Man, would I love to! Sooo much pork, waste, corruption, and outright thievery in the DoD budget & spending!
I have no sacred cows here. I don't care a damn what part of government we're talking about, if it has waste, corruption, violates civil rights/the Constitution, isn't even actually allowed for the fed to do by the plain reading of the Constitution, etc etc, then that thing needs serious auditing/reductions or elimination altogether.
"Sustainability" has become a buzz-word these days, those principles should be kept in mind regarding the US federal government, as on the current path it is unsustainable both economically and in the context of a reasonably free and open society.
Of *course* these "cyberweapons" are ineffective against ISIS!
These weapons and the entire current US surveillance infrastructure were designed from their inceptions to monitor and control the US population and their digital communications. It is entirely unsuited to combating external threats.
That's like using a hammer on a machine-screw. Duh! Wrong tool for the job.
It's either that, or the US government has known beforehand of past attacks and allowed them to go forward and kill innocent people to stir up fear and panic so the populace will be willing to let them take away and violate the people's rights, freedoms, and privacy.
They are either so incompetent they should be removed from power, or they are totalitarian/authoritarian, oath-violating, power-seeking, criminal, seditious, corrupt, shitheads that should be hung by the neck from the nearest tall object and left up as an object lesson. I leave the decision to the reader.
You use that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Less money" =/= "defunded"
The core, really important stuff that pretty much everyone would agree is important like keeping rivers, lakes, etc from becoming polluted, helping keep air quality at reasonable levels, help police against dumping of toxic/hazardous substances, etc, all that and more is a relatively minor part of the EPA bureaucratic behemoth and their commensurately-astronomical annual budget.
EPA could even afford to better-fund and devote more human resources to those important functions with less dead-weight to carry on the books, much of which is just a way to funnel money to political allies/cronies in the agency and in the countless private sector government contractors, K-Street lobbyists, and public-sector labor unions. I wouldn't feel nearly so bad about all our tax money the EPA received if nearly all of it was spent on combating good old regular, everyday, industrial and societal pollution.
Follow the money. Much if not most is *not* going towards what most people would consider reasonable and logical things for an environmental agency to spend money on.
We have developed a network that allows essentially instantaneous planetwide communication - and somehow think that delaying entertainment for months and years is a GOOD idea that will not be circumvented by any means available.
Including illegal ones.
Well, of *course*! That's the point!
The only power government has besides taxation is cracking down on criminals who break the law. Well, the government wants more power over people so it makes more of them into criminals. Then with selective enforcement suddenly millions of people have a legal Damocles Sword hanging over their heads with government holding the rope. Well, holding the rope without letting go only as long as you toe the line, comply, and keep your mouth shut.
If you're *not* on the 'watchlists' of those who casually and daily commit mass violations of primary civil rights while making a mockery of the Rule of Law, what does that say about *you*?;)
WTF!?!? A "secret" law? If the SCOTUS is OK with this, fuck the entire SCOTUS up their collective asses sideways with a rusty lawnmower blade! Twice on Tuesdays! There is no Rule of Law left in this shithole. The US government has lost all legitimacy as it no longer recognizes any limits to it's powers. The nutcases can shoot them all, for all I care. They're all criminals and usurpers of legitimate power.
The violent liberal Bernie Bro who attacked people with a rifle this morning? The FBI says that more people are beaten to death every year with pipes, baseball bats, and bare hands then are killed with any sort of long gun (rifles, shotguns, etc) and that includes hunting accidents, suicides and the rest.
What scares them about long-guns is that a guy with a rifle can kill a VIP from a distance with no warning from a concealed position. They could care less about blacks killing each other with pistols in the inner-cities.
It would be nearly impossible to get near enough to a high-level VIP with a competent security detail to use a pistol effectively. Someone could be 300-400 yards or more distant and have an excellent chance for a kill-shot on a VIP with a security detail, using a 'scoped rifle. Soros must sweat like a pig every time he has to be outside in the open.
I'd have bigger problems to worry about under a small weak government. Like having my life savings stolen by all the criminals.
No, you would not. Stop with the absolutism. Not every part of government gets equal resources and funding nor identical increases/decreases in them. If anything, being able to devote more resources to effective enforcement due to reductions in government spending in other areas plus a reduction in duplicative bureaucracy and the red-tape they engender would mean *more* criminals are caught quicker, and with lower overall costs.
Now, that program to fund studies that put shrimp on tiny treadmills? Yeah, we can much better use that money elsewhere. Like government oversight and ethics enforcement. (I know, the shrimp-study is old, but it gets the point across and I don't have time to search for the latest ridiculous gov. program that you know are out there in droves)
...it is more effective to fix the broken machine than suffer the process of replacing it.
The problem is that too much auxiliary crap has been hooked into the machine, to the point that the original core is barely if at all visible and the machine tasked to purposes the machine was never designed for, and all this crap has taken on a life of it's own and infects any parts not already suborned.
You'll never fix the machine, hell you'll never be actually able to get to the actual machine to do *anything* meaningful, until you un-crap-ify it first. It's much easier, faster, and takes less effort to change the course of a destroyer than an aircraft carrier.
If you want a good, generally non-corrupt, responsive, and caring government, then that government must be small and weak enough for those in it to actually, truly, fear the anger of citizens.
Don't you understand? We need guns around to fix the problems caused by having guns around!
Guns are the genie out of the bottle, the cat out of the bag, the horses that have left the barn, the bell that's rung. There's simply no practical way to eliminate guns being a part of American society.
Even enacting an East German Stasi-style police state could not stop people in the US from having and obtaining firearms. There are far too many guns in circulation already to eliminate, plus the US has very porous land borders which would promote the mass smuggling of firearms into the US, and those would be regular full-auto military-style, as why not if they're all illegal anyway? So we go from MS13, Crips, Bloods, using semi-auto pistols and semi-auto rifles, to full-on military fully-automatic weapons. And since they'll be dealing with foreign arms dealers, they can also get grenades, RPGs, landmines, etc etc.
Being that the reality is that there will *always* be criminals with guns, it is only sensible to NOT disarm law-abiding, peaceful citizens and deprive them of the natural right to self-defense.
There are more good people than bad people. Allowing people to arm themselves means there will be more good people with a gun than bad people with a gun. Making guns illegal merely removes the guns from the good people. Bad people don't care about laws.
Wrong. DOE standards updates are required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act and Energy Policy Acts
And?
What recourse do the courts have if the Executive Branch simply ignores/stonewalls them? Remember, the Executive Branch enforces laws, not the Judicial Branch.
There *is* precedent set by Andrew Jackson:
"John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." -- Andrew Jackson on Worcester v. Georgia
That's not even taking into account law/decision-flouting and stonewalling by relatively-recent past administrations.
Let's say your a small company, doing will in the local scene and want to expand to neighboring states. It's not so fun to learn that they would have different standards which make your product illegal. It works a lot better for common markets to have the same standards.
Nothing stops the States from forming some sort of commission in order to harmonize standards between each other where needed. The Feds could even provide various resources, guidance, experts, and data to help.
On average, the more local the law/regulation is, the more efficient, low-impact, and cost-effective it is, and so more people will be inclined to participate, raising compliance and therefor better-fulfilling the initial goals of the law/regulation.
The antidote for corruption and abuse of the legislative system is anti-corruption enforcement. Not anarchy.
Not that I advocate for anarchy, but I find your stark cognitive-dissonance absolutely breathtaking in expecting the government, the one that you, yourself, said was corrupt and the legislative system abused, to actually enforce the laws (that they're already breaking!) on themselves!!
Like just about every other "alliance" of large corporations, they give themselves some bullshit name to window dress the fact that they are looking to screw people over one way or another.
In another day and age, back before crony-capitalism passed the tipping-point and jumped the shark, they had another name for a group of leading corporations in an industry working together to control a market, set prices, and lobby for laws.
A "cartel".
But, that was before the money and resources the corporations offered those in power made them realize that "cartels" are really "alliances" in many cases and are now a good thing.
Slashdot editors, I don't get the focused vendetta against Uber here.
What's not to hate about Uber from a Progressive point of view, which we know is how most/. editors tend to heavily lean?
Uber is disrupting the taxi industry which in many places is unionized, and operated on corrupt medallion-systems in many areas. It also disrupts the wage-slave/weekly-paycheck dynamic. All of which Progressives heavily support. Uber gives people alternative choices outside of the typical employer/employee paradigm, and Progressives don't like people having choices outside the Progressive's preferred range of "guided" choices.
Yes, as Uber is such a stick-in-the-eye (along with similar disruptive businesses like AirBnB) to nearly all Progressive principles, it's no surprise at all that SlashProg editors post these sorts of hit-piece articles regarding Uber/Lyft/AirBnB/etc.
The stench of Collectivism and Social Justice is strong on Slashdot, including the editors.
Wrong. They do it with a strike for better contract terms. A strike is a legally protected collective action that stops all work production, and where it is illegal for a firm to replace any of the striking workers or punish them for it.
That's worked out so well to keep autoworker jobs from going to Mexico and elsewhere, same with other unionized companies like Kelloggs and Post Cereals.
Unions were needed back before the US enacted tons of labor laws and programs to protect workers and provide a safety net. These days labor unions are simply legalized extortion gangs. Public-sector unions are an abomination. They should have never been allowed and should be eliminated ASAP. That fact that union bosses and politicians, many not even elected, actually meet and decide how much of *our* money the government will give the unions, and under the table, how much of that money the unions will launder and send back to those politicians, is obscene. The welfare of workers and the taxpayers are their very last considerations.
No matter what you do you'll always know the vast right wing conspiracy fucked you good and hard.
No, Progressives' own dishonesty, corruption, elitism, and arrogance fucked them good and hard. They were hoisted by their own petard, as it were. If they weren't criminal primary-rigging sleazebags no amount of email leaks or hackers, Russian or otherwise, could have damaged them like we saw happen in 2016. An opened bag of stale, moldy potato chips found alongside the road could have won vs HRC.
It's as if they finally listened to all the liberty-loving people who've been telling them to go fuck themselves, and they actually went and did it!
Politicians seem to miss a couple of key points about encryption. The first big one is that like fire or alcohol or math, encryption exists and they can't simply make it illegal. The second point is that also like fire or alcohol or math, there's no way to limit the use or impact of encryption to certain select parties.
No, the understand quite well. This is about expanding the surveillance state and reducing individual liberty, privacy, and freedom.
It's the Alinsky "bottom-up, top-down, inside-out". Import terrorists, wait for the people to cry out (bottom-up) when an increasing number of attacks occur, and step in to save the day (top-down) with new infringements on privacy, freedom, and civil rights (inside-out).
Western governments *want* terrorist attacks, just not the catastrophic kind like destruction of an entire major city. Suicide/car-bombers and vehicular/knife attacks like we've seen? They *love* that shit! It splashes across the news cycle with horrendous scenes and people are ready to let government do all kinds of crap in order to stop it. But they won't. It pays too well. They just use the new powers and laws against regular people, especially those who might vocally oppose them and their policies.
Of course gold is volatile, in terms of relative value to everyday goods, both up and down. The largest Fiat currencies tend to be stable realitve to everyday goods.
Wrong.
Just the opposite is true: Everything else, including fiat currencies, are volatile relative to goods/services, whereas gold and silver are not.
A 1-Oz US $20 gold coin would, in it's day, buy a fine suit or pay for a lavish dinner at a 5-star restaurant. That same 1-Oz of gold today, valued at around $1200, would purchase an Armani suit or an evening out and a dinner for two at a five-star restaurant.
Two silver US dimes (10-cent pieces) would buy a gallon of gasoline many years ago. Today the value of the silver in those dimes would still buy a gallon of gasoline.
So no, you've got things completely flipped around.
Ransomware payments are only a tiny fraction of the drive behind the increasing demand/value of crypto-currencies.
The true drivers are the impending collapse of the US Dollar combined with the world dropping it as the primary trade currency, and the global trend towards governments taking ever more control of people's money through "cashless" systems and fears of Greece-style "haircuts" where government simply confiscates some percentage from individual accounts when the government is in financial crisis.
People increasingly wish to place their wealth out of the reach of governments and their spending habits out of the reach of law enforcement/intelligence agency databases and data analysis systems. People do not trust them, and with very good reasons backed by history.
Yes, you got it. That's why they can't stop anything. They collect everything thus when something blows up they can figure it all out. But they can't stop it because it's too much info to parse adequately.
The only use the current design of the US electronic surveillance infrastructure is truly suited for is spying on the domestic population. It is a poor tool for anything else.
I find it tragically-hilarious to watch all these corrupt TLA officials and Congresscritters trying to dance around those facts while performing these Kabuki-theater "investigations" in an attempt to deflect public outrage.
I'm just excited that lithium ion batteries in the cargo hold are safe now. Otherwise I'd be worried.
The lithium-ion batteries will even have each other for company so they don't get lonely, likely as it is they'll all be placed in one container, so they can...share their feelings...feelings...of impending doom...doom...at 37,000 feet...[cough]...umm, yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
can you also break the DOD budget down please ?
Man, would I love to! Sooo much pork, waste, corruption, and outright thievery in the DoD budget & spending!
I have no sacred cows here. I don't care a damn what part of government we're talking about, if it has waste, corruption, violates civil rights/the Constitution, isn't even actually allowed for the fed to do by the plain reading of the Constitution, etc etc, then that thing needs serious auditing/reductions or elimination altogether.
"Sustainability" has become a buzz-word these days, those principles should be kept in mind regarding the US federal government, as on the current path it is unsustainable both economically and in the context of a reasonably free and open society.
Strat
Oh, and partisan trolls please note: I blame *both* (R) & (D) equally!
None of this crap could have reached this disgusting Orwellian point without cooperation and collusion between both major US political parties.
There are no "good guys" here.
Strat
Of *course* these "cyberweapons" are ineffective against ISIS!
These weapons and the entire current US surveillance infrastructure were designed from their inceptions to monitor and control the US population and their digital communications. It is entirely unsuited to combating external threats.
That's like using a hammer on a machine-screw. Duh! Wrong tool for the job.
It's either that, or the US government has known beforehand of past attacks and allowed them to go forward and kill innocent people to stir up fear and panic so the populace will be willing to let them take away and violate the people's rights, freedoms, and privacy.
They are either so incompetent they should be removed from power, or they are totalitarian/authoritarian, oath-violating, power-seeking, criminal, seditious, corrupt, shitheads that should be hung by the neck from the nearest tall object and left up as an object lesson. I leave the decision to the reader.
Strat
Is that why they seriously defund the EPA ?
You use that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Less money" =/= "defunded"
The core, really important stuff that pretty much everyone would agree is important like keeping rivers, lakes, etc from becoming polluted, helping keep air quality at reasonable levels, help police against dumping of toxic/hazardous substances, etc, all that and more is a relatively minor part of the EPA bureaucratic behemoth and their commensurately-astronomical annual budget.
EPA could even afford to better-fund and devote more human resources to those important functions with less dead-weight to carry on the books, much of which is just a way to funnel money to political allies/cronies in the agency and in the countless private sector government contractors, K-Street lobbyists, and public-sector labor unions. I wouldn't feel nearly so bad about all our tax money the EPA received if nearly all of it was spent on combating good old regular, everyday, industrial and societal pollution.
Follow the money. Much if not most is *not* going towards what most people would consider reasonable and logical things for an environmental agency to spend money on.
Strat
We have developed a network that allows essentially instantaneous planetwide communication - and somehow think that delaying entertainment for months and years is a GOOD idea that will not be circumvented by any means available.
Including illegal ones.
Well, of *course*! That's the point!
The only power government has besides taxation is cracking down on criminals who break the law. Well, the government wants more power over people so it makes more of them into criminals. Then with selective enforcement suddenly millions of people have a legal Damocles Sword hanging over their heads with government holding the rope. Well, holding the rope without letting go only as long as you toe the line, comply, and keep your mouth shut.
Pick up that can!
Strat
And what is the penalty for being a false prophet?
The Alarmists have the government pass a law making climate-heresy a criminal offense.
Oh wait...you thought Climate Alarmists could be held responsible for any of their failed predictions, policies, or scientific theories!? Bwaahahaha!
Heh, sorry, I know you understand as well as I do that the world would have to radically change before that has any chance of happening.
Strat
Wow.....you must be on every watchlist ever !
If you're *not* on the 'watchlists' of those who casually and daily commit mass violations of primary civil rights while making a mockery of the Rule of Law, what does that say about *you*? ;)
Strat
Secret laws, secret courts, tyranny
Came here to say this.
WTF!?!? A "secret" law? If the SCOTUS is OK with this, fuck the entire SCOTUS up their collective asses sideways with a rusty lawnmower blade! Twice on Tuesdays! There is no Rule of Law left in this shithole. The US government has lost all legitimacy as it no longer recognizes any limits to it's powers. The nutcases can shoot them all, for all I care. They're all criminals and usurpers of legitimate power.
Strat
The violent liberal Bernie Bro who attacked people with a rifle this morning? The FBI says that more people are beaten to death every year with pipes, baseball bats, and bare hands then are killed with any sort of long gun (rifles, shotguns, etc) and that includes hunting accidents, suicides and the rest.
What scares them about long-guns is that a guy with a rifle can kill a VIP from a distance with no warning from a concealed position. They could care less about blacks killing each other with pistols in the inner-cities.
It would be nearly impossible to get near enough to a high-level VIP with a competent security detail to use a pistol effectively. Someone could be 300-400 yards or more distant and have an excellent chance for a kill-shot on a VIP with a security detail, using a 'scoped rifle. Soros must sweat like a pig every time he has to be outside in the open.
Strat
I'd have bigger problems to worry about under a small weak government. Like having my life savings stolen by all the criminals.
No, you would not. Stop with the absolutism. Not every part of government gets equal resources and funding nor identical increases/decreases in them. If anything, being able to devote more resources to effective enforcement due to reductions in government spending in other areas plus a reduction in duplicative bureaucracy and the red-tape they engender would mean *more* criminals are caught quicker, and with lower overall costs.
Now, that program to fund studies that put shrimp on tiny treadmills? Yeah, we can much better use that money elsewhere. Like government oversight and ethics enforcement. (I know, the shrimp-study is old, but it gets the point across and I don't have time to search for the latest ridiculous gov. program that you know are out there in droves)
Strat
...it is more effective to fix the broken machine than suffer the process of replacing it.
The problem is that too much auxiliary crap has been hooked into the machine, to the point that the original core is barely if at all visible and the machine tasked to purposes the machine was never designed for, and all this crap has taken on a life of it's own and infects any parts not already suborned.
You'll never fix the machine, hell you'll never be actually able to get to the actual machine to do *anything* meaningful, until you un-crap-ify it first. It's much easier, faster, and takes less effort to change the course of a destroyer than an aircraft carrier.
If you want a good, generally non-corrupt, responsive, and caring government, then that government must be small and weak enough for those in it to actually, truly, fear the anger of citizens.
Strat
Don't you understand? We need guns around to fix the problems caused by having guns around!
Guns are the genie out of the bottle, the cat out of the bag, the horses that have left the barn, the bell that's rung. There's simply no practical way to eliminate guns being a part of American society.
Even enacting an East German Stasi-style police state could not stop people in the US from having and obtaining firearms. There are far too many guns in circulation already to eliminate, plus the US has very porous land borders which would promote the mass smuggling of firearms into the US, and those would be regular full-auto military-style, as why not if they're all illegal anyway? So we go from MS13, Crips, Bloods, using semi-auto pistols and semi-auto rifles, to full-on military fully-automatic weapons. And since they'll be dealing with foreign arms dealers, they can also get grenades, RPGs, landmines, etc etc.
Being that the reality is that there will *always* be criminals with guns, it is only sensible to NOT disarm law-abiding, peaceful citizens and deprive them of the natural right to self-defense.
There are more good people than bad people. Allowing people to arm themselves means there will be more good people with a gun than bad people with a gun. Making guns illegal merely removes the guns from the good people. Bad people don't care about laws.
Strat
Wrong. DOE standards updates are required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act and Energy Policy Acts
And?
What recourse do the courts have if the Executive Branch simply ignores/stonewalls them? Remember, the Executive Branch enforces laws, not the Judicial Branch.
There *is* precedent set by Andrew Jackson:
"John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." -- Andrew Jackson on Worcester v. Georgia
That's not even taking into account law/decision-flouting and stonewalling by relatively-recent past administrations.
Strat
Let's say your a small company, doing will in the local scene and want to expand to neighboring states. It's not so fun to learn that they would have different standards which make your product illegal. It works a lot better for common markets to have the same standards.
Nothing stops the States from forming some sort of commission in order to harmonize standards between each other where needed. The Feds could even provide various resources, guidance, experts, and data to help.
On average, the more local the law/regulation is, the more efficient, low-impact, and cost-effective it is, and so more people will be inclined to participate, raising compliance and therefor better-fulfilling the initial goals of the law/regulation.
Strat
The antidote for corruption and abuse of the legislative system is anti-corruption enforcement. Not anarchy.
Not that I advocate for anarchy, but I find your stark cognitive-dissonance absolutely breathtaking in expecting the government, the one that you, yourself, said was corrupt and the legislative system abused, to actually enforce the laws (that they're already breaking!) on themselves!!
Bravo, sir! A stunning display!
Strat
Like just about every other "alliance" of large corporations, they give themselves some bullshit name to window dress the fact that they are looking to screw people over one way or another.
In another day and age, back before crony-capitalism passed the tipping-point and jumped the shark, they had another name for a group of leading corporations in an industry working together to control a market, set prices, and lobby for laws.
A "cartel".
But, that was before the money and resources the corporations offered those in power made them realize that "cartels" are really "alliances" in many cases and are now a good thing.
Strat
Slashdot editors, I don't get the focused vendetta against Uber here.
What's not to hate about Uber from a Progressive point of view, which we know is how most /. editors tend to heavily lean?
Uber is disrupting the taxi industry which in many places is unionized, and operated on corrupt medallion-systems in many areas. It also disrupts the wage-slave/weekly-paycheck dynamic. All of which Progressives heavily support. Uber gives people alternative choices outside of the typical employer/employee paradigm, and Progressives don't like people having choices outside the Progressive's preferred range of "guided" choices.
Yes, as Uber is such a stick-in-the-eye (along with similar disruptive businesses like AirBnB) to nearly all Progressive principles, it's no surprise at all that SlashProg editors post these sorts of hit-piece articles regarding Uber/Lyft/AirBnB/etc.
The stench of Collectivism and Social Justice is strong on Slashdot, including the editors.
Strat
Wrong. They do it with a strike for better contract terms. A strike is a legally protected collective action that stops all work production, and where it is illegal for a firm to replace any of the striking workers or punish them for it.
That's worked out so well to keep autoworker jobs from going to Mexico and elsewhere, same with other unionized companies like Kelloggs and Post Cereals.
Unions were needed back before the US enacted tons of labor laws and programs to protect workers and provide a safety net. These days labor unions are simply legalized extortion gangs. Public-sector unions are an abomination. They should have never been allowed and should be eliminated ASAP. That fact that union bosses and politicians, many not even elected, actually meet and decide how much of *our* money the government will give the unions, and under the table, how much of that money the unions will launder and send back to those politicians, is obscene. The welfare of workers and the taxpayers are their very last considerations.
Strat
No matter what you do you'll always know the vast right wing conspiracy fucked you good and hard.
No, Progressives' own dishonesty, corruption, elitism, and arrogance fucked them good and hard. They were hoisted by their own petard, as it were. If they weren't criminal primary-rigging sleazebags no amount of email leaks or hackers, Russian or otherwise, could have damaged them like we saw happen in 2016. An opened bag of stale, moldy potato chips found alongside the road could have won vs HRC.
It's as if they finally listened to all the liberty-loving people who've been telling them to go fuck themselves, and they actually went and did it!
Strat
Politicians seem to miss a couple of key points about encryption. The first big one is that like fire or alcohol or math, encryption exists and they can't simply make it illegal. The second point is that also like fire or alcohol or math, there's no way to limit the use or impact of encryption to certain select parties.
No, the understand quite well. This is about expanding the surveillance state and reducing individual liberty, privacy, and freedom.
It's the Alinsky "bottom-up, top-down, inside-out". Import terrorists, wait for the people to cry out (bottom-up) when an increasing number of attacks occur, and step in to save the day (top-down) with new infringements on privacy, freedom, and civil rights (inside-out).
Western governments *want* terrorist attacks, just not the catastrophic kind like destruction of an entire major city. Suicide/car-bombers and vehicular/knife attacks like we've seen? They *love* that shit! It splashes across the news cycle with horrendous scenes and people are ready to let government do all kinds of crap in order to stop it. But they won't. It pays too well. They just use the new powers and laws against regular people, especially those who might vocally oppose them and their policies.
Strat
Of course gold is volatile, in terms of relative value to everyday goods, both up and down. The largest Fiat currencies tend to be stable realitve to everyday goods.
Wrong.
Just the opposite is true: Everything else, including fiat currencies, are volatile relative to goods/services, whereas gold and silver are not.
A 1-Oz US $20 gold coin would, in it's day, buy a fine suit or pay for a lavish dinner at a 5-star restaurant. That same 1-Oz of gold today, valued at around $1200, would purchase an Armani suit or an evening out and a dinner for two at a five-star restaurant.
Two silver US dimes (10-cent pieces) would buy a gallon of gasoline many years ago. Today the value of the silver in those dimes would still buy a gallon of gasoline.
So no, you've got things completely flipped around.
Strat
Stop ransomware and you kill Bitcoin.
Bullshit!
Ransomware payments are only a tiny fraction of the drive behind the increasing demand/value of crypto-currencies.
The true drivers are the impending collapse of the US Dollar combined with the world dropping it as the primary trade currency, and the global trend towards governments taking ever more control of people's money through "cashless" systems and fears of Greece-style "haircuts" where government simply confiscates some percentage from individual accounts when the government is in financial crisis.
People increasingly wish to place their wealth out of the reach of governments and their spending habits out of the reach of law enforcement/intelligence agency databases and data analysis systems. People do not trust them, and with very good reasons backed by history.
Strat
"You those guitars that are, like, double guitars?"
Well, no, but I do go to eleven, that's one more louder than ten, innit? :D
~S
Yes, you got it. That's why they can't stop anything. They collect everything thus when something blows up they can figure it all out. But they can't stop it because it's too much info to parse adequately.
The only use the current design of the US electronic surveillance infrastructure is truly suited for is spying on the domestic population. It is a poor tool for anything else.
I find it tragically-hilarious to watch all these corrupt TLA officials and Congresscritters trying to dance around those facts while performing these Kabuki-theater "investigations" in an attempt to deflect public outrage.
Strat
I'm just excited that lithium ion batteries in the cargo hold are safe now. Otherwise I'd be worried.
The lithium-ion batteries will even have each other for company so they don't get lonely, likely as it is they'll all be placed in one container, so they can...share their feelings...feelings...of impending doom...doom...at 37,000 feet...[cough]...umm, yeah.
Don't worry! Be happy! [whistles]
Strat