tal8d

I'll go ahead and skip addressing the weird meta-analysis, aside from recognizing it - and calling it weird. As far as taking exception with the language used to describe the rioting, well that is just more of the same - the desperation to control language has gone from mildly annoying to simply pitiful. It also makes the task of accurately describing the participants and their activities impossible, which you foreshadow...

> ...what do the air quotes mean?

Consider not only the stupidity of cramming so many people into a single label suffixed by the word "community", but the utility that such an exercise would offer - and to who's benefit. Do you feel a sense of community with the rest of the people who share some arbitrary set of qualities with you? The right handed, brown eyed, bowl cut community?

I have a fantasy about the linguists returning to place formal logic back where it belongs - towering over the collapsed heap of probabilistic-blackbox-cat-picture-classifiers. A constrained natural language system would then be loosed on the Federal Register, steadily chewing through a 100 year mess, identifying clauses that violate the growing model's internal coherence, and suggesting potential constraints where global satisfiability is possible. It is a nice dream.

One thing only lightly hinted on is how sccs was designed to tightly couple the source files to the output object files. Imagine super fine grain symbol versioning + loads of metadata for large project management tools. There was also stuff related to version constraints, security, and dynamic dispatching. They had a very different definition of "source control". I still see some odd artifacts of it pop up every so often in AIX object files.

> It's because the price of the average house is due to the cost of urban/suburban land...

That maybe true, but it would be unrelated to my observations.

> ...rises steeply with median incomes...

Whoops! For that to be true there would have to be a non-linear relation that would itself be far more interesting than the housing prices issue.

> ...often dominated by building costs which rise slower than incomes...

Not a lot of new mansion construction going on. Oh, and those construction costs are pretty ridiculous right now due to a jump in lumber and appliance costs - income would have had to nearly double to match construction's rate of increase. I collected bids a few months ago for a grading and paving, jobs dominated by labor costs. The quotes were laughably overpriced.

> ...as the NFL player/movie star/exiting startup founder pays in cash...

lol, your conception of today's millionaire is way off - it is a distinction that has never been more easily attained.

> That is a statement full of hubris.

No, that is - and presumptuous :) Also, that final sentence agrees with the mortgage issue I mentioned, gets the direction of migration wrong, and finally overlooks the steadily growing income disparity - which is somehow resulting in mansions doing poorly on the real estate market. So you did a pretty good job of unintentionally proving my point with regard to the situation being misrepresented.

This reminds me of a supplier that was notorious in the security industry for stacking the sales dept with very friendly but otherwise unqualified "closers". I can't imagine that sales strategy is working so well right now.

Well that is a major mischaracterization of my views on the US government. It is funny that you mention Snowden, because many of us were called paranoid conspiracy nuts for using the exact same logic I just demonstrated to warn about dragnet surveillance programs. Watch: the USG has the disposition to spy on its citizens and the capability to do so without fear of consequences, therefor it is almost certainly happening. You can see that argument commonly popping up all over the 90s cypherpunks mailing list.

Now, try to apply that same reasoning to your allegation without looking silly. Yes, the USG has secretly run certain aspects of a public biowarfare program - and when it came to light they paid. Boom, they couldn't keep it secret and they couldn't escape the consequences (lots of very damaging legal cases and hearings). Finally, do they have an incentive? No - as I said, it makes no sense for them to reduce the cost of yet another world ending weapon. Now you could point to Russia getting caught with massive stockpiles of Anthrax after they claimed to end the program... but their nuclear program's credibility isn't comparable - they've always demonstrated clear signs of insecurity about it. That isn't the case for the USG.

> Healthcare, for one - there are lifesaving treatments...

The correct metric would be life expectancy, as it sidesteps the zero priors problem. Using that, the healthcare you are talking about looks a lot more like the diminishing returns you get on higher priced modern cars. Before anyone says anything about "quality of life", I'd recommend looking at the way assisted living operations are run. Anyway, we really started to lose steam after dentistry... dunno what the analog would be for cars, power steering?

> If the house you "need" to fulfill a specific lifestyle...

This is another thing I've been dealing with recently. I've delayed entry into the housing market way past what I'd have liked because the pricing makes no sense to me, and I've found that usually if something doesn't make sense to me - it is because it is misrepresented. After watching the market for a few years in two very different parts of the country I noticed something interesting: sub-million dollar homes were quickly getting more expensive, and multi-million dollar mansions were relatively static. I wonder how much of that has to do with home-loan accessibility, similar to the cost of educating students magically increasing in lock step with student loan program scope and availability.

The very public shuttering of facilities, the absence of military doctrine, etc. Yes, there could be secret congressional funding for a secret research lab serving a secret component of the military that secretly maintains readiness to do something that is strategically counterproductive and categorically denied. Do I really need to go on with how silly that line of thought is?

That sort of vindictive obsession seems to pop up a lot in the media. I remember that time that Newsweek published photos of some old guy's house and declared to the world that he was the secret bitcoin billionaire Satoshi Nakamoto. His face is still all over the search results. Instead of backing off in the face of the growing ridiculing laughter at her stupidity, the reporter doubled down. She eventually shutup about it, presumable after Newsweek got tired of repeating "We stand behind our reporters".

It is an absolutely braindead thing for a nuclear power to do - bio/chem weapon R&D. The reason why the US abandoned that course so long ago had nothing to do with morality - somebody in the DoD simply realized that they were furthering the state of the art in dirt cheap WMDs. If you already have nukes, you want to keep the cost of doomsday devices as high as possible - limiting the number of potential rivals.

I wrote a curses scheduling application for warehouse managers and essentially just set it as their login shell to a machine that only did timesheet stuff. No complaints and no problems for all the years it ran. Of course... they were already doing a lot of their work in a 5250 terminal emulator - and probably just assumed they were talking to an AS/400 instead of a headless disused Dell workstation. Don't get hung up on the shell thing, you only need to think about env variables, stdin/stdout, and maybe termcap/terminfo (depending on how fancy you want to get).

okbye, good luck with the word blindness.

> If you don't like the term, why did you use it in the first place?

I do like it, I like it a lot - it perfectly represents the manipulative nature of the situation.

"...both scientific consensus and political will have come a long way." -- VP Al Gore, Kyoto Climate Change Conference 1997

> What does the "that" refer to?

The false dichotomy you seem so interested in pursuing. The ratio of cooling to warming papers doesn't mean anything when neither deliver accurate models.

> You were gamed by a TV show designed to get viewers by pushing some wacky ideas.

I wonder if you are so obtuse that you believe that to be an accurate estimate of my position, or even a clever dig. It just makes you look desperate to avoid the fact that science plays little role in what has become an ad-campaign/power-grab.

> There was no scientific consensus in favor of global cooling.

Define "scientific consensus", and then step back and ask yourself why anyone would elect to corrupt the scientific process with something so easily gamed. I already hear the cries of "bbbut meta analysis, science is hard!" It has nothing to do with science, it is a political phrase.

> Hardly a consensus.

Oddly missing from that are all the scientists calling both parties out for being unable to accurately predict anything, which is a pretty good sign of inaccurate attribution within the models.

> What documentary was this, "In Search of..."?

Unless he did more than one, yes. Also, enjoy the Youtube editorial flag assuring you of the opposite - because this is about science.

> FWIW, Nimoy was never a scientist, so how is that at all relevant?

Because scientists aren't playing much of a role in the messaging campaign calling for extra-national economic management.

I prefer the more mean spirited "aggressively stupid", but I don't want to tempt a splintering of the "Hanlon's razor" people - I'm quite happy with the mental image I have of them already.

A company can damage an open source project in a number of creative ways that have nothing to do with file formats. One word: Oracle. OpenOffice vs LibreOffice is a pretty good example of plausibly deniable sabotage that would enjoy a bonus with the number of people interjecting, index finger raised, with "Actually, Hanlon's razor..." To be fair to Oracle, Sun didn't help that situation at all, Oracle just ratcheted it up.

> ...it'll likely lead to governments delaying doing anything.

You have a much higher opinion of the world's governments than I do. They seem very eager to establish extra-national governance, and climate change has provided the perfect vehicle for exactly that - a justification for global economic management. I seriously doubt that truth would ever get in the way of that, so buck up - you'll get what you think you want :)

Sarcasm failed to translate, "scientific consensus" is a goofy euphemism for a messaging campaign that has nothing to do with science. You are completely right about the disagreement between scientists at the time, with many pointing out the fact that we couldn't accurately predict these changes - so we had absolutely no hope of attributing cause to effect until that changed. Still good advice.

There are over 30 million BTC addresses with a balance. So if everyone used "online wallets", they'd either have to be intentionally leaving dust in their exchange wallets, or there is some Superman 3 salami slicing going on and the exchanges have very patiently held off on sweeping up their ill-gotten gains.

lol, it is oddly comforting to take a break for a few years and then come back to find that ripple is still the Wile E. Coyote of the space. Fingers crossed for some kind of Frankenstein ZuckBuck.

> To be completely clear, not all of today’s cryptocurrencies will be supported on our network ... What are we looking for?

> ...privacy and security of consumers’ information — the same level of security people have come to expect in their credit cards.

Well that is a low bar, so OK.

> ...strict compliance protocols will be needed, including Know Your Customer...

Woops, suddenly we aren't talking about a currency - we're talking about another licensed money transmitter.

> To reach our network, crypto assets will need to offer the stability people need in a vehicle for spending, not investment.

So some kind of pre-mined and centralized token system... hmmm, I wonder which poison pill they're talking about... could it be anything besides ripple?

Full disclosure: I didn't read the entire paper, I just know where the landmines are in these "Better than POW with no downside!1!!" altcoin papers - as they've been around for a long time. After the 5th or 6th time scrutinizing a self-styled bitcoin killer, it gets pretty familiar. But I certainly encourage everyone to read the whitepaper (and genuinely understand) for whatever cryptocurrency they're looking at, and then examine the source. That is the way it was done in the beginning, and those that did were always better off for having done it. Also, final bit of unsolicited advice: if somebody tells you to diversify your crypto portfolio, they're either dumb or they think you are.

Lets just take the shortcut: Who assigns the the proofing unit? The metric doesn't even matter, it is a question of who. Now, who controls that? Once you figure that out you'll realize that you are trusting parties that you either didn't know you were trusting, or you kinda knew but didn't want to think too hard about because nobody really cares about chucky cheese coin. You can't be rewarded for performing useful compute without some degree of implicit trust, which makes you dependent on the other party. You can dress it up with quorum algorithms, etc - but it only further obscures the underlying vulnerability. That is fine for a token system, but not for a cryptocurrency.

Step one, don't do this:

"BOINC superblocks fetch a participant’s BOINC recent average credit, also called researcher RAC. RAC is based on a participant’s earned BOINC credits. !!!>>>*Credits and RAC are defined by BOINC*<<<!!!"

Yeah, that is basically a science themed chucky cheese token - not an independent currency.

Which is the worst thing you could possibly use to secure anything.

> Can you actually point out the misinformation?

Yes. I submit to you this article. Consider the framing of bitcoin's utility and the immovability of the status quo.

> This article is not proposing to 'waste energy' on folding proteins.

No, that accompanies the handwringing about POW - you can substitute an number of other silly suggestions: SETI, fusion reactor modeling, etc.

> This article points out that other systems may also consume a lot of energy, but they give our societies a ton of value in return.

Have you maybe considered the possibility that, I dunno, bitcoin replaces the fiat currency - as intended from the outset of the entire endeavor?

You couldn't be more wrong, even the people complain about this made up problem will admit it when pressed. Follow the link and see for yourself.

The whole "Cryptographically securing your currency is wasteful, you should fold proteins!" talking point has popped up several times over the years, despite the fact that it is silly to complain about when considered in relation to the present solution.

> Whataboutism arguments regarding traditional currencies and the financial sector are a completely absurd response. Yes, a real currency like the Euro and by proxy the Eurozone absolutely emits more CO2 than bitcoin.

lol, and there it is.

I've never seen such a concerted effort to hammer this misinformation into peoples heads as I have for the last few days. Like I said, the concern has been raised and addressed before, but this volume of messaging is new.

> > BTC is a pump and dump play.

> > ..."bitcoin evangelists" and are recruiting more people into the network to get the price to go up. Classic Ponzi scheme.

> > ...this doesn't perfectly fit with existing definitions of other scams.

> I said that the enthusiasts are activity looking to expand the number of people investing.

I wonder. Are you aware of how far your characterization of the situation has shifted within the same thread?

evangelist -> enthusiast

recruiting -> expanding

Ponzi scheme/scam -> investment

Have you changed your position, or simply softened your language as a result of finding your position indefensible? If the former, congrats; if the latter, maybe think on that a little more.

> ...always end in people believing that decentralization or cryptography are magical words...

Well, you claimed earlier that off chain transactions were functionally equivalent, from the perspective of the money transfer service, to credit cards. When challenged, you adjusted that to debit cards - which is also not even close to being true. Even if you were talking about it from the perspective of the end user, or merchant, you'd still be very wrong. So you clearly don't know much about the stuff you've expressed strong opinions on, and that means your estimates of others' opinions on the same carry no weight.

> ...the price doesn't matter to me.

You might want that to be true, but it rarely works out that way. Opportunity cost can do funny things to people, like compel them to construct elaborate coping mechanisms in defense of their ego. Sometimes that looks like a confidently stated, but ill-informed, opinion that crumbles in the face of any pushback. Like I said, I've been here a long time and I've seen it all. There is one guy I worked with years ago who asked me about bitcoin but took no action. I only pay attention to the price toward the end of the year, when working on taxes. But without fail if I get a call from him then I know that bitcoin has just had a major selloff. The funny thing is that he is totally unaware of the behavior, it isn't as if he aggressively gloats - but he always brings up bitcoin, and then I don't hear from him again until the next selloff.