Soldiers come from US cities and towns, and would be very reluctant to fire on ordinary people in a widespread rebellion; they could be shooting their parents or friends.
About 1 family in three has a gun in the household; to effectively fight a force like that the military would have to kill everybody. Using the military against a widespread popular rebellion would be futile. Even a psychopath like the current occupant of the White House would be unlikely to engage in such an effort, because at the end there'd be nobody left to rule over.
Not every employee of the US government is in the military, and not every member of the military is a combatant. Massive attacks on the IRS, for example, would have a great effect.
Attitudes like yours are self-defeating; you can't win if you don't try. You'd make a complacent slave.
Or, you can leave a stable, slow growing company for a dynamic startup, and surprise! The leader is a childish, bullheaded solipsist who runs the company into the ground with erratic decisions and confident ignorance. Most startups fail quickly.
Most people at big companies who seem so able to identify flaws in their company's policies are fools in love with the sound of their own voice. If you must look beyond your own job, then gather your own facts and reach your own conclusions.
The fact BTC are seen as being more like gold, something to be hoarded, than a currency is a pretty clear indication that it isn't working very well as a replacement currency.
If what you say is true, you are seeing Gresham's law in action. The inferior currency, the dollar, drives the superior currencies (gold, bitcoin) out of the market.
I can't cover all your errors; and you have many things right or close to right. But consider this:
Interest always accrues on the outstanding balance, and after a payment the new balance reflects the previous balance, the payment, and the interest which had accrued. When you make a payment on a loan, unless you have some screwed up contract that says otherwise, you are always paying off part of the current balance. Early in a loan's life that balance is large, so for a particular interest rate the interest represents a large portion of the payment. Later in the loan's life the balance is small, so the interest portion is proportionally lower.
It is not part of a (nefarious) plan that the interest payments are large in the beginning, that's just how the math works out. When you understand the underlying principle, everything else follows.
With finite currencies like the gold standard, oil standard, or Bitcoin, there is always going to be a fixed upper limit on wealth.
You don't understand what wealth is. The value of money is determined by what it can buy. To give a monetary example, consider a world in which the total money supply is $1 million, and the only worldly goods are fish, of which there are 1 million pounds. Under those conditions, people might be willing to trade 1 pound of fish for 1 dollar. Now consider a second world, in which there is $10 million and 1 million pounds of fish. In the second world people would probably trade 10 dollars for 1 pound of fish. The people of the second world are not ten times as wealthy; their wealth is the same as the first world because the supply of material goods is the same.
Money is not wealth. Money is a measure of wealth, and the quality of that measure is questionable. Money is a medium of trade, making it easier than barter to exchange goods and services. Good money is durable, divisible, stable, and fungible; good money allows a person to trade a lot of labor for a lot of money and save some of that money for food, clothing, and shelter later in life when he's no longer able to labor effectively.
Banks being discouraged from loaning is a good thing, as shown by the most recent financial crisis which had as its biggest intermediate cause excessive poor quality loans. Everybody was hurt, banks and people encouraged to take loans they couldn't afford, and the world in general as the side effects expanded.
Loans are profitable to banks without regard to either inflation or deflation. With deflation, they get back more dollars than they loaned out, and the dollars they get back are worth more. PROFIT!. (The increased risk is that in case of default, the asset translates to fewer dollars.) With inflation the situation is more difficult, to profit they're relying on being able to borrow (from savings accounts and the government) at a rate lower than that at which they lend.
What's best for banks is a stable currency. What's very bad is a volatile, unpredictable currency that makes planning impossible.
Like anybody else, science fiction authors have political axes to grind. Like many bright people, some of them use their intelligence not to find the truth, but to find ways to buttress their cockamamie ideas. One of the most blatant examples of foolish political ideas by science fiction authors is Gene Roddenberry's idea that advanced civilizations would have no money.
The 9 billion was a government bribe to Boeing to protect the unions that would otherwise have driven Boeing to union-free states in the American southeast. Typical of government action, a huge amount of money is being spent to provide a much smaller benefit to a special-interest-group.
Company owners that intend to do well build businesses that will last at least long enough to make them rich. That tends to prevent them from discouraging repeat business by bludgeoning their customers or building unsafe stores. It is the self interest of capitalists, not the heavy hand of government, that protects customers.
FWIW, the last time I heard of a roof collapse caused by snow burden, it was a government building.
Property taxes. Capitations. Coincidentally (?) these are the proper taxes to fund the only proper functions of government, the protection of people and their property.
Individual businesses should not get tax breaks because it gives one business an "unfair" advantage over others. It's an open invitation for bribery and corruption. It's Fascism. It's a risk, and government shouldn't be taking risks with our money.
TFA did not mention the particular fix to the problem, so I'll speculate. They mentioned that zeros would cause a recognizable branch, so choices are: make the code non-branching, or make the timing of the branch for zero the same as not branching. Other possibilities include inserting pseudo-random delays in the code, processing sections of the message out of order (randomly), and interspersing decoding of bogus messages with the decoding of the real message.
Nutritional needs change over a lifetime. Your doctor visit, which hasn't a chance in hell of testing accurately for all vitamins, will be almost meaningless in 10 years.
Oil soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) can be stored for a substantial amount of time. Water soluble vitamins disappear relatively quickly, but even then they don't disappear entirely in a day. Stop taking vitamin C and it will be months before you get frank scurvy. (Don't try it.)
If you are concerned, go to your doctor and get tested.
Yup, speaking of pissing away stuff, there goes a few hundred dollars. Or maybe you think it comes from Obama's stash.
Nice trick. You completely ignored his argument. I'll restate the vitamin E portion.
For decades, almost all studies on vitamin E have only been done on the alpha tocopherol portion, and those who wish to misrepresent vitamin E do so to this day. For the last decade it's been pretty well known that doses above 400 IU of alpha tocopherol start producing negative incremental benefits because they deplete the very important gamma tocopherol. Beta and delta portions may also have some benefit. There are also the related alpha, beta, gamma, and delta tocotrienols, put into the better vitamin E formulations for additional benefit.
RDAs for vitamins were initially set by measuring typical intake rather than actual need, and have only been adjusted moderately since then. let's assume that the RDAs actually measure the average person's need. Since each individual varies in his need for each vitamin, only half of the people, for each vitamin, are getting enough. Consider that perhaps 15 vitamins are actually essential, and that for each vitamin there's an independent chance of deficiency. That means that only one person in 32,768 gets enough of each of those 15 vitamins.
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Never designed military electronics, have you?
Soldiers come from US cities and towns, and would be very reluctant to fire on ordinary people in a widespread rebellion; they could be shooting their parents or friends.
About 1 family in three has a gun in the household; to effectively fight a force like that the military would have to kill everybody. Using the military against a widespread popular rebellion would be futile. Even a psychopath like the current occupant of the White House would be unlikely to engage in such an effort, because at the end there'd be nobody left to rule over.
Not every employee of the US government is in the military, and not every member of the military is a combatant. Massive attacks on the IRS, for example, would have a great effect.
Attitudes like yours are self-defeating; you can't win if you don't try. You'd make a complacent slave.
Or, you can leave a stable, slow growing company for a dynamic startup, and surprise! The leader is a childish, bullheaded solipsist who runs the company into the ground with erratic decisions and confident ignorance. Most startups fail quickly.
Most people at big companies who seem so able to identify flaws in their company's policies are fools in love with the sound of their own voice. If you must look beyond your own job, then gather your own facts and reach your own conclusions.
You might also consider Niven's "Bordered in Black".
If what you say is true, you are seeing Gresham's law in action. The inferior currency, the dollar, drives the superior currencies (gold, bitcoin) out of the market.
I can't cover all your errors; and you have many things right or close to right. But consider this:
Interest always accrues on the outstanding balance, and after a payment the new balance reflects the previous balance, the payment, and the interest which had accrued. When you make a payment on a loan, unless you have some screwed up contract that says otherwise, you are always paying off part of the current balance. Early in a loan's life that balance is large, so for a particular interest rate the interest represents a large portion of the payment. Later in the loan's life the balance is small, so the interest portion is proportionally lower.
It is not part of a (nefarious) plan that the interest payments are large in the beginning, that's just how the math works out. When you understand the underlying principle, everything else follows.
You don't understand what wealth is. The value of money is determined by what it can buy. To give a monetary example, consider a world in which the total money supply is $1 million, and the only worldly goods are fish, of which there are 1 million pounds. Under those conditions, people might be willing to trade 1 pound of fish for 1 dollar. Now consider a second world, in which there is $10 million and 1 million pounds of fish. In the second world people would probably trade 10 dollars for 1 pound of fish. The people of the second world are not ten times as wealthy; their wealth is the same as the first world because the supply of material goods is the same.
Money is not wealth. Money is a measure of wealth, and the quality of that measure is questionable. Money is a medium of trade, making it easier than barter to exchange goods and services. Good money is durable, divisible, stable, and fungible; good money allows a person to trade a lot of labor for a lot of money and save some of that money for food, clothing, and shelter later in life when he's no longer able to labor effectively.
Is it good to be a patriot in an evil country?
Banks being discouraged from loaning is a good thing, as shown by the most recent financial crisis which had as its biggest intermediate cause excessive poor quality loans. Everybody was hurt, banks and people encouraged to take loans they couldn't afford, and the world in general as the side effects expanded.
Loans are profitable to banks without regard to either inflation or deflation. With deflation, they get back more dollars than they loaned out, and the dollars they get back are worth more. PROFIT!. (The increased risk is that in case of default, the asset translates to fewer dollars.) With inflation the situation is more difficult, to profit they're relying on being able to borrow (from savings accounts and the government) at a rate lower than that at which they lend.
What's best for banks is a stable currency. What's very bad is a volatile, unpredictable currency that makes planning impossible.
Like anybody else, science fiction authors have political axes to grind. Like many bright people, some of them use their intelligence not to find the truth, but to find ways to buttress their cockamamie ideas. One of the most blatant examples of foolish political ideas by science fiction authors is Gene Roddenberry's idea that advanced civilizations would have no money.
So is masturbation. The results are similar, too: you feel good for a while, and have to clean up a slimy mess afterwards.
The 9 billion was a government bribe to Boeing to protect the unions that would otherwise have driven Boeing to union-free states in the American southeast. Typical of government action, a huge amount of money is being spent to provide a much smaller benefit to a special-interest-group.
Company owners that intend to do well build businesses that will last at least long enough to make them rich. That tends to prevent them from discouraging repeat business by bludgeoning their customers or building unsafe stores. It is the self interest of capitalists, not the heavy hand of government, that protects customers.
FWIW, the last time I heard of a roof collapse caused by snow burden, it was a government building.
Property taxes. Capitations. Coincidentally (?) these are the proper taxes to fund the only proper functions of government, the protection of people and their property.
Individual businesses should not get tax breaks because it gives one business an "unfair" advantage over others. It's an open invitation for bribery and corruption. It's Fascism. It's a risk, and government shouldn't be taking risks with our money.
TFA did not mention the particular fix to the problem, so I'll speculate. They mentioned that zeros would cause a recognizable branch, so choices are: make the code non-branching, or make the timing of the branch for zero the same as not branching. Other possibilities include inserting pseudo-random delays in the code, processing sections of the message out of order (randomly), and interspersing decoding of bogus messages with the decoding of the real message.
Nutritional needs change over a lifetime. Your doctor visit, which hasn't a chance in hell of testing accurately for all vitamins, will be almost meaningless in 10 years.
Ahh........Whoosh. (sarcasm)
Care to define overdose, for vitamin C?
There are more benefits to vitamins than disease prevention.
Vitamins created by gut bacteria in most people have generally been removed from the group of substances called "vitamins".
Oil soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) can be stored for a substantial amount of time. Water soluble vitamins disappear relatively quickly, but even then they don't disappear entirely in a day. Stop taking vitamin C and it will be months before you get frank scurvy. (Don't try it.)
Yup, speaking of pissing away stuff, there goes a few hundred dollars. Or maybe you think it comes from Obama's stash.
Nice trick. You completely ignored his argument. I'll restate the vitamin E portion.
For decades, almost all studies on vitamin E have only been done on the alpha tocopherol portion, and those who wish to misrepresent vitamin E do so to this day. For the last decade it's been pretty well known that doses above 400 IU of alpha tocopherol start producing negative incremental benefits because they deplete the very important gamma tocopherol. Beta and delta portions may also have some benefit. There are also the related alpha, beta, gamma, and delta tocotrienols, put into the better vitamin E formulations for additional benefit.
RDAs for vitamins were initially set by measuring typical intake rather than actual need, and have only been adjusted moderately since then. let's assume that the RDAs actually measure the average person's need. Since each individual varies in his need for each vitamin, only half of the people, for each vitamin, are getting enough. Consider that perhaps 15 vitamins are actually essential, and that for each vitamin there's an independent chance of deficiency. That means that only one person in 32,768 gets enough of each of those 15 vitamins.