Many pets are specifically bred to be sold. If there are no buyers, people are not going to breed these animals
Ferrets make a particularly good example - As induced ovulators, the females will remain in estrus until they mate or die. For that reason, you almost never see non-fixed ferrets for sale. Though considering the city involved here, they probably already ban ferrets outright. Horrid, vicious things, with their cute burbling and playful nipping - Can't have that, why, someone might leave a newvborn alone with one after starving it for a month!
However, I found one particular quote from the article especially revealing about the mindset involved here...
"Why fish? Why not fish?" said Philip Gerrie, a member of the city's Commission of Animal Control and Welfare and a coauthor of the proposal.
Why not fish? Because, Mr. Gerrie, believe it or not, you don't need to regulate every last detail of the domain arguably under your control. Until something becomes a clear problem, just leave it the hell alone. "Not fish", because NO ONE ABUSES FISH. Because you don't see stray fish picking through garbage outside restaurants. Because you don't hear about feral fish attacks when a child wanders down the wrong alley. Because fish lead to as close to zero potential for abuse as you could hope from any possible pet-animal.
So, because you don't feel like heading to the library to make that photocopy, you think you'd be justified in ripping off the digital copy that some company has made available online at its own expense?
So, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
I feel justified in accessing, by any means authorized or not, content that MY GODDAMNED TAX DOLLARS already paid for.
If Elsevier et al don't like those terms, they have every right to see how long they last without any content derived from public funding.
Just because some companies offer options contracts that work in the manner you expect does not mean that every company does.
Because redefining commonly understood words - and making you hunt down those definitions with no reason to suspect they've changed - Counts as nothing short of a "lucky he didn't go postal" level of sleaziness.
I want to pay you a million dollars a year to work for me. See my non-attached 300 pages of fine print for the definition of "dollar".
Except that it's highly affected by manipulation, as the recent Mt. Gox debacle proved. Everything about this dude's answers look like hand-waving and talking points.
Except, not so much.
Mt.Gox got pwned, plain and simple. Someone obtained access to over 10% of the total assets stored there, then mass dumped them. We then saw the obvious outcome, the same outcome we would have seen if a major shareholder in any fortune-500 company suddenly sold everything.
Most importantly, you'll note that two major BitCoin exchanges exist... And that despite one of them crashing, the other stabilized with about a 10% drop from the previous day's average on both exchanges.
You can call that a serious failure by Mt.Gox, but it has little bearing on BitCoin itself.
...You could just get them a cell phone on a family plan, authorize tracking of it, then watch their movements in something resembling realtime on the cell provider's website. That way, when Grandpa heads down to the basement to rub one out, you don't need to start a six-county manhunt.
Or better, stop playing games and just put 'em in a home. If you don't have the time to monitor someone like that 24/7 (ie, if you have to actually work for a living), you shouldn't have custody of them. For their sake and your own, place them in an environment that can properly care for them.
Way to decide what I want for me. There are people in this world who like change sometimes
As a geek, I would usually tend to agree with you - Give me bigger, better, faster, newer, and give it to me now.
Most users, however, do not count as geeks. They want Functional. Stable. Intuitive (or since that always fails, substitute "consistent"). They basically just want their computer to behave the same way today that it did yesterday.
You don't personally have to agree with that, and I have absolutely no problem with you or anyone else running the daily build of Joe's l33t browzer v97.65b; Firefox, however, targets the mainstream, not the bleeding edge. Every time Mozilla decides "Hey, let's move everything around for no reason", Grandma basically sees it as an entirely new browser.
And for me, well, perhaps this will cost me some geek cred, but I no longer view browsers as something to rank based on their "cool"ness. I view them as just one more boring but critical application on my system, and it annoys me when I need to waste time (re)configuring something that worked just fine yesterday.
"Wow, the internet has 20x as many ads today as yesterday, weird... Oh, look, got an update that borked Adblock, there goes another hour of my life".
It seems like AMDs biggest complaint is that the benchmark isn't offloading CPU intensive tasks to the GPU. It is pretty hard to take them seriously when they are complaining that the benchmark favors their competition by actually benchmarking the CPU.
Although once I would have agreed that, as a pure CPU benchmark it seems strange to allow offloading work to the GPU, the line has blurred rather a lot in the past year. AMD/ATI has put a ton of work into getting their OpenCL implementation as close to general purpose as most programmers could ask for - SIMD on a truly massive scale. So if the benchmark allows SSE, why shouldn't it allow OpenCL?
And as for the performance thereof... If some of the haters will forgive me for bringing up BitCoins, the performance of the various GPU miners on AMD vs NVidia vs Intel hardware leaves each of those, two orders of magnitude behind the next, in the order I just gave them. OpenCL destroys CUDA, and Intel doesn't even rank.
I still don't think we need the major version to roll multiple times a year, but this addresses one of my issues about as elegantly as I could ask for.
Damnit, we need to get rid of this "rapid release" BS.
I've finally gotten 4 configured the way I like; and prior to that, I completely skipped over v3.
People don't want cutting edge web browsers. They want them to work, and they want them to look and feel the same for years at a time. Add support for new media types, tweak the rendering engine, but leave everything else alone!.
And that doesn't even consider how this crap breaks plugins... Literally half the plugins I currently run, I had to edit the install.rdf just to get around the damned version check (after which, they all work just fine of course).
Who cares if someone donated 10 bitcoins the day they were worthless.
The IRS cares.
The EFF functions as a 501c3 in the US, meaning Americans can deduct their donations to the EFF on their federal tax return.
By accepting BTC, entirely aside from its own actions and legal status, the EFF inadvertently provided a loophole by which you could launder a potentially "rogue" currency into US dollars at 35% of its exchange value, via the US government itself.
The same logic applies to the Fannie and Freddie bailouts you mentioned. They were far too entrenched to let go.
And there, we have our disconnect. I haven't failed to grasp the difference here - I simply prefer to take my pain up-front and get it over with, rather than drag it on forever. As I see it, bailing out one private corp (okay, I'll admit Fannie and Freddy sort of form a unique historical exception there) poisons the whole barrel; If we really do need one particular company so much, why the hell have we let them remain private? And on the flip side, if we do start absorbing banks "too big to fail", such as F&F, we need to strip them of their corporate-charter-enforced "profit motive" ASAP. Because playing both sides of that fence leads to... Hmm, the last three years?
Let 'em all succeed or fail on their own merits, or accept ownership. None of this dancing around the issue.
By the previous decade of tax cuts and wars, yes. If we had stuck with Clinton's budget, we would have had plenty of resources to deal with this crisis without causing the painful debt we currently have.
Did you expect me to disagree with that? We ran a surplus under Clinton, and despite the tech crash, if we still had his exact budget, we'd have a surplus today. I would absolutely love to see the federal government revert to his last budget.
That, however, won't happen, because even the hardest-core fiscal-only Republicans would rather fiddle while Rome burns than admit Clinton did anything well (much less, that soon after their failed hero Reagan).
Take away the precious welfare entitlement programs, some people will die of hunger, die from lack of medical care or lose their homes.
Yes. Yes, they will. And if the US defaults on its national debt, instead of just the sick and extremely poor, you'll see the middle class among the ranks of those you describe.
Take away the American Military's budget, the imperialism will end
Yes, very true - Because we would end up a colony of China within the week. Or perhaps Russia... Or France. Or Belgium.
Both of those expenses have some good to them. Maintaining a modest defensive military makes sense, in the real world full of violent domesticated apes intent on killing each other and taking each other's food, women, and land. Minimizing the number of people starving or freezing to death makes sense, because it keeps them from rioting in the streets in the process (thereby killing each other and taking each other's food, women, and land). What we have now both fails to accomplish its goals and costs way more than we can afford.
I call bullshit on false equivalency.
I didn't call them equivalent, I called them both intolerable. Not a matter of who we call "worse" - I really don't care about playing blame games, except insofar as they have both caused the problem, and both lack the balls to do anything about it.
The funny part of all this, I would personally tend to side more with the Democrats, except the second I say things like my first sentence above, they make it quite clear they don't want me. "How dare you put a price on human life!"... Sorry, but my compassion ends where it starts hurting me, simple as that.
Running awesome games is the only serious non-time-wasting application for GPUs.
What more can I say? Screw cancer and SETI, a man's gotta play!
I can't find a goddamned $125 Radeon card ANYWHERE
Have you, uh, tried Newegg or Amazon?
The former has 50+ DX11-capable Radeons under $125. And if you bump that price to $140, they have another 20 choices, including quite a few 5770s - Not too shabby a card!
When was the last time the Democrats did anything remotely like that?
Skipping the obvious crack about ObamaCare, we have a congress about to let the US default on its national debt because the Dems won't let us touch their precious welfare entitlement programs.
Make no mistake, though - For their part, the Republicans won't let us touch the military. God (by which we all mean "Jesus", of course) forbid we can't kill brown people on the opposite side of the globe!
Because the Goldman Sachs bailout came over a month after Lehman Brothers crashed! TARP was in many ways a response to that crash. It wasn't even three years ago! How have you already forgotten?
Well, one of us seems to have already forgotten, anyway...
For example, which of us remembers the 50 billion in TAF approved six months before Lehman collapsed, with hundreds of billions more in near-weekly expansions to that program?
Or that the the first big-money bailout happened at the end of July 2008 (two months prior to Lehman), with the US government starting its buyout of Fanny and Freddy thanks to 300 billion from the HERA and a guarantee of unlimited credit?
Or that quite a few smaller banks had gone belly-up in the two months after HERA and prior to Lehman?
Or the fact that congress hauled Bernanke's butt in, before the end of that week to justify his decision (it didn't "just happen", we let it happen) not to bail out Lehman?
Or most telling of all, that the Federal Reserve did bail out AIG the same goddamned day Lehman's value dropped by 2/3rds?
Stop lying. Stop spreading conspiracy theories. Just stop.
I have no interest in revisionism, but We The People got fucked, and hard. So, which financial institution do you work for?
So it is their fault you voted for a totally corrupt out of control government who tramples on your rights daily in the name of "security"? Perhaps you should vote for someone who will actually uphold the US Constitution?
Because in the US, we have a choice between people who will ignore the constitution to build their utopian socialist welfare state, and people who will ignore the constitution to build their Christian-Industrial heaven-on-Earth.
I'd say showing support for the likes of LulzSec by publicly cheering them on comes about as close as most people can get to really voting for "none of the above".
Banks have classified "Government" information? What are these kids trying to achieve, exactly?
Quick question - Why did we bail out Goldman, but not Lehman?
Totally unrelated second question - Which former CEO of Goldman Sachs "just happened" to also serve as the Secretary of the Treasury who oversaw the bank bailouts at the peak of the recession?
You want to find out who has the real power, you look at who has the money. Simple as that.
Y'know, I consider BitCoins pretty much just a nice idea, at this point, with plenty of problems and no real value (beyond speculation).
That said, the number of people who bother actually posting just to tell us how much they dislike them, in response to even the slightest, even humorous (in this case) mention of BTC... Just wow.
Makes me lean toward taking them a bit more seriously - No one hates on Linden dollars or even Facebook credits.
With the price of bitcoins vs the dollar going up and down like a yoyo, I would say there is MASSIVE risk
Cyclic volatility doesn't mean "risk", it means "profit". And that doesn't just relate to BitCoins - When you see the same trend in a "real" market, you can exploit it just as well. Biggest difference in something like Forex, a one percent per one day cycle would make international headlines; with MtGox, we've seen a regular 30% swing per day, and a lot of folks have made a lot of money as a result.
Who's to say that if there isn't a run on the exchanges that the $1000 limit doesn't go down to $100 tomorrow, $10 the next day?
First of all, MtGox only has that limit for user-initiated online withdrawals. If you want to get USD$150k out tomorrow (well, a normal tomorrow, the current situation has made that somewhat less convenient), you can contact the admins and arrange it.
Second, you have to consider the level at which limits become overly burdensome, and your target audience. MtGox appeals to middle class geeks, playing around with a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; Taking a week to withdraw it all only presents a minor nuisance. Drop the limit down to $10, and they'd lose their target audience.
Finally, MtGox doesn't function the same way as a fractional reserve bank - It maintains 100% of the assets (in both BTC and USD) transferred in, and makes its profit off trade fees. So the admins don't care if the market collapses overnight, except insofar as it did so in the present case because of a flaw in the site itself.
It is to avoid accounts showing up in the black market for hacked passwords, as Gmail account access can be used to obtain access at other sites (PayPal, Facebook, etc).
Well, that would make sense... If Google (and every other large email provider on the planet) didn't let people make accounts at the drop of a hat.
I have half a dozen myself, that I use specifically to protect myself from events like this - MtGox getting hacked, while certainly a nuisance, doesn't "spread" to contaminate my entire online presence, merely to a handful of similarly untrusted sites.
IMO, yes, though I don't think I'd bother dying on that particular hill. One could argue that they merely pool risk for a fee, but consider what happens when too many participants try to cash out at once (ie, after a widespread natural disaster) - The insurance companies fold, and you end up with a situation virtually indistinguishable from Bernie Madoff's fallout.
Well, as long as you intend to take this discussion at least somewhat seriously...
social security is not, and was never meant to be an investment
My particular word choice no bearing on the underlying dynamics of the system. Whether you say "investment" or "contribution" or "donation" or "cookies", if the amount extracted by generation M exceeds that put in by generation M+1, you cannot avoid ending up with an empty jar.
Yes, actually, they do. The entire "necessary" budget, including the massively bloated full current military funding level, comes out to under 1.2 trillion. We have a current yearly deficit of 1.4 trillion.
Put bluntly, Military, Social Security, Welfare (medicare + medicaid): Eliminate TWO to balance the budget.
I'll admit to the fact that bitcoins are not a ponzi scheme as soon as I get an open admission that neither is social security by one of the notorious conservatrolls here.
Ponzi schemes have one, and only one, defining characteristic, of which many people seem to take great delight in proving their ignorance:
Generation-M investors receive their "profits" directly from the investment of Generation-M+n. Simple as that, nothing more and nothing less. All the other attributes of a Ponzi scheme (geometric growth, for example) merely derive from that core property either as a direct mathematical consequence, or as a hack to keep the scheme from collapsing sooner.
BitCoins do have any inherent value beyond their buying power (currently close to zero). That most of their trading activity comes directly from 100% pure unrestrained speculation has nothing to do with Ponzi schemes, any more than you could say the same of NYMEX or FOREX. If you choose to cash out of BitCoins today, you don't get paid by tricking new participants out of their investment dollars - You get paid because you fairly and openly sold something to a buyer who knew fully well what they received.
Social security, OTOH, has always had the explicitly stated intent of paying Generation-M directly from the payments of Generation-M+n. Your ability to "get yours" in the future depends entirely on fleecing new "investors" out of their then-present-day contributions to the system.
Put another way - If you buy tulip bulbs and the market crashes, you still have (possibly worthless) tulip bulbs. If you give me $100 today with nothing but a promise that I'll give you $200 next week, and I vanish from the planet, you have nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Ferrets make a particularly good example - As induced ovulators, the females will remain in estrus until they mate or die. For that reason, you almost never see non-fixed ferrets for sale. Though considering the city involved here, they probably already ban ferrets outright. Horrid, vicious things, with their cute burbling and playful nipping - Can't have that, why, someone might leave a newvborn alone with one after starving it for a month!
However, I found one particular quote from the article especially revealing about the mindset involved here...
Why not fish? Because, Mr. Gerrie, believe it or not, you don't need to regulate every last detail of the domain arguably under your control. Until something becomes a clear problem, just leave it the hell alone. "Not fish", because NO ONE ABUSES FISH. Because you don't see stray fish picking through garbage outside restaurants. Because you don't hear about feral fish attacks when a child wanders down the wrong alley. Because fish lead to as close to zero potential for abuse as you could hope from any possible pet-animal.
What if, uh, the original owner wants to start fresh?
Dear CapCom: DIAF.
Thanks.
So, because you don't feel like heading to the library to make that photocopy, you think you'd be justified in ripping off the digital copy that some company has made available online at its own expense?
So, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
I feel justified in accessing, by any means authorized or not, content that MY GODDAMNED TAX DOLLARS already paid for.
If Elsevier et al don't like those terms, they have every right to see how long they last without any content derived from public funding.
Just because some companies offer options contracts that work in the manner you expect does not mean that every company does.
Because redefining commonly understood words - and making you hunt down those definitions with no reason to suspect they've changed - Counts as nothing short of a "lucky he didn't go postal" level of sleaziness.
I want to pay you a million dollars a year to work for me. See my non-attached 300 pages of fine print for the definition of "dollar".
Except that it's highly affected by manipulation, as the recent Mt. Gox debacle proved. Everything about this dude's answers look like hand-waving and talking points.
Except, not so much.
Mt.Gox got pwned, plain and simple. Someone obtained access to over 10% of the total assets stored there, then mass dumped them. We then saw the obvious outcome, the same outcome we would have seen if a major shareholder in any fortune-500 company suddenly sold everything.
Most importantly, you'll note that two major BitCoin exchanges exist... And that despite one of them crashing, the other stabilized with about a 10% drop from the previous day's average on both exchanges.
You can call that a serious failure by Mt.Gox, but it has little bearing on BitCoin itself.
...You could just get them a cell phone on a family plan, authorize tracking of it, then watch their movements in something resembling realtime on the cell provider's website. That way, when Grandpa heads down to the basement to rub one out, you don't need to start a six-county manhunt.
Or better, stop playing games and just put 'em in a home. If you don't have the time to monitor someone like that 24/7 (ie, if you have to actually work for a living), you shouldn't have custody of them. For their sake and your own, place them in an environment that can properly care for them.
Way to decide what I want for me. There are people in this world who like change sometimes
As a geek, I would usually tend to agree with you - Give me bigger, better, faster, newer, and give it to me now.
Most users, however, do not count as geeks. They want Functional. Stable. Intuitive (or since that always fails, substitute "consistent"). They basically just want their computer to behave the same way today that it did yesterday.
You don't personally have to agree with that, and I have absolutely no problem with you or anyone else running the daily build of Joe's l33t browzer v97.65b; Firefox, however, targets the mainstream, not the bleeding edge. Every time Mozilla decides "Hey, let's move everything around for no reason", Grandma basically sees it as an entirely new browser.
And for me, well, perhaps this will cost me some geek cred, but I no longer view browsers as something to rank based on their "cool"ness. I view them as just one more boring but critical application on my system, and it annoys me when I need to waste time (re)configuring something that worked just fine yesterday.
"Wow, the internet has 20x as many ads today as yesterday, weird... Oh, look, got an update that borked Adblock, there goes another hour of my life".
It seems like AMDs biggest complaint is that the benchmark isn't offloading CPU intensive tasks to the GPU. It is pretty hard to take them seriously when they are complaining that the benchmark favors their competition by actually benchmarking the CPU.
Although once I would have agreed that, as a pure CPU benchmark it seems strange to allow offloading work to the GPU, the line has blurred rather a lot in the past year. AMD/ATI has put a ton of work into getting their OpenCL implementation as close to general purpose as most programmers could ask for - SIMD on a truly massive scale. So if the benchmark allows SSE, why shouldn't it allow OpenCL?
And as for the performance thereof... If some of the haters will forgive me for bringing up BitCoins, the performance of the various GPU miners on AMD vs NVidia vs Intel hardware leaves each of those, two orders of magnitude behind the next, in the order I just gave them. OpenCL destroys CUDA, and Intel doesn't even rank.
Ah, thanks... Most useful response yet!
I still don't think we need the major version to roll multiple times a year, but this addresses one of my issues about as elegantly as I could ask for.
Damnit, we need to get rid of this "rapid release" BS.
I've finally gotten 4 configured the way I like; and prior to that, I completely skipped over v3.
People don't want cutting edge web browsers. They want them to work, and they want them to look and feel the same for years at a time. Add support for new media types, tweak the rendering engine, but leave everything else alone!.
And that doesn't even consider how this crap breaks plugins... Literally half the plugins I currently run, I had to edit the install.rdf just to get around the damned version check (after which, they all work just fine of course).
Who cares if someone donated 10 bitcoins the day they were worthless.
The IRS cares.
The EFF functions as a 501c3 in the US, meaning Americans can deduct their donations to the EFF on their federal tax return.
By accepting BTC, entirely aside from its own actions and legal status, the EFF inadvertently provided a loophole by which you could launder a potentially "rogue" currency into US dollars at 35% of its exchange value, via the US government itself.
The same logic applies to the Fannie and Freddie bailouts you mentioned. They were far too entrenched to let go.
And there, we have our disconnect. I haven't failed to grasp the difference here - I simply prefer to take my pain up-front and get it over with, rather than drag it on forever. As I see it, bailing out one private corp (okay, I'll admit Fannie and Freddy sort of form a unique historical exception there) poisons the whole barrel; If we really do need one particular company so much, why the hell have we let them remain private? And on the flip side, if we do start absorbing banks "too big to fail", such as F&F, we need to strip them of their corporate-charter-enforced "profit motive" ASAP. Because playing both sides of that fence leads to... Hmm, the last three years?
Let 'em all succeed or fail on their own merits, or accept ownership. None of this dancing around the issue.
By the previous decade of tax cuts and wars, yes. If we had stuck with Clinton's budget, we would have had plenty of resources to deal with this crisis without causing the painful debt we currently have.
Did you expect me to disagree with that? We ran a surplus under Clinton, and despite the tech crash, if we still had his exact budget, we'd have a surplus today. I would absolutely love to see the federal government revert to his last budget.
That, however, won't happen, because even the hardest-core fiscal-only Republicans would rather fiddle while Rome burns than admit Clinton did anything well (much less, that soon after their failed hero Reagan).
Take away the precious welfare entitlement programs, some people will die of hunger, die from lack of medical care or lose their homes.
Yes. Yes, they will. And if the US defaults on its national debt, instead of just the sick and extremely poor, you'll see the middle class among the ranks of those you describe.
Take away the American Military's budget, the imperialism will end
Yes, very true - Because we would end up a colony of China within the week. Or perhaps Russia... Or France. Or Belgium.
Both of those expenses have some good to them. Maintaining a modest defensive military makes sense, in the real world full of violent domesticated apes intent on killing each other and taking each other's food, women, and land. Minimizing the number of people starving or freezing to death makes sense, because it keeps them from rioting in the streets in the process (thereby killing each other and taking each other's food, women, and land). What we have now both fails to accomplish its goals and costs way more than we can afford.
I call bullshit on false equivalency.
I didn't call them equivalent, I called them both intolerable. Not a matter of who we call "worse" - I really don't care about playing blame games, except insofar as they have both caused the problem, and both lack the balls to do anything about it.
The funny part of all this, I would personally tend to side more with the Democrats, except the second I say things like my first sentence above, they make it quite clear they don't want me. "How dare you put a price on human life!"... Sorry, but my compassion ends where it starts hurting me, simple as that.
Running awesome games is the only serious non-time-wasting application for GPUs.
What more can I say? Screw cancer and SETI, a man's gotta play!
I can't find a goddamned $125 Radeon card ANYWHERE
Have you, uh, tried Newegg or Amazon?
The former has 50+ DX11-capable Radeons under $125. And if you bump that price to $140, they have another 20 choices, including quite a few 5770s - Not too shabby a card!
When was the last time the Democrats did anything remotely like that?
Skipping the obvious crack about ObamaCare, we have a congress about to let the US default on its national debt because the Dems won't let us touch their precious welfare entitlement programs.
Make no mistake, though - For their part, the Republicans won't let us touch the military. God (by which we all mean "Jesus", of course) forbid we can't kill brown people on the opposite side of the globe!
Because the Goldman Sachs bailout came over a month after Lehman Brothers crashed! TARP was in many ways a response to that crash. It wasn't even three years ago! How have you already forgotten?
Well, one of us seems to have already forgotten, anyway...
For example, which of us remembers the 50 billion in TAF approved six months before Lehman collapsed, with hundreds of billions more in near-weekly expansions to that program?
Or that the the first big-money bailout happened at the end of July 2008 (two months prior to Lehman), with the US government starting its buyout of Fanny and Freddy thanks to 300 billion from the HERA and a guarantee of unlimited credit?
Or that quite a few smaller banks had gone belly-up in the two months after HERA and prior to Lehman?
Or the fact that congress hauled Bernanke's butt in, before the end of that week to justify his decision (it didn't "just happen", we let it happen) not to bail out Lehman?
Or most telling of all, that the Federal Reserve did bail out AIG the same goddamned day Lehman's value dropped by 2/3rds?
Stop lying. Stop spreading conspiracy theories. Just stop.
I have no interest in revisionism, but We The People got fucked, and hard. So, which financial institution do you work for?
So it is their fault you voted for a totally corrupt out of control government who tramples on your rights daily in the name of "security"? Perhaps you should vote for someone who will actually uphold the US Constitution?
Because in the US, we have a choice between people who will ignore the constitution to build their utopian socialist welfare state, and people who will ignore the constitution to build their Christian-Industrial heaven-on-Earth.
I'd say showing support for the likes of LulzSec by publicly cheering them on comes about as close as most people can get to really voting for "none of the above".
Banks have classified "Government" information? What are these kids trying to achieve, exactly?
Quick question - Why did we bail out Goldman, but not Lehman?
Totally unrelated second question - Which former CEO of Goldman Sachs "just happened" to also serve as the Secretary of the Treasury who oversaw the bank bailouts at the peak of the recession?
You want to find out who has the real power, you look at who has the money. Simple as that.
Y'know, I consider BitCoins pretty much just a nice idea, at this point, with plenty of problems and no real value (beyond speculation).
That said, the number of people who bother actually posting just to tell us how much they dislike them, in response to even the slightest, even humorous (in this case) mention of BTC... Just wow.
Makes me lean toward taking them a bit more seriously - No one hates on Linden dollars or even Facebook credits.
With the price of bitcoins vs the dollar going up and down like a yoyo, I would say there is MASSIVE risk
Cyclic volatility doesn't mean "risk", it means "profit". And that doesn't just relate to BitCoins - When you see the same trend in a "real" market, you can exploit it just as well. Biggest difference in something like Forex, a one percent per one day cycle would make international headlines; with MtGox, we've seen a regular 30% swing per day, and a lot of folks have made a lot of money as a result.
Who's to say that if there isn't a run on the exchanges that the $1000 limit doesn't go down to $100 tomorrow, $10 the next day?
First of all, MtGox only has that limit for user-initiated online withdrawals. If you want to get USD$150k out tomorrow (well, a normal tomorrow, the current situation has made that somewhat less convenient), you can contact the admins and arrange it.
Second, you have to consider the level at which limits become overly burdensome, and your target audience. MtGox appeals to middle class geeks, playing around with a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; Taking a week to withdraw it all only presents a minor nuisance. Drop the limit down to $10, and they'd lose their target audience.
Finally, MtGox doesn't function the same way as a fractional reserve bank - It maintains 100% of the assets (in both BTC and USD) transferred in, and makes its profit off trade fees. So the admins don't care if the market collapses overnight, except insofar as it did so in the present case because of a flaw in the site itself.
It is to avoid accounts showing up in the black market for hacked passwords, as Gmail account access can be used to obtain access at other sites (PayPal, Facebook, etc).
Well, that would make sense... If Google (and every other large email provider on the planet) didn't let people make accounts at the drop of a hat.
I have half a dozen myself, that I use specifically to protect myself from events like this - MtGox getting hacked, while certainly a nuisance, doesn't "spread" to contaminate my entire online presence, merely to a handful of similarly untrusted sites.
So insurance is a Ponzi scheme?
IMO, yes, though I don't think I'd bother dying on that particular hill. One could argue that they merely pool risk for a fee, but consider what happens when too many participants try to cash out at once (ie, after a widespread natural disaster) - The insurance companies fold, and you end up with a situation virtually indistinguishable from Bernie Madoff's fallout.
Wish the trout were that cooperative these days
Well, as long as you intend to take this discussion at least somewhat seriously...
social security is not, and was never meant to be an investment
My particular word choice no bearing on the underlying dynamics of the system. Whether you say "investment" or "contribution" or "donation" or "cookies", if the amount extracted by generation M exceeds that put in by generation M+1, you cannot avoid ending up with an empty jar.
No they don't.
Yes, actually, they do. The entire "necessary" budget, including the massively bloated full current military funding level, comes out to under 1.2 trillion. We have a current yearly deficit of 1.4 trillion.
Put bluntly, Military, Social Security, Welfare (medicare + medicaid): Eliminate TWO to balance the budget.
Also, you can raise taxes
"Can" does not mean "should".
I'll admit to the fact that bitcoins are not a ponzi scheme as soon as I get an open admission that neither is social security by one of the notorious conservatrolls here.
Ponzi schemes have one, and only one, defining characteristic, of which many people seem to take great delight in proving their ignorance:
Generation-M investors receive their "profits" directly from the investment of Generation-M+n. Simple as that, nothing more and nothing less. All the other attributes of a Ponzi scheme (geometric growth, for example) merely derive from that core property either as a direct mathematical consequence, or as a hack to keep the scheme from collapsing sooner.
BitCoins do have any inherent value beyond their buying power (currently close to zero). That most of their trading activity comes directly from 100% pure unrestrained speculation has nothing to do with Ponzi schemes, any more than you could say the same of NYMEX or FOREX. If you choose to cash out of BitCoins today, you don't get paid by tricking new participants out of their investment dollars - You get paid because you fairly and openly sold something to a buyer who knew fully well what they received.
Social security, OTOH, has always had the explicitly stated intent of paying Generation-M directly from the payments of Generation-M+n. Your ability to "get yours" in the future depends entirely on fleecing new "investors" out of their then-present-day contributions to the system.
Put another way - If you buy tulip bulbs and the market crashes, you still have (possibly worthless) tulip bulbs. If you give me $100 today with nothing but a promise that I'll give you $200 next week, and I vanish from the planet, you have nothing.