Given that economics (as a field) seems to be even more willing to pretend that anthropology has nothing to tell us about the economic behavior of human groups than it has been willing to pretend that psychology has nothing to tell us about the economic behavior of human individuals; I'd take any just-so stories about the origins of currency with a serious grain of salt.
Archeology certainly suggests that we've been taking shiny things seriously for a long time; and gold certainly has lots of properties that appeal to the primitive would-be metalsmith (soft, ductile, low melting point, nontrivial amounts that are usable without any refining, accidental or deliberate alloying with copper has very good results, etc.); but positing a 'gold standard' involves a couple of gigantic leaps (most notably, the existence of 'currency', in something like recognizable form, along with the theoretical and technical expertise to worry about and handle clipping, debasement, and other nontrivial weights-and-measures stuff).
Being divisible helps architecturally, since you can stave off the point where there just aren't enough of the things for basic transactional purposes. Whether the behavioral incentives of deflation end up being an issue is currently unclear (at present, speculative activity around their future exchange rates is a much bigger factor; but deflation is an incentive to just sit on your reserves and wait for them to appreciate, which is somewhat unhelpful to a medium of exchange...) There's a certain emotional charm to deflation that inflation doesn't share; but both are potentially dangerous distractions from the business of actually being a useful currency.
Let's be honest here, OCZ customer service could never have been as bad as Toshiba.
My experience has been that Toshiba makes total shit computers (in terms of reliability, durability, service life, and driver support); but their SSD business does a lot of OEM work for just about anybody selling computers with SSDs inside. The sort of buyers who get really, really, really, touchy if a given component supplier ends up being responsible for a lot of warranty incidents. If they are doing that successfully, they can probably handle 'boring, but reliable' at any rate.
"The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation."
That would be nice. However, if the sale is structured as a partial asset acquisition, rather than a sale of the whole company as an entity, it may or may not be true. The details are brutally complex and varied; but it cannot be safely assumed that a few tedious 'obligations' (especially to a class of very small claimants, who are unlikely to be nearly as well represented or tightly drafted as a large creditor or a few such...) won't conveniently be retained on the books of the sacrificial company, while the assets worth taking are transferred and the remnants allowed to sink into bankruptcy.
As best I can tell, juries don't actually accept volunteers (at the federal level, and at least not in my state, apparently there are some places where you might be able to; but it's generally discouraged, presumably out of concern over juror-pool injection attacks). And, even if you do have a summons, apparently subject-matter knowledge is considered a fairly good way to get cut.
39" is a fairly modest TV; but a big monitor. Like 'dominates your desk' big. I suspect that the bigger question would be whether you find yourself comfortably able to use real estate that is that far out of the center of your field of view (and, unlike dual or triple monitor setups, is all fixed in the same plane, rather than in two or more individually rotated chunks).
Feynman was sort of a rockstar. Also "Did the math for blowing up the fucking planet" has a certain... punch... that 'foundational work in assymetric key cryptography' doesn't.
Given that, for now, we aren't allowed to fire ze missiles and degenerate to all-out-war, the crypto geeks have overall greater practical significance; but there will, perhaps, never be a generation of nerds quite like the Cold War Nuclear Nerds (unless the post LHC Black Hole Crew actually has something to show for it), in terms of "We did the geek grunt work for the largest disruption in human history since we descended from the trees, motherfucker." cred.
If things stay cool, crypto will end up being a bigger deal than nukes; but that remains to be seen, and will be a matter of continual 'so long as nobody gets jumpy', a condition that the nuke jockeys didn't have to appeal to. If things went hot, they'd have done the math that made that work. Team Crypto is behind the status quo, and its continuation, rather than the end of history, with all the drama it provides.
I tend to figure that (so long as I don't cling to the bleeding edge, where even the honest reviews are of inferior gear for high prices, soon to be replaced by more mature gear at lower price), it tends to matter a lot less. Do PR flacks buy good reviews? Yes, it seems likely. Should they be first against the wall when the revolution comes? Well, probably not first; but I'd gladly make room for them in line. Can they crowd out the mass of reviews once the early-adopting suckers pass and an item becomes subject to mass judgement? If so, that's some serious cash being dropped on buying reviews.
All blathering aside, if you aren't trying to ride the bleeding edge, the stakes are lower and the odds of, at very least, ending up with 'good enough, and crazy cheap' are good.
It's the early adopters who really face a difficult problem, when the goods are at their least mature and most expensive, and the flacks outnumber and control the actual buyers and actual reviewers to the greatest extent. Simply practice a little patience and you can easily avoid the greatest trouble. Leading the bleeding-edge by the nose, by controlling who gets per-release and super-early gear just isn't that difficult, and even if the reviews are real, they reflect mostly early-adopter fanboy optimists. Just sit back, fuck around with whatever tech you already have (take comfort, for it is no doubt greater than that which inaugurated the internet) and wait a month or two. Lower prices, greater clarity, and general sanity await you.
Not that they've been doing a particularly good job lately; but the US's strongest international PR move (and, incidentally, weapon in encouraging foreign defectors) is being 'the guys who don't have any creepy secrets (aside from things like the specifics of how atomic bombs work, which the Rosenbergs went down for). Unfortunately, we've squandered that of late. Being 'the good guys' isn't just some bleeding-heart bullshit to appease liberal pinkos. It's a powerful tool in any soft-power contest of ideas. Having nothing but weapons-related details to hide was an extreme moral-high-ground position. We'll be damn lucky to see something nearly so good again in my lifetime. Will we ever see something truly golden, as we did in WWII, with Axis units bumbling around looking for Americans to surrender to? That is what 'soft power' really looks like. It doesn't deliver the goods every day; but on a good day it isn't some theoretical, it's one hell of an advantage. Can we regain that sort of reputation?
So, either Irresponsible Terrorist Ruskie Collaborator Snowden is (in fact) concealing numerous US secrets that aren't directly related to what he was planning to blow the whistle on, or the feds are freaking out over nothing. Well, what's it going to be?
(Perhaps more realistically: If you were some sort of undercover fed, whose continued freedom and/or life depended on the silence of the feds, would you be comfortable now? Mr. Snowden, to his credit, appears to be trying to minimize the casualties associated with his whistle-blowing; but will you be so lucky next time? A single screwdriver-monkey contractor, not even a full NSA agent, punked the shit out of the agency. Do you think that some poor sucker with nothing but patriotism motivating him is the only clandestine operative in the agency? That there isn't a single other leaker in the, apparently porous, organization? Nobody infiltrating with an actual payoff awaiting him? You sure about that?)
In capitalist America, we pump people full of lead, so that the are guaranteed to be nice and thin, even with limited amounts of walking! High density ensures caloric expenditure even over short distances!
I know you're trying to be snarky, but in fact it would be true if the warm tropical weather came by itself without the increase in disease carrying insects and vermin, torrential rain, etc. Not to mention the cultures that evolved in tropical climates have yet to develop science and medical technology.
The few places in tropical climates that have developed to European levels enjoy excellent health and longevity. Singapore would be one example.
Fact is, people (especially old people) die en mass in cold winters and do well in hot weather. Why do you think old people all move to Florida instead of enjoying their Michigan/NY winters?
Without the very bleeding edge in anti-parasitic technologies, warm weather means increased parasite load starting among children and young adults, and continuing to EOL. The American south is something of an exception, because the US FDA (remember, the gumment ain't done nothing for you!) has eliminated yellow fever, screwworms, and most of the least pleasant parasitic buddies of tropical living, with air conditioning mopping up the rest. Were it not for that, they'd probably be hanging out with their buddies, getting schistosomiasis, and being generally useless in the face of the northern hemisphere.
Also (in the specific case of opiates) anti-overdose medication is available. It isn't fun (it more or less kicks you from 'high' to 'withdrawal' within a couple of minutes; but it's relatively cheap, easy to administer, and effective. It's also blatantly unrecreational(since its only purpose is to absolutely crater a heroin high) and thus not subject to any sensible abuse. Anyone who is against that is more or less motivated by distaste for druggies, rather than any sort of harm-minimization policy.
Aside from any other effects, prohibition isn't likely to produce either more discriminating or smarter addicts. I'm not in favor of being an opiate junkie but it does make me wonder: what if we said "Fuck it." and replaced all source-local heroin interdiction efforts with cheap synthetics. More junkies? Probably. Total collapse of the syndicates attempting to sell illegal, dubiously pure, product vs. licit, accurately labelled licit opiates? Game over man, game over.
I realize that opiate junkies are disgusting creatures, and any money spent hurting them is a wise investment; but how long can we afford to play that game? Prohibition has not broken the backs of cartels. Licit, high quality, goods, (ideally usable, by prescription, by people who are also functional members of society, since they just need to got to CVS, rather than hustle, for drugs), just might be. These aren't fundamentally scarce goods, so the licit stuff, with quality control, sanitation, accurate labelling, and availability through the health system, should crush the illicit variants, which have none of that.
Remember Athletes!!!! In addition to disguisting junkies, who must be minimizied at every public opportunity; because they are gross pillheads, remember the athletes who used assorted untested drugs to stay one step ahead of drug testing!
That is all. Pillheads deserve public re-probation; but athletes are heroes of the common man!
Oh, VIA... I'm honestly always a bit surprised to see them still trying.
Back before Intel got (slightly) serious about cheap, with 'atom' and AMD got slightly serious about low-power, with some of their APUs, they made more sense, (in particular, a number of rather interesting x86 embedded specialty boards were VIA based, for situations too low-power or cost constrained for a p3/p4); but lately they've been a much tougher sell. Still some interesting specialty stuff; but 'Unichrome' graphics are such a clusterfuck to deal with that they make AMD look like GPU driver gods, and Intel look (while slow) nearly infallible, and both Intel and AMD have put some rather more aggressive parts into what used to be VIA's playground.
If memory serves, their argument varies (depending on whether the FTC appears interested or not) between 'fuck you, it's the Intel compiler collection, and it'll do what's best for Intel. Go suck an Opteron if you like AMD so much.' and 'Gosh, we sure know about the capabilities flags; but we can't be sure of the details of other vendors'(*cough*shoddy, probably reverse engineered illegally*cough*) implementations of certain complex features, and our customers expect our compiler suite to provide stable, correct output, so reverting to the x87 codepath is our only real option..."
How can humans be prevented from having power over other humans if there aren't any humans with power over other humans to prevent the humans from having power over other humans?
What is somewhat surprising is that Newegg had, as expert witness, Whitfield Diffie, as in 'Diffie-Hellman' Diffie. I didn't even know that it was possible to lose an assymetric-key encryption related case with him on your side, especially against nobody in particular.
The problem isn't just parents, it is also that we allow sociopaths to pass the bar exam.
But can't we blame the parents for raising a sociopath?
I'm not a fancy psych expert; but my understanding was that sociopathy is born, not made, though the distinction between the dumb, locally dangerous sociopaths(who will probably kill somebody, maybe more than one; but then end up in prison or going down in a hail of bullets) and the smart, systemically dangerous ones (who would never do anything so crass; and are alarmingly likely to worm their way into positions of influence, may be environmental.
Hopefully this turns out to be good advertising for NewEgg - I know I'll be making my next computer purchase from them to help support them in fighting a patent troll.
Newegg follows a 'no protection money to trolls' policy generally. Plus, they ship fast and always seem to be within a few percent, plus/minus, of the going rate (aside from occasional retail loss leaders, or the 'you can get 20 USB cables for a dollar, on the slow boat from China' ebay deals). Microcenter FTW for retail; but they make a fairly compelling case for online purchases.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that economics (as a field) seems to be even more willing to pretend that anthropology has nothing to tell us about the economic behavior of human groups than it has been willing to pretend that psychology has nothing to tell us about the economic behavior of human individuals; I'd take any just-so stories about the origins of currency with a serious grain of salt.
Archeology certainly suggests that we've been taking shiny things seriously for a long time; and gold certainly has lots of properties that appeal to the primitive would-be metalsmith (soft, ductile, low melting point, nontrivial amounts that are usable without any refining, accidental or deliberate alloying with copper has very good results, etc.); but positing a 'gold standard' involves a couple of gigantic leaps (most notably, the existence of 'currency', in something like recognizable form, along with the theoretical and technical expertise to worry about and handle clipping, debasement, and other nontrivial weights-and-measures stuff).
Being divisible helps architecturally, since you can stave off the point where there just aren't enough of the things for basic transactional purposes. Whether the behavioral incentives of deflation end up being an issue is currently unclear (at present, speculative activity around their future exchange rates is a much bigger factor; but deflation is an incentive to just sit on your reserves and wait for them to appreciate, which is somewhat unhelpful to a medium of exchange...) There's a certain emotional charm to deflation that inflation doesn't share; but both are potentially dangerous distractions from the business of actually being a useful currency.
How many studies do you need to do to prove that gunshots to the head are often fatal?
Just keep insisting on higher standards of statistical rigor until you run out of test subjects who you dislike. Simple enough.
Let's be honest here, OCZ customer service could never have been as bad as Toshiba.
My experience has been that Toshiba makes total shit computers (in terms of reliability, durability, service life, and driver support); but their SSD business does a lot of OEM work for just about anybody selling computers with SSDs inside. The sort of buyers who get really, really, really, touchy if a given component supplier ends up being responsible for a lot of warranty incidents. If they are doing that successfully, they can probably handle 'boring, but reliable' at any rate.
The Harper Regime is working as fast as it can! Give it time...
"The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation."
That would be nice. However, if the sale is structured as a partial asset acquisition, rather than a sale of the whole company as an entity, it may or may not be true. The details are brutally complex and varied; but it cannot be safely assumed that a few tedious 'obligations' (especially to a class of very small claimants, who are unlikely to be nearly as well represented or tightly drafted as a large creditor or a few such...) won't conveniently be retained on the books of the sacrificial company, while the assets worth taking are transferred and the remnants allowed to sink into bankruptcy.
As best I can tell, juries don't actually accept volunteers (at the federal level, and at least not in my state, apparently there are some places where you might be able to; but it's generally discouraged, presumably out of concern over juror-pool injection attacks). And, even if you do have a summons, apparently subject-matter knowledge is considered a fairly good way to get cut.
Do you really want a TV whose name translates into "death blood" in Chinese?
Honestly, that's actually fairly compelling as brand names go. I'll have two.
39" is a fairly modest TV; but a big monitor. Like 'dominates your desk' big. I suspect that the bigger question would be whether you find yourself comfortably able to use real estate that is that far out of the center of your field of view (and, unlike dual or triple monitor setups, is all fixed in the same plane, rather than in two or more individually rotated chunks).
Feynman was sort of a rockstar. Also "Did the math for blowing up the fucking planet" has a certain... punch... that 'foundational work in assymetric key cryptography' doesn't.
Given that, for now, we aren't allowed to fire ze missiles and degenerate to all-out-war, the crypto geeks have overall greater practical significance; but there will, perhaps, never be a generation of nerds quite like the Cold War Nuclear Nerds (unless the post LHC Black Hole Crew actually has something to show for it), in terms of "We did the geek grunt work for the largest disruption in human history since we descended from the trees, motherfucker." cred.
If things stay cool, crypto will end up being a bigger deal than nukes; but that remains to be seen, and will be a matter of continual 'so long as nobody gets jumpy', a condition that the nuke jockeys didn't have to appeal to. If things went hot, they'd have done the math that made that work. Team Crypto is behind the status quo, and its continuation, rather than the end of history, with all the drama it provides.
I tend to figure that (so long as I don't cling to the bleeding edge, where even the honest reviews are of inferior gear for high prices, soon to be replaced by more mature gear at lower price), it tends to matter a lot less. Do PR flacks buy good reviews? Yes, it seems likely. Should they be first against the wall when the revolution comes? Well, probably not first; but I'd gladly make room for them in line. Can they crowd out the mass of reviews once the early-adopting suckers pass and an item becomes subject to mass judgement? If so, that's some serious cash being dropped on buying reviews.
All blathering aside, if you aren't trying to ride the bleeding edge, the stakes are lower and the odds of, at very least, ending up with 'good enough, and crazy cheap' are good.
It's the early adopters who really face a difficult problem, when the goods are at their least mature and most expensive, and the flacks outnumber and control the actual buyers and actual reviewers to the greatest extent. Simply practice a little patience and you can easily avoid the greatest trouble. Leading the bleeding-edge by the nose, by controlling who gets per-release and super-early gear just isn't that difficult, and even if the reviews are real, they reflect mostly early-adopter fanboy optimists. Just sit back, fuck around with whatever tech you already have (take comfort, for it is no doubt greater than that which inaugurated the internet) and wait a month or two. Lower prices, greater clarity, and general sanity await you.
Not that they've been doing a particularly good job lately; but the US's strongest international PR move (and, incidentally, weapon in encouraging foreign defectors) is being 'the guys who don't have any creepy secrets (aside from things like the specifics of how atomic bombs work, which the Rosenbergs went down for). Unfortunately, we've squandered that of late. Being 'the good guys' isn't just some bleeding-heart bullshit to appease liberal pinkos. It's a powerful tool in any soft-power contest of ideas. Having nothing but weapons-related details to hide was an extreme moral-high-ground position. We'll be damn lucky to see something nearly so good again in my lifetime. Will we ever see something truly golden, as we did in WWII, with Axis units bumbling around looking for Americans to surrender to? That is what 'soft power' really looks like. It doesn't deliver the goods every day; but on a good day it isn't some theoretical, it's one hell of an advantage. Can we regain that sort of reputation?
So, either Irresponsible Terrorist Ruskie Collaborator Snowden is (in fact) concealing numerous US secrets that aren't directly related to what he was planning to blow the whistle on, or the feds are freaking out over nothing. Well, what's it going to be? (Perhaps more realistically: If you were some sort of undercover fed, whose continued freedom and/or life depended on the silence of the feds, would you be comfortable now? Mr. Snowden, to his credit, appears to be trying to minimize the casualties associated with his whistle-blowing; but will you be so lucky next time? A single screwdriver-monkey contractor, not even a full NSA agent, punked the shit out of the agency. Do you think that some poor sucker with nothing but patriotism motivating him is the only clandestine operative in the agency? That there isn't a single other leaker in the, apparently porous, organization? Nobody infiltrating with an actual payoff awaiting him? You sure about that?)
Have a nice day.
In capitalist America, we pump people full of lead, so that the are guaranteed to be nice and thin, even with limited amounts of walking! High density ensures caloric expenditure even over short distances!
I know you're trying to be snarky, but in fact it would be true if the warm tropical weather came by itself without the increase in disease carrying insects and vermin, torrential rain, etc. Not to mention the cultures that evolved in tropical climates have yet to develop science and medical technology.
The few places in tropical climates that have developed to European levels enjoy excellent health and longevity. Singapore would be one example.
Fact is, people (especially old people) die en mass in cold winters and do well in hot weather. Why do you think old people all move to Florida instead of enjoying their Michigan/NY winters?
Without the very bleeding edge in anti-parasitic technologies, warm weather means increased parasite load starting among children and young adults, and continuing to EOL. The American south is something of an exception, because the US FDA (remember, the gumment ain't done nothing for you!) has eliminated yellow fever, screwworms, and most of the least pleasant parasitic buddies of tropical living, with air conditioning mopping up the rest. Were it not for that, they'd probably be hanging out with their buddies, getting schistosomiasis, and being generally useless in the face of the northern hemisphere.
Honestly, even if it assured us 3-6 months extra brutal war per adult, it'd probably still be worth it...
Also (in the specific case of opiates) anti-overdose medication is available. It isn't fun (it more or less kicks you from 'high' to 'withdrawal' within a couple of minutes; but it's relatively cheap, easy to administer, and effective. It's also blatantly unrecreational(since its only purpose is to absolutely crater a heroin high) and thus not subject to any sensible abuse. Anyone who is against that is more or less motivated by distaste for druggies, rather than any sort of harm-minimization policy.
Aside from any other effects, prohibition isn't likely to produce either more discriminating or smarter addicts. I'm not in favor of being an opiate junkie but it does make me wonder: what if we said "Fuck it." and replaced all source-local heroin interdiction efforts with cheap synthetics. More junkies? Probably. Total collapse of the syndicates attempting to sell illegal, dubiously pure, product vs. licit, accurately labelled licit opiates? Game over man, game over. I realize that opiate junkies are disgusting creatures, and any money spent hurting them is a wise investment; but how long can we afford to play that game? Prohibition has not broken the backs of cartels. Licit, high quality, goods, (ideally usable, by prescription, by people who are also functional members of society, since they just need to got to CVS, rather than hustle, for drugs), just might be. These aren't fundamentally scarce goods, so the licit stuff, with quality control, sanitation, accurate labelling, and availability through the health system, should crush the illicit variants, which have none of that.
Remember Athletes!!!! In addition to disguisting junkies, who must be minimizied at every public opportunity; because they are gross pillheads, remember the athletes who used assorted untested drugs to stay one step ahead of drug testing!
That is all. Pillheads deserve public re-probation; but athletes are heroes of the common man!
Oh, VIA... I'm honestly always a bit surprised to see them still trying.
Back before Intel got (slightly) serious about cheap, with 'atom' and AMD got slightly serious about low-power, with some of their APUs, they made more sense, (in particular, a number of rather interesting x86 embedded specialty boards were VIA based, for situations too low-power or cost constrained for a p3/p4); but lately they've been a much tougher sell. Still some interesting specialty stuff; but 'Unichrome' graphics are such a clusterfuck to deal with that they make AMD look like GPU driver gods, and Intel look (while slow) nearly infallible, and both Intel and AMD have put some rather more aggressive parts into what used to be VIA's playground.
If memory serves, their argument varies (depending on whether the FTC appears interested or not) between 'fuck you, it's the Intel compiler collection, and it'll do what's best for Intel. Go suck an Opteron if you like AMD so much.' and 'Gosh, we sure know about the capabilities flags; but we can't be sure of the details of other vendors'(*cough*shoddy, probably reverse engineered illegally*cough*) implementations of certain complex features, and our customers expect our compiler suite to provide stable, correct output, so reverting to the x87 codepath is our only real option..."
How can humans be prevented from having power over other humans if there aren't any humans with power over other humans to prevent the humans from having power over other humans?
A simple engineering problem.
What is somewhat surprising is that Newegg had, as expert witness, Whitfield Diffie, as in 'Diffie-Hellman' Diffie. I didn't even know that it was possible to lose an assymetric-key encryption related case with him on your side, especially against nobody in particular.
The problem isn't just parents, it is also that we allow sociopaths to pass the bar exam.
But can't we blame the parents for raising a sociopath?
I'm not a fancy psych expert; but my understanding was that sociopathy is born, not made, though the distinction between the dumb, locally dangerous sociopaths(who will probably kill somebody, maybe more than one; but then end up in prison or going down in a hail of bullets) and the smart, systemically dangerous ones (who would never do anything so crass; and are alarmingly likely to worm their way into positions of influence, may be environmental.
Hopefully this turns out to be good advertising for NewEgg - I know I'll be making my next computer purchase from them to help support them in fighting a patent troll.
Newegg follows a 'no protection money to trolls' policy generally. Plus, they ship fast and always seem to be within a few percent, plus/minus, of the going rate (aside from occasional retail loss leaders, or the 'you can get 20 USB cables for a dollar, on the slow boat from China' ebay deals). Microcenter FTW for retail; but they make a fairly compelling case for online purchases.