No. At the risk of speaking for someone else, he appears to believe that we live in a society where it is far too easy for individuals with malign motivations to blur the line between managing someone's money and stealing it.
2,158 karma · joined March 11, 2014
It's much easier to just coerce the media and get the public to consume the propaganda as entertainment.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/entertainment/la-ca-...
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-...
Two of my neighbors have internet-connected surveillance cameras around their homes. There are cameras at most street lights. The police have cameras in their cars, including ones that scan license plates automatically.
I live near a school, which is festooned with cameras (and has a constant police presence, too, with their car and body cameras). The stores I shop at have cameras mounted everywhere, mostly behind shaded plastic globes so they're not obvious. (Small businesses tend to have fewer cameras, but still have them.) ATMs have cameras, as do gas stations. My workplace has cameras at entrances, elevators, stairwells and hallways.
And that's before we get into cellphones, Facebook and government surveillance, or the advertising- and data-mining-driven stalkerware that haunts you on the internet.
It is not that you are trusted to do the right thing. It's just that until you somehow gain the attention of some persons or powers with access to all that surveillance, they don't care what you do.
I was renting in a century-old house that had been converted into apartments. Every night, around midnight, this very high-pitched hum would start, and continue until almost dawn. None of the other residents ever heard it when they were around. While the exact timing varied, the time during which it happened overlapped with my sleep schedule (I was working a late tech support shift at the time) and it kept me awake. Earplugs didn't really seem to help.
There didn't seem to be any obvious source. I did exhaustive work to try and track it down - even got the permission of the owner and my fellow tenants to try shutting off the power at the breaker box in the middle of the night to see if that helped. (It didn't.)
It wasn't always constant, but it was around enough and preventing me from sleeping enough that I was going slowly insane. I had my ears checked for tinnitus - nope, I had and still have darn good hearing. I started reading about the Taos hum, looking into resonant frequencies, and finally stumbled across the answer.
The noise started a little while after everyone in the building went to bed. It stopped shortly after they got up in the morning. It was the sound of the century-old plumbing system at full pressure. If I just left a tap open a trickle, and the noise went away along with my sleep-deprivation.
μνάσασθαί τινά φαιμι †καὶ ἕτερον† ἀμμέων
"I think men will remember us even hereafter."
There are other translations, but the core idea, that this woman writing ~2600 years ago grokked that she and her words we be known to humans across so many years, really seems powerful to me.
Yes, bitcoin has uses. (Including some cool, elegant and potentially very significant ones.) But despite the troubled state of the world, it does not appear to me that anything has happened that would justify the current ongoing explosion in price.
For an example of a mania in action, take a look at the price spike in tulip bulbs in the early 1800s: http://www.thebubblebubble.com/tulip-mania/
What we really need to do is start combing the databases for anomalous X-ray flares so we can find any nearby Oasa emitters.
How on Earth is turning the country into an absolute dictatorship, with the rule of law utterly disregarded, supposed to help Saudi Arabia move forward? The last things I would want to do financially would be to put money into a state where the local dictator has a proven willingness to seize assets on a whim.
You may agree or not (I'm conflicted myself), but at least see clearly. The situation isn't going to change unless society's mind changes.
Once they have a business model that does not revolve around selling data about their users to their customers, claiming they don't spy can be something other than a bad punchline.
And it's not just based on shape, color or what it's doing, either.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sri-lanka-china-ports-idU...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/world/asia/china-aircraft...
I've been inspired by this:https://gizmodo.com/heres-a-pretty-legit-gibsonian-cyberdeck...