What I am waiting to see is Cryptolocker's descendant. [...] The software will gradually encrypt files over time. However, when an encrypted file is accessed, it will decrypt it on the fly... for a time.
Then, once it completes encrypting files, it will stop decrypting on the fly, purges the private keys it used, then demand ransom. Since this was done over a period of weeks to months, even backups stored on Mozy or other places will be locked out.
Wouldn't the backup software also get the decrypted data? Or is the ransomware treating requests by the backup software differently than requests by other programs?
The effect is the same whether it's one bank acting alone or many banks acting in concert. One dollar deposited at one bank leads to a series of loans and further deposits which eventually permit 1000 banks to make 1000 $1 loans and, all together, collect $10 worth of interest. Provided, of course, that no two individuals ever ask to withdraw "their" dollars at the same time and thus bring the whole house of cards crashing down.
Out of curiosity, do the banks really need to be different, or does money deposited by a bank's loan customer count toward that bank's deposits? It was my impression that all deposits counted and there was no need for the money to pass through many distinct banks.
I'm not really as fanatical about fractional-reserve banking as some. I consider it shady and unsound but not inherently fraudulent so long as the bank's practices are public knowledge; caveat emptor. I would prefer a clear dividing line between demand accounts, which the bank must be prepared to pay out in full at any time (full reserves), and time accounts, which should be clearly described as investments, loans to the bank which, like any loan, may not be available for withdrawal on demand and could end in default, costing you some or all of your principle. Current practice is to mix the two types in varying proportions, from interest-bearing checking accounts to CDs guaranteed against default.
You point out unpredictable deflation leads to things like the Great Depression. The problem is that predictable deflation also leads to recessions as well.
Not "unpredictable deflation", just significant decreases in the supply of money—planned or otherwise. Price deflation is not correlated with recessions in general, just in cases like the Great Depression where the supply of money underwent a significant contraction. You point out that a deliberate policy of destroying currency to manipulate its price relative to other currencies led to recessions. Well, naturally; that's what happens when you play with the currency supply, regardless of whether you're creating inflation or deflation: you send false signals, which leads to malinvestment, which destroys wealth, which leads to a recession.
BTW, in a relativity steady inflationary environment you donâ(TM)t need to find investments that beat inflation.... Real assets... value tends to increase at the same rate as inflation.
If the value is only increasing at the rate of inflation then it's not an investment, it's just savings. So I buy a house, and in ten years (ignoring taxes and maintenance costs) I still have the same house, and it's worth about the same relative to other goods as it was when I bought it. Where's the expected return? To be an investment there needs to be an expectation of a net return, not just in nominal dollars but in actual value, and for that the nominal return has to outpace inflation.
There are no reserve requirements any more, except on "demand" (checking) accounts. But that bank earns its money as much as the "guy on the net" does. As a software developer, I'm going to insist that work of the mind is just as much "earning" as work of the body.
As I said, low reserve requirements.
I have no problem with "work of the mind"—I'm a software developer too, BTW. But when you can take $1 in reserves (just enough to meet the daily demand for physical currency) and turn it into a $1000 loan, and get paid real interest on the full $1000, there's something undeniably fishy going on. If you or I tried that we'd be charged with fraud in a heartbeat. Though I suppose running a successful scam can be considered "work of the mind" if you stretch it far enough, I wouldn't consider the proceeds "earned".
No, they convince people to lend them money.
They do convince people to lend them money. However, if I convince someone to lend me a dollar, I can't turn around and convert that into a $1000 loan to someone else. If I want to collect interest on a $1000 loan, I have to actually have $1000 to lend out or be considered a fraud. The bank has a monopoly on cheap money because when they want to collect $10 in interest on a $1000 loan they only need to convince people to lend them $1, not $1000.
The inability to charge back is the #1 reason that prevents any consumer from perceiving it as a safe currency against vendor fraud. It serves no benefit to the consumer.
Nonsense. There is a mechanism for chargebacks in Bitcoin. It's known as "escrow". Given a non-reversible payment mechanism, it's trivial to add reversible transactions as a layer on top. Implementing a non-reversible payment scheme on top of reversible transactions, on the other hand, is nearly impossible. Which kind you need depends on the situation. For an individual ordering durable goods from the smaller online venders, you want escrow to protect both sides. For the provision of services or highly non-durable goods, where there is no way to recover costs in the event of a chargeback, a more permanent form of payment makes sense. Disputes in such cases need to be handled through arbitration anyway.
You've been listening to the wrong "hard money types". Jarring, unexpected changes in the money supply are a problem regardless of whether they amount to inflation or deflation. However, deflation doesn't have to be like that any more than inflation does. Proponents of hard currency tend to prefer a fixed money supply without much in the way of fractional-reserve banking. Such policies avoid both unpredictable inflation due to a central bank's monetary policy and sudden, jarring deflation due to credit contractions when banks are proven insolvent (like in America's Great Depression).
As you say, people can always factor in a consistent level of inflation or deflation in their planning. That's easy. Of course, the fact that you know you're going to lose a few percent to inflation only means that you need a correspondingly higher return from your investments; it doesn't imply that you'll actually be able to find such investments. As an investor, inflation hurts your bargaining position: when you're the one holding the perishable goods, you can't afford to wait around for a better offer.
The other problem, of course, is that inflation and deflation aren't consistent—and aren't supposed to be. In the absence of manipulation they reflect the state of the economy. Inflation means we need more capital investment to improve our ability to produce, while deflation means that we've invested enough and its time to consume. Whether manipulation makes them change when they shouldn't, or keeps them at a fixed level when they should change, the result is false signals and malinvestment.
The difference between a bank and a "random guy on the net" is that the bank can loan out money at no cost to themselves, apart from the low reserve requirements, while the guy on the net has to actually earn every single dollar he loans out.
Banks may not have a monopoly on dollars, but they do have a monopoly on cheap dollars that effectively prevents anyone else from competing in their domain.
Its not your property if you do not retain the rights afforded to property owners.
While that's true enough, so far as it goes, the taxpayers do retain the rights afforded to property owners. You don't lose the rights to your property just because someone stole it from you, even if you're powerless to do anything about it. Might does not make right.
We the people give permission to people/corporations to operate profitably amongst us...
How magnanimous of you. Guess what: they don't need your permission. Which means you don't get to attach strings or demand concessions.
If you choose to build some infrastructure without any prior arrangement, you can deny them access to it but you have no basis for charging them for it. That was your decision, not theirs; you bear the costs.
Most of us, unlike Karl Marx, do not believe you need to own something to control it - the evidence is that it is quite possible to alter the volume on someone else's stereo, or drive a stolen car.
Marx got a lot of things wrong, but he had the right idea here. While you can control something you don't own, you do need to own it to have the right to control it. That's what ownership means: the right to control. If you take control of something then you are acting as the owner, whether you have any legitimate right to do so or not. If the state claims the right to control the means of production, then the state is claiming to own the means of production. There is no meaningful distinction.
The important point is to add up the total cost that an american would have to pay in order to get the same benefits.
You're assuming that the American would want exactly those benefits. If they don't want a particular benefit, whether in general or just Denmark's particular implementation of it, the American can choose to save the money or find an alternate benefit more to his or her liking, while the Danish citizen has no choice but to pay the tax and accept whatever benefits the state chooses to provide. Fundamentally, the problem with tax-funded programs isn't their cost, it's the way they take away individuals' ability to choose how to spend their income.
Savings accounts will pay a bit less than inflation absent government meddling...
Inflation is government meddling, most of the time (excepting rare decreases in the demand for currency and non-government forms of money), though not the kind you were referring to. Savings accounts should pay a bit more than inflation, not a bit less, as you're supposed to receive a net return in exchange for letting the bank borrow and invest your funds. Without inflation, no bank could get away with letting your purchasing power depreciate over time, because no one would bother with a savings account under those terms. Inflation lends the banks additional bargaining power since it means your money is losing value anyway, and even a poor investment begins to look better than stuffing your money under your mattress. (And by "poor investment" I mean a net loss to the economy, not merely low yields, though in the end it's the same thing. On the whole, it's better for the economy to hold your money and not invest than to invest in a below-average venture, but inflation pushes people to invest even when they shouldn't just to avoid part of the inflation. This is often a stated goal of inflationary policies, to force people to invest their savings rather than "hoard", but the harmful effects are either not understood or simply ignored.)
But in any case, my point in all of this was it's a mistake to keep a significant amount of savings in cash, whether savings account, CDs, or whatever: it's a bad plan.
I don't disagree. By all means, hold as little inflationary currency as possible. It would be stupid to keep any significant portion of your wealth in assets which depreciate by design. In the end, though, that just hands the problem off to someone else—generally someone even less able to deal with it. Not everyone has enough savings to make brokerage fees worthwhile, or the time to carry out essential market research while holding down two (or more) jobs just to pay the rent. That's part of the reason the inflation tax is so regressive.
Your highly idealized government is made up of some fellow citizens. Government is force, whether you think it justified or not, and it attracts those who share an affinity for aggression. Lack of trust in these particular people does not imply lack of trust in the remainder.
You seem to think that either everyone is trustworthy, or no one is. The answer is neither: some people are trustworthy and others are not. Those who believe that aggression is a legitimate tool to control others' behavior have proven themselves untrustworthy; they are willing to harm others to further their own purposes.
I trust the people who solve their problems without aggression, who find solutions which preserve the rights of everyone involved. I do not trust those who think it legitimate to harm some for the benefit of others. Whether based on the flawed concept of "for the greater good" or some other such nonsense, it all comes down to putting your own subjective preferences and plans above others' rights. Find another way.
That's only true of physical currency, which is a nearly trivial portion of the banking and financial world. Holding a lot of physical currency is even sillier than a saving account paying 1% less than inflation.
It's not just physical currency. If you have something whose value is tied to the dollar, and not adjusted for inflation, then you're affected by it. That includes not just cash in your wallet, but also savings and checking accounts, CDs, loans, rents, annuities, other contractual payments, even some foreign currencies. When prices go up by 3% across the board, what difference does it make whether you pay for it out of your checking account or cash from your wallet? You've lost the same purchasing power either way. And while you can try to adjust for inflation, that only works if you can predict the amount in advance.
As for savings accounts which pay 1% less than inflation... have you checked the rates recently? A really good 3-year CD might pay 1.2% APY. The best I could find for a high-yield savings account was 1%, with a $10,000 minimum. Please tell me you aren't claiming that inflation is less than 2.2%—even the BLS says that the CPI increased by around 2.23% annually from 2003 to 2013. That's only tracking changes in consumer prices, not the difference between where prices are vs. where they would have been without the inflation in the money supply; if prices would have decreased on their own, the actual loss is even greater.
Inflation steals value from past hard work. Deflation steals value from future work. And you canÃ(TM)t have zero inflation.
The only "stolen value" is the tax, the actual worth and usefulness of what's owned isn't directly affected by devaluing the currency.
No, that's not quite true. There is another sense in which inflation steals value, which only applies when the inflation is the result of an increase in the currency supply and not a decrease in the demand for currency. Namely, the entity that produces the new money (essentially for free, unless we're talking about a commodity like gold) gets to spend it and receive valuable goods and services at the expense of everyone else holding the currency, or contractual claims on currency, prior to the inflation.
It's all well and good to say that it's silly to hold onto cash savings in an inflationary economy, but at any given time someone will be left holding the cash, and the net loss to everyone but the central bank is the same whether it's one person holding a large amount of cash or many people each holding small amounts.
If we can't trust our government, then we can't trust each other.
Oh really? I think you'll find that it's quite easy to trust the majority of our fellow human beings, those who haven't tried to set themselves up in a position of false authority, while simultaneously refusing to trust governments or other criminal organizations trying to rule over us.
Almost everyone does need health care at some point, but not everyone has above-average risk factors. Those who do should expect to pay more for insurance, not because they "deserve" hardship, but simply because their expected cost is higher.
The right way to handle the case you described would be pre-conception insurance against birth defects. You and your partner undergo some tests and agree to pay a fixed amount based on your risk factors, and if anything goes wrong the insurer covers the cost of treatment.
Insurance is fundamentally equivalent to betting that something will go wrong. The default state without insurance is equivalent to betting that everything will go right; an opposing bet balances out the extremes, both good and bad. Requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions without a corresponding increase in premiums amounts to letting people place their bets after the race is finished, on the same terms as those who bet before the race. It would be more honest, not to mention more efficient, to just pay the health care costs directly out of tax money (a la Medicaid) rather than perverting the concept of insurance into some kind of pseudo-charity. At least then people could see where their money is going.
the support of healthcare is by definition needs to be by those that do not require healthcare at the time
Your logic is indeed simple, and dead wrong. While, yes, the people actively earning the money to pay for health care are not generally the ones who have an pressing need for it, they are the ones who may have a need for it in the near future. You pay for insurance now, while you're healthy, because your health may take an unexpected turn for the worse. The amount you pay is supposed to correlate with actuarial risk, the probability and expected cost of each such event. Real insurance is not a wealth transfer scheme, or a subsidy, or charity. Real insurance does not require anyone to be forced to participate.
Any quantity over one is plural, including 1.5 hours. For that matter, while fractions between zero and one are generally written in the singular form (1/2 hour), the equivalent decimal forms are typically plural (0.5 hours). Zero is always plural. Really, the only quantity guaranteed to use the singular form is exactly one.
That said, you're correct that the quantity-free "hours" would generally imply at least two hours, regardless of the fact that 90 minutes converted to hours would be written with a plural. That's because it doesn't include potential fractions of an hour, only whole numbers.
Putting aside the fact that Wikipedia is not a primary source, your own quotes support my position: atheism is the absence of belief in deities, not necessarily belief in their absence except "in a narrower sense", what is sometimes referred to as "strong" or "positive" atheism. No doubt there are a few atheists who actively believe in the non-existence of deities. For most, though, it's simply the default position taken for anything lacking supporting evidence, and not an act of faith.
If you read past the first few sentences of the articles you quoted, you'd find pretty much exactly what I said in my previous post. To put it simply, if (like most agnostics) you don't actively believe in a deity, and at the same time (like most atheists) you don't believe you have certain knowledge that no such deity exists, then you can be describe by a reasonable person as both an atheist and an agnostic. Neither term is anywhere near a precision instrument, and there is no clear line of demarcation between atheist and agnostic.
Also, I was not referring to the Gnostic religion, just the more general concept that one has special knowledge regarding the existence of deities—the same sense used by the person who coined the term "agnostic" not so very long ago. That should have been obvious from context. Bonus points for knowing that bit of trivia, though.
... but I do agree that atheism is a religion. After all, how can one believe that a supernatural power does not exist except through faith?
There's your problem, right at the beginning. You're assuming that atheism means a belief that no supernatural power exists, rather than merely the lack of belief in the existence of a supernatural power. Lack of belief does not require faith and is not a religion any more than not collecting stamps is a hobby (to coin a phrase).
You refer to agnosticism "in its simplest form". The simplest form of atheism is the absence of belief, not belief in absence. To be completely general, there are actually four possible combinations: gnostic theist, agnostic theist, gnostic atheist, and agnostic atheist. An atheist can be gnostic or agnostic, and an agnostic can be theist or atheist. Using either word alone inevitably leads to confusion.
The term "agnostic" refers almost exclusively to agnostic atheists, while "atheist" by itself is more flexible. In general practice "atheist" also refers to the agnostic atheist—just with different emphasis (lack of evidence for a supernatural being, vs. lack of knowledge). Of the two, the emphasis on lack of evidence is more scientific. We don't emphasize how little we know about invisible pink unicorns when faced with the complete lack of evidence in favor of their existence. We require evidence of existence, not evidence of absence.
You really only need to worry about confirmations if you're planning on delivering the good or service immediately and have little or no chance of recovering the lost value in the event the payment falls through. In these cases you can generally afford to wait for 3-6 confirmations, depending on the size of the transaction.
If you're delivering physical goods from an online store, you have the recipient's street address on file and will probably have more than six confirmations by the time you actually ship the product anyway.
In a brick-and-mortar store the buyer can't expect to get very far away before the transaction confirms at least once, and you probably have their face recorded on your security tapes in the event something goes wrong. You could also require a photo ID.
A hosting or VPS provider isn't risking much by providing the first 10-20 minutes of service on credit before the transaction is confirmed.
More generally, if you also accept credit cards, the risk of a successful double-spending attack with Bitcoin is significantly less than the risk of a chargeback from a credit card up to several weeks (or months) after the transaction is supposedly completed. Even checks and ACH transfers are reversible long after the fact, though not as easily.
Aggression is pretty easy to define, really. If you use force against someone in any way other than as a proportional response to force they have used, or are in the process of using, against either you or someone whose interests you represent (by mutual consent), then you are an aggressor.
The U.S. would not be an aggressor for assisting its allies in their defense against Hitler. On the other hand, invading a country for its oil, without provocation, would obviously be an aggressive act.
Given the US is one of the biggest arms dealers around the world regardless of side I think YES you can say the same about engineers.
The U.S. is a major exporter of arms, but it restricts the export of the most effective weapons, reserving them for its own use. If you're working on something which isn't restricted for export (to anyone) you can claim not to discriminate. The same is not true if you're working on something with limited distribution. And thanks to general export bans to certain countries, you would be hard-pressed to find any weapon which isn't restricted in some way.
Saying an engineer shouldn't design a better weapon is like saying a doctor shouldn't treat a wounded soldier.
Ethical doctors treat the wounded on both sides. Can most (military) weapon designers make the same claim?
I see nothing unethical about designing or manufacturing weapons for defensive use, so long as you sell them indiscriminately to anyone in need of defense. Knowingly designing or manufacturing weapons for use by an aggressor, on the other hand, would make you complicit—much like selling a weapon to someone knowing that they plan to use it to rob a bank or commit a murder.
Slashdot Mirror
What I am waiting to see is Cryptolocker's descendant. [...] The software will gradually encrypt files over time. However, when an encrypted file is accessed, it will decrypt it on the fly... for a time.
Then, once it completes encrypting files, it will stop decrypting on the fly, purges the private keys it used, then demand ransom. Since this was done over a period of weeks to months, even backups stored on Mozy or other places will be locked out.
Wouldn't the backup software also get the decrypted data? Or is the ransomware treating requests by the backup software differently than requests by other programs?
The effect is the same whether it's one bank acting alone or many banks acting in concert. One dollar deposited at one bank leads to a series of loans and further deposits which eventually permit 1000 banks to make 1000 $1 loans and, all together, collect $10 worth of interest. Provided, of course, that no two individuals ever ask to withdraw "their" dollars at the same time and thus bring the whole house of cards crashing down.
Out of curiosity, do the banks really need to be different, or does money deposited by a bank's loan customer count toward that bank's deposits? It was my impression that all deposits counted and there was no need for the money to pass through many distinct banks.
I'm not really as fanatical about fractional-reserve banking as some. I consider it shady and unsound but not inherently fraudulent so long as the bank's practices are public knowledge; caveat emptor. I would prefer a clear dividing line between demand accounts, which the bank must be prepared to pay out in full at any time (full reserves), and time accounts, which should be clearly described as investments, loans to the bank which, like any loan, may not be available for withdrawal on demand and could end in default, costing you some or all of your principle. Current practice is to mix the two types in varying proportions, from interest-bearing checking accounts to CDs guaranteed against default.
You point out unpredictable deflation leads to things like the Great Depression. The problem is that predictable deflation also leads to recessions as well.
Not "unpredictable deflation", just significant decreases in the supply of money—planned or otherwise. Price deflation is not correlated with recessions in general, just in cases like the Great Depression where the supply of money underwent a significant contraction. You point out that a deliberate policy of destroying currency to manipulate its price relative to other currencies led to recessions. Well, naturally; that's what happens when you play with the currency supply, regardless of whether you're creating inflation or deflation: you send false signals, which leads to malinvestment, which destroys wealth, which leads to a recession.
BTW, in a relativity steady inflationary environment you donâ(TM)t need to find investments that beat inflation.... Real assets ... value tends to increase at the same rate as inflation.
If the value is only increasing at the rate of inflation then it's not an investment, it's just savings. So I buy a house, and in ten years (ignoring taxes and maintenance costs) I still have the same house, and it's worth about the same relative to other goods as it was when I bought it. Where's the expected return? To be an investment there needs to be an expectation of a net return, not just in nominal dollars but in actual value, and for that the nominal return has to outpace inflation.
There are no reserve requirements any more, except on "demand" (checking) accounts. But that bank earns its money as much as the "guy on the net" does. As a software developer, I'm going to insist that work of the mind is just as much "earning" as work of the body.
As I said, low reserve requirements.
I have no problem with "work of the mind"—I'm a software developer too, BTW. But when you can take $1 in reserves (just enough to meet the daily demand for physical currency) and turn it into a $1000 loan, and get paid real interest on the full $1000, there's something undeniably fishy going on. If you or I tried that we'd be charged with fraud in a heartbeat. Though I suppose running a successful scam can be considered "work of the mind" if you stretch it far enough, I wouldn't consider the proceeds "earned".
No, they convince people to lend them money.
They do convince people to lend them money. However, if I convince someone to lend me a dollar, I can't turn around and convert that into a $1000 loan to someone else. If I want to collect interest on a $1000 loan, I have to actually have $1000 to lend out or be considered a fraud. The bank has a monopoly on cheap money because when they want to collect $10 in interest on a $1000 loan they only need to convince people to lend them $1, not $1000.
The inability to charge back is the #1 reason that prevents any consumer from perceiving it as a safe currency against vendor fraud. It serves no benefit to the consumer.
Nonsense. There is a mechanism for chargebacks in Bitcoin. It's known as "escrow". Given a non-reversible payment mechanism, it's trivial to add reversible transactions as a layer on top. Implementing a non-reversible payment scheme on top of reversible transactions, on the other hand, is nearly impossible. Which kind you need depends on the situation. For an individual ordering durable goods from the smaller online venders, you want escrow to protect both sides. For the provision of services or highly non-durable goods, where there is no way to recover costs in the event of a chargeback, a more permanent form of payment makes sense. Disputes in such cases need to be handled through arbitration anyway.
You've been listening to the wrong "hard money types". Jarring, unexpected changes in the money supply are a problem regardless of whether they amount to inflation or deflation. However, deflation doesn't have to be like that any more than inflation does. Proponents of hard currency tend to prefer a fixed money supply without much in the way of fractional-reserve banking. Such policies avoid both unpredictable inflation due to a central bank's monetary policy and sudden, jarring deflation due to credit contractions when banks are proven insolvent (like in America's Great Depression).
As you say, people can always factor in a consistent level of inflation or deflation in their planning. That's easy. Of course, the fact that you know you're going to lose a few percent to inflation only means that you need a correspondingly higher return from your investments; it doesn't imply that you'll actually be able to find such investments. As an investor, inflation hurts your bargaining position: when you're the one holding the perishable goods, you can't afford to wait around for a better offer.
The other problem, of course, is that inflation and deflation aren't consistent—and aren't supposed to be. In the absence of manipulation they reflect the state of the economy. Inflation means we need more capital investment to improve our ability to produce, while deflation means that we've invested enough and its time to consume. Whether manipulation makes them change when they shouldn't, or keeps them at a fixed level when they should change, the result is false signals and malinvestment.
The difference between a bank and a "random guy on the net" is that the bank can loan out money at no cost to themselves, apart from the low reserve requirements, while the guy on the net has to actually earn every single dollar he loans out.
Banks may not have a monopoly on dollars, but they do have a monopoly on cheap dollars that effectively prevents anyone else from competing in their domain.
Its not your property if you do not retain the rights afforded to property owners.
While that's true enough, so far as it goes, the taxpayers do retain the rights afforded to property owners. You don't lose the rights to your property just because someone stole it from you, even if you're powerless to do anything about it. Might does not make right.
We the people give permission to people/corporations to operate profitably amongst us...
How magnanimous of you. Guess what: they don't need your permission. Which means you don't get to attach strings or demand concessions.
If you choose to build some infrastructure without any prior arrangement, you can deny them access to it but you have no basis for charging them for it. That was your decision, not theirs; you bear the costs.
Most of us, unlike Karl Marx, do not believe you need to own something to control it - the evidence is that it is quite possible to alter the volume on someone else's stereo, or drive a stolen car.
Marx got a lot of things wrong, but he had the right idea here. While you can control something you don't own, you do need to own it to have the right to control it. That's what ownership means: the right to control. If you take control of something then you are acting as the owner, whether you have any legitimate right to do so or not. If the state claims the right to control the means of production, then the state is claiming to own the means of production. There is no meaningful distinction.
The important point is to add up the total cost that an american would have to pay in order to get the same benefits.
You're assuming that the American would want exactly those benefits. If they don't want a particular benefit, whether in general or just Denmark's particular implementation of it, the American can choose to save the money or find an alternate benefit more to his or her liking, while the Danish citizen has no choice but to pay the tax and accept whatever benefits the state chooses to provide. Fundamentally, the problem with tax-funded programs isn't their cost, it's the way they take away individuals' ability to choose how to spend their income.
Savings accounts will pay a bit less than inflation absent government meddling...
Inflation is government meddling, most of the time (excepting rare decreases in the demand for currency and non-government forms of money), though not the kind you were referring to. Savings accounts should pay a bit more than inflation, not a bit less, as you're supposed to receive a net return in exchange for letting the bank borrow and invest your funds. Without inflation, no bank could get away with letting your purchasing power depreciate over time, because no one would bother with a savings account under those terms. Inflation lends the banks additional bargaining power since it means your money is losing value anyway, and even a poor investment begins to look better than stuffing your money under your mattress. (And by "poor investment" I mean a net loss to the economy, not merely low yields, though in the end it's the same thing. On the whole, it's better for the economy to hold your money and not invest than to invest in a below-average venture, but inflation pushes people to invest even when they shouldn't just to avoid part of the inflation. This is often a stated goal of inflationary policies, to force people to invest their savings rather than "hoard", but the harmful effects are either not understood or simply ignored.)
But in any case, my point in all of this was it's a mistake to keep a significant amount of savings in cash, whether savings account, CDs, or whatever: it's a bad plan.
I don't disagree. By all means, hold as little inflationary currency as possible. It would be stupid to keep any significant portion of your wealth in assets which depreciate by design. In the end, though, that just hands the problem off to someone else—generally someone even less able to deal with it. Not everyone has enough savings to make brokerage fees worthwhile, or the time to carry out essential market research while holding down two (or more) jobs just to pay the rent. That's part of the reason the inflation tax is so regressive.
Your highly idealized government is made up of some fellow citizens. Government is force, whether you think it justified or not, and it attracts those who share an affinity for aggression. Lack of trust in these particular people does not imply lack of trust in the remainder.
You seem to think that either everyone is trustworthy, or no one is. The answer is neither: some people are trustworthy and others are not. Those who believe that aggression is a legitimate tool to control others' behavior have proven themselves untrustworthy; they are willing to harm others to further their own purposes.
I trust the people who solve their problems without aggression, who find solutions which preserve the rights of everyone involved. I do not trust those who think it legitimate to harm some for the benefit of others. Whether based on the flawed concept of "for the greater good" or some other such nonsense, it all comes down to putting your own subjective preferences and plans above others' rights. Find another way.
That's only true of physical currency, which is a nearly trivial portion of the banking and financial world. Holding a lot of physical currency is even sillier than a saving account paying 1% less than inflation.
It's not just physical currency. If you have something whose value is tied to the dollar, and not adjusted for inflation, then you're affected by it. That includes not just cash in your wallet, but also savings and checking accounts, CDs, loans, rents, annuities, other contractual payments, even some foreign currencies. When prices go up by 3% across the board, what difference does it make whether you pay for it out of your checking account or cash from your wallet? You've lost the same purchasing power either way. And while you can try to adjust for inflation, that only works if you can predict the amount in advance.
As for savings accounts which pay 1% less than inflation... have you checked the rates recently? A really good 3-year CD might pay 1.2% APY. The best I could find for a high-yield savings account was 1%, with a $10,000 minimum. Please tell me you aren't claiming that inflation is less than 2.2%—even the BLS says that the CPI increased by around 2.23% annually from 2003 to 2013. That's only tracking changes in consumer prices, not the difference between where prices are vs. where they would have been without the inflation in the money supply; if prices would have decreased on their own, the actual loss is even greater.
Inflation steals value from past hard work. Deflation steals value from future work. And you canÃ(TM)t have zero inflation.
The only "stolen value" is the tax, the actual worth and usefulness of what's owned isn't directly affected by devaluing the currency.
No, that's not quite true. There is another sense in which inflation steals value, which only applies when the inflation is the result of an increase in the currency supply and not a decrease in the demand for currency. Namely, the entity that produces the new money (essentially for free, unless we're talking about a commodity like gold) gets to spend it and receive valuable goods and services at the expense of everyone else holding the currency, or contractual claims on currency, prior to the inflation.
It's all well and good to say that it's silly to hold onto cash savings in an inflationary economy, but at any given time someone will be left holding the cash, and the net loss to everyone but the central bank is the same whether it's one person holding a large amount of cash or many people each holding small amounts.
If we can't trust our government, then we can't trust each other.
Oh really? I think you'll find that it's quite easy to trust the majority of our fellow human beings, those who haven't tried to set themselves up in a position of false authority, while simultaneously refusing to trust governments or other criminal organizations trying to rule over us.
Almost everyone does need health care at some point, but not everyone has above-average risk factors. Those who do should expect to pay more for insurance, not because they "deserve" hardship, but simply because their expected cost is higher.
The right way to handle the case you described would be pre-conception insurance against birth defects. You and your partner undergo some tests and agree to pay a fixed amount based on your risk factors, and if anything goes wrong the insurer covers the cost of treatment.
Insurance is fundamentally equivalent to betting that something will go wrong. The default state without insurance is equivalent to betting that everything will go right; an opposing bet balances out the extremes, both good and bad. Requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions without a corresponding increase in premiums amounts to letting people place their bets after the race is finished, on the same terms as those who bet before the race. It would be more honest, not to mention more efficient, to just pay the health care costs directly out of tax money (a la Medicaid) rather than perverting the concept of insurance into some kind of pseudo-charity. At least then people could see where their money is going.
the support of healthcare is by definition needs to be by those that do not require healthcare at the time
Your logic is indeed simple, and dead wrong. While, yes, the people actively earning the money to pay for health care are not generally the ones who have an pressing need for it, they are the ones who may have a need for it in the near future. You pay for insurance now, while you're healthy, because your health may take an unexpected turn for the worse. The amount you pay is supposed to correlate with actuarial risk, the probability and expected cost of each such event. Real insurance is not a wealth transfer scheme, or a subsidy, or charity. Real insurance does not require anyone to be forced to participate.
Any quantity over one is plural, including 1.5 hours. For that matter, while fractions between zero and one are generally written in the singular form (1/2 hour), the equivalent decimal forms are typically plural (0.5 hours). Zero is always plural. Really, the only quantity guaranteed to use the singular form is exactly one.
That said, you're correct that the quantity-free "hours" would generally imply at least two hours, regardless of the fact that 90 minutes converted to hours would be written with a plural. That's because it doesn't include potential fractions of an hour, only whole numbers.
Putting aside the fact that Wikipedia is not a primary source, your own quotes support my position: atheism is the absence of belief in deities, not necessarily belief in their absence except "in a narrower sense", what is sometimes referred to as "strong" or "positive" atheism. No doubt there are a few atheists who actively believe in the non-existence of deities. For most, though, it's simply the default position taken for anything lacking supporting evidence, and not an act of faith.
If you read past the first few sentences of the articles you quoted, you'd find pretty much exactly what I said in my previous post. To put it simply, if (like most agnostics) you don't actively believe in a deity, and at the same time (like most atheists) you don't believe you have certain knowledge that no such deity exists, then you can be describe by a reasonable person as both an atheist and an agnostic. Neither term is anywhere near a precision instrument, and there is no clear line of demarcation between atheist and agnostic.
Also, I was not referring to the Gnostic religion, just the more general concept that one has special knowledge regarding the existence of deities—the same sense used by the person who coined the term "agnostic" not so very long ago. That should have been obvious from context. Bonus points for knowing that bit of trivia, though.
... but I do agree that atheism is a religion. After all, how can one believe that a supernatural power does not exist except through faith?
There's your problem, right at the beginning. You're assuming that atheism means a belief that no supernatural power exists, rather than merely the lack of belief in the existence of a supernatural power. Lack of belief does not require faith and is not a religion any more than not collecting stamps is a hobby (to coin a phrase).
You refer to agnosticism "in its simplest form". The simplest form of atheism is the absence of belief, not belief in absence. To be completely general, there are actually four possible combinations: gnostic theist, agnostic theist, gnostic atheist, and agnostic atheist. An atheist can be gnostic or agnostic, and an agnostic can be theist or atheist. Using either word alone inevitably leads to confusion.
The term "agnostic" refers almost exclusively to agnostic atheists, while "atheist" by itself is more flexible. In general practice "atheist" also refers to the agnostic atheist—just with different emphasis (lack of evidence for a supernatural being, vs. lack of knowledge). Of the two, the emphasis on lack of evidence is more scientific. We don't emphasize how little we know about invisible pink unicorns when faced with the complete lack of evidence in favor of their existence. We require evidence of existence, not evidence of absence.
You really only need to worry about confirmations if you're planning on delivering the good or service immediately and have little or no chance of recovering the lost value in the event the payment falls through. In these cases you can generally afford to wait for 3-6 confirmations, depending on the size of the transaction.
More generally, if you also accept credit cards, the risk of a successful double-spending attack with Bitcoin is significantly less than the risk of a chargeback from a credit card up to several weeks (or months) after the transaction is supposedly completed. Even checks and ACH transfers are reversible long after the fact, though not as easily.
Aggression is pretty easy to define, really. If you use force against someone in any way other than as a proportional response to force they have used, or are in the process of using, against either you or someone whose interests you represent (by mutual consent), then you are an aggressor.
The U.S. would not be an aggressor for assisting its allies in their defense against Hitler. On the other hand, invading a country for its oil, without provocation, would obviously be an aggressive act.
Given the US is one of the biggest arms dealers around the world regardless of side I think YES you can say the same about engineers.
The U.S. is a major exporter of arms, but it restricts the export of the most effective weapons, reserving them for its own use. If you're working on something which isn't restricted for export (to anyone) you can claim not to discriminate. The same is not true if you're working on something with limited distribution. And thanks to general export bans to certain countries, you would be hard-pressed to find any weapon which isn't restricted in some way.
and is not in direct conflict with the defense limitations of their own/home nation
Exactly: they discriminate. They don't sell weapons to other countries which could realistically stand up to aggression by their own.
Saying an engineer shouldn't design a better weapon is like saying a doctor shouldn't treat a wounded soldier.
Ethical doctors treat the wounded on both sides. Can most (military) weapon designers make the same claim?
I see nothing unethical about designing or manufacturing weapons for defensive use, so long as you sell them indiscriminately to anyone in need of defense. Knowingly designing or manufacturing weapons for use by an aggressor, on the other hand, would make you complicit—much like selling a weapon to someone knowing that they plan to use it to rob a bank or commit a murder.