Any time money is successfully stolen, it causes a transfer of wealth.
If a bank gets robbed, the reason you get your money back is because the bank loses it (i.e. the money comes from shareholders) If the bank is insured against theft, presumably they are paying for this insurance and the money comes from the owners of the insurance company. If the insurance company is the government, then the money comes from taxpayers and current owners of the currency.
With bitcoin, you are your own bank. You can buy insurance if you were really worried about it. As a bank customer and US taxpayer you are already indirectly paying for that insurance anyway.
Yes bitcoins have been stolen. It is not impossible to steal bitcoins. It is *harder* to steal bitcoins than US dollars.
When someone breaks into your house and takes all your stuff, nobody reimburses you unless you had insurance. This is not a new thing. That fact that money can be stolen is not a reason to abandon money. It's a reason to take appropriate precautions to minimize money theft. The fact that bitcoins can be stolen just means that we need to take necessary steps to minimize the threat of theft. In the case of bitcoin this means ensuring that escrow services like bitcoin exchanges have proper security and possibly even insurance against theft. No one is forced to use an exchange that is not insured it would just cost a little more. Based the likelihood of theft, it may or may not be worth it to insure. You don't buy volcano insurance even though some people do lose everything to a volcano from time to time.
The bitcoin deck is only stacked in favor of the merchant if we presume that the merchant is paid before the service or product is given to the buyer, but this is just arbitrary. Some things, like restaurants, work the other way around. In these instances the deck is stacked against the merchant (i.e. dine and dashers). For markets where both sides are sufficiently apprehensive of potential fraud you can just use a mutually agreed upon escrow company to manager the transaction.>/p>
Ultimately, the credit card system has the same issues and potential solutions, they have merely implemented one of the solutions. They act as a partial escrow company for the money but not the goods. You buy something online. The credit card company holds onto the money (i.e. they give it to the merchant but are free to take it back), you receive the good, and if a certain amount of time goes by without any complaints, the credit card company gives the money to the merchant (i.e. they relinquish their entitlement to take the money back).
There is no reason that a system like this couldn't be implemented for bitcoin in almost the exact same way. The only difference would be that the merchant would not get the money immediately (as opposed to getting the money immediately with possibility of it getting taken back). The merchant would be getting a conditional promise of wealth, which is ultimately only what US dollars in a bank account is anyway.
Bitcoin was created in 2009. Given that it is the first real attempt at a decentralized digital currency (something most people are completely unfamiliar with), I wouldn't expect rapid widespread adoption. That said, one of it's advantages is that it does not require maintenance from a central authority to function. Short of destroying the internet, bitcoin will remain a stable and easy to use digital currency for anyone who wants to use it.
I don't see any reason that there couldn't be places that would start accepting bitcoin as it becomes less scary.
Yes bitcoin is volatile, like I would expect any new currency to be, but it's not as if other currencies are completely stable, they are just slightly more stable, and that is only for now.
Why would a gorcery store or amazon take US dollars? Because they have trust in it. People don't trust bitcoin yet, but it's not because it's not trustworthy. If it works well, I don't see why people won't come to trust it. It took backing the US dollar with gold for like 200 years before people trusted it enough that it could be used as a fiat currency.
The reason people trust the dollar for the same reason that ancient people trusted that the sun would come up tomorrow (because it had done it for as long as the could remember and therefore would probably continue to, especially if they sacrificed some virgins to their god). The reason to trust bitcoin is a much better one. The laws of physics and math make it impossible to easily manipulate it. It will take time for people to realize how good a reason this is.
Is the US government and banks going to continue to manipulate the US dollar for the foreseeable future? Yes.
Is "A. Random H@X0R" going away tomorrow? It doesn't matter. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency. Bitcoin is not dependent upon "A. Random H@X0R" for it to be trusted.
Where does the trust in bitcoin come from? Well if you don't know anything about bitcoin, you probably shouldn;t trust it. If you know something about computer science and theory of computability, you'd know that bitcoins are actually much harder to acquire than a government issued currency, and is therefore much harder to manipulate (e.g. like gold). A trillion US dollars can be created virtually with a keyboard stroke. The only thing stopping this from happening is the people in charge. What stops a trillion bitcoins from being instantly created is the laws of physics and math.
A lot of currencies have collapsed from rampant inflation exactly because the people in charge could *not* be trusted.
Some people trust government officials more than the laws of physics and math. I personally don't.
Yes you must accept dollars as legal tender. This does nothing to prop up the value of the dollar. If the dollar collapses, I will still accept the US dollar as legal tender. I will sell my services for either $1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e. more than how much exists) or one can of soup. They can't force me to accept a certain value of the dollar.
It doesn't matter if the currency is physical or digital. It is not backed by anything. If the dollar collapsed, you wouldn't have any legal authority to demand a fixed amount of land from the banks in exchange for dollars. Back when dollars were backed with gold, the value of dollars could never fall below gold, because the exchange rate from dollars to gold was fixed by the US government and the government guaranteed it had enough gold to cover all the dollars in circulation. The dollar were just a substitute for gold. Now dollars are a fiat currency. Just like gold is a fiat currency and bitcoin is a fiat currency. None of them is backed by anything. The only difference being that US dollars can be easily created and manipulated by the government and gold and bitcoin can't.
When the dollar was backed with gold, it meant if the dollar crashed, you could always exchange it for X amount of gold (whatever that's worth). As long as gold was worth something, then that propped up the dollar.
I don't see how the power to tax does anything to prop up the dollar. The US taxes are in dollars. So how can dollars be propped up by more dollars? If the government promises to give you $1 for every $1 in the event of a dollar collapse, how is this any different than keeping your worthless $1? If the dollar crashes and the government decides to tax me $1,000,000 who cares? I don't need worthless dollars. The government can have every dollar I own, but they are not getting any of my canned soup without a fight.
Sure the US has land and gold. Someone holding US dollars is not legally entitled to any of it, so how does that do anything to back the currency? The amount of US land and gold you can buy with US dollars are dictated only by the free market. With the termination of the gold standard, that amount of land and gold you can buy if the dollar collapses will be very little.
The nice thing about bitcoin is that it *isn't* controlled by the US or any government. It can't be easily created, manipulated, or counterfeited. The transaction history of every bitcoin is known to everyone. Traditional centralized currencies are incredibly susceptible to abuse. There is nothing stopping the controller of the currency from inflating it for their own benefit.
One day bitcoins will run out, mining will stop, and bitcoin supply will be completely static. It will be like gold but without the wasted resources trying to mine it.
The gambling law does specifically only prohibit bank transactions, so it seems like a good solution to me. The government took care to craft a law that outlawed online gambling while keeping IRL Vegas style gambling legal (because one is immoral and one isn't?). The law was specifically targetting bank transfers because they can't really stop people from gambling on sites hosted overseas, but they can seize the money deposited into US bank accounts. The beauty of bitcoin is that it is not (and can't be) under the control of anybody. Bitcoin works like traditional currency that can be physically possessed and have it's ownership transferred without interference from a 3rd party, but with the ease of electronic money transfer.
The US government can certainly shutdown US gambling sites, but they can't shutdown sites hosted in foreign countries nor can they seize bitcoins. They only plce they might be able to stop it is by seizing any money that is transferred into a bank account by a entity that is known to exchange bitcoins for US currency, but this would be more like attempting to shut down bitcoin entirely rather than simply stopping internet gambling. If ever bitcoin became a more widely accepted, it might make the ability of the US government to seize money held in US bank accounts less effective, because use of US bank accounts could be avoided entirely.
I don't expect the US to give up it's control over the world's financial system without a fight, but they might actually lose this fight. Bitcoin or even some future distributed digital currency might turn out to be so much more advantageous that it can't be stopped by anyone (e.g. like use of gold as currency). I think the only thing holding it back now is widespread apprehension in something so radically different.
I'm sure you can find lots of examples of people who don't know anything about guns saying all kinds of stupid stuff. I have heard many people saying that semi-automatic guns should be banned (because that's what the guy in the mass shooting had) not realizing that almost every gun is semi-automatic.
I think it is perfectly ok to have limited knowledge of guns if your position is that all guns should be banned. But to enter the debate about banning specific guns (e.g. assault weapons ban) should require some basic understanding. It's pretty hard to have a debate when people are not using the same definitions.
Quality of code has a very significant subjective aspect to it. There is correctness (does the code do what it's supposed to) which is pretty objective , but things like maintainability are not as easily quantifiable. What one person feels is understandable and easy to maintain another might feel is convoluted and hard to understand. It's like food. Some people like italian food and think it's better than chinese food, and vice versa. Almost everyone agrees that french fries are better than dirt, but that doesn't mean it's not subjective.
Also, the fact that I consider code beauty to be subjective doesn't mean that I am not extremely picky about code. I am a code nazi. There is a right way and a wrong way, according to my aesthetics, but there is no objective reason why my aesthetics are correct.
I suppose there is also something to be said for weighting death causes by how much stopping them would help. For example in the US pneumonia might kill lots of people, but it's mostly people who are already weakened health (e.g. HIV positive, elderly). Most of these people if they didn't die of pneumonia, would have died of something else soon after. Shootings are almost as likely to kill people in the prime of their life as any other time.
Calculating cause of death is normally quite subjective. Someone might die to asphyxiation, caused by pneumonia, caused by lung cancer, caused by decades of smoking, caused by addiction to nicotine early in life, caused by bad parenting. Rather than treating all causes of death equally, I would suggest counting each cause by how many more years of life can be lived if the cause is removed. In the case of cigarettes, we might say it shortens life on average by 10 years (I'm guessing), but for a shooting, they average could be like 50 years. And really we should probably calculate the integral of quality of life over lifespan if we wanted to be really thorough.
If I had a choice between a 50% chance of being shot and dying at some point in my life or a 100% chance of getting the flu and dying when I was 90, I would take the flu.
Well I'm not talking about an individual needing a gun. I am talking about society as a whole needing guns. At a societal level, there isn't an abrupt tipping point (like being shot and killed). As a society we don't need to have guns before the need arises as much. If the government becomes more tyrannical, we have several options.
1. If it's not too bad , try to fix it within the system, by electing better representatives to repeal bad laws and enact new good laws, and appoint people to enforce the law fairly.
2. If the system is just not working, then there is less reason to obey the law. Buy smuggled guns on the black market, or work to manufacture your own guns (the cat is out of the bag).
3. It's actually pretty hard to keep enough law enforcement and military (the ones who actually have the guns) necessary to quell an insurrection loyal to a tyrant. What could you possibly give that many people that is better than living in a free and peaceful society? As military and police defect, they bring their government guns with them to the rebellion.
Like I said, I am not saying that getting rid of all guns is a good move. it is probably the worst move if we thought tyranny was likely. I am just saying that getting rid of all guns is not a guarantee of tyranny, and that it is possible to get the guns back if need be. It is possible that the lives lost living in a society with easy gun access exceeds the lives lost reacquiring guns in the event of tyranny.
Loss of freedom is not necessarily always a bad thing. I think the loss of freedom for people to have biological weapons (despite it being allowed by the 2nd amendment) is a good thing.
1. Are you referring to a scenario where one might be forced to be injected with a vaccine? Or is it more like forcibly injecting a violent mental patient with sedatives? This seems reasonable to me provided the harm to others is an imminent threat to someone else.
4. Do you mean A. that an employer could never force you change how you practice your religion? Or do you mean B. an employer could never offer to hire you on condition of changing how you practice your religion, or fire you for refusing to change how you practice your religion?
I would say A already exists and makes sense. I would say that B doesn't make sense because ti violates the principle of free association.
The thing we lost may be a good thing. If the thing we lost was a suspicion that the government would turn so tyrannical that the *best* alternative was a violent overthrow, then it depends. If this is actually going to happen then it's a bad thing. If it isn't then we lost a fear of something that is not going to happen (a good thing), and if we manage in addition to make society safer, then hooray.
The question is whether the ability to violently overthrow our government is worth the reduction in safety. I personally am not convinced it is. A government that is incorruptible seems like a fairytale, but at the same time ours kind of seems to work (i.e. is reasonably accountable to the people), and it doesn't seem like this is due to the government being worried that an uprising is imminent.
I am not saying the trade is good or bad. I am saying it's not obvious to me what the right decision is, and even the most left person should acknowledge the possibility of a failed government given how common it has been in history, and even the most right person should acknowledge that it is possible that we won't have tyranny any time soon, and that if it's not coming soon, we don't need guns to stop it.
Mass shootings are committed by crazy people. Only about 150 people on average die in mass shootings every year. I'm not saying these deaths are not tragedies, but in a country of 300 million where 15,000 die of "normal" shootings every year on average (100x the number in mass shootings), we should do what it takes to reduce the 15,000 number which is a much bigger problem than worrying about how to restrict free press in order to reduce mass shootings.
Rather than having guns that ware smart, we should have smart bullets that will only kill bad people. After being fired the smart bullet will immediately ascertain the worst person within range using a sophisticated algorithm weighing criminal history, internet searches, and music preference, and impact that person right in the face, piercing any face armor up to 2 inches of hardened steel, and igniting it's incendiary and high explosive payloads.
It is logically impossible that there is not at least one bad person nearby, because a room full of only good people would never fire a gun. It's logic.
The fact that the most likely target of a smart bullet is yourself, this will greatly reduce the number of shootings. The only trick is to get people to abandon regular bullets. I know, we could make people with regular bullets at the top priority of the smart bullet hit list algorithm! There will a violent but short war between the "smarties" and the "norms", but *then* there will be reduced shootings.
Yes indeed, everyone should have a right to their own body and what goes into it provided it does not gravely endanger anyone else. Fortunately for them, not getting a flu shot is not so dangerous so these nurses should not be forced to do it. One thing people should *not* have a right to is a job where you refuse to follow the rules of said job. It shouldn't matter that it is for religious reasons. I could believe in my own crazy version of Christianity that says it's a sin to wash my hands. I should be free to do that. I sure as shit shouldn't be allowed to work in a hospital or even a restaurant.
1. You should be free to put whatever you want into your body (provided it doesn't harm others)
2. You should be free to practice whatever religion you want (provided it doesn't harm others)
3. You should be entitled to a job even if you can't or won't do it to the employer's satisfaction because of religious beliefs.
People frequently confuse these statements. They say and think they want 1 and 2 (which are very reasonable), but what they actually want is 3 (which is completely retarded).
Apparently the romans were not poisoned by lead...
From wikipedia:
"The great disadvantage of lead has always been that it is poisonous. This was fully recognised by the ancients, and Vitruvius specifically warns against its use. Because it was nevertheless used in profusion for carrying drinking water, the conclusion has often been drawn that the Romans must therefore have suffered from lead poisoning; sometimes conclusions are carried even further and it is inferred that this caused infertility and other unwelcome conditions, and that lead plumbing was largely responsible for the decline and fall of Rome. In fact, two things make this otherwise attractive hypothesis impossible. First, the calcium carbonate deposit that formed so thickly inside the aqueduct channels also formed inside the pipes, effectively insulating the water from the lead, so that the two never touched. Second, because the Romans had so few taps and the water was constantly running, it was never actually inside the pipes for more than a few minutes, and certainly not long enough to become contaminated. The thesis that the Romans contracted lead poisoning from the lead pipes in their water systems must therefore be declared completely unfounded."
1. You write the most horrible code imaginable.
2. You stuff entire programs into single functions.
3. You artificially stretch function through relentless repetition
4. You make uninformative variable and class names.
5. You ignore basic language features, when they could make everything shorter and more readable
6. You don't use OOP correctly.
You need to be smart to write good code. Being smart does not guarantee that you write good code. Writing code since before (insert person) was born does not make someone good at writing code. Some people just can't learn new things, especially some of these old self taught programmers who were considered hackers and geniuses back in the days when computers were simpler and dealing with a few hacks here and there was ok and easily fixed through more hacks here and there. When you graduate from a bicycle to a 747, duck tape is no longer allowed (and probably didn't even belong on the bicycle either).
In either case, we shouldn't be designing laws to stop massacres by crazy people. There's about 150 people killed in mass shootings each year. There's 15,000 people killed in non-mass shootings every year. Reducing the number of regular shootings by 1% will save just as many lives as eliminating mass shootings by 100% the only difference is that one of those is actually attainable. We should be focusing all our efforts on reducing non-mass shootings and treat the sandy hooks and columbines as outliers. Your chances of dying in a mass shooting are literally 1 in 2 million. Your chances of dying in a regular shooting are 1 in 20,000.
The problem isn't that intelligence can't be reduced to to a single number, it is that intelligence is a very vague term. There is not an accepted standard for what intelligence is. You can definitely measure abilities like spatial recognition and memory. You can also come up with some system of aggregating scores of various abilities and come up with a single number. We do this kind of thing all the time in the decathalon, triathalon, biathalon, any number of subjective olympic sports like figure skating and gymnatsics. We even do this on standardized tests like the SAT.
The difference between the SAT and IQ is that there is more widespread agreement that multiple choice vocabulary and math are the correct abilities to aggregate into the final score of "scholastic aptitude" than for the idea that whatever is in the IQ test are the correct measurements for "intelligence".
I am not even sure scholastic aptitude is a more concrete term than intelligence, I just think it is one that is not politically incorrect to suggest people lack. No one cares if you didn't do well on the SAT. It doesn't mean you are stupid. All you lack is scholastic aptitude. You could still be intelligent in a way that is not easily testable. If you fail an IQ test the implication is that you lack intelligence. Now people feel insulted, and feel other people should feel insulted.
People can always disregard some metric or another by saying they just don't value whatever that metric claims to test. For whatever reason people do not like disregarding intelligence as unimportant. They would much rather just claim that intelligence is impossible to test. I suspect the same is true for beauty.
If I were to make a test called the BQ (beauty quotient), that reduced beauty to a single number, even if it was more accurate than something like the SAT, I think most would condemn it. If I could think of something else to call it where people who scored low could just ignore it easily without feeling insulted, I think it would have a much higher chance of success. I just need a lame euphemism like "facial symmetry factor". I have a low facial symmetry factor. Big deal. It's not like I'm ugly or anything. Afterall beauty is impossible to test.
It absolutely is a reflection of our electorate. I suppose what I was naively hoping for, was that our government would be the wise representatives of our relatively ignorant electorate. Instead we get a group of crooks just smart enough to trick a plurality of an apathetic electorate. How sad.
Maybe this is just a necessary evil of democracy. In order for people to have true freedom, they must also have the freedom to make terrible choices, and everyone has to live with it. Maybe one day, benevolent smart people will figure out a way to trick stupid people into doing whats best for themselves and society as a whole and we can end the cycle of stupidity.
"'Recent court decisions demonstrate that some people still do not get it. They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons. Parents, pediatricians, and psychologists know better."
If all the parents, pediatricians, and psychologists already *know* that violent video games are causing violence in children, why bother wasting money on a study to show what we already know?". I am not sure the Senator or most politicians in general realize what the point of a scientific study is. You do it when you *don't* know they answer and want to find out, not when you have already decided what the answer is and fabricate a study to support your prior conclusion. You have to use like real science and real statistics and stuff to ensure your study is as objective and free from bias as possible so that the answers are somewhat close to being true rather than merely supporting your position.
What is shocking to me is not that people would try to use BS science for political reasons. It is that they are not even trying to make it look like real science. The only reason I can think of why they don't is that they don't even know what real science looks like, so they can't even fake it.
It's like we have a bunch of people running the country that are at the intellectual level of mediocre high school students practicing to be adults through mock trials and model united nations.
Slashdot Mirror
Any time money is successfully stolen, it causes a transfer of wealth.
If a bank gets robbed, the reason you get your money back is because the bank loses it (i.e. the money comes from shareholders) If the bank is insured against theft, presumably they are paying for this insurance and the money comes from the owners of the insurance company. If the insurance company is the government, then the money comes from taxpayers and current owners of the currency.
With bitcoin, you are your own bank. You can buy insurance if you were really worried about it. As a bank customer and US taxpayer you are already indirectly paying for that insurance anyway.
Yes bitcoins have been stolen. It is not impossible to steal bitcoins. It is *harder* to steal bitcoins than US dollars.
When someone breaks into your house and takes all your stuff, nobody reimburses you unless you had insurance. This is not a new thing. That fact that money can be stolen is not a reason to abandon money. It's a reason to take appropriate precautions to minimize money theft. The fact that bitcoins can be stolen just means that we need to take necessary steps to minimize the threat of theft. In the case of bitcoin this means ensuring that escrow services like bitcoin exchanges have proper security and possibly even insurance against theft. No one is forced to use an exchange that is not insured it would just cost a little more. Based the likelihood of theft, it may or may not be worth it to insure. You don't buy volcano insurance even though some people do lose everything to a volcano from time to time.
The bitcoin deck is only stacked in favor of the merchant if we presume that the merchant is paid before the service or product is given to the buyer, but this is just arbitrary. Some things, like restaurants, work the other way around. In these instances the deck is stacked against the merchant (i.e. dine and dashers). For markets where both sides are sufficiently apprehensive of potential fraud you can just use a mutually agreed upon escrow company to manager the transaction.>/p>
Ultimately, the credit card system has the same issues and potential solutions, they have merely implemented one of the solutions. They act as a partial escrow company for the money but not the goods. You buy something online. The credit card company holds onto the money (i.e. they give it to the merchant but are free to take it back), you receive the good, and if a certain amount of time goes by without any complaints, the credit card company gives the money to the merchant (i.e. they relinquish their entitlement to take the money back).
There is no reason that a system like this couldn't be implemented for bitcoin in almost the exact same way. The only difference would be that the merchant would not get the money immediately (as opposed to getting the money immediately with possibility of it getting taken back). The merchant would be getting a conditional promise of wealth, which is ultimately only what US dollars in a bank account is anyway.
Bitcoin was created in 2009. Given that it is the first real attempt at a decentralized digital currency (something most people are completely unfamiliar with), I wouldn't expect rapid widespread adoption. That said, one of it's advantages is that it does not require maintenance from a central authority to function. Short of destroying the internet, bitcoin will remain a stable and easy to use digital currency for anyone who wants to use it.
I don't see any reason that there couldn't be places that would start accepting bitcoin as it becomes less scary.
Yes bitcoin is volatile, like I would expect any new currency to be, but it's not as if other currencies are completely stable, they are just slightly more stable, and that is only for now.
Why would a gorcery store or amazon take US dollars? Because they have trust in it. People don't trust bitcoin yet, but it's not because it's not trustworthy. If it works well, I don't see why people won't come to trust it. It took backing the US dollar with gold for like 200 years before people trusted it enough that it could be used as a fiat currency.
The reason people trust the dollar for the same reason that ancient people trusted that the sun would come up tomorrow (because it had done it for as long as the could remember and therefore would probably continue to, especially if they sacrificed some virgins to their god). The reason to trust bitcoin is a much better one. The laws of physics and math make it impossible to easily manipulate it. It will take time for people to realize how good a reason this is.
Is the US going away tomorrow? No.
Is the US government and banks going to continue to manipulate the US dollar for the foreseeable future? Yes.
Is "A. Random H@X0R" going away tomorrow? It doesn't matter. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency. Bitcoin is not dependent upon "A. Random H@X0R" for it to be trusted.
Where does the trust in bitcoin come from? Well if you don't know anything about bitcoin, you probably shouldn;t trust it. If you know something about computer science and theory of computability, you'd know that bitcoins are actually much harder to acquire than a government issued currency, and is therefore much harder to manipulate (e.g. like gold). A trillion US dollars can be created virtually with a keyboard stroke. The only thing stopping this from happening is the people in charge. What stops a trillion bitcoins from being instantly created is the laws of physics and math.
A lot of currencies have collapsed from rampant inflation exactly because the people in charge could *not* be trusted.
Some people trust government officials more than the laws of physics and math. I personally don't.
Yes you must accept dollars as legal tender. This does nothing to prop up the value of the dollar. If the dollar collapses, I will still accept the US dollar as legal tender. I will sell my services for either $1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e. more than how much exists) or one can of soup. They can't force me to accept a certain value of the dollar.
It doesn't matter if the currency is physical or digital. It is not backed by anything. If the dollar collapsed, you wouldn't have any legal authority to demand a fixed amount of land from the banks in exchange for dollars. Back when dollars were backed with gold, the value of dollars could never fall below gold, because the exchange rate from dollars to gold was fixed by the US government and the government guaranteed it had enough gold to cover all the dollars in circulation. The dollar were just a substitute for gold. Now dollars are a fiat currency. Just like gold is a fiat currency and bitcoin is a fiat currency. None of them is backed by anything. The only difference being that US dollars can be easily created and manipulated by the government and gold and bitcoin can't.
When the dollar was backed with gold, it meant if the dollar crashed, you could always exchange it for X amount of gold (whatever that's worth). As long as gold was worth something, then that propped up the dollar.
I don't see how the power to tax does anything to prop up the dollar. The US taxes are in dollars. So how can dollars be propped up by more dollars? If the government promises to give you $1 for every $1 in the event of a dollar collapse, how is this any different than keeping your worthless $1? If the dollar crashes and the government decides to tax me $1,000,000 who cares? I don't need worthless dollars. The government can have every dollar I own, but they are not getting any of my canned soup without a fight.
Sure the US has land and gold. Someone holding US dollars is not legally entitled to any of it, so how does that do anything to back the currency? The amount of US land and gold you can buy with US dollars are dictated only by the free market. With the termination of the gold standard, that amount of land and gold you can buy if the dollar collapses will be very little.
The nice thing about bitcoin is that it *isn't* controlled by the US or any government. It can't be easily created, manipulated, or counterfeited. The transaction history of every bitcoin is known to everyone. Traditional centralized currencies are incredibly susceptible to abuse. There is nothing stopping the controller of the currency from inflating it for their own benefit.
One day bitcoins will run out, mining will stop, and bitcoin supply will be completely static. It will be like gold but without the wasted resources trying to mine it.
The gambling law does specifically only prohibit bank transactions, so it seems like a good solution to me. The government took care to craft a law that outlawed online gambling while keeping IRL Vegas style gambling legal (because one is immoral and one isn't?). The law was specifically targetting bank transfers because they can't really stop people from gambling on sites hosted overseas, but they can seize the money deposited into US bank accounts. The beauty of bitcoin is that it is not (and can't be) under the control of anybody. Bitcoin works like traditional currency that can be physically possessed and have it's ownership transferred without interference from a 3rd party, but with the ease of electronic money transfer.
The US government can certainly shutdown US gambling sites, but they can't shutdown sites hosted in foreign countries nor can they seize bitcoins. They only plce they might be able to stop it is by seizing any money that is transferred into a bank account by a entity that is known to exchange bitcoins for US currency, but this would be more like attempting to shut down bitcoin entirely rather than simply stopping internet gambling. If ever bitcoin became a more widely accepted, it might make the ability of the US government to seize money held in US bank accounts less effective, because use of US bank accounts could be avoided entirely.
I don't expect the US to give up it's control over the world's financial system without a fight, but they might actually lose this fight. Bitcoin or even some future distributed digital currency might turn out to be so much more advantageous that it can't be stopped by anyone (e.g. like use of gold as currency). I think the only thing holding it back now is widespread apprehension in something so radically different.
I'm sure you can find lots of examples of people who don't know anything about guns saying all kinds of stupid stuff. I have heard many people saying that semi-automatic guns should be banned (because that's what the guy in the mass shooting had) not realizing that almost every gun is semi-automatic.
I think it is perfectly ok to have limited knowledge of guns if your position is that all guns should be banned. But to enter the debate about banning specific guns (e.g. assault weapons ban) should require some basic understanding. It's pretty hard to have a debate when people are not using the same definitions.
Quality of code has a very significant subjective aspect to it. There is correctness (does the code do what it's supposed to) which is pretty objective , but things like maintainability are not as easily quantifiable. What one person feels is understandable and easy to maintain another might feel is convoluted and hard to understand. It's like food. Some people like italian food and think it's better than chinese food, and vice versa. Almost everyone agrees that french fries are better than dirt, but that doesn't mean it's not subjective.
Also, the fact that I consider code beauty to be subjective doesn't mean that I am not extremely picky about code. I am a code nazi. There is a right way and a wrong way, according to my aesthetics, but there is no objective reason why my aesthetics are correct.
I suppose there is also something to be said for weighting death causes by how much stopping them would help. For example in the US pneumonia might kill lots of people, but it's mostly people who are already weakened health (e.g. HIV positive, elderly). Most of these people if they didn't die of pneumonia, would have died of something else soon after. Shootings are almost as likely to kill people in the prime of their life as any other time.
Calculating cause of death is normally quite subjective. Someone might die to asphyxiation, caused by pneumonia, caused by lung cancer, caused by decades of smoking, caused by addiction to nicotine early in life, caused by bad parenting. Rather than treating all causes of death equally, I would suggest counting each cause by how many more years of life can be lived if the cause is removed. In the case of cigarettes, we might say it shortens life on average by 10 years (I'm guessing), but for a shooting, they average could be like 50 years. And really we should probably calculate the integral of quality of life over lifespan if we wanted to be really thorough.
If I had a choice between a 50% chance of being shot and dying at some point in my life or a 100% chance of getting the flu and dying when I was 90, I would take the flu.
1. If it's not too bad , try to fix it within the system, by electing better representatives to repeal bad laws and enact new good laws, and appoint people to enforce the law fairly.
2. If the system is just not working, then there is less reason to obey the law. Buy smuggled guns on the black market, or work to manufacture your own guns (the cat is out of the bag).
3. It's actually pretty hard to keep enough law enforcement and military (the ones who actually have the guns) necessary to quell an insurrection loyal to a tyrant. What could you possibly give that many people that is better than living in a free and peaceful society? As military and police defect, they bring their government guns with them to the rebellion.
Like I said, I am not saying that getting rid of all guns is a good move. it is probably the worst move if we thought tyranny was likely. I am just saying that getting rid of all guns is not a guarantee of tyranny, and that it is possible to get the guns back if need be. It is possible that the lives lost living in a society with easy gun access exceeds the lives lost reacquiring guns in the event of tyranny.
Loss of freedom is not necessarily always a bad thing. I think the loss of freedom for people to have biological weapons (despite it being allowed by the 2nd amendment) is a good thing.
1. Are you referring to a scenario where one might be forced to be injected with a vaccine? Or is it more like forcibly injecting a violent mental patient with sedatives? This seems reasonable to me provided the harm to others is an imminent threat to someone else.
4. Do you mean A. that an employer could never force you change how you practice your religion? Or do you mean B. an employer could never offer to hire you on condition of changing how you practice your religion, or fire you for refusing to change how you practice your religion?
I would say A already exists and makes sense. I would say that B doesn't make sense because ti violates the principle of free association.
The thing we lost may be a good thing. If the thing we lost was a suspicion that the government would turn so tyrannical that the *best* alternative was a violent overthrow, then it depends. If this is actually going to happen then it's a bad thing. If it isn't then we lost a fear of something that is not going to happen (a good thing), and if we manage in addition to make society safer, then hooray.
The question is whether the ability to violently overthrow our government is worth the reduction in safety. I personally am not convinced it is. A government that is incorruptible seems like a fairytale, but at the same time ours kind of seems to work (i.e. is reasonably accountable to the people), and it doesn't seem like this is due to the government being worried that an uprising is imminent.
I am not saying the trade is good or bad. I am saying it's not obvious to me what the right decision is, and even the most left person should acknowledge the possibility of a failed government given how common it has been in history, and even the most right person should acknowledge that it is possible that we won't have tyranny any time soon, and that if it's not coming soon, we don't need guns to stop it.
Mass shootings are committed by crazy people. Only about 150 people on average die in mass shootings every year. I'm not saying these deaths are not tragedies, but in a country of 300 million where 15,000 die of "normal" shootings every year on average (100x the number in mass shootings), we should do what it takes to reduce the 15,000 number which is a much bigger problem than worrying about how to restrict free press in order to reduce mass shootings.
Rather than having guns that ware smart, we should have smart bullets that will only kill bad people. After being fired the smart bullet will immediately ascertain the worst person within range using a sophisticated algorithm weighing criminal history, internet searches, and music preference, and impact that person right in the face, piercing any face armor up to 2 inches of hardened steel, and igniting it's incendiary and high explosive payloads.
It is logically impossible that there is not at least one bad person nearby, because a room full of only good people would never fire a gun. It's logic.
The fact that the most likely target of a smart bullet is yourself, this will greatly reduce the number of shootings. The only trick is to get people to abandon regular bullets. I know, we could make people with regular bullets at the top priority of the smart bullet hit list algorithm! There will a violent but short war between the "smarties" and the "norms", but *then* there will be reduced shootings.
Yes indeed, everyone should have a right to their own body and what goes into it provided it does not gravely endanger anyone else. Fortunately for them, not getting a flu shot is not so dangerous so these nurses should not be forced to do it. One thing people should *not* have a right to is a job where you refuse to follow the rules of said job. It shouldn't matter that it is for religious reasons. I could believe in my own crazy version of Christianity that says it's a sin to wash my hands. I should be free to do that. I sure as shit shouldn't be allowed to work in a hospital or even a restaurant.
1. You should be free to put whatever you want into your body (provided it doesn't harm others)
2. You should be free to practice whatever religion you want (provided it doesn't harm others)
3. You should be entitled to a job even if you can't or won't do it to the employer's satisfaction because of religious beliefs.
People frequently confuse these statements. They say and think they want 1 and 2 (which are very reasonable), but what they actually want is 3 (which is completely retarded).
Sorry replied to the wrong post, this was meant to be in response to the lead aqueducts hypothesis comment.
Apparently the romans were not poisoned by lead...
From wikipedia:
"The great disadvantage of lead has always been that it is poisonous. This was fully recognised by the ancients, and Vitruvius specifically warns against its use. Because it was nevertheless used in profusion for carrying drinking water, the conclusion has often been drawn that the Romans must therefore have suffered from lead poisoning; sometimes conclusions are carried even further and it is inferred that this caused infertility and other unwelcome conditions, and that lead plumbing was largely responsible for the decline and fall of Rome. In fact, two things make this otherwise attractive hypothesis impossible. First, the calcium carbonate deposit that formed so thickly inside the aqueduct channels also formed inside the pipes, effectively insulating the water from the lead, so that the two never touched. Second, because the Romans had so few taps and the water was constantly running, it was never actually inside the pipes for more than a few minutes, and certainly not long enough to become contaminated. The thesis that the Romans contracted lead poisoning from the lead pipes in their water systems must therefore be declared completely unfounded."
1. You write the most horrible code imaginable. 2. You stuff entire programs into single functions. 3. You artificially stretch function through relentless repetition 4. You make uninformative variable and class names. 5. You ignore basic language features, when they could make everything shorter and more readable 6. You don't use OOP correctly. You need to be smart to write good code. Being smart does not guarantee that you write good code. Writing code since before (insert person) was born does not make someone good at writing code. Some people just can't learn new things, especially some of these old self taught programmers who were considered hackers and geniuses back in the days when computers were simpler and dealing with a few hacks here and there was ok and easily fixed through more hacks here and there. When you graduate from a bicycle to a 747, duck tape is no longer allowed (and probably didn't even belong on the bicycle either).
In either case, we shouldn't be designing laws to stop massacres by crazy people. There's about 150 people killed in mass shootings each year. There's 15,000 people killed in non-mass shootings every year. Reducing the number of regular shootings by 1% will save just as many lives as eliminating mass shootings by 100% the only difference is that one of those is actually attainable. We should be focusing all our efforts on reducing non-mass shootings and treat the sandy hooks and columbines as outliers. Your chances of dying in a mass shooting are literally 1 in 2 million. Your chances of dying in a regular shooting are 1 in 20,000.
The problem isn't that intelligence can't be reduced to to a single number, it is that intelligence is a very vague term. There is not an accepted standard for what intelligence is. You can definitely measure abilities like spatial recognition and memory. You can also come up with some system of aggregating scores of various abilities and come up with a single number. We do this kind of thing all the time in the decathalon, triathalon, biathalon, any number of subjective olympic sports like figure skating and gymnatsics. We even do this on standardized tests like the SAT.
The difference between the SAT and IQ is that there is more widespread agreement that multiple choice vocabulary and math are the correct abilities to aggregate into the final score of "scholastic aptitude" than for the idea that whatever is in the IQ test are the correct measurements for "intelligence".
I am not even sure scholastic aptitude is a more concrete term than intelligence, I just think it is one that is not politically incorrect to suggest people lack. No one cares if you didn't do well on the SAT. It doesn't mean you are stupid. All you lack is scholastic aptitude. You could still be intelligent in a way that is not easily testable. If you fail an IQ test the implication is that you lack intelligence. Now people feel insulted, and feel other people should feel insulted.
People can always disregard some metric or another by saying they just don't value whatever that metric claims to test. For whatever reason people do not like disregarding intelligence as unimportant. They would much rather just claim that intelligence is impossible to test. I suspect the same is true for beauty.
If I were to make a test called the BQ (beauty quotient), that reduced beauty to a single number, even if it was more accurate than something like the SAT, I think most would condemn it. If I could think of something else to call it where people who scored low could just ignore it easily without feeling insulted, I think it would have a much higher chance of success. I just need a lame euphemism like "facial symmetry factor". I have a low facial symmetry factor. Big deal. It's not like I'm ugly or anything. Afterall beauty is impossible to test.
It absolutely is a reflection of our electorate. I suppose what I was naively hoping for, was that our government would be the wise representatives of our relatively ignorant electorate. Instead we get a group of crooks just smart enough to trick a plurality of an apathetic electorate. How sad. Maybe this is just a necessary evil of democracy. In order for people to have true freedom, they must also have the freedom to make terrible choices, and everyone has to live with it. Maybe one day, benevolent smart people will figure out a way to trick stupid people into doing whats best for themselves and society as a whole and we can end the cycle of stupidity.
FTA:
"'Recent court decisions demonstrate that some people still do not get it. They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons. Parents, pediatricians, and psychologists know better."
If all the parents, pediatricians, and psychologists already *know* that violent video games are causing violence in children, why bother wasting money on a study to show what we already know?". I am not sure the Senator or most politicians in general realize what the point of a scientific study is. You do it when you *don't* know they answer and want to find out, not when you have already decided what the answer is and fabricate a study to support your prior conclusion. You have to use like real science and real statistics and stuff to ensure your study is as objective and free from bias as possible so that the answers are somewhat close to being true rather than merely supporting your position.
What is shocking to me is not that people would try to use BS science for political reasons. It is that they are not even trying to make it look like real science. The only reason I can think of why they don't is that they don't even know what real science looks like, so they can't even fake it.
It's like we have a bunch of people running the country that are at the intellectual level of mediocre high school students practicing to be adults through mock trials and model united nations.