It also raises and endless series of questions about the real value of Bitcoin -- you know, the value that is determined by the supply and demand. Where does the demand for monopoly money come from? Why should Bitcoin have more demand than monopoly money?
...and what will happen when Chaumiam-style digital cash is issued and is backed by some governments (hint: Bitcoin will die because people will flock to that currency)?
No, that is why it is not useful when the population grows faster than gold can be mined. Gold has value primarily because at one time, it was accepted as currency by most world governments, which only happened because no better system could be devised with the technology of the time. The industrial uses of gold account for almost none of its value, and make gold even less useful as a currency (since some currency may simply vanish when it is used industrially).
Money that is deflationary encourages hoarding, which only worsens the deflationary trend. That is why currency needs to at least scale with a growing population.
If you want digital, anonymity, and convenient, well good luck with that. The combination of the 3 just screams "counterfeit". Like the old saying goes, pick two.
Except that we have ways to deal with that. Chaumiam systems, for instance, will de-anonymize anyone who tries to double-spend their money (the equivalent of counterfeiting; true counterfeiting is hard because of the properties of digital signatures).
Real digital cash involves an issuing authority, which can be a bank or a government, but which neither knows who it has issued any specific token to nor when or where that token has been spent (well, strictly, it only requires this if it is to be both scalable and support offline payments). Real digital cash allows transactions to happen offline i.e. requiring no parties other than the two parties involved in the transaction. That is what Chaum and many other cryptographers spent lots of time developing.
"...isn't backed by any government..."
Sounds good to me. Certainly true anyway.
So what creates the demand for Bitcoin? See, that's the difference between monopoly money and government backed money: a government backing a currency creates a substantial demand for that currency -- the courts will base damage awards and property value assessments on that currency (by extension, loans will be issued and must be repaid using that currency), taxes must be paid in that currency, and the general legal structure surrounding the currency makes it safer to use in a transaction. Now, if you can find the point at which the demand for Bitcoin even approaches that kind of demand, let's see it.
To put it another way, the value of anything depends on both supply and demand. We know all about the supply of Bitcoin; now let's talk about demand.
Yesterday, I got a cheap dinner with a friend; it came out to about $5 for each of us. I handed the cashier a credit card, since I have not been to an ATM in quite a while, and he gave me a dirty look.
That anecdote illustrates the problem. On the one hand, we have a cheap, anonymous, private way to make payments (cash), but it requires us to have physical paper or coins in our pockets. On the other hand, we have electronic methods that require a connection to an online transaction processor, which results in higher transaction costs and poor privacy protections.
That is why digital cash -- the real kind, not the Bitcoin kind -- is so useful. It allows private, electronic payments to occur online or offline (in the sense of two smartphones performing a transaction over Bluetooth), with all the advantages of cash and all the advantages of the current electronic payment system.
Fix? I think you mean, "migrate"
on
The PHP Singularity
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
It is not as though there is no other choice. The only two things that need to be done are (a) stop writing new PHP code and (b) start migrating old PHP code to better languages. We can do web development in Python, Haskell, various Lisps, Scala, and several others. There is no "fixing" necessary, just phasing out -- and the only code related to PHP that needs to be written, if any, would be interfaces for better languages, so that old, impossible-to-rewrite code can be extended with something that is not PHP.
Right, so when a country makes overly expansive definitions of crimes, we should just go with their definition. Let's just use the most confusing, least meaningful definitions of crimes from all the countries in the world -- then everyone will be a criminal, and we can just dispense with the court system entirely.
If you are willing to forgive the following uses of scare quotes,
In Saudi Arabia, a woman is a "prostitute if she is in the company of a man who is not her husband. I guess that's our new definition of prostitution!
In Vietnam, someone who plans a protest against the government is a "terrorist." Yes, there are terrorists all around us!
In Ethiopia, any homosexual sex is a "sex crime." I guess all those people in Greenwich Village are criminals!
So please, let's set aside this nonsense about respecting other countries' bizarre and overly expansive definitions of crimes. Quotation marks are well deserved and appropriate.
No, it's your use of the scare quotes around rape that minimizes a rape, regardless of whether you agree with the definition.
It is not minimizing rape if the so-called crime does not even fit any reasonable definition of "rape." Under Sweden's definition, nearly anyone who has been sexually active for any significant length of time would have committed a "rape." I would be both a "victim" and a "rapist" myself if we applied that definition.
But you keep banging on me about the fact that I dislike the idea of playing semantic games with rape accusations.
So let's see, in your world, the moment someone is accused of rape, the case is settled -- regardless of whether or not we even have a common definition of the word.
You're minimizing a rape allegation.
That is because nobody else thinks that what Assange is charged with even constitutes rape.
That makes you scum. Period.
Right, scum. Scum, because I think there should be a limit on what is considered rape. Scum, because when I think of women I know who were raped, I think of the tears, the emotional pain, the broken trust, and not of women who went to a party in honor of their attacker. Scum, because I do not want people to assume that normal sexual behavior constitutes rape.
Yes, clearly, I am scum for not wanting to accept such an expansive definition of the word "rape" that people stop taking the crime seriously.
Except there is, both in terms of what he is charged with (which does not fit any reasonable definition of the word "rape") and in how he has been charged, since the charges were already dropped by the prosecutor originally assigned to the case. Dropped, by the way, for lack of evidence -- even under Swedens expansive definition of "rape," there was not enough evidence to charge Mr. Assange...until some other prosecutor came in and reopened the case.
The scare quotes are propaganda, designed to make people question the veracity of the accuser's claims.
As opposed to the facts surrounding the case causing people to doubt the verasity of the claims. You know, like the fact that the first prosecutor who handled the case dropped all charges for (and again, quotes are appropriate here), "lack of evidence." Like the fact that the "victims" were proud to have slept with Mr. Assange, with one attending a party in his honor after supposedly being raped by him. Nor the fact that both women consented and were able to give consent, and only decided after the fact, and after meeting with each other, to file charges.
None of that matters; it's the use of quotation marks around the word "rape" that will cause of us to doubt his guilt.
Wouldn't the hospitals and doctors still have a profit motive?
In theory, no; doctors do swear an oath to use their skills to heal the sick, not to become medical robber barons. In practice, there may be such a motive, but:
Insurance company profits are nearly orthogonal to hospital profits. Insurance companies do some amount of negotiation with clinics and hospitals, but they still seem to find a way to pass the cost of health care on to the people receiving it. They would not be (as) profitable if they paid for everything.
The government does not need to report to shareholders, and can be required to cover procedures entirely. This leaves the government in to position of having to push back against those doctors and hospitals who try to maximize their monetary profits, rather than just passing the costs on to us "little people." Yes, taxes may be raised, but we "little people" do have a real say in that, unlike insurance companies (what, you want to pay less? well you get less coverage!).
with health insurance policies typically set up so the individual see's little cost to themselves for procedures and tests, who would be providing a counterbalance to the doctors' profit motives to keep costs moderately sane?
There is no counterbalance now. When people get expensive medical treatments and their insurance plans do not pay, they just go into debt, and some cases bankruptcy. People have to think twice about routine tests and procedures, because they might get stuck with a bill they cannot afford. Some people do not get the treatment they need as a result -- the most obscene outcome of the current system.
I actually think the public option was a good idea, although mostly for folks that don't/can't get insurance through their employer. But I don't think it was actually going to help noticeably with costs.
The nice thing about the public option is that, if the people of this country wanted to, they could reallocate funds from destructive programs like the war on drugs to health care. Right now, when medical expenses go up, the bill is just passed directly to the people receiving treatment; if you an insured, that happens through your insurance company, and if you are uninsured, well the hospital will just extend you a line of credit and demand money from you. It is not as though you can say, "I do not want to pay for the world's largest prison population, I would rather be healthy." Usually the choice looks more like this: "I do not want to lose my house, so I will wait until I am so sick that I cannot go on any further."
The other advantage of the public option is that it could be funded with a progressive tax (yes, scary -- the top 1% of earners paying to keep the rest of society healthy). Historically, America had a much heavier progressive tax, which paid for great improvements to our society. There is no reason we cannot increase the taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations to pay for the healthcare of everyone else. We already use tax money to pay for medical research (see: NIH, NSF), which often benefits the wealthy long before it benefits the rest of society.
Yeah but then we will have to -- gasp -- cover the medical expenses of people who are just above the poverty line (and think of how terrible it is that we cover the costs of people who are below the poverty line!).
The popular sentiment these days is that everyone should just fend for themselves, compete with each other as vigorously as possible, and those who are unable to compete do not deserve to live in our society. The entire outlook can be summarized in just three words: greed is good.
Ah sorry for the misunderstanding. I am unfortunately surrounded by people who never bothered to read past, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" and who think that everyone in our society should just fend for themselves and anyone who cannot compete should just be left to die.
Right, paying taxes makes you a slave. Interesting concept, I wonder how you think governments are supposed to function? Perhaps you think soldiers should just point their guns at people and demand food and shelter, simply bypassing the taxes entirely.
the public opinion of those who want to freeload off the rest of us because they think freedom means they don't have to pay for their healthcare, we do?
You do realize that a society full of sick people is just one step from a plague, right? There is a threshold beyond which even people who receive medical care can be affected.
So get over it -- yes, tax dollars should be used to keep people alive and healthy, just like tax dollars are used to keep roads paved. We spend huge amounts of tax money funding paramilitary police forces and keeping millions of people incarcerated (more prisoners than any other country by orders of magnitude); how about we take the money out of those programs and use it to pay for health care?
Without the public option, this bill is just a way to further cement and inflate the profits of health insurance companies -- which, last I checked, were the "bad guys" who refuse to cover the cost of necessary treatment. Your ability to have your medical treatments paid for depends on whether or not you can afford deductibles, premiums, co-pays, "co-insurance" (which is obviously different from co-pay), and tests, prescriptions, or treatments that the insurance company will not even both to cover (in the words of Aetna: this is not covered because it is an integral part of a covered procedure).
That is the sort of thing that comes out of a for-profit system -- the health insurance companies turn their greatest profits when they are not paying for treatment, and so they do everything they can to avoid paying.
No, the public option is not perfect -- it invites fraud of various kinds, it is an open target for politicians who think a government should not be in the position of keeping its citizens alive and healthy, and it would likely replace the current bureaucracy with another. It is still better than a system where banks, investment companies, and disconnected investors become wealthier when sick people are denied medical care.
It seems like increasing the demand for health insurance will make the price of go up. Could someone please explain why that is wrong?
That is why, originally, there was the public option. That never did make it through, so now we are stuck with the same profit-from-denying-treatment system we were trying to get rid of.
You want a technical aspect? Computerized medical records are one of the most complex software systems being worked on right now. There is an entire programming language that was developed for that purpose:
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It also raises and endless series of questions about the real value of Bitcoin -- you know, the value that is determined by the supply and demand. Where does the demand for monopoly money come from? Why should Bitcoin have more demand than monopoly money?
...and what will happen when Chaumiam-style digital cash is issued and is backed by some governments (hint: Bitcoin will die because people will flock to that currency)?
No, that is why it is not useful when the population grows faster than gold can be mined. Gold has value primarily because at one time, it was accepted as currency by most world governments, which only happened because no better system could be devised with the technology of the time. The industrial uses of gold account for almost none of its value, and make gold even less useful as a currency (since some currency may simply vanish when it is used industrially).
Money that is deflationary encourages hoarding, which only worsens the deflationary trend. That is why currency needs to at least scale with a growing population.
If you want digital, anonymity, and convenient, well good luck with that. The combination of the 3 just screams "counterfeit". Like the old saying goes, pick two.
Except that we have ways to deal with that. Chaumiam systems, for instance, will de-anonymize anyone who tries to double-spend their money (the equivalent of counterfeiting; true counterfeiting is hard because of the properties of digital signatures).
Not being "backed" by any government is nothing less than the very first prerequisite of anonymity
So that's the reast I know exactly who held the dollar bill in my pocket before I received it...
Someone forgot to look at the work done by this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum
Real digital cash involves an issuing authority, which can be a bank or a government, but which neither knows who it has issued any specific token to nor when or where that token has been spent (well, strictly, it only requires this if it is to be both scalable and support offline payments). Real digital cash allows transactions to happen offline i.e. requiring no parties other than the two parties involved in the transaction. That is what Chaum and many other cryptographers spent lots of time developing.
"...isn't backed by any government..."
Sounds good to me. Certainly true anyway.
So what creates the demand for Bitcoin? See, that's the difference between monopoly money and government backed money: a government backing a currency creates a substantial demand for that currency -- the courts will base damage awards and property value assessments on that currency (by extension, loans will be issued and must be repaid using that currency), taxes must be paid in that currency, and the general legal structure surrounding the currency makes it safer to use in a transaction. Now, if you can find the point at which the demand for Bitcoin even approaches that kind of demand, let's see it.
To put it another way, the value of anything depends on both supply and demand . We know all about the supply of Bitcoin; now let's talk about demand.
You forgot:
[x] Does not scale.
Yesterday, I got a cheap dinner with a friend; it came out to about $5 for each of us. I handed the cashier a credit card, since I have not been to an ATM in quite a while, and he gave me a dirty look.
That anecdote illustrates the problem. On the one hand, we have a cheap, anonymous, private way to make payments (cash), but it requires us to have physical paper or coins in our pockets. On the other hand, we have electronic methods that require a connection to an online transaction processor, which results in higher transaction costs and poor privacy protections.
That is why digital cash -- the real kind, not the Bitcoin kind -- is so useful. It allows private, electronic payments to occur online or offline (in the sense of two smartphones performing a transaction over Bluetooth), with all the advantages of cash and all the advantages of the current electronic payment system.
This man disagrees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum
It is not as though there is no other choice. The only two things that need to be done are (a) stop writing new PHP code and (b) start migrating old PHP code to better languages. We can do web development in Python, Haskell, various Lisps, Scala, and several others. There is no "fixing" necessary, just phasing out -- and the only code related to PHP that needs to be written, if any, would be interfaces for better languages, so that old, impossible-to-rewrite code can be extended with something that is not PHP.
Then we can dump them out of my list of companies whose products I buy, recommend to others, or neglect to give negative reviews to.
If you are willing to forgive the following uses of scare quotes,
So please, let's set aside this nonsense about respecting other countries' bizarre and overly expansive definitions of crimes. Quotation marks are well deserved and appropriate.
No, it's your use of the scare quotes around rape that minimizes a rape, regardless of whether you agree with the definition.
It is not minimizing rape if the so-called crime does not even fit any reasonable definition of "rape." Under Sweden's definition, nearly anyone who has been sexually active for any significant length of time would have committed a "rape." I would be both a "victim" and a "rapist" myself if we applied that definition.
But you keep banging on me about the fact that I dislike the idea of playing semantic games with rape accusations.
So let's see, in your world, the moment someone is accused of rape, the case is settled -- regardless of whether or not we even have a common definition of the word.
You're minimizing a rape allegation.
That is because nobody else thinks that what Assange is charged with even constitutes rape.
That makes you scum. Period.
Right, scum. Scum, because I think there should be a limit on what is considered rape. Scum, because when I think of women I know who were raped, I think of the tears, the emotional pain, the broken trust, and not of women who went to a party in honor of their attacker. Scum, because I do not want people to assume that normal sexual behavior constitutes rape.
Yes, clearly, I am scum for not wanting to accept such an expansive definition of the word "rape" that people stop taking the crime seriously.
Except there is, both in terms of what he is charged with (which does not fit any reasonable definition of the word "rape") and in how he has been charged, since the charges were already dropped by the prosecutor originally assigned to the case. Dropped, by the way, for lack of evidence -- even under Swedens expansive definition of "rape," there was not enough evidence to charge Mr. Assange...until some other prosecutor came in and reopened the case.
Funny how those charges were dropped for lack of evidence, then mysteriously reopened...
The scare quotes are propaganda, designed to make people question the veracity of the accuser's claims.
As opposed to the facts surrounding the case causing people to doubt the verasity of the claims. You know, like the fact that the first prosecutor who handled the case dropped all charges for (and again, quotes are appropriate here), "lack of evidence." Like the fact that the "victims" were proud to have slept with Mr. Assange, with one attending a party in his honor after supposedly being raped by him. Nor the fact that both women consented and were able to give consent, and only decided after the fact, and after meeting with each other, to file charges.
None of that matters; it's the use of quotation marks around the word "rape" that will cause of us to doubt his guilt.
No sane person would define what he is accused of as "rape."
Wouldn't the hospitals and doctors still have a profit motive?
In theory, no; doctors do swear an oath to use their skills to heal the sick, not to become medical robber barons. In practice, there may be such a motive, but:
with health insurance policies typically set up so the individual see's little cost to themselves for procedures and tests, who would be providing a counterbalance to the doctors' profit motives to keep costs moderately sane?
There is no counterbalance now. When people get expensive medical treatments and their insurance plans do not pay, they just go into debt, and some cases bankruptcy. People have to think twice about routine tests and procedures, because they might get stuck with a bill they cannot afford. Some people do not get the treatment they need as a result -- the most obscene outcome of the current system.
I actually think the public option was a good idea, although mostly for folks that don't/can't get insurance through their employer. But I don't think it was actually going to help noticeably with costs.
The nice thing about the public option is that, if the people of this country wanted to, they could reallocate funds from destructive programs like the war on drugs to health care. Right now, when medical expenses go up, the bill is just passed directly to the people receiving treatment; if you an insured, that happens through your insurance company, and if you are uninsured, well the hospital will just extend you a line of credit and demand money from you. It is not as though you can say, "I do not want to pay for the world's largest prison population, I would rather be healthy." Usually the choice looks more like this: "I do not want to lose my house, so I will wait until I am so sick that I cannot go on any further."
The other advantage of the public option is that it could be funded with a progressive tax (yes, scary -- the top 1% of earners paying to keep the rest of society healthy). Historically, America had a much heavier progressive tax, which paid for great improvements to our society. There is no reason we cannot increase the taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations to pay for the healthcare of everyone else. We already use tax money to pay for medical research (see: NIH, NSF), which often benefits the wealthy long before it benefits the rest of society.
Yeah but then we will have to -- gasp -- cover the medical expenses of people who are just above the poverty line (and think of how terrible it is that we cover the costs of people who are below the poverty line!).
The popular sentiment these days is that everyone should just fend for themselves, compete with each other as vigorously as possible, and those who are unable to compete do not deserve to live in our society. The entire outlook can be summarized in just three words: greed is good.
Welcome to America!
Ah sorry for the misunderstanding. I am unfortunately surrounded by people who never bothered to read past, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" and who think that everyone in our society should just fend for themselves and anyone who cannot compete should just be left to die.
Right, paying taxes makes you a slave. Interesting concept, I wonder how you think governments are supposed to function? Perhaps you think soldiers should just point their guns at people and demand food and shelter, simply bypassing the taxes entirely.
Try again kid.
the public opinion of those who want to freeload off the rest of us because they think freedom means they don't have to pay for their healthcare, we do?
You do realize that a society full of sick people is just one step from a plague, right? There is a threshold beyond which even people who receive medical care can be affected.
So get over it -- yes, tax dollars should be used to keep people alive and healthy, just like tax dollars are used to keep roads paved. We spend huge amounts of tax money funding paramilitary police forces and keeping millions of people incarcerated (more prisoners than any other country by orders of magnitude); how about we take the money out of those programs and use it to pay for health care?
Without the public option, this bill is just a way to further cement and inflate the profits of health insurance companies -- which, last I checked, were the "bad guys" who refuse to cover the cost of necessary treatment. Your ability to have your medical treatments paid for depends on whether or not you can afford deductibles, premiums, co-pays, "co-insurance" (which is obviously different from co-pay), and tests, prescriptions, or treatments that the insurance company will not even both to cover (in the words of Aetna: this is not covered because it is an integral part of a covered procedure).
That is the sort of thing that comes out of a for-profit system -- the health insurance companies turn their greatest profits when they are not paying for treatment, and so they do everything they can to avoid paying.
No, the public option is not perfect -- it invites fraud of various kinds, it is an open target for politicians who think a government should not be in the position of keeping its citizens alive and healthy, and it would likely replace the current bureaucracy with another. It is still better than a system where banks, investment companies, and disconnected investors become wealthier when sick people are denied medical care.
It seems like increasing the demand for health insurance will make the price of go up. Could someone please explain why that is wrong?
That is why, originally, there was the public option. That never did make it through, so now we are stuck with the same profit-from-denying-treatment system we were trying to get rid of.
You want a technical aspect? Computerized medical records are one of the most complex software systems being worked on right now. There is an entire programming language that was developed for that purpose:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS