Again, the US dollar likewise has no intrinic utilty. If the mechanics of bitcoin's scarcity being tied to math and encryption doesn't count, then the fact that all those US soldier are paid in US dollars doesn't count either.
But they both count. The US dollar is strong, for a whole variety of reasons, and I can trust that certain people will accept bitcoins as a form of payment.
Money has no utility beyond it's value. People trade it for shit.
the dollar is tied to the utility of the full faith and credit of the United States
Ahhhh, the utility of "faith". Uh huh. ok, I can roll with that: Bitcoin is tied to the utility of the full faith of hard encryption and math. So far all the servers in the NSA, FBI, CIA, Amazon, and Google combined would still take millennia to crack hard encryption and thwart about $5 of electricity on commodity hardware. Maybe you can call that "Real Power", but I'd lean more towards REAL ULTIMATE POWER with ninjas and shit.
I've got a significant amount of faith that 1+1=2 and factoring large numbers is a bitch and a half.
Investors in... bitcoin. You've ready entered crazy town. It's an internet currency. People speculating on it are already nuts. The fact that things are crazy in crazy town isn't shocking at all. And frankly it doesn't subtract from it's utility. IF you get $50 worth of bitcoin, do your transactions, and then sell your coins for cash, bitcoin still does it's job. Cheaper, faster, more secure international money transfers....And laundering. That too.
There's no way they'd spend all the money, time and energy on R&D to get something like this put on Mars, when they REALLY only expected it would be used for a few months.
Why not? The first month of operation was likely the most insightful and it did most everything it was going to do and flexed all of it's scientific equipment. It got pictures, dug a trench, analyzed the air, and did spectrometry. It also traveled to a location with hematite, which geologists were eager to study. That's all in month 1.
Given a set of tools, there's only so much science you can do. Rovers can move around and use the same tools and more locations, which is awesome, but eventually there will be diminishing returns on variance in what those tools find. There's bound to be some long-term studies, like comparing the seasonal changes in the findings. And more refined models of daily temperatures.
It's not like we're getting 2x the scientific insight if it lasts another 15 years.
"What a none niche commodity item you where 20 years ago...."
Are you ok? Are you having a stroke?
Did you mean "non-niche commodity item you were 20 years ago...."? Non-niche, as in.... wide-spread? Yes, there's actually a lot of places to find work. I got my start in a tiny-ass little Iowa town. Made the computers that go into meters for oil and gas pipelines. Then a medium sized city had 4 professional engineering firms.
I dunno about commodity... oh, other than IoT devices. Yeah, and arduinos are like candy. Ok. I'll give you that. I work slightly more critical hardware, but all this stuff is a GREAT entry point.
20 years ago... huh? All this is true today. 20 years ago, embedded development was... assembly and soul-crushingly small processors. In general it's like regular computer development with a 20 year lag. For example, there's a big push to move from C to C++. The arguments being thrown around are actually a bit nostalgic. I think that means in 20 years your toaster will be running tensorFlow to find optimal toastyness.
So unemployment is actually 36%, not their phoney bullshit "historic low" 3.9%.
Right. But we don't expect our 5 year olds to go to work in coal mines anymore. The statistics don't count kids, the elderly, or the disabled. The unemployment statistics everyone throws about is trying to count people currently looking for a job. And that's important because they're all competing with each other. (other than tradesmen and professionals and specialists, whom should really look at statistics within their own niche). The part where the statistic is bullshit is that it ignores people who have given up. NEETs. It ignores a lot of people on bullshit disability. It doesn't account for underemployment like a mathmatics PHD handing people coffee or cutting edge vertex shader developers cranking out business SQL scripts.
REGARDLESS of the bullshit though, it's been consistent* bullshit so you can compare the number to other years. And yeah, the rate is low in historical terms.
* I dunno though, don't they change how they count now and then? When was the last big rule-change?
That makes sense. People take "gigs" to tide them over until they can get a real job. But real jobs are more available now.
There was a bunch of people out of work a decade ago when rising gas prices made the housing bubble burst leading to the Econopocalypse that everyone likes to references with "These hard economic times". But those times are over. We've had steady (if slow) employment growth and now unemployment is creeping below 4%. Down into rates we haven't seen since the 1960's.
Anyone in the gig economy is underemployed (or has REALLY shitty job prospects). As times get better, fewer people need to do shitty gigs to make ends meet.
(And it's less... new. For a while, all those people were being paid with venture capitalist money)
I think they're both examples of retrofuturism. Past visions of the future.
A lot of things from Star Wars and old SciFi just don't make any sense anymore. We have to actively ignore that a robot or AI could do a job much better, safer, and with less trouble than having humans do the job. Like a gunner on a Star Destroyer. Or a interpreter droid. In the 70's, droids were boxy clunky things. In RogueOne, no one blinked when a bot caught a grenade mid-air and casually tossed it back with perfect timing. Or perfectly aimed without looking and shot a guy. Of course robots can do that, they've seen the boston dynamic videos. But that raises the question of why the fuck don't droids do everything? Especially when troopers can't aim. Space-opera sci-fi these days is clinging onto a bit of retrofuturism.
Dune at least had a good explanation for why that would happen; lingering taboos after universal devastation/enslavement.
But we could work with this:
The characters are AI programs on a drone carrier deep in enemy territory. But we don't tell the audience. They're kept in the dark as much as possible about the nature of the characters and we just throw a TON of equivalents and euphemism at them. The actors/characters are all metaphorical. They need a pilot to fly ships, they need a gunner to aim the cannon, they need a navigator to plot the course. They're all AI running on the ship's mainframe, but in the show they're actors doing the job. We get that old-timey space-opera feel of people going places and doing things out in space while keeping up with technological trends. (And ignoring a lot of the difficulties of keeping people alive in space).
In an interview she specifically said that she did not feel like she needed to cater to the fan base.
That's a pretty stupid thing to say after the biggest IP megacorp buys out a major franchise. The brand is worth nothing without the legions of people guaranteed to watch whatever garbage you make. It's an established religion in England. Not catering to the fan base is literally sacrilegious. Of course, it's hard to get any worse than freakin' mitochondrias, I mean midichlorians.
The actual quote:
"I have a responsibility to the company that I work with. I don’t feel that I have a responsibility to cater in some way. I would never just seize on saying, 'Well, this is a franchise that’s appealed primarily to men for many, many years, and therefore I owe men something.'"
So, not specifically the fan base, just.... all men in general. hmmm. She was probably just explaining why the lead in RogueOne was a chic. But.... yeah man, there's undertones of sexism there.
she talked about her committment to finding a female director for the Star Wars franchise in an upcoming film
Yeeeep. Feminism. Enforcing equality of outcome isn't going to end well.
Oooooor fix it, and note that you fixed it. It's not like anything in a git repo "never needs to be changed". The values in the ledger change all the time. It's actually their defining feature keeping track of a value that goes up and down.
I've no doubt all that's tracked on some server somewhere. But if it were a blockchain, the intermediaries couldn't fuck with it. It would let top China party members trust the regional bosses to collect lists of all the phone logs, money transfers, lists of people they black-bagged. Their underlings couldn't just pencil in whatever value they wanted, or run a SQL script to DELETE FROM TaxRecords WHERE name=${myNephew}.
It ALSO means they can't fuck with it, which isn't the sort of loss of control I'd expect from godless commie bastards.
It's mathematically hard by design. That means computational crunching power. You can see that as wasteful if you want, but think of all income of all the bankers and all the severs running VISA transactions and all the advertising costs that Visa and Mastercard and such pay for. And all the fraud. Visa just eats the costs of a lot of fraud (and passes it onto merchants).
But yeah, any blockchain tech that gets popular and has lots of transactions is going to take serious hardware and have electricity costs.
well yeah. But with the added twist of "you don't have to trust the people holding onto the database." Like how email let you "send mail... but on a computer", all the crazy blockchain ideas are just old tasks done on a distributed ledger that's secure from people fucking with it. Right now you have to trust your bank to keep the right number next to your account. You have to trust the DMV to have the right picture and birth year and name associated with your driver's license. And they generally do a great job. But you also have to trust that Experian and TransUnion doesn't get anything wrong with your account or it can mess up your credit score. And they get that shit wrong all the time. If we had a blockchain yelp of people complaining about companies, people, governments, it'd be immune to censorship. No warrant or black van could censor what someone said....Unless they blocked the whole thing.
Are (any) fiat-currency and (any) cryptocurrency really equivalent, as cryptocurrency fans claim?
Of course they're not equivalent. Fiat-currencies are backed by hopes and dreams and the trust in the issuer. They can, at their whim, simply print more money and devalue it, making all of the currency you're holding worth less and throwing your usage of the currency into uncertainty. If you can trust the US government to keep the private institution that is the Fed in line, then you can trust the value of the currency. And if you can trust FDIC, you can even trust banks and credit-unions and such. And you can. The US government is very stable. So people think US dollars have value, and so it does.
And on the other-hand, crypto currencies are backed up by math and a metric metaphysical ton of speculation. As well as people needing to send money globally without wanting to pay as much to middle men or being tracked. It's relatively new, and people are wrapping their heads around it, and there's a ton of hype, so the price is volatile as all get out and there's loads of uncertainty. So I wouldn't set prices by it, and I wouldn't hold onto coins longer than necessary. But it let's me trust a random stranger on the Internet across the globe give me money, so it has utility. There are other services that do this with US dollars, but they're more expensive, and less trustworthy. Paypal was good for a while, but they've got a bad habit of freezing funds.
For example, US Dollar and Bitcoin are really equals?
No, right now one bitcoin get you 7413.99 US dollars.
What authorization/guarantee/insurance is behind Bitcoin?
Math.
Math is your friend. You can trust math. Implementations using it... ehhhh, they can have troubles. But you can take every resource available to the US government and the US public and they are powerless against $5 of processing time on commodity hardware running hard crypto. Because of math.
Why do you think Satoshi Nakamoto is really hiding his identity, if Bitcoin is really such a great innovation?
He's a paranoid recluse. Very much the sort of scheme and work really hard trying to.... upend the US monetary system? I'm pretty sure he's the type to rant about how central banks are behind a bunch of conspiracies and shit like that. And yeah, I imagine he has a pile of bitcoins and could sell them for a load of money. Having that sort of asset sitting around on your hard drive makes you a juicy target.
It's not a ponzi scheme. At least not a classical one. That requires you to lie about how well other peoples investments are doing. You have to hope people don't try to cash out. But it IS very much the sort of thing other people have to believe in to have value. Like everything else. There's..... mind-space market share. Like a company brand or shit like that.
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really good innovation, why they attract so many criminals/criminal activity?
Oh no, don't get me wrong. It's crazy useful for money laundering. Moving money around the globe is one of those things that (big time) criminals do a lot of. There's a difference between doing well and doing good.
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really currency, why no company/store can use Bitcoin as currency anymore?
Well... there ARE stores that accept bitcoin. So... blow that one out of your ass. But yeah, with this volatility, I wouldn't list a static price in bitcoins. You'd have to have a dynamic market-price tracker with some reasonable limits, or just state the price in US dollars and accept bitcoins as an intermediary. Hopefully the price will stabilize.
Would the result be different, if Bitcoin replaced by any other "cryptocurrency"?
Fundamentally? Probably not. I think they all try to do their own thing, each a little
When someone says you talk a lot but don't listen well, that's really not an invitation for a wall of text.
Furthermore, you're called bullshit on "Outsourcing to china increases the Gini coefficient" being obvious. Going so far as to compare it to the theory of spontaneous genesis..... and proceed to talk about trade deficits... Now, I get that they're related, I wouldn't be so nitpicky if you didn't employ so much hyperbole. But you kinda swapped out the topic there. Holy shit, shut up and READ a little bit. And if you DO read any of this, give comprehension a try. Seriously, this is TWICE. I was insulted the first time. Now I'm just giving up on you.
The MIT paper only says "FREE TRADE GOOD". But it doesn't mention trade deficits at all. Or imbalance. It only talks about budget deficits. And I agree, free trade good. Nobody has said otherwise....that graph shows DOES appear to show that it shows that you're full of shit. I was confused about why you were showing it to me. People getting laid off, money going overseas. But yeah, sure, they both probably just a function of the economy going into the shitter.
If a trade deficit were reducing our wealth, however, we wouldn't be able to pay the new laborers to work. Instead of growing, we'd be shrinking. We're not.
UNLESS WE FUCKING MADE THE MONEY SOMEWHERE ELSE! Jesus. Thricely I say unto thee: OUR ECONOMY IS GROWING ~~MORE~~ THAN THE HALF TRILLION WE SEND TO CHINA We can afford it.
This isn't the first time we've danced around each other you know. I think it might have even been years ago. Listen Lucid, John, if I may... my advice now, just as it was then, is still the same. You've got some good ideas, but holy shit you need to learn to simply AGREE with other people when they're agreeing with you. There's no need to start an argument over semantics or disagree with someone simply because they said the same thing in the wrong way. There's no fucking way you'll make it in politics if you're THIS fucking combative to people who would otherwise be in the exact same political camp. Stop bible-thumping your own choir. Be friendly, god damnit. And the pretentious thing won't get you votes.
If Paul CREATES and sells $50 of potatoes in a primary industry, but BUYS $60 of mexican melons, where's the fucking wealth going? Is Potato Paul getting richer or poorer? I'm not saying we should stop all trade, that's fucking idiotic. I guess Paul just really needs those melons. Shut down trade and Paul would then have to buy $120 of US melons or something. Whatever. But TRADE IMBALANCE is a direct and obvious example of a WEALTH TRANSFER. It might be the cheapest, best, most rational option, but it doesn't mean money and wealth isn't flowing in that direction. From us, to them.
BUT HEY! just to really hammer home that money flowing from one of the wealthiest nations to the poor masses of humanity isn't that bad of a thing. Frankly, they've earned it. Yay elevating our brothers and all that shit.
The whole idea that you must be bleeding money because you're importing more than you export is economics as a zero-sum game.
I explicitly said our economy is growing enough that it's not a problem. You talk a lot but you don't listen well.
The trick here is even a collapsed factory town is a tiny, tiny piece of our economy. Any one movement is 99.9% winners and 0.1% losers, if not much better. Most of them are 0.001% or further down (localized improvements).
A factory town? As in single? Son, you need to get out more. The Gini coefficient takes into account EVERYONE.
That means the GNI coefficient isn't much affected by [outsourcing to China] in particular, except maybe in the long run and by other, bigger mechanisms.
Yeah, no shit sherlock. Way to finally pick up what I was laying down. Like a full minute after you knee started jerking and you let your mouth start running. Factory jobs were outsourced to China (and automation started eating jobs around 2000). You can bet your ass that employing cheaper Chinese factory workers MOST DEFINITELY contributed to the rising Gini coefficient. It put more money to the US owners, while giving some money to the Chinese, and took away the money from the US workers. This is super obvious. A direct and rational cause and effect.
Gini coefficient. GINI, not the gross national income. It's named after an Italian guy. A metric of inequality.
hmmmm, I think he's an ass, but I think he's right about this one. China has been subsiding solar cells and steel. Much the same way that America's "farm bill" subsidized corn and various crops. It makes those products cheaper and more competitive abroad. We can buy food CHEAP. We do that to protect our breadbasket as it's not the sort of thing a nation wants to do without. Likewise, people in China can build things out of steel girders for cheap.
The.... targeted dumping and presumed intentions may or may not be true... Someone in some meeting probably had that intent, so sure. But it really is protectionism.
But where's the money coming from? We protect our farmers. China protects their steel industry. Who pays for that? America, it's the tax payers. In China, I'd argue it is (or at least was) more due to the suppressed currency. The Chinese people have artificially low wages (relative to the rest of the world) because they pegged their currency to the US dollar. And that's on top of that whole "crazy bad" levels of pollution. That tactic made China competitive and they kinda took a majority market share of global manufacturing. So China has experienced explosive growth, and all in all it's worked out. But I think the next generation isn't all giddy from being elevated from starving paddy-farming peasants and expects to be middle class. They're becoming consumers.
With a (more) centralized state-run economy, China has had a much more focused strategy than the US. Like I said it's worked well. And while they're dependent on having global customers... we're also dependent on them buying US bonds to fund our government... And hell, if all those freighters shut down this year, we'd be FUCKED trying to spin up a manufacturing sector. It's like a decade-long process.
Right, it's not falling apart, just hemorrhaging wealth to other nations. Specifically China. But the economy is growing so we can live with a half trillion open wound every year. Seriously, our economy is huge, we can take it. And a decade or two that has really elevated a bunch of poor Chinese peasants into something resembling middle class. It's truly money from those who can afford it to those who need it most. Been a big help with all sorts of averaged worldwide metrics. Obesity is now a bigger problem than malnourishment almost entirely because the Chinese started eating.
Low-cost imports make the importing nation wealthier.
Yes. Also high-cost imports. Pretty much anything the buying is willing to pay for is a net-wealth gain. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. It's kinda how trade works. And cheaper goods means more trade. And global trade has been great for society. Super-great for anyone that managed to move their factory over there. And by that I mean outsource (haha, it's not like China gov would let Americans own that). Although it's a real fucking kick in the teeth to the previously middle class factory workers, or those expecting that lifestyle. Certainly a contributor to the growing GINI coefficient. (That's the income gap between the wealthy and the poor)
Hope they keep buying US bonds though, otherwise our government is fucked. You know, more so than the agency heads actively dismantling themselves. Interest paid on federal debt is... what? 11% of GDP?
Literally, people are starving to death in North America, and on the other hand, 27000$ megatransactions. THE FUCK
This argument equally applies to any form of recreation. The gaming industry is ~$80 billion a year. The (legal) gambling industry is $335 billion. Film industry (Hollywood) is $40B. Tobacco is $500B. All of this is money being pissed away that could have just as equally gone to starving people.
And just why the hell do you only care about people in North America? All those starving kids in South America or Asia can just go chew shoes I guess?
But I guess that's an important distinction, because we're pretty rich over here. **Cough Central america is part of north america but we're going to ignore them too for now Cough**. If only there was some way to FORCE people into supporting those who need support. I mean, that sounds pretty fascist and authoritarian, but hey, it's for a good cause. Maybe these funds could even come from the people who could most easily pay it, the rich. Or at least the high income earners. Kinda the same thing*. And then you realize that EBT is a real thing and we already do that. If you're starving, we will feed you. Because we're a good nation of good people. There are some forms, there are people that will help you with that. And despite all this, there are STILL people who will be starving. And not just the fashion models. The people that have issues and just can't get themselves together to even go get a free handout. dropouts. Unless you want to make them wards of the state, strip them of their rights, strap them down, and force feed them... some percentage of society will starve. The goal is not zero, that's impossible. The goal is to be relatively low (making us more attractive than competitors), and to give people a means to go feed themselves. Because without a means, they tend to riot and burn shit.
ok, help me out here. If you save an object (or any data) to a file, as long as you validate the data when you open the file and load it..... what's the problem?
Because we have "persistent objects", they're called files.
signed serialized blobs
We call those a CRC bits, or checksums. Usually there's one per record and/or one for the whole file / stream / whatnot.
Also, those round things are called "wheels", there's really no need to re-invent them. And PLEASE don't try patenting them, that has the potential for a big headache for the rest of us.
maybe he owes Jabba, and 'A guys gotta do what a guys gotta do. Nothing personal, Han.'
In the books he's the quintessential mercenary, "doing it for the money". It's not even debt, it's just a paycheck. If someone hires him to put a bullet in you, once he's done he's the sort you can hire to return the favor.
Disney decided that this was a shit idea, and all those millions of fans that loved SW, the force, jedi, sith, grey jedi and all the rest weren't the fan base anymore.
And then they employed Abrams, the killer of canon, to take all that "expanded universe" out back and shoot it.
I thought they would have LOVED a pile of content that they could have picked the best cherries out of. But no, that means they'd have to pay the original authors some royalties or something. And apparently "Sold well and the fans loved it" isn't a safe enough bet, so they have to rehash episode IV.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, the US dollar likewise has no intrinic utilty. If the mechanics of bitcoin's scarcity being tied to math and encryption doesn't count, then the fact that all those US soldier are paid in US dollars doesn't count either.
But they both count. The US dollar is strong, for a whole variety of reasons, and I can trust that certain people will accept bitcoins as a form of payment.
Bitcoin uses SHA-256. Child, teach thyself.
Utility is what you can use it for.
Value is what you can trade it for.
Money has no utility beyond it's value. People trade it for shit.
the dollar is tied to the utility of the full faith and credit of the United States
Ahhhh, the utility of "faith". Uh huh. ok, I can roll with that: Bitcoin is tied to the utility of the full faith of hard encryption and math. So far all the servers in the NSA, FBI, CIA, Amazon, and Google combined would still take millennia to crack hard encryption and thwart about $5 of electricity on commodity hardware. Maybe you can call that "Real Power", but I'd lean more towards REAL ULTIMATE POWER with ninjas and shit.
I've got a significant amount of faith that 1+1=2 and factoring large numbers is a bitch and a half.
Bitcoin.
rather than real demand from investors
Investors in... bitcoin. You've ready entered crazy town. It's an internet currency. People speculating on it are already nuts. The fact that things are crazy in crazy town isn't shocking at all. And frankly it doesn't subtract from it's utility. IF you get $50 worth of bitcoin, do your transactions, and then sell your coins for cash, bitcoin still does it's job. Cheaper, faster, more secure international money transfers. ...And laundering. That too.
There's no way they'd spend all the money, time and energy on R&D to get something like this put on Mars, when they REALLY only expected it would be used for a few months.
Why not? The first month of operation was likely the most insightful and it did most everything it was going to do and flexed all of it's scientific equipment. It got pictures, dug a trench, analyzed the air, and did spectrometry. It also traveled to a location with hematite, which geologists were eager to study. That's all in month 1.
Given a set of tools, there's only so much science you can do. Rovers can move around and use the same tools and more locations, which is awesome, but eventually there will be diminishing returns on variance in what those tools find. There's bound to be some long-term studies, like comparing the seasonal changes in the findings. And more refined models of daily temperatures.
It's not like we're getting 2x the scientific insight if it lasts another 15 years.
"What a none niche commodity item you where 20 years ago...."
Are you ok? Are you having a stroke?
Did you mean "non-niche commodity item you were 20 years ago...."? Non-niche, as in .... wide-spread? Yes, there's actually a lot of places to find work. I got my start in a tiny-ass little Iowa town. Made the computers that go into meters for oil and gas pipelines. Then a medium sized city had 4 professional engineering firms.
I dunno about commodity... oh, other than IoT devices. Yeah, and arduinos are like candy. Ok. I'll give you that. I work slightly more critical hardware, but all this stuff is a GREAT entry point.
20 years ago... huh? All this is true today. 20 years ago, embedded development was... assembly and soul-crushingly small processors. In general it's like regular computer development with a 20 year lag. For example, there's a big push to move from C to C++. The arguments being thrown around are actually a bit nostalgic. I think that means in 20 years your toaster will be running tensorFlow to find optimal toastyness.
So unemployment is actually 36%, not their phoney bullshit "historic low" 3.9%.
Right. But we don't expect our 5 year olds to go to work in coal mines anymore. The statistics don't count kids, the elderly, or the disabled. The unemployment statistics everyone throws about is trying to count people currently looking for a job. And that's important because they're all competing with each other. (other than tradesmen and professionals and specialists, whom should really look at statistics within their own niche). The part where the statistic is bullshit is that it ignores people who have given up. NEETs. It ignores a lot of people on bullshit disability. It doesn't account for underemployment like a mathmatics PHD handing people coffee or cutting edge vertex shader developers cranking out business SQL scripts.
REGARDLESS of the bullshit though, it's been consistent* bullshit so you can compare the number to other years. And yeah, the rate is low in historical terms.
* I dunno though, don't they change how they count now and then? When was the last big rule-change?
The "Tech industry" is wide and wonderful. What shitty corner are you working in? Because embedded development has worked out pretty well for me.
That makes sense. People take "gigs" to tide them over until they can get a real job. But real jobs are more available now.
There was a bunch of people out of work a decade ago when rising gas prices made the housing bubble burst leading to the Econopocalypse that everyone likes to references with "These hard economic times". But those times are over. We've had steady (if slow) employment growth and now unemployment is creeping below 4%. Down into rates we haven't seen since the 1960's.
Anyone in the gig economy is underemployed (or has REALLY shitty job prospects). As times get better, fewer people need to do shitty gigs to make ends meet.
(And it's less... new. For a while, all those people were being paid with venture capitalist money)
I think they're both examples of retrofuturism. Past visions of the future.
A lot of things from Star Wars and old SciFi just don't make any sense anymore. We have to actively ignore that a robot or AI could do a job much better, safer, and with less trouble than having humans do the job. Like a gunner on a Star Destroyer. Or a interpreter droid. In the 70's, droids were boxy clunky things. In RogueOne, no one blinked when a bot caught a grenade mid-air and casually tossed it back with perfect timing. Or perfectly aimed without looking and shot a guy. Of course robots can do that, they've seen the boston dynamic videos. But that raises the question of why the fuck don't droids do everything? Especially when troopers can't aim. Space-opera sci-fi these days is clinging onto a bit of retrofuturism.
Dune at least had a good explanation for why that would happen; lingering taboos after universal devastation/enslavement.
But we could work with this:
The characters are AI programs on a drone carrier deep in enemy territory. But we don't tell the audience. They're kept in the dark as much as possible about the nature of the characters and we just throw a TON of equivalents and euphemism at them. The actors/characters are all metaphorical. They need a pilot to fly ships, they need a gunner to aim the cannon, they need a navigator to plot the course. They're all AI running on the ship's mainframe, but in the show they're actors doing the job. We get that old-timey space-opera feel of people going places and doing things out in space while keeping up with technological trends. (And ignoring a lot of the difficulties of keeping people alive in space).
In an interview she specifically said that she did not feel like she needed to cater to the fan base.
That's a pretty stupid thing to say after the biggest IP megacorp buys out a major franchise. The brand is worth nothing without the legions of people guaranteed to watch whatever garbage you make. It's an established religion in England. Not catering to the fan base is literally sacrilegious. Of course, it's hard to get any worse than freakin' mitochondrias, I mean midichlorians.
The actual quote:
"I have a responsibility to the company that I work with. I don’t feel that I have a responsibility to cater in some way. I would never just seize on saying, 'Well, this is a franchise that’s appealed primarily to men for many, many years, and therefore I owe men something.'"
So, not specifically the fan base, just.... all men in general. hmmm. She was probably just explaining why the lead in RogueOne was a chic. But.... yeah man, there's undertones of sexism there.
she talked about her committment to finding a female director for the Star Wars franchise in an upcoming film
Yeeeep. Feminism. Enforcing equality of outcome isn't going to end well.
Oooooor fix it, and note that you fixed it. It's not like anything in a git repo "never needs to be changed". The values in the ledger change all the time. It's actually their defining feature keeping track of a value that goes up and down.
I've no doubt all that's tracked on some server somewhere. But if it were a blockchain, the intermediaries couldn't fuck with it. It would let top China party members trust the regional bosses to collect lists of all the phone logs, money transfers, lists of people they black-bagged. Their underlings couldn't just pencil in whatever value they wanted, or run a SQL script to DELETE FROM TaxRecords WHERE name=${myNephew}.
It ALSO means they can't fuck with it, which isn't the sort of loss of control I'd expect from godless commie bastards.
It's mathematically hard by design. That means computational crunching power. You can see that as wasteful if you want, but think of all income of all the bankers and all the severs running VISA transactions and all the advertising costs that Visa and Mastercard and such pay for. And all the fraud. Visa just eats the costs of a lot of fraud (and passes it onto merchants).
But yeah, any blockchain tech that gets popular and has lots of transactions is going to take serious hardware and have electricity costs.
well yeah. But with the added twist of "you don't have to trust the people holding onto the database." Like how email let you "send mail... but on a computer", all the crazy blockchain ideas are just old tasks done on a distributed ledger that's secure from people fucking with it. Right now you have to trust your bank to keep the right number next to your account. You have to trust the DMV to have the right picture and birth year and name associated with your driver's license. And they generally do a great job. But you also have to trust that Experian and TransUnion doesn't get anything wrong with your account or it can mess up your credit score. And they get that shit wrong all the time. If we had a blockchain yelp of people complaining about companies, people, governments, it'd be immune to censorship. No warrant or black van could censor what someone said. ...Unless they blocked the whole thing.
Are (any) fiat-currency and (any) cryptocurrency really equivalent, as cryptocurrency fans claim?
Of course they're not equivalent. Fiat-currencies are backed by hopes and dreams and the trust in the issuer. They can, at their whim, simply print more money and devalue it, making all of the currency you're holding worth less and throwing your usage of the currency into uncertainty. If you can trust the US government to keep the private institution that is the Fed in line, then you can trust the value of the currency. And if you can trust FDIC, you can even trust banks and credit-unions and such. And you can. The US government is very stable. So people think US dollars have value, and so it does.
And on the other-hand, crypto currencies are backed up by math and a metric metaphysical ton of speculation. As well as people needing to send money globally without wanting to pay as much to middle men or being tracked. It's relatively new, and people are wrapping their heads around it, and there's a ton of hype, so the price is volatile as all get out and there's loads of uncertainty. So I wouldn't set prices by it, and I wouldn't hold onto coins longer than necessary. But it let's me trust a random stranger on the Internet across the globe give me money, so it has utility. There are other services that do this with US dollars, but they're more expensive, and less trustworthy. Paypal was good for a while, but they've got a bad habit of freezing funds.
For example, US Dollar and Bitcoin are really equals?
No, right now one bitcoin get you 7413.99 US dollars.
What authorization/guarantee/insurance is behind Bitcoin?
Math.
Math is your friend. You can trust math. Implementations using it... ehhhh, they can have troubles. But you can take every resource available to the US government and the US public and they are powerless against $5 of processing time on commodity hardware running hard crypto. Because of math.
Why do you think Satoshi Nakamoto is really hiding his identity, if Bitcoin is really such a great innovation?
He's a paranoid recluse. Very much the sort of scheme and work really hard trying to.... upend the US monetary system? I'm pretty sure he's the type to rant about how central banks are behind a bunch of conspiracies and shit like that. And yeah, I imagine he has a pile of bitcoins and could sell them for a load of money. Having that sort of asset sitting around on your hard drive makes you a juicy target.
It's not a ponzi scheme. At least not a classical one. That requires you to lie about how well other peoples investments are doing. You have to hope people don't try to cash out. But it IS very much the sort of thing other people have to believe in to have value. Like everything else. There's..... mind-space market share. Like a company brand or shit like that.
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really good innovation, why they attract so many criminals/criminal activity?
Oh no, don't get me wrong. It's crazy useful for money laundering. Moving money around the globe is one of those things that (big time) criminals do a lot of. There's a difference between doing well and doing good.
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really currency, why no company/store can use Bitcoin as currency anymore?
Well... there ARE stores that accept bitcoin. So... blow that one out of your ass. But yeah, with this volatility, I wouldn't list a static price in bitcoins. You'd have to have a dynamic market-price tracker with some reasonable limits, or just state the price in US dollars and accept bitcoins as an intermediary. Hopefully the price will stabilize.
Would the result be different, if Bitcoin replaced by any other "cryptocurrency"?
Fundamentally? Probably not. I think they all try to do their own thing, each a little
When someone says you talk a lot but don't listen well, that's really not an invitation for a wall of text.
Furthermore, you're called bullshit on "Outsourcing to china increases the Gini coefficient" being obvious. Going so far as to compare it to the theory of spontaneous genesis..... and proceed to talk about trade deficits... Now, I get that they're related, I wouldn't be so nitpicky if you didn't employ so much hyperbole. But you kinda swapped out the topic there. Holy shit, shut up and READ a little bit. And if you DO read any of this, give comprehension a try. Seriously, this is TWICE. I was insulted the first time. Now I'm just giving up on you.
The MIT paper only says "FREE TRADE GOOD". But it doesn't mention trade deficits at all. Or imbalance. It only talks about budget deficits. And I agree, free trade good. Nobody has said otherwise. ...that graph shows DOES appear to show that it shows that you're full of shit. I was confused about why you were showing it to me. People getting laid off, money going overseas. But yeah, sure, they both probably just a function of the economy going into the shitter.
If a trade deficit were reducing our wealth, however, we wouldn't be able to pay the new laborers to work. Instead of growing, we'd be shrinking. We're not.
UNLESS WE FUCKING MADE THE MONEY SOMEWHERE ELSE! Jesus. Thricely I say unto thee: OUR ECONOMY IS GROWING ~~MORE~~ THAN THE HALF TRILLION WE SEND TO CHINA We can afford it.
This isn't the first time we've danced around each other you know. I think it might have even been years ago. Listen Lucid, John, if I may... my advice now, just as it was then, is still the same. You've got some good ideas, but holy shit you need to learn to simply AGREE with other people when they're agreeing with you. There's no need to start an argument over semantics or disagree with someone simply because they said the same thing in the wrong way. There's no fucking way you'll make it in politics if you're THIS fucking combative to people who would otherwise be in the exact same political camp. Stop bible-thumping your own choir. Be friendly, god damnit. And the pretentious thing won't get you votes.
If Paul CREATES and sells $50 of potatoes in a primary industry, but BUYS $60 of mexican melons, where's the fucking wealth going? Is Potato Paul getting richer or poorer? I'm not saying we should stop all trade, that's fucking idiotic. I guess Paul just really needs those melons. Shut down trade and Paul would then have to buy $120 of US melons or something. Whatever. But TRADE IMBALANCE is a direct and obvious example of a WEALTH TRANSFER. It might be the cheapest, best, most rational option, but it doesn't mean money and wealth isn't flowing in that direction. From us, to them.
BUT HEY! just to really hammer home that money flowing from one of the wealthiest nations to the poor masses of humanity isn't that bad of a thing. Frankly, they've earned it. Yay elevating our brothers and all that shit.
The whole idea that you must be bleeding money because you're importing more than you export is economics as a zero-sum game.
I explicitly said our economy is growing enough that it's not a problem. You talk a lot but you don't listen well.
The trick here is even a collapsed factory town is a tiny, tiny piece of our economy. Any one movement is 99.9% winners and 0.1% losers, if not much better. Most of them are 0.001% or further down (localized improvements).
A factory town? As in single? Son, you need to get out more. The Gini coefficient takes into account EVERYONE.
That means the GNI coefficient isn't much affected by [outsourcing to China] in particular, except maybe in the long run and by other, bigger mechanisms.
Yeah, no shit sherlock. Way to finally pick up what I was laying down. Like a full minute after you knee started jerking and you let your mouth start running. Factory jobs were outsourced to China (and automation started eating jobs around 2000). You can bet your ass that employing cheaper Chinese factory workers MOST DEFINITELY contributed to the rising Gini coefficient. It put more money to the US owners, while giving some money to the Chinese, and took away the money from the US workers. This is super obvious. A direct and rational cause and effect.
Gini coefficient. GINI, not the gross national income. It's named after an Italian guy. A metric of inequality.
hmmmm, I think he's an ass, but I think he's right about this one. China has been subsiding solar cells and steel. Much the same way that America's "farm bill" subsidized corn and various crops. It makes those products cheaper and more competitive abroad. We can buy food CHEAP. We do that to protect our breadbasket as it's not the sort of thing a nation wants to do without. Likewise, people in China can build things out of steel girders for cheap.
The.... targeted dumping and presumed intentions may or may not be true... Someone in some meeting probably had that intent, so sure. But it really is protectionism.
But where's the money coming from? We protect our farmers. China protects their steel industry. Who pays for that? America, it's the tax payers. In China, I'd argue it is (or at least was) more due to the suppressed currency. The Chinese people have artificially low wages (relative to the rest of the world) because they pegged their currency to the US dollar. And that's on top of that whole "crazy bad" levels of pollution. That tactic made China competitive and they kinda took a majority market share of global manufacturing. So China has experienced explosive growth, and all in all it's worked out. But I think the next generation isn't all giddy from being elevated from starving paddy-farming peasants and expects to be middle class. They're becoming consumers.
With a (more) centralized state-run economy, China has had a much more focused strategy than the US. Like I said it's worked well. And while they're dependent on having global customers... we're also dependent on them buying US bonds to fund our government... And hell, if all those freighters shut down this year, we'd be FUCKED trying to spin up a manufacturing sector. It's like a decade-long process.
Right, it's not falling apart, just hemorrhaging wealth to other nations. Specifically China. But the economy is growing so we can live with a half trillion open wound every year. Seriously, our economy is huge, we can take it. And a decade or two that has really elevated a bunch of poor Chinese peasants into something resembling middle class. It's truly money from those who can afford it to those who need it most. Been a big help with all sorts of averaged worldwide metrics. Obesity is now a bigger problem than malnourishment almost entirely because the Chinese started eating.
Low-cost imports make the importing nation wealthier.
Yes. Also high-cost imports. Pretty much anything the buying is willing to pay for is a net-wealth gain. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. It's kinda how trade works. And cheaper goods means more trade. And global trade has been great for society. Super-great for anyone that managed to move their factory over there. And by that I mean outsource (haha, it's not like China gov would let Americans own that). Although it's a real fucking kick in the teeth to the previously middle class factory workers, or those expecting that lifestyle. Certainly a contributor to the growing GINI coefficient. (That's the income gap between the wealthy and the poor)
Hope they keep buying US bonds though, otherwise our government is fucked. You know, more so than the agency heads actively dismantling themselves. Interest paid on federal debt is... what? 11% of GDP?
Literally, people are starving to death in North America, and on the other hand, 27000$ megatransactions. THE FUCK
This argument equally applies to any form of recreation. The gaming industry is ~$80 billion a year. The (legal) gambling industry is $335 billion. Film industry (Hollywood) is $40B. Tobacco is $500B. All of this is money being pissed away that could have just as equally gone to starving people.
And just why the hell do you only care about people in North America? All those starving kids in South America or Asia can just go chew shoes I guess?
But I guess that's an important distinction, because we're pretty rich over here. **Cough Central america is part of north america but we're going to ignore them too for now Cough**. If only there was some way to FORCE people into supporting those who need support. I mean, that sounds pretty fascist and authoritarian, but hey, it's for a good cause. Maybe these funds could even come from the people who could most easily pay it, the rich. Or at least the high income earners. Kinda the same thing*. And then you realize that EBT is a real thing and we already do that. If you're starving, we will feed you. Because we're a good nation of good people. There are some forms, there are people that will help you with that. And despite all this, there are STILL people who will be starving. And not just the fashion models. The people that have issues and just can't get themselves together to even go get a free handout. dropouts. Unless you want to make them wards of the state, strip them of their rights, strap them down, and force feed them... some percentage of society will starve. The goal is not zero, that's impossible. The goal is to be relatively low (making us more attractive than competitors), and to give people a means to go feed themselves. Because without a means, they tend to riot and burn shit.
ok, help me out here. If you save an object (or any data) to a file, as long as you validate the data when you open the file and load it..... what's the problem?
Because we have "persistent objects", they're called files.
signed serialized blobs
We call those a CRC bits, or checksums. Usually there's one per record and/or one for the whole file / stream / whatnot.
Also, those round things are called "wheels", there's really no need to re-invent them. And PLEASE don't try patenting them, that has the potential for a big headache for the rest of us.
Would you accept an actor that wasn't Mark Hamill? How did you like Solo's character in the latest?
maybe he owes Jabba, and 'A guys gotta do what a guys gotta do. Nothing personal, Han.'
In the books he's the quintessential mercenary, "doing it for the money". It's not even debt, it's just a paycheck. If someone hires him to put a bullet in you, once he's done he's the sort you can hire to return the favor.
Disney decided that this was a shit idea, and all those millions of fans that loved SW, the force, jedi, sith, grey jedi and all the rest weren't the fan base anymore.
And then they employed Abrams, the killer of canon, to take all that "expanded universe" out back and shoot it.
I thought they would have LOVED a pile of content that they could have picked the best cherries out of. But no, that means they'd have to pay the original authors some royalties or something. And apparently "Sold well and the fans loved it" isn't a safe enough bet, so they have to rehash episode IV.