Why AC to prevent point loss? The side of the aisle supporting Obamacare and thrashing Trump has the podium simply because they are so militant and control the most popular news media.
Without the public option Obamacare was not a kept promise, the public option WAS the promise. You can argue we should have public healthcare, you can argue we shouldn't have public healthcare but either way Obamacare is a bastardized hybrid that has skyrocketed healthcare costs and gutted insurance coverage to the point of being useless for those who could afford insurance.
Maybe more people are technically covered but the number of people who can't afford to actually get care and who are bankrupted by it has increased drastically as well. Unless your objective was simply to get people past the "insurance check" at the doctor's office and not actually get their healthcare costs covered Obamacare is a bastardized flop.
"Try bottling your own tap water and selling it commercially, and see how legal that is."
You do realize that dozens of companies are doing exactly that? Walk into Walmart for an example. Or outside many stores where you can purchase large bottles of water and fill them from machines that are nothing but filters hooked up to the tap. There are always vague and broad laws where there is discretion involved and most every human activity could be tossed under one of them but it is unlikely the courts would buy an attempt to stop me from selling water without new legislation.
In this case, the precedent is well established. Essentially every "herbal" remedy and formulation piggy backs on this (although there are special FDA exemptions for actual herbs most herbal remedies and alternative medicines are not actual raw herbs). LSD became so popular because when first invented it was perfectly legal for quite some time. Pretty much the only thing that would get in the way is the analog substances act.
By your logic we operate with a default deny rule and only things which the government whitelists are allowed. If that were really the case I'd suggest we remind them that their authority is entirely by consent of the governed. But the reality is that the default rule is everything is legal unless blocked by law. Even if there is a law, it isn't going to explicitly cover something new and every day that it is clear those who should enforce it have demonstrated they don't feel it applies by not doing so, they weaken their argument it applies should they ever attempt to do so. Not enforced is not "under the radar."
Just admit it, you are reaching here. When it comes to new substances the precedent is well established, unless you are making some kind analog for an illegal drug, or making some kind of medical claim regarding it, you can sell it all day long. If you are worried you can't sell it without skirting the line just follow the tried and true practice of mixing with an herb that is "believed" to help with the same thing or produce a GMO of said herb to actually include your ingredient.
"Samsung uses Android and thus gets all the new ideas that are part of Android. These new ideas should not be credited to Samsung. However, Samsung does try to do some sort of value add and some of those ideas get adopted by all smart phone vendors. So Pogue is actually giving Samsung credit for its contributions to the smart phone industry rather than ignoring it like he did the many smaller Android smart phone vendors."
Exactly, it isn't Samsung vs Apple, it is Apple vs Android. Apple made their platform closed and that decision costs them innovation from multiple parties in an open and shared ecosystem. Sorry if Apple is annoyed that it is Google plus dozen manufacturers plus thousands of developers vs them but that is their choice. They traded having the superior and more innovative platform for keeping all the booty to themselves. That is great for their stock but it is a bit of a slap in the face to their users.
"If you really think it biased for Apple, just consider the Samsung ideas as Android ideas."
Ummm... yes but I don't see how that helps stop misinformation from being spread to others who might not know better by this heavily biased review. Those of us with technical knowledge have an obligation. Every time a manager buys an IPhone a geek loses his wings.
The bias you refer to is pretty clear in the summary logic. Why make a big point of trying to split samsung vs google innovations? Because Apple has fewer. It is fair to lump them together because Android is an open platform and having lots of separate entities building on that open platform results in more innovation. Apple closes their platform and therefore loses this innovation benefit. You should not merely be comparing samsung and google innovations either, for a fair comparison you need to compile all the innovations across all Android developers.
I haven't even reviewed what he classified as innovations and what left out.
I'm less concerned about that, the mesh network concept wouldn't really need to be that much more complex than many other similar networks that have been built and are well proven including those among satellites and smart devices you might have in your house now. Even removing points of failure and having the network be self healing should be quite manageable (note: that is without regard to actual balloons they are building as a platform which might be complex and unmanageable).
My concern would be scaling and future proofing. First there is the device and traffic chatter. The problem with most projects these days is that there are dozen scripting languages, libraries, automation platforms, development tools, etc. Each one takes months to learn to wield properly and far too many projects simply crank out with a complex blend of solutions from whichever ones devs on the team happen to have in their toolset. There simply isn't going to be anyone who can support it properly a few years down the road that way.
Then there is the issue that because complex frameworks and abstraction are all the rage the underlying mechanisms at the core of many of these systems of parallel operation and coordination have deadlocks, traffic light problems, etc that are masked or have bandaids over them and the people using the frameworks have embraced a philosophy of just trusting them because they are widely used... by a bunch of others making the same assumptions. We didn't have all these magical massive parallel and networked application frameworks in the past because we believed in understanding the implementations we built on and knew these flaws made such structures unreliable not because nobody could do it. Cascading failures and bitrot are inevitable with these kind of underlying flaws at large scale, they will appear at the edges as odd one off cases that go away with resets or the like but at scale in critical deployments it's statistically just a question of when the starts align and the house of cards collapses not if. I predict we'll see an increasing rate of critical enterprise failures over the next decade. Hopefully this isn't another one that will go on the list.
There is a gap between heavily regulate and regulation free you know.
And yes, people do have the right to be idiots and kill themselves. The responsibility is to show them the water, they have every right to decide whether or not to drink for themselves. Letting them do so is how we can allow independent and even anti-social behavior, views, and ideas and yet grow stronger over time. Our responsibility as a society is more along the lines of stopping people from providing "water" that isn't water so that the results actually reflect the merits of the choices made be they good or ill.
On second thought this might be more about kids... currently vaping has replaced smoking among the young and vaping without nicotine is indistinguishable from vaping with. You have younger generations not getting addicted to nicotine. Nobody likes tobacco flavors except long time smokers and the tobacco companies are simply outmatched on producing e-cig devices and flavors because fantastic flavors are blended without all the crap they add to them at stores on every corner now. The only place they make money is from production of the nicotine itself which gets extracted from tobacco. Actual tobacco products kill their users off, if this e-cig thing doesn't get stopped the tobacco industry will die with their users.
Yes, and the courts have already denied them on their attempts to regulate e-cigs as medical devices. Which left regulating the juice in a similar manner to tobacco but if there is no nicotine in the juice that doesn't apply. That just leaves the food aspect which is quite difficult to argue given that nobody eats the stuff or claims you should eat it and it doesn't even go into ones stomach.
If vapor is food then so is regular air. About the only thing the FDA does regulate without the nicotine involved is the flavorings added to the juice but only in the sense they certify them as food additives. It's imperfect because inhalation is not digestion but that regulation does give a consumer without a lab handy at least some level of assurance those additives don't contain any number of substances known to be harmful to humans and are produced with some safety standards in handling.
It all circles around to this, nicotine costs money and adds a harshness to the vapor, only those already addicted to nicotine add it because there is no drive to do otherwise. If you are a kid and you want to vape like the other kids you just select nicotine free on anything but tobacco flavored juice at the counter (and only old long time smokers new to vaping get tobacco flavors, tobacco doesn't taste good).
In other words this wouldn't impact kids, it targets people who have dropped tobacco in flavor of vaping. This probably a misguided effort spread with the backing of the tobacco lobby to curb vaping and bring people back to their deadly products. The sad thing is they are using kids to kick in parents protective instincts. A kid puffing on an e-cig without nicotine is indistinguishable from one with nicotine to his friends but if those friends are back to smoking tobacco products that stops being true.
"Personally, I think they *should* put some curbs into this vaping thing, but only to limit the levels of the addictive components and perhaps limit the sales of the devices and the consumed components with addictive components to adults only."
They already do. They juices are regulated much like tobacco at this point but not the devices, the courts shut down their attempts to treat the devices as drug delivery devices when tobacco pipes are not regulated in such a manner.
This isn't really about children, you don't add nicotine if you aren't addicted to nicotine and aside from maybe a couple tobacco replacement flavors that use tobacco in their manufacture it's an extra step and cost to add it. Kids aren't generally adding nicotine, their friends couldn't even tell. They might take a puff off one with nicotine to try a flavor or something but it takes months of regular use to become addicted to nicotine. This is either just a simple misguided effort or coming straight from the tobacco lobby... most likely a combination of the two. Kids are just being used here to kick in the protective instincts of us parents.
Sure there is no regulation, or for that matter any real testing (especially when vaping began and people starting looking for what might be safe). You know that anything known to be harmful if eaten isn't being included in those ingredients. In the absence of any more specific measure it is a better indicator than nothing. There is a pretty huge overlap we between what is definitely going to be harmful inhaled and eaten and zero ability without regulation to determine if was used in manufacturing a vape flavoring... UNLESS that vape flavoring had to meet FDA requirements as a food flavoring.
Using this precaution means not adding scent flavorings or something containing arsenic, lead, heavy metals sanitary conditions, etc.
Unless by "do your own research" you meant that every corner shop and person mixing their own juice should be running their own lab gear and doing a chemical analysis of random clear smelly liquids to see what hides in them. It's not like you can just google it.
What couldn't the Nazi's take by force? They took over all of Europe save the UK and the V2 had spelled it's end if not for the combination of invading Russia, US involvement, and the dumb luck of finding Turing. After that the US and Russians are the ones who came back in and graciously decided not keep the territory they reconquered from the Germans.
You can also back them up, make digital copies, and stream them on your own plex server. As for not having any movies removed... I've smoked thousands of cigarettes before, never gotten any cancer. I'm sure lots of things have happened to you for the first time at some point, were you under the impression they won't happen? Even if they never do, was there something about my comment that limits it to you specifically?
The point is you've paid for a revocable permission to stream a title from one particular vendor not ownership of a copy, even a digital copy. The same companies that have provided them license to distribute can revoke THEIR right to stream you that title as happened here. Or Walmart might choose to fold the service, or they might have some underlying disk corruption that makes it through a checksum and causes bitrot in their database that propagates across the array without being detected and titles get removed from your list.
All that aside, the audio tracks are shit from the streaming services... I don't know why when the master audio is negligible compared to the video stream but they give crappy dolby 5.1 streams at best.
Neither really represent the people, the disparity in wealth is too great for the people to have an effective voice in either. You can't represent the will of the people if the the will of the people is being manipulated with false information and information deliberate spun. You don't have to be brighter than people, their attention is spread across any number of issues and personal concerns, you really just need to care enough about the issue to outspin the 15 seconds to 5 minutes they'll spend actually considering the issue vs repeating other sources they trust to make their will your will. The wealthy (via their primary corporate vehicles) can pay an entire team of experts to spend 8+hrs a day doing nothing but shaping and working the intelligence and spin of that 15s-5m.
We don't need to heavily regulate this particular market. The only needed regulation is comparable to the quality, safety, and fair labeling practices we see on food. Sure, claims of medical effectiveness should be evaluated but there is no need to regulate distribution, sale, restrict consumption, or restrict who does the manufacturing so long as they comply with inspections for production safety.
"There may be a perfectly good medicine that already exists and is being sold in other countries, but if it's not FDA approved, you may be SOL. It's illegal for anyone to sell that medication to you."
Not quite true. It illegal for the manufacturer to claim it does something medically. If it isn't a regulated drug it isn't regulated, you can have a lab in China produce it by the pound for a couple hundred if you want. EVERYTHING is a chemical and therefore a drug, including water. The default is that everything is legal to sell, not the other way around.
That's pretty meaningless, meeting those FDA requirements I'd be very surprised if the medication in the bottle costs as much to make as the plastic bottle you get it in.
This isn't just about Apple. Never buy licensed digital content like this, not from Apple, Sony, Vudu, Amazon or any of the others. It is NOT the same as buying a blu-ray. The same goes for music, games, etc. If you are going to spend funds on digital content spend it streaming services where you aren't paying prices only borne by the market because they think they own what they are buying.
"Norms are not just fixed features of the environment, like the biology of a plant. They are dynamic and responsive structures that we make and remake on a daily basis, as we decide whether or when to let someone know that "this" is the way "we" do things around here. These normative systems are the systems on which we rely to solve the challenge of ensuring that people behave the way we want them to in our communities, workplaces and social environments."
So you are saying we should teach the machine the psychotic and irrational behaviors that have poisoned actual human thinking and culture? How is that safe and why would we want to do it? Just because we have this baggage floating around from the ancient times when we didn't know better and poisoning our culture doesn't mean our AI should have it.
The FDA has no authority to regulate if the juice contains no nicotine and teens who don't already spoke don't use the nicotine juice. You can make any flavor with or without it, the nicotine is an add on.
"The bag" is a fully functional interest in a completely legitimate and counterfeit proof resistant system of digital currency. The whales identified that system and recognized it's potential BEFORE it was obvious so they are entitled to their rewards. Legitimate investors will do just fine since they will simply coast over short term dips.
As for people investing on the speculative markets chasing gold instead of believing in the technology... who cares? These are the same market abusers who disrupt all the markets.
"The largest cryptocurrencies are manipulated by the Whales."
What exactly do you think the central banks and the handful of families who are intimately tied to them are? Printed currency they have to buy in the US but they buy it at printing cost and they create digital funds just by loaning it to other banks at will. Who runs a long established mine, a 5th or better generation miner, so who do you think are the whales of fiat currency? You think the government controls the fed because a presidential appointment that comes with no obligation after the fact... who exactly do you think they can justify appointing?
There are whales in all the markets, in the cryptocurrency markets they just early investors who are trying to slowly liquidate without crashing the markets. You know what things are like when they are done? Smaller whales.
50k people or not, it is a sovereign nation giving cryptocurrency a fair test alongside the dollar, if it works it undermines fiat currency and the power of the US dollar while validating the concept of not needing to rely on the central banks. If it does work, momentum might build.
This was foolish of them though if they weren't threatening to without emergency disaster aid and such nobody would have likely ever known about this experiment, even if successful.
They are adding it as a second currency not the only currency. If it doesn't take off it hurts nothing, it certainly doesn't follow that other nations could no longer provide them aid. The concern here is definitely a sovereign nation validating a concept of currency that isn't controlled by a central bank, the US dollar being the potentially supplanted is especially damning.
Slashdot Mirror
Why AC to prevent point loss? The side of the aisle supporting Obamacare and thrashing Trump has the podium simply because they are so militant and control the most popular news media.
Without the public option Obamacare was not a kept promise, the public option WAS the promise. You can argue we should have public healthcare, you can argue we shouldn't have public healthcare but either way Obamacare is a bastardized hybrid that has skyrocketed healthcare costs and gutted insurance coverage to the point of being useless for those who could afford insurance.
Maybe more people are technically covered but the number of people who can't afford to actually get care and who are bankrupted by it has increased drastically as well. Unless your objective was simply to get people past the "insurance check" at the doctor's office and not actually get their healthcare costs covered Obamacare is a bastardized flop.
"Try bottling your own tap water and selling it commercially, and see how legal that is."
You do realize that dozens of companies are doing exactly that? Walk into Walmart for an example. Or outside many stores where you can purchase large bottles of water and fill them from machines that are nothing but filters hooked up to the tap. There are always vague and broad laws where there is discretion involved and most every human activity could be tossed under one of them but it is unlikely the courts would buy an attempt to stop me from selling water without new legislation.
In this case, the precedent is well established. Essentially every "herbal" remedy and formulation piggy backs on this (although there are special FDA exemptions for actual herbs most herbal remedies and alternative medicines are not actual raw herbs). LSD became so popular because when first invented it was perfectly legal for quite some time. Pretty much the only thing that would get in the way is the analog substances act.
By your logic we operate with a default deny rule and only things which the government whitelists are allowed. If that were really the case I'd suggest we remind them that their authority is entirely by consent of the governed. But the reality is that the default rule is everything is legal unless blocked by law. Even if there is a law, it isn't going to explicitly cover something new and every day that it is clear those who should enforce it have demonstrated they don't feel it applies by not doing so, they weaken their argument it applies should they ever attempt to do so. Not enforced is not "under the radar."
Just admit it, you are reaching here. When it comes to new substances the precedent is well established, unless you are making some kind analog for an illegal drug, or making some kind of medical claim regarding it, you can sell it all day long. If you are worried you can't sell it without skirting the line just follow the tried and true practice of mixing with an herb that is "believed" to help with the same thing or produce a GMO of said herb to actually include your ingredient.
"Samsung uses Android and thus gets all the new ideas that are part of Android. These new ideas should not be credited to Samsung. However, Samsung does try to do some sort of value add and some of those ideas get adopted by all smart phone vendors. So Pogue is actually giving Samsung credit for its contributions to the smart phone industry rather than ignoring it like he did the many smaller Android smart phone vendors."
Exactly, it isn't Samsung vs Apple, it is Apple vs Android. Apple made their platform closed and that decision costs them innovation from multiple parties in an open and shared ecosystem. Sorry if Apple is annoyed that it is Google plus dozen manufacturers plus thousands of developers vs them but that is their choice. They traded having the superior and more innovative platform for keeping all the booty to themselves. That is great for their stock but it is a bit of a slap in the face to their users.
"If you really think it biased for Apple, just consider the Samsung ideas as Android ideas."
Ummm... yes but I don't see how that helps stop misinformation from being spread to others who might not know better by this heavily biased review. Those of us with technical knowledge have an obligation. Every time a manager buys an IPhone a geek loses his wings.
The bias you refer to is pretty clear in the summary logic. Why make a big point of trying to split samsung vs google innovations? Because Apple has fewer. It is fair to lump them together because Android is an open platform and having lots of separate entities building on that open platform results in more innovation. Apple closes their platform and therefore loses this innovation benefit. You should not merely be comparing samsung and google innovations either, for a fair comparison you need to compile all the innovations across all Android developers.
I haven't even reviewed what he classified as innovations and what left out.
I'm less concerned about that, the mesh network concept wouldn't really need to be that much more complex than many other similar networks that have been built and are well proven including those among satellites and smart devices you might have in your house now. Even removing points of failure and having the network be self healing should be quite manageable (note: that is without regard to actual balloons they are building as a platform which might be complex and unmanageable).
My concern would be scaling and future proofing. First there is the device and traffic chatter. The problem with most projects these days is that there are dozen scripting languages, libraries, automation platforms, development tools, etc. Each one takes months to learn to wield properly and far too many projects simply crank out with a complex blend of solutions from whichever ones devs on the team happen to have in their toolset. There simply isn't going to be anyone who can support it properly a few years down the road that way.
Then there is the issue that because complex frameworks and abstraction are all the rage the underlying mechanisms at the core of many of these systems of parallel operation and coordination have deadlocks, traffic light problems, etc that are masked or have bandaids over them and the people using the frameworks have embraced a philosophy of just trusting them because they are widely used... by a bunch of others making the same assumptions. We didn't have all these magical massive parallel and networked application frameworks in the past because we believed in understanding the implementations we built on and knew these flaws made such structures unreliable not because nobody could do it. Cascading failures and bitrot are inevitable with these kind of underlying flaws at large scale, they will appear at the edges as odd one off cases that go away with resets or the like but at scale in critical deployments it's statistically just a question of when the starts align and the house of cards collapses not if. I predict we'll see an increasing rate of critical enterprise failures over the next decade. Hopefully this isn't another one that will go on the list.
There is a gap between heavily regulate and regulation free you know.
And yes, people do have the right to be idiots and kill themselves. The responsibility is to show them the water, they have every right to decide whether or not to drink for themselves. Letting them do so is how we can allow independent and even anti-social behavior, views, and ideas and yet grow stronger over time. Our responsibility as a society is more along the lines of stopping people from providing "water" that isn't water so that the results actually reflect the merits of the choices made be they good or ill.
On second thought this might be more about kids... currently vaping has replaced smoking among the young and vaping without nicotine is indistinguishable from vaping with. You have younger generations not getting addicted to nicotine. Nobody likes tobacco flavors except long time smokers and the tobacco companies are simply outmatched on producing e-cig devices and flavors because fantastic flavors are blended without all the crap they add to them at stores on every corner now. The only place they make money is from production of the nicotine itself which gets extracted from tobacco. Actual tobacco products kill their users off, if this e-cig thing doesn't get stopped the tobacco industry will die with their users.
Yes, and the courts have already denied them on their attempts to regulate e-cigs as medical devices. Which left regulating the juice in a similar manner to tobacco but if there is no nicotine in the juice that doesn't apply. That just leaves the food aspect which is quite difficult to argue given that nobody eats the stuff or claims you should eat it and it doesn't even go into ones stomach.
If vapor is food then so is regular air. About the only thing the FDA does regulate without the nicotine involved is the flavorings added to the juice but only in the sense they certify them as food additives. It's imperfect because inhalation is not digestion but that regulation does give a consumer without a lab handy at least some level of assurance those additives don't contain any number of substances known to be harmful to humans and are produced with some safety standards in handling.
It all circles around to this, nicotine costs money and adds a harshness to the vapor, only those already addicted to nicotine add it because there is no drive to do otherwise. If you are a kid and you want to vape like the other kids you just select nicotine free on anything but tobacco flavored juice at the counter (and only old long time smokers new to vaping get tobacco flavors, tobacco doesn't taste good).
In other words this wouldn't impact kids, it targets people who have dropped tobacco in flavor of vaping. This probably a misguided effort spread with the backing of the tobacco lobby to curb vaping and bring people back to their deadly products. The sad thing is they are using kids to kick in parents protective instincts. A kid puffing on an e-cig without nicotine is indistinguishable from one with nicotine to his friends but if those friends are back to smoking tobacco products that stops being true.
"Personally, I think they *should* put some curbs into this vaping thing, but only to limit the levels of the addictive components and perhaps limit the sales of the devices and the consumed components with addictive components to adults only."
They already do. They juices are regulated much like tobacco at this point but not the devices, the courts shut down their attempts to treat the devices as drug delivery devices when tobacco pipes are not regulated in such a manner.
This isn't really about children, you don't add nicotine if you aren't addicted to nicotine and aside from maybe a couple tobacco replacement flavors that use tobacco in their manufacture it's an extra step and cost to add it. Kids aren't generally adding nicotine, their friends couldn't even tell. They might take a puff off one with nicotine to try a flavor or something but it takes months of regular use to become addicted to nicotine. This is either just a simple misguided effort or coming straight from the tobacco lobby... most likely a combination of the two. Kids are just being used here to kick in the protective instincts of us parents.
Sure there is no regulation, or for that matter any real testing (especially when vaping began and people starting looking for what might be safe). You know that anything known to be harmful if eaten isn't being included in those ingredients. In the absence of any more specific measure it is a better indicator than nothing. There is a pretty huge overlap we between what is definitely going to be harmful inhaled and eaten and zero ability without regulation to determine if was used in manufacturing a vape flavoring... UNLESS that vape flavoring had to meet FDA requirements as a food flavoring.
Using this precaution means not adding scent flavorings or something containing arsenic, lead, heavy metals sanitary conditions, etc.
Unless by "do your own research" you meant that every corner shop and person mixing their own juice should be running their own lab gear and doing a chemical analysis of random clear smelly liquids to see what hides in them. It's not like you can just google it.
What couldn't the Nazi's take by force? They took over all of Europe save the UK and the V2 had spelled it's end if not for the combination of invading Russia, US involvement, and the dumb luck of finding Turing. After that the US and Russians are the ones who came back in and graciously decided not keep the territory they reconquered from the Germans.
3. Free exchange of information and ideas
You can also back them up, make digital copies, and stream them on your own plex server. As for not having any movies removed... I've smoked thousands of cigarettes before, never gotten any cancer. I'm sure lots of things have happened to you for the first time at some point, were you under the impression they won't happen? Even if they never do, was there something about my comment that limits it to you specifically?
The point is you've paid for a revocable permission to stream a title from one particular vendor not ownership of a copy, even a digital copy. The same companies that have provided them license to distribute can revoke THEIR right to stream you that title as happened here. Or Walmart might choose to fold the service, or they might have some underlying disk corruption that makes it through a checksum and causes bitrot in their database that propagates across the array without being detected and titles get removed from your list.
All that aside, the audio tracks are shit from the streaming services... I don't know why when the master audio is negligible compared to the video stream but they give crappy dolby 5.1 streams at best.
Neither really represent the people, the disparity in wealth is too great for the people to have an effective voice in either. You can't represent the will of the people if the the will of the people is being manipulated with false information and information deliberate spun. You don't have to be brighter than people, their attention is spread across any number of issues and personal concerns, you really just need to care enough about the issue to outspin the 15 seconds to 5 minutes they'll spend actually considering the issue vs repeating other sources they trust to make their will your will. The wealthy (via their primary corporate vehicles) can pay an entire team of experts to spend 8+hrs a day doing nothing but shaping and working the intelligence and spin of that 15s-5m.
People don't have a chance.
We don't need to heavily regulate this particular market. The only needed regulation is comparable to the quality, safety, and fair labeling practices we see on food. Sure, claims of medical effectiveness should be evaluated but there is no need to regulate distribution, sale, restrict consumption, or restrict who does the manufacturing so long as they comply with inspections for production safety.
"There may be a perfectly good medicine that already exists and is being sold in other countries, but if it's not FDA approved, you may be SOL. It's illegal for anyone to sell that medication to you."
Not quite true. It illegal for the manufacturer to claim it does something medically. If it isn't a regulated drug it isn't regulated, you can have a lab in China produce it by the pound for a couple hundred if you want. EVERYTHING is a chemical and therefore a drug, including water. The default is that everything is legal to sell, not the other way around.
That's pretty meaningless, meeting those FDA requirements I'd be very surprised if the medication in the bottle costs as much to make as the plastic bottle you get it in.
This isn't just about Apple. Never buy licensed digital content like this, not from Apple, Sony, Vudu, Amazon or any of the others. It is NOT the same as buying a blu-ray. The same goes for music, games, etc. If you are going to spend funds on digital content spend it streaming services where you aren't paying prices only borne by the market because they think they own what they are buying.
"Norms are not just fixed features of the environment, like the biology of a plant. They are dynamic and responsive structures that we make and remake on a daily basis, as we decide whether or when to let someone know that "this" is the way "we" do things around here. These normative systems are the systems on which we rely to solve the challenge of ensuring that people behave the way we want them to in our communities, workplaces and social environments."
So you are saying we should teach the machine the psychotic and irrational behaviors that have poisoned actual human thinking and culture? How is that safe and why would we want to do it? Just because we have this baggage floating around from the ancient times when we didn't know better and poisoning our culture doesn't mean our AI should have it.
Uh huh... last I checked nobody is eating the e-juice.
The FDA has no authority to regulate if the juice contains no nicotine and teens who don't already spoke don't use the nicotine juice. You can make any flavor with or without it, the nicotine is an add on.
"The bag" is a fully functional interest in a completely legitimate and counterfeit proof resistant system of digital currency. The whales identified that system and recognized it's potential BEFORE it was obvious so they are entitled to their rewards. Legitimate investors will do just fine since they will simply coast over short term dips.
As for people investing on the speculative markets chasing gold instead of believing in the technology... who cares? These are the same market abusers who disrupt all the markets.
"The largest cryptocurrencies are manipulated by the Whales."
What exactly do you think the central banks and the handful of families who are intimately tied to them are? Printed currency they have to buy in the US but they buy it at printing cost and they create digital funds just by loaning it to other banks at will. Who runs a long established mine, a 5th or better generation miner, so who do you think are the whales of fiat currency? You think the government controls the fed because a presidential appointment that comes with no obligation after the fact... who exactly do you think they can justify appointing?
There are whales in all the markets, in the cryptocurrency markets they just early investors who are trying to slowly liquidate without crashing the markets. You know what things are like when they are done? Smaller whales.
50k people or not, it is a sovereign nation giving cryptocurrency a fair test alongside the dollar, if it works it undermines fiat currency and the power of the US dollar while validating the concept of not needing to rely on the central banks. If it does work, momentum might build.
This was foolish of them though if they weren't threatening to without emergency disaster aid and such nobody would have likely ever known about this experiment, even if successful.
They are adding it as a second currency not the only currency. If it doesn't take off it hurts nothing, it certainly doesn't follow that other nations could no longer provide them aid. The concern here is definitely a sovereign nation validating a concept of currency that isn't controlled by a central bank, the US dollar being the potentially supplanted is especially damning.