But I bet it's higher than ~3.5, which means this is a niche solution even if they're the only people in the world using Bitcoin. It's also stupid, but hey, a lot of things that people use to make a living are stupid.
And no matter what the ledger says, the person in physical possession of the trading card is the one who owns it, because the government isn't going to recognize Bitcoin as proof of ownership.
So really, we're talking about a barter economy because the Venezuelan bolÃvar is in the shitter, and a portion of people using a particular item as a substitute for currency tracking it (though it's not really currency since it IS the value, not a promissory note) with a blockchain.
Err... OK. Personally, I'd just keep the damn cards somewhere safe. Or, given that you're already hiding economic activity from the government by using something other than the official currency, I'd just use the USD everyone would ultimately exchange the cards for anyway. More reliable value, easier to subdivide, easier to spend if you get out of the country.
>$5 a month or $.99 an episode is my price. Offer that and I (along with millions of others) will pay. Otherwise i won't
I think signing up with a streaming service for pay-per-view isn't a bad idea. Prepaid or just bill at the end of the month, and anything you rent you get full access for 30 days in case you decide to watch it twice or something. And probably some kind of threshold where if you go over then additional rentals are deeply discounted....And multiple tiers. C'mon... Are you going to pay a buck for something for a 30 minute show from the 1940s? Are you going to be willing to pay more for something longer, newer and with a bigger budget? One price for all isn't really a great idea.
And then, for the all the rest of it, a monthly fee would get you unlimited access to the 'random file' (which hey, may as well include all that old back-catalog stuff you wouldn't pay a buck for).
The nice thing about pay-per-view is you're no longer stuck signing up to just one service because they have the most shows you want. Sign up to a few, spread the love around. It's not that expensive for them to set up an account for you!
Cable: Take what we offer, more or less when we offer it (and we'll do our best to mess with any DVR you try to use), and pay through the nose for it. And then double or triple that to get some decent channels.
Streaming: Take what you want from our entire catalog, whenever you want, for a fraction of a cable subscription. You need an Internet connection, but we don't really care how you connect.
AMC: "Let's start a service that should replace cable television, but require subscribers to maintain their cable television subscription as well! What could possibly be stupid about that?"
I've had more female bosses and supervisors than male. I've always had at least one female co-worker on my team. I think I'm up to ~20 years of IT experience now, and I started out as a contractor visiting a wide variety of sites before I started taking corporate cubical gigs.
The problems have been with socially awkward guys, not with misogyny or institutionalized sexism. And even those problems started waning in the early 2000s as employers had more and more potential employees to choose from and could get pickier.
>The Uber driver won't be paying it unless they lower their fares so the customers pay the same as before,
Yes. But the customer sees that as a significant fare increase, and Uber fares are where they are to make them much more attractive than cabs.
>they just collect it.
Which is a pain in the ass, especially for people who are making shit money and will likely spend the extra collected money and worry about paying the taxes in April (except I think GST remittance is quarterly... it's been a while). Anyway, it won't work out well for them.
>If the drivers are smart, they'll register themselves as a business, get a tax number, and get reimbursed for whatever GST they pay for business purposes, things like gas, vehicle maintenance along with the vehicle, clothes, phones etc. Might actually come out ahead.
I agree in theory, but I suspect in practice the extra overhead in paperwork will be too much for the kind of person who is trying to make a living as an Uber driver.
I certainly don't expect Uber to handle the GST for them. In fact, as long as they're treating the drivers as contractors, they can't.
What else do you call it when you can connect your phone to an external keyboard, monitor, and control devices? The phone did most things by Bluetooth but video (and audio optionally) over HDMI. It would also connect to Samba shares for file access.
Now, if I can put my phone down on the opened 'laptop' and it's smart enough to act as a trackpad for the external device while drawing power from it and sending video and audio to it, that'd be nice.
I don't really need massively upgraded processing power or video - my phone itself is already good enough for most purposes, and if the external device has all those upgrades, I'd probably use it instead of the phone and not bother with the whole 'docking' part.
In theory, taxation takes a percentage of all productivity and redirects it to the common good. That makes Regan's rule "Take a little from everywhere, and if it looks like it's killing something important, use some of the money taken elsewhere and give it to that thing".
Though meant as a joke, that seems like a decent guideline for funding a government... as long as you cap your taxation at 'enough to fund government programs' even if things keep moving briskly despite what you're already taking.
The regulation part is kind of silly. That's part and parcel of the taxation - you have to define something to tax it, then find new definition for the stuff that falls outside the initial ones, etc.
>Federal tax laws already offer small business owners a break on collecting sales tax, but unfairly exclude taxi drivers. The best way to support taxi drivers and level the playing field is to extend the same exemption to them."
This is because the taxi driver's an employee everywhere but on paper. Uber's model is to exploit the system (which is good for cracking the cab licencing scheme but no better for tax collection and worse for the drivers).
If those drivers had resources (and at their wages they'll never save up enough to do anything), they could get together and pay some other entity to handle dispatching them, pay another entity to handle the money, and a third to vet drivers and vehicles. Keep 'em separate so they can't collude against the drivers.
But what really needs to be done is to reform the cab licencing systems.
Until we have the medical technology to make people to thrive in microgravity, Mars' 0.38g is the best chance we have at surviving off-Earth. Of course, we still don't know if 0.38 is enough.
Regardless, making the Martian surface marginally habitable (meaning self-sustaining colonies, not walking around without a pressure suit) is only just beyond our reach right now. The Moon isn't worth considering as more than a more distant space station. If you're really focused on the resource and manufacturing issues, then you should focus on asteroid mining instead.
> the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.
It's a choice between community and individuals. Self-reliance was great back in the day when you could (in theory) walk into the wilds and build your own civilization, but if you want a modern standard of living there are simply too many things to do, too much to know. We rely heavily on people taking on highly specialized roles and ultimately everyone lives better as a result.
Modern 'self-reliance' is more like modern 'fuck you, I got mine'. It's people exploiting others and making them like it by holding out the carrot of their own anomalous success. And we eat it up because the human brain is shitty at probabilities... we all think WE are going to be the next big exploiter when the odds are far better that we'll win the lottery, and the truth is we're more likely to die by lightning strike than have either of those things happen.
Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not. Or they can watch wealth disparity continue to increase, a smaller and smaller portion of the population living like near-Gods while the greater portion has less and less. It'll take time for that to become apparent, so long as bellies are full and everyone has an Internet connection, but eventually the mob rises up and you get a revolution.
I guess I'm older. I used to travel with a Perly's Guide for the Toronto area and big folding maps for the rest of the province. And some change for a pay phone.
I got pretty good at dead reckoning and knowing my approximate position at different scales. It's also pretty easy to estimate your travel time when the highway markers count kilometers and traffic goes at 120 km/h. 2km/min. Of course, you have to know where the highway terminus is (or at least your exit) so you can figure out how far you have left to go, but that doesn't take long since exit numbers match the distance from the terminus.
Big trips are easy. Head to the biggest road that heads the way you want to go. Bump over to a country concession if the highway's blocked. Big cities... everything's nicely marked even if some of the roads twist and wind a bit.
Small towns, though... I could get lost on a postage stamp. For that I am immensely glad for smartphones, ubiquitous cellular coverage, mobile GPS apps, and Google Streetview.
Still, I'm glad I have the navigation skills I developed the difficult way even though I now generally rely on GPS. When the navigation directions are poor, I'm not a slave to the device.
>Most DRM isn't expected to prevent 100% of copies indefinitely. Usually it's intended to deter and/or delay casual copying, and in that, it is often quite successful these days.
I can't recall the last time I looked for media that wasn't available in an unencrypted stream within hours of being released in digital format, whatever the DRM.
>then if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?
Well, yes, because it's almost impossible that there's nothing around to hear it - animals have brains and ears, too.
If you only count humans, the answer is 'no'. Without the act of hearing, there is just a radiating vibration of air, not a sound. Sound is in the perception of those vibrations, not the vibrations themselves.
I think a magnetic launch assist for commercial jets would be a fantastic idea. Jets can burn 40% more fuel during take-off than during cruise, and they're going a lot slower while doing it. A nice push to get them started wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Maybe even use a proper rail and have a launch cradle you can position under the plane so it can ride 'gear up'.
It'd be interesting to look at a cost/benefit analysis of such a system.
They're just gonna hitch up their Hummer to that goalpost and move it again, because that's easier than taking the lifestyle hit that change would require.
Humans only live ~80 years anyway, and most people talking about this (and with money to do something about it) will be in their late 30s at least. None of them will really see significant change in the remainder of their life, so it's not real to them. Hell, most of them don't even plan for the next decade.
That's mostly movie stuff, and most of that cabling is underground (at least any place I've seen built in the last 40 years or so).
I suppose you could go all Hollywood and get a fake maintenance vans and uniforms and disconnect the house from the local nodes... (you know, after learning how to trace the lines or figuring out the local telco/cable company labeling system) but these days you have to do phone, cable, power, plus jam wireless signals.
Nobody's doing that for what they'd score from the average home. Simple smash-and-grab is where it's at. The real thieves are con artists who convince you to hand over your money willingly.
But if you could package this attack into a smartphone app and sell it to a burglar... they wouldn't have to be all that bright, would they?
You know the first way an experienced burglar used to check a house prior to encrypted radio being common? They broke in the back door then left to listen to their scanner for alarm company or police dispatch radio traffic.
If somebody else packages up the tools, they're quite capable of using them.
From a man who has to have almost everything gilded, I expect his (limited - the budget's still down, just not as much as anticipated) support is because it's a big, flashy, expensive prestige thing to him. There's a little bit of pork barrelling involved, too. I would expect his interest in the exploration and science return to be minimal.
But if we wanted to get to Mars in under a decade... we could just tell him it can happen by the end of his presidency if he gives NASA 10x the budget for a few years. He'd be on Twitter promoting it in seconds!
There's so much wrong with the thinking behind your post that people have dedicated essays to it. I'll go with the overly simplified version:
If you treat Bitcoins as currency, you spend them. Thus, you're not holding on to them long enough for them to accrue value. If you treat them as an investment, you're not spending them, and there's no Bitcoin economy to make them worth anything.
That's why Bitcoin trading is pure speculation. There's absolutely nothing behind them except the willingness of the next idiot to buy some. They're different from Beanie Babies only in that when Bitcoin finally peters out you won't be left with something you can put on a shelf somewhere or give to a little kid.
If you could magically time markets, Bitcoin is probably one of the last things you'd try it with since it's a lot easier to trade in other financial instruments with far less risk of fraud.
Wow. Read your post from title to end and the only conclusion I can come to is that you're a raging asshole if you can only express your opinion with such vitriol.
But you have a manifesto to keep you company, so there's that.
The thing about that is that the people invested in Bitcoin (emotionally, not necessarily financially) have a quasi-religious fervour and are willing to put proportionately far more time than anyone else into the subject.
They must be down to an exceedingly small fraction of the social networking user population if they're no longer able to overpower discussions on social networking sites.
Slashdot Mirror
But I bet it's higher than ~3.5, which means this is a niche solution even if they're the only people in the world using Bitcoin. It's also stupid, but hey, a lot of things that people use to make a living are stupid.
And no matter what the ledger says, the person in physical possession of the trading card is the one who owns it, because the government isn't going to recognize Bitcoin as proof of ownership.
So really, we're talking about a barter economy because the Venezuelan bolÃvar is in the shitter, and a portion of people using a particular item as a substitute for currency tracking it (though it's not really currency since it IS the value, not a promissory note) with a blockchain.
Err... OK. Personally, I'd just keep the damn cards somewhere safe. Or, given that you're already hiding economic activity from the government by using something other than the official currency, I'd just use the USD everyone would ultimately exchange the cards for anyway. More reliable value, easier to subdivide, easier to spend if you get out of the country.
>$5 a month or $.99 an episode is my price. Offer that and I (along with millions of others) will pay. Otherwise i won't
I think signing up with a streaming service for pay-per-view isn't a bad idea. Prepaid or just bill at the end of the month, and anything you rent you get full access for 30 days in case you decide to watch it twice or something. And probably some kind of threshold where if you go over then additional rentals are deeply discounted. ...And multiple tiers. C'mon... Are you going to pay a buck for something for a 30 minute show from the 1940s? Are you going to be willing to pay more for something longer, newer and with a bigger budget? One price for all isn't really a great idea.
And then, for the all the rest of it, a monthly fee would get you unlimited access to the 'random file' (which hey, may as well include all that old back-catalog stuff you wouldn't pay a buck for).
The nice thing about pay-per-view is you're no longer stuck signing up to just one service because they have the most shows you want. Sign up to a few, spread the love around. It's not that expensive for them to set up an account for you!
Cable: Take what we offer, more or less when we offer it (and we'll do our best to mess with any DVR you try to use), and pay through the nose for it. And then double or triple that to get some decent channels.
Streaming: Take what you want from our entire catalog, whenever you want, for a fraction of a cable subscription. You need an Internet connection, but we don't really care how you connect.
AMC: "Let's start a service that should replace cable television, but require subscribers to maintain their cable television subscription as well! What could possibly be stupid about that?"
I've had more female bosses and supervisors than male. I've always had at least one female co-worker on my team. I think I'm up to ~20 years of IT experience now, and I started out as a contractor visiting a wide variety of sites before I started taking corporate cubical gigs.
The problems have been with socially awkward guys, not with misogyny or institutionalized sexism. And even those problems started waning in the early 2000s as employers had more and more potential employees to choose from and could get pickier.
>The Uber driver won't be paying it unless they lower their fares so the customers pay the same as before,
Yes. But the customer sees that as a significant fare increase, and Uber fares are where they are to make them much more attractive than cabs.
>they just collect it.
Which is a pain in the ass, especially for people who are making shit money and will likely spend the extra collected money and worry about paying the taxes in April (except I think GST remittance is quarterly... it's been a while). Anyway, it won't work out well for them.
>If the drivers are smart, they'll register themselves as a business, get a tax number, and get reimbursed for whatever GST they pay for business purposes, things like gas, vehicle maintenance along with the vehicle, clothes, phones etc. Might actually come out ahead.
I agree in theory, but I suspect in practice the extra overhead in paperwork will be too much for the kind of person who is trying to make a living as an Uber driver.
I certainly don't expect Uber to handle the GST for them. In fact, as long as they're treating the drivers as contractors, they can't.
...and probably everyone else.
What else do you call it when you can connect your phone to an external keyboard, monitor, and control devices? The phone did most things by Bluetooth but video (and audio optionally) over HDMI. It would also connect to Samba shares for file access.
Now, if I can put my phone down on the opened 'laptop' and it's smart enough to act as a trackpad for the external device while drawing power from it and sending video and audio to it, that'd be nice.
I don't really need massively upgraded processing power or video - my phone itself is already good enough for most purposes, and if the external device has all those upgrades, I'd probably use it instead of the phone and not bother with the whole 'docking' part.
In theory, taxation takes a percentage of all productivity and redirects it to the common good. That makes Regan's rule "Take a little from everywhere, and if it looks like it's killing something important, use some of the money taken elsewhere and give it to that thing".
Though meant as a joke, that seems like a decent guideline for funding a government... as long as you cap your taxation at 'enough to fund government programs' even if things keep moving briskly despite what you're already taking.
The regulation part is kind of silly. That's part and parcel of the taxation - you have to define something to tax it, then find new definition for the stuff that falls outside the initial ones, etc.
>Federal tax laws already offer small business owners a break on collecting sales tax, but unfairly exclude taxi drivers. The best way to support taxi drivers and level the playing field is to extend the same exemption to them."
This is because the taxi driver's an employee everywhere but on paper. Uber's model is to exploit the system (which is good for cracking the cab licencing scheme but no better for tax collection and worse for the drivers).
If those drivers had resources (and at their wages they'll never save up enough to do anything), they could get together and pay some other entity to handle dispatching them, pay another entity to handle the money, and a third to vet drivers and vehicles. Keep 'em separate so they can't collude against the drivers.
But what really needs to be done is to reform the cab licencing systems.
Until we have the medical technology to make people to thrive in microgravity, Mars' 0.38g is the best chance we have at surviving off-Earth. Of course, we still don't know if 0.38 is enough.
Regardless, making the Martian surface marginally habitable (meaning self-sustaining colonies, not walking around without a pressure suit) is only just beyond our reach right now. The Moon isn't worth considering as more than a more distant space station. If you're really focused on the resource and manufacturing issues, then you should focus on asteroid mining instead.
By which I mean, someone wants to claim ownership of their creation for the sole purpose of denying others the ability to patent it.
If there is such a thing, that patenting process ought to be government subsidized and possibly given processing priority.
IIRC, we tore that apart in the comments. Political spin on a budget cut, that's all.
>With one statement, you show yourself the fool,
You wasted a lot more time showing everyone you're an idiot, so I guess you win.
> the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.
It's a choice between community and individuals. Self-reliance was great back in the day when you could (in theory) walk into the wilds and build your own civilization, but if you want a modern standard of living there are simply too many things to do, too much to know. We rely heavily on people taking on highly specialized roles and ultimately everyone lives better as a result.
Modern 'self-reliance' is more like modern 'fuck you, I got mine'. It's people exploiting others and making them like it by holding out the carrot of their own anomalous success. And we eat it up because the human brain is shitty at probabilities... we all think WE are going to be the next big exploiter when the odds are far better that we'll win the lottery, and the truth is we're more likely to die by lightning strike than have either of those things happen.
Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not. Or they can watch wealth disparity continue to increase, a smaller and smaller portion of the population living like near-Gods while the greater portion has less and less. It'll take time for that to become apparent, so long as bellies are full and everyone has an Internet connection, but eventually the mob rises up and you get a revolution.
I guess I'm older. I used to travel with a Perly's Guide for the Toronto area and big folding maps for the rest of the province. And some change for a pay phone.
I got pretty good at dead reckoning and knowing my approximate position at different scales. It's also pretty easy to estimate your travel time when the highway markers count kilometers and traffic goes at 120 km/h. 2km/min. Of course, you have to know where the highway terminus is (or at least your exit) so you can figure out how far you have left to go, but that doesn't take long since exit numbers match the distance from the terminus.
Big trips are easy. Head to the biggest road that heads the way you want to go. Bump over to a country concession if the highway's blocked. Big cities... everything's nicely marked even if some of the roads twist and wind a bit.
Small towns, though... I could get lost on a postage stamp. For that I am immensely glad for smartphones, ubiquitous cellular coverage, mobile GPS apps, and Google Streetview.
Still, I'm glad I have the navigation skills I developed the difficult way even though I now generally rely on GPS. When the navigation directions are poor, I'm not a slave to the device.
>Most DRM isn't expected to prevent 100% of copies indefinitely. Usually it's intended to deter and/or delay casual copying, and in that, it is often quite successful these days.
I can't recall the last time I looked for media that wasn't available in an unencrypted stream within hours of being released in digital format, whatever the DRM.
>then if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?
Well, yes, because it's almost impossible that there's nothing around to hear it - animals have brains and ears, too.
If you only count humans, the answer is 'no'. Without the act of hearing, there is just a radiating vibration of air, not a sound. Sound is in the perception of those vibrations, not the vibrations themselves.
I think a magnetic launch assist for commercial jets would be a fantastic idea. Jets can burn 40% more fuel during take-off than during cruise, and they're going a lot slower while doing it. A nice push to get them started wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Maybe even use a proper rail and have a launch cradle you can position under the plane so it can ride 'gear up'.
It'd be interesting to look at a cost/benefit analysis of such a system.
They're just gonna hitch up their Hummer to that goalpost and move it again, because that's easier than taking the lifestyle hit that change would require.
Humans only live ~80 years anyway, and most people talking about this (and with money to do something about it) will be in their late 30s at least. None of them will really see significant change in the remainder of their life, so it's not real to them. Hell, most of them don't even plan for the next decade.
That's mostly movie stuff, and most of that cabling is underground (at least any place I've seen built in the last 40 years or so).
I suppose you could go all Hollywood and get a fake maintenance vans and uniforms and disconnect the house from the local nodes... (you know, after learning how to trace the lines or figuring out the local telco/cable company labeling system) but these days you have to do phone, cable, power, plus jam wireless signals.
Nobody's doing that for what they'd score from the average home. Simple smash-and-grab is where it's at. The real thieves are con artists who convince you to hand over your money willingly.
But if you could package this attack into a smartphone app and sell it to a burglar... they wouldn't have to be all that bright, would they?
You know the first way an experienced burglar used to check a house prior to encrypted radio being common? They broke in the back door then left to listen to their scanner for alarm company or police dispatch radio traffic.
If somebody else packages up the tools, they're quite capable of using them.
Do you remember the crowds on the National Mall for Trump's inauguration?
Basically, you lie your damn head off and attack anyone who calls you on it, even if they're holding up irrefutable proof right in front of your face.
It's also known as 'politics', it's just that Trump is about as subtle as using a nuke in a fist fight.
From a man who has to have almost everything gilded, I expect his (limited - the budget's still down, just not as much as anticipated) support is because it's a big, flashy, expensive prestige thing to him. There's a little bit of pork barrelling involved, too. I would expect his interest in the exploration and science return to be minimal.
But if we wanted to get to Mars in under a decade... we could just tell him it can happen by the end of his presidency if he gives NASA 10x the budget for a few years. He'd be on Twitter promoting it in seconds!
There's so much wrong with the thinking behind your post that people have dedicated essays to it. I'll go with the overly simplified version:
If you treat Bitcoins as currency, you spend them. Thus, you're not holding on to them long enough for them to accrue value. If you treat them as an investment, you're not spending them, and there's no Bitcoin economy to make them worth anything.
That's why Bitcoin trading is pure speculation. There's absolutely nothing behind them except the willingness of the next idiot to buy some. They're different from Beanie Babies only in that when Bitcoin finally peters out you won't be left with something you can put on a shelf somewhere or give to a little kid.
If you could magically time markets, Bitcoin is probably one of the last things you'd try it with since it's a lot easier to trade in other financial instruments with far less risk of fraud.
Wow. Read your post from title to end and the only conclusion I can come to is that you're a raging asshole if you can only express your opinion with such vitriol.
But you have a manifesto to keep you company, so there's that.
The thing about that is that the people invested in Bitcoin (emotionally, not necessarily financially) have a quasi-religious fervour and are willing to put proportionately far more time than anyone else into the subject.
They must be down to an exceedingly small fraction of the social networking user population if they're no longer able to overpower discussions on social networking sites.