It makes using gold as money infinitely more complex
We have computers now. Record-keeping makes using gold as money very slightly more complex - and can be done by the guy actually holding the gold on your behalf. (Unless you propose trading by physically exchanging chunks of gold, which I hope you don't.)
South Park being the show which consists entirely of, "Poop! Pee! Shit! Fuck! I said fuck! Simplistic stereotype! Guys we really hope with this show you'll see why libertarianism is so great. Poop!"
The government gets the trail only by following a particular legislatively approved procedure. What I think you're asking for is a change in the list of occasions where the procedure is applicable. There are times, such as criminal investigation of people trafficking (that's newspeak for "slavery"), where surely you see that it is reasonable for the police to investigate the flow of money. AML isn't just about tax evasion and drugs money.
As for inflation, you're assuming that the supply of gold remains constant. This includes the absurdly luddite assumption that deflation and technology won't make synthesis of gold cheaper than its purchase. Also hoarding => class system, rinse, repeat.
True, but you may be a native American speaker. The US have this habit of regarding organisations as persons in their own right. British English recognises that organisation = group of people. Plural.
At some point the receiver is going to read the transaction. At some point he's going to do something with the BitCoin representation of his wealth.
BitCoin is absurd because the moment someone has a file on their hard drive representing the value of a house, the profitability of cracking that computer, installing a keylogger for passphrase and taking the file becomes so significant that not just average joes but even the geekiest geek will be outsmarted by organised criminals. It's a typical case of a computer scientist catching the mouse and ignoring the elephant in the room: great in a theoretical world which only has mice.
(Oh, and the government. But the government would just outlaw significant anonymous Bitcoin usage under AML regulations.)
The first problem with Tor is that its threat model assumes a non-global adversary. If only there were some way for government to eavesdrop on Internet communications.
Without the audit trail, you are proposing what, exactly? That we physically transport gold to each other? That the amount of gold we own is represented by a single entry in a database with no evidence to back it up in case of malfunction/dispute? Who protects this gold and the systems surrounding it?
Since we are eliminating reversibility and record-keeping, I look forward to working for your bank and transferring your balance to my account. That is monetary freedom, which is actually a large part of freedom. Have a nice day!
The "invisible hand of the market" was a quasi-religious substitute for god in a time when atheistic concepts were crude and relatively unevolved from their theistic heritage. Those who had broken free from the chains of pious dogma found themselves lonely - perhaps man could divine an intelligent design for society instead? One so perfect that it must surely improve everyone's lot.
Turns out god is just man, and man is not god.
Some people are taking their time to catch up with this.
To concern yourself with who pays the man is to engage in non-productive bitterness. Have you ever done work for a company which has at any point benefited from a government contract? Have you ever purchased anything from a company which has benefited from a government contract? Then you are benefiting, however indirectly (and all corrupt beneficiaries benefit indirectly), from the taxpayer and all your records should be made public.
What matters is not who pays him but the power he has. If the government puts him, say, in some sort of policy-making or judicial role then his work clearly becomes that of a government official. If he's just doing research and teaching students then, well, feel free to judge him on that. He, like any government or private employee, will have an opinion on stuff, and his opinion will affect his work. If you want him to hide that opinion then, well, "don't ask don't tell" doesn't work, OK? If you want his opinion not to influence his work inappropriately, that's fine and that's what the university administration (which is a government official role) comes in.
Perhaps I did not express myself clearly enough. The fact that the professor is involved in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah is not what makes him exempt. It is the fact that he is not acting as a government official.
For example, a government-sponsored think tank is involved in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah, but I think there is a sound argument that its interactions (considering particularly its relationship with any special interests) should be made public. And when a professor is charged by government to help implement some awful reform, his work should then be treated as a government official's work. This is so not least because, if you're in the United Kingdom (see: drugs, welfare, banking regulation, etc.), the academic is likely to eventually announce that the government's implementation of his proposal is awful, acts in contradiction to his advice and needs complete overhaul - even while the government continues to insist that it is acting on sound academic advice. The public, including other well-meaning academics, can find out whether the academic was hoodwinked or whether he was in on it from day one.
If you're going to have an open records law then you don't get to make exceptions for political reasons. Otherwise you end up with the inevitable, "It's only OK to request records for a cause advantaging the sufficiently powerful." It's the listener flip side to declaring freedom of speech then listing a million forms of speech which don't really count as speech.
The role of the professor in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah is irrelevant. Everyone should be able to engage in all these things, and life would be even worse if only certain classes of people are exempted on account of being allowed to "think more freely" than others, or something.
This means that any open records law must be limited in application to specific people in specific roles which affect the public: legislative, executive or judicial. In particular, those representatives directly elected or those appointed by such representatives should expect to have all their correspondence scrutinised.
Exceptions may only exist when the exception is required to protect the well-being of a private citizen, and they must exist for only as long as that protection is required. For example, correspondence relating to a police investigation would not be appropriate to reveal until the investigation and any judicial wheel-turning is complete, but should be available for perusal after that unless certain private witnesses need protecting. If the witness-protection justification is used, it must be well documented so that, after the natural death of the witness (or as appropriate), records can be revealed and our descendants can study our performance and learn from it.
Remember also that, while today we think that we have an impossible mound of bureauratic record-keeping, in 100 years time computer systems may be able to intelligently search and analyse more text than we have ever created.
Alas, the most corrupt will communicate off the record anyway.
These studies are not conclusive, merely suggestive of something that requires more study.
Yes. I hope you weren't supporting some argument about nuclear safety using these non-conclusive studies. The uninitiated reader may assume you're asserting that the occasional nuclear incident is to be encouraged, or something similarly strabismic.;-)
I don't mean to butt in like some pre-political-correctness oaf to this learned inquiry on pedigree, but "Aryanian" sounds really cool. Can we use that word somewhere in your argument?
"Rule of law" doesn't mean "laws exist". It means that laws and the legal system aren't engineered to give an advantage to particular men. But when that engineering has occurred, unfair competition regulations act as a counterbalance.
Law is meant to rule men, more rule of law is more rule of men, and you're haphazard quips are pathetic - I hope if you are as bat-shit insane as you sound you will promptly commit suicide and rid us all of you're lunacy, if you are just a bad PR person I hope you at least get replaced by someone competent enough not to turn against a company I otherwise love (Microsoft, seriously, even though I'm posting on/. I worked in Redmond and love that place). You are an utter disgrace to the Human race in any regard, its embarrassing, really.
I just wanted to quote this paragraph because it's stuff like this that keeps the Internet entertaining. Thanks.
You might want to start arguing with the WHO. The concern in the aftermath of radiation exposure is not millions dying suddenly; it's significant numbers having their lives shortened and their quality of life affected in the long term. With wind power, you can say, "OK, this guy died instantly because a blade fell on him"; with nuclear power, you acknowledge that many people die of cancer in the long term and compare age/severity/etc of cancer in the general population vs those exposed to higher levels of radiation during some period.
You then have to factor in the amount of work which has to be done to minimise the effects of a nuclear containment breach: clean-up; sealing; long-term evacuation; treatment.
Nuclear power remains more risky than wind power unless you deliberately restrict what counts as harmful. The solution is not to abandon nuclear power; it is to employ modern designs and to force existing plants to keep up with improvements in safety. Fukushima was only running because it was given an inappropriate stay of execution, and this incident only occurred on the scale observed because Fukushima was still running (and perhaps because TEPCO were unwilling to quickly employ reactor-destroying measures to help with cooling). Nuclear power will now suffer a setback. People who make simplistic analyses such as your own are their own worst enemy.
...and it's not as insane as it seems. Regulation is usually to protect the small guy while the big guys have the lawyer power to avoid it. By phrasing regulation in terms on unfair competition laws, you end up with big businesses paying to enforce regulation. Which do you prefer: (i) One big business forcing another business to abide by some law; (ii) That same big business also ignoring the law.
Perhaps the underlying law is unjust. But then you tackle the underlying law - you don't tackle some principle which makes it harder to enforce a law. Let us have more rule of law and less rule of men, yes?
I was responding to the scientific inaccuracies with scientific fact and supporting evidence. I was responding to political extremism (greens vs pro-nuclear) with a more balanced political/economic outlook (profit vs risk).
I'm not sure how to respond to emotional accusations like that I "create bad blood". Sorry.
Does it really need to be said that the Japanese lost control of exactly 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000% of their nuclear fuel.
If exposure of the rods and burning off of radioactive isotopes is zero loss of control, then stabbing someone is zero loss of blood unless they die.
Wanna bet the author of this story is a "green scientist" ?
The only thing I'd bet is that you're thoroughly annoyed that an out-of-date power plant has demonstrated that humans need to try much harder when deploying nuclear power. You're deliberately polarising it as greens vs nuclear advocates when it's really the desire for safe nuclear power vs the desire for maximising profit at inappropriate risk.
Weird. I find any attempt to "immerse" me by bombarding my senses just distracts or limits my imagination from providing a more interesting experience. It'd be like reading fiction with pop-ups every few pictures.
As gets we want to explore these possibilities, mentally catalog it and imagine what it would be like to manipulate our worlds (or the fantasy world) with it just like we do the technology that really exists.
This is relevant. If you don't think "imagin[ing] what it would be like to manipulate our worlds" involves heroism, diplomacy and social progression then.. erm.. something's gone wrong.
Why watch content with strings and models when I can watch content with cgi
Seriously? Have we really reached that point where science fiction isn't spurring the imagination, just about feeding an image to your head? I couldn't give a hoot about visible strings or "crappy colour", just as we can both cope that we don't have a 360 degree 3D panorama with tactile and olfactory stimulation.
If you think any Star Trek is about heroism, diplomacy, and social progressiveness its you who needs to turn in your geek card.
What is it about? Spaceships with flashing lights and meeting funny-looking aliens?
Slashdot Mirror
It makes using gold as money infinitely more complex
We have computers now. Record-keeping makes using gold as money very slightly more complex - and can be done by the guy actually holding the gold on your behalf. (Unless you propose trading by physically exchanging chunks of gold, which I hope you don't.)
and for the most part uncontrolled by governments
For the most part.
Hording is a problem, but most people will just leave it in banks
Leaving in bank = hoarding, assuming that you're eliminating fractional reserve banking (and that by "leaving in bank" you didn't mean "investing").
hording is more a problem now since people don't trust paper dollars to keep their value.
Inflation tends to increase spending and borrowing.
South Park being the show which consists entirely of, "Poop! Pee! Shit! Fuck! I said fuck! Simplistic stereotype! Guys we really hope with this show you'll see why libertarianism is so great. Poop!"
The government gets the trail only by following a particular legislatively approved procedure. What I think you're asking for is a change in the list of occasions where the procedure is applicable. There are times, such as criminal investigation of people trafficking (that's newspeak for "slavery"), where surely you see that it is reasonable for the police to investigate the flow of money. AML isn't just about tax evasion and drugs money.
As for inflation, you're assuming that the supply of gold remains constant. This includes the absurdly luddite assumption that deflation and technology won't make synthesis of gold cheaper than its purchase. Also hoarding => class system, rinse, repeat.
Those French are a blond lot...
I'm not a native English speaker
True, but you may be a native American speaker. The US have this habit of regarding organisations as persons in their own right. British English recognises that organisation = group of people. Plural.
At some point the receiver is going to read the transaction. At some point he's going to do something with the BitCoin representation of his wealth.
BitCoin is absurd because the moment someone has a file on their hard drive representing the value of a house, the profitability of cracking that computer, installing a keylogger for passphrase and taking the file becomes so significant that not just average joes but even the geekiest geek will be outsmarted by organised criminals. It's a typical case of a computer scientist catching the mouse and ignoring the elephant in the room: great in a theoretical world which only has mice.
(Oh, and the government. But the government would just outlaw significant anonymous Bitcoin usage under AML regulations.)
The first problem with Tor is that its threat model assumes a non-global adversary. If only there were some way for government to eavesdrop on Internet communications.
The second problem is that not even that assumption is sufficient.
Without the audit trail, you are proposing what, exactly? That we physically transport gold to each other? That the amount of gold we own is represented by a single entry in a database with no evidence to back it up in case of malfunction/dispute? Who protects this gold and the systems surrounding it?
Since we are eliminating reversibility and record-keeping, I look forward to working for your bank and transferring your balance to my account. That is monetary freedom, which is actually a large part of freedom. Have a nice day!
If only there were some way for government to eavesdrop on Internet communications.
The "invisible hand of the market" was a quasi-religious substitute for god in a time when atheistic concepts were crude and relatively unevolved from their theistic heritage. Those who had broken free from the chains of pious dogma found themselves lonely - perhaps man could divine an intelligent design for society instead? One so perfect that it must surely improve everyone's lot.
Turns out god is just man, and man is not god.
Some people are taking their time to catch up with this.
Thomas Mann: "Everything is politics."
To concern yourself with who pays the man is to engage in non-productive bitterness. Have you ever done work for a company which has at any point benefited from a government contract? Have you ever purchased anything from a company which has benefited from a government contract? Then you are benefiting, however indirectly (and all corrupt beneficiaries benefit indirectly), from the taxpayer and all your records should be made public.
What matters is not who pays him but the power he has. If the government puts him, say, in some sort of policy-making or judicial role then his work clearly becomes that of a government official. If he's just doing research and teaching students then, well, feel free to judge him on that. He, like any government or private employee, will have an opinion on stuff, and his opinion will affect his work. If you want him to hide that opinion then, well, "don't ask don't tell" doesn't work, OK? If you want his opinion not to influence his work inappropriately, that's fine and that's what the university administration (which is a government official role) comes in.
Perhaps I did not express myself clearly enough. The fact that the professor is involved in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah is not what makes him exempt. It is the fact that he is not acting as a government official.
For example, a government-sponsored think tank is involved in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah, but I think there is a sound argument that its interactions (considering particularly its relationship with any special interests) should be made public. And when a professor is charged by government to help implement some awful reform, his work should then be treated as a government official's work. This is so not least because, if you're in the United Kingdom (see: drugs, welfare, banking regulation, etc.), the academic is likely to eventually announce that the government's implementation of his proposal is awful, acts in contradiction to his advice and needs complete overhaul - even while the government continues to insist that it is acting on sound academic advice. The public, including other well-meaning academics, can find out whether the academic was hoodwinked or whether he was in on it from day one.
If you're going to have an open records law then you don't get to make exceptions for political reasons. Otherwise you end up with the inevitable, "It's only OK to request records for a cause advantaging the sufficiently powerful." It's the listener flip side to declaring freedom of speech then listing a million forms of speech which don't really count as speech.
The role of the professor in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah is irrelevant. Everyone should be able to engage in all these things, and life would be even worse if only certain classes of people are exempted on account of being allowed to "think more freely" than others, or something.
This means that any open records law must be limited in application to specific people in specific roles which affect the public: legislative, executive or judicial. In particular, those representatives directly elected or those appointed by such representatives should expect to have all their correspondence scrutinised.
Exceptions may only exist when the exception is required to protect the well-being of a private citizen, and they must exist for only as long as that protection is required. For example, correspondence relating to a police investigation would not be appropriate to reveal until the investigation and any judicial wheel-turning is complete, but should be available for perusal after that unless certain private witnesses need protecting. If the witness-protection justification is used, it must be well documented so that, after the natural death of the witness (or as appropriate), records can be revealed and our descendants can study our performance and learn from it.
Remember also that, while today we think that we have an impossible mound of bureauratic record-keeping, in 100 years time computer systems may be able to intelligently search and analyse more text than we have ever created.
Alas, the most corrupt will communicate off the record anyway.
If the principle is accepted and applied elsewhere, we're all responsible for whatever Kevin Bacon does.
No, you're responsible for the benefit you voluntarily and actively obtain from what Kevin Bacon does.
You know what happens if you pay a contract killer? Same principle.
These studies are not conclusive, merely suggestive of something that requires more study.
Yes. I hope you weren't supporting some argument about nuclear safety using these non-conclusive studies. The uninitiated reader may assume you're asserting that the occasional nuclear incident is to be encouraged, or something similarly strabismic. ;-)
I don't mean to butt in like some pre-political-correctness oaf to this learned inquiry on pedigree, but "Aryanian" sounds really cool. Can we use that word somewhere in your argument?
"Rule of law" doesn't mean "laws exist". It means that laws and the legal system aren't engineered to give an advantage to particular men. But when that engineering has occurred, unfair competition regulations act as a counterbalance.
Law is meant to rule men, more rule of law is more rule of men, and you're haphazard quips are pathetic - I hope if you are as bat-shit insane as you sound you will promptly commit suicide and rid us all of you're lunacy, if you are just a bad PR person I hope you at least get replaced by someone competent enough not to turn against a company I otherwise love (Microsoft, seriously, even though I'm posting on /. I worked in Redmond and love that place). You are an utter disgrace to the Human race in any regard, its embarrassing, really.
I just wanted to quote this paragraph because it's stuff like this that keeps the Internet entertaining. Thanks.
So the longest term impact of Chernobyl is more politicians?
Imaginary deity help us all!
You might want to start arguing with the WHO. The concern in the aftermath of radiation exposure is not millions dying suddenly; it's significant numbers having their lives shortened and their quality of life affected in the long term. With wind power, you can say, "OK, this guy died instantly because a blade fell on him"; with nuclear power, you acknowledge that many people die of cancer in the long term and compare age/severity/etc of cancer in the general population vs those exposed to higher levels of radiation during some period.
You then have to factor in the amount of work which has to be done to minimise the effects of a nuclear containment breach: clean-up; sealing; long-term evacuation; treatment.
Nuclear power remains more risky than wind power unless you deliberately restrict what counts as harmful. The solution is not to abandon nuclear power; it is to employ modern designs and to force existing plants to keep up with improvements in safety. Fukushima was only running because it was given an inappropriate stay of execution, and this incident only occurred on the scale observed because Fukushima was still running (and perhaps because TEPCO were unwilling to quickly employ reactor-destroying measures to help with cooling). Nuclear power will now suffer a setback. People who make simplistic analyses such as your own are their own worst enemy.
...and it's not as insane as it seems. Regulation is usually to protect the small guy while the big guys have the lawyer power to avoid it. By phrasing regulation in terms on unfair competition laws, you end up with big businesses paying to enforce regulation. Which do you prefer:
(i) One big business forcing another business to abide by some law;
(ii) That same big business also ignoring the law.
Perhaps the underlying law is unjust. But then you tackle the underlying law - you don't tackle some principle which makes it harder to enforce a law. Let us have more rule of law and less rule of men, yes?
I was responding to the scientific inaccuracies with scientific fact and supporting evidence. I was responding to political extremism (greens vs pro-nuclear) with a more balanced political/economic outlook (profit vs risk).
I'm not sure how to respond to emotional accusations like that I "create bad blood". Sorry.
Both Iodine and Cesium are only dangerous if you ingest significant quantities of them. Additionally they have halflives measured in hours
No.
I-131 8 days.
Cs-137 30.2 years.
The problem at Chernobyl was release of Uranium and Plutonium in clouds, which then spread around the site, and irradiated everything.
In the long term the problem was the Cs-137.
Does it really need to be said that the Japanese lost control of exactly 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000% of their nuclear fuel.
If exposure of the rods and burning off of radioactive isotopes is zero loss of control, then stabbing someone is zero loss of blood unless they die.
Wanna bet the author of this story is a "green scientist" ?
The only thing I'd bet is that you're thoroughly annoyed that an out-of-date power plant has demonstrated that humans need to try much harder when deploying nuclear power. You're deliberately polarising it as greens vs nuclear advocates when it's really the desire for safe nuclear power vs the desire for maximising profit at inappropriate risk.
Weird. I find any attempt to "immerse" me by bombarding my senses just distracts or limits my imagination from providing a more interesting experience. It'd be like reading fiction with pop-ups every few pictures.
As gets we want to explore these possibilities, mentally catalog it and imagine what it would be like to manipulate our worlds (or the fantasy world) with it just like we do the technology that really exists.
This is relevant. If you don't think "imagin[ing] what it would be like to manipulate our worlds" involves heroism, diplomacy and social progression then.. erm.. something's gone wrong.
Why watch content with strings and models when I can watch content with cgi
Seriously? Have we really reached that point where science fiction isn't spurring the imagination, just about feeding an image to your head? I couldn't give a hoot about visible strings or "crappy colour", just as we can both cope that we don't have a 360 degree 3D panorama with tactile and olfactory stimulation.
If you think any Star Trek is about heroism, diplomacy, and social progressiveness its you who needs to turn in your geek card.
What is it about? Spaceships with flashing lights and meeting funny-looking aliens?