A wealthy enough person can take a hit on the transaction costs and just buy with one of his wallets while selling with another...... if the gamble pays off, he stands to make millions, possibly tens or hundreds of millions. If the gamble fails, all he is losing is some Bitcoins that he might have picked up much earlier at a very low USD price.
- and just like with any other product or service, the cheaper it is, the more of it is consumed, the cheaper the labour, the more of it can be bought and used productively.
Wages are prices, cheaper labour = cheaper prices and it's a good thing for the economy.
As long as the monarch is a computer and not a person, that is programmed to run a small number of tasks, that are similar to the ones that are given to the government as powers in the original USA Constitution (but take away any type of patent and copyright protections, running the post office, any roads for it, specifically disallow for any form of income related taxes and any form of wealth redistribution, prohibit the monarch from coming up with any type of business related regulations, prohibit the monarch from money manipulation, money should be market based) then it will make perfect sense.
Democracy is garbage, it degenerates into the 'bread and circuses' self destructive behaviour, where the mob votes for more armed robbery committed by the government on behalf of the mob, which is what destroys the individual freedoms and the economy. Complete Anarchy is usually replaced with some type of autocracy or a feudal system, where the results will vary based on the whims of a feudal. Constitutional monarchy, where the rules are set up to provide a very consistent rule of law and where the rules cannot change on the whim of the monarch (thus a computer program that is set up once and protected from any changes) and where the rules are set to provide as much individual freedoms and as little collectivism as possible and where the monarch holds the overriding military power (robots with sharks and lasers?) to protect the system from being manipulated by any outside force makes most sense.
are you asking this for real? Bitcoins have no intrinsic value, their prices are always pure speculation, nothing else. You can only redeem anything for BTCs as long as somebody else is willing to take them, while speculating that somebody else will also take them off their hands. You can't make anything out of BTCs of any material use, you can't make a bracelet that anybody would want, you can't redeem them into anything unless there is a 'greater fool' out there. Now, I am NOT saying that BTCs will not go up higher, again, they may as well be 1,000,000,000 USD per BTC in some not so distant future. However eventually, without a doubt, the value of BTC will be 0, that's because there is no value except perception, and you are correct in one thing: there WILL be other electronic currencies.
Once there is one that is similar to BTC but where you can actually steadily redeem it for something (for example, 1Electronic Coin for 1 gram of gold), then that Electronic Coin in fact becomes a real currency.
As is, BTC is not a currency, it's MONEY, there is nothing standing behind it, but there is no store of value attribute present in it. Without store of value it's pure speculation, and now with the higher and higher relative prices, it's not even good as a unit of account, just as you mentioned yourself.
Nobody sabotaged it, it is the inherent property of an electronic file that has no real life backing. It can be used as a medium of exchange even now, as long as you can trade into and out of it very quickly and so the value of that is bypassing the traditional banking transfer systems. However once an electronic currency comes into play with a real redeemable quality behind it, then it can also have the same medium of exchange attribute and then BTC falls through the floor.
No, nobody should copy ridiculous ideas and this one won't pass in Switzerland either.
In any case,/. is a complete circle jerk of collectivists of all kinds, from your socialist and Marxist to your fascist, the comments that are found here are a good indicator, which way the system is going and I have bucket of popcorn and a comfortable chair to enjoy this spectacle. You can begin now.
The free market invented the telegraph, the phone, the radio, the TV. The Internet did not absolutely need TCP/IP, other protocols would come on line, telecommunications with computers is a logical step to other forms of communications and was inevitable.
You like to point at some specific government programs that ended up being useful but how much money and other resources is wasted by government on things that never work out and only reduce total economic viability?
Well, this is no longer very important, at least not in the USA. Chinese just decided they will no longer buy USA Treasuries and no American media reports on this. Guess what, you can't avoid the reality even if you don't want to acknowledge it.
All countries are led forward by the mob and USA used to have a private health care system that was, at the time (before Medicare, Medicaid, SS, and most income taxes, inflation, business regulations) the envy of the world.
The mob is great at destroying the free market and destroying a well working system in the long run.
So I visited that site, despite an 'impressive' vault picture and a bunch of assurances that "the site is built for stability and security", I got this error after clicking on some link: "Database object is busy, please try again later."
Beyond that, here is a note from the site: "Please Note: Short Selling will be enabled on livenet when platform liquidity crosses a preset threshold. This feature is available on CampBX testnet if you would like to try it out in the meantime."
Of-course the real problem with it as I see it, is its location, it's in Alpharetta, Georgia, USA, the country of the Fed, IRS and NSA.
Anything can be used as a 'medium of exchange', BTCs have no unique properties that make it better than anything else, in fact they are too volatile to be useful as medium of exchange.
Think about it, governments are basically contrarian indicators to any truth or knowledge or insight. That's all I wanted to say about this: BTC can be 1,000,000 USD per coin tomorrow or it could be 10 cents. Nobody knows, there is no intrinsic value whatsoever, more currencies of this type are created all the time, that's how you have inflation in BTC (never mind that every single BTC is actually a stack of 10,000,000 coins in its own right, all of which have exactly the same intrinsic value as the 1BTC, which is to say 0).
BTC may as well be 1,000,000,000 dollars in 2 months, who knows, but without a mechanism to SHORT this coin (except by not owning it), what I mean is without a mechanism to borrow coins to sell them, there is no downward pressure at all, while so many people are enticed into this particular pyramid, feeling like they are missing out on something. The early holders of BTC may all be millionaires right now if they sell. They have everything to gain from higher prices, they won't sell and if you want to buy, you have to pay more and more.
What happens when large holders want to sell without any prior shorting in the market?
That is just one tiny example of why gov't shouldn't be regulating any businesses, why it shouldn't be involved in any projects, including infrastructure - no competition. If this law passes, it just gives the gov't established monopoly a special power to tax people because they have no competition. No competing grids, no competing roads, no competing water and sewer and garbage providers, etc.etc. This company COULD, in a free market, do the same thing: impose a fee like that. However if it did, people would have a choice to switch to another provider, however that would have been done, but we can't even KNOW at this point, because of gov't meddling, which gives monopolies to the most connected players.
Your entire comment is just blissful ignorance and nonsense. The economy is in the crapper because of government, not because there are not enough regulations. It's in the crapper because of government, because of collectivist ideology that makes both socialism and fascism possible.
I am happy to tell you that there won't be a government solution to any climate change 'problem', it's not going to happen. In fact if you care about the environment, you should be rooting AGAINST government in all cases, not for it, so that there is more free market capitalism, more competition, more people trying different things, including things that are explicitly prevented by governments from people even attempting, like trying to figure out more efficient uses for nuclear power.
Except that there is NO scarcity with BTC, there is NO anonymity either.
Scarcity is not there, you can subdivide BTC into tens of millions, that's first (and a fraction can be assigned an arbitrary value, it doesn't actually represent a small weight or mass, it represents a number that is not actually different from any other number in the world of computers. The fact that 1BTC can be subdivided into 10,000,000 or so does not change the reality, which is that other types of BTC are already in existence and there will be more of them and they can also be exchanged against BTCs, thus EXTENDING the entire system.
It is not different from government created money, because it is just spawned into existence out of pretty much nothing and it can be extended to infinity, if not under the same name. Of-course it also relies on existing infrastructure (networks, energy) even to be useful, unlike actual physical objects, that can and do exist in the physical world.
Now, I am NOT saying that BTC will not go up in relative prices to USD and other currencies, however what I am saying is that it is a bubble and it has no intrinsic value of its own, but it does extend the intrinsic value of the networks that can provide this as a method of gambling basically. It is a way to extract money from a larger population and to redistribute it to a smaller population, that is better at this particular game.
Snapchat specializes in ephemeral mobile messages, including text or photographs, that disappear after a few seconds. The service has not generated any revenue, but is especially popular among teenagers and young adults, who use the app to send messages to friends.
- I like the use of word 'ephemeral' to describe all three, the services that this company offers, the supposed customer base for it and the actual value of the company.
I see that it was just offered 3,000,000,000 USD and declined it, which while might be height of arrogance, does not surprise me. I would not be surprised to find out that tomorrow this very company gets picked up for 5,000,000,000 USD. I also would not be surprised to find out 2 years from now that it still is not generating any revenues and 3 years from now that its valuation is down to a few million ephemeral dollars (which by that time could be ephemeral all on their own).
Pretty much can't be surprised about anything in this age of rampant inflation and destruction of actual productive economy by the largest government and government manipulation of money in history.
Have you ever wondered why is it that Americans (and some of the Europeans as well) are so in love with the zombie theme? I mean why are zombie movies so popular nowadays?
I have a hypothesis that we see ourselves in the movies, the movies that we like are those, that reflect back to us something about ourselves. Thus at one time westerns were popular, Americans saw themselves as these cowboys, fighting for something, standing for something, whatever. At one time various scary movies were popular, especially during the most seemingly dangerous parts of the cold war, when people thought that a nuclear war was a real possibility.
Now zombie movies are all over the place, everybody is into them. People see themselves for what their society is - a bunch of zombies, from the zombie economy, which is really no longer alive, it's dead and it feeds on other economies and turns them into zombies, to these war machines, which are not dead nor are they alive, but they are out there, searching for people to feed upon.
Just a question: what comes after zombies? After all, apocalyptic movies are also on the rise.
- you shouldn't be giving advice on 'studying history' when you don't know the very basics of it.
Rockefeller's wealth got to the equivalent of 600BILLION USD. Carnegie's wealth got to the equivalent of 300BILLION USD.
Unless your contention is that average people at the time were multi-millionaires, you should sit down and put a sock in it.
It was rising because the gap was getting narrower.
- ignorant as always.
100 years ago free market enslaved children in sweat shops, poisoned bodies of water, allow real owners to destroy anything in their past. Whole cities would have coal ash in the air all the time, created monopolies that remove choice.
- more ignorance. That's the exact point, the children were working in factories in the beginning of the industrial revolution and as the progress moved forward, their parents stopped needing their help, because the capitalist system made their parents so productive by giving them various labour saving devices (tools) and training them to work with those tools that they became extremely productive compared to all of the generations before them and finally did not have to send their children to work from a very young age. It is never government that stops child labour, it's wealth of the nation and in case of the USA of 19th century, the wealth was growing, not despite, but because of the growing wealth gap.
Cities were created at the time, yes, American cities were not created by governments, they were created by industries.
But capitalism alone can't address the needs of the very poor. This means market-driven innovation can actually widen the gap between rich and poor.... We take a double-pronged approach: (1) Narrow the gap so that advances for the rich world reach the poor world faster, and (2) turn more of the world's IQ toward devising solutions to problems that only people in the poor world face.'"
- a bunch of absolute nonsense.
The people are not suffering poverty because of any 'widening gap' between the rich and the poor. The rich of today pale in comparison to the wealthy of the last century. Rockefellers, Carnegies had 10 times as much wealth as Bill Gates, the 'wealth gap' was much wider, yet the standard of living for the poor was rising, not falling the way it is today.
The reason for it is lack of free market capitalism, not abundance of it. USA has almost no free market capitalism compared to what it used to have 100 years ago. The problem for the poor nations in Africa for example is their government, not the fact that there are people with more money.
The more people with more money exists in the world, the better for everybody, as that money is used as investments. The problem is that the rich ARE NOT as rich as they used to be. Again, Bill Gates is a wealthy man, but he is nothing when compared to Rockefeller and Rockefeller started from scratch, while helping everybody in the world to get access to cheaper, higher quality product (oil in his case). The problem today is that the collectivism has destroyed free market capitalism in places like the USA and Europe, but in Africa the governments were even worse in many cases, completely out of control, seeing the citizens nothing more than a nuisance that needed to be removed from the lands.
The problem is lack of individual freedom and private property ownership and of large government.
Charity? How about using the money wisely to invest in a business opportunity? OTOH somebody who owns part of an oil production probably doesn't care about other business opportunities, but charity? WTF?
There shouldn't be any large unions in the first place, your comment tries hard to make it seem as if it is a bad thing that large unions fall apart.
It is most certainly not a bad thing, the smaller the government, the more competition between smaller governments, the better for the individual freedoms.
As to the rest of it, you are no better at it than the prognosticators of the past. AFAIC people are going towards expansion, not contraction, and this is based on simple observation of history. Regardless of the plagues, regardless of the insane, enormous, almost all encompassing and protracted wars, the people only lose a few percentage points of the population and then there is a boom in population growth that follows those.
As to metals, etc., metals are easily recycled, but more importantly, we don't actually need metals for everything. Using more carbon and silica structures is something that is expanding, not contracting. Metal of-course can be found outside of the planet itself. The problem is not metals, the problem is energy and this one has to be solved by working out more designs of various techniques to use nuclear of various types. Beyond that, there are plenty of metals deeper in the planet, we have been only scratching the surface here.
Again, the real question is energy. It's everything, from food and heating, to transport, to housing, to medicine, everything is energy intensive. If we can expand our energy production, then we'll expand our population and all other problems only become opportunities for the free market capitalism to be solved.
If we don't expand our energy production, we will contract, that's all there is to it. Energy production is also something that free market capitalism will solve, the real question becomes: will we allow free market capitalism or will be attempt to destroy it, as we are always set on doing?
However AFAIC free market capitalism finds the way, that's why USSR fell apart, that's why USA became the most productive and wealthy country on the planet in the 19th century, that's why China is likely the most productive and prosperous country today. Lack of free market capitalism is what destroys nations, that's why USA is failing today, that's why there will be more and more failures based on large governments around the world. As failures intensify, the people will have a choice: keep at it and try and clench the fist of collectivism tighter or allow free market capitalism to work.
I think after making a bunch of wrong decisions, people will eventually stumble upon the correct choice, but because it will not be done consciously, the road is rocky, but not what you think it is going to be.
I am interested in building a service that would compile this public record information with other information, that I may come from other sources, like the social media, maybe some private company records, etc. and I would sell this information to the willing employers for a subscription fee. If there is a way to identify the employees that file claims against employers, this information needs to be provided to the employers that are interested in figuring out if they are hiring somebody who is more likely to sue them and then it's their choice to take or not to take this risk.
- says you, because Google is able to monetise some information that is in fact not useful to you personally because you are not collecting and not looking at it and you are unable to understand that what Google does is it collects this information about you to present it back to you in a way, because that's what targeted advertising is. It's your own information given back to you after some analysis, so rather than getting bombarded with a metric ton of useless ads you maybe bombarded with a ton of ads that have at least some tangential relation to your life.
Google is as 'evil' by using this data to give you back something that you may in fact use (and they are able to get this data from you because you are using a bunch of free services, so it's a mutual relationship, it takes 2 to tango). Aren't YOU evil by using Google services while expecting not to pay for anything they give you in any way, while it is obvious that they are expecting you to pay with the data they can collect?
Slashdot Mirror
A wealthy enough person can take a hit on the transaction costs and just buy with one of his wallets while selling with another...... if the gamble pays off, he stands to make millions, possibly tens or hundreds of millions. If the gamble fails, all he is losing is some Bitcoins that he might have picked up much earlier at a very low USD price.
Which is why the jury should always nullify laws in the courtroom.
In plain English, it's cheap labor.
- and just like with any other product or service, the cheaper it is, the more of it is consumed, the cheaper the labour, the more of it can be bought and used productively.
Wages are prices, cheaper labour = cheaper prices and it's a good thing for the economy.
As long as the monarch is a computer and not a person, that is programmed to run a small number of tasks, that are similar to the ones that are given to the government as powers in the original USA Constitution (but take away any type of patent and copyright protections, running the post office, any roads for it, specifically disallow for any form of income related taxes and any form of wealth redistribution, prohibit the monarch from coming up with any type of business related regulations, prohibit the monarch from money manipulation, money should be market based) then it will make perfect sense.
Democracy is garbage, it degenerates into the 'bread and circuses' self destructive behaviour, where the mob votes for more armed robbery committed by the government on behalf of the mob, which is what destroys the individual freedoms and the economy. Complete Anarchy is usually replaced with some type of autocracy or a feudal system, where the results will vary based on the whims of a feudal. Constitutional monarchy, where the rules are set up to provide a very consistent rule of law and where the rules cannot change on the whim of the monarch (thus a computer program that is set up once and protected from any changes) and where the rules are set to provide as much individual freedoms and as little collectivism as possible and where the monarch holds the overriding military power (robots with sharks and lasers?) to protect the system from being manipulated by any outside force makes most sense.
When I go from Switzerland to Germany to France to UK to Belgium to Germany, etc., I prefer having a few 500 notes on me, they are just a convenience.
are you asking this for real? Bitcoins have no intrinsic value, their prices are always pure speculation, nothing else. You can only redeem anything for BTCs as long as somebody else is willing to take them, while speculating that somebody else will also take them off their hands. You can't make anything out of BTCs of any material use, you can't make a bracelet that anybody would want, you can't redeem them into anything unless there is a 'greater fool' out there. Now, I am NOT saying that BTCs will not go up higher, again, they may as well be 1,000,000,000 USD per BTC in some not so distant future. However eventually, without a doubt, the value of BTC will be 0, that's because there is no value except perception, and you are correct in one thing: there WILL be other electronic currencies.
Once there is one that is similar to BTC but where you can actually steadily redeem it for something (for example, 1Electronic Coin for 1 gram of gold), then that Electronic Coin in fact becomes a real currency.
As is, BTC is not a currency, it's MONEY, there is nothing standing behind it, but there is no store of value attribute present in it. Without store of value it's pure speculation, and now with the higher and higher relative prices, it's not even good as a unit of account, just as you mentioned yourself.
Nobody sabotaged it, it is the inherent property of an electronic file that has no real life backing. It can be used as a medium of exchange even now, as long as you can trade into and out of it very quickly and so the value of that is bypassing the traditional banking transfer systems. However once an electronic currency comes into play with a real redeemable quality behind it, then it can also have the same medium of exchange attribute and then BTC falls through the floor.
No, nobody should copy ridiculous ideas and this one won't pass in Switzerland either.
In any case, /. is a complete circle jerk of collectivists of all kinds, from your socialist and Marxist to your fascist, the comments that are found here are a good indicator, which way the system is going and I have bucket of popcorn and a comfortable chair to enjoy this spectacle. You can begin now.
3000 telecommunication companies were destroyed by the USA government to provide a monopoly to AT&T.
The free market invented the telegraph, the phone, the radio, the TV. The Internet did not absolutely need TCP/IP, other protocols would come on line, telecommunications with computers is a logical step to other forms of communications and was inevitable.
You like to point at some specific government programs that ended up being useful but how much money and other resources is wasted by government on things that never work out and only reduce total economic viability?
Well, this is no longer very important, at least not in the USA. Chinese just decided they will no longer buy USA Treasuries and no American media reports on this. Guess what, you can't avoid the reality even if you don't want to acknowledge it.
Not everybody has eye sockets and not all those who have them have eyes, you insensitive clod!
All countries are led forward by the mob and USA used to have a private health care system that was, at the time (before Medicare, Medicaid, SS, and most income taxes, inflation, business regulations) the envy of the world.
The mob is great at destroying the free market and destroying a well working system in the long run.
So I visited that site, despite an 'impressive' vault picture and a bunch of assurances that "the site is built for stability and security", I got this error after clicking on some link: "Database object is busy, please try again later."
Beyond that, here is a note from the site: "Please Note: Short Selling will be enabled on livenet when platform liquidity crosses a preset threshold. This feature is available on CampBX testnet if you would like to try it out in the meantime."
Of-course the real problem with it as I see it, is its location, it's in Alpharetta, Georgia, USA, the country of the Fed, IRS and NSA.
Anything can be used as a 'medium of exchange', BTCs have no unique properties that make it better than anything else, in fact they are too volatile to be useful as medium of exchange.
Think about it, governments are basically contrarian indicators to any truth or knowledge or insight. That's all I wanted to say about this: BTC can be 1,000,000 USD per coin tomorrow or it could be 10 cents. Nobody knows, there is no intrinsic value whatsoever, more currencies of this type are created all the time, that's how you have inflation in BTC (never mind that every single BTC is actually a stack of 10,000,000 coins in its own right, all of which have exactly the same intrinsic value as the 1BTC, which is to say 0).
BTC may as well be 1,000,000,000 dollars in 2 months, who knows, but without a mechanism to SHORT this coin (except by not owning it), what I mean is without a mechanism to borrow coins to sell them, there is no downward pressure at all, while so many people are enticed into this particular pyramid, feeling like they are missing out on something. The early holders of BTC may all be millionaires right now if they sell. They have everything to gain from higher prices, they won't sell and if you want to buy, you have to pay more and more.
What happens when large holders want to sell without any prior shorting in the market?
That is just one tiny example of why gov't shouldn't be regulating any businesses, why it shouldn't be involved in any projects, including infrastructure - no competition. If this law passes, it just gives the gov't established monopoly a special power to tax people because they have no competition. No competing grids, no competing roads, no competing water and sewer and garbage providers, etc.etc. This company COULD, in a free market, do the same thing: impose a fee like that. However if it did, people would have a choice to switch to another provider, however that would have been done, but we can't even KNOW at this point, because of gov't meddling, which gives monopolies to the most connected players.
Your entire comment is just blissful ignorance and nonsense. The economy is in the crapper because of government, not because there are not enough regulations. It's in the crapper because of government, because of collectivist ideology that makes both socialism and fascism possible.
I am happy to tell you that there won't be a government solution to any climate change 'problem', it's not going to happen. In fact if you care about the environment, you should be rooting AGAINST government in all cases, not for it, so that there is more free market capitalism, more competition, more people trying different things, including things that are explicitly prevented by governments from people even attempting, like trying to figure out more efficient uses for nuclear power.
Except that there is NO scarcity with BTC, there is NO anonymity either.
Scarcity is not there, you can subdivide BTC into tens of millions, that's first (and a fraction can be assigned an arbitrary value, it doesn't actually represent a small weight or mass, it represents a number that is not actually different from any other number in the world of computers. The fact that 1BTC can be subdivided into 10,000,000 or so does not change the reality, which is that other types of BTC are already in existence and there will be more of them and they can also be exchanged against BTCs, thus EXTENDING the entire system.
It is not different from government created money, because it is just spawned into existence out of pretty much nothing and it can be extended to infinity, if not under the same name. Of-course it also relies on existing infrastructure (networks, energy) even to be useful, unlike actual physical objects, that can and do exist in the physical world.
Now, I am NOT saying that BTC will not go up in relative prices to USD and other currencies, however what I am saying is that it is a bubble and it has no intrinsic value of its own, but it does extend the intrinsic value of the networks that can provide this as a method of gambling basically. It is a way to extract money from a larger population and to redistribute it to a smaller population, that is better at this particular game.
Snapchat specializes in ephemeral mobile messages, including text or photographs, that disappear after a few seconds. The service has not generated any revenue, but is especially popular among teenagers and young adults, who use the app to send messages to friends.
- I like the use of word 'ephemeral' to describe all three, the services that this company offers, the supposed customer base for it and the actual value of the company.
I see that it was just offered 3,000,000,000 USD and declined it, which while might be height of arrogance, does not surprise me. I would not be surprised to find out that tomorrow this very company gets picked up for 5,000,000,000 USD. I also would not be surprised to find out 2 years from now that it still is not generating any revenues and 3 years from now that its valuation is down to a few million ephemeral dollars (which by that time could be ephemeral all on their own).
Pretty much can't be surprised about anything in this age of rampant inflation and destruction of actual productive economy by the largest government and government manipulation of money in history.
Have you ever wondered why is it that Americans (and some of the Europeans as well) are so in love with the zombie theme? I mean why are zombie movies so popular nowadays?
I have a hypothesis that we see ourselves in the movies, the movies that we like are those, that reflect back to us something about ourselves. Thus at one time westerns were popular, Americans saw themselves as these cowboys, fighting for something, standing for something, whatever. At one time various scary movies were popular, especially during the most seemingly dangerous parts of the cold war, when people thought that a nuclear war was a real possibility.
Now zombie movies are all over the place, everybody is into them. People see themselves for what their society is - a bunch of zombies, from the zombie economy, which is really no longer alive, it's dead and it feeds on other economies and turns them into zombies, to these war machines, which are not dead nor are they alive, but they are out there, searching for people to feed upon.
Just a question: what comes after zombies? After all, apocalyptic movies are also on the rise.
laughably false.
- you shouldn't be giving advice on 'studying history' when you don't know the very basics of it.
Rockefeller's wealth got to the equivalent of 600BILLION USD.
Carnegie's wealth got to the equivalent of 300BILLION USD.
Unless your contention is that average people at the time were multi-millionaires, you should sit down and put a sock in it.
It was rising because the gap was getting narrower.
- ignorant as always.
100 years ago free market enslaved children in sweat shops, poisoned bodies of water, allow real owners to destroy anything in their past. Whole cities would have coal ash in the air all the time, created monopolies that remove choice.
- more ignorance. That's the exact point, the children were working in factories in the beginning of the industrial revolution and as the progress moved forward, their parents stopped needing their help, because the capitalist system made their parents so productive by giving them various labour saving devices (tools) and training them to work with those tools that they became extremely productive compared to all of the generations before them and finally did not have to send their children to work from a very young age. It is never government that stops child labour, it's wealth of the nation and in case of the USA of 19th century, the wealth was growing, not despite, but because of the growing wealth gap.
Cities were created at the time, yes, American cities were not created by governments, they were created by industries.
Anyway, more ignorance from 'geekoid'.
But capitalism alone can't address the needs of the very poor. This means market-driven innovation can actually widen the gap between rich and poor. ... We take a double-pronged approach: (1) Narrow the gap so that advances for the rich world reach the poor world faster, and (2) turn more of the world's IQ toward devising solutions to problems that only people in the poor world face.'"
- a bunch of absolute nonsense.
The people are not suffering poverty because of any 'widening gap' between the rich and the poor. The rich of today pale in comparison to the wealthy of the last century. Rockefellers, Carnegies had 10 times as much wealth as Bill Gates, the 'wealth gap' was much wider, yet the standard of living for the poor was rising, not falling the way it is today.
The reason for it is lack of free market capitalism, not abundance of it. USA has almost no free market capitalism compared to what it used to have 100 years ago. The problem for the poor nations in Africa for example is their government, not the fact that there are people with more money.
The more people with more money exists in the world, the better for everybody, as that money is used as investments. The problem is that the rich ARE NOT as rich as they used to be. Again, Bill Gates is a wealthy man, but he is nothing when compared to Rockefeller and Rockefeller started from scratch, while helping everybody in the world to get access to cheaper, higher quality product (oil in his case). The problem today is that the collectivism has destroyed free market capitalism in places like the USA and Europe, but in Africa the governments were even worse in many cases, completely out of control, seeing the citizens nothing more than a nuisance that needed to be removed from the lands.
The problem is lack of individual freedom and private property ownership and of large government.
Charity? How about using the money wisely to invest in a business opportunity? OTOH somebody who owns part of an oil production probably doesn't care about other business opportunities, but charity? WTF?
There shouldn't be any large unions in the first place, your comment tries hard to make it seem as if it is a bad thing that large unions fall apart.
It is most certainly not a bad thing, the smaller the government, the more competition between smaller governments, the better for the individual freedoms.
As to the rest of it, you are no better at it than the prognosticators of the past. AFAIC people are going towards expansion, not contraction, and this is based on simple observation of history. Regardless of the plagues, regardless of the insane, enormous, almost all encompassing and protracted wars, the people only lose a few percentage points of the population and then there is a boom in population growth that follows those.
As to metals, etc., metals are easily recycled, but more importantly, we don't actually need metals for everything. Using more carbon and silica structures is something that is expanding, not contracting. Metal of-course can be found outside of the planet itself. The problem is not metals, the problem is energy and this one has to be solved by working out more designs of various techniques to use nuclear of various types. Beyond that, there are plenty of metals deeper in the planet, we have been only scratching the surface here.
Again, the real question is energy. It's everything, from food and heating, to transport, to housing, to medicine, everything is energy intensive. If we can expand our energy production, then we'll expand our population and all other problems only become opportunities for the free market capitalism to be solved.
If we don't expand our energy production, we will contract, that's all there is to it. Energy production is also something that free market capitalism will solve, the real question becomes: will we allow free market capitalism or will be attempt to destroy it, as we are always set on doing?
However AFAIC free market capitalism finds the way, that's why USSR fell apart, that's why USA became the most productive and wealthy country on the planet in the 19th century, that's why China is likely the most productive and prosperous country today. Lack of free market capitalism is what destroys nations, that's why USA is failing today, that's why there will be more and more failures based on large governments around the world. As failures intensify, the people will have a choice: keep at it and try and clench the fist of collectivism tighter or allow free market capitalism to work.
I think after making a bunch of wrong decisions, people will eventually stumble upon the correct choice, but because it will not be done consciously, the road is rocky, but not what you think it is going to be.
I am interested in building a service that would compile this public record information with other information, that I may come from other sources, like the social media, maybe some private company records, etc. and I would sell this information to the willing employers for a subscription fee. If there is a way to identify the employees that file claims against employers, this information needs to be provided to the employers that are interested in figuring out if they are hiring somebody who is more likely to sue them and then it's their choice to take or not to take this risk.
Information needs to be provided.
It sounds very positive.
Google... is evil.
- says you, because Google is able to monetise some information that is in fact not useful to you personally because you are not collecting and not looking at it and you are unable to understand that what Google does is it collects this information about you to present it back to you in a way, because that's what targeted advertising is. It's your own information given back to you after some analysis, so rather than getting bombarded with a metric ton of useless ads you maybe bombarded with a ton of ads that have at least some tangential relation to your life.
Google is as 'evil' by using this data to give you back something that you may in fact use (and they are able to get this data from you because you are using a bunch of free services, so it's a mutual relationship, it takes 2 to tango). Aren't YOU evil by using Google services while expecting not to pay for anything they give you in any way, while it is obvious that they are expecting you to pay with the data they can collect?