jeremyt

Well, I guess that's great. It's a free market, and the best option will win, but a blockchain isn't a blockchain unless you have enough distributed hashing power behind it to ensure that no one entity or small groups of entities has control over the network.

I'm still puzzled as to how banks think they're going to do this.

The people in this thread hating on crypto are missing the point.

Complaining that you can't go into CVS and buy something with Bitcoin right now is like complaining that all you can do with the Internet is send "electronic mail", which nobody reads, in 1990, or like complaining that Facebook is nothing but a glorified campus directory in 2006.

The truth is, you can't buy things with Bitcoin at CVS because the technology isn't there yet. Right now, Bitcoin is suitable to be digital gold, but with a much higher possibility of return because it's a new asset.

In a couple of years, the addition of the lightning network on top of the Bitcoin network will enable you to buy things at CVS.

Right now, buying Bitcoin is like making an angel investment.

What's weird to me is you seem to keep trying to play this off as you being the reasonable one here, as if i'm being frustratingly obtuse.

Frankly, I don't understand what your argument is, because "I believe in consent of the governed, and making progress through reaching agreement on items that both sides can accept" doesn't mean anything.

I mean, consent of the governed usually means representative democracy, which is what we have. So, if that's what you're for, then all the regulations we have are perfectly reasonably determined. If that's not what you mean, I don't know what you mean. How would the system specifically change to be more "consent of the governed"?

We also have a system where we "reach agreement on items that both sides can accept". That's the problem with regulatory capture. We have lobbyists on one side and politicians on the other, and they both agree on things and then we get regulations. Ostensibly, politicians are acting on behalf of their constituents. If they are not, then you have a problem with our structure of government, not the regulatory system.

So far, your only concrete suggestion is that we replace 5000 lines of regulations with two sentences of regulation, which I've already explained why I think is a bad idea. Everything else you said is just feel good words that could mean anything to anyone.

You also seem to be assuming what my position is. My position is that in order to justify a regulation, we have to find a true and significant market failure. In such case, the first option should be investigating ways that the market failure could be addressed without regulation. And before a regulation is promulgated, we should require a cost-benefit analysis that results in the calculation that the regulation will create more benefit for society than it costs.

Your regulation suggestion would fail both of my tests. First, because the problem you're trying to fix is already fixed. Second because your proposed solution would cost much more than we are actually paying in inconvenience right now.

I have a lot of experience working in complex systems, and I have some government experience, and I know that systems are always much more complex than we think they are. I have an extreme amount of modesty toward thinking that I can introduce easy solutions to problems in complex systems. Government workers, most of the time are ill-equipped to step into a market and make it better.

I'm sorry, i'm just laughing.

I appreciate your response, and I'm struggling to take it seriously, but I think you just admonished me for being one of those knee-jerk deregulationists while in the same breath suggesting that you can replace 5000 pages of regulation with two sentences.

I'll do my best to add a serious comment though:

The government has no business defining products. The government doesn't know what the market wants or what companies can offer, and it has no idea what the appropriate supply and demand curves look like or what features people value or not.

Again, we just witnessed a situation in which an unregulated part of the market bit United in the ass and cost them a few million dollars, and now are they are rushing to fix it, along with all of the other airlines. No intervention from the government was needed, and now the problem no longer exists. I don't understand why you think the government stepping in and "defining" a product is going to help.

There are many reasons why, but I'll just pull one out of my head: Governments have no idea what's coming. Any regulations or definitions for service unavoidably make it harder for new entrants to offer unique services and products.

Maybe one of the airlines wants to move to your two-tiered system. If the government mandates it, then we have one choice, whether it is the best or not.

I struggle to lay out my argument any more clearly, but I feel like you still, deep down, believe that the government has this secret cabal of smart people who are going to step in and, for example, sensibly define all of our products for us. Who are these people?

/edit In the spirit of trying to agree on something, I will agree that regulations are too complex across the board. It's one of my personal causes. That said, calling for "smarter" regulation is not going to help.

Did you really just "Double right on" the need for smart regulation and then proceed to armchair quarterback your way to another useless regulation?

Look, we don't have a problem with overbooking in this country (USA). I saw a chart with numbers of how many voluntary and involuntary losses of seats there were on each airline. Even if you add everything together for all the airlines, for the whole year, it's like 10,000. And a huge percentage of those are voluntary rebookings.

Do you know how many people fly every day?

You've just introduced an idea for yet another regulation to fix a nonexistent problem that will screw up the airlines pricing strategy and most likely raise ticket prices for everyone.

Just let the market sort it out, and it appears it already has. Most of the airlines have already revised their rebooking procedure.

We. Don't. Need. More. Regulation. Smart or not.

This is exactly the problem. Everybody wants smart regulation, and everybody thinks they are the smart ones.

Look, this is silly.

Thinking that one news story reported by the media is representative of the whole United States is like westerners thinking that if they travel to the Middle East there will be a roving bands of Muslims beheading people in the streets.

The media exaggerates EVERYTHING.

The absolute worst thing that will possibly happen to you is to get pulled aside for some extra questions and apparently somebody flipping through your phone. That sucks, but as an American who travels all the time, I have never seen or known anyone to have to go through anything like that.

The closest I can get to is one of my Indian friends being pulled aside for a pat down in Canada.

In the most non-trolling way that I can manage, why can this not be generalized to the economy?

Why is academia a special case scenario where bureaucracy and regulations create unintended consequences and cause people to expend effort to get around them, but we can't say the same thing about the economy as a whole?

Why do we believe that people can't even manage PhD's at a university, but we can take the same people, put them in government, and expect them to, for example, manage the monetary supply or see bubbles in advance and create proper policy to avoid them?

Stack overflow is a bad example. The vast majority of their workforce is in sales and works on the recruiting product. The actual team which maintains and improves the Q&A product is tiny

So let me get this straight, her domain got hacked, transferred to a hacker, who proceeded to sell it.

Then, she contacted the FBI, who gave her an interview and basically did not much, and then she got her domain back by paying for it and then putting a stop on the money transfer? And this is worthy of a Sandra Bullock movie?

Yeah, real nail biter there.

This is just content hacking to get me to read more of the article so she can make more money on medium. I feel a bit cheated.

If you raised wages and nobody wants the job, you haven't raised wages enough.

Nobody knows about what I have. It's not public, and the product never went out of private beta.

You think FDA employees are immune from this type of thing? How do we go about finding the angels needed to staff this agency?

See, I added, "in general", because I knew somebody was going to come behind me and give one anecdotal reference to a good public school. Yes, there are some good public colleges, and a whole lot of crappy public colleges. Yes, there are a few good public secondary schools and a whole lot of really awful ones.

Public schools are not nice, in general. That's why anyone with any money at all sends their kids to private school.

The price crashed today because the BOC visited BTCC. I think that's obvious.

Until they aren't. Bear Stearns paid its bills every year until it suddently didn't.

I'm sorry, but this statement is not true. These numbers require the use of the Social Security trust fund. The Social Security trust fund is a "special issue treasury bond" in which money is deposited and then spent by the US government.

So, when the trustees say that Social Security can pay 75% of the benefits, what they mean is that there are enough IOUs in the trust fund to pay 75% of the benefits. But when we start redeeming the IOUs, we will quickly discover that the money isn't in existence. We are going to have to raise taxes or cut spending or otherwise get the money from somewhere else. The trust fund is just a very very clever way of obfuscating the fact that the government has no money saved at all for Social Security.

Bitcoin

Try protonmail

Just sour grapes.

You don't have any magical insight into the industry. You're just drawing conclusions from one data point.

Here are two more data points for you: I've worked at two startups and so far both startups are solid successes.

Mitt Romney paid 14% federal, that doesn't include state. And the person I was responding to said that there is "nobody" paying more than 50%.

FYI, he paid 14% federal because most of his money came from carried interest which is taxed like dividends. The 14% is only after the same income is taxed at the corporate level at 35%.

Are you kidding? An upper income taxpayer in California pays 39.6% federal, 10% state. On top of that there are sales taxes, property taxes, payroll taxes, unemployment benefit insurance, the 3.4% Medicare surcharge, car registration taxes and fees, transfer taxes on assets, and estate taxes when you die. Explain to me how that doesn't add up to more than 50%?

I actually think that medical records are basically public. It's only a matter of time before the various doctors offices or government agencies or private companies that hold these records are hacked and the records released on the Internet.

That said, I would definitely trust a private entity with specialized knowledge over the government or individual doctors offices, so I wish you the best of luck.

For example, I just had my medical records sent from an old doctor's office, and the only thing they required was a fax with my signature on it and an address to send the records to. Could have been sent by anybody to anywhere, and there were no checks whatsoever.

Could you lay out the play-by-play on how global warming is a threat to civilization? It seems to me, at worst, a slow-motion problem that will take almost a century to unfold and perhaps force large chunks of people to relocate to other places.

I would appreciate it very much if you wouldn't read any kind of tone into my question. Straight up honest question.

Could you cite one or two of those?

Or read a few paragraphs of Lyndon Johnson's biography.

How should this be done by, say, a small team of three with no SysAdmin?

They have taken effect, it's just that the city has decided to not enforce them.

Yes they do. The most popular mortgage here is a 30 year fixed rate.

I'm sorry, but that is just not an acceptable excuse in this case. I acknowledge that ageism is real, but I've also worked in companies where we went out of our way to hire older engineers.

That said, the article makes it sound like this guy has been out of work for close to a decade or more. Maybe he can't get a cutting-edge IT or engineering job, but he could do tech-support, an entry-level job, or even drive for Uber or a taxi.