I think possibly you're the one that needs to think about what I said, particularly the bit where I pointed out that Bitcoin isn't for storing money but rather for moving it around. It's not meant to function as a currency, it's meant to function as a replacement to services like Paypal.
You're right that Bitcoin makes a bad currency, but that's largely because it's not meant to be a currency in the first place.
You're right, high volatility isn't good for payments either, but there's a huge difference in the risk to a company that's actively trading (who only need stability on a timescale of days) vs somebody trying to store bitcoin for multiple years.
In practice fees for payments over Bitcoin are currently a few percent, which is comparable to the fees for non-Bitcoin payment methods and suggests that the risk is manageable at the moment.
Depends on what you're doing. Buying a coffee on your morning commute... yeah. Buying something online that'll get delivered from China? It's no problem for that.
At least complaints about the confirmation speed are relevant complaints, unlike most of what I see on Slashdot...
Yeah: you're trying to use Bitcoin to store value. Bitcoin is for moving your savings around, not for storing them. You don't keep 20 BTC in your wallet, you keep $20k in it and then use the Bitcoin network to move $1k per payment. It makes no odds whether that's 1 BTC or 2 BTC at the time of payment.
What does it matter if that's 1 BTC or 1.5 BTC? It's still $1000 of BTC. Bitcoin is for making payments, not for storing money or fixing your prices against (you want a currency for those, not a payment network).
It's a payment network. It wasn't designed as a replacement to the dollar but rather as a replacement to Paypal. As such it shouldn't be too surprising that it doesn't make a good currency; it's just not designed for that.
And here we have a textbook example of the AI effect.
It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'.
It depends on the number of users involved. For this case of 20 users... yeah, you're probably right that you couldn't guarantee no packet loss all of the time, but you would probably get quite close. "It's a weekend" wouldn't be enough to saturate it; even when actively using the internet, most people's bandwidth use is short large spikes surrounded by lots of idle time. Torrents would be a better bet, but maxing out the link would require 10 users torrenting at their max line speed. There are people who will do that, sure, but your odds of having 10 of them at once in a building of 20 people are low.
At the main ISP level, where you're aggregating thousands of customers together, you can overprovision far more than 2:1 safely because customers average each other's traffic out and unusually high peaks become even rarer.
(I should point out that I have no operational experience running a network like this so a lot of this is educated guesswork, but the ~100 Kbit/s figure I gave in the last post comes from people who do have that experience.)
* The provider is selling 100/100 Mbit/s to 20 people with a 1 Gbit/s uplink. * You hook a WiFi router up to the 100/100 connection. * While trying to VoIP/Skype on one WiFi device, somebody else starts watching Netflix on another. * The latency on your WiFi (and thus your VoIP call) jumps up to 50-100ms due to bad buffer management on the WiFi. * A third device starts trying to sync photos to a backup service, introducing another 100-250ms* of latency by tying up your upstream and generating another badly managed queue on your router.
That's a ton of unnecessary latency being generated right in your own house, by your own gear, and none of it will be helped by the ISP putting in more upstream bandwidth.
...on the topic of which, it would be insanely unnecessary to have 2 Gbit/s of bandwidth for twenty 100 Mbit/s users. You don't need enough bandwidth for every user to max out their connection simultaneously, because that never happens; you only need enough to cover whatever your actual peak traffic is without dropping any packets. When averaging over thousands of customers, this actually works out to needing something around 100 Kbit/s(!) per customer today.
Of course 20 is much less than "thousands" and the traffic profile of 20 customers will be much more peaky than the one of 1000 customers, but I suspect even then that 1000 Mbit/s would be enough to cover twenty 100 Mbit/s connections without dropping any packets. It certainly wouldn't be anywhere near having a "real uplink of 50 Mbit/s".
(*: Probably it wouldn't be this bad with a symmetric 100/100 connection; the graph I linked is for a 140/12 connection, but those are probably more common than symmetric connections anyway.)
Badly managed buffers are a massive problem for latency. Just look at this graph from the article. You see the four ping time measurements on the right? You see how one of them is 100-250ms and the rest are more like 20ms? That's exactly the same link in all cases, but the first measurement has a giant pile of latency introduced purely by poor buffer management.
I'm not going to dismiss the problem you described, because I agree it's a problem. But it makes no sense to worry about 100ms on cross-Atlantic links and yet completely dismiss 200ms right on the first hop.
How so? Take someone that's being paid, let's say, $5000/month at the moment, and let's take a UBI of $1000/month to have a neat number to work with. With the UBI they'll be getting $6000/mo, but paying back $1000/mo for a net of $5000/mo. That's exactly what they were already getting, so where's the subsidy for the employer?
At the other end of the scale, imagine someone earning $1100/month starting to receive the same UBI. Say they're paying back very little of the UBI (let's call it $0 for easy numbers), so their new income is a net of $2100/mo. The employer could now drop their wages to $100/mo and their net income would be back to $1100/mo. This is what you're calling a subsidy, but it seems to be that if you tell somebody you're going to pay them $100/mo for something you were paying them $1100/mo to do last week (11x less!) they're going to give you the finger -- especially when doing so now only reduces their monthly income by 9% rather than by 100%.
(In the middle is perhaps a different matter, but all the numbers depend hugely on how exactly you implement the UBI so it's easy to argue either way.)
Ultimately though, the value of human labor is going to drop as it gets replaced by cheap automation, so it does make sense for people's wages to drop with it. (I don't think "improved tech leads to lower costs" counts as a subsidy though.) At the moment the minimum wage puts a lower floor on how little a company is allowed to pay, and the minimum wage requirement is needed because a) people need a minimum amount of money to live, and b) employers as a whole have way too much negotiating power over wages (since you can't afford to walk away from working). A UBI may reasonably let us remove the minimum wage requirement, since it deals with both of those problems.
If you insist on looking at everything as a subsidy, then the minimum wage starts to look an awful lot like a subsidy that employers are forced to pay to employees to make up for the fact that their labor isn't worth very much (and particularly so after automation starts to seriously replace humans).
There is arguably plenty of work that is not so much "pointless" as not particularly profitable. Someone to help little old ladies on and off buses, for example. Or more teachers. Or take back all the jobs around publicly funded services that have been privatised and improve it (eg: cleaning staff).
It's a good point. I quite like the general idea. None of this is going to be viable long term though, because we can automate all of these things too. Eventually you get to the stage where the only way to have something for people to do is to waste their time. Imagine asking people to cut all public grass in the country with shears instead of sit-on lawn mowers, because that's the only way you can keep enough people busy for 8 hours/day. That shouldn't be the future we want to build.
They can't just pay $X less and hope to still have people working for them though, unless the resulting wage is high enough that the employee will be paying most or all of their UBI back in taxes, in which case the $X reduction is mostly or completely just a regular pay cut.
A job guarantee relies on there being jobs available, which as we've established is kind of the problem. I guess you could invent some pointless work for someone to do, but forcing them to spend a significant chunk of their time doing meaningless busy work doesn't strike me as being better than not forcing them to do it.
Right now they have 2000 people who, if they get a job, will lose their unemployment benefits, and many of the jobs they could get will barely pay more than the benefits do. That's a strong disincentive to "do shit", as you put it.
With the guaranteed UBI, suddenly those same jobs will give them significantly more income, and thus be much more attractive. By making jobs more attractive to do, they're likely to increase the number of people who do them, rather than decrease it.
To be fair, not the ones that involve earning $80/month for 80 hours of work. But at that point you probably aren't paying enough to get anybody to actually do the job.
And if you don't pay your employees enough, they'll stop working for you -- a UBI gives them the ability to do that without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from. That'll save you even more money!
But since people who are working will essentially be giving their UBI back in taxes anyway, I find it hard to see it as a subsidy to businesses.
Yeah: because it's fiction. But that doesn't mean it's impossible.
At some point we're going to get to the tech level where we can quite feasibly make robots that could continue fighting each other long after we're dead. We'd better be damn well prepared for that, because if they get out of control they'll be kinda hard to stop.
Have you ever accidentally fork bombed yourself on a Linux system? No amount of hitting ctrl+c will save you once it's started. When you start making robots that do things in the real world, you have a very real risk of doing a real-world analog to a fork bomb -- one that you can't just hit the reboot button on the planet to recover from.
Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." AI researcher Rodney Brooks complains "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"
Identifying with a jerk who put his company out of business because he couldn't walk away, not so much
According to this, PA Online were a dial-up ISP that went out of business in 2015 (after being acquired in 2013, so really it's more like the dial-up branch of the combined company got shut down). Given that this story is about events from 2010, I think it's more likely that they got shut down because they were a dial-up ISP in 2015 rather than because of anything this guy did 5 years previous.
I admit the summary does try quite hard to give you the wrong impression, but blaming it on this guy definitely isn't fair to him.
No. If the product was bad then that'd be worthy of a 1-star product review, but if you bought 6 of something and only one showed up, that doesn't justify a 1-star review of the product. It would justify a 1-star review of the seller if they don't fix it, but the seller and the product are different things.
(I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with rejecting the review though, because product reviews are sometimes the only way to give feedback about a specific seller.)
Is this really the case? I'm not sure about Google, but I've had to fill out way too damn many Cloudflare captchas when using Tor and I can always get to the site in the end. I can't remember a single instance of Cloudflare actually refusing access to me as a Tor user.
Slashdot Mirror
I think possibly you're the one that needs to think about what I said, particularly the bit where I pointed out that Bitcoin isn't for storing money but rather for moving it around. It's not meant to function as a currency, it's meant to function as a replacement to services like Paypal.
You're right that Bitcoin makes a bad currency, but that's largely because it's not meant to be a currency in the first place.
I've thought about it.
...I'm not sure what that was supposed to accomplish though. Me thinking isn't going to change Bitcoin's design.
You're right, high volatility isn't good for payments either, but there's a huge difference in the risk to a company that's actively trading (who only need stability on a timescale of days) vs somebody trying to store bitcoin for multiple years.
In practice fees for payments over Bitcoin are currently a few percent, which is comparable to the fees for non-Bitcoin payment methods and suggests that the risk is manageable at the moment.
...and people who are happy to pay fees for transferring money but don't want to pay those fees to Paypal or VISA. That doesn't make you a criminal.
Then use gold for that. Use the right tool for the job; when you want to store money, Bitcoin isn't it.
(I'm not convinced that gold is either, but Bitcoin definitely isn't. Bitcoin is for moving money around, not for keeping it.)
Depends on what you're doing. Buying a coffee on your morning commute... yeah. Buying something online that'll get delivered from China? It's no problem for that.
At least complaints about the confirmation speed are relevant complaints, unlike most of what I see on Slashdot...
Yeah: you're trying to use Bitcoin to store value. Bitcoin is for moving your savings around, not for storing them. You don't keep 20 BTC in your wallet, you keep $20k in it and then use the Bitcoin network to move $1k per payment. It makes no odds whether that's 1 BTC or 2 BTC at the time of payment.
It'll be $1000 worth of Bitcoin.
What does it matter if that's 1 BTC or 1.5 BTC? It's still $1000 of BTC. Bitcoin is for making payments, not for storing money or fixing your prices against (you want a currency for those, not a payment network).
It's a payment network. It wasn't designed as a replacement to the dollar but rather as a replacement to Paypal. As such it shouldn't be too surprising that it doesn't make a good currency; it's just not designed for that.
And here we have a textbook example of the AI effect.
It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'.
It depends on the number of users involved. For this case of 20 users... yeah, you're probably right that you couldn't guarantee no packet loss all of the time, but you would probably get quite close. "It's a weekend" wouldn't be enough to saturate it; even when actively using the internet, most people's bandwidth use is short large spikes surrounded by lots of idle time. Torrents would be a better bet, but maxing out the link would require 10 users torrenting at their max line speed. There are people who will do that, sure, but your odds of having 10 of them at once in a building of 20 people are low.
At the main ISP level, where you're aggregating thousands of customers together, you can overprovision far more than 2:1 safely because customers average each other's traffic out and unusually high peaks become even rarer.
(I should point out that I have no operational experience running a network like this so a lot of this is educated guesswork, but the ~100 Kbit/s figure I gave in the last post comes from people who do have that experience.)
It's pretty much not that at all. It's closer to:
* The provider is selling 100/100 Mbit/s to 20 people with a 1 Gbit/s uplink.
* You hook a WiFi router up to the 100/100 connection.
* While trying to VoIP/Skype on one WiFi device, somebody else starts watching Netflix on another.
* The latency on your WiFi (and thus your VoIP call) jumps up to 50-100ms due to bad buffer management on the WiFi.
* A third device starts trying to sync photos to a backup service, introducing another 100-250ms* of latency by tying up your upstream and generating another badly managed queue on your router.
That's a ton of unnecessary latency being generated right in your own house, by your own gear, and none of it will be helped by the ISP putting in more upstream bandwidth.
...on the topic of which, it would be insanely unnecessary to have 2 Gbit/s of bandwidth for twenty 100 Mbit/s users. You don't need enough bandwidth for every user to max out their connection simultaneously, because that never happens; you only need enough to cover whatever your actual peak traffic is without dropping any packets. When averaging over thousands of customers, this actually works out to needing something around 100 Kbit/s(!) per customer today.
Of course 20 is much less than "thousands" and the traffic profile of 20 customers will be much more peaky than the one of 1000 customers, but I suspect even then that 1000 Mbit/s would be enough to cover twenty 100 Mbit/s connections without dropping any packets. It certainly wouldn't be anywhere near having a "real uplink of 50 Mbit/s".
(*: Probably it wouldn't be this bad with a symmetric 100/100 connection; the graph I linked is for a 140/12 connection, but those are probably more common than symmetric connections anyway.)
Maybe in their core, but what happens when they try to fit that traffic down your 10 Mbit/s DSL link? There is going to be a buffer there.
Badly managed buffers are a massive problem for latency. Just look at this graph from the article. You see the four ping time measurements on the right? You see how one of them is 100-250ms and the rest are more like 20ms? That's exactly the same link in all cases, but the first measurement has a giant pile of latency introduced purely by poor buffer management.
I'm not going to dismiss the problem you described, because I agree it's a problem. But it makes no sense to worry about 100ms on cross-Atlantic links and yet completely dismiss 200ms right on the first hop.
How so? Take someone that's being paid, let's say, $5000/month at the moment, and let's take a UBI of $1000/month to have a neat number to work with. With the UBI they'll be getting $6000/mo, but paying back $1000/mo for a net of $5000/mo. That's exactly what they were already getting, so where's the subsidy for the employer?
At the other end of the scale, imagine someone earning $1100/month starting to receive the same UBI. Say they're paying back very little of the UBI (let's call it $0 for easy numbers), so their new income is a net of $2100/mo. The employer could now drop their wages to $100/mo and their net income would be back to $1100/mo. This is what you're calling a subsidy, but it seems to be that if you tell somebody you're going to pay them $100/mo for something you were paying them $1100/mo to do last week (11x less!) they're going to give you the finger -- especially when doing so now only reduces their monthly income by 9% rather than by 100%.
(In the middle is perhaps a different matter, but all the numbers depend hugely on how exactly you implement the UBI so it's easy to argue either way.)
Ultimately though, the value of human labor is going to drop as it gets replaced by cheap automation, so it does make sense for people's wages to drop with it. (I don't think "improved tech leads to lower costs" counts as a subsidy though.) At the moment the minimum wage puts a lower floor on how little a company is allowed to pay, and the minimum wage requirement is needed because a) people need a minimum amount of money to live, and b) employers as a whole have way too much negotiating power over wages (since you can't afford to walk away from working). A UBI may reasonably let us remove the minimum wage requirement, since it deals with both of those problems.
If you insist on looking at everything as a subsidy, then the minimum wage starts to look an awful lot like a subsidy that employers are forced to pay to employees to make up for the fact that their labor isn't worth very much (and particularly so after automation starts to seriously replace humans).
There is arguably plenty of work that is not so much "pointless" as not particularly profitable. Someone to help little old ladies on and off buses, for example. Or more teachers. Or take back all the jobs around publicly funded services that have been privatised and improve it (eg: cleaning staff).
It's a good point. I quite like the general idea. None of this is going to be viable long term though, because we can automate all of these things too. Eventually you get to the stage where the only way to have something for people to do is to waste their time. Imagine asking people to cut all public grass in the country with shears instead of sit-on lawn mowers, because that's the only way you can keep enough people busy for 8 hours/day. That shouldn't be the future we want to build.
They can't just pay $X less and hope to still have people working for them though, unless the resulting wage is high enough that the employee will be paying most or all of their UBI back in taxes, in which case the $X reduction is mostly or completely just a regular pay cut.
A job guarantee relies on there being jobs available, which as we've established is kind of the problem. I guess you could invent some pointless work for someone to do, but forcing them to spend a significant chunk of their time doing meaningless busy work doesn't strike me as being better than not forcing them to do it.
Probably not.
Right now they have 2000 people who, if they get a job, will lose their unemployment benefits, and many of the jobs they could get will barely pay more than the benefits do. That's a strong disincentive to "do shit", as you put it.
With the guaranteed UBI, suddenly those same jobs will give them significantly more income, and thus be much more attractive. By making jobs more attractive to do, they're likely to increase the number of people who do them, rather than decrease it.
To be fair, not the ones that involve earning $80/month for 80 hours of work. But at that point you probably aren't paying enough to get anybody to actually do the job.
And if you don't pay your employees enough, they'll stop working for you -- a UBI gives them the ability to do that without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from. That'll save you even more money!
But since people who are working will essentially be giving their UBI back in taxes anyway, I find it hard to see it as a subsidy to businesses.
Yeah: because it's fiction. But that doesn't mean it's impossible.
At some point we're going to get to the tech level where we can quite feasibly make robots that could continue fighting each other long after we're dead. We'd better be damn well prepared for that, because if they get out of control they'll be kinda hard to stop.
Have you ever accidentally fork bombed yourself on a Linux system? No amount of hitting ctrl+c will save you once it's started. When you start making robots that do things in the real world, you have a very real risk of doing a real-world analog to a fork bomb -- one that you can't just hit the reboot button on the planet to recover from.
AI effect much?
Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." AI researcher Rodney Brooks complains "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"
Identifying with a jerk who put his company out of business because he couldn't walk away, not so much
According to this, PA Online were a dial-up ISP that went out of business in 2015 (after being acquired in 2013, so really it's more like the dial-up branch of the combined company got shut down). Given that this story is about events from 2010, I think it's more likely that they got shut down because they were a dial-up ISP in 2015 rather than because of anything this guy did 5 years previous.
I admit the summary does try quite hard to give you the wrong impression, but blaming it on this guy definitely isn't fair to him.
toss em all into a piranha tank.
Surely there are cheaper ways of feeding lawyers.
No. If the product was bad then that'd be worthy of a 1-star product review, but if you bought 6 of something and only one showed up, that doesn't justify a 1-star review of the product. It would justify a 1-star review of the seller if they don't fix it, but the seller and the product are different things.
(I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with rejecting the review though, because product reviews are sometimes the only way to give feedback about a specific seller.)
Is this really the case? I'm not sure about Google, but I've had to fill out way too damn many Cloudflare captchas when using Tor and I can always get to the site in the end. I can't remember a single instance of Cloudflare actually refusing access to me as a Tor user.