"Its biggest daily moves in 2016 were around 10 percent, still very volatile compared with fiat currencies, but markedly lower than the trading of 2013, which saw daily price swings of as much as 40 percent."
We feel like helping others in these situations is simply the right thing to do, and our governments are better able to do it than individual citizens.
I would argue that the government is not better able to provide charity than individual citizens. For example, the Zika funding bill was voted down, because members of congress disagreed with each other. If Zika funding was provided through voluntary means, then we would not have these stalemates and delays. I won't say that private charities are perfect, but at least you can choose the private charity that you want to donate to; when it comes to government, you only get a "choice" every couple of years, and it's usually not much of a choice.
Based on that flawed logic, most of the rural US would still be lacking power and phone service.
My guess is that rural communities would simply pay a premium for those services. Morally, that seems perfectly acceptable, because more resources are required per customer to service rural communities.
But even if I'm wrong, I still don't see what the problem is. If your hypothetical scenario came to pass, that would mean the urban residents refused to provide the rural communities with charity. Now, if the urban residents are perfectly content with the suffering of the rural residents, then who am I to judge? But if the urban residents are angered by the living conditions of the rural residents, then that would mean the urban residents are complaining about the conditions of the very people that those urban residents chose not to help with charity. In that case, I must confess that I really don't care what some hypocrites think of my policies.
If something is not profitable enough, then that is still a form of charity. For example, suppose that my market rate is $50/hour. An organization tells me that they could really use my services, but all they can afford to pay me is $10/hour. If I accept their offer, then I am essentially giving them the equivalent of $40/hour in charity.
Anyway, let's assume that you're correct and you can earn a nice 10% return by taking a moderate risk. Why not start this company yourself? The private sector is open to everyone. If people want your service badly enough, and they trust you to provide that service, then you should be able to raise the money.
Even if you like to pay taxes, would you be willing to acknowledge that taxes are, at best, a necessary evil, and the use of coercion should be minimized? As an analogy, suppose that you have a police officer who is legally justified in killing a threatening man, but this police officer believes he can safely de-escalate the situation. Would you like the officer to minimize his use of force? If so, then you should also wish to keep the use of taxation to a minimum.
Mr. Goings went even further, talking about the bigger picture when it comes to “lighting up” poor and underserved areas of our country: This is bigger than Wilson. This is about the rural areas, particularly in eastern North Carolina, because the majority of the area does not present enough profitability to attract the private-sector investment
In other words, what Mr. Goings is saying is that it would be an act of charity to serve rural areas. The problem that I have with this situation is that Greenlight is not charitable organization that runs on donations; it is a government entity that collects revenue through taxation (i.e. coercion). This situation is being presented as if the people of Pinetops are having their rights violated; in reality, it is the taxpayers in Wilson who are being forced to subsidize a neighboring community.
The solution to this problem seems simple enough: Greenlight should be privatized. After that, if Greenlight would like to support neighboring towns, then it should solicit donations. If Greenlight is not able to collect enough money to fund service for Pinetops, then that dose not prove the market failed; instead, it proves that the residents of Wilson, when presented with an honest choice, do not want to subsidize their neighbors.
Actually, I see bitcoin as the revolution, and if the rebels turn on each other, then the revolution stops. In other words, if the bitcoin world goes to war, then that creates a climate of uncertainty that drives the average investor away.
It's true that the businessmen probably outnumber the purists. However, businessmen like certainty, and certainty is especially important when you're buying something that is supposed to rival the certainty of owning a hard asset like gold. If the 75% network starts attacking the 25% one, and the 25% one happens to be the one used by all the western websites, then there's going to be a major disruption and a lot of uncertainty. I think that uncertainty is going to scare the average person away.
Bitcoin has always been based on that notion, "the moral majority will have the most hashing power"
Yes, that's true. And, if the majority of miners use their hashing power to attack the old network, then they will be proving that notion false, which will destroy faith in bitcoin and ultimately hurt those same miners. People hold bitcoin because they believe 1) their money will be safe, and 2) the fundamental rules won't change. If miners successfully attack the old network, then they will have proven at least one of those beliefs to be false, which means that many users (myself included) will dump their bitcoins. But, if you don't buy that, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
Those attacks would not change the rules of the old network, which was my original point. Also, there is defense. However, even if that defense fails, then all that means is that the attacks will damage faith in both the old and new networks. After all, if the old network can be attacked successfully, who is to say the same thing won't happen to the new network in the future when there is another disagreement? This uncertainty lowers the value of bitcoin as a whole, which means these attacks would be suicidal from a financial perspective. So, the question isn't how evil they want to be; it's how much money they're willing to burn to destroy their own wealth.
If coinbase.com, bitpay.com, circle.com, etc. do not change their bitcoin software, then anyone who uses those sites will still be operating on the old network...even if the miners on the old network only account for 25% of the hash power.
there are fears that China's government could decide, at some point, to pressure miners in the country to use their influence to alter the rules of the Bitcoin network
The Chinese miners can't change the rules of the bitcoin network, because the bitcoin network uses cryptography to see if anyone is breaking the rules. The Chinese government could attempt to pressure miners into using their influence over the bitcoin world, but Chinese miners only have influence because the rest of the world does not currently view them as anti-bitcoin. However, if Chinese miners suggested, for example, that the supply limit be changed to something other than 21 million, they would be seen as anti-bitcoin by the rest of the bitcoin world, and then they would lose their influence. Chinese miners could launch a 51% double-spending attack (and possibly destroy the value of their own coins in the process), but no amount of computing power would give them the ability to change the rules (because cryptography).
The ISP could negotiate with land owners, instead of using eminent domain. If there is going to be regulation, then the regulation should be that cities cannot prevent healthy cable competition by refusing to allow multiple ISPs to run layer 1 over or under city-owned roads.
I was with you when you said 'Abolish the cable monopolies', but then you lost me when you said you want to replace that with regulation and price controls. In other words, when it comes to physical cables, you want to rely on static laws, instead of market power and dynamic human minds.
Why would you prefer a higher chance that your driver is going to hurt you in some way? That makes no sense.
Security costs money. For example, take the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Would putting armed guards at every theater in the country make us safer in movie theaters? Probably. Would it be worth the cost? Probably not. If you disagree, you are free to open your own theater and hire armed guards yourself. That's the beauty of the free market.
Likewise, Uber tells me that they already do background checks, and they say that the fingerprint check that the city of Austin wants is redundant and creates an undue operational burden. I choose to believe Uber. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my choice. And, unlike you and the city of Austin, I'm not trying to force my choices on anyone else.
If you want to pass a law that says Uber must display a prominent warning to new users in their app that says, "We do not fingerprint drivers. Use this system at your own risk.", so be it. However, Uber should also be free, right after that warning, to tell people what the actual probability is that the driver will assault the passenger, and User should be able to compare that to the risk you will be assaulted in a taxi. Let the facts speak for themselves.
It's sad that the state will allow me to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, but they will not allow me to get into a car with a stranger who has not been fingerprinted (unless of course that stranger gives me a ride for free).
Fingerprinting doesn't guarantee that you know who the bad guys are. Fingerprinting helps you make a decision, but you're always assuming some amount of risk no matter what you do. Why can't I decide the level of risk I want to take?
What's the problem with letting the market decide? If you feel unsafe riding with someone who hasn't been fingerprinted, then don't use Uber. But if I want to use Uber, and Uber wants to take my money, then that should be the end of it. The Uber driver is an adult, and I'm an adult. We don't need a nanny.
The economy is not an iron mine. New disposable income does not come from some finite source. An economy is money moving in circulation. People stop spending as much, you get a recession. People spending more, economic boom. More money going to the working class, which spends 100% of their available funds, means more money out, more money flow and a better economy.
If that was true, hyperinflation would be the best thing for an economy, because hyperinflation causes a tremendous increase in "money flow" as people desperately try to spend their rapidly depreciating currency.
The truth is, disposable income does come from a finite source, because the supply of goods available in an economy is finite. The minimum wage is a price control, and like all price controls, it distorts the economy. A price ceiling causes a shortage, and a price floor causes a surplus. The minimum wage is a price floor, which means it causes a surplus. What does it cause a surplus of? It causes a surplus of labor, which is also known as "unemployment".
You may respond, "Can't employers simply raise their prices so that no one has to lose their job?" The problem is that employers have already set the price of the goods that they are selling to the level that clears the market. In other words, if the employer raises his prices, he will lose customers (if this weren't true, then he would have increased his prices long ago). In summary, to the extent that employers raise their prices, they are losing customers, which ultimately means less work for their employees, which ultimately increases unemployment among marginal workers (e.g. teenagers).
If you want to start playing with some deep learning models, I would highly recommend this page. It provides some basic examples that run right in your browser. Also, this page provides a great guide to working with neural networks without getting bogged down in a bunch of mathematical equations.
Another great resource is Caffe. Caffe is a deep learning framework that will let you define a wide variety of neural networks by just writing a text file. You can run Caffe applications in CPU or GPU mode (a lot of open source deep learning code will only work with GPUs, so being able to run things either way is a nice feature).
If you want to do computer vision, make sure that you read up on fully convolutional neural networks, because they are the big thing right now.
Remember that story about a program that was able to learn how to play just about any Atari game? That is called reinforcement learning, and that's a big thing right now too. Udacity has a great course on reinforcement learning.
some people say 'altcoin' when they mean anything that isn't bitcoin-with-the-annointed-blockchain.
You are correct that some people are advancing this definition, but I do not consider it to be an honest definition; instead, I consider it to be an attempt to conflate two clearly distinct concepts: A competing bitcoin client that would fork the blockchain and an altcoin. The only reason some people are attempting to conflate these concepts is so that they can pretend that censoring discussion of BitcoinXT on a bitcoin message board is not really censorship, but simply the removal of off-topic, altcoin discussion.
So, in 2013, when the developers switched from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB and accidentally caused a fork between the miners running bitcoind 0.8 and the miners running bitcoind 0.7, which one was the alternate crypto currency? 0.7 or 0.8? 0.8 had more hashing power behind it, but the developers chose 0.7. What if the developers had chosen 0.8, instead? Would you say that an altcoin was adopted in 2013 if that had happened, since it doesn't matter how many people join in? What if people abandon bitcoin at some point and switch to litecoin? I suppose we could also call that 'switching to an altcoin'. Is it okay to use the exact same terminology to discuss such radically different situations?
As far as I know the only bitcoin core developer working on an altcoin is gavin andresen.
BitcoinXT is not an altcoin; it's an attempt to increase the bitcoin blocksize. It does not change any bitcoin rules unless 75% of the hashing power is running it. BitcoinXT has not been widely adopted yet, but Coinbase just started running it in production, so it will be interesting to see if others follow their lead. But calling it an altcoin will only add to, rather than avoid, confusion. In fact, some moderators are actively censoring discussion of BitcoinXT on the most popular bitcoin reddit board, and they are trying to justify this censorship by calling BitcoinXT an altcoin. So, calling BitcoinXT an "altcoin" is a very contentious issue right now.
Those rating agencies have been given a special position by the government. For example, as this article mentions, the Fed will only accept assets as collateral if they carry high ratings from S&P, Moody's and Fitch. Even an SEC Commissioner admits that the credit rating agencies have acted like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other companies that dominate the market because of government actions.
In a free market, poor credit rating agencies would go away, because if they lose the trust of investors, there is no longer any reason for companies to use those credit rating agencies. The reason that the big three know they have nothing to worry about is because they know the SEC and the Fed will continue to grant them special status.
How does that differ from the pre-FDA situation? It would seem problems with that model is exactly why the FDA was created in the first place.
There have been plenty of withdrawn drugs and foodborne illness outbreaks under the reign of the FDA. If these are the types of "problems" that prove that the free market model does not work, then surely these problems also prove that the FDA model does not work?
The fact is, we don't know exactly what form the market would take if we allowed competition in the food and drug review business. For all we know, competition in that space may result in fewer withdrawn drugs and foodborne illness outbreaks. What we know for sure is that consumers will ultimately vote with their wallets. If the FDA's way of doing business is clearly superior, then it follows that consumers will only use FDA-approved products.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin is slowly becoming more stable:
"Its biggest daily moves in 2016 were around 10 percent, still very volatile compared with fiat currencies, but markedly lower than the trading of 2013, which saw daily price swings of as much as 40 percent."
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets-bitcoin-idUSKBN14M0IF
TensorFlow is what everyone is using because it works well and it has a nice license to go with it.
Can TensorFlow run on Windows?
We feel like helping others in these situations is simply the right thing to do, and our governments are better able to do it than individual citizens.
I would argue that the government is not better able to provide charity than individual citizens. For example, the Zika funding bill was voted down, because members of congress disagreed with each other. If Zika funding was provided through voluntary means, then we would not have these stalemates and delays. I won't say that private charities are perfect, but at least you can choose the private charity that you want to donate to; when it comes to government, you only get a "choice" every couple of years, and it's usually not much of a choice.
Based on that flawed logic, most of the rural US would still be lacking power and phone service.
My guess is that rural communities would simply pay a premium for those services. Morally, that seems perfectly acceptable, because more resources are required per customer to service rural communities.
But even if I'm wrong, I still don't see what the problem is. If your hypothetical scenario came to pass, that would mean the urban residents refused to provide the rural communities with charity. Now, if the urban residents are perfectly content with the suffering of the rural residents, then who am I to judge? But if the urban residents are angered by the living conditions of the rural residents, then that would mean the urban residents are complaining about the conditions of the very people that those urban residents chose not to help with charity. In that case, I must confess that I really don't care what some hypocrites think of my policies.
If something is not profitable enough, then that is still a form of charity. For example, suppose that my market rate is $50/hour. An organization tells me that they could really use my services, but all they can afford to pay me is $10/hour. If I accept their offer, then I am essentially giving them the equivalent of $40/hour in charity.
Anyway, let's assume that you're correct and you can earn a nice 10% return by taking a moderate risk. Why not start this company yourself? The private sector is open to everyone. If people want your service badly enough, and they trust you to provide that service, then you should be able to raise the money.
Even if you like to pay taxes, would you be willing to acknowledge that taxes are, at best, a necessary evil, and the use of coercion should be minimized? As an analogy, suppose that you have a police officer who is legally justified in killing a threatening man, but this police officer believes he can safely de-escalate the situation. Would you like the officer to minimize his use of force? If so, then you should also wish to keep the use of taxation to a minimum.
Mr. Goings went even further, talking about the bigger picture when it comes to “lighting up” poor and underserved areas of our country: This is bigger than Wilson. This is about the rural areas, particularly in eastern North Carolina, because the majority of the area does not present enough profitability to attract the private-sector investment
In other words, what Mr. Goings is saying is that it would be an act of charity to serve rural areas. The problem that I have with this situation is that Greenlight is not charitable organization that runs on donations; it is a government entity that collects revenue through taxation (i.e. coercion). This situation is being presented as if the people of Pinetops are having their rights violated; in reality, it is the taxpayers in Wilson who are being forced to subsidize a neighboring community.
The solution to this problem seems simple enough: Greenlight should be privatized. After that, if Greenlight would like to support neighboring towns, then it should solicit donations. If Greenlight is not able to collect enough money to fund service for Pinetops, then that dose not prove the market failed; instead, it proves that the residents of Wilson, when presented with an honest choice, do not want to subsidize their neighbors.
You may think everyone would revolt.
Actually, I see bitcoin as the revolution, and if the rebels turn on each other, then the revolution stops. In other words, if the bitcoin world goes to war, then that creates a climate of uncertainty that drives the average investor away.
It's true that the businessmen probably outnumber the purists. However, businessmen like certainty, and certainty is especially important when you're buying something that is supposed to rival the certainty of owning a hard asset like gold. If the 75% network starts attacking the 25% one, and the 25% one happens to be the one used by all the western websites, then there's going to be a major disruption and a lot of uncertainty. I think that uncertainty is going to scare the average person away.
Bitcoin has always been based on that notion, "the moral majority will have the most hashing power"
Yes, that's true. And, if the majority of miners use their hashing power to attack the old network, then they will be proving that notion false, which will destroy faith in bitcoin and ultimately hurt those same miners. People hold bitcoin because they believe 1) their money will be safe, and 2) the fundamental rules won't change. If miners successfully attack the old network, then they will have proven at least one of those beliefs to be false, which means that many users (myself included) will dump their bitcoins. But, if you don't buy that, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
Those attacks would not change the rules of the old network, which was my original point. Also, there is defense. However, even if that defense fails, then all that means is that the attacks will damage faith in both the old and new networks. After all, if the old network can be attacked successfully, who is to say the same thing won't happen to the new network in the future when there is another disagreement? This uncertainty lowers the value of bitcoin as a whole, which means these attacks would be suicidal from a financial perspective. So, the question isn't how evil they want to be; it's how much money they're willing to burn to destroy their own wealth.
If coinbase.com, bitpay.com, circle.com, etc. do not change their bitcoin software, then anyone who uses those sites will still be operating on the old network...even if the miners on the old network only account for 25% of the hash power.
there are fears that China's government could decide, at some point, to pressure miners in the country to use their influence to alter the rules of the Bitcoin network
The Chinese miners can't change the rules of the bitcoin network, because the bitcoin network uses cryptography to see if anyone is breaking the rules. The Chinese government could attempt to pressure miners into using their influence over the bitcoin world, but Chinese miners only have influence because the rest of the world does not currently view them as anti-bitcoin. However, if Chinese miners suggested, for example, that the supply limit be changed to something other than 21 million, they would be seen as anti-bitcoin by the rest of the bitcoin world, and then they would lose their influence. Chinese miners could launch a 51% double-spending attack (and possibly destroy the value of their own coins in the process), but no amount of computing power would give them the ability to change the rules (because cryptography).
The ISP could negotiate with land owners, instead of using eminent domain. If there is going to be regulation, then the regulation should be that cities cannot prevent healthy cable competition by refusing to allow multiple ISPs to run layer 1 over or under city-owned roads.
I was with you when you said 'Abolish the cable monopolies', but then you lost me when you said you want to replace that with regulation and price controls. In other words, when it comes to physical cables, you want to rely on static laws, instead of market power and dynamic human minds.
Why would you prefer a higher chance that your driver is going to hurt you in some way? That makes no sense.
Security costs money. For example, take the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Would putting armed guards at every theater in the country make us safer in movie theaters? Probably. Would it be worth the cost? Probably not. If you disagree, you are free to open your own theater and hire armed guards yourself. That's the beauty of the free market.
Likewise, Uber tells me that they already do background checks, and they say that the fingerprint check that the city of Austin wants is redundant and creates an undue operational burden. I choose to believe Uber. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my choice. And, unlike you and the city of Austin, I'm not trying to force my choices on anyone else.
If you want to pass a law that says Uber must display a prominent warning to new users in their app that says, "We do not fingerprint drivers. Use this system at your own risk.", so be it. However, Uber should also be free, right after that warning, to tell people what the actual probability is that the driver will assault the passenger, and User should be able to compare that to the risk you will be assaulted in a taxi. Let the facts speak for themselves.
It's sad that the state will allow me to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, but they will not allow me to get into a car with a stranger who has not been fingerprinted (unless of course that stranger gives me a ride for free).
Fingerprinting doesn't guarantee that you know who the bad guys are. Fingerprinting helps you make a decision, but you're always assuming some amount of risk no matter what you do. Why can't I decide the level of risk I want to take?
What's the problem with letting the market decide? If you feel unsafe riding with someone who hasn't been fingerprinted, then don't use Uber. But if I want to use Uber, and Uber wants to take my money, then that should be the end of it. The Uber driver is an adult, and I'm an adult. We don't need a nanny.
The economy is not an iron mine. New disposable income does not come from some finite source. An economy is money moving in circulation. People stop spending as much, you get a recession. People spending more, economic boom. More money going to the working class, which spends 100% of their available funds, means more money out, more money flow and a better economy.
If that was true, hyperinflation would be the best thing for an economy, because hyperinflation causes a tremendous increase in "money flow" as people desperately try to spend their rapidly depreciating currency.
The truth is, disposable income does come from a finite source, because the supply of goods available in an economy is finite. The minimum wage is a price control, and like all price controls, it distorts the economy. A price ceiling causes a shortage, and a price floor causes a surplus. The minimum wage is a price floor, which means it causes a surplus. What does it cause a surplus of? It causes a surplus of labor, which is also known as "unemployment".
You may respond, "Can't employers simply raise their prices so that no one has to lose their job?" The problem is that employers have already set the price of the goods that they are selling to the level that clears the market. In other words, if the employer raises his prices, he will lose customers (if this weren't true, then he would have increased his prices long ago). In summary, to the extent that employers raise their prices, they are losing customers, which ultimately means less work for their employees, which ultimately increases unemployment among marginal workers (e.g. teenagers).
I believe the AC was referring to negative interest rates.
If you want to start playing with some deep learning models, I would highly recommend this page. It provides some basic examples that run right in your browser. Also, this page provides a great guide to working with neural networks without getting bogged down in a bunch of mathematical equations.
Another great resource is Caffe. Caffe is a deep learning framework that will let you define a wide variety of neural networks by just writing a text file. You can run Caffe applications in CPU or GPU mode (a lot of open source deep learning code will only work with GPUs, so being able to run things either way is a nice feature).
If you want to do computer vision, make sure that you read up on fully convolutional neural networks, because they are the big thing right now.
Remember that story about a program that was able to learn how to play just about any Atari game? That is called reinforcement learning, and that's a big thing right now too. Udacity has a great course on reinforcement learning.
some people say 'altcoin' when they mean anything that isn't bitcoin-with-the-annointed-blockchain.
You are correct that some people are advancing this definition, but I do not consider it to be an honest definition; instead, I consider it to be an attempt to conflate two clearly distinct concepts: A competing bitcoin client that would fork the blockchain and an altcoin. The only reason some people are attempting to conflate these concepts is so that they can pretend that censoring discussion of BitcoinXT on a bitcoin message board is not really censorship, but simply the removal of off-topic, altcoin discussion.
So, in 2013, when the developers switched from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB and accidentally caused a fork between the miners running bitcoind 0.8 and the miners running bitcoind 0.7, which one was the alternate crypto currency? 0.7 or 0.8? 0.8 had more hashing power behind it, but the developers chose 0.7. What if the developers had chosen 0.8, instead? Would you say that an altcoin was adopted in 2013 if that had happened, since it doesn't matter how many people join in? What if people abandon bitcoin at some point and switch to litecoin? I suppose we could also call that 'switching to an altcoin'. Is it okay to use the exact same terminology to discuss such radically different situations?
As far as I know the only bitcoin core developer working on an altcoin is gavin andresen.
BitcoinXT is not an altcoin; it's an attempt to increase the bitcoin blocksize. It does not change any bitcoin rules unless 75% of the hashing power is running it. BitcoinXT has not been widely adopted yet, but Coinbase just started running it in production, so it will be interesting to see if others follow their lead. But calling it an altcoin will only add to, rather than avoid, confusion. In fact, some moderators are actively censoring discussion of BitcoinXT on the most popular bitcoin reddit board, and they are trying to justify this censorship by calling BitcoinXT an altcoin. So, calling BitcoinXT an "altcoin" is a very contentious issue right now.
Those rating agencies have been given a special position by the government. For example, as this article mentions, the Fed will only accept assets as collateral if they carry high ratings from S&P, Moody's and Fitch. Even an SEC Commissioner admits that the credit rating agencies have acted like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other companies that dominate the market because of government actions.
In a free market, poor credit rating agencies would go away, because if they lose the trust of investors, there is no longer any reason for companies to use those credit rating agencies. The reason that the big three know they have nothing to worry about is because they know the SEC and the Fed will continue to grant them special status.
How does that differ from the pre-FDA situation? It would seem problems with that model is exactly why the FDA was created in the first place.
There have been plenty of withdrawn drugs and foodborne illness outbreaks under the reign of the FDA. If these are the types of "problems" that prove that the free market model does not work, then surely these problems also prove that the FDA model does not work?
The fact is, we don't know exactly what form the market would take if we allowed competition in the food and drug review business. For all we know, competition in that space may result in fewer withdrawn drugs and foodborne illness outbreaks. What we know for sure is that consumers will ultimately vote with their wallets. If the FDA's way of doing business is clearly superior, then it follows that consumers will only use FDA-approved products.