Good luck getting enough people to listen. They're mostly fat, lazy sheep now... easily controlled, and mollified by bread and circuses.
That's hardly a new story. Here's the basic plot line: 1. A country is on the receiving end of a pretty serious terrorist attack (or at least what appears to be a serious terrorist attack). 2. The government blames the attack on some religious and political minorities that are hated and feared by a large percentage of the general population. 3. The government tells its people that in order to protect the country's existence, it needs to oppress that minority domestically and invade some foreign countries thought to be "sheltering" the bad guys. 4. The government in question now imprisons and tortures members of the minority group it gets its hands on, and spies on everyone it can in any way it can. 5. Police state is now formed.
Although I should mention that the idea of mollifying people with bread and circuses started back in the Roman Empire, if not earlier.
Anyone who didn't see this coming 12 years ago had their head in the sand or hasn't read their history.
Which includes many of those members of Congress who voted for the Patriot Act (the others, of course, are complicit). The ones that didn't back in 2001 include only 1 senator and 65 representatives. Of those, 3 were Republicans (yes, Ron Paul is among those illustrious few), 62 were Democrats, and lone socialist Bernie Sanders. When they voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in 2006, things were only slightly better: 10 senators and 138 representatives opposed it, with a party split of 13 Republicans, 133 Democrats, and 2 independents.
And that's why I haven't voted for a Republican for federal office since 2000: As a party, they've made it very very clear that to oppose the Patriot Act and its abuses is heresy. And in recent years, I've stopped supporting Democrats too, for the same reason.
Support candidates who fight that suppression. Rand Paul is looking really good for 2016.
There are 3 problems with your solution: 1. Rand Paul may oppose the suppression, but his party wholeheartedly supports it. That will prevent him from actually doing what he says he wants to do.
2. There's a question of whether the various three-letter agencies are doing this without any kind of authorization from any president, or lying to the president about what they're doing and / or why they're doing it. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if career spooks were doing all sorts of illegal things and classifying it to avoid getting caught.
3. Obama entered office claiming at least to be fighting against the suppression of our constitutional rights, and even had a background in constitutional law. Either something happened to him that changed his mind, or he was lying all along. Either way, what's true of Obama could just as easily be true of Paul.
I'd be reasonably certain that the criminal answer is the right one.
Here's the "allow bad guys to profit from the swings" plan: 1. DDOS Bitcoin trading sites, and watch the Bitcoin prices drop. 2. Buy some Bitcoins. 3. Stop your DDOS. 4. Bitcoin price goes back up. 5. Sell your Bitcoins at the now higher price. 6. PROFIT!!!
Here's the "Destabilize the currency" plan: 1. DDOS Bitcoin trading sites. 2. Convince everyone who might be considering using Bitcoins to use dollars or Euro or yen or krona or yuan or something. 3. ??? 4. PROFIT!!!
One of these has simple and obvious steps from DDOS to profits. The other does not.
If they allowed knives back on, and any kind of terrorist attack occurred with knives, then someone would be held responsible for that decision, no matter how wise it seemed at the time. If they disallow knives, people will kick and scream, but won't actually change their flying behavior much, and everyone's job will be safe.
Also, the passenger side is right next to the sidewalk if the car is parallel-parked. That makes it a lot easier than trying to break into a car while traffic is barely missing your tush.
I'm not advocating getting rid of the profit motive of people actually doing medicine, I'm targeting the people who hire other people to do the actual medical work. Switching to non-profit doesn't mean that medical professionals don't get paid, it means that Wall Street doesn't get a huge chunk of everybody's health care dollars for doing not much useful.
But don't believe me, believe the markets: There are quite a few really successful non-profit medical groups in the US, e.g. the Mayo Clinic.
I know, from your previous posts, that your basic view of the world is that the only reason anyone does anything is for profit, but when you ask or read the writings of people in medical fields, the reasons they cite are: 1. A genuine desire to save and improve the lives of their patients. 2. Like how many/.ers have a knack for applying technical skills and become programmers or admins, some go into medicine because they have that same knack for applying biology. 3. Some are motivated by what they experienced while dealing with a medical problem. 4. Some were pushed to do it by their parents, who in some cases also were in medicine. 5. Some want the fame and prestige and respect that goes along with it. 6. And yes, some are after a good steady job in about the $75-$200K range. This is rarely the sole motivator, though, because medicine is harder to get into than more profitable professions like business and finance.
Making billions on some new drug or device or treatment usually isn't a big motivator, in large part because the people doing the medical work almost never actually see those billions. That suggests that in theory at least we could get the same sort of results by hiring doctors, nurses, researchers, etc to work in non-profit hospitals and labs, make and sell devices and treatments and drugs and the like at cost, and save something like 30% of our health care spending.
Ed Vogler is a brilliant businessman, a brilliant judge of people, and a man who has never lost a fight. You know how I know that the new ACE inhibitor is good? Because the old one was good. The new one is really the same, it's just more expensive. A lot more expensive. See, that's another example of Ed's brilliance. Whenever one of his drugs is about to lose its patent he has his boys and girls alter it just a tiny bit and patent it all over again. Making not just a pointless new pill, but millions and millions of dollars. Which is good for everybody, right? Except for the patients. Psht. Who cares? They're just so damn sick. God obviously never liked them anyway.
This sort of thing is to be expected in a for-profit system of health care products: If the primary reason for doing something is profits rather than results, you get perverse incentives. For example, it's far more profitable to create an ongoing treatment to a disease than it is to create a cure for that same disease, because a cure is a one-time purchase but an ongoing treatment can require payments for 40 or 50 years.
Or strategically moving to a location where the camera can't see. For example, look up the dashboard footage of the shooting of John T Williams in Seattle: SPD officer Ian Burke sees Williams committing the heinous crime of walking across a street, yells at him to stop, leaves the camera frame, and then shoots Williams 4 times in the back and side. In the ensuing investigation, Burke successfully claimed self defense and avoided all criminal responsibility, even though he was the only person at the scene who did anything remotely violent. This even though the eyewitnesses (including one that courageously confronted Burke immediately) said that Williams presented no danger to them or to Burke.
A good model for ideal human behavior, sure, but actual behavior?!?
Not only is monogamy not what humans actually do (about half of all husbands and a third of all wives have affairs, at least in the US), it's questionable that monogamy is even a good idea - the motivating factors for it were (a) Protestant Christianity and (b) trying to ensure that patrilinear inheritance went to legitimate sons. Most societies historically were polygamous, and some societies still are polygamous.
As an example of some radically different notions about it: - Plato suggested a system of randomly selecting spouses annually out of the pool of people smart enough to be considered part of the ruling class. - The Oneida Community (a utopian group in the 19th century) attempted planned breeding, where people were assigned to mate for genetic reasons. For some reason, though, this purely scientific effort always ended up putting the most attractive women with the guy responsible for doing the assignments, which caused the system to fall apart. - Iroquois women had complete control over who they partnered with, and could divorce at any time by kicking her partner out of her tent and leaving his stuff outside.
The slashdot libertarian, a quite different beast than real life ones, is generally the worst at this.
Well, you say that, but I've come across real-life flesh-and-blood libertarians, including a Libertarian candidate for Congress, who spout ideas very similar to the Slashdot libertarian. Anything suggesting that libertarians are universally smart articulate people smacks of a "No True Scotsman" argument.
The majority of followers of most political belief systems have no idea why they believe what they believe or the theories behind it, and decide more on their gut reaction. For example, the liberal gut reaction is, in a nutshell, "Those people are victims of circumstances beyond their control, and that's not fair!". The conservative gut reaction is "Those people are lazy, and it's unfair that I have to pay for keeping them alive!". The libertarian gut reaction is "That tax bill is theft, and it's unfair that I have to pay it!". The authoritarian gut reaction is "Those people are dangerous and/or idiotic, and need to be controlled or all heck will break loose!". And so on for most other political belief systems.
I have a different sort of idea about that: 1. Almost all people with no power, don't want a police state, dictatorship, etc because they know it will oppress them.
2. Almost all people with power would rather like a police state or dictatorship, because that allows them to keep their power.
3. Those people without power who have chosen to identify with or support a subgroup of those people with power have to square their opposition to police states with their decision to support their chosen subgroup. That leads to the "My party isn't oppressing me, the other party is oppressing me!" thinking from self-identified partisans.
The real blindness is this, which came out in a conversation between myself (borderline socialist), a moderately liberal friend, and a libertarian friend: Which person in your life is most likely to be oppressing you in some way? Answer: Your boss.
What decisions make you think Scalia is a "conservative hack"?
- Bush v Gore, in which he stated in his opinion that Americans don't have the right to vote for president and included a bit about how this opinion, unlike every other opinion issued by the Supreme Court, was not to be cited as precedent in case law. For what it's worth, this was also the decision that convinced David Souter to retire from the court as soon as a Democrat took office - from that decision he concluded that Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist were basically partisan hacks with no regard for legal argument.
- Hamdan v Rumsfeld, where he filed a dissent that stated if Congress says Gitmo prisoners can't file for habeus corpus, the courts don't have the power to say otherwise (even though constitutional law supercedes anything Congress says). Also the similar case Rumsfeld v Padilla, where he sided with the majority that threw out a habeus corpus petition filed by a US citizen on a technicality after the citizen in question had been held in a military brig for over 2 years without charges.
My friend the Google search, it taught me what to say My friend the Google search, it taught me what to do It knew what I would buy when said what I liked, by typing:
Ooh, ee, ooh ah ah Ting tang walla-walla bing bang Ooh, ee, ooh ah ah Ting tang walla-walla bing bang
Some other things federal law enforcement regularly gets involved in dealing with: - Kidnappings - Gun trafficking - Human trafficking - Drug smuggling - Gang violence - Organized crime - Bank heists - Counterfeiting - Securities fraud - Hate crimes committed by groups like the KKK or Aryan Nation - And, oh yeah, terrorists (I'm not saying we should be running around afraid of terrorists, but there are some, and the FBI is the leading organization to deal with them in the US)
That's stupid for 2 reasons: 1. I'll bet you good money you believe in more than 1% of what the government is doing: 1% of the US federal budget is $38 billion, which just about covers either federal law enforcement (including prosecutions) or transportation infrastructure (including air travel, highways, rail, and cargo shipping), but not both. Cut out law enforcement and you might as well not have a legal system. Cut out transportation and all that stuff you currently see showing up in your local Walmart won't get there. I highly doubt you want to live in that kind of country.
2. If Paul evades taxes successfully, the government will simply try to collect revenue from someone else. If they can't, they will borrow the money to function. If they can't borrow the money, they will inflate the currency.
Basically, your argument, which I'm guessing you think is libertarian, is actually anarchist - a coercive authority with no money can't do anything at all. So on that basis, I'd recommend that you move to Somalia, Afghanistan, or one of the other areas of the world that has no functioning government whatsoever, and thus no taxes.
1. What you're doing as a programmer most of the time is basically applied math. Most of it is discrete math. 2. If you can't figure out the logic of higher math courses, you're going to have serious trouble figuring out the logic of 300,000-line programs. If you can't handle it, you may be going into the wrong sub-field, and would do better focusing on, say, technical writing. 3. Statistics is incredibly useful. For example, let's say you're tracking the performance of your systems, and you need to figure out what's an unusual number for some metric you're tracking, and whether it's worth waking up the sysadmin to investigate. 4. Linear algebra and calculus are critical if you're trying to do stuff with graphics. And you can make big bucks by doing that well, as some of my classmates who went to Pixar found out.
In a world in which the US government can't send guys with guns to enforce the value of its own currency, your Bitcoins (or gold, for that matter) are useless too, because the things that will be valuable in that world are food, shelter, drinking water, and weapons. In that kind of chaos, anyone with the things they need to survive are not going to be willing to trade those things for things they don't need to survive.
By "inherent value", I mean that the commodity in question can be used for something other than exchanging it for something else. For example, a bushel of apples has inherent value because I can eat it.
There are some historical currencies that had inherent value: bronze objects in Bronze Age Britain were extremely valuable, for example, both as useful tools and weapons, but also as a medium of exchange. Later on, the dominant currency in the same area was grain.
The key thing to understand about government-backed currency is this: You have to pay your taxes in them. If you don't, said government can and will force you to do so. The government may also force a creditor to accept your currency to pay whatever debt you may have. In other words, it's backed up by the long arm of the law, and has value because if you choose to ignore its value guys with guns will show up to help explain the situation to you.
By contrast, Bitcoin is backed by absolutely nothing. It has no inherent value, and unlike government-backed currencies there's no use of force to back it up. In Hyper-inflation World that many Bitcoin enthusiasts think is America's future, you still have the guys with guns to demand that you use dollars to pay for certain things. By contrast, if Bitcoin goes belly-up, you have nothing except a bunch of bits that are of no use to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck getting enough people to listen. They're mostly fat, lazy sheep now ... easily controlled, and mollified by bread and circuses.
That's hardly a new story. Here's the basic plot line:
1. A country is on the receiving end of a pretty serious terrorist attack (or at least what appears to be a serious terrorist attack).
2. The government blames the attack on some religious and political minorities that are hated and feared by a large percentage of the general population.
3. The government tells its people that in order to protect the country's existence, it needs to oppress that minority domestically and invade some foreign countries thought to be "sheltering" the bad guys.
4. The government in question now imprisons and tortures members of the minority group it gets its hands on, and spies on everyone it can in any way it can.
5. Police state is now formed.
Although I should mention that the idea of mollifying people with bread and circuses started back in the Roman Empire, if not earlier.
Anyone who didn't see this coming 12 years ago had their head in the sand or hasn't read their history.
Which includes many of those members of Congress who voted for the Patriot Act (the others, of course, are complicit). The ones that didn't back in 2001 include only 1 senator and 65 representatives. Of those, 3 were Republicans (yes, Ron Paul is among those illustrious few), 62 were Democrats, and lone socialist Bernie Sanders. When they voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in 2006, things were only slightly better: 10 senators and 138 representatives opposed it, with a party split of 13 Republicans, 133 Democrats, and 2 independents.
And that's why I haven't voted for a Republican for federal office since 2000: As a party, they've made it very very clear that to oppose the Patriot Act and its abuses is heresy. And in recent years, I've stopped supporting Democrats too, for the same reason.
Support candidates who fight that suppression. Rand Paul is looking really good for 2016.
There are 3 problems with your solution:
1. Rand Paul may oppose the suppression, but his party wholeheartedly supports it. That will prevent him from actually doing what he says he wants to do.
2. There's a question of whether the various three-letter agencies are doing this without any kind of authorization from any president, or lying to the president about what they're doing and / or why they're doing it. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if career spooks were doing all sorts of illegal things and classifying it to avoid getting caught.
3. Obama entered office claiming at least to be fighting against the suppression of our constitutional rights, and even had a background in constitutional law. Either something happened to him that changed his mind, or he was lying all along. Either way, what's true of Obama could just as easily be true of Paul.
I'd be reasonably certain that the criminal answer is the right one.
Here's the "allow bad guys to profit from the swings" plan:
1. DDOS Bitcoin trading sites, and watch the Bitcoin prices drop.
2. Buy some Bitcoins.
3. Stop your DDOS.
4. Bitcoin price goes back up.
5. Sell your Bitcoins at the now higher price.
6. PROFIT!!!
Here's the "Destabilize the currency" plan:
1. DDOS Bitcoin trading sites.
2. Convince everyone who might be considering using Bitcoins to use dollars or Euro or yen or krona or yuan or something.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!!!
One of these has simple and obvious steps from DDOS to profits. The other does not.
Also, for those of you using the wonderfully obsolete furlongs/fortnight/hogshead system, 2750 feet is exactly 4 1/6 furlongs.
If they allowed knives back on, and any kind of terrorist attack occurred with knives, then someone would be held responsible for that decision, no matter how wise it seemed at the time. If they disallow knives, people will kick and scream, but won't actually change their flying behavior much, and everyone's job will be safe.
Also, the passenger side is right next to the sidewalk if the car is parallel-parked. That makes it a lot easier than trying to break into a car while traffic is barely missing your tush.
I'm not advocating getting rid of the profit motive of people actually doing medicine, I'm targeting the people who hire other people to do the actual medical work. Switching to non-profit doesn't mean that medical professionals don't get paid, it means that Wall Street doesn't get a huge chunk of everybody's health care dollars for doing not much useful.
But don't believe me, believe the markets: There are quite a few really successful non-profit medical groups in the US, e.g. the Mayo Clinic.
I'm just imagining what this might do for say, MC Hawking - I mean, you think that guy is badass now, we could turn him into Iron Man.
I know, from your previous posts, that your basic view of the world is that the only reason anyone does anything is for profit, but when you ask or read the writings of people in medical fields, the reasons they cite are: /.ers have a knack for applying technical skills and become programmers or admins, some go into medicine because they have that same knack for applying biology.
1. A genuine desire to save and improve the lives of their patients.
2. Like how many
3. Some are motivated by what they experienced while dealing with a medical problem.
4. Some were pushed to do it by their parents, who in some cases also were in medicine.
5. Some want the fame and prestige and respect that goes along with it.
6. And yes, some are after a good steady job in about the $75-$200K range. This is rarely the sole motivator, though, because medicine is harder to get into than more profitable professions like business and finance.
Making billions on some new drug or device or treatment usually isn't a big motivator, in large part because the people doing the medical work almost never actually see those billions. That suggests that in theory at least we could get the same sort of results by hiring doctors, nurses, researchers, etc to work in non-profit hospitals and labs, make and sell devices and treatments and drugs and the like at cost, and save something like 30% of our health care spending.
Ed Vogler is a brilliant businessman, a brilliant judge of people, and a man who has never lost a fight. You know how I know that the new ACE inhibitor is good? Because the old one was good. The new one is really the same, it's just more expensive. A lot more expensive. See, that's another example of Ed's brilliance. Whenever one of his drugs is about to lose its patent he has his boys and girls alter it just a tiny bit and patent it all over again. Making not just a pointless new pill, but millions and millions of dollars. Which is good for everybody, right? Except for the patients. Psht. Who cares? They're just so damn sick. God obviously never liked them anyway.
This sort of thing is to be expected in a for-profit system of health care products: If the primary reason for doing something is profits rather than results, you get perverse incentives. For example, it's far more profitable to create an ongoing treatment to a disease than it is to create a cure for that same disease, because a cure is a one-time purchase but an ongoing treatment can require payments for 40 or 50 years.
Or strategically moving to a location where the camera can't see. For example, look up the dashboard footage of the shooting of John T Williams in Seattle: SPD officer Ian Burke sees Williams committing the heinous crime of walking across a street, yells at him to stop, leaves the camera frame, and then shoots Williams 4 times in the back and side. In the ensuing investigation, Burke successfully claimed self defense and avoided all criminal responsibility, even though he was the only person at the scene who did anything remotely violent. This even though the eyewitnesses (including one that courageously confronted Burke immediately) said that Williams presented no danger to them or to Burke.
That's just Big Idiocy at work.
A good model for ideal human behavior, sure, but actual behavior?!?
Not only is monogamy not what humans actually do (about half of all husbands and a third of all wives have affairs, at least in the US), it's questionable that monogamy is even a good idea - the motivating factors for it were (a) Protestant Christianity and (b) trying to ensure that patrilinear inheritance went to legitimate sons. Most societies historically were polygamous, and some societies still are polygamous.
As an example of some radically different notions about it:
- Plato suggested a system of randomly selecting spouses annually out of the pool of people smart enough to be considered part of the ruling class.
- The Oneida Community (a utopian group in the 19th century) attempted planned breeding, where people were assigned to mate for genetic reasons. For some reason, though, this purely scientific effort always ended up putting the most attractive women with the guy responsible for doing the assignments, which caused the system to fall apart.
- Iroquois women had complete control over who they partnered with, and could divorce at any time by kicking her partner out of her tent and leaving his stuff outside.
The slashdot libertarian, a quite different beast than real life ones, is generally the worst at this.
Well, you say that, but I've come across real-life flesh-and-blood libertarians, including a Libertarian candidate for Congress, who spout ideas very similar to the Slashdot libertarian. Anything suggesting that libertarians are universally smart articulate people smacks of a "No True Scotsman" argument.
The majority of followers of most political belief systems have no idea why they believe what they believe or the theories behind it, and decide more on their gut reaction. For example, the liberal gut reaction is, in a nutshell, "Those people are victims of circumstances beyond their control, and that's not fair!". The conservative gut reaction is "Those people are lazy, and it's unfair that I have to pay for keeping them alive!". The libertarian gut reaction is "That tax bill is theft, and it's unfair that I have to pay it!". The authoritarian gut reaction is "Those people are dangerous and/or idiotic, and need to be controlled or all heck will break loose!". And so on for most other political belief systems.
I have a different sort of idea about that:
1. Almost all people with no power, don't want a police state, dictatorship, etc because they know it will oppress them.
2. Almost all people with power would rather like a police state or dictatorship, because that allows them to keep their power.
3. Those people without power who have chosen to identify with or support a subgroup of those people with power have to square their opposition to police states with their decision to support their chosen subgroup. That leads to the "My party isn't oppressing me, the other party is oppressing me!" thinking from self-identified partisans.
The real blindness is this, which came out in a conversation between myself (borderline socialist), a moderately liberal friend, and a libertarian friend: Which person in your life is most likely to be oppressing you in some way? Answer: Your boss.
What decisions make you think Scalia is a "conservative hack"?
- Bush v Gore, in which he stated in his opinion that Americans don't have the right to vote for president and included a bit about how this opinion, unlike every other opinion issued by the Supreme Court, was not to be cited as precedent in case law. For what it's worth, this was also the decision that convinced David Souter to retire from the court as soon as a Democrat took office - from that decision he concluded that Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist were basically partisan hacks with no regard for legal argument.
- Hamdan v Rumsfeld, where he filed a dissent that stated if Congress says Gitmo prisoners can't file for habeus corpus, the courts don't have the power to say otherwise (even though constitutional law supercedes anything Congress says). Also the similar case Rumsfeld v Padilla, where he sided with the majority that threw out a habeus corpus petition filed by a US citizen on a technicality after the citizen in question had been held in a military brig for over 2 years without charges.
My friend the Google search, it taught me what to say
My friend the Google search, it taught me what to do
It knew what I would buy when said what I liked, by typing:
Ooh, ee, ooh ah ah
Ting tang walla-walla bing bang
Ooh, ee, ooh ah ah
Ting tang walla-walla bing bang
Some other things federal law enforcement regularly gets involved in dealing with:
- Kidnappings
- Gun trafficking
- Human trafficking
- Drug smuggling
- Gang violence
- Organized crime
- Bank heists
- Counterfeiting
- Securities fraud
- Hate crimes committed by groups like the KKK or Aryan Nation
- And, oh yeah, terrorists (I'm not saying we should be running around afraid of terrorists, but there are some, and the FBI is the leading organization to deal with them in the US)
That's stupid for 2 reasons:
1. I'll bet you good money you believe in more than 1% of what the government is doing: 1% of the US federal budget is $38 billion, which just about covers either federal law enforcement (including prosecutions) or transportation infrastructure (including air travel, highways, rail, and cargo shipping), but not both. Cut out law enforcement and you might as well not have a legal system. Cut out transportation and all that stuff you currently see showing up in your local Walmart won't get there. I highly doubt you want to live in that kind of country.
2. If Paul evades taxes successfully, the government will simply try to collect revenue from someone else. If they can't, they will borrow the money to function. If they can't borrow the money, they will inflate the currency.
Basically, your argument, which I'm guessing you think is libertarian, is actually anarchist - a coercive authority with no money can't do anything at all. So on that basis, I'd recommend that you move to Somalia, Afghanistan, or one of the other areas of the world that has no functioning government whatsoever, and thus no taxes.
1. What you're doing as a programmer most of the time is basically applied math. Most of it is discrete math.
2. If you can't figure out the logic of higher math courses, you're going to have serious trouble figuring out the logic of 300,000-line programs. If you can't handle it, you may be going into the wrong sub-field, and would do better focusing on, say, technical writing.
3. Statistics is incredibly useful. For example, let's say you're tracking the performance of your systems, and you need to figure out what's an unusual number for some metric you're tracking, and whether it's worth waking up the sysadmin to investigate.
4. Linear algebra and calculus are critical if you're trying to do stuff with graphics. And you can make big bucks by doing that well, as some of my classmates who went to Pixar found out.
Badgers? Badgers!? We don't need no stinkin' badgers!
In a world in which the US government can't send guys with guns to enforce the value of its own currency, your Bitcoins (or gold, for that matter) are useless too, because the things that will be valuable in that world are food, shelter, drinking water, and weapons. In that kind of chaos, anyone with the things they need to survive are not going to be willing to trade those things for things they don't need to survive.
By "inherent value", I mean that the commodity in question can be used for something other than exchanging it for something else. For example, a bushel of apples has inherent value because I can eat it.
There are some historical currencies that had inherent value: bronze objects in Bronze Age Britain were extremely valuable, for example, both as useful tools and weapons, but also as a medium of exchange. Later on, the dominant currency in the same area was grain.
The key thing to understand about government-backed currency is this: You have to pay your taxes in them. If you don't, said government can and will force you to do so. The government may also force a creditor to accept your currency to pay whatever debt you may have. In other words, it's backed up by the long arm of the law, and has value because if you choose to ignore its value guys with guns will show up to help explain the situation to you.
By contrast, Bitcoin is backed by absolutely nothing. It has no inherent value, and unlike government-backed currencies there's no use of force to back it up. In Hyper-inflation World that many Bitcoin enthusiasts think is America's future, you still have the guys with guns to demand that you use dollars to pay for certain things. By contrast, if Bitcoin goes belly-up, you have nothing except a bunch of bits that are of no use to anyone.