An astrobiologist studying the possibility of life on Mars
But wouldn't that be just a regular biologist who specializes in "a-thermal" extremophiles? Or maybe the kind of geologist that studies things like stromatolites?
Money and currency are different things, money is...
Currency is what is used in circulation...
So what is "paper money"?
Gold... has intrinsic value
No. It only has the value that we believe it has. Just like... fiat money!!!
The only difference between metals+land (aka physical assets) and fiat money is that they'll be around long after fiat money has gone away. Unless, of course, the government seizes it, it corrodes away (silver, titanium copper, etc), gets flooded out, is lost, stolen, misplaced, etc.
USD used to be a meaningful reserve currency before 1971, now it is not
If we had stayed on the gold standard, what would have happened to the US (and world, for that matter) economy when the population is growing faster than the new supply of precious metals?
The world population increased 75% from 1960 to 1999. Did the amount of gold increase 75% in that time? No. Population is going up exponentially, but the gold supply is going up linearly.
We also have more "stuff" (cars, bigger houses, TVs, gadgets, computers, etc) than we did 50 years ago. That "stuff" has to be paid for, which would require even more gold.
Thus, commodity-based currency eventually became unsustainable.
As to gold and silver, that's money, not currency, there is no comparison.
Do you actually know the definitions of money and currency? 'Cause... when *I* look at the definitions of "currency" and "money", they're God damned similar; i.e., a metric ass-load of comparison.
Are you a gold bug ("Someone who considers one commodity, usually gold, "the appropriate measure of wealth, regardless of the quantity of other goods and services that it can buy"") with tendencies towards conspiracy theories? (Not that you'd think or admit you are, even if you actually are...)
What you are relying upon, when you say 'regulated' is actually the infinite paper supply...
Of course I know that it's the US$ is fiat, and based on faith in a government that's $18T debt. That does not make it less safe than gold, silver, the Yen or Renminbi.
(My paternal grandparents grew up in the Depression, but still had no fear of banks. They were pretty darned cautious, though, by only using a big local *bank*, not S&L, that survived the Depression. Their parents probably didn't use banks in the 30s -- and *maybe* not in the 40s -- but definitely did in the 50s.)
If bank of america and other major institutions cannot keep your info out of the hands of hackers why would you think any other website is infallible?
My bank (Chase) got hacked last year, and Teh Evil Haxx0rz might have gotten my vital info, but all of my money is still in the bank.
Months before that, someone used my Chase CC to buy a couple of Amtrak tickets (presumably to then refund them for cash). Got a fraud alert from Chase, and called them to confirm that it was in fact fraud. They immediately canceled my card sent me new ones. Checks of my & my wife's credit reports show no unusual activity.
So, thank you very much, but I'll stick with fiat money stored in an actual, regulated American bank.
Economic feasibility is not just "will the ticket prices cover operating expenses".
It also entails having a large enough market that the incredibly high development costs can be amortized out across a large fleet of vehicles. Otherwise, each plane is going to be S-U-P-E-R expensive, and the price of the tickets -- which must also include a portion of the price of the airplane, since Boeing and Airbus don't just give their planes away -- will be concomitantly enormous.
The bottom line is that there comes a "good enough" point where people stop paying more for better service. Naturally, that point will be different for different income levels, but... remember Occupy Wall Street and "We Are the 99%"?
The rest of us factor in things like time to travel to the airport, waiting in TSA checkpoint lines and our bank balance to then say "Meh, 550 MPH is Good Enough."
Turn trans-Pacific/Atlantic into a weekend trip instead of the current 3 days of travel time and there's a market for it.
The Concorde turned a 6 hour flight across the Atlantic into a 3 hour flight. Why, then, was the Concorde economically unfeasible? Cost
Those sub-orbital flights will cost a lot more than the Concorde flights. People will say, "$1200 for a 10 hour flight, or $5000 for a 4 hour flight?" Sure, a handful will pick the $5000 ticket ($20,000 when you add in spouse and a couple of children) but most will say, "4 hours is not worth $15,200."
Trying to balance a big pencil on a postage stamp that's moving unpredictably and simultaneously in 4 axises (pitch, roll, yaw, altitude) doesn't seem to have very high odds of success. And the worse the sea is running, the lower the odds.
If it works, though, count me really impressed by what would surely be a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
if a fire starts in your home, you want the system to respond appropriately in milliseconds,
Given the time it takes for people to become alert from a deep sleep, the time it takes a telephone to be automatically "dialed" and connected, and the fired trucks to arrive, ISTM that a 5ms response to a fire alarm signal is no more needed than a 500ms response. OTOH if houses were nuclear powered or flew at 1000 MPH then 5ms response times might actually be considered slow...
holding back new research tools because amateurs and politically motivated groups could misuse them is very scary indeed.
An analogy: we hold back guns from four year olds -- even when we show it to them and say, "Very dangerous! Never touch!", but not from legally competent adults; when said four year old gets his hands on a gun, bad things can happen.
Likewise, we should not hold back *copies* of data from the world. However, so as to protect the "chain of provenance", edit privileges should be limited in some way, so as to prevent abuse by sock puppets and the anonymous. Maybe something as simple as requiring editors to log in using a cryptographic certificate signed by a trusted third party which requires some form of official ID and manual verification.
(1) Wikidata would either have to keep (many) multiple copies of possibly quite large data sets, or keep diffs. How much of a strain does it put on a busy server to generate a dataset from a huge original and lots of large diffs.
(2) Not too many people pay attention to Wikipedia changelogs. If only the current form of the data is easily visible, that's what most people -- especially amateurs and those with political motivations -- will use.
We've identified many deep problems with scientific research on this very forum
Most revolving around laziness and academic corruption. Allowing data (for example: historical weather gauge readings, or IQ scores, or any other data having to do with hot-button topics) to be edited is an invitation to socio-political fraud on an unheard-of scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait until the next school shooting when one of these is live streaming.
Let's go for the trifecta!
1) School shooting,
2) by a black guy,
3) with a Muslim name.
Imagine if the shooters in the Paris attack had something like this ...
Exactly. Just wait until some guy with a thick accent named Abdul Mohammad Mustafa buys a couple and they wind up in Syria or Palestine...
you could buy a new car for 20 ounces 100 years ago you can still buy a new car for 20 ounces today.
But there are a lot more cars (and people to buy them) now than 100 years ago. That's a big problem, and why I said that the GS is unsustainable.
Gold provides natural level of inflation at about 1.5% a year.
It does?
Philosophers discovered
See that? It's past tense.
So... he's not even an actual biologist???
An astrobiologist studying the possibility of life on Mars
But wouldn't that be just a regular biologist who specializes in "a-thermal" extremophiles? Or maybe the kind of geologist that studies things like stromatolites?
Philosopher, astrobiologist, futurist, nanotech entrepreneur.
WTF do astrobiologists actually do besides suck at the government teat?
And futurists... gah. Those idiots are Miss Cleo rejects.
Money and currency are different things, money is ...
Currency is what is used in circulation ...
So what is "paper money"?
Gold ... has intrinsic value
No. It only has the value that we believe it has. Just like... fiat money!!!
The only difference between metals+land (aka physical assets) and fiat money is that they'll be around long after fiat money has gone away. Unless, of course, the government seizes it, it corrodes away (silver, titanium copper, etc), gets flooded out, is lost, stolen, misplaced, etc.
USD used to be a meaningful reserve currency before 1971, now it is not
If we had stayed on the gold standard, what would have happened to the US (and world, for that matter) economy when the population is growing faster than the new supply of precious metals?
The world population increased 75% from 1960 to 1999. Did the amount of gold increase 75% in that time? No. Population is going up exponentially, but the gold supply is going up linearly.
We also have more "stuff" (cars, bigger houses, TVs, gadgets, computers, etc) than we did 50 years ago. That "stuff" has to be paid for, which would require even more gold.
Thus, commodity-based currency eventually became unsustainable.
As to gold and silver, that's money, not currency, there is no comparison.
Do you actually know the definitions of money and currency? 'Cause... when *I* look at the definitions of "currency" and "money", they're God damned similar; i.e., a metric ass-load of comparison.
Are you a gold bug ("Someone who considers one commodity, usually gold, "the appropriate measure of wealth, regardless of the quantity of other goods and services that it can buy"") with tendencies towards conspiracy theories? (Not that you'd think or admit you are, even if you actually are...)
What you are relying upon, when you say 'regulated' is actually the infinite paper supply...
Of course I know that it's the US$ is fiat, and based on faith in a government that's $18T debt. That does not make it less safe than gold, silver, the Yen or Renminbi.
Exactly.
(My paternal grandparents grew up in the Depression, but still had no fear of banks. They were pretty darned cautious, though, by only using a big local *bank*, not S&L, that survived the Depression. Their parents probably didn't use banks in the 30s -- and *maybe* not in the 40s -- but definitely did in the 50s.)
What?
If bank of america and other major institutions cannot keep your info out of the hands of hackers why would you think any other website is infallible?
My bank (Chase) got hacked last year, and Teh Evil Haxx0rz might have gotten my vital info, but all of my money is still in the bank.
Months before that, someone used my Chase CC to buy a couple of Amtrak tickets (presumably to then refund them for cash). Got a fraud alert from Chase, and called them to confirm that it was in fact fraud. They immediately canceled my card sent me new ones. Checks of my & my wife's credit reports show no unusual activity.
So, thank you very much, but I'll stick with fiat money stored in an actual, regulated American bank.
If the actual flight was only 6 hours, you'd still burn a whole day in each direction; it just wouldn't be as stressful of a day.
OTOH, were you able to nap on the flights to and from your destination? That helps to reduce stress and fatigue too.
Economic feasibility is not just "will the ticket prices cover operating expenses".
It also entails having a large enough market that the incredibly high development costs can be amortized out across a large fleet of vehicles. Otherwise, each plane is going to be S-U-P-E-R expensive, and the price of the tickets -- which must also include a portion of the price of the airplane, since Boeing and Airbus don't just give their planes away -- will be concomitantly enormous.
The bottom line is that there comes a "good enough" point where people stop paying more for better service. Naturally, that point will be different for different income levels, but... remember Occupy Wall Street and "We Are the 99%"?
There just aren't enough people out there who's "good enough" point is high enough to pay for a fleet of sub-orbital (and supersonic, for that matter) planes over the ocean (since that's the only place they'll be allowed to fly). If there were, Aérospatiale-BAC would have made more Concordes, and Boeing would have proceeded with development of the 2707 SST.
The rest of us factor in things like time to travel to the airport, waiting in TSA checkpoint lines and our bank balance to then say "Meh, 550 MPH is Good Enough."
Glad (kinda, in some perverse manner) that I'm not the only one.
the flight takes 14 hours,
10 hours, nonstop.
Turn trans-Pacific/Atlantic into a weekend trip instead of the current 3 days of travel time and there's a market for it.
The Concorde turned a 6 hour flight across the Atlantic into a 3 hour flight. Why, then, was the Concorde economically unfeasible? Cost
Those sub-orbital flights will cost a lot more than the Concorde flights. People will say, "$1200 for a 10 hour flight, or $5000 for a 4 hour flight?" Sure, a handful will pick the $5000 ticket ($20,000 when you add in spouse and a couple of children) but most will say, "4 hours is not worth $15,200."
Trying to balance a big pencil on a postage stamp that's moving unpredictably and simultaneously in 4 axises (pitch, roll, yaw, altitude) doesn't seem to have very high odds of success. And the worse the sea is running, the lower the odds.
If it works, though, count me really impressed by what would surely be a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
Increasingly, companies want to make a "me too" product or do things based on what focus groups tell them is good.
We won't mention that vertically-launched multi-stage rockets powered by RP-1/LOX are pretty "me too".
If you want a repairable computer with a separate chip for every application, I have a coal plant to sell you
Or an original IBM PC/XT. All the chips were socketed, and every IO device (except maybe the KB) required it's own card on the ISA bus.
Yearly major releases and more frequent bug fixes was a solved problem long before billg co-founded the Evil Empire...
if a fire starts in your home, you want the system to respond appropriately in milliseconds,
Given the time it takes for people to become alert from a deep sleep, the time it takes a telephone to be automatically "dialed" and connected, and the fired trucks to arrive, ISTM that a 5ms response to a fire alarm signal is no more needed than a 500ms response. OTOH if houses were nuclear powered or flew at 1000 MPH then 5ms response times might actually be considered slow...
holding back new research tools because amateurs and politically motivated groups could misuse them is very scary indeed.
An analogy: we hold back guns from four year olds -- even when we show it to them and say, "Very dangerous! Never touch!", but not from legally competent adults; when said four year old gets his hands on a gun, bad things can happen.
Likewise, we should not hold back *copies* of data from the world. However, so as to protect the "chain of provenance", edit privileges should be limited in some way, so as to prevent abuse by sock puppets and the anonymous. Maybe something as simple as requiring editors to log in using a cryptographic certificate signed by a trusted third party which requires some form of official ID and manual verification.
(1) Wikidata would either have to keep (many) multiple copies of possibly quite large data sets, or keep diffs. How much of a strain does it put on a busy server to generate a dataset from a huge original and lots of large diffs.
(2) Not too many people pay attention to Wikipedia changelogs. If only the current form of the data is easily visible, that's what most people -- especially amateurs and those with political motivations -- will use.
We've identified many deep problems with scientific research on this very forum
Most revolving around laziness and academic corruption. Allowing data (for example: historical weather gauge readings, or IQ scores, or any other data having to do with hot-button topics) to be edited is an invitation to socio-political fraud on an unheard-of scale.