Actually, if everyone simply agreed to stop running the Bitcoin software and delete the blockchain from their computers, there'd be no Bitcoins. People could wake up tomorrow and decide gold is worth less than polystyrene, but the gold would still continue to exist. That's decentralization for you.
Cryptocurrency also has all these advantages--it too is very difficult to corrupt, is fairly rare, and will remain after natural disasters. It even avoids the downside of being heavy.
Crypto's rarity is simply an agreed upon constraint by its userbase. There's absolutely no reason it couldn't be forked to spew out more "coins", if most of the miners decided more is better than less, and updated to the new fork. To look at it another way, Bitcoin's rarity hinges on the same aspect of the human psyche which enabled Donald Trump to become president (as long as enough people agree to support something insane, it can happen).
Unless there's some crazy breakthrough in the cost of nuclear transmutation, gold is going to stay rare.
I'm still somewhat skeptical of man-made climate change myself
All fossil fuels started out as prehistoric biomass. Epcot used to have a mildly entertaining attraction which explained this. The ecosystem we're living in today has adapted over millions of years to a cooler climate, thanks to all that carbon being sequestered underground.
It is simply denying reality to assume reversing the process of carbon sequestration is going to have no effect on the climate. Now yeah, if you believe God just put all that oil and coal down there for his devout followers to reap, yeah - can't argue logic and reason against religious beliefs.
Al Gore lectures me on energy efficiency, then gets into a SUV and drives home to a mansion that uses 10x more electricity every month than my family does. In short, put up or shut up.
That dimwitted blonde deplorable making the rounds on social media made the same argument. The flaw in that logic, however, is that it's tantamount to dismissing a warning of "smoking is unhealthy", because it was given to you by a smoker. The hypocritical behavior of the messenger does not invalidate the factuality of the message.
The take away is that yes, they should be practicing what they preach. Not that their hypocritical behavior is an acceptable justification for you to start rollin' coal.
...one of those things in life you'll either stand idle by and watch it like it was a show, you'll think "oh why - oh why did I not invest when it was new and cheap"
Here's the part most people miss: High risk investments are only for the rich, to make themselves richer.
Most of us who work 9-5 for a living would rather have money in our bank accounts than tied up in wild speculation.
Bitcoin may go up, or it may go down, but it absolutely is not a Ponzi scheme. If you think it is, then you don't understand Bitcoins, you don't understand what a Ponzi scheme is, or both.
Yes, a ponzi scheme is an investment scam from the get-go, because it is mathematically predestined to collapse.
Bitcoin is more like tulip mania, driven by the greater fool theory. The irony is, unlike tulip bulbs, Bitcoin's rarity could be easily adjusted by forking the coin (yet again) and then, coins for everyone! Everyone can be rich!
Heck, if I was better at coding, I'd do it. I'd call it "Bitcoin Inflation Totally Couldn't Hurt". When everyone loses their money, then I'd get to say "Well, ain't that a B.I.T.C.H.."
It was more of a general statement on how the founding fathers got the free speech thing right, but our election process still has a few bugs. If things were flipped around and Hillary had won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, you can bet the other side would've cried "foul" too. (Also: Insert quip about the shortcomings of our essentially two-party system here)
If you like the UK healthcare system, it means cutting per-patient Medicare/Medicaid spending in half, making most doctors government employees, cutting the average doctor salaries in half, introducing waiting times of many months, and limiting services to the elderly. If you think that results in a better healthcare system, you're a fool.
If you can afford to pay your way in our profit-driven healthcare system, yes - that system sounds worse. However, if you can't afford a plan with realistic co-pay costs and deductibles (and are unlucky enough to live in a state which rejected the ACA subsidies), you may as well have no insurance at all.
Being uninsured means either paying completely out of pocket for all your medical expenses, and/or going to the E.R. and defaulting on the bill.
It's not all that uncommon to hear about people here who have lost their homes due to medical expenses. But we can take all the pictures we want of the sheriff when he comes to serve the eviction notice. Yay.
No journalist has ever been threatened arrested or beaten for photographing the police in the US, despite it being legal.
I didn't say that. I specifically said that if you do run into trouble for photographing the police in the USA, there will very likely be a horde of lawyers beating a path to your door to take your case.
Despite whoever modded my original post as "Troll", the fact is, photographing law enforcement in the UK is more loophole-y than it is in the USA. We take our constitutional rights quite literally. Just ask any fan of the second amendment how they feel it should be interpreted.
It seems like Google has made it clear that their work environment is definitively hostile towards anyone who dares question feminist dogma.
The man was a software engineer. There was no reason for him to be writing an anti-SJW manifesto and distributing it on company time. That was way outside the scope of whatever it was he's supposed to be doing, and disruptive to the work environment of the other employees.
If you spent your days at work repainting the office because you loathed the color of the walls, you wouldn't be surprised when your employer gives you a pink slip. Same thing.
The movie where humanity loses the ability to genetically engineer crops, but something, something wormhole something, incomprehensible acid trip time-travel plot. It's just yet another one of those movies where it's supposed to be "deep" because the writer(s) didn't bother to come up with a plausible technobabble explanation for the shit you just watched.
No, if you don't want to pay: don't watch it. We're not talking about some movie Disney made a million years ago and everyone who worked on it is retired or dead - this is a show which is in current production. They have every right to earn money on something they've just invested money in bringing to the screen.
Perhaps in 20 years you'd be right to bitch if they're still being copyright nazis about something they've long since abandoned, ya know?
I anticipate a serious, informative and insightful discussion on not just the merits of the iphone, but about the general concepts of value and...
The iPhone really isn't that expensive compared to other things people regularly spend money on. Smoke? A pack-a-day habit averages around $2k per year. Go out drinking? That can easily run into the thousands, annually. Have cable TV? In my neck of the woods, that'll cost you at least as much annually as a current generation iPhone. Most people keep their phone longer than a year, too.
Technical merits aside, the advantage of the iPhone is that it is a "safe" choice if you're not interested in researching phones. You can be reasonably assured it will take decent pictures, run all the most common apps, provide acceptable reception, have ample battery life, and make clear phone calls. Should it not function properly, the issue can be quickly resolved at an Apple store (yeah, good customer service makes a difference in customer loyalty - just ask Chick-Fil-A).
Plus, as good old economics 101 will tell you, if people are still lining up to buy something - it's not overpriced.
It could be a lifestyle problem. I know that in my case I started with sugar cola, then switched to diet because I was getting too much sugar, so much I was starting to show off early signs of diabetes mellitus. Then now I am trying to switch off to water (more difficult than you think - I have now bouts of water consumption and bouts of soda without sugar - bad habits are hard to shake. On the other hand my weight is dropping).
Unless you're trying to avoid spending money on diet soda, you're just needlessly frustrating yourself. Diet soda has the same caloric content as water.
Yeah, drinking something sweet may challenge the mental discipline required to stick to your diet, but that's psychological. You'd very likely experience the same thing if you burned scented candles which smell like delicious junk foods.
Yet, I've suffered some of the stupidest comments from people who seem to be self-proclaimed "experts" on diet drinks, only to be disproved by actually speaking out loud. And people really, really want to give their opinions about the subject when none was ever asked for.
Blame social media. "Artificial sweeteners are poison!" articles spread like wildfire on there, thanks to quacks like Dr. Mercola.
Worse, I've seen parents tell their kids "no" to diet soda, and insist they instead drink a water/HFCS/fruit flavoring mixture that the parent mistakenly believes (due to clever marketing) is "juice". No wonder there's a childhood obesity problem in the USA...
Unless they had a control group eating the same exact diets (minus the artificial sweeteners) as the artificial-sweetener-consuming group, then the study is complete bullshit.
Here's the thing: Diet soda is about harm reduction. If it didn't exist, I'd still be stuffing my face full of greasy chicken tacos, loaded with cheese and sour cream - but I'd also be drinking an additional 420 calories worth of Coke with the meal too.
It's like head-shaving, early mornings, shouting and strict rules in boot camp; it breaks you into being obedient. Why should you follow your diet when you've got a nice cold, delicious glass of no-guilt Coke Zero sitting next to you? But when drill sergeant "Bland Water" is yelling at you, you *know* that supreme pizza is off-limits.
So, wouldn't it also be reasonable to ban alcohol use...
Alcohol can be enjoyed responsibly and also has substantial uses in culinary arts. (cabernet sauce, beer-batter fried seafood, bourbon marinade, vodka sauce, moonshine BBQ sauce, Jack Daniels beans, garlic butter white wine sauce, kahlua chocolate mousse... etc.)
It would be like banning crowbars because they can be used to break into homes.
So when Trump started saying things like healthcare for all and good jobs and education folks rallied around him because, hey, whatdayagot to lose?
I think you have Trump confused with Bernie. Trump told 'merica that he has a really great healthcare plan, the best. So good, in fact, even he isn't sure of the details - but it will be great! On jobs, Trump claimed he'd bring them back. He wasn't very clear on this one either; perhaps he meant reanimating the corpse of the late Steve Jobs. Maybe he wants to build one of those sarcophagus things from Stargate SG1. That would take care of healthcare and bringing back Jobs. Of course, there were also hellish naquadah mines on SG1, so bringing back mining is also a possibility.
As for education, your highschool participation award is good enough to work in our naquadah mines or build air conditioners. You don't have to go to college to MAGA. You're entitled to the American Dream(TM) by mere virtue of American exceptionalism!
I see many people say this, yet I've never had a problem fitting a phone in my pocket.
No, I'm not a skinny-jeans-wearing hipster; I'm sure a 5.5" screen phone would still fit in my pocket just fine. It's just a lot harder to ignore that it's there, especially when sitting down.
There are those of us who do like the conveniences of a smartphone (with a decent camera), but we don't need to be perpetually entertained.
Due to the "only $19.95 a month!" hardware purchasing gimmicks built into a lot of cell contracts these days, what you meant to say is no one realizes they're already paying for a $479 Android phone...
The carriers don't really push service contracts anymore. Lately, they're actually quite upfront about how much you're financing when you buy a high end phone. People are willing to spend more for the same reasons they'll overspend on anything else they can finance (cars, homes, hot tubs, water treatment systems, timeshares, etc.)
Why is Apple the only company "courageous" enough to still offer a model of their flagship phone in a pocketable form-factor? Every time I read one of these new Android phone announcements, it's always a huge disappointment when I get to the screen size specification. It really seems like with Android phones if you want a smaller screen, you've gotta make big sacrifices in the CPU, RAM and camera quality departments. Manufacturers are only willing to put smaller screens on low-end phones.
At least OnePlus bucked the idiotic curved glass trend. I already lived through the CRT era; geometric distortion should've stayed in the past. I can't believe all these Millennials who actually think it looks cool to see the edges of everything being distorted across the sides of their phones.
Slashdot Mirror
There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins.
Actually, if everyone simply agreed to stop running the Bitcoin software and delete the blockchain from their computers, there'd be no Bitcoins. People could wake up tomorrow and decide gold is worth less than polystyrene, but the gold would still continue to exist. That's decentralization for you.
Yes, it is designed that way. Its artificial scarcity is intrinsic - you cannot just switch it off.
Actually, you can. Bitcoin is open source - feel free to modify it any way you like.
The difficulty is getting a majority of miners and end users to switch to your fork. It's already happened with "Bitcoin Cash".
Cryptocurrency also has all these advantages--it too is very difficult to corrupt, is fairly rare, and will remain after natural disasters. It even avoids the downside of being heavy.
Crypto's rarity is simply an agreed upon constraint by its userbase. There's absolutely no reason it couldn't be forked to spew out more "coins", if most of the miners decided more is better than less, and updated to the new fork. To look at it another way, Bitcoin's rarity hinges on the same aspect of the human psyche which enabled Donald Trump to become president (as long as enough people agree to support something insane, it can happen).
Unless there's some crazy breakthrough in the cost of nuclear transmutation, gold is going to stay rare.
I'm still somewhat skeptical of man-made climate change myself
All fossil fuels started out as prehistoric biomass. Epcot used to have a mildly entertaining attraction which explained this. The ecosystem we're living in today has adapted over millions of years to a cooler climate, thanks to all that carbon being sequestered underground.
It is simply denying reality to assume reversing the process of carbon sequestration is going to have no effect on the climate. Now yeah, if you believe God just put all that oil and coal down there for his devout followers to reap, yeah - can't argue logic and reason against religious beliefs.
Al Gore lectures me on energy efficiency, then gets into a SUV and drives home to a mansion that uses 10x more electricity every month than my family does. In short, put up or shut up.
That dimwitted blonde deplorable making the rounds on social media made the same argument. The flaw in that logic, however, is that it's tantamount to dismissing a warning of "smoking is unhealthy", because it was given to you by a smoker. The hypocritical behavior of the messenger does not invalidate the factuality of the message.
The take away is that yes, they should be practicing what they preach. Not that their hypocritical behavior is an acceptable justification for you to start rollin' coal.
Apparently the new way of going home is to swipe up from the bottom.
I foresee a lot of pissed off Pokemon Go players.
...one of those things in life you'll either stand idle by and watch it like it was a show, you'll think "oh why - oh why did I not invest when it was new and cheap"
Here's the part most people miss: High risk investments are only for the rich, to make themselves richer.
Most of us who work 9-5 for a living would rather have money in our bank accounts than tied up in wild speculation.
Bitcoin may go up, or it may go down, but it absolutely is not a Ponzi scheme. If you think it is, then you don't understand Bitcoins, you don't understand what a Ponzi scheme is, or both.
Yes, a ponzi scheme is an investment scam from the get-go, because it is mathematically predestined to collapse.
Bitcoin is more like tulip mania, driven by the greater fool theory. The irony is, unlike tulip bulbs, Bitcoin's rarity could be easily adjusted by forking the coin (yet again) and then, coins for everyone! Everyone can be rich!
Heck, if I was better at coding, I'd do it. I'd call it "Bitcoin Inflation Totally Couldn't Hurt". When everyone loses their money, then I'd get to say "Well, ain't that a B.I.T.C.H.."
Could be worse: it could be Hillary
It was more of a general statement on how the founding fathers got the free speech thing right, but our election process still has a few bugs. If things were flipped around and Hillary had won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, you can bet the other side would've cried "foul" too. (Also: Insert quip about the shortcomings of our essentially two-party system here)
If you like the UK healthcare system, it means cutting per-patient Medicare/Medicaid spending in half, making most doctors government employees, cutting the average doctor salaries in half, introducing waiting times of many months, and limiting services to the elderly. If you think that results in a better healthcare system, you're a fool.
If you can afford to pay your way in our profit-driven healthcare system, yes - that system sounds worse. However, if you can't afford a plan with realistic co-pay costs and deductibles (and are unlucky enough to live in a state which rejected the ACA subsidies), you may as well have no insurance at all.
Being uninsured means either paying completely out of pocket for all your medical expenses, and/or going to the E.R. and defaulting on the bill.
It's not all that uncommon to hear about people here who have lost their homes due to medical expenses. But we can take all the pictures we want of the sheriff when he comes to serve the eviction notice. Yay.
No journalist has ever been threatened arrested or beaten for photographing the police in the US, despite it being legal.
I didn't say that. I specifically said that if you do run into trouble for photographing the police in the USA, there will very likely be a horde of lawyers beating a path to your door to take your case.
Despite whoever modded my original post as "Troll", the fact is, photographing law enforcement in the UK is more loophole-y than it is in the USA. We take our constitutional rights quite literally. Just ask any fan of the second amendment how they feel it should be interpreted.
...gets arrested for taking photos of police.
It's legal here, and generally you'll have no trouble finding a lawyer if you ran into that sort of issue here.
But there's also Trump, and our horribly awful healthcare system. So just stop photographing the police, and be glad it's the least of your worries.
Is there anything that doesn't explode?
That's pretty much Michael Bay's mantra.
It seems like Google has made it clear that their work environment is definitively hostile towards anyone who dares question feminist dogma.
The man was a software engineer. There was no reason for him to be writing an anti-SJW manifesto and distributing it on company time. That was way outside the scope of whatever it was he's supposed to be doing, and disruptive to the work environment of the other employees.
If you spent your days at work repainting the office because you loathed the color of the walls, you wouldn't be surprised when your employer gives you a pink slip. Same thing.
As for Nolan, I enjoyed Interstellar enormously
The movie where humanity loses the ability to genetically engineer crops, but something, something wormhole something, incomprehensible acid trip time-travel plot. It's just yet another one of those movies where it's supposed to be "deep" because the writer(s) didn't bother to come up with a plausible technobabble explanation for the shit you just watched.
Its a corruption of the market.
No, if you don't want to pay: don't watch it. We're not talking about some movie Disney made a million years ago and everyone who worked on it is retired or dead - this is a show which is in current production. They have every right to earn money on something they've just invested money in bringing to the screen.
Perhaps in 20 years you'd be right to bitch if they're still being copyright nazis about something they've long since abandoned, ya know?
I anticipate a serious, informative and insightful discussion on not just the merits of the iphone, but about the general concepts of value and...
The iPhone really isn't that expensive compared to other things people regularly spend money on. Smoke? A pack-a-day habit averages around $2k per year. Go out drinking? That can easily run into the thousands, annually. Have cable TV? In my neck of the woods, that'll cost you at least as much annually as a current generation iPhone. Most people keep their phone longer than a year, too.
Technical merits aside, the advantage of the iPhone is that it is a "safe" choice if you're not interested in researching phones. You can be reasonably assured it will take decent pictures, run all the most common apps, provide acceptable reception, have ample battery life, and make clear phone calls. Should it not function properly, the issue can be quickly resolved at an Apple store (yeah, good customer service makes a difference in customer loyalty - just ask Chick-Fil-A).
Plus, as good old economics 101 will tell you, if people are still lining up to buy something - it's not overpriced.
It could be a lifestyle problem. I know that in my case I started with sugar cola, then switched to diet because I was getting too much sugar, so much I was starting to show off early signs of diabetes mellitus. Then now I am trying to switch off to water (more difficult than you think - I have now bouts of water consumption and bouts of soda without sugar - bad habits are hard to shake. On the other hand my weight is dropping).
Unless you're trying to avoid spending money on diet soda, you're just needlessly frustrating yourself. Diet soda has the same caloric content as water.
Yeah, drinking something sweet may challenge the mental discipline required to stick to your diet, but that's psychological. You'd very likely experience the same thing if you burned scented candles which smell like delicious junk foods.
Yet, I've suffered some of the stupidest comments from people who seem to be self-proclaimed "experts" on diet drinks, only to be disproved by actually speaking out loud. And people really, really want to give their opinions about the subject when none was ever asked for.
Blame social media. "Artificial sweeteners are poison!" articles spread like wildfire on there, thanks to quacks like Dr. Mercola.
Worse, I've seen parents tell their kids "no" to diet soda, and insist they instead drink a water/HFCS/fruit flavoring mixture that the parent mistakenly believes (due to clever marketing) is "juice". No wonder there's a childhood obesity problem in the USA...
Unless they had a control group eating the same exact diets (minus the artificial sweeteners) as the artificial-sweetener-consuming group, then the study is complete bullshit.
Here's the thing: Diet soda is about harm reduction. If it didn't exist, I'd still be stuffing my face full of greasy chicken tacos, loaded with cheese and sour cream - but I'd also be drinking an additional 420 calories worth of Coke with the meal too.
It's like head-shaving, early mornings, shouting and strict rules in boot camp; it breaks you into being obedient. Why should you follow your diet when you've got a nice cold, delicious glass of no-guilt Coke Zero sitting next to you? But when drill sergeant "Bland Water" is yelling at you, you *know* that supreme pizza is off-limits.
Alcohol and tobacco are not legal because they have some sort of redeeming quality to them
You do know there are other alcoholic products besides Budweiser?
So, wouldn't it also be reasonable to ban alcohol use...
Alcohol can be enjoyed responsibly and also has substantial uses in culinary arts. (cabernet sauce, beer-batter fried seafood, bourbon marinade, vodka sauce, moonshine BBQ sauce, Jack Daniels beans, garlic butter white wine sauce, kahlua chocolate mousse... etc.)
It would be like banning crowbars because they can be used to break into homes.
So when Trump started saying things like healthcare for all and good jobs and education folks rallied around him because, hey, whatdayagot to lose?
I think you have Trump confused with Bernie. Trump told 'merica that he has a really great healthcare plan, the best. So good, in fact, even he isn't sure of the details - but it will be great! On jobs, Trump claimed he'd bring them back. He wasn't very clear on this one either; perhaps he meant reanimating the corpse of the late Steve Jobs. Maybe he wants to build one of those sarcophagus things from Stargate SG1. That would take care of healthcare and bringing back Jobs. Of course, there were also hellish naquadah mines on SG1, so bringing back mining is also a possibility.
As for education, your highschool participation award is good enough to work in our naquadah mines or build air conditioners. You don't have to go to college to MAGA. You're entitled to the American Dream(TM) by mere virtue of American exceptionalism!
I see many people say this, yet I've never had a problem fitting a phone in my pocket.
No, I'm not a skinny-jeans-wearing hipster; I'm sure a 5.5" screen phone would still fit in my pocket just fine. It's just a lot harder to ignore that it's there, especially when sitting down.
There are those of us who do like the conveniences of a smartphone (with a decent camera), but we don't need to be perpetually entertained.
Due to the "only $19.95 a month!" hardware purchasing gimmicks built into a lot of cell contracts these days, what you meant to say is no one realizes they're already paying for a $479 Android phone...
The carriers don't really push service contracts anymore. Lately, they're actually quite upfront about how much you're financing when you buy a high end phone. People are willing to spend more for the same reasons they'll overspend on anything else they can finance (cars, homes, hot tubs, water treatment systems, timeshares, etc.)
Why is Apple the only company "courageous" enough to still offer a model of their flagship phone in a pocketable form-factor? Every time I read one of these new Android phone announcements, it's always a huge disappointment when I get to the screen size specification. It really seems like with Android phones if you want a smaller screen, you've gotta make big sacrifices in the CPU, RAM and camera quality departments. Manufacturers are only willing to put smaller screens on low-end phones.
At least OnePlus bucked the idiotic curved glass trend. I already lived through the CRT era; geometric distortion should've stayed in the past. I can't believe all these Millennials who actually think it looks cool to see the edges of everything being distorted across the sides of their phones.