Government run entity runs something and messes up = government is incompetent
Government outsources to private enterprise and they mess up = government contract management is incompetent.
Somewhere in there it needs to be realised that people mess up, regardless of whether they work for a public or private organisation.
Get rid of the blame game and work out a non-biased system that determines whether the infrastructure or service should be government run or not, and set them up as required.
It will be interesting to find out exactly what was in the contract. That will come out in the lawsuit,
You're assuming NG didn't throw in a binding arbitration clause together with their general Disclaimer of Warranty and Force Majeure covering unexpected situations such as a GPS Rollover as part of the client onboarding.
Force Majeure is in no way applicable to a man created event that has an 100% probability and known timeframe down to the second - 20 years in advance.
Hooning
Hooning is the common word we use for any anti-social behaviour conducted in a motor vehicle—a car, van or motorbike—such as speeding, street racing, burnouts and playing loud music from a car stereo.
Hooning includes any number of traffic offences, such as dangerous driving, careless driving, driving without reasonable consideration for other people, driving in a way that makes unnecessary noise or smoke, and racing or conducting speed trials on a public road.
Penalties for hooning
Penalties vary for different hooning offences. For example, driving in a way that makes unnecessary noise or smoke carries a maximum fine of 20 penalty units ($2611) while the most serious offences, such as careless driving—also known as driving without due care and attention—or street racing, carry a maximum fine of 40 penalty units ($5222) or 6 months in jail.
In addition, for specific offences classed as hooning—anti-social behaviour in a motor vehicle—police now have the power to impound, immobilise and confiscate the vehicle you were driving when you committed the offence.
So in order to get around a bad-faith company abusing their market position, I should conduct a multi-hundred-thousand dollar transaction to sell my house, pack up all my earthly belongings at financial and time expense, and move to where another company may or may not be abusing their monopoly position already?
https://www.news.com.au/techno...
Not so far fetched - that was our Prime Minister at the time, who was directing the government owned nbnco on the expectations of the national broadband network implementation - the new monopoly for fixed line connections.
I'm sure you can see the irony where the owner of the entity that is going to make broadband available to every single premise in the nation is telling someone to move house for a better internet connection. Just WTH are they going to deliver?
At first this annoyed me. Because I figure that if they're going to force me to pay them money they shouldn't be adding insult to injury by making me pay to do their paperwork for paying them money.
But then I thought about it for a second: 1. The IRS is infamously inept with technology (they're still using paper in 2019).
underfunded for improvements
2. The government is infamously bloated, inefficient, inept, incompetent, and just... stupid in every way at actually getting things done.
hampered by bureaucratic red tape that prevents efficient work practices, and requiring layer on layer of managers
3. Wouldn't I rather have something that actually works? (i.e. Turbotax)
There's no reason the IRS couldn't make something that works - plus they should be able to access a lot more information sources on your behalf, which reduces the chance of you submitting an incorrect lodgement
4. If the government had to write its own tax software wouldn't they simply increase my taxes to pay for it? So couldn't I just think of the price of tax software as being part of the taxes that the government protection racket was going to take from me anyway?
Online lodging reduces paper handling, and leads to less errors and faster turnarounds. It would pay for itself easily - especially across 300 million plus people (online lodging works fine for much smaller countries)
5. Wouldn't I rather have the for-profit tax software company be liable for errors in the software instead of just being screwed if the government (inevitably) screwed up?
When the government screws up the system citizens use to meet obligations, the government should take responsibility for it. That's how other countries do it. Why can't the IRS?
So I'm actually OK with this if it gets passed.
This passes on extra costs to those least able to afford it. The rich already have tax accountants minimising their taxes, so they wouldn't use a government created system anyway.
And it's not just consumers. When you have to tell an IT person that TCO for actually having server hardware you run is less than renting container time from AWS...
It might be, but getting users to pay for their consumption can be a massive PITA both upfront and ongoing. Putting them on a cloud based service that sends them a bill for their usage can save significant person hours that could be better spent elsewhere.
Once they actually start footing their share of the bills, then there might be a swing back to on-prem ownership instead.
There is a 'neutral' point for the engines to be located such that a large amount of thrust causes the body to remain mostly neutral.
Yup, and that's how the other versions are configured. These new MAX configs have physically larger engines, so - to prevent have to redesign the whole aircraft to deal with them - the engines are positioned a little bit further forward, and a centre of the engine a little bit higher off the ground (ie closer to the wing). The centre of thrust is consequently moved forward and up in relation to the centre of gravity. The result is the craft will nose-up under full throttle.
The other problem is that companies were assured pilots would not need training in the new system, however a critical difference between this system and normal auto-pilot systems is that this system does not turn off when pilots attempt an overide.
The costs for new coal plants are higher than new renewables + storage based plants, so your rant about skyrocketing costs of electricity would be more applicable if replacement coal plants were on the cards instead of renewables.
You might be skeptical about this, but right now new privately owned plants based on renewables are showing up everywhere as replacements for decommissioning coal plants, so commercially the figures must make sense. A search showed one in my neighbourhood I hadn't heard of at all, coincidentally the same capacity as what's coal fired in New Mexico: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/02/22/1-5-gw-solar-500-mwh-battery-project-breaks-ground-in-australia/
Any country with a liberal enough government reduces poverty significantly when electricity penetration is high.
Sure some are taking their time, however IMO there certainly seems correlation between the 2.
Of course, someone else has discounted that, but as noted there is more than just electricity driving reduction in poverty. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ucenergy/2018/03/09/does-providing-electricity-to-the-poor-reduce-poverty-research-suggests-not-quite/#38144646e39b
...haven't been able too because Huawei can come straight back with U.S. equipment and show how it is being used to spy
Another possibility is that US intelligence agencies cannot guarantee they can hack Huawei devices without being discovered and/or their hack being used against them.
Went with my partner and our 3 month old baby (a specific parent/baby targeted session). As someone who hasn't seen any of the marketing material, comics interviews, or anything that seems SJWish (I live in the southern hemisphere and don't watch TV), it was enjoyable enough.
Right now the most logical reason to me is that 5 Eyes do not have (enough) backdoor access to Huawei gear, hence the aggressive campaign against the company by these countries.
There *is* an Enterprise version of Windows 10. What enterprisey stuff need to be removed from the Home edition?
I just checked the Start menu on my work Win10 PC. Only work and Office related apps. Cortana is locked down. Updates are selected and pushed as available for a period of time, then forced install after a date.I need to login with a different account for local admin rights, and that account cannot access the internet through our web proxy.
That would not bring you very far in Germany.
I don't know a single bakery where you can pay with a card, what so ever the card is.
Or a pub for that matter, sure, there are some but my two favourite ones definitely don't accept cards.
That's..pretty disappointing really. I used cash to buy some chocolates from a coworker raising money for their school earlier today, but otherwise I'm having a hard time thinking of a place that doesn't accept contactless cards now (Australia).
The fresh food market - all the stalls can process cards. Food trucks, yep. Go to a concert in a big field and all the bars and food vans will take cards - even the merchandising tents will take cards. Coffee shops, bottle shops, pubs, supermarkets, comic stores, music stores, everyone takes cards - you'd be throwing away a massive percentage of customers if you didn't.
Even the MANIAX axe-throwing place takes cards.
ahh wait, the homeless and chuggers aren't yet running around with card readers. Thankfully.
That's because the coal fired power plants can't take the extreme heat baking Australia at the moment - January was Australia’s hottest month on record, with the country’s mean temperature exceeding 30C for the first time since records began in 1910. This results in coal plants going offline, so gas plants spin up to take on the load - but only *after* spot pricing has gone through the roof. The Tesla battery is taking the top out of this market, but it's only one player where more are needed..
Lastly - the private owners of the coal fired Liddel power station are closing it down as it is cheaper to move to renewables than spend $500-600 million refurbing an almost 50yr old power station, pushing it well past its design specs. The last time this was done the budget was blown by ~100% and the plant was online for only 20% of the time - a complete failure. This closure of coal plants in favour of renewables is happening nationwide - there are NIL new coal plants proposed due to poor financials.
Incorrect, I implied a correlation between spending money on R&D and reducing costs for production. I left it at 'imply', as that's what was discussed a few posts above.
'For all we know'...no. We know the key technologies involved.
We _were_ spending money on PVs in the 70s. Throwing masses of money at a problem doesn't improve the number of qualified researchers.
Say what? Throw money at something and you'll get more people studying it to get a piece of that gravy train. As an obvious example have a look at government grants.
Look at what all the funding for AIDs did, it slowed cancer research.
Wait, so throwing money at one topic dragged researchers from other areas? That's the correlation I get from your statement.
I thought you just said throwing money at a problem doesn't improve the number of researchers, yet here you are implying the exact opposite.
You cannot schedule breakthroughs. Going industrial when you should stay in the lab is a sure path to bankruptcy.
Agreed.
All costs are opportunity costs. What research would you have had them not do in order to chase PVs?
That's a bit of a strawman - limited dollars for R&D will always mean prioritisation based on some criteria. Since we're being ridiculous, maybe "they" in the 70s could have dropped R&D on fracking & shale oil extraction, or supporting military coups in Latin America and the ME?
...these government sites only function if viewed through Chrome on Windows
So they've finally ditched the IE6 requirement?!? Now that's progress.
Sarcasm aside, government core business function almost everywhere is unrelated to OS development, and application development is usually business specific. I'm sure that certain security related agencies could be set as responsible for developing a secure core OS for use across all government sectors, but you're also running against corporate interests in regards to some pretty large US based companies out there. Considering this is a US centric site, supporting US centric companies is no-where near as big a deal as every other country also doing it.
China has their Red-Flag (RH) linux, so it's certainly being done. I think there's little political capital around supporting that type of operation though, so it just won't happen.
We don't need it to be 100% renewable and we don't need zero emission either.
We just need to get to a point where we emit less than what nature can deal with.
that's really the whole point of having an Emissions Trading System - add some regulation about emissions target, and allow companies to sell anything under that. You end up with a bunch of companies doing things like planting trees and sequestering carbon, and companies unable to clean up their act buy their excess credits. You might start with set pricing for carbon credits, and eventually let the market decide the value.
It is also acceptable to to have localized pollution. If we can stop gas emission now for the cost of toxic landfills then that could be an acceptable trade if we don't find any better solution.
I feel it likely that landfills will be mined for resources at some point so having them isn't necessarily a problem. Toxicity however does need containment to prevent contamination of groundwater tables.
Heck, if we can stop Greenland and the South Pole from melting we can afford a couple of hundred Chernobyl style incidents and still have more habitable land left.
Can't speak to that, but I think that NIMBY is going to prevent nuclear power proliferation, so may as well take renewables for now. Plus renewables have much lower investment requirements and are faster to install, so you can get ROI quickly plus scale up at numerous locations for resilience.
that discounts the probability that the costs have gone down because we started spending money on them.
Then please explain the price of the latest iPhone?
Demand driven pricing and corporate greed? It has little to do with the cost of manufacture in that segment.
The implication that in spending money developing PV the cost has reduced. Doing that spend back in the 70s vs doing it in the 2000-10s? There's no way to measure the potential difference in end user costs that I know of. For all we know, doing more R&D in the 70s could have had us running 90+% renewables world-wide by now, and people would be complaining that climate change was just a figment of the imagination. Perhaps less wars that have oil supplies at the core of the matter?
I disagree with this point. It's my app/website/whatever. If I want to use information that your browser or operating system sends to my server, I don't have to tell you what I'm collecting or how I'm using that information.
Does your screengrabbing/whatever software stop the instant your app is interrupted by a message notification or any other type of context/focus switch? Everything else is not "your app", and that sure isn't "your information" to do with as you please.
When does your screengrabbing start up again?
what about devices that can run multiple apps displayed simultaneously? My phone can have 2 apps running at half-screen at the same time. Is your app screengrabbing the lot, or just your applications' half? How do I know that for sure?
Wrong! Your net worth is still negative. You don't own your house!
Your net value will jump up when you pay your house in full, but at the moment you don't own it, if you have a mortgage. Only if you have enough liquid money to pay your remaining mortgage in full you can claim that your net value is non-zero.
Don't believe me - stop making payments, the bank will take your house away, and all the money you have paid until this moment are gone, like you have paid rent.
The bank may foreclose and sell the house, and any excess money after paying down the mortgage is your to keep - the bank can't keep it as they are creditors to only a certain amount.
Now, since the bank doesn't care about getting any excess and just wants its debt paid off, they'll do a quick sale that recovers as much of the debt as possible. If you lose out a chunk of equity then it's too bad for you.
Of course, you might live in a backwards country where you don't receive the excess, but I can't do anything about that for you.
> Medium of exchange refers to being a universally accepted token of value, unlike a barter economy where you need to find someone who has what you want to barter with.
Right, universally accepted value. The key words being "accept" and "value". Meaning most people (universally) will say "I'll _accept_ 20Money for this item I'm selling". Most people don't in any way accept *coin, or even appear to accept it. Those that appear to don't accept *coin at a certain _value_. Some online stores use a payment servicer that processes via *coin, but the _value_ they offer to _accept_ is "$20 worth of *coin". The _value_ they put on it is denominated in US dollars.
There is no "universally accepted" token of value - the medium of exchange for goods is defined by the currency accepted by the service provider. Luckily there are numerous places that will exchange your freedom dollars for whatever is accepted locally, whether that is Yen, Rubles, unmovable massive stones, barrels of crude oil (ok maybe not this one), US$, or Bitcoin.
The primary difference is that Bitcoin is not a popular currency for local use, so not many services are priced using it.
Slashdot Mirror
Government outsources to private enterprise and they mess up = government contract management is incompetent.
Somewhere in there it needs to be realised that people mess up, regardless of whether they work for a public or private organisation.
Get rid of the blame game and work out a non-biased system that determines whether the infrastructure or service should be government run or not, and set them up as required.
It will be interesting to find out exactly what was in the contract. That will come out in the lawsuit,
You're assuming NG didn't throw in a binding arbitration clause together with their general Disclaimer of Warranty and Force Majeure covering unexpected situations such as a GPS Rollover as part of the client onboarding.
Force Majeure is in no way applicable to a man created event that has an 100% probability and known timeframe down to the second - 20 years in advance.
https://www.qld.gov.au/law/cri...
Hooning
Hooning is the common word we use for any anti-social behaviour conducted in a motor vehicle—a car, van or motorbike—such as speeding, street racing, burnouts and playing loud music from a car stereo.
Hooning includes any number of traffic offences, such as dangerous driving, careless driving, driving without reasonable consideration for other people, driving in a way that makes unnecessary noise or smoke, and racing or conducting speed trials on a public road.
Penalties for hooning
Penalties vary for different hooning offences. For example, driving in a way that makes unnecessary noise or smoke carries a maximum fine of 20 penalty units ($2611) while the most serious offences, such as careless driving—also known as driving without due care and attention—or street racing, carry a maximum fine of 40 penalty units ($5222) or 6 months in jail.
In addition, for specific offences classed as hooning—anti-social behaviour in a motor vehicle—police now have the power to impound, immobilise and confiscate the vehicle you were driving when you committed the offence.
Really.
So in order to get around a bad-faith company abusing their market position, I should conduct a multi-hundred-thousand dollar transaction to sell my house, pack up all my earthly belongings at financial and time expense, and move to where another company may or may not be abusing their monopoly position already?
https://www.news.com.au/techno... Not so far fetched - that was our Prime Minister at the time, who was directing the government owned nbnco on the expectations of the national broadband network implementation - the new monopoly for fixed line connections.
I'm sure you can see the irony where the owner of the entity that is going to make broadband available to every single premise in the nation is telling someone to move house for a better internet connection. Just WTH are they going to deliver?
At first this annoyed me. Because I figure that if they're going to force me to pay them money they shouldn't be adding insult to injury by making me pay to do their paperwork for paying them money.
But then I thought about it for a second: 1. The IRS is infamously inept with technology (they're still using paper in 2019).
underfunded for improvements
2. The government is infamously bloated, inefficient, inept, incompetent, and just... stupid in every way at actually getting things done.
hampered by bureaucratic red tape that prevents efficient work practices, and requiring layer on layer of managers
3. Wouldn't I rather have something that actually works? (i.e. Turbotax)
There's no reason the IRS couldn't make something that works - plus they should be able to access a lot more information sources on your behalf, which reduces the chance of you submitting an incorrect lodgement
4. If the government had to write its own tax software wouldn't they simply increase my taxes to pay for it? So couldn't I just think of the price of tax software as being part of the taxes that the government protection racket was going to take from me anyway?
Online lodging reduces paper handling, and leads to less errors and faster turnarounds. It would pay for itself easily - especially across 300 million plus people (online lodging works fine for much smaller countries)
5. Wouldn't I rather have the for-profit tax software company be liable for errors in the software instead of just being screwed if the government (inevitably) screwed up?
When the government screws up the system citizens use to meet obligations, the government should take responsibility for it. That's how other countries do it. Why can't the IRS?
So I'm actually OK with this if it gets passed.
This passes on extra costs to those least able to afford it. The rich already have tax accountants minimising their taxes, so they wouldn't use a government created system anyway.
Taxation *IS* Theft, Theft is Immoral.
Paying taxes is the price for staying in the country you currently live in. Feel free to emigrate to a country where they don't tax you.
And it's not just consumers. When you have to tell an IT person that TCO for actually having server hardware you run is less than renting container time from AWS...
It might be, but getting users to pay for their consumption can be a massive PITA both upfront and ongoing. Putting them on a cloud based service that sends them a bill for their usage can save significant person hours that could be better spent elsewhere.
Once they actually start footing their share of the bills, then there might be a swing back to on-prem ownership instead.
Would this not prove that Amazon is less inclined to be blackmailed?
There is a 'neutral' point for the engines to be located such that a large amount of thrust causes the body to remain mostly neutral.
Yup, and that's how the other versions are configured. These new MAX configs have physically larger engines, so - to prevent have to redesign the whole aircraft to deal with them - the engines are positioned a little bit further forward, and a centre of the engine a little bit higher off the ground (ie closer to the wing). The centre of thrust is consequently moved forward and up in relation to the centre of gravity. The result is the craft will nose-up under full throttle.
The other problem is that companies were assured pilots would not need training in the new system, however a critical difference between this system and normal auto-pilot systems is that this system does not turn off when pilots attempt an overide.
You might be skeptical about this, but right now new privately owned plants based on renewables are showing up everywhere as replacements for decommissioning coal plants, so commercially the figures must make sense. A search showed one in my neighbourhood I hadn't heard of at all, coincidentally the same capacity as what's coal fired in New Mexico:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/02/22/1-5-gw-solar-500-mwh-battery-project-breaks-ground-in-australia/
Sure some are taking their time, however IMO there certainly seems correlation between the 2.
Of course, someone else has discounted that, but as noted there is more than just electricity driving reduction in poverty.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ucenergy/2018/03/09/does-providing-electricity-to-the-poor-reduce-poverty-research-suggests-not-quite/#38144646e39b
...haven't been able too because Huawei can come straight back with U.S. equipment and show how it is being used to spy
Another possibility is that US intelligence agencies cannot guarantee they can hack Huawei devices without being discovered and/or their hack being used against them.
Went with my partner and our 3 month old baby (a specific parent/baby targeted session). As someone who hasn't seen any of the marketing material, comics interviews, or anything that seems SJWish (I live in the southern hemisphere and don't watch TV), it was enjoyable enough.
Right now the most logical reason to me is that 5 Eyes do not have (enough) backdoor access to Huawei gear, hence the aggressive campaign against the company by these countries.
What enterprisey stuff need to be removed from the Home edition?
I just checked the Start menu on my work Win10 PC. Only work and Office related apps. Cortana is locked down. Updates are selected and pushed as available for a period of time, then forced install after a date.I need to login with a different account for local admin rights, and that account cannot access the internet through our web proxy.
That would not bring you very far in Germany. I don't know a single bakery where you can pay with a card, what so ever the card is. Or a pub for that matter, sure, there are some but my two favourite ones definitely don't accept cards.
That's..pretty disappointing really. I used cash to buy some chocolates from a coworker raising money for their school earlier today, but otherwise I'm having a hard time thinking of a place that doesn't accept contactless cards now (Australia).
The fresh food market - all the stalls can process cards. Food trucks, yep. Go to a concert in a big field and all the bars and food vans will take cards - even the merchandising tents will take cards. Coffee shops, bottle shops, pubs, supermarkets, comic stores, music stores, everyone takes cards - you'd be throwing away a massive percentage of customers if you didn't.
Even the MANIAX axe-throwing place takes cards.
ahh wait, the homeless and chuggers aren't yet running around with card readers. Thankfully.
The Tesla battery is taking the top out of this market, but it's only one player where more are needed..
Lastly - the private owners of the coal fired Liddel power station are closing it down as it is cheaper to move to renewables than spend $500-600 million refurbing an almost 50yr old power station, pushing it well past its design specs. The last time this was done the budget was blown by ~100% and the plant was online for only 20% of the time - a complete failure. This closure of coal plants in favour of renewables is happening nationwide - there are NIL new coal plants proposed due to poor financials.
You are just assuming the answer you want.
Incorrect, I implied a correlation between spending money on R&D and reducing costs for production. I left it at 'imply', as that's what was discussed a few posts above.
'For all we know'...no. We know the key technologies involved.
We _were_ spending money on PVs in the 70s. Throwing masses of money at a problem doesn't improve the number of qualified researchers.
Say what? Throw money at something and you'll get more people studying it to get a piece of that gravy train.
As an obvious example have a look at government grants.
Look at what all the funding for AIDs did, it slowed cancer research.
Wait, so throwing money at one topic dragged researchers from other areas? That's the correlation I get from your statement.
I thought you just said throwing money at a problem doesn't improve the number of researchers, yet here you are implying the exact opposite.
You cannot schedule breakthroughs. Going industrial when you should stay in the lab is a sure path to bankruptcy.
Agreed.
All costs are opportunity costs. What research would you have had them not do in order to chase PVs?
That's a bit of a strawman - limited dollars for R&D will always mean prioritisation based on some criteria. Since we're being ridiculous, maybe "they" in the 70s could have dropped R&D on fracking & shale oil extraction, or supporting military coups in Latin America and the ME?
...these government sites only function if viewed through Chrome on Windows
So they've finally ditched the IE6 requirement?!? Now that's progress.
Sarcasm aside, government core business function almost everywhere is unrelated to OS development, and application development is usually business specific. I'm sure that certain security related agencies could be set as responsible for developing a secure core OS for use across all government sectors, but you're also running against corporate interests in regards to some pretty large US based companies out there. Considering this is a US centric site, supporting US centric companies is no-where near as big a deal as every other country also doing it.
China has their Red-Flag (RH) linux, so it's certainly being done. I think there's little political capital around supporting that type of operation though, so it just won't happen.
We don't need it to be 100% renewable and we don't need zero emission either. We just need to get to a point where we emit less than what nature can deal with.
that's really the whole point of having an Emissions Trading System - add some regulation about emissions target, and allow companies to sell anything under that.
You end up with a bunch of companies doing things like planting trees and sequestering carbon, and companies unable to clean up their act buy their excess credits.
You might start with set pricing for carbon credits, and eventually let the market decide the value.
It is also acceptable to to have localized pollution. If we can stop gas emission now for the cost of toxic landfills then that could be an acceptable trade if we don't find any better solution.
I feel it likely that landfills will be mined for resources at some point so having them isn't necessarily a problem. Toxicity however does need containment to prevent contamination of groundwater tables.
Heck, if we can stop Greenland and the South Pole from melting we can afford a couple of hundred Chernobyl style incidents and still have more habitable land left.
Can't speak to that, but I think that NIMBY is going to prevent nuclear power proliferation, so may as well take renewables for now. Plus renewables have much lower investment requirements and are faster to install, so you can get ROI quickly plus scale up at numerous locations for resilience.
that discounts the probability that the costs have gone down because we started spending money on them.
Then please explain the price of the latest iPhone?
Demand driven pricing and corporate greed? It has little to do with the cost of manufacture in that segment.
The implication that in spending money developing PV the cost has reduced. Doing that spend back in the 70s vs doing it in the 2000-10s? There's no way to measure the potential difference in end user costs that I know of.
For all we know, doing more R&D in the 70s could have had us running 90+% renewables world-wide by now, and people would be complaining that climate change was just a figment of the imagination. Perhaps less wars that have oil supplies at the core of the matter?
Ads are not as big a problem as providing credit card data that seems to be leaked almost instantly.
I disagree with this point. It's my app/website/whatever. If I want to use information that your browser or operating system sends to my server, I don't have to tell you what I'm collecting or how I'm using that information.
Does your screengrabbing/whatever software stop the instant your app is interrupted by a message notification or any other type of context/focus switch? Everything else is not "your app", and that sure isn't "your information" to do with as you please.
When does your screengrabbing start up again?
what about devices that can run multiple apps displayed simultaneously? My phone can have 2 apps running at half-screen at the same time. Is your app screengrabbing the lot, or just your applications' half? How do I know that for sure?
Wrong! Your net worth is still negative. You don't own your house! Your net value will jump up when you pay your house in full, but at the moment you don't own it, if you have a mortgage. Only if you have enough liquid money to pay your remaining mortgage in full you can claim that your net value is non-zero. Don't believe me - stop making payments, the bank will take your house away, and all the money you have paid until this moment are gone, like you have paid rent.
The bank may foreclose and sell the house, and any excess money after paying down the mortgage is your to keep - the bank can't keep it as they are creditors to only a certain amount.
Now, since the bank doesn't care about getting any excess and just wants its debt paid off, they'll do a quick sale that recovers as much of the debt as possible. If you lose out a chunk of equity then it's too bad for you.
Of course, you might live in a backwards country where you don't receive the excess, but I can't do anything about that for you.
I didn't do a great job of making my point clear.
> Medium of exchange refers to being a universally accepted token of value, unlike a barter economy where you need to find someone who has what you want to barter with.
Right, universally accepted value. The key words being "accept" and "value". Meaning most people (universally) will say "I'll _accept_ 20Money for this item I'm selling". Most people don't in any way accept *coin, or even appear to accept it. Those that appear to don't accept *coin at a certain _value_. Some online stores use a payment servicer that processes via *coin, but the _value_ they offer to _accept_ is "$20 worth of *coin". The _value_ they put on it is denominated in US dollars.
There is no "universally accepted" token of value - the medium of exchange for goods is defined by the currency accepted by the service provider.
Luckily there are numerous places that will exchange your freedom dollars for whatever is accepted locally, whether that is Yen, Rubles, unmovable massive stones, barrels of crude oil (ok maybe not this one), US$, or Bitcoin.
The primary difference is that Bitcoin is not a popular currency for local use, so not many services are priced using it.