Because we don't have it. What we have in Europe is a warranty that your income will not drop below a certain level, because then your income will be subsidized by the state, if and only if you have no other means left. It means that you have to sell your house and your car and all your other assets, before you are entitled to Welfare. It means in most countries that you have to take any job that generates income, while you are on Welfare.
The conditionless basic income is quite different. It's a fixed amount of money everyone gets, without any questions asked. Billionaires are entitled the same way as people too lazy to look for a job. It's not a tax credit, because you also get it if you don't pay any taxes. It doesn't get reduced if you get another source of income.
The blockchain within Bitcoin is useful because Bitcoin is used as a currency.
But that doesn't mean that any blockchain used outside of Bitcoin has to be useless. There are other cases where having a distributed ledger of events (or transactions) is very useful. One is for instance recordings of ownership for real estate. Everytime, some piece of real estate changes owners, you update the blockchain of that real estate. This would amount to a tamper proof way of recording real estate transactions. It's of no use anymore for someone to bribe an official to quietly change the real estate records in your favour, as every change is recorded and can be backtracked, and every real estate owner has a wallet which does not contain Bitcoins, but real estate certificates, which can't change owners without his consent (e.g. with his private key). Obligations are part of the wallet of the obligee, and only if the obligee signalizes fulfillment, the obligation can be erased from the real estate etc.pp.
People should educate themselves about the levees first before they start to propose them as a solution. There is always the shiny example of the Netherlands, and the solution is always "build levees as the Netherlands do!" But no one of them actually asks what conditions allow the Netherlands to build those levees in the first place.
First of all, the Netherlands don't have an ocean coast line, the sea north of the Netherlands is the Northern Sea. It's a very shallow sea, often less than 100 feet deep. One result is that the height difference between the tides is much higher than that of an ocean, as with each tide, huge amounts of water come in from the Atlantic, and leave the Northern Sea again. Like waves coming in at the shore, which get higher and higher until they break down, this water coming from the deep into a shallow sea will increase the amplitude of the flooding. The height difference can reach 15 feet and more. This creates a wide stripe of ground along the coast, which is covered by sea water during the High Tide and falls dry during the Low Tide. This stripe can be at places several miles wide. It's a unique feature you don't find very often. At most other places, the height difference between the tides is less than three feet, less than the expected rise in sea levels.
With this large height difference, rivers will always flow to the sea during the low tide, and the sea water will flow into the land at the high tide. If you build a levee at the mound of the river, you can stop the sea water coming in during the high tide by simply closing a gate in the levee, and you open it at the low tide to let the river flow into the sea. With a height difference of 15 feet, this would still work, if sea levels rise 6 feet, there are still 9 feet left for this mechanism to work. At an ocean coast, you don't have this effect. If the sea level rises 6 feet, rivers won't flow into the sea during the low tide, as the water level of the river is still 3 feet below sea level. You would have to install big pumping stations at the river mounds to pump the water out of the rivers and into the sea. (Even the Netherlands have a large amount of pumps along the coast, the famous wind mills of the Netherlands were mostly build to power those pumps during the Middle Age.)
Second: The coastal line of the Netherlands is not that long. It's about 200 mls from the northernmost point to the southernmost. It has only a few large rivers whose banks also have to be protected by levees. The network of levees was constructed over thousand years. For a country with 16,000 square miles of area, this is manageable. It is not manageable for countries with much longer coastal lines like Florida, with less dry land area like most of the island states, or with a vast network of rivers like Bangladesh.
You will find that for every topic, there is a group that wants to use it to oppress the masses and redistribute wealth to the own people and their cronies. That is nothing new.
The only new thing is that climate change is singled out. So you can be sure that it's not about the potential oppression of the masses or a new attempt at wealth distribution that is at stake here. Because every other topic would do too. It's about people whose business model depends on ignoring the situation or pretending it wouldn't happen. And blindly reiterating their talking points makes clear that also you aren't interesting in the freedom of oppressed masses, and you would probably gladly accept any attempt at wealth redistribution as long as it promises to redistributes some wealth to you too.
In this case, it was the finance departement of an airspace industry company, not a bank official. And so far, we don't even know if they were tricked by scammers to do so, or if it was an inside scheme from the beginning.
It was an inside job, their first announcement was, that it was a suspected hack, and that they sent their collected data so far to a cyber incidence response center, and later determined it must have been an inside job. This is the (german) article from a leading Austrian newspaper about the incident from yesterday morning: FACC article. Feel free to use your favorite online translation service if your german is not good enough.
And Linus Pauling, winner of the Nobel prize for Chemistry, believed high doses of Vitamine C would cure cancer. Excellence in one field of science does not translate in sound knowledge in another field of science, even if it is related.
Burt Rutan can build successful space ships. That doesn't make him an authority in the field of weather prediction and climate modelling.
No. Of course it is less than that since the 1960ies. The 1 degree is the warming since 1900. But even 0.2 degree warming mean a height difference of about 60 m or 200 feet, and if you have a slope of 10% (which is usually a "family ride"), it means 600 m more from the ski lift station to the actual glacier. If you have to walk 600 m over dry ground with your skiing equipment shouldered, you will notice the difference. And you will notice 200 feet of rock sliding down the slope in the summer.
NOAA is still responsible for your daily weather forecast. I wouldn't believe any weather forecast if I was you. And if they predict 20 F for tonight and it really is 20 F tonight, then it must have to do with some wellknown effect (like the Sun not shining) which just by chance yields the same result the weather forecasters predicted but which they never thought about to include in their models.
No, they weren't. One guy was complaining in quite uncomplimentary words that a scientific journal was accepting articles with quite unscientific claims, and another one proudly told the world that he found a new way to recalibrate tree ring data with thermometer data and called it a neat trick.
And those mails then got trumped up as a proof that the climate scientists were routinely manipulating data and shunning people not aligned with the group think.
My personal observation agree with the paid scientific community. I live in a mountainous region, where one degree Celsius difference in average temperature means 300 m (or 1000 feet) height difference for glaciers. It means that winter sport infrastructure that was built in the 1900ies and 1920ies is now far below the end of the glacier. Even the ski lift stations from the 1960ies are now located too low for a long winter sport season. And additionally it means that 300 m of rocks and mud, that once were baked together in permafrost, are now thawing and creating avalanches and mudslides.
It's not the U.S. oil price that has dropped to $1.50. It's the price of a certain crude of low quality, North Dakota Sour, which is rich in sulfur and thus expensive to clean and to refine.
As I have several muslim acquaintances, I can tell you: You are wrong. Just because there are some muslim who wear certain dresses, it does not mean all of them do. None of my acquaintances does. And certainly none of the muslim classmates of my children does, just the mother of one of them.
Christianity dominated the entire globe by means of conquest and colonialism and killing everyone not wanting to convert.
So in general, you have a strong opinion about muslims, but a weak knowledge.
Appearently (and supported by much demographic data), birth rates are not related to the availability of common contraceptiva. Case in point: The pill, introduced in 1963. The birth rate in the U.S. was already declining at the end of the 1950ies, before the pill became available. The birth rate in European countries was declining only five years after the pill became available. Thus while the pill was available nearly at the same time in the U.S. and in European countries, the beginning of declining birth rates was 10 years apart. The introduction of the pill and declining birth rates seems to be a classical case of correlation, but not causation.
Thus back to airbombing people with the condom: It won't affect the birth rate. Birth rates decline in all countries with rising female education levels and better health care, wether you carpet bomb them with condoms or not.
That's a common misconception. The birth rates are high only in regions with a long lasting, ongoing civil war, like Afghanistan, Somalia or Zaire. And that are places where you can't distribute condoms without being shot at sight.
Most other countries have continously falling birth rates, even the so called poor ones. The average birth rate in the African countries for instance is close to 2.5 children per woman, not much higher than for instance the U.S..
Islamic culture did both absorb other cultures and kept them alive. It was the islamic Spain, where the jews survived, it was the re-christianized Spain after the Reconquista, where the jews were either forcefully converted to Christianity or burnt at a stake.
I wonder which religion you are talking about. As far as I know, the Christian religion makes a big difference between men and women, it explicitely states, that the wife has to remain silent in the community.
If I remember correctly, region coding was declared illegal in Australia, and it was declared non-enforceable in New Zealand. The argument at the time that convinced the judge(s) was that only 700 english titles were released for region 4 (South America, Southern Pacific), while at the same time more than 17,000 english titles were available in region 1 (U.S., Canada), and the motion picture industry couldn't explain why they needed that much time for a regional release.
According to the specs of my TV set, it supports both NTSC and PAL(+). Only SECAM is left out. Of course it's a cheap one, because only a high price brand will make the effort to create specific versions for different markets. The cheap ones go the one-size-fits-all-route. I've seen this happening first with DVD players, where the number of formats they play was somehow inversely proportional to the price tag, and the very cheap ones even left out regio coding.
The only reason why you can move your phone number between providers is because some law requires it to be that way. From a technical point of view, if you switch providers, you switch your numbering plan. Now phone providers have an extra layer whose only task it is to route phone numbers to the provider currently operating it. And this layer could work on anything, not just on phone numbers. It could actually work on your ID and then assign the right provider and calling port to you.
In fact, phone numbers were just the most convenient way to unambiguous identify a certain line. That this line was rented by some person with a name and an address is of no technical relevance. The end of the wire just happened to be on the premises of said person. With today's One Numbering Service, with call centers and phone mailboxes other ways to handle calls, the definition of what exactly a line is becomes somewhat vague, and the necessity to address it by a phone number is long gone.
What strangled the economy was printing all the dollars and Nixon defaulting on the gold dollar once the USA government printed all that money that it could never back with the gold it had. There is always enough gold, the only question is the relative price of gold to things, including to currencies.
This I would call U.S.-centric ideology, not economical science. There were many more economies involved in getting rid of the Gold standard, so any interior problems of the U.S. at that time have to take second place in looking at the reasons why the Gold standard was abandoned. Why would for instance Germany or France be inclined to help Richard Nixon to deal with domestic U.S. problems in the 1970ies?
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The conditionless basic income is quite different. It's a fixed amount of money everyone gets, without any questions asked. Billionaires are entitled the same way as people too lazy to look for a job. It's not a tax credit, because you also get it if you don't pay any taxes. It doesn't get reduced if you get another source of income.
But that doesn't mean that any blockchain used outside of Bitcoin has to be useless. There are other cases where having a distributed ledger of events (or transactions) is very useful. One is for instance recordings of ownership for real estate. Everytime, some piece of real estate changes owners, you update the blockchain of that real estate. This would amount to a tamper proof way of recording real estate transactions. It's of no use anymore for someone to bribe an official to quietly change the real estate records in your favour, as every change is recorded and can be backtracked, and every real estate owner has a wallet which does not contain Bitcoins, but real estate certificates, which can't change owners without his consent (e.g. with his private key). Obligations are part of the wallet of the obligee, and only if the obligee signalizes fulfillment, the obligation can be erased from the real estate etc.pp.
First of all, the Netherlands don't have an ocean coast line, the sea north of the Netherlands is the Northern Sea. It's a very shallow sea, often less than 100 feet deep. One result is that the height difference between the tides is much higher than that of an ocean, as with each tide, huge amounts of water come in from the Atlantic, and leave the Northern Sea again. Like waves coming in at the shore, which get higher and higher until they break down, this water coming from the deep into a shallow sea will increase the amplitude of the flooding. The height difference can reach 15 feet and more. This creates a wide stripe of ground along the coast, which is covered by sea water during the High Tide and falls dry during the Low Tide. This stripe can be at places several miles wide. It's a unique feature you don't find very often. At most other places, the height difference between the tides is less than three feet, less than the expected rise in sea levels.
With this large height difference, rivers will always flow to the sea during the low tide, and the sea water will flow into the land at the high tide. If you build a levee at the mound of the river, you can stop the sea water coming in during the high tide by simply closing a gate in the levee, and you open it at the low tide to let the river flow into the sea. With a height difference of 15 feet, this would still work, if sea levels rise 6 feet, there are still 9 feet left for this mechanism to work. At an ocean coast, you don't have this effect. If the sea level rises 6 feet, rivers won't flow into the sea during the low tide, as the water level of the river is still 3 feet below sea level. You would have to install big pumping stations at the river mounds to pump the water out of the rivers and into the sea. (Even the Netherlands have a large amount of pumps along the coast, the famous wind mills of the Netherlands were mostly build to power those pumps during the Middle Age.)
Second: The coastal line of the Netherlands is not that long. It's about 200 mls from the northernmost point to the southernmost. It has only a few large rivers whose banks also have to be protected by levees. The network of levees was constructed over thousand years. For a country with 16,000 square miles of area, this is manageable. It is not manageable for countries with much longer coastal lines like Florida, with less dry land area like most of the island states, or with a vast network of rivers like Bangladesh.
The reproduction rate of the U.S. (2.2 births per woman) is higher than that of Asia (1.8 births per woman). So lets nuke the U.S. first!
The only new thing is that climate change is singled out. So you can be sure that it's not about the potential oppression of the masses or a new attempt at wealth distribution that is at stake here. Because every other topic would do too. It's about people whose business model depends on ignoring the situation or pretending it wouldn't happen. And blindly reiterating their talking points makes clear that also you aren't interesting in the freedom of oppressed masses, and you would probably gladly accept any attempt at wealth redistribution as long as it promises to redistributes some wealth to you too.
In this case, it was the finance departement of an airspace industry company, not a bank official. And so far, we don't even know if they were tricked by scammers to do so, or if it was an inside scheme from the beginning.
It was an inside job, their first announcement was, that it was a suspected hack, and that they sent their collected data so far to a cyber incidence response center, and later determined it must have been an inside job. This is the (german) article from a leading Austrian newspaper about the incident from yesterday morning: FACC article. Feel free to use your favorite online translation service if your german is not good enough.
And you are an authority about Burt Rutan's knowledge in the field of global warming, so I have to take your word on it. Right.
Burt Rutan can build successful space ships. That doesn't make him an authority in the field of weather prediction and climate modelling.
No. Of course it is less than that since the 1960ies. The 1 degree is the warming since 1900. But even 0.2 degree warming mean a height difference of about 60 m or 200 feet, and if you have a slope of 10% (which is usually a "family ride"), it means 600 m more from the ski lift station to the actual glacier. If you have to walk 600 m over dry ground with your skiing equipment shouldered, you will notice the difference. And you will notice 200 feet of rock sliding down the slope in the summer.
NOAA is still responsible for your daily weather forecast. I wouldn't believe any weather forecast if I was you. And if they predict 20 F for tonight and it really is 20 F tonight, then it must have to do with some wellknown effect (like the Sun not shining) which just by chance yields the same result the weather forecasters predicted but which they never thought about to include in their models.
And those mails then got trumped up as a proof that the climate scientists were routinely manipulating data and shunning people not aligned with the group think.
My personal observation agree with the paid scientific community. I live in a mountainous region, where one degree Celsius difference in average temperature means 300 m (or 1000 feet) height difference for glaciers. It means that winter sport infrastructure that was built in the 1900ies and 1920ies is now far below the end of the glacier. Even the ski lift stations from the 1960ies are now located too low for a long winter sport season. And additionally it means that 300 m of rocks and mud, that once were baked together in permafrost, are now thawing and creating avalanches and mudslides.
The last time, the Sahara was green (about 6000 AD), it was a savanna, but not a rain forest.
Dying is also naturally occuring. So we are fucking idiots if we think the guy with the bloody knife in his hands has anything to do with it.
It's not the U.S. oil price that has dropped to $1.50. It's the price of a certain crude of low quality, North Dakota Sour, which is rich in sulfur and thus expensive to clean and to refine.
Christianity dominated the entire globe by means of conquest and colonialism and killing everyone not wanting to convert.
So in general, you have a strong opinion about muslims, but a weak knowledge.
Thus back to airbombing people with the condom: It won't affect the birth rate. Birth rates decline in all countries with rising female education levels and better health care, wether you carpet bomb them with condoms or not.
Most other countries have continously falling birth rates, even the so called poor ones. The average birth rate in the African countries for instance is close to 2.5 children per woman, not much higher than for instance the U.S..
Islamic culture did both absorb other cultures and kept them alive. It was the islamic Spain, where the jews survived, it was the re-christianized Spain after the Reconquista, where the jews were either forcefully converted to Christianity or burnt at a stake.
I wonder which religion you are talking about. As far as I know, the Christian religion makes a big difference between men and women, it explicitely states, that the wife has to remain silent in the community.
If I remember correctly, region coding was declared illegal in Australia, and it was declared non-enforceable in New Zealand. The argument at the time that convinced the judge(s) was that only 700 english titles were released for region 4 (South America, Southern Pacific), while at the same time more than 17,000 english titles were available in region 1 (U.S., Canada), and the motion picture industry couldn't explain why they needed that much time for a regional release.
According to the specs of my TV set, it supports both NTSC and PAL(+). Only SECAM is left out. Of course it's a cheap one, because only a high price brand will make the effort to create specific versions for different markets. The cheap ones go the one-size-fits-all-route. I've seen this happening first with DVD players, where the number of formats they play was somehow inversely proportional to the price tag, and the very cheap ones even left out regio coding.
In fact, phone numbers were just the most convenient way to unambiguous identify a certain line. That this line was rented by some person with a name and an address is of no technical relevance. The end of the wire just happened to be on the premises of said person. With today's One Numbering Service, with call centers and phone mailboxes other ways to handle calls, the definition of what exactly a line is becomes somewhat vague, and the necessity to address it by a phone number is long gone.
What strangled the economy was printing all the dollars and Nixon defaulting on the gold dollar once the USA government printed all that money that it could never back with the gold it had. There is always enough gold, the only question is the relative price of gold to things, including to currencies.
This I would call U.S.-centric ideology, not economical science. There were many more economies involved in getting rid of the Gold standard, so any interior problems of the U.S. at that time have to take second place in looking at the reasons why the Gold standard was abandoned. Why would for instance Germany or France be inclined to help Richard Nixon to deal with domestic U.S. problems in the 1970ies?