What is this stupidity? Removing Putin would be like removing any other first-world leader - instant world-ending war.
I'm so tired of these fools who can't seem to get it through their head that Russia is a global military superpower. That Russia is NOT a cowardly bully. Cowardly bullies act out because of their own insecurities and lack of agency.
Putin has no insecurities. He has successfully moved his country forward. Crime rates, wages, standards of living are all significantly better than when he first took control of Russia. However questionably and brutally he did it, the simple fact is that he was successful, and the Russian people are by and large pragmatic and results-orientated. Their lives are better, Putin is responsible for that. End of Story.
Russia has no lack of agency. Russia can hit a button and kill us all.
Russia simply wants to no longer be treated like some second or third-class citizen in the world. You don't like that they fucked with our politics? Too bad. We've been fucking with theirs for YEARS. You don't like that they hacked us? What the fuck do you think the US has been doing?
People should go watch Oliver Stone's Putin interviews. While the whole anti-Russia crowd whined about Stone being some fawning Putin sycophant, what was ignored is that 80% of what Putin said was absolutely correct. NATO expansions, US treaty violations, outright abuses of the openness that Russia had to America in the post-soviet years. The US had the opportunity to bring Russia into the 21st century as friends, allies, and economic partners. Instead the old cold-war guard kept kicking the downed dog. Is it any wonder that now that the dog has healed and can bite back, it is?
Russia can now do to us as we've been doing to them - perhaps they're even better at it.
Anyone with a real global outlook can see that Russia is not the real problem, China is. China is far more totalitarian, far more 'evil', far more repressive, more racist, more sexist, and has far grander plans of world domination - and far further along on those plans. Russia is a potential solution to a huge future problem, but the US can't pull its backwards-looking head out of its indignant idealistic ass to see it.
The US policy has been one of containing Russia and keeping it econmically depressed, while letting China grow into a beast that is now weilding massive political and economic influence within our own country to our detriment.
The computers were completely intact, with license stickers. The hard-drives were just erased. Should he have to pay M$ to reinstall the OS on a computer that was already licensed?
He was NOT taking the license from a computer. The computer remained intact and the license sticker still attached. He just made copies of the recovery discs so that the consumer could reinstall the OS as needed on the erased hard drive.
Bullshit. China's pollution comes from producing crap for Chinese people, cooking for Chinese people, and keeping Chinese people warm. Just their middle class is larger than the entire population of North America.
Let's have something inspiring - what SF used to be!
Science fiction started as social justice literature. The very first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, was all about how small-minded members of the alt-right attacked someone who was misunderstood for looking and acting different.
Frankenstein was a semi-religious anti-science screed set in a world contemporary to the author. This isn't the science-fiction anyone is referring to.
As for the sci-fi this discussion is actually about: Social justice? NO.
Social equality, yes.
Golden-age and much of new-wave sci-fi showed us a world where people got over their differences, accepted different religious/social practices, and joined together as one humanity. The vast majority of it was libertarian-leaning in that self-reliance, pragmatism, hard work, and logic were the tools of success. Even new-wave's existential navel-gazing still focused on breaking down barriers and ignoring differences despite (or because of) the futility of life.
Today color-blindness is 'racism' while paying attention to color and treating people differently because of it is 'mindfulness.' Rewarding people based on merit is either 'white privilege' or 'male privilege' depending on which group feels victimized.
People who got into mining in October before card prices skyrocketed again likely got their ROI 1-2 months ahead of schedule because of the bump in value across all cryptos in November/Dec.
People getting into mining now *might* have a problem hitting an ROI in 6 months due to the high cost of cards, or another spike in value could make them all profitable by March (assuming they hold a percentage of their mined coins).
You can't guarantee that the gamer who was using the card didn't stress the shit out of it by overclocking it and running 3dmark for 3 days to 'burn in' the card.
The risk seems the same. In fact, the used mining cards might be more likely to be safe, as the miner at least had longevity of their money-making investment in mind.
A one-off show in what looks to be a basement, with poorly choreographed dancing. Stupid drive-by media lined up to interview them as soon as they're done 'performing'.
"The cost involved in making a transaction is skyrocketing, the rate at which transactions can be processed is very low and even now there exist many tens of thousands of transactions that are unconfirmed by the network with them even getting dropped after a couple of weeks. And even in the case you describe it is still just an intermediate store of value, you're going to convert your local currency to bitcoin, transfer it to another location and then convert back to the new local currency so you can actually use it for something because bitcoin itself is not useful."
A. The costs can be mitigated, either simply by increasing the blocksize, or through side-chains. There are discussions/competing ideas, eventually the problem will be solved. I'm actually OK with the transaction costs remaining high, it will cement bitcoin as a store of value rather than a currency, while side-chains and/or altcoins take up the currency slack - many of them are far better suited for it.
B. The cheap-asses who tried to pay lower fees get what they deserve. They existed back in 2013 too, I was one of them. Took 2 weeks to get my BTC back, lesson learned.
C. Western union converts your 'dollars' to electronic bits, sends the bits to the other side of the world, reconverts back to dollars, and then you have to go convert those dollars to local currency. I send money to family Eastern Europe all the time, the stores don't take US dollars any more than they take bitcoin.
But that is an aside to the fact that bitcoin has no use outside of being a store of value, other stores of value (gold, diamonds, land, etc for example) have many uses which is why they have value. Their value changes based in part on speculation but also as supply and demand for the real uses of those commodities fluctuates. Bitcoin's value changes purely on speculation because it has no actual usefulness.
You just proved my point! None of the stores of value you mention are easily portable. In many instances transporting such is either outright illegal and/or must be declared for inspection/investigation.
Moreover, these 'stores of value' are often just as much hype as you decry bitcoin for. Retail diamonds are priced purely on market manipulation, hype, and marketing. Industrial diamonds are cheap as hell - you can get them on Ebay for $5.50/carat. Gold's price is NOT based on its utility, in fact only 12% of the global demand for gold is industrial/medical use. The rest is jewelry/wealth storage, and that wealth storage is based on its social acceptance and its limited supply/stable production.
Land is only valuable based on commercial potential - cropland, mineral rights, or proximity to urban centers for business/residential development - and that too is subject to bubbles and market shifts, not to mention it's not easily convertible to cash.
"It's little more than a decentralized store of value and that value is really based on the hype around it"
There is little of the internet that has any value besides social value. Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union. Not to mention that the increased competition has forced Western Union and moneygram to lower their fees, which are now half of what they were just a couple years ago.
Now btc's first mover advantage has placed it as the 'gold standard' of which an entire ecosystem of digital currencies valued at $600 Billion (of which BTC itself is less than half that) are traded against.
Remember that the USD is backed by the 'faith and credit' of the government, as every other world currency is backed by the faith and credit that their respective goverments won't fuck up their economy so much that their currency becomes worthless.
Bitcoin sidesteps all of that 'faith' by having a limited supply, decentralized management and markets, and the inability for any one organization or actor to fuck it all up (China tried, and failed) That has very clear utility for financial markets and economic systems.
""You really think all of this accounts for 42 billion in USD volume over the last 30 days????""
"More drugs than that flows between the US and Mexican border every single day, so yes."
Um no. The world drug trade is about $300-$400 billion - so about ~$1billion a day - and you can't begin to suggest that even half of that is done in cryptocurrency.
Commercial speech is not protected. That can be redefined so that 'commercial' includes clickbait, fake news, and the like.
The problem is definition and enforcement. All news outlets are commercial these days save for maybe NPR/Public Television. CNN published some whoppers last election cycle that were not true, how do you punish them? Fines when articles are proven untrue? OK, but how untrue is untrue? What if they got one small bit of a larger true story wrong? How sensationalistic can headlines be before running afoul? Do 'satire' sites like Onion or HardTimes get a pass?
Once 'defined' then how do you enforce it? Is it criminal or civil? Do we now enlist an army of 'truth police?'
The key there is the number of mass-extinction events in our fossil records are directly connected with exactly these same events.
Source? - AFAIK, there are no mass-extinction events associated with methane spikes large enough to increase planetary temperature >6c within 80 years.
Labor isn't a free market, unfortunately. It's being completely manipulated by business interests.
All those jobs that 'Americans don't want" are actually jobs that 'Americans don't want at the stupid-low wages'. There are a number of industries - farming, food processing, landscaping, service, light manufacturing/assembly - that require low-paid workers as part of their business model, and do everything they can to find ways to bring in labor from outside their market (immigrants - both illegal and legal) that is willing to work for those wages you (and most Americans) deem 'unlivable'.
Any true progressive should really recognize that if they want wealth equalization, then fixing labor-market manipulations is the answer - not introducing new ones. Fixing labor-market manipulations (such as illegal immigration, and H1-B/H2-B abuse) increases pressure to increase wages, and the resulting increases in prices are distributed across the populace, and minimal in overall cost to the individual consumer.
Finally, the problem with a 'living wage' is what defines a proper standard of living? How many cars? How big of a TV? $15/hour would be OK for Minnesota, but I'd imagine that $15/hour in San Francisco just gets you a bigger cardboard box to live in. How long until populist politicians start promising to give everyone a raise?
All social structures are based on some level of faith and/or assumptions in mankind or of an ideological ideal. Religion (god), government (the state), the academic system (tenure, ontologies)
You can be a twat about religion, but your adherence to a social contract of any sort, or utilizing any social system of any type, means you're partaking in essentially the same thing.
At least Wheeler came around and took actions directly against the interests of his prior masters in supporting Title II
The Obama-Appointed-Republican Pai is still firmly in their pocket. Don't forget that Pai was on the NCTA's legal team for the BrandX case which completely gutted the Telecom's open-access provisions, and he was against the increase of the definition of 'Broadband' from 4mbps to 25mbps just a couple years ago (because 4mbps was enough for a whole family...)
I think you're spot-on. Consider this like music. Assuming you're above the age of 30, nobody cares about the music you used to listen to, and the music that is produced now isn't for you, it's for the 13-24 year old age group that actually spends money on music.
Each iteration of Star Trek isn't about the 'old guard' so much as attracting a new generation of viewers. The old guard isn't enough to bank a show on, unless their kids get in on it.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this stupidity? Removing Putin would be like removing any other first-world leader - instant world-ending war.
I'm so tired of these fools who can't seem to get it through their head that Russia is a global military superpower. That Russia is NOT a cowardly bully. Cowardly bullies act out because of their own insecurities and lack of agency.
Putin has no insecurities. He has successfully moved his country forward. Crime rates, wages, standards of living are all significantly better than when he first took control of Russia. However questionably and brutally he did it, the simple fact is that he was successful, and the Russian people are by and large pragmatic and results-orientated. Their lives are better, Putin is responsible for that. End of Story.
Russia has no lack of agency. Russia can hit a button and kill us all.
Russia simply wants to no longer be treated like some second or third-class citizen in the world. You don't like that they fucked with our politics? Too bad. We've been fucking with theirs for YEARS. You don't like that they hacked us? What the fuck do you think the US has been doing?
People should go watch Oliver Stone's Putin interviews. While the whole anti-Russia crowd whined about Stone being some fawning Putin sycophant, what was ignored is that 80% of what Putin said was absolutely correct. NATO expansions, US treaty violations, outright abuses of the openness that Russia had to America in the post-soviet years. The US had the opportunity to bring Russia into the 21st century as friends, allies, and economic partners. Instead the old cold-war guard kept kicking the downed dog. Is it any wonder that now that the dog has healed and can bite back, it is?
Russia can now do to us as we've been doing to them - perhaps they're even better at it.
Anyone with a real global outlook can see that Russia is not the real problem, China is. China is far more totalitarian, far more 'evil', far more repressive, more racist, more sexist, and has far grander plans of world domination - and far further along on those plans. Russia is a potential solution to a huge future problem, but the US can't pull its backwards-looking head out of its indignant idealistic ass to see it.
The US policy has been one of containing Russia and keeping it econmically depressed, while letting China grow into a beast that is now weilding massive political and economic influence within our own country to our detriment.
The computers were completely intact, with license stickers. The hard-drives were just erased. Should he have to pay M$ to reinstall the OS on a computer that was already licensed?
No he didn't. Read the damn article.
He was NOT taking the license from a computer. The computer remained intact and the license sticker still attached. He just made copies of the recovery discs so that the consumer could reinstall the OS as needed on the erased hard drive.
Bullshit. China's pollution comes from producing crap for Chinese people, cooking for Chinese people, and keeping Chinese people warm. Just their middle class is larger than the entire population of North America.
The point is, you can turn America OFF and not do a damn thing for the environment because India and China.
Science fiction started as social justice literature. The very first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, was all about how small-minded members of the alt-right attacked someone who was misunderstood for looking and acting different.
Frankenstein was a semi-religious anti-science screed set in a world contemporary to the author. This isn't the science-fiction anyone is referring to.
As for the sci-fi this discussion is actually about:
Social justice? NO.
Social equality, yes.
Golden-age and much of new-wave sci-fi showed us a world where people got over their differences, accepted different religious/social practices, and joined together as one humanity. The vast majority of it was libertarian-leaning in that self-reliance, pragmatism, hard work, and logic were the tools of success. Even new-wave's existential navel-gazing still focused on breaking down barriers and ignoring differences despite (or because of) the futility of life.
Today color-blindness is 'racism' while paying attention to color and treating people differently because of it is 'mindfulness.'
Rewarding people based on merit is either 'white privilege' or 'male privilege' depending on which group feels victimized.
There are now algorithms that Nvidia is inherently better at (Zcash)
An Nvidia 1050 isn't spectacular, but it's efficient enough that a rig of 6 of them can still bring in $200-$300/mo.
People who got into mining in October before card prices skyrocketed again likely got their ROI 1-2 months ahead of schedule because of the bump in value across all cryptos in November/Dec.
People getting into mining now *might* have a problem hitting an ROI in 6 months due to the high cost of cards, or another spike in value could make them all profitable by March (assuming they hold a percentage of their mined coins).
You can't guarantee that the gamer who was using the card didn't stress the shit out of it by overclocking it and running 3dmark for 3 days to 'burn in' the card.
The risk seems the same. In fact, the used mining cards might be more likely to be safe, as the miner at least had longevity of their money-making investment in mind.
The lesson here is to never buy a used GPU unless you can be sure it wasnâ(TM)t a mining GPU.
Why, exactly? The cards are run at lower wattage, at lower temps, 24/7 - minimal power cycling.
How does that make the card less valuable over time, or more likely to fail? What parts (besides the fans) are going to experience wear&tear?
5) Why salt the bomb? That would poison the oceans over a vast area.
At last a sensible question. I don't know the answer to this one.
Area denial. There would be a lot of leftover resources that would not be able to be scavenged.
Poisoning of the coastal food-chain.
This ^
A one-off show in what looks to be a basement, with poorly choreographed dancing. Stupid drive-by media lined up to interview them as soon as they're done 'performing'.
Fake news indeed.
Actually, that article is in response to last months actions against BTC exchanges in South Korea. Today's article is something new.
That being said, banning bitcoin to prevent gambling is like banning hand-lotion to prevent jerking off...
"The cost involved in making a transaction is skyrocketing, the rate at which transactions can be processed is very low and even now there exist many tens of thousands of transactions that are unconfirmed by the network with them even getting dropped after a couple of weeks. And even in the case you describe it is still just an intermediate store of value, you're going to convert your local currency to bitcoin, transfer it to another location and then convert back to the new local currency so you can actually use it for something because bitcoin itself is not useful."
A. The costs can be mitigated, either simply by increasing the blocksize, or through side-chains. There are discussions/competing ideas, eventually the problem will be solved. I'm actually OK with the transaction costs remaining high, it will cement bitcoin as a store of value rather than a currency, while side-chains and/or altcoins take up the currency slack - many of them are far better suited for it.
B. The cheap-asses who tried to pay lower fees get what they deserve. They existed back in 2013 too, I was one of them. Took 2 weeks to get my BTC back, lesson learned.
C. Western union converts your 'dollars' to electronic bits, sends the bits to the other side of the world, reconverts back to dollars, and then you have to go convert those dollars to local currency. I send money to family Eastern Europe all the time, the stores don't take US dollars any more than they take bitcoin.
But that is an aside to the fact that bitcoin has no use outside of being a store of value, other stores of value (gold, diamonds, land, etc for example) have many uses which is why they have value. Their value changes based in part on speculation but also as supply and demand for the real uses of those commodities fluctuates. Bitcoin's value changes purely on speculation because it has no actual usefulness.
You just proved my point! None of the stores of value you mention are easily portable. In many instances transporting such is either outright illegal and/or must be declared for inspection/investigation.
Moreover, these 'stores of value' are often just as much hype as you decry bitcoin for. Retail diamonds are priced purely on market manipulation, hype, and marketing. Industrial diamonds are cheap as hell - you can get them on Ebay for $5.50/carat. Gold's price is NOT based on its utility, in fact only 12% of the global demand for gold is industrial/medical use. The rest is jewelry/wealth storage, and that wealth storage is based on its social acceptance and its limited supply/stable production.
Land is only valuable based on commercial potential - cropland, mineral rights, or proximity to urban centers for business/residential development - and that too is subject to bubbles and market shifts, not to mention it's not easily convertible to cash.
"It's little more than a decentralized store of value and that value is really based on the hype around it"
There is little of the internet that has any value besides social value. Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union. Not to mention that the increased competition has forced Western Union and moneygram to lower their fees, which are now half of what they were just a couple years ago.
Now btc's first mover advantage has placed it as the 'gold standard' of which an entire ecosystem of digital currencies valued at $600 Billion (of which BTC itself is less than half that) are traded against.
Remember that the USD is backed by the 'faith and credit' of the government, as every other world currency is backed by the faith and credit that their respective goverments won't fuck up their economy so much that their currency becomes worthless.
Bitcoin sidesteps all of that 'faith' by having a limited supply, decentralized management and markets, and the inability for any one organization or actor to fuck it all up (China tried, and failed) That has very clear utility for financial markets and economic systems.
""You really think all of this accounts for 42 billion in USD volume over the last 30 days????""
"More drugs than that flows between the US and Mexican border every single day, so yes."
Um no. The world drug trade is about $300-$400 billion - so about ~$1billion a day - and you can't begin to suggest that even half of that is done in cryptocurrency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Commercial speech is not protected. That can be redefined so that 'commercial' includes clickbait, fake news, and the like.
The problem is definition and enforcement. All news outlets are commercial these days save for maybe NPR/Public Television. CNN published some whoppers last election cycle that were not true, how do you punish them? Fines when articles are proven untrue? OK, but how untrue is untrue? What if they got one small bit of a larger true story wrong? How sensationalistic can headlines be before running afoul? Do 'satire' sites like Onion or HardTimes get a pass?
Once 'defined' then how do you enforce it? Is it criminal or civil? Do we now enlist an army of 'truth police?'
It's a thorny issue...
The key there is the number of mass-extinction events in our fossil records are directly connected with exactly these same events.
Source? - AFAIK, there are no mass-extinction events associated with methane spikes large enough to increase planetary temperature >6c within 80 years.
Labor isn't a free market, unfortunately. It's being completely manipulated by business interests.
All those jobs that 'Americans don't want" are actually jobs that 'Americans don't want at the stupid-low wages'. There are a number of industries - farming, food processing, landscaping, service, light manufacturing/assembly - that require low-paid workers as part of their business model, and do everything they can to find ways to bring in labor from outside their market (immigrants - both illegal and legal) that is willing to work for those wages you (and most Americans) deem 'unlivable'.
Any true progressive should really recognize that if they want wealth equalization, then fixing labor-market manipulations is the answer - not introducing new ones. Fixing labor-market manipulations (such as illegal immigration, and H1-B/H2-B abuse) increases pressure to increase wages, and the resulting increases in prices are distributed across the populace, and minimal in overall cost to the individual consumer.
Finally, the problem with a 'living wage' is what defines a proper standard of living? How many cars? How big of a TV? $15/hour would be OK for Minnesota, but I'd imagine that $15/hour in San Francisco just gets you a bigger cardboard box to live in. How long until populist politicians start promising to give everyone a raise?
This is actually the proper thing to do constitutionally.
Obama, from what I understand really overstepped his constitutional powers by enacting this in the first place.
I understand his heart was in the right place, but I believe this was an overreach of his powers and should be rescinded.
If the US wants it as part of our Law...then congress should be the ones to enact it.
This - 100x THIS^^^
Obama didn't have the constitutional authority to do this. It would have been struck down eventually by the Supreme Court.
All social structures are based on some level of faith and/or assumptions in mankind or of an ideological ideal. Religion (god), government (the state), the academic system (tenure, ontologies)
You can be a twat about religion, but your adherence to a social contract of any sort, or utilizing any social system of any type, means you're partaking in essentially the same thing.
really smart in their chosen field
People who are really smart in a particular field are quite capable of being really smart in other fields, because they are really smart.
Perhaps their opinion is incorrect, but I'm not going to dismiss them out of hand because they didn't take a class at their local community college.
At least Wheeler came around and took actions directly against the interests of his prior masters in supporting Title II
The Obama-Appointed-Republican Pai is still firmly in their pocket. Don't forget that Pai was on the NCTA's legal team for the BrandX case which completely gutted the Telecom's open-access provisions, and he was against the increase of the definition of 'Broadband' from 4mbps to 25mbps just a couple years ago (because 4mbps was enough for a whole family...)
Anyone who wants to see the twisted Orwellian bullshit this guy writes should read this: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
The complaint is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of COPPA principles...
The law does not mean what you think it means...
I think you're spot-on. Consider this like music. Assuming you're above the age of 30, nobody cares about the music you used to listen to, and the music that is produced now isn't for you, it's for the 13-24 year old age group that actually spends money on music.
Each iteration of Star Trek isn't about the 'old guard' so much as attracting a new generation of viewers. The old guard isn't enough to bank a show on, unless their kids get in on it.