As an employer (who pays above minimum wage anyway, the labour *market* sets the price for software and hardware developers higher than the artificial limit that the mob decides must be the minimum), I can tell you what I do. I have multiple teams where the vast majority of workers are located in countries with a much lower salary expectation and very few employees where the expectation for absolute dollar amounts per hour are high. This allows me to hire more people than I could otherwise. Obviously for a small retail place or a restaurant this does not work yet, they cannot outsource, so they will automate instead (and I will provide some of that automation).
Minimum wage sets a limit on the number of people a business that pays it cab hire. There shouldn't be an artificial minimum wage at all, you don't have to work for a business if you don't like the wage. Of course with the minimum wage present the amount that the businesses have for salaries is strictly limited, so they hire fewer people.
Minimum wage is responsible for lack of grocery baggers, fuel station attendants, cashiers, people answering phones, etc. Minimum wage gives the left a war cry they can employ to rally the troops as a response to the inflation created by the government central bankers and the resulting rising prices. Minimum wage is a convenient ruse for the government unions to push for their pay increases.
Minimum wage actually sets minimum ability of the applicant when hired by a large business and it sets maximum people when hired by a small one
Central bankers should know a thing or two about apocalypses, after all they routinely bring about destruction that takes down economies and nations. Central bankers by definition are the financial arms of the state and when a state goes rogue (as in it becomes collectivist) it uses its financial arms to clip coins. Clipping coins never led to anything constructive, it is a destructive activity that Sir Isaac Newton would hang people for.
Central bankers would have you believe that technological progress requires more involvement of the central bankers of course. They love their positions of power, they never actually have to work and do something actually useful for a change and they destroy the money (at the requests/demands from the government but they love doing what the government wants, it makes them feel useful and powerful).
Central bankers love to think they can control an economy "like stepping on gas or break pedals", in reality they are nothing more than elephants in a fine China shop, destroying the real economy while blowing bubbles to create an illusion of an economy (have to have an illusion, once they are done with the real thing an illusion is all that is left).
Central bankers, not automation destroy jobs. Central bankers and the inflation they create is what causes businesses to offshore, scale down, shut down, go bankrupt. Central bankers destroy the businesses and jobs and standard of living for all. Too bad central bankers are not automated away by a small script that would answer all government demands and requests to 'help' with a consistent and a never yielding 'no'.
when people found out I worked in the government (called a pig at the trough, incompetent, stupid, lazy, a drone, had my car vandalized multiple times, threaten with death on a weekly basis, and assaulted) and got a job in the private sector that pays one hell of a lot better.
- wow, I am all teared up, not everything is lost, there are more people out there who are willing to do what is needed and push government employees out of government positions. Too bad this tactic doesn't work on congressmen and other politicians, only on low level drones like what you were.
Government must not oppress individuals and must not be allowed to legislate any form of compassion, etc. Government is in it's most basic form an evil. Some believe it is a necessary evil, I not I'm that camp, it pure evil, it should be stopped. Good for you that you got out.
Of course nobody should ever under any circumstances be forced by any form of collective government to pay for anybody else for any purpose, education, health care, anything at all. Everyone must survive on his or her own, nothing should be stolen from anybody to help anybody. Voluntary private charity is still there and more of it would exist if taxes didn't.
Profit is the opposite of a tax. Profit is generated from voluntary participation of trading sides, tax is never voluntary, tax is a forceful removal of money by a collective mob.
People came to the USA for independence, there is the *independence day*, there is no *interdependence day*
I lived in many countries in my life, I value independence and individualism above all else and I am far from a Puritan.
AFAIC freedom trumps convenience and any feeling of safety. I do not cooperate by decree, I do not collaborate by force, I do not see you as anything but a trade partner if you can offer me something of value to me on voluntary basis. I am not part of anything greater than myself and will not be part of any group. You cannot make me fight a war for you, you cannot make me work for you. You can trade with me if you find what I produce of value to you voluntarily.
That is all you can expect from me and I am telling you this upfront openly so you know not to expect any sacrifice on my part. I make rational decisions for my own benefit. I consider all coercion to be damaging to me. I exist for myself and maybe my close relatives and possibly a friend, that is all.
Don't worry, 'troll' moderation will take care of it and will hide it from your eyes, wouldn't it? My other comments in this thread are already at -1, so you don't have to read any of it, go on your merry way.
As to being a 'sociopath', with the society that I observe around me it is very easy not to like it one bit. What is there to like? Religions? To me religions are collectivist mobs just as much as democratically elected politicians that got elected by promising theft and destruction of individual freedoms. Should I like the government systems that are constantly waging wars and murder and maim individuals and economies? What is there to like in this collective?
I like individuals, I like individual entrepreneurs or researchers, I like individuals who stand up against the collective, I like people that do what they must on their own without bothering with the public opinion.
So yes, I don't like the so called 'society' but I am a humanist because I see the value of individuals when they are acting on their own, in their own self interest working for themselves.
Trump is a toy, hopefully he can be used for the good of humanism and for destruction of the collective.
Nobody is preventing a legless invalid from having the right to participating in society. A right is protection against government oppression. Are the disabled oppressed by the government and are not legally allowed to take a bus?
You are never talking about rights, you are talking about entitlements, call things what they are and then you will understand that the demands put forward by the disabled are not about their rights, it is about their entitlement to live their lives paid for by the rest of the people who have absolutely *nothing* to do with them. To force everybody else to pay for their transportation, parking, special toilets, whatever it is.
A business that believes it will have a good chunk of the disabled patron its establishment does not need any laws or lawsuits to create accessible environment at an extra expense to the business.
However a business that does not want to deal with this will not be frequented by the disabled and that is the end of it. That business should not be forced to cater to the disabled no matter what you believe.
I think USA economy is falling apart and your ideology is the reason for it, it should fall apart, the flood of failure is needed sometimes to wash away the ruins that caused it.
We are a lawless society, the laws apply differently to different groups of people, this is lawlessness masquerading as lawfulness.
A lawful society would not apply different standards of different groups of people. There wouldn't be such a concept as a graduated income tax for example, all taxes would be flat, because the society wouldn't discriminate against people based on their income level and of-course graduating income taxes up is hitting a smaller and smaller minority, a minority cannot do anything in the voting booth against a majority, so the majority are stealing from the minority and calling it a 'democracy'. You call this law, I call this oppression.
I think there are still too many jobs left in the USA, more jobs must go somewhere else. More jobs need to leave the country that punishes people for building businesses that is my opinion.
In my *NOT SO HUMBLE OPINION* all of this government oppression that allows somebody with a disability to sue a company for not providing that person with some extra entitlements that other customers do not receive. This is government oppression, this is violation of property rights, this is theft and economic destruction.
Jobs and businesses in general need to leave and go some place where people who start businesses are not treated as fucking second class citizens because they start a business.
There shouldn't be any income or wealth taxes, there shouldn't be any idiotic ideas about providing people with disabilities with entitlements at the expense of the businesses that are doing whatever they can but not necessarily catering to a particular segment of the population.
I should be within my full rights to start a company catering specifically to women or specifically to men or specifically to children or specifically to people without disabilities or specifically to people with disabilities or any mix of the above. People of any specific age or race or colour or culture or language, etc., anybody should be able to start a company catering to a specific subset of people. Catering to gays, catering to not gays, catering to people who only have any one arm and their left ear but not necessarily people with both ears.
Government creates these entitlements that destroy any ability and even desire to do business in such environment.
There's a part of me that wonders if one could actually do better "under the table", at least on the short term
- the issue is that as a business you need to write off the money that you are paying your workers against your gross revenues, otherwise you will be taxed on income that was paid out as salaries. What you are suggesting works if the income itself can be received without a receipt (which is possible for restaurants, while food can be written of as spoilage).
Why is that? As a private person I incorporated (that's for tax purposes) and hired people to do what I needed them to do, I paid out of my savings, why should somebody be forced to work for free?
So what you are saying is that: working for free is fine as long as you don't hire somebody from any other place other than where you live for money? Hiring somebody that you can afford to hire for money is not good, only having free workforce is good?????
A vegetarian such as myself does not object to people eating meat, fish, eggs and such, I don't eat them because I am experimenting with my health, not because I care about not eating animals.
Almost 700 years ago a massive plague wiped out tens or maybe hundreds of millions of Europeans and today a computer virus caused massive outages of service for retailers, banks, manufacturers, airports and government offices (the most irrelevant of all problems, maybe an actual benefit even). Obviously this is all connected and it's Russia that caused it obviously (Petia - diminutive of Petr or Peter if you like.)
Let me ask you something, if a private person wants to build an application and resell it should he want to pay more to develop it or should he save the money wherever possible? Also if he has a budget should he spend it on higher salaries or on more people?
Just want to hear your ideas on how to run a business, you must be a successful business person, knowing how things should really be done.
Does a metal have intrinsic value in this Universe? It does, a metal is a very small part of the total composition of the Universe, by the very nature of it being rare it is intrinsically valuable because its properties (properties of a rare substance relative to the rest of the Universe) are so different from most of what exists (Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon, Silicon). The total content of heavy elements within the Universe is on the order of ~0.03% of total matter, so it is rare and as such a rarity it is valuable in itself.
As to random (or non-random) numbers in files, what is their value if we can generate as many of them as we like and fill all our storage media with them? There is nothing at all that is valuable about any sequence of numbers and other characters in a file except if the message that is represented by this number is valued by somebody, but even there there is a difference.
A digital photograph of your memories is more valuable to you than a file filled with random noise (I presume). So if a Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency is no longer in demand because the network that used to exchange it doesn't exist anymore (it exchanges some other cryptocurrency) the number that represents a coin is no different from any other random number, thus intrinsically it is valueless.
There's at least a factor of 40 between the spot price of gold and the round-trip cost per kilo of materials on the moon.
- sure, that's because there is no gold on the Moon that the costs are what they are. With the gold there we would have worked on cost reductions for at least 50 years and would have been mining already, definitely with robots.
You don't like the idea of these currencies; neither do I.
- I don't? Where did I say that or how did you derive it from what I wrote? How did you come to the conclusion that 'I do not like these currencies'. I don't actively dislike them, I have a little bit of this and a little bit of that, I don't have any reasons to dislike them.
and then look for reasons why that means that CCs are bad. You have an agenda, then you go looking for facts. In other words, you're a tool.
- you are a tool since you cannot parse meanings of sentences.
My position is though they are speculative vehicles and cannot store value because there is nothing in them that makes them valuable without the momentarily desire of the network to exchange them.
My hypothesis is that cryptocurrencies without any backing can be either valuable or they can be stable but they cannot be both at the same time.
Currencies actually work better when they have no intrinsic value.
- nonsense.
It's one of the reasons that commodity money is rarely found outside black markets
- wrong. The reason is that governments do not want to have to be tied to something hard that cannot be printed, that's the reason, nothing else.
BitCoin is becoming more stable
- nonsense.
There is no real difference between it and any other currency other than the issuer and the current volatility.
- I don't dispute that fiat currencies of the day are just as intrinsically worthless as crypto-currencies.
If the moon had precious metals on it we would mine it today already, that much is certain. The moon is made of silicon and some metals, mostly of oxides (thus oxygen). Silicon is abundant on Earth, so no reason to mine that there.
Intrinsic value is not actually that difficult, it is value that is not decreed and it is not tied to being money, it is value in itself as the property of whatever is under discussion. A human has intrinsic value outside of being productive, for example a human can serve as an organ donor, or a companion, or just as a member of the audience, as a representative of the species - DNA carrier, there you go, there is some value there not even specifically tied to the function of being a human. There are over 7 billion of us, so in reality intrinsic value of any particular human is quite low, but it exists.
The value of a specific number in a file, taken out of a group of other numbers is valuable if somebody wants it for that unique property - being part of a group that represents an idea that a network of people find attractive. However taken all by itself, out of context of that group, desired by a subset of people this number has no value that is worth anything to anybody. It could be a random string of alphanumeric characters and what is the value of that? How many files of more intrinsic value are on your computer? You have some photographs, videos, bank account numbers, encryption keys, those all have stand alone value that is higher than a bitcoin or any coin of a cryptocurrency not backed by anything tangible that is no longer in demand. The only reason to demand a coin is to be able to use it as a coin, no other purpose exists, no intrinsic value higher than a random number generator would provide.
AFAIC all cryptocurrencies not backed by anything solid (something tangible, whatever that is) are either stable or valuable but they cannot be both. They are traded as long as they are valuable, which makes them (and requires them to be) unstable, it is their instability that is valuable. If they are stable, the value disappears. Nobody wants to be in a stable cryptocurrency that is backed by nothing, that's because a currency backed by nothing only leads to inflation and loss of value, it cannot keep value, that's because unbacked currencies have no intrinsic value.
Intrinsic value is not a value assigned to something by decree, it is a value in itself. Any metal on this planet is valuable to some degree, some metals are more valuable than others (and this can change with time), but metals are valuable in themselves without being money.
Something that is only an electronic file with some number in it that is not backed by anything that has intrinsic value is only valuable as long as there are people desiring it for its *only* property, which is specifically to be money (in case of unbacked cryptocurrencies).
Nobody wants to be in a cryptocurrency that is not growing, people move to currencies that grow, these currencies cannot grow all the time, so there are wild swings in pricing, however if they stop growing they lose value and become stable. This stability may or may not last, but a currency like this must grow to be valuable, otherwise it is very stable and not valuable to anybody interested in growing cryptocurrencies.
This is an example of free market at work, a company invested resources and failed to deliver, this is a good thing, those resources were getting wasted (whatever the reasons) and eventually the investor took the losses and stopped thus preventing further losses of scarce resources on a failing project. This is how things should be done, but when a government gets involved it tells us it is going to 'save' jobs by taxing or borrowing or printing money and propping up the failures. This is economically stupid behaviour, the failures need to be allowed to fail, whether the failing party is a business or an individual. It is necessary to allow failure to work through the process of deleveraging, reducing the expenses, restructuring the debts and starting over.
You know, there is an actual name for things that access a database (any database, shared or not) and implement some domain specific logic. They are called programs.
'Micro service' is yet another silver bullet and it solves precisely dick if it is used as part of a push towards it rather than being used once in a while when it makes sense (and would always make sense whenever people decide to write a new program).
Here is the actual reason people jump from one silver bullet to another cyclically: programs grow, the developers move on, time passes, requirements grow and change, documentation gets stale, nobody remembers what it is anymore, management changes and developers move on into architecture and feel the need to differentiate themselves with something buzzwordy.
Any 'micro' service will eventually do more and more to manage requirements, the communications between 'micro' services is just like communications between any services within a monolith, only more expensive to maintain.
All of this follows normal rules of entropy, there are no silver bullets and everything new is repackaged old.
Something to consider: if evolution of our bodies used micro services, would we have eyes running separately from our heads with their own tiny feet?
Slashdot Mirror
As an employer (who pays above minimum wage anyway, the labour *market* sets the price for software and hardware developers higher than the artificial limit that the mob decides must be the minimum), I can tell you what I do. I have multiple teams where the vast majority of workers are located in countries with a much lower salary expectation and very few employees where the expectation for absolute dollar amounts per hour are high. This allows me to hire more people than I could otherwise. Obviously for a small retail place or a restaurant this does not work yet, they cannot outsource, so they will automate instead (and I will provide some of that automation).
Minimum wage sets a limit on the number of people a business that pays it cab hire. There shouldn't be an artificial minimum wage at all, you don't have to work for a business if you don't like the wage. Of course with the minimum wage present the amount that the businesses have for salaries is strictly limited, so they hire fewer people.
Minimum wage is responsible for lack of grocery baggers, fuel station attendants, cashiers, people answering phones, etc. Minimum wage gives the left a war cry they can employ to rally the troops as a response to the inflation created by the government central bankers and the resulting rising prices. Minimum wage is a convenient ruse for the government unions to push for their pay increases.
Minimum wage actually sets minimum ability of the applicant when hired by a large business and it sets maximum people when hired by a small one
Central bankers should know a thing or two about apocalypses, after all they routinely bring about destruction that takes down economies and nations. Central bankers by definition are the financial arms of the state and when a state goes rogue (as in it becomes collectivist) it uses its financial arms to clip coins. Clipping coins never led to anything constructive, it is a destructive activity that Sir Isaac Newton would hang people for.
Central bankers would have you believe that technological progress requires more involvement of the central bankers of course. They love their positions of power, they never actually have to work and do something actually useful for a change and they destroy the money (at the requests/demands from the government but they love doing what the government wants, it makes them feel useful and powerful).
Central bankers love to think they can control an economy "like stepping on gas or break pedals", in reality they are nothing more than elephants in a fine China shop, destroying the real economy while blowing bubbles to create an illusion of an economy (have to have an illusion, once they are done with the real thing an illusion is all that is left).
Central bankers, not automation destroy jobs. Central bankers and the inflation they create is what causes businesses to offshore, scale down, shut down, go bankrupt. Central bankers destroy the businesses and jobs and standard of living for all. Too bad central bankers are not automated away by a small script that would answer all government demands and requests to 'help' with a consistent and a never yielding 'no'.
when people found out I worked in the government (called a pig at the trough, incompetent, stupid, lazy, a drone, had my car vandalized multiple times, threaten with death on a weekly basis, and assaulted) and got a job in the private sector that pays one hell of a lot better.
- wow, I am all teared up, not everything is lost, there are more people out there who are willing to do what is needed and push government employees out of government positions. Too bad this tactic doesn't work on congressmen and other politicians, only on low level drones like what you were.
Government must not oppress individuals and must not be allowed to legislate any form of compassion, etc. Government is in it's most basic form an evil. Some believe it is a necessary evil, I not I'm that camp, it pure evil, it should be stopped. Good for you that you got out.
Of course nobody should ever under any circumstances be forced by any form of collective government to pay for anybody else for any purpose, education, health care, anything at all. Everyone must survive on his or her own, nothing should be stolen from anybody to help anybody. Voluntary private charity is still there and more of it would exist if taxes didn't.
Profit is the opposite of a tax. Profit is generated from voluntary participation of trading sides, tax is never voluntary, tax is a forceful removal of money by a collective mob.
People came to the USA for independence, there is the *independence day*, there is no *interdependence day*
I lived in many countries in my life, I value independence and individualism above all else and I am far from a Puritan.
AFAIC freedom trumps convenience and any feeling of safety. I do not cooperate by decree, I do not collaborate by force, I do not see you as anything but a trade partner if you can offer me something of value to me on voluntary basis. I am not part of anything greater than myself and will not be part of any group. You cannot make me fight a war for you, you cannot make me work for you. You can trade with me if you find what I produce of value to you voluntarily.
That is all you can expect from me and I am telling you this upfront openly so you know not to expect any sacrifice on my part. I make rational decisions for my own benefit. I consider all coercion to be damaging to me. I exist for myself and maybe my close relatives and possibly a friend, that is all.
I noticed just now something about /. headline style that seems a bit new to me and it is not too subtle.
Germany Approves Plans To Fine Social Media Firms Up To $57M
Investors Who Back VC Funds Are Worried About Valley Culture
With a Single Wiretap Order, US Authorities Listened In on 3.3 Million Phone Calls
Facebook Inches Closer To Its Goal of Beaming Internet to World's Remotest Places
Japan Wants To Put a Man On the Moon, Accelerating Asian Space Race
The Life, Death, and Legacy of iPhone Jailbreaking
Ends, Means, and Antitrust
A Million Bottles a Minute: World's Plastic Binge 'As Dangerous as Climate Change'
Vertu, Phone-Maker To the Rich, Says It's Broke
You're Thinking About the Dictionary All Wrong, Lexicographers Say
The Age of Distributed Truth
AMD Launches Ryzen PRO CPUs: Enhanced Security, Longer Warranty, Better Quality
Sony Will Start Pressing Vinyl Records After 28-Year Hiatus
France Drops Windows 10 Privacy Case After Microsoft Changes Telemetry Settings
India Presses Microsoft For Windows Discount in Wake of Cyber Attacks
Look at all these headlines... Can you see?
0 is not livable??? Maybe the absolute 0 is not livable, but I routinely live in places that get below 0, significantly below 0.
You should maybe consider no longer fucking their mothers for a change then?
Don't worry, 'troll' moderation will take care of it and will hide it from your eyes, wouldn't it? My other comments in this thread are already at -1, so you don't have to read any of it, go on your merry way.
As to being a 'sociopath', with the society that I observe around me it is very easy not to like it one bit. What is there to like? Religions? To me religions are collectivist mobs just as much as democratically elected politicians that got elected by promising theft and destruction of individual freedoms. Should I like the government systems that are constantly waging wars and murder and maim individuals and economies? What is there to like in this collective?
I like individuals, I like individual entrepreneurs or researchers, I like individuals who stand up against the collective, I like people that do what they must on their own without bothering with the public opinion.
So yes, I don't like the so called 'society' but I am a humanist because I see the value of individuals when they are acting on their own, in their own self interest working for themselves.
Trump is a toy, hopefully he can be used for the good of humanism and for destruction of the collective.
Then you shouldn't be expecting police, healthcare, public education or military protection.
- why would I expect something that I am actively against in the first place?
Nobody is preventing a legless invalid from having the right to participating in society. A right is protection against government oppression. Are the disabled oppressed by the government and are not legally allowed to take a bus?
You are never talking about rights, you are talking about entitlements, call things what they are and then you will understand that the demands put forward by the disabled are not about their rights, it is about their entitlement to live their lives paid for by the rest of the people who have absolutely *nothing* to do with them. To force everybody else to pay for their transportation, parking, special toilets, whatever it is.
A business that believes it will have a good chunk of the disabled patron its establishment does not need any laws or lawsuits to create accessible environment at an extra expense to the business.
However a business that does not want to deal with this will not be frequented by the disabled and that is the end of it. That business should not be forced to cater to the disabled no matter what you believe.
I think USA economy is falling apart and your ideology is the reason for it, it should fall apart, the flood of failure is needed sometimes to wash away the ruins that caused it.
We are a lawless society, the laws apply differently to different groups of people, this is lawlessness masquerading as lawfulness.
A lawful society would not apply different standards of different groups of people. There wouldn't be such a concept as a graduated income tax for example, all taxes would be flat, because the society wouldn't discriminate against people based on their income level and of-course graduating income taxes up is hitting a smaller and smaller minority, a minority cannot do anything in the voting booth against a majority, so the majority are stealing from the minority and calling it a 'democracy'. You call this law, I call this oppression.
I think there are still too many jobs left in the USA, more jobs must go somewhere else. More jobs need to leave the country that punishes people for building businesses that is my opinion.
In my *NOT SO HUMBLE OPINION* all of this government oppression that allows somebody with a disability to sue a company for not providing that person with some extra entitlements that other customers do not receive. This is government oppression, this is violation of property rights, this is theft and economic destruction.
Jobs and businesses in general need to leave and go some place where people who start businesses are not treated as fucking second class citizens because they start a business.
There shouldn't be any income or wealth taxes, there shouldn't be any idiotic ideas about providing people with disabilities with entitlements at the expense of the businesses that are doing whatever they can but not necessarily catering to a particular segment of the population.
I should be within my full rights to start a company catering specifically to women or specifically to men or specifically to children or specifically to people without disabilities or specifically to people with disabilities or any mix of the above. People of any specific age or race or colour or culture or language, etc., anybody should be able to start a company catering to a specific subset of people. Catering to gays, catering to not gays, catering to people who only have any one arm and their left ear but not necessarily people with both ears.
Government creates these entitlements that destroy any ability and even desire to do business in such environment.
There's a part of me that wonders if one could actually do better "under the table", at least on the short term
- the issue is that as a business you need to write off the money that you are paying your workers against your gross revenues, otherwise you will be taxed on income that was paid out as salaries. What you are suggesting works if the income itself can be received without a receipt (which is possible for restaurants, while food can be written of as spoilage).
Why is that? As a private person I incorporated (that's for tax purposes) and hired people to do what I needed them to do, I paid out of my savings, why should somebody be forced to work for free?
So what you are saying is that: working for free is fine as long as you don't hire somebody from any other place other than where you live for money? Hiring somebody that you can afford to hire for money is not good, only having free workforce is good?????
A vegetarian such as myself does not object to people eating meat, fish, eggs and such, I don't eat them because I am experimenting with my health, not because I care about not eating animals.
Almost 700 years ago a massive plague wiped out tens or maybe hundreds of millions of Europeans and today a computer virus caused massive outages of service for retailers, banks, manufacturers, airports and government offices (the most irrelevant of all problems, maybe an actual benefit even). Obviously this is all connected and it's Russia that caused it obviously (Petia - diminutive of Petr or Peter if you like.)
Let me ask you something, if a private person wants to build an application and resell it should he want to pay more to develop it or should he save the money wherever possible? Also if he has a budget should he spend it on higher salaries or on more people?
Just want to hear your ideas on how to run a business, you must be a successful business person, knowing how things should really be done.
Does a metal have intrinsic value in this Universe? It does, a metal is a very small part of the total composition of the Universe, by the very nature of it being rare it is intrinsically valuable because its properties (properties of a rare substance relative to the rest of the Universe) are so different from most of what exists (Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon, Silicon). The total content of heavy elements within the Universe is on the order of ~0.03% of total matter, so it is rare and as such a rarity it is valuable in itself.
As to random (or non-random) numbers in files, what is their value if we can generate as many of them as we like and fill all our storage media with them? There is nothing at all that is valuable about any sequence of numbers and other characters in a file except if the message that is represented by this number is valued by somebody, but even there there is a difference.
A digital photograph of your memories is more valuable to you than a file filled with random noise (I presume). So if a Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency is no longer in demand because the network that used to exchange it doesn't exist anymore (it exchanges some other cryptocurrency) the number that represents a coin is no different from any other random number, thus intrinsically it is valueless.
There's at least a factor of 40 between the spot price of gold and the round-trip cost per kilo of materials on the moon.
- sure, that's because there is no gold on the Moon that the costs are what they are. With the gold there we would have worked on cost reductions for at least 50 years and would have been mining already, definitely with robots.
You don't like the idea of these currencies; neither do I.
- I don't? Where did I say that or how did you derive it from what I wrote? How did you come to the conclusion that 'I do not like these currencies'. I don't actively dislike them, I have a little bit of this and a little bit of that, I don't have any reasons to dislike them.
and then look for reasons why that means that CCs are bad. You have an agenda, then you go looking for facts. In other words, you're a tool.
- you are a tool since you cannot parse meanings of sentences.
My position is though they are speculative vehicles and cannot store value because there is nothing in them that makes them valuable without the momentarily desire of the network to exchange them.
My hypothesis is that cryptocurrencies without any backing can be either valuable or they can be stable but they cannot be both at the same time.
Currencies actually work better when they have no intrinsic value.
- nonsense.
It's one of the reasons that commodity money is rarely found outside black markets
- wrong. The reason is that governments do not want to have to be tied to something hard that cannot be printed, that's the reason, nothing else.
BitCoin is becoming more stable
- nonsense.
There is no real difference between it and any other currency other than the issuer and the current volatility.
- I don't dispute that fiat currencies of the day are just as intrinsically worthless as crypto-currencies.
If the moon had precious metals on it we would mine it today already, that much is certain. The moon is made of silicon and some metals, mostly of oxides (thus oxygen). Silicon is abundant on Earth, so no reason to mine that there.
Intrinsic value is not actually that difficult, it is value that is not decreed and it is not tied to being money, it is value in itself as the property of whatever is under discussion. A human has intrinsic value outside of being productive, for example a human can serve as an organ donor, or a companion, or just as a member of the audience, as a representative of the species - DNA carrier, there you go, there is some value there not even specifically tied to the function of being a human. There are over 7 billion of us, so in reality intrinsic value of any particular human is quite low, but it exists.
The value of a specific number in a file, taken out of a group of other numbers is valuable if somebody wants it for that unique property - being part of a group that represents an idea that a network of people find attractive. However taken all by itself, out of context of that group, desired by a subset of people this number has no value that is worth anything to anybody. It could be a random string of alphanumeric characters and what is the value of that? How many files of more intrinsic value are on your computer? You have some photographs, videos, bank account numbers, encryption keys, those all have stand alone value that is higher than a bitcoin or any coin of a cryptocurrency not backed by anything tangible that is no longer in demand. The only reason to demand a coin is to be able to use it as a coin, no other purpose exists, no intrinsic value higher than a random number generator would provide.
AFAIC all cryptocurrencies not backed by anything solid (something tangible, whatever that is) are either stable or valuable but they cannot be both. They are traded as long as they are valuable, which makes them (and requires them to be) unstable, it is their instability that is valuable. If they are stable, the value disappears. Nobody wants to be in a stable cryptocurrency that is backed by nothing, that's because a currency backed by nothing only leads to inflation and loss of value, it cannot keep value, that's because unbacked currencies have no intrinsic value.
Intrinsic value is not a value assigned to something by decree, it is a value in itself. Any metal on this planet is valuable to some degree, some metals are more valuable than others (and this can change with time), but metals are valuable in themselves without being money.
Something that is only an electronic file with some number in it that is not backed by anything that has intrinsic value is only valuable as long as there are people desiring it for its *only* property, which is specifically to be money (in case of unbacked cryptocurrencies).
Nobody wants to be in a cryptocurrency that is not growing, people move to currencies that grow, these currencies cannot grow all the time, so there are wild swings in pricing, however if they stop growing they lose value and become stable. This stability may or may not last, but a currency like this must grow to be valuable, otherwise it is very stable and not valuable to anybody interested in growing cryptocurrencies.
This is an example of free market at work, a company invested resources and failed to deliver, this is a good thing, those resources were getting wasted (whatever the reasons) and eventually the investor took the losses and stopped thus preventing further losses of scarce resources on a failing project. This is how things should be done, but when a government gets involved it tells us it is going to 'save' jobs by taxing or borrowing or printing money and propping up the failures. This is economically stupid behaviour, the failures need to be allowed to fail, whether the failing party is a business or an individual. It is necessary to allow failure to work through the process of deleveraging, reducing the expenses, restructuring the debts and starting over.
You know, there is an actual name for things that access a database (any database, shared or not) and implement some domain specific logic. They are called programs.
'Micro service' is yet another silver bullet and it solves precisely dick if it is used as part of a push towards it rather than being used once in a while when it makes sense (and would always make sense whenever people decide to write a new program).
Here is the actual reason people jump from one silver bullet to another cyclically: programs grow, the developers move on, time passes, requirements grow and change, documentation gets stale, nobody remembers what it is anymore, management changes and developers move on into architecture and feel the need to differentiate themselves with something buzzwordy.
Any 'micro' service will eventually do more and more to manage requirements, the communications between 'micro' services is just like communications between any services within a monolith, only more expensive to maintain.
All of this follows normal rules of entropy, there are no silver bullets and everything new is repackaged old.
Something to consider: if evolution of our bodies used micro services, would we have eyes running separately from our heads with their own tiny feet?