DareRight

I'm not sure what your point is. A numbering system based on five-fingered hands is still base6. It doesn't make mathematical sense to argue that we learn base10 today because our hands have 5 fingers. Even if you argue that we have 10 total fingers, that's base11. Does anybody advocate that? How did we come to such an arbitrary thing as base ten?

A numbering system based on human fingers would be base6.

I've never understood this thinking. A state has a certain amount of expenditures in their budget. They have to acquire those funds somehow. If they don't collect income tax, they bump up food tax, or hotel tax, or restaurant tax, or diesel tax, etc. The money is coming out of your wallet one way or the other.

Nit pick: 100 years is more like four or five generations.

The Sears catalog

So you're saying, "Grow something unusual."? Something like... water chestnuts? Or mint?

Convert your wheat crop to mint?

Commodities are commodities because there is such a huge demand for them. Niche products are not some super easy to get rich with scheme.

If you want to succeed in the mint market, you'd better do you homework, execute perfectly, and get lucky. Just like in the commodities market.

I also own one of those hobby farms. My simple answer is, No. At my scale, barter is pretty useless. How many vegetables will you trade me for one pig? It better be a lot because I only have 6-10 pigs to barter every year. We have a lot of hobby farms around here. But they all raise animals. Nobody is doing potatos or cabbage. I mean we all do a few onions and tomatoes. But nobody is growing enough of anything that they could trade for half a beef.

When people want half a beef, they pay cash.

The old style barter systems require scale just like the OP said. That scale no longer exists. Everybody is either too small or too big. If you are small enough that I can barter with you, you don't have enough of what I need. If you are ADP, you don't have a human who can interact with me to execute a trade and you have no interest whatsoever in my goat.

I generally value tptacek's comments on security matters, but this position doesn't make sense to me.

When Apple decides to take away an app I paid for, I have no security to block them. When Apple decides to quit posting security updates, I'm out of luck. When Google reaches in and takes my location data without permission, I can't stop them.

With open software, there's no guarantee I'm more secure. But when some security issue does come to my attention, I'm more likely to have some say in how I respond. Somebody claims to have a more secure or privacy-respecting driver? Strongly recommended by experts I trust? I'll look into it. With Apple, I can't. There is no such alternative.

The ssl lib has known vulnerabilities? Wait for Apple? Or install some shim until there's a fix? Oh wait, on Apple devices, you don't have an option.

Apple is not only closed. It's walled. As the owner I am kept on the wrong side of the wall. And there are parties on the other side of the wall that I don't want to be on that side.

This is a security model that is hard to lose to. If Purism let's me control the wall, I'd say that's a welcome change.

Ok. How about we forgive every outstanding mortgage they hold? They're so big, they can take a hit, right?

What's that? They don't hold many mortgages? They sell them all upstream? Then why are they foreclosing? But it's a good point that they have such easy access to the secondary market. How about we cut that off, too?

Maybe they are too big to fail overnight. But we can do it in bites. Diminish one piece of their business at a time. Eventually (sooner than you think) they can be trimmed back to a manageable size. But we should start right away. With their track record, each new infraction should result in the death penalty for some piece of their empire.

Then again, we don't need the government to punish them. We just need account holders to close their accounts. If people are not willing to do this, why should the government that represents those people get involved? One reasonable thing that the government could do is require WF to pay the refinance fees for anybody who wants to move their mortgage (or even the servicing of their mortgage) away from WF. Then people can impose a personal penalty on WF without any cost to themselves except the time and effort to go through the process. If we are fed up enough, we could even require WF to buy down the refi to the same interest rate. But that would only benefit recent mortgages who should have known better to begin with.

I could take you on a 100 mile ride through my neck of the woods right through dozens of ranchers' grazing grounds and I bet you'd see less than a dozen cows. There's nothing artificial about it. The land is still very natural. Oh. Except for the car we'd be driving in and the road and the four towns we'd pass through. But the BLM land is very much in it's natural state.

Just ask the Bundy's

Of course you should stay out of the way. But on the other hand, if everyone stayed out of the way, nobody would actually help. Do you see all those miles of hoses? Where do you suppose those came from? Did you see the discarded pile that were 8cm instead of 10cm? Who is mocking the fire department that donated those? What about that silly convenience store that shipped in all the Spam to feed people who would prefer to eat roast beef? Should we mock them for all the Spam that got thrown away?

When you and I sat in front of our monitors to see what others were doing, some people took inventory of their resources and offered whatever they could in the chance that it might be useful. They were willing for it to be thrown away if it wasn't useful.

I'm not here to apologise for Musk. I'm here to praise everyone who donated food, tanks, hoses, pumps, skeds, submarines, money, housing, or their life. Thank you.