The intelligence report on uranium was false. It was flaunted at the UN as absolute proof that Iraq was after WMD. It was untrue.
That's not enough to make it a lie. The person conveying the report would have to know that it was false. Neither the President nor the Secretary of State knew it at the time. They both had good-faith belief that it was the truth. Thus they weren't lying. They were mistaken. The worst you can accuse them of is being wrong on an intelligent guess that they made. Calling it a "lie" is a lie in itself.
Plame-gate showed that this was known at the time.
It wasn't known to those making the statement in public. Therefore it was NOT a lie (although it was clearly a mistake).
The media was filled with government officials claiming ties between Saddam and Al-Quaida.
Al Queda, despite current claims of it being a cohesive network, was then described as a network of loosely connected semi-independent nodes. Some of those nodes did provably receive training by Saddam's forces. The fact that Saddam and Osama were at odds notwithstanding. The claim of the link, therefore, stands.
Maybe Bush didn't lie, the Bush administration surely did, and that's what matters.
Not really. No one questions the fact that Bush wanted to go to war with or without evidence of WMD. In fact, Clinton should have gone in there if he were at all responsible. The case for taking Saddam was overwhelming and compelling long before any evidence of WMD existed. He violated the cease-fire agreement on multiple occasions and in multiple ways. This alone indicated that his commitment to a peaceful course was nonexistent. Bush was NOT responsible for a lie he didn't tell. There is EVERY evidence to believe that he had a good-faith belief that Iraq had WMD's. The fact that the invading force was fully equipped to be dealing with a chemical-warfare-ridden battle field is but one piece of that evidence. You ARE stretching your case. Which, by your standard, make you a lair. There is no evidence that Bush, however, stretched the case.
Oh, and he is responsible for Iraq. Both for its failures and its successes. Make no mistake. The anti-war fervor was based on the belief, at the time, that we were losing the war. Bush's biggest failure was not the invasion itself. It was not replacing Rumsfeld early enough with a more competent leader. US didn't mind that war as much as we minded the possibility of losing it.
You are trying to pigeon hole the argument into 1 issue. But that simply isn't supported by the reality. The case for the war was compelling on multiple issues. The possibility of WMD (in the situation where Saddam was prevents inspectors from examining the sites where WMD's could have been stored) was of marginal importance at best. It was a regime which openly sought to wage war against the US. It had the will, the resources, and if it were left to its devices, it would have, with time, acquired the means. Bush was not wrong on policy. He was only lousy on its initial execution. Which makes him a bad President. But the fact that he was right on policy still makes him a much, much, much, much better President the current one.
Dubya fed us a huge pile of lies for his favorite war, and completely dropped the ball on his less favorite one.
Name 1 lie that Bush told. Or STFU. Did he have an intelligence report suggesting that Iraq was trying to get uranium? Yes. Did Iraq violate the armistice and thereby legally restarted the hostilities which ended in '93? Yes. Did Iraq lock missiles on planes patrolling the no-fly zone? Yes. Did Iraq take pot shots at planes patrolling the no-fly zone? Yes. Did Iraq prevent inspectors from unfettered access in violation of the armistice agreement? Yes. Did Bush ever definitively state that Iraq without a doubt had WMD's? No.
The fact that Messiah-in-chief is more arrogant and less competent than ANY President in modern memory is at this point unquestionable. If you still don't believe it, you'll have to wait until the second coming. Because this time around, your lord and savior is not getting a second chance.
It doesn't matter because multiple copies of the private key don't replicate the bitcoins. It just means that both computers (or a computer and a hacker) have access to the same account. Having two keys to a house doesn't replicate a house. But if one of those keys was a duplicate made by a robber, he can steal its content.
By the way, and I am afraid this will inspire the traditional "scarcity has no inherent value" debate, verifyably scarce fungible commodity has value as an enumeration token. As the current descent into inflationary policies shows, varifyable scarcity of exchange tokens which are not based on a physical commodity is actually quite difficult to achieve.
The bitcoin network becomes a distributed repository of all these solutions. Since sha1 had been used and is still occasionally used, cracking it has a utility. Having an accessible repository in which such solutions can be looked up is, at least, of theoretical value. It doesn't mean much to those who don't care to crack sha1. But if cracking it has value to some people, then it produces value for them. The fact that it's represented with 0's and 1's is hardly important. All (ok, virtually all) information in the modern world is ultimately represented with 0's and 1's.
Your examples do not justify your conclusions. That is, using the word "falsified" is incorrect.. Just because a rail system provides an alternative (and thereby reduces the number of cars on the road), doesn't mean the rail system is optimally designed. It only means that a less-than-optimal alternative is still an alternative. The fact remains that were transportation systems allowed to be self-financed, the most congested routes would be quickly covered multiple competing transportation providers. The gains that you get from energy savings by staying at cruising speed are marginal past a certain point. There are after all local and "express" trains. The express trains simply reach a higher cruising speed. The lower cruising speed of local trains allows for energy savings that you are so concerned with. But it's all irrelevant. The most relevant metric is not externalities of the system. The most relevant metric is occupancy rates. If a system can reach high occupancy without subsidies to the ticket prices (through any type of subsidies to the system at large), then it is successful. Unsubsidized profitability indicates advantageous allocation of resources.
That's not what "fiat" means. "Fiat" means by the virtue of having been ordered by an authority. It does NOT mean through a commonly accepted practice. Since no legal authority decreed bitcoin to be the only currency in which exchanges can be made, bitcoin is (by definition) not a fiat currency. I don't care what Wikipedia says. I am not about to go editing an article on a topic that is so controversial that getting it right would mean wrestling with egos of all the fanbois and all the hatebois.
The "coins" themselves are (just as all other money) just information. This particular information is not stored on your computer. It's stored in the network. What's stored on your computer is the private key which allows you to validate that you are the owner of a particular account which owns these coins. It doesn't matter if 2 computers know the private key. Once the private key is known to a hacker he can use the account in the same way that you can.
I think achievement are along the lines of "drank a health potion, drank 10 health potions, drank 50 health potions,..., drank 5000 health potions". I would guess that someone who accomplished such a chain of achievements does, in fact, like drinking health potions. But then again, WoW players are (in their majority) clinically insane. A good number of them will go through 90% of all available achievements just because they are there to go through. There is an actual achievement to get the title "insane" and it involves going through months of meaningless boring tasks. And people actually take pride in getting this achievement.
They aren't asking anyone anything. From the summary it sounds like they simply created a correlation matrix of all the achievements in WoW. So the idea is to steer people towards achievements that are similar to the ones which people have already accomplished. I agree that it is highly doubtful that Blizzard isn't doing this already on their own.
Don't you know that these are "shovel-ready" jobs suited for anyone unemployed? The government already calculated the "proper" compensation level for such specialists. And is ready to hire anyone willing to go to school or switch careers or go through whatever great effort people go though in order to a government-calculated proper rate of compensation. See: we don't need any profit motif. Welcome to the new world!
If cars weren't subsidized by the government (through a free highway system), you wouldn't have to wish. Just as long as you are ok with "public" transportation system being run privately for profit. Kindda hard to compete with free roads.
My city has for-profit fire departments. They work really well. Basically, the fire trucks compete with each other to get to the fire scene. City only pays the company whose truck arrives 1st to the scene. I don't know of any case when fire trucks arrived to the scene too late. Nor do I know of any incident of anyone dying in a house fire in this city.
Rail is something you have to roll out on a large scale, the larger the better.
This is really, really, really, really not true. The best way to grow a railroad system always was and always will be to lay tracks between most congested (and therefore most profitable) routes.
Well, automakers were heavily subsidized (through taxpayer-funded road system). And any government-subsidized industry has a leg up to mess with the competition. This would be similar to government buying tracks for railroads and not charging the railroad companies anything to use those tracks.
I think you are the one who fundamentally missed the analogy. The GP's point is that despite the fact that the owner of a transportation system (you of your car and China of its rail system) loses money on the act of ownership, that act has positive externalities. I am not saying that the net effect for China is a gain, but his analogy does work to demonstrate the point.
I think it's a matter of definitions. If something valuable (ie, difficult to obtain) is fungible, then its use as a tool for enumeration of exchange makes it money. But if you define money as something that has some sort of approval from a group of people who have ultimate authority on life and death decisions (be that approval in the form of a stamp, a nod or whatever), then by your definition money would have to created by a government.
Fungibility, however, is a more important factor than some sort of official approval. Case in point is interchangeability of gold coins when gold coins were in use. You might be aware of the biblical story of whipping of the money changers (and I only bring up the story to demonstrate a point -- not to proselytize). The fact that during the time of the writing of the Bible the story communicated a meaningful metaphor indicated that gold and silver coins at that time were interchangeable regardless of the stamp they had on them. It was only for the official government purposes that specific coins had to be used. But coins were used and accepted despite the fact that governing authority would not accept them. Which pretty much meant that they had utility far exceeding the utility of being able to pay government debts.
Come to think of it, there are more obvious examples. There is no international government. Yet, international exchanges happen all the time. And most of the time they gravitate towards some universally accepted unit of enumeration. The same pattern of behavior emerges on the smaller scale (between individuals and small of individuals) as emerges on the larger scale. The fact remains that barter requires solving an NP problem. While trading with currency requires simple arithmetic. So the currency has emerges as a natural tool whether it is mandated or not.
The point that there was money before there was government, by the way, was fairly tangential to the whole argument. The main thrust of the argument was the tokens used for enumerating exchange have to have certain utilitarian properties and at the same time they have to have certain properties which enable them. Bitcoin has both. Just as a full disclosure, I don't own any bitcoins. But then again, I don't own any Yen or any gold either.
Only if you define heading a family (actual family associated through family ties) as a governance. Both money and government are abstractions. I am willing to admit that throughout the hunter-gathering period one would be able to find examples of either one without the other. But, while these two abstractions are often connected, the case that either one of them completely depends on the other is flawed.
Slashdot Mirror
Bush has complied with WPA, but he obtained the requisite consent with fraud.
This is an outrageous lie. And if Bush had any balls he'd sue the likes of you for liable.
The intelligence report on uranium was false. It was flaunted at the UN as absolute proof that Iraq was after WMD. It was untrue.
That's not enough to make it a lie. The person conveying the report would have to know that it was false. Neither the President nor the Secretary of State knew it at the time. They both had good-faith belief that it was the truth. Thus they weren't lying. They were mistaken. The worst you can accuse them of is being wrong on an intelligent guess that they made. Calling it a "lie" is a lie in itself.
Plame-gate showed that this was known at the time.
It wasn't known to those making the statement in public. Therefore it was NOT a lie (although it was clearly a mistake).
The media was filled with government officials claiming ties between Saddam and Al-Quaida.
Al Queda, despite current claims of it being a cohesive network, was then described as a network of loosely connected semi-independent nodes. Some of those nodes did provably receive training by Saddam's forces. The fact that Saddam and Osama were at odds notwithstanding. The claim of the link, therefore, stands.
Maybe Bush didn't lie, the Bush administration surely did, and that's what matters.
Not really. No one questions the fact that Bush wanted to go to war with or without evidence of WMD. In fact, Clinton should have gone in there if he were at all responsible. The case for taking Saddam was overwhelming and compelling long before any evidence of WMD existed. He violated the cease-fire agreement on multiple occasions and in multiple ways. This alone indicated that his commitment to a peaceful course was nonexistent. Bush was NOT responsible for a lie he didn't tell. There is EVERY evidence to believe that he had a good-faith belief that Iraq had WMD's. The fact that the invading force was fully equipped to be dealing with a chemical-warfare-ridden battle field is but one piece of that evidence. You ARE stretching your case. Which, by your standard, make you a lair. There is no evidence that Bush, however, stretched the case.
Oh, and he is responsible for Iraq. Both for its failures and its successes. Make no mistake. The anti-war fervor was based on the belief, at the time, that we were losing the war. Bush's biggest failure was not the invasion itself. It was not replacing Rumsfeld early enough with a more competent leader. US didn't mind that war as much as we minded the possibility of losing it.
You are trying to pigeon hole the argument into 1 issue. But that simply isn't supported by the reality. The case for the war was compelling on multiple issues. The possibility of WMD (in the situation where Saddam was prevents inspectors from examining the sites where WMD's could have been stored) was of marginal importance at best. It was a regime which openly sought to wage war against the US. It had the will, the resources, and if it were left to its devices, it would have, with time, acquired the means. Bush was not wrong on policy. He was only lousy on its initial execution. Which makes him a bad President. But the fact that he was right on policy still makes him a much, much, much, much better President the current one.
Dubya fed us a huge pile of lies for his favorite war, and completely dropped the ball on his less favorite one.
Name 1 lie that Bush told. Or STFU. Did he have an intelligence report suggesting that Iraq was trying to get uranium? Yes. Did Iraq violate the armistice and thereby legally restarted the hostilities which ended in '93? Yes. Did Iraq lock missiles on planes patrolling the no-fly zone? Yes. Did Iraq take pot shots at planes patrolling the no-fly zone? Yes. Did Iraq prevent inspectors from unfettered access in violation of the armistice agreement? Yes. Did Bush ever definitively state that Iraq without a doubt had WMD's? No.
The fact that Messiah-in-chief is more arrogant and less competent than ANY President in modern memory is at this point unquestionable. If you still don't believe it, you'll have to wait until the second coming. Because this time around, your lord and savior is not getting a second chance.
He never said the change was for the better. But hey, you were free to hope.
It doesn't matter because multiple copies of the private key don't replicate the bitcoins. It just means that both computers (or a computer and a hacker) have access to the same account. Having two keys to a house doesn't replicate a house. But if one of those keys was a duplicate made by a robber, he can steal its content.
By the way, and I am afraid this will inspire the traditional "scarcity has no inherent value" debate, verifyably scarce fungible commodity has value as an enumeration token. As the current descent into inflationary policies shows, varifyable scarcity of exchange tokens which are not based on a physical commodity is actually quite difficult to achieve.
The bitcoin network becomes a distributed repository of all these solutions. Since sha1 had been used and is still occasionally used, cracking it has a utility. Having an accessible repository in which such solutions can be looked up is, at least, of theoretical value. It doesn't mean much to those who don't care to crack sha1. But if cracking it has value to some people, then it produces value for them. The fact that it's represented with 0's and 1's is hardly important. All (ok, virtually all) information in the modern world is ultimately represented with 0's and 1's.
Oh, but bitcons do have intrinsic (albeit esoteric) value. They are created by producing a solution to a computationally-intensive problem.
Your examples do not justify your conclusions. That is, using the word "falsified" is incorrect.. Just because a rail system provides an alternative (and thereby reduces the number of cars on the road), doesn't mean the rail system is optimally designed. It only means that a less-than-optimal alternative is still an alternative. The fact remains that were transportation systems allowed to be self-financed, the most congested routes would be quickly covered multiple competing transportation providers. The gains that you get from energy savings by staying at cruising speed are marginal past a certain point. There are after all local and "express" trains. The express trains simply reach a higher cruising speed. The lower cruising speed of local trains allows for energy savings that you are so concerned with. But it's all irrelevant. The most relevant metric is not externalities of the system. The most relevant metric is occupancy rates. If a system can reach high occupancy without subsidies to the ticket prices (through any type of subsidies to the system at large), then it is successful. Unsubsidized profitability indicates advantageous allocation of resources.
That's not what "fiat" means. "Fiat" means by the virtue of having been ordered by an authority. It does NOT mean through a commonly accepted practice. Since no legal authority decreed bitcoin to be the only currency in which exchanges can be made, bitcoin is (by definition) not a fiat currency. I don't care what Wikipedia says. I am not about to go editing an article on a topic that is so controversial that getting it right would mean wrestling with egos of all the fanbois and all the hatebois.
The "coins" themselves are (just as all other money) just information. This particular information is not stored on your computer. It's stored in the network. What's stored on your computer is the private key which allows you to validate that you are the owner of a particular account which owns these coins. It doesn't matter if 2 computers know the private key. Once the private key is known to a hacker he can use the account in the same way that you can.
Probably someone who got them for a few hundred dollars just a year ago.
The payments were anonymous. The hacking probably not so much.
I think achievement are along the lines of "drank a health potion, drank 10 health potions, drank 50 health potions, ..., drank 5000 health potions". I would guess that someone who accomplished such a chain of achievements does, in fact, like drinking health potions. But then again, WoW players are (in their majority) clinically insane. A good number of them will go through 90% of all available achievements just because they are there to go through. There is an actual achievement to get the title "insane" and it involves going through months of meaningless boring tasks. And people actually take pride in getting this achievement.
They aren't asking anyone anything. From the summary it sounds like they simply created a correlation matrix of all the achievements in WoW. So the idea is to steer people towards achievements that are similar to the ones which people have already accomplished. I agree that it is highly doubtful that Blizzard isn't doing this already on their own.
Don't you know that these are "shovel-ready" jobs suited for anyone unemployed? The government already calculated the "proper" compensation level for such specialists. And is ready to hire anyone willing to go to school or switch careers or go through whatever great effort people go though in order to a government-calculated proper rate of compensation. See: we don't need any profit motif. Welcome to the new world!
If cars weren't subsidized by the government (through a free highway system), you wouldn't have to wish. Just as long as you are ok with "public" transportation system being run privately for profit. Kindda hard to compete with free roads.
My city has for-profit fire departments. They work really well. Basically, the fire trucks compete with each other to get to the fire scene. City only pays the company whose truck arrives 1st to the scene. I don't know of any case when fire trucks arrived to the scene too late. Nor do I know of any incident of anyone dying in a house fire in this city.
Rail is something you have to roll out on a large scale, the larger the better.
This is really, really, really, really not true. The best way to grow a railroad system always was and always will be to lay tracks between most congested (and therefore most profitable) routes.
Car manufacturers make money because US taxpayers pay for the roads.
Well, automakers were heavily subsidized (through taxpayer-funded road system). And any government-subsidized industry has a leg up to mess with the competition. This would be similar to government buying tracks for railroads and not charging the railroad companies anything to use those tracks.
I think you are the one who fundamentally missed the analogy. The GP's point is that despite the fact that the owner of a transportation system (you of your car and China of its rail system) loses money on the act of ownership, that act has positive externalities. I am not saying that the net effect for China is a gain, but his analogy does work to demonstrate the point.
I think it's a matter of definitions. If something valuable (ie, difficult to obtain) is fungible, then its use as a tool for enumeration of exchange makes it money. But if you define money as something that has some sort of approval from a group of people who have ultimate authority on life and death decisions (be that approval in the form of a stamp, a nod or whatever), then by your definition money would have to created by a government.
Fungibility, however, is a more important factor than some sort of official approval. Case in point is interchangeability of gold coins when gold coins were in use. You might be aware of the biblical story of whipping of the money changers (and I only bring up the story to demonstrate a point -- not to proselytize). The fact that during the time of the writing of the Bible the story communicated a meaningful metaphor indicated that gold and silver coins at that time were interchangeable regardless of the stamp they had on them. It was only for the official government purposes that specific coins had to be used. But coins were used and accepted despite the fact that governing authority would not accept them. Which pretty much meant that they had utility far exceeding the utility of being able to pay government debts.
Come to think of it, there are more obvious examples. There is no international government. Yet, international exchanges happen all the time. And most of the time they gravitate towards some universally accepted unit of enumeration. The same pattern of behavior emerges on the smaller scale (between individuals and small of individuals) as emerges on the larger scale. The fact remains that barter requires solving an NP problem. While trading with currency requires simple arithmetic. So the currency has emerges as a natural tool whether it is mandated or not.
The point that there was money before there was government, by the way, was fairly tangential to the whole argument. The main thrust of the argument was the tokens used for enumerating exchange have to have certain utilitarian properties and at the same time they have to have certain properties which enable them. Bitcoin has both. Just as a full disclosure, I don't own any bitcoins. But then again, I don't own any Yen or any gold either.
Only if you define heading a family (actual family associated through family ties) as a governance. Both money and government are abstractions. I am willing to admit that throughout the hunter-gathering period one would be able to find examples of either one without the other. But, while these two abstractions are often connected, the case that either one of them completely depends on the other is flawed.