Admitting that he should have publicly fired the person who took the non-memo that was actually an internal G+ discussion item and waved it like a bloody flag to clickbait shitposters would be an admission that Damore has a case.
But that is precisely what he should have done. He should have called a town hall meeting, asked the person to come to the stage and publicly fired them without any severance with a stern warning that anyone who decides to go activist and take dirty laundry to the media instead of working through official channels will be punished even harder because now they know that Google won't tolerate it.
I find this a bit disingenuous. The memo was clearly written for a Google wide audience directing how the company should act. If it were not for the poor reception I suspect Damore would have encouraged its distribution.
Nope.. I'm afraid that thinkwaitfast was correct. It's a republic (a representative one) rather than a democracy - at least in the technical sense. Two things keep it from being a democracy:
1. Not everyone has the right to vote. 2. There is a constitutional limit placed upon the majority will. As a result, the government representing the majority vote is unable to necessarily enact their will if doing so violates the constitution.
The differences are subtle, though, in modern democratic republics:
I think your second link isn't as reputable as you think it is:
Basis for Comparison | Democracy | Republic Revenue through | Illegitimate taxes, fees, fines and licenses | Legitimate taxes and fees
More realistically Republic vs Democracy is a bit of a pointless argument since there aren't firm definitions for either, at least not as they apply in the modern world.
Every state has some sort of constitution, most have elections, and all those elections have at least some restrictions on who can vote, even if it is just 'a citizen who is of majority age'.
Republic is generally thought to be a bit more restrictive since Democracy (the Greeks) came first and the Roman Republic followed. In modern times places that call themselves Republics seem to place more emphasis on the Executive/President role while Democracies focus on the legislative leader (the Prime Minister).
I can't see the original paper so the authors might account for it, but it strikes me that they have a huge selection bias problem.
I basically see three reasons why people become leaders.
1) They're connected. 2) They've got great leadership skills. 3) They're extremely competent in the field.
The connected people are probably of average intelligence and leadership skills.
But as to the other two groups, you're comparing group #2 selected for their leadership skills to group #3 selected for their brains. An inverse relationship between intelligence and leadership is an expected outcome.
I'd be more curious to see what happens if you take 10 random people and assign one to be the leader for some task. Do you still end up with the inverse relationship?
"If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it."
Pierre Gallois
"I don't understand X, and it's really inconveniently for me to believe X, therefore I believe it's impossible for anyone to understand X."
Based on the data, most countries optimize their revenue by setting corporate tax rates at about half of what the US has had.
Most industrialized countries had the same corporate tax rate as the US after deductions.
What most economists wanted was for the US to lower its corporate tax rate while eliminating (or reducing) many of the deductions. What the bill did is lower the corporate tax rate while keeping the deductions.
They said the software used 137 data points on determining the probability of re-offending but they were no better than if someone use just 2, age and prior convictions. Perhaps I've had more statistics training than most but this seems highly probable. This is pretty basic data analysis, or so I thought. If you take a bunch of data points and correlate them to re-offend rate there will be some data points that correlate more than others. If one doing the analysis tossed out the data points that had little to no correlation then the accuracy of the predictive value will still be effectively unchanged.
I don't think pure statistics is the proper approach as much as machine learning. To be honest the problem sounds like something that could be tackled in an undergraduate course, "here's your variables, there's your outcomes, run a classifier, and submit your results".
Perhaps there's something fundamentally difficult about getting above 2/3 accuracy, but it seems you should REALLY be able to beat untrained workers on a problem like this.
I suspect this is just a case of a product built in the late 90's on weak ML (or some homegrown stats) and they never felt the need to improve their results since.
Another thing that I've learned, and I'll admit is controversial to the SJWs out there, is the correlations between ethnicity and intelligence, and between criminal tendencies and intelligence. This is not controversial to the people that do this analysis, it's been established with considerable evidence.
There's no question that there's correlations between IQ and skin colour, the question is whether that's the characteristic of the ethnicity or race or due to socio-economic factors.
Those with an IQ around 85 or 90 (depending on who you ask) will be most likely to be criminals. Above that IQ there is greater profit in getting a job. Below that IQ the people will have problems concocting the means to break the law and still come out ahead.
The biggest predictor of criminality is age, the cause isn't poor earning potential, it's poor self-control and ability to anticipate consequences.
People from certain areas of the world will, on average, have a lower IQ. Average IQ, by definition, is 100.
If these people want a more accurate indication of criminal behavior then give an IQ test. They won't do that though because people with a certain ethnic background will "fail" this test and be considered more likely to offend.
They won't do that because you'd be denying people bail for being dumb. Anyway, you're probably not getting useful data because we're already dealing with convicted criminals and we have data on their criminal history.
With this trend of ethnic background having some correlation to skin color this algorithm would immediately be considered "racist" and be tossed out by the SJWs. Even though it would be highly accurate in determining future criminal behavior we can't tolerate a "racist" algorithm.
Why do we see more people with dark skin in prisons? Not because of some inherent racism. It's because low IQ people are more likely to break the law, and people with dark skin tend to have a lower IQ. This should not reflect on any individual because "trend" does not mean "will" or "did". Also, even with a 90 average IQ in a population still leaves a lot of room on a bell curve for many geniuses in that population.
Posted anonymously because I'm sure just mentioning these indisputable facts will likely get me labeled a racist.
If you wanted to discuss the role of race in a predictive algorithm that's valid, there's definitely an issue where machine learning algorithms can learn racial bias, even when they have to infer it through secondary measures. And depending on your view that's a good thing (it improves accuracy) or a bad thing (people are literally being judged by the colour of thei
Can any corporate finance experts explain why companies would do this? Should we buy that they're just being generous/trying to foster goodwill?
IANACFE but...
The tax cut is awesome for corporations, and their major shareholders in particular.
But, it's also extremely unpopular because it's generally considered a handout to corporations at the expense of average people, and that creates two problems.
1) Employees realize the company got a massive pile of cash and can feel resentful that they didn't get any. Resentful employees are employees who might look for work elsewhere. 2) Nationally the tax bill is unpopular, and there's a decent chance that in 4 years Democrats have a super-majority and choose to kill it.
So you give your employees a raise, or better yet, a one-off bonus. The employees stop feeling resentful and you help change the national narrative which helps keep your cheap tax rate around in 4 years.
Read Tim Cook's past statements about not bringing the money back to the US at the existing 35% tax rate. It's well documented. He said he would only bring it home when the tax laws were changed to be more favorable to business in the US.
If you haven't figured it out already... higher taxes = money leaves to find a lower tax location. Pay attention!
I've no doubt Apple's decision to bring the money into the US had to do with the tax law (whether that law was the best decision is debatable, you might have gotten a lot more than $38 billion with another law).
What I contest is that the expansion was a result of the tax law or something they would have done anyway. Apple was not short of cash before this.
Companies have been re-branding existing expansions as the result of Dear Leader since election day.
Why should I now believe this expansion happened because of Trump or the tax law? It's not like Apple was previously short of cash or didn't need to expand their workforce.
Just compare the charts for the last 5 years. It drops off like this every year about this time. This is not that unusual.
I suspect that's more to do with "It's a new year so I'll change X" and in years where Bitcoin did well X was taking the opportunity to cash-out, this could be what's motivating the Asian traders as well.
I don't think the gift+travel idea makes sense. Bitcoin ownership is massively concentrated, anyone who has enough Bitcoin to tank the market should already have more than enough fiat currency to fund whatever holiday plans they have.
In this case however, there's more than enough bad news to suggest that the sell-off is based on very real factors.
At the end of the day, it seems if you were there early and out at the peak then you won. But overall the whole system seems worse or more world wrecking than country issued currency. I wouldn't be surprised if bitcoin crashes badly or dies someday leaving a sour taste in crytocurrency.
Honestly, it seems to me that Bitcoin is less world-wrecking than country-issued currency. Simply burning the energy consumption of a small country seems like a lot but,
It's doing that now, as a giant market bubble. How much power do you think it will consume as a global currency?
in a world without state-issued currency, it would be significantly more difficult for states to start wars.
Which is why we never had wars during the Gold standard.
Also, some of the supposed advantages of one over the other are quite subjective, such as Bitcoin being harder for authorities to track than bank transfers.
A lot of people are selling this as a way to take power away from the government, but really, it's a way to regulators and law enforcement less powerful, and that makes the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful.
Just look at any advanced country with weak institutions, Russia is a great example, without strong institutions the powerful make their own institutions to gain more wealth.
A world run on untraceable crypto-currency is a world where politicians collect bribes in secret wallets and oligarchs launder money with sales from untraceable clients.
If I were a gambling man, I'd be tempted to invest now. Seems a big overreaction to cause this to make it drop 50% of value.
But I'm not a gambling man. Yes, I was born a rambling man.
I bought a little after the first crash after the run-up. Not so much because I thought I'd make a lot of money, but missing out on the massive rise was annoying, and in a weird bit of psychology being in the market took away that annoyance.
I don't know when this tumble will stop (of course, no one does), we're going to see a few big price shocks down as big holders start walking away from the table a bit (there's not much volume) and the fundamental tech issues remain. I doubt it will hit $20k again in a year, but I wouldn't be shocked if it were close to $1k.
They didn't invent this tech yet they're patenting the shit out of it.
The people that work at the USPTO need to be shot.
Most likely this wouldn't be patents on the blockchain itself, but patents on how to integrate it into other banking technology.
But that's not the only scenario, I expect two main possibilities of what's going on here.
1) They're planning on using the blockchain to help with money transfers between banks. No so much a crypto-currency but a way to track existing currency. 2) They're trying to solve the same problems bitcoin is trying to solve, with the intention of preventing bitcoin from using that solution (and thus blocking crypto-currencies).
So, you'd expect that if at least 3700 women used it.
Not quite, this is just one hospital, so discounting a local phenomena that's 3700 app users who would be attending that hospital.
And 37 is the cases they know about, depending on how they got this number there could be a lot more at just that hospital they don't know about.
I'm also not sure what 99% means in this context. Per year? Then you need to multiply those quarterly positives by 4. 99% effective per sexual encounter? You're going to end up with a lot of pregnancies. 99% less than absolutely no protection? That's probably a lot less than %1 of the users getting pregnant over a year.
There is no reason to doubt our esteemed intelligence community. When they implore us to trust them because the evidence is too dangerous to show to the public, it is every patriotic citizen's duty to trust them. Spies are lurking in every corner, even on our beloved Slashdot, so we must remain vigilant against efforts to undermine faith in government. Faith keeps us strong, strength crushes enemies. Have faith.
Now consider the NSA. How do they know about the Russian's using Kaspersky? Is it a mole in Kaspersky? A mole in Russian intelligence? A backdoor into Kaspersky or Russian intelligence? They hacked someone's email account? etc, etc.
Any piece of information you give out jeopardizes your ability to gather intel in the future. Just exposing the fact they knew the Russians were responsible was probably the cause of a big debate.
Is it fair to hold your CEO accountable for every action you or even your team takes at your job? Sure, sometimes you do something because of a policy or general culture set by upper management, but sometimes you take a course of action because that simply what you wanted to do.
Not everything that a Federal Government does during an administration is the direct responsibility of the administration and/or ruling party.
So your plan is a massive corporate tax cut (without removing any of the corporate deductions) AND an individual tax cut when your country is already running a huge deficit?
When do you plan on paying down that deficit?
I'm not the OP, but I'm responding because this question gets asked often.
An economy in motion is a lot like an airplane in flight - you have height, and airspeed to manage. Ideally, you want both height and fast airspeed. A bad situation is low elevation and slow airspeed. At worst, you stall, then crash. Game over.
Right now, our elevation isn't very good, but our airspeed is getting critically slow! We need drop the elevation to pick up airspeed. To do that, we need to reduce taxation and overall burden on the economic engine. Once airspeed has been regained, and increasing on its own, only then can we pick up elevation (start increasing taxes again). But if we were to start taxing more, we will stall and crash the economy.
If employment 4% and years of massive corporate profits isn't the right time to raise taxes then when IS the right time?
We've already seen this movie, economy is doing well, there's a huge unfunded tax cut, economy does better until everyone over-extends and it all comes crashing down.
Now is the time to raise taxes and get a positive budget balance, then if the economy starts to sputter you can start spending some of that money to start fixing things. The disaster of the end of the Bush presidency was massive deficits while the economy was strong. So when things collapsed there was no money to fix it.
You're saying it's as bad as the Obamacare time-bomb? So, it's not a partisan thing, it's a psychopath/politician thing, they all do it.
Except the ACA wasn't written with the expectation that expiring provisions would get renewed, they were written to help the transition to the new system.
>Taxes, some of which will hopefully be paid by these people, reduced benefits from other programs, and reduced administration in running the program.
This tired argument again?
1. These people are getting barely enough money to live on in the first place. They will not be paying taxes.
One of the reasons they don't work is working means they lose benefits. But they don't lose the UBI by working, therefore more will enter the labour force (to get extra money) and pay more taxes.
2. Just _reduced_ benefits? What happened to eliminating those altogether? Reducing won't eliminate overhead.
I don't know all the details of this implementation. But I'd assume that some would be eliminated entirely and others remain, overall a reduction in benefits paid and administration.
3. Reduced administration will not pay for the difference. Shall we do some math?
No it will not. The bulk will come from taxes. The reduced administration just makes things more efficient.
Apparently minimum cost of living is something like $15000/year in the US, so let's set UB to that level. There are 308 million people living in the US. Simple multiplication tells us we need $4.6 trillion/year to pay for UBI.
The total US federal income for 2016 was $3.3 trillion.
Remember coupled with that massive tax hike is a massive rebate in the form of the UBI.
When it all balances out it's not that different from making the tax code more progressive and giving everyone who's unemployed EI benefits. The fact these people are surviving right now suggests we're giving the necessary resources to live, the UBI just changes how we direct those resources.
And if the UBI does bring more people back into the labour force you make the country wealthier.
The Wall Street Journal pointed out that people in underdeveloped countries are now using it as a store of value since their own countries' currencies are so unstable.
I'm not sure it's useful there either.
One big problem with Bitcoins, they're very easy to lose and very easy to steal.
Bitcoin will be like diamonds in the regard that it will carry a constantly changing value. Bitcoin although called a crypto-"currency" should be considered a crypto-"stock".
That's good way to think about it. After all, Bitcoin can't be considered a substitute for currency before it becomes so stable that you can pay salaries or make other reasonable contracts based on it. And before that link to economic output is established, it has only speculative value, or no value at all (to put my neighbor's Marxist hat on).
I'm not sure how Bitcoin gets there.
If people are going to use a currency as cash they need to be paid in it, which means it needs to be a national currency. Even if it's easily convertible you want to be paid in the same dollars as the surrounding goods so you don't get hurt by the volatility.
But no country is going to adopt an existing crypto-currency as their dollar since acquiring the necessary currency would jack up the value and bankrupt them.
So, the reason the individual income tax cut is not permanent is because the DNC voted against it? Had they gotten 9 DNC Senators on board the tax cut for workers would be perm?
Sounds like we need to boot out DNC that hates middle class workers and get the GOP another 9 seats at the least so we can make it perm for us.
Yea, its the GOP that did something for the workers that is evil, while the DNC that shit on us is our friends? Fuck off.
So your plan is a massive corporate tax cut (without removing any of the corporate deductions) AND an individual tax cut when your country is already running a huge deficit?
When do you plan on paying down that deficit?
(and it's fun how you manage to blame the Democrats for the GOP's awful tax bill)
No, it's testing a specific aspect of a universal basic income, exactly what you'd want a responsible government to do.
It's simply another welfare program.
No, a welfare program is designed to maintain the well-being of citizens, this is an experiment to see if a universal basic income will reduce unemployment.
And the money has to come from SOMEWHERE.
Taxes, some of which will hopefully be paid by these people, reduced benefits from other programs, and reduced administration in running the program.
We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
But we don't know how big that segment is, or exactly how they are distributed, this will shed light on that question.
So, all that's been created is an incentive not to achieve anything.
They already had an incentive not to achieve anything, traditional welfare programs.
What this does do is reduce some pressure to find work, but it also removes some incentives for not entering the workforce (such as losing benefits).
Take note that race is essentially the top reason the parent lists for people not leaving Finland. It's white people with blonde hair. There is little difference between that and Trump's racist comment about wanting more immigrants from Norway.
There's more than a little difference.
Extolling the positive virtues of a race is a type of stereotyping, but it's often done in the way of finding positives for each race that's stereotyped so it's not that harmful.
But Trump asking for fewer people from a black country and more people from one of the whitest countries is almost explicitly indicating a preferred race.
The bill made permanent tax cuts for corporations and temporary ones for individuals. The reason is that reconciliation (the rule that let them pass the bill with only 51 votes) says the bill can't raise the deficit after 10 years. So at the 10 year mark the corporate tax cut is partially paid for by a tax hike on individuals.
Of course this is fake math since the GOP doesn't actually expect the individual cuts to expire. In 10 years they expect a Democratic administration to be in power, an administration who will be faced with either letting the cuts expire (and getting blamed for raising taxes on the middle class) or renewing the cuts and finding a way to pay for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Admitting that he should have publicly fired the person who took the non-memo that was actually an internal G+ discussion item and waved it like a bloody flag to clickbait shitposters would be an admission that Damore has a case.
But that is precisely what he should have done. He should have called a town hall meeting, asked the person to come to the stage and publicly fired them without any severance with a stern warning that anyone who decides to go activist and take dirty laundry to the media instead of working through official channels will be punished even harder because now they know that Google won't tolerate it.
I find this a bit disingenuous. The memo was clearly written for a Google wide audience directing how the company should act. If it were not for the poor reception I suspect Damore would have encouraged its distribution.
Nope.. I'm afraid that thinkwaitfast was correct. It's a republic (a representative one) rather than a democracy - at least in the technical sense. Two things keep it from being a democracy:
1. Not everyone has the right to vote.
2. There is a constitutional limit placed upon the majority will. As a result, the government representing the majority vote is unable to necessarily enact their will if doing so violates the constitution.
The differences are subtle, though, in modern democratic republics:
https://www.diffen.com/differe...
https://keydifferences.com/dif...
I think your second link isn't as reputable as you think it is:
Basis for Comparison | Democracy | Republic
Revenue through | Illegitimate taxes, fees, fines and licenses | Legitimate taxes and fees
More realistically Republic vs Democracy is a bit of a pointless argument since there aren't firm definitions for either, at least not as they apply in the modern world.
Every state has some sort of constitution, most have elections, and all those elections have at least some restrictions on who can vote, even if it is just 'a citizen who is of majority age'.
Republic is generally thought to be a bit more restrictive since Democracy (the Greeks) came first and the Roman Republic followed. In modern times places that call themselves Republics seem to place more emphasis on the Executive/President role while Democracies focus on the legislative leader (the Prime Minister).
I can't see the original paper so the authors might account for it, but it strikes me that they have a huge selection bias problem.
I basically see three reasons why people become leaders.
1) They're connected.
2) They've got great leadership skills.
3) They're extremely competent in the field.
The connected people are probably of average intelligence and leadership skills.
But as to the other two groups, you're comparing group #2 selected for their leadership skills to group #3 selected for their brains. An inverse relationship between intelligence and leadership is an expected outcome.
I'd be more curious to see what happens if you take 10 random people and assign one to be the leader for some task. Do you still end up with the inverse relationship?
"If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it."
Pierre Gallois
"I don't understand X, and it's really inconveniently for me to believe X, therefore I believe it's impossible for anyone to understand X."
-pipingguy (paraphrasing)
Based on the data, most countries optimize their revenue by setting corporate tax rates at about half of what the US has had.
Most industrialized countries had the same corporate tax rate as the US after deductions.
What most economists wanted was for the US to lower its corporate tax rate while eliminating (or reducing) many of the deductions. What the bill did is lower the corporate tax rate while keeping the deductions.
They said the software used 137 data points on determining the probability of re-offending but they were no better than if someone use just 2, age and prior convictions. Perhaps I've had more statistics training than most but this seems highly probable. This is pretty basic data analysis, or so I thought. If you take a bunch of data points and correlate them to re-offend rate there will be some data points that correlate more than others. If one doing the analysis tossed out the data points that had little to no correlation then the accuracy of the predictive value will still be effectively unchanged.
I don't think pure statistics is the proper approach as much as machine learning. To be honest the problem sounds like something that could be tackled in an undergraduate course, "here's your variables, there's your outcomes, run a classifier, and submit your results".
Perhaps there's something fundamentally difficult about getting above 2/3 accuracy, but it seems you should REALLY be able to beat untrained workers on a problem like this.
I suspect this is just a case of a product built in the late 90's on weak ML (or some homegrown stats) and they never felt the need to improve their results since.
Another thing that I've learned, and I'll admit is controversial to the SJWs out there, is the correlations between ethnicity and intelligence, and between criminal tendencies and intelligence. This is not controversial to the people that do this analysis, it's been established with considerable evidence.
There's no question that there's correlations between IQ and skin colour, the question is whether that's the characteristic of the ethnicity or race or due to socio-economic factors.
Those with an IQ around 85 or 90 (depending on who you ask) will be most likely to be criminals. Above that IQ there is greater profit in getting a job. Below that IQ the people will have problems concocting the means to break the law and still come out ahead.
The biggest predictor of criminality is age, the cause isn't poor earning potential, it's poor self-control and ability to anticipate consequences.
People from certain areas of the world will, on average, have a lower IQ. Average IQ, by definition, is 100.
If these people want a more accurate indication of criminal behavior then give an IQ test. They won't do that though because people with a certain ethnic background will "fail" this test and be considered more likely to offend.
They won't do that because you'd be denying people bail for being dumb. Anyway, you're probably not getting useful data because we're already dealing with convicted criminals and we have data on their criminal history.
With this trend of ethnic background having some correlation to skin color this algorithm would immediately be considered "racist" and be tossed out by the SJWs. Even though it would be highly accurate in determining future criminal behavior we can't tolerate a "racist" algorithm.
Why do we see more people with dark skin in prisons? Not because of some inherent racism. It's because low IQ people are more likely to break the law, and people with dark skin tend to have a lower IQ. This should not reflect on any individual because "trend" does not mean "will" or "did". Also, even with a 90 average IQ in a population still leaves a lot of room on a bell curve for many geniuses in that population.
Posted anonymously because I'm sure just mentioning these indisputable facts will likely get me labeled a racist.
If you wanted to discuss the role of race in a predictive algorithm that's valid, there's definitely an issue where machine learning algorithms can learn racial bias, even when they have to infer it through secondary measures. And depending on your view that's a good thing (it improves accuracy) or a bad thing (people are literally being judged by the colour of thei
Can any corporate finance experts explain why companies would do this? Should we buy that they're just being generous/trying to foster goodwill?
IANACFE but...
The tax cut is awesome for corporations, and their major shareholders in particular.
But, it's also extremely unpopular because it's generally considered a handout to corporations at the expense of average people, and that creates two problems.
1) Employees realize the company got a massive pile of cash and can feel resentful that they didn't get any. Resentful employees are employees who might look for work elsewhere.
2) Nationally the tax bill is unpopular, and there's a decent chance that in 4 years Democrats have a super-majority and choose to kill it.
So you give your employees a raise, or better yet, a one-off bonus. The employees stop feeling resentful and you help change the national narrative which helps keep your cheap tax rate around in 4 years.
Read Tim Cook's past statements about not bringing the money back to the US at the existing 35% tax rate. It's well documented. He said he would only bring it home when the tax laws were changed to be more favorable to business in the US.
If you haven't figured it out already... higher taxes = money leaves to find a lower tax location. Pay attention!
I've no doubt Apple's decision to bring the money into the US had to do with the tax law (whether that law was the best decision is debatable, you might have gotten a lot more than $38 billion with another law).
What I contest is that the expansion was a result of the tax law or something they would have done anyway. Apple was not short of cash before this.
Companies have been re-branding existing expansions as the result of Dear Leader since election day.
Why should I now believe this expansion happened because of Trump or the tax law? It's not like Apple was previously short of cash or didn't need to expand their workforce.
Just compare the charts for the last 5 years. It drops off like this every year about this time. This is not that unusual.
I suspect that's more to do with "It's a new year so I'll change X" and in years where Bitcoin did well X was taking the opportunity to cash-out, this could be what's motivating the Asian traders as well.
I don't think the gift+travel idea makes sense. Bitcoin ownership is massively concentrated, anyone who has enough Bitcoin to tank the market should already have more than enough fiat currency to fund whatever holiday plans they have.
In this case however, there's more than enough bad news to suggest that the sell-off is based on very real factors.
At the end of the day, it seems if you were there early and out at the peak then you won. But overall the whole system seems worse or more world wrecking than country issued currency. I wouldn't be surprised if bitcoin crashes badly or dies someday leaving a sour taste in crytocurrency.
Honestly, it seems to me that Bitcoin is less world-wrecking than country-issued currency. Simply burning the energy consumption of a small country seems like a lot but,
It's doing that now, as a giant market bubble. How much power do you think it will consume as a global currency?
in a world without state-issued currency, it would be significantly more difficult for states to start wars.
Which is why we never had wars during the Gold standard.
Also, some of the supposed advantages of one over the other are quite subjective, such as Bitcoin being harder for authorities to track than bank transfers.
A lot of people are selling this as a way to take power away from the government, but really, it's a way to regulators and law enforcement less powerful, and that makes the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful.
Just look at any advanced country with weak institutions, Russia is a great example, without strong institutions the powerful make their own institutions to gain more wealth.
A world run on untraceable crypto-currency is a world where politicians collect bribes in secret wallets and oligarchs launder money with sales from untraceable clients.
No it is not.
If I were a gambling man, I'd be tempted to invest now. Seems a big overreaction to cause this to make it drop 50% of value.
But I'm not a gambling man. Yes, I was born a rambling man.
I bought a little after the first crash after the run-up. Not so much because I thought I'd make a lot of money, but missing out on the massive rise was annoying, and in a weird bit of psychology being in the market took away that annoyance.
I don't know when this tumble will stop (of course, no one does), we're going to see a few big price shocks down as big holders start walking away from the table a bit (there's not much volume) and the fundamental tech issues remain. I doubt it will hit $20k again in a year, but I wouldn't be shocked if it were close to $1k.
They didn't invent this tech yet they're patenting the shit out of it.
The people that work at the USPTO need to be shot.
Most likely this wouldn't be patents on the blockchain itself, but patents on how to integrate it into other banking technology.
But that's not the only scenario, I expect two main possibilities of what's going on here.
1) They're planning on using the blockchain to help with money transfers between banks. No so much a crypto-currency but a way to track existing currency.
2) They're trying to solve the same problems bitcoin is trying to solve, with the intention of preventing bitcoin from using that solution (and thus blocking crypto-currencies).
So, you'd expect that if at least 3700 women used it.
Not quite, this is just one hospital, so discounting a local phenomena that's 3700 app users who would be attending that hospital.
And 37 is the cases they know about, depending on how they got this number there could be a lot more at just that hospital they don't know about.
I'm also not sure what 99% means in this context. Per year? Then you need to multiply those quarterly positives by 4. 99% effective per sexual encounter? You're going to end up with a lot of pregnancies. 99% less than absolutely no protection? That's probably a lot less than %1 of the users getting pregnant over a year.
There is no reason to doubt our esteemed intelligence community. When they implore us to trust them because the evidence is too dangerous to show to the public, it is every patriotic citizen's duty to trust them. Spies are lurking in every corner, even on our beloved Slashdot, so we must remain vigilant against efforts to undermine faith in government. Faith keeps us strong, strength crushes enemies. Have faith.
That's a very valid concern.
But also consider the other side. A few months ago Trump bragged to the Russian Ambassador about getting intelligence about a laptop bombing plot out of a specific city in Syria. That initial leak basically led to the entire operation being exposed (and the Israeli bug being useless).
Now consider the NSA. How do they know about the Russian's using Kaspersky? Is it a mole in Kaspersky? A mole in Russian intelligence? A backdoor into Kaspersky or Russian intelligence? They hacked someone's email account? etc, etc.
Any piece of information you give out jeopardizes your ability to gather intel in the future. Just exposing the fact they knew the Russians were responsible was probably the cause of a big debate.
Very embarrassing for Obama and the Democrats.
Haha.
Is it fair to hold your CEO accountable for every action you or even your team takes at your job? Sure, sometimes you do something because of a policy or general culture set by upper management, but sometimes you take a course of action because that simply what you wanted to do.
Not everything that a Federal Government does during an administration is the direct responsibility of the administration and/or ruling party.
I'm not the OP, but I'm responding because this question gets asked often.
An economy in motion is a lot like an airplane in flight - you have height, and airspeed to manage. Ideally, you want both height and fast airspeed. A bad situation is low elevation and slow airspeed. At worst, you stall, then crash. Game over.
Right now, our elevation isn't very good, but our airspeed is getting critically slow! We need drop the elevation to pick up airspeed. To do that, we need to reduce taxation and overall burden on the economic engine. Once airspeed has been regained, and increasing on its own, only then can we pick up elevation (start increasing taxes again). But if we were to start taxing more, we will stall and crash the economy.
If employment 4% and years of massive corporate profits isn't the right time to raise taxes then when IS the right time?
We've already seen this movie, economy is doing well, there's a huge unfunded tax cut, economy does better until everyone over-extends and it all comes crashing down.
Now is the time to raise taxes and get a positive budget balance, then if the economy starts to sputter you can start spending some of that money to start fixing things. The disaster of the end of the Bush presidency was massive deficits while the economy was strong. So when things collapsed there was no money to fix it.
You're saying it's as bad as the Obamacare time-bomb? So, it's not a partisan thing, it's a psychopath/politician thing, they all do it.
Except the ACA wasn't written with the expectation that expiring provisions would get renewed, they were written to help the transition to the new system.
>Taxes, some of which will hopefully be paid by these people, reduced benefits from other programs, and reduced administration in running the program.
This tired argument again?
1. These people are getting barely enough money to live on in the first place. They will not be paying taxes.
One of the reasons they don't work is working means they lose benefits. But they don't lose the UBI by working, therefore more will enter the labour force (to get extra money) and pay more taxes.
2. Just _reduced_ benefits? What happened to eliminating those altogether? Reducing won't eliminate overhead.
I don't know all the details of this implementation. But I'd assume that some would be eliminated entirely and others remain, overall a reduction in benefits paid and administration.
3. Reduced administration will not pay for the difference. Shall we do some math?
No it will not. The bulk will come from taxes. The reduced administration just makes things more efficient.
Apparently minimum cost of living is something like $15000/year in the US, so let's set UB to that level. There are 308 million people living in the US. Simple multiplication tells us we need $4.6 trillion/year to pay for UBI.
The total US federal income for 2016 was $3.3 trillion.
Remember coupled with that massive tax hike is a massive rebate in the form of the UBI.
When it all balances out it's not that different from making the tax code more progressive and giving everyone who's unemployed EI benefits. The fact these people are surviving right now suggests we're giving the necessary resources to live, the UBI just changes how we direct those resources.
And if the UBI does bring more people back into the labour force you make the country wealthier.
The Wall Street Journal pointed out that people in underdeveloped countries are now using it as a store of value since their own countries' currencies are so unstable.
I'm not sure it's useful there either.
One big problem with Bitcoins, they're very easy to lose and very easy to steal.
Bitcoin will be like diamonds in the regard that it will carry a constantly changing value. Bitcoin although called a crypto-"currency" should be considered a crypto-"stock".
That's good way to think about it. After all, Bitcoin can't be considered a substitute for currency before it becomes so stable that you can pay salaries or make other reasonable contracts based on it. And before that link to economic output is established, it has only speculative value, or no value at all (to put my neighbor's Marxist hat on).
I'm not sure how Bitcoin gets there.
If people are going to use a currency as cash they need to be paid in it, which means it needs to be a national currency. Even if it's easily convertible you want to be paid in the same dollars as the surrounding goods so you don't get hurt by the volatility.
But no country is going to adopt an existing crypto-currency as their dollar since acquiring the necessary currency would jack up the value and bankrupt them.
So, the reason the individual income tax cut is not permanent is because the DNC voted against it? Had they gotten 9 DNC Senators on board the tax cut for workers would be perm?
Sounds like we need to boot out DNC that hates middle class workers and get the GOP another 9 seats at the least so we can make it perm for us.
Yea, its the GOP that did something for the workers that is evil, while the DNC that shit on us is our friends?
Fuck off.
So your plan is a massive corporate tax cut (without removing any of the corporate deductions) AND an individual tax cut when your country is already running a huge deficit?
When do you plan on paying down that deficit?
(and it's fun how you manage to blame the Democrats for the GOP's awful tax bill)
This program is neither universal or basic.
No, it's testing a specific aspect of a universal basic income, exactly what you'd want a responsible government to do.
It's simply another welfare program.
No, a welfare program is designed to maintain the well-being of citizens, this is an experiment to see if a universal basic income will reduce unemployment.
And the money has to come from SOMEWHERE.
Taxes, some of which will hopefully be paid by these people, reduced benefits from other programs, and reduced administration in running the program.
We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
But we don't know how big that segment is, or exactly how they are distributed, this will shed light on that question.
So, all that's been created is an incentive not to achieve anything.
They already had an incentive not to achieve anything, traditional welfare programs.
What this does do is reduce some pressure to find work, but it also removes some incentives for not entering the workforce (such as losing benefits).
Take note that race is essentially the top reason the parent lists for people not leaving Finland. It's white people with blonde hair. There is little difference between that and Trump's racist comment about wanting more immigrants from Norway.
There's more than a little difference.
Extolling the positive virtues of a race is a type of stereotyping, but it's often done in the way of finding positives for each race that's stereotyped so it's not that harmful.
But Trump asking for fewer people from a black country and more people from one of the whitest countries is almost explicitly indicating a preferred race.
Raised our taxes?
I dunno about YOU, but I'm going to see MORE back on my tax returns.
And I'm not some billionaire.
Wait 10 years.
The bill made permanent tax cuts for corporations and temporary ones for individuals. The reason is that reconciliation (the rule that let them pass the bill with only 51 votes) says the bill can't raise the deficit after 10 years. So at the 10 year mark the corporate tax cut is partially paid for by a tax hike on individuals.
Of course this is fake math since the GOP doesn't actually expect the individual cuts to expire. In 10 years they expect a Democratic administration to be in power, an administration who will be faced with either letting the cuts expire (and getting blamed for raising taxes on the middle class) or renewing the cuts and finding a way to pay for them.