Note that TFA simply asked if people thought they were better off than two generations ago, rather than doing some type of measurement.
Whether or not someone feels better off than they think they would have been 50 years ago is a purely subjective judgement. You might be able to prove that people actually are better off in terms of wealth, health etc. but it is still possible that they feel worse off despite this due to divisive politics, terrorist threats, mass immigration etc.
When it comes to how people feel the only practical measure is to ask them and trust their responses. A survey like this is a measurement of that subjective feeling.
The knights templar didn't give out their own currency, they gave out credit notes.
...which is exactly what government currency used to be when countries were on the gold standard. UK notes even used to have on them "I promise to pay the bearer on demand..." as a reflection of that (you actually used to be able to go into the Bank of England and demand your gold although that has not been true for a long time).
the only reason to do that with bitcoin instead of dollars or euro is because regulations hadn't caught up to bitcoin yet.
No, the reason to do it is that even if regulations do catch up with bitcoin there is nothing the government can really do to prevent you from making a transaction. Hence the usual means that governments use to restrict movement of currency, such as preventing banks from moving money or handing out cash, simply do not work for bitcoin because there is no bank to restrict. I suppose they could make such transactions illegal but even then all you have to do is leave and complete the transaction in another country.
I agree that bitcoin is not very useful for this at the moment but cryptocurrencies are still in their infancy. If the volatility settles down then bitcoin and its ilk will be fantastic at this. Whether they can go further and be used for everyday transactions certainly remains to be seen though.
None of those examples seems to support your position. You didn't spend Templar credit notes, you traded them in for local currency if you wanted to spend some. It was a way of transporting money. Bitcoin's actual use seems similar:
That was exactly my position. You use bitcoin to store and transport money and you can only do that if you trust that it will be worth something at some point later in time when you want to redeem it. Governments are not capable of providing this trust on a global stage and so, in the sphere that bitcoin operates it is at least as trustworthy as any government-backed currency.
Sorry - that should be 135 shuttle missions - I used the number of crew instead of the number of missions. This makes the statistics even worse at about a 1% failure rate. Would you get on a plane if it had a 1% chance of blowing up due to engine failure?
Yes with an enormous budget and an entire ground control room staffed with engineers to monitor everything to stop things exploding. Even with this two of 833 Space shuttle launches ended in disaster although only one is attributable to a rocket failure. However even one failure in 833 launches would mean huge numbers of plane crashes every single day. Liquid hydrogen fuelled rockets are not in anyway a viable alternative to the modern jet engine.
Currency that is backed by the power of a government is far more reliable than an abstract currency like bitcoin.
That's certainly true in recent history but not if you look back further back. For example, the Knights Templar had an international banking system which allowed pilgrims to deposit cash in their home country, carry a letter of credit and then withdraw the cash when they got to Jerusalem. This was replaced in the 16th century by private banks allowing merchants to purchase notes in a private currency called "ecu de marc" which they could then travel with and convert into the local currency wherever they were going.
Indeed it seems that bitcoin is just the latest in a long line of private innovations which cover the one thing which individual governments are no good at: providing a currency which is trusted globally. For such a currency to work you cannot trust any one government because it is unlikely to protect the interests of non-citizens. So I don't see bitcoin as heralding any shift in trust it is just technology coming up with a new solution to an old problem. Indeed the advantage of such a global currency is that it is less prone to the power of any one government and we have seen this happen with people in Greece and Cyprus moving money into bitcoin to escape government imposed currency controls during financial crises there.
Seriously 47? I call bullshit, there have to be more Russian trolls on twitter at any given second.
I suspect that just stopped creating more once they realized that they could not possibly do a better job in dividing Britain than the Conservative party was doing all by itself. They are so divided that recently they even threatened to sue their own MPs.
I've thought about this exact issue and my conclusion was that hydrogen fuel cells is the best alternative based on current technology.
The problem with this is that fuel cells generate electricity so you are now limiting yourself to a propeller aircraft which will be a lot slower than current jet technology. Even if you develop a hydrogen jet engine storing the fuel it needs is currently something we do not have the technology for since high pressure tanks are extremely heavy since they are metal and carbon fibre ones have far lower pressures.
It's certainly possible that there could be technological solutions to these problems before 2040 but isn't the sensible thing to develop the technology first and THEN motivate the switch to it by passing laws. Picking some arbitrary timescale and enshrining it in law is just daft when meeting the deadline depends on something over which you have no control.
Only until they realize that there are many non-fuel related uses of oil such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, clothing/fabrics, asphalt etc. Then there is the question about how to power their aircraft.
No it isn't. The parity of both seven and eight is the same:
Eight in binary = 1000, containing an odd number of 1s
Seven in binary = 0111, also containing an odd number of 1s
The set up should be "What goes pieces of nice, pieces of nine", as:
Nine in binary = 1001, containing an even number of 1s
I agree with your point that Christianity at the time was a de facto standard and everyone pretty much had to be Christian on the surface in order to function. However, this does not explain why, out of all the myriad religions in the world at the time, did only Christianity foster the development of science?
Technologically Europe was behind both the Muslim and Chinese and yet not only leapt past them but did so spectacularly that they have only just caught up recently. It's hard to believe that the education, free exchange of ideas and work ethic that Christianity enabled and encouraged had nothing to do with this.
I thought you were no longer allowed to use that term. How about "fact-based according to a someone who admits he doesn't know what he is talking about"?
My wild guess is for Christianity to have slowed scientific progress by ~1500 years.
Really? Back in the day science was a product of Christianity. The belief that nature was all ruled and ordered by god lead various clergy to look for that order which in turn lead to the development of science. Many early scientists held religious positions since, unless they were from a wealthy family, this was the only way to get the education and the time and support required to be able to perform their studies.
For example, Oxford and Cambridge dons were all originally clergy and when they retired they took up positions as vicars around the UK. Bacon, who gave us the very idea of the scientific method, was a staunch Christian and Newton even wasted time trying to figure out the date of the rapture from the bible (IIRC he came up with 2060 so we haven't got too long to wait!;-).
Christianity may have restricted and held back some areas of science in the past but let's not forget that its overall impact on science has been such a positive one that it is not even clear that we would have a modern concept of science without it. The conflict between religion and science in modern times is fuelled by an ignorance of both and seems to be primarily a US-based phenomenon although it is sadly starting to spread.
If you hate science because it conflicts with your religious beliefs...
I don't think this has anything to do with religious belief. I think it is due to a dangerous mix of ignorance (partly willful and partly due to lack of intellectual capacity) and short-sighted financial self-interest. If Trump and co were capable of understanding science and were open-minded enough to realize that there is a lot of money to be made developing green technology they would be cheering science on, not desperately trying to hide and/or ignore the truth of it.
Creation of $300B in bitcoin won't help the world to feed one more mouth.
Neither will the creation of one more video game or the invention of some new beauty product. People invest money in lots of useless things, why should Bitcoin be any different?
Flying nuclear reactors are never a clever idea. Fukushima produced detectable nuclear contamination across the entire Pacific ocean due to a leak. How much worse will it be if the containment vessel shatters due to a high speed impact? Plus, even if they spend most of their time over the ocean they have to land somewhere and a crash on land will cause a lot of contamination. The technology is interesting but let's hope they are clever and stick to land and sea-based applications.
Canada exports a lot of wood and paper products so I would expect that Europe gets a lot from there or other, similar locations given the high price of land in Europe and the vast areas of wilderness filled with renewable trees in places like Canada. High quality, archive paper is made from cotton and other fibres because it does not contain lignin and so will not degrade with time. However paperback books, printer paper, newspapers, tissues, paper/cardboard packaging etc. are almost certainly pure wood products. I'm not sure how much is made from recycled clothes anymore though since our clothes now contain a lot of artificial fibres.
...until this same idiot finds out that you can order magnifying glasses from Amazon without even a fake prescription or any requirement to show a physics qualification. These are far more dangerous than a contact lens: you can start fires with them and even use them to read the small print most companies don't want you to see.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that TFA simply asked if people thought they were better off than two generations ago, rather than doing some type of measurement.
Whether or not someone feels better off than they think they would have been 50 years ago is a purely subjective judgement. You might be able to prove that people actually are better off in terms of wealth, health etc. but it is still possible that they feel worse off despite this due to divisive politics, terrorist threats, mass immigration etc.
When it comes to how people feel the only practical measure is to ask them and trust their responses. A survey like this is a measurement of that subjective feeling.
The knights templar didn't give out their own currency, they gave out credit notes.
the only reason to do that with bitcoin instead of dollars or euro is because regulations hadn't caught up to bitcoin yet.
No, the reason to do it is that even if regulations do catch up with bitcoin there is nothing the government can really do to prevent you from making a transaction. Hence the usual means that governments use to restrict movement of currency, such as preventing banks from moving money or handing out cash, simply do not work for bitcoin because there is no bank to restrict. I suppose they could make such transactions illegal but even then all you have to do is leave and complete the transaction in another country.
I agree that bitcoin is not very useful for this at the moment but cryptocurrencies are still in their infancy. If the volatility settles down then bitcoin and its ilk will be fantastic at this. Whether they can go further and be used for everyday transactions certainly remains to be seen though.
None of those examples seems to support your position. You didn't spend Templar credit notes, you traded them in for local currency if you wanted to spend some. It was a way of transporting money. Bitcoin's actual use seems similar:
That was exactly my position. You use bitcoin to store and transport money and you can only do that if you trust that it will be worth something at some point later in time when you want to redeem it. Governments are not capable of providing this trust on a global stage and so, in the sphere that bitcoin operates it is at least as trustworthy as any government-backed currency.
Sorry - that should be 135 shuttle missions - I used the number of crew instead of the number of missions. This makes the statistics even worse at about a 1% failure rate. Would you get on a plane if it had a 1% chance of blowing up due to engine failure?
Yes with an enormous budget and an entire ground control room staffed with engineers to monitor everything to stop things exploding. Even with this two of 833 Space shuttle launches ended in disaster although only one is attributable to a rocket failure. However even one failure in 833 launches would mean huge numbers of plane crashes every single day. Liquid hydrogen fuelled rockets are not in anyway a viable alternative to the modern jet engine.
Currency that is backed by the power of a government is far more reliable than an abstract currency like bitcoin.
That's certainly true in recent history but not if you look back further back. For example, the Knights Templar had an international banking system which allowed pilgrims to deposit cash in their home country, carry a letter of credit and then withdraw the cash when they got to Jerusalem. This was replaced in the 16th century by private banks allowing merchants to purchase notes in a private currency called "ecu de marc" which they could then travel with and convert into the local currency wherever they were going.
Indeed it seems that bitcoin is just the latest in a long line of private innovations which cover the one thing which individual governments are no good at: providing a currency which is trusted globally. For such a currency to work you cannot trust any one government because it is unlikely to protect the interests of non-citizens. So I don't see bitcoin as heralding any shift in trust it is just technology coming up with a new solution to an old problem. Indeed the advantage of such a global currency is that it is less prone to the power of any one government and we have seen this happen with people in Greece and Cyprus moving money into bitcoin to escape government imposed currency controls during financial crises there.
Seriously 47? I call bullshit, there have to be more Russian trolls on twitter at any given second.
I suspect that just stopped creating more once they realized that they could not possibly do a better job in dividing Britain than the Conservative party was doing all by itself. They are so divided that recently they even threatened to sue their own MPs.
I've thought about this exact issue and my conclusion was that hydrogen fuel cells is the best alternative based on current technology.
The problem with this is that fuel cells generate electricity so you are now limiting yourself to a propeller aircraft which will be a lot slower than current jet technology. Even if you develop a hydrogen jet engine storing the fuel it needs is currently something we do not have the technology for since high pressure tanks are extremely heavy since they are metal and carbon fibre ones have far lower pressures.
It's certainly possible that there could be technological solutions to these problems before 2040 but isn't the sensible thing to develop the technology first and THEN motivate the switch to it by passing laws. Picking some arbitrary timescale and enshrining it in law is just daft when meeting the deadline depends on something over which you have no control.
Only until they realize that there are many non-fuel related uses of oil such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, clothing/fabrics, asphalt etc. Then there is the question about how to power their aircraft.
Given the prices they now charge a more honest slogan would be:
It just works...for us.
If it crashes in the ocean the radioactive stuff will freeze and be easily recoverable (or forgotten).
Try googling "fukushima radiation map" to see how wrong you can be.
Why are you discriminating against people who don't know what they're talking about?
I wasn't, I was just stating the facts.....ah sorry now I see where I went wrong!
Surely a Tolkien Ring, no?
Wouldn't that be ones using a Gandalf box?
No it isn't. The parity of both seven and eight is the same: Eight in binary = 1000, containing an odd number of 1s Seven in binary = 0111, also containing an odd number of 1s The set up should be "What goes pieces of nice, pieces of nine", as: Nine in binary = 1001, containing an even number of 1s
So I guess this is what you call a parody error?
Ajit Pai is not only incompetent... he's also a complete clown.
Exactly. So people are getting their Star Wars analogy wrong when they compare him to Darth Vader. This guy is Jar-jar Binks.
I agree with your point that Christianity at the time was a de facto standard and everyone pretty much had to be Christian on the surface in order to function. However, this does not explain why, out of all the myriad religions in the world at the time, did only Christianity foster the development of science?
Technologically Europe was behind both the Muslim and Chinese and yet not only leapt past them but did so spectacularly that they have only just caught up recently. It's hard to believe that the education, free exchange of ideas and work ethic that Christianity enabled and encouraged had nothing to do with this.
I thought you were no longer allowed to use that term. How about "fact-based according to a someone who admits he doesn't know what he is talking about"?
Does that mean we will be allowed to start using 'emacs' and 'vi' again?
My wild guess is for Christianity to have slowed scientific progress by ~1500 years.
Really? Back in the day science was a product of Christianity. The belief that nature was all ruled and ordered by god lead various clergy to look for that order which in turn lead to the development of science. Many early scientists held religious positions since, unless they were from a wealthy family, this was the only way to get the education and the time and support required to be able to perform their studies.
;-).
For example, Oxford and Cambridge dons were all originally clergy and when they retired they took up positions as vicars around the UK. Bacon, who gave us the very idea of the scientific method, was a staunch Christian and Newton even wasted time trying to figure out the date of the rapture from the bible (IIRC he came up with 2060 so we haven't got too long to wait!
Christianity may have restricted and held back some areas of science in the past but let's not forget that its overall impact on science has been such a positive one that it is not even clear that we would have a modern concept of science without it. The conflict between religion and science in modern times is fuelled by an ignorance of both and seems to be primarily a US-based phenomenon although it is sadly starting to spread.
If you hate science because it conflicts with your religious beliefs...
I don't think this has anything to do with religious belief. I think it is due to a dangerous mix of ignorance (partly willful and partly due to lack of intellectual capacity) and short-sighted financial self-interest. If Trump and co were capable of understanding science and were open-minded enough to realize that there is a lot of money to be made developing green technology they would be cheering science on, not desperately trying to hide and/or ignore the truth of it.
Creation of $300B in bitcoin won't help the world to feed one more mouth.
Neither will the creation of one more video game or the invention of some new beauty product. People invest money in lots of useless things, why should Bitcoin be any different?
Flying nuclear reactors are never a clever idea. Fukushima produced detectable nuclear contamination across the entire Pacific ocean due to a leak. How much worse will it be if the containment vessel shatters due to a high speed impact? Plus, even if they spend most of their time over the ocean they have to land somewhere and a crash on land will cause a lot of contamination. The technology is interesting but let's hope they are clever and stick to land and sea-based applications.
Canada exports a lot of wood and paper products so I would expect that Europe gets a lot from there or other, similar locations given the high price of land in Europe and the vast areas of wilderness filled with renewable trees in places like Canada. High quality, archive paper is made from cotton and other fibres because it does not contain lignin and so will not degrade with time. However paperback books, printer paper, newspapers, tissues, paper/cardboard packaging etc. are almost certainly pure wood products. I'm not sure how much is made from recycled clothes anymore though since our clothes now contain a lot of artificial fibres.
...until this same idiot finds out that you can order magnifying glasses from Amazon without even a fake prescription or any requirement to show a physics qualification. These are far more dangerous than a contact lens: you can start fires with them and even use them to read the small print most companies don't want you to see.
There is a whole slew of physical evidence for alien craft. Admittedly it does tend to disappear fast
Ever wonder why?