I would have this was pretty well-known and well accepted by now. TFA specifically looks at office workers of various types, so it's a good bet that the average worker will have an IQ in the 100-110 range. So a manager with an IQ of 120 is just enough smarter to do the job well, but not too smart to run into communications problems. A completely believable "sweet spot" for your typical office. But probably not for JPL or a construction site.
If you get beyond 2 sigmas: For anything more than small talk, the smart person feels like they have to "dumb down" everything they say, and even then it's hard to get across anything complex. Meanwhile the lower IQ person realizes that they're being "talked down to", that they are being seen as dumb, and they resent it.
Who wants to bet: BoA isn't really interested in BlockChain. They are interested in being able to attack targets at will with their patent lawyers. Who cares if they patent existing technology? Or obvious extensions thereof? By the time anyone survives a patent lawsuit, they are a few million poorer, and have been seriously distracted from whatever they were doing.
Whatever you think of digital currencies, the pace of innovation is currently breathtaking. Once people start having to dodge stupidly obvious patents, well, that will serve as a huge brake on the process.
Can we please finally drive a stake through the heart of software patents?
I suppose being convicted and imprisoned will at least make Manning unfriendly to the government - although then: why become part of it?
Being transgender will automatically win over some of the more extreme progs, but beyond that: exactly why would voters want Manning in the government, representing them? Poor education, no professional experience to speak of, shaky mental health from all that time in solitary confinement. Why would Manning (or whoever is really behind the senate run) think that voters would be interested?
Cynically, there is some bigger game being played here.
DA said they're still determining if they're going to charge the cop or not, so that's not decided yet. But the caller was an easier decision, I guess.
Person A kills person B. No obvious extenuating circumstances, seeing as Person B wasn't armed, was not threatening Person A, in fact wasn't even near Person A. This should not be a difficult decision - and _would_not_be_ if the guy weren't a cop. The only real question is what to charge him with.
I'm still wondering about the guy who gave the caller a wrong address -- did he know the victim? did he know if was a real address? why did he pick that one?
Yeah, that's more difficult, because it really depends on what he knew. What did he think the address was for? Did he really expect a swatting incident? And, as you say, why _that_ particular address. Crawling inside the guy's head to find this out is impossible, so I don't think a criminal charge will stick ("beyond a reasonable doubt"). However, a civil suit seems entirely appropriate, since the standard of proof is lower. He can at least pay financial damages to the family he helped destroy.
Ok, so this douchebag will get what's coming to him. We're still missing at least one person, though: The cop who shot an innocent, unarmed person. You know, the guy who did the actual killing.
The McDonalds where I live have introduced automated kiosks for ordering. You can also still go to the counter and order from a person.
After only 2-3 tries, I have to say: ordering from the kiosks is better. It's faster, and there are no more misunderstandings. You get a number, wait for it to show at the pickup counter, and you're done. The whole operation becomes more efficient, lines are shorter, customers are happier. What's not to like?
If a couple of jobs went lost, well, that's pretty much the story of unskilled employment throughout history. Increases in efficiency through mechanization have been happening for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, jobs have been created for the people who manufacture and maintain the kiosks. If there's a moral to the story, it is: don't be unskilled.
The web is not slow. There actually is no problem.
Individual sites are slow, because they load ridiculous quantities of scripts and third-party content. They deserve to be slow. Three examples:
- Homepage of an eCommerce site, would like to compete with Amazon: 1.1MB of data, 74 requests, 2.1 seconds load time.
- Homepage of a major newspaper 1.3MB of data, 80 requests, 3.2 seconds load time.
- Homepage of a small eCommerce site that I manage: 130kb of data, 14 requests, 350ms load time. Where's the problem?
tl;dr: It's their own damned fault. If they insist on zillions of trackers, annoying content and huge JS frameworks - well, there's a penalty to be paid.
The inability of law enforcement authorities to gain convictions due to legal rights is an “urgent public safety issue,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday in remarks that sought to renew a contentious debate over privacy and security.
The FBI was unable to force convictions of nearly data from nearly 7% of the accused in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, despite possessing proper legal authority to lie, trick, and deceive, a figure that impacts every area of the agency's work, Wray said during a speech at a cyber security conference in New York.
“This is an urgent public safety issue,” Wray added, while saying that a solution is “not so clear cut.”
"No one person's account drives Twitter's growth..."
That's true, because Twitter has no growth. The number of users flattened out about two years ago - any growth since 2015 is minimal, and possibly faked. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to bleed money. Twitter is in a slow-motion death spiral, and desperately hoping that someone - anyone - will buy it.
Twitter doesn't dare block Trump's account, because they could instantly lose all Trump followers as users. Twitter currently has around 300 million users. Trump has 46 million followers. So they could lose more than 10% of their users in one blow, and that would be the beginning of the end.
If everything is attributable to "climate change", then their theory is no longer falsifiable. Which means it is no longer science; instead, it's just buzzwords that trigger government bureaucrats into opening the subsidy faucet.
Of course, it's always been this way - they're just getting honest about it. After all the money thrown at climate modelling, we still have never seen a clean scientific test consisting of specific predictions that could be verified or falsified. Instead, we get hundreds of climate models, we get adapted data (with the original data "lost"), the press announces panic after panic after panic. Really, it's tiresome.
The planet is warming. Yep. has been for a while now. CO2 is increasing due to people. Yep, probably not a good idea, but negative feedback cycles clearly dominate - a look into atmospheric history shows that clearly: CO2 causes slight increase in warmth, causes more water vapor, causes more clouds, reflects more sunlight. Oops, can't say that, doesn't cause a panic, won't get any government funding, so let's pretend that the planet is dominated by positive feedback cycles.
Poorer? The worldwide standard of living has risen dramatically over the past 40 years, including specifically the poorest. The rich are *much* richer - the discrepancy is larger - but literally all groups are better off. This is almost entirely due to the benefits of capitalism.
The "sweet spot" for taxation is 35% to 40% of GDP? Jesus. Which socialist paradise do you live in?
You talk about infrastructure - and it is important. But governments spending that much money are using most of it for income redistribution. Plus non-trivial amounts for regulatory bureaucracies.
There is every reason to suppose that a government could get by on 10% GDP, or even less, if it actually concentrated only on infrastructure and government services like courts and police.
You're not wrong. A lot of youthful behavior is driven by hormones. Looked at objectively, it's a bit ridiculous: it's just a species survival reflex: the act (simulated or real) of reproduction triggers an endorphin hit. Take this out of the equation, and human behavior would be very different. While there is a lot of pleasure to be had from those endorphins, they also cause a whopping lot of unhappiness, especially among young people.
Happiness rising with age - makes sense, it's called wisdom. Realizing what's actually important, and what definitely isn't. Some of us come to this later than others (and some people clearly never do). Oddly, one problem that's hard to get rid of is regret for stupid decisions taken earlier - somehow it's easier to dwell on failures than on successes. And, really, neither of those matter: no matter your age, it's better to focus on the present and the future, because those are what you can control.
Happiness declining in later years - 70s and above - is certainly related to health. Aches and pains and more serious health problems accumulate, and that definitely impacts your happiness.
Really, the court ruling is idiotic. If Amazon cannot book those words, some counterfeiter will. And what permutations, exactly, counts as a misspelling? What about other names, where there are many legitimate spellings?
That said, Amazon has really shot itself in the foot with it's 3rd party marketplace. It is increasingly difficult to sort out the crap, the potential crap, and the legitimate products. Personally, and precisely for this reason, I order a lot less from Amazon than I used to.
Consumers need to take responsibility for themselves, their health, and their finances. Know what your doctor is doing, know what medicines are being prescribed. it's your health, after all, and ultimately also your wallet.
Example: I went in to a clinic for an ultrasound of the other day. While I'm sitting there, the doc places his ultrasound gadget on some unrelated body-part. On my bill appears a charge for Fr. 60. I can either blindly accept the bill, or I can apply my brain, go back to the doctor's office and say "not what I ordered, not paying this, take it off the bill". Doctors are service providers just like any other - people need to treat them as such, and not as all-knowing and infallible demigods.
Same for prescriptions. You get a prescription, tell the doc to explain what it is, what it's for, etc.. Ask if there is an OTC or generic version. If not, ask if there is an equivalent medicine that would be OTC or generic. Also: research it yourself: all this stuff is online. Sometimes you'll even find information that your doctor is unaware of.
Lastly, in the US where ObamaCare has screwed up the markets beyond recognition, there are an increasing number of places that will take cash. Last time I visited the US, I saw exactly this: while we were there, our son came down with strep throat. Went to a local doc, told him we were paying cash: they were suddenly all smiles, and the prices were very reasonable. They didn't want to deal with the insurance crap any more than we did.
I thought it was pretty much settled? Thin atmosphere, solar radiation disassociated water into hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen left, the oxygen combined with various minerals. At least, that's what I had learned...
The media has been pounding on the Russian drum for over a year now. So far, it's a big nothing-burger. A few alleged Facebook ads, not even a molecule in a drop in a bucket. Otherwise, endless allegations, but a stunning lack of actual proof.
Really, it's like the media are trying to distract from something. Like, maybe, Trump isn't doing such a bad job after all?
IOTA is an interesting concept, but it's silly to say it's not a blockchain. It absolutely is - it just allows parallel versions to exist for undetermined amounts of time, until they happen to merge together.
IOTA also has a fundamental problem that - imho - will prove impossible to resolve. It is possible for contradictory things to happen on parallel branches. On a blockchain, this would be something like double-spending, and one of two transactions would quickly be invalidated. Since IOTA allows parallel branches to exist for indeterminate amounts of time, what happens when conflicting transactions are discovered? Potentially, you would have to roll back a very long chain of other transactions - but that same branch may have already given rise to many, many other branches in the tangle.
As far as I can see, there are only two ways to deal with this. (1) Restrict the branching behavior - making IOTA more like a classic blockchain. (2) Only trust the IOTA ledger in a very limited scope - say, during the segment of the branch that you can see. An unrestricted tangle is fundamentally incompatible with a globally trustworthy ledger.
A couple of tidbits that I, personally, found interesting:
- The definition of E-waste: "all items of electrical and electronic equipment and its parts that have been discarded by its owner as waste without the intent of re-use". This includes everything from appliances to solar cells to smartphones.
- On a per-person basis, E-waste is highest in Europe, the Americas and Oceania. However, Europe had the highest recycling rate (35%).
- Unstated, but North America is likely the biggest generator, because the figures given are for "the Americas", which includes North, Central and South in one big lump. That's a really odd decision, for a way to group countries.
- The report claims that only 20% of E-waste is recycled through "appropriate" channels, but they do not define what an "appropriate channel" is.
Living in Europe, I do not believe the recycling figures. In many European countries - and certainly where I live - it would be very difficult *not* to recycle an appliance. Sure, a small charger may land in a wastebasket, but a washing machine? A refrigerator? We don't have public dumps, and these don't fit in a municipal garbage bag. - the recycling center is the only possible place to dispose of these. More: recycling is free (actually: pre-paid with the original purchase price). The last figures I saw nationally were well over 70%, and I suspect the rates are a lot higher by now.
Now, how the recycling companies work is a different matter. Some of them ship the devices to unlicensed or fraudulent companies in Africa or Asia for disassembly, which is often...um...suboptimal. But that is an entirely different problem, actually an enforcement problem since this behavior is (afaik) illegal.
The US has a much bigger problem - not only with E-waste, but with garbage in general. Hauling your garbage off to dumps and burying it, having zero control over what lands in those dumps, geez. Separate the bulk recyclables, incinerate the trash (free electricity + heat), run the ash through separators to recover more metals and minerals. But no, it gets buried, the dumps will eventually leak, and future generations will have to clean it all up.
I like the parent comment's story of the lightning bug. Reminds me of the time I watched the moon being nuked: Standing outside, looking at the moon through hazy clouds. There were points of light on the moon's surface that would grow and shrink - truly, it looked like a huge explosion. One after another after another. Really spooky.
Obviously, I knew the moon wasn't being nuked, though I can imagine the article some tabloid might have written. It took several minutes for me to understand what I was seeing. There were two layers of hazy clouds at different altitudes, moving in different directions. Probably altocumulus, with relatively few gaps. When gaps in both cloud layers lined up, the full brightness of the moon would shine through: growing as the gaps lined up, and shrinking as they passed each other.
People see strange things. If they don't take the time to figure out what they are really seeing, it's easy to make something up. It's the same reason the ancients believed Zeus was throwing lightning bolts - lack of a better explanation. For many people, the "Zeus" of weird things seen in the sky is to assign them to UFOs. Plus probably some degree of attention-seeking: "I'm special, I saw a UFO".
Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention," he told Bloomberg TV. "It doesn't serve any socially useful function."
Circumventing governments is a socially useful function. Virtually all modern governments have grown to be far too powerful. Bitcoin represents a small but important struggle against one, small aspect of this power. Likely it will be either squashed or (worse) absorbed, but...maybe not. There's also a vanishingly small chance that people will realize that modern governments need to be massively reduced in scale, focusing on the essential needs of their constituents, rather than the global fantasies of the elite.
Geez, that doesn't sound half bad. Maybe I should become a propaganda writer:-/
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. They reached 0.5% of the registered voters. With an indeterminate effect on even those. That's pretty much a failure.
When will the sore Hillary! losers stop looking for someone else to blame, for their election failure?
"IQ positively correlated with ratings of leader effectiveness...The ratings peaked at an IQ of around 120"
If two people have an IQ difference of more than 2 sigma (2 standard deviations, or about 30 IQ points), it becomes very difficult for them to communicate with each other effectively.
I would have this was pretty well-known and well accepted by now. TFA specifically looks at office workers of various types, so it's a good bet that the average worker will have an IQ in the 100-110 range. So a manager with an IQ of 120 is just enough smarter to do the job well, but not too smart to run into communications problems. A completely believable "sweet spot" for your typical office. But probably not for JPL or a construction site.
If you get beyond 2 sigmas: For anything more than small talk, the smart person feels like they have to "dumb down" everything they say, and even then it's hard to get across anything complex. Meanwhile the lower IQ person realizes that they're being "talked down to", that they are being seen as dumb, and they resent it.
Who wants to bet: BoA isn't really interested in BlockChain. They are interested in being able to attack targets at will with their patent lawyers. Who cares if they patent existing technology? Or obvious extensions thereof? By the time anyone survives a patent lawsuit, they are a few million poorer, and have been seriously distracted from whatever they were doing.
Whatever you think of digital currencies, the pace of innovation is currently breathtaking. Once people start having to dodge stupidly obvious patents, well, that will serve as a huge brake on the process.
Can we please finally drive a stake through the heart of software patents?
I suppose being convicted and imprisoned will at least make Manning unfriendly to the government - although then: why become part of it?
Being transgender will automatically win over some of the more extreme progs, but beyond that: exactly why would voters want Manning in the government, representing them? Poor education, no professional experience to speak of, shaky mental health from all that time in solitary confinement. Why would Manning (or whoever is really behind the senate run) think that voters would be interested?
Cynically, there is some bigger game being played here.
DA said they're still determining if they're going to charge the cop or not, so that's not decided yet. But the caller was an easier decision, I guess.
Person A kills person B. No obvious extenuating circumstances, seeing as Person B wasn't armed, was not threatening Person A, in fact wasn't even near Person A. This should not be a difficult decision - and _would_not_be_ if the guy weren't a cop. The only real question is what to charge him with.
I'm still wondering about the guy who gave the caller a wrong address -- did he know the victim? did he know if was a real address? why did he pick that one?
Yeah, that's more difficult, because it really depends on what he knew. What did he think the address was for? Did he really expect a swatting incident? And, as you say, why _that_ particular address. Crawling inside the guy's head to find this out is impossible, so I don't think a criminal charge will stick ("beyond a reasonable doubt"). However, a civil suit seems entirely appropriate, since the standard of proof is lower. He can at least pay financial damages to the family he helped destroy.
The only one that requires some clarification
Ok, so this douchebag will get what's coming to him. We're still missing at least one person, though: The cop who shot an innocent, unarmed person. You know, the guy who did the actual killing.
The McDonalds where I live have introduced automated kiosks for ordering. You can also still go to the counter and order from a person.
After only 2-3 tries, I have to say: ordering from the kiosks is better. It's faster, and there are no more misunderstandings. You get a number, wait for it to show at the pickup counter, and you're done. The whole operation becomes more efficient, lines are shorter, customers are happier. What's not to like?
If a couple of jobs went lost, well, that's pretty much the story of unskilled employment throughout history. Increases in efficiency through mechanization have been happening for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, jobs have been created for the people who manufacture and maintain the kiosks. If there's a moral to the story, it is: don't be unskilled.
The web is not slow. There actually is no problem.
Individual sites are slow, because they load ridiculous quantities of scripts and third-party content. They deserve to be slow. Three examples:
- Homepage of an eCommerce site, would like to compete with Amazon: 1.1MB of data, 74 requests, 2.1 seconds load time.
- Homepage of a major newspaper 1.3MB of data, 80 requests, 3.2 seconds load time.
- Homepage of a small eCommerce site that I manage: 130kb of data, 14 requests, 350ms load time. Where's the problem?
tl;dr: It's their own damned fault. If they insist on zillions of trackers, annoying content and huge JS frameworks - well, there's a penalty to be paid.
The inability of law enforcement authorities to gain convictions due to legal rights is an “urgent public safety issue,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday in remarks that sought to renew a contentious debate over privacy and security.
The FBI was unable to force convictions of nearly data from nearly 7% of the accused in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, despite possessing proper legal authority to lie, trick, and deceive, a figure that impacts every area of the agency's work, Wray said during a speech at a cyber security conference in New York.
“This is an urgent public safety issue,” Wray added, while saying that a solution is “not so clear cut.”
"No one person's account drives Twitter's growth..."
That's true, because Twitter has no growth. The number of users flattened out about two years ago - any growth since 2015 is minimal, and possibly faked. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to bleed money. Twitter is in a slow-motion death spiral, and desperately hoping that someone - anyone - will buy it.
Twitter doesn't dare block Trump's account, because they could instantly lose all Trump followers as users. Twitter currently has around 300 million users. Trump has 46 million followers. So they could lose more than 10% of their users in one blow, and that would be the beginning of the end.
If everything is attributable to "climate change", then their theory is no longer falsifiable. Which means it is no longer science; instead, it's just buzzwords that trigger government bureaucrats into opening the subsidy faucet.
Of course, it's always been this way - they're just getting honest about it. After all the money thrown at climate modelling, we still have never seen a clean scientific test consisting of specific predictions that could be verified or falsified. Instead, we get hundreds of climate models, we get adapted data (with the original data "lost"), the press announces panic after panic after panic. Really, it's tiresome.
The planet is warming. Yep. has been for a while now. CO2 is increasing due to people. Yep, probably not a good idea, but negative feedback cycles clearly dominate - a look into atmospheric history shows that clearly: CO2 causes slight increase in warmth, causes more water vapor, causes more clouds, reflects more sunlight. Oops, can't say that, doesn't cause a panic, won't get any government funding, so let's pretend that the planet is dominated by positive feedback cycles.
Poorer? The worldwide standard of living has risen dramatically over the past 40 years, including specifically the poorest. The rich are *much* richer - the discrepancy is larger - but literally all groups are better off. This is almost entirely due to the benefits of capitalism.
The "sweet spot" for taxation is 35% to 40% of GDP? Jesus. Which socialist paradise do you live in?
You talk about infrastructure - and it is important. But governments spending that much money are using most of it for income redistribution. Plus non-trivial amounts for regulatory bureaucracies.
There is every reason to suppose that a government could get by on 10% GDP, or even less, if it actually concentrated only on infrastructure and government services like courts and police.
You're not wrong. A lot of youthful behavior is driven by hormones. Looked at objectively, it's a bit ridiculous: it's just a species survival reflex: the act (simulated or real) of reproduction triggers an endorphin hit. Take this out of the equation, and human behavior would be very different. While there is a lot of pleasure to be had from those endorphins, they also cause a whopping lot of unhappiness, especially among young people.
Happiness rising with age - makes sense, it's called wisdom. Realizing what's actually important, and what definitely isn't. Some of us come to this later than others (and some people clearly never do). Oddly, one problem that's hard to get rid of is regret for stupid decisions taken earlier - somehow it's easier to dwell on failures than on successes. And, really, neither of those matter: no matter your age, it's better to focus on the present and the future, because those are what you can control.
Happiness declining in later years - 70s and above - is certainly related to health. Aches and pains and more serious health problems accumulate, and that definitely impacts your happiness.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
Anyway, be assured that the politicians want students trained to think the way politicians want them to. Only the "other guy" is fake news
Really, the court ruling is idiotic. If Amazon cannot book those words, some counterfeiter will. And what permutations, exactly, counts as a misspelling? What about other names, where there are many legitimate spellings?
That said, Amazon has really shot itself in the foot with it's 3rd party marketplace. It is increasingly difficult to sort out the crap, the potential crap, and the legitimate products. Personally, and precisely for this reason, I order a lot less from Amazon than I used to.
No shit. When was the last time that a new UI actually improved a product? Pro tip to UIX folk: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Consumers need to take responsibility for themselves, their health, and their finances. Know what your doctor is doing, know what medicines are being prescribed. it's your health, after all, and ultimately also your wallet.
Example: I went in to a clinic for an ultrasound of the other day. While I'm sitting there, the doc places his ultrasound gadget on some unrelated body-part. On my bill appears a charge for Fr. 60. I can either blindly accept the bill, or I can apply my brain, go back to the doctor's office and say "not what I ordered, not paying this, take it off the bill". Doctors are service providers just like any other - people need to treat them as such, and not as all-knowing and infallible demigods.
Same for prescriptions. You get a prescription, tell the doc to explain what it is, what it's for, etc.. Ask if there is an OTC or generic version. If not, ask if there is an equivalent medicine that would be OTC or generic. Also: research it yourself: all this stuff is online. Sometimes you'll even find information that your doctor is unaware of.
Lastly, in the US where ObamaCare has screwed up the markets beyond recognition, there are an increasing number of places that will take cash. Last time I visited the US, I saw exactly this: while we were there, our son came down with strep throat. Went to a local doc, told him we were paying cash: they were suddenly all smiles, and the prices were very reasonable. They didn't want to deal with the insurance crap any more than we did.
I thought it was pretty much settled? Thin atmosphere, solar radiation disassociated water into hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen left, the oxygen combined with various minerals. At least, that's what I had learned...
Exactly.
The media has been pounding on the Russian drum for over a year now. So far, it's a big nothing-burger. A few alleged Facebook ads, not even a molecule in a drop in a bucket. Otherwise, endless allegations, but a stunning lack of actual proof.
Really, it's like the media are trying to distract from something. Like, maybe, Trump isn't doing such a bad job after all?
IOTA is an interesting concept, but it's silly to say it's not a blockchain. It absolutely is - it just allows parallel versions to exist for undetermined amounts of time, until they happen to merge together.
IOTA also has a fundamental problem that - imho - will prove impossible to resolve. It is possible for contradictory things to happen on parallel branches. On a blockchain, this would be something like double-spending, and one of two transactions would quickly be invalidated. Since IOTA allows parallel branches to exist for indeterminate amounts of time, what happens when conflicting transactions are discovered? Potentially, you would have to roll back a very long chain of other transactions - but that same branch may have already given rise to many, many other branches in the tangle.
As far as I can see, there are only two ways to deal with this. (1) Restrict the branching behavior - making IOTA more like a classic blockchain. (2) Only trust the IOTA ledger in a very limited scope - say, during the segment of the branch that you can see. An unrestricted tangle is fundamentally incompatible with a globally trustworthy ledger.
Testing for exactly what, well...
Link to a page with the report. Direct link to the PDF.
A couple of tidbits that I, personally, found interesting:
- The definition of E-waste: "all items of electrical and electronic equipment and its parts that have been discarded by its owner as waste without the intent of re-use". This includes everything from appliances to solar cells to smartphones.
- On a per-person basis, E-waste is highest in Europe, the Americas and Oceania. However, Europe had the highest recycling rate (35%).
- Unstated, but North America is likely the biggest generator, because the figures given are for "the Americas", which includes North, Central and South in one big lump. That's a really odd decision, for a way to group countries.
- The report claims that only 20% of E-waste is recycled through "appropriate" channels, but they do not define what an "appropriate channel" is.
Living in Europe, I do not believe the recycling figures. In many European countries - and certainly where I live - it would be very difficult *not* to recycle an appliance. Sure, a small charger may land in a wastebasket, but a washing machine? A refrigerator? We don't have public dumps, and these don't fit in a municipal garbage bag. - the recycling center is the only possible place to dispose of these. More: recycling is free (actually: pre-paid with the original purchase price). The last figures I saw nationally were well over 70%, and I suspect the rates are a lot higher by now.
Now, how the recycling companies work is a different matter. Some of them ship the devices to unlicensed or fraudulent companies in Africa or Asia for disassembly, which is often...um...suboptimal. But that is an entirely different problem, actually an enforcement problem since this behavior is (afaik) illegal.
The US has a much bigger problem - not only with E-waste, but with garbage in general. Hauling your garbage off to dumps and burying it, having zero control over what lands in those dumps, geez. Separate the bulk recyclables, incinerate the trash (free electricity + heat), run the ash through separators to recover more metals and minerals. But no, it gets buried, the dumps will eventually leak, and future generations will have to clean it all up.
I like the parent comment's story of the lightning bug. Reminds me of the time I watched the moon being nuked: Standing outside, looking at the moon through hazy clouds. There were points of light on the moon's surface that would grow and shrink - truly, it looked like a huge explosion. One after another after another. Really spooky.
Obviously, I knew the moon wasn't being nuked, though I can imagine the article some tabloid might have written. It took several minutes for me to understand what I was seeing. There were two layers of hazy clouds at different altitudes, moving in different directions. Probably altocumulus, with relatively few gaps. When gaps in both cloud layers lined up, the full brightness of the moon would shine through: growing as the gaps lined up, and shrinking as they passed each other.
People see strange things. If they don't take the time to figure out what they are really seeing, it's easy to make something up. It's the same reason the ancients believed Zeus was throwing lightning bolts - lack of a better explanation. For many people, the "Zeus" of weird things seen in the sky is to assign them to UFOs. Plus probably some degree of attention-seeking: "I'm special, I saw a UFO".
Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention," he told Bloomberg TV. "It doesn't serve any socially useful function."
Circumventing governments is a socially useful function. Virtually all modern governments have grown to be far too powerful. Bitcoin represents a small but important struggle against one, small aspect of this power. Likely it will be either squashed or (worse) absorbed, but...maybe not. There's also a vanishingly small chance that people will realize that modern governments need to be massively reduced in scale, focusing on the essential needs of their constituents, rather than the global fantasies of the elite.
Geez, that doesn't sound half bad. Maybe I should become a propaganda writer :-/