Most legislative and judicial houses are decorated with historic laws and lawgivers.* In that context, the 10 Commandments are not there so much for their religious value as they are for their historic value. In practice, I suspect that it is the overlap that is most important here, with the 10 Commandments being the most important law code in the religious tradition that, like it or not, was and is the most influential in the US.
What historic lawgiving events are the satanists planning to depict? Yeah...
Now, if Tulsa's Babylonian citizens and Mardukists get together to fund a display of Hammurabi or his code, I'll personally pitch in.
I was going to consolidate all of your questions in this entire thread into a single reply that would answer all of them. But now I see that there is no point. You already know **all about** how bitcoin works.
Your dictionary must be different from mine. Mine would never let me claim to know **all about** something while I was asking basic FAQ-level questions about it.
Your musings about the unknown actors that pick blocks, and the unknown forces that cause the block subsidy to right-shift according on schedule were side-splittingly funny, when read **in context**.
That said, drop me a line if you ever learn the basics of bitcoin and still have questions.
The scope still does everything. Other tools may have taken over some jobs, and may even be better at some things. But nothing can do as many jobs as the scope does, and I'm not even sure that a collection of tools can replace it entirely.
Also, building accessories for your scope is FUN. Tempted by cheap 8-channel logic probes? Don't buy one until after you've built a multiplexer for your scope. Other good projects include function generators, trigger modules (delays, holdoffs, strobes, logic, etc).
Buy a good soldering iron. Weller, temperature controlled. A couple of cheapo irons in different sizes and wattages can be handy too. Have a variety of good solder removal systems (bulbs, plungers, bulbs on hollow irons, braid). If you do surface mount work, find a decent Chinese clone of a Japanese (Hakko) rework station. My Aoyue 852 sees a lot of action.
Build a bench power supply out of an ATX PSU. They make boards for this, or you can make your own interface box, or you can pop the cover, drill some holes for a switch, some LEDs and a row of binding posts/banana jacks. This will cover 90% of projects for 90% of people. If you need more, build or buy something more capable.
Have a good variety of components on hand: resistors, different types of caps, diodes, transistors, LEDs. Have a bunch of interconnects on hand: snap-off pin sockets and pins, IDC headers, power pole, quarter inch QC tabs. Depending on the work you do, IC sockets, inductors.
Have a ton of solderless breadboards for prototyping. I really do mean a ton. I make a lot of little things and then just leave them intact because buying a replacement breadbord is less hassle than making it as a PCB. Plenty of copperclad perfboard is handy too, in a variety of styles (individual holes, bus strip, IC breakout).
Look into ways to make PCBs at home. I prefer the glossy paper/clothes iron toner transfer method, but direct milling is easier if you have a CNC minimill. With a little practice, toner and etchant gives finer features than milling. If you need finer features yet, or plated vias, or more than 2 layers, or silk screening, or resist masking, or... you need commercial production. There are several services that do group buys on short runs and small pieces. They assemble a variety of designs, send them out for fabication, then split them out and mail them back to you. I've used dorkbotpdx quite a few times, but there are plenty of others.
The town I live in is served by two cable companies. Both of them have full fiber networks, and service is dirt cheap. My house actually has three fiber pairs servicing it, one for TV, one for internet, and one for the other cable company. (I wanted my network ONT in a different spot, but haven't gotten around to redoing the coax inside yet, cable company had no problem putting up a second box.)
When the first company's exclusive franchise expired a while back, the second company lobbied for it not to be renewed. They then came in and wired up the whole town. No one complained about them doing it. The city didn't pay a dime for it. The old company had to cut prices to keep customers, and they did. A few years later, the new cable company came back and redid the entire town with fiber (this was a while ago). The next year, the old company ran fiber everywhere too.
Did I mention that my town is about 2500 people? Oh, and they did the rural areas around town too. I'm actually about 6 miles out.
The new company has detailed plans for fiber networks in every town in the area. Every few years they get another one to let their exclusive franchise lapse and they spring into action.
This "story" is a joke. Where the cable system has actually been deregulated to the point of breaking the government granted monopolies, internet access is cheap and awesome. Where the monopolies still exist, it sucks monkey balls. I'm not sure how anyone with access to a dictionary can consider a government granted monopoly to be "deregulated".
P.S. I have 50 down and 50 up for $45 per month. I could go much cheaper, or I could go much faster, if I wanted to. I used to live in a different city, where Charter has a monopoly. I paid close to $100 for 30 down and 5 up, which was top of the line there.
P.P.S. Oh, phone service is relatively cheap here too, from what I hear. I haven't looked into it myself because the notion of getting a landline seems quaint to me. Three companies providing phone service and all. But it isn't as cheap as you'd expect because phone service is mostly governed by the state public utility commission, which amusingly sets floors on what a company can charge.
"Something must be done! This is something, thus we must do this!". I've seen that notion expressed many times, but I was amused to find it in the constitutional debate from 225+ years ago.
There are ways to decouple medical coverage from employment that don't involve massive growth of government.
For example, they could transition the employer tax benefits of providing medical plans into a employer tax benefit for paying that out as cash (to be used in full, in part, or not at all for the employee to buy their own plan). That change alone would fix about 90% of what's wrong with the country's medical billing system.
That would resurrect proper health insurance, reform pre-paid medical plans (what people usually mean when they say "health insurance" these days), gut the administration and billing nightmare, and restore market pressure and competition to all levels of the process.
Malpractice tort reform and encouragement of HDHP/HSA plans would do the rest.
Note that all of these are things that would shrink the federal government and reduce federal power, so they are just as unthinkable as they are obvious.
He was an interesting character. He helped me sneak a girl into a hacker party at the Peppermill one year during Defcon. No one that drank with him, even once, will ever forget him.
God had better keep an eye on him. If the pearly gates have any exploits, he'll find them.
Yeah, we all knew it was a ponzi when it was running. No, really. Go read some of the old threads on the forums.
Some people were just happy to collect "earnings" while it was running. A few people even managed to cash out before it all went to shit.
Also, keep in mind that most of the losses reported by people were their account balances after a few months of compounded 7% per week "interest" (LOL). The actual losses were much lower.
And we all know the course this thing will follow. Anyone who opposes this edict will be branded a bigot; any schoolchild who questions the legitimacy of homosexual marriage will be expelled for "hate speech." The fanatical Left will insist that anyone who upholds the fundamental meaning that marriage has always had, everywhere, until this generation, is a "homophobe" and therefore mentally ill.
This story is off the front page, and I don't know if anyone will read it. Also, this post is far too long, and I haven't got the time to make it any shorter. As a result, I'm not putting a lot of effort into polishing it. Some parts are detailed, other parts are just bare comments on parts of the parent post. If you get lost, read it along with the parent post and you should be able to get context by following along with what I was reading as I wrote each section (sometimes each sentence).
You dislike the generation curve chosen. Can you demonstrate an objective measure of the goodness of such curves? I personally can't think of any arbitrary curve where someone can't raise objections similar to the ones you raised. Oh, and don't forget that the acceptable inputs to the curve generating function are necessarily limited to verifiable objective facts, like block height.
Simply put, a curve had to be chosen. Every possible curve has good points and bad points, with no way to predict the future, and no way to collect feedback from the outside world. The curve we have has advantages above and beyond most curves in that it depends on two very simple integer math operations that no one can possibly mess up.
By the way, this comes up on the forums pretty often. Every single one so far has been at least as "stupid", and most are far stupider.
Science is that which is testable. If something isn't testable, it is by definition part of that "large pile of untested bullshit", and thus, not science. We are concerned with the nature of the things, not the names people like to call them by. "Computer Science" is mostly not science (but parts are). "Political Science" is not science at all, unless I've missed some recent developments. "String Theory" is a funny one. We aren't really sure if it is testable or not, so it currently exists in an indeterminate state. Eventually, we will either prove that it is untestable, or find a way to test it.
And no, we can't do economic tests. Not macro, not micro, maybe gedanken. For an amusing experience, read some papers claiming to have tested various economic theories. Count the controls that the authors acknowledge ignoring. Now find five more that they ignored, but didn't know or admit to ignoring. Now imagine someone finding five more that you didn't find...
As for macro, the central banks don't do experiments, they fiddle with knobs. When things go the way they wanted, they claim success. When things don't, they claim a confounding factor. What is really happening is that the confounding factors are always there, but they are just as much responsible for the successes as the failures. Since the "experiments" are unable to distinguish, they are not tests, and no science happens.
Your opinions on velocity are not needed, the data is public. Everyone in the world can see for themselves exactly how fast bitcoins are moving. Lack of a credit market does not in any way impede money velocity. Why on earth do you think it does? Also, there is absolutely no reason why credit markets cannot work with bitcoin. Don't take this the wrong way, but you are taking features of the specific financial system that we are currently using, and confusing them for universal constants. A lack of credit markets would be the death of the dollar because the dollar *is* the credit markets. Bitcoin is not built upon (that kind of) credit.
There are soft and hard constraints on bitcoin velocity, but we are nowhere near either of them. When you think of "Supply and Demand", you must always keep in mind that the market only acts on "effective supply" and "effective demand". In bitcoin, "effective supply" is "coins not hoarded" multiplied by velocity multiplied by value. I'm using value here as an abstraction, rather than any particular exchange rate. Velocity is practically unbound because the system is fairly efficient. Value is practically unbound because the currency supports division down to very small units. Put them together, and t
Sorry, but your entire post is wrong from top to bottom. Don't take it personally, it isn't like they teach this stuff properly in schools.
First, you did appeal to authority, and continue to do so. That you didn't do it in a way that is obvious to you is your problem, and yours alone. I will give you a hint: economics is not a science. There is no proof, there is no truth. If you take physics as your standard for avoiding self-delusion, economics doesn't have theories either. Citing "economics" as a source is automatically an appeal to the prestige of a collection of untested speculation.
Second, you ignore velocity and divisibility. If we assume that the hoarding hypothesis is correct, then you end up in a situation where deflation is forestalled, but acceptance is not. I'm going to skip my angry rant about people not understanding the dynamic equilibrium, but the short version is that virtually everything in your experience is the product of a balance of opposing forces. To the extent that hoarding can raise the exchange rate, the exchange rate tempts people to divest their funds. Acceptance is a product of utility and familiarity. Utility is very high and getting higher every day, while familiarity is very low, but also growing fast.
Third, you appear to have weak grasp on the distinction between money and wealth, and also on the Janus nature of credit and debt. I'm not sure how useful it would be to try explaining how much of your third section is wrong. From your point of view, your analysis appears to be completely correct, but it isn't, because your mind is wrong. In our current system, borrowing money is really damn cheap because most of the cost of your borrowing is paid for by other people (mostly through currency inflation). If you ignore the external costs, then yes, borrowing is the cheapest way to go.
Capital is wealth, you cannot borrow it unless someone has already produced it and is willing to lend it to you. You cannot buy it unless it has already been created and someone is willing to sell it to you. You can, however, create it yourself, but specialization says that your efforts are likely to be better spent doing whatever it is that you do well instead.
Money on the other hand, is merely a system for accounting and exchange. Since it is ruled not by laws of the universe, but by laws of men, it does whatever we say it does. We can create and destroy it at will. And by "we", I mean special people. You and I don't got a vote. Bitcoin is an attempt to more closely approach the platonic ideal of money-ness, and part of that is by deciding up front the answers to the questions "how much money?", "who gets it?" and "when?".
Bitcoin is an agreement among men, made real through software. We agree to follow certain rules, and give up any chance at special privilege, in return, we know that everyone else also has to follow the same rules, and are prevented from ever trying to claim special privileges for themselves (like the ability to shave a bit off of other people's money to make new money for themselves).
I tend to come off a bit harshly, but I hope this post was educational rather than offensive. I hope you (and everyone else) will ponder carefully on what is real, and what is imaginary.
Computer science is about processes and structures, not computers, and not programs. LISP is still the ideal vehicle for learning about the important parts.
On a personal note, a friend of mine had a CS 101 intro course some years ago that was Javascript based. It was absolutely terrible. I know that it was terrible, because I ended up re-teaching him each of the concepts using random old textbooks that I had lying around. He had no problem learning concepts in other languages (Fortran, BASIC, C, even some MIX when I used Knuth) and then applying them to back to the Javascript that he had to do the problems in.
I know that Javascript wasn't entirely to blame there, but it sure didn't help. But why try to polish that particular turd?
Well, liquids aren't compressible in general, so I suspect that is already covered.
The problem with diving isn't the blood, it is the lungs, and later (when you resurface) the difference in solubility of various gasses in your tissues under different pressures.
The amount of, for example, nitrogen that can dissolve into your blood (again, for example) depends on the pressure. As the pressure goes up, more can dissolve. As the pressure goes down, less can dissolve, which means that when you surface, nitrogen dissolved in your body can suddenly reappear as a gas bubble which requires many times the volume that it took while dissolved. In a joint, or long muscle or fat, this can be painful. In an important artery or in your heart or other important organ (most of them), this can be fatal.
Who cares if money is hoarded? The real problem is hoarding of wealth.
If that doesn't make sense to you, it is because you think that money is wealth, but it is not.
Inflation encourages people to hold onto their assets, because tomorrow those same assets will buy more dollars, and the dollars they buy with them tomorrow won't be able to buy the same asset back the next day. Wealth at work is capital. Money at work is debt.
The currency generation function in bitcoin is a shift operator. Bitcoins are limited to a precise discrete value. A move to wider registers could allow that number to be higher by a tiny, tiny, tiny amount. There is no "indefinitely" about it.
The rest of your post is just Keynesian nonsense. We get the message. You love debt. You want to reward debtors, which is the same thing as punishing savers.
Deflation is the natural state of an advancing world. Computers have deflated massively against other technologies, and we are all cheering about it. The only people that think that inflation is better are statists and bankers (when they own the statists). Banks create money out of thin air, and they get to sell it (to you!) right away, before it starts chasing assets and driving their prices up. If inflation came from a different mechanism, bankers would hate it too, since it would devalue their holdings then, just like it devalues yours and mine.
It doesn't matter why governments devalue currency, what matters is that they do. Always and without fail. In practical terms, Congress really likes having a bottomless checkbook. That it destroys the value of our currency is a problem for someone else to solve, like our kids.
My brother was an electrician doing low voltage work for St. Mary's Hospital (aka, the Mayo Clinic). This was many years ago, before the change to the newer, fancier "power limited" terminology.
He worked hard, and he felt that he should work 8 hours when he was getting paid for 8 hours, so any crew he was on did very well. Eventually, he became a supervisor with his own crew. That was when the problems started.
His crew was around 75% retired firefighters. Firefighters retire with a pension very early, usually like at 45 or 50 years old. But one pension isn't enough, so they like to double dip by finding a union job they can coast through for 5 years before retiring a second time, with a second pension.
Since they weren't there to work, but merely to pass the time before the second pension kicked in, they obviously didn't take the work very seriously. They worked at half his rate, and would find places to hide to avoid working for hours at a time. He had known these guys from working with them for a couple of years, and he was entirely used to doing as much work in a shift as the entire rest of his crew. But, as a supervisor, he didn't have to put up with that shit any more.
So, he rode them hard, and made them work like they were supposed to work. And they whined, and they bitched. Eventually, they complained to the union leadership, and the union leadership called the shop manager. Then the shop manager decided that the company needed another bid crew to go look at work sites and collect the information needed to bid on jobs.
This new bid crew only had one person, my brother. He was sent out to bid on a couple of token small jobs, and then the shop manager decided that the company didn't need a small job bid crew after all, and eliminated the position.
Union rules dictated that my brother had to be reassigned to a different job, and another person with less seniority had to be let go, but, oddly enough, the union declined to press the issue with the company.
If you know any young eager workers that have worked in or around union shops, they all have stories like this. I know that unions have done a lot of good in the past, and I won't quite say that all unions are now corrupt and foul, but it sure seems like it at times. And organized theft and pension fraud schemes like this are almost always set up by corrupt unions.
Nonsense. Long term planning didn't die because the market didn't want it.
Long term planning is dead because we (meaning society and government) actively hunted it down and killed it.
We have smashed or crippled every single institution that was capable of thinking long term. The IRS, the SEC and the courts have actually made it illegal for companies to think beyond the next quarter or year. Churches have been withering for decades under the assault of militant secularism. Marriage has been gutted and is now meaningless, which is killing family formation (surprise!). The few wealthy families that have somehow managed to form can now be sure that any long range planning they wanted to do, whether a charitable foundation or a trust to fund a dynasty, will be undone within a few years of the death of the founders.
Government is literally incapable of looking past the next election, so not only are they of no help, but they are actually the problem.
Thankfully, the generation (which I won't name to protect the guilty) that got us into this mess will start dying off soon. Hopefully the next one will be able to look beyond the con job their parents slipped them.
The common ground idea is between the people, not the subjects. If you expect it between the subjects, you are almost certainly akin to the 15% that sees a conflict.
Just make sure that you match layman to layman and philosopher to philosopher. Comparing serious scientists to random people off the street that feel that they are "religious" would be pretty silly. Just about as silly as comparing serious theologians to random street folks that consider themselves to be "scientific".
For a preview, find yourself just about any work by a respected serious renaissance or post-renaissance theologian, and you'll see evidence of a viewpoint very similar to that expressed by the folks in this survey.
Assume that every email address you give out is going to get spam, so use different ones in different places.
When the inevitable spam starts, make the decision. Do you believe that this entity is likely to respect unsubscribe requests? If so, hit unsubscribe. If not, forward to/dev/null.
The practice is so damn common now, that no matter how much it pisses you off, you have to understand that the other guy has no idea that you think he is a worthless scumbag. You really can't buy from anyone online without them assuming that you want to hear about their specials every week until the end of time.
Oh, and an added bonus: if their customer database ever gets leaked, you only need to ditch the one throwaway address and update your info with just the one site.
There are other variations too, for example I have two main work email addresses. One is the one I use and give out, the other is on the website. As far as I can tell, the one on the website has never ever been legitimately used. 100% of email to that address is spam. Because of the nature of my job, I give people quite a bit of leeway when it comes to harvesting that address and adding it to their spam lists. But if I recognize the source, like if they send more than one email every few weeks, that entire domain/spam service goes in the permanent block list.
Slashdot Mirror
Most legislative and judicial houses are decorated with historic laws and lawgivers.* In that context, the 10 Commandments are not there so much for their religious value as they are for their historic value. In practice, I suspect that it is the overlap that is most important here, with the 10 Commandments being the most important law code in the religious tradition that, like it or not, was and is the most influential in the US.
What historic lawgiving events are the satanists planning to depict? Yeah...
Now, if Tulsa's Babylonian citizens and Mardukists get together to fund a display of Hammurabi or his code, I'll personally pitch in.
* No, really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Supreme_Court_Building#Sculptural_program
http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/relief-portrait-plaques-lawgivers/about-relief-portrait-plaques-lawgivers
I was going to consolidate all of your questions in this entire thread into a single reply that would answer all of them. But now I see that there is no point. You already know **all about** how bitcoin works.
Your dictionary must be different from mine. Mine would never let me claim to know **all about** something while I was asking basic FAQ-level questions about it.
Your musings about the unknown actors that pick blocks, and the unknown forces that cause the block subsidy to right-shift according on schedule were side-splittingly funny, when read **in context**.
That said, drop me a line if you ever learn the basics of bitcoin and still have questions.
The scope still does everything. Other tools may have taken over some jobs, and may even be better at some things. But nothing can do as many jobs as the scope does, and I'm not even sure that a collection of tools can replace it entirely.
Also, building accessories for your scope is FUN. Tempted by cheap 8-channel logic probes? Don't buy one until after you've built a multiplexer for your scope. Other good projects include function generators, trigger modules (delays, holdoffs, strobes, logic, etc).
Buy a good soldering iron. Weller, temperature controlled. A couple of cheapo irons in different sizes and wattages can be handy too. Have a variety of good solder removal systems (bulbs, plungers, bulbs on hollow irons, braid). If you do surface mount work, find a decent Chinese clone of a Japanese (Hakko) rework station. My Aoyue 852 sees a lot of action.
Build a bench power supply out of an ATX PSU. They make boards for this, or you can make your own interface box, or you can pop the cover, drill some holes for a switch, some LEDs and a row of binding posts/banana jacks. This will cover 90% of projects for 90% of people. If you need more, build or buy something more capable.
Have a good variety of components on hand: resistors, different types of caps, diodes, transistors, LEDs. Have a bunch of interconnects on hand: snap-off pin sockets and pins, IDC headers, power pole, quarter inch QC tabs. Depending on the work you do, IC sockets, inductors.
Have a ton of solderless breadboards for prototyping. I really do mean a ton. I make a lot of little things and then just leave them intact because buying a replacement breadbord is less hassle than making it as a PCB. Plenty of copperclad perfboard is handy too, in a variety of styles (individual holes, bus strip, IC breakout).
Look into ways to make PCBs at home. I prefer the glossy paper/clothes iron toner transfer method, but direct milling is easier if you have a CNC minimill. With a little practice, toner and etchant gives finer features than milling. If you need finer features yet, or plated vias, or more than 2 layers, or silk screening, or resist masking, or... you need commercial production. There are several services that do group buys on short runs and small pieces. They assemble a variety of designs, send them out for fabication, then split them out and mail them back to you. I've used dorkbotpdx quite a few times, but there are plenty of others.
Nonsense.
The town I live in is served by two cable companies. Both of them have full fiber networks, and service is dirt cheap. My house actually has three fiber pairs servicing it, one for TV, one for internet, and one for the other cable company. (I wanted my network ONT in a different spot, but haven't gotten around to redoing the coax inside yet, cable company had no problem putting up a second box.)
When the first company's exclusive franchise expired a while back, the second company lobbied for it not to be renewed. They then came in and wired up the whole town. No one complained about them doing it. The city didn't pay a dime for it. The old company had to cut prices to keep customers, and they did. A few years later, the new cable company came back and redid the entire town with fiber (this was a while ago). The next year, the old company ran fiber everywhere too.
Did I mention that my town is about 2500 people? Oh, and they did the rural areas around town too. I'm actually about 6 miles out.
The new company has detailed plans for fiber networks in every town in the area. Every few years they get another one to let their exclusive franchise lapse and they spring into action.
This "story" is a joke. Where the cable system has actually been deregulated to the point of breaking the government granted monopolies, internet access is cheap and awesome. Where the monopolies still exist, it sucks monkey balls. I'm not sure how anyone with access to a dictionary can consider a government granted monopoly to be "deregulated".
P.S. I have 50 down and 50 up for $45 per month. I could go much cheaper, or I could go much faster, if I wanted to. I used to live in a different city, where Charter has a monopoly. I paid close to $100 for 30 down and 5 up, which was top of the line there.
P.P.S. Oh, phone service is relatively cheap here too, from what I hear. I haven't looked into it myself because the notion of getting a landline seems quaint to me. Three companies providing phone service and all. But it isn't as cheap as you'd expect because phone service is mostly governed by the state public utility commission, which amusingly sets floors on what a company can charge.
"Something must be done! This is something, thus we must do this!". I've seen that notion expressed many times, but I was amused to find it in the constitutional debate from 225+ years ago.
There are ways to decouple medical coverage from employment that don't involve massive growth of government.
For example, they could transition the employer tax benefits of providing medical plans into a employer tax benefit for paying that out as cash (to be used in full, in part, or not at all for the employee to buy their own plan). That change alone would fix about 90% of what's wrong with the country's medical billing system.
That would resurrect proper health insurance, reform pre-paid medical plans (what people usually mean when they say "health insurance" these days), gut the administration and billing nightmare, and restore market pressure and competition to all levels of the process.
Malpractice tort reform and encouragement of HDHP/HSA plans would do the rest.
Note that all of these are things that would shrink the federal government and reduce federal power, so they are just as unthinkable as they are obvious.
That sucks.
He was an interesting character. He helped me sneak a girl into a hacker party at the Peppermill one year during Defcon. No one that drank with him, even once, will ever forget him.
God had better keep an eye on him. If the pearly gates have any exploits, he'll find them.
Yeah, we all knew it was a ponzi when it was running. No, really. Go read some of the old threads on the forums.
Some people were just happy to collect "earnings" while it was running. A few people even managed to cash out before it all went to shit.
Also, keep in mind that most of the losses reported by people were their account balances after a few months of compounded 7% per week "interest" (LOL). The actual losses were much lower.
From 2004:
This story is off the front page, and I don't know if anyone will read it. Also, this post is far too long, and I haven't got the time to make it any shorter. As a result, I'm not putting a lot of effort into polishing it. Some parts are detailed, other parts are just bare comments on parts of the parent post. If you get lost, read it along with the parent post and you should be able to get context by following along with what I was reading as I wrote each section (sometimes each sentence).
You dislike the generation curve chosen. Can you demonstrate an objective measure of the goodness of such curves? I personally can't think of any arbitrary curve where someone can't raise objections similar to the ones you raised. Oh, and don't forget that the acceptable inputs to the curve generating function are necessarily limited to verifiable objective facts, like block height.
Simply put, a curve had to be chosen. Every possible curve has good points and bad points, with no way to predict the future, and no way to collect feedback from the outside world. The curve we have has advantages above and beyond most curves in that it depends on two very simple integer math operations that no one can possibly mess up.
By the way, this comes up on the forums pretty often. Every single one so far has been at least as "stupid", and most are far stupider.
Science is that which is testable. If something isn't testable, it is by definition part of that "large pile of untested bullshit", and thus, not science. We are concerned with the nature of the things, not the names people like to call them by. "Computer Science" is mostly not science (but parts are). "Political Science" is not science at all, unless I've missed some recent developments. "String Theory" is a funny one. We aren't really sure if it is testable or not, so it currently exists in an indeterminate state. Eventually, we will either prove that it is untestable, or find a way to test it.
And no, we can't do economic tests. Not macro, not micro, maybe gedanken. For an amusing experience, read some papers claiming to have tested various economic theories. Count the controls that the authors acknowledge ignoring. Now find five more that they ignored, but didn't know or admit to ignoring. Now imagine someone finding five more that you didn't find...
As for macro, the central banks don't do experiments, they fiddle with knobs. When things go the way they wanted, they claim success. When things don't, they claim a confounding factor. What is really happening is that the confounding factors are always there, but they are just as much responsible for the successes as the failures. Since the "experiments" are unable to distinguish, they are not tests, and no science happens.
Your opinions on velocity are not needed, the data is public. Everyone in the world can see for themselves exactly how fast bitcoins are moving. Lack of a credit market does not in any way impede money velocity. Why on earth do you think it does? Also, there is absolutely no reason why credit markets cannot work with bitcoin. Don't take this the wrong way, but you are taking features of the specific financial system that we are currently using, and confusing them for universal constants. A lack of credit markets would be the death of the dollar because the dollar *is* the credit markets. Bitcoin is not built upon (that kind of) credit.
There are soft and hard constraints on bitcoin velocity, but we are nowhere near either of them. When you think of "Supply and Demand", you must always keep in mind that the market only acts on "effective supply" and "effective demand". In bitcoin, "effective supply" is "coins not hoarded" multiplied by velocity multiplied by value. I'm using value here as an abstraction, rather than any particular exchange rate. Velocity is practically unbound because the system is fairly efficient. Value is practically unbound because the currency supports division down to very small units. Put them together, and t
Sorry, but your entire post is wrong from top to bottom. Don't take it personally, it isn't like they teach this stuff properly in schools.
First, you did appeal to authority, and continue to do so. That you didn't do it in a way that is obvious to you is your problem, and yours alone. I will give you a hint: economics is not a science. There is no proof, there is no truth. If you take physics as your standard for avoiding self-delusion, economics doesn't have theories either. Citing "economics" as a source is automatically an appeal to the prestige of a collection of untested speculation.
Second, you ignore velocity and divisibility. If we assume that the hoarding hypothesis is correct, then you end up in a situation where deflation is forestalled, but acceptance is not. I'm going to skip my angry rant about people not understanding the dynamic equilibrium, but the short version is that virtually everything in your experience is the product of a balance of opposing forces. To the extent that hoarding can raise the exchange rate, the exchange rate tempts people to divest their funds. Acceptance is a product of utility and familiarity. Utility is very high and getting higher every day, while familiarity is very low, but also growing fast.
Third, you appear to have weak grasp on the distinction between money and wealth, and also on the Janus nature of credit and debt. I'm not sure how useful it would be to try explaining how much of your third section is wrong. From your point of view, your analysis appears to be completely correct, but it isn't, because your mind is wrong. In our current system, borrowing money is really damn cheap because most of the cost of your borrowing is paid for by other people (mostly through currency inflation). If you ignore the external costs, then yes, borrowing is the cheapest way to go.
Capital is wealth, you cannot borrow it unless someone has already produced it and is willing to lend it to you. You cannot buy it unless it has already been created and someone is willing to sell it to you. You can, however, create it yourself, but specialization says that your efforts are likely to be better spent doing whatever it is that you do well instead.
Money on the other hand, is merely a system for accounting and exchange. Since it is ruled not by laws of the universe, but by laws of men, it does whatever we say it does. We can create and destroy it at will. And by "we", I mean special people. You and I don't got a vote. Bitcoin is an attempt to more closely approach the platonic ideal of money-ness, and part of that is by deciding up front the answers to the questions "how much money?", "who gets it?" and "when?".
Bitcoin is an agreement among men, made real through software. We agree to follow certain rules, and give up any chance at special privilege, in return, we know that everyone else also has to follow the same rules, and are prevented from ever trying to claim special privileges for themselves (like the ability to shave a bit off of other people's money to make new money for themselves).
I tend to come off a bit harshly, but I hope this post was educational rather than offensive. I hope you (and everyone else) will ponder carefully on what is real, and what is imaginary.
I'd pay for an app that tells me the average weight of the chicks at a bar before I go there. Even better, the simple quantity of non-fat girls.
There is still no finer introduction to computer science than Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. Also, be sure to watch the videos.
Computer science is about processes and structures, not computers, and not programs. LISP is still the ideal vehicle for learning about the important parts.
On a personal note, a friend of mine had a CS 101 intro course some years ago that was Javascript based. It was absolutely terrible. I know that it was terrible, because I ended up re-teaching him each of the concepts using random old textbooks that I had lying around. He had no problem learning concepts in other languages (Fortran, BASIC, C, even some MIX when I used Knuth) and then applying them to back to the Javascript that he had to do the problems in.
I know that Javascript wasn't entirely to blame there, but it sure didn't help. But why try to polish that particular turd?
Well, liquids aren't compressible in general, so I suspect that is already covered.
The problem with diving isn't the blood, it is the lungs, and later (when you resurface) the difference in solubility of various gasses in your tissues under different pressures.
The amount of, for example, nitrogen that can dissolve into your blood (again, for example) depends on the pressure. As the pressure goes up, more can dissolve. As the pressure goes down, less can dissolve, which means that when you surface, nitrogen dissolved in your body can suddenly reappear as a gas bubble which requires many times the volume that it took while dissolved. In a joint, or long muscle or fat, this can be painful. In an important artery or in your heart or other important organ (most of them), this can be fatal.
Who cares if money is hoarded? The real problem is hoarding of wealth.
If that doesn't make sense to you, it is because you think that money is wealth, but it is not.
Inflation encourages people to hold onto their assets, because tomorrow those same assets will buy more dollars, and the dollars they buy with them tomorrow won't be able to buy the same asset back the next day. Wealth at work is capital. Money at work is debt.
Ha!
The currency generation function in bitcoin is a shift operator. Bitcoins are limited to a precise discrete value. A move to wider registers could allow that number to be higher by a tiny, tiny, tiny amount. There is no "indefinitely" about it.
The rest of your post is just Keynesian nonsense. We get the message. You love debt. You want to reward debtors, which is the same thing as punishing savers.
Deflation is the natural state of an advancing world. Computers have deflated massively against other technologies, and we are all cheering about it. The only people that think that inflation is better are statists and bankers (when they own the statists). Banks create money out of thin air, and they get to sell it (to you!) right away, before it starts chasing assets and driving their prices up. If inflation came from a different mechanism, bankers would hate it too, since it would devalue their holdings then, just like it devalues yours and mine.
It doesn't matter why governments devalue currency, what matters is that they do. Always and without fail. In practical terms, Congress really likes having a bottomless checkbook. That it destroys the value of our currency is a problem for someone else to solve, like our kids.
The water is just sitting there. Anyone that wants to can go check it for themselves.
It looks like the website linked is designed to avoid oversharing. There doesn't seem to be any way to export the data in bulk.
If only someone could have foreseen this and warned you!
My brother was an electrician doing low voltage work for St. Mary's Hospital (aka, the Mayo Clinic). This was many years ago, before the change to the newer, fancier "power limited" terminology.
He worked hard, and he felt that he should work 8 hours when he was getting paid for 8 hours, so any crew he was on did very well. Eventually, he became a supervisor with his own crew. That was when the problems started.
His crew was around 75% retired firefighters. Firefighters retire with a pension very early, usually like at 45 or 50 years old. But one pension isn't enough, so they like to double dip by finding a union job they can coast through for 5 years before retiring a second time, with a second pension.
Since they weren't there to work, but merely to pass the time before the second pension kicked in, they obviously didn't take the work very seriously. They worked at half his rate, and would find places to hide to avoid working for hours at a time. He had known these guys from working with them for a couple of years, and he was entirely used to doing as much work in a shift as the entire rest of his crew. But, as a supervisor, he didn't have to put up with that shit any more.
So, he rode them hard, and made them work like they were supposed to work. And they whined, and they bitched. Eventually, they complained to the union leadership, and the union leadership called the shop manager. Then the shop manager decided that the company needed another bid crew to go look at work sites and collect the information needed to bid on jobs.
This new bid crew only had one person, my brother. He was sent out to bid on a couple of token small jobs, and then the shop manager decided that the company didn't need a small job bid crew after all, and eliminated the position.
Union rules dictated that my brother had to be reassigned to a different job, and another person with less seniority had to be let go, but, oddly enough, the union declined to press the issue with the company.
If you know any young eager workers that have worked in or around union shops, they all have stories like this. I know that unions have done a lot of good in the past, and I won't quite say that all unions are now corrupt and foul, but it sure seems like it at times. And organized theft and pension fraud schemes like this are almost always set up by corrupt unions.
William Briggs has a slightly different take on this. He does statistics, so his post is about the error bars.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4564
Hmm. 10,000 would be better.
Nonsense. Long term planning didn't die because the market didn't want it.
Long term planning is dead because we (meaning society and government) actively hunted it down and killed it.
We have smashed or crippled every single institution that was capable of thinking long term. The IRS, the SEC and the courts have actually made it illegal for companies to think beyond the next quarter or year. Churches have been withering for decades under the assault of militant secularism. Marriage has been gutted and is now meaningless, which is killing family formation (surprise!). The few wealthy families that have somehow managed to form can now be sure that any long range planning they wanted to do, whether a charitable foundation or a trust to fund a dynasty, will be undone within a few years of the death of the founders.
Government is literally incapable of looking past the next election, so not only are they of no help, but they are actually the problem.
Thankfully, the generation (which I won't name to protect the guilty) that got us into this mess will start dying off soon. Hopefully the next one will be able to look beyond the con job their parents slipped them.
The common ground idea is between the people, not the subjects. If you expect it between the subjects, you are almost certainly akin to the 15% that sees a conflict.
Just make sure that you match layman to layman and philosopher to philosopher. Comparing serious scientists to random people off the street that feel that they are "religious" would be pretty silly. Just about as silly as comparing serious theologians to random street folks that consider themselves to be "scientific".
For a preview, find yourself just about any work by a respected serious renaissance or post-renaissance theologian, and you'll see evidence of a viewpoint very similar to that expressed by the folks in this survey.
It happens sometimes. People just explode.
link.
Assume that every email address you give out is going to get spam, so use different ones in different places.
When the inevitable spam starts, make the decision. Do you believe that this entity is likely to respect unsubscribe requests? If so, hit unsubscribe. If not, forward to /dev/null.
The practice is so damn common now, that no matter how much it pisses you off, you have to understand that the other guy has no idea that you think he is a worthless scumbag. You really can't buy from anyone online without them assuming that you want to hear about their specials every week until the end of time.
Oh, and an added bonus: if their customer database ever gets leaked, you only need to ditch the one throwaway address and update your info with just the one site.
There are other variations too, for example I have two main work email addresses. One is the one I use and give out, the other is on the website. As far as I can tell, the one on the website has never ever been legitimately used. 100% of email to that address is spam. Because of the nature of my job, I give people quite a bit of leeway when it comes to harvesting that address and adding it to their spam lists. But if I recognize the source, like if they send more than one email every few weeks, that entire domain/spam service goes in the permanent block list.