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Bitcoin isn't growing in value because it represents shares of a business that makes real money: it's growing in value because demand is increasing. You can directly connect AAPL's profitability with the value of the phones and computers they produce. Bitcoin does not have such an analogue. The "asset" behind Bitcoin is one part the group of miners who consider to keep the ledger going, one part the ability to facilitate a trade using that shared ledger, and three parts speculation. It's the speculative component that makes it, and all other cryptocurrency, more gambling than investment.

Everything has declined in value over the past 6 weeks compared to BTC.

When the next recession strikes, people will attempt to liquidate their Bitcoin to pay their bills and find out that no one really wants to buy them.

Great blog post, but I had to take pause at this line:

>Economist: More than happy to keep our discussion grounded to Earth.

Of course we can't just keep ramping up terrestrial energy production ad infinitum. All evidence points to us trying to leave spaceship Earth. The entire discussion was grounded in a reality we are trying to move past.

>But... there is the question of whether our economic growth brings us closer to the absolute carrying capacity of spaceship Earth.

Are we inching up on the absolute carrying capacity of Earth? Perhaps. But what about the carrying capacity of the Sun?

We are barely capturing a fraction of the energy the Sun sends our way. Think about what we could do if our ability to harvest renewable energy in the next two decades increased not tenfold or even a hundredfold, but a thousandfold.

The smartphones in our pockets are almost unfathomably more powerful than those of a few decades ago, yet we still power them by burning rocks we found in the ground, eking out barely a day of usage before plugging them back into the grid. There is so much about our digital world that is limited by energy in ways we don't fully appreciate.

Imagine a miniaturized particle accelerator [1] that could actually turn lead into gold [2]. Imagine this done at a scale powered by energy production several orders of magnitude greater than what we have today. Obviously, this is an implausible scenario, but the fact that it could even brush up against the possible makes me wonder. How would such a system affect the value of gold? Our perception of what gold is? How would such a system applied to any resource, design, good, or service fundamentally change the way we interact with our world?

The digital revolution we have seen is something to behold, but perhaps it is only a stepping stone to something larger.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/devices/n...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

>Whatever the reason was, that a family or people where able to accumulate that much wealth: I believe, there should be an upper limit.

And what should that upper limit be? Who decides what it is, and how do we ensure that people powerful enough to get close to that limit don't simply play financial games to skirt these rules?

If the source of my wealth is unrealized capital coming from ownership of a company I founded, what am I supposed to do if my wealth nears the cap? What is to prevent bad actors from inflating my stock price to force me to sell? If I hold my companies privately, who decides what they are worth and by proxy how much wealth I possess?

So you solution (highlighted in point 4) is to move to a Western country and become part of the problem?

EA recently released a statement that their "Loot Box" mechanic, a system by which players can only purchase items by buying them in a randomly-generated bundle, does not constitute gambling. If you were looking for a specific item, you may have to purchase hundreds of these boxes. EA argues that since the box you purchase is guaranteed to have some kind of item, the rules and regulations that apply to gambling with legal tender do not apply.

The null hypothesis signifies a lack of relatedness. Give circumstance A and outcome B, we make no assumptions, i.e. we assume A and B are unrelated by not assuming they are related. This is the null hypothesis. In order to reject that, we must provide compelling evidence.

If you start by assuming A and B are related, your experiment would have to fail reject that notion in order to prove that A and B are indeed related, which is a less direct way of approaching scientific discovery.

Could you name some other streamers that have similar setups? I have never seen any.

He's involved with boom.tv, which is creating a suite of tools streamers can use to interact with viewers in real time. He's not necessarily the best player or the most highly-paid streamer, but the production value of his stream is unmatched. He's innovating how people use the medium that is streaming. He uses live transitions with synchronized music, pre-configured greenscreens for his character's various gags, live viewer-triggered replays, and many other small touches that really do give the stream a better feel. Other streamers are going to have to match pace.

I'm not defending all of Shaw's ridiculous critiques of Python 3, but the Turing-complete thing was a joke.

The conversation, IIRC, was something like this:

ZS: Why can't I import or translate Python2 into Python3?

P3: That would be a technically challenging thing to do.

ZS: But surely it is technically possible, even if it is pragmatically unfeasible?

P3: We can't do it.

ZS: OK, Python 3 must be Turing-incomplete, ha ha ha!

source: https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/nopython3.html

It's what happens when you treat history as a story rather than a lesson.

Think about Facebook the way you might think about alcohol. For many (if not most) people, even the occasional overindulgence isn't going to cause too much harm. But for some, it has an insidious effect and sometimes the best strategy is to simply swear it off completely.

>A house at $250k at a 3.5% interest rate would cost you $72k in interest on a 15-year mortgage or $154k in interest on a 30-year mortgage. At that point, it is worth sending additional payments (especially early on in the mortgage) to save on interest.

I would argue that it's not necessarily a smart idea to pay extra just to avoid interest. $154k looks like a lot, and it is, but it's still just paying interest at 3.5%. On average, you'll do better to put that money into investments. Additionally, the ~$1k you're paying every month is a lot less in year 20 than it was in year 1 due to inflation. Your mortgage payments, inflation adjusted, are actually going down every year.

>Surely you see someone clearly messed up after doing drugs.

You may not start to see the negative impact of drug use until years later. By then it's too late.

Keep in mind that Americans live in a country where you can drive for hundreds of miles in any direction and still end up somewhere where English is spoken. We can hop around from state to state and opportunity to opportunity without having to take the time to learn a new language. The US is not Europe.

Is this a problem that needs solving?

>What if independent bakeries baked only what they thought they could sell and no more?

Then they would lose money, period.

>I just can't see running the Facebook app. Facebook on the desktop, sure, but why on a phone? Other than checking in once a day or so to see what my friends are doing, Facebook has nothing I want.

This is like saying, "I just don't understand binge drinking. Red wine with dinner, sure, but a fifth of vodka in a night? I enjoy a light buzz, I have no need to get wasted."

Some people are simply more susceptible to this addiction than others. This product is much more prevalent and addiction is less stigmatized and arguably more profitable. Motives have to be questioned.

It's not "just a label," it's a political viewpoint. Liberal/conservative aren't just funny sounding words we made up to describe different "teams." They actually have meaning behind them and describe a general set of held principles. It's perfectly normal to want a different word for a different set of beliefs.

I also didn't make any value judgments. I didn't say that my views were "much better," I just said that I don't identify with leftist political views.

These people are not liberals; they are leftists. I consider myself a liberal and find myself having more in common with centrist Republicans than I do with some members of my own party.

I read the memo, and compared to the stuff I read from the real "deplorables" (on 4chan, The_Donald, etc.), it was pretty tame.

Yes, many of his ideas are backwards and unjustified. At the same time, many of his arguments were perfectly sane (e.g. silencing all dissenting opinions leads to an increasingly toxic and divided culture). If you want people like him to actually change their minds, you have to be willing to hear them out first. You can't show someone where they went wrong if they're too scared to tell you what they think in the first place.

Sexism in the workplace clearly exists. We've seen it manifest too many times for any rational person to deny it. At the same time, many of the initiatives that SV companies pursue to combat sexism are treating the symptoms rather than the cause. Googlers should try to make sure that they are consciously fighting their unconscious biases when hiring, but changing your hiring practices isn't going to eradicate sexism. Many of these diversity "action-plans" are more effective at improving a company's PR than they are at actually combating sex-related discrepancies. They become self-serving, even though their goal is noble. The author of the memo was trying to get at that, but that message was lost due to his problematic views on biological determinism, among other things.

The operative word here is "all."

What good are your altcoins when the developers/miners give up on the project? A bar of gold is always a bar of gold, no matter what the price of gold is.

The WHO is a fairly reputable source.[0]

[0] http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/

In a natural world, these animals would have the choice to reproduce (or not). You're forcing them to reproduce and then saying, "Well, it's OK, because they wouldn't exist otherwise." If these animals truly wanted to reproduce in this environment, we wouldn't need to artificially inseminate them.

There are many species that stop reproducing depending on their environment. In zoos, this can be a big problem.

If it were humans in this situation, would you feel the same way? Is your treatment of them excused because you "allowed them to live"? Why is it OK to do this to a pig but not, say, a dog? Or a gorilla?

>A thing you two aren't considering is the that US and the UK are the world leaders on the offensive side of this same technology

Exactly, on the offensive side. I'm not particularly concerned about our ability to retaliate proportionally.

But what good is a deterrent if it fails to deter attackers? Our defensive capabilities are clearly lacking, as these past few attacks have shown.

I'm surprised to see even people on this site downplaying how worrisome these attacks are.

The ability to shut down an enemy's computer systems remotely is an awesome power, and will only become more impactful as we rely more and more on computer systems in our everyday lives.

Forget space: the internet is the next frontier. A group of enemy soldiers shutting down a hospital would be met with outrage and military backlash. A group of hackers shutting down fifty hospitals is met with jokes about outdated operating systems and derision towards IT directors.

At what point do we stop treating these like annoyances of a strange new world and start treating them like what they are: targeted, military-grade attacks. The whole world can see how woefully unprepared the West is for attacks of this nature and the attackers are only going to grow more bold.

The more intertwined tech is with the military, the more powerful the cyber-warfare paradigm becomes.

Of course they did. It was heretical to imply that something conceivable by man would be impossible for God to create. If we can imagine it, he can do it. A rather roundabout way of arriving at a theory of parallel universes, but fascinating nonetheless.

Your critique of my analogy reminds me of this web comic: http://imgur.com/a/BqPzT