in your hypothetical Randian libertarian utopia my parents would've had way more money and success and were able to pay for all of the things I needed and still had an equal or better standard of living than they now do, which is massively unlikely because they'd have to be making several times more money for that to be the case, but let's assume that. Well great, that would work for me. But what if I had worse parents? What If me or someone like me was born to say, a single mother or unemployed parents, or something like that, so that they absolutely did not have the means to provide the things I needed to get where I am now. I'd need charity. However, is there any mechanism to make sure some charity or charities would provide the things for me? No. Charity's voluntary, which means charitable organizations only have as much resources to spread as people voluntarily give them, which means even if there were plenty of organizations around willing to help, there's no way to guarantee that those organisations have the resources to do so. So it'd be a gamble wherein the parents unable to help their own child would petition different charities for help, some would get it, some would get a part of what they need but not everything, while others would get nothing. This is already apparent in the States, wherein there simply don't exist enough charities to provide health care for people who can't afford it or are uninsured, and that's even though you have a limited form of public insurance. If the public insurances were removed, the amount of people in need of charity would skyrocket
Here's where your fundamental assumption goes wrong: what you're saying is that with little to no taxation all wealthy people would suddenly turn into grade A altruists who'd make sure that they'd donate collectively enough money to take care of everyone that needs taking care off. However these people, like you, oppose taxation precisely because they do not want to pay for 'someone else's stuff' that, in their opinion, is none of their concern and they should get to keep all their money to pass onto their children and their families. So it is de facto guaranteed that the elimination of taxes would not result in a massive uptake of altruism but instead the opposite wherein the wealthy and their offspring would be even better off than they're now, and the poor would be doing massively worse.
Now if you want a society wherein people are not penalized if they happen to be born sick and/or to shitty parents and everyone's capable to engage in the pursuit of happiness regardless of their starting point in life, that cannot be guaranteed with a private charity model for these reasons. Socialist systems address this issue because welfare systems like the ones in here are charities that are non-optional. We as a people have come together, and following the principles of the veil
A bricked device is not harmless: it has to be replaced. If the average price of those devices was as low as $10, he caused $ 100 million in damage.
Yes, but that cost needs to be paid for by the manufacturer who has sold you a faulty device with a vulnerability.
nd he left the owners of those devices with no clue as to what was going on. The user only noticed his device had become unusable, and would be far more likely to assume a hardware problem than someone remotely disabling his device (let alone divine WHY someone chose to do that).
The user doesn't even need to know what was the true cause because this is identical to a serious hardware issue.
I once bought an iPod that suddenly stopped working after some months of use because the hard drive failed. I returned the device and got my money back. In that case it was actually the fault of the seller because it turned out the device was not indeed brand new but a returned device which had been repackaged and sold as new, which is of course illegal. However the point is as a customer I don't care one bit 'what's going on' and whether or not it's faulty hardware or if someone's remotely bricked the device. The only thing I care about is I paid money for something that doesn't work as intended, and it needs to be fixed.
Imagine if you were sold a car for example that had a design flaw in the locking system allowing anyone to remotely unlock the doors with an exploit, or start the engine. Obviously you'd want it fixed, but unless these things are brought to public attention the company could just claim that it's bad luck that your car got stolen and they've nothing to do with it.
That's why it's good that these things happen. Exposing critical vulnerabilities publicly is the only guaranteed way of putting pressure on the manufacturer to fix the vulnerability as they're legally obligated to do.
The hopeless and broken wretches who seek to bring those around them down as an excuse for their own failures in life. These are truly worthless human beings who are nothing but a determent to mankind.
You do realize people are born into widely different circumstances and those circumstances, both biological, social and economic have a huge impact on their capabilities to function in a modern society, right? I was born with cerebral palsy and the initial estimate of the doctors was that I'd likely never learn to read or write, yet I now do so fluently in 2 languages and less fluently in 2 others. Is this all because I'm some kind of a superman who beat all the odds with sheer willpower and managed to lift myself up by my own bootstraps? Well, yes and no. You see, my parents decided they weren't going to just give up on me and decided to try and put me into a normal elementary school, where I needed an assistant to help me. The first couple of years were hard and I took a lot longer than most people to master reading/writing, and almost gave up a couple times, but the encouraging support from my family as well as my then doctor kept me going. I also had to have several surgeries performed to hone out major physiological issues that were making my movement really hard, received physical therapy 2-3 times a week (still do) and had to spend quite a while learning basic motor skills with the help of a therapist. This all obviously took motivation and desire to progress from me, which I did have because as soon as I learned to read it became clear to me that the only way of getting on par with the rest of the people out there is to educate myself. However, it also took insane amounts of resources. The amount of money poured into me at an early age is staggering when you factor in the surgeries, the therapy, the costs for the assistant at school, my wheelchairs, mobility scooters, medication (I had to be injected with synthetic growth hormone because my body proiduced almost none of it naturally and synthetic human growth hormone costs a ton) and so on.
Lucky me for being born into a wealthy family right? No. My parents are firmly middle-class, so while we're never dirt poor, I have 2 other brothers so money was often tight, and there's no way my parents could have afforded all these things for me had it been up to them. Luckily I happened to have been born into a country (Finland) in which the constitution guarantees people certain rights, one of which is the right to social security and health care. This means that in fact the state paid for all of these things. All of them. Later on when I graduated high school, at that point having become quite good at studying once my biology was no longer in the way, I managed to get myself into a university here on my second attempt, and that too was paid for by the state as it is for everyone here, for education is also universal here and is a constitutional right, so I eventually graduated with 0 student debt. During my final year at the uni I happened to land an office job working for the health care sector which I stayed on after graduation for a while until a position opened up on the IT side and I moved there. Finally, with a steady income and no existing debt I was able to get a mortgage and buy myself an apartment and move out on my own. Now, at the age of 27 I live by myself still, but I have an assistant who comes by a few times a week to help with cleaning and other laborious tasks that are difficult for me to do, again paid for by state (as is my still continuing physical therapy that's a requirement for me staying functional physically) which is good because although I make enough money to pay my own expenses, I don't have the kind of excess income that would allow me to hire those people on my own dime. Last year I also started a small startup with a couple of friends from the uni that currently is still a part time thing as we've all got our day jobs but the hope is to one day be working for ourselves.
You won't get more than 6 hours of productive work from a knowledge worker. They can be there for longer, but they could do their shit faster and head home, and there would be no difference in output.
This is indeed true and backed up by studies and experiments.
The 8 hour work day is by and large a remnant of the industrialization when factories needed to be ran in 3 shifts. When you're talking about a monotonous, assembly line type of a job, 8 hours lets you get by with just 3 shifts instead of 4 which saves cost and the productivity difference in those kinds of jobs was not too noticeable.
However, when you start talking about anything that requires more than performing a simple manual task over and over again, 8 hours starts to be too much. When you combine this with the fact that the need for time-consuming manual tasks is going down as automation and AIs increase it starts to make even more sense to cut down the length of the workday.
Personally as a project manager on almost all days I can get the relevant stuff done in 6 hours or under, the main exceptions being the days when there happens to be several meetings that require travelling between locations, and even then the extra time is spent on the road instead of doing something productive. I'd happily have my work time reduced to 6 hours provided the pay stays the same. And herein lies the core problem with this situation: we know that cutting down work time will increase efficiency, but we still evaluate and pay workers based on 'time spent at workstation' so the intuition of corporations is that if worktime is cut, pay must also be cut.
In other words: the basic assumption that people are paid 'for their time' needs to be done away with in knowledge work especially and replaced with paying people for working outcomes.
but every time I research the raw data it becomes very clear these aren't all that smart of AIs. In fact, the term AI is very misleading.
No, no it isn't misleading, people just associate the word with something it doesn't mean. Intelligence is a scale, not a binary thing. Biological systems have differing amounts of intelligence within them as well: a fish for example is not very smart by human/mammal standards but it's instantly obvious that a a fish has way more intelligence than say, bacteria. Likewise rats are not hugely intelligent compared to apes, but a rat can be trained and is clearly more intelligent than a fish. And so on and so forth. But when we start to talk about machines and machine learning people forget about this and when they read that a system is artificially intelligent they falsely assume it to mean either 'human level (general) intelligence' and/or 'consciousness' neither of which are required for a system to be intelligent.
Intelligence is simply information processing in physical systems. An algorithm that can correctly classify items from a moving image in real time to thousands of different categories is way smarter than all non-human animals, and even smarter than small children in said task. Sure, that doesn't make it smarter than adults overall (nor smarter than the fish when it comes to surviving in a marine ecosystem), but it also doesn't make it not intelligent.
The goal posts are moving when it comes to AI: if you told people 30 years ago that we now have cars capable of driving themselves autonomously amidst traffic with normal human drivers and avoid accidents successfully, that'd have been instantly classified as a type of AI - and deemed impossible by most people. But now since people's understanding of what machines are capable of doing that autonomous car is suddenly 'not very smart' (even though these systems are by and large better at driving that the vast majority of humans) because while it can drive it cannot also debate with me about Plato while doing so.
They're more like smart scripts.;-)
You mean they're more like scripts with narrow scope of (artificial) intelligence. Same goes for chess engines and alphaGo for example: they're systems which can only do 1 thing really, but they're capable of doing that one thing better than the best human players, making them more intelligent in those fields than any human, even though they're 'dumb' in every other aspect. Intelligence and general intelligence are 2 entirely different things.
I don't know, when just two or three companies have such a big chunk of the online space, government forcing a break up may be the only option. Three-quarters of online traffic goes through just the top two companies, CompuServe and Prodigy. Oh sorry, not anymore. Those companies went away when someone else offered something better. Three quarters of online traffic flows through AOL and Yahoo. No sorry it changed again. Yahoo has been beaten out by Altavista, and AOL is the main ISP. Fuck it's hard to keep up. You say Altavista, the mighty Altavista is gone? So it's AOL and who that run the whole internet now? What? No AOL? Dang the government should has done an amazing job breaking up all the online powerhouses.
While the point you raise is a good observation the examples are not really equivocal to the current situation. Note that I'm not advocating for a government breakdown of the companies, but it's a fact that both Google and FB have a much tighter hold of their respective markets than say Altavista or AOL ever had because of the amount of usage data they have access to. I mean as far as search engines go, there's really no possible way of starting a service that could efficiently compete with Google at this point. The sheer volume of searches means they can optimize the search results far better than any of their competition, which is why pretty much no-one is even trying, and why Bing & al are a universal joke.
With FB it's an even tighter lock because you can't move people from FB to a competing service individually. That is, even if someone creates a social media service that I prefer over FB, me moving to it from FB will be useless unless a significant portion of my friends also move there. Without the circle of friends, the 'social' in social media is gone and the service is useless no matter how awesome it may be. And since for the majority of users FB 'does the job', it's at this point very hard to convince most people to switch to another nearly identical service. FB has actively taken measures to lock down their userbase by involving historical features of all kinds. This is why you see all these old posts that it suggests: 'On this day X years ago, you shared this", "You and X became friends on this day N years ago" etc. This, as well as all the gazillion of 'apps'/games is all the kind of stuff that cannot be moved from facebook to another platform and silly as it may sound it counts. There's a notable scaling benefit to having a large and widely used social media site, obviously for the advertisers/data miners but for the users as well. I mean, it should be indicative of just how much of a monopoly they have that even Google kinda gave up on Google+ after they realized no matter how much they try to force it people will not be shifting to use it. They even had the significant advantage of saying to people 'hey if you have a google account you don't even have to sign up you can just start using it", and it still didn't take off because for the majority of consumers who're on FB they gain no additional benefits by starting to use another identical service with less users and none of their data.
The ecosystem of the net has changed quite rapidly and is no longer in a similar state than it was say at the turn of the century or even 10 years ago. It's switched from a service many people use every now and again to state where most western people are essentially online 24/7 via smartphones, so the early age of heavy competition in for example search engines and social media has passed. It's the age of machine learning now, so it means whoever has the data, makes the rules. It's why steam dominates the PC digital sales market despite containing unbelievable amounts of garbage and has rather shitty customer service: they have insane amounts of data on sales and what people are playing which they can use to target sales/ads and discounts to people that are likely to buy. It's why there are no real competitors to Youtube even though many content creator
Seriously, get the fuck off of ANY non-face-to-face human interaction every once in a while.
The problem with social media (not just FB) and depression is not that people do nothing but stare at FB and get depressed. The problem (or, one of them) is that if you're already depressed, viewing social media can make it worse. Why? Well, because people like to present their best side on social media; people's profiles are by and large advertisements of themselves. People post about their holidays, trips, happy times with friends and family, If you're someone who feels shitty about your life, browsing the feed can make these feelings even worse because it seems to highlight to you how much better everyone else is doing and hence how much of a 'failure' you are because you don't have these kinds of situations.
So yeah, staying out of FB can be a good thing during depression, but it carries the downside of isolating one even more from one's social circle. For me and you it's easy to call up a friend and go grab a beer or a coffee out in the real world, but for a depressed person who might have trouble just getting out of bed this can be a monumental task, so just telling these people to log out of FB and go out is not exactly a miracle solution.
What FB could do if they get this working is change the feed of depressed people slightly. I mean, they already embed ads into the feed, so for these individuals embedding information and resources about getting help as well as possible articles/videos about how to deal with depression while also simulatenously toning down the amount of other people's 'look at my awesome day out on a date with my girlfriend' -posts would likely be a good thing.
There are going to be some serious privacy issues and a lot of false positives. If all goes according to plan, expect the cops to send a SWAT team to bust down someone's door and "accidentally" pump two dozen bullets into them
If the cops respond to a suspected suicidal person with a SWAT-team, then the AI reporting to them about a suicidal individual is the least of your problems.
So, what you're saying is, if you pay $2100 then you get to play the game a lot less, and the more you pay the more you get to avoid playing the game?
The point is precisely that you need to pay to skip content which is in the game just to waste your time and is not enjoyable. EA is saying that in order to enjoy the full-experience you need to pay more money or you're stuck with a sub-par experience for thousands of hours. The standard gameplay experience is designed to be not worth playing, which illustrates how fucked up their business logic is.
If that's an incentive then I've got a better deal: for $0, you can not play the game at all!
Exactly. And that's precisely what I'm doing and encouraging everyone else to do!
If it was simply "buy this skin" no RNG involved, people would not be having a shit fit. But this RNG "slot machine" type of behavior is exactly designed to bilk players out of money and hand out as few valuable items as possible. You know where like a real slot machine pays out 93-97% of the time. Loot boxes may never pay out.
Absolutely. The math has been done and the apprximate amount of money one has to spend if you wish to unlock all of the content (in the game you've already paid good money for) is 2100 $! Or, alternatively, without money, it takes over 4500 hours of gameplay to unlock everything!
The greed of EA is beyond disgusting. The SW license is one of the strongest out there, and heavily liked by kids and teens, and they purposefully use it to design a grind-marathon which is designed to incentive people at throwing money in the hopes of getting something useful. The business model is even greedier than most of the free to play models it's been copied from, and we're talking about a 60 to 80 dollars full-price release. Even more pathetic are the weak excuses the asswipes at EA tried to conjur up to defend this racket by saying it's desgined to 'give players a sense of accomplishment and pride', when the in game progression doesn't even relate to player skill in any way. It doesn't matter if you're a top player or a rookie, the rate at which you progress without microtransactions is simply tied to time in game. Skill and accomplishments have nothing to do with it. It's a 100 % pay-to-win system designed to do nothing but drive sales of the lootboxes.
This is why I prefer the game commentator/youtuber Jim Sterling's (whose made several videos about microtransaction BS this year, including this recent one about this EA/Battlefront situation) terminology for these 'triple AAA' releases with lootbox shit: 'fee-to-pay'. It's absolute BS and I do hope these shitty developers end up getting burned. Wanna include gambling mechanics to your full-price release? Fine, but can't sell it to underaged people then. And I do hope Disney ends up force chocking the license out of EAs hands if and hopefully when the sales of Battlefront II fall short of their expectations because of this.
As a longtime gamer and a SW fan I plead all here: do not buy this game. Don't buy it for yourself, don't buy it as a gift, don't even buy it at a discount. It's the only way the companies will ever learn. Don't be fooled by the decision to disable them for now, Dice admitted already that it's a temporary measure while they're 're-adjusting' the system. Meaning. they tried the waters out, now they're waiting for the holiday sales to pass and the dust to settle before introducing a watered down version of the same bullshit.
Compare this to proper publishers like CD Projekt Red: like I just recently picked up Wicher 3 with both of its expansions from a steam sale at 20 euros, and I do have to say CD Projekt Red are doing it right: you buy the game, you get all the content straight out of the box. And before someone points out that it's somehow 'different' for single-player games I remind you all that in this Year of the Lootbox WB included a shitton of mictrotransactions and grinding in Shadow of War's single player campaign.
This behavior is destructive and antithetical to the whole point of quality games, because introducing intentional grind-fests that are meant to bog the player down with menial repetitive tasks is sending a message of 'yeah, we know the base gameplay sucks, we intentionally designed it to suck, but hey, you can skip it by paying us more money and get to the good stuff'.
Fuck. These. Publishers. They need to fall and be replaced by companies that actual develop stuff gameplay first.
Remove the Electoral College, and you have a situation where candidates only need pander to a small handful of states
And yet, the Electoral College only makes this problem worse. The EC allows the presidency to be decided on a minority vote, meaning that really, candidates only already have to pander to a small subset of states, the swing-states. Trump moneyballed the entire election and won despite getting some 3 million less votes.
I'm not american, but if you ask me this if anything is a system designed to increase the efficiency of pandering, and means that the people living in the swing states have undue and uneven power over the whole process.
It would also heavily slant the Executive branch's agenda towards the concerns, demands and desires of the megacities
As opposed to the current situation where the agenda is tilted to favor the Trump-base in the swing states instead of the majority of americans?
I find it rather unfathomable how people can still support the EC system after it was basically the main driver that allowed Trump to win the election despite not being the most voted candidate. There's a reason most western countries have long since ditched these archaic systems, you know, and it's precisely because they skew the democratic will of the people.
Are all already banned in Russia. ISPs are madated by law to prevent the use of Tor/proxies/VPNs because they can be used to access 'extremist material'.
It's really descriptive of just how totalitarian the country has become that they're hard at work at out-Chinaing China itself when it comes to the control of the internet.
This is not to say there won't be those who still have access to Tor and VPNs, especially to those who're friends of the right people, but for the common folk this makes it really hard.
I have located your problem: you're assuming a man who believes that the Earth is flat has reason.
The ancient Greeks knew the Earth to be round. They also laid the foundations of western philosophy and reasoning. Therefore this individual is clearly at a level of intellect far more distant in the past than the ancient Greeks, it's no wonder he's irrational and has outdated views about astronomy.
Someone needs to tell this man about our lord and saviour in white robes who died for his beliefs, Socrates!:P
It really is a fitting symbol of the insane level of polarization in US politics that an article simply reporting on what the administration is doing is labeled 'anti-Trump clickbait'. Hint: If reporting on the actions of your president counts as 'anti-Trump', that should tell you a lot about the level of competence of Trump and his suitability to rule.
But nah, better just to shut your ears and yell about boycotts and witch hunts, right? Reminds me of Gollum from the Lord of The Rings. 'Filthy mediases, reporting on what is happening. We hates it, we hates it, precious!"
Stop lying to yourself and take 1 hour to read the white paper. Then you will know why you should start buying. Its time to take money away from banks and governments.
You do understand bitcoin is worthless without fiat currencies, right? BC is not somehow detached and or independent from the global currency systems, that's one of the biggest myths about it circulated by people who don't really understand how BC derives its value. The market value of BC is measured in terms of fiat currencies, which by itself should tell you that the value of BC and the value of fiat currencies are interlinked.
Imagine for a moment of the major currencies crashed tomorrow and became totally or nearly worthless. You may have some bitcoins saved up, but in order to actually get nearly anything with those bitcoins you have to exchange them to a fiat currency first. Or do you expect just to walk to a store and say: 'I'd like to buy some groceries, I assume you accept bitcoins?", because if that's the case you'll be sorely disappointed. You see, what's keeping the mining infrastructure alive at this point is the profit, made in fiat currencies, from the mining. The cost of mining a single BC is increasing as time goes by, the electricity and hardware costs are going to keep going up. But right now it's done because by doing that you can make money by doing so, as in, non-BC money, actual currency. If fiat currencies collapse, the mining/upkeep of BC infrastructure will become hugely unprofitable, which means that should the value of fiat currencies crash across the world, the BC infrastructure will likely collapse as continuing to spend resources into mining is unwise at that point, which means that trying to perform transactions using BC in such a situation will likely become impossible, and BC will be worthless..
'Just invest all your money into BC and the power will be taken away from banks and governments' is just as dumb as saying 'Just invest all your money into EVE Online ISKs or gold and power will be taken away from banks and governments'.
The value of Bitcoin rests upon the functionality of the global market and currency systems. Without them, bitcoin is just a vast and energy-intensive network of virtual tokens.
Like many laws originating in the EU, it probably had some noble intentions behind it. Maybe this time it really was trying to limit the ability of scam web sites operating outside EU jurisdictions to harm people when the operators couldn't be pursued directly under EU law.
Yes, from the article:
CPC factsheets and guidance documents claim this new legal frame could only be used for websites that sell scam products or break EU-wide consumer protection laws, such as e-commerce stores or travel booking sites that do not refund users, use fake product images, sell inexistent products, and so on.
Consumer protection laws are always needed to protect customers against cases like Infurn.com, a website that peddled modern furniture but never delivered and hid the identity of its owners via data protection laws that prevented the domain registrar from revealing who was behind the scheme.
As for this:
Sadly, the EU often exhibits a combination of ignorance, apathy and carelessness when it comes to making the actual laws, and consequently it often causes large amounts of collateral damage. I suspect in many cases those responsible genuinely don't know or understand what they've done,
While incompetence and ignorance are surely one factor, another issue with the way the EU currently works is that while having a shared currency and other features that have taken it closer to a federation-like entity, it's still a trade union and not an actual federation. This means that drafting regulations has to often be done with enough flexibility to account for the fact that different states have vastly different configurations of courts and authorities, and for example the way consumer protection cases are handled differs country by country, and in many countries most consumer cases are in fact already handled without the participation of a court. This is why the wording used often speaks of 'competent authorities', meaning 'whichever national body this matter falls under'
Here in Finland for example, the authority responsible for handling the details of consumer protection is the Finnish competition and consumer authority, which oversees the consumer market and sets guidelines based on existing legislation but does not handle individual complaints, although they do give out advice and knowledge on past rulings. I have personally done business with them once a few years back after an online vendor operating from Sweden that I had bought a 64 gig iPod from refused to take it into warranty after it stopped working 10 months after the purchase claiming that their 'inspection' proved I had dropped it, which was not the case. The FCAA responded that I should have a 3rd party have a look at the device and give their assessment, which I did and in that process apple maintenance also noted that it wasn't even actually a brand new device as it had been registered in their care before, so it was a return product which they had repackaged and sold to me as new, which is obviously illegal. With this knowledge in hand I recontacted the FCAA, which sided with me and pointed out to the vendor that if the case is take further they will almost certainly lose as the evidence is clear at this point, and they finally yielded, giving me a full refund, but no additional compensation although such was recommended, which bugged me out. However, should I have wanted to fight over compensation, I would have needed to take the matter further to the the consumer disputes board, whose members are appointed by the ministry of Justice for 5 years at a time. It works very similarly to a court, but it is not one, meaning it cannot give out legally binding/enforceable rulings but instead gives out recommendations, which are usually followed. The board would have likely sided with me but at that point the likely compensation would have
I'm going to ignore the fact that you just listed Buzzfeed, a clickbait site that doesn't do actual news together with actual news organizations and point out that as a European leftist I find it rather confusing that someone would label stuff like CNN 'leftist'. I live in a country that's comparatively very far to the left of the US, which means we've got, among other things, universal health care and education systems. I admit I do not read/follow CNN regularly but i certainly have not been left with the impression that they support either of these policies for example. They certainly lean more towards the democrats, but the democratic party is not 'the left'.
The point here is this: compared to other western nations, the US has tilted heavily to the right in the past few decades. The democrats are now what the republicans were in the past, whereas the republicans have kept going to the right, so you essentially have 2 right-wing parties, one far-right and one more centrist, but no leftist party, and this reflects in the media landscape as well, so that anything close to the center is labeled 'the left', and anything actually to the left is labeled 'communism'.
Overall the two party system has caused american politics to become hyperpolarized. Any and all nuance seems, at least from the outside, to be gone. It's all a game of 'blue vs. red', 'us vs. them' and both sides are making the divide worse by actively demonizing the other side.
As a case study look at the way the attempted ACA repeal went down. The republicans have the congress, the presidency and the senate, yet they failed to repeal the ACA because the suggested repeal was not right-wing enough for a segment of the republicans, even though said proposal would have robbed millions of americans health care and likely resulted in tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. In Europe, a health care plan that would remove coverage from millions of people with low income would be considered extremely far to the right, but even this was not enough for some republicans.
And then when outlets like the CNN point out the fact that such plans would lead to massive amounts of deaths when people are robbed of coverage, they're labeled 'leftist crap', as if not towing the line of the ruling party and presenting facts about the proposal somehow makes them 'the left', which is not true.
Not commenting on Bitcoin gold, but this line in the summary is incorrect:
The original vision for Bitcoin was that anyone would be able to participate in Bitcoin mining with their personal PCs, earning a bit of extra cash as they helped to support the network. But as Bitcoin became more valuable, people discovered that Bitcoin mining could be done much more efficiently with custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). As a result, Bitcoin mining became a specialized and highly concentrated industry.
It's true that: BC mining has become a highly concentrated industry, but this was always bound to happen. The way BC is setup and the way the algorithm is build is such that the complexity of calculation and thus the resources needed to perform it are increasing as time goes by. It was predictable from day 1 that as the complexity grows, home PCs (and even custom home built clusters using stuff like playstations that people were for a moment rigging and using for mining) were going to become unprofitable, as the electricity consumption and hence the operating cost would soar past the yielded profit. It's not about efficiency, it's about profitability. People would still be running mining software on their home machines if it was profitable even if the profit made was small compared to large scale dedicated operations, but right now anyone using anything other than a custom mining machine will actually be losing money.
BC is this way by design (and if you ask me, that's one of the major problems of its design), so claiming that the original plan was to keep users running mining software on their own computers is to be ignorant.
This is something that in the long term endangers the whole of BC infrastructure: right now the large scale miners in Asia (mostly China) have kept on doing what they do because the price of the coin has kept going up, meaning that even though electricity and hardware costs have kept increasing, the increasing costs have been offset by the increasing price of the coin. However the fundamental issue is that the market price of BC fluctuates heavily, whereas the complexity only goes one way and that's up. If the market price of BC crashes, the mining will stop being profitable even for the dedicated operators, which will destroy the mining industry and essentially render BC unusable (and hence, worthless).
Mass murders do happen in Europe. In fact you are much more likely to be killed by a machine gun in Europe than the USA.
The word you're looking for is an assault rifle (machine guns are not used by people other than military) but that's a moot point.
This important thing to note is argument is a red herring when it comes to the issue of gun legislation because fact of the matter is that US has both a higher rate of homicide in general as well as a higher rate of mass shootings/murders than Europe. So the fact of the matter is that you're statistically much more likely to become a victim of a mass murder in the US than in Europe.
Most mass shootings happen with handguns.
This is correct.
You want to know what I noticed about these recent mass shootings? Well, I'll tell you anyway. Most of them were in gun free zones.
You want to know what I've noticed about these recent mass shootings? Over a third of them globally happen in the US despite you being only 5 % of the world population. Compared to other western nations, even other western nations with a high gun ownership rate such as we here in Finland, the difference is staggering.
Most of the people doing the shooting were barred from possessing a firearm, this could be because of age (have to be 18 to own a gun, older in some states), previous conviction (felony or some violent misdemeanors), prior drug use/possession (even in states where it's been legalized, federal law still prohibits firearm possession), mental health history (this can be permanent or temporary), illegal alien (as it should be, this is an armed invasion IMHO), or as mentioned before being in a "gun free zone" at the time.
First of all, this idea that most mass murders are done with an illegal gun seems to not hold true in light of the facts (more on that later).
But even if it would, even if it'd be the case that most mass shootings are done with an illegal weapon, that's not an argument against control, that's evidence to the contrary because it indicates that what gun control you do have is poorly implemented if criminals can acquire guns with such ease. Those illegal weapons come from somewhere. The fact that people who shouldn't be allowed to own guns manage to get them with such ease that mass shootings are now almost a daily phenomenon in the US should tell you that the system is broken somewhere. Either the laws are broken or alternatively the enforcement of the rules is lacking, because it should be alarming to you that murderous criminals can acquire weapons that they should not be allowed to get with relative ease.
Nearly every illegal weapon used was at some point a legal one. The gun show loophole is perhaps the most famous one of the examples that comes to my mind, though I'm not an expert on US law. No level of gun control will make much difference if there exist legal ways for people to bypass the level of control and purchase weapons without having their backgrounds checked and so on. This comes down to a combination of points made by the OP and you. The OP said that the ease of getting an AR-15 probably has something to do with it, and you rightfully corrected him that most mass murders are done with handguns. Therefore the correct question is: does the ease of getting a handgun affect the rate of murders?
Yes, yes it does. One of the key reasons why Europe on average has less murders & mass murders is precisely because you cannot acquire a legal handgun here nearly as easily as you can in the states. This means that the amount of handguns in the black market is also consid
Detached from fiat currencies (even if traded for fiat, bitcoin still lives within its own ecosystem. See usage in Venezuela or Zimbabwe for proof )
Eh... The usage of BC in areas with hyperinflation is not proof that it's detached from fiat systems because it's not. Areas with hyperinflation traditionally switch to using currencies other than their own one, meaning traditionally the dollar and other major currencies. In this case some have chosen to use BC, but most of the black market trade is still conducted using other major fiat currencies because they're more easily available.
You still need fiat currencies to purchase bitcoins. Without the exchanges (which can be regulated quite easily) bitcoin would be useless as without a convenient way of transferring back and forth between fiat-bitcoin-fiat the utility of BC (and hence, its value) will plummet.
Simplicity of use in a digital era
What? Compared to regular debit/credit cards that are pretty much universally accepted and cash BC is terrible in terms of simplicity of use.
Network upkeep incentive by mining mechanism
There's a problem with this incentive though: the more time passes, the more complicated and difficult the mining becomes which makes it increasingly energy-intensive and hence costly. For the mining to be profitable the price of the coin must keep going up to match the increasing difficulty of calculation, which means should the value of BC drop drastically in the future due to any number of reasons (competitors, increasing regulation etc.) the whole mining infrastructure may suddenly become massively unprofitable and collapse.
Stocks are ownership in a real world corporation that, ideally, pays regular dividends to share holders. The corporation has actual assets. Bitcoin is just numbers on a computer. It is effectively a currency, and while currency trading does occur, the currency markets are a great way to lose money. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, but rather maintains its value by the utility it offers and the number of people who hold Bitcoin. This makes it very similar to any fiat currency, actually. At least investing in metals gives you something with intrinsic value.
You should note however, that the same is true of stock: stocks have no intrinsic value and are essentially also just numbers on a computer that reflect your share of a given company. The value of that stock (both the dividends and aftermarket value of the stock itself) is entirely maintained by the utility it (and therefore the company) offers and the number of people who hold them. If the company goes under or the economy collapses the stock is worthless. The fact that a corporation has actual real world assets does not protect them from bankruptcy. The company may well have assets while at the same time having debt that exceeds the value of said assets.
'Intrinsic value' is a bit of a quirky term because intrinsic value attached to things like metal come from their use in the current economy. Gold has some applications in electronics for example, but outside that most of its value is made up non-intrinsically by the fact that historically we've chosen to attach a great deal of value to it as it used to work (together with other metals) as a currency.
Think about a thought experiment where you take a laptop to someone in the west and ask them to trade it for a week's supply of food. It's pretty safe to say that nearly all people would take said trade because even if they have no use for the laptop themselves, they know and understand they can sell the laptop. Now think about doing this in the third world and ask someone there to trade it for a week's worth of food: it may work if the individual I'm bartering with is educated enough to understand that even though they likely have poor access to electricity/the net, they can still go to town and exchange said laptop for money or directly for supplies they need. However if that's not the case (think about for example some of the Amazonian tribes living essentially isolated from the modern world and having little to no concept of money, let alone electronics), it's highly unlikely that I'm able to do said trade even if for me the laptop is worth much more than a few meals. The 'intrinsic value' of the laptop (and conversely, food) is entirely different for me and the individual I'm trying to trade it with depending on the position of said individual within the global market as well as the state of the global economy itself. In a post-apocalyptic scenario with little electricity and no internet, the laptop will likely be worth a tiny tiny fraction of what it is now.
The point here is to say that in the end, all value-statements are always subjective and bound to current market conditions. That is, we can't make statements such as "Item X is always intrinsically worth at least Z dollars" but that also means it's impossible to peg the value to anything else either, so statements like "Item X is always intrinsically worth at least Z kilograms of wheat" are equally not true.
Which is not to say that intrinsic value is a useless concept, it's not. It's clear that metals have more intrinsic value than works of art for example because they have real world applications and uses. Likewise stock in major corporations currently has more intrinsic value than bitcoin. The point I'm getting at is just that 'intrinsic value' does not and will never equate to 'objective value', which in fact does not exist.
Or should we, the rest of the World, to just sit and close our mouth with whatever thing they like to do that might fuck our countries? Same as the Paris Climate?
Wait what? Did you just equate genetically modified species being released into the wild with a non-binding international treaty to curb emissions? Wtf?
For the Nth time, the Paris climate agreement is non-binding. If for whatever reason your country does not care about the global climate, you're entirely free to ignore the Paris goals, shut your eyes and keep burning all the oil and the coal you want. There are no sanctions in the treaty for countries that do not meet their goals.
The point of the Paris agreement is to try to get everyone to do what they can to slow down the rate of emissions (and hence warming) to a point where the consequences are more manageable. The point is precisely to try to make sure nations don't get fucked by massive climatic changes.
Comparing such a project, which has a well understood basis in natural science (the greenhouse effect has been well understood for over a century and is demonstrable in a lab) and is based on the voluntary co-operation of nations for the common good of everyone (just like the closing of the hole in the ozone layer, which was also achieved by an international consensus and realization that continuation of past practices would have lead to serious harm for everyone) to an experiment where a single nation starts to release genetically modified insects is just plain dumb. We know that reducing emissions is good for everyone in the mid to long term, and we know this for a fact. We don't know that releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild will not have significant adverse effects.
I understand that this kind of strawman where the Paris treaty is seen as some kind of NWO tool to control what nations can do flies on facebook & al where people get their news from mainly reading headlines of blogposts, but I seriously expect people on this site to have a modicum more of insight into what the treaty actually says before going overboard with the tinfoilhat level of crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
Your entire post represents perhaps the most gigantic misunderstanding an/or willful misrepresentation of facts about health care I have ever read, and I've been discussing the matter for several years with people here and elsewhere as someone who works for the public health care sector of Finland.
Let's get something clear:
1. The US health care system is the most privatized model in advanced economies, you're the only OECD member state that still doesn't have universal coverage
2. The US model is the most expensive model on the planet per capita, The combined tax+private spending is about 2-3 times that of most western economies, and even that's an understatement, because the per capita cost in your case divides the sum of total costs with all Americans, that is, including those who do not in fact have coverage. Therefore the total cost per citizen actually covered is even higher.
You have it entirely backwards. It is the lack of universal public insurance model that's causing the costs to skyrocket. In here, the government has a vested interest in making sure the system is cost-effective, because it ends up being paid for by the tax payer in most cases (well, we do have private clinics and insurances but those are used only by a tiny fraction of the wealthy for mainly non-urgent procedures). For the government, health care is a cost, like the police and the fire department. The government also suffers if people are not treated, because high levels of untreated people lead to increased unemployment, loss of productivity and tax income.
The current center-right government has been trying to open up our model and move it more towards the direction of an american model but maintain the universal nature, so that private hospitals could provide basic healthcare and the cost would be paid by the tax payer as it is now. The claim is that increasing private presence on the production side would increase efficiency and hence decrease cost, but this is blatantly false, which is why the bill has been slammed by every single expert analysis because data from the world, especially the US is clear that such a change will only increase costs as the private chains will start to charge overheads, which the public system obviously does not do, and because health care demand is inelastic. That is, increasing supply will not affect the demand, so building more (private) infrastructure to partially compete with the public one will only raise the costs for both the private and the public side, as each instance now treats only a part of the patients while having equal fixed costs. I wrote more about this and gave an actual example of how the inelasticity makes an entirely private market highly inefficient in keeping costs down for example here.
Healthcare is one of those subjects in which the political discussion is often entirely detached from the scientific data we have on performance and cost-effectiveness. Again, all western nations besides the US have been running universal models - some based on a single payer model like here in the Nordics, others based on a mix of public and private insurance like in Germany - for over half a century and we've been doing so consistently with lower costs and equal or better treatment outcomes to that of the US. People live lon
This is largely the case bacause the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth.
-Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century
I remind you as a non-American that while wealth inequality and its continued rise is an issue faced by all advanced economies, the US is at a level of its own in this regard because nowhere in the world is the inequality as massive as it is in the States. The top 1 % owns nearly half of all national wealth and the rest is held almost exclusively by the following 9 %, because the bottom 90 % doesn't own much besides their residences. The bottom 90 % also owns almost 75 % of all privately held debt. (source)
And the trend shows no sings of stopping, in fact the current republican 'tax reform' is a massive handout to the ultra-rich at the cost of the bottom 90 % in the long term.
With these stats in mind it is exceedingly hard not to call the USA in its current socio-economic state an oligarchy. And the system they have setup to protect themselves ideologically speaking is massively effective. You had 1 left of center candidate in the presidential primaries that took this issue with any seriousness, and Sanders was labelled a lunatic and a 'communist' for merely talking about introducing systems that are already in place in many western societies like universal health care and education.
This just goes to show how effective of a grip the ruling class has on the society overall. The 2 party system, the primaries and the electoral college all appear to me as an outsider to be things which do not serve the interest of the general public but rather the interests of the above mentioned oligarchs in that they allow for a great level of control over what options are given to the american people in national elections especially.
You missed the point he was making.
A currency =! a functional currency. The Venezuelan bolivar is functionally a currency, but because of the hyperinflation that has made it worthless it's not a functional currency and the people have by and large transitioned away from it and are operating using other currencies, mainly the dollar.
Bitcoin is certainly in a similar situation but for different reasons (not inflation). The amount of actual vendors (outside the dark/grey market(s) in Tor which constitute the majority of BCs current usage) is so tiny that it's de facto impossible to buy nearly anything with BC in the real world. It's a currency still, but because of the low amount of practical uses, the highly unstable value and the insanely slow transaction speed (and cost), it's a very very dysfunctional one.
I couldn't buy a carton of milk with BC from a store even if I wanted to, and even if I could there's no benefit for me in doing so as compared to using regular cash.
This is massively incorrect for 2 reasons. Firstly, If people stop buying BC that means BC will lose its market value which means there's no reason for anyone to accept BC as a payment. If no-one's buying or selling bitcoin, there's no reason why anyone will accept it as payment for actual goods because there's no guarantee whatsoever that you will be able to get anything with the coins you receive as payment. Imagine if I wanted to buy your car with BC. Say your car's worth around 15 000 $. Okay, with current BC market price that means I could, if you agree, pay you about 1 bitcoin for it and it'd be a solid deal for both of us. However, in 10 years if no-one's exchanging BC for real world currencies you'd certainly not agree to the trade with just 1 BC. Would you agree to it at 100 BC? 1000? How do you measure the amount of coins you'd need for the trade to be fair? You can't. For any trade to be feasible, you have to have a market value measurable in other currencies, because without it just saying. "I will pay you N bitcoins for your car" is a meaningless statement that doesn't convey how much value is actually being transferred to the seller.
Secondly and more importantly, if no-one's buying or selling BC the mining infrastructure will collapse making BC transactions impossible. Running the mining operation is insanely energy intensive and only gets more intensive with time as the calculations required to maintain the blockchain get increasingly complex. Right now people are doing this because the value of the coins they receive as payment for mining are worth several times more than the electricity/hardware costs to run the operation. If the market collapses or BC price drops significantly, the mining will become unprofitable, ie. running the mining will cost you more than you get out of it as a reward*. The moment this happens there's no economic incentive for anyone to be running BC mining, which will make any transactions impossible,
*=This is already actually the case with home PC mining. Running the mining on standard machines will currently cost you way more than you get out of it because of the increased complexity, which is why the entire mining industry is now de facto centralized to the hands of large commercial operators mostly in Asia.
This is a fundamentally flawed idea for multiple reasons, but I'll focus on the most apparent one explained through the concept of the veil of ignorance by the American philosopher John Rawls.
Thing is, none of us get to choose the conditions we're born into. We don't choose our parents or the community we're born to. The point of the veil of ignorance is to highlight that in light of this fact societal systems should be designed with that in mind. Ie. what kind of a society would you desire if you had no idea who you're going to be, whether you were going to be born healthy, sick, to a rich family, a poor one, an orphan, etc. From that perspective charity by private instances has a major flaw: it's not guaranteed.
For the sake of argument I'll grant you that my parents may have been better off themselves without socialism (although I disagree and your figures on taxation are way off btw but that's irrelevant for this argument). Let's assume the best case scenario and say that in your hypothetical Randian libertarian utopia my parents would've had way more money and success and were able to pay for all of the things I needed and still had an equal or better standard of living than they now do, which is massively unlikely because they'd have to be making several times more money for that to be the case, but let's assume that. Well great, that would work for me. But what if I had worse parents? What If me or someone like me was born to say, a single mother or unemployed parents, or something like that, so that they absolutely did not have the means to provide the things I needed to get where I am now. I'd need charity. However, is there any mechanism to make sure some charity or charities would provide the things for me? No. Charity's voluntary, which means charitable organizations only have as much resources to spread as people voluntarily give them, which means even if there were plenty of organizations around willing to help, there's no way to guarantee that those organisations have the resources to do so. So it'd be a gamble wherein the parents unable to help their own child would petition different charities for help, some would get it, some would get a part of what they need but not everything, while others would get nothing. This is already apparent in the States, wherein there simply don't exist enough charities to provide health care for people who can't afford it or are uninsured, and that's even though you have a limited form of public insurance. If the public insurances were removed, the amount of people in need of charity would skyrocket
Here's where your fundamental assumption goes wrong: what you're saying is that with little to no taxation all wealthy people would suddenly turn into grade A altruists who'd make sure that they'd donate collectively enough money to take care of everyone that needs taking care off. However these people, like you, oppose taxation precisely because they do not want to pay for 'someone else's stuff' that, in their opinion, is none of their concern and they should get to keep all their money to pass onto their children and their families. So it is de facto guaranteed that the elimination of taxes would not result in a massive uptake of altruism but instead the opposite wherein the wealthy and their offspring would be even better off than they're now, and the poor would be doing massively worse.
Now if you want a society wherein people are not penalized if they happen to be born sick and/or to shitty parents and everyone's capable to engage in the pursuit of happiness regardless of their starting point in life, that cannot be guaranteed with a private charity model for these reasons. Socialist systems address this issue because welfare systems like the ones in here are charities that are non-optional. We as a people have come together, and following the principles of the veil
Yes, but that cost needs to be paid for by the manufacturer who has sold you a faulty device with a vulnerability.
The user doesn't even need to know what was the true cause because this is identical to a serious hardware issue.
I once bought an iPod that suddenly stopped working after some months of use because the hard drive failed. I returned the device and got my money back. In that case it was actually the fault of the seller because it turned out the device was not indeed brand new but a returned device which had been repackaged and sold as new, which is of course illegal. However the point is as a customer I don't care one bit 'what's going on' and whether or not it's faulty hardware or if someone's remotely bricked the device. The only thing I care about is I paid money for something that doesn't work as intended, and it needs to be fixed.
Imagine if you were sold a car for example that had a design flaw in the locking system allowing anyone to remotely unlock the doors with an exploit, or start the engine. Obviously you'd want it fixed, but unless these things are brought to public attention the company could just claim that it's bad luck that your car got stolen and they've nothing to do with it.
That's why it's good that these things happen. Exposing critical vulnerabilities publicly is the only guaranteed way of putting pressure on the manufacturer to fix the vulnerability as they're legally obligated to do.
You do realize people are born into widely different circumstances and those circumstances, both biological, social and economic have a huge impact on their capabilities to function in a modern society, right? I was born with cerebral palsy and the initial estimate of the doctors was that I'd likely never learn to read or write, yet I now do so fluently in 2 languages and less fluently in 2 others. Is this all because I'm some kind of a superman who beat all the odds with sheer willpower and managed to lift myself up by my own bootstraps? Well, yes and no. You see, my parents decided they weren't going to just give up on me and decided to try and put me into a normal elementary school, where I needed an assistant to help me. The first couple of years were hard and I took a lot longer than most people to master reading/writing, and almost gave up a couple times, but the encouraging support from my family as well as my then doctor kept me going. I also had to have several surgeries performed to hone out major physiological issues that were making my movement really hard, received physical therapy 2-3 times a week (still do) and had to spend quite a while learning basic motor skills with the help of a therapist. This all obviously took motivation and desire to progress from me, which I did have because as soon as I learned to read it became clear to me that the only way of getting on par with the rest of the people out there is to educate myself. However, it also took insane amounts of resources. The amount of money poured into me at an early age is staggering when you factor in the surgeries, the therapy, the costs for the assistant at school, my wheelchairs, mobility scooters, medication (I had to be injected with synthetic growth hormone because my body proiduced almost none of it naturally and synthetic human growth hormone costs a ton) and so on.
Lucky me for being born into a wealthy family right? No. My parents are firmly middle-class, so while we're never dirt poor, I have 2 other brothers so money was often tight, and there's no way my parents could have afforded all these things for me had it been up to them. Luckily I happened to have been born into a country (Finland) in which the constitution guarantees people certain rights, one of which is the right to social security and health care. This means that in fact the state paid for all of these things. All of them. Later on when I graduated high school, at that point having become quite good at studying once my biology was no longer in the way, I managed to get myself into a university here on my second attempt, and that too was paid for by the state as it is for everyone here, for education is also universal here and is a constitutional right, so I eventually graduated with 0 student debt. During my final year at the uni I happened to land an office job working for the health care sector which I stayed on after graduation for a while until a position opened up on the IT side and I moved there. Finally, with a steady income and no existing debt I was able to get a mortgage and buy myself an apartment and move out on my own. Now, at the age of 27 I live by myself still, but I have an assistant who comes by a few times a week to help with cleaning and other laborious tasks that are difficult for me to do, again paid for by state (as is my still continuing physical therapy that's a requirement for me staying functional physically) which is good because although I make enough money to pay my own expenses, I don't have the kind of excess income that would allow me to hire those people on my own dime. Last year I also started a small startup with a couple of friends from the uni that currently is still a part time thing as we've all got our day jobs but the hope is to one day be working for ourselves.
Now I agree w
This is indeed true and backed up by studies and experiments.
The 8 hour work day is by and large a remnant of the industrialization when factories needed to be ran in 3 shifts. When you're talking about a monotonous, assembly line type of a job, 8 hours lets you get by with just 3 shifts instead of 4 which saves cost and the productivity difference in those kinds of jobs was not too noticeable.
However, when you start talking about anything that requires more than performing a simple manual task over and over again, 8 hours starts to be too much. When you combine this with the fact that the need for time-consuming manual tasks is going down as automation and AIs increase it starts to make even more sense to cut down the length of the workday.
Personally as a project manager on almost all days I can get the relevant stuff done in 6 hours or under, the main exceptions being the days when there happens to be several meetings that require travelling between locations, and even then the extra time is spent on the road instead of doing something productive. I'd happily have my work time reduced to 6 hours provided the pay stays the same. And herein lies the core problem with this situation: we know that cutting down work time will increase efficiency, but we still evaluate and pay workers based on 'time spent at workstation' so the intuition of corporations is that if worktime is cut, pay must also be cut.
In other words: the basic assumption that people are paid 'for their time' needs to be done away with in knowledge work especially and replaced with paying people for working outcomes.
No, no it isn't misleading, people just associate the word with something it doesn't mean. Intelligence is a scale, not a binary thing. Biological systems have differing amounts of intelligence within them as well: a fish for example is not very smart by human/mammal standards but it's instantly obvious that a a fish has way more intelligence than say, bacteria. Likewise rats are not hugely intelligent compared to apes, but a rat can be trained and is clearly more intelligent than a fish. And so on and so forth. But when we start to talk about machines and machine learning people forget about this and when they read that a system is artificially intelligent they falsely assume it to mean either 'human level (general) intelligence' and/or 'consciousness' neither of which are required for a system to be intelligent.
Intelligence is simply information processing in physical systems. An algorithm that can correctly classify items from a moving image in real time to thousands of different categories is way smarter than all non-human animals, and even smarter than small children in said task. Sure, that doesn't make it smarter than adults overall (nor smarter than the fish when it comes to surviving in a marine ecosystem), but it also doesn't make it not intelligent.
The goal posts are moving when it comes to AI: if you told people 30 years ago that we now have cars capable of driving themselves autonomously amidst traffic with normal human drivers and avoid accidents successfully, that'd have been instantly classified as a type of AI - and deemed impossible by most people. But now since people's understanding of what machines are capable of doing that autonomous car is suddenly 'not very smart' (even though these systems are by and large better at driving that the vast majority of humans) because while it can drive it cannot also debate with me about Plato while doing so.
You mean they're more like scripts with narrow scope of (artificial) intelligence. Same goes for chess engines and alphaGo for example: they're systems which can only do 1 thing really, but they're capable of doing that one thing better than the best human players, making them more intelligent in those fields than any human, even though they're 'dumb' in every other aspect. Intelligence and general intelligence are 2 entirely different things.
While the point you raise is a good observation the examples are not really equivocal to the current situation. Note that I'm not advocating for a government breakdown of the companies, but it's a fact that both Google and FB have a much tighter hold of their respective markets than say Altavista or AOL ever had because of the amount of usage data they have access to. I mean as far as search engines go, there's really no possible way of starting a service that could efficiently compete with Google at this point. The sheer volume of searches means they can optimize the search results far better than any of their competition, which is why pretty much no-one is even trying, and why Bing & al are a universal joke.
With FB it's an even tighter lock because you can't move people from FB to a competing service individually. That is, even if someone creates a social media service that I prefer over FB, me moving to it from FB will be useless unless a significant portion of my friends also move there. Without the circle of friends, the 'social' in social media is gone and the service is useless no matter how awesome it may be. And since for the majority of users FB 'does the job', it's at this point very hard to convince most people to switch to another nearly identical service. FB has actively taken measures to lock down their userbase by involving historical features of all kinds. This is why you see all these old posts that it suggests: 'On this day X years ago, you shared this", "You and X became friends on this day N years ago" etc. This, as well as all the gazillion of 'apps'/games is all the kind of stuff that cannot be moved from facebook to another platform and silly as it may sound it counts. There's a notable scaling benefit to having a large and widely used social media site, obviously for the advertisers/data miners but for the users as well. I mean, it should be indicative of just how much of a monopoly they have that even Google kinda gave up on Google+ after they realized no matter how much they try to force it people will not be shifting to use it. They even had the significant advantage of saying to people 'hey if you have a google account you don't even have to sign up you can just start using it", and it still didn't take off because for the majority of consumers who're on FB they gain no additional benefits by starting to use another identical service with less users and none of their data.
The ecosystem of the net has changed quite rapidly and is no longer in a similar state than it was say at the turn of the century or even 10 years ago. It's switched from a service many people use every now and again to state where most western people are essentially online 24/7 via smartphones, so the early age of heavy competition in for example search engines and social media has passed. It's the age of machine learning now, so it means whoever has the data, makes the rules. It's why steam dominates the PC digital sales market despite containing unbelievable amounts of garbage and has rather shitty customer service: they have insane amounts of data on sales and what people are playing which they can use to target sales/ads and discounts to people that are likely to buy. It's why there are no real competitors to Youtube even though many content creator
The problem with social media (not just FB) and depression is not that people do nothing but stare at FB and get depressed. The problem (or, one of them) is that if you're already depressed, viewing social media can make it worse. Why? Well, because people like to present their best side on social media; people's profiles are by and large advertisements of themselves. People post about their holidays, trips, happy times with friends and family, If you're someone who feels shitty about your life, browsing the feed can make these feelings even worse because it seems to highlight to you how much better everyone else is doing and hence how much of a 'failure' you are because you don't have these kinds of situations.
So yeah, staying out of FB can be a good thing during depression, but it carries the downside of isolating one even more from one's social circle. For me and you it's easy to call up a friend and go grab a beer or a coffee out in the real world, but for a depressed person who might have trouble just getting out of bed this can be a monumental task, so just telling these people to log out of FB and go out is not exactly a miracle solution.
What FB could do if they get this working is change the feed of depressed people slightly. I mean, they already embed ads into the feed, so for these individuals embedding information and resources about getting help as well as possible articles/videos about how to deal with depression while also simulatenously toning down the amount of other people's 'look at my awesome day out on a date with my girlfriend' -posts would likely be a good thing.
If the cops respond to a suspected suicidal person with a SWAT-team, then the AI reporting to them about a suicidal individual is the least of your problems.
The point is precisely that you need to pay to skip content which is in the game just to waste your time and is not enjoyable. EA is saying that in order to enjoy the full-experience you need to pay more money or you're stuck with a sub-par experience for thousands of hours. The standard gameplay experience is designed to be not worth playing, which illustrates how fucked up their business logic is.
Exactly. And that's precisely what I'm doing and encouraging everyone else to do!
Absolutely. The math has been done and the apprximate amount of money one has to spend if you wish to unlock all of the content (in the game you've already paid good money for) is 2100 $! Or, alternatively, without money, it takes over 4500 hours of gameplay to unlock everything!
The greed of EA is beyond disgusting. The SW license is one of the strongest out there, and heavily liked by kids and teens, and they purposefully use it to design a grind-marathon which is designed to incentive people at throwing money in the hopes of getting something useful. The business model is even greedier than most of the free to play models it's been copied from, and we're talking about a 60 to 80 dollars full-price release. Even more pathetic are the weak excuses the asswipes at EA tried to conjur up to defend this racket by saying it's desgined to 'give players a sense of accomplishment and pride', when the in game progression doesn't even relate to player skill in any way. It doesn't matter if you're a top player or a rookie, the rate at which you progress without microtransactions is simply tied to time in game. Skill and accomplishments have nothing to do with it. It's a 100 % pay-to-win system designed to do nothing but drive sales of the lootboxes.
This is why I prefer the game commentator/youtuber Jim Sterling's (whose made several videos about microtransaction BS this year, including this recent one about this EA/Battlefront situation) terminology for these 'triple AAA' releases with lootbox shit: 'fee-to-pay'. It's absolute BS and I do hope these shitty developers end up getting burned. Wanna include gambling mechanics to your full-price release? Fine, but can't sell it to underaged people then. And I do hope Disney ends up force chocking the license out of EAs hands if and hopefully when the sales of Battlefront II fall short of their expectations because of this.
As a longtime gamer and a SW fan I plead all here: do not buy this game. Don't buy it for yourself, don't buy it as a gift, don't even buy it at a discount. It's the only way the companies will ever learn. Don't be fooled by the decision to disable them for now, Dice admitted already that it's a temporary measure while they're 're-adjusting' the system. Meaning. they tried the waters out, now they're waiting for the holiday sales to pass and the dust to settle before introducing a watered down version of the same bullshit.
Compare this to proper publishers like CD Projekt Red: like I just recently picked up Wicher 3 with both of its expansions from a steam sale at 20 euros, and I do have to say CD Projekt Red are doing it right: you buy the game, you get all the content straight out of the box. And before someone points out that it's somehow 'different' for single-player games I remind you all that in this Year of the Lootbox WB included a shitton of mictrotransactions and grinding in Shadow of War's single player campaign.
This behavior is destructive and antithetical to the whole point of quality games, because introducing intentional grind-fests that are meant to bog the player down with menial repetitive tasks is sending a message of 'yeah, we know the base gameplay sucks, we intentionally designed it to suck, but hey, you can skip it by paying us more money and get to the good stuff'.
Fuck. These. Publishers. They need to fall and be replaced by companies that actual develop stuff gameplay first.
And yet, the Electoral College only makes this problem worse. The EC allows the presidency to be decided on a minority vote, meaning that really, candidates only already have to pander to a small subset of states, the swing-states. Trump moneyballed the entire election and won despite getting some 3 million less votes.
I'm not american, but if you ask me this if anything is a system designed to increase the efficiency of pandering, and means that the people living in the swing states have undue and uneven power over the whole process.
As opposed to the current situation where the agenda is tilted to favor the Trump-base in the swing states instead of the majority of americans?
I find it rather unfathomable how people can still support the EC system after it was basically the main driver that allowed Trump to win the election despite not being the most voted candidate. There's a reason most western countries have long since ditched these archaic systems, you know, and it's precisely because they skew the democratic will of the people.
Are all already banned in Russia. ISPs are madated by law to prevent the use of Tor/proxies/VPNs because they can be used to access 'extremist material'.
It's really descriptive of just how totalitarian the country has become that they're hard at work at out-Chinaing China itself when it comes to the control of the internet.
This is not to say there won't be those who still have access to Tor and VPNs, especially to those who're friends of the right people, but for the common folk this makes it really hard.
I have located your problem: you're assuming a man who believes that the Earth is flat has reason.
The ancient Greeks knew the Earth to be round. They also laid the foundations of western philosophy and reasoning. Therefore this individual is clearly at a level of intellect far more distant in the past than the ancient Greeks, it's no wonder he's irrational and has outdated views about astronomy.
Someone needs to tell this man about our lord and saviour in white robes who died for his beliefs, Socrates! :P
It really is a fitting symbol of the insane level of polarization in US politics that an article simply reporting on what the administration is doing is labeled 'anti-Trump clickbait'. Hint: If reporting on the actions of your president counts as 'anti-Trump', that should tell you a lot about the level of competence of Trump and his suitability to rule.
But nah, better just to shut your ears and yell about boycotts and witch hunts, right? Reminds me of Gollum from the Lord of The Rings. 'Filthy mediases, reporting on what is happening. We hates it, we hates it, precious!"
You do understand bitcoin is worthless without fiat currencies, right? BC is not somehow detached and or independent from the global currency systems, that's one of the biggest myths about it circulated by people who don't really understand how BC derives its value. The market value of BC is measured in terms of fiat currencies, which by itself should tell you that the value of BC and the value of fiat currencies are interlinked.
Imagine for a moment of the major currencies crashed tomorrow and became totally or nearly worthless. You may have some bitcoins saved up, but in order to actually get nearly anything with those bitcoins you have to exchange them to a fiat currency first. Or do you expect just to walk to a store and say: 'I'd like to buy some groceries, I assume you accept bitcoins?", because if that's the case you'll be sorely disappointed. You see, what's keeping the mining infrastructure alive at this point is the profit, made in fiat currencies, from the mining. The cost of mining a single BC is increasing as time goes by, the electricity and hardware costs are going to keep going up. But right now it's done because by doing that you can make money by doing so, as in, non-BC money, actual currency. If fiat currencies collapse, the mining/upkeep of BC infrastructure will become hugely unprofitable, which means that should the value of fiat currencies crash across the world, the BC infrastructure will likely collapse as continuing to spend resources into mining is unwise at that point, which means that trying to perform transactions using BC in such a situation will likely become impossible, and BC will be worthless..
'Just invest all your money into BC and the power will be taken away from banks and governments' is just as dumb as saying 'Just invest all your money into EVE Online ISKs or gold and power will be taken away from banks and governments'.
The value of Bitcoin rests upon the functionality of the global market and currency systems. Without them, bitcoin is just a vast and energy-intensive network of virtual tokens.
Yes, from the article:
As for this:
While incompetence and ignorance are surely one factor, another issue with the way the EU currently works is that while having a shared currency and other features that have taken it closer to a federation-like entity, it's still a trade union and not an actual federation. This means that drafting regulations has to often be done with enough flexibility to account for the fact that different states have vastly different configurations of courts and authorities, and for example the way consumer protection cases are handled differs country by country, and in many countries most consumer cases are in fact already handled without the participation of a court. This is why the wording used often speaks of 'competent authorities', meaning 'whichever national body this matter falls under'
Here in Finland for example, the authority responsible for handling the details of consumer protection is the Finnish competition and consumer authority, which oversees the consumer market and sets guidelines based on existing legislation but does not handle individual complaints, although they do give out advice and knowledge on past rulings. I have personally done business with them once a few years back after an online vendor operating from Sweden that I had bought a 64 gig iPod from refused to take it into warranty after it stopped working 10 months after the purchase claiming that their 'inspection' proved I had dropped it, which was not the case. The FCAA responded that I should have a 3rd party have a look at the device and give their assessment, which I did and in that process apple maintenance also noted that it wasn't even actually a brand new device as it had been registered in their care before, so it was a return product which they had repackaged and sold to me as new, which is obviously illegal. With this knowledge in hand I recontacted the FCAA, which sided with me and pointed out to the vendor that if the case is take further they will almost certainly lose as the evidence is clear at this point, and they finally yielded, giving me a full refund, but no additional compensation although such was recommended, which bugged me out. However, should I have wanted to fight over compensation, I would have needed to take the matter further to the the consumer disputes board, whose members are appointed by the ministry of Justice for 5 years at a time. It works very similarly to a court, but it is not one, meaning it cannot give out legally binding/enforceable rulings but instead gives out recommendations, which are usually followed. The board would have likely sided with me but at that point the likely compensation would have
I'm going to ignore the fact that you just listed Buzzfeed, a clickbait site that doesn't do actual news together with actual news organizations and point out that as a European leftist I find it rather confusing that someone would label stuff like CNN 'leftist'. I live in a country that's comparatively very far to the left of the US, which means we've got, among other things, universal health care and education systems. I admit I do not read/follow CNN regularly but i certainly have not been left with the impression that they support either of these policies for example. They certainly lean more towards the democrats, but the democratic party is not 'the left'.
The point here is this: compared to other western nations, the US has tilted heavily to the right in the past few decades. The democrats are now what the republicans were in the past, whereas the republicans have kept going to the right, so you essentially have 2 right-wing parties, one far-right and one more centrist, but no leftist party, and this reflects in the media landscape as well, so that anything close to the center is labeled 'the left', and anything actually to the left is labeled 'communism'.
Overall the two party system has caused american politics to become hyperpolarized. Any and all nuance seems, at least from the outside, to be gone. It's all a game of 'blue vs. red', 'us vs. them' and both sides are making the divide worse by actively demonizing the other side.
As a case study look at the way the attempted ACA repeal went down. The republicans have the congress, the presidency and the senate, yet they failed to repeal the ACA because the suggested repeal was not right-wing enough for a segment of the republicans, even though said proposal would have robbed millions of americans health care and likely resulted in tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. In Europe, a health care plan that would remove coverage from millions of people with low income would be considered extremely far to the right, but even this was not enough for some republicans.
And then when outlets like the CNN point out the fact that such plans would lead to massive amounts of deaths when people are robbed of coverage, they're labeled 'leftist crap', as if not towing the line of the ruling party and presenting facts about the proposal somehow makes them 'the left', which is not true.
Not commenting on Bitcoin gold, but this line in the summary is incorrect:
It's true that: BC mining has become a highly concentrated industry, but this was always bound to happen. The way BC is setup and the way the algorithm is build is such that the complexity of calculation and thus the resources needed to perform it are increasing as time goes by. It was predictable from day 1 that as the complexity grows, home PCs (and even custom home built clusters using stuff like playstations that people were for a moment rigging and using for mining) were going to become unprofitable, as the electricity consumption and hence the operating cost would soar past the yielded profit. It's not about efficiency, it's about profitability. People would still be running mining software on their home machines if it was profitable even if the profit made was small compared to large scale dedicated operations, but right now anyone using anything other than a custom mining machine will actually be losing money.
BC is this way by design (and if you ask me, that's one of the major problems of its design), so claiming that the original plan was to keep users running mining software on their own computers is to be ignorant.
This is something that in the long term endangers the whole of BC infrastructure: right now the large scale miners in Asia (mostly China) have kept on doing what they do because the price of the coin has kept going up, meaning that even though electricity and hardware costs have kept increasing, the increasing costs have been offset by the increasing price of the coin. However the fundamental issue is that the market price of BC fluctuates heavily, whereas the complexity only goes one way and that's up. If the market price of BC crashes, the mining will stop being profitable even for the dedicated operators, which will destroy the mining industry and essentially render BC unusable (and hence, worthless).
The word you're looking for is an assault rifle (machine guns are not used by people other than military) but that's a moot point.
This important thing to note is argument is a red herring when it comes to the issue of gun legislation because fact of the matter is that US has both a higher rate of homicide in general as well as a higher rate of mass shootings/murders than Europe. So the fact of the matter is that you're statistically much more likely to become a victim of a mass murder in the US than in Europe.
This is correct.
You want to know what I've noticed about these recent mass shootings? Over a third of them globally happen in the US despite you being only 5 % of the world population. Compared to other western nations, even other western nations with a high gun ownership rate such as we here in Finland, the difference is staggering.
First of all, this idea that most mass murders are done with an illegal gun seems to not hold true in light of the facts (more on that later).
But even if it would, even if it'd be the case that most mass shootings are done with an illegal weapon, that's not an argument against control, that's evidence to the contrary because it indicates that what gun control you do have is poorly implemented if criminals can acquire guns with such ease. Those illegal weapons come from somewhere. The fact that people who shouldn't be allowed to own guns manage to get them with such ease that mass shootings are now almost a daily phenomenon in the US should tell you that the system is broken somewhere. Either the laws are broken or alternatively the enforcement of the rules is lacking, because it should be alarming to you that murderous criminals can acquire weapons that they should not be allowed to get with relative ease.
Nearly every illegal weapon used was at some point a legal one. The gun show loophole is perhaps the most famous one of the examples that comes to my mind, though I'm not an expert on US law. No level of gun control will make much difference if there exist legal ways for people to bypass the level of control and purchase weapons without having their backgrounds checked and so on. This comes down to a combination of points made by the OP and you. The OP said that the ease of getting an AR-15 probably has something to do with it, and you rightfully corrected him that most mass murders are done with handguns. Therefore the correct question is: does the ease of getting a handgun affect the rate of murders?
Yes, yes it does. One of the key reasons why Europe on average has less murders & mass murders is precisely because you cannot acquire a legal handgun here nearly as easily as you can in the states. This means that the amount of handguns in the black market is also consid
Eh... The usage of BC in areas with hyperinflation is not proof that it's detached from fiat systems because it's not. Areas with hyperinflation traditionally switch to using currencies other than their own one, meaning traditionally the dollar and other major currencies. In this case some have chosen to use BC, but most of the black market trade is still conducted using other major fiat currencies because they're more easily available.
You still need fiat currencies to purchase bitcoins. Without the exchanges (which can be regulated quite easily) bitcoin would be useless as without a convenient way of transferring back and forth between fiat-bitcoin-fiat the utility of BC (and hence, its value) will plummet.
What? Compared to regular debit/credit cards that are pretty much universally accepted and cash BC is terrible in terms of simplicity of use.
There's a problem with this incentive though: the more time passes, the more complicated and difficult the mining becomes which makes it increasingly energy-intensive and hence costly. For the mining to be profitable the price of the coin must keep going up to match the increasing difficulty of calculation, which means should the value of BC drop drastically in the future due to any number of reasons (competitors, increasing regulation etc.) the whole mining infrastructure may suddenly become massively unprofitable and collapse.
You should note however, that the same is true of stock: stocks have no intrinsic value and are essentially also just numbers on a computer that reflect your share of a given company. The value of that stock (both the dividends and aftermarket value of the stock itself) is entirely maintained by the utility it (and therefore the company) offers and the number of people who hold them. If the company goes under or the economy collapses the stock is worthless. The fact that a corporation has actual real world assets does not protect them from bankruptcy. The company may well have assets while at the same time having debt that exceeds the value of said assets.
'Intrinsic value' is a bit of a quirky term because intrinsic value attached to things like metal come from their use in the current economy. Gold has some applications in electronics for example, but outside that most of its value is made up non-intrinsically by the fact that historically we've chosen to attach a great deal of value to it as it used to work (together with other metals) as a currency.
Think about a thought experiment where you take a laptop to someone in the west and ask them to trade it for a week's supply of food. It's pretty safe to say that nearly all people would take said trade because even if they have no use for the laptop themselves, they know and understand they can sell the laptop. Now think about doing this in the third world and ask someone there to trade it for a week's worth of food: it may work if the individual I'm bartering with is educated enough to understand that even though they likely have poor access to electricity/the net, they can still go to town and exchange said laptop for money or directly for supplies they need. However if that's not the case (think about for example some of the Amazonian tribes living essentially isolated from the modern world and having little to no concept of money, let alone electronics), it's highly unlikely that I'm able to do said trade even if for me the laptop is worth much more than a few meals. The 'intrinsic value' of the laptop (and conversely, food) is entirely different for me and the individual I'm trying to trade it with depending on the position of said individual within the global market as well as the state of the global economy itself. In a post-apocalyptic scenario with little electricity and no internet, the laptop will likely be worth a tiny tiny fraction of what it is now.
The point here is to say that in the end, all value-statements are always subjective and bound to current market conditions. That is, we can't make statements such as "Item X is always intrinsically worth at least Z dollars" but that also means it's impossible to peg the value to anything else either, so statements like "Item X is always intrinsically worth at least Z kilograms of wheat" are equally not true.
Which is not to say that intrinsic value is a useless concept, it's not. It's clear that metals have more intrinsic value than works of art for example because they have real world applications and uses. Likewise stock in major corporations currently has more intrinsic value than bitcoin. The point I'm getting at is just that 'intrinsic value' does not and will never equate to 'objective value', which in fact does not exist.
Wait what? Did you just equate genetically modified species being released into the wild with a non-binding international treaty to curb emissions? Wtf?
For the Nth time, the Paris climate agreement is non-binding. If for whatever reason your country does not care about the global climate, you're entirely free to ignore the Paris goals, shut your eyes and keep burning all the oil and the coal you want. There are no sanctions in the treaty for countries that do not meet their goals.
The point of the Paris agreement is to try to get everyone to do what they can to slow down the rate of emissions (and hence warming) to a point where the consequences are more manageable. The point is precisely to try to make sure nations don't get fucked by massive climatic changes.
Comparing such a project, which has a well understood basis in natural science (the greenhouse effect has been well understood for over a century and is demonstrable in a lab) and is based on the voluntary co-operation of nations for the common good of everyone (just like the closing of the hole in the ozone layer, which was also achieved by an international consensus and realization that continuation of past practices would have lead to serious harm for everyone) to an experiment where a single nation starts to release genetically modified insects is just plain dumb. We know that reducing emissions is good for everyone in the mid to long term, and we know this for a fact. We don't know that releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild will not have significant adverse effects.
I understand that this kind of strawman where the Paris treaty is seen as some kind of NWO tool to control what nations can do flies on facebook & al where people get their news from mainly reading headlines of blogposts, but I seriously expect people on this site to have a modicum more of insight into what the treaty actually says before going overboard with the tinfoilhat level of crazy.