Yeah.
When I realized it was changing the number in the URL.... "Uh oh..."
714 karma · joined April 5, 2012
When I realized it was changing the number in the URL.... "Uh oh..."
The 'thing' that becomes money doesn't have to have a real world use. It must be desired by some people. People can desire bitcoins expecting it to become a widely used currency. Yes, it's circular, but there's nothing preventing a self-fulfilling prophecy from being compatible with the regression theorem.
Now, if you absolutely need to have some kind of basic usage to feel better, know that to use the Bitcoin blockchain, you must pay a fee in bitcoins. A bitcoin enables you to use the blockchain, the world's most secure distributed financial database.
Civilization crumbled and humanity disappeared.
In fact you are just dreaming this life. Time to wake up!
<insert dramatic chipmunk music>
Believe me, I wanted to love Nintendo after the Gamecube. NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, GBA, DS... I loved them all. But after that, somewhere along the way, it seems Nintendo lost its unique flavor and started to look like a pale copy of what it once was.
I'm not trying to defend the guy who coded a Mario Bros. clone (in fact, I couldn't care less...). I'm rather pointing out how saddened I am by the fact that the only instances where I hear about Nintendo now are for silly disputes like these.
Who wants to be cool here? The guy who replicates a game everyone knows he didn't create, or the lawyers trying to 'defend the company's assets' by making sure a game released in 1985 isn't playable on the Internet?
But now, it seems you can't make anything newsworthy anymore. (Or when you end up in the news, it's because of some silly takedown like this one.)
As with tipping, everything is in the 'social norm'.
Seriously, security on governmental websites (in Canada and Québec) is terrible.
I wouldn't be surprised if they stored password in plain text: they ask you to choose a shorter password if yours is too long.
Thanks for the suggestion!
What about her skills? Her personality? Her past achievements?
And while the other one says "Older men don’t want to report to young females!", why is it the gender that pops out? What about young?
Javascript however... Let's just say that you can count on IE to make sure you'll have to patch your code at least once.
But turns out the introduction was the entire text.
In addition, insurance companies can target a certain demographic to offer lower prices: An insurance for office workers will not be the same as an insurance for football players.
This is a really key point. Market forces push insurance to offer specialised coverages that match your risks. Start smoking? Hey, we're going to bump you in the next bracket...
And in case the only insurance offered are a clear rip off (extended warranty kind of thing), you can always walk off and say "no thanks".
Now, imagine a new government program that decides to accept everyone because capitalisms is obviously flawed and full of greedy people.
The cost of such an insurance will be, for certain individuals, higher than what they would be with a targeted coverage. (The office workers for example.) Those individuals have now every incentives to leave this insurance and either take a private one, or even take none at all.
This causes the remaining few in the government insurance to have higher premiums, causing even more people to leave and check for alternatives.
The only way to prevent this exodus is to force everyone to stay with a single, monolithic insurance coverage. Even (especially!) those who are healthy.
Let's assume that you are OK with the concept, because without the government, the sick, single moms and children are facing certain death...
Because this super insurance is working outside of the market, you can't evaluate the value it provides. (If you force someone to buy an ice cream cone $36 at gunpoint, is it really worth $36? Maybe, maybe not...) This in itself is a huge problem, because you never know when you are wasting too much resource to try to solve a problem. Would this money better spent financing schools? Perhaps it would be better to distribute better food to poor families? Again, it's outside the market so you'll probably never know. While there's an infinity of bad/suboptimal ideas, there's only one or a handful good. Now pick one and 'hope'. Throw in a little political games in it, and you'll probably never end up with what you were expecting to begin it.
But there's yet another, more 'local' problem. Now that you have your too-big-to-fail insurance, how can you keep it in check? Should it cost $1k to process a claim, or $10k? When is your administration too big? You can compare yourself to some other insurance companies, but that's assuming you didn't wipe out the entire market (which you have to, eventually, to prevent the exodus). Even with comparison, you never have a decisive proof that it's too big. How do workers react, when you try to resize an industry, without the proof that it needs to be done? If, in addition, it's a government subsidized industry, good luck ever making it smaller.
The end result is a "service" that not a single soul knows how much it should cost, but with a constant pressure to increase the funding.
Also, this is without taking into consideration some pharmaceutical firms' lobbying. Imagine how happy they would be, if none of their consumers were the payers! (It's already a problem in the U.S. IMO; people use drugs but just forward the bill to their insurance.)
These problems only grow with time. While a government insurance might be "not so bad" in the beginning, every structures and forces around will deteriorate it. And before you know it, you won't ever be able to talk against any of its part, because then you'll be a greedy capitalist that wants to leave the poor and sick die a painful death.
This is the trap I'm talking about. When you're in it, there's no way out.
Just because something has the backing of a government doesn't change the definition of words.
You can argue who is the owner of the money being taxed, but you can't say something is or isn't because it's lawful.
Adjective Savagely cruel; exceedingly brutal. Primitive; unsophisticated.
I fail to see how, when a group decide to take from the minority, it could be seen as anything else than barbaric.
It saddens me to see one of the last first world country coming closer to the universal health care trap. Sure, the US medical fees are insanely overpriced, but you don't solve a problem like this just by hiding the costs in a social program.
Or in other words, it's not because the general concept of insurance can be wise that every implementations are interesting.
Wow. Just wow.
'Murica, much?
We are often surprised to see the corruption in other countries, and yet to them paying a government official "To Insure Promptness" is completely normal.
Same thing here: it seems normal to pay someone -who is employed by someone else- to do some various tasks.
There's still time, but it really is something you don't want to mess up. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157141.0
"Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others." https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en