But to have a sense of purpose in a meaningless world, it needs to be packaged properly. Religion is just a very effective and time-tested vessel for purpose.
Separation of state and federal responsibilities was put into the constitution for one reason: to allow the unification to occur, period. Since then, it has evolved to allow a decent amount of legal experimentation as well as giving individuals options under the same national umbrella. The local distinction mostly allows for small communities to define their own unique ways of life at a finer level. Local police have been phasing out of this role for some time and tend to be just copies of the local police on the other side of the state. With microcultures disappearing from the US, it's not unthinkable that they could some day be phased out in some states and merged with the state police.
Somehow I got off on a tangent there but when people talk about federal and state redundancy, they typically aren't talking about the front facing organizations. Instead they are referring to multiple welfare programs targeting the same disadvantage, or internal administrative organizations that do the same task and/or conflict with each other, or multiple organizations that enforce the same law or similar laws. Many of the overlaps don't even need to include both federal and state.
Don't ask me to list too many examples since I'm on a phone, though I have heard horror stories about Federal and CA ADA/disability laws conflicting with each other.
Really? A dollar is only worth what you can buy with it. It can become nearly worthless overnight. It is only paper and your faith in it is all that gives it value.
That's a foolish and tired cliche. It has centuries of history.
Tell me, in your lifetime did the USSR or the Berlin wall fall? Even if not, can you please inform me how such events affected the currencies involved?
For someone who cites history, you've little respect of it.
The Soviet ruble was converted at varying exchange rates to the new local currencies.
The eastern mark was converted to deutsche marks.
A better example would be Zimbabwe but even that didn't happen overnight.
I'm not arguing against diversification here, I'm just arguing that the USD would take a lot of work to be rendered worthless. (understatement of the thread right there)
By the way, my original concern was that organizations with clout like EFF are being distracted by Bitcoin, away from better designed alternatives. Just a mindshare concern...not alleging that Bitcoin is standing high on a cliff, bellowing "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"
Thanks for bringing these up. I never heard of any of them, as I'm not "in the know" and searching for alternatives to bitcoin mostly brings up "bitcoin is the new shiny alternative to evil rotten fiat currency", as well as direct Bitcoin clones like Litecoin which suffer from the same flaws. I will definitely do my homework with your alternatives!
Really? A dollar is only worth what you can buy with it. It can become nearly worthless overnight. It is only paper and your faith in it is all that gives it value.
That's a foolish and tired cliche. It has centuries of history. People realize that society would collapse if we just gave up on the dollar overnight. I'm no fan of our current president but I certainly know that the checks and balances in our system would make it virtually impossible for his administration to ruin the currency. (fears which propped up gold) There is apocalyptic military might backing it up. People have been making that argument since we went off the gold standard (not the first time in U.S. history, btw...was a common practice during wartime) and most realize these things (at least subconsciously) and rest easy that their fellow citizens will not allow the economy to spontaneously combust and return to the barter system.
Unless you're a college student who is just waking up to how the world works, it's ridiculous to make that statement. Adults will simply reply: We know, and we don't care.
Why blame the victim? The rise and fall in price (PLEASE, not "value". There's a difference, you know) is due to speculation, not to the currency itself. Dollars, euros and other fiat currency are just as vulnerable.
Once again, the pro-bitcoin problem takes a massive problem and attempts to diminish it. The combination of unregulated markets and deflationary currency creates a huge problem with regards to human nature. If we were all robots and behaved how the currency wants us to, it wouldn't be a problem. But we're not. We will speculate. We will hoard. We will look at the currency late and go "fuck you, I'm not going to make the early adopters rich" which was one of the flaws of the original design. The problems with Bitcoins and its alternatives was in the design phase. I'll be the first to admit (as a certifiable hater) that it was brilliantly engineered, from a technical standpoint alone. It was poorly socially engineered.
sadly we might need some entity with a record on privacy (i.e. EFF) to regulate a currency similar to a fiat for some of the benefits of Bitcoin to be in a future viable currency, but sadly EFF is in love with Bitcoins. I guess part of the reason I'm a hater is because Bitcoins are holding back the alternative(s) we truly need.
I'm a certifiable Bitcoin hater and I agree with DiSKiLLeR. I feel that Bitcoin was brilliantly engineered but poorly designed, the designers and many of its proponents write off human nature as a small problem (rather than the ultimate cause of its instability), but it is indeed a fascinating concept. As long as Slashdot stays on the level and reports fairly on the bubblings and crashes, it doesn't bother me.
Try looking at a yearly or lifetime graph. $90 isn't the mean, it's the denial phase before it drops back down to the real mean, which is 20-25. Though we may get a double bubble if enough people believe 250 is a sign of its legitimacy.
He admits that the USD isn't perfectly fixed, but it is exponentially more stable than bitcoins. If you only need to gripe once every few years about how your cheez-its are 10% more expensive, you have something that's as stable as humans need it to be.
I think the real story here is the bitcoin bubble burst. No one saw that coming...oh, wait, WE ALL DID (second link)
They are definitely not outliers either, as Family Guy has brought the big band genre to 20-somethings and 30-somethings. FWIW, I've lately been frequenting a 30's-50's station on Pandora -- inspired by a flash animation which featured "Reefer Man" (saw 8 years ago), I now listen to songs like Louis Armstrong's "You Rascal You" and "That Cat Is High", both recorded over 40 years before I was born.
It's a shame my (long since deceased) father's Stones collection is lost to the ages. I've grown to like them.
Mod parent up. I myself almost forgot about the PATRIOT Act, let alone countless others. Obama's love affair with drones had a seven year setup that had nothing to do with him.
'Tis why I still buy CDs. It makes me a luddite, sure, but I can easily digitize it and so long as I delete the copies, I am still protected by first sale. (Guess this only works if you only buy music where you get it for the entire album experience)
Bit of a generalization there. Notice a trend in the music industry for retro everything? Album of the year went to a band influenced by the 1800s, probably lamenting that none of those original works were ever recorded. The current #1 album on the charts is Justin Timberlake's throwback to the 50s and 60s. That digital collection would be enjoyed just fine.
A good portion of the snowflakes on the site were six sided or clearly used to be six sided. Expecting the level of precision (that they are implying) in nature is ridiculous, though....
I'm talking about the true internet natives, children...you probably don't hang out with many. How much they know compared to how much my generation knew at their age makes me reeeeally envious, heh. I'm surprised that I got mod hate for my optimism (politics, meh) but I really do think this generation will be far more capable of making good decisions than our own. I'm already of a bent where I feel government intervention and overregulation makes people lower their guard, making them more vulnerable since their critical thinking skills(and various other skills, like bargaining with employers) are diminished. (Kind of like how my command line skills have gone down the toilet since 98% of my work is faster to do via gui) These policies will be a lot less defensible in the future.
You are doing a good job teaching them why libertarianism ultimately leads to a hypercapitalist dystopia. The vast majority of people making up "the market" are not informed, do not want to become informed, and probably cannot become informed in any meaningful way [...]
Libertarian here, and I do agree somewhat with the second sentence...but give it time. There has been no better time in history for libertarianism to flourish because information has never been so widely available. There will always be the terminally ignorant (sentence 2 point b) but as the population shifts from internet clueless to internet savvy (sentence 2 points a and c), a far greater percentage of the population will get why bad companies are so messed up and will know how to seek out alternatives.
Libertarianism rewards the thoughtful. The reverse drags everyone down to the level of (and breeds more of) the ignorant.
I find privacy to be important, I also feel that governments need to be countermanded from time to time. Many have terrible practices -- it was the EU pressuring Cyprus to rob its citizens.
I actually do like the idea of Bitcoins and what goals they are trying to accomplished, but they fucked up, plainly stated. The designers did not adequately account for human nature when designing the currency. There will never be a utopia with free flowing bitcoins and privacy with transactions online because it is always going to fluctuate. If all fiat currencies were done away with, it would be like using a snowblower filled with grain, pointed at the gears of the economy. Anyone who has the means to hoard would, for as long as the world's population rises, the demands will always increase.
Human greed and speculation are not small problems that you can stick "if only" in front of and diminish -- they are massive, inborn, and and unsolvable flaws that will forever deny acceptance or independence. (i.e. not using middlemen for tying transactions to fiat currency) It was a nice try, but we need to start over. More focus on privacy and less on gradual value decline, which is a necessary evil to keep economies from stagnating. (Fun fact: precious metal standards were routinely abandoned during times of war)
The purpose of my post wasn't a general rant about Bitcoin, but more of a reference to the now famous (and very true) Anatomy of a Bubble. It's a beautiful rendering of what many of us have known about bubble behavior for some time. I wrote my post hastily during my (public transit:P ) commute, but a quick google search shows that we are back in the media awareness phase, and there'll probably be a manic rise before a nasty crash. I'm only guessing 15-20 because it's the "mean", though I still maintain that Bitcoin is doomed to fail in the long, long term. I don't want to go there, I'm only posting to point out where we're at.
I suppose what triggered this bubble was the mess in Cyprus, as well as the currency gaining some recognition by financial institutions there. Not really sure how that's going to work with the inherent instability of Bitcoin. (and the patterns of behavior that inflationary currencies bring about)
That said, I suppose I was too accusative of the original poster. Starting out with pointing out its recently inflated value, effectively "Bitcoins are currently double what you last remember them being if you don't have any" reminds me of the mania surrounding other bubbles in my lifetime. Supp0rtLinux is probably not trying to incite mania given their long history on/., though I guarantee you fake posts with the sole purpose of raising public awareness of the bubble will omnipresent until it crashes in the next 1-2 months.
Anyone else notice that this question is being asked during a massive bubble period, and what is necessary to prop up a bubble is public awareness? Just like my post just now is shamefully unrelated to its parent, might the true purpose of this Ask Slashdot be to bring in a few more suckers before it crashes down to 15 or 20?
I will admit my biases against Bitcoin and my post history speaks to this, but this is a tactic also used to prop up stocks and precious metals. So yeah, I'm calling out TFS.
The os will do simple things like kill processes, but it is up to the software and most software is written conservatively so it can handle the crap devices. Low app prices means optimizations like OP is describing is not worth the effort.
Sadly, I liked McKids. It had some nifty mechanics, and a lot of levels. For its time, it was one of the rare licensor titles which was fun to play. Music wasn't all that great, though...
Slashdot Mirror
But to have a sense of purpose in a meaningless world, it needs to be packaged properly. Religion is just a very effective and time-tested vessel for purpose.
Separation of state and federal responsibilities was put into the constitution for one reason: to allow the unification to occur, period. Since then, it has evolved to allow a decent amount of legal experimentation as well as giving individuals options under the same national umbrella. The local distinction mostly allows for small communities to define their own unique ways of life at a finer level. Local police have been phasing out of this role for some time and tend to be just copies of the local police on the other side of the state. With microcultures disappearing from the US, it's not unthinkable that they could some day be phased out in some states and merged with the state police.
Somehow I got off on a tangent there but when people talk about federal and state redundancy, they typically aren't talking about the front facing organizations. Instead they are referring to multiple welfare programs targeting the same disadvantage, or internal administrative organizations that do the same task and/or conflict with each other, or multiple organizations that enforce the same law or similar laws. Many of the overlaps don't even need to include both federal and state.
Don't ask me to list too many examples since I'm on a phone, though I have heard horror stories about Federal and CA ADA/disability laws conflicting with each other.
Really? A dollar is only worth what you can buy with it. It can become nearly worthless overnight. It is only paper and your faith in it is all that gives it value.
That's a foolish and tired cliche. It has centuries of history.
Tell me, in your lifetime did the USSR or the Berlin wall fall? Even if not, can you please inform me how such events affected the currencies involved?
For someone who cites history, you've little respect of it.
The Soviet ruble was converted at varying exchange rates to the new local currencies.
The eastern mark was converted to deutsche marks.
A better example would be Zimbabwe but even that didn't happen overnight.
I'm not arguing against diversification here, I'm just arguing that the USD would take a lot of work to be rendered worthless. (understatement of the thread right there)
By the way, my original concern was that organizations with clout like EFF are being distracted by Bitcoin, away from better designed alternatives. Just a mindshare concern...not alleging that Bitcoin is standing high on a cliff, bellowing "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"
Thanks for bringing these up. I never heard of any of them, as I'm not "in the know" and searching for alternatives to bitcoin mostly brings up "bitcoin is the new shiny alternative to evil rotten fiat currency", as well as direct Bitcoin clones like Litecoin which suffer from the same flaws. I will definitely do my homework with your alternatives!
Really? A dollar is only worth what you can buy with it. It can become nearly worthless overnight. It is only paper and your faith in it is all that gives it value.
That's a foolish and tired cliche. It has centuries of history. People realize that society would collapse if we just gave up on the dollar overnight. I'm no fan of our current president but I certainly know that the checks and balances in our system would make it virtually impossible for his administration to ruin the currency. (fears which propped up gold) There is apocalyptic military might backing it up. People have been making that argument since we went off the gold standard (not the first time in U.S. history, btw...was a common practice during wartime) and most realize these things (at least subconsciously) and rest easy that their fellow citizens will not allow the economy to spontaneously combust and return to the barter system.
Unless you're a college student who is just waking up to how the world works, it's ridiculous to make that statement. Adults will simply reply: We know, and we don't care.
Damnit sladhdot, phone users like me need an edit function.
"...the pro-bitcoin crowd takes a massive problem..."
Why blame the victim? The rise and fall in price (PLEASE, not "value". There's a difference, you know) is due to speculation, not to the currency itself. Dollars, euros and other fiat currency are just as vulnerable.
Once again, the pro-bitcoin problem takes a massive problem and attempts to diminish it. The combination of unregulated markets and deflationary currency creates a huge problem with regards to human nature. If we were all robots and behaved how the currency wants us to, it wouldn't be a problem. But we're not. We will speculate. We will hoard. We will look at the currency late and go "fuck you, I'm not going to make the early adopters rich" which was one of the flaws of the original design. The problems with Bitcoins and its alternatives was in the design phase. I'll be the first to admit (as a certifiable hater) that it was brilliantly engineered, from a technical standpoint alone. It was poorly socially engineered.
sadly we might need some entity with a record on privacy (i.e. EFF) to regulate a currency similar to a fiat for some of the benefits of Bitcoin to be in a future viable currency, but sadly EFF is in love with Bitcoins. I guess part of the reason I'm a hater is because Bitcoins are holding back the alternative(s) we truly need.
I'm a certifiable Bitcoin hater and I agree with DiSKiLLeR. I feel that Bitcoin was brilliantly engineered but poorly designed, the designers and many of its proponents write off human nature as a small problem (rather than the ultimate cause of its instability), but it is indeed a fascinating concept. As long as Slashdot stays on the level and reports fairly on the bubblings and crashes, it doesn't bother me.
Try looking at a yearly or lifetime graph. $90 isn't the mean, it's the denial phase before it drops back down to the real mean, which is 20-25. Though we may get a double bubble if enough people believe 250 is a sign of its legitimacy.
He admits that the USD isn't perfectly fixed, but it is exponentially more stable than bitcoins. If you only need to gripe once every few years about how your cheez-its are 10% more expensive, you have something that's as stable as humans need it to be.
I think the real story here is the bitcoin bubble burst. No one saw that coming...oh, wait, WE ALL DID (second link)
Tulip bulbs, anyone?
They are definitely not outliers either, as Family Guy has brought the big band genre to 20-somethings and 30-somethings. FWIW, I've lately been frequenting a 30's-50's station on Pandora -- inspired by a flash animation which featured "Reefer Man" (saw 8 years ago), I now listen to songs like Louis Armstrong's "You Rascal You" and "That Cat Is High", both recorded over 40 years before I was born.
It's a shame my (long since deceased) father's Stones collection is lost to the ages. I've grown to like them.
Mod parent up. I myself almost forgot about the PATRIOT Act, let alone countless others. Obama's love affair with drones had a seven year setup that had nothing to do with him.
'Tis why I still buy CDs. It makes me a luddite, sure, but I can easily digitize it and so long as I delete the copies, I am still protected by first sale. (Guess this only works if you only buy music where you get it for the entire album experience)
Sorry, I meant it 'features a single' that blah blah...though he also performed it on SNL and other places on his'buy my new album' tour...
Bit of a generalization there. Notice a trend in the music industry for retro everything? Album of the year went to a band influenced by the 1800s, probably lamenting that none of those original works were ever recorded. The current #1 album on the charts is Justin Timberlake's throwback to the 50s and 60s. That digital collection would be enjoyed just fine.
A good portion of the snowflakes on the site were six sided or clearly used to be six sided. Expecting the level of precision (that they are implying) in nature is ridiculous, though....
I'm talking about the true internet natives, children...you probably don't hang out with many. How much they know compared to how much my generation knew at their age makes me reeeeally envious, heh. I'm surprised that I got mod hate for my optimism (politics, meh) but I really do think this generation will be far more capable of making good decisions than our own. I'm already of a bent where I feel government intervention and overregulation makes people lower their guard, making them more vulnerable since their critical thinking skills(and various other skills, like bargaining with employers) are diminished. (Kind of like how my command line skills have gone down the toilet since 98% of my work is faster to do via gui) These policies will be a lot less defensible in the future.
You are doing a good job teaching them why libertarianism ultimately leads to a hypercapitalist dystopia. The vast majority of people making up "the market" are not informed, do not want to become informed, and probably cannot become informed in any meaningful way [...]
Libertarian here, and I do agree somewhat with the second sentence...but give it time. There has been no better time in history for libertarianism to flourish because information has never been so widely available. There will always be the terminally ignorant (sentence 2 point b) but as the population shifts from internet clueless to internet savvy (sentence 2 points a and c), a far greater percentage of the population will get why bad companies are so messed up and will know how to seek out alternatives.
Libertarianism rewards the thoughtful. The reverse drags everyone down to the level of (and breeds more of) the ignorant.
Will this end the stereotype of the discount butcher? Probably not, with all the talk of "green" around here...
I find privacy to be important, I also feel that governments need to be countermanded from time to time. Many have terrible practices -- it was the EU pressuring Cyprus to rob its citizens.
I actually do like the idea of Bitcoins and what goals they are trying to accomplished, but they fucked up, plainly stated. The designers did not adequately account for human nature when designing the currency. There will never be a utopia with free flowing bitcoins and privacy with transactions online because it is always going to fluctuate. If all fiat currencies were done away with, it would be like using a snowblower filled with grain, pointed at the gears of the economy. Anyone who has the means to hoard would, for as long as the world's population rises, the demands will always increase.
Human greed and speculation are not small problems that you can stick "if only" in front of and diminish -- they are massive, inborn, and and unsolvable flaws that will forever deny acceptance or independence. (i.e. not using middlemen for tying transactions to fiat currency) It was a nice try, but we need to start over. More focus on privacy and less on gradual value decline, which is a necessary evil to keep economies from stagnating. (Fun fact: precious metal standards were routinely abandoned during times of war)
The purpose of my post wasn't a general rant about Bitcoin, but more of a reference to the now famous (and very true) Anatomy of a Bubble. It's a beautiful rendering of what many of us have known about bubble behavior for some time. I wrote my post hastily during my (public transit :P ) commute, but a quick google search shows that we are back in the media awareness phase, and there'll probably be a manic rise before a nasty crash. I'm only guessing 15-20 because it's the "mean", though I still maintain that Bitcoin is doomed to fail in the long, long term. I don't want to go there, I'm only posting to point out where we're at.
/., though I guarantee you fake posts with the sole purpose of raising public awareness of the bubble will omnipresent until it crashes in the next 1-2 months.
I suppose what triggered this bubble was the mess in Cyprus, as well as the currency gaining some recognition by financial institutions there. Not really sure how that's going to work with the inherent instability of Bitcoin. (and the patterns of behavior that inflationary currencies bring about)
That said, I suppose I was too accusative of the original poster. Starting out with pointing out its recently inflated value, effectively "Bitcoins are currently double what you last remember them being if you don't have any" reminds me of the mania surrounding other bubbles in my lifetime. Supp0rtLinux is probably not trying to incite mania given their long history on
Anyone else notice that this question is being asked during a massive bubble period, and what is necessary to prop up a bubble is public awareness? Just like my post just now is shamefully unrelated to its parent, might the true purpose of this Ask Slashdot be to bring in a few more suckers before it crashes down to 15 or 20?
I will admit my biases against Bitcoin and my post history speaks to this, but this is a tactic also used to prop up stocks and precious metals. So yeah, I'm calling out TFS.
The os will do simple things like kill processes, but it is up to the software and most software is written conservatively so it can handle the crap devices. Low app prices means optimizations like OP is describing is not worth the effort.
Sadly, I liked McKids. It had some nifty mechanics, and a lot of levels. For its time, it was one of the rare licensor titles which was fun to play. Music wasn't all that great, though...