Actually, it's more important for a currency to be a viable method of account: If there is no significant market whose prices stay relatively fixed with respect to the currency, it's not much of a currency. Bitcoin does even worse at this than as a method of exchange.
Either way, yes, if it's being held mostly as an investment vehicle, one is clearly not using it as a method of account, and thus it isn't being used as a currency, but as an asset. One can hold foreign currencies as assets in specific circumstances, but it takes a very twisted frame of reference to think that bitcoin is the stable currency, and whatever your local currency is happens to be the volatile one. I might as well claim that the sun and the moon are orbiting around my navel, and that every time I sit in a car, the earth is the one doing the moving.
Sure, you can get a job in industry after a PhD, but it's probably not paying enough over what you'd get with a 4 year degree to compensate for the years required to get the PhD. This is specially true if you actually paid for your education, instead of riding full scholarships.
My current employer is choke full of Science PhDs that left academia when they saw the hell that is a postdoc. You won't find many that didn't regret at least 6 years worth of their education.
Well, self reproducing to a point. Soybeans are self reproducing alright, but second generation corn has very different genetics that whatever was planted in the first place. It probably grows way worse too.
Now, the interesting question is why, specifically, we would consider that the GMO is riskier than a wild conventional crop. Mutations happen. Agrobacteria can alter the DNA of a plant in nature, just like it's done in a lab. We are just assuming that one is potentially dangerous, and the other is not.
Now, if what we wanted was a clear genetic lineage in the plants we eat, with well controlled genetics, agribusiness would actually love it, because big corn sells 100% identical hybrids. After a certain amount of testing, they'd be pretty darned sure that you are getting the exact same genetics you got last year, barring natural mutation that happens in any crossing. If I want to do the same through natural means, I need to either use the exact same hybridization techniques that you'll get from Monsanto or Dupont, or only grow inbred corn, which has terrible yields. No more replanting random seedcorn, because at that points, who knows where the pollen came from.
The studies looking for harm are casting too wide a net, and the people that are absolutely opposed to GMOs are casting too wide a net.
It'd not be impossible to create a single strain of corn that is far worse for your health than the one you bought on the market 20 years ago. I find it unlikely, because you'd need to create major chemical differences in corn seeds themselves, but still, possible. If you want to go against GMOs, then look for one family of hybrid corn that has said problem, and then say the testing was insufficient, and stick an extra X years of testing to the current trials to make sure something is safe. You get a big blow vs GMOs, and at least you actually prove something.
Instead, what we get is people complaining about GMOs in general, which is like hating everything that has been built using a wrench. And at that point it's not dealing with science, but superstition. You'd be far better off arguing against other parts of agribusiness, like patents, or the kind of contracts that are required to plant anything by a big company. But arguing against the tool that makes the science possible? that's very silly.
Implicit taxation through inflation? First, inflation is extremely low on the entire western world. Second, inflation only eats away at you if you are sitting on currency as assets, which is a terrible thing to do. If most of your wealth is being productive somewhere, changes in the medium of account shouldn't matter a bit.
Now, having zero inflation, or all the way into deflation, is not a good thing for an economy. We have this fundamental problem called Money Illusion. It's been measured in a whole lot of studies, just look it up. As long as there's money illusion, in practice, economies work better when economies grow in a predictable manner, which implies some mild inflation. Without said inflation, velocity drops, and with it economic activity. We really, really, don't want a shrinking GDP. A central bank is a compromise to make sure that someone, in some way, is actually altering the money supply to achieve that objective. What we need though is a way to make sure central banks are making less decisions that look like reading entrails, and more that are empirically testable and forward looking.
I guess they'll do it in the exact same way as you'd do it when you test any other row crop: Some work at a single plant level is made to figure out which plants have any value at all, then you bulk up the seed, plant a bunch of those survivors in a few dozen locations, along with some commercial plants that you use as a control. Then you compare yields, resistance to disease, or whatever else you feel like looking at.
If you really want to add some tech, you can do a genetic analysis of the plants early on to see of the genetic changes have anything to do with the ones you were looking for.
So the question is, if a GMO does not provide better yields than a traditional crop, why do farmers purchase them? They are certainly more expensive than the alternatives. With something like Soybeans, you'd be hard pressed to find many field that have non-gmo soybeans in the US.
So if your conclusions hold, either the farmers are complete idiots, or are being controlled by the illuminati.
Well yeah, some of your new hires turn out bad. Other times, your new hires turn out too good, and then you realize that some formerly very influential people should be replaced, because they are hurting your business.
Either way, a concerted effort at looking at dysfunction in an organization is a good idea. The trick is not to turn said search for dysfunction into a big political fight. People really don't like to fire other people, so it's very easy for large organizations to constantly lose technical quality. Ever wondered why there's so many long tenured employees out there that don't accomplish very much?
It doesn't matter how many servers it's hosted in today, but how many servers they could scale it to tomorrow. The techniques to become scalable are fairly well known, as hundreds of sites get hammered like that every day. Reactive programming and all that.
Anyone building a website today that has a design relying on components that can't be easily scaled should look for a different line of business.
I've been in one of those companies. The top performers have a few options: Set things up to be the one competent developer in a team, thus getting good reviews but lots of stress and zero. They can go into the good team, and then play politics, because once all developers are pretty good, most managers can't tell who is actually the best of the lot, or just quit. Then there's option 3: Leave for a less horrible employer, and then quickly poach all those other good developers who hate the system. The lucky company gets a much better staff than average, while the other loses a good percentage of their top talent, needing even deeper staffing cuts. Repeat until all development is sent overseas, because the local talent the company has is now so bad, you are better off with an average team 10 time zones away.
That only works if you actually like their competitor. If you don't, then you see that Google is mostly copying their competitor, who has been promoting using their system for 3rd party forums for quite a while now. Many places have stopped taking comments without a Facebook account.
Why do you think Facebook, well known for shitting on people's privacy settings, is any better than Google?
We'd be doing far better if we just weeded people out just because they can't cut it at the job, rather than because they are not in the top 10% of their class. Just train more people, and have supply and demand do its thing, instead of leaving things to organizations that want the supply of doctors to be low.
Not increasing the monetary base, and just using appreciation leaves open a huge hole for a deflationary spiral that stops any exchanges from happening.
Imagine keeping money in your pocket was a good investment, because we had an 8% yearly deflation. You'd need very strong reasons to spend the money. Imagine the problems of loans when not loaning the money at all provides such a great rate of return.
The only way to get a working economy using the system Bitcoin has would be to have said economy grow extremely slowly. In essence, Bitcoin only has a chance of working if it's unpopular.
First, there's how good a predictor of expenses is your history. Your chances of a traffic accident are not quite as highly correlated to your claim history as those in healthcare. For those that are really bad drivers, prices skyrocket, and the government doesn't really foot the bill.
Another important difference is what can be done to correct things. If I am a terrible driver, I can be quite motivated to stop crashing, or stop driving. However, increasing your premiums doesn't make people stop having type 1 diabetes, or magically fixing a bad back. Leukemia? Let's raise your fees, and you'll get better in no time.
It's not really an issue of conflict of interest: You don't have an issue of conflicts of interest in other kinds of insurance. What is special with healthcare is that the information asymmetry is clearly on the side of the insured, which leads to situations where we are not really doing insurance, but prepayment.
Let's look at the silliest example, vision insurance. You can easily sign up when you are expecting to actually use the benefits that year, and ignore it in the other years. Therefore, rates are pretty much the same as the actual benefit: Otherwise providing vision insurance would be extremely unprofitable,as I could sign up the years I want, and fail to do so when I don't plan on buying new glasses and such.
Regular insurance is the same thing. There are some generic risks, which by themselves are not all that problematic to insure. The issue is that very few people do need most of the coverage, and they know they are going to need it. Therefore, voluntary insurance just makes anyone that is guaranteed to get more benefits that will pay to sign up for the coverage that provides them the biggest savings. The best plan thus gets more and more expensive. The more that happens, the more it stops being insurance, and becomes just prepayment.
Therefore, if you want healthcare to behave like real insurance, and just minimize risk, what you have to do is increase the size of the pool, and turn the whole thing into a way to transfer money from the healthy to the unhealthy, which is the whole point of the exercise anyway.
Now, aside from all of that, it's the issue of how little competition there is for actually providing the medical services themselves, but that's problematic regardless of your payment system.
You were extremely right 10 years ago. You are still pretty much correct today. But I sure hope you will be mostly wrong in another 10 years.
For truly risky applications, I want to use a tool that makes it extremely hard to shoot myself in the foot, while still meeting the required performance parameters. No more mutable state. Use static code analysis to make sure stack overflows can't even happen. A language where NPEs can't happen, because we use some form of Option parameter. Now, tools like that are often too slow for most embedded systems today, but a man can dream.
I don't know if you realize that in many parts of Europe, even bookstore chains are regulated so that they don't outcompete the small bookseller. Many countries have rules that stop stores from opening too long, and there are things like minimum prices.
Remember Borders? A chain that couldn't compete in the US would be banned in some parts of Europe for being too competitive!
We call that Rent Seeking. By encouraging reading despite the pricing, in essence you are saying that people should pay more on books than they'd want to spend without protectionism.
The other way to do similar rent seeking is to just get the government to foot the bill for you, and thus subsidize the product. You see that all the time in European are. Spanish movies, for instance, used to get nice laws like forcing a certain percentage of all screens in a multiplex to show Spanish movies, and the government funded movies left and right. To nobody's surprise, this meant that as long as the socialist party was in power, most subsidized movies would be about how much communists suffered in the civil war and during Franco's reign. Those movies would magically stop getting made when Spain's right wing party controlled the budget.
So what do we get with all this protectionism? Some things are more expensive than they were before, some intermediates become drastically more powerful, as their competition is outlawed, and the product is changed to match whatever the government wants. This might be better than the alternative in some cases, but I sure don't think that this is true with books. Do we have a crisis in the US due to the existence of Amazon and iTunes? If anything, it's the opposite.
So why do you think the computer can't? The sensors can see things just as well as you do. The sensors also can see that every single lane is driving 80 mph when the road is marked 40. There's nothing stopping the algorithm designer to let the computer realize that following the speed limit might be dangerous.
And the computer isn't driving based off a map: It determines its route using the map. The actual 'tactical' driving is done using local sensors. It doesn't matter what google maps think: Automated drivers don't drive down cliffs.
Safe breaking distance depends on a whole lot of things, including the car in front of you. For instance, if the car ahead of you is a small sports car with summer tires, it'll be able to break quite a bit faster than your average minivan with tires that are supposed to last 70K miles. Imagine the minivan is right behind the sports car: Panic break differences, if we start at 60 mph, can be about 60 feet or so. 2 seconds is nowhere near enough in that situation: The minivan better have time to swerve to a different lane. 4 seconds is probably not enough either.
So if you are driving a van or an SUV, you better give nice security distances to the guy in front of you.
Tainted by association makes no sense at all. If you limit the association to direct association, it's trivial to bypass by creating intermediaries. If you make the taint spread, then almost everyone is tainted, so there's nothing to gain. You might as well try to avoid people that are 7 degrees of separation or less from Kevin Bacon.
It's not that PC game sales are dropping: Heck, no we can find Japanese companies releasing their games on PC, which is something that would have never happened 10 years ago. Valve is not having any trouble selling games, and neither do indies.
Now, It'd not surprise me if EA sales on PC were dropping. They decided to build their own ecosystem, one that is not just separate from anything else you can buy on PC, bun one that is drastically overpriced. EA sales can't compete with the sales you can get on anything else. Their console-oriented shooters can't compete with PC-centric ones. Sim City was an unmitigated disaster. They are failing on PC because they've been working very hard at it, and all that work is finally bearing fruit.
I'd not put corsair in the same bucket as the other two. Their RAM, for instance, will not spontaneously combust. The other two... yeah, you don't have to look very far to see that they have the build quality of white branded parts.
It's a problem when you look for, say, mechanical keyboards. Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.
If there is one constant to programming, it is that requirements change. So any system that generates skeletons that then you have to work with will lead to utter failure, as you'll quickly reach a point where you can't generate anymore.
Remember the CASE tool craze, with Rational Rose and the like? It's pretty related to what you describe, but nothing good ever came out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's more important for a currency to be a viable method of account: If there is no significant market whose prices stay relatively fixed with respect to the currency, it's not much of a currency. Bitcoin does even worse at this than as a method of exchange.
Either way, yes, if it's being held mostly as an investment vehicle, one is clearly not using it as a method of account, and thus it isn't being used as a currency, but as an asset. One can hold foreign currencies as assets in specific circumstances, but it takes a very twisted frame of reference to think that bitcoin is the stable currency, and whatever your local currency is happens to be the volatile one. I might as well claim that the sun and the moon are orbiting around my navel, and that every time I sit in a car, the earth is the one doing the moving.
Sure, you can get a job in industry after a PhD, but it's probably not paying enough over what you'd get with a 4 year degree to compensate for the years required to get the PhD. This is specially true if you actually paid for your education, instead of riding full scholarships.
My current employer is choke full of Science PhDs that left academia when they saw the hell that is a postdoc. You won't find many that didn't regret at least 6 years worth of their education.
Well, self reproducing to a point. Soybeans are self reproducing alright, but second generation corn has very different genetics that whatever was planted in the first place. It probably grows way worse too.
Now, the interesting question is why, specifically, we would consider that the GMO is riskier than a wild conventional crop. Mutations happen. Agrobacteria can alter the DNA of a plant in nature, just like it's done in a lab. We are just assuming that one is potentially dangerous, and the other is not.
Now, if what we wanted was a clear genetic lineage in the plants we eat, with well controlled genetics, agribusiness would actually love it, because big corn sells 100% identical hybrids. After a certain amount of testing, they'd be pretty darned sure that you are getting the exact same genetics you got last year, barring natural mutation that happens in any crossing. If I want to do the same through natural means, I need to either use the exact same hybridization techniques that you'll get from Monsanto or Dupont, or only grow inbred corn, which has terrible yields. No more replanting random seedcorn, because at that points, who knows where the pollen came from.
The studies looking for harm are casting too wide a net, and the people that are absolutely opposed to GMOs are casting too wide a net.
It'd not be impossible to create a single strain of corn that is far worse for your health than the one you bought on the market 20 years ago. I find it unlikely, because you'd need to create major chemical differences in corn seeds themselves, but still, possible. If you want to go against GMOs, then look for one family of hybrid corn that has said problem, and then say the testing was insufficient, and stick an extra X years of testing to the current trials to make sure something is safe. You get a big blow vs GMOs, and at least you actually prove something.
Instead, what we get is people complaining about GMOs in general, which is like hating everything that has been built using a wrench. And at that point it's not dealing with science, but superstition. You'd be far better off arguing against other parts of agribusiness, like patents, or the kind of contracts that are required to plant anything by a big company. But arguing against the tool that makes the science possible? that's very silly.
Implicit taxation through inflation? First, inflation is extremely low on the entire western world. Second, inflation only eats away at you if you are sitting on currency as assets, which is a terrible thing to do. If most of your wealth is being productive somewhere, changes in the medium of account shouldn't matter a bit.
Now, having zero inflation, or all the way into deflation, is not a good thing for an economy. We have this fundamental problem called Money Illusion. It's been measured in a whole lot of studies, just look it up. As long as there's money illusion, in practice, economies work better when economies grow in a predictable manner, which implies some mild inflation. Without said inflation, velocity drops, and with it economic activity. We really, really, don't want a shrinking GDP. A central bank is a compromise to make sure that someone, in some way, is actually altering the money supply to achieve that objective. What we need though is a way to make sure central banks are making less decisions that look like reading entrails, and more that are empirically testable and forward looking.
I guess they'll do it in the exact same way as you'd do it when you test any other row crop: Some work at a single plant level is made to figure out which plants have any value at all, then you bulk up the seed, plant a bunch of those survivors in a few dozen locations, along with some commercial plants that you use as a control. Then you compare yields, resistance to disease, or whatever else you feel like looking at.
If you really want to add some tech, you can do a genetic analysis of the plants early on to see of the genetic changes have anything to do with the ones you were looking for.
So the question is, if a GMO does not provide better yields than a traditional crop, why do farmers purchase them? They are certainly more expensive than the alternatives. With something like Soybeans, you'd be hard pressed to find many field that have non-gmo soybeans in the US.
So if your conclusions hold, either the farmers are complete idiots, or are being controlled by the illuminati.
Well yeah, some of your new hires turn out bad. Other times, your new hires turn out too good, and then you realize that some formerly very influential people should be replaced, because they are hurting your business.
Either way, a concerted effort at looking at dysfunction in an organization is a good idea. The trick is not to turn said search for dysfunction into a big political fight. People really don't like to fire other people, so it's very easy for large organizations to constantly lose technical quality. Ever wondered why there's so many long tenured employees out there that don't accomplish very much?
It doesn't matter how many servers it's hosted in today, but how many servers they could scale it to tomorrow. The techniques to become scalable are fairly well known, as hundreds of sites get hammered like that every day. Reactive programming and all that.
Anyone building a website today that has a design relying on components that can't be easily scaled should look for a different line of business.
I've been in one of those companies. The top performers have a few options: Set things up to be the one competent developer in a team, thus getting good reviews but lots of stress and zero. They can go into the good team, and then play politics, because once all developers are pretty good, most managers can't tell who is actually the best of the lot, or just quit. Then there's option 3: Leave for a less horrible employer, and then quickly poach all those other good developers who hate the system. The lucky company gets a much better staff than average, while the other loses a good percentage of their top talent, needing even deeper staffing cuts. Repeat until all development is sent overseas, because the local talent the company has is now so bad, you are better off with an average team 10 time zones away.
That only works if you actually like their competitor. If you don't, then you see that Google is mostly copying their competitor, who has been promoting using their system for 3rd party forums for quite a while now. Many places have stopped taking comments without a Facebook account.
Why do you think Facebook, well known for shitting on people's privacy settings, is any better than Google?
We'd be doing far better if we just weeded people out just because they can't cut it at the job, rather than because they are not in the top 10% of their class. Just train more people, and have supply and demand do its thing, instead of leaving things to organizations that want the supply of doctors to be low.
Not increasing the monetary base, and just using appreciation leaves open a huge hole for a deflationary spiral that stops any exchanges from happening.
Imagine keeping money in your pocket was a good investment, because we had an 8% yearly deflation. You'd need very strong reasons to spend the money. Imagine the problems of loans when not loaning the money at all provides such a great rate of return.
The only way to get a working economy using the system Bitcoin has would be to have said economy grow extremely slowly. In essence, Bitcoin only has a chance of working if it's unpopular.
First, there's how good a predictor of expenses is your history. Your chances of a traffic accident are not quite as highly correlated to your claim history as those in healthcare. For those that are really bad drivers, prices skyrocket, and the government doesn't really foot the bill.
Another important difference is what can be done to correct things. If I am a terrible driver, I can be quite motivated to stop crashing, or stop driving. However, increasing your premiums doesn't make people stop having type 1 diabetes, or magically fixing a bad back. Leukemia? Let's raise your fees, and you'll get better in no time.
It's not really an issue of conflict of interest: You don't have an issue of conflicts of interest in other kinds of insurance. What is special with healthcare is that the information asymmetry is clearly on the side of the insured, which leads to situations where we are not really doing insurance, but prepayment.
Let's look at the silliest example, vision insurance. You can easily sign up when you are expecting to actually use the benefits that year, and ignore it in the other years. Therefore, rates are pretty much the same as the actual benefit: Otherwise providing vision insurance would be extremely unprofitable,as I could sign up the years I want, and fail to do so when I don't plan on buying new glasses and such.
Regular insurance is the same thing. There are some generic risks, which by themselves are not all that problematic to insure. The issue is that very few people do need most of the coverage, and they know they are going to need it. Therefore, voluntary insurance just makes anyone that is guaranteed to get more benefits that will pay to sign up for the coverage that provides them the biggest savings. The best plan thus gets more and more expensive. The more that happens, the more it stops being insurance, and becomes just prepayment.
Therefore, if you want healthcare to behave like real insurance, and just minimize risk, what you have to do is increase the size of the pool, and turn the whole thing into a way to transfer money from the healthy to the unhealthy, which is the whole point of the exercise anyway.
Now, aside from all of that, it's the issue of how little competition there is for actually providing the medical services themselves, but that's problematic regardless of your payment system.
You were extremely right 10 years ago. You are still pretty much correct today. But I sure hope you will be mostly wrong in another 10 years.
For truly risky applications, I want to use a tool that makes it extremely hard to shoot myself in the foot, while still meeting the required performance parameters. No more mutable state. Use static code analysis to make sure stack overflows can't even happen. A language where NPEs can't happen, because we use some form of Option parameter. Now, tools like that are often too slow for most embedded systems today, but a man can dream.
I don't know if you realize that in many parts of Europe, even bookstore chains are regulated so that they don't outcompete the small bookseller. Many countries have rules that stop stores from opening too long, and there are things like minimum prices.
Remember Borders? A chain that couldn't compete in the US would be banned in some parts of Europe for being too competitive!
We call that Rent Seeking. By encouraging reading despite the pricing, in essence you are saying that people should pay more on books than they'd want to spend without protectionism.
The other way to do similar rent seeking is to just get the government to foot the bill for you, and thus subsidize the product. You see that all the time in European are. Spanish movies, for instance, used to get nice laws like forcing a certain percentage of all screens in a multiplex to show Spanish movies, and the government funded movies left and right. To nobody's surprise, this meant that as long as the socialist party was in power, most subsidized movies would be about how much communists suffered in the civil war and during Franco's reign. Those movies would magically stop getting made when Spain's right wing party controlled the budget.
So what do we get with all this protectionism? Some things are more expensive than they were before, some intermediates become drastically more powerful, as their competition is outlawed, and the product is changed to match whatever the government wants. This might be better than the alternative in some cases, but I sure don't think that this is true with books. Do we have a crisis in the US due to the existence of Amazon and iTunes? If anything, it's the opposite.
So why do you think the computer can't? The sensors can see things just as well as you do. The sensors also can see that every single lane is driving 80 mph when the road is marked 40. There's nothing stopping the algorithm designer to let the computer realize that following the speed limit might be dangerous.
And the computer isn't driving based off a map: It determines its route using the map. The actual 'tactical' driving is done using local sensors. It doesn't matter what google maps think: Automated drivers don't drive down cliffs.
Safe breaking distance depends on a whole lot of things, including the car in front of you. For instance, if the car ahead of you is a small sports car with summer tires, it'll be able to break quite a bit faster than your average minivan with tires that are supposed to last 70K miles. Imagine the minivan is right behind the sports car: Panic break differences, if we start at 60 mph, can be about 60 feet or so. 2 seconds is nowhere near enough in that situation: The minivan better have time to swerve to a different lane. 4 seconds is probably not enough either.
So if you are driving a van or an SUV, you better give nice security distances to the guy in front of you.
It's an extremely uninteresting problem.
Tainted by association makes no sense at all. If you limit the association to direct association, it's trivial to bypass by creating intermediaries. If you make the taint spread, then almost everyone is tainted, so there's nothing to gain. You might as well try to avoid people that are 7 degrees of separation or less from Kevin Bacon.
It's not that PC game sales are dropping: Heck, no we can find Japanese companies releasing their games on PC, which is something that would have never happened 10 years ago. Valve is not having any trouble selling games, and neither do indies.
Now, It'd not surprise me if EA sales on PC were dropping. They decided to build their own ecosystem, one that is not just separate from anything else you can buy on PC, bun one that is drastically overpriced. EA sales can't compete with the sales you can get on anything else. Their console-oriented shooters can't compete with PC-centric ones. Sim City was an unmitigated disaster. They are failing on PC because they've been working very hard at it, and all that work is finally bearing fruit.
I'd not put corsair in the same bucket as the other two. Their RAM, for instance, will not spontaneously combust. The other two... yeah, you don't have to look very far to see that they have the build quality of white branded parts.
It's a problem when you look for, say, mechanical keyboards. Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.
If there is one constant to programming, it is that requirements change. So any system that generates skeletons that then you have to work with will lead to utter failure, as you'll quickly reach a point where you can't generate anymore.
Remember the CASE tool craze, with Rational Rose and the like? It's pretty related to what you describe, but nothing good ever came out of it.
I am sure their efforts involve hacking all the computers of sports teams to increase their budget through insider information on sports betting.