It's not that there aren't people who want to work in the sex industry - there absolutely are. However, as studies repeatedly bear out, the number who want to is far below the demand; most people who work in the sex industry don't want to be there, and abusive trafficking is an inevitable consequence of this situation.
Making prostitution symmetrically illegal doesn't solve the problem. By making it illegal and aggressively policing it, yes, you cut down on part of the demand. But you also cut down on the supply. And since the ratio of clients to sex workers is far greater than 1, it's much easier to crack down on the "supply" side of the equation, thus increasing the trafficking motive. On the other hand, making it fully legal causes a boom in demand (and especially sex tourism), which usually is associated with a trafficking boom.
I'm personally a fan of the Nordic system: purchasing sex is illegal, as is pimping, but selling sex is perfectly illegal. After all, if your goal is to stamp out trafficking and protect abused women, why would you throw them in jail? The Nordic system cuts demand without cutting supply, thus heavily damaging the trafficking motive; it's been very successful. There are some things you have to be careful about, of course - for example, in the first version of the Swedish laws they had problems with landlords kicking prostitutes out, out of fear that they'd get caught up in anti-pimping / anti-brothel laws (the laws were later amended to address this). But in general it's been shown to work well. It also makes it so that prostitutes are unafraid of having to deal with the police, which means better crime reporting and an all-around better environment for them.
Interesting article, although the debris and animal feces were at an Aerojet facility, not SpaceX, according to the article. All three vendors, however, were faulted (SpaceX, ULA and Aerojet).
There's no need to "pick up" tholins; they seem to naturally form everywhere we look in the distant solar system, from simple carbon and nitrogen compounds. Kuiper belt objects are a mix of red (tholins) and white (ices); where you see ices, that's generally young terrain. Actually, to be fair, tholins are more of a rust brown than "red", but that's picking at straws;) Tholins are an extremely broad range of chemical compounds (some very long), and probably differ significantly in ratios from place to place, but form a family of common celestial organic "gunk".
And on that front, it's kept up its growth by moving from the most hardcore crypto-anarcho-capitalists into general libertarians and geeks into the general, computer-illiterate / non-ideologically-driven public who only has a vague idea what bitcoin is, but they're buying it because it's going up in value.
Eventually you run out of suckers. Those who correctly predicted or lucked into a big wave of suckers behind them, and then get out, end up with said suckers money. That's how these things work.
Update: Coinbase said Tuesday evening users wouldn't be able to buy and sell bitcoin cash four hours after it said trading of the cryptocurrency would be enabled on its platforms. Chief executive Brian Armstrong said the company is looking into whether employees tried to profit from advanced knowledge of the news.
Seriously, is it even possible for there to be any new event related to cryptocurrencies without them turning into some sort of scam, hack, insider trading, or other such event? Seriously...
That's very much Musk's plan. Superchargers are going to battery buffered designs. Megachargers are going to have huge battery buffers. And just wait til you see the size of the battery buffers at ports when container shipping goes electric;) Dozens of gigawatt hours per port.
Having battery buffers embedded in chargers does double duty with a single piece of hardware: it buffers both supply (grid instability) and demand (the randomness of fast charging loads, from "extreme" to "none").
Actually, no, it wasnt engineered to back up a power plant in Victoria, it was engineered to back up power in South Australia. There was an entirely different coal power plant that was supposed to back up Loy Yang (which is one of Australia's largest) - a plant that ratepayers have to pay to keep running on standby, which is supposed to hold the grid up until downed power plants can be brought back up and/or more baseload elsewhere ramped up. But from nearly 1000km away, the Tesla battery did the standby plant's job for it during its 4-second wakeup time - stopping and reversing the decline in grid frequency so that there wasn't even a meaningful blink in power quality.
This is not what the Tesla battery was designed to do. It was designed to deal with situations with downed lines / plants in South Australia, to keep the lights on there. It wasn't supposed to take over the work from standby plants halfway across the country. That it technically can should surprise nobody. But that's not what it was purchased to do.
To be really fair, when someone predicts something and their prediction turns out accurate, then their hypothesis is *probably* correct.
So if I predict "Company A's stock will rise and become huge!", and then the next day someone blows up Company A's headquarters in a terrorst attack, is that my fault that the prediction turned out bad? Heck, Sanders isn't even making a prediction, just an observation about the present.
Most of the disastrous policies that led to Venezuela's plunge were enacted under Maduro. His approach to deal with the decline in income in 2014 was, rather than cutting back, to pretend that it wasn't happening by printing more money. And more. And more. And raising minimum wages to keep track with inflation. And again and again and again. And raising subsidies. Anything to pretend that it wasn't actually happening. Which of course plunged Venezuela deeper and deeper into a hole. It was entirely preventable, had Maduro responded to changing circumstances. Every government, regardless of where it lies on the capitalism-socialism spectrum, must do this. Venezuela did not.
Is it somehow Sanders' fault that someone who wasn't president when he wrote an op-ed decided to close his eyes, plug his ears and chant "la la la I can't hear you" as his government's revenue stream was reduced, rather than responding to it?
One could raise the contrast with, say, Ecuador - also under hard-left leadership, with someone whose personality is not too unlike Maduro's (blustering, anti-democratic tendencies, etc). Ecuador's economy is also heavily dependent on oil. But Ecuador didn't try to print its way out of the oil crash. Correa may have wanted to, but he couldn't, because Ecuador is tied to the dollar. Ecuador's economy certainly weakened from the oil crash, but did not crash in a way reminiscent of Venezuela's.
And then the fix is "okay, we'll subsidize the first X kWh, then it gets more expensive". But that's just dancing around UBI. If you want a basic subsidy to cover necessities, just give people the money rather than distorting market prices. And as for the notion that some people will just "squander it" - well, that's their bloody choice. If someone finds buying liquor to be more important than keeping the lights on, hey, it's their choice if they want to drink in the dark. Most people won't join them.
To be fair "these days" was referring to 2011, when that article by Sanders was written. A time when the Venezuelan economy was rebounding. Two years before Maduro was even sworn in.
It's very much in "Greater Fool" mode. I was just messaged the other day by my sister, who is my standard bearer for the technologically illiterate (can't even remember how many times I've had to remove viruses from her system because she installed some program or opened some email attachment or another... probably is infected with spyware as we speak). Your standard instagram / pinterest / farmville / etc user. She and her husband had already bought a small amount of bitcoin and were thinking about buying a lot, and wanted my opinion on it; she sounded like she expected me to say "Go all in, it's going to be huge!" and appeared surprised and disappointed when I advised against it.
She has no clue what the technical merits of bitcoin are. Probably doesn't even know what it's supposed to be used for. She's just buying it because it's going up in value. And I guarantee you, it's people like these who make up an increasing dominant fraction of the money flowing into the bitcoin network.
Just admit this is new territory and doesn't work the same as traditional stocks.
All forms of financial assets function as a form of promissory note: an asset that can later be exchanged for desired goods and services. The "selling point" for BTC was that it going to be some new global payment system replacing credit cards, unbacked by anything but public trust, but with sufficient public trust that it can retain value without physical backing assets or a country behind it. How's that assumption going?
* BTC is a terrible payment system from a technological perspective due to the huge processing cost and delays per transaction. Bitcoin fees aren't high because of gouging, they're high because bitcoin is technologically awful.
* It's far too volatile for such a role
* It already has a market cap as high as the major credit card companies combined, yet is accepted by a minuscule fraction as credit cards for the above reasons - which just screams "massive bubble".
* Indeed, many early "forward thinking" adopters have been going backwards and eliminating bitcoin payment options - the very excuse for justifying its price.
* Bitcoin is favoured target of hackers; it's proven much easier to compromise exchanges and wallets than traditional financial networks.
* Governments have numerous reasons to crack down on bitcoin (drugs, money laundering, deliberately crashing the assets of states with bitcoin reserves like North Korea, trying to pop a bubble gently to prevent a recession, etc), and extensive tools to do so, effectively driving it back to its innate value (a currency for underground criminal activity). Historically, the loss of one market - for example, China - has been compensated for by growth in western markets. But if you take western markets out of the picture, you're taking the vast majority of the world's capital out of the picture, period. It's even worse because western markets have disproportional leverage on the world's global financial systems, and decisions taken by them can reach well beyond their borders.
"Neck beards" also pointed out that the dotcom bubble was, in fact, a bubble, even though they couldn't tell you when it was going to burst. Yes, sometimes "neck beards" may underestimate the general public's willingness to mortgage all of their assets into internet fads when they blinded by a growth curve. But that doesn't change the basic issues underlying it all.
That doesn't mean that nothing will survive. Some of the dotcom crash's survivors became giants today eBay, Google, Amazon, etc. But most people who had their money lost their shirts. Perhaps some "coin" future may survive and even ultimately flourish. But what I can say is that BTC itself is going to pop at some point or another.
The amount of money people are dumping into coins is just absurd. I was just checking, and Dogecoin now has a market cap of $754 - more than the combined GDPs of Tualu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Palau. For a joke.
While Faraday has no future, the house of cards I'm really looking forward to dying is Nikola Motors. At least Faraday isn't making promises based around numbers that are physically impossible, and even changing their plans for what sort of energy source their vehicles will use at regular intervals.
Yes - you get a couple buds (new small bulbs that branch off the original) per tulip per year (as I repeatedly wrote). It was a biologically-enforced rarity for traits that spread only through buds.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that there aren't people who want to work in the sex industry - there absolutely are. However, as studies repeatedly bear out, the number who want to is far below the demand; most people who work in the sex industry don't want to be there, and abusive trafficking is an inevitable consequence of this situation.
Making prostitution symmetrically illegal doesn't solve the problem. By making it illegal and aggressively policing it, yes, you cut down on part of the demand. But you also cut down on the supply. And since the ratio of clients to sex workers is far greater than 1, it's much easier to crack down on the "supply" side of the equation, thus increasing the trafficking motive. On the other hand, making it fully legal causes a boom in demand (and especially sex tourism), which usually is associated with a trafficking boom.
I'm personally a fan of the Nordic system: purchasing sex is illegal, as is pimping, but selling sex is perfectly illegal. After all, if your goal is to stamp out trafficking and protect abused women, why would you throw them in jail? The Nordic system cuts demand without cutting supply, thus heavily damaging the trafficking motive; it's been very successful. There are some things you have to be careful about, of course - for example, in the first version of the Swedish laws they had problems with landlords kicking prostitutes out, out of fear that they'd get caught up in anti-pimping / anti-brothel laws (the laws were later amended to address this). But in general it's been shown to work well. It also makes it so that prostitutes are unafraid of having to deal with the police, which means better crime reporting and an all-around better environment for them.
Interesting article, although the debris and animal feces were at an Aerojet facility, not SpaceX, according to the article. All three vendors, however, were faulted (SpaceX, ULA and Aerojet).
Why is an uninteresting fake letter "news"?
Indeed. I doubt most people buying bitcoin today even really understand exactly what it is. They just see "skyrocketing investment".
There's no need to "pick up" tholins; they seem to naturally form everywhere we look in the distant solar system, from simple carbon and nitrogen compounds. Kuiper belt objects are a mix of red (tholins) and white (ices); where you see ices, that's generally young terrain. Actually, to be fair, tholins are more of a rust brown than "red", but that's picking at straws ;) Tholins are an extremely broad range of chemical compounds (some very long), and probably differ significantly in ratios from place to place, but form a family of common celestial organic "gunk".
And on that front, it's kept up its growth by moving from the most hardcore crypto-anarcho-capitalists into general libertarians and geeks into the general, computer-illiterate / non-ideologically-driven public who only has a vague idea what bitcoin is, but they're buying it because it's going up in value.
Eventually you run out of suckers. Those who correctly predicted or lucked into a big wave of suckers behind them, and then get out, end up with said suckers money. That's how these things work.
Speaking of that, note the update:
Seriously, is it even possible for there to be any new event related to cryptocurrencies without them turning into some sort of scam, hack, insider trading, or other such event? Seriously...
7MW was all that was needed for reversing the frequency drop. The battery can output 129MW.
It very demonstrably did reverse the frequency drop. See the graphs.
That's very much Musk's plan. Superchargers are going to battery buffered designs. Megachargers are going to have huge battery buffers. And just wait til you see the size of the battery buffers at ports when container shipping goes electric ;) Dozens of gigawatt hours per port.
Having battery buffers embedded in chargers does double duty with a single piece of hardware: it buffers both supply (grid instability) and demand (the randomness of fast charging loads, from "extreme" to "none").
Better have a huge receiver on the ground. The sun is not a point light source.
Actually, no, it wasnt engineered to back up a power plant in Victoria, it was engineered to back up power in South Australia. There was an entirely different coal power plant that was supposed to back up Loy Yang (which is one of Australia's largest) - a plant that ratepayers have to pay to keep running on standby, which is supposed to hold the grid up until downed power plants can be brought back up and/or more baseload elsewhere ramped up. But from nearly 1000km away, the Tesla battery did the standby plant's job for it during its 4-second wakeup time - stopping and reversing the decline in grid frequency so that there wasn't even a meaningful blink in power quality.
This is not what the Tesla battery was designed to do. It was designed to deal with situations with downed lines / plants in South Australia, to keep the lights on there. It wasn't supposed to take over the work from standby plants halfway across the country. That it technically can should surprise nobody. But that's not what it was purchased to do.
Wonder if you could pull off TEMPEST in a consumer electronics-sized device. That would lead to some seriously concerning possibilities.
So if I predict "Company A's stock will rise and become huge!", and then the next day someone blows up Company A's headquarters in a terrorst attack, is that my fault that the prediction turned out bad? Heck, Sanders isn't even making a prediction, just an observation about the present.
Most of the disastrous policies that led to Venezuela's plunge were enacted under Maduro. His approach to deal with the decline in income in 2014 was, rather than cutting back, to pretend that it wasn't happening by printing more money. And more. And more. And raising minimum wages to keep track with inflation. And again and again and again. And raising subsidies. Anything to pretend that it wasn't actually happening. Which of course plunged Venezuela deeper and deeper into a hole. It was entirely preventable, had Maduro responded to changing circumstances. Every government, regardless of where it lies on the capitalism-socialism spectrum, must do this. Venezuela did not.
Is it somehow Sanders' fault that someone who wasn't president when he wrote an op-ed decided to close his eyes, plug his ears and chant "la la la I can't hear you" as his government's revenue stream was reduced, rather than responding to it?
One could raise the contrast with, say, Ecuador - also under hard-left leadership, with someone whose personality is not too unlike Maduro's (blustering, anti-democratic tendencies, etc). Ecuador's economy is also heavily dependent on oil. But Ecuador didn't try to print its way out of the oil crash. Correa may have wanted to, but he couldn't, because Ecuador is tied to the dollar. Ecuador's economy certainly weakened from the oil crash, but did not crash in a way reminiscent of Venezuela's.
And then the fix is "okay, we'll subsidize the first X kWh, then it gets more expensive". But that's just dancing around UBI. If you want a basic subsidy to cover necessities, just give people the money rather than distorting market prices. And as for the notion that some people will just "squander it" - well, that's their bloody choice. If someone finds buying liquor to be more important than keeping the lights on, hey, it's their choice if they want to drink in the dark. Most people won't join them.
To be fair "these days" was referring to 2011, when that article by Sanders was written. A time when the Venezuelan economy was rebounding. Two years before Maduro was even sworn in.
Same way they track people who grow pot in their homes, I suspect.
I did the last time I was at her house. But she surely has a new computer by now.
It's very much in "Greater Fool" mode. I was just messaged the other day by my sister, who is my standard bearer for the technologically illiterate (can't even remember how many times I've had to remove viruses from her system because she installed some program or opened some email attachment or another... probably is infected with spyware as we speak). Your standard instagram / pinterest / farmville / etc user. She and her husband had already bought a small amount of bitcoin and were thinking about buying a lot, and wanted my opinion on it; she sounded like she expected me to say "Go all in, it's going to be huge!" and appeared surprised and disappointed when I advised against it.
She has no clue what the technical merits of bitcoin are. Probably doesn't even know what it's supposed to be used for. She's just buying it because it's going up in value. And I guarantee you, it's people like these who make up an increasing dominant fraction of the money flowing into the bitcoin network.
All forms of financial assets function as a form of promissory note: an asset that can later be exchanged for desired goods and services. The "selling point" for BTC was that it going to be some new global payment system replacing credit cards, unbacked by anything but public trust, but with sufficient public trust that it can retain value without physical backing assets or a country behind it. How's that assumption going?
* BTC is a terrible payment system from a technological perspective due to the huge processing cost and delays per transaction. Bitcoin fees aren't high because of gouging, they're high because bitcoin is technologically awful.
* It's far too volatile for such a role
* It already has a market cap as high as the major credit card companies combined, yet is accepted by a minuscule fraction as credit cards for the above reasons - which just screams "massive bubble".
* Indeed, many early "forward thinking" adopters have been going backwards and eliminating bitcoin payment options - the very excuse for justifying its price.
* Bitcoin is favoured target of hackers; it's proven much easier to compromise exchanges and wallets than traditional financial networks.
* Governments have numerous reasons to crack down on bitcoin (drugs, money laundering, deliberately crashing the assets of states with bitcoin reserves like North Korea, trying to pop a bubble gently to prevent a recession, etc), and extensive tools to do so, effectively driving it back to its innate value (a currency for underground criminal activity). Historically, the loss of one market - for example, China - has been compensated for by growth in western markets. But if you take western markets out of the picture, you're taking the vast majority of the world's capital out of the picture, period. It's even worse because western markets have disproportional leverage on the world's global financial systems, and decisions taken by them can reach well beyond their borders.
"Neck beards" also pointed out that the dotcom bubble was, in fact, a bubble, even though they couldn't tell you when it was going to burst. Yes, sometimes "neck beards" may underestimate the general public's willingness to mortgage all of their assets into internet fads when they blinded by a growth curve. But that doesn't change the basic issues underlying it all.
That doesn't mean that nothing will survive. Some of the dotcom crash's survivors became giants today eBay, Google, Amazon, etc. But most people who had their money lost their shirts. Perhaps some "coin" future may survive and even ultimately flourish. But what I can say is that BTC itself is going to pop at some point or another.
This whole situation reminds me of the old Onion article, AOL Acquires Time-Warner In Largest-Ever Expenditure Of Pretend Internet Money. The AOL-Time Warner merger was the peak in the Dot Com boom insanity, en route to it transitioning to a bust. Now: Bitcoin Plunge Reveals Possible Vulnerabilities In Crazy Imaginary Internet Money
The amount of money people are dumping into coins is just absurd. I was just checking, and Dogecoin now has a market cap of $754 - more than the combined GDPs of Tualu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Palau. For a joke.
Did someone just mow your tulips?
My favourite part is where the Death Eaters start making out. ;) I imagine someone has already shipped this...
While Faraday has no future, the house of cards I'm really looking forward to dying is Nikola Motors. At least Faraday isn't making promises based around numbers that are physically impossible, and even changing their plans for what sort of energy source their vehicles will use at regular intervals.
Yes - you get a couple buds (new small bulbs that branch off the original) per tulip per year (as I repeatedly wrote). It was a biologically-enforced rarity for traits that spread only through buds.