freech

"Income from virtual currency transactions", not "virtual currency transactions".

There are lots of CRUD apps that help people in need.

You could require people to advance some money, that they only get back if they pass the test.

If you want to stop having casual sex but feel you can't control yourself, maybe you can have yourself committed to some sort of clinic, instead of trying to take away the possibility from everyone else too? (Which probably wouldn't even help, since if you're not hideously ugly you will probably find more then enough men willing to have sex with you without craigslist.)

The person who runs the platform could do some calculations themselves and then throw people out if there's a disagreement.

Reddit but only academics can participate? Probably better then peer review, but it won't have the aura.

This is protectionism for capitalists. At the end, capital competes for labor and less foreign capital means domestic capitalists have to pay less.

> Even Green’s 93-year-old father sometimes asks if he really wants to spend his time making life difficult for companies that employ thousands of Brits.

This is such a teriffic argument. The mafia also employs people. If a company that employs people that earns money with fraud, not by doing anything productive goes bankrupt, that just means that those people will now have to work for a company that does do something productive, which is a good thing.

You've got to be kidding. What about the cast system? Do you think that would be better or worse now if the british had never colonialised india? Would india be a democracy now?

> In October 2008, Barclays was saved from collapse thanks to a $12 billion investment led by Qatar’s government. As part of the transaction, Barclays paid Qatar a secret $452 million fee for “advisory services” and loaned the country an additional $3 billion. To the SFO, the fee looked like a bribe and the loan an attempt by Barclays to illegally fund a purchase of its own shares. (The executives and the bank deny wrongdoing.)

Preventing stuff like this is essential to a working stock market. How can anyone invest in any company, if he has to fear that the companies assets he supposedly owns a share of, are given away in exchange for buying stock, so that the managers can get a bonus for the rising stock price, instead of the company getting raided and the managers replaced with better ones?

There's no detail about the other cases, but at least in this case it's clear that there's no dichotomy at all between the UK's economic interest, jobs, the free market and ethics, but rather between those things and the upper management of a single company.

> Bankers who manipulate markets ought to be charged, he said, but “simply ratcheting up ever-larger fines that just penalize shareholders, erode capital reserves, and diminish the lending potential of the economy is not, in the end, a long-term answer.”

"penalize shareholders" Shareholders are supposed to invest in sound businesses. There's nothing wrong with them being "penalized" by fines, anymore then there's anything wrong with them being "penalized" if a companies new product fails.

It follows from the law of marginal utility.

So china invades Taiwan, Taiwan nukes them, and then? China decides to nuke them of the map instead?

The entire point of cryptocurrency is to control it yourself, by owning the private keys. Instead of investing in ethereum with coinbase, why not invest in a centralized smart contract platform (much easier and even safer as long as you trust the person who runs it)?

> There was a guy a while ago who bought a hardware wallet on ebay and lost all his coins.

Was this because he sent his coins to a paper wallet that the seller generated for him? I would be impressed if someone had actually managed to produce a fake trezor, but even then, it's pretty straightforward not to buy them on ebay.

> We'd probably know if they'd ever tested a weapon. We wouldn't necessarily know if they'd actually built one. If I were them, I totally would have.

What's the point of having nuclear weapons and not telling everyone? The entire point of nuclear weapons is to deter attacks.

The employees of corporations are absolutely subject to things like the 3 strikes law and the death penalty for things they do for the corporation. So it makes sense that they have the same rights when they do things for the corporation.

It would be inconsistent to say: If you do something in the employment of a corporation you have same duties as anyone who acts on his own, but none of the rights.

> If you're in a country where child pornography is legal, should all other countries just accept it?

Yes.

> If you're in a country where doxxing is legal, should the victims not be able to do anything against it?

No.

I wonder whether Amazon accounts for this properly. If someone asked them to remove a competitors products, how much money would they demand? They'd have to calculate the damage this does their brand. Do they calculate in this case?

> mainly because the www.gutenberg.org site has some content in the German language.

That's an extraordinary theory of international law. By that logic Austria and Namibia also have jurisdiction.

In contrast to Warren Buffett, who presumably uses his Coca-Cola shares to buy coffee somewhere.

I honestly don't get the point of this company. If I feel competent to judge that some decision they make like investing in American Express is good, why not do that directly, myself?

How is American Express not a primarily digital business?

There's a third possibility in your example though: Invest in mining the PoW currency.

> first, you identify inefficiencies in the market: weaknesses, loopholes, things like that

Huh? That's not what inefficiency means. It means that an asset costs more (or less) then it's worth.

The difference here is that if I fail to secure my wallet only I loose my money, but if the bank fails to secure their database, all its customers loose their money.

"Private blockchains are a different matter, and they will have applications in e.g. automating many transactions."

A private blockchain is just an inefficient databse.

"which is nevertheless very effectively backed by the government’s universal tendency to require said paper money for taxes, not to mention the inconvenient fact that if societal trust erodes sufficiently for paper money to lose its value, it’s highly unlikely an arbitrary string of ones and zeros in an arbitrary hard disk somewhere would fare much better"

I've never seen the argument made that paper money is going to lose it's value because societal trust erodes, it is losing it's value because people keep printing more of it. So yeah, I think Bitcoin already does fare better.

> And in New York, a small union called the New York Taxi Workers Alliance declared that there would be no taxi pickups from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday night at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

> For Uber, that would create extra demand at the airport, which meant it could charge more—but this would probably cause a backlash. That had happened before when the company let its “surge pricing” algorithms do their thing. So the New York managers decided to be good citizens and suspend surge pricing for the night.

> If the company wasn’t price gouging this time, maybe it was trying to break up the JFK strike.

That's actually the opposite of what disabling surge pricing does. It makes sure that drivers aren't paid enough to bother picking up passengers there, so it protects the strike.

People are idiots. Uber should start a campaign featuring polar bears cruising around or something (or maybe make fun of trump on their twitter account if they have to save money) instead of trying to fulfill the publics demands.

As soon as a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a useful measure.

It's impossible to only question those ideas you personally really need to question, while ignoring other ideas you hear that seem wrong. You either develop a habit of questioning or not. Habits need to be simple, you can't have a habit of showering every day, except when the date is a prime number.

Maybe you'd prefer watching a polar bear eat a seal alive?