moccachino

Sure, but the shift is also within the U.S. over time. To support a strong public education system and hold a sensible position on gun control used to be something Republicans did as far as I can tell.

There has been a definite shift to the fringe. Both in the plutocratic direction, with the one-dollar-one-vote philosophy, and also in just a general nutcase direction (see the NRA).

I don't want to get into politics much here but I have to respond to this. I'm not American but from where I stand I see that Trump is trying his best to turn his presidency into a dictatorship. He also admires and enjoys the company of actual dictators. So using this word as a form of criticism is not unfounded.

Also, it's not the general rule, most articles I see use 'administration'.

And I don't think it's the media who has a leftward bias, rather the Republican Party has moved way way out on the fringe. If you look globally, the average Democratic office holder would be a right wing politician in most other countries.

Pot calling the kettle black!

Iceland could claim government copyright on all their landscape, and charge for every Instagram post.

That's a valid point, but the removal of the physical step only serves to make the whole process even more absurd.

With gold bars at the very least you have in your hands a concentrated lump of actual material that will survive a power outage or a lost password or something.

But of course that whole process is as absurd as you point out today because gold holds residual value from when it actually was a convenient universally recognized store of value.

I guess you are right that it's useful for black-market commerce and I suspect that's probably the only reason it has value.

Regarding this:

>Actually most of the energy comes from renewable sources, which would be wasted otherwise. The Bitcoin mining industry is so competitive, it wouldn't be profitable otherwise.

Geothermal energy isn't renewable unless it's used sparingly. Hydro-power requires huge sacrifices of land, usually fertile valleys, in the reservoir lakes. Windmills are loud, huge and ugly. Power lines require sacrifices of land. And everything needs to be produced, with the environmental impact that brings.

I'm not saying renewables are bad, they're not, but they are not so pristine that using them for bitcoins isn't a sad thing.

One is stuck in an 'information bubble' or an 'echo-chamber' when one gets most or all of ones news from a relatively small, homogeneous group that's rather fixated on specific issues.

Anything that can be called mainstream media is (as a whole) none of those things.

Besides that, the term Mainstream Media is now so politicized that it's almost unusable in conversation.

Of all the bizarre phenomenons in the world, I think the Bitcoin-as-an-investment takes the cake.

People spend a ton of energy (that could otherwise to actual useful things) on shifting around bits that they then claim are very valuable.

You could make a similar claim about fiat money except that actually makes commerce easier. Bitcoin is not a good way to transfer value since like you said it's too volatile for a currency.

So it's built on nothing, it does nothing and underpins nothing, it wastes huge amounts of otherwise useful energy and that makes it a good investment?

Maybe I'm just too dumb to see the genius of it.

Michael Cohen was sentenced for exactly this [1] just a few months ago.

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/12/13/michael-c...

Oops, you are right!

To put that number into perspective, the 2015 US Military budget was --4 trillion-- 600 billion dollars [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

I used site:news.ycombinator.com on both engines

There was a discussion about exactly that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135

Ironically I could not find this link via DDG, but it was the first hit on Google.

That's not really feasible. You might know for which persons you are the emergency contact but you can't possibly know from which phone you would be contacted in case of an actual emergency.

As long as the internet remains free and not completely controlled by a few big players.

Sure, a benevolent, supremely intelligent and incorruptible dictator would be the best leader for any country.

But governments should be about stability, resilience and steady progress, and not optimizing for superb efficiency at the cost of being extremely unstable.

Edit: Also to be clear, the dictator in question would be a fairy tale person. As such we could add a requirement for dragons, that would be cool.

Our whole lives consist of rationalizing after-the-fact what we observe ourselves to be doing.

From around here that's everyone's experience of tradespeople in every non-emergency task.

"Sure I can do this in 3 weeks."

Then shows up once every two weeks and finishes around the four month mark.

>You'd think that after the stupid Russian collusion story was dismantled by the recent Mueller report

Not true at all. No one except the DoJ and probably white house have seen the Mueller report. They do all they can to prevent people from seeing this supposedly exonerating report.

... Great.

Well, I guess consideration for anything except mission results is too much to ask of an organization like a military...

It seems to me that on a budget of 600-700 billion, it would not be too difficult to spend a few billion on bullets. Also not every bullet has to be the same (ignoring logistics and interoperability for the moment), but if there are already different sizes of bullets then they could be made out of different materials.

At least that should slightly decrease the concentration of any single material when large quantities of bullets pile up.

Impressive!

Yes, if you don't have the radio on, if other people aren't talking, if your car isn't loud and rattling, if you don't mind sharing the data with google and of course if the voice recognition and app interfacing works at all. Not all of the above are always true.

But I know, things are not all bad. I'm only a bit saddened by the disappearance of the reliable deterministic haptic-only control that older phones had.

But it could be done without looking. Driving home, reach for phone in the other seat, unlock, go to your contact (you remember the phonebook position of your frequent contacts), choose send sms, type the message fairly quickly, send. This could all be done fast and reliable without one look, perhaps one last glance before sending to make sure it looks right.

The law won't touch rich people where they care, their money. Why are there still tax havens? Why do corporations still make special tax exemption deals? Why are tax loopholes not as aggressively fought as drug smuggling?

And even the case you linked to, very wealthy people are much less likely to be charged with these kinds of crime as well.

Sure, I've actually got nothing against rich people or even the idea of super rich people. But the whole system is set up in such a way that if you're wealthy you own the world and have to actively screw up to not get wealthier. The system just needs a tiny self-correction mechanism.

And the problem with immense wealth is not raising inflation or anything like that, that is market stuff that will correct itself. The problem is buying your way into policy control, and people/corporations that are so powerful that not even the law dares touch them.

I don't mean this specifically as a solution to expensive housing, just a general solution to super disparate wealth inequality. The point is not to get more money for the state (income tax could be abolished to offset) but to put a natural negative feedback mechanism on wealth accumulation, instead of the positive feedback mechanism that exists today and makes the uber rich own the world.

There is no need to put a hard limit, just an effective limit by having a general wealth tax. Money flows to where money already is, that's inevitable in a capitalist market economy. There's no need to change that, but progressively bigger piles of wealth should be progressively higher taxed to keep them in check, thus ensuring a competitive market.

Edit: I guess I should have known mentioning wealth tax would get people nervous. But this is not about taxing your old grandma for her paid-off house. This is about small but increasing percentage, starting at maybe $1M-10M and really kicking in at $1B and above. You can then abolish dividend taxing (that's only fair) and perhaps income tax altogether.

Keep your friends close...

some gyms have showers? some don't?