I'd argue that everybody has an ego, but it's not often belittled and abused if your conclusions are the same as those of everyone else. How are you sure that hackers aren't smarter then anyone else, if when you replace hacker who has odd interests with a smart person who has odd interests (and most of them do), society treats them the same?
As far as being pig headed and stubborn, if you are a normal person, and the majority of people agree with your opinions, it's quite easy to let things go, because you can always fall back on common beliefs to support your ego. But if your ideas are mostly in conflict, you've got two choices. Either be argumentative all the time, and be treated suspiciously and shunned by the general population, or keep quiet and hide your true thoughts from most anybody. Either way it's a lonely existence, and completely understandable to me why they would fight so hard to have people actually *agree* about something they believe, rather than being forced the other way around.
No, horses aren't an end in themselves, but I don't think most people really get that privilege either.
Poor people are being killed today and in the past to help rich people get what they want. Look at the plight of the native American. Look at all the poor people thrown in jail for nearly their entire life, which effectively is killing them, given they can no longer reproduce. Or neighborhoods where the cops generally just give up on. Do you think rich people there? The rich do kill the poor, but they do it slowly and keep it under the radar, and find something to pin the blame on rather then themselves.
Most people don't really care about economic efficiency, nor what to do about the poor. They just want a certain amount of wealth for themselves, some more, some less, but mostly just a little more then their neighbor. And most people of today seem fine with letting poor people die if it means getting a better life for themselves and their loved ones. So then, what is the difference between poor people and the middle class, besides wealth? I'd say nothing at all. There are two kinds of wealth, what you own and what you can produce. If what you can produce is so little, so easily manufactured without you, that you are practically worthless to the economy, and you have no money otherwise, then you become unimportant to the economy, and will be treated just like the poor of today. The only difference now is that the bar is being raised so high, that people can't rely on their skills like they could before and eventually no one who doesn't already have wealth will be immune.
Are the uber wealthy that much different than the middle class? Are they mostly interested in having one more yacht then the other guy? I really don't know, but I do know they don't care much about the poor either based on what is happening to them.
Also, democracy isn't a binary switch, but a continuum, and the continuum has been sliding ever more to favor the rich and powerful (or haven't you noticed?). So there is the third option for your selfish uber-wealthy character example, if they don't like the rules, they change them.
I don't think it's possible to stop technology, either. I meant my comment only as speculation as to what will happen in the future. I'm not sure what to can be done to change it.
Let's look at another creature who used to be a large part of the economy but who's numbers have dwindled to nearly nothing, the horse. Technology has created machines that were able to replace nearly all that a horse could do, ie. farming, transportation, warfare. The few remaining jobs, being a pet, used for the pastime of horse back riding were not enough to employ all the horses, so they were mostly killed and not allowed to breed.
The only difference I see between horses and the common man is that he or she can vote. So if there became to be no more work that most humans were qualified for, a safety net could be voted in to support them. This should work for awhile, but eventually as the military forces becomes more machine than man, until totally being machine, and the people holding the reigns on them become fewer and fewer, the power of the vote will become less and less. People that speak out against the system will be rounded up and disappeared'ed, your representatives will completely ignore the will of the people, etc. One day the vote will become a complete charade, or a coup will occur, (which would be much more easily done with an army of robots, then the human army today, since soldiers won't be there to refuse to fire on civilians of their own country) and the population of people will be forced to dwindle to near nothing, along side the horses of the past, once a great beast but now completely dependent on and subservient to the whims of a technological being more advanced then them.
With bitcoin, you are your own bank. You can buy insurance if you were really worried about it. As a bank customer and US taxpayer you are already indirectly paying for that insurance anyway.
How could you buy insurance for an anonymous currency?
You: "Somebody stole my bitcoins!" Insurance company: "Prove it!" You: "Well, there's the rub..."
I suppose cash may be considered anonymous, too, and I guess you can insure that... but at least there would be some evidence of a break in. With bitcoin, it's simply gone, or it's not and the owner simply lied about it.
I don't think any of the OWS claims were satisfied (if there are any, it's kind of difficult to discern whether they agreed about anything at all). I do think that them being in the news for so long caused an imprint on public consciousness (which I expanded further in my reply to phantomfive), and that caused the shift.
BTW, I'm not in support of OWS, I just found the fallout interesting. Nor do I attribute the effect to some sort of clever scheme by the OWS people. Mainly, I think the effect they did cause was not consciously understood by them.
I like a lot of your ideas. I agree that fixing the issues must be done politically rather than by industry. Actually doing it is the trick, however. If we could pass one bill that's politically acceptable enough to pass and start the unraveling of the whole currently broken and corrupt system (maybe your enforced sunset idea), maybe we could get the country back on track.
BTW, I'm not in support of OWS, I just found the fallout interesting. Nor do I attribute some sort of clever scheme by the OWS people. Mainly I think the effect they did cause was not consciously understood.
IMO By just being in the news so much, their ideas get absorbed over and over again in the public consciousness. The same principle as used in advertising. Repeating an idea over and over again is nebulous force, difficult to fight against with a logical argument, but definitely present and can be extremely powerful. Especially the way they did it, showing mobs of people all in agreement of *something*, which provokes the "me too" instinct. Even if that *something* is not logically consistent, or even completely definable, it still puts beliefs into peoples minds, or makes certain ideas appear more socially and therefore readily acceptable.
Just ask why beer and soda companies advertise so much, even though 99% general public would still understand what their product is and what it does if they did so far less.
I would assume that what is most worrying is that most people that google her wouldn't tell you that they did so. To at least defend against that, your fiancee should create a blog defending herself from the accusations, so at least her side would be expressed.
At least it would garner sympathy for her, and potential employers/clients may feel pity for her more than anything and overlook the whole mess.
Regardless if it's the people running Google's self-driving car program or not, you can't just let people do whatever they like, and when they screw up, shrug your shoulders and say, oh well, it's their fault!
There are thousands of regulations in the airline industry, the construction industry and basically anywhere there are human lives at stake. Are you saying that should be all thrown out the window? Or just in this particular case for some reason?
Not to mention that most humans would be thinking the computer isn't driving fast enough, and their "help" would be to mash the accelerator while the computer uses the steering to try to keep the car from careening out of control.
Guns dont cause violence. If they did, I should be able to put a gun in a room and have violence happen.
That's absurd. You can take anything and place it in an environment rendering it useless. By your logic, I could say people don't cause violence, because if I chained them all down to the floor, no violence would occur. And that allowing people the freedom to move is the actual underlying cause of violence.
Obviously the nut job that did this had some responsibility as well, but violence due to nut job plus gun is greater than nut job without gun. So the nut job and the gun are both causes.
If guns don't cause violence, you'd agree that more powerful guns also don't cause violence, right? So if machine guns were legalized, and the guy could get hold of a fully automatic AK-47, then there wouldn't be more violence? Yeah, right.
Let's look at another creature who used to be a large part of the economy but who's numbers have dwindled to nearly nothing, the horse. Technology has created machines that were able to replace nearly all that a horse could do, ie. farming, transportation, warfare. The few remaining jobs, being a pet, used for the pastime of horse back riding were not enough to employ all the horses, so they were mostly killed and not allowed to breed.
Human's still have some abilities that cannot be replicated by technology, but these will, I believe, eventually be replaced as well. You can say a robot can't be all lovely dovey and social and all that, and you'd never make a robot your friend, but you're looking at robots of today. Just like the cool kids in the 70's would look at computers at the time and think they were and always will be just used by nerds. Also, just because you'd never befriend a robot, or tolerate being served by a robot, doesn't mean the future generations won't. I'm sure there were some hold outs who refused to buy an automobile and kept their horse and buggy until the day they died, if you did the same with robots, it would make no difference.
The only difference I see between horses and the common man is that he or she can vote. So if there became to be no more work that most humans were qualified for, a safety net could be voted in to support them. This should work for awhile, but eventually as the military forces becomes more machine than man, until totally being machine, and the people holding the reigns on them become fewer and fewer, the power of the vote will become less and less. People that speak out against the system will be rounded up and disappeared'ed, your representatives will completely ignore the will of the people, etc. One day the vote will become a complete charade, or a coup will occur, and the population of people will be forced to dwindle to near nothing, along side the horses of the past, once a great beast but now completely dependent on and subservient to the whims of a technological being more advanced then us.
Where do you think all these desires besides breeding are for?
I believe that is complex behavior that evolved to ensure your genes are passed on and nothing more. This instinct to care about other people can be explained in that we used to live in tribes and each tribe member would share a lot of genes with other tribe members. So the survival of the tribe propagates your genes even if you don't happen to survive. The fact that you care about the whole world is just the result of your instinctual desires being thrown into an environment they were not designed for. Same as a person's body killing itself by overreacting to a foreign invader. In the past, there were no doctors that could heal you, and it was all up to the body itself. So nearly killing itself in order to fight back the invader, (and sometimes going overboard), worked better than keeping it's defenses toned down and hoping for some outside influence, although that is not true today.
In addition, all the other thoughts not explained by the above could be just novel, unexpected consequences of the interaction of the very many systems of the complex machine that is your human body, your immediate neighbors and society in general.
If it's not the above, that what is it? Do you believe that God came down and gave people feelings?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd argue that everybody has an ego, but it's not often belittled and abused if your conclusions are the same as those of everyone else. How are you sure that hackers aren't smarter then anyone else, if when you replace hacker who has odd interests with a smart person who has odd interests (and most of them do), society treats them the same?
As far as being pig headed and stubborn, if you are a normal person, and the majority of people agree with your opinions, it's quite easy to let things go, because you can always fall back on common beliefs to support your ego. But if your ideas are mostly in conflict, you've got two choices. Either be argumentative all the time, and be treated suspiciously and shunned by the general population, or keep quiet and hide your true thoughts from most anybody. Either way it's a lonely existence, and completely understandable to me why they would fight so hard to have people actually *agree* about something they believe, rather than being forced the other way around.
How long have you've been taking them? If not long, how do you know it's not a placebo effect?
No, horses aren't an end in themselves, but I don't think most people really get that privilege either.
Poor people are being killed today and in the past to help rich people get what they want. Look at the plight of the native American. Look at all the poor people thrown in jail for nearly their entire life, which effectively is killing them, given they can no longer reproduce. Or neighborhoods where the cops generally just give up on. Do you think rich people there? The rich do kill the poor, but they do it slowly and keep it under the radar, and find something to pin the blame on rather then themselves.
Most people don't really care about economic efficiency, nor what to do about the poor. They just want a certain amount of wealth for themselves, some more, some less, but mostly just a little more then their neighbor. And most people of today seem fine with letting poor people die if it means getting a better life for themselves and their loved ones. So then, what is the difference between poor people and the middle class, besides wealth? I'd say nothing at all. There are two kinds of wealth, what you own and what you can produce. If what you can produce is so little, so easily manufactured without you, that you are practically worthless to the economy, and you have no money otherwise, then you become unimportant to the economy, and will be treated just like the poor of today. The only difference now is that the bar is being raised so high, that people can't rely on their skills like they could before and eventually no one who doesn't already have wealth will be immune.
Are the uber wealthy that much different than the middle class? Are they mostly interested in having one more yacht then the other guy? I really don't know, but I do know they don't care much about the poor either based on what is happening to them.
Also, democracy isn't a binary switch, but a continuum, and the continuum has been sliding ever more to favor the rich and powerful (or haven't you noticed?). So there is the third option for your selfish uber-wealthy character example, if they don't like the rules, they change them.
I don't think it's possible to stop technology, either. I meant my comment only as speculation as to what will happen in the future. I'm not sure what to can be done to change it.
Let's look at another creature who used to be a large part of the economy but who's numbers have dwindled to nearly nothing, the horse. Technology has created machines that were able to replace nearly all that a horse could do, ie. farming, transportation, warfare. The few remaining jobs, being a pet, used for the pastime of horse back riding were not enough to employ all the horses, so they were mostly killed and not allowed to breed.
The only difference I see between horses and the common man is that he or she can vote. So if there became to be no more work that most humans were qualified for, a safety net could be voted in to support them. This should work for awhile, but eventually as the military forces becomes more machine than man, until totally being machine, and the people holding the reigns on them become fewer and fewer, the power of the vote will become less and less. People that speak out against the system will be rounded up and disappeared'ed, your representatives will completely ignore the will of the people, etc. One day the vote will become a complete charade, or a coup will occur, (which would be much more easily done with an army of robots, then the human army today, since soldiers won't be there to refuse to fire on civilians of their own country) and the population of people will be forced to dwindle to near nothing, along side the horses of the past, once a great beast but now completely dependent on and subservient to the whims of a technological being more advanced then them.
Here is what the Dr. Hansen did: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/12/03/climate_change_deniers_write_another_fact_free_op_ed.html
Yea, no cherry picking there..
They have a P/E under 12, and a huge amount of cash. What fundamentals are you talking about?
Greed, huh? You know what happens to things that are based on greed, right? They grow..
With bitcoin, you are your own bank. You can buy insurance if you were really worried about it. As a bank customer and US taxpayer you are already indirectly paying for that insurance anyway.
How could you buy insurance for an anonymous currency?
You: "Somebody stole my bitcoins!"
Insurance company: "Prove it!"
You: "Well, there's the rub..."
I suppose cash may be considered anonymous, too, and I guess you can insure that... but at least there would be some evidence of a break in. With bitcoin, it's simply gone, or it's not and the owner simply lied about it.
No matter how well they guard it, the risk vs reward will be off the scale!
I don't think any of the OWS claims were satisfied (if there are any, it's kind of difficult to discern whether they agreed about anything at all). I do think that them being in the news for so long caused an imprint on public consciousness (which I expanded further in my reply to phantomfive), and that caused the shift.
BTW, I'm not in support of OWS, I just found the fallout interesting. Nor do I attribute the effect to some sort of clever scheme by the OWS people. Mainly, I think the effect they did cause was not consciously understood by them.
I like a lot of your ideas. I agree that fixing the issues must be done politically rather than by industry. Actually doing it is the trick, however. If we could pass one bill that's politically acceptable enough to pass and start the unraveling of the whole currently broken and corrupt system (maybe your enforced sunset idea), maybe we could get the country back on track.
BTW, I'm not in support of OWS, I just found the fallout interesting. Nor do I attribute some sort of clever scheme by the OWS people. Mainly I think the effect they did cause was not consciously understood.
In what way?
IMO By just being in the news so much, their ideas get absorbed over and over again in the public consciousness. The same principle as used in advertising. Repeating an idea over and over again is nebulous force, difficult to fight against with a logical argument, but definitely present and can be extremely powerful. Especially the way they did it, showing mobs of people all in agreement of *something*, which provokes the "me too" instinct. Even if that *something* is not logically consistent, or even completely definable, it still puts beliefs into peoples minds, or makes certain ideas appear more socially and therefore readily acceptable.
Just ask why beer and soda companies advertise so much, even though 99% general public would still understand what their product is and what it does if they did so far less.
In my opinion, they definitely shifted the politics of the country more to the left.
I would assume that what is most worrying is that most people that google her wouldn't tell you that they did so. To at least defend against that, your fiancee should create a blog defending herself from the accusations, so at least her side would be expressed.
At least it would garner sympathy for her, and potential employers/clients may feel pity for her more than anything and overlook the whole mess.
That's not a very nice thing to do to Motorola right before Christmas.
Regardless if it's the people running Google's self-driving car program or not, you can't just let people do whatever they like, and when they screw up, shrug your shoulders and say, oh well, it's their fault!
There are thousands of regulations in the airline industry, the construction industry and basically anywhere there are human lives at stake. Are you saying that should be all thrown out the window? Or just in this particular case for some reason?
Not to mention that most humans would be thinking the computer isn't driving fast enough, and their "help" would be to mash the accelerator while the computer uses the steering to try to keep the car from careening out of control.
Guns dont cause violence. If they did, I should be able to put a gun in a room and have violence happen.
That's absurd. You can take anything and place it in an environment rendering it useless. By your logic, I could say people don't cause violence, because if I chained them all down to the floor, no violence would occur. And that allowing people the freedom to move is the actual underlying cause of violence.
Obviously the nut job that did this had some responsibility as well, but violence due to nut job plus gun is greater than nut job without gun. So the nut job and the gun are both causes.
If guns don't cause violence, you'd agree that more powerful guns also don't cause violence, right? So if machine guns were legalized, and the guy could get hold of a fully automatic AK-47, then there wouldn't be more violence? Yeah, right.
Let's look at another creature who used to be a large part of the economy but who's numbers have dwindled to nearly nothing, the horse. Technology has created machines that were able to replace nearly all that a horse could do, ie. farming, transportation, warfare. The few remaining jobs, being a pet, used for the pastime of horse back riding were not enough to employ all the horses, so they were mostly killed and not allowed to breed.
Human's still have some abilities that cannot be replicated by technology, but these will, I believe, eventually be replaced as well. You can say a robot can't be all lovely dovey and social and all that, and you'd never make a robot your friend, but you're looking at robots of today. Just like the cool kids in the 70's would look at computers at the time and think they were and always will be just used by nerds. Also, just because you'd never befriend a robot, or tolerate being served by a robot, doesn't mean the future generations won't. I'm sure there were some hold outs who refused to buy an automobile and kept their horse and buggy until the day they died, if you did the same with robots, it would make no difference.
The only difference I see between horses and the common man is that he or she can vote. So if there became to be no more work that most humans were qualified for, a safety net could be voted in to support them. This should work for awhile, but eventually as the military forces becomes more machine than man, until totally being machine, and the people holding the reigns on them become fewer and fewer, the power of the vote will become less and less. People that speak out against the system will be rounded up and disappeared'ed, your representatives will completely ignore the will of the people, etc. One day the vote will become a complete charade, or a coup will occur, and the population of people will be forced to dwindle to near nothing, along side the horses of the past, once a great beast but now completely dependent on and subservient to the whims of a technological being more advanced then us.
Where do you think all these desires besides breeding are for?
I believe that is complex behavior that evolved to ensure your genes are passed on and nothing more. This instinct to care about other people can be explained in that we used to live in tribes and each tribe member would share a lot of genes with other tribe members. So the survival of the tribe propagates your genes even if you don't happen to survive. The fact that you care about the whole world is just the result of your instinctual desires being thrown into an environment they were not designed for. Same as a person's body killing itself by overreacting to a foreign invader. In the past, there were no doctors that could heal you, and it was all up to the body itself. So nearly killing itself in order to fight back the invader, (and sometimes going overboard), worked better than keeping it's defenses toned down and hoping for some outside influence, although that is not true today.
In addition, all the other thoughts not explained by the above could be just novel, unexpected consequences of the interaction of the very many systems of the complex machine that is your human body, your immediate neighbors and society in general.
If it's not the above, that what is it? Do you believe that God came down and gave people feelings?
The article states it's 2.5 cm or about 1 inch thick
The article states the walls are 2.5 cm thick, which is almost an inch
Why would the price go down if BTC became easier to buy?