stretchwithme

"offer them extra money to not sell to any of my competitors"

Is that what Amazon is doing?

THAT will lead to the downfall of the regime :-)

OK, probably not. Kids will figure out how to go around it somehow.

Of course it's doable.

But SSNs aren't even ONE factor.

It's time the US government entered the 21st century.

For example?

Can you imagine a private company giving you an account number that you can use to do things without needing to know a password?

Would that situation persist for decades?

Maybe what we actually need are neighborhoods where motor vehicles all travel in a well-ventilated basement level and people travel in the fresh air above.

When does AI start being smarter than us? Can't wait.

Oh, they do have those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine

Seems like a sub would be more surreptitious.

I don't how stable your systems are. If too much print currency is printed, prices will rise. And if the printing is great enough and sustained long enough, hyperinflation will result.

Does a stable supply of a currency, coupled with collapsed systems, create hyperinflation?

Does a currency's value only drop up where systems collapse and not suffer hyperinflation elsewhere where systems are working?

It hasn't replaced it. But it does compete with it for some things.

Payments with BTC certainly isn't competitive. But that probably won't last.

Maybe we'll still need branches. Not everybody can deal with the security required for crypto and there will probably be companies that help people treat it like a regular bank.

Inflation is a real issue and Hitler came to power after the hyperinflation in the Weimar republic. Fiat made that possible.

But Germany still would have had to pay the WW1 reparations somehow. With very high taxation probably.

But the hyperinflation happens after multiple years of expanding the currency too much, often with little impact for several years. That can destroy confidence in government in a way that consistently high but stable taxation might not.

How wasteful crypto is depends on how its energy consumption compares to the energy consumption of the traditional banking system.

What is the energy consumption of armed trucks anyway? How much energy is required to build a bank branch?

Sure, the transaction charges are tiny with Bitcoin and storage is free. Is that an indicator of the differences in total energy consumption once the mining is over?

Also, what is the total energy consumed by coping with fiat currency's inflation? Probably should include that.

I think some hyperinflation events also contribute to wars happening. These use energy too.

Anyone who's always speaking "as a millionaire" isn't someone I'd listen to.

Radar based cruise control, like what my Toyota has, is pretty inaccurate. The shape of a vehicle affects how close the system estimates it to be. Its size too.

Maybe that's just one badly implemented system. But my eyes don't judge a vehicle's distance differently because of its size or shape. Usually :-)

If you have two different systems for judging distance, you still need to decide which one is correct. Maybe if there were three, it would be more reliable.

I completely agree.

I'm not sure I'd buy a car without a single mechanical interior door handle.

Sure, there might be a mechanical backup to the electronic door handle. But will I remember to use it in an emergency?

sure, but someone had to recognize what it was and do a lot of work beyond that accidental discovery to understand it make it usable.

That work is not a series of accidents.

And people say young people have no initiative now. Wait until this surveillance system is done with them.

What is it?

The dog is the achievement, not the achiever.

Rarely do any of these dogs show up on their own and win. Most can't fill out the entry form unassisted.

From what the Nobel committee says, the prize is for a who, not a what. And it's for excellence, not accidents.

"The Nobel Prize is a celebration of excellence. The Nobel Prize is considered the most prestigious award in the world in its field. It is awarded to 'those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind'."

https://sweden.se/work-business/study-research/the-swedish-n...

What happened is the resources put into this account were invested in highly successful things. If all investment accounts were this successful, society would be 10X or 100X or 1000X more wealthy.

That's why I always go for the non-invasive brain surgery whenever the option is available.

I spent my first five years in Rochester. Xerox was very big back then. Then I returned to complete my degree at RIT. There was a Bausch and Lomb building on campus and another named after Kodak. Imaging and vision were very big.

And two of my co-op assignments were with IBM. With the Federal Sector Division in Owego and one of the labs in Endicott.

It's actually just a bit over a 2 hour drive from Owego to RIT.

I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs sometimes had that long of a commute between Pixar and Apple, given the traffic we have here.

If only organizations would backup their own data. Then they could just restore and avoid paying.

I have a backup device of my own at home and that's the one I have to use. The company I work relies on some MSFT service that is pretty inflexible and won't back up the entire machine.

When witnesses give testimony in court, they simply relate what they saw. They do not need to couch it CYA language.

I did notice that your statement is pretty confident about what I think. No "allegedly" required. No "I suspect he believes X and Y". These imaginary rules don't seem to apply to you.

Have you considered that my statement was about the person that I saw?

If I discover that the person is actually not dead, I would certainly think my conclusion.

No. If I had said someone allegedly committed a crime, they allegedly are a criminal.

If I see them murdering someone, I'm not going to say to myself "That person is allegedly a criminal".

I am allowed to think, to have an opinion about reality.

There's also no need to call them a suspect if you just saw a person committing a crime.

When you haven't yet proved that a specific person did it, they're a suspect. The crime is alleged.

But not when you KNOW it. I'm not saying newspapers should say that or a court should say that. I'm saying I have no problem describing what I see.

Desperation is just one reason people commit crimes.

Such as wanting what other people have. Such as vengeance.

If only we had to worry about people who were desperate, paying them off would actually work.