Before arguing fatuous points, go visit fueleconomy.gov. 2013 Mercedes-Benz E400 Hybrid gets 26 mpg. Still 15 tons of gasoline.
Most people are only willing to compromise so much for the environment. If they were really concerned about the environment, and willing to make personal sacrifices, they would take the bus and not own a car. So even if it does only get 26 mpg, buyers are likely to view that as an acceptable compromise in exchange for the roomy luxury sedan. Hybrid allows them the appearance of being green and to these buyers appearance often maters more than reality, especially when it comes to the environment. As for myself I couldn't care less. I'd rather have the horsepower and luxury if I was going to shell out for the Mercedes E or S class. After all, when you're spending that much for a car, you're well past caring about how much it costs to gas up. If you have to worry about that then you can't afford it.
Perhaps this a dumb question by why not simply develop the parts of the game that aren't likely to change much during development, like data storage / retrieval, mechanics, and the like while saving things like graphics and sound until the game is in the final 6-12 months? In theory it should be possible to have the skeleton of the game pretty much templated out and ready to go for building out the mechanics and then working in the graphics and sound. Why do the window dressings take so much time in a game relative to the frame of the building and the wiring? Are they just doing it wrong?
Don't oversell your straw man. The $95,000 S Class is more expensive and quite a bit more luxurious.
You and I both know that people in the market for a model S are looking for a top end luxury car and all that comes with that. They're going to want the leather seats, power everything, navigation with concierge service, sophisticated "glass cockpit" LCD touch screens, automatic parking and polished walnut burl inlay. The loaded price for the Model S is $96,000 (after tax credit) which puts it squarely in competition with the Mercedes S class for top end luxury. Even the base price model at $71,000 is well into luxury car territory. These are cars for the 1%, period.
Tesla just repaid its $465M loan under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program set up under the G.W. Bush administration
What was the total amount of interest received? I question whether it was enough to justify the risks that we took. Tesla succeeded but they very well could have failed too (they still might). Indeed, several other taxpayer investments in alternative energy did fail, notably Solyndra. If we didn't receive enough interest to justify the risks that we took when we loaned money to Tesla then we still lost because we could have earned the same amount elsewhere for less risk or more for the same amount of risk.
Your sneering tone about "appearing green" ignores the genuine increase in efficiency from an electric drive.
The people driving these cars aren't concerned about efficiency. They have enough money that they don't care how much fuel for the Mercedes would have cost or how much less efficient the drive is. Indeed, they're typically far more concerned with horsepower and to a lesser extent 0-60 times. What they want is a large and luxurious sedan with a powerful motor that accelerates them quickly onto the highway. Efficiency is the least of their concerns.
ignoring the increasing role of cleaner natural gas in USA's electricity generating mix, and that many buyers will install solar PV to reduce their carbon footprint further.
Natural gas will come back under price pressure again as more commercial vehicle fleets, with known routes and fueling locations, switch to realize cost savings over diesel. As for reducing carbon footprint, this is something that mostly wealthier Americans in the top 10% income brackets worry about or at least are willing to pay for. The rest are just getting by and don't have the luxury of worrying about carbon footprints or being green, except perhaps in an abstract sense. They're worried about their jobs and retirement and to a lesser extent their health care, so green is way down on their list of spending priorities and they won't be installing solar panels on the roof because even with tax credits they cannot afford it.
Meanwhile a Mercedes E-Class (is everyone driving that a "limousine whatever" too?) is a lot slower and at around 25 mpg will consume 15 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles.
That argument might resonate with Mercedes buyers who tend to be wealthier and therefore would care more about the environment because they're in a position to afford luxury goods. However, the Mercedes E class is also offered in a hybrid configuration for those buyers who are concerned about their carbon footprint or being seen as "green" in a chic sort of way.
Because if he succeedes then we are closer to having green cars for the masses. We cannot massify electric cars until the market is proven.
The market will decide when that happens and it will happen as soon as it becomes economically competitive and not before. I'm extremely skeptical of spending limited tax dollars, which are desperately needed elsewhere, in vain attempts to speed that process along. If the market isn't doing something it should be a signal that the technology isn't ready yet because if it was somebody would come in and making a killing disrupting the existing fossil fuel infrastructure. That alone should be sufficient incentive for work to continue on alternatives. Having the government jump in prematurely as an unsophisticated investor can actually harm progress by encouraging waste and fraud and disrupting the normal investment process whereby worthy companies are funded while charlatans are not.
That avoids the problem of swapping your $12,000 pristine battery for a clapped-out beater. But all the cost-time-weight-safety-standardization tradeoffs work against it. Skip the hassle and rent a long-range car for those trips, or use the other car that's already in the garage of most American households.
This is an economic argument against it, but the fact remains that swappable battery fails in the market because not enough people really want it and why should they? It doesn't offer enough advantage over an integrated battery or simply using a regular fossil fuel vehicle to be worth the hassle. This is especially true if a household can only afford one vehicle for their cheap and reliable transportation. In such cases a quality used fossil fuel vehicle, which has already been depreciated, is the best choice from a kitchen table dollars and cents perspective.
Maybe he was talking about the Apple-style model: buy a new car with pre-charged batteries!/duck
All they would have to do is slap an Apple logo on it and there would be legions of idiots rushing to defend the idea of getting a new vehicle with pre-charged batteries every time your vehicle runs low on charge.
People have been swapping AA's for decades just fine.
Sure, but have you noticed how much extra space is required to accommodate the battery bay with springs and contact plates? Why do you suppose that Apple chose to use integrated batteries soldered directly onto circuit boards, hardly the model of accessibility? The answer of course is space. In the case of the iPhone they were trying to make the device thin and light enough to fit comfortably into your shirt pocket. In the case of a vehicle, the more space that's taken up by vehicle systems, including batteries of fuel tanks, the less space there is for passengers and cargo. It's a trade-off and you don't get swappable batteries without sacrificing either seating or cargo space.
but it would make a lot of sense for them to take or buy the idea.
What's to take or buy? A removable battery isn't exactly a revolutionary idea and neither is having a supply of them on hand to facilitate on demand swapping. It's more like an obvious technical consideration for anyone designing and building electric vehicles and their associated infrastructure.
if they can agree on a standard that allows the battery to be removed and replaced vertically from the bottom of the car by a machine accessible scissor lift, the electric car will have a better future.
As it is we cannot even get European and American car makers to agree what side of the vehicle to place the gas cap on in our fossil fuel vehicles and you want them to standardize the location, size and method of battery replacement? I suppose we'll just have to wait until we can all get to that "Better Place", wherever that is.
Elon has said that the Model S ( and presumably the Model X) is capable of conversion to battery swap
Capable? Yes, it could probably be done. Will it be done? No. Elon is a smart man and he knows how to say the right things to the right audience to get what he wants. However, as a practical matter the Model S already has difficulty competing with fossil fuel powered vehicles on range and even then only by making the batteries fully integrated components molded into every bit of spare room in the vehicle frame. Any additional batteries, removable or not, would further reduce either cargo or interior seating. Musk has done a better job than Fisker and others, but what has he achieved? At $60,000+ (the actual price with options that a typical luxury car buyer would want is closer to $80,000) this still isn't a car for the everyman. In fact it's more like an alternative to the S class Mercedes for limousine liberals who want to appear green using our green (aka money). Tell me again why my tax dollars should be subsidizing Musk and Tesla?
If anyone from the EFF is reading this, it might be worthwhile for you guys to take some time and write a point by point rebuttal of this document. It may also be beneficial to remind our lawmakers that even if such programs were technically feasible, which of course they're not, they would render any discussion of US cyber security moot. Can we really afford to expose our vital infrastructure to cyber attacks merely because the entertainment industry believes that it will lose revenue if we don't? It's madness to expect that we can secure our vital infrastructure while opening up security holes on purpose and equally foolish to believe that our enemies will not target those weaknesses. The economic and military might of the United States depends upon the reliable operation of our civil and military infrastructure which in turn depends upon reliable computing. If for no other reason, this request by the entertainment industry should be denied simply on grounds of national security, quite apart from other compelling economic arguments against their requests.
Nothing more amusing than watching conservatives complaining about "leftists trying to pretend this is all okay" when virtually none are.
There aren't many apologists on this issue, it's true. However, the criticism of the Obama Administration from the left, at least on this issue, also seems to be half-hearted. It's more interesting to see who isn't talking, neither defending nor criticizing President Obama, so as to curry favor with the administration and ensure priority access to the President for future interviews and White House briefings.
Leftist here. It's not OK because its Fox and it's not OK because Obama did it.
Rightist here. Why is nobody in the Obama Administration ever punished for their mistakes or misconduct, criminal and otherwise? Have you noticed that whenever there is a scandal nobody seems to know anything, including the President himself? WTF is going on up there in the White House, the State Department, the DOJ and the IRS? How is it that nobody is ever found to be responsible for anything and punished? Instead they stonewall and delay and cover up while spinning like crazy and the journalists, with the exception of Fox news and few others, let them off the hook? I didn't vote for Obama and I've never had a high opinion of the man or his policies, but this sort of corrupt behavior only confirms for many of us on the right what we've suspected all along, that behind the flowery rhetoric and flawed liberal policies lies a deeply corrupt and duplicitous administration, the likes of which hasn't been seen since 1974.
Why do we need the government to tell us this? They're incompetent so why should we listen to them when they tell us how we should be running our businesses? WTF do they know about running a business? Almost nothing. I don't need some paper pusher bureaucrat in Washington telling me how to secure my networks and I sure as hell don't need them to give me advice on passwords. From my perspective all the government ever does is take my tax money and waste it on God knows who and for God knows what, but it sure as hell doesn't help me that's for damn sure because if I don't make something happen for myself, it doesn't happen.
I think that when any person or entity gets too much power, either in Socialism or Capitalism, it generally leads to abuse. Power, profit, ego.
A corrupt capitalism still produces things, albeit at less than full capacity or optimum efficiency, whereas a corrupt socialism simply wastes resources to little or no effect because nobody gives a shit individually about the fate of the collective property.
This is in the country with the second biggest proven oil reserves in the world
Which does you no good if you cannot get it out of the ground. Chavez misappropriated the funds earmarked for repair, replacement and maintenance of oil field equipment and operations and diverted them instead to social programs. The result was a bit like eating your seed corn. Now the oil fields are only producing a fraction of the oil that they should be and no foreign firm wants to touch Venezuela with a ten foot pole because of the recent nationalizations by the Venezuelan government which is still packed with the disciples of Chavez and socialism. If I were a foreign investor and the Venezuelan state oil company wanted either goods or services I would demand payment in full up front in either dollars or gold. Nationalizing property owned by foreigners is a good way to scare off all international investment as Venezuelans are now discovering to their collective misery.
The difference with Bitcoins is that the entire transaction chain is by definition permanent public record. The bank might record the serial numbers of bills issued to you at the ATM, but the chain is pretty much broken as soon as you spend them because intermediaries rarely take steps to record serial numbers and link them with those who spend them. At best they might know what you bought and how much it cost, but not necessarily which bills you used to pay for the purchase. Unless you use your Bitcoins in a way that doesn't expose your identity, either by buying them in person at one of these ATMs or spending them in a way that links your wallet to your real identity, they can actually be less anonymous than cash and even one slip up exposes all of your previous transactions using that wallet.
I would say that the difference between those crimes and the one being discussed here was in the intent. There can be no doubt that the intent of the man who killed the British soldier in London was to intimidate the society at large into changing the foreign policy of the British government with regard to lands that the killer and others consider to be Muslim. Indeed, he made a statement on camera to that effect immediately after the killing so that there can be no doubt that the killing and the statement of intent were linked and intended to achieve a political goal. Contrast this with a killing done not for the purpose of political change but rather for revenge or due to prejudice or a grudge against a specific group or persons. It is the explicitly stated threat to society at large and the political goal that makes this terrorism and not simply a murder for hire or a crime of passion.
The killer very clearly expounded the reasons for the killing, including references to British foreign policies in "muslim lands" and "an eye for an eye", while holding the bloody knife and cleaver in his red hands. The obvious intent of this statement, which was made to the camera immediately after the killing so that it would be recorded and seen by the entire world, was to intimidate and effect political change through fear of more violence if those changes desired by the terrorist and his confederates were not made. If that's not the very definition of terrorism, I don't know what is.
The VCs are free to be as stupid as they want to be with their own money, but with titles like "Head of Regulatory Strategy" you know that they will be going after government money too which means that us taxpayers may still be footing the bill for this bullshit. That's what really chaps my hide.
BTW, unless you've got some sort of special machine that detects "wrong people" guns
As far as the gun control lefties are concerned, every gun in private ownership is a "wrong people" gun. Like you said, they're idiots.
What will you aim to ban next? Knives? Screwdrivers? Sticks? Baseball bats? Fireworks? Tree stump remover? Model rocket engines? Lithium batteries? Fertilizer? Dry ice?
You forgot board with rusty nail
Perfect safety is NOT achievable no matter how many rights you decide to give up
Yes, but liberals believe that it is or at least they see no problem in eliminating all of your rights to try because in their minds it was worthwhile if even one life was saved (which it probably wasn't).
Which is exactly the point. They can't tax the federal government. So they decided to create a law that allows for a loophole that taxes the power company and the law also allows the power company to pass the additional costs on to the federal government.
Well, you've got to hand it to the Mormons; they're clever in their business dealings. Frankly I'm surprised that the NSA guys didn't see this one coming.
When you think about how unacceptable this would be anywhere else, you have to wonder how this insane system came to be as it is.
Here is the in-depth answer if you're interested. I usually get shot down for posting this link here on Slashdot because it doesn't comport well with the groupthink on health care, but if you honestly want to hear a good economic argument explaining why health care in the United States is so expensive instead of the same old "greedy insurance company" canards, it's probably worth your time.
This appears to be a common sentiment here on Slashdot, but the concept of money does indeed have value in an economy quite apart from any additional value that the monetary commodity may or may not itself possess. Ask yourself, what is the purpose of money? Why do we use money when we could use barter instead? In a word, efficiency. If I have milk to trade and you have a car to trade and I want the car but you don't want the milk then I must take time and effort to find someone who wants milk and is willing to trade me something that you want so that I can come back to you and trade for the car. It's entirely possible that I might have to make a great many such trades in sequence before I can finally acquire the commodity that you want for the car and even then there are no guarantees. For example, I may be unable to organize a series of trades that ends with me trading you for the car on a given day and even if I can all of this takes time and effort that I could have spent doing something else which is also a cost. Money solves what economists call the coincidence of wants problem by creating an artificial commodity that everyone wants simply to facilitate exchanges and thus save everyone time and effort. We all participate in this system willingly because we're better off participating than refusing to use the money and demanding barter instead. Indeed a large and complex modern economy would not be possible without a stable unit of account to serve as money. The fact that the idea of money has arisen independently many times in different cultures who had no contact with each other proves that the development of a money commodity is a natural evolutionary step along the path to organized and complex society.
The reason why gold was so often chosen, at least before electronics and computers become widely available, was that it's rare enough and compact enough to serve as a meaningful unit of account while at the same time being easy to recognize, difficult to fake, easy to subdivide or recombine and relatively impervious to rot, corrosion, rust, tarnish or other forms of degradation. In preindustrial societies there really wasn't anything better to serve as the monetary commodity wherever gold and to a lesser extent silver were available in sufficient quantities.
You're arguing over whether the cat should be black or white when all that really matters is that it catches mice. The money commodity is chosen and accepted by the marketplace because it's vastly more efficient than barter. Indeed, markets cannot grow beyond a certain size or complexity without the standardization that a monetary commodity brings. As you said, the commodity that is ultimately chosen as the money is not important so long as everyone agrees upon the choice. Throughout history money has been at various times and places sea shells, salt, copper, iron or even large circular stones with holes drilled in them, it just depends upon what's available. However, gold and other precious metals have been common choices, where available in sufficient quantities, because they're rare and yet easy to recognize and difficult to counterfeit. Gold in particular also had other advantages. It didn't rust or otherwise degrade and it was easy to divide as necessary to provide the necessary units of account. So even in your example the gold, where it available in sufficient supply, would probably displace your bottle cap money in much the same way that contact with Europeans and other outsiders led the Yapese to abandon Rai stones in favor of more convenient alternatives.
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Before arguing fatuous points, go visit fueleconomy.gov. 2013 Mercedes-Benz E400 Hybrid gets 26 mpg. Still 15 tons of gasoline.
Most people are only willing to compromise so much for the environment. If they were really concerned about the environment, and willing to make personal sacrifices, they would take the bus and not own a car. So even if it does only get 26 mpg, buyers are likely to view that as an acceptable compromise in exchange for the roomy luxury sedan. Hybrid allows them the appearance of being green and to these buyers appearance often maters more than reality, especially when it comes to the environment. As for myself I couldn't care less. I'd rather have the horsepower and luxury if I was going to shell out for the Mercedes E or S class. After all, when you're spending that much for a car, you're well past caring about how much it costs to gas up. If you have to worry about that then you can't afford it.
Perhaps this a dumb question by why not simply develop the parts of the game that aren't likely to change much during development, like data storage / retrieval, mechanics, and the like while saving things like graphics and sound until the game is in the final 6-12 months? In theory it should be possible to have the skeleton of the game pretty much templated out and ready to go for building out the mechanics and then working in the graphics and sound. Why do the window dressings take so much time in a game relative to the frame of the building and the wiring? Are they just doing it wrong?
Don't oversell your straw man. The $95,000 S Class is more expensive and quite a bit more luxurious.
You and I both know that people in the market for a model S are looking for a top end luxury car and all that comes with that. They're going to want the leather seats, power everything, navigation with concierge service, sophisticated "glass cockpit" LCD touch screens, automatic parking and polished walnut burl inlay. The loaded price for the Model S is $96,000 (after tax credit) which puts it squarely in competition with the Mercedes S class for top end luxury. Even the base price model at $71,000 is well into luxury car territory. These are cars for the 1%, period.
Tesla just repaid its $465M loan under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program set up under the G.W. Bush administration
What was the total amount of interest received? I question whether it was enough to justify the risks that we took. Tesla succeeded but they very well could have failed too (they still might). Indeed, several other taxpayer investments in alternative energy did fail, notably Solyndra. If we didn't receive enough interest to justify the risks that we took when we loaned money to Tesla then we still lost because we could have earned the same amount elsewhere for less risk or more for the same amount of risk.
Your sneering tone about "appearing green" ignores the genuine increase in efficiency from an electric drive.
The people driving these cars aren't concerned about efficiency. They have enough money that they don't care how much fuel for the Mercedes would have cost or how much less efficient the drive is. Indeed, they're typically far more concerned with horsepower and to a lesser extent 0-60 times. What they want is a large and luxurious sedan with a powerful motor that accelerates them quickly onto the highway. Efficiency is the least of their concerns.
ignoring the increasing role of cleaner natural gas in USA's electricity generating mix, and that many buyers will install solar PV to reduce their carbon footprint further.
Natural gas will come back under price pressure again as more commercial vehicle fleets, with known routes and fueling locations, switch to realize cost savings over diesel. As for reducing carbon footprint, this is something that mostly wealthier Americans in the top 10% income brackets worry about or at least are willing to pay for. The rest are just getting by and don't have the luxury of worrying about carbon footprints or being green, except perhaps in an abstract sense. They're worried about their jobs and retirement and to a lesser extent their health care, so green is way down on their list of spending priorities and they won't be installing solar panels on the roof because even with tax credits they cannot afford it.
Meanwhile a Mercedes E-Class (is everyone driving that a "limousine whatever" too?) is a lot slower and at around 25 mpg will consume 15 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles.
That argument might resonate with Mercedes buyers who tend to be wealthier and therefore would care more about the environment because they're in a position to afford luxury goods. However, the Mercedes E class is also offered in a hybrid configuration for those buyers who are concerned about their carbon footprint or being seen as "green" in a chic sort of way.
Because if he succeedes then we are closer to having green cars for the masses. We cannot massify electric cars until the market is proven.
The market will decide when that happens and it will happen as soon as it becomes economically competitive and not before. I'm extremely skeptical of spending limited tax dollars, which are desperately needed elsewhere, in vain attempts to speed that process along. If the market isn't doing something it should be a signal that the technology isn't ready yet because if it was somebody would come in and making a killing disrupting the existing fossil fuel infrastructure. That alone should be sufficient incentive for work to continue on alternatives. Having the government jump in prematurely as an unsophisticated investor can actually harm progress by encouraging waste and fraud and disrupting the normal investment process whereby worthy companies are funded while charlatans are not.
That avoids the problem of swapping your $12,000 pristine battery for a clapped-out beater. But all the cost-time-weight-safety-standardization tradeoffs work against it. Skip the hassle and rent a long-range car for those trips, or use the other car that's already in the garage of most American households.
This is an economic argument against it, but the fact remains that swappable battery fails in the market because not enough people really want it and why should they? It doesn't offer enough advantage over an integrated battery or simply using a regular fossil fuel vehicle to be worth the hassle. This is especially true if a household can only afford one vehicle for their cheap and reliable transportation. In such cases a quality used fossil fuel vehicle, which has already been depreciated, is the best choice from a kitchen table dollars and cents perspective.
Maybe he was talking about the Apple-style model: buy a new car with pre-charged batteries! /duck
All they would have to do is slap an Apple logo on it and there would be legions of idiots rushing to defend the idea of getting a new vehicle with pre-charged batteries every time your vehicle runs low on charge.
People have been swapping AA's for decades just fine.
Sure, but have you noticed how much extra space is required to accommodate the battery bay with springs and contact plates? Why do you suppose that Apple chose to use integrated batteries soldered directly onto circuit boards, hardly the model of accessibility? The answer of course is space. In the case of the iPhone they were trying to make the device thin and light enough to fit comfortably into your shirt pocket. In the case of a vehicle, the more space that's taken up by vehicle systems, including batteries of fuel tanks, the less space there is for passengers and cargo. It's a trade-off and you don't get swappable batteries without sacrificing either seating or cargo space.
but it would make a lot of sense for them to take or buy the idea.
What's to take or buy? A removable battery isn't exactly a revolutionary idea and neither is having a supply of them on hand to facilitate on demand swapping. It's more like an obvious technical consideration for anyone designing and building electric vehicles and their associated infrastructure.
if they can agree on a standard that allows the battery to be removed and replaced vertically from the bottom of the car by a machine accessible scissor lift, the electric car will have a better future.
As it is we cannot even get European and American car makers to agree what side of the vehicle to place the gas cap on in our fossil fuel vehicles and you want them to standardize the location, size and method of battery replacement? I suppose we'll just have to wait until we can all get to that "Better Place", wherever that is.
Elon has said that the Model S ( and presumably the Model X) is capable of conversion to battery swap
Capable? Yes, it could probably be done. Will it be done? No. Elon is a smart man and he knows how to say the right things to the right audience to get what he wants. However, as a practical matter the Model S already has difficulty competing with fossil fuel powered vehicles on range and even then only by making the batteries fully integrated components molded into every bit of spare room in the vehicle frame. Any additional batteries, removable or not, would further reduce either cargo or interior seating. Musk has done a better job than Fisker and others, but what has he achieved? At $60,000+ (the actual price with options that a typical luxury car buyer would want is closer to $80,000) this still isn't a car for the everyman. In fact it's more like an alternative to the S class Mercedes for limousine liberals who want to appear green using our green (aka money). Tell me again why my tax dollars should be subsidizing Musk and Tesla?
If anyone from the EFF is reading this, it might be worthwhile for you guys to take some time and write a point by point rebuttal of this document. It may also be beneficial to remind our lawmakers that even if such programs were technically feasible, which of course they're not, they would render any discussion of US cyber security moot. Can we really afford to expose our vital infrastructure to cyber attacks merely because the entertainment industry believes that it will lose revenue if we don't? It's madness to expect that we can secure our vital infrastructure while opening up security holes on purpose and equally foolish to believe that our enemies will not target those weaknesses. The economic and military might of the United States depends upon the reliable operation of our civil and military infrastructure which in turn depends upon reliable computing. If for no other reason, this request by the entertainment industry should be denied simply on grounds of national security, quite apart from other compelling economic arguments against their requests.
Nothing more amusing than watching conservatives complaining about "leftists trying to pretend this is all okay" when virtually none are.
There aren't many apologists on this issue, it's true. However, the criticism of the Obama Administration from the left, at least on this issue, also seems to be half-hearted. It's more interesting to see who isn't talking, neither defending nor criticizing President Obama, so as to curry favor with the administration and ensure priority access to the President for future interviews and White House briefings.
Leftist here. It's not OK because its Fox and it's not OK because Obama did it.
Rightist here. Why is nobody in the Obama Administration ever punished for their mistakes or misconduct, criminal and otherwise? Have you noticed that whenever there is a scandal nobody seems to know anything, including the President himself? WTF is going on up there in the White House, the State Department, the DOJ and the IRS? How is it that nobody is ever found to be responsible for anything and punished? Instead they stonewall and delay and cover up while spinning like crazy and the journalists, with the exception of Fox news and few others, let them off the hook? I didn't vote for Obama and I've never had a high opinion of the man or his policies, but this sort of corrupt behavior only confirms for many of us on the right what we've suspected all along, that behind the flowery rhetoric and flawed liberal policies lies a deeply corrupt and duplicitous administration, the likes of which hasn't been seen since 1974.
Why do we need the government to tell us this? They're incompetent so why should we listen to them when they tell us how we should be running our businesses? WTF do they know about running a business? Almost nothing. I don't need some paper pusher bureaucrat in Washington telling me how to secure my networks and I sure as hell don't need them to give me advice on passwords. From my perspective all the government ever does is take my tax money and waste it on God knows who and for God knows what, but it sure as hell doesn't help me that's for damn sure because if I don't make something happen for myself, it doesn't happen.
I think that when any person or entity gets too much power, either in Socialism or Capitalism, it generally leads to abuse. Power, profit, ego.
A corrupt capitalism still produces things, albeit at less than full capacity or optimum efficiency, whereas a corrupt socialism simply wastes resources to little or no effect because nobody gives a shit individually about the fate of the collective property.
This is in the country with the second biggest proven oil reserves in the world
Which does you no good if you cannot get it out of the ground. Chavez misappropriated the funds earmarked for repair, replacement and maintenance of oil field equipment and operations and diverted them instead to social programs. The result was a bit like eating your seed corn. Now the oil fields are only producing a fraction of the oil that they should be and no foreign firm wants to touch Venezuela with a ten foot pole because of the recent nationalizations by the Venezuelan government which is still packed with the disciples of Chavez and socialism. If I were a foreign investor and the Venezuelan state oil company wanted either goods or services I would demand payment in full up front in either dollars or gold. Nationalizing property owned by foreigners is a good way to scare off all international investment as Venezuelans are now discovering to their collective misery.
The difference with Bitcoins is that the entire transaction chain is by definition permanent public record. The bank might record the serial numbers of bills issued to you at the ATM, but the chain is pretty much broken as soon as you spend them because intermediaries rarely take steps to record serial numbers and link them with those who spend them. At best they might know what you bought and how much it cost, but not necessarily which bills you used to pay for the purchase. Unless you use your Bitcoins in a way that doesn't expose your identity, either by buying them in person at one of these ATMs or spending them in a way that links your wallet to your real identity, they can actually be less anonymous than cash and even one slip up exposes all of your previous transactions using that wallet.
I would say that the difference between those crimes and the one being discussed here was in the intent. There can be no doubt that the intent of the man who killed the British soldier in London was to intimidate the society at large into changing the foreign policy of the British government with regard to lands that the killer and others consider to be Muslim. Indeed, he made a statement on camera to that effect immediately after the killing so that there can be no doubt that the killing and the statement of intent were linked and intended to achieve a political goal. Contrast this with a killing done not for the purpose of political change but rather for revenge or due to prejudice or a grudge against a specific group or persons. It is the explicitly stated threat to society at large and the political goal that makes this terrorism and not simply a murder for hire or a crime of passion.
The killer very clearly expounded the reasons for the killing, including references to British foreign policies in "muslim lands" and "an eye for an eye", while holding the bloody knife and cleaver in his red hands. The obvious intent of this statement, which was made to the camera immediately after the killing so that it would be recorded and seen by the entire world, was to intimidate and effect political change through fear of more violence if those changes desired by the terrorist and his confederates were not made. If that's not the very definition of terrorism, I don't know what is.
The VCs are free to be as stupid as they want to be with their own money, but with titles like "Head of Regulatory Strategy" you know that they will be going after government money too which means that us taxpayers may still be footing the bill for this bullshit. That's what really chaps my hide.
BTW, unless you've got some sort of special machine that detects "wrong people" guns
As far as the gun control lefties are concerned, every gun in private ownership is a "wrong people" gun. Like you said, they're idiots.
What will you aim to ban next? Knives? Screwdrivers? Sticks? Baseball bats? Fireworks? Tree stump remover? Model rocket engines? Lithium batteries? Fertilizer? Dry ice?
You forgot board with rusty nail
Perfect safety is NOT achievable no matter how many rights you decide to give up
Yes, but liberals believe that it is or at least they see no problem in eliminating all of your rights to try because in their minds it was worthwhile if even one life was saved (which it probably wasn't).
Yeah, as if they couldn't figure out what you think about it based on this sentence.
Well, they failed to account for those crafty Mormons finding a way to tax them, so I'm not so sure.
Which is exactly the point. They can't tax the federal government. So they decided to create a law that allows for a loophole that taxes the power company and the law also allows the power company to pass the additional costs on to the federal government.
Well, you've got to hand it to the Mormons; they're clever in their business dealings. Frankly I'm surprised that the NSA guys didn't see this one coming.
When you think about how unacceptable this would be anywhere else, you have to wonder how this insane system came to be as it is.
Here is the in-depth answer if you're interested. I usually get shot down for posting this link here on Slashdot because it doesn't comport well with the groupthink on health care, but if you honestly want to hear a good economic argument explaining why health care in the United States is so expensive instead of the same old "greedy insurance company" canards, it's probably worth your time.
This appears to be a common sentiment here on Slashdot, but the concept of money does indeed have value in an economy quite apart from any additional value that the monetary commodity may or may not itself possess. Ask yourself, what is the purpose of money? Why do we use money when we could use barter instead? In a word, efficiency. If I have milk to trade and you have a car to trade and I want the car but you don't want the milk then I must take time and effort to find someone who wants milk and is willing to trade me something that you want so that I can come back to you and trade for the car. It's entirely possible that I might have to make a great many such trades in sequence before I can finally acquire the commodity that you want for the car and even then there are no guarantees. For example, I may be unable to organize a series of trades that ends with me trading you for the car on a given day and even if I can all of this takes time and effort that I could have spent doing something else which is also a cost. Money solves what economists call the coincidence of wants problem by creating an artificial commodity that everyone wants simply to facilitate exchanges and thus save everyone time and effort. We all participate in this system willingly because we're better off participating than refusing to use the money and demanding barter instead. Indeed a large and complex modern economy would not be possible without a stable unit of account to serve as money. The fact that the idea of money has arisen independently many times in different cultures who had no contact with each other proves that the development of a money commodity is a natural evolutionary step along the path to organized and complex society.
The reason why gold was so often chosen, at least before electronics and computers become widely available, was that it's rare enough and compact enough to serve as a meaningful unit of account while at the same time being easy to recognize, difficult to fake, easy to subdivide or recombine and relatively impervious to rot, corrosion, rust, tarnish or other forms of degradation. In preindustrial societies there really wasn't anything better to serve as the monetary commodity wherever gold and to a lesser extent silver were available in sufficient quantities.
You're arguing over whether the cat should be black or white when all that really matters is that it catches mice. The money commodity is chosen and accepted by the marketplace because it's vastly more efficient than barter. Indeed, markets cannot grow beyond a certain size or complexity without the standardization that a monetary commodity brings. As you said, the commodity that is ultimately chosen as the money is not important so long as everyone agrees upon the choice. Throughout history money has been at various times and places sea shells, salt, copper, iron or even large circular stones with holes drilled in them, it just depends upon what's available. However, gold and other precious metals have been common choices, where available in sufficient quantities, because they're rare and yet easy to recognize and difficult to counterfeit. Gold in particular also had other advantages. It didn't rust or otherwise degrade and it was easy to divide as necessary to provide the necessary units of account. So even in your example the gold, where it available in sufficient supply, would probably displace your bottle cap money in much the same way that contact with Europeans and other outsiders led the Yapese to abandon Rai stones in favor of more convenient alternatives.