Even if they did, I'd wonder what point that is supposed to prove. It isn't as if assassinations haven't been bought with other currencies. Hell, I remember watching a Forensic Files episode where some guy bought an assassination with opals.
A Ponzi scheme requires constant additional funds from new investors in order to stay afloat. Think Social Security (which is the only Ponzi scheme that gets a free pass.)
Bitcoin has no such need. Bitcoin only has the same need as any other currency - it needs to be traded. If that requirement makes it a Ponzi scheme to you, then every world currency is a Ponzi scheme.
So the big question is, "are we willing to let the robots do all the work, and live surprisingly well and at the same time frugally due to government distribution of wealth, or keep our jobs and eliminate the productivity advances that give us all these advances?"
The day that robots can replace all of our jobs is quite simply the day that we no longer need to work to begin with. If that truly happened, you wouldn't really have a need for an economy - be it a free one or a command one.
Notice how relatively easy it is for some people to skirt through life without working at all these days and living better than even a rich person of 200 years ago. In the past that was exceptionally rare. (Karl Marx was actually one such person by the way; he wrote his communist manifesto after his rich daddy stopped giving him free money -- he WAS part of the bourgeois that he vilified, and when the rug was pulled from underneath him he couldn't take it.)
Think about it: If a robot planted, harvested, and cooked all of your meals, then why do you need an income to keep that going? You certainly don't need to pay anybody for it, after all.
Should things ever reach that place, it'll no longer be about what you need to do to make ends meet, but rather what you need to do to keep yourself entertained. That is where the expenses will lie, and likewise where the future jobs will end up. Think like how people with more money than sense like to do strange things, like collecting as many rare sports cars as they can or something like that. Everybody would be that way, only less pronounced in the case of the poor. Basically there will only be the rich and the very rich. (Think how Bill Murray is poor compared to Bill Gates, but neither are truly poor.)
I don't know what "ism" that would fall under, but that is my definitive and final answer to that question. Robot jobs will not be the end of civilization -- possibly a new renaissance if anything.
They aren't trying to use this information to harm you, rather they are trying to get to know you so that they can design products that you'll be more willing to pay them for. That means better things that improve your quality of life because they're doing a better job of what you want them to do.
It's kind of disturbing because they know a lot about you without actually knowing you. But, it's harmless. Personally I don't fall into the FUD about Google reading my gmails because I know an actual person really isn't interested in the "how's life treating you" letter I just got from my friend in England. Not only that, but no real person ever even reads it except for me.
You do actually benefit from this data being collected. Part of the cost of selling a product is actually in the process of selling it. If that cost can be lowered, then those savings eventually make their way to you.
The only bothersome part is that if any information exists about you in a database somewhere, the government CAN force it out of them legally, regardless of whether or not they want to share it. But that problem isn't caused by the advertisers or marketers, rather it's caused by the government.
Except they produce proteins which provide resistance to glyphosate, right? That would imply they are distinguishable, right? If they weren't, how would Monsanto be able to sue farmers for planting GM crops without their permission (which they do).
Let me be a little more precise: There are only 100,000 or so different proteins in nature; what we're changing is how they are arranged. You can identify a GMO plant with a DNA test, but once it reaches your plate, and further once it reaches your blood stream (which all food you eat eventually does) it's for all intents and purposes the same food.
This is why none of those tests linking GMO to any sort of health problems have ever lived up to scrutiny. Ever. Not a single one. They were all based on junk science.
A gene gun literally shotgun blasts cell DNA with the new genes stuck to metal particles hoping some sticks in the right spots; progeny are selected which express the desired trait but it can't be known if other areas of the DNA were adversely affected.
Yes it can, and further those scary sounding metal particles don't end up in the new plant.
The safety aspects of GMO crops are still up for debate (obviously!). I advocate caution is all. That and transparency. If they're so freakin' safe, why does Monsanto spend sooo much cash to prevent labeling?
I don't know whether or not they do that, but if they do I know why and I don't blame them. It's the same reason cell phone companies don't want labeling of radiation output of phones. It's a useless figure that will not impact public health in any way, yet it will inevitably be used as a bargaining tool by some to try to make some "low radiation phones" be preferable for no good reason at all, and therefore phones will needlessly cost more money to make in order to make them "safer". That inevitably means lower sales, and nothing was gained by anybody, except some smug politician now feels even more smug.
Further, I myself wholly reject the idea of GMO labeling, but not for this reason. There's already limited space available on food labels to the point that very vital information to my own personal health is omitted already, namely the potassium and phosphorus content of foods, which being on a renal diet I have to watch carefully. I don't expect the government to require those on the label (us kidney failure people are a small minority, and I don't expect the masses to bend to us unlike certain other minorities) but needs for my diet far outweigh a label as useless as one indicating whether or not the food has GMO in it, and the government if anything should take that into consideration, as well as vitamin k (for people with cirrhosis) and a whole slew of other things that are already omitted from labels due to space concerns long long LONG before we take into consideration whether some hippie doesn't "feel good" about his food.
That isn't true at all, in fact quite the opposite. The information age has empowered customers over the last two decades, and marketing departments have to work with this fact (the exact words I've heard used are "more powerful customers," which are customers described as having easier access to competitors as well as doing research on the internet.)
With a lot of the cheap stuff I buy, I've had so many of these companies follow up and ask me to write a review of their product, because it tends to be a lot harder to sell something with few reviews (or negative reviews) and that is a direct result of customer empowerment.
And I don't know what all this talk about shit products is either - the quality of everything I buy these days is much better than before, and I pay less for it. I very rarely have to replace something because the old one broke, it's almost always because I wanted something new and improved instead. I own a lot of material goods that are very nice, ranging from my Nexus 4 to my 55" Sony TV, both of which I paid peanuts for relative to what stuff used to cost a long time ago, and it's much better than the stuff I bought back when. If this so called "race to the bottom" of yours was true, then my Nexus 4 would be something worse than the 90's brick phone, and my old big rear projection 55" HDTV that cost $3,800 back in 2001 would have better picture quality than the 55" $1,500 LED-LCD HDTV I have now - yet it doesn't, it looks like garbage in comparison.
Personally I think these changes are working out great. I know you socialist types reject anything that isn't somehow "organic" or "wholesome" but I prefer working smart over working hard, and that's exactly what these changes are. Being able to avoid using somebody's services is a good thing because it frees up that labor resource to work on something else. On the down side you get frictional unemployment, but on the up side the economy grows. This is why today's poor are wealthier than ever, and food is cheaper than ever.
In other words, who needs a middle class when the poor have a higher standard of living today than the middle class and even some of the wealthy of any period earlier than the 60's? The difference between middle class after all is just an arbitrary number on a spreadsheet that some government bureaucrat decided upon.
Just for added giggles to debunk the organic movement, have a look at this from the American Cancer Society:
Are foods labeled "organic" more effective in lowering cancer risk?
The term organic is popularly used to designate plant foods grown without pesticides and genetic modifications. At this time, no research exists to demonstrate whether such foods are more effective in reducing cancer risk than are similar foods produced by other farming methods.
Do pesticides in foods cause cancer?
Pesticides and herbicides can be toxic when used improperly in industrial, agricultural, or other occupational settings. Although vegetables and fruits sometimes contain low levels of these chemicals, overwhelming scientific evidence supports the overall health benefits and cancer-protective effects of eating vegetables and fruits. At present there is no evidence that residues of pesticides and herbicides at the low doses found in foods increase the risk of cancer, but fruits and vegetables should be washed thoroughly before eating.
If you just object to the idea of pesticides, then organic isn't your solution either, as virtually ALL organic farmers who sell their crops commercially use pesticides. Rather instead of synthetic pesticides, they use much larger quantities of "natural" (and I use that term loosely) pesticides.
The anti-GMO movement is every bit as destructive as the anti-vaccine movement, perhaps more so. They basically want to take the green revolution, which has ended famine in SOO many countries, and throw it away just because it makes them feel better about themselves. Sure, they might have the money to blow on organic food that costs a lot more and has no scientifically proven benefits, but poor people do not.
Probably because in the end, these foods are chemically indistinguishable from non-GMO plants.
Keep in mind that every time you breed a plant, you have thousands of genes that mutate in unknown ways; we have no idea what kind of change might take place in that plant, and it's impractical to ever know. But, we assume they're safe anyways - which isn't a bad idea, it's worked for thousands of years after all.
Yet in the case of GMO, we have one very small and very controlled deliberate mutation that makes them resistant to glyphosate, we know precisely what it does, akin to other plants that are naturally resistant...and HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE, THIS CAN'T BE SAFE TO EAT!
Really, in light of the second paragraph, is the third at all rational? Think about it for a minute.
Contrast to that of pharmaceuticals where we're looking at a chemical structure that flat out hasn't ever been put inside of a human body before. In the case of a GMO plant, what you are consuming from the plant might have a different protein pattern, but by the time they reach your plate they aren't distinguishable from non-GMO plants. This is mainly because there are so many variations from plant to plant that without doing a DNA analysis you aren't going to tell one minor strain from another very easily.
How would creationists be more dangerous? If anti-GMO people had their way, we'd effectively roll back the green revolution, and famine would return to India, China, and various parts of Eastern Europe. Africa's famine would get much worse.
Creationists at the worst might get a public school textbook changed in Texas. People might get dumber, but nobody will die.
I'd say climate change deniers won't hurt either. We've already seen periods much warmer than the current one, and the result has always been increased biodiversity and "greener" terrain (literally, much more prosperous plantlife.) These periods also are accompanied by CO2 levels about 18 times what we have right now. We are actually heading for another one of these in a few million years, regardless of whether or not mankind exists (search google for "pangea ultima", which current earth sciences say is inevitable.) Whether it happens by us, or it happens naturally, I'm not sure what difference it makes in the end.
A big difference to the Stepford Wives community we lived in in New England. More power to the folks in HILO. right on folks.
I very much doubt that, especially if you believe everything you just said above.
Conventional farming cannot last long term. Period. The green revolution is the whole reason most of us aren't starving right now, and being against GMO's is attempting to roll agriculture back to before the green revolution. That means your most basic needs become a LOT more expensive, and your economy has to now devote more of its resources towards food production instead of technology advancement.
Sure, eat what you want, but don't come running to the US for aid packages when famine hits, because you've been warned about that pandora's box you're opening up. The same warnings were given to the anti-vaccine movement, and they're just now starting to see the error of their ways (The data is in: Non-vaccined kids have not had reduced autism rates, however they do have increased fatalities caused by what are otherwise third world problems while living in a first world country.)
The science doesn't support any of the claims of the anti-GMO or anti-vaccine movements.
To really understand why this is wrong, you have to fundamentally understand what a fiat currency is. It's more or less simply a store of value.
Take for example the ruble after the collapse of the USSR. Supposedly communist right? Well, people had already been trading in currencies (sorry but Marx is wrong and always will be wrong, no matter how hard you try, private property and therefore money will never go away) and during the lifespan of the USSR that was the ruble. However when the USSR collapsed, the ruble went with it. People still needed to have a store of value until something came to replace it (barter only systems are simply incapable of fostering even seemingly dead economies -- liquidity is required for any kind of fast trading to occur, which barter does not provide.)
So what do they do? Well, turned out that people resorted to using cigarettes and vodka as currency. A single cigarette was the smallest division, a pack was larger of course, and a bottle of vodka was worth the most. You really didn't need a country or any large organization to keep this afloat and regulated. The problem with vodka and cigarettes is that they're rather easy to make, so a more well defined currency eventually replaced them (the new ruble,) but meanwhile the Russians didn't have to have somebody step in and say "use this."
This isn't the only example -- things that have been used as currencies also include coffee beans and shark teeth. These don't require governments to regulate the supply of, but they are inherently inferior because there's basically a limitless supply of them.
Bitcoin is the same deal as these, only it doesn't have the problem of being easy to create more (the total number of bitcoins that can exist already exist, by the way, just not all of them have been claimed yet.) Because of that, it is interesting to see where bitcoin will go that these previous currencies have not because they could not.
I did. I traded most of what I had for just over a grand. Probably wasn't a good idea because the value went up after that (though now it's about the same value as what I sold it at.)
Really you can say the same thing about any fiat currency.
Like playing a game of poker and saying "Ok, red chips are worth $1, white chips $5, and blue chips $10". Even the US dollar is this way -- its value is very much arbitrary.
Now just because it is only worth whatever you think its worth does not necessarily make it worth nothing.
Could have something to do with PETA killing more animals than just about any so called "animal shelter" out there.
I was reading a commentary a while back about a veterinarian who had some dogs that she gave a clean bill of health and were well mannered to be adoptable. She heard good things about PETA (who hasn't?) and sent them there. Turned out later that PETA euthanized all of them. PETA's reasoning is that they want to end the ownership of animals as pets, and euthanasia is preferred over adoption.
I can't be assed to find it right now, but you can start here:
Actually what I find more disturbing than a biased juror is how Obama permitted apple to sell its phones even though samsung won a ban legally, yet didn't grant the same favor to samsung in the exact same circumstances. That's pretty obvious favoritism, and unlike the biased juror, it's perfectly legal and not subject to appeal.
Actually California wouldn't be able to stand on its own; not at all.
Without Arizona, California would be living in the dark. Literally. Arizona provides a huge chunk of the electrons that migrate through California's power grid.
I don't know the exact reasons why (some say it's due to "hippie" liberal politicians not wanting to harm the earth, some say due to greedy private enterprises wanting to drive the costs of electricity up) but regardless of the cause, California outright refuses to upgrade its power grid to supply adequate levels of electricity for its own consumption. Even with Arizona providing as much as it does, California still has to resort to rolling brownouts just to keep its nose above the water (don't confuse these with rolling blackouts.)
No you don't, but I think it's actually a bit more fun to. If you've only lived in the Southwest US, I can understand why what you perceive as "Latino" culture might bore you, mainly because most of what you see is Mexican. Cubans are some nice people to hang around and they like to party, same with Peurto Ricans; I tend to like both of their cultures a lot better than Mexican culture, which is rather boring in comparison. Another thing I like about Cubans is they hate socialism (mainly because they've lived it and have seen first hand what it does.)
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Even if they did, I'd wonder what point that is supposed to prove. It isn't as if assassinations haven't been bought with other currencies. Hell, I remember watching a Forensic Files episode where some guy bought an assassination with opals.
A Ponzi scheme requires constant additional funds from new investors in order to stay afloat. Think Social Security (which is the only Ponzi scheme that gets a free pass.)
Bitcoin has no such need. Bitcoin only has the same need as any other currency - it needs to be traded. If that requirement makes it a Ponzi scheme to you, then every world currency is a Ponzi scheme.
So the big question is, "are we willing to let the robots do all the work, and live surprisingly well and at the same time frugally due to government distribution of wealth, or keep our jobs and eliminate the productivity advances that give us all these advances?"
The day that robots can replace all of our jobs is quite simply the day that we no longer need to work to begin with. If that truly happened, you wouldn't really have a need for an economy - be it a free one or a command one.
Notice how relatively easy it is for some people to skirt through life without working at all these days and living better than even a rich person of 200 years ago. In the past that was exceptionally rare. (Karl Marx was actually one such person by the way; he wrote his communist manifesto after his rich daddy stopped giving him free money -- he WAS part of the bourgeois that he vilified, and when the rug was pulled from underneath him he couldn't take it.)
Think about it: If a robot planted, harvested, and cooked all of your meals, then why do you need an income to keep that going? You certainly don't need to pay anybody for it, after all.
Should things ever reach that place, it'll no longer be about what you need to do to make ends meet, but rather what you need to do to keep yourself entertained. That is where the expenses will lie, and likewise where the future jobs will end up. Think like how people with more money than sense like to do strange things, like collecting as many rare sports cars as they can or something like that. Everybody would be that way, only less pronounced in the case of the poor. Basically there will only be the rich and the very rich. (Think how Bill Murray is poor compared to Bill Gates, but neither are truly poor.)
I don't know what "ism" that would fall under, but that is my definitive and final answer to that question. Robot jobs will not be the end of civilization -- possibly a new renaissance if anything.
I'm not terrified at all.
They aren't trying to use this information to harm you, rather they are trying to get to know you so that they can design products that you'll be more willing to pay them for. That means better things that improve your quality of life because they're doing a better job of what you want them to do.
It's kind of disturbing because they know a lot about you without actually knowing you. But, it's harmless. Personally I don't fall into the FUD about Google reading my gmails because I know an actual person really isn't interested in the "how's life treating you" letter I just got from my friend in England. Not only that, but no real person ever even reads it except for me.
You do actually benefit from this data being collected. Part of the cost of selling a product is actually in the process of selling it. If that cost can be lowered, then those savings eventually make their way to you.
The only bothersome part is that if any information exists about you in a database somewhere, the government CAN force it out of them legally, regardless of whether or not they want to share it. But that problem isn't caused by the advertisers or marketers, rather it's caused by the government.
Two potential methods here:
http://www.amazon.com/40-Cubic-Foot-Nitrogen-Tank/dp/B0041UWB7U
No firearms license required!
Except they produce proteins which provide resistance to glyphosate, right? That would imply they are distinguishable, right? If they weren't, how would Monsanto be able to sue farmers for planting GM crops without their permission (which they do).
Let me be a little more precise: There are only 100,000 or so different proteins in nature; what we're changing is how they are arranged. You can identify a GMO plant with a DNA test, but once it reaches your plate, and further once it reaches your blood stream (which all food you eat eventually does) it's for all intents and purposes the same food.
This is why none of those tests linking GMO to any sort of health problems have ever lived up to scrutiny. Ever. Not a single one. They were all based on junk science.
A gene gun literally shotgun blasts cell DNA with the new genes stuck to metal particles hoping some sticks in the right spots; progeny are selected which express the desired trait but it can't be known if other areas of the DNA were adversely affected.
Yes it can, and further those scary sounding metal particles don't end up in the new plant.
The safety aspects of GMO crops are still up for debate (obviously!). I advocate caution is all. That and transparency. If they're so freakin' safe, why does Monsanto spend sooo much cash to prevent labeling?
I don't know whether or not they do that, but if they do I know why and I don't blame them. It's the same reason cell phone companies don't want labeling of radiation output of phones. It's a useless figure that will not impact public health in any way, yet it will inevitably be used as a bargaining tool by some to try to make some "low radiation phones" be preferable for no good reason at all, and therefore phones will needlessly cost more money to make in order to make them "safer". That inevitably means lower sales, and nothing was gained by anybody, except some smug politician now feels even more smug.
Further, I myself wholly reject the idea of GMO labeling, but not for this reason. There's already limited space available on food labels to the point that very vital information to my own personal health is omitted already, namely the potassium and phosphorus content of foods, which being on a renal diet I have to watch carefully. I don't expect the government to require those on the label (us kidney failure people are a small minority, and I don't expect the masses to bend to us unlike certain other minorities) but needs for my diet far outweigh a label as useless as one indicating whether or not the food has GMO in it, and the government if anything should take that into consideration, as well as vitamin k (for people with cirrhosis) and a whole slew of other things that are already omitted from labels due to space concerns long long LONG before we take into consideration whether some hippie doesn't "feel good" about his food.
That isn't true at all, in fact quite the opposite. The information age has empowered customers over the last two decades, and marketing departments have to work with this fact (the exact words I've heard used are "more powerful customers," which are customers described as having easier access to competitors as well as doing research on the internet.)
With a lot of the cheap stuff I buy, I've had so many of these companies follow up and ask me to write a review of their product, because it tends to be a lot harder to sell something with few reviews (or negative reviews) and that is a direct result of customer empowerment.
And I don't know what all this talk about shit products is either - the quality of everything I buy these days is much better than before, and I pay less for it. I very rarely have to replace something because the old one broke, it's almost always because I wanted something new and improved instead. I own a lot of material goods that are very nice, ranging from my Nexus 4 to my 55" Sony TV, both of which I paid peanuts for relative to what stuff used to cost a long time ago, and it's much better than the stuff I bought back when. If this so called "race to the bottom" of yours was true, then my Nexus 4 would be something worse than the 90's brick phone, and my old big rear projection 55" HDTV that cost $3,800 back in 2001 would have better picture quality than the 55" $1,500 LED-LCD HDTV I have now - yet it doesn't, it looks like garbage in comparison.
Personally I think these changes are working out great. I know you socialist types reject anything that isn't somehow "organic" or "wholesome" but I prefer working smart over working hard, and that's exactly what these changes are. Being able to avoid using somebody's services is a good thing because it frees up that labor resource to work on something else. On the down side you get frictional unemployment, but on the up side the economy grows. This is why today's poor are wealthier than ever, and food is cheaper than ever.
In other words, who needs a middle class when the poor have a higher standard of living today than the middle class and even some of the wealthy of any period earlier than the 60's? The difference between middle class after all is just an arbitrary number on a spreadsheet that some government bureaucrat decided upon.
So what you're saying is we need global warming to cancel it out?
Just for added giggles to debunk the organic movement, have a look at this from the American Cancer Society:
Are foods labeled "organic" more effective in lowering cancer risk?
The term organic is popularly used to designate plant foods grown without pesticides and genetic modifications. At this time, no research exists to demonstrate whether such foods are more effective in reducing cancer risk than are similar foods produced by other farming methods.
Do pesticides in foods cause cancer?
Pesticides and herbicides can be toxic when used improperly in industrial, agricultural, or other occupational settings. Although vegetables and fruits sometimes contain low levels of these chemicals, overwhelming scientific evidence supports the overall health benefits and cancer-protective effects of eating vegetables and fruits. At present there is no evidence that residues of pesticides and herbicides at the low doses found in foods increase the risk of cancer, but fruits and vegetables should be washed thoroughly before eating.
http://www.cancer.org/healthy/eathealthygetactive/acsguidelinesonnutritionphysicalactivityforcancerprevention/acs-guidelines-on-nutrition-and-physical-activity-for-cancer-prevention-diet-cancer-questions
If you just object to the idea of pesticides, then organic isn't your solution either, as virtually ALL organic farmers who sell their crops commercially use pesticides. Rather instead of synthetic pesticides, they use much larger quantities of "natural" (and I use that term loosely) pesticides.
The anti-GMO movement is every bit as destructive as the anti-vaccine movement, perhaps more so. They basically want to take the green revolution, which has ended famine in SOO many countries, and throw it away just because it makes them feel better about themselves. Sure, they might have the money to blow on organic food that costs a lot more and has no scientifically proven benefits, but poor people do not.
Probably because in the end, these foods are chemically indistinguishable from non-GMO plants.
Keep in mind that every time you breed a plant, you have thousands of genes that mutate in unknown ways; we have no idea what kind of change might take place in that plant, and it's impractical to ever know. But, we assume they're safe anyways - which isn't a bad idea, it's worked for thousands of years after all.
Yet in the case of GMO, we have one very small and very controlled deliberate mutation that makes them resistant to glyphosate, we know precisely what it does, akin to other plants that are naturally resistant...and HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE, THIS CAN'T BE SAFE TO EAT!
Really, in light of the second paragraph, is the third at all rational? Think about it for a minute.
Contrast to that of pharmaceuticals where we're looking at a chemical structure that flat out hasn't ever been put inside of a human body before. In the case of a GMO plant, what you are consuming from the plant might have a different protein pattern, but by the time they reach your plate they aren't distinguishable from non-GMO plants. This is mainly because there are so many variations from plant to plant that without doing a DNA analysis you aren't going to tell one minor strain from another very easily.
How would creationists be more dangerous? If anti-GMO people had their way, we'd effectively roll back the green revolution, and famine would return to India, China, and various parts of Eastern Europe. Africa's famine would get much worse.
Creationists at the worst might get a public school textbook changed in Texas. People might get dumber, but nobody will die.
I'd say climate change deniers won't hurt either. We've already seen periods much warmer than the current one, and the result has always been increased biodiversity and "greener" terrain (literally, much more prosperous plantlife.) These periods also are accompanied by CO2 levels about 18 times what we have right now. We are actually heading for another one of these in a few million years, regardless of whether or not mankind exists (search google for "pangea ultima", which current earth sciences say is inevitable.) Whether it happens by us, or it happens naturally, I'm not sure what difference it makes in the end.
Hell, who am I kidding, they'll come running to us anyways, and we'll give them aid packages anyways. They always do, and we always do.
A big difference to the Stepford Wives community we lived in in New England. More power to the folks in HILO. right on folks.
I very much doubt that, especially if you believe everything you just said above.
Conventional farming cannot last long term. Period. The green revolution is the whole reason most of us aren't starving right now, and being against GMO's is attempting to roll agriculture back to before the green revolution. That means your most basic needs become a LOT more expensive, and your economy has to now devote more of its resources towards food production instead of technology advancement.
Sure, eat what you want, but don't come running to the US for aid packages when famine hits, because you've been warned about that pandora's box you're opening up. The same warnings were given to the anti-vaccine movement, and they're just now starting to see the error of their ways (The data is in: Non-vaccined kids have not had reduced autism rates, however they do have increased fatalities caused by what are otherwise third world problems while living in a first world country.)
The science doesn't support any of the claims of the anti-GMO or anti-vaccine movements.
To really understand why this is wrong, you have to fundamentally understand what a fiat currency is. It's more or less simply a store of value.
Take for example the ruble after the collapse of the USSR. Supposedly communist right? Well, people had already been trading in currencies (sorry but Marx is wrong and always will be wrong, no matter how hard you try, private property and therefore money will never go away) and during the lifespan of the USSR that was the ruble. However when the USSR collapsed, the ruble went with it. People still needed to have a store of value until something came to replace it (barter only systems are simply incapable of fostering even seemingly dead economies -- liquidity is required for any kind of fast trading to occur, which barter does not provide.)
So what do they do? Well, turned out that people resorted to using cigarettes and vodka as currency. A single cigarette was the smallest division, a pack was larger of course, and a bottle of vodka was worth the most. You really didn't need a country or any large organization to keep this afloat and regulated. The problem with vodka and cigarettes is that they're rather easy to make, so a more well defined currency eventually replaced them (the new ruble,) but meanwhile the Russians didn't have to have somebody step in and say "use this."
This isn't the only example -- things that have been used as currencies also include coffee beans and shark teeth. These don't require governments to regulate the supply of, but they are inherently inferior because there's basically a limitless supply of them.
Bitcoin is the same deal as these, only it doesn't have the problem of being easy to create more (the total number of bitcoins that can exist already exist, by the way, just not all of them have been claimed yet.) Because of that, it is interesting to see where bitcoin will go that these previous currencies have not because they could not.
Sure you can copy the concept, but not the actual coin. The US dollar doesn't actually have that advantage, but bitcoin does.
I did. I traded most of what I had for just over a grand. Probably wasn't a good idea because the value went up after that (though now it's about the same value as what I sold it at.)
Really you can say the same thing about any fiat currency.
Like playing a game of poker and saying "Ok, red chips are worth $1, white chips $5, and blue chips $10". Even the US dollar is this way -- its value is very much arbitrary.
Now just because it is only worth whatever you think its worth does not necessarily make it worth nothing.
PETA puts animal welfare above that of humans
Well publicly yes, but privately they actually don't. It's pretty well documented that they don't.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-j-winograd/peta-kills-puppies-kittens_b_2979220.html
Could have something to do with PETA killing more animals than just about any so called "animal shelter" out there.
I was reading a commentary a while back about a veterinarian who had some dogs that she gave a clean bill of health and were well mannered to be adoptable. She heard good things about PETA (who hasn't?) and sent them there. Turned out later that PETA euthanized all of them. PETA's reasoning is that they want to end the ownership of animals as pets, and euthanasia is preferred over adoption.
I can't be assed to find it right now, but you can start here:
http://www.petakillsanimals.com/
PETA not just kills but also neglects and abuses:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-j-winograd/peta-kills-puppies-kittens_b_2979220.html
Except there won't be any dual booting. Think modernmix, only with Android apps instead of the cheesy Metro apps.
This.
Though I'm probably the only person I know who almost never posts to facebook.
Actually what I find more disturbing than a biased juror is how Obama permitted apple to sell its phones even though samsung won a ban legally, yet didn't grant the same favor to samsung in the exact same circumstances. That's pretty obvious favoritism, and unlike the biased juror, it's perfectly legal and not subject to appeal.
Actually California wouldn't be able to stand on its own; not at all.
Without Arizona, California would be living in the dark. Literally. Arizona provides a huge chunk of the electrons that migrate through California's power grid.
I don't know the exact reasons why (some say it's due to "hippie" liberal politicians not wanting to harm the earth, some say due to greedy private enterprises wanting to drive the costs of electricity up) but regardless of the cause, California outright refuses to upgrade its power grid to supply adequate levels of electricity for its own consumption. Even with Arizona providing as much as it does, California still has to resort to rolling brownouts just to keep its nose above the water (don't confuse these with rolling blackouts.)
In that case they'd know that no amount of protesting will reduce how much somebody values their property.
Now terrorism and/or violent crime on the other hand can devalue property. Is that what they're willing to do?
No you don't, but I think it's actually a bit more fun to. If you've only lived in the Southwest US, I can understand why what you perceive as "Latino" culture might bore you, mainly because most of what you see is Mexican. Cubans are some nice people to hang around and they like to party, same with Peurto Ricans; I tend to like both of their cultures a lot better than Mexican culture, which is rather boring in comparison. Another thing I like about Cubans is they hate socialism (mainly because they've lived it and have seen first hand what it does.)