All currencies are essentially commodities. It's just the universality of acceptance (and the ability to pay taxes with it) that makes something a currency. Bitcoin was pretty widely accepted for a while, and if you were looking for illicit goods or services, it was the currency that many were dealing in so it became necessary to use for some who might not have been otherwise interested.
You do realize that applies to almost all currencies in use today as almost none are based on any kind of resource-backed standard, where there's a guarantee that the currency can always be exchanged for a certain amount of some other commodity. The only thing that stops most government currency from following the same trajectory as bitcoin is that the people running the presses generally know that running them too fast is idiotic, though there are always a few countries that didn't get that memo or think that they can solve all of their problems by just printing more money.
Way back in the day Michelin was looking to increase sales and one way to do that was to get people to buy cars and drive more (hence more tires sold) and they needed a reason for people to want a car. So Michelin started reviewing restaurants (awarding them Michelin stars which are still given out today and considered somewhat prestigious) with the thinking that people would want to buy a car or use it more if they could have an exceptional dining experience.
They'll naturally start to care as they continue to industrialize and start developing IP of their own and some new countries that begin to occupy the position that China is in now start stealing that IP. In the meanwhile, there will be some public slaps on the wrist and a little bit of extra lip service, but you're not going to get complete reform overnight.
I like nuclear, but if it isn't viable without subsidies, then why should anyone who doesn't like it have to pay for it? By all means, remove the various roadblocks that have been unfairly enacted, but don't subsidize it either. Like anything else, give it a level playing field, and let it compete fairly. If something else does a better job, then that's what should win.
I kind of thought that was implied, but in case it wasn't for the people who want to politically grandstand, "yes". Get rid of all subsidies. If you can't live unless it's at someone else's expense, then throw yourself at the feet of someone else's charity. Demanding the man in Washington shake down the rest of the country for your existence is really just a subtle violation of the 14th amendment.
The people who abhor Trump would say he's cost the country more than $80 million. If keeping him on the golf course stops him from fucking up anything else, wouldn't you say that's a pretty good deal?
Wouldn't the obvious solution simply be to stop giving fossil fuels a subsidy? The original point is that if something is viable, it doesn't need help. If fossil fuels need help, they're not viable. You don't go around fixing something that's wrong by committing further wrongs. Rectify the underlying problem and the downstream issues will start to resolve as well.
Fine, but take the rest of the subsidies with them. Whether that's the farmers, the oil companies, the various housing subsidies, or anyone else getting a deal. The U.S. has slowly morphed into a petty kleptocracy where everyone is picking everyone else's pocket. Just end the madness and let the people who are incapable fail. There's no need (other than votes) for the government to try to prop them up.
You assume that that's the only more useful thing that a person could be doing. Apparently.
I won't deny that there are some people who are truly incapable of much, and through no fault of their own, but if you look at the world today, there are large number of jobs that no one foresaw 30 years ago. If the future were that predicable, the stock market wouldn't exist.
One of the nice things about Tumblr is that it served as a nice home for exactly the sort of people who liked the kind of content you would often find on Tumblr. If you're not familiar with the website, it has a reputation for featuring the kind of erotica that tends not to be published on more mainstream porn sites. So now you're going to get a lot of furries, adult-baby fetishists, and all manner of other sexual oddities looking for new homes. That's right folks, 40-year old men that like jerking off to erotic My Little Pony art, coming soon to a web community near you.
If the government should subsidize anything it's Tumblr and 4chan. You'd be hard pressed to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it keeps those people from being somewhere else for most of the day.
That and it doesn't prevent someone else from starting a satellite television company in the future, which would only absorb all of the customers who still prefer to have it. If the demand is still there, it's an even bigger waste of their money.
There's also non-troubling things, like removing genetic disorders. The possibility for the first shouldn't preclude using it for the second.
Not even that is going to be simple. There are some deaf people that don't want their own deaf children to get cochlear implants or to have other types of procedures that could restore their hearing. If they don't want that, odds are they won't accept a genetic fix to prevent the problem from developing in the first place.
There's also a whole can of worms as to what constitutes a genetic disorder. Suppose for sake of argument that sexual preference has a genetic control (I don't believe that this is the case, but this is for the sake of argument) and some parent doesn't want (or does, as some people today may well do) their child to be a homosexual. Is that something that's permissible to "fix"?
If you bother to look at the data as a whole instead of just state spending per student, you'll see that state spending has been increasing. A more detailed analysis even shows that the cost increases that are being charged to students to offset this, exceed the drop in per student spending.
What's been happening is that more and more people are going to college and it's got to the point where a lot of them shouldn't be. Here's one university where it was reported that 14% of students were failing an intermediate algebra course, which is for people who can't even get into the first 100-level math course.
You're not going to fix the problems with education by throwing even more money at it and the current financial model that gives loans to anyone who wants them regardless of likelihood of succeeding or the likelihood of being able to pay that loan back.
They survived the last ice age when a sizable part of their current habitat was buried under glaciers. Life is fairly resilient on the whole. 80% of the population might not be able to survive that change, but the 20% that do are the ones that pass on their genes and their offspring are more fit for the changing environment.
Tariffs are idiotic and Trump is stupid for using them at all. If the Chinese want to make their own citizens pay more for goods when they could buy cheaper American ones, that's their loss. Worse yet, they only encourage their own industry to remain less efficient and allow it to remain inefficient.
Similarly if they want to subsidize their industries, we should import as many of those goods as possible, since it's the Chinese taxpayer who is ultimately paying for Americans to have cheaper prices.
What does is matter who owns them? If we ever went to war or something like that, it's pretty easy to seize those assets, since they're in the U.S. and so are the people who actually work on them. If Chinese investors do a better job running those farms, are Americans any worse off because they are more productive? If Chinese investors do a worse job, won't they just lose out to better run businesses?
People fall asleep at the wheel all the time, most of them without self-driving cars beyond cruise control. He was also apparently drunk as per the article, so I think he just passed out after being out drinking until bar close.
You must be pretty damn sanctimonious to have never used "fuck" or any other language someone else might find objectionable in a professional setting. Maybe you have the benefit of only working with individuals just as or more competent than yourself, but there are some people who need to be told to stay the fuck away from something, or they will fuck it up and make a real fucking mess of things.
Myself, I'd rather be told to "fuck off" if I need to be. If I think it's out of line, I'll let you know. If I think you're being an abusive asshole, I'll let you know that too. Otherwise I'd rather not sit through some milquetoast discussion where it feels like someone is trying to address a five year old child that shouldn't hear the bad words. Frankly, that's more dehumanizing than someone being pissed off.
FOSS assists in a concentration of power by select corporations.
Not the way i hoped it would work out.
What were you expecting, that the people who can barely use their computers and the FOSS operating systems or applications that run on them would somehow be able to modify the code and contribute back? It doesn't matter whether FOSS exists or not, because you're always going to see that outcome as long as you allow competition in a market. The most able competitors will eliminate those that are ineffective.
Because the ideal state of capitalism and socialism, is actually the same state.
What nonsense. An individual company might seek to become so powerful and all controlling that they essentially own everything, which would have a similar effect to the state removing private property, but that has nothing to do with the system itself. Without special treatment or protection from the government, it's quite unlikely that any single entity could ever reach that level of control.
At a certain point, people are responsible for their own actions and poor choices. It isn't victim blaming if you tell someone that they have cancer because they spent their entire life smoking cigarettes.
Slashdot Mirror
All currencies are essentially commodities. It's just the universality of acceptance (and the ability to pay taxes with it) that makes something a currency. Bitcoin was pretty widely accepted for a while, and if you were looking for illicit goods or services, it was the currency that many were dealing in so it became necessary to use for some who might not have been otherwise interested.
You do realize that applies to almost all currencies in use today as almost none are based on any kind of resource-backed standard, where there's a guarantee that the currency can always be exchanged for a certain amount of some other commodity. The only thing that stops most government currency from following the same trajectory as bitcoin is that the people running the presses generally know that running them too fast is idiotic, though there are always a few countries that didn't get that memo or think that they can solve all of their problems by just printing more money.
Way back in the day Michelin was looking to increase sales and one way to do that was to get people to buy cars and drive more (hence more tires sold) and they needed a reason for people to want a car. So Michelin started reviewing restaurants (awarding them Michelin stars which are still given out today and considered somewhat prestigious) with the thinking that people would want to buy a car or use it more if they could have an exceptional dining experience.
Even then it might not be a bad deal, especially if the cost of the battery technology comes down over time.
They'll naturally start to care as they continue to industrialize and start developing IP of their own and some new countries that begin to occupy the position that China is in now start stealing that IP. In the meanwhile, there will be some public slaps on the wrist and a little bit of extra lip service, but you're not going to get complete reform overnight.
I like nuclear, but if it isn't viable without subsidies, then why should anyone who doesn't like it have to pay for it? By all means, remove the various roadblocks that have been unfairly enacted, but don't subsidize it either. Like anything else, give it a level playing field, and let it compete fairly. If something else does a better job, then that's what should win.
I kind of thought that was implied, but in case it wasn't for the people who want to politically grandstand, "yes". Get rid of all subsidies. If you can't live unless it's at someone else's expense, then throw yourself at the feet of someone else's charity. Demanding the man in Washington shake down the rest of the country for your existence is really just a subtle violation of the 14th amendment.
The people who abhor Trump would say he's cost the country more than $80 million. If keeping him on the golf course stops him from fucking up anything else, wouldn't you say that's a pretty good deal?
Wouldn't the obvious solution simply be to stop giving fossil fuels a subsidy? The original point is that if something is viable, it doesn't need help. If fossil fuels need help, they're not viable. You don't go around fixing something that's wrong by committing further wrongs. Rectify the underlying problem and the downstream issues will start to resolve as well.
Fine, but take the rest of the subsidies with them. Whether that's the farmers, the oil companies, the various housing subsidies, or anyone else getting a deal. The U.S. has slowly morphed into a petty kleptocracy where everyone is picking everyone else's pocket. Just end the madness and let the people who are incapable fail. There's no need (other than votes) for the government to try to prop them up.
You assume that that's the only more useful thing that a person could be doing. Apparently.
I won't deny that there are some people who are truly incapable of much, and through no fault of their own, but if you look at the world today, there are large number of jobs that no one foresaw 30 years ago. If the future were that predicable, the stock market wouldn't exist.
One of the nice things about Tumblr is that it served as a nice home for exactly the sort of people who liked the kind of content you would often find on Tumblr. If you're not familiar with the website, it has a reputation for featuring the kind of erotica that tends not to be published on more mainstream porn sites. So now you're going to get a lot of furries, adult-baby fetishists, and all manner of other sexual oddities looking for new homes. That's right folks, 40-year old men that like jerking off to erotic My Little Pony art, coming soon to a web community near you.
If the government should subsidize anything it's Tumblr and 4chan. You'd be hard pressed to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it keeps those people from being somewhere else for most of the day.
That and it doesn't prevent someone else from starting a satellite television company in the future, which would only absorb all of the customers who still prefer to have it. If the demand is still there, it's an even bigger waste of their money.
There's also non-troubling things, like removing genetic disorders. The possibility for the first shouldn't preclude using it for the second.
Not even that is going to be simple. There are some deaf people that don't want their own deaf children to get cochlear implants or to have other types of procedures that could restore their hearing. If they don't want that, odds are they won't accept a genetic fix to prevent the problem from developing in the first place.
There's also a whole can of worms as to what constitutes a genetic disorder. Suppose for sake of argument that sexual preference has a genetic control (I don't believe that this is the case, but this is for the sake of argument) and some parent doesn't want (or does, as some people today may well do) their child to be a homosexual. Is that something that's permissible to "fix"?
If you bother to look at the data as a whole instead of just state spending per student, you'll see that state spending has been increasing. A more detailed analysis even shows that the cost increases that are being charged to students to offset this, exceed the drop in per student spending.
What's been happening is that more and more people are going to college and it's got to the point where a lot of them shouldn't be. Here's one university where it was reported that 14% of students were failing an intermediate algebra course, which is for people who can't even get into the first 100-level math course.
You're not going to fix the problems with education by throwing even more money at it and the current financial model that gives loans to anyone who wants them regardless of likelihood of succeeding or the likelihood of being able to pay that loan back.
That and it means the taxes are likely to go up and you'll wind up paying more while waiting for those fewer number of customers to buy.
They survived the last ice age when a sizable part of their current habitat was buried under glaciers. Life is fairly resilient on the whole. 80% of the population might not be able to survive that change, but the 20% that do are the ones that pass on their genes and their offspring are more fit for the changing environment.
Tariffs are idiotic and Trump is stupid for using them at all. If the Chinese want to make their own citizens pay more for goods when they could buy cheaper American ones, that's their loss. Worse yet, they only encourage their own industry to remain less efficient and allow it to remain inefficient.
Similarly if they want to subsidize their industries, we should import as many of those goods as possible, since it's the Chinese taxpayer who is ultimately paying for Americans to have cheaper prices.
What does is matter who owns them? If we ever went to war or something like that, it's pretty easy to seize those assets, since they're in the U.S. and so are the people who actually work on them. If Chinese investors do a better job running those farms, are Americans any worse off because they are more productive? If Chinese investors do a worse job, won't they just lose out to better run businesses?
People fall asleep at the wheel all the time, most of them without self-driving cars beyond cruise control. He was also apparently drunk as per the article, so I think he just passed out after being out drinking until bar close.
You must be pretty damn sanctimonious to have never used "fuck" or any other language someone else might find objectionable in a professional setting. Maybe you have the benefit of only working with individuals just as or more competent than yourself, but there are some people who need to be told to stay the fuck away from something, or they will fuck it up and make a real fucking mess of things.
Myself, I'd rather be told to "fuck off" if I need to be. If I think it's out of line, I'll let you know. If I think you're being an abusive asshole, I'll let you know that too. Otherwise I'd rather not sit through some milquetoast discussion where it feels like someone is trying to address a five year old child that shouldn't hear the bad words. Frankly, that's more dehumanizing than someone being pissed off.
I'm glad to see that the code of conduct is resulting such good use of developer time.
These sad, sad people clearly need a hug.
FOSS assists in a concentration of power by select corporations.
Not the way i hoped it would work out.
What were you expecting, that the people who can barely use their computers and the FOSS operating systems or applications that run on them would somehow be able to modify the code and contribute back? It doesn't matter whether FOSS exists or not, because you're always going to see that outcome as long as you allow competition in a market. The most able competitors will eliminate those that are ineffective.
Because the ideal state of capitalism and socialism, is actually the same state.
What nonsense. An individual company might seek to become so powerful and all controlling that they essentially own everything, which would have a similar effect to the state removing private property, but that has nothing to do with the system itself. Without special treatment or protection from the government, it's quite unlikely that any single entity could ever reach that level of control.
At a certain point, people are responsible for their own actions and poor choices. It isn't victim blaming if you tell someone that they have cancer because they spent their entire life smoking cigarettes.