And that's assuming they offer a second language at all. More often than not the language ends up being Spanish, which all too frequently becomes more of a service to ESL students than value to anyone else.
First - I appreciate the value of knowing a second language. I don't mean this as a "speak English or die" rant...
But learning a second language while living in the US counts as a complete and utter waste of time. If you don't use a language, you lose it, simple as that - Personally, I took seven years of French in school, starting from a young age (2nd grade), and I can just barely read it, painfully slow. Despite having wasted somewhere on the order of thousands of hours of instructional time cramming that language into my head, I have very nearly no ability whatsoever to carry on a conversation with someone who only speaks French.
Now, if you live in an area (even in the US) that has a large Spanish-speaking population - Perhaps you can use it enough that it will "stick". If you live in Europe, where they have multiple languages spoken regularly, a second or even third language makes functional sense. If you live somewhere that doesn't speak English (and again, I don't mean this as a pro-English screed), it makes sense to learn English as a second language, as the lingua Franca of international business (and yes, I appreciate the irony of that phrase).
Australia will have the exact same problem we have in the US. They can mandate kids pass a proficiency test, but three years after highschool, it will have made no difference in the number of languages known.
You, uh, realize we pay for that anyway? No federal TLA actually needs to worry about things like balancing their budget - The more they pay, the more you and I pay!
So no, I actually do not feel okay about giving an extra chunk of my salary to Utah. Fuck you, Utah, make your money back from the fundies and your crappy low-alcohol liquor, and leave me out of it!
O'm not sure what that means for "my rights online"
It means that we have yet another shining example of the last bastion of justice in a 1st-world legal system demonstrating their complete incompetence when it comes to making decisions about the most powerful tool ever devised by humans.
Not only does it show an outright scary lack of understanding of how the internet works (in the organizational sense), but it also proves him as so out of touch with the reality of the modern world that he doesn't even recognize the sort of memes we pretty much take for granted - In this case, the "Streisand effect".
/ I've got my copy, and you have no jurisdiction over me, Mr. Peart. Your move.
Bitcoin doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things (at least, for now and for a long time yet). Whole BTC economy is smaller than any of major corporations (and most of minor ones).
The Bitcoin economy has a market cap of USD$1.2B, making it roughly the same size as a little Mom 'n Pop bookstore you might have heard of - Barnes & Noble?
The government finally decided to care and used the one achilles heel of BitCoin...conversion to and from dollars.
Why would you consider that an achilles' heel? Those of us using BitCoin use it because it blows the dollar away for convenience in certain types of transactions (by which I don't mean "drugs" - Tide Unscented remains the king there, followed by US cash). In particular, any movement of small amounts of money (in the $100 range) between countries typically takes upwards of 50% of the total in various fees (and that assumes 1st-world countries with more-or-less legitimate banking and postal systems on both ends of the transaction).
So, for the reasons I would choose to denominate a given transaction in Bitcoins, the ability to convert it directly to USD has little to no value.
We'll now see how well the BitCoin market can operate as a completely stand-alone entity.
So far, the exchange rate (even if "exchange" may have just become a lot harder) hasn't even dipped outside the normal standard daily swings for USD:BTC. We'll see if the market panics tomorrow, but I wouldn't count on it. I don't use BitCoin because of its value in dollars, and neither, I suspect, do most of its (non-speculating) users.
The problem here - He did use "regular" seeds: "cheap soybeans he bought from a grain elevator". Monsanto seeds don't come out an easily-identifiable fluorescent purple, he had no way of knowing which seeds came from Monsanto licensees and which came from traditional seeds.
For all of post-nomadic human history, farmers have taken a small portion of last year's harvest and used it to plant this year's crop. Standard Operating Procedure.
Unfortunately for we mere humans, Monsanto couldn't have begged for a better "test" case to go before the USSC. Even I have difficulty feeling bad for Farmer Dale, given that he deliberately tried to reproduce Monsanto's IP commercially without licensing it. But the underlying idea of taking seeds from the community hopper and planting them, perfectly kosher. It completely disgusts me that this case effectively sets a precedent, placing on the farmer the burden of separating the non-fluorescent-purple Monsanto seeds from the non-fluorescent-purple legal-to-grow seeds.
Far more disturbingly, though - Apply this same legal precedent to genetic therapies for human disease. A custom gene patch cures Alzheimer's forever? Great! Except - Hope you remember to pay your yearly license fee, because Pfizer owns your kids.
Try 2140, not 2020. Your larger point may stand, but the specific urgency of it happening in the next decade - Or even without our lifetimes - does not.
It's just that the new Bitcoin and the old Bitcoin are becoming two different currencies. People need to convert all their old Bitcoins to new ones to avoid this.
Bzzzt. Users of Bitcoin don't need to do anything beyond download a client written in the past year. They don't need to convert anything, they don't need to send themselves their balance to make sure the new program sees it, they don't even need to re-download the block chain. Just update their software.
Nothing about the currency itself has changed; just the removal of an artificial cap on block size placed in the original client, from back before the early developers expected it to take off so well.
More seriously, though - You can get an untraceable "real" gun a hell of a lot cheaper and easier - even in California - than by buying a $1000 machine, finding the plans online, trying to get it to print all the parts un-warped enough to actually fit together, and then will only fire a single shot, perhaps half a dozen times before it deforms too much to use again.
/ You can have my Bic ball-point pen over my cold dead hands, you 2nd (and 1st!) amendment hating scum!
If the guy's job description doesn't require "Concurrent code" then STFU and keep your petty issues to yourself, if it does then hes unable to perform the job and needs training or reassignment.
I don't often respond to ACs (and even less often positively), but you've hit the nail on the head here.
My current job requires absolutely no explicitly concurrent programming. I do mostly SQL, which has a high degree of implicit parallelism (arguably the highest possible, if you religiously avoid RBAR); I've also played around with OpenCL just for kicks. But even such fundamentals as semaphores and IPC matter not one whit to my continued employment.
I can appreciate the FP's problem, having worked with programmers who just don't have passion for the art anymore (and age has nothing to do with it, I've worked with a 60YO that made me look like a neophobe, and a 30YO that honestly would have liked his job better if he could do nothing but sharpen pencils all day). But most programming jobs don't require high-level cutting edge skills. Quite the opposite, I've more often found myself suffering for want of familiarity with ancient big-iron scripting languages than for the latest and greatest set of buzzwords.
Put bluntly, most programming jobs involve getting an ancient GL database to talk to an ancient POS system; converting 20 years worth of Excel VBA scripts (or god help you if someone's nephew actually knew Access) to "real" code; Hacking together a driver that lets a $2M instrument talk to a Win7 x64 box, when the most recent driver from the (now defunct) manufacturer runs on a German version of Windows ME (and FWIW, I didn't exactly pull that example out of my ass).
I'd love to see an actual breakdown of the numbers, but make no mistake, the number of programmers working on Real Software(tm) falls into a small minority of the total.
Seriously, why don't we just "burn" this? Add it as a contaminant to the fuel rods used in other reactors (or more realistically, since most of the waste comes from spent fuel rods, start recycling the damned things instead of trying to bury them).
All the furor over Yucca or Hanford or wherever, just to honor one of the single most short-sighted executive orders ever issued? Time to tell Carter where to stick his legendarily failed energy policy and move into 20th century tech for handling waste.
I love how that they insinuate that only students from low income families come unprepared for engineering studies.
If you come from a middle (or upper) class family and plan to attend college, you take college prep courses that (at least try to) prepare you for college. Yes, you very much still have people who don't "get" math, but an extra year of paying college tuition for remedial classes won't change that fact.
So realistically, low income people count as the only ones this sort of program would help - Non-dumb kids that just didn't have the opportunity (or luxury) to properly learn precalc in high school.
Which, as an American, matters why to me compared to the Euro? Free clue: I don't hold securities denominated in GBP and RMB so I can pay taxes in England and China.
Its persuasive power depends on the reader sharing said misunderstandings.
Or - given that I didn't make a persuasive argument, I rebutted one - having basic reading comprehension skills.
If you understand how commodities work, you should take THAT to mean the only rational action is to short Bitcoin.
Really now? So I take it you've shorted the entire CME? Or just those commodities that have trended strongly upward in the past three years?
Buying and selling goods with Bitcoin is EXACTLY like buying and selling goods with livestock. It`s bartering, pure and simple.
Funny that you would specifically highlight the subtle distinction between legal tender and currency, yet would then confuse a perfectly good token currency (though not legal tender) for barter.
Protip: Carry a sheep around for a week. Keep a Bitcoin in an online wallet for a week. Let me know which one shits all over you.
Look, if I want to buy food at the grocery store, the only way to do this is BTC->USD-> FOOD.
Not entirely true - You can buy just about anything, directly denominated in BTC - But not worth picking nits over. As you point out, whether you pay in BTC or convert on the fly makes little difference.
You'll notice that the amount of food I get (which, mind you, does not actually fluctuate in value that much over the last say 10 years) fluctuates wildly over the last 3 years for BTC; with the USD, it's basically constant (you know, to within a few % points a year). If you cannot recognize this as a problem with BTC as a currency, then you're just deluding yourself.
Of course it counts as a problem, and a pretty substantial one at that. But not a problem with nature of the currency itself; rather, a problem with the relative size of the economies involved. The US Dollar has a hell of a lot more users than does Bitcoin, and thus, we enjoy a day-to-day stability that even most other national currencies do not (ask most of Eastern Europe if they'd have loved a "mere" 30% inflation in a month in the early 1990's - Or hell, half the planet during WWII).
When a currency has 4 billion users, it takes a hell of a lot to change its value. When it has 10 million, sudden large shocks can move it a few percent here and there. And when it has only 50 thousand users, a change in the weather can send it flying by 10-20%.
if you consider the existence of a low-friction non-nationally controlled currency as an overall good idea, the solution to this problem lies in nothing more complex than having more people use it for more day-to-day purposes (as opposed to only trading it on the exchanges). And if you see no need for that, well, you have every right not to use it.
You don't, however, have the right not to use USD, if you owe taxes in the US. Keep that in mind.
You can't pay your (US) taxes in Euros, either. Does that say anything about the legitimacy of the Euro? Though in fairness, if you wanted to consider that particular example one of a failing currency, I'd have a hard time disagreeing.;)
As for overall confidence, there's a sucker born every minute, as long as there are suckers having confidence in it, it will remain, until such a time as it becomes so mind blowingly obvious that even the most idiotic supporter can't deny it.
I literally cannot think of a better argument against fiat currency. "Here, suckers, work for 40 years to collect enough of these papers we prooooomise will still hold (30% of) their value when you retire, and when they don't, hey, at least you'll have <snicker> Social Security to fall back on". And for the record, it actually comes out to more like eight suckers born every minute (in the US alone). That doesn't necessarily make BTC any better - But as with my point about the Euro, any argument against something you dislike that applies equally well to something you like, doesn't really have much persuasive power.
even with that "relatively stable" 90-120 range you're still talking about a 30% fluctuation, which is both unpredictable and dangerous for people who are trying to use it for normal currency stuff.
Barnes & Noble has a market cap of 1.3B - Roughly the same as Bitcoin. It shot up, yesterday alone, by 30% (well, 26%, anyway). Most people, even its own investors, expect it to go the way of Borders within a year or two.
Barnes & Noble stock, however, does not count as a currency. So take that as you will.
In the long term it will deflate out of existence, I just hope that there are some criminal prosecutions for the folks that are boosting the currency for personal gain.
I merely disagreed with you up to that statement. But that? Why? Why would you hope for criminal prosecutions over something you have gone so far to minimize as little more than a fad? Do you wish the same for collectors of Beanie Babies and Hummels, or do you reserve your bitterness for collectors of failed foreign currencies?
have you seen any major currency fluctuate over >1000% within a month lately? Ignoring what actually happens in real life does not help your argument.
Bitcoin has not fluctuated anywhere near 1000% in the past month. At most you could say 530%, comparing the low of 50 on April 16 to the high of 266 on April 10th. And excluding that bubble-and-pop (which very much still happens in USD-denominated assets), the exchange rate has remained relatively stable in the 90-120 range.
However, even in making that 530% point, you've overlooked the opposite side of the coin - Bitcoin has whatever value people will pay for it, as does the US dollar. If people will pay $266 US dollars for one Bitcoin, not only has Bitcoin shot up in relative value, but the US dollar has shot down at the same time.
Only the size of the USD vs BTC economies hides that fact. But when people will pay $266 for what most of the haters call a scam currency, that doesn't reflect well on the overall confidence in what they've traded for that "scam" currency.
This whole "story" frankly makes me a little sick, treating this guy like he was doing something great when he was running from a MURDER CHARGE
Meh. Regardless of what he did or didn't do, his adventures make for a hell of a lot more interesting read than coverage of Betty "Free Jahar" Crocker and his sidekick Speedbump, or Three Useless Girls Who Can''t Break Windows.
just because the guy is rich does NOT mean he should just walk away.
Absolutely not! And if the events described had taken place in the US or really any country without so much corruption that it refuses to even release enough information to rank them, we'd have a much different story here, more OJ than Three Stooges. But as it stands, we have the story we have.
Its actually much cheaper in real (but unfortunately largely hidden) costs to take the time to get it right before you deliver to the customer. I'll take the programmer who loses these competitions because they took the time to do a robust job thanks.
Absolutely correct - And largely irrelevant to the modern business environment.
In almost twenty years of working as a programmer, I've had the luxury of doing it "right" exactly four times. Outside that, the speed with which I can hack something together has mattered far, far more in my day to day job performance. Yeah, I can build you the Bugatti Veyron of code, given $X budget and Y months; but everyone just wants a slightly used moped, preferably by 2pm yesterday.
Yes, you have it correct, some people can't handle large projects but might do okay on a coding contest - Certainly a problem. But some people don't know when not to turn a request for a moped into a Veyron. That hypothetical god-like software engineer who fails your contest? He failed not in doing "too good" of a job, but in ignoring the actual project requirements, simple as that: "Make it work, ASAP, ACAP".
Or you could just, y'know, upload it to Google Docs and make it public, without playing all the games.
For small amounts of data (in the few-GB range), you can host crap in a bazillion places online for free. No need to send yourself 400 multi-part uuencoded emails these days to "sneak" it past the storage provider.
The point is that if you want to sell to everybody, then there's a cost to doing that. If you can't bear the cost, then don't do it.
The point is that if you want to have a physical storefront, then there's a cost to doing that. If you can't bear the cost, then don't do it.
Making a special-interest tax structure to favor the Luddites really doesn't seem like the optimal solution here.
It's pretty fucking complicated for me to do my income taxes. Does that mean I shouldn't pay them?
Great example! Should you have file 1,500 other people's taxes just because you eFile, when your neighbor puts pen to paper and mails it in so he only has to fill out his own?
And how many mom and pops get to sell to every jurisdiction on the planet?
Any of them with the will to set up an online store front?
You can get started for literally under a hundred bucks, if you can do most of the work yourself (and not talking about super complex work - If you can handle building Ikea furniture, you can get an online storefront up and running). If you need to have someone do it for you, still looking at well under a thousand for a basic setup.
Why should a company selling to everybody have the same burden for collecting taxes than a company selling to people in an immediate local area?
Because the law supposedly applies to everyone fairly and uniformly, and we already have laws relating to the collection of use tax owed to your home state?
The fact that most people choose not to pay taxes they owe says more about this situation than I ever could.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's assuming they offer a second language at all. More often than not the language ends up being Spanish, which all too frequently becomes more of a service to ESL students than value to anyone else.
First - I appreciate the value of knowing a second language. I don't mean this as a "speak English or die" rant...
But learning a second language while living in the US counts as a complete and utter waste of time. If you don't use a language, you lose it, simple as that - Personally, I took seven years of French in school, starting from a young age (2nd grade), and I can just barely read it, painfully slow. Despite having wasted somewhere on the order of thousands of hours of instructional time cramming that language into my head, I have very nearly no ability whatsoever to carry on a conversation with someone who only speaks French.
Now, if you live in an area (even in the US) that has a large Spanish-speaking population - Perhaps you can use it enough that it will "stick". If you live in Europe, where they have multiple languages spoken regularly, a second or even third language makes functional sense. If you live somewhere that doesn't speak English (and again, I don't mean this as a pro-English screed), it makes sense to learn English as a second language, as the lingua Franca of international business (and yes, I appreciate the irony of that phrase).
Australia will have the exact same problem we have in the US. They can mandate kids pass a proficiency test, but three years after highschool, it will have made no difference in the number of languages known.
You, uh, realize we pay for that anyway? No federal TLA actually needs to worry about things like balancing their budget - The more they pay, the more you and I pay!
So no, I actually do not feel okay about giving an extra chunk of my salary to Utah. Fuck you, Utah, make your money back from the fundies and your crappy low-alcohol liquor, and leave me out of it!
Several times since the Revolutionary War, nutcases have tried to rise up in armed resistance to the U.S. government.
...Whereas in the Revolutionary war - The nutcases fucking won, against the world's greatest superpower at the time.
O'm not sure what that means for "my rights online"
It means that we have yet another shining example of the last bastion of justice in a 1st-world legal system demonstrating their complete incompetence when it comes to making decisions about the most powerful tool ever devised by humans.
Not only does it show an outright scary lack of understanding of how the internet works (in the organizational sense), but it also proves him as so out of touch with the reality of the modern world that he doesn't even recognize the sort of memes we pretty much take for granted - In this case, the "Streisand effect".
/ I've got my copy, and you have no jurisdiction over me, Mr. Peart. Your move.
Heh... Kinda a joke, in context, but...
Not entirely.
Bitcoin doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things (at least, for now and for a long time yet). Whole BTC economy is smaller than any of major corporations (and most of minor ones).
The Bitcoin economy has a market cap of USD$1.2B, making it roughly the same size as a little Mom 'n Pop bookstore you might have heard of - Barnes & Noble?
Grocery stores don't accept bitcoins.
Actually...
The government finally decided to care and used the one achilles heel of BitCoin...conversion to and from dollars.
Why would you consider that an achilles' heel? Those of us using BitCoin use it because it blows the dollar away for convenience in certain types of transactions (by which I don't mean "drugs" - Tide Unscented remains the king there, followed by US cash). In particular, any movement of small amounts of money (in the $100 range) between countries typically takes upwards of 50% of the total in various fees (and that assumes 1st-world countries with more-or-less legitimate banking and postal systems on both ends of the transaction).
So, for the reasons I would choose to denominate a given transaction in Bitcoins, the ability to convert it directly to USD has little to no value.
We'll now see how well the BitCoin market can operate as a completely stand-alone entity.
So far, the exchange rate (even if "exchange" may have just become a lot harder) hasn't even dipped outside the normal standard daily swings for USD:BTC. We'll see if the market panics tomorrow, but I wouldn't count on it. I don't use BitCoin because of its value in dollars, and neither, I suspect, do most of its (non-speculating) users.
Why isn't the farmer using regular seeds?
The problem here - He did use "regular" seeds: "cheap soybeans he bought from a grain elevator". Monsanto seeds don't come out an easily-identifiable fluorescent purple, he had no way of knowing which seeds came from Monsanto licensees and which came from traditional seeds.
For all of post-nomadic human history, farmers have taken a small portion of last year's harvest and used it to plant this year's crop. Standard Operating Procedure.
Unfortunately for we mere humans, Monsanto couldn't have begged for a better "test" case to go before the USSC. Even I have difficulty feeling bad for Farmer Dale, given that he deliberately tried to reproduce Monsanto's IP commercially without licensing it. But the underlying idea of taking seeds from the community hopper and planting them, perfectly kosher. It completely disgusts me that this case effectively sets a precedent, placing on the farmer the burden of separating the non-fluorescent-purple Monsanto seeds from the non-fluorescent-purple legal-to-grow seeds.
Far more disturbingly, though - Apply this same legal precedent to genetic therapies for human disease. A custom gene patch cures Alzheimer's forever? Great! Except - Hope you remember to pay your yearly license fee, because Pfizer owns your kids.
Fortunately, it's only mining software that needs to be updated. Anyone just handling ordinary transactions doesn't really need to worry.
Just so you know - You have that exactly backward.
Try 2140, not 2020. Your larger point may stand, but the specific urgency of it happening in the next decade - Or even without our lifetimes - does not.
It's just that the new Bitcoin and the old Bitcoin are becoming two different currencies. People need to convert all their old Bitcoins to new ones to avoid this.
Bzzzt. Users of Bitcoin don't need to do anything beyond download a client written in the past year. They don't need to convert anything, they don't need to send themselves their balance to make sure the new program sees it, they don't even need to re-download the block chain. Just update their software.
Nothing about the currency itself has changed; just the removal of an artificial cap on block size placed in the original client, from back before the early developers expected it to take off so well.
Uh, oh - No one tell him about "zip" guns!
More seriously, though - You can get an untraceable "real" gun a hell of a lot cheaper and easier - even in California - than by buying a $1000 machine, finding the plans online, trying to get it to print all the parts un-warped enough to actually fit together, and then will only fire a single shot, perhaps half a dozen times before it deforms too much to use again.
/ You can have my Bic ball-point pen over my cold dead hands, you 2nd (and 1st!) amendment hating scum!
If the guy's job description doesn't require "Concurrent code" then STFU and keep your petty issues to yourself, if it does then hes unable to perform the job and needs training or reassignment.
I don't often respond to ACs (and even less often positively), but you've hit the nail on the head here.
My current job requires absolutely no explicitly concurrent programming. I do mostly SQL, which has a high degree of implicit parallelism (arguably the highest possible, if you religiously avoid RBAR); I've also played around with OpenCL just for kicks. But even such fundamentals as semaphores and IPC matter not one whit to my continued employment.
I can appreciate the FP's problem, having worked with programmers who just don't have passion for the art anymore (and age has nothing to do with it, I've worked with a 60YO that made me look like a neophobe, and a 30YO that honestly would have liked his job better if he could do nothing but sharpen pencils all day). But most programming jobs don't require high-level cutting edge skills. Quite the opposite, I've more often found myself suffering for want of familiarity with ancient big-iron scripting languages than for the latest and greatest set of buzzwords.
Put bluntly, most programming jobs involve getting an ancient GL database to talk to an ancient POS system; converting 20 years worth of Excel VBA scripts (or god help you if someone's nephew actually knew Access) to "real" code; Hacking together a driver that lets a $2M instrument talk to a Win7 x64 box, when the most recent driver from the (now defunct) manufacturer runs on a German version of Windows ME (and FWIW, I didn't exactly pull that example out of my ass).
I'd love to see an actual breakdown of the numbers, but make no mistake, the number of programmers working on Real Software(tm) falls into a small minority of the total.
Seriously, why don't we just "burn" this? Add it as a contaminant to the fuel rods used in other reactors (or more realistically, since most of the waste comes from spent fuel rods, start recycling the damned things instead of trying to bury them).
All the furor over Yucca or Hanford or wherever, just to honor one of the single most short-sighted executive orders ever issued? Time to tell Carter where to stick his legendarily failed energy policy and move into 20th century tech for handling waste.
I love how that they insinuate that only students from low income families come unprepared for engineering studies.
If you come from a middle (or upper) class family and plan to attend college, you take college prep courses that (at least try to) prepare you for college. Yes, you very much still have people who don't "get" math, but an extra year of paying college tuition for remedial classes won't change that fact.
So realistically, low income people count as the only ones this sort of program would help - Non-dumb kids that just didn't have the opportunity (or luxury) to properly learn precalc in high school.
No suich country exists for Bitcoin. Try again.
Which, as an American, matters why to me compared to the Euro? Free clue: I don't hold securities denominated in GBP and RMB so I can pay taxes in England and China.
Its persuasive power depends on the reader sharing said misunderstandings.
Or - given that I didn't make a persuasive argument, I rebutted one - having basic reading comprehension skills.
If you understand how commodities work, you should take THAT to mean the only rational action is to short Bitcoin.
Really now? So I take it you've shorted the entire CME? Or just those commodities that have trended strongly upward in the past three years?
Buying and selling goods with Bitcoin is EXACTLY like buying and selling goods with livestock. It`s bartering, pure and simple.
Funny that you would specifically highlight the subtle distinction between legal tender and currency, yet would then confuse a perfectly good token currency (though not legal tender) for barter.
Protip: Carry a sheep around for a week. Keep a Bitcoin in an online wallet for a week. Let me know which one shits all over you.
Look, if I want to buy food at the grocery store, the only way to do this is BTC->USD-> FOOD.
Not entirely true - You can buy just about anything, directly denominated in BTC - But not worth picking nits over. As you point out, whether you pay in BTC or convert on the fly makes little difference.
You'll notice that the amount of food I get (which, mind you, does not actually fluctuate in value that much over the last say 10 years) fluctuates wildly over the last 3 years for BTC; with the USD, it's basically constant (you know, to within a few % points a year). If you cannot recognize this as a problem with BTC as a currency, then you're just deluding yourself.
Of course it counts as a problem, and a pretty substantial one at that. But not a problem with nature of the currency itself; rather, a problem with the relative size of the economies involved. The US Dollar has a hell of a lot more users than does Bitcoin, and thus, we enjoy a day-to-day stability that even most other national currencies do not (ask most of Eastern Europe if they'd have loved a "mere" 30% inflation in a month in the early 1990's - Or hell, half the planet during WWII).
When a currency has 4 billion users, it takes a hell of a lot to change its value. When it has 10 million, sudden large shocks can move it a few percent here and there. And when it has only 50 thousand users, a change in the weather can send it flying by 10-20%.
if you consider the existence of a low-friction non-nationally controlled currency as an overall good idea, the solution to this problem lies in nothing more complex than having more people use it for more day-to-day purposes (as opposed to only trading it on the exchanges). And if you see no need for that, well, you have every right not to use it.
You don't, however, have the right not to use USD, if you owe taxes in the US. Keep that in mind.
I can't pay my taxes in BTC
;)
You can't pay your (US) taxes in Euros, either. Does that say anything about the legitimacy of the Euro? Though in fairness, if you wanted to consider that particular example one of a failing currency, I'd have a hard time disagreeing.
As for overall confidence, there's a sucker born every minute, as long as there are suckers having confidence in it, it will remain, until such a time as it becomes so mind blowingly obvious that even the most idiotic supporter can't deny it.
I literally cannot think of a better argument against fiat currency. "Here, suckers, work for 40 years to collect enough of these papers we prooooomise will still hold (30% of) their value when you retire, and when they don't, hey, at least you'll have <snicker> Social Security to fall back on". And for the record, it actually comes out to more like eight suckers born every minute (in the US alone). That doesn't necessarily make BTC any better - But as with my point about the Euro, any argument against something you dislike that applies equally well to something you like, doesn't really have much persuasive power.
even with that "relatively stable" 90-120 range you're still talking about a 30% fluctuation, which is both unpredictable and dangerous for people who are trying to use it for normal currency stuff.
Barnes & Noble has a market cap of 1.3B - Roughly the same as Bitcoin. It shot up, yesterday alone, by 30% (well, 26%, anyway). Most people, even its own investors, expect it to go the way of Borders within a year or two.
Barnes & Noble stock, however, does not count as a currency. So take that as you will.
In the long term it will deflate out of existence, I just hope that there are some criminal prosecutions for the folks that are boosting the currency for personal gain.
I merely disagreed with you up to that statement. But that? Why? Why would you hope for criminal prosecutions over something you have gone so far to minimize as little more than a fad? Do you wish the same for collectors of Beanie Babies and Hummels, or do you reserve your bitterness for collectors of failed foreign currencies?
have you seen any major currency fluctuate over >1000% within a month lately? Ignoring what actually happens in real life does not help your argument.
Bitcoin has not fluctuated anywhere near 1000% in the past month. At most you could say 530%, comparing the low of 50 on April 16 to the high of 266 on April 10th. And excluding that bubble-and-pop (which very much still happens in USD-denominated assets), the exchange rate has remained relatively stable in the 90-120 range.
However, even in making that 530% point, you've overlooked the opposite side of the coin - Bitcoin has whatever value people will pay for it, as does the US dollar. If people will pay $266 US dollars for one Bitcoin, not only has Bitcoin shot up in relative value, but the US dollar has shot down at the same time.
Only the size of the USD vs BTC economies hides that fact. But when people will pay $266 for what most of the haters call a scam currency, that doesn't reflect well on the overall confidence in what they've traded for that "scam" currency.
This whole "story" frankly makes me a little sick, treating this guy like he was doing something great when he was running from a MURDER CHARGE
Meh. Regardless of what he did or didn't do, his adventures make for a hell of a lot more interesting read than coverage of Betty "Free Jahar" Crocker and his sidekick Speedbump, or Three Useless Girls Who Can''t Break Windows.
just because the guy is rich does NOT mean he should just walk away.
Absolutely not! And if the events described had taken place in the US or really any country without so much corruption that it refuses to even release enough information to rank them, we'd have a much different story here, more OJ than Three Stooges. But as it stands, we have the story we have.
Its actually much cheaper in real (but unfortunately largely hidden) costs to take the time to get it right before you deliver to the customer. I'll take the programmer who loses these competitions because they took the time to do a robust job thanks.
Absolutely correct - And largely irrelevant to the modern business environment.
In almost twenty years of working as a programmer, I've had the luxury of doing it "right" exactly four times. Outside that, the speed with which I can hack something together has mattered far, far more in my day to day job performance. Yeah, I can build you the Bugatti Veyron of code, given $X budget and Y months; but everyone just wants a slightly used moped, preferably by 2pm yesterday.
Yes, you have it correct, some people can't handle large projects but might do okay on a coding contest - Certainly a problem. But some people don't know when not to turn a request for a moped into a Veyron. That hypothetical god-like software engineer who fails your contest? He failed not in doing "too good" of a job, but in ignoring the actual project requirements, simple as that: "Make it work, ASAP, ACAP".
Or you could just, y'know, upload it to Google Docs and make it public, without playing all the games.
For small amounts of data (in the few-GB range), you can host crap in a bazillion places online for free. No need to send yourself 400 multi-part uuencoded emails these days to "sneak" it past the storage provider.
The point is that if you want to sell to everybody, then there's a cost to doing that. If you can't bear the cost, then don't do it.
The point is that if you want to have a physical storefront, then there's a cost to doing that. If you can't bear the cost, then don't do it.
Making a special-interest tax structure to favor the Luddites really doesn't seem like the optimal solution here.
It's pretty fucking complicated for me to do my income taxes. Does that mean I shouldn't pay them?
Great example! Should you have file 1,500 other people's taxes just because you eFile, when your neighbor puts pen to paper and mails it in so he only has to fill out his own?
And how many mom and pops get to sell to every jurisdiction on the planet?
Any of them with the will to set up an online store front?
You can get started for literally under a hundred bucks, if you can do most of the work yourself (and not talking about super complex work - If you can handle building Ikea furniture, you can get an online storefront up and running). If you need to have someone do it for you, still looking at well under a thousand for a basic setup.
Why should a company selling to everybody have the same burden for collecting taxes than a company selling to people in an immediate local area?
Because the law supposedly applies to everyone fairly and uniformly, and we already have laws relating to the collection of use tax owed to your home state?
The fact that most people choose not to pay taxes they owe says more about this situation than I ever could.