You realize this is exactly the same problem higgs had. Just because we don't have the tools to perform the experiment yet doesn't stop it from being science. It doesn't magically blossom into being science when build the equipment to test it.
Not necessarily because the stock market is not random. If someone has a strong enough record their predictions can become self fulfilling prophecies as millions of people buy when they buy and drive up the price of whatever they bought and then sell when they sell.
As long as enough people with enough dollars believe in the prophet his prophecies will come true. Of course at some point the whole thing mathematically becomes a pyramid scheme that comes crashing down.
More reputable? I certainly doubt that. Some form of astrology was a valid hypothesis either causing or associated with natural behavior believed by almost every member of civilization at one point. That sounds pretty reputable to me. Astrology isn't even gone, we still utilize our study of the stars and their behavior to explain how things work and came to be here on Earth and Astronomy is a direct descendant. Astronomy is Astrology what Alchemy is chemistry, or what plate tectonics is to continental drift, or relativity is to Newtonian physics.
The people who practiced astrology and alchemy in their day were people who would practice science either theoretical or applied today and it could be argued that without their pursuits the scientific method would never have been devised.
Astrology and Alchemy aren't science but they are most definitely pre-science and the pre-cursors of science. If you follow the scientific method you are doing science, but nothing which predates that method could possibly have followed it. Further not all aspects of astrology were ever reached and/or tested within the framework of the scientific method.
We shouldn't go back to them but we shouldn't spit on the graves of those who came before us just because someone finds it entertaining to read what some nut wrote down for their daily horoscope in the newspaper.
" I think that a large fan base is an indication that there is material that might make a popular movie, not the bare numbers thing that print fans = movie fans, $profit$"
I think there is a little of both. A massive bare number volume of print fans means a guaranteed audience and if it is massive enough (Harry Potter, LOTR, The Hobbit) you have a sure thing even if the movie actually sucks. But more importantly a large bare number volume of print fans means name recognition. It means word of mouth spreading about the material, everyone who has actually read the books tells a dozen friends, spreads it on social media, etc.
" I think that if you're telling a good story on a reasonable way people will tend to want to see it, and if you screw up enough of the film elements, people will tend not to want to see it"
How exactly does one assess either of those things BEFORE they see the movie? Movie bombs in the box office because there was no interest, then explodes in rentals, netflix, premium channels (hbo, showtime, etc) because it was a great film. That movie is and forever will be considered a flop.
Books sell because they are great stories. Movies sell because they peak the curiosity and interest of lots of people. Films don't need a quality story, they need have a very simple and easy to follow plot, (you can't re-read, you can't slow down for the important parts, you can't read the characters thoughts, and it's a far more passive medium with far less focus from the audience in the first place vs a book), a few witty lines, and enough visual and auditory candy to keep people from noticing the lack of depth.
I'm not saying there is no fan base or the books sucked. But you need a huge fan base for major film adaptations to do well purely on that basis alone.
If the movie had been an amazing piece of work on it's own and popularized enough it might have worked regardless but if you want a guaranteed winner you need to pick something popular enough for it to have it's own major con at the least.
LOTR was a no brainer. Anyone who made LOTR movies that didn't suck entirely had a license to print money and even one that sucked epically would have made money from the sheet massive fan base going to watch it in order to find out it sucked.
A song of fire and ice had a pretty large fan base but honestly I think great material combined with the fan base of HBO originals combined to make it an epic fan base. Pre game of thrones, that would be a movie that flopped despite having a larger fan base to begin with than the John Carter material. Post game of thrones it would be a guaranteed mint, even if it sucked (again, flaw in looking at opening box office sales to judge movie success is those tickets were bought not knowing if the movie sucked or not).
For those of us who are fantasy fans and for the comic book fans as well this is a great time. Hollywood has discovered those movies can sell and sell on a truely epic level so it will give many of us the movie(s) that we think our favorite books deserve. Eventually though it will figure out there are probably only half a dozen book series that actually have a massive enough following to guarantee a profit. Once it comes down to actual quality of material + translatability to a screen it will dry up. Hollywood isn't interested in actually finding what is good, it wants titles that sell regardless of content.
I'm a huge Wheel of Time fan and I wouldn't be surprised to see them give that a shot with the kind of money harry potter and marvel material has drawn in. It is the best selling fantasy series of all time and for awhile comprised 60% of all Tor's profits. I'll go and hope the author's widow enjoys the proceeds as it was a truly epic and complex web across millions of words. But either they will condense it and it will be a movie that maybe shares some major character names and general concepts with the books or it will suck and suck in a very epic way, I mean worse than "The Stand" series suck. That story could be made into a set of good movies and it would take several movies to pull it off and they should stick with the story arc for the most part but there definitely would need to be some adaptation.
"Like, this is just ludicrous. You can just browse the net and see people complaining about it RIGHT NOW. Just getting one confirmation can take half an hour trivially, and you need multiple normally."
You need zero normally. You can see the transaction broadcast in the blockchain almost instantly and you at that point have a much higher confidence level than you do with a check or credit card payment. They can't take it back. With one confirmation you have enough data to guarantee it isn't counterfeit and therefore more confidence than if someone handed you cash. With two confirmations a transaction has spread to the point where it is completely irreversible by any force on earth, be it bank, hacker, credit card company dispute, or even government. With a credit card transaction the payment can be reversed for months after the fact, 20 minutes and even the IRS can't touch it is a hell of a lot faster and more secure.
People who are complaining about high transaction times while waiting for multiple confirmations are sitting around demanding a higher level of confidence in payment every time they buy a pack of bubble gum than you have when your swiss bank indicates a successful funds transfer. It is ignorance and ridiculous.
Besides, your problem isn't that it takes two long to transfer funds into the account at your favorite drug vendor site of choice. Your concern should be why your site of choice wants you to deposit funds at all instead of paying directly to the receiving address of the party you are purchasing from. Anybody doing that is just waiting until the deposit total is high enough to be worth ripping everyone off.
It wouldn't be the worst thing ever for the US. Currently, the best chip fabs are intel and actually based in the US and initially that mining gear would need to be purchased with fiat currency.
Because of this the mining power distribution would probably roughly parallel the current economic distribution. It would somewhat level the playing field. On paper asian powers like china would suddenly be a bigger deal but the reality is they just wouldn't be cheating anymore.
Want to start a brokerage/bank/etc? Now instead of some arbitrary guidelines you buy mining capacity and are as big a player as you can afford to be, no more, no less, no accounting tricks, just math. Some geek in his garage who comes up with a more efficient way to mine... suddenly you are the new rich kid.
Maybe that is exactly what they understand and they want every major national bank/brokerage/etc to be mining on one blockchain for exchange amongst one another while using an internal blockchain they control for accounts within their own system with their various server farm components voting on whether a transaction actually occurred to prevent "double spending" within their own large geographically distributed clusters.
Imagine changing the system to extend the block chain (with the transactions voted on by consensus the same as regular bitcoin transactions) and the extensions triggered automatically when the average transaction gets too small. Now each major national bank operating as large a mining operation as their nation can afford.
You now have a global currency with no nation having to trust another to value it's currency, they instead build the biggest farms they can and increase the transaction processing power at the same time. No more china cheating on the value of their currency or hidden us inflation. No more nations having to use US currency to buy oil or trust a nation to value it's currency appropriately and off debts between nations in money the debtor can simply print.
"1- Bitcoin transactions can take hours to complete, and in no cases do they complete fast"
Several years ago sure. Typically minutes with todays hashing rate.
"3- Everyone who touches this stuff seems to turn into some kind of thief. It's like dark magic. Feds bust DPR, one of them steals his shit. Mt Gox takes off with everyone's cash, or a hacker does, or who knows, the point is it is gone. It's all gone, every time. Put bitcoins in this jar, I have a plan. Oops, the plan was to take the jar."
In almost every case someone is basically trying to take the form of a bank. In the fiat system all the money is given to the banks (literally, it's created digitally on demand at lower interest than treasury bills, which can then be deposited in the bank allowing the bank to borrow 20x their value, buy tbills with it, deposit, rinse and repeat). You don't need a bank. No deposits, no having your deposits being ripped off. The problem is the transition period. I've got no fix for that one.
"5- A ton of bitcoin are locked up by the person or people who premined it, who may or may not be the businessman who got investigated, or who knows. The whole thing is shrouded in ludicrous amounts of secrecy."
This is the one I hate hearing the most. At it's peak it was like $200 million bucks worth. So what? Look what zuckerberg got for making facebook. He also is still sitting on most of it (okay he's about to give most of it to charity but pick another, bill gates, steve jobs, etc most of them still have the majority of their stock counting on their business growing and the value going up). Why shouldn't the creator of the system and the early adopters (early investors) make more. Bitcoin operates in a circular fashion as a unit of value in proper exchange for goods and services. It is not a ponzi or pyramid. This is a hell of a lot more reasonable than the current fiat system which mathematically depends on generating inflation and then automatically gives all the new inflation to people in the top 0.001%.
"and backed by nothing except scarcity"
Wrong. Scarcity is not bitcoins value. Bitcoins value is that it is currently the only commodity which is impossible to counterfeit. There is not a single.00000000001 BTC worth of fake bitcoin, anywhere, ever. No government can say that about their currency. If they can make it, and do so cheaply enough to make it viable, someone else can produce it as well. Combine that with scarcity and you have not only the perfect value holding unit but something governments can use to exchange with each other. No longer would the US have to trust that China would under value their currency to gain a trade advantage. No longer could new zealand produce almost nothing of value with a tiny population but live like a thriving highly productive western nation. Bitcoin COULD be made inflationary (although once a currency can divide to arbitrary decimal places it mathematically functions the same as an inflationary currency, you just end up trading smaller bits rather than larger quantities and no longer need to figure out who to give the money to). But the system to determine more units were needed in circulation would need to also be a distributed peer system that works automatically based on math. The average transaction size goes below x, add to the blockchain and if 60% of clients agree the extended blockchain is valid the extension is valid.
"takes a premium to trade with"
This is true of all digitial currencies. Even with regular fiat currencies, cash transactions have a premium because they have a minimum unit size and fractions get shaved.
"Oh, and the price is ludicrously volatile."
True but that is primarily a problem of scale. If the bitcoin market were the size of a major nations economy it would be just as stable if not more so.
"It's not really clear if democracy is not working."
A working government != democracy. Democracy is rule by the people, if the people aren't ruling, it isn't democracy. Whether whatever form of government you do have is successful or not is another issue.
"Things are good because we let innovation/technology to move at good speed -- harnessing nature (laws of physics) to aid in man's comfortable living. "
Imagine how much better they would be if 60+% of those benefits weren't going to 0.001% of the population.
"I think in US, with just two parties (democrats/republicans), its easier for the 1P (1%-ers/powers-at-top/top-wealth-holders) to buy both the candidates"
In a true democracy there are no candidates. There are candidates aka representatives in a republic. Technology has progressed to the point where we no longer need representatives or parties. I don't think you and I are really disagreeing overall here.
"Just like why we don't see snake-oil salesmen today [but were present say 200 years ago], people can see thru' a lie"
Ah but you do see snake-oil salesmen today. That is what either party is, that is what CNN and Fox News are. That is what the ab blaster is. People can't see through a lie, people are idiots. After Hillary Clinton stood up and made not one single promise or commitment in the democratic debate CNN immediately started calling her "presidential" and most of the idiots in the country immediately jumped back on her bandwagon. Now morons everywhere keep repeating their favorite buzzword "presidential" not one real person walked away thinking she seemed "presidential" except in the sense she promised to do nothing or take no controversial action.
"Greed is a great motivator (probably next only to Fear in selfishness-driven motives); so polarization of wealth may not be such a big deal after all.. Just watch/ensure if people (99P) are having a good time/standard of living..that's it. [if someone takes to alcohol/drugs n sit before the large LCD/LED screen.. hmm..it's his/her choice..society can make available information that they can find that/better happiness in something else too if they try.. v hard]"
Here is why it's a huge problem. If you live in the western world, that 99.999% with all the wealth, they are global. They are working furiously to automate away the high paying information based jobs that keep westerners staring at LCD screens. In another hundred years all their profits will come from india/asia and the United States, rather than being the wealthy nation profiting from their investments in india/asia and sitting secure will instead be the unemployed detroit of the world, a once prosperous city that is now nothing more than a slum that has out served it's usefulness with the wealthy tycoons moved on. When the time comes for ASIA to be the new industrious world of producers and consumers the United States and it's people need to hold the purse strings and be the 1%ers they complain about, not merely the 0.001% who currently hold ours.
"Freelancers are people who want to trade some of the safety for a bit more money."
More and more frequently they aren't people who want to make that trade at all. The contracts have terms which block overtime (wherein overtime is even more than 8hrs in a single day even if less than a 40 hour week), unpaid holidays alongside being barred from working on those days, and at will terms. Non-competes are attached and requirements that you not be doing what the article suggests and working multiple positions. Often there are requirements to work on site despite positions being ideal for offsite work to keep an eye an on you just as they would an employee. Basically, all the limitations of employment along with the protections and benefits of employment removed in the bargain. The actual jobs being performed are the same as regular employees, in fact you'll often work with people on a team with other members doing the exact same job but as employees with the contractors considered a sort of second class citizen. By the time your agency takes their cut your base pay rate isn't even always higher. As far as I can tell now that tech workers have to be paid overtime the big move to making them all at will contractors is really just about dodging that overtime.
Contractors still have to be paid health benefits under obamacare, the difference is just whether the employer provides a contribution or not. If they don't they to pay it at tax time. Either way you end up paying huge amounts of premium BEFORE you can put a single dollar in your HSA. Sure a plan + HSA will normally pay everything after you meet deductible but if you could pay the premium plus deductible into an HSA directly you could pay for a major event like having a baby after just one year and skip the insurance company altogether.
"Currently there is no better alternative to democracy; so need to work within it."
When something is in the interest of 4-5 9's of the population, is easily accomplished, and isn't being done you don't have democracy. Period.
It might be one person one vote but the people who control the impact of that vote and the education/information of those casting it are ruling this country not the people.
Remember when Bernie Sanders won the democratic debate and CNN pulled the results and posted bogus results favoring Hillary Clinton? This shit can change, easily, there are 10000-100000 of us ants for every one of them gras... no actually still just other ants. The problem is they've neatly divided the people educated enough to understand the problem and the people with the stomach to bleed and die to stop such tyranny and convinced them it's more important for them to scream red faced about whether or not there should be a nativity scene on the courthouse lawn.
They've also utilized the same psychological attacks they feared from science fiction after world war 2, the spreading of the idea that a third world war could not be won. The idea that it is somehow impossible to defeat people who actively working to the benefit of.001% of the population and against 99.999% of the population but at least 99% of the population thinks it is an unwinnable fight. Class warfare is actually pretty trivial to win when virtually everyone is of the same class.
"Many corporations, especially small ones, are created to protect the owners from (often frivolous) lawsuits.
There are also charity corporations."
Small businesses are made for the same reason as large businesses. Protecting yourself from liability from your actions is a way to make money by saving money. You might collect profits all year long as plumber and then fold rather than pay the bill out of your profits when you destroy someone's home by flooding the basement. You've just increased your bottom line for the year dramatically at the expense of everyone elses home owners insurance. Similarly movie studios create a corporation for every movie, they loan it money (with first right to collect) to make the film and get all the services they can on credit with name recognitition. Afterward if the movie flops they collapse the corporation and claim first right to all proceeds as creditors. If the movie doesn't flop they burn people on royalties by taking heavy interest on the required loan payments before determining if any are to be paid. Liability protection is one form of profiting the other major one is tax avoidance. Businesses get to deduct all their expenses while individuals do not.
That I don't think anyone was at risk of confusing my comments regarding publically traded corporations with small businesses or non-profit corporations or charitable non-profit corporations.
For profit businesses are vehicles for making money. When there is a single or small group of owners who don't have to answer to investors such an entity might be "run by people" but outside of that such an entity is run by employees, who do their jobs, and other employees whose jobs are to make sure they do their jobs. Those employees are accountable to passive investors who buy their interest in order to get a return on investment and have little concern for how it is gotten and the right to sue those employees at the board and executive levels if they are acting in a manner counter to their job which is to bring investors a return.
As part of the world at large I'd beg to differ. There are a hell of a lot more of me.
This is like an argument that the top.001% by wealth having their wealth redistributed would be the greatest of all evils... despite having a dramatic positive impact on 99.999% of the population and the negative impact for the tiny few is only that they'd have to get a real job like everyone else.
If you live in a town of 100,000 people and that new traffic light is a benefit to everyone but you the 0.001%er do you really think they shouldn't build the light? Why exactly is it that suddenly this all falls apart if your interest is business? Oh right, because you can bribe the people who are supposed to be representing the other 99,999 people.
That is interesting but is a different conversation. Note how quickly you jumped to random crackpot related material or conspiracy material. And this after the mass government warrantless NSA spying cover-up was unveiled.
The claim was that energy companies buy up emerging energy technology startups. Startups like university researchers who bred algae that turns sunlight and nutrients in a tank directly into gasoline, diesel fuel, and other hydrocarbons. These aren't laymen in their garage trying to build the next unity engine.
How plausible is it? Well they are corporations, first and foremost in all things they do is the fundamental profit motivation. Literally no action a corporation takes is for any purpose but saving or making maximum profit. Is it profitable to eliminate competing technologies? Yes, yes it is. Is it profitable to buy any technology that might be the next step after oil runs out? Yes again. Is it profitable to get utilize existing infrastructure and inventory (oil) for as long as possible before moving to something new? Yup. In other words, if energy companies are NOT doing this they are at risk of being sued by their shareholders.
Is the juice worth the squeeze? There is no squeeze, the energy lobby is massive and would never allow something so profitable for them to be illegal. Which is why not only is this not crackpot conspiracy theory, it isn't even a secret or a theory but an easily verified fact. Energy companies will spin this as them planning for the future rather than trying to block technologies that would bottom out their market.
You can be sure of one thing though, they certainly would buy technology that carries a risk of doing so and leave that one on the shelf. That is self preservation and doing otherwise would almost certainly result in shareholders suing the board.
Existing energy companies can and do buy up almost any emerging energy startup with a real product. It isn't even a secret, their justification is that oil won't last forever and they want to be the ones who own whatever comes next. Like any and all corporations they exist to make profit and anything which would result in a model that would reduce their profit isn't pursued further. There are no shortage of companies who have bought other companies primarily to take them out of the game and energy companies are not the pure and sacred exception.
There are definitely some crazy crackpots out there. If a few years ago you would have called someone talking about the us government having a network of foreign torture prison camps to bypass due process, a massive warrantless internet spying infrastructure with backdoors in all common encryption technologies in collusion with every major network carrier, a secret court to grant automatic permission for any action the government wishes with no authority to demand accounting for any of it, and that the response to the outrage of it being uncovered would be to shut people up with an unconstitutional bill from congress that claims to stop the illegal warrantless spying while actually authorizing it to continue a crackpot or conspiracy theorist... maybe you should take your gullibility points and learn from history already rather than repeating it yet again.
This kind of thing is essentially the same thing the defense does to a rape victim at trial. Anything you can do to disparage their character. If you can get people laughing at them all the better. By discrediting the source you make people forget that all forms of argument which utilize the merit of the source are fallacy because an argument is valid or invalid on it's own merits independent of any supposed authority of the one making it.
Take anyone who tries to dismiss someone by saying or implying that they are a crackpot or conspiracy theorist with a major grain of salt. They may or may not be a sock puppet but either way the merit of the claim stands or falls on its own.
Have you considered it might be time to ask what the fuck is wrong with the fossil fuel giants who buy up any breakthrough energy related technology and vanish it.
Given that most western socialized medical systems provide the same quality or superior medical care compared with the US while paying less tax dollars per citizen for that care than the US does I fail to see any reason not to socialize healthcare.
Do you really like paying more to subsidize an industry with a market that will bare literally anything the consumer can pay when you could enjoy a tax cut and provide every citizen with complete healthcare?
Last time I went to the hospital I had a broken humerus. It needed to be immobilized and morphine delivered immediately. Instead they left me in the waiting room and wandering around with it loose for four hours. The staff was mostly hanging out chatting during this time. When I finally got in I noted no shortage of empty emergency stalls and was given a quick x-ray and a sling for a rotor cuff injury (no relation to my broken bone) along with a shot of morphine and a script for pain pills.
Quality of care: I should sue them. Time spent treating me: Maybe 15-20min Cost to hospital for the tests: Lets go off the charts and call it $1. Bill: $3,000 and counting, as you are double billed by the hospital for the service and again by each person you walked near.
Which part of this do you actually believe is consistent with the nonsense spouted by those opposed to socialized medicine who claim we have the "best care in the world" and that "waits will be outrageous?" The only place I've found decent speed of service (less than 40min combined waits) in the US is in the offices of surgeons and dentists looking to provide unneeded and overpriced care on the order of tens of thousands of dollars.
I assume by that you mean eliminate all forms of employment freelance/contractual arrangements that are de facto employment? Or at least 100% employee owned with equal stakes private companies with total personal liability. Sure, I'd be down but I suspect there would be a lot of opposition.
"Welcome to being an entrepreneur. You want time off? You earn enough to take some time. You want work/life balance? You earn it. Sometimes getting there requires working pretty hard for a while. You talk about work/life balance as if it is something you are entitled to have rather than something you earn. There's nothing wrong with working for someone else but very few people can earn a substantial income without a lot of time, effort and risk."
A freelancer is hardly a true entrepreneur. A freelancer is effectively an employee without benefits. Freelancers are capped by the market rates for staff plus the cost of providing them benefits. This is quite different than truly being an entrepreneur making the value of what he is producing. There is a huge gap between the market rate for labor and the market value of a laborers output... if there weren't nobody would hire employees or entrepreneurs. Actual entrepreneurs are exploiting this to make a profit on the work of others without adding value themselves (at least not beyond the value of any one of the workers) and they absolutely owe those workers benefits.
60% of business ventures fail and most of the ones that don't fail aren't profitable in the first five years. You better have one hell of a safety net to be taking that kind of roll of the dice. It does depend on the business of course but the only ones I know of that significantly improve that outlook are effectively just employment opportunities minus benefits.
The supreme court abolished the Consitution long ago. The problem with the Constitution is that people are far too willing to accept illegal and unconstitutional laws/rulings if the result is an end they approve of rather than demanding the Constitution be obeyed and holding out for their goal to come about via an amendment or never. Amendments are hard, that was by design.
Our Constitutional government is long gone. The supreme has made many rulings that blatantly contradict what the document says. Congress passes laws every day that do the same. Not one person advocating gun control is actually trying to amend the second amendment to do so legally. Nor are those who want to deny the right to privacy (mostly for abortion) trying to amend the portion indicating that not all rights are enumerated in the Constitution. Those who want to support waterboarding aren't trying to amend the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Those who support publicly available criminal records and sex offender lists aren't doing so either.
We have such a twisted interpretation of the Constitution that nobody even questions the legitimacy of Congress enacting a war without a Congressional Declaration of War. When the Constitution explicitly spells out the process and requirements for a congressional vote to go to war it is blatantly unconstitutional for the congress or our government to go to war without following that process and meeting those requirements. The intent is so clear that the foremost legal expert in the country could stand in front of a group of random citizens and say otherwise and every one of them would know he was full of shit. The Constitution is written in plain if slightly dated English, not the legalize of today. Anyone can read and understand it.
Tell me that any judge would accept the same sort of dodgy justifications, workarounds, and artificial constructs that supreme court justices have accepted to get around the constitution from a poor private citizen with a trust document and a tax debt and I might reconsider. For some reason congress, the president, and our judges don't get charged with treason when they violate the Constitution. If our US Attorney isn't hard at work on this what is he/she doing? Oh right, prosecuting hundreds of thousands of cases wherein people have violated laws which are outside the Constitutional authority of the federal government in the first place.
The people had two checks against their representatives and the founders gave government no authority to override them. The people reserved force of arms and the final say in whether any man/woman/child could be imprisoned regardless of law or circumstance. Both of them are long since dust.
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You realize this is exactly the same problem higgs had. Just because we don't have the tools to perform the experiment yet doesn't stop it from being science. It doesn't magically blossom into being science when build the equipment to test it.
Not necessarily because the stock market is not random. If someone has a strong enough record their predictions can become self fulfilling prophecies as millions of people buy when they buy and drive up the price of whatever they bought and then sell when they sell.
As long as enough people with enough dollars believe in the prophet his prophecies will come true. Of course at some point the whole thing mathematically becomes a pyramid scheme that comes crashing down.
"Astronomy is Astrology what Chemistry is to Alchemy, or what Newtonian Physics is to Relativity."
;)
Whoops I flipped the ordering around somewhere in the middle here and fixed above. You got the point anyway
More reputable? I certainly doubt that. Some form of astrology was a valid hypothesis either causing or associated with natural behavior believed by almost every member of civilization at one point. That sounds pretty reputable to me. Astrology isn't even gone, we still utilize our study of the stars and their behavior to explain how things work and came to be here on Earth and Astronomy is a direct descendant. Astronomy is Astrology what Alchemy is chemistry, or what plate tectonics is to continental drift, or relativity is to Newtonian physics.
The people who practiced astrology and alchemy in their day were people who would practice science either theoretical or applied today and it could be argued that without their pursuits the scientific method would never have been devised.
Astrology and Alchemy aren't science but they are most definitely pre-science and the pre-cursors of science. If you follow the scientific method you are doing science, but nothing which predates that method could possibly have followed it. Further not all aspects of astrology were ever reached and/or tested within the framework of the scientific method.
We shouldn't go back to them but we shouldn't spit on the graves of those who came before us just because someone finds it entertaining to read what some nut wrote down for their daily horoscope in the newspaper.
" I think that a large fan base is an indication that there is material that might make a popular movie, not the bare numbers thing that print fans = movie fans, $profit$"
I think there is a little of both. A massive bare number volume of print fans means a guaranteed audience and if it is massive enough (Harry Potter, LOTR, The Hobbit) you have a sure thing even if the movie actually sucks. But more importantly a large bare number volume of print fans means name recognition. It means word of mouth spreading about the material, everyone who has actually read the books tells a dozen friends, spreads it on social media, etc.
" I think that if you're telling a good story on a reasonable way people will tend to want to see it, and if you screw up enough of the film elements, people will tend not to want to see it"
How exactly does one assess either of those things BEFORE they see the movie? Movie bombs in the box office because there was no interest, then explodes in rentals, netflix, premium channels (hbo, showtime, etc) because it was a great film. That movie is and forever will be considered a flop.
Books sell because they are great stories. Movies sell because they peak the curiosity and interest of lots of people. Films don't need a quality story, they need have a very simple and easy to follow plot, (you can't re-read, you can't slow down for the important parts, you can't read the characters thoughts, and it's a far more passive medium with far less focus from the audience in the first place vs a book), a few witty lines, and enough visual and auditory candy to keep people from noticing the lack of depth.
I'm not saying there is no fan base or the books sucked. But you need a huge fan base for major film adaptations to do well purely on that basis alone.
If the movie had been an amazing piece of work on it's own and popularized enough it might have worked regardless but if you want a guaranteed winner you need to pick something popular enough for it to have it's own major con at the least.
LOTR was a no brainer. Anyone who made LOTR movies that didn't suck entirely had a license to print money and even one that sucked epically would have made money from the sheet massive fan base going to watch it in order to find out it sucked.
A song of fire and ice had a pretty large fan base but honestly I think great material combined with the fan base of HBO originals combined to make it an epic fan base. Pre game of thrones, that would be a movie that flopped despite having a larger fan base to begin with than the John Carter material. Post game of thrones it would be a guaranteed mint, even if it sucked (again, flaw in looking at opening box office sales to judge movie success is those tickets were bought not knowing if the movie sucked or not).
For those of us who are fantasy fans and for the comic book fans as well this is a great time. Hollywood has discovered those movies can sell and sell on a truely epic level so it will give many of us the movie(s) that we think our favorite books deserve. Eventually though it will figure out there are probably only half a dozen book series that actually have a massive enough following to guarantee a profit. Once it comes down to actual quality of material + translatability to a screen it will dry up. Hollywood isn't interested in actually finding what is good, it wants titles that sell regardless of content.
I'm a huge Wheel of Time fan and I wouldn't be surprised to see them give that a shot with the kind of money harry potter and marvel material has drawn in. It is the best selling fantasy series of all time and for awhile comprised 60% of all Tor's profits. I'll go and hope the author's widow enjoys the proceeds as it was a truly epic and complex web across millions of words. But either they will condense it and it will be a movie that maybe shares some major character names and general concepts with the books or it will suck and suck in a very epic way, I mean worse than "The Stand" series suck. That story could be made into a set of good movies and it would take several movies to pull it off and they should stick with the story arc for the most part but there definitely would need to be some adaptation.
"Like, this is just ludicrous. You can just browse the net and see people complaining about it RIGHT NOW. Just getting one confirmation can take half an hour trivially, and you need multiple normally."
You need zero normally. You can see the transaction broadcast in the blockchain almost instantly and you at that point have a much higher confidence level than you do with a check or credit card payment. They can't take it back. With one confirmation you have enough data to guarantee it isn't counterfeit and therefore more confidence than if someone handed you cash. With two confirmations a transaction has spread to the point where it is completely irreversible by any force on earth, be it bank, hacker, credit card company dispute, or even government. With a credit card transaction the payment can be reversed for months after the fact, 20 minutes and even the IRS can't touch it is a hell of a lot faster and more secure.
People who are complaining about high transaction times while waiting for multiple confirmations are sitting around demanding a higher level of confidence in payment every time they buy a pack of bubble gum than you have when your swiss bank indicates a successful funds transfer. It is ignorance and ridiculous.
Besides, your problem isn't that it takes two long to transfer funds into the account at your favorite drug vendor site of choice. Your concern should be why your site of choice wants you to deposit funds at all instead of paying directly to the receiving address of the party you are purchasing from. Anybody doing that is just waiting until the deposit total is high enough to be worth ripping everyone off.
It wouldn't be the worst thing ever for the US. Currently, the best chip fabs are intel and actually based in the US and initially that mining gear would need to be purchased with fiat currency.
Because of this the mining power distribution would probably roughly parallel the current economic distribution. It would somewhat level the playing field. On paper asian powers like china would suddenly be a bigger deal but the reality is they just wouldn't be cheating anymore.
Want to start a brokerage/bank/etc? Now instead of some arbitrary guidelines you buy mining capacity and are as big a player as you can afford to be, no more, no less, no accounting tricks, just math. Some geek in his garage who comes up with a more efficient way to mine... suddenly you are the new rich kid.
It isn't because John Carter is a new franchise. It's because the movie sucked and it wasn't that popular of subject matter in the first place.
Maybe that is exactly what they understand and they want every major national bank/brokerage/etc to be mining on one blockchain for exchange amongst one another while using an internal blockchain they control for accounts within their own system with their various server farm components voting on whether a transaction actually occurred to prevent "double spending" within their own large geographically distributed clusters.
Imagine changing the system to extend the block chain (with the transactions voted on by consensus the same as regular bitcoin transactions) and the extensions triggered automatically when the average transaction gets too small. Now each major national bank operating as large a mining operation as their nation can afford.
You now have a global currency with no nation having to trust another to value it's currency, they instead build the biggest farms they can and increase the transaction processing power at the same time. No more china cheating on the value of their currency or hidden us inflation. No more nations having to use US currency to buy oil or trust a nation to value it's currency appropriately and off debts between nations in money the debtor can simply print.
"1- Bitcoin transactions can take hours to complete, and in no cases do they complete fast"
.00000000001 BTC worth of fake bitcoin, anywhere, ever. No government can say that about their currency. If they can make it, and do so cheaply enough to make it viable, someone else can produce it as well. Combine that with scarcity and you have not only the perfect value holding unit but something governments can use to exchange with each other. No longer would the US have to trust that China would under value their currency to gain a trade advantage. No longer could new zealand produce almost nothing of value with a tiny population but live like a thriving highly productive western nation. Bitcoin COULD be made inflationary (although once a currency can divide to arbitrary decimal places it mathematically functions the same as an inflationary currency, you just end up trading smaller bits rather than larger quantities and no longer need to figure out who to give the money to). But the system to determine more units were needed in circulation would need to also be a distributed peer system that works automatically based on math. The average transaction size goes below x, add to the blockchain and if 60% of clients agree the extended blockchain is valid the extension is valid.
Several years ago sure. Typically minutes with todays hashing rate.
"3- Everyone who touches this stuff seems to turn into some kind of thief. It's like dark magic. Feds bust DPR, one of them steals his shit. Mt Gox takes off with everyone's cash, or a hacker does, or who knows, the point is it is gone. It's all gone, every time. Put bitcoins in this jar, I have a plan. Oops, the plan was to take the jar."
In almost every case someone is basically trying to take the form of a bank. In the fiat system all the money is given to the banks (literally, it's created digitally on demand at lower interest than treasury bills, which can then be deposited in the bank allowing the bank to borrow 20x their value, buy tbills with it, deposit, rinse and repeat). You don't need a bank. No deposits, no having your deposits being ripped off. The problem is the transition period. I've got no fix for that one.
"5- A ton of bitcoin are locked up by the person or people who premined it, who may or may not be the businessman who got investigated, or who knows. The whole thing is shrouded in ludicrous amounts of secrecy."
This is the one I hate hearing the most. At it's peak it was like $200 million bucks worth. So what? Look what zuckerberg got for making facebook. He also is still sitting on most of it (okay he's about to give most of it to charity but pick another, bill gates, steve jobs, etc most of them still have the majority of their stock counting on their business growing and the value going up). Why shouldn't the creator of the system and the early adopters (early investors) make more. Bitcoin operates in a circular fashion as a unit of value in proper exchange for goods and services. It is not a ponzi or pyramid. This is a hell of a lot more reasonable than the current fiat system which mathematically depends on generating inflation and then automatically gives all the new inflation to people in the top 0.001%.
"and backed by nothing except scarcity"
Wrong. Scarcity is not bitcoins value. Bitcoins value is that it is currently the only commodity which is impossible to counterfeit. There is not a single
"takes a premium to trade with"
This is true of all digitial currencies. Even with regular fiat currencies, cash transactions have a premium because they have a minimum unit size and fractions get shaved.
"Oh, and the price is ludicrously volatile."
True but that is primarily a problem of scale. If the bitcoin market were the size of a major nations economy it would be just as stable if not more so.
"It's not really clear if democracy is not working."
A working government != democracy. Democracy is rule by the people, if the people aren't ruling, it isn't democracy. Whether whatever form of government you do have is successful or not is another issue.
"Things are good because we let innovation/technology to move at good speed -- harnessing nature (laws of physics) to aid in man's comfortable living. "
Imagine how much better they would be if 60+% of those benefits weren't going to 0.001% of the population.
"I think in US, with just two parties (democrats/republicans), its easier for the 1P (1%-ers/powers-at-top/top-wealth-holders) to buy both the candidates"
In a true democracy there are no candidates. There are candidates aka representatives in a republic. Technology has progressed to the point where we no longer need representatives or parties. I don't think you and I are really disagreeing overall here.
"Just like why we don't see snake-oil salesmen today [but were present say 200 years ago], people can see thru' a lie"
Ah but you do see snake-oil salesmen today. That is what either party is, that is what CNN and Fox News are. That is what the ab blaster is. People can't see through a lie, people are idiots. After Hillary Clinton stood up and made not one single promise or commitment in the democratic debate CNN immediately started calling her "presidential" and most of the idiots in the country immediately jumped back on her bandwagon. Now morons everywhere keep repeating their favorite buzzword "presidential" not one real person walked away thinking she seemed "presidential" except in the sense she promised to do nothing or take no controversial action.
"Greed is a great motivator (probably next only to Fear in selfishness-driven motives); so polarization of wealth may not be such a big deal after all.. Just watch/ensure if people (99P) are having a good time/standard of living..that's it. [if someone takes to alcohol/drugs n sit before the large LCD/LED screen.. hmm..it's his/her choice..society can make available information that they can find that/better happiness in something else too if they try.. v hard]"
Here is why it's a huge problem. If you live in the western world, that 99.999% with all the wealth, they are global. They are working furiously to automate away the high paying information based jobs that keep westerners staring at LCD screens. In another hundred years all their profits will come from india/asia and the United States, rather than being the wealthy nation profiting from their investments in india/asia and sitting secure will instead be the unemployed detroit of the world, a once prosperous city that is now nothing more than a slum that has out served it's usefulness with the wealthy tycoons moved on. When the time comes for ASIA to be the new industrious world of producers and consumers the United States and it's people need to hold the purse strings and be the 1%ers they complain about, not merely the 0.001% who currently hold ours.
"Freelancers are people who want to trade some of the safety for a bit more money."
More and more frequently they aren't people who want to make that trade at all. The contracts have terms which block overtime (wherein overtime is even more than 8hrs in a single day even if less than a 40 hour week), unpaid holidays alongside being barred from working on those days, and at will terms. Non-competes are attached and requirements that you not be doing what the article suggests and working multiple positions. Often there are requirements to work on site despite positions being ideal for offsite work to keep an eye an on you just as they would an employee. Basically, all the limitations of employment along with the protections and benefits of employment removed in the bargain. The actual jobs being performed are the same as regular employees, in fact you'll often work with people on a team with other members doing the exact same job but as employees with the contractors considered a sort of second class citizen.
By the time your agency takes their cut your base pay rate isn't even always higher. As far as I can tell now that tech workers have to be paid overtime the big move to making them all at will contractors is really just about dodging that overtime.
Contractors still have to be paid health benefits under obamacare, the difference is just whether the employer provides a contribution or not. If they don't they to pay it at tax time. Either way you end up paying huge amounts of premium BEFORE you can put a single dollar in your HSA. Sure a plan + HSA will normally pay everything after you meet deductible but if you could pay the premium plus deductible into an HSA directly you could pay for a major event like having a baby after just one year and skip the insurance company altogether.
"Currently there is no better alternative to democracy; so need to work within it."
.001% of the population and against 99.999% of the population but at least 99% of the population thinks it is an unwinnable fight. Class warfare is actually pretty trivial to win when virtually everyone is of the same class.
When something is in the interest of 4-5 9's of the population, is easily accomplished, and isn't being done you don't have democracy. Period.
It might be one person one vote but the people who control the impact of that vote and the education/information of those casting it are ruling this country not the people.
Remember when Bernie Sanders won the democratic debate and CNN pulled the results and posted bogus results favoring Hillary Clinton? This shit can change, easily, there are 10000-100000 of us ants for every one of them gras... no actually still just other ants. The problem is they've neatly divided the people educated enough to understand the problem and the people with the stomach to bleed and die to stop such tyranny and convinced them it's more important for them to scream red faced about whether or not there should be a nativity scene on the courthouse lawn.
They've also utilized the same psychological attacks they feared from science fiction after world war 2, the spreading of the idea that a third world war could not be won. The idea that it is somehow impossible to defeat people who actively working to the benefit of
"Many corporations, especially small ones, are created to protect the owners from (often frivolous) lawsuits.
There are also charity corporations."
Small businesses are made for the same reason as large businesses. Protecting yourself from liability from your actions is a way to make money by saving money. You might collect profits all year long as plumber and then fold rather than pay the bill out of your profits when you destroy someone's home by flooding the basement. You've just increased your bottom line for the year dramatically at the expense of everyone elses home owners insurance. Similarly movie studios create a corporation for every movie, they loan it money (with first right to collect) to make the film and get all the services they can on credit with name recognitition. Afterward if the movie flops they collapse the corporation and claim first right to all proceeds as creditors. If the movie doesn't flop they burn people on royalties by taking heavy interest on the required loan payments before determining if any are to be paid. Liability protection is one form of profiting the other major one is tax avoidance. Businesses get to deduct all their expenses while individuals do not.
That I don't think anyone was at risk of confusing my comments regarding publically traded corporations with small businesses or non-profit corporations or charitable non-profit corporations.
For profit businesses are vehicles for making money. When there is a single or small group of owners who don't have to answer to investors such an entity might be "run by people" but outside of that such an entity is run by employees, who do their jobs, and other employees whose jobs are to make sure they do their jobs. Those employees are accountable to passive investors who buy their interest in order to get a return on investment and have little concern for how it is gotten and the right to sue those employees at the board and executive levels if they are acting in a manner counter to their job which is to bring investors a return.
As part of the world at large I'd beg to differ. There are a hell of a lot more of me.
.001% by wealth having their wealth redistributed would be the greatest of all evils... despite having a dramatic positive impact on 99.999% of the population and the negative impact for the tiny few is only that they'd have to get a real job like everyone else.
This is like an argument that the top
If you live in a town of 100,000 people and that new traffic light is a benefit to everyone but you the 0.001%er do you really think they shouldn't build the light? Why exactly is it that suddenly this all falls apart if your interest is business? Oh right, because you can bribe the people who are supposed to be representing the other 99,999 people.
False dichotomy, developments not panning out of the lab do not preclude energy companies from buying up advances they believe will pan out.
That is interesting but is a different conversation. Note how quickly you jumped to random crackpot related material or conspiracy material. And this after the mass government warrantless NSA spying cover-up was unveiled.
The claim was that energy companies buy up emerging energy technology startups. Startups like university researchers who bred algae that turns sunlight and nutrients in a tank directly into gasoline, diesel fuel, and other hydrocarbons. These aren't laymen in their garage trying to build the next unity engine.
How plausible is it? Well they are corporations, first and foremost in all things they do is the fundamental profit motivation. Literally no action a corporation takes is for any purpose but saving or making maximum profit. Is it profitable to eliminate competing technologies? Yes, yes it is. Is it profitable to buy any technology that might be the next step after oil runs out? Yes again. Is it profitable to get utilize existing infrastructure and inventory (oil) for as long as possible before moving to something new? Yup. In other words, if energy companies are NOT doing this they are at risk of being sued by their shareholders.
Is the juice worth the squeeze? There is no squeeze, the energy lobby is massive and would never allow something so profitable for them to be illegal. Which is why not only is this not crackpot conspiracy theory, it isn't even a secret or a theory but an easily verified fact. Energy companies will spin this as them planning for the future rather than trying to block technologies that would bottom out their market.
You can be sure of one thing though, they certainly would buy technology that carries a risk of doing so and leave that one on the shelf. That is self preservation and doing otherwise would almost certainly result in shareholders suing the board.
Existing energy companies can and do buy up almost any emerging energy startup with a real product. It isn't even a secret, their justification is that oil won't last forever and they want to be the ones who own whatever comes next. Like any and all corporations they exist to make profit and anything which would result in a model that would reduce their profit isn't pursued further. There are no shortage of companies who have bought other companies primarily to take them out of the game and energy companies are not the pure and sacred exception.
There are definitely some crazy crackpots out there. If a few years ago you would have called someone talking about the us government having a network of foreign torture prison camps to bypass due process, a massive warrantless internet spying infrastructure with backdoors in all common encryption technologies in collusion with every major network carrier, a secret court to grant automatic permission for any action the government wishes with no authority to demand accounting for any of it, and that the response to the outrage of it being uncovered would be to shut people up with an unconstitutional bill from congress that claims to stop the illegal warrantless spying while actually authorizing it to continue a crackpot or conspiracy theorist... maybe you should take your gullibility points and learn from history already rather than repeating it yet again.
This kind of thing is essentially the same thing the defense does to a rape victim at trial. Anything you can do to disparage their character. If you can get people laughing at them all the better. By discrediting the source you make people forget that all forms of argument which utilize the merit of the source are fallacy because an argument is valid or invalid on it's own merits independent of any supposed authority of the one making it.
Take anyone who tries to dismiss someone by saying or implying that they are a crackpot or conspiracy theorist with a major grain of salt. They may or may not be a sock puppet but either way the merit of the claim stands or falls on its own.
Have you considered it might be time to ask what the fuck is wrong with the fossil fuel giants who buy up any breakthrough energy related technology and vanish it.
Given that most western socialized medical systems provide the same quality or superior medical care compared with the US while paying less tax dollars per citizen for that care than the US does I fail to see any reason not to socialize healthcare.
Do you really like paying more to subsidize an industry with a market that will bare literally anything the consumer can pay when you could enjoy a tax cut and provide every citizen with complete healthcare?
Last time I went to the hospital I had a broken humerus. It needed to be immobilized and morphine delivered immediately. Instead they left me in the waiting room and wandering around with it loose for four hours. The staff was mostly hanging out chatting during this time. When I finally got in I noted no shortage of empty emergency stalls and was given a quick x-ray and a sling for a rotor cuff injury (no relation to my broken bone) along with a shot of morphine and a script for pain pills.
Quality of care: I should sue them.
Time spent treating me: Maybe 15-20min
Cost to hospital for the tests: Lets go off the charts and call it $1.
Bill: $3,000 and counting, as you are double billed by the hospital for the service and again by each person you walked near.
Which part of this do you actually believe is consistent with the nonsense spouted by those opposed to socialized medicine who claim we have the "best care in the world" and that "waits will be outrageous?" The only place I've found decent speed of service (less than 40min combined waits) in the US is in the offices of surgeons and dentists looking to provide unneeded and overpriced care on the order of tens of thousands of dollars.
I assume by that you mean eliminate all forms of employment freelance/contractual arrangements that are de facto employment? Or at least 100% employee owned with equal stakes private companies with total personal liability. Sure, I'd be down but I suspect there would be a lot of opposition.
"Welcome to being an entrepreneur. You want time off? You earn enough to take some time. You want work/life balance? You earn it. Sometimes getting there requires working pretty hard for a while. You talk about work/life balance as if it is something you are entitled to have rather than something you earn. There's nothing wrong with working for someone else but very few people can earn a substantial income without a lot of time, effort and risk."
A freelancer is hardly a true entrepreneur. A freelancer is effectively an employee without benefits. Freelancers are capped by the market rates for staff plus the cost of providing them benefits. This is quite different than truly being an entrepreneur making the value of what he is producing. There is a huge gap between the market rate for labor and the market value of a laborers output... if there weren't nobody would hire employees or entrepreneurs. Actual entrepreneurs are exploiting this to make a profit on the work of others without adding value themselves (at least not beyond the value of any one of the workers) and they absolutely owe those workers benefits.
60% of business ventures fail and most of the ones that don't fail aren't profitable in the first five years. You better have one hell of a safety net to be taking that kind of roll of the dice. It does depend on the business of course but the only ones I know of that significantly improve that outlook are effectively just employment opportunities minus benefits.
The supreme court abolished the Consitution long ago. The problem with the Constitution is that people are far too willing to accept illegal and unconstitutional laws/rulings if the result is an end they approve of rather than demanding the Constitution be obeyed and holding out for their goal to come about via an amendment or never. Amendments are hard, that was by design.
Our Constitutional government is long gone. The supreme has made many rulings that blatantly contradict what the document says. Congress passes laws every day that do the same. Not one person advocating gun control is actually trying to amend the second amendment to do so legally. Nor are those who want to deny the right to privacy (mostly for abortion) trying to amend the portion indicating that not all rights are enumerated in the Constitution. Those who want to support waterboarding aren't trying to amend the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Those who support publicly available criminal records and sex offender lists aren't doing so either.
We have such a twisted interpretation of the Constitution that nobody even questions the legitimacy of Congress enacting a war without a Congressional Declaration of War. When the Constitution explicitly spells out the process and requirements for a congressional vote to go to war it is blatantly unconstitutional for the congress or our government to go to war without following that process and meeting those requirements. The intent is so clear that the foremost legal expert in the country could stand in front of a group of random citizens and say otherwise and every one of them would know he was full of shit. The Constitution is written in plain if slightly dated English, not the legalize of today. Anyone can read and understand it.
Tell me that any judge would accept the same sort of dodgy justifications, workarounds, and artificial constructs that supreme court justices have accepted to get around the constitution from a poor private citizen with a trust document and a tax debt and I might reconsider. For some reason congress, the president, and our judges don't get charged with treason when they violate the Constitution. If our US Attorney isn't hard at work on this what is he/she doing? Oh right, prosecuting hundreds of thousands of cases wherein people have violated laws which are outside the Constitutional authority of the federal government in the first place.
The people had two checks against their representatives and the founders gave government no authority to override them. The people reserved force of arms and the final say in whether any man/woman/child could be imprisoned regardless of law or circumstance. Both of them are long since dust.