They should have rigged their primary like the Democrats did.
Yes, they should. If ever there was an argument for superdelegates and all the rest of their weirdness, it's Trump's primary win.
Of course, If ever there was an argument against superdelegates and all the rest of their weirdness, it's Hillary's primary win.
How the two major parties of the most powerful nation on Earth selected an idiot slimeball and a scheming crook as their preferred candidates, I'll never understand. As a conservative-leaning libertarian I don't think I've been given an actual good candidate for president since, well, ever, but 2016 set some kind of record for shitty choices.
Are you white and male? Then your opinions and feelings are invalid.
That's obviously wrong, and stupid. Everyone's opinions and feelings are valid. Well, everyone's feelings are valid; opinions can be invalid if they contradict facts (of course, facts seem to be malleable of late, which complicates everything).
But, it's worth thinking about how and why that ugly notion that white male feelings are invalid arose. It is a direct result of white men essentially arguing that the opinions of women and minorities are invalid. That doesn't make it right, but neither is it right to discount the feelings of others.
It goes like this (just an example; there are a million versions): A woman feels sexually harassed when a male boss makes a sexist joke, so she complains. The response that it's not big deal is a none-too-subtle statement that her feeling is invalid. When called on this, the male boss is confused, because it really is no big deal to him. He didn't mean to offend or belittle, he just thought the joke was funny and can't see why she's bothered by it. It was just a joke. So, the woman says (with some justification) that he doesn't understand because he's not a woman and so doesn't get it.
This is the origin of identity politics (which is a conservative thing just as much as a liberal thing, BTW). It's a widespread error, that comes from a broad truth. It really is the case that people can easily misunderstand the viewpoints of people who are different from them. However, it's also perfectly possible for people to make an effort to empathize, and to succeed to a significant and useful degree. It's also possible for people to refuse to make the attempt. In addition, it's also possible for people to exploit the difficulty of understanding another's feelings to their own advantage, pretending hurt where it doesn't exist. And it's possible for people to assume that real hurt is being faked when it's not, or even to pretend to believe it's faked even when they know it's real, again to gain advantage.
But all of that nuance is complicated, and there are significant numbers of people who will refuse to even attempt to navigate it.
However, my core point is that whatever your race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., you can do the world and yourself a big favor by realizing and acting upon the fact that everyone's feelings are valid, even if they don't make sense to you! If you're in a position where your own class is dominant, you should also realize that your opinions and feelings carry inappropriate and unfair weight, due to your relative power, which means that you should make an effort not to ride roughshod over people with less power. If you don't, you're an asshole.
I'm shouting uselessly into the void, I realize, but I really wish people wouldn't redefine "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency", rather than "cryptography", which is what it has meant for decades.
If you implement backdoors in your software, you can as well close shop. Nobody, at least no company with at least a hint of self preservation, will buy your product. If I cannot trust my company trade secrets to be secret from espionage because your product is insecure (and yes, a backdoor makes a product insecure BY DEFINITION), I will not use your product.
Apple already has a back door: their code-signing keys.
Calling that a back door is a stretch. Having the keys needed to sign firmware clearly wasn't intended as a backdoor, it was an operational necessity required to close the front door. You need signed firmware and hardware with ROM code that will refuse to load firmware without the correct signature so that attackers can't simply install their own malicious firmware. And in order to sign firmware, someone has to have the keys. Of course, those keys need to be carefully secured, but there are well-known techniques for that, including keeping the keys in a hardware security module, keeping the security module under tight physical security, and instituting access control policies (preferably enforced by the secure hardware) that require multiple authorized individuals to approve signing, etc.
Of course, those mitigations can only make it harder for insiders to sign firmware that defeats security, not impossible, and that's a problem.
The best solution I've seen is the one implemented in the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. While Google obviously has the keys to sign firmware updates for the NXP security chip that secures user authentication, the software is designed in such a way that updates cannot be done without the user's password. So, to install firmware that bypasses the user's password, you have to present the user's password. Well, unless the NXP security chip can be broken. If the hardware is vulnerable, there's nothing software can do. But there's ample reason to believe that the hardware is pretty good.
Nowhere does it guarantee a right to privacy. The government needs to be able to keep people safe and they cannot do this unless they have to the correct tools.
You should read the Constitution more carefully. The ninth Amendment states, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The Constitution is about what the federal government is allowed to do. It does not enshrine certain rights and exclude others.
No need to reach for the catchall 9th in this case. The 4th amendment clearly guarantees a right to privacy. Emphasis mine, obviously.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
GMail is a system app on a lot (if not all?) of phones, it can't be removed. At best it can have its updates removed and be disabled.
Installing Gmail Go will only end up using even more storage space.
Storage is rarely the biggest problem on low and midrange Android devices. Insufficient RAM is what makes things suck. The Go apps use less RAM, that's their real benefit.
The most likely case is you will be involuntary let go from your current job and then suddeny find none of your experience matters and you can't even get an interview.
Vanishingly unlikely in my case. My expertise (cryptographic security) is in very high demand across the industry. Moreover, my specific experience in Google over the last several has put me in close contact with lots of major industry players, and built up a lot of expertise and knowledge they'd love to have (nothing secret; it's all open source). I could have a dozen job offers next week, either contract or full-time, my choice.
I'm not claiming my position is typical. It's not. My career is hitting kind of a sweet spot at the moment. But I also know lots of other "individual contributor" engineers at Google who are significantly older than me and plugging happily along, doing their work. Including one in his 70s (who has no financial need to work, but likes it).
From everything I can see, if you're a software engineer at Google, no one cares how young or old you are, what color you are, what gender you are (if any), or used to be, what you look like, what you wear, etc. If you can do good work, you'll keep your job, and you'll get paid commensurate with that work.
It will be fascinating to me to see what comes out in these various legal proceedings.
I didn't say I hadn't heard of it. I said that there were nothing but allegations, nothing proven. You're assuming they're valid. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. From where I sit, I don't see it. We'll see what happens.
Google saves, complies, and sells the contents of every email. I don't know how email could be *less* secure.
Google does nothing of the sort. Google doesn't give your email content to anyone; Google's mail servers scan your email and use the content to decide what ads to show you in the Gmail interface. That's it.
I call bullshit on the "without ads there would be no content" argument though; there was plenty of quality content on the Internet before ads came along
Nothing remotely like there is today. Either you didn't actually use the pre-ad Internet (meaning before about 1993), or you have forgotten.
My fourth option is the same as the one I use when I come across a site with an anti-adblock script where the effort to work around it outweighs my desire to read their specific take on the content. See if that content is available elsewhere, with a side-option of probably not returning to that site again if it's a high-enough profile to enter my conciousness or particularly obnoxious about the detection.
There's an implicit assumption underlying this option which should be made explicit: You're assuming that the content you would like to see/read is available for free somewhere. In a world where everyone used the same strategy you do, that would almost certainly not be the case. It takes time and effort to produce content, and it takes space, labor, hardware, power and bandwidth to serve it. Outside of whatever hobbyists are willing to do for free, all of that costs money. Without ads, it either wouldn't happen, or everything would be paywalled.
Okay, but will this rise affect me in my lifetime, or can I safely ignore it and pass this problem off to the next generation like I plan on doing with the national debt?
The key difference between the two is that the national debt is little more than a pattern of bits on some spinning disks (as the GOP seems to have suddenly realized), whereas the rising sea levels are a serious physical threat (which they have unfortunately not yet realized).
Both are very real, and serious. Roughly the same level of real and serious, and even the same kind of real and serious, mostly, since rising sea levels will primarily be an economic catastrophe, not generally a threat to life and limb (with the exception of a few people who refuse to get out of the path of storms).
The representation of the national debt is little more than patterns of bits, but the debts those bits represent are extremely real, not least to the people to whom the money is owed, and who will be very unhappy if they're suddenly discarded, or inflated away. Who are those people? Well, they fall into two main categories: Americans and foreigners. Americans are owed most of it, and the majority of American-held debt consists of the retirement savings of individual Americans. A little under 20% of it is owed to Social Security.
So if the US decides to renege on its debt, lots of retirees and those who are getting close to retire are going to be seriously screwed. Even those who have their 401k accounts invested in non-government securities are going to get shafted when lots of institutional investors get shafted and the resulting stock market tumble. If you're thinking that the US can just invent a bunch more bits to feed and house and care for all of the retirees (including many who saved their whole lives and are seriously pissed that their government just screwed them), you create a whole new set of problems. I could go into them, but that's a subject for another post.
What about the 47% of national debt that is owed to foreigners? What would be the impact of telling them "Ha ha fooled you, suckers!"? Lots and lots of things. First, it would very likely trigger a global depression (which would hurt America). Second, it's not inconceivable that it could provoke a war, at a moment when, third, we'd lose the ability to borrow at non-insane rates. This, in turn, would also mean that either the flow of international goods into the US would cease, or we'd have to start selling lots of America in exchange for the foreign stuff we want to buy, since we have been and will for the foreseeable future run current account deficits (the net difference between imports and exports). Those current account deficits are in large part facilitated by the countries with current account surpluses, who are collecting large piles of dollars, loaning those dollars back to us.
In addition, Americans owe foreigners almost as much money as foreigners owe Americans. Refusing to make good on our debts to them will cause them to refuse to make good on their debts to us. So if the US government won't honor its obligations to foreign banks and investors, they won't honor their obligations to US banks and investors. Oops, there's Joe Sixpack's retirement taking it in the shorts yet again. Plus maybe his employer suddenly finding itself insolvent and laying him off.
There's a lot more, but the bottom line is that the US cannot simply decide that its debts don't matter. The result would be economic catastrophe... probably not terribly different from the economic catastrophe caused by trillions of dollars of prime real estate gradually becoming marine life habitat. Not because bits really matter, but because the obligations those bits represent, obligations to real people, who have made real plans based on the assumption that the debts will be made good, matter.
Money is not real. It's a fiction. But the goods, services and labor that money stands for and is used to trade are very
I expect that the idea is to make it easy to create a large number of digital pseudonyms, each of which is used for only one purpose, and which the real owner can prove ownership of, but without revealing their true identity or enabling anyone to link back to it.
So there's no need to erase records, instead if you have a pseudonymous identity you don't use any more, you just abandon it in place, destroying the credentials you use to prove ownership. It still exists, but has no connection to you.
Of course this very neat theory (which has been discussed heavily in cryptography circles for decades) runs into some real challenges when you want to use these identities in practice. There are lots of cool ideas about how to use cryptographic protocols, possibly involving a trusted third party, to validate bits of information about you without identifying you, and even to create "conditional" links between pseudonyms and real identities. For example, maybe you could employ a trusted third party protocol to validate your creditworthiness, and give the lender a cryptographic token that enables them, with the assistance of the third party, or perhaps a court, to decrypt your real identity. That way, perhaps you could get a loan that isn't linked to your identity. (Note that one ugly element of this scenario is that the likely candidates for the trusted third party are the credit agencies, which have proven themselves to be anything but trustworthy.)
Anyway, lots of interesting ideas in this space. No idea what the real-world implications might be. Governments would probably be terrified of having such systems become the norm, since it would make it really hard to track people.
So I guess you are a believer in voter id laws then?
Precisely the opposite. That's a case where we can fairly easily measure the impact of the laws, in both directions and in multiple ways, and it's easy to demonstrate that they harm democracy by disenfranchising the poor far more than they help it by eliminating fraudulent voting.
You're the one making the claim that has to be defended. You're saying that this new stream of disinformation has no effect.
How can somebody disprove an effect if nobody is able to describe or quantify it?
Describing it is easy. Quantifying it... doing that would prove or disprove it, or more likely somewhere in between. That's really hard.
But I stand by my previously-stated position: Given that this affects the integrity of our democracy, we should assume that it may be a risk and work to mitigate it, until someone can prove that it doesn't exist, or exists but is negligible.
You're the one making the claim that has to be defended. You're saying that this new stream of disinformation has no effect. In general, disinformation is a tried and true technique with a long history of success, so it's on you to demonstrate why this particular form of it is ineffectual.
Now, if someone comes along and claims that the Russian disinformation did change the election outcome, then it's on them to support their claim. But the claim that it might have follows logically from the fact that disinformation has often been effective in other contexts.
And given the stakes here, I'd argue that it behooves us to assume that social media disinformation campaigns are a threat to the integrity of our democratic process and take steps to remedy them. Unless someone can satisfactorily prove that they aren't.
I'm basically saying is that the clock is two hours out year round. Yes the current system gives more sun in the summer months. But it basically means we come home in the dark in winter. Why not come home to a little sun and enjoy some outdoor time with the family, friends the garden what have you.
Why not leave the clock alone and go to work at 6 AM rather than 8 AM?
Until then it doesn't matter what the US, UK and EU do. All of those having falling CO2 emissions
Cite? The best information I can find shows the US emissions as flat over the last few years (emissions from power generation have fallen a bit, but total emissions have not). Your graph shows that they're expected to keep climbing (albeit slower than China). Yes, China needs to reduce emissions, but everything I see shows that they're working far harder at it than we are. Your graph was based on 2009 data, and in the last 2-3 years China has begun investing extremely heavily in solar and wind, more than any other country in the world. China has also recognized that they can't abandon coal entirely, because they don't have a lot of natural gas. So instead, they're building out renewable generation capacity as fast as they can (China generates more electricity from solar than any other country already, and has 70% of the world's solar thermal capacity), while executing a plan to maximize the efficiency of their coal generation. Lots of those new coal power plants they're building are replacements, enabling them to shut down older, less-efficient plants.
The bottom line is that in the last few years, China has turned over a new leaf and is working really hard to address their CO2 emissions. Much harder than we are. Their emissions are going to continue climbing for a few years yet, but then they're going to start falling rapidly as they hit their stride and renewable deployment significantly outpaces increase in demand.
China will never reach US per-capita emission rates. They're on track to peak at just over half of our rates, then start to fall. Meanwhile, we're doing almost nothing.
The only way to stop the CO2 is to have ALL NATIONS STOP ADDING COAL and back off rather quickly.
That's far from enough.
Note that the assumptions underlying the Paris accord include the notion that we (soon) not only dramatically reduce the CO2 we put into the atmosphere, but that we actually start removing and sequestering large quantities. We have no real idea how to do that, and while we've begun scaling back emissions (well, slowed the rate of increase) we haven't even started seriously extracting CO2.
We need to look at the problem holistically, as a geoengineering problem, not just as an emissions problem. Of course, cutting emissions is almost certainly cheaper than recapturing CO2, or reducing insolation, but we need to be looking at all parts, because no single approach is going to be sufficient.
Slashdot Mirror
They should have rigged their primary like the Democrats did.
Yes, they should. If ever there was an argument for superdelegates and all the rest of their weirdness, it's Trump's primary win.
Of course, If ever there was an argument against superdelegates and all the rest of their weirdness, it's Hillary's primary win.
How the two major parties of the most powerful nation on Earth selected an idiot slimeball and a scheming crook as their preferred candidates, I'll never understand. As a conservative-leaning libertarian I don't think I've been given an actual good candidate for president since, well, ever, but 2016 set some kind of record for shitty choices.
(And, no, I didn't vote for either of them.)
Are you white and male? Then your opinions and feelings are invalid.
That's obviously wrong, and stupid. Everyone's opinions and feelings are valid. Well, everyone's feelings are valid; opinions can be invalid if they contradict facts (of course, facts seem to be malleable of late, which complicates everything).
But, it's worth thinking about how and why that ugly notion that white male feelings are invalid arose. It is a direct result of white men essentially arguing that the opinions of women and minorities are invalid. That doesn't make it right, but neither is it right to discount the feelings of others.
It goes like this (just an example; there are a million versions): A woman feels sexually harassed when a male boss makes a sexist joke, so she complains. The response that it's not big deal is a none-too-subtle statement that her feeling is invalid. When called on this, the male boss is confused, because it really is no big deal to him. He didn't mean to offend or belittle, he just thought the joke was funny and can't see why she's bothered by it. It was just a joke. So, the woman says (with some justification) that he doesn't understand because he's not a woman and so doesn't get it.
This is the origin of identity politics (which is a conservative thing just as much as a liberal thing, BTW). It's a widespread error, that comes from a broad truth. It really is the case that people can easily misunderstand the viewpoints of people who are different from them. However, it's also perfectly possible for people to make an effort to empathize, and to succeed to a significant and useful degree. It's also possible for people to refuse to make the attempt. In addition, it's also possible for people to exploit the difficulty of understanding another's feelings to their own advantage, pretending hurt where it doesn't exist. And it's possible for people to assume that real hurt is being faked when it's not, or even to pretend to believe it's faked even when they know it's real, again to gain advantage.
But all of that nuance is complicated, and there are significant numbers of people who will refuse to even attempt to navigate it.
However, my core point is that whatever your race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., you can do the world and yourself a big favor by realizing and acting upon the fact that everyone's feelings are valid, even if they don't make sense to you! If you're in a position where your own class is dominant, you should also realize that your opinions and feelings carry inappropriate and unfair weight, due to your relative power, which means that you should make an effort not to ride roughshod over people with less power. If you don't, you're an asshole.
That $40 million in savings from firing 1800 people could have been had by firing a single CEO
The B&N CEO made $5M in 2017, most of that in (rapidly declining) stock. https://www1.salary.com/Max-J-...
I'm shouting uselessly into the void, I realize, but I really wish people wouldn't redefine "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency", rather than "cryptography", which is what it has meant for decades.
If you implement backdoors in your software, you can as well close shop. Nobody, at least no company with at least a hint of self preservation, will buy your product. If I cannot trust my company trade secrets to be secret from espionage because your product is insecure (and yes, a backdoor makes a product insecure BY DEFINITION), I will not use your product.
Apple already has a back door: their code-signing keys.
Calling that a back door is a stretch. Having the keys needed to sign firmware clearly wasn't intended as a backdoor, it was an operational necessity required to close the front door. You need signed firmware and hardware with ROM code that will refuse to load firmware without the correct signature so that attackers can't simply install their own malicious firmware. And in order to sign firmware, someone has to have the keys. Of course, those keys need to be carefully secured, but there are well-known techniques for that, including keeping the keys in a hardware security module, keeping the security module under tight physical security, and instituting access control policies (preferably enforced by the secure hardware) that require multiple authorized individuals to approve signing, etc.
Of course, those mitigations can only make it harder for insiders to sign firmware that defeats security, not impossible, and that's a problem.
The best solution I've seen is the one implemented in the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. While Google obviously has the keys to sign firmware updates for the NXP security chip that secures user authentication, the software is designed in such a way that updates cannot be done without the user's password. So, to install firmware that bypasses the user's password, you have to present the user's password. Well, unless the NXP security chip can be broken. If the hardware is vulnerable, there's nothing software can do. But there's ample reason to believe that the hardware is pretty good.
Nowhere does it guarantee a right to privacy. The government needs to be able to keep people safe and they cannot do this unless they have to the correct tools.
You should read the Constitution more carefully. The ninth Amendment states, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The Constitution is about what the federal government is allowed to do. It does not enshrine certain rights and exclude others.
No need to reach for the catchall 9th in this case. The 4th amendment clearly guarantees a right to privacy. Emphasis mine, obviously.
RAM is a *huge* problem when you have only 512 MB.
GMail is a system app on a lot (if not all?) of phones, it can't be removed. At best it can have its updates removed and be disabled.
Installing Gmail Go will only end up using even more storage space.
Storage is rarely the biggest problem on low and midrange Android devices. Insufficient RAM is what makes things suck. The Go apps use less RAM, that's their real benefit.
The most likely case is you will be involuntary let go from your current job and then suddeny find none of your experience matters and you can't even get an interview.
Vanishingly unlikely in my case. My expertise (cryptographic security) is in very high demand across the industry. Moreover, my specific experience in Google over the last several has put me in close contact with lots of major industry players, and built up a lot of expertise and knowledge they'd love to have (nothing secret; it's all open source). I could have a dozen job offers next week, either contract or full-time, my choice.
I'm not claiming my position is typical. It's not. My career is hitting kind of a sweet spot at the moment. But I also know lots of other "individual contributor" engineers at Google who are significantly older than me and plugging happily along, doing their work. Including one in his 70s (who has no financial need to work, but likes it).
From everything I can see, if you're a software engineer at Google, no one cares how young or old you are, what color you are, what gender you are (if any), or used to be, what you look like, what you wear, etc. If you can do good work, you'll keep your job, and you'll get paid commensurate with that work.
It will be fascinating to me to see what comes out in these various legal proceedings.
I didn't say I hadn't heard of it. I said that there were nothing but allegations, nothing proven. You're assuming they're valid. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. From where I sit, I don't see it. We'll see what happens.
Google saves, complies, and sells the contents of every email. I don't know how email could be *less* secure.
Google does nothing of the sort. Google doesn't give your email content to anyone; Google's mail servers scan your email and use the content to decide what ads to show you in the Gmail interface. That's it.
I call bullshit on the "without ads there would be no content" argument though; there was plenty of quality content on the Internet before ads came along
Nothing remotely like there is today. Either you didn't actually use the pre-ad Internet (meaning before about 1993), or you have forgotten.
Yeah, and if we ALL don't buy at Walmart they will have to...
C'mon, not gonna happen.
Stuff costs. It's gotta get paid for somehow. You're assuming that everything you care about will always be free.
C'mon, not gonna happen.
And you will notice that those paywalled results don't stay in the top 10 google results for long.
They will when everything relevant is paywalled.
My fourth option is the same as the one I use when I come across a site with an anti-adblock script where the effort to work around it outweighs my desire to read their specific take on the content. See if that content is available elsewhere, with a side-option of probably not returning to that site again if it's a high-enough profile to enter my conciousness or particularly obnoxious about the detection.
There's an implicit assumption underlying this option which should be made explicit: You're assuming that the content you would like to see/read is available for free somewhere. In a world where everyone used the same strategy you do, that would almost certainly not be the case. It takes time and effort to produce content, and it takes space, labor, hardware, power and bandwidth to serve it. Outside of whatever hobbyists are willing to do for free, all of that costs money. Without ads, it either wouldn't happen, or everything would be paywalled.
Okay, but will this rise affect me in my lifetime, or can I safely ignore it and pass this problem off to the next generation like I plan on doing with the national debt?
The key difference between the two is that the national debt is little more than a pattern of bits on some spinning disks (as the GOP seems to have suddenly realized), whereas the rising sea levels are a serious physical threat (which they have unfortunately not yet realized).
Both are very real, and serious. Roughly the same level of real and serious, and even the same kind of real and serious, mostly, since rising sea levels will primarily be an economic catastrophe, not generally a threat to life and limb (with the exception of a few people who refuse to get out of the path of storms).
The representation of the national debt is little more than patterns of bits, but the debts those bits represent are extremely real, not least to the people to whom the money is owed, and who will be very unhappy if they're suddenly discarded, or inflated away. Who are those people? Well, they fall into two main categories: Americans and foreigners. Americans are owed most of it, and the majority of American-held debt consists of the retirement savings of individual Americans. A little under 20% of it is owed to Social Security.
So if the US decides to renege on its debt, lots of retirees and those who are getting close to retire are going to be seriously screwed. Even those who have their 401k accounts invested in non-government securities are going to get shafted when lots of institutional investors get shafted and the resulting stock market tumble. If you're thinking that the US can just invent a bunch more bits to feed and house and care for all of the retirees (including many who saved their whole lives and are seriously pissed that their government just screwed them), you create a whole new set of problems. I could go into them, but that's a subject for another post.
What about the 47% of national debt that is owed to foreigners? What would be the impact of telling them "Ha ha fooled you, suckers!"? Lots and lots of things. First, it would very likely trigger a global depression (which would hurt America). Second, it's not inconceivable that it could provoke a war, at a moment when, third, we'd lose the ability to borrow at non-insane rates. This, in turn, would also mean that either the flow of international goods into the US would cease, or we'd have to start selling lots of America in exchange for the foreign stuff we want to buy, since we have been and will for the foreseeable future run current account deficits (the net difference between imports and exports). Those current account deficits are in large part facilitated by the countries with current account surpluses, who are collecting large piles of dollars, loaning those dollars back to us.
In addition, Americans owe foreigners almost as much money as foreigners owe Americans. Refusing to make good on our debts to them will cause them to refuse to make good on their debts to us. So if the US government won't honor its obligations to foreign banks and investors, they won't honor their obligations to US banks and investors. Oops, there's Joe Sixpack's retirement taking it in the shorts yet again. Plus maybe his employer suddenly finding itself insolvent and laying him off.
There's a lot more, but the bottom line is that the US cannot simply decide that its debts don't matter. The result would be economic catastrophe... probably not terribly different from the economic catastrophe caused by trillions of dollars of prime real estate gradually becoming marine life habitat. Not because bits really matter, but because the obligations those bits represent, obligations to real people, who have made real plans based on the assumption that the debts will be made good, matter.
Money is not real. It's a fiction. But the goods, services and labor that money stands for and is used to trade are very
Studies in states that have enacted voter ID strongly contradict your assertions. You speak as though it has not been enacted anywhere, but it has.
Does past records every get erased?
I expect that the idea is to make it easy to create a large number of digital pseudonyms, each of which is used for only one purpose, and which the real owner can prove ownership of, but without revealing their true identity or enabling anyone to link back to it.
So there's no need to erase records, instead if you have a pseudonymous identity you don't use any more, you just abandon it in place, destroying the credentials you use to prove ownership. It still exists, but has no connection to you.
Of course this very neat theory (which has been discussed heavily in cryptography circles for decades) runs into some real challenges when you want to use these identities in practice. There are lots of cool ideas about how to use cryptographic protocols, possibly involving a trusted third party, to validate bits of information about you without identifying you, and even to create "conditional" links between pseudonyms and real identities. For example, maybe you could employ a trusted third party protocol to validate your creditworthiness, and give the lender a cryptographic token that enables them, with the assistance of the third party, or perhaps a court, to decrypt your real identity. That way, perhaps you could get a loan that isn't linked to your identity. (Note that one ugly element of this scenario is that the likely candidates for the trusted third party are the credit agencies, which have proven themselves to be anything but trustworthy.)
Anyway, lots of interesting ideas in this space. No idea what the real-world implications might be. Governments would probably be terrified of having such systems become the norm, since it would make it really hard to track people.
Who validates the new data that comes in?
Answered in blockchain documentation.
Which blockchain documentation are you referring to?
So I guess you are a believer in voter id laws then?
Precisely the opposite. That's a case where we can fairly easily measure the impact of the laws, in both directions and in multiple ways, and it's easy to demonstrate that they harm democracy by disenfranchising the poor far more than they help it by eliminating fraudulent voting.
You're the one making the claim that has to be defended. You're saying that this new stream of disinformation has no effect.
How can somebody disprove an effect if nobody is able to describe or quantify it?
Describing it is easy. Quantifying it... doing that would prove or disprove it, or more likely somewhere in between. That's really hard.
But I stand by my previously-stated position: Given that this affects the integrity of our democracy, we should assume that it may be a risk and work to mitigate it, until someone can prove that it doesn't exist, or exists but is negligible.
You're the one making the claim that has to be defended. You're saying that this new stream of disinformation has no effect. In general, disinformation is a tried and true technique with a long history of success, so it's on you to demonstrate why this particular form of it is ineffectual.
Now, if someone comes along and claims that the Russian disinformation did change the election outcome, then it's on them to support their claim. But the claim that it might have follows logically from the fact that disinformation has often been effective in other contexts.
And given the stakes here, I'd argue that it behooves us to assume that social media disinformation campaigns are a threat to the integrity of our democratic process and take steps to remedy them. Unless someone can satisfactorily prove that they aren't.
I'm basically saying is that the clock is two hours out year round. Yes the current system gives more sun in the summer months. But it basically means we come home in the dark in winter. Why not come home to a little sun and enjoy some outdoor time with the family, friends the garden what have you.
Why not leave the clock alone and go to work at 6 AM rather than 8 AM?
Until then it doesn't matter what the US, UK and EU do. All of those having falling CO2 emissions
Cite? The best information I can find shows the US emissions as flat over the last few years (emissions from power generation have fallen a bit, but total emissions have not). Your graph shows that they're expected to keep climbing (albeit slower than China). Yes, China needs to reduce emissions, but everything I see shows that they're working far harder at it than we are. Your graph was based on 2009 data, and in the last 2-3 years China has begun investing extremely heavily in solar and wind, more than any other country in the world. China has also recognized that they can't abandon coal entirely, because they don't have a lot of natural gas. So instead, they're building out renewable generation capacity as fast as they can (China generates more electricity from solar than any other country already, and has 70% of the world's solar thermal capacity), while executing a plan to maximize the efficiency of their coal generation. Lots of those new coal power plants they're building are replacements, enabling them to shut down older, less-efficient plants.
The bottom line is that in the last few years, China has turned over a new leaf and is working really hard to address their CO2 emissions. Much harder than we are. Their emissions are going to continue climbing for a few years yet, but then they're going to start falling rapidly as they hit their stride and renewable deployment significantly outpaces increase in demand.
China will never reach US per-capita emission rates. They're on track to peak at just over half of our rates, then start to fall. Meanwhile, we're doing almost nothing.
The only way to stop the CO2 is to have ALL NATIONS STOP ADDING COAL and back off rather quickly.
That's far from enough.
Note that the assumptions underlying the Paris accord include the notion that we (soon) not only dramatically reduce the CO2 we put into the atmosphere, but that we actually start removing and sequestering large quantities. We have no real idea how to do that, and while we've begun scaling back emissions (well, slowed the rate of increase) we haven't even started seriously extracting CO2.
We need to look at the problem holistically, as a geoengineering problem, not just as an emissions problem. Of course, cutting emissions is almost certainly cheaper than recapturing CO2, or reducing insolation, but we need to be looking at all parts, because no single approach is going to be sufficient.