No, he clearly showed that given two stationary subjects (A and B), and two subjects traveling at a significant percentage of the speed of light (C and D), how information sent by FTL from A to B, picked up by C and sent by FTL to D would get to D before D arrives at A's location.
If D then transmits that information to A by FTL communication, A will get it before A sends it. I.e. a direct violation of causality.
Huh? He showed nothing of the sort. In fact it is not possible even with the FTL information transfer, no matter what combination of relative velocities of A, B, C and D you can come up with. All he did was to fool himself by drawing pretty diagrams and linking colourful lines on them. Which is frequently a problem with applying some fancy visualization method one falls in love with while not realizing that in actuality it obscures - or has no relationship to - the nature of the problem. See also under: "technical trading" in the stock market.
Consider this simple fact: all of the hypothetical people in A, B, C and D have clocks running forward relative to each other. Even the extreme cases when all of A, B, C, D move away from each other at c, or move towards each other at c, at worst the clock of any of them is stopped in relation to everyone else, that is at speed difference of c, the time stops for the other object from the point of view of the reference object. The case is less severe for any other combinations of velocity vectors. So no matter what instantaneous jumps do I perform between the points, because at no point their clocks run backwards in relation to each other, all I am doing is, at best, to deliver information which is at least 0 seconds old, even in relativistic time frames. There is no way for me to jump and deliver information that is in the future relative to any of the participants because my local and all relative departure times are always at least 0 seconds behind the arrival times. And this does not change with addition of any new points, E, F, G and so on or any jump order between them.
His diagrams merely obfuscated this simple fact.
Furthermore, mathematical "elegance" notwithstanding, we actually have no clue what happens should some object manage to exceed the speed of light even completely within the relativistic universe, never you mind in many proposed modes of FTL which cause a "bubble" of a relativistic universe to be separated out and then merged back in at another location. The math indicates that the time should run "backwards" at speeds exceeding c but there is absolutely no proof that the relativity theory even holds at this point. What if the time simply stops at velocities past c, messing up all the pretty and completely unproven at this point for such a case mathematical model?
There are however other severe effects that would limit FTL capabilities, for example jumping from point A to B while A is travelling at c relative to B is likely to be impossible because from the point of view of B it would not only take an infinite amount of time for the captain to press his "jump" button but it would involve infinite energies. So even a "jump" type FTL is bound to have a lot of limitations (such as only being able to jump without changing any relative velocities upon return) that will prevent it from violating causality and many relativistic principles even with the whole business of leaving the Universe and coming back into it.
As for "horrible diagrams", I can only presume you're not used to Minkowski diagrams, and tried to read them as "normal" 2-dimensional physical (X/Y) maps. Then they would be horrible, indeed.
Diagrams, no matter how convoluted, are merely visual representations of some kind of underlying premise. If I can defeat the premise without the diagrams then they are completely superfluous.
I consider Avigdor Lieberman to be moderately right.
And herein lies the rub. Lieberman is in my book is a right wing wacko who, if given such power, would have tried to ethnically cleanse Israel. He also opposes separation of state and religion which has long been the position of extreme right. Perhaps he is not as extreme as some others who call for outright extermination of Palestinians and for "preemptive" nuking of Iran but a moderate?!
So if you consider such person a "moderate", I fear that your idea of "moderation" is somewhat faulty...
That is one arrogant attempt at bludgeoning everyone over the head with the general relativity as if it were some kind of religious doctrine.
At no point in time did that Rich dude (horrible diagrams notwithstanding) actually proved breakdown of causality. All he demonstrated was that by using FTL communications one can receive information about events faster than by the means of speed of light, but at no point before they occur. Also simple experiments such as this demonstrate that general relativity is far, far away from explaining the nature of the physical Universe, never you mind the nature of far more convoluted concepts such as information.
You remind me of the physicists of the Newtonian establishment who used to strut around with their "infallible" "Clockwork Universe" ideas and who downright ridiculed anyone who tried to point out that their model was somewhat deficient.
And if time travel is possible, then (to paraphrase Fermi), where are all the time travelers?
Since FTL does not imply (colourful pictures notwithstanding) backwards time travel, there is no paradox.
A terrorist uses VIOLENCE to further a political agenda.
No, that is a definition of a government, or maybe a revolutionary, not a terrorist.
Terrorism is far more specific: it is the use of violence to terrorize the civilian populace of your enemy, usually a part of tactics of asymmetrical warfare of some kind, but not always.
Thus armies and partisans can become terrorists but it is not always the case. Organizations like Wikileaks can never become terrorists as long as they do not take up actual guns and explosives. Being a messenger bearing a message, even a terrorist message, does not make one a terrorist in itself. The key is the specifically-planned-to-terrorize violence.
The attempts to cover government's ruthless, totalitarian actions by using demagogic tools like the ever drifting re-definition of the term "terrorist" (and apparently unquestioning acceptance of it by many propaganda-susceptible idiots amongst citizens) is one of the prime examples of why today's governments are no longer fulfilling their most basic societal contract with the citizenry they supposedly represent, never you mind other, loftier goals they are supposed to serve.
Systems like BitCoin will become illegal because they allow transferring of money outside of government control. Most governments today are too corrupt to allow citizens free reign with their funds. The excuses are legion: tax evasion, Wars On Everything, money proceeds from general crime etc. So instead of trying to figure out ways to create a taxation system that works and is financially viable (which of course would mean 80-90% reduction in size of most governments), stopping ridiculous religiously-motivated witch-hunts or fighting actual crime as opposed to its symptoms, the governments take the easy (and most profitable to them) way out: ever more Orwellian control of all citizenry.
We see it continuously on every front, but nowhere it is as vicious as in the world of money. OECD governments will terrorize any country that refuses to become their slavishly obedient "partner" in their taxation schemes, they will stop at nothing to eliminate all cash transactions (as cash is mostly untraceable), they drool at the day when every last cent of every last citizen has been accounted for, taxed, tracked and eventually transferred to the personal account of some lawyer, lawyer-cum-politician, bureaucrat paper-pusher or their personal friend business associate.
That is why any e-currencies are all doomed to fail: they are one of the ultimate threats to absolute power of governments over citizenry. E-currencies that have a centralized registry (as does BitCoin) offer a central point of attack and that is how they will be destroyed. Any other attempts will be attacked at the point of conversion to real-world goods and services. And if you do not believe me, you can look up what happened to other, earlier attempts such as e-gold.
I do not believe that a currency not subject to complete government control will become viable until a far-greater-in-scope revolt against the farce that the "democratic" governments have become is successful. And that is an entirely different story.
My personal take is that the Dark Ages of totalitarianism-dressed-up-as-"freedom" are upon us and things will keep getting progressively worse until the day when blood of the lawyers and politicians, their mercenaries and many, many of those yearning for freedom will flow on the streets of the oh-so-smug "democracies" again.
No, as I said, the economy is crippled. Deflation will eventually occur if, magically half the products are sold at some lower price, but this is very painful to the people who are attempting to live during it and now can't afford materials.....
And yet deflation occurs after stuff has been produced.
Deflation happens when the same amount of money chases more goods. The 'more goods' part of that happens after the goods are made.
Which means they have to buy materials at the old prices, which is why deflation is so painful and harms manufacturing.
I've come to the conclusion that you are simply dishonest and would stop at nothing to somehow try to "save face", up to and including desperately trying to accuse your opponents of subscribing to your own defeated theories in order to show how "wrong" they are.
This has happened repeatedly in this "discussion", when you tried to insinuate that people will hold onto goods in deflationary economies because they will become "more expensive", when you tried to pretend that units of currencies are indivisible and can only be replaced with higher denominations, when you tried to imply that technological progress is not a factor in prices, when you tried to pretend that deflation does not occur until all prices of a particular - arbitrarily selected by you - class of goods in the entire economy fell simultaneously instead of it being the result of simple arithmetic, etc and so on and on and on and on.
And now you are trying to pretend that when technological progress occurs in a deflationary economy it is "painful" and "harms manufacturing" by reducing the prices of goods by increasing their supply versus demand but when the same thing (after all the market principles are the same) occurs in inflationary economies, it is somehow miraculous and causes no hardship whatsoever to the competitors of the innovator company.
That somehow when one company becomes more efficient, the competitors in inflationary economy are magically not forced to produce goods at a lower profit by "buying the materials at the old prices" - why, no, competition and its effects is something that happens only in a deflationary economy! Or more accurately, your fiat currency world retains all the wonderful positive effects of competition and all the negative effects are somehow teleported, by your awesome power of will - no doubt, to the deflationary economies.
Which was not at all the problem I pointed out. The problem I pointed out is that either a) the bakers keep charging the same price, in which deflation doesn't happen, or b) they charge lower prices, which blows up the economy because now they can't actually buy supplies.
Right, and in the miraculous inflationary economy the government simply prints more money to give to those bakers who are no longer competitive to allow them to keep producing less efficiently and to sell at the new prices while buying raw materials at the same price as before, all to allow them to "compete" with the more efficient ones... oh wait! Or maybe it makes sure that even with innovation prices keep rising so that the average consumer clod cannot tell which end is up and keeps buying from the bakers who cant find their asses with both hands and a flashlight while down the street a baker who busted his chops innovating improvements is now going bankrupt... no?
The reason we've have economic problem has nothing at all to do with fiat currency. It has to do with the banks not being regulated. It has to do with us not actually taxing those 'financiers' you rail against, or stopping them from doing stupid shit. You're right that they provide no benefit and are a casino, but that had nothing to do with anything...the problem is they were, with the tacit support of the government, running a casino with our money, instead of theirs.
But the financial system is just a small part of that.
And to ban backwards time travel, you also have to ban FTL travel. Because FTL violates causality, it allows backwards time travel.
Actually, no. It allows for accessing information about events faster than the relativistic model says should be accessible after they occurred (i.e. propagating with the speed no faster then c). That is not the same as "traveling back in time". Given that the theory of relativity has really very little to say about the nature of information itself and its relationship to the Universe in general (about which relationship we really know didley-squat) this is not even technically a violation of the general relativity assumptions.
Most FTL ideas involve "dropping out of the relativistic universe" into some kind of super-dimension and then coming back in another location (usually demanding that the event occurs in areas of space with least gravity/particles/enery/etc present). This does not violate the relativistic model itself as it is simply bypassing it.
Is it possible? Who knows. But it is not an outright violation of causality as you would have is believe.
The Jerusalem Post hosts a range of views, but overall, it is a secular, center-left mainstream media organization, complete with a Zodiac/astrology page.
"center-left"?! Apparently you are confusing the JP with the Haaertz.
You are probably thinking of the days before Conrad Black bought the thing and David Landau and crew walked out. These days Jerusalem Post is Avigdor Liberman's favorite English language outlet...
Governments are like nuclear power. If left unchecked they will kill a lot of people, screw up the neighborhood for generations and cause loss of standard of living for a lot other people. In the extreme, they can be used as a weapon and cause far more damage yet.
On the other hand, given enough containment and backup control systems, they can be the most powerful source of help in everyday life to a lot of people.
So where the challenge truly lies is in engineering such containment and control (see for example: the US Constitution) and then maintaining it. But when citizens willing to fight for their rights to the death are replaced with the likes of lardy American Idol fans, there is simply no one left to look after rusty, sieve-like containment vessels.
And so, unfortunately, most governments on the planet today are in various stages of performing their Chernobyl thing.
What I am saying is that Jerusalem Post is known for... err... "stretching the truth" when it comes to topics dear to the Israeli hard-liners' hearts and so their claim of "two years of setback" to Iran's nuclear program should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.
Stuxnet Virus Set Back Iran's Nuclear Program by 2 Years...LOIC set Mastercard back 2 hours. Advantage, Stuxnet!
Err, thats "two Jerusalem Post Years", which are sort of like the "Iraqi Information Minister's Years", so in reality it was probably a tie.
Weake up people. Jerusalem Post is a mouthpiece of Israel's far, far right. Those are the same turkeys who believe in Greater Israel and the like. In their view, should Stuxnet not be handily around to embellish on, they would have to fall back on to their old standby canard of "God's finger" slowing the Iranian centrifuges directly to protect his Jewish children...
They make Fox News look downright fair and balanced!
That's not really deflation, at least not how you said it. It's only half deflation, and is exactly the problem with deflation in that manner.
I already pointed out that your jumping up and down when you find something inconvenient to your pre-conceived notions is not going to change any definitions. Deflation is defined very simply and the example I gave fits it perfectly.
So, after the invention, every day, the farmers sell $1 worth of rye to the baker...and the bakers sell 50 cents back...hey, wait a second. That only works for two days, then the farmer has all the money.
That is only because of the simplicity of the example. Make it 10000 bakers and 10000 farmers and even 50% of the bakers going out of business is not possible because of the upper limit of the ability of others to make bread fast enough. I thought that it was patently obvious and such trivia did not have to be spelled out. I guess I underestimated how desperately obtuse you can get in your heroic effort to ignore the reality.
The bakers has to keep selling at $1, simply because he can't make enough to live otherwise. Maybe he can edge out a living at 80 cents if he eats less food, to compete with the other baker and
try to sell loafs to both farmers, but it's a race to the bottom. And that other guy is out of work.
Competition is a "race to the bottom", it always was. That is the one of the main issues that people have with Capitalism. You are totally confused by the fact that this is not as glaring when you look at 10000 bakers instead of two. But the dynamics has never changed with larger numbers. With each new improvement of productivity a whole lot of bakers are forced out of business and have to find new work. The situation stabilizes for a while and might even reverse with population growth... until the next improvement. That is how Capitalism operates. In many industries the "race to the bottom" destroyed almost everyone so that there are only two major competitors left globally (Intel/AMD for example) with no chance whatsoever of new ones arising due to huge barriers to entry.
The problem with your hypothetical is that unless everything gets cheaper exactly the same, you won't have real deflation, just weird and economy crippling partial deflation in whatever got cheaper. Deflation caused by increasing the availability of goods doesn't work well, at all.(1)
Now you are just being stupid. So deflation does not occur if only half of products in the world are sold at lower prices, while the rest stayed the same because their local markets did not catch up yet? 80%? Still not "real"? How about 99.95%? Oh, it must be full 100% for "real", DavidTC Approved (tm) Deflation! He is the one that makes the decision on what's "real", the arbiter of global economies that he is! He farts - deflation! No gaseous discharge - no deflation!
Never you mind clear, straightforward definitions everybody else is using...
Actually, the real problem with that hypothetical is that progress doesn't work how you think it does. A lot of stuff had, in the 50s or whenever, a huge bump in productivity as production was automated...and that's it. I will point out that houses still cost basically the same to make as they ever did. (That's after removing inflation and the stupid bubble. I'm talking about construction.) Actual hours of human labor are the same, materials are maybe 20% easier to make than 100 years ago. Some things will functionally never get cheaper.
Now this is funny. The guy uses the negative effects of his fiat currency inflation bullshit to try to show that any other model would not work...
For your information: the amount of labour required to construct a "house" (which is what the average pile of cardboard and sticks is being euphemistically referred to today) has g
No, progress does not make deflation. Progress makes things easier, which means they cost less to make, but it also means people get paid to make them.
This alters the standard of living, but does nothing WRT to deflation or inflation at all. (I wondered where the hell you thought deflation was coming from.)
And normal population growth, at minimum, also makes the economy bigger. Which means it needs more actual cash.
I see your problem: you just can't grasp the relationship between progress and growth of economy.
Imagine a super-simplified "economy" of just 2 people, a baker and a farmer. They together have $1 buck, backed by 1 gram of gold. The baker starts with all of it for the sake of this thought experiment. That is all the gold there is in their world and all the dollars. The farmer grows only rye, and just enough for 2 loaves of bread and some seed for the next crop. He sells his extra rye to the baker for his $1 and the baker then bakes the two loaves of bread. One he eats and the other he sells to the farmer back for the $1. The cycle then repeats. It is stable and infinite (assuming that these theoretical "people" live forever). Each item has a fixed price: rye for two loaves is $1, a finished loaf of bread is $1.
Now imagine that the baker somehow discovers a recipe that lets him bake two and a half loaves of bread. That is, scientific progress happens. Suddenly there is 2.5 loaves for the $1 rye but only $1 to go around. Each loaf is no longer worth $1, it is now worth less. The farmer cannot come up with another $0.50 because the whole "economy" has only $1. So the baker can either sell more than a loaf for $1 (or pretend that progress did not happen and consume the extra). One can argue that the baker had no incentive to discover the new recipe and in such a simplified scenario it would be true, but as soon as you expand this experiment to 2 farmers and 2 bakers, a new factor called "competition" is introduced and it is that aspect that provides the incentive: the baker who can bake more is the one to whom both farmers will go.
So the end result of progress: more goods, same amount of money in circulation: deflation.
If you can't grasp this, I don't think you are going to grasp anything else.
Deflation requires increase of number of goods available, which in turn requires the ability to produce them, which in turn is dependent on scientific and technological progress!
(Erm, except no one would build cars because by the time they got them to people, the deflation would eat their profits.)
That's utter bullshit and you know it. The process (for consumer goods) is self-regulating: if there is not enough sellers, the number of goods available goes down and in a deflationary economy prices stabilize and even go up. That is in fact the whole point of a "free market": that it has this self-regulating ability.
This, incidentally, is not due to 'progress', it's due to our economy being much much bigger and having to stretch the money out. (In actual fact, our economy would be repeatedly crippled through out history by the lack of money, especially as people have every incentive to hoard it.)
What cripples economies is runaway accumulation of wealth aided by fiat currencies and their lunatic-debt-financed, inflationary "bubbles". Capitalist economies are unstable for a whole long list of reasons and fiat currencies just make things much worse, not better, for a majority of the populace. Their main point however is to allow the governments and the very rich to control the value of currencies to suit their needs at the expense of the workers.
I.e, the problem with deflation is that no one will actually make things, because buying raw materials and hiring people to sell the stuff today is stupid when you can do it for 95% of the cost tomorrow. Deflation is incredibly bad for an
You might want to check your tinfoil hat -- it's on a bit too tight...
I guess you have not been following the news then. So try to use your MasterCard to pay someone who the US government doesn't like, set up a PayPal fund to promote some inconvenient freedom of speech or better yet - and more to the point - use the Amazon "cloud" to store information that Uncle Sam would prefer you didn't have.
Or just go back to that cave of yours and stop bothering people who pay attention. Your whining about "tin foil hats" had some traction before the "laughably improbable conspiracy theories" were actually (and with pride!) confirmed by their suspected participants.
To ignore their widely publicized actions now in favour of make-believe, feel-good image of "apolitical mega-corporations" competing fairly under "the benevolent eye of justice-loving US government" would be the true lunacy.
There are advantages to these "do it in the cloud" ideas...
Whatever the other merits, tour terminology is incorrect. As the recent developments clearly demonstrated, it is "do it in the Uncle Sam's pen for clueless cattle" not "do it in the cloud".
Google (and any other alternative that is large enough to do it) are, to put it bluntly, whores for the US government. Some theoretical European competitor would be likewise sucking the dicks of the EU governments.
Even if you pay these "cloud" operators, they most definitely do not work for you, their customers are those with true power and money. You and your data (through which they will go continuously at will - and thats in the fine print of all EULAs of all "cloud" operators) are just the fodder to feed to their true clients.
Subsequently unless you are in the "cattle" class of society, i.e. an insignificant slave happily willing to submit to exploitation of every conceivable kind, and bonus: to be subject to random pogroms by some three-letter agencies on a power binge, you better stay away from any idiotic "clouds" as far as you can.
Using "clouds" is akin to volunteering for a full body scan, a groping session and body cavity search at every TSA checkpoint and then asking for the process to be repeated by some random private business because "it will keep you safe!". Any last trace of independence, self-respect and self-determination has to be completely gone from a majority of the members of a society before such things become commercially viable. But then again one has to only look at what the US (and many other Western "democracies") has become....
That is not necessarily true. At a scale small enough, any talk about "ratchets" and "wheels" becomes silly, as the mechanics becomes wholly unlike that of the macroscopic world. Short range atomic forces become a factor, atomic electrical fields have very large effects, your "levers" are two atoms long, etc. This is what leads to a whole new range of nano-scale "mechanical" problems such as "protein folding".
So to assume that nano-machinery would be just like some kind of car engine - only smaller - is missing the point entirely.
4) a significant proportion of its mass would be in the form or crystal matrices.
What gave you that idea? Carbon based life is, on the cellular level, nano-machinery of just one possible type, out of the whole wide class of all conceivable nano-machinery. It uses specific materials and processes out of a vast range of theoretical possibilities. Thus "bio-tech" is merely a specialist sub-section of a far wider field of "nano-tech".
Technically, a genetically modified bacteria which has inserted into it a set of genes to produce some kind of nano-structure that does not occur in biological realm goes already beyond bio-tech and crosses into the wider nano-tech field.
5) it's controlled from the outside by em or magnetic transmissions.
See above. This is not a requirement at all. Nano-tech can be powered by a huge array of power sources - including direct use of biological processes - and obtain its instructions from whatever source it was designed to obtain them - including internal storage (which is what carbon-based life does), EM signals, radiation, chemical signals, etc - and any combinations of these.
My original assertion was that nanomachinery is unlikely to be any more dangerous than plagues, so the more dangerous you conceive plagues as being, the more true that statement is.
The above points you presented explain why you believe that nano-tech is so limited as compared to bio-tech (i.e. the sub-section of nano-tech that focuses on carbon-based - so far - nano-machinery of life) because you self-restricted your own definitions so narrowly as to exclude the most potent forms of nano-technology from the scope of your consideration. In truth however nano-tech is theoretically vastly more powerful than bio-tech, because while nano-tech has at its disposal all of the tricks of bio-tech, it also has a range of materials and processes far beyond those available to mere bio-tech. In practical terms, nano-tech is a superset of bio-tech.
I said, and this is a fact: If we had stay on the gold standard, with gold a $35 dollars an ounce, we could not operate our economy as '(our economy/$35)*ounces of gold' does not exist. (Hell, barely enough gold exists at current prices.)
I like your circular reasoning here! The amount of gold is too small to cover the amount of currency needed at some fixed exchange rate that belonged to pre-fiat days because of inflation caused by fiat currency which we introduced because there was supposedly not enough gold to cover the inflation that occurred because of the fiat... and so on into the merry infinite loop!
Clue: inflation is a prominent feature of fiat currencies, in its absence the amount of gold would be quite sufficient, thank you, even if it were unchanging since the 1920s. What would happen instead would be deflation as the economy grew, rather then inflation as is the case of fiat currencies.
Your arguments are quite comical actually, you start by presupposing that you are right and then attempt to make the case by trying to show that if your assumptions were to be incorrect, then you'd be wrong! It never occurs to you that you happen to be wrong to begin with.
You apparently think we would, at this point, be using microcents for things. You're trying to assert that 'deflation' would happen, that bread would now cost, say, 0.0002 cents a loaf or something? (Obviously, we'd make a new unit for it so it's in manageable numbers, but whatever.)
Indeed, that is what would happen. Progress would result in continuous reduction of prices and continuous increase of purchasing power of salaries (obviously there would be a pressure to reduce salaries over time but that is another discussion and as opposed to the current situation, the wage earners would be at the advantage as opposed to the disadvantage, where they are now in this inflationary race).
Okay, now I'd like you explain why deflation would happen? If we introduced half-pennies into the US, would deflation happen? What, exactly, do you think causes deflation?
I already explained repeatedly, the growth of the economy, increase of manufacturing efficiency, technological progress and the like would result in the decrease of prices and increase of the standards of living of average wage earners. Such effects are visible even now, with all the fiat currency inflationary idiocy acting against them, if radical enough decreases in manufacturing costs are managed. See also under: Chinese imports.
Introducing smaller bits of currency does not cause deflation. Deflation happens when less money cases more goods and services, and making smaller money parts does not make less of it exist.
You simply missed, again, the fact that none of what I explained causes the amount of the actual original currency to increase, while the amount of goods has increased due to natural progression of scientific and industrial development. Measured in the original dollars, the prices would simply keep falling. Hence deflation. The reverse is precisely true for fiat currencies. 1930s dollar would have to be replaced by tens of dollars today if you wanted to equal its original purchasing power. If gold standard was maintained, cars would cost less in absolute dollar terms today (a few hundred bucks) than they did in 1930, instead of $40k+. A 5 cent soda would be something like 0.005 cent soda, etc. Again, deflation (more goods, same amount of dollars in circulation - but now split down to mini-cents) instead of fiat currency inflation.
I know that you have difficulties grasping this but money does not mean some divinely fixed number of indivisible pieces of God-anointed metal, or some similar dogmatic concept that you appear to be so fixated on. Money is merely a numeric representation of value, a representation that in case of a "gold standard" cur
That's not in accord with how I understand the evolutionary process. If a variation doesn't have an advantage, then it will never become a significant factor.
That is a common misconception about evolution. Adaptation and competition amongst species have a very large stochastic element and small efficiency differences become accounted for only over very long time frames. That is why there are tens of thousands of strains of bacteria even though there are variations in efficiency between them and many occupy essentially the same niche. But because the stochastic element is so large and the population sizes so immense, the lower efficiency species survive quite well in many places. The stochastic element becomes less pronounced in more complex species where the population sizes become much, much smaller than that of single celled organisms. Also the evolutionary processes in more complex species are more specialized at the expense of robustness so that small differences have large impact on natural selection due to these accelerators (complex organisms have chromosomes which localize cross-over exchanges to particular zones of the overall DNA, use sexual reproduction, have multiple copies of genetic material etc - all meant to speed up adaptation). The price for all this however is an inability of complex organisms to change their biochemistry in any radical way, a feat that bacteria can perform given sufficiently adverse conditions and long enough time.
I disagree. You are still going to need to manufacture it more rapidly than it breaks down over whatever area that it has dispersed to. That means that something that disperses rapidly is insanely expensive for a bacterium, unless it has a local use.
Again, if the bacteria was using the gas for its own purposes, rather then being engineered to make it for another task, you would be right. Evolution would select for toxins that are localized within the cell as to make the cell less digestible by other organisms. As it stands however, the production rate of a gas (which naturally would vent into the atmosphere, very much like other by-products of bacterial activity such as methane during fermentation) would determine how deadly it would be, which would express itself as a number of particles of the gas per cubic volume in a particular area, which would be a direct function of the number of bacteria present. True, the gas would dissipate and be absorbed by various naturally occurring absorbers but given enough bacteria the production would quickly exceed the absorption rate. A particularly devious system might involve actually producing a precursor that becomes active only by contact with some naturally occurring common substance and so the final airborne particle would be only the final stage of such reaction designed to reduce the environmental absorption rates and to maximize the release into the atmosphere.
There are a lot of cells of the bacterium, admittedly, but just how many will be sporting the modified genes. I'd bet the fraction would be immeasurably small. It require additional cellular machinery, it's energetically expensive, it requires extra raw materials, and it provides no advantage. This is not the recipe for a mutation that survives.
Again, you imagine (for reasons that I cannot understand) the competition between bacteria as all-or-nothing, on-off scenario. It is not. A new strain of bacteria can spread merrily all over the place, combine with others, dominate small areas, be dominated in others based on a myriad of random factors. As I explained, the stochastic element accounts for a lion share of short-term survivability of new strains, of which this would be just one. Your view of evolution is more in tune with that of very complex, small population size organisms, such as primates.
Furthermore, a particularly devious scientist can introduce a retro-virus into the scheme where it would spread and modify t
Sigh. If you're expecting these new smaller units to be able to buy as much as the old units, (and thus the older ones could buy more) you've just REINVENTED FIAT CURRENCY, you idiot.
I think this must be a requirement to be a proponent of fiat currencies: not only an inability to divide but also utter incomprehension of a simple addition.
No, you dolt. Individual cents do not equal dollars, it takes a hundred of them to make 1 dollar. You need a hundred cents to buy something worth 1 dollar. No, the dollar did not change its value magically by being simply divided into smaller pieces, all we got is more precision! Which was needed because prices went down in an economy where progress has actual rewards, but the side effect of which is introduction of more units to trade with.
Do you really not grasp that gold-based currencies can't vary in value? The entire fucking point is that they are fixed to the price of gold. The only way for them to vary in value is for there to be more or less gold. (What's more, it might not even be possible for the government to control this by adding and removing gold coinage...the value might just be stuck, by the world market, to the gold market in general.)
Which is precisely what happened. The 1 dollar unit stayed where it was, still worth exactly the same amount of gold as it was before division into cents. New units called cents have now 1/100th of the value of a dollar, each still worth exactly 1/100 of the gold amount of a dollar. No new currency was introduced, merely more physical pieces of the existing currency but with greater precision to trade with. All values remained unchanged.
It is quite amusing that your ideology warps your mind so badly that it prevents you from grasping such a simple scenario.
You're assuming that somehow the dollar can be fixed to gold, but vary in value WRT everything else. Which is a) stupid, prices cannot operate like that, and b) if it did work, would defeat 90% of the supposed point of gold-based currency to start with, because now you do have inflation.
Now you are just descending into lunacy. Since gold is merely a natural resource, its value (and so the value of any currency based on it) in respect to all other things is determined by the marketplace. Of course the prices will fluctuate depending on market conditions. The only thing that remains constant is the exchange amount of gold for each unit of the currency. For example, 1 dollar is always 1 gram of gold, 1 cent is always 1/100 gram, some future "mini-cent" if needed is 1/1000 gram, etc. But a loaf of bread might cost 5 cents today and 4 cents tomorrow, that value is determined by the market.
To repeat: WHAT YOU JUST DESCRIBED IS CALLED INFLATION, the exact thing you're railing against.
As I said before, you should understand the concepts of inflation and deflation before braying your way into discussions on economics. I am sure it comes as a surprise to you but you will not change these basic definitions just by screeching louder and waving your arms faster.
To repeat once again: when you divide a dollar into 100 cents and when a loaf of bread instead of costing 1 dollar yesterday costs 95 cents today, that is deflation, a true decrease in price, not inflation which would occur of you replaced a bundle of 100 dollars with one "new" dollar because every loaf of bread, thanks to fiat currency nonsense, now costs 1000 bucks and you want to make it appear as if it got cheaper somehow and so now it is "only" 10 "new" bucks...
Figure these basics out before barging in and trying to drown anyone opposing your inanity with spittle.
But, hey, I posed a puzzle for you in my other post. Go and solve it. Explain the actual changes you'd do, not how you're vaguely 'divide the currency more'.
If you divide the thing more among existing issued currency, aka, if one 'gold dollar' is now worth half the amount of gold, you have, tada, inflation, and you've just 'printed more money'. If, OTOH, you try to print more gold, um, I already said we're out of gold Not enough has actually been mined.
This is rich. You can't distinguish inflation from deflation, the master economist you! Inflation is when you devalue a currency versus the value of goods (i.e. prices increase), deflation is when the value of the currency increases versus that of goods (i.e. prices decrease). In this case the "dollar's" value has increased so that another unit (of much smaller denomination) has to be introduced, bread that used to cost $1 now costs $0.75 or 75 of the new units that are smaller then the original. The price went down, not up.
I don't even begin to understand how you think a gold-based system works, but the actual fact is, if we'd stayed on a gold standard, either a) We would have had to materialize twice as much gold as exists out of thin air, or b) we'd have had to change the price of a dollar from $35 an ounce to $70 an ounce, and then to $100 an ounce, and right now we'd need about $300 an ounce, c) we'd have started at that $300 an ounce price, which makes it a fiat currency where the government will only pay 10% of the actual value in gold, and we'll still hit B later, or d) we'd have an economy that's a tenth of the size of the current one, and about half the size of one capable of actually feeding everyone.
You are so in love with your own smugly irrational ideology that basic arithmetic escapes you. a) no we would not, there is no need to "materialize" anything beyond the normal mining and exploration - the point of using a natural resource as a reference is scarcity - less mining the better, b) no, we would simply add a new sub-unit to $1 dollar, called cents. Should that prove insufficient, we would divide the cents into smaller sub-units, etc. The amount of gold that corresponds to each new unit would simply decrease as compared to the unchanged old units, the finite limit being an amount being small enough to be measured practically, at which point we would switch from gold to much more difficult to obtain (i.e. scarce) material and repeat the process, c) no such thing would have been needed.
But at no point in time would the amount of gold (or whatever reference resource we use) assigned to $1 dollar (or any of the smaller sub-units) change! And that is the crux of the whole thing: at no point there is a devaluation of any of the old units. In order to increase the circulation of the currency, prices of things would have to decrease: its called "progress" and "raise of the standards of living", those two things that proponents of fiat currencies positively loathe (for everyone except themselves that is).
The wholly unwanted inflationary pressure would actually be introduced by mining and that is why resources like gold are ultimately too common to make a perfect currency, other, better reference materials would have to be found that are much harder to obtain yet.
THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS.
As soon as you figure out that highly complicated arithmetical thing called "division" you will discover them.
Please note that a requires magic, and is exactly the same as printing more money, b is manual inflation, and exactly the same as printing more money, c has uncontrollable inflation, and d has people dying in the streets because their employer does not have any money to physically hand them for them to exchange for food. (Or, more likely at this point, living on some not-backed-by-anything borrowing system, like the English did. Let's convert to an IOU based economy, where businesses and the wealthy issue scrip instead of paying people, and at some point we just all hope we need something from them so we ca
That's the real joke all you anti 'fiat currency' loons don't get. If we'd, for example, stayed on the gold standard...there's not actually enough gold in existence to operate the economy at $35 an ounce.
We'd have fucking money shortages, which have actually happened before. It happened in England once, where people cannot actually locate enough money to actually do things. If there's only physically $400 floating around, no one can actually buy a damn car, and people have to start bartering for stuff.
As far as the priests of the fiat currency religion go, I've heard a lot of exquisite bullshit and logical pretzels but this is my all time favourite: you see, currencies tied to physical natural resources are indivisible! You can't make more by simply dividing the unit of 1 (let's call the thing a "dollar") into 100 of (let's call the thing "cents"). Impossible I tell you!
With "arguments" like these by the Wall Street casino addicts and "high finance" crooks to defend them its no wonder that fiat currencies are these days finally recognized by more and more people for the tools of crooked thievery they truly are...
You probably should change your con a bit, add some new twists into it, because the marks are waking up.
Ah, yes, and people saving money in the bank would help the economy. In stupid land, where recessions are caused by something other than people not purchasing things.
Right so the "ideal" economy is one in which people purchase infinite amounts of useless crap which they throw away the next second, "paying" for it by their bottomless credit-cards, right?
Speaking about dolts and the truly stupid...
In a real, working economy the amount of labour is balanced by the amount of real services and products. As in not in "financial services" and "disposable entertainment" which in a sane world would represent a tiny minority of the economy. Economy that is based on producing bullshit for the sake of bullshit fake "money", all of it topped by a gigantic casino, is a bomb that must explode, eventually. As the victims of the con in the US (and the whole Western world actually) are discovering the hard way.
If it makes, as you suggest, VX nerve gas, then it need to pay for the excess production. The more the bacterium produces, the more it needs to pay. It's competition (other e-coli) don't need to pay that price, so they out-compete it.
This is irrelevant. You seem to misunderstand the nature of such competition. In the very long term, you are right, the modified bacteria will be out-competed by the more efficient one in many places. On the scale of maybe hundreds or thousands of years, if ever. More "efficient" organisms exist everywhere and yet older forms survive all over in various niches. But with a difference of efficiency of, say, 10% the modified bacteria will still spread to a very significant degree in the short term before evolution or mutation renders it less effective. It if occupies only a 1% of volume of all e.coli globally at its peak, it would still mean hundreds of tons of VX gas per minute.
I took all this into consideration. That is why VX or other agent which only requires a very small amount of gas per cubic volume (and thus very slight amount to be produced by each bacteria) is perfect for the task of genocide. Even with very low efficiency of the whole process, the effect would be still deadly.
E-coli depends on having live hosts. Dead, or really sick, hosts don't help to spread it. (Dysentery is a special case here.)
Err no. e.coli is a bacterium that lives everywhere, the soil, ponds, etc. There many many strains of it that can be found in pretty much any place where bacteria is present. Volume wise the bacteria that lives on animals is a tiny fraction of bacteria that lives on plants and in water and soil.
Additionally, when bacteria make a chemical, they prefer to make do with VERY small amount. So they concentrate on exceedingly potent poisons that doen't spread easily. Other things aren't as advantageous to them.
A very, very small amount multiplied by trillions of trillions of cells of individual bacteria? As I said, even with efficiency far below 1% it would still mean the end of nearly all humanity on Earth within a few years.
I think that energetic considerations will limit the danger of "grey goo" to being no worse than other bacteria.
I can see that you are quite deficient in the area of Machiavellian deviousness. But then again, you probably should take it as a compliment.
Consider this, just one example out of thousands: I make a version of one of the most common bacterium that is present everywhere, say e.coli, except that in addition to its usual cycle it produces very small (so that the strain on its metabolism is negligible) quantities of the VX nerve gas...
Then I release the thing into the wild. Because its a very, very common bacteria that lives everywhere, within weeks or perhaps months, there would be whole areas of the globe where the concentration of a potent chemical weapon of mass destruction exceeds lethal levels. Within a year the whole globe would be uninhabitable by any life-form with a nervous system susceptible to VX as the production of the gas would reach hundreds of tons per minute...
Etc and so on. You simply underestimate the countless ways in which advanced bio-weapons can produce utter devastation...
I *could* be wrong, but if so I'd find it quite surprising.
See above. Sadly, you are very wrong indeed, although I too wish that it weren't so.
But I think that they'd be quite fragile.
How so? The plague would attack everyone but only blond people would suffer massive organ failures, while others would merely get some fever and act as incubators and propagation vectors by sneezing the weapon onto the blond targets.
Again, there are countless ways of wreaking devastation that open up with easy availability of nano-scale-technologies and it only takes a sufficiently devious mind to find them...
I propose an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting those in any position of authority in the federal government...
Its a nice sentiment except of course they will all use family members and close friends instead, who will then get the gravy passed back onto the crooks after they "retire"....
Stopping corruption in governments will require much more radical measures than that method, which by the way was attempted to be applied many times before in many governments, with no results to speak of.
And so instead I will use one of the many other no-physical-hardware-contact methods available to me...
Unless you disconnect that computer from that SIPRNET thing entirely and make sure that it has no classified data on its HDD, you are pretty much screwed if it comes to stopping skilled people from getting stuff out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? He showed nothing of the sort. In fact it is not possible even with the FTL information transfer, no matter what combination of relative velocities of A, B, C and D you can come up with. All he did was to fool himself by drawing pretty diagrams and linking colourful lines on them. Which is frequently a problem with applying some fancy visualization method one falls in love with while not realizing that in actuality it obscures - or has no relationship to - the nature of the problem. See also under: "technical trading" in the stock market.
Consider this simple fact: all of the hypothetical people in A, B, C and D have clocks running forward relative to each other. Even the extreme cases when all of A, B, C, D move away from each other at c, or move towards each other at c, at worst the clock of any of them is stopped in relation to everyone else, that is at speed difference of c, the time stops for the other object from the point of view of the reference object. The case is less severe for any other combinations of velocity vectors. So no matter what instantaneous jumps do I perform between the points, because at no point their clocks run backwards in relation to each other, all I am doing is, at best, to deliver information which is at least 0 seconds old, even in relativistic time frames. There is no way for me to jump and deliver information that is in the future relative to any of the participants because my local and all relative departure times are always at least 0 seconds behind the arrival times. And this does not change with addition of any new points, E, F, G and so on or any jump order between them.
His diagrams merely obfuscated this simple fact.
Furthermore, mathematical "elegance" notwithstanding, we actually have no clue what happens should some object manage to exceed the speed of light even completely within the relativistic universe, never you mind in many proposed modes of FTL which cause a "bubble" of a relativistic universe to be separated out and then merged back in at another location. The math indicates that the time should run "backwards" at speeds exceeding c but there is absolutely no proof that the relativity theory even holds at this point. What if the time simply stops at velocities past c, messing up all the pretty and completely unproven at this point for such a case mathematical model?
There are however other severe effects that would limit FTL capabilities, for example jumping from point A to B while A is travelling at c relative to B is likely to be impossible because from the point of view of B it would not only take an infinite amount of time for the captain to press his "jump" button but it would involve infinite energies. So even a "jump" type FTL is bound to have a lot of limitations (such as only being able to jump without changing any relative velocities upon return) that will prevent it from violating causality and many relativistic principles even with the whole business of leaving the Universe and coming back into it.
Diagrams, no matter how convoluted, are merely visual representations of some kind of underlying premise. If I can defeat the premise without the diagrams then they are completely superfluous.
And herein lies the rub. Lieberman is in my book is a right wing wacko who, if given such power, would have tried to ethnically cleanse Israel. He also opposes separation of state and religion which has long been the position of extreme right. Perhaps he is not as extreme as some others who call for outright extermination of Palestinians and for "preemptive" nuking of Iran but a moderate?!
So if you consider such person a "moderate", I fear that your idea of "moderation" is somewhat faulty...
That is one arrogant attempt at bludgeoning everyone over the head with the general relativity as if it were some kind of religious doctrine.
At no point in time did that Rich dude (horrible diagrams notwithstanding) actually proved breakdown of causality. All he demonstrated was that by using FTL communications one can receive information about events faster than by the means of speed of light, but at no point before they occur. Also simple experiments such as this demonstrate that general relativity is far, far away from explaining the nature of the physical Universe, never you mind the nature of far more convoluted concepts such as information.
You remind me of the physicists of the Newtonian establishment who used to strut around with their "infallible" "Clockwork Universe" ideas and who downright ridiculed anyone who tried to point out that their model was somewhat deficient.
Since FTL does not imply (colourful pictures notwithstanding) backwards time travel, there is no paradox.
No, that is a definition of a government, or maybe a revolutionary, not a terrorist.
Terrorism is far more specific: it is the use of violence to terrorize the civilian populace of your enemy, usually a part of tactics of asymmetrical warfare of some kind, but not always.
Thus armies and partisans can become terrorists but it is not always the case. Organizations like Wikileaks can never become terrorists as long as they do not take up actual guns and explosives. Being a messenger bearing a message, even a terrorist message, does not make one a terrorist in itself. The key is the specifically-planned-to-terrorize violence.
The attempts to cover government's ruthless, totalitarian actions by using demagogic tools like the ever drifting re-definition of the term "terrorist" (and apparently unquestioning acceptance of it by many propaganda-susceptible idiots amongst citizens) is one of the prime examples of why today's governments are no longer fulfilling their most basic societal contract with the citizenry they supposedly represent, never you mind other, loftier goals they are supposed to serve.
Systems like BitCoin will become illegal because they allow transferring of money outside of government control. Most governments today are too corrupt to allow citizens free reign with their funds. The excuses are legion: tax evasion, Wars On Everything, money proceeds from general crime etc. So instead of trying to figure out ways to create a taxation system that works and is financially viable (which of course would mean 80-90% reduction in size of most governments), stopping ridiculous religiously-motivated witch-hunts or fighting actual crime as opposed to its symptoms, the governments take the easy (and most profitable to them) way out: ever more Orwellian control of all citizenry.
We see it continuously on every front, but nowhere it is as vicious as in the world of money. OECD governments will terrorize any country that refuses to become their slavishly obedient "partner" in their taxation schemes, they will stop at nothing to eliminate all cash transactions (as cash is mostly untraceable), they drool at the day when every last cent of every last citizen has been accounted for, taxed, tracked and eventually transferred to the personal account of some lawyer, lawyer-cum-politician, bureaucrat paper-pusher or their personal friend business associate.
That is why any e-currencies are all doomed to fail: they are one of the ultimate threats to absolute power of governments over citizenry. E-currencies that have a centralized registry (as does BitCoin) offer a central point of attack and that is how they will be destroyed. Any other attempts will be attacked at the point of conversion to real-world goods and services. And if you do not believe me, you can look up what happened to other, earlier attempts such as e-gold.
I do not believe that a currency not subject to complete government control will become viable until a far-greater-in-scope revolt against the farce that the "democratic" governments have become is successful. And that is an entirely different story.
My personal take is that the Dark Ages of totalitarianism-dressed-up-as-"freedom" are upon us and things will keep getting progressively worse until the day when blood of the lawyers and politicians, their mercenaries and many, many of those yearning for freedom will flow on the streets of the oh-so-smug "democracies" again.
I've come to the conclusion that you are simply dishonest and would stop at nothing to somehow try to "save face", up to and including desperately trying to accuse your opponents of subscribing to your own defeated theories in order to show how "wrong" they are.
This has happened repeatedly in this "discussion", when you tried to insinuate that people will hold onto goods in deflationary economies because they will become "more expensive", when you tried to pretend that units of currencies are indivisible and can only be replaced with higher denominations, when you tried to imply that technological progress is not a factor in prices, when you tried to pretend that deflation does not occur until all prices of a particular - arbitrarily selected by you - class of goods in the entire economy fell simultaneously instead of it being the result of simple arithmetic, etc and so on and on and on and on.
And now you are trying to pretend that when technological progress occurs in a deflationary economy it is "painful" and "harms manufacturing" by reducing the prices of goods by increasing their supply versus demand but when the same thing (after all the market principles are the same) occurs in inflationary economies, it is somehow miraculous and causes no hardship whatsoever to the competitors of the innovator company.
That somehow when one company becomes more efficient, the competitors in inflationary economy are magically not forced to produce goods at a lower profit by "buying the materials at the old prices" - why, no, competition and its effects is something that happens only in a deflationary economy! Or more accurately, your fiat currency world retains all the wonderful positive effects of competition and all the negative effects are somehow teleported, by your awesome power of will - no doubt, to the deflationary economies.
Right, and in the miraculous inflationary economy the government simply prints more money to give to those bakers who are no longer competitive to allow them to keep producing less efficiently and to sell at the new prices while buying raw materials at the same price as before, all to allow them to "compete" with the more efficient ones ... oh wait! Or maybe it makes sure that even with innovation prices keep rising so that the average consumer clod cannot tell which end is up and keeps buying from the bakers who cant find their asses with both hands and a flashlight while down the street a baker who busted his chops innovating improvements is now going bankrupt ... no?
Actually, no. It allows for accessing information about events faster than the relativistic model says should be accessible after they occurred (i.e. propagating with the speed no faster then c). That is not the same as "traveling back in time". Given that the theory of relativity has really very little to say about the nature of information itself and its relationship to the Universe in general (about which relationship we really know didley-squat) this is not even technically a violation of the general relativity assumptions.
Most FTL ideas involve "dropping out of the relativistic universe" into some kind of super-dimension and then coming back in another location (usually demanding that the event occurs in areas of space with least gravity/particles/enery/etc present). This does not violate the relativistic model itself as it is simply bypassing it.
Is it possible? Who knows. But it is not an outright violation of causality as you would have is believe.
"center-left"?! Apparently you are confusing the JP with the Haaertz.
You are probably thinking of the days before Conrad Black bought the thing and David Landau and crew walked out. These days Jerusalem Post is Avigdor Liberman's favorite English language outlet...
Governments are like nuclear power. If left unchecked they will kill a lot of people, screw up the neighborhood for generations and cause loss of standard of living for a lot other people. In the extreme, they can be used as a weapon and cause far more damage yet.
On the other hand, given enough containment and backup control systems, they can be the most powerful source of help in everyday life to a lot of people.
So where the challenge truly lies is in engineering such containment and control (see for example: the US Constitution) and then maintaining it. But when citizens willing to fight for their rights to the death are replaced with the likes of lardy American Idol fans, there is simply no one left to look after rusty, sieve-like containment vessels.
And so, unfortunately, most governments on the planet today are in various stages of performing their Chernobyl thing.
What I am saying is that Jerusalem Post is known for ... err ... "stretching the truth" when it comes to topics dear to the Israeli hard-liners' hearts and so their claim of "two years of setback" to Iran's nuclear program should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.
Err, thats "two Jerusalem Post Years", which are sort of like the "Iraqi Information Minister's Years", so in reality it was probably a tie.
Weake up people. Jerusalem Post is a mouthpiece of Israel's far, far right. Those are the same turkeys who believe in Greater Israel and the like. In their view, should Stuxnet not be handily around to embellish on, they would have to fall back on to their old standby canard of "God's finger" slowing the Iranian centrifuges directly to protect his Jewish children ...
They make Fox News look downright fair and balanced!
I already pointed out that your jumping up and down when you find something inconvenient to your pre-conceived notions is not going to change any definitions. Deflation is defined very simply and the example I gave fits it perfectly.
That is only because of the simplicity of the example. Make it 10000 bakers and 10000 farmers and even 50% of the bakers going out of business is not possible because of the upper limit of the ability of others to make bread fast enough. I thought that it was patently obvious and such trivia did not have to be spelled out. I guess I underestimated how desperately obtuse you can get in your heroic effort to ignore the reality.
Competition is a "race to the bottom", it always was. That is the one of the main issues that people have with Capitalism. You are totally confused by the fact that this is not as glaring when you look at 10000 bakers instead of two. But the dynamics has never changed with larger numbers. With each new improvement of productivity a whole lot of bakers are forced out of business and have to find new work. The situation stabilizes for a while and might even reverse with population growth ... until the next improvement. That is how Capitalism operates. In many industries the "race to the bottom" destroyed almost everyone so that there are only two major competitors left globally (Intel/AMD for example) with no chance whatsoever of new ones arising due to huge barriers to entry.
Now you are just being stupid. So deflation does not occur if only half of products in the world are sold at lower prices, while the rest stayed the same because their local markets did not catch up yet? 80%? Still not "real"? How about 99.95%? Oh, it must be full 100% for "real", DavidTC Approved (tm) Deflation! He is the one that makes the decision on what's "real", the arbiter of global economies that he is! He farts - deflation! No gaseous discharge - no deflation!
Never you mind clear, straightforward definitions everybody else is using...
Now this is funny. The guy uses the negative effects of his fiat currency inflation bullshit to try to show that any other model would not work...
For your information: the amount of labour required to construct a "house" (which is what the average pile of cardboard and sticks is being euphemistically referred to today) has g
I see your problem: you just can't grasp the relationship between progress and growth of economy.
Imagine a super-simplified "economy" of just 2 people, a baker and a farmer. They together have $1 buck, backed by 1 gram of gold. The baker starts with all of it for the sake of this thought experiment. That is all the gold there is in their world and all the dollars. The farmer grows only rye, and just enough for 2 loaves of bread and some seed for the next crop. He sells his extra rye to the baker for his $1 and the baker then bakes the two loaves of bread. One he eats and the other he sells to the farmer back for the $1. The cycle then repeats. It is stable and infinite (assuming that these theoretical "people" live forever). Each item has a fixed price: rye for two loaves is $1, a finished loaf of bread is $1.
Now imagine that the baker somehow discovers a recipe that lets him bake two and a half loaves of bread. That is, scientific progress happens. Suddenly there is 2.5 loaves for the $1 rye but only $1 to go around. Each loaf is no longer worth $1, it is now worth less. The farmer cannot come up with another $0.50 because the whole "economy" has only $1. So the baker can either sell more than a loaf for $1 (or pretend that progress did not happen and consume the extra). One can argue that the baker had no incentive to discover the new recipe and in such a simplified scenario it would be true, but as soon as you expand this experiment to 2 farmers and 2 bakers, a new factor called "competition" is introduced and it is that aspect that provides the incentive: the baker who can bake more is the one to whom both farmers will go.
So the end result of progress: more goods, same amount of money in circulation: deflation.
If you can't grasp this, I don't think you are going to grasp anything else.
Deflation requires increase of number of goods available, which in turn requires the ability to produce them, which in turn is dependent on scientific and technological progress!
That's utter bullshit and you know it. The process (for consumer goods) is self-regulating: if there is not enough sellers, the number of goods available goes down and in a deflationary economy prices stabilize and even go up. That is in fact the whole point of a "free market": that it has this self-regulating ability.
What cripples economies is runaway accumulation of wealth aided by fiat currencies and their lunatic-debt-financed, inflationary "bubbles". Capitalist economies are unstable for a whole long list of reasons and fiat currencies just make things much worse, not better, for a majority of the populace. Their main point however is to allow the governments and the very rich to control the value of currencies to suit their needs at the expense of the workers.
I guess you have not been following the news then. So try to use your MasterCard to pay someone who the US government doesn't like, set up a PayPal fund to promote some inconvenient freedom of speech or better yet - and more to the point - use the Amazon "cloud" to store information that Uncle Sam would prefer you didn't have.
Or just go back to that cave of yours and stop bothering people who pay attention. Your whining about "tin foil hats" had some traction before the "laughably improbable conspiracy theories" were actually (and with pride!) confirmed by their suspected participants.
To ignore their widely publicized actions now in favour of make-believe, feel-good image of "apolitical mega-corporations" competing fairly under "the benevolent eye of justice-loving US government" would be the true lunacy.
Whatever the other merits, tour terminology is incorrect. As the recent developments clearly demonstrated, it is "do it in the Uncle Sam's pen for clueless cattle" not "do it in the cloud".
Google (and any other alternative that is large enough to do it) are, to put it bluntly, whores for the US government. Some theoretical European competitor would be likewise sucking the dicks of the EU governments.
Even if you pay these "cloud" operators, they most definitely do not work for you, their customers are those with true power and money. You and your data (through which they will go continuously at will - and thats in the fine print of all EULAs of all "cloud" operators) are just the fodder to feed to their true clients.
Subsequently unless you are in the "cattle" class of society, i.e. an insignificant slave happily willing to submit to exploitation of every conceivable kind, and bonus: to be subject to random pogroms by some three-letter agencies on a power binge, you better stay away from any idiotic "clouds" as far as you can.
Using "clouds" is akin to volunteering for a full body scan, a groping session and body cavity search at every TSA checkpoint and then asking for the process to be repeated by some random private business because "it will keep you safe!". Any last trace of independence, self-respect and self-determination has to be completely gone from a majority of the members of a society before such things become commercially viable. But then again one has to only look at what the US (and many other Western "democracies") has become ....
That is not necessarily true. At a scale small enough, any talk about "ratchets" and "wheels" becomes silly, as the mechanics becomes wholly unlike that of the macroscopic world. Short range atomic forces become a factor, atomic electrical fields have very large effects, your "levers" are two atoms long, etc. This is what leads to a whole new range of nano-scale "mechanical" problems such as "protein folding".
So to assume that nano-machinery would be just like some kind of car engine - only smaller - is missing the point entirely.
What gave you that idea? Carbon based life is, on the cellular level, nano-machinery of just one possible type, out of the whole wide class of all conceivable nano-machinery. It uses specific materials and processes out of a vast range of theoretical possibilities. Thus "bio-tech" is merely a specialist sub-section of a far wider field of "nano-tech".
Technically, a genetically modified bacteria which has inserted into it a set of genes to produce some kind of nano-structure that does not occur in biological realm goes already beyond bio-tech and crosses into the wider nano-tech field.
See above. This is not a requirement at all. Nano-tech can be powered by a huge array of power sources - including direct use of biological processes - and obtain its instructions from whatever source it was designed to obtain them - including internal storage (which is what carbon-based life does), EM signals, radiation, chemical signals, etc - and any combinations of these.
The above points you presented explain why you believe that nano-tech is so limited as compared to bio-tech (i.e. the sub-section of nano-tech that focuses on carbon-based - so far - nano-machinery of life) because you self-restricted your own definitions so narrowly as to exclude the most potent forms of nano-technology from the scope of your consideration. In truth however nano-tech is theoretically vastly more powerful than bio-tech, because while nano-tech has at its disposal all of the tricks of bio-tech, it also has a range of materials and processes far beyond those available to mere bio-tech. In practical terms, nano-tech is a superset of bio-tech.
I like your circular reasoning here! The amount of gold is too small to cover the amount of currency needed at some fixed exchange rate that belonged to pre-fiat days because of inflation caused by fiat currency which we introduced because there was supposedly not enough gold to cover the inflation that occurred because of the fiat ... and so on into the merry infinite loop!
Clue: inflation is a prominent feature of fiat currencies, in its absence the amount of gold would be quite sufficient, thank you, even if it were unchanging since the 1920s. What would happen instead would be deflation as the economy grew, rather then inflation as is the case of fiat currencies.
Your arguments are quite comical actually, you start by presupposing that you are right and then attempt to make the case by trying to show that if your assumptions were to be incorrect, then you'd be wrong! It never occurs to you that you happen to be wrong to begin with.
Indeed, that is what would happen. Progress would result in continuous reduction of prices and continuous increase of purchasing power of salaries (obviously there would be a pressure to reduce salaries over time but that is another discussion and as opposed to the current situation, the wage earners would be at the advantage as opposed to the disadvantage, where they are now in this inflationary race).
I already explained repeatedly, the growth of the economy, increase of manufacturing efficiency, technological progress and the like would result in the decrease of prices and increase of the standards of living of average wage earners. Such effects are visible even now, with all the fiat currency inflationary idiocy acting against them, if radical enough decreases in manufacturing costs are managed. See also under: Chinese imports.
You simply missed, again, the fact that none of what I explained causes the amount of the actual original currency to increase, while the amount of goods has increased due to natural progression of scientific and industrial development. Measured in the original dollars, the prices would simply keep falling. Hence deflation. The reverse is precisely true for fiat currencies. 1930s dollar would have to be replaced by tens of dollars today if you wanted to equal its original purchasing power. If gold standard was maintained, cars would cost less in absolute dollar terms today (a few hundred bucks) than they did in 1930, instead of $40k+. A 5 cent soda would be something like 0.005 cent soda, etc. Again, deflation (more goods, same amount of dollars in circulation - but now split down to mini-cents) instead of fiat currency inflation.
I know that you have difficulties grasping this but money does not mean some divinely fixed number of indivisible pieces of God-anointed metal, or some similar dogmatic concept that you appear to be so fixated on. Money is merely a numeric representation of value, a representation that in case of a "gold standard" cur
That is a common misconception about evolution. Adaptation and competition amongst species have a very large stochastic element and small efficiency differences become accounted for only over very long time frames. That is why there are tens of thousands of strains of bacteria even though there are variations in efficiency between them and many occupy essentially the same niche. But because the stochastic element is so large and the population sizes so immense, the lower efficiency species survive quite well in many places. The stochastic element becomes less pronounced in more complex species where the population sizes become much, much smaller than that of single celled organisms. Also the evolutionary processes in more complex species are more specialized at the expense of robustness so that small differences have large impact on natural selection due to these accelerators (complex organisms have chromosomes which localize cross-over exchanges to particular zones of the overall DNA, use sexual reproduction, have multiple copies of genetic material etc - all meant to speed up adaptation). The price for all this however is an inability of complex organisms to change their biochemistry in any radical way, a feat that bacteria can perform given sufficiently adverse conditions and long enough time.
Again, if the bacteria was using the gas for its own purposes, rather then being engineered to make it for another task, you would be right. Evolution would select for toxins that are localized within the cell as to make the cell less digestible by other organisms. As it stands however, the production rate of a gas (which naturally would vent into the atmosphere, very much like other by-products of bacterial activity such as methane during fermentation) would determine how deadly it would be, which would express itself as a number of particles of the gas per cubic volume in a particular area, which would be a direct function of the number of bacteria present. True, the gas would dissipate and be absorbed by various naturally occurring absorbers but given enough bacteria the production would quickly exceed the absorption rate. A particularly devious system might involve actually producing a precursor that becomes active only by contact with some naturally occurring common substance and so the final airborne particle would be only the final stage of such reaction designed to reduce the environmental absorption rates and to maximize the release into the atmosphere.
Again, you imagine (for reasons that I cannot understand) the competition between bacteria as all-or-nothing, on-off scenario. It is not. A new strain of bacteria can spread merrily all over the place, combine with others, dominate small areas, be dominated in others based on a myriad of random factors. As I explained, the stochastic element accounts for a lion share of short-term survivability of new strains, of which this would be just one. Your view of evolution is more in tune with that of very complex, small population size organisms, such as primates.
Furthermore, a particularly devious scientist can introduce a retro-virus into the scheme where it would spread and modify t
I think this must be a requirement to be a proponent of fiat currencies: not only an inability to divide but also utter incomprehension of a simple addition.
No, you dolt. Individual cents do not equal dollars, it takes a hundred of them to make 1 dollar. You need a hundred cents to buy something worth 1 dollar. No, the dollar did not change its value magically by being simply divided into smaller pieces, all we got is more precision! Which was needed because prices went down in an economy where progress has actual rewards, but the side effect of which is introduction of more units to trade with.
Which is precisely what happened. The 1 dollar unit stayed where it was, still worth exactly the same amount of gold as it was before division into cents. New units called cents have now 1/100th of the value of a dollar, each still worth exactly 1/100 of the gold amount of a dollar. No new currency was introduced, merely more physical pieces of the existing currency but with greater precision to trade with. All values remained unchanged.
It is quite amusing that your ideology warps your mind so badly that it prevents you from grasping such a simple scenario.
Now you are just descending into lunacy. Since gold is merely a natural resource, its value (and so the value of any currency based on it) in respect to all other things is determined by the marketplace. Of course the prices will fluctuate depending on market conditions. The only thing that remains constant is the exchange amount of gold for each unit of the currency. For example, 1 dollar is always 1 gram of gold, 1 cent is always 1/100 gram, some future "mini-cent" if needed is 1/1000 gram, etc. But a loaf of bread might cost 5 cents today and 4 cents tomorrow, that value is determined by the market.
As I said before, you should understand the concepts of inflation and deflation before braying your way into discussions on economics. I am sure it comes as a surprise to you but you will not change these basic definitions just by screeching louder and waving your arms faster.
To repeat once again: when you divide a dollar into 100 cents and when a loaf of bread instead of costing 1 dollar yesterday costs 95 cents today, that is deflation, a true decrease in price, not inflation which would occur of you replaced a bundle of 100 dollars with one "new" dollar because every loaf of bread, thanks to fiat currency nonsense, now costs 1000 bucks and you want to make it appear as if it got cheaper somehow and so now it is "only" 10 "new" bucks...
Figure these basics out before barging in and trying to drown anyone opposing your inanity with spittle.
Did
This is rich. You can't distinguish inflation from deflation, the master economist you! Inflation is when you devalue a currency versus the value of goods (i.e. prices increase), deflation is when the value of the currency increases versus that of goods (i.e. prices decrease). In this case the "dollar's" value has increased so that another unit (of much smaller denomination) has to be introduced, bread that used to cost $1 now costs $0.75 or 75 of the new units that are smaller then the original. The price went down, not up.
You are so in love with your own smugly irrational ideology that basic arithmetic escapes you. a) no we would not, there is no need to "materialize" anything beyond the normal mining and exploration - the point of using a natural resource as a reference is scarcity - less mining the better, b) no, we would simply add a new sub-unit to $1 dollar, called cents. Should that prove insufficient, we would divide the cents into smaller sub-units, etc. The amount of gold that corresponds to each new unit would simply decrease as compared to the unchanged old units, the finite limit being an amount being small enough to be measured practically, at which point we would switch from gold to much more difficult to obtain (i.e. scarce) material and repeat the process, c) no such thing would have been needed.
But at no point in time would the amount of gold (or whatever reference resource we use) assigned to $1 dollar (or any of the smaller sub-units) change! And that is the crux of the whole thing: at no point there is a devaluation of any of the old units. In order to increase the circulation of the currency, prices of things would have to decrease: its called "progress" and "raise of the standards of living", those two things that proponents of fiat currencies positively loathe (for everyone except themselves that is).
The wholly unwanted inflationary pressure would actually be introduced by mining and that is why resources like gold are ultimately too common to make a perfect currency, other, better reference materials would have to be found that are much harder to obtain yet.
As soon as you figure out that highly complicated arithmetical thing called "division" you will discover them.
As far as the priests of the fiat currency religion go, I've heard a lot of exquisite bullshit and logical pretzels but this is my all time favourite: you see, currencies tied to physical natural resources are indivisible! You can't make more by simply dividing the unit of 1 (let's call the thing a "dollar") into 100 of (let's call the thing "cents"). Impossible I tell you!
With "arguments" like these by the Wall Street casino addicts and "high finance" crooks to defend them its no wonder that fiat currencies are these days finally recognized by more and more people for the tools of crooked thievery they truly are ...
You probably should change your con a bit, add some new twists into it, because the marks are waking up.
Right so the "ideal" economy is one in which people purchase infinite amounts of useless crap which they throw away the next second, "paying" for it by their bottomless credit-cards, right?
Speaking about dolts and the truly stupid...
In a real, working economy the amount of labour is balanced by the amount of real services and products. As in not in "financial services" and "disposable entertainment" which in a sane world would represent a tiny minority of the economy. Economy that is based on producing bullshit for the sake of bullshit fake "money", all of it topped by a gigantic casino, is a bomb that must explode, eventually. As the victims of the con in the US (and the whole Western world actually) are discovering the hard way.
This is irrelevant. You seem to misunderstand the nature of such competition. In the very long term, you are right, the modified bacteria will be out-competed by the more efficient one in many places. On the scale of maybe hundreds or thousands of years, if ever. More "efficient" organisms exist everywhere and yet older forms survive all over in various niches. But with a difference of efficiency of, say, 10% the modified bacteria will still spread to a very significant degree in the short term before evolution or mutation renders it less effective. It if occupies only a 1% of volume of all e.coli globally at its peak, it would still mean hundreds of tons of VX gas per minute.
I took all this into consideration. That is why VX or other agent which only requires a very small amount of gas per cubic volume (and thus very slight amount to be produced by each bacteria) is perfect for the task of genocide. Even with very low efficiency of the whole process, the effect would be still deadly.
Err no. e.coli is a bacterium that lives everywhere, the soil, ponds, etc. There many many strains of it that can be found in pretty much any place where bacteria is present. Volume wise the bacteria that lives on animals is a tiny fraction of bacteria that lives on plants and in water and soil.
A very, very small amount multiplied by trillions of trillions of cells of individual bacteria? As I said, even with efficiency far below 1% it would still mean the end of nearly all humanity on Earth within a few years.
I can see that you are quite deficient in the area of Machiavellian deviousness. But then again, you probably should take it as a compliment.
Consider this, just one example out of thousands: I make a version of one of the most common bacterium that is present everywhere, say e.coli, except that in addition to its usual cycle it produces very small (so that the strain on its metabolism is negligible) quantities of the VX nerve gas...
Then I release the thing into the wild. Because its a very, very common bacteria that lives everywhere, within weeks or perhaps months, there would be whole areas of the globe where the concentration of a potent chemical weapon of mass destruction exceeds lethal levels. Within a year the whole globe would be uninhabitable by any life-form with a nervous system susceptible to VX as the production of the gas would reach hundreds of tons per minute ...
Etc and so on. You simply underestimate the countless ways in which advanced bio-weapons can produce utter devastation...
See above. Sadly, you are very wrong indeed, although I too wish that it weren't so.
How so? The plague would attack everyone but only blond people would suffer massive organ failures, while others would merely get some fever and act as incubators and propagation vectors by sneezing the weapon onto the blond targets.
Again, there are countless ways of wreaking devastation that open up with easy availability of nano-scale-technologies and it only takes a sufficiently devious mind to find them ...
Its a nice sentiment except of course they will all use family members and close friends instead, who will then get the gravy passed back onto the crooks after they "retire" ....
Stopping corruption in governments will require much more radical measures than that method, which by the way was attempted to be applied many times before in many governments, with no results to speak of.
And so instead I will use one of the many other no-physical-hardware-contact methods available to me...
Unless you disconnect that computer from that SIPRNET thing entirely and make sure that it has no classified data on its HDD, you are pretty much screwed if it comes to stopping skilled people from getting stuff out of it.