Same deal with how wall street was looking at blockchain. You certainly don't need it if you have a trusted relationship
Finalizing a stock transaction can take several days, and involve a third party clearing house. This is because Wall Street organizations don't trust each other.
Blockchains could make this process far faster and more efficient.
If you think Wall Street institutions should trust each other, because, hey, they are big and reputable, then you may want to read up on Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brothers, and LTCM.
No reason to use a blockchain here. A blockchain is great because it is a public database without the need of a trusted entity.
If you consider the government to be, and always remain, a "trusted entity", then you are correct. If you think that corruption is possible, and public records may be destroyed or altered someday, then a blockchain makes that more difficult.
The tradeoff is, it is extremely inefficient.
Blockchains are not inherently inefficient. Cryptocurrencies are designed to be inefficient to throttle the generation of new coins. But there is no reason for a county clerk to use the same algorithm.
Well, it seems people really like their cell phones, computers, voice-controlled lights, and all those other luxuries of the ever-advancing modern society, so people keep working.
Those techno-luxuries cost little. Food and transportation costs have gone down since 1950. The big increase is in housing, and even there it is mostly because people today have much more living space. Houses today are twice the size, and families are half the size.
When I was a kid, I shared my bedroom with 3 siblings (two sets of bunkbeds), and the whole family took turns with one bathroom. Today, my kids each have their own room, and my wife and I each have a home office.
The subsidies stem back to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. That's when Americans realized that OMG it's possible for the country not to produce enough food to feed everyone.
This is nonsense. The dust bowl affected mostly Oklahoma and Kansas, and did NOT lead to food shortages. The problem during the depression was OVER PRODUCTION and FALLING PRICES. And the purpose of the subsidies was an attempt to pull land out of production, and raise prices to fight deflation.
This was part of the NIRA, which was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1935.
If it were totally 100% left up to the free market, the REAL situation we'd have with food supplies is that they'd wildly thrash back and forth between abundance and scarcity.
Most countries don't subsidize dairy, and many don't subsidize farms or food at all. Please provide some examples of the "thrashing" that occurs in these countries.
Its hard work to ramp up and ramp down farms and the needed generational skills. Most normal nations do all they can to keep their farms productive and producing so their nations will never face food shortages.
... and other countries have no subsidies at all. New Zealand has none. Do you think they are starving?
Subsidies are driven by politics, not by "preventing hunger".
The American Electoral College, which magnifies the power of small rural states, means that our system of subsidies is especially stupid. Even European farm subsides look sensible when compared with ours.
Swahili itself is the 8th most used L2 language, and it developed as a lingua franca for... non-local commerce.
Indeed. Intra-African trade is very low by world standards. African countries would benefit far more by lowering trade barriers with each other than from mortgaging their assets to China.
The verbs are a bastard though. Fuck knows how many tenses and subjunctives on top.
In Chinese, all of this is drop dead simple. There are no irregular verbs, no gendered pronouns (at least when spoken), tenses are handled either by context or by appending a grammatical particle that sets the tense for the entire sentence, not the individual verb, which makes way more sense.
Countries see what's up. The US is declining as world power, and China is the big rising star.
Latin was the default international language for more than a millennium after the fall of Rome.
French remained the language of diplomacy for a century after Waterloo.
There are some big barriers to Chinese becoming the default international language: 1. English has a huge head start. 2. Chinese is very hard to learn as a second language if your first is atonal. 3. Chinese is the first language in only a handful of countries. 50 countries have English as a first or official language. 4. Even in China, English is a prestige language, and most educated and ambitious people learn it. 5. Many countries are military allies of America, and look to America for security guarantees. English helps them interoperate. China has no real friends, and only a handful of allies (Cambodia and Pakistan) based on shared enemies (Vietnam and India respectively) not shared values.
Wrong. If you write the same text in English and Chinese, the Chinese will be significantly more compact.
Although Chinese is a bit slower to type, it is faster to read. Poor English readers sound out the letters phonetically. But proficient readers recognized the words visually. The difference is that Chinese, by its very nature, is read visually. So proficient readers can process it faster.
... and a terrible way to store information.
This is, of course, nonsense. But why do you think it is true?
Slashdot Mirror
Same deal with how wall street was looking at blockchain. You certainly don't need it if you have a trusted relationship
Finalizing a stock transaction can take several days, and involve a third party clearing house. This is because Wall Street organizations don't trust each other.
Blockchains could make this process far faster and more efficient.
If you think Wall Street institutions should trust each other, because, hey, they are big and reputable, then you may want to read up on Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brothers, and LTCM.
No reason to use a blockchain here. A blockchain is great because it is a public database without the need of a trusted entity.
If you consider the government to be, and always remain, a "trusted entity", then you are correct. If you think that corruption is possible, and public records may be destroyed or altered someday, then a blockchain makes that more difficult.
The tradeoff is, it is extremely inefficient.
Blockchains are not inherently inefficient. Cryptocurrencies are designed to be inefficient to throttle the generation of new coins. But there is no reason for a county clerk to use the same algorithm.
Does it also use 1.21 jigawatts of power to pull up the record and send it to you?
Appending information to a blockchain can be energy intensive. Reading it is not.
Even appending is not inherently energy intensive. If there is only one authorized writer, then no "proof of work" is needed.
Who cares? It is just two CEOs talking shit about each other's products. What matters is performance on actual realistic benchmarks.
But it depends on how you use your GPU. Until TensorFlow supports OpenCL, I am stuck with Nvidia.
Well, it seems people really like their cell phones, computers, voice-controlled lights, and all those other luxuries of the ever-advancing modern society, so people keep working.
Those techno-luxuries cost little. Food and transportation costs have gone down since 1950. The big increase is in housing, and even there it is mostly because people today have much more living space. Houses today are twice the size, and families are half the size.
When I was a kid, I shared my bedroom with 3 siblings (two sets of bunkbeds), and the whole family took turns with one bathroom. Today, my kids each have their own room, and my wife and I each have a home office.
Maybe I just haven't had my caffeine yet, but have there been any naval battles between equal-ish powers since WW2?
The closest was India vs Pakistan in 1971. 15 naval ships and 18 cargo ships sunk. Decisive Indian victory.
Several Arab-Israeli conflicts involved ships.
The Falklands War could be considered equal-ish if you include attacks on British ships by Argentina's land based aircraft.
Those things are matters of criminal record
The EU "right to be forgotten" includes criminal records, and other public records. The UK's RTBF also includes criminal convictions.
Right to be forgotten
(don't have to dock exactly to a charging port)
Have your use a modern drone? I have a DJI Mavic. Landing within an inch is easy even for a human.
... and caused less wear and tear on the landing struts, etc.
Is this supposed to be sarcasm? Or are you actually serious? 8 minutes of hovering will cause more wear on parts that actually matter.
I would probably be interested in $120,000 wireless charging solution.
You may want to apply to be a financial analyst for DoD. They would love you.
A fully autonomous drone could land and recharge at a ground station for a heck of a lot less than $120,000.
Yoghurt is cheaper than milk for me ... I don't really see the point.
Where is that?
Why would anyone make milk into yogurt if the yogurt is cheaper?
Where I am, milk is $3 per gallon. Yogurt is $0.60 per cup, or nearly $10 per gallon.
Decades of useful method lost to a few days of police publicity.
The same thing happened when the CIA publicly bragged about nailing OBL by tracking Al Qaeda's cell phones. They all went dark within minutes.
I'd buy yogurt daily
Get a yogurt maker, such as this one (which also makes great soup). Then you can make your own yogurt for the price of whole milk, and eat it fresh.
The subsidies stem back to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. That's when Americans realized that OMG it's possible for the country not to produce enough food to feed everyone.
This is nonsense. The dust bowl affected mostly Oklahoma and Kansas, and did NOT lead to food shortages. The problem during the depression was OVER PRODUCTION and FALLING PRICES. And the purpose of the subsidies was an attempt to pull land out of production, and raise prices to fight deflation.
This was part of the NIRA, which was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1935.
If it were totally 100% left up to the free market, the REAL situation we'd have with food supplies is that they'd wildly thrash back and forth between abundance and scarcity.
Most countries don't subsidize dairy, and many don't subsidize farms or food at all. Please provide some examples of the "thrashing" that occurs in these countries.
There's a reason why most countries regulate the dairy market.
What reason is that?
How come the countries that do NOT subsidize dairy have not seen the sky collapse?
Its hard work to ramp up and ramp down farms and the needed generational skills.
Most normal nations do all they can to keep their farms productive and producing so their nations will never face food shortages.
... and other countries have no subsidies at all. New Zealand has none. Do you think they are starving?
Subsidies are driven by politics, not by "preventing hunger".
The American Electoral College, which magnifies the power of small rural states, means that our system of subsidies is especially stupid. Even European farm subsides look sensible when compared with ours.
Indeed. If the possibility of a horrible violent death for you and your family does not keep you loyal nothing will.
Especially now knowing that the FBI will rat out their informers.
Swahili itself is the 8th most used L2 language, and it developed as a lingua franca for... non-local commerce.
Indeed. Intra-African trade is very low by world standards. African countries would benefit far more by lowering trade barriers with each other than from mortgaging their assets to China.
The verbs are a bastard though. Fuck knows how many tenses and subjunctives on top.
In Chinese, all of this is drop dead simple. There are no irregular verbs, no gendered pronouns (at least when spoken), tenses are handled either by context or by appending a grammatical particle that sets the tense for the entire sentence, not the individual verb, which makes way more sense.
The other latin languages aren't much better.
Spanish and Italian map directly from spelling to pronunciation.
So does Korean, and Japanese katakana/hiragana.
AFAIK Esperanto uses the same alphabet as English.
Correct, but Esperanto has standard pronunciation rules, and adds diacritic marks to some of the letters.
you have to learn by heart the pronunciation of every character?
Actually, you don't. Many hanzi have both a "meaning" radical and a "pronunciation" radical.
Learning the 2-3 thousand hanzi needed to read a newspaper is hard, but not that hard. A billion people have done it.
Countries see what's up. The US is declining as world power, and China is the big rising star.
Latin was the default international language for more than a millennium after the fall of Rome.
French remained the language of diplomacy for a century after Waterloo.
There are some big barriers to Chinese becoming the default international language:
1. English has a huge head start.
2. Chinese is very hard to learn as a second language if your first is atonal.
3. Chinese is the first language in only a handful of countries. 50 countries have English as a first or official language.
4. Even in China, English is a prestige language, and most educated and ambitious people learn it.
5. Many countries are military allies of America, and look to America for security guarantees. English helps them interoperate. China has no real friends, and only a handful of allies (Cambodia and Pakistan) based on shared enemies (Vietnam and India respectively) not shared values.
You think Kenya is crowded? It's less densely populated than Austria, Switzerland and Italy.
China isn't very crowded either, on average. By population density, it is 88th.
Western China has some immense empty spaces.
List of countries by population density
It's a stupid, inefficient writing system
Wrong. If you write the same text in English and Chinese, the Chinese will be significantly more compact.
Although Chinese is a bit slower to type, it is faster to read. Poor English readers sound out the letters phonetically. But proficient readers recognized the words visually. The difference is that Chinese, by its very nature, is read visually. So proficient readers can process it faster.
... and a terrible way to store information.
This is, of course, nonsense. But why do you think it is true?
As automation and AI eradicate the concept of human employment ...
Sure, whatever. Jobs have been automated away for the last 300 years ... yet we have a full employment economy.
So go get your "personal fulfillment", and let your robot earn your income. Good luck.