The S&P 500 is up about 7% annually over the last 5 years, with inflation never exceeding 3% over that period. That leaves a calm 4% real return on one of the less risky investment options.
797 karma · joined April 12, 2012
> Although sweating is found in a wide variety of mammals, relatively few, such as humans and horses, produce large amounts of sweat in order to cool down.
We don't beat them out necessarily because we can replenish more, but because we are much more efficient at cooling ourselves. Obviously water and tools helped us, but imagine trying to compete in a 5k wearing a rubber suit--you wouldn't come close to competing with those humans you're up against.
This attitude is typically a very bad one to have when dieting. Ingesting fewer calories should be sustainable after you've reached your target weight.
Anyways, good luck to you in your efforts. If this is a way for you to start, then there's nothing wrong with it at all.
It really annoying to me that people keep putting up this straw man. What economist is saying that BTC has no intrinsic value and is thus worthless? Really? You learn in ECO101 that currency only has value because of what you can exchange it for. Money demand is not a fringe concept in economics--its a core concept that anyone in any branch of economics that deals with currency and money thinks about several times a day.
The fact that you can only do business with the vast majority of american society in USD is what gives the USD value. We got to that point because the US government said that US currency should be acceptable to pay off any debts in the US, including taxes. The fact that dollar exists and is the common currency in the US is tied to the law, but its exchange rate and purchasing power is (aka its 'value') is tied to other factors completely.
You can make the argument that the long term value of BTC is zero because there's nothing that guarantees it continued existence, like US law guarantees the existence of the dollar. But thats totally separate from the value and exchangability of BTC to US.
Is Google above doing bad things? Did you believe that there was collusion over hiring practices what that news broke? Thats ludicrous, but yet there was a class action lawsuit that proved it occured.
I completely agree this is ludicrous--and yet, what if its true? Even on some meaningful level? People, including you, are willing to accept it as fact that this is an obviously false conspiracy theory because its Google. I don't think whitewashing is a behavior people should accept when its coming from a company like Google.
This shouldn't need to be nipped in the bud by a google spokesperson. The only way you're going to do that in a legitimate way is if a third party comes in to investigate it.
I doubt thats going to happen, but I think this accusation is not obviously impossible, and because of that, if the consensus becomes "no, google would never do this", I don't want it to be because of a whitewashing effort by google. I want it to be because no one has any reason to believe this is actually the case.
Are you authorized to act as a spokesperson on Google's behalf? If these accusations are true and someone thought it warranted a class action lawsuit or otherwise, would you really want to be so visibly commenting on it?
I don't know to what extent that industry is regulated, but there is a very long history of teamsters getting their way.
Coinbase is more like an AC'd storage facility with locks on the doors and people on staff checking IDs than an a "dark open lot 2 miles from my house". Yeah, its not Fort Knox, or even a basic bank vault, but if I think I'm much more likely to lose a thumb drive or have my computer stolen than suffer a catastrophic problem with a storage facility owned by reputable people, how does it not make sense?
That said, I'd probably be thinking about this a lot harder if I had any serious money put away in bitcoin. A storage facility is not an appropriate place to store 5 tons of gold.
The big players (optimizers) seem to be doing about the same thing, but with their own value added features. I've literally seen no open source or independent platform do this though, and I'm not interested in paying for a vendor locked in solution. I've started working on a project on my own that does this, but I'm not really motivated by it because I don't know enough about the industry to see if its a problem for other publishers.
IRC obviously isn't mainstream and lacks features that some other systems have, but whenever I'm working on something and want a quick question answered that I can't get via google, I look for an IRC channel first.
No one has ever doubted that this was possible. 'Robust' currency has existed without a central monetary authority in the past (for millenia!). The reason the Fed exists is because its believe that it takes an existing 'robust' currency and makes it better.
Then again, people will call anything a bubble. But its easy to see that this is not evidence of it by asking yourself if we'd be worse off if Google disappeared tomorrow vs if Exxon did.