epscylonb

I am convinced that that in the same vein as america pioneering the separation of church and state, the next big government evolution will be the separation of state and business.

It will be extremely hard to accomplish though because historically money and power have always been bedfellows.

The real problem is the people are complacent, most of what western governments legislate is in the interests of lobbyists, but people only care about lawmaking when they are personally poor or if it concerns foreign policy (TERRORISM).

I have always thought a jury system for legislation might be a good idea, get the sponsor of a bill to stand in front of 12 randomly picked citizens and have them explain what the bill will do, and most importantly, why they are trying to pass the bill.

Agreed, and I believe the Chromium guys have been asked for this feature and said they won't do it.

I don't think it is possible with chrome extensions either.

I remember reading somewhere that comedians tend to have above average IQs.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if Satoshi was staying away from cryptography conferences.

This article was posted ages ago.

No one is forcing you to do anything, you can write your own database access layer if you like. Often developers who do this end up using parts of their code across different projects, basically they write their own ORM.

Or you can use a pre-built ORM, as far as I am concerned for me this is the saner choice. I really doubt I could write something on my lonesome that is as secure, performant and has the features of ActiveRecord in a non trivial amount of time.

But the important part is that whichever path you go down, if your project is growing, complex or needs to scale, you need to know your stack. You need to be able to modify or reconfigure each part. You need to understand at a high level what each part of the stack does, and be able to learn exactly what it does at a low level quickly should the need arise.

There is risk everywhere, getting out of bed in the morning is a risk.

Working for a start up is almost always inherently more risky than working for BigCo, regardless if you are employee number 1 or not.

I think we are basically on the same page.

Copyright should be granted for free for a short amount of time.

Once that is up, the copyright holder should have the option of extending the copyright. They should be made to pay for this right, since the extension of the copyright only really benefits them.

This would allow copyright holders to keep a hold of stuff that is obviously profitable, at the same time the vast majority of stuff would enter the public domain.

You are assuming that perpetual copyright is beneficial to society.

Time limited copyright (say 10 years) almost certainly is beneficial, perpetual copyright is harmful both culturally and in the long run economically.

The pension argument is lame, if a performer wants a pension they should do what everybody else does, save for it.

It amazes me how long this console generation seems to be lasting. The XBox360 was released in 2005, at this point you would have thought we would know details about its successor, yet we know virtually nothing.

It is almost as if Sony and Microsoft have made an agreement to keep the current consoles going.

I would rather buy bitcoins.

Perhaps I am taking your post too literally, but I think this is an example of the mythos that Apple generates.

I don't believe for a second that Jobs had the iPad in mind in 2000.

They probably just brainstorm, try different stuff internally, see what works and see if they can make a product out of it that meets their high expectations. Jobs was no doubt an important part of this process but it is not impossible for the culture and process to outlive the person who helped create them.

I would not be surprised if Jobs was speaking honestly when he talked down tablets in 2008.

Interesting point, I guess we need to know to what extent this behaviour is genetic.

If there is something in society that causes women not to want to have kids and this remains in place then the prediction is correct.

This is a nature versus nurture debate.

My first thought as well.

Bitcoin is often said to have many of the properties of gold, not least its scarcity.

But here is a clear example of how bitcoin trumps gold, people can move large amounts of bitcoin in a short amount of time with very little risk. Bitcoin users are already doing this.

http://blockexplorer.com/block/0000000000022043f9ea2c298f338...

Total BTC?: 416300.33

At todays bitcoin market value that is 4,605,201.67 USD.

Still some way off 12 billion I grant you, but astonishing considering gold has been used as currency for thousands of years and bitcoin is less than 3 years old.

I would be interested to see the same thing done with Politics.

I suspect there may be a few abstract concepts that this applies to.

We are probably in agreement with regards to your last statement.

I think one of the major themes of politics to come will be the separation of business and state (much like how America pioneered the separation of church and state).

This will require a shift in society though, most voters see it as the governments job to manage the economy and help it grow. But corporate welfare is as damaging to business as social welfare is to individuals.

This is unfortunately a very gray area, at what point do tax breaks stop "encouraging" business versus at what point do businesses become dependent on them?. The inequality is what bothers me most, small businesses paying a higher percentage of tax than big businesses, the percentage should be the same.

I don't believe we can get there by regulation alone, citizens have to care as well, although I do concede that regulation may be necessary to a certain extent.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

> The problem with the libertarian perspective is that it irrationally assumes the best of people when there is no incentive for them to do so.

I assume no such thing about people regardless of whether they are rich or poor.

I think crux of our disagreement is about the involvement of government in peoples lives. I heard a quote recently, "The more the government tries to do the less well it does everything", I might have mangled that slightly.

Your supposition is that we need the government to force us to be nice and act in a way that is beneficial to society, if so isn't that a losing proposition from the outset?. Who is the moral arbiter here?, I would really like to minimize the amount of situations where government passes judgement on its citizens.

What I am really against is mob rule, the state is a necessary evil, a large state is a larger evil.

I am convinced that while the last century's politics was dominated by left versus right, this century will be dominated by authoritarian versus libertarian. The world isn't black and white, in certain situations we can't avoid making those kind of judgements but where we can avoid it we should.

The reason I put fairer in quotes is because it is a term that can be argued over.

Yes two bands, with the focus on making it attractive for people to earn money and pay tax, ideally the 0% band would be just enough to clothe, feed yourself and pay rent in a bad neighbourhood.

Progressive is a word that seems to mean different things to the left and the right, I notice you didn't define it.

As I said a flat tax is economically progressive because it doesn't discourage people from trying to earn more money.

At the moment you have people buying houses they don't need or using complex financial instruments just to do something with their money because if they don't they will get taxed more. Investing this money for the sake of it is not always beneficial to the economy or society, I favour a persons right to choose what to do with their own money.

I am coming from this from a libertarian perspective, whether you earn 50k a year or 500k the government should not be taking a higher percentage from you than other people. Especially considering that with a percentage rate whilst the proportion is the same, the actual amount of tax high earners pay is greater (which is socially progressive enough for me, but perhaps not for you). I believe I am using the word proportion correctly here, but if not please feel free to let me know how I have got it wrong.

Here in the UK the top rate of tax is 50%. I doubt I will ever be taxed at that rate but the government taking half a persons income scares me a little, no wonder people try to move their money around so the taxman can't get at it.

It is a slightly whimisical what if? blog post. I didn't find it all that misleading or confusing.

Wouldn't you if you had tons of money?, especially if all the other "rich kids" are doing the same?. If you expect people to always do the altruistic thing then be prepared for a life full of disappointment. The best you can do is try to shape peoples behavior.

Personally I would prefer a flat percentage rate of tax with an exception for very low incomes where it just isn't worth the governments time trying to collect it.

This would probably raise most peoples tax and lower rich peoples tax but I believe it is "fairer" for everybody to pay the same fixed proportion of their income. At the same time though I would simplify business taxes as well, get rid of loopholes, stop companies that do business in a country off shoring their profits. It is insane that some companies view their accounting departments as profit centers.

Flat tax economies boom, and they are progressive in the sense that there is no penalty for trying to earn more money.

This kind of misses the point.

A password doesn't necessarily need to be something that is easy to remember. It just needs to be a unique token that is easy for you personally to present when needed.

I currently use a keepass file stored in my dropbox folder. I am not certain what the silver bullet to online authentication will look like. However I suspect it may not require you to remember more than one secure password, perhaps not even that.

Trust online is hard though, looking at the problems establishing trust online reminds me how clever human beings are, we sometimes make mistakes but we are pretty good at evaluating trustworthiness in the real world.

The problem is the voters, you get the politicians you deserve.

I don't think the american people are dumb or lazy, I think they are very complacent.

Americans have become so used to their fairly high standard of living that they are ignoring substantive issues and focusing on trivia.

My personal prediction is that the voters will wise up and listen to smart people who understand the issues eventually. At the moment though americans just see high gas prices and demand their government fix "the problem", they aren't interested in the challenging geo political, economic and social complexities.

How far amercia falls on the way to this correction is difficult to tell.

edit: just in case anyone thinks I am america bashing, the above applies to most of western europe as well.

The safe option is to use an established government backed currency, I want bitcoin to succeed, but I can't honestly tell people about it without describing it as an incredibly risky investment (right now).

Bitcoin has unique properties in terms of exchanging wealth. If you don't actually need those properties though you probably shouldn't be using bitcoin for anything other than playing with it.

Adam smith said that something is worth whatever a person at a particular time is willing to pay for it, there is no consistent, inherrent value in any given trade.

SMS is popular because it is ubiquitous, the mobile phone networks have priced it at a point where the vast majority of users are happy to pay for it. There is no law against high profit margins, nor should there be in my opinion. You could argue there is a competition/monopoly/cartel issue here, but that wasn't too apparent in the article.

And as others have said SMS will eventually go away due to the availability of data plans. I wish all my friends had data plans and were on twitter, I would never need to send an SMS again, until then I can afford it, especially since I don't send very many.

It is stuff like this that makes bitcoin look like it has potential.

I agree financial regulation is mostly a good thing, but I am also happy with the concept of a financial wild west in the form of a crypto currency. As long as people know what they are getting in to.

I would be much more impressed if people who raised this point also suggested a fairer way of distributing the coins.

It is difficult to tell if they think the fundamental concept of bitcoin is bad or if they just have sour grapes because they aren't an early adopter.

But while we are at it, why shouldn't early adopters profit?, they took a risk early on.

And actually if you ask me I think the minting system is pretty good, mining costs electricity, while many miners are surely hoarding and speculating they all have to pay their electricity bill on a fairly regular basis.

This ensures there is always someone somewhere selling bitcoins and increases the liquidity of the market.

Good developers write DRY code, and SQL everywhere leads to, eventually, some library that looks remarkably like... an ORM...

I agree with this.

I think you can look at this two ways, over time you incur technical debt for a variety of reasons (if your app is being used or growing in any way). The articles author thinks it is best to start at the bottom and build up your "model layer" from scratch.

People who use an ORM start from above and almost certainly will have to modify their entire software stack to address things like scaling and unusual features along the way. As long as you know your ORM well and can do the rearcitecting this really is not a problem.

Basically whichever approach you take a good developer would end up with the app in roughly the same state.

Personally I would prefer to start with an ORM and work down, just because it is a hell of lot quicker.

This surprised me as well, I was told that in Postgres at least, there is no difference in query speed between selecting a subset of a record and the entire thing.

so you are predicting the price against the dollar will fall?

it has risen and fallen many times already

a huge crash is inevitable and unavoidable because the market is thinly traded and very psychological at the moment

but when all is said and done, the bitcoin network will still be there, people will still have their bitcoins and will be able to transfer them across the globe is a short amount of time

i don't have a crystal ball, i can't tell you if bitcoin will become a successful currency, but you should realise that what is going on at the moment is a sideshow and doesn't reflect bitcoins true potential

a more constructive comment from you might have proposed a "fairer" system of minting than rewarding early adopters...

i can't tell if you are being serious or not...