It used to be full of homepages. Personal sites. If you searched for something (and search sucked in those days, trust me), more often then not you found a website that someone had made on their own time and covered whatever subjects they wanted it to. And not a blurb on some reviewing site. No, the whole damn site was theirs. It depended on what you were searching for, but it ran the gamut of important to trivial. From fan-reviews of books, to people raging about how awesome the newest game was. But also important stuff like the effects of the fall of the Berlin wall the the social entanglement the web is posing for Muslim women.
Most of these pages were hosted for free. And I believe that's where I came in. Way past the endless September. Before the 90's putting something on the web required you to run your own server. Or have access to one in college or something. In the 90's, geocities and all lowered the bar for the internet and hosting was now free, with a small string attached.
Now a days things have changed. People no longer have their own servers or websites, that's too much work. The bar has been lowered even further. You no longer need to know HTML or even what a tag is. In the web 2.0 world, everyone can simply upload what they want onto websites. Facebook, flicker, tumbler, wordpress, and all. Those places have done the heavy lifting of making the webpage and all people have to do is insert the content. Web pages that take in people's information, pictures, links, knowledge and all that crap and host it for everyone else to see. When you google something now, the first result is usually wikipedia. Because wikipedia is where people upload their knowledge.
And that's it's own separate rant on the importance of wikipedia.
But anyway, today's internet is more centralized. If you want to know about a movie, you don't find someone's website with a page dedicated to ranting about the movie, you go to imdb and find facts and reviews uploaded by people. You see someone's rant that was upmodded by other. The one that got downmodded is buried and the truly insightful one got censored. (and then you go torrent it, but that's not the web).
This is a slightly disturbing consolidation of the web. Whereas there was once an ever-increasing amount of participation on the web, the meaningful web is now a handful of sites dedicated to their particular topic. It's arguably more structured, but it's taking the power from the people and putting it in the hands of the companies that own the sites. It's arguably the natural course for these sorts of things. Something new came along. Everyone competed, and then a few, very few, people won, ate up the losers, and the consolidation left one or two victors. Which is why everyone was desperate to become to defacto standard. Fighting that process is hopeless. But the natural way things work is kinda crap. It leads to monopolies, and abuse of power. I guess I'm simply unsure about the nature of our gatekeepers.
And Jesus christ. Think about email. A wonderfully decentralized system where it's a no-holds-bar capitalist survival of the fittest right? We SSSHEEEEEIIITT boy! There's Gmail, yahoo, and maybe hotmail. There are also corporate mail servers. But by and far, for most of the populace, email has consolidated. When the fuck did THAT happen and how did I not notice?
Man, this was finally explained by a coward up there.
Bit coins flow like water, there's no serial number on individual coins. It's values in and out. They mix together. And there's an endless number of addresses, and those addresses aren't tied to real people (UNTIL THEY ARE).
So if you want to receive bitcoins anonymously, you make a new address, receive the bitcoins, put it into a mixer, and take it out with a different address.
Now the only entity that knows who you are is the mixer whom you paid as a centrally organized likely-criminal enterprise.... that will most certainly attract the attention of anyone wishing to bust a bunch of bad guys. And since you had to pay them, likely with credit card, the feds can simply go to VISA and get most of the info they really need..... hmmm, ok, so maybe it's not anonymous. oh, wait, no. Rather than specific mixers people just use big bitcoin exchanges. It'd be harder for the feds to get a warrant for all transactions on an exchange, which presumably has legitimate business.
What you CAN tell from putting a name to a single address is to go back and see where the bitcoins came from. But bitcoins are like water. You can follow the flow, but you cannot distinguish my cup from the other water it comes into contact with. Trying to follow MY cup of water as it mixes with others (e.g. taint analysis) isn't exactly trivial and will usually require more information that even the authorities don't have access to. And if I pour my cup of water into a known mixing lake, you might assume I control one or more of the "cups" of water taken out of the lake, but you have no idea which one(s).
Holy SHIT is that a good explanation for something I knew about but couldn't wrap my head around. I had the exact same sort of conception about the blockchain that the coward did and wondered just how it was ever used in criminal enterprise. I knew "they went into an anonymizer" but didn't understand how that lost track of who was who.
Still, there's list out there of everyone who has ever accepted stolen bitcoins. If I could go to the FBI or whatever cyberpolice and report that $2 mill of bitcoins were stolen, there's public knowledge of the address of the person who stole them. If that address every trade them, THAT transaction is also public knowledge.
Could US law regulate us-based services and tell them to not accept transactions using coins that are on a known and government controlled "STOLEN BITCOIN" black-list? Those big mixing lakes could have a mandatory check, and it'd be pretty trivial and quick compared to actually crunching the blockchain. Going one further, any transactions with a history of transactions to a non-regulated source or mixing pool could be grounds for investigation. You know if we wanted to go full authoritarian.
Ah, jcr, you crazy sonnovabitch. Let's calibrate that crazy-o-meter and see how you're doing.
Alright, so lay it on me. What's the alternative?
Describe your libertarian utopia. How do roads work? Defending against a bigger thug simply taking all our stuff? What do you do when the wheels fall off the new car you purchased and killed half your family?
So taxation is theft. Fine. Whatever floats your goat. So what do we do from there?
You are correct that there is only one water pipe into my house. I own it.
Mystery of mysteries! Let me open your eyes to the wide and wonderful world of pipe technology:
The pipe doesn't actually terminate at the wall. It keeps going. The stuff that comes in through the pipe doesn't magically genesis at your property.
YOU DON'T OWN IT PAST YOUR HOUSE
Or property. I don't actually know. I imagine it's a city-to-city thing.
Anyway, there's a pipe that goes into your house. You own it.... up to a point. You DON'T own it past that point. You have no claim to pipe that travels from the water treatment plant to your neighborhood. You really really really don't want there to have to be multiple competing systems of pipes feeding into your house.
The original AT&T acquired their monopoly because the government wanted there to be a single telephone company
. . . 1885? During the string of Do-Nothing-Presidents? In the age of the Robber Barons? The government was practically a contractor of a few wealthy industrialists.
If you're shocked that the rules at said time favored big business, then you've got a very insightful history lesson ahead of you.
And... what's the point here? "RassimFrassim ebil Gobmint ruins ever`thang!" ? Really? Yeah, sure, whatever. They've certainly fucked up shit in the past just as they've certainly did some good in the past. I'm a fan of Sherman's Hammer, you might not be. But regardless of all that coming together and discussing the merits of proposed changes to the system we've got depends on people agreeing on terminology. Natural monopolies exist despite your efforts to redefine them and claim they don't.
Because you most certainly don't own the pipe that goes into your house. (Not the one coming out of the wall, the one going INTO the wall, from the outside. Holy shit the point I have to start being this pedantic is the point I'm fighting willful ignorance. Good luck out there)
Where I worked, the slots were all digital bingo. At one point they managed to convince a judge or regulator or someone that digital bingo that picked numbers with a computer was legit. And then they convinced someone that putting a bit of a facade in front of the game of bingo was legit. So every time you pull the lever on a slot machine in Iowa, it plays a quick game of bingo and if you win that, the three slots align on what your bingo-winnings resulted in.
Realize this is also the place where they have a casino where they dug out a pit, filled it with water, put pontoons on the water, then built a casino on top of those pontoons, and covered up the rest of the water so they could legally say that it was a floating river-boat and not a free-standing casino because those have different rules.
It's all bullshit all the way from the top to the bottom and the industry is feeding on lifeless husks of former people addicted to the glimmer of hope and easily distracted by gaudy lights and the gilding of wealth. God I'm glad I got out of that.
The definition I heard for "natural monopoly" was one where a free market would result in a monopoly without government intervention.
Well you see, sometimes people say stupid stuff and that mis-informs others. The definition you've heard was wrong.
ANY AND ALL markets will form a monopoly without government intervention. See: Robber Barons. And/or late-stage capitalism, or the eventual end-state of anarchy, which is just brutal totalitarian thugs/kings which kill anyone that doesn't do as they say. Capitalism is a competition. Left alone, eventually someone wins and the market consolidates. Just as the transition from anarchy->authoritarian->democracy is kind of a natural progression, there's a similar progression of frontier free market -> consolidation into a monopoly (or a handful of oligarchs if you've tried to outlaw straight-up monopolies) -> An industry that's so heavily regulated it might as well be government.
[his] definition appears to be that a "natural monopoly: is one where a monopoly is in the best interest (although I am not sure who's best interest)
How many water pipes do you have going into your house? just the one? If someone owned that and had full libertarian-style control over that pipe at the transition between your land and not-your-land, that would be a monopoly. Do you want multiple water-pipes? Sewer lines, electrical lines, junction boxes, ROADS. Do you want multiple competing roadway systems? Like you drive forwards out of your house to get on CorpA roads and drive out the back of your house to get on competitor's CorpB roads that don't play well with each other and have bridges and underpasses everywhere? No. No you want a single set of roads that interconnect. with standards rules. Having one set of these things is in your best interest. That's what's natural. So of course it's regulated by the government and no company can own that monopoly and abuse it for profit.
But imagine that AT&T owned the literal road up to your driveway. They'd have a natural monopoly. And they're talking about only allowing certain colored cars on the road. Sounds terrible doesn't it? We're suggesting that utilities like water, power, and communications should be treated in a similar fashion.
"And when fiber comes to town, they won't be able to undercut Google while affording those subsidies by jacking up the price elsewhere."
It reduces the barrier to entry and lets LOCAL COMPETITION come to town without anti-competitive practices being leveraged against them because they won't be powerful enough individually.
Are you ignoring the article? LOCAL COMPETITION is being dragged through the courts and fought at every turn in an effort to stall. The Telecoms are working to block LOCAL COMPETITION from existing. This was, arguably, a minor win in that regard, but it doesn't matter.
If the municipality is taking shortcuts to ease the way for the competition, you betcha there will be legal challenges
Why? I mean I get that the entrenched corporations squeezing the city for cash don't want competition and will squawk all day long about government colluding against them with their enemy, but it's no different then subsidies for electric cars. "This sucks, we want alternatives". You talk like that's a bad thing. And hey, I don't think cities should bend over super-backwards to try and get fiber into town. This bullshit where cities have to bribe factories to come there is fucking bullshit of the highest degree. But "easing the way" and encouraging free-market competition? That's a good thing.
[Yeah, physically cutting the competition's cables sounds right up their alley.] applies to every competitor.
No it doesn't. My statement is a comment on the general corporate culture surrounding the telecoms. Does Google have that sort of underhanded backstabbing customer-be-damned fuck-you-we're-a-monopoly sort of culture?...only a little.
"You touched it you're liable" is no longer the criterion, it's "you touched it and were negligent so you are liable".
Did it break? Were you the last one to touch it? Did it not have any other reason to break? You were negligent. This really doesn't change much.
How do you "break up" a cable monopoly given that they are defacto and not dejure to start with?
I don't think that really makes a difference. You get the territory map that they've carved the USA into, and instead of 4-5 companies controlling the bulk of the business, you split them into 40-50 companies. A CEO in Cleaveland won't give money to a CEO in NY to afford the court dog and pony show. And when fiber comes to town, they won't be able to undercut Google while affording those subsidies by jacking up the price elsewhere. If they instead try to take away business from each other, the free market exists and capitalism works great. It's business. Size is power. The telecoms are abusing their power so it's time to cut them down. Or take them over, I think I'd prefer them as a utility.
There's a whole hell of a lot of details and intricacies to managing the Internet I'm positive I'm completely ignorant of. I'm really just spouting rhetoric here about whipping out Sherman's hammer. But when a market gets abused by anti-competitive practices and no one can enter the market due to the artificially inflated barrier to entry, then it's time to nationalize, regulate, or bring out the mother fucking hammer. It's the proper response.
Why do you think things will get better when the law says that one company can move the other company's stuff around at will?
I don't. It doesn't matter. They'll find some other way to stall the competition's entry into their market. Yeah, physically cutting the competition's cables sounds right up their alley.
Just the act of putting it through the courts delayed Google and cost them enough money that the whole thing is unprofitable. They don't expand or their expansion is slower and AT&T doesn't face competition. With no competition, and essentially the only game in a lot of towns, they can milk those locations for the money it costs to put all of this through the courts.
Every city will be a legal battle to route the entrenched and established monopoly.
Yay late-stage capitalism. If someone like GOOGLE just isn't quite big enough to enter the market, then there is no free market and capitalism cannot function. It should be a public utility or the monopolies need to be broken up.
Of course there are exemptions, but good luck arguing that to the idiots who still don't understand the difference between a tax bracket, a marginal tax rate, and an effective tax rate. They'll SWEAR that their friend or co-worker got a raise which made them lose money due to taxes.
Small businesses are exempt. If you don't care about what she's paid (ha, good luck learning about business other than the lesson is that those in power are screwing her over) then I guarantee that you could find somewhere willing to take on an "intern" doing it for the experience.
If you can't find that job, it's not the fault of minimum wage laws.
this notion of any job requiring to provide a living wage is absolute garbage, there are MILLIONS of teens, seniors, spouses and people who want to work, who will work, for much less than $10/hr if given the chance, who OMG, DON'T NEED OR WANT A LIVING WAGE, and this economic activity is KILLED by minimum wage laws.
Just millions? Like 2? Because that 0.6% of the populace can kiss the ass of the 14.5% of America that live below the poverty line. That's 45 million. Did you pull that vague number out of your ass or are you going to cite a source?
Furthermore, do you have any idea how many companies and places of employment are exempt from minimum wage law? It's really just a shackle on big businesses. Small businesses are exempt. Unless you've got hundreds of teens you want to stuff in the coal mine or on a factory line, this law doesn't apply to you. And if it does, you really should reconsider trying to build your empire on the backs of children. If you're a business that did whatever work and employed kids and your business is growing, congrats. That's great news. It really is. But at some point you should probably start paying your workers like real people. And that limit is Half a Million Dollars.
"but when a man complains about a gender issue issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner"
He's mostly talking about the tech gender gap, but he's certainly not silent about how well women perform. That's the stated reason he was fired.
Fix the hiring process? One of his complaints is "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate". Yeah, actually he DOES want to fix the hiring process. Buuuuuuut not in the way I think you think. And it's not called "employment process", it's called "hiring process". The process of employment is, you know, a career. The process of hiring decides who works there.
So, if he'd produced any evidence that his female colleagues perform less well, he might have a point.
Moving goalpost 101. You're trying to redefine the conversation. He's talking about the gender gap. Are we not allowed to talk about the gender gap?
And the most likely reason he didn't was that he has a prejudice masquerading as a political view
Just go for it. Call him a misogynist. You already said he was whining, there's really no need to pull your punches.
the only evidence that's relevant.
Except that the gender gap in tech is typically the stated reason for the policies he's "whining" about. You won't see a company have affirmative action to hire more women because "We've found women suck at the job". No, they have affirmative action because "90% of of our coders are dudes".
the only candidate in the last election who even appears to give a sufficient shit about the environment was Jill Stein. Democrats pay lip service to environmental issues but seldom do anything of consequence.
That's great that you're praising Jill Stein for giving the appearance of caring while bashing the democrats for giving the appearance of caring.... in a thread about subsidies for electric cars.
That's great. Super. We're simultaneously bitching about all the money we're giving away. While bitching about not REALLY doing anything. While bitching that other people WOULD TOTALLY really do something.
Well, no. A resource that we depended upon but could not produce cheaply ourselves
Well YES. They imposed rationing. You were only allowed to buy so much fuel to make sure everyone could get SOME fuel. They literally could not make or get enough.
It's best for us when OPEC is selling their oil cheaply,
Hell yeah! Although some people act like it's the end of the world because they're in the business of selling oil. Ignore those people, it's good for everyone else.
because we would like to use up the rest of the world's oil before ours.
Well that's pretty brutal, but sure. I can see that angle.
Sustainability is not even on the list of things to care about.
Oh ye of little foresight.
Let me make this perfectly clear. It IS on the list. It might not be super high on YOUR list, but it's pretty high up on MY list. Do you want a society that only plans out things as far as the next business quarter? Do you care about what sort of planet your children will live on? Do you ever thing about retiring?
With a sustainable energy policy we don't have to invade the other side of the world to destabilize them and keep them from raising their oil prices. We don't have to worry about countries invading us to take what resources we have. We don't have to care about what the rest of the world is doing if we don't depend upon them.
But even rich people care about emissions, because we all breathe the same air. It's not like water, where they can just protect some of it and not other parts and they can be healthy while we all get sick.
Uh... historically the gentry moved out of the shit-filled urban centers to the country-side which had fresh air. A little while ago they moved out of the urban industrial centers where all the smog collected. But these days we just outsource all that dirty work to China. Emissions and air pollution is definitely local pollution. I mean, it also has a global warming element to it, but as far as actual smoke and fumes are concerned, the farmland in Iowa is clear and sunny.
But yeah, you're talking about climate change, which affects us all. But I'd bet money the rich will simply avoid the areas that get really screwed over by it. And when the refugees escape the dried out husks or the flash-flooded destruction, they'll arrive where the rich already own all the land. Who knows, maybe a lawyer convention will get flooded and we can finally get that Bioshock scenario.
Worse: in order to induce car buyers to spend their money on electric vehicles, the federal government offers a $7,500 rebate on the purchase price.
Is that bad? Because not too long ago our national security was at risk since OPEC had us by the balls over a resource that we depended upon but could not produce ourselves. And as gas prices rose and applies economic pressure on everyone it bust bubbles causing a massive financial econopocalypse. The sort that hadn't been seen since the great depression.
We launched TRIllion dollar WARS over this shit.
Last I checked, there was a temporary spike in US oil production as we squeeze the last few drops out of old wells via fracking, and unlocked some oil from shale. Yay technological improvement. But that doesn't change the fact that cars are running on fossil fuels and ultimately this is not sustainable.
So what do we do? We encourage investment into alternatives. Like electric cars. Which can be powered off of grid power which can, in turn, be powered by renewable sources. So we subsidize electric cars. Would you rather we ban ice cars? Add an ice-tax? Tax fuel prices? Because raising fuel prices worked out so well for us last time.
All that said. If a company specifically targets hoovering up government subsidies, that's generally a bad thing. And there WILL come a time when such encouraging subsidies go away. But you have to examine each program on it's merits or flaws rather than on the whole. Everyone likes to bitch about taxes until you start suggesting programs to cut to reduce them.
When did I even begin to suggest that anyone buys coal from OPEC?
Oh, jesus, my bad. In that case, you're not only wrong, You're not EVEN wrong.
BEHOLD:
" I was talking about buying oil from OPEC, which India does to fuel their cars."
vs
" India has expanded heavily its electricity production w/ less than 25% coming from OPEC,"
Notice that those two statements swap out a RATHER IMPORTANT DETAIL. Now, if it was a simple typo, hey, that's fine. I'm just correcting it in case anyone were to take that as fact. And, since, you know, electricity production is the topic of discussion, the fact that India's OIL supply comes from somewhere isn't even an issue.
Point I was making is that with all of these, oil is increasingly used exclusively for cars, and even there, trends like hybrids and others would drive down the demand.
. . . when has oil not been used primarily for cars?...And what does that have to do with the electrification of India?
And driving down the demand for oil.... Doesn't save farmhands and construction workers from dying from heat exhaustion.
I mean, first off, who the hell powers their grid off of Oil? You know, that thing that Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries... export. You burn oil for electricity only where you need to run generators, because you can't get power there otherwise. That accounts for You are wrong about it when it comes to oil.
But the spin you're trying to apply here lies in the fact that no, India does not import COAL from OPEC. They get their coal imports from Indonesia and Australia.
That's disingenuous at best because....
and the bulk of it coming from biomass, hydroelectric, wind and solar.
... Their generation is still ~60% coal. (As opposed to the USA's 40%. But that's a bullshit comparison when you throw in Natural Gas.)
The bulk of their power still comes from coal. But they ARE doing better than the USA in the renewable energy field, with ~30% being renewable as opposed the the USA's 12%. All my whining about statistics aside, they're doing great. Mad props to them. (Also their cheap satellites are damn impressive, bravo guys).
It recently signed an agreement w/ the US to buy more of its energy from US.
"energy". Is that oil or coal? Because both are fungible resources that they'll get from wherever is cheapest and typically that means closest. It's why no one really cares about how the USA imports oil from Venezuela even while our leaders threw a hissy fit at each other. One is buying, one is selling. And why the Iran embargo was pretty moot when it came to their oil.
And look into automating the farming.
It's happening. John deer is selling them a lot of combines and tractors. Mechanizing/Automating, same story different year.
Well... he didn't suggest we NOT give painkillers to those with terminal cancer. This would be one of those "in addition to" sort of things. But his analogy sucks. You don't fix terminal cancer. Kinda... by the definition of "terminal". And yeah, killing the pain and giving them a comfortable send-off is about all you can do. I'm.... pretty sure the Earth doesn't have a "terminal" case of warming. If it does, then anything we do, good or bad, is pretty pointless.
But I get what you're saying: "Doing anything about global warming is just a political agenda". Like it's just politics for politics sake. That kinda sucks. And there IS a lot of that. But it'd be wrong of me to simply dismiss the policy of my opponents as "just a political agenda". I fully understand why they want to kick out all the illegal immigrants, or have a strong military, or disrupting the governments South America that got too cozy with communism. There are concern and fears. Some of them legitimate, some of them bullshit.
Sure, "We need to do something about global warming" is on the agenda of the democrats/liberals/progressive/Not-Your-Team. Whatever. But the reason it's on that list is because there's a legitimate concern that we're setting ourselves up for a massive clusterfuck where a ton of people die. Is "Drastic action to limit carbon and methane" on that agenda? You know, as a "what we going to do about it?" sort of thing? Eh, there's not a consensus on that. If you want to attack or call to question THIS specific plan, go for it. That sort of debate is useful and informative. At least when it's not low effort "so how many people do you want to die?" sort of partisan hacks. Better debate topics would be "How do you get China to play along?" and now "How do you get Trump to play along?" and "How do you convince others to conserve while you yourself are wasteful? Because I'm looking at you USA's CO2 per capita". And that loops back around to the article with "Meanwhile India is really green per capita... But oh look they might start dying from it".
Anyway, none of that doesn't exclude Indian rural electrification. That will help, but it won't solve the bigger problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a rant about this from 2012:
Yeah, the web has changed in my day.
It used to be full of homepages. Personal sites. If you searched for something (and search sucked in those days, trust me), more often then not you found a website that someone had made on their own time and covered whatever subjects they wanted it to. And not a blurb on some reviewing site. No, the whole damn site was theirs. It depended on what you were searching for, but it ran the gamut of important to trivial. From fan-reviews of books, to people raging about how awesome the newest game was. But also important stuff like the effects of the fall of the Berlin wall the the social entanglement the web is posing for Muslim women.
Most of these pages were hosted for free. And I believe that's where I came in. Way past the endless September. Before the 90's putting something on the web required you to run your own server. Or have access to one in college or something. In the 90's, geocities and all lowered the bar for the internet and hosting was now free, with a small string attached.
Now a days things have changed. People no longer have their own servers or websites, that's too much work. The bar has been lowered even further. You no longer need to know HTML or even what a tag is. In the web 2.0 world, everyone can simply upload what they want onto websites. Facebook, flicker, tumbler, wordpress, and all. Those places have done the heavy lifting of making the webpage and all people have to do is insert the content. Web pages that take in people's information, pictures, links, knowledge and all that crap and host it for everyone else to see. When you google something now, the first result is usually wikipedia. Because wikipedia is where people upload their knowledge.
And that's it's own separate rant on the importance of wikipedia.
But anyway, today's internet is more centralized. If you want to know about a movie, you don't find someone's website with a page dedicated to ranting about the movie, you go to imdb and find facts and reviews uploaded by people. You see someone's rant that was upmodded by other. The one that got downmodded is buried and the truly insightful one got censored. (and then you go torrent it, but that's not the web).
This is a slightly disturbing consolidation of the web. Whereas there was once an ever-increasing amount of participation on the web, the meaningful web is now a handful of sites dedicated to their particular topic. It's arguably more structured, but it's taking the power from the people and putting it in the hands of the companies that own the sites. It's arguably the natural course for these sorts of things. Something new came along. Everyone competed, and then a few, very few, people won, ate up the losers, and the consolidation left one or two victors. Which is why everyone was desperate to become to defacto standard. Fighting that process is hopeless. But the natural way things work is kinda crap. It leads to monopolies, and abuse of power. I guess I'm simply unsure about the nature of our gatekeepers.
And Jesus christ. Think about email. A wonderfully decentralized system where it's a no-holds-bar capitalist survival of the fittest right? We SSSHEEEEEIIITT boy! There's Gmail, yahoo, and maybe hotmail. There are also corporate mail servers. But by and far, for most of the populace, email has consolidated. When the fuck did THAT happen and how did I not notice?
Man, this was finally explained by a coward up there.
Bit coins flow like water, there's no serial number on individual coins. It's values in and out. They mix together. And there's an endless number of addresses, and those addresses aren't tied to real people (UNTIL THEY ARE).
So if you want to receive bitcoins anonymously, you make a new address, receive the bitcoins, put it into a mixer, and take it out with a different address.
Now the only entity that knows who you are is the mixer whom you paid as a centrally organized likely-criminal enterprise.... that will most certainly attract the attention of anyone wishing to bust a bunch of bad guys. And since you had to pay them, likely with credit card, the feds can simply go to VISA and get most of the info they really need..... hmmm, ok, so maybe it's not anonymous. oh, wait, no. Rather than specific mixers people just use big bitcoin exchanges. It'd be harder for the feds to get a warrant for all transactions on an exchange, which presumably has legitimate business.
What you CAN tell from putting a name to a single address is to go back and see where the bitcoins came from. But bitcoins are like water. You can follow the flow, but you cannot distinguish my cup from the other water it comes into contact with. Trying to follow MY cup of water as it mixes with others (e.g. taint analysis) isn't exactly trivial and will usually require more information that even the authorities don't have access to. And if I pour my cup of water into a known mixing lake, you might assume I control one or more of the "cups" of water taken out of the lake, but you have no idea which one(s).
Holy SHIT is that a good explanation for something I knew about but couldn't wrap my head around. I had the exact same sort of conception about the blockchain that the coward did and wondered just how it was ever used in criminal enterprise. I knew "they went into an anonymizer" but didn't understand how that lost track of who was who.
Still, there's list out there of everyone who has ever accepted stolen bitcoins. If I could go to the FBI or whatever cyberpolice and report that $2 mill of bitcoins were stolen, there's public knowledge of the address of the person who stole them. If that address every trade them, THAT transaction is also public knowledge.
Could US law regulate us-based services and tell them to not accept transactions using coins that are on a known and government controlled "STOLEN BITCOIN" black-list? Those big mixing lakes could have a mandatory check, and it'd be pretty trivial and quick compared to actually crunching the blockchain. Going one further, any transactions with a history of transactions to a non-regulated source or mixing pool could be grounds for investigation. You know if we wanted to go full authoritarian.
Ah, jcr, you crazy sonnovabitch. Let's calibrate that crazy-o-meter and see how you're doing.
Alright, so lay it on me. What's the alternative?
Describe your libertarian utopia. How do roads work? Defending against a bigger thug simply taking all our stuff? What do you do when the wheels fall off the new car you purchased and killed half your family?
So taxation is theft. Fine. Whatever floats your goat. So what do we do from there?
You are correct that there is only one water pipe into my house. I own it.
Mystery of mysteries! Let me open your eyes to the wide and wonderful world of pipe technology:
The pipe doesn't actually terminate at the wall. It keeps going. The stuff that comes in through the pipe doesn't magically genesis at your property.
YOU DON'T OWN IT PAST YOUR HOUSE
Or property. I don't actually know. I imagine it's a city-to-city thing.
Anyway, there's a pipe that goes into your house. You own it.... up to a point. You DON'T own it past that point. You have no claim to pipe that travels from the water treatment plant to your neighborhood. You really really really don't want there to have to be multiple competing systems of pipes feeding into your house.
The original AT&T acquired their monopoly because the government wanted there to be a single telephone company
. . . 1885? During the string of Do-Nothing-Presidents? In the age of the Robber Barons? The government was practically a contractor of a few wealthy industrialists.
If you're shocked that the rules at said time favored big business, then you've got a very insightful history lesson ahead of you.
And... what's the point here? "RassimFrassim ebil Gobmint ruins ever`thang!" ? Really? Yeah, sure, whatever. They've certainly fucked up shit in the past just as they've certainly did some good in the past. I'm a fan of Sherman's Hammer, you might not be. But regardless of all that coming together and discussing the merits of proposed changes to the system we've got depends on people agreeing on terminology. Natural monopolies exist despite your efforts to redefine them and claim they don't.
Because you most certainly don't own the pipe that goes into your house. (Not the one coming out of the wall, the one going INTO the wall, from the outside. Holy shit the point I have to start being this pedantic is the point I'm fighting willful ignorance. Good luck out there)
I worked in the Iowa gambling industry for a bit.
Where I worked, the slots were all digital bingo. At one point they managed to convince a judge or regulator or someone that digital bingo that picked numbers with a computer was legit. And then they convinced someone that putting a bit of a facade in front of the game of bingo was legit. So every time you pull the lever on a slot machine in Iowa, it plays a quick game of bingo and if you win that, the three slots align on what your bingo-winnings resulted in.
Realize this is also the place where they have a casino where they dug out a pit, filled it with water, put pontoons on the water, then built a casino on top of those pontoons, and covered up the rest of the water so they could legally say that it was a floating river-boat and not a free-standing casino because those have different rules.
It's all bullshit all the way from the top to the bottom and the industry is feeding on lifeless husks of former people addicted to the glimmer of hope and easily distracted by gaudy lights and the gilding of wealth. God I'm glad I got out of that.
The definition I heard for "natural monopoly" was one where a free market would result in a monopoly without government intervention.
Well you see, sometimes people say stupid stuff and that mis-informs others. The definition you've heard was wrong.
ANY AND ALL markets will form a monopoly without government intervention. See: Robber Barons. And/or late-stage capitalism, or the eventual end-state of anarchy, which is just brutal totalitarian thugs/kings which kill anyone that doesn't do as they say. Capitalism is a competition. Left alone, eventually someone wins and the market consolidates. Just as the transition from anarchy->authoritarian->democracy is kind of a natural progression, there's a similar progression of frontier free market -> consolidation into a monopoly (or a handful of oligarchs if you've tried to outlaw straight-up monopolies) -> An industry that's so heavily regulated it might as well be government.
[his] definition appears to be that a "natural monopoly: is one where a monopoly is in the best interest (although I am not sure who's best interest)
How many water pipes do you have going into your house? just the one? If someone owned that and had full libertarian-style control over that pipe at the transition between your land and not-your-land, that would be a monopoly. Do you want multiple water-pipes? Sewer lines, electrical lines, junction boxes, ROADS. Do you want multiple competing roadway systems? Like you drive forwards out of your house to get on CorpA roads and drive out the back of your house to get on competitor's CorpB roads that don't play well with each other and have bridges and underpasses everywhere? No. No you want a single set of roads that interconnect. with standards rules. Having one set of these things is in your best interest. That's what's natural. So of course it's regulated by the government and no company can own that monopoly and abuse it for profit.
But imagine that AT&T owned the literal road up to your driveway. They'd have a natural monopoly. And they're talking about only allowing certain colored cars on the road. Sounds terrible doesn't it? We're suggesting that utilities like water, power, and communications should be treated in a similar fashion.
How does that create LOCAL COMPETITION?
"And when fiber comes to town, they won't be able to undercut Google while affording those subsidies by jacking up the price elsewhere."
It reduces the barrier to entry and lets LOCAL COMPETITION come to town without anti-competitive practices being leveraged against them because they won't be powerful enough individually.
Are you ignoring the article? LOCAL COMPETITION is being dragged through the courts and fought at every turn in an effort to stall. The Telecoms are working to block LOCAL COMPETITION from existing. This was, arguably, a minor win in that regard, but it doesn't matter.
If the municipality is taking shortcuts to ease the way for the competition, you betcha there will be legal challenges
Why? I mean I get that the entrenched corporations squeezing the city for cash don't want competition and will squawk all day long about government colluding against them with their enemy, but it's no different then subsidies for electric cars. "This sucks, we want alternatives". You talk like that's a bad thing. And hey, I don't think cities should bend over super-backwards to try and get fiber into town. This bullshit where cities have to bribe factories to come there is fucking bullshit of the highest degree. But "easing the way" and encouraging free-market competition? That's a good thing.
[Yeah, physically cutting the competition's cables sounds right up their alley.] applies to every competitor.
No it doesn't. My statement is a comment on the general corporate culture surrounding the telecoms. Does Google have that sort of underhanded backstabbing customer-be-damned fuck-you-we're-a-monopoly sort of culture? ...only a little.
"You touched it you're liable" is no longer the criterion, it's "you touched it and were negligent so you are liable".
Did it break? Were you the last one to touch it? Did it not have any other reason to break? You were negligent. This really doesn't change much.
Why on earth are you sucking AT&T's cock so hard?
How do you "break up" a cable monopoly given that they are defacto and not dejure to start with?
I don't think that really makes a difference. You get the territory map that they've carved the USA into, and instead of 4-5 companies controlling the bulk of the business, you split them into 40-50 companies. A CEO in Cleaveland won't give money to a CEO in NY to afford the court dog and pony show. And when fiber comes to town, they won't be able to undercut Google while affording those subsidies by jacking up the price elsewhere. If they instead try to take away business from each other, the free market exists and capitalism works great. It's business. Size is power. The telecoms are abusing their power so it's time to cut them down. Or take them over, I think I'd prefer them as a utility.
There's a whole hell of a lot of details and intricacies to managing the Internet I'm positive I'm completely ignorant of. I'm really just spouting rhetoric here about whipping out Sherman's hammer. But when a market gets abused by anti-competitive practices and no one can enter the market due to the artificially inflated barrier to entry, then it's time to nationalize, regulate, or bring out the mother fucking hammer. It's the proper response.
Why do you think things will get better when the law says that one company can move the other company's stuff around at will?
I don't. It doesn't matter. They'll find some other way to stall the competition's entry into their market. Yeah, physically cutting the competition's cables sounds right up their alley.
Just the act of putting it through the courts delayed Google and cost them enough money that the whole thing is unprofitable. They don't expand or their expansion is slower and AT&T doesn't face competition. With no competition, and essentially the only game in a lot of towns, they can milk those locations for the money it costs to put all of this through the courts.
Every city will be a legal battle to route the entrenched and established monopoly.
Yay late-stage capitalism. If someone like GOOGLE just isn't quite big enough to enter the market, then there is no free market and capitalism cannot function. It should be a public utility or the monopolies need to be broken up.
. . . That pretty much showcases the good and bad side of both systems.
Of course there are exemptions, but good luck arguing that to the idiots who still don't understand the difference between a tax bracket, a marginal tax rate, and an effective tax rate. They'll SWEAR that their friend or co-worker got a raise which made them lose money due to taxes.
Small businesses are exempt. If you don't care about what she's paid (ha, good luck learning about business other than the lesson is that those in power are screwing her over) then I guarantee that you could find somewhere willing to take on an "intern" doing it for the experience.
If you can't find that job, it's not the fault of minimum wage laws.
this notion of any job requiring to provide a living wage is absolute garbage, there are MILLIONS of teens, seniors, spouses and people who want to work, who will work, for much less than $10/hr if given the chance, who OMG, DON'T NEED OR WANT A LIVING WAGE, and this economic activity is KILLED by minimum wage laws.
Just millions? Like 2? Because that 0.6% of the populace can kiss the ass of the 14.5% of America that live below the poverty line. That's 45 million. Did you pull that vague number out of your ass or are you going to cite a source?
Furthermore, do you have any idea how many companies and places of employment are exempt from minimum wage law? It's really just a shackle on big businesses. Small businesses are exempt. Unless you've got hundreds of teens you want to stuff in the coal mine or on a factory line, this law doesn't apply to you. And if it does, you really should reconsider trying to build your empire on the backs of children. If you're a business that did whatever work and employed kids and your business is growing, congrats. That's great news. It really is. But at some point you should probably start paying your workers like real people. And that limit is Half a Million Dollars.
I've read every sorry, whining word of it.
Whelp, that's off to a good start:
"but when a man complains about a gender issue issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner"
He's mostly talking about the tech gender gap, but he's certainly not silent about how well women perform. That's the stated reason he was fired.
Fix the hiring process? One of his complaints is "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate". Yeah, actually he DOES want to fix the hiring process. Buuuuuuut not in the way I think you think. And it's not called "employment process", it's called "hiring process". The process of employment is, you know, a career. The process of hiring decides who works there.
So, if he'd produced any evidence that his female colleagues perform less well, he might have a point.
Moving goalpost 101. You're trying to redefine the conversation. He's talking about the gender gap. Are we not allowed to talk about the gender gap?
And the most likely reason he didn't was that he has a prejudice masquerading as a political view
Just go for it. Call him a misogynist. You already said he was whining, there's really no need to pull your punches.
the only evidence that's relevant.
Except that the gender gap in tech is typically the stated reason for the policies he's "whining" about. You won't see a company have affirmative action to hire more women because "We've found women suck at the job". No, they have affirmative action because "90% of of our coders are dudes".
Alright. Lay it on me. What needs to be done?
the only candidate in the last election who even appears to give a sufficient shit about the environment was Jill Stein. Democrats pay lip service to environmental issues but seldom do anything of consequence.
That's great that you're praising Jill Stein for giving the appearance of caring while bashing the democrats for giving the appearance of caring.... in a thread about subsidies for electric cars.
That's great. Super. We're simultaneously bitching about all the money we're giving away. While bitching about not REALLY doing anything. While bitching that other people WOULD TOTALLY really do something.
Well, no. A resource that we depended upon but could not produce cheaply ourselves
Well YES. They imposed rationing. You were only allowed to buy so much fuel to make sure everyone could get SOME fuel. They literally could not make or get enough.
It's best for us when OPEC is selling their oil cheaply,
Hell yeah! Although some people act like it's the end of the world because they're in the business of selling oil. Ignore those people, it's good for everyone else.
because we would like to use up the rest of the world's oil before ours.
Well that's pretty brutal, but sure. I can see that angle.
Sustainability is not even on the list of things to care about.
Oh ye of little foresight.
Let me make this perfectly clear. It IS on the list. It might not be super high on YOUR list, but it's pretty high up on MY list. Do you want a society that only plans out things as far as the next business quarter? Do you care about what sort of planet your children will live on? Do you ever thing about retiring?
With a sustainable energy policy we don't have to invade the other side of the world to destabilize them and keep them from raising their oil prices. We don't have to worry about countries invading us to take what resources we have. We don't have to care about what the rest of the world is doing if we don't depend upon them.
But even rich people care about emissions, because we all breathe the same air. It's not like water, where they can just protect some of it and not other parts and they can be healthy while we all get sick.
Uh... historically the gentry moved out of the shit-filled urban centers to the country-side which had fresh air. A little while ago they moved out of the urban industrial centers where all the smog collected. But these days we just outsource all that dirty work to China. Emissions and air pollution is definitely local pollution. I mean, it also has a global warming element to it, but as far as actual smoke and fumes are concerned, the farmland in Iowa is clear and sunny.
But yeah, you're talking about climate change, which affects us all. But I'd bet money the rich will simply avoid the areas that get really screwed over by it. And when the refugees escape the dried out husks or the flash-flooded destruction, they'll arrive where the rich already own all the land. Who knows, maybe a lawyer convention will get flooded and we can finally get that Bioshock scenario.
That's a god-damned lie and you know it. ~4000 of our troops and ~300,000 civilians.
I don't know about junior's ego vs his daddy's. But I'd say that surrounding himself with people who had already planned and pushed for an invasion of Iraq was probably a bigger factor.
Worse: in order to induce car buyers to spend their money on electric vehicles, the federal government offers a $7,500 rebate on the purchase price.
Is that bad? Because not too long ago our national security was at risk since OPEC had us by the balls over a resource that we depended upon but could not produce ourselves. And as gas prices rose and applies economic pressure on everyone it bust bubbles causing a massive financial econopocalypse. The sort that hadn't been seen since the great depression.
We launched TRIllion dollar WARS over this shit.
Last I checked, there was a temporary spike in US oil production as we squeeze the last few drops out of old wells via fracking, and unlocked some oil from shale. Yay technological improvement. But that doesn't change the fact that cars are running on fossil fuels and ultimately this is not sustainable.
So what do we do? We encourage investment into alternatives. Like electric cars. Which can be powered off of grid power which can, in turn, be powered by renewable sources. So we subsidize electric cars. Would you rather we ban ice cars? Add an ice-tax? Tax fuel prices? Because raising fuel prices worked out so well for us last time.
All that said. If a company specifically targets hoovering up government subsidies, that's generally a bad thing. And there WILL come a time when such encouraging subsidies go away. But you have to examine each program on it's merits or flaws rather than on the whole. Everyone likes to bitch about taxes until you start suggesting programs to cut to reduce them.
When did I even begin to suggest that anyone buys coal from OPEC?
Oh, jesus, my bad. In that case, you're not only wrong, You're not EVEN wrong.
BEHOLD:
" I was talking about buying oil from OPEC, which India does to fuel their cars."
vs
" India has expanded heavily its electricity production w/ less than 25% coming from OPEC,"
Notice that those two statements swap out a RATHER IMPORTANT DETAIL. Now, if it was a simple typo, hey, that's fine. I'm just correcting it in case anyone were to take that as fact. And, since, you know, electricity production is the topic of discussion, the fact that India's OIL supply comes from somewhere isn't even an issue.
Point I was making is that with all of these, oil is increasingly used exclusively for cars, and even there, trends like hybrids and others would drive down the demand.
. . . when has oil not been used primarily for cars? ...And what does that have to do with the electrification of India?
And driving down the demand for oil.... Doesn't save farmhands and construction workers from dying from heat exhaustion.
But oh look, they're dying from being "so green".
uuuuuuuuhhhhh, gonna have to call you to task on a couple of those.
w/ less than 25% coming from OPEC
I mean, first off, who the hell powers their grid off of Oil? You know, that thing that Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries... export. You burn oil for electricity only where you need to run generators, because you can't get power there otherwise. That accounts for You are wrong about it when it comes to oil.
But the spin you're trying to apply here lies in the fact that no, India does not import COAL from OPEC. They get their coal imports from Indonesia and Australia.
That's disingenuous at best because....
and the bulk of it coming from biomass, hydroelectric, wind and solar.
... Their generation is still ~60% coal. (As opposed to the USA's 40%. But that's a bullshit comparison when you throw in Natural Gas.)
The bulk of their power still comes from coal. But they ARE doing better than the USA in the renewable energy field, with ~30% being renewable as opposed the the USA's 12%. All my whining about statistics aside, they're doing great. Mad props to them. (Also their cheap satellites are damn impressive, bravo guys).
It recently signed an agreement w/ the US to buy more of its energy from US.
"energy". Is that oil or coal? Because both are fungible resources that they'll get from wherever is cheapest and typically that means closest. It's why no one really cares about how the USA imports oil from Venezuela even while our leaders threw a hissy fit at each other. One is buying, one is selling. And why the Iran embargo was pretty moot when it came to their oil.
And look into automating the farming.
It's happening. John deer is selling them a lot of combines and tractors. Mechanizing/Automating, same story different year.
Well... he didn't suggest we NOT give painkillers to those with terminal cancer. This would be one of those "in addition to" sort of things. But his analogy sucks. You don't fix terminal cancer. Kinda... by the definition of "terminal". And yeah, killing the pain and giving them a comfortable send-off is about all you can do. I'm.... pretty sure the Earth doesn't have a "terminal" case of warming. If it does, then anything we do, good or bad, is pretty pointless.
But I get what you're saying: "Doing anything about global warming is just a political agenda". Like it's just politics for politics sake. That kinda sucks. And there IS a lot of that. But it'd be wrong of me to simply dismiss the policy of my opponents as "just a political agenda". I fully understand why they want to kick out all the illegal immigrants, or have a strong military, or disrupting the governments South America that got too cozy with communism. There are concern and fears. Some of them legitimate, some of them bullshit.
Sure, "We need to do something about global warming" is on the agenda of the democrats/liberals/progressive/Not-Your-Team. Whatever. But the reason it's on that list is because there's a legitimate concern that we're setting ourselves up for a massive clusterfuck where a ton of people die. Is "Drastic action to limit carbon and methane" on that agenda? You know, as a "what we going to do about it?" sort of thing? Eh, there's not a consensus on that. If you want to attack or call to question THIS specific plan, go for it. That sort of debate is useful and informative. At least when it's not low effort "so how many people do you want to die?" sort of partisan hacks. Better debate topics would be "How do you get China to play along?" and now "How do you get Trump to play along?" and "How do you convince others to conserve while you yourself are wasteful? Because I'm looking at you USA's CO2 per capita". And that loops back around to the article with "Meanwhile India is really green per capita... But oh look they might start dying from it".
Anyway, none of that doesn't exclude Indian rural electrification. That will help, but it won't solve the bigger problem.
right right, you didn't murder him, he just ran into your knife.
So, what do you do to "Shelter" your money from taxes? I'm honestly curious. What makes your "complicated".