lumberjack

The 1st Amendment is just US law. What would be the argument elsewhere?

There is a lot of potential work that needs to be done. The market is not providing the capital for it, but the need is apparent and you have an educated labor force surplus. It is logical, moral and efficient to put that educated labor surplus to good use. It is stupid to throw that potential away, just because it does not enrich a few bankers and their wealthy shareholders. What about the rest of America?

Fakenews is just going to become another arena where all political entities both domestic and foreign will get involved. I submitted this report but I will also post it here: http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/cybertroops2018/

If you look at the budgets you will see that despite the media narrative (Russia is the fake news source) most western countries and many developing countries are engaging in such tactics and many countries outspend Russia. And this is obvious. Just think of Climate Change, for example.

Traditionally there are three political groups: conservatives, liberals and socialists.

"Far-left" falls under socialism, along with anarchism and communism. The idea that ties them together is this concept of trying to fight against and eliminate some hierarchy in society. Often times, wealth inequality. There is no such thing in the US.

To say that you are a liberal far-left is indeed a misuse of terminology.

Fascism falls under conservatism along with monarchism and any other traditionalist or reactionary political ideology. Standing opposed to "the left", the chief idea that ties all these ideologies together is that some hierarchal structures are beneficial to society.

Interesting to note that Republicanism is a liberal ideology, not a conservative one. Liberalism is a much more well defined ideology than the other two. Briefly speaking: "all men are created equal" (hence Republicanism), small government and free markets and capitalism.

Privacy is one but not the only problem with centralised web search. The other big problem is manipulation of search results. Of course it already happens for ads and filesharing and that is bad. But worst is when they do it for political reasons. Bing cannot tell who you are, but they can still promote their own agenda by tweaking the ranking of search results. Blog against MS? Send it to the 10th page or hide it entirely. Of course I use here a very innocuous example. You can imagine the power of tweaking search results. You can change the perception of reality, essentially.

Neither Google nor Facebook are going to give away that power so easily.

Facebook and Google alone could effectively change "facts" to suit their political agendas. They alone could easily heavily influence the democratic process all over the world. That is far more dangerous than some guys with guns.

Facebook has a built a legal surveillance machine that can read the thoughts of most people on the planet. That is very valuable. I don't doubt Facebook is incredibly valuable both for reading our thoughts and for its ability to shape them. The only current danger to Facebook's model is the EU severely curtailing their operations within the EU, but even if they have just the US market that is still hugely valuable.

Of course it is a danger to society and hugely unethical but financially they are sound.

They are not business interests within the EU.

What I am saying is that because they do not care, they stop society from dealing with these problems until it is too late. Climate change is the obvious example.

We got rid of a lot of "bad parts". For example we got rid of institutionalized classism whereby certain stations in society were reserved for nobles and royals.

And one other thing facet to think about is that "avoiding collapse" is not necessarily the same as progress. These new aristocrats may decide to give everyone just the very minimum to get by, leaving the masses in a sort of limbo. And then that defeats the whole point of capitalism; the individual is not longer in control of their destiny.

From what I understand the basic qualm that socialists have, concerns the moral justification for owning income generating assets. Everything else stems from that.

Although I believe some would rather argue from an utilitarian point of view rather than from a moral one.

The solution is to use technology to replace high skilled professions with average Joes. These high skilled professionals can just go do research, and there is always more research to be done. The average Joes will be aided by a combination of technology and human supervision to do a job that is effectively as good as a professional would have done it.

For example, a nurse might be retrained to do diagnosis. Instead of learning the corpus of medical literature they will have Internet access to a database and supervision from an MD. So that way we might be able to replace many MDs who will instead go into research.

I think that is the sane way forward. And it won't be a solution for everyone, of course. But I think it should be doable.

One "problem" with western liberal democracies is that the billionaires are not tied to the land. This means that they are less concerned about the future of any one particular country. They can just relocate with ease. It also makes them less likely to invest considerable time and effort in trying to shape any one particular country because some other faction might take over power in a few years and all their work will be lost.

This is in contrast with countries like China where the CCP oligarchs are more or less tied to their country. That is the so called technocracy. It is not that they are any better than western billionaires. They just have no choice but to ensure the future stability of the only country in which the can retain their high status.

Now, I say "problem" because do we really want to recreate a new aristocracy?

Cash for clunkers is still going on in many European countries.

Wage growth is not everything. Low financial risk is another important consideration. The average Joe is some countries is ridiculously exposed, despite the supposed wealth of the nation.

What the EU is actually proposing is to encourage more migration within the EU. The EU has very abysmal levels of intra-EU migration, around 1/10th of that of the US. Because of this, you have areas with a lack of jobs and other areas with a lack of labour.

In your very specific situation this might work. But problems that a lot of people would face: 1. unreliable local BTC exchanges that increase the risk substantially 2. local banks that will scrutinize or prohibit transfers to/from BTC exchanges 3. cheaper/faster/better options (e.g. SEPA) 4. in some countries it takes weeks to months to setup an account with a BTC exchange

On top of that, international payments are only a PITA because banks are lazy. Banks could easily make the process cheaper and faster if they were so inclined. If BTC ever gains ground in this market, it would not last for long.

On the one hand it is good to deny them explicit permission. On the other hand I am 100% certain that Facebook is still tracking every single data point of every single EU user. They are not scared of breaking the law.

People have modest ambitions and most often, if you are highly ambitious, this is frowned upon. American optimism is the exception.

We are told to delay acting on climate change because it costs money. Then we are told by the same people that carbon capture will save the day. Now, most definitely by the laws of thermodynamics you will spend more energy in this roundabout way of doing things. Not releasing a gas in the first place, is cheaper (in energy units) than releasing it and then trying to capture it back.

Assuming that energy units roughly equate to dollars, it would be immensely cheaper to cut our emissions today, as much as possible, than to keep emitting CO2 at our current rates and then hope to capture it back in the future. The reasons we behave in this illogical fashion:

1. The costs of acting now and the costs of acting in the future are going to be bared by different entities. Thus some entities can profit out of this, to the detriment of the rest of us.

2. The nominal economic cost will be higher, but it might become economically more viable, still, just plainly out of desperation when things get really bad.

So to answer you question, maybe yes. Not entirely though. CO2 can be captured back, maybe, but the damage to human societies and the environment cannot be fixed. But nonetheless, this should not be an excuse to delay action on climate change!

The problem is searching through all the blogspam to find that nugget of good content.

>due to their own anti-startup regulation and taxation regime

Mention one such law.

Each European country has its own laws, but most countries never had anything resembling "freedom of speech" as an American would understand it. Every country has a list of "limitations" on free speech. It is also not something people care about.

Visa had a massive outage spanning the whole of Europe, yesterday. Not sure if this is related.

There are many entities claiming they found some chemical process that outputs a flammable gas (or heat) and the whole process is carbon negative, somehow. But all of these claims are all vapourware, still.

Nominal is better if you want to compare the economic might of countries, which is what this is presumably doing.

Despite all predictions to the contrary, the US government is doing quite a lot to legitimize Bitcoin.

No. The rich and everyone else send their kids to the same public schools.

In the Netherlands people value the idea of living in a classless society. It would not be acceptable for certain people to have their own "special" schools where their kids get "special" education.

The way the rich try to get around that is by congregating in the same rich neighbourhoods and sending their kids to the same school. That is why the lottery exists, to distribute the kids evenly in a fair manner.