The worst part is none of this will stop piracy. The software can be cracked to disable/fool the periodic authentication and proxy servers can be set up to emulate the cloud services for saving files.
Only businesses that need to stay legit will be affected by this. If there is a network outage or bottleneck they will be shut down. If they let their subscription lapse they will be shut down. If they refuse to upgrade for too long, they will eventually lose the ability to collaborate with other groups as new features are added that are not backwards compatible.
It's tantamount to extortion for anyone who wants or needs to stay legit, but really only an annoyance for people who are willing and able to pirate. =Smidge=
Which, by the way, is still faster than other form of "transfer without a central authority", like bank money transfer (from a day up to a couple of days).
So what? Over the course of a 3-4 days, exchange rates rarely vary by more than a percent or two. Bitcoin clearly has the ability to change by 10%+ or more within hours. That's apples to durians in comparison.
Worth noting that with bank transfers, the delay is built in to help mitigate fraud, unlike bitcoin's delay which is a bug not a feature. Banks could process the transfer almost immediately if they wanted to, bitcoin effectively cannot.
Which, by the way, is still within the same kind of margin that some central authority money transfers end up costing.
Not even close, though I'm not sure if that's a reference to transaction fees... it shouldn't be, because I never mentioned those.
I'm referring to the change in value of the currency being transferred. If I agree to pay you $5 and the value of my currency drops 50% by the time it shows up in your account, I've effectively only sent you $2.50.
Yes, that effect happens when moving between different currencies, but nowhere near as bad and nowhere near s often.
How are you supposed to *hide* movements of money, on a system whose entire purpose of existence is to replace central authorities, with a system where every single movement of money is broadcast to the entire network and kept in a distributed ledger by all nodes ?
Bitcoins are not associated to real identities and rely only on unique tokens. Tying transactions to individuals requires associating public wallet addresses with IP addresses.
Using VPNs/Proxies/Tor/Open hotspots obscures your identity a decent amount with relatively little effort. Using mixing services is effectively the Bitcoin equivalent to money laundering. You can get any number of addresses for transactions and, since there is no personal information associated with those addresses, you can easily confound attempts to track funds between a known payer and an unknown receiver.
Kind of the whole allure behind cryptocurrencies is how easily it is to foil attempts to track a transaction. You just have to be not stupid about it...
The whole point of bitcoin protocol is not to make transaction secret.
The point is to make transactions auditable, which is not the same as traceable. You can easily verify the history of funds being transferred from one account to another, but it's very difficult to track funds being transferred from one person to another. =Smidge=
the later doesn't really care so much since bitcoins are not held for any appreciable amount of time (immediately bought by person A, transferred, immediately sold by person B)
Buying bitcoin, transferring it and selling it again is three transactions; That will take roughly four hours. As evidenced a few days ago, Bitcoin could easily gain or lose 10% or more of its value in those four hours. No sane or intelligent person would attempt it, unless they were desperate to hide the movement of money.
And even the criminals are starting to doubt it's worth it. =Smidge=
It's a very very toxic measure, especially among rural Republican voters who are the ones usually stuck with one ISP. They're the ones who get screwed over by Verizon/Comcast/ ATnT. So each Republican Senator they force to support Ajit's toxic measure, is a Republican that will have to face his constituents later and explain why they supported this anti consumer measure.
Not a problem; They're also the ones who are thoroughly convinced that Net Neutrality is the digital equivalent to Nazi concentration camps... the most egregious attempt at government control and censorship in all of history.
Ajit has helped enormously with his insulting and patronizing videos and ignoring of all those fake comments with half a million of them from Russian email addresses.
...which, ironically, few of the aforementioned constituents have seen since they lack decent internet speeds. Besides, if/when things do come to a head, I'm sure Fox News will slap a (D) next to his name. =Smidge=
Then it would not really matter if BTC increases or drops by 10% in a few hours.
Yes it would.
As a buyer paying in bitcoin, if I can anticipate the value increasing by 10% in an hour then I will wait an hour to make my purchase. If I anticipate the price rising significantly in the future at all, then it's in my best interest to spend as little of it as possible.
As a seller accepting bitcoin, instant conversion makes things a bit easier but there is a similar dilemma in that it might not pay to convert immediately. But if you are converting BTC to USD immediately, and presumably pegging the price in BTC to the price in USD, then why bother with the extra headaches and just use USD to begin with? There's little incentive to accept a form of payment that customers are reluctant to use. =Smidge=
You are paying for Verizon's VOD as part of your Verizon bill.
That's one way to look at it, I suppose. Another way to look at it is Verizon is giving their own service a free ride. FiOS does not (currently) have data caps or throttling that I've encountered, so there is no argument to be made here that they're trying to save costs on bandwidth or justifying offering free VoD to FiOS customers because it's part of a package. There is no distinction between traffic used to stream video from Verizon's service or Netflix's service, other than Verizon could increase their profits if something were to make Netflix less competitive.
In a fair and neutral internet, the cost to watch a streamed movie would cover the cost of the bandwidth - you pay a Netflix service fee, and that fee covers the cost of their bandwidth (and other expenses). I pay my ISP service fee and that covers the cost of bandwidth with Verizon on my end. Without network neutrality, Netflix stands to become much less reliable and also more expensive because Verizon can abuse their position as ISP to stifle their competition... and VoD will suddenly not be free anymore.
Reminds me of how the major selling point of Cable TV was that it was commercial free. Then it was mostly commercial free with some premium channels (extra cost above base service costs) being commercial free. Now even the premium channels you're paying extra for run ads...
Sorry, but a data cap doesn't automatically mean your data is interrupted.
Never said anything about data caps. "Zero rating" if data is another issue that becomes a problem without NN but I'm speaking to quality of service in that quote.
Explain how a NN law in California stops Comcast of Iowa from not letting packets from an Iowa company on the net, thus effectively blocking subscribers to Comcast of California from getting access to them.
It doesn't, and that's kind of the problem with the state-level approach. We seem to agree on this point, at least. =Smidge=
"Certain web traffic" because the concern - well founded by historical behavior, I might add - is that ISPs will selectively slow or block access to services in order to either extort more money or to put up barriers to competition.
For example, your startup video streaming service competes with Verizon's video on demand? Well your traffic will count towards Verizon's data caps while their own traffic does not (letting them charge more from their customers) and *your* traffic in particular will be throttled or interrupted unless you pay extra.
See: Portugal's tiered internet structure, various lawsuits against Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others over the past decade.
It has nothing to do with the potential for government censorship - that can happen any time for any reason with or without Net Neutrality rules. Instead, by opposing Net Neutrality, you are advocating that corporations be allowed to censor whenever it benefits them. =Smidge=
Yeah, Jim Crow laws worked great in some states but not in others, so it should be up to each state to decide which US citizens deserve to be treated like citizens and which do not.
So how would any state and its citizenry be better served by allowing ISPs to block/snarl competitive services or charge said competitors extortion fees for access to their users? =Smidge=
I don't know that much about CPU design and fabrication but it's my understanding that the manufacturing process takes several months at least, so assuming they discovered the flaw in June and managed to *immediately* change the design to fix it, implementing those changes to the production line the very next day, it quite possibly could still have taken months for the revised designs to make it into the factory doors.
But after you consider that coming up with a fix might itself take weeks at least, and implementing those changes weeks to months all on its own (to be sure it fixes the problem and doesn't create new ones), it will probably be quite a while longer yet until this is resolved. =Smidge=
It's arguable that the product isn't "defective." It's operating properly and as designed... It just happens that the design has a serious but unintended consequence.
If someone uses a screwdriver to pry open a lock we don't say the screwdriver and/or lock is "defective." Inadequate maybe, but not defective. =Smidge=
It's because what you're getting at is nonsensical from a a technical perspective. It's a distinction without a difference, especially form the end user's perspective. Remember that it's not merely providing an internal service that competes with an external one, it's deliberately leveraging the fact that you are the gatekeeper to competing third party services to give yourself a competitive advantage.
That's assuming that the videos (in this very specific example) are actually hosted by Verizon, on Verizon hardware, and is located physically near the consumers. If that's not the case it makes this considerably worse for your viewpoint because that's apparently all it's based on.
The security guard to your gated condo complex controls access to your home. Imagine if he decides to start operating his own pizza delivery service, and deliberately stalling deliveries of competing pizza places at the gate and charging them a gate toll (thus making their pizzas both cold and more expensive by the time they get to you). Does anything seem ethically or legally dubious about this situation? Does it matter if he bakes the pizzas right in the guard booth?
Difficulty: If you move out of the condo complex, your options are either another condo complex where the guards do exactly the same thing or a remote cabin with miles of swerving unpaved roads to access it. If you're lucky. =Smidge=
I can stream a movie from Verizon's VOD service, or from Netflix, Amazon, Youtube etc. It's safe to assume that if I choose one service I won't be using another at the same time, so it's not like my choice will affect the "last mile" bandwidth at all.
However, Verizon can and will deliberately hinder traffic from all services other than its own unless an extortion fee is paid. This makes the competing services less competitive - Poorer service for higher price - than Verizon's through artificial and underhanded means.
So I'm not at all clear what it is you think "may not happen"... because if you think traffic tampering and charging fees only to third party providers won't happen, it already does. It's called Zero-Rating, and it's been allowed to happen because there's some legal wiggle room in how cell phone traffic is treated. Without NN you can expect it to become the norm for all internet access. =Smidge=
But those could also easily be argued to not be "Internet" access, as it's all on Verizon's internal network
But the competing service is coming in over the internet connection, and is being (in this scenario) actively tampered with to make it less competitive. That's a problem.
I don't think we need to worry about that just yet
It's already happened. It's already happening. At what point do you start to worry about it? =Smidge=
The difficulty is when, say, Verizon's own streaming service is zero-rated and doesn't count towards your speed or data caps, but all other services do.
Even if all third parties have "equal access" to pay for extra data or whatever, the service provider is offering competing services and is able to avoid those costs, reducing competitiveness. =Smidge=
Liquidity is about how easy it is to convert an asset's value, not how often. Frequent trades are not necessarily a good indication of liquidity; If at any given time there is no buyer for your stuff, then it's not liquid at that moment. You might think that frequent trades means more opportunities to sell, but it can also be that the market is saturated and any one specific seller might have a hard time finding a buyer.
All frequent trades like what you're describing can really tell you is it's not something worth holding on to for very long, which would be worrisome.
In either case, however, this does not help the business that issued the original stock unless and until they issue more stock of their own, and in absolutely no case are you investing in that business if you don't buy the stock directly from them. =Smidge=
The very notion of "Liquidity" is bullshit, especially in this situation.
Either someone is gonna buy the stocks you're trying to sell or nobody will. Buyers and sellers are essentially commodities. A stock doesn't become more "liquid" if A sells to B, or if A sells to B who then sells to C, or if A sells to C directly. =Smidge=
The difference is, the stock markets represent people's monetary investments in businesses
Yes and no. I draw a distinction between investing in, and being invested in, a company.
Example: If you buy stock in Smidge Industries LTD, that means someone is selling that stock. If SIL is selling that stock, then you are investing in that company. Your money goes to the business.
If, however, SIL is not selling stocks at that time, then you're buying from someone else. Your money does not go to Smidge Industries LTD, and they do not tangibly benefit from the transaction. However, you still own stock in SIL, so you are invested in the company.
But in the second case, your financial transaction means nearly nothing to the company. I say nearly, because with enough activity it can affect the price of the stock which, in turn, helps or harms the company's ability to raise more money by selling more stock if it chooses to do so. And since the vast majority of the stock market is transactions that don't involve the companies that issued the stocks being traded, I'd argue that the stock markets don't truly represent people investing in companies as much as they represent people being invested in companies. =Smidge=
The very fact that it would require a government, or (government sanctioned/appointed) agency to assess and enforce such penalties means it is not a "market approach."
But that doesn't mean I disagree; if anything the fines should be at least 100x higher, maybe even 1000x since there's an almost certainty that penalties will settle for pennies on the dollar anyway. =Smidge=
Maybe you're just not there when the trains are? It typically takes a train all of 30 seconds to pass by. Do you really sit and stare at the tracks for 6 hours and keep count?
Maybe the tracks you DO manage to keep a constant eye on are not along major commuter corridors. In order for trains to be useful, they need to have endpoints at or near places people and things need to be. A lot of tracks (especially in urban areas) were build to support specific industries or functions that might no longer exist, or are used far less frequently.
If it's a particularly long length of track, then traffic might be restricted because trains can only run so close together, and two trains can't go in opposite directions on the same track at the same time unless there's room for a side track to let them pass each other.
(I'm sure you'll reply to this with some of these "papers and studies" you mentioned which probably say some very similar things...) =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
The worst part is none of this will stop piracy. The software can be cracked to disable/fool the periodic authentication and proxy servers can be set up to emulate the cloud services for saving files.
Only businesses that need to stay legit will be affected by this. If there is a network outage or bottleneck they will be shut down. If they let their subscription lapse they will be shut down. If they refuse to upgrade for too long, they will eventually lose the ability to collaborate with other groups as new features are added that are not backwards compatible.
It's tantamount to extortion for anyone who wants or needs to stay legit, but really only an annoyance for people who are willing and able to pirate.
=Smidge=
Which, by the way, is still faster than other form of "transfer without a central authority", like bank money transfer (from a day up to a couple of days).
So what? Over the course of a 3-4 days, exchange rates rarely vary by more than a percent or two. Bitcoin clearly has the ability to change by 10%+ or more within hours. That's apples to durians in comparison.
Worth noting that with bank transfers, the delay is built in to help mitigate fraud, unlike bitcoin's delay which is a bug not a feature. Banks could process the transfer almost immediately if they wanted to, bitcoin effectively cannot.
Which, by the way, is still within the same kind of margin that some central authority money transfers end up costing.
Not even close, though I'm not sure if that's a reference to transaction fees... it shouldn't be, because I never mentioned those.
I'm referring to the change in value of the currency being transferred. If I agree to pay you $5 and the value of my currency drops 50% by the time it shows up in your account, I've effectively only sent you $2.50.
Yes, that effect happens when moving between different currencies, but nowhere near as bad and nowhere near s often.
How are you supposed to *hide* movements of money, on a system whose entire purpose of existence is to replace central authorities, with a system where every single movement of money is broadcast to the entire network and kept in a distributed ledger by all nodes ?
Bitcoins are not associated to real identities and rely only on unique tokens. Tying transactions to individuals requires associating public wallet addresses with IP addresses.
Using VPNs/Proxies/Tor/Open hotspots obscures your identity a decent amount with relatively little effort. Using mixing services is effectively the Bitcoin equivalent to money laundering. You can get any number of addresses for transactions and, since there is no personal information associated with those addresses, you can easily confound attempts to track funds between a known payer and an unknown receiver.
Kind of the whole allure behind cryptocurrencies is how easily it is to foil attempts to track a transaction. You just have to be not stupid about it...
The whole point of bitcoin protocol is not to make transaction secret.
The point is to make transactions auditable, which is not the same as traceable. You can easily verify the history of funds being transferred from one account to another, but it's very difficult to track funds being transferred from one person to another.
=Smidge=
the later doesn't really care so much since bitcoins are not held for any appreciable amount of time (immediately bought by person A, transferred, immediately sold by person B)
Buying bitcoin, transferring it and selling it again is three transactions; That will take roughly four hours. As evidenced a few days ago, Bitcoin could easily gain or lose 10% or more of its value in those four hours. No sane or intelligent person would attempt it, unless they were desperate to hide the movement of money.
And even the criminals are starting to doubt it's worth it.
=Smidge=
It's a very very toxic measure, especially among rural Republican voters who are the ones usually stuck with one ISP. They're the ones who get screwed over by Verizon/Comcast/ ATnT. So each Republican Senator they force to support Ajit's toxic measure, is a Republican that will have to face his constituents later and explain why they supported this anti consumer measure.
Not a problem; They're also the ones who are thoroughly convinced that Net Neutrality is the digital equivalent to Nazi concentration camps... the most egregious attempt at government control and censorship in all of history.
Ajit has helped enormously with his insulting and patronizing videos and ignoring of all those fake comments with half a million of them from Russian email addresses.
...which, ironically, few of the aforementioned constituents have seen since they lack decent internet speeds. Besides, if/when things do come to a head, I'm sure Fox News will slap a (D) next to his name.
=Smidge=
Then it would not really matter if BTC increases or drops by 10% in a few hours.
Yes it would.
As a buyer paying in bitcoin, if I can anticipate the value increasing by 10% in an hour then I will wait an hour to make my purchase. If I anticipate the price rising significantly in the future at all, then it's in my best interest to spend as little of it as possible.
As a seller accepting bitcoin, instant conversion makes things a bit easier but there is a similar dilemma in that it might not pay to convert immediately. But if you are converting BTC to USD immediately, and presumably pegging the price in BTC to the price in USD, then why bother with the extra headaches and just use USD to begin with? There's little incentive to accept a form of payment that customers are reluctant to use.
=Smidge=
You are paying for Verizon's VOD as part of your Verizon bill.
That's one way to look at it, I suppose. Another way to look at it is Verizon is giving their own service a free ride. FiOS does not (currently) have data caps or throttling that I've encountered, so there is no argument to be made here that they're trying to save costs on bandwidth or justifying offering free VoD to FiOS customers because it's part of a package. There is no distinction between traffic used to stream video from Verizon's service or Netflix's service, other than Verizon could increase their profits if something were to make Netflix less competitive.
In a fair and neutral internet, the cost to watch a streamed movie would cover the cost of the bandwidth - you pay a Netflix service fee, and that fee covers the cost of their bandwidth (and other expenses). I pay my ISP service fee and that covers the cost of bandwidth with Verizon on my end. Without network neutrality, Netflix stands to become much less reliable and also more expensive because Verizon can abuse their position as ISP to stifle their competition... and VoD will suddenly not be free anymore.
Reminds me of how the major selling point of Cable TV was that it was commercial free. Then it was mostly commercial free with some premium channels (extra cost above base service costs) being commercial free. Now even the premium channels you're paying extra for run ads...
Sorry, but a data cap doesn't automatically mean your data is interrupted.
Never said anything about data caps. "Zero rating" if data is another issue that becomes a problem without NN but I'm speaking to quality of service in that quote.
Explain how a NN law in California stops Comcast of Iowa from not letting packets from an Iowa company on the net, thus effectively blocking subscribers to Comcast of California from getting access to them.
It doesn't, and that's kind of the problem with the state-level approach. We seem to agree on this point, at least.
=Smidge=
Those suits are recording their every move. once enough data is collected they'll be able to replace them with robots!
You're motion-training your own replacements!
=Smidge=
"Certain web traffic" because the concern - well founded by historical behavior, I might add - is that ISPs will selectively slow or block access to services in order to either extort more money or to put up barriers to competition.
For example, your startup video streaming service competes with Verizon's video on demand? Well your traffic will count towards Verizon's data caps while their own traffic does not (letting them charge more from their customers) and *your* traffic in particular will be throttled or interrupted unless you pay extra.
See: Portugal's tiered internet structure, various lawsuits against Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others over the past decade.
It has nothing to do with the potential for government censorship - that can happen any time for any reason with or without Net Neutrality rules. Instead, by opposing Net Neutrality, you are advocating that corporations be allowed to censor whenever it benefits them.
=Smidge=
Yeah, Jim Crow laws worked great in some states but not in others, so it should be up to each state to decide which US citizens deserve to be treated like citizens and which do not.
So how would any state and its citizenry be better served by allowing ISPs to block/snarl competitive services or charge said competitors extortion fees for access to their users?
=Smidge=
I don't know that much about CPU design and fabrication but it's my understanding that the manufacturing process takes several months at least, so assuming they discovered the flaw in June and managed to *immediately* change the design to fix it, implementing those changes to the production line the very next day, it quite possibly could still have taken months for the revised designs to make it into the factory doors.
But after you consider that coming up with a fix might itself take weeks at least, and implementing those changes weeks to months all on its own (to be sure it fixes the problem and doesn't create new ones), it will probably be quite a while longer yet until this is resolved.
=Smidge=
It's arguable that the product isn't "defective." It's operating properly and as designed... It just happens that the design has a serious but unintended consequence.
If someone uses a screwdriver to pry open a lock we don't say the screwdriver and/or lock is "defective." Inadequate maybe, but not defective.
=Smidge=
Two ways to argue this;
1) Nothing about automatic implies preplanning; "Done or occurring spontaneously, without conscious thought or attention"
2) Explosions are absolutely pre-planned in rocket design, though the intent is to keep the explosions contained within the engine. :-)
=Smidge=
...that all rocket explosions are automatic. They're rarely intended or desired but they still qualify as "automatic."
=Smidge=
It's because what you're getting at is nonsensical from a a technical perspective. It's a distinction without a difference, especially form the end user's perspective. Remember that it's not merely providing an internal service that competes with an external one, it's deliberately leveraging the fact that you are the gatekeeper to competing third party services to give yourself a competitive advantage.
That's assuming that the videos (in this very specific example) are actually hosted by Verizon, on Verizon hardware, and is located physically near the consumers. If that's not the case it makes this considerably worse for your viewpoint because that's apparently all it's based on.
The security guard to your gated condo complex controls access to your home. Imagine if he decides to start operating his own pizza delivery service, and deliberately stalling deliveries of competing pizza places at the gate and charging them a gate toll (thus making their pizzas both cold and more expensive by the time they get to you). Does anything seem ethically or legally dubious about this situation? Does it matter if he bakes the pizzas right in the guard booth?
Difficulty: If you move out of the condo complex, your options are either another condo complex where the guards do exactly the same thing or a remote cabin with miles of swerving unpaved roads to access it. If you're lucky.
=Smidge=
I don't understand what you're saying.
I can stream a movie from Verizon's VOD service, or from Netflix, Amazon, Youtube etc. It's safe to assume that if I choose one service I won't be using another at the same time, so it's not like my choice will affect the "last mile" bandwidth at all.
However, Verizon can and will deliberately hinder traffic from all services other than its own unless an extortion fee is paid. This makes the competing services less competitive - Poorer service for higher price - than Verizon's through artificial and underhanded means.
So I'm not at all clear what it is you think "may not happen" ... because if you think traffic tampering and charging fees only to third party providers won't happen, it already does. It's called Zero-Rating, and it's been allowed to happen because there's some legal wiggle room in how cell phone traffic is treated. Without NN you can expect it to become the norm for all internet access.
=Smidge=
But those could also easily be argued to not be "Internet" access, as it's all on Verizon's internal network
But the competing service is coming in over the internet connection, and is being (in this scenario) actively tampered with to make it less competitive. That's a problem.
I don't think we need to worry about that just yet
It's already happened. It's already happening. At what point do you start to worry about it?
=Smidge=
The difficulty is when, say, Verizon's own streaming service is zero-rated and doesn't count towards your speed or data caps, but all other services do.
Even if all third parties have "equal access" to pay for extra data or whatever, the service provider is offering competing services and is able to avoid those costs, reducing competitiveness.
=Smidge=
To be fair, none of them were embroiled in scandal *while campaigning.* ...and Most of them resigned as the scandals came out.
Republicans, on the other hand, almost seemed to use the accusations as a positive point.
=Smidge=
It's cute how you insert an arbitrary time base.
Liquidity is about how easy it is to convert an asset's value, not how often. Frequent trades are not necessarily a good indication of liquidity; If at any given time there is no buyer for your stuff, then it's not liquid at that moment. You might think that frequent trades means more opportunities to sell, but it can also be that the market is saturated and any one specific seller might have a hard time finding a buyer.
All frequent trades like what you're describing can really tell you is it's not something worth holding on to for very long, which would be worrisome.
In either case, however, this does not help the business that issued the original stock unless and until they issue more stock of their own, and in absolutely no case are you investing in that business if you don't buy the stock directly from them.
=Smidge=
The very notion of "Liquidity" is bullshit, especially in this situation.
Either someone is gonna buy the stocks you're trying to sell or nobody will. Buyers and sellers are essentially commodities. A stock doesn't become more "liquid" if A sells to B, or if A sells to B who then sells to C, or if A sells to C directly.
=Smidge=
The difference is, the stock markets represent people's monetary investments in businesses
Yes and no. I draw a distinction between investing in, and being invested in, a company.
Example: If you buy stock in Smidge Industries LTD, that means someone is selling that stock. If SIL is selling that stock, then you are investing in that company. Your money goes to the business.
If, however, SIL is not selling stocks at that time, then you're buying from someone else. Your money does not go to Smidge Industries LTD, and they do not tangibly benefit from the transaction. However, you still own stock in SIL, so you are invested in the company.
But in the second case, your financial transaction means nearly nothing to the company. I say nearly, because with enough activity it can affect the price of the stock which, in turn, helps or harms the company's ability to raise more money by selling more stock if it chooses to do so. And since the vast majority of the stock market is transactions that don't involve the companies that issued the stocks being traded, I'd argue that the stock markets don't truly represent people investing in companies as much as they represent people being invested in companies.
=Smidge=
The only people pushing tulip comparisons are bank shills like Chase CEO.
You're right, it's a dumb comparison.
Bitcoins are more like Beanie Babies.
=Smidge=
The very fact that it would require a government, or (government sanctioned/appointed) agency to assess and enforce such penalties means it is not a "market approach."
But that doesn't mean I disagree; if anything the fines should be at least 100x higher, maybe even 1000x since there's an almost certainty that penalties will settle for pennies on the dollar anyway.
=Smidge=
Maybe you're just not there when the trains are? It typically takes a train all of 30 seconds to pass by. Do you really sit and stare at the tracks for 6 hours and keep count?
Maybe the tracks you DO manage to keep a constant eye on are not along major commuter corridors. In order for trains to be useful, they need to have endpoints at or near places people and things need to be. A lot of tracks (especially in urban areas) were build to support specific industries or functions that might no longer exist, or are used far less frequently.
If it's a particularly long length of track, then traffic might be restricted because trains can only run so close together, and two trains can't go in opposite directions on the same track at the same time unless there's room for a side track to let them pass each other.
(I'm sure you'll reply to this with some of these "papers and studies" you mentioned which probably say some very similar things...)
=Smidge=
40%... down from over 50% ten years ago. And that's WITH a decline in nuclear capacity.
I'd say Germany is making pretty good progress on a tough goal.
=Smidge=