I have never heard of a private business that "burns up" unspent money. Anyone caught doing that would jeopardize their job.
But it is a common practice for government departments, where it is much harder to fire anyone, and there is much less concern about saving money because managers are judged by the size of their budget (what they consume) rather than what they produce.
in the US usually the person that spends the most money on advertising wins
Part of the reason for this is that the person most likely to win attracts the most donations.
I believe that we, in the US, are getting to that point as well.
I don't think so. Every person who thinks we need to move further to the left is counterbalanced by someone else who wants to move right.
Everyone may be frustrated, but they are frustrated about different things, and desire different solutions. The current system is about as close to a consensus as we are going to get.
Americans used similar tactics to move the needles on civil rights, the Vietnam war
The most influential protests in these movements were non-violent. The protests that were violent were likely counterproductive.
... and the shitty police force in Baltimore.
The shittiness of the Baltimore PD has not changed. They have repeatedly been caught planting and falsifying evidence, with no more than administrative action against the criminal cops.
Perhaps there is room on both sides to stop acting like children, and learn to work together.
I don't think so. Every time Donald throws a tantrum, his base poll numbers go up, and congressional Republicans tremble in fear.
Likewise for Democrats. Nancy Pelosi was demonized by people like AOC last fall, yet now that she is standing up to Trump, her popularity with the progressive base has soared.
So far the shutdown has not affected me in the slightest. I wouldn't even know it was happening if I turned off the news.
The French need to decide what kind of country they want to be. Issues like these should be resolved democratically, not through vandalism. Yet France has a long history of caving in to violent demonstrators, which has made street demonstrations more and more popular, and made any sort of sensible economic reforms impossible.
The latest polls show that a majority of the French support the vandals and rioters.
It doesn't have to be that way. They should look at Italy as a country that manages to be economically dysfunctional without political violence. France could do the same.
Well, I would hope it would at least be a "fixed balace = 123.03;" because floating point is subject to precision errors and is not a good method of representing financial data.
Banks do not use floating point. They use integers, with the balance in cents. So $123.03 is stored as 12303.
Many banks now use 64 bit signed integers with the balance in hundredths of a cent. So a balance of $123.03 is stored internally as 1230300, and then rounded and shifted when displayed.
This will work until Jeff Bezo's account balance goes over $922 Trillion.
That happened because Cyprus does not control its own currency. America does. The Fed can handle any bank run by creating any amount of money needed.
Currency unions such as the West African Franc work well because the members have similar economies, and have a clear agreement that there will be no bailouts.
The Euro tries to unify countries as different as Cyprus and Germany, with very different levels of income, productivity, and cultural expectations of financial responsibility. The convergence of interest rates following the currency union clearly indicated that investors expected a bailout... and that is exactly what happened, with German and Dutch taxpayers subsidizing Greek and Cypriot profligacy.
It works the same in America, except the limit is $250k, and the FDIC fund is backstopped with tax dollars, so a big collapse that depleted the FDIC fund would mean the government "printing" money to make up the shortfall.
Will this lead to inflation? Unlikely. In a financial crisis, the big danger is deflation, not inflation. Following the 2008 crisis, the Fed "printed" $3.5 Trillion, and inflation remained near zero.
If the county recorder used a blockchain, it would not help you verify that the original birth certificate was valid. But it would verify that the birth certificate retrieved 40 years later is the same as the original.
Or we could go back to the original logic of having been punished erasing the crime and people having a second chance.
We tried that. The problem is that if a bank robber robs another bank, the bank is out a bit of money. If a child rapist rapes another child, another life is destroyed.
The problem is equating child rape with public urination. That is what our current system does.
What does blockchain provide in this case that standard digital signatures do not?
Distributed trust. If you trust one entity, and know you will trust that entity's successor, and their successor, etc., then you don't need a blockchain.
With a blockchain, you don't have to trust a single entity, you just need to trust that they will not collude to cheat you. For instance, I don't trust the US government, the Russian government, nor the Chinese government. But they trust each other even less than I trust them. So if all three verify a hash, it is almost certainly valid.
So let's say that public records do get altered. Then you still have the physical birth certificate.
When there is a difference between public records and physical documents, the physical document may be suspected as a forgery.
The reason it has to get signed by the attending physician and all the other hoops to jump through is precisely so that the physical certificate is self-authenticating.
Signatures can be forged. How else did Obama become president?
If there's only one authorized writer then you have a bog standard hash list.
You also want automatic distributed backups and integrity checks. Blockchain = hash list + distribution + integrity checks. If it makes you feel better, maybe we could call it something else.
The "novelty" of blockchain is that you can put it on the Internet and let any idiot write to it.
No. There is no requirement that a blockchain be publicly writable.
Committing to a stock transaction takes milliseconds using third party exchanges.
Committing may take a millisecond. Clearing the transaction can take far longer. Most small transactions are cleared internally within a single brokerage. They just match up buys and sells from their own client base, or make-market from their own account. But if there is a large transaction or an imbalance, and they need to go through the exchange or a dark pool, it can take days to clear.
it much more closely resembles git than a cryptocurrency and talking about it like it's based on the latter instead of the former is just talking in buzzwords.
Blockchains are not "based" on cryptocurrencies. It is the other way around. Cryptocurrencies are based on blockchains, but they are not the only applications, and non-CC blockchains can have very different characteristics. The one thing they have in common is that "trust" is distributed.
Comparing blockchains to git is a useful analogy, but there are significant differences. Git is designed to distribute content rather than "trust", commits can be spoofed, and there is no concept of resolving conflicting commits automatically.
Blockchain verifications can take over a week and be outright rejected because no one wants to spend the CPU cycles to do it.
This is true for cryptocurrencies, but not true for blockchains in general. CCs are based on proof-of-work and anyone can mine. Bitcoin has over 7000 active nodes, and Ethereum has over 25000.
For financial transactions, there would be a limited number of authorized writers, and no proof-of-work would be needed. Transactions could be done in minutes or even seconds, and at little cost.
One solution to the sex offender registry is MORE information, rather than less. One guy may be on the list for raping a four year old. Another guy may be on it for urinating in a public park. Perhaps we should distinguish between these.
A man in my neighborhood is on the list for having sex with his wife. At the time he was 18 and she was 15. Her parents disapproved of the relationship, and called the police. He accepted a plea bargain without understanding the consequences. They got married when she turned 18. Their son and my son are best friends. He must stay 300 yards from any school, can't go to PTA meetings, and has never met his son's teachers. Branding this guy for life is idiotic, since he is no danger to anyone, but that doesn't mean that the registry should be abolished for real predators.
Slashdot Mirror
These surveys are not like private industry surveys. They are not used to root out malcontents and the people responding are well protected.
Exactly. If you give the wrong answers, you will not be fired. You will just be assigned to the cubicle next to the photocopier machines.
Who gave you the idea that Republicans were libertarian?
Indeed. Libertarians believe in small government, elimination of subsidies, reduced military spending, and free trade.
This is the precise opposite of Trumpism, which is an ad-hoc blend of the dumbest ideas from both the left and right.
They essentially got free advertising from Netflix, and instead of saying 'thank you' decide to sue.
Perhaps. But litigation is more profitable than gratitude.
Netflix should have known better.
Imagine if Samsung tablets were advertised as having rounded corners "inspired by Apple."
I thought for sure that CYOA was generic as hell by this point.
It is. But Netflix specifically referenced Chooseco as an inspiration, without permission to do so.
That was stupid and amateurish. They are now going to get an extremely expensive lesson in intellectual property law.
What companies have you worked for where not spending your budget in one quarter gives you more the next quarter?
Profitable companies.
I have never heard of a private business that "burns up" unspent money. Anyone caught doing that would jeopardize their job.
But it is a common practice for government departments, where it is much harder to fire anyone, and there is much less concern about saving money because managers are judged by the size of their budget (what they consume) rather than what they produce.
in the US usually the person that spends the most money on advertising wins
Part of the reason for this is that the person most likely to win attracts the most donations.
I believe that we, in the US, are getting to that point as well.
I don't think so. Every person who thinks we need to move further to the left is counterbalanced by someone else who wants to move right.
Everyone may be frustrated, but they are frustrated about different things, and desire different solutions. The current system is about as close to a consensus as we are going to get.
Americans used similar tactics to move the needles on civil rights, the Vietnam war
The most influential protests in these movements were non-violent. The protests that were violent were likely counterproductive.
... and the shitty police force in Baltimore.
The shittiness of the Baltimore PD has not changed. They have repeatedly been caught planting and falsifying evidence, with no more than administrative action against the criminal cops.
Perhaps there is room on both sides to stop acting like children, and learn to work together.
I don't think so. Every time Donald throws a tantrum, his base poll numbers go up, and congressional Republicans tremble in fear.
Likewise for Democrats. Nancy Pelosi was demonized by people like AOC last fall, yet now that she is standing up to Trump, her popularity with the progressive base has soared.
So far the shutdown has not affected me in the slightest. I wouldn't even know it was happening if I turned off the news.
The French need to decide what kind of country they want to be. Issues like these should be resolved democratically, not through vandalism. Yet France has a long history of caving in to violent demonstrators, which has made street demonstrations more and more popular, and made any sort of sensible economic reforms impossible.
The latest polls show that a majority of the French support the vandals and rioters.
It doesn't have to be that way. They should look at Italy as a country that manages to be economically dysfunctional without political violence. France could do the same.
Explain the autobahn.
When I drove on the Autobahn, it was so congested that I averaged about 40km/hr.
It was as bad as I-405 in Los Angeles.
Well, I would hope it would at least be a "fixed balace = 123.03;" because floating point is subject to precision errors and is not a good method of representing financial data.
Banks do not use floating point. They use integers, with the balance in cents. So $123.03 is stored as 12303.
Many banks now use 64 bit signed integers with the balance in hundredths of a cent. So a balance of $123.03 is stored internally as 1230300, and then rounded and shifted when displayed.
This will work until Jeff Bezo's account balance goes over $922 Trillion.
Have you forgotten the 2013 Cyprus bank run ?
That happened because Cyprus does not control its own currency. America does. The Fed can handle any bank run by creating any amount of money needed.
Currency unions such as the West African Franc work well because the members have similar economies, and have a clear agreement that there will be no bailouts.
The Euro tries to unify countries as different as Cyprus and Germany, with very different levels of income, productivity, and cultural expectations of financial responsibility. The convergence of interest rates following the currency union clearly indicated that investors expected a bailout ... and that is exactly what happened, with German and Dutch taxpayers subsidizing Greek and Cypriot profligacy.
In Europe, deposits are typically insured up to 100000€, and this is backed by a fund into which the banks are required to pay, not the government.
It works the same in America, except the limit is $250k, and the FDIC fund is backstopped with tax dollars, so a big collapse that depleted the FDIC fund would mean the government "printing" money to make up the shortfall.
Will this lead to inflation? Unlikely. In a financial crisis, the big danger is deflation, not inflation. Following the 2008 crisis, the Fed "printed" $3.5 Trillion, and inflation remained near zero.
I think this is the most useless product I have ever heard of
I agree. It does nothing for those of us that didn't look so good even when we were young.
And how does that apply to a birth certificate?
If the county recorder used a blockchain, it would not help you verify that the original birth certificate was valid. But it would verify that the birth certificate retrieved 40 years later is the same as the original.
Or we could go back to the original logic of having been punished erasing the crime and people having a second chance.
We tried that. The problem is that if a bank robber robs another bank, the bank is out a bit of money. If a child rapist rapes another child, another life is destroyed.
The problem is equating child rape with public urination. That is what our current system does.
What does blockchain provide in this case that standard digital signatures do not?
Distributed trust. If you trust one entity, and know you will trust that entity's successor, and their successor, etc., then you don't need a blockchain.
With a blockchain, you don't have to trust a single entity, you just need to trust that they will not collude to cheat you. For instance, I don't trust the US government, the Russian government, nor the Chinese government. But they trust each other even less than I trust them. So if all three verify a hash, it is almost certainly valid.
So let's say that public records do get altered. Then you still have the physical birth certificate.
When there is a difference between public records and physical documents, the physical document may be suspected as a forgery.
The reason it has to get signed by the attending physician and all the other hoops to jump through is precisely so that the physical certificate is self-authenticating.
Signatures can be forged. How else did Obama become president?
If there's only one authorized writer then you have a bog standard hash list.
You also want automatic distributed backups and integrity checks. Blockchain = hash list + distribution + integrity checks. If it makes you feel better, maybe we could call it something else.
The "novelty" of blockchain is that you can put it on the Internet and let any idiot write to it.
No. There is no requirement that a blockchain be publicly writable.
The best solution would be a database where you use authentication to control access
You are assuming that authorization equals trust, and that all future authorized users will also be trusted, by everyone.
"Trust" means confidence in competence and diligence as well as trust in honesty.
If there is a lack of trust, then you need a database plus an audit trail, and automatic external backups. That is what a blockchain provides.
Committing to a stock transaction takes milliseconds using third party exchanges.
Committing may take a millisecond. Clearing the transaction can take far longer. Most small transactions are cleared internally within a single brokerage. They just match up buys and sells from their own client base, or make-market from their own account. But if there is a large transaction or an imbalance, and they need to go through the exchange or a dark pool, it can take days to clear.
it much more closely resembles git than a cryptocurrency and talking about it like it's based on the latter instead of the former is just talking in buzzwords.
Blockchains are not "based" on cryptocurrencies. It is the other way around. Cryptocurrencies are based on blockchains, but they are not the only applications, and non-CC blockchains can have very different characteristics. The one thing they have in common is that "trust" is distributed.
Comparing blockchains to git is a useful analogy, but there are significant differences. Git is designed to distribute content rather than "trust", commits can be spoofed, and there is no concept of resolving conflicting commits automatically.
Blockchain verifications can take over a week and be outright rejected because no one wants to spend the CPU cycles to do it.
This is true for cryptocurrencies, but not true for blockchains in general. CCs are based on proof-of-work and anyone can mine. Bitcoin has over 7000 active nodes, and Ethereum has over 25000.
For financial transactions, there would be a limited number of authorized writers, and no proof-of-work would be needed. Transactions could be done in minutes or even seconds, and at little cost.
One solution to the sex offender registry is MORE information, rather than less. One guy may be on the list for raping a four year old. Another guy may be on it for urinating in a public park. Perhaps we should distinguish between these.
A man in my neighborhood is on the list for having sex with his wife. At the time he was 18 and she was 15. Her parents disapproved of the relationship, and called the police. He accepted a plea bargain without understanding the consequences. They got married when she turned 18. Their son and my son are best friends. He must stay 300 yards from any school, can't go to PTA meetings, and has never met his son's teachers. Branding this guy for life is idiotic, since he is no danger to anyone, but that doesn't mean that the registry should be abolished for real predators.