Now my username and password are in the apache logs... I hope rusty doesn't steal all my bitcoins with this information. Humvns is a direct rip off of Real Humans... Even the names are the same. Real Humans will always be the original though. Hay! At least he was in a stable relationship. I guess he couldn't reign in his desires... poor guy getting saddled with this... but if the shoe fits... nailed it! That's the mane thing. You can beat the wrap, but you can't beat the ride. Hopefully he has to give those kids aids $ Guys, I meant helpers... lol... I heard Jarrad got thin due to his helpers (not aids like the disease --- lol)... Maybe those helpers were a little bit too young to be 'helping' in that way though. In your interest... how old are you holly? You should probably be taking extra folic acid to help prevent chances of down syndrome in a woman your age. Also, out of interest... have you had the baby checked for downs or other disorders? Is that standard now days? What would you do if there are problems? Seriously though, all the best. Cromwell's law is irrelevant. Easily avoided by dealing in log probabilities... which would have to be +/-inf to have priors of 0 or 1. Secondly... when people say no, impossible, all or always... that's because they are using natural language, and if you could develop a human brain capable of understanding natural language... you would realise they mean very close to zero or one probability... not actually zero or one... Finally... moore's law is clearly not an exponential curve... practically no natural data matches any functional curve perfectly... but in reality it matches an exponential curve plus some noise (ie, "almost")... maybe... but the S curve is also exponential in the early stages... and again... practically... every real life growth curve is an S curve... not an exponential curve. You sound like a child who's just heard his dog has died "You're lying. You don't know anything"... wah wah wah... Learn how to process natural language... and stop treating it like mathematics to be cast into absolutes... Nobody's priors are actually zero or one... they are 10^-40 or 1-10^-40... probably closer to 10^-15 and 1-10^-15. You know why? Because if they actually see and experience the thing they don't believe in... they will believe in it... meaning they didn't really have priors of one or zero... they just said it that way... cause they weren't expressing mathematically the actual probabilities represented by their neurons... they were expressing how the feel... using words... imprecisely... ambiguously. Truth is... no one even knows their own priors... they can only guess at them... it's the most ridiculous argument ever. And cromwells law is wrong... that's just mathematics, and can't be as expressive as natural language... it's all just gossip anyway. Cromwell is hand waving. LOL --- you so stupid. Dude... it's NOT an exponential... It's "almost" a fucking exponential... Are those dots all on the exponential line? No... they are just pretty close... You don't understand curve fitting at all... And you saying "absolutely and unequivocally" means your priors are absolute, and therefore not subject to change through any means... so, by your own logic, you must be wrong. Get a grip. Also... there really are no unbound exponentials in nature... p<1e-6. Still waiting on your critique of the free market$ What's with dirty slavs claiming to be white? You're practically a fucking gyppo... You got some serious white envy going on.... you wanna be white like bruce jenner wants to be a woman... you can try and look the part... but no one really takes you seriously. That's why we anesthetize them first. Animals are like women... if they're not conscious, then they aren't saying no by running away... so it's automatically consent. Is that a fact? Steady state would be any pattern that eventually repeats... so, for a finite world, if you see the same pattern as before, you've reached a steady state. For it not to hit a steady state, you could do it on an infinite world... if it continued to expand... but in a finite world it would have to be chaotic... and then it would still have a steady state... but that might have extremely large periods... So... are you sure? How would that kill you? Was he attempting to electroplate his balls? Was he holding a high voltage power source while dipping his balls in some gold something solution? Could this be achieved another way? Say gold particles in suspension sprayed on your balls so that the solution evaporated leaving just the gold? Just asking... you know... for a friend. Explains why this guy plead guilty to huffing paint? Also explains his frown... But with free money people could buy more delicious meat. Dude... you just don't understand economics... It's quite simple as that... If you could make everyone wealthier... they are going to engage in more of the things they like... if they like eating meat... you're only going to encourage meat eating. Slavery goes against the free market... because it imposes externalities on people. So, that's a bad argument. Now... if you wanted to include animals as economic agents... then yes... we impose externalities on them... IMHO... too fucking bad... the rights of animals is vanishingly small compared to humans. I'm anthropocentric... deal with it. If you want to diminish meat eating... you can tax it... or you could subsidise vegetarians... but your stupidity is absolutely worthless whatever goals you're trying to achieve. No... you provably do not understand markets... You can't see that there is utility in it for every (human) actor in the system. If I don't care about where it came from, but enjoy the tastes and benefits from meat... Then it has utility for me... and I will spend up to that much utility to obtain it... whether I raise and slaughter it myself... or if I can offer someone more utility than they doing that themselves costs them... Markets exist anyway... no matter what you do... unless you're in a VR... then it doesn't matter, cause then your end goal is met... but we aren't... so they do. And if we give everyone enough 'money' (like it could change the above facts --- in fact, if I had enough money, I probably would farm my own meat)... then however that applies to farming meat applies equally to farming grain and vegetables. Seriously... you don't want to accept economics... so shut the fuck up about it... you can't understand incentives (utility gain) and disincentives (disutility / cost) so you have nothing to add. I've been eating sushi since the late 90s... So... haven't noticed it being something new... no. You chose a bad example with 1/0... The limit of x = 0+ is +infinity, and x = 0- is -infinity... even the limit is discontinuous... so... undefined or NaN or whatever... yes. So, any N not zero N/0 is undefined. The only interesting case is 0/0, where you could use L'Hopital's rule... otherwise, you're SOL for anything else. If anyone can define Z meaningfully, it would be you... To me... Z would mean possibly any, all, some, none or even sets of ranges of the numbers in the range [-inf, +inf] (not sure I used the right brackets to indicate including... It's been a while since I did maths). Not sure how much more useful that is than undefined though. Of course, you would probably solve the grand unified theory of physics... those pesky singularities won't be a problem anymore. Hmmmm... the only useful property I can think of is that 1/Z = 0? Hmmmm... maybe it can only be +inf or -inf or something? No, the limit of x/x as x-> 0 IS 1 No argument... limit of y/x as x -> 0 if y(x=0)=0 IS y'(x). but x/x and y/x are both undefined at y=x=0. I don't see any problem with L'Hospital's rule. Okay, right... 0/0 is undefined... but if you had a function that was 3x/x... it's limit is still 3 as x approaches zero... But L'Hospitals rules doesn't define 0/0... the derivative of 0 is 0, so L'Hospitals rule applied to 0/0 is 0/0 or still undefined. So... no... it doesn't solve 0/0... what it does solve is functions that are otherwise continuous at 0... except that both parts go to zero... often that actually is the value at that point in physical systems... it's just you hadn't used the right maths. You've just failed to describe it mathematically.. Not maths failing to describe it... but you failing to describe it with a particular tool...all you've proven is your incompetence with that tool. The 'gradient' of a hill becomes undefined... which is why it no longer has a gradient and becomes a cliff... with a height... with no defined gradient... You can measure the 'slope' in radians though... and you will find that it always has a slope... 90o is just fine in maths... though the tangient becomes undefined in this case! So... no... it's not a problem with maths... it's a problem of you choosing how to model nature... Because in reality... hills only have a gradient in some very simplified model... and cliffs exist in the same way... it's all made of little points of mass and energy interacting mostly via the electromagnetic force after all... there's no such regularity except for your model strawman that you note is broken by design. As for computers... if you asked for N/0... you should bloody well should get an error or exception or at least NaN as a result... this doesn't crash your computer either... the computer is still running fine doing exactly what it should... just not what you wanted it to do... but that's your fault for not knowing that dividing by zero is 'undefined' mathematically and makes no sense in any context. Computers don't do what you mean them to do... they do what you tell them to do... no matter how advanced AI gets... it's always going to have this problem... as long as it doesn't perfectly know what you mean when you tell it something... and given that people often mean different things when they say the same thing... this problem is unsolvable in principal... but you can get closer to it in aggregate... but if someone ever asks it, how many apples per person if I shared 5 apples between zero people... it's going to tell you, one way or the other, that you question makes no sense... that there is no answer... you're an idiot... or any number of apples, it doesn't matter, and five left over. Damn you're so retarded... Private business 'creating' money is totally different, and has totally different effects than the government just spending money into existence. Every asset created has a liability... it's balanced money creation. And bankers don't decide the value of anything except the trades they are involved in... ie... the value of the CDS and such... and furthermore... in an as-if* free market, they would have been punished (by the market) for getting them so horrendously wrong instead of being rewarded for it with bail outs. As for your divide by zero theory... fucking hell... it's undefined... end of fucking story... how many square meters of land on earth does each person have when there are zero people? There is no number that makes sense in that context... it's simply not defined... Your infatuation with proving that maths is 'wrong' just means that nothing you say has any basis in logic or reality in general. *: I'm calling a market that is regulated to account for externalities, limited information and competition, such that it creates the same outcomes as a free market the as-if-free market... to clear up a discussion I had with MI over this. No... it's not about businesses carrying debt etc the bankruptcy or the dissolution of those businesses is the punishment.... rather... not even a punishment... they're just removed from the market for being idiots... or at best... for being 'wrong'. They should have been removed from the market for exactly the reason you state (not emotional reasons though)... to change the incentives for the next bank... and especially those that run them and made the decisions that lead to that problem. And yeah... they don't gamble like you think they do... they don't maximise expected profits... oddly enough that's a sure fire way to failure in any risk taking situation... it's not enough to maximise expected profits (the arithmetic mean of outcomes times their probabilities)... it is a necessary condition for a given bet to have value, but not sufficient... instead you must maximise expected growth (the geometric means of the outcomes, including total value you hold outside the bet, to the power of the probability of the outcome)... which always makes you bet less than maximum expected return would suggest... Going to zero is ruin... which is why you maximise expected growth, not profit... the former you never go to zero (mathematically... not practically... cause fixed costs)... the former you always go to zero in a series of bad bets... so, going to zero and removing the companies that do so is 'good enough'... the bailouts just amplify the pain... bankruptcy and nationalisation were the correct answer. Nothing to do with emotion... This is the exact purpose of the market... to make more of the things that are successful (in terms of providing social surplus) and less of the things that aren't... so removing failures from the market is what makes it efficient. Well... read the bit above on expected growth vs expected value first... Then... if the company is in the business of making 100% bets on coin flips with 'good' returns... reasonable investors will know that the value of that company is actually zero... and those that don't will find out at some point. All such ventures end in ruin. As for an individual... setting up a company... investing a fraction of his total value in it... and having that company make a 3:1 bet on a coinflip once before dissolving the company... it's exactly the same as him making a coinflip with a fraction of his value... and is the right thing to do... but why does he need a company to do it? And if a company is using just a fraction of their value... then they are again a viable company... Why set up all these companies knowing half will fail and half will be worth triple? Also... why not? So... no... your scenario isn't important... what's important is that companies that are reckless and fail are removed (from private control)... and that's good enough. Although I think the as-if-free market is emotionally satisfying too... I've said it before... every time people complain about the 'free market' it's almost always because of an uncorrected deviation from the free market... externalities, bad information, competition. Because the (ideal) free market increases everyone's utility without diminishing anyone's utility... utility is what makes you feel good... so free market outcomes are emotionally satisfying... and are intuitively democratically fair... The only other complaint is wealth distribution... covered by the second welfare theorem of the free market... BI and wealth taxes. Of course it is... The companies were bankrupt... they had no right existing in private hands... normally insolvency and all that side of things takes care of that... but... the banks were claiming they were critical infrastructure of the modern economy... like some positive externality or something... they should have been handed over to the government to maintain that critical infrastructure... sell off what it could, pay creditors, etc... find that core critical infrastructure... see how it breaks the assumptions of the free market... and either run it, regulate it, or subsidise it. Banks would have the choice... find a way to continue to exist... go normal insolvency or insolvency via nationalisation. Free money for failure just incentivises failure... that's why the whole thing was such a scam. A lot of people use the word free market when they mean the laissez fare market... or no government intervention... I mean free market in the sense of microeconomics (you can do a microecon fundamentals course online)... which means the government has a role in identifying how the market deviates from the assumptions of the free market and correcting for them... and in wealth redistribution... Ayn Rand and all those others did not seem to understand micro-economics... that externalities need to be corrected for... both positive and negative and corrected through subsidies and taxes... that natural monopolies exist (and probably have to be subsidised on a per unit basis)... that there is a role for nationalising critical infrastructure (normally things that are both positive externalities and natural monopolies)... etc... Are roads generally privately owned in the US? What do the objectivists and co say about that one? That's a good example of critical infrastructure with positive externalities and natural monopolies. Then they completely miss the second welfare theorem suggesting they think that any efficient outcome is as good as any other... ie, they would have everyone starve if one person could have a holodeck to wank in... rather than everyone be comfortable but dude get's no holodeck... Ie, they think it's okay for the poor to starve because 'free market (TM)'... whereas the second welfare theorem states that we can bring about efficient allocations where they don't. So, free market isn't laissez fare market... and as-if-free market is a government corrected market to bring about free market like outcomes and is definitely not a laissez fare market and recognises there is a role for government intervention... furthermore... I think you'll find most economists think more like this than Ayn Rand's poorly thought out philosophy. Any microeconomics course... Any modern professor teaching this course will first go over the free market and its assumptions... well... they'll build to that by covering utility, then free trade and supply and demand and proving that the free market is optimal under the assumptions of the free market... Then they go into each deviation of the free market and how the market is suboptimal and how it can be corrected... If those corrections aren't an endorsement of government intervention I have no idea what is. So... standard mainstream microeconomics actually... not some popular, but ultimately incompatible and wrong, fringe philosophy like objectivism... what is now called neoclassical marginalist welfare economics. I am literally saying and pointing you to any introduction to microeconomics fundamentals course... though one with a bit a maths is preferred over one that uses graphics like supply and demand curves - though they are ultimately the same, the maths adds more rigour - and there's no understanding like derivation from first principles. So.. I dunno... which economists would agree that the free-est market is a hands off market except for a very particular and limited set of government interventions? Adam Smith, Milton Friedman... many others... most mainstream economists. Mitlon Friedman on public goods and monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman#Public_goods_and_monopoly Just one example... He also supported a BI paid via a progressive tax with negative rates at the bottom end. The free market exactly is a model under ideal conditions... it is the model used in welfare economics... There are only two fundamental theorems of welfare economics... the first is that a free market, under the assumptions of the free market (which we can correct for in non-ideal markets) leads to efficient outcome where everyone is better off and no one is worse off. The second second theorem of welfare economics says that we can enact lumps sum transfers (ie, wealth redistribution) to bring about any particular efficient outcome! You can call it the free corrected market or whatever... I'm not sure what economists call it... but the idea is that it is free market like after correcting the assumptions through regulation... And... like requiring a courts and other things that markets do not provide... wealth redistribution yes... requires intervention that the free market would otherwise NOT provide... which is kind of the point. I've never said the free market is self bootstrapping or anything like that. Every neoclassical marginalist welfare economist agrees with the fundamental theorems... and it is clear to all that the second one requires government intervention... and it is clear to all that correcting for the assumptions generally requires government intervention too... none of this is controversial. It all comes directly from the free market model... so... I call it the free market... welfare economists basically argue for these interventions to bring about free market like behaviour... if you want to be pedantic... call it the corrected to be free market like with wealth redistribution market... or as-if-free market. You don't even here Randians saying they want to abolish courts and use private means to settle contract disputes... so, in reality... to create free markets requires government intervention... and wealth redistribution is not incompatible with free market outcomes - it is the second welfare theorem after all! I mean... seriously... if you doubt me... just do a short fundamentals to microecon course... and see if you're still arguing along the lines that it's not a free market if the government is intervening... you'll actually realise the opposite... but you'll see which regulations are useful and which ones make the situation worse. So... there is the ideal perfect free market model... and there's everything else to bring about free market outcomes... and that's it. Arguing it's not a free market because it requires government intervention really doesn't make sense unless you've got this insane prior that says free markets have no government intervention. Let me give you an example... One of the assumptions of the free market is no externalities... ie, everyone effected by a transaction is willingly involved in the transaction. Markets must be adjusted for externalities to be free markets... (they can't be ideal free markets because ideal free markets have no externalities by definitions... but real markets do... so you adjust them... then they are free markets, no?). You can see that murder breaks the no externality assumption... because someone's utility is being affected in a way they didn't choose (and negatively)... so you can't have a free market where people are allowed to murder... only by regulating against murder can we have a free market like outcome... or, put short... a free market requires government regulation against murder. Euthanasia on the other hand is exactly the same action and outcome, EXCEPT that those affected by the transaction have willingly chosen to be in the transaction... So, it's NOT a free market if the government regulates against euthanasia... BUT ONLY because the intervention goes against the free market (now the government is the negative externality affecting people's free choice to die). So... a free market requires no prohibition of euthanasia. Same physical acts... but requiring different regulations... if the intent (and it should be) is to bring about a free market. No... a mixed economy is something else... Adam smith advocated FREE MARKETS... Which means he advocated VERY SPECIFIC REGULATIONS on ACTUAL MARKETS. A mixed economy could allow murder and prohibit euthenasia... but it certainly isn't a free market. A mixed economy could fix the price of bread, but not tax pollution... which certainly isn't a free market. No... it's not a matter of mixed economy... A free market is bought about by VERY SPECIFIC REGULATION... and mixed market doesn't describe this. The problem you have is that TV has taught you a false prior that a free market has no government intervention... this is simply FALSE... you have to throw this nonsense away. In the ideal free market it's impossible to say murder someone or steal from them... it's in the assumptions... so no regulation is required... but to make a practical free market you have to create conditions that approximate those assumptions through regulations... Other regulations are not compatible with the free market. Adam smith was calling for REGULATION... like no slavery... His free market model doesn't suggest a free for all, privateers dueling it out to steal each others land and loot and driving men into battle under the command of slavers etc... Adam smith said a free market requires a certain environment, so it requires certain regulation... never once never did it say no regulation. That's some USA USA USA T-Party bullshit meme that regulations are anti-free market... no --- free market is CERTAIN regulations. It certainly isn't mixed economy... Mixed economy is like the government owning the post office and outlawing the private delivery of letters... it's not free market... The government can of course run a post office (public good, technical monopoly)... but others must be free to compete with it to be a free market. Mixed economy is something else. A practical free market is a regulated market... end of. I know... I've been doing the same... and economics is really poorly covered by wikipedia... everywhere I look is confusion of terms... For example, the laissez fare market is the free market... because laissez fare proponents call it that... Last time I looked up the effects of tariffs on wikipedia and the information was a complete mess... there were two incompatible graphs of the situation... one was right... the other was nonsense... Anyway... By free market I am referring to the ideal free market model used in Neoclassical Marginalist Welfare microeconomics. On one hand, the ideal... where the assumptions cannot be broken... and on the other hand... the practical free market... where the assumptions are made true via deliberate government intervention. Government intervention that approximates the outcomes of the assumptions is free market... government intervention that breaks the assumptions or moves the market away from free market outcomes under the assumptions is anti-free market. As the lecturer said... for the welfare theorems... breaking these we call market failures... the welfare theorems no longer hold... and whenever the market fails, it is because the assumptions have been violated... whenever the assumptions are violated... the market fails... every single time. I don't think you'll find what you are looking for outside of a fundamentals of microecon course or book... but it's the mainstream economic view. If you have a few spare hour a week... Why not do an intro course? Then we'll be 99% on the same page I imagine. It's like four hours a week absolute tops for 12 weeks or so. It will totally change the way you view the world... and for the better. You'll see a just how much bullshit flies around when people are screaming free market to justify breaking the very assumptions of the free market! (As laissez faire proponents often do -- say "We don't need labels on our medicines... the free market will sort that out!", when having complete information is one of the assumptions of the free market... it's anti-free market to not have useful labelling -- Nothing in the free market model suggests it brings about its own assumptions... it's not self creating or bootstrapping or self correcting in favour of its own assumptions - quite the opposite in fact). Well... you got the four assumptions wrong... perfect information no externalities perfect competition rational actors Your claim that such things are incredibly complex just doesn't make sense... the laws to bring these about are simple... you just haven't been shown the proofs. Convincing entrenched interests to enact those laws is complex... but what laws are required is really really really fucking simple. perfect information is corrected through laws against false advertising, fraud and where necessary requiring disclosure of certain details before sale. Externalities are corrected through pigouvian taxes and subsidies... simples... the difficult part is the political will to implement... who wants to tax the oil industry? Imperfect competition is corrected through laws against collusion and with subsidies... Again the solution is mathematically straight forward... it's the politics that are difficult. Don't even need to bother... This has little effect and is mostly a mathematical requirement for analysis. I mean... you say the required regulations are incredibly complex... but each of the possible problems with the market has a well known and well examined solution that are covered well enough in any intro course that you should know them. If everybody knew the possible problems with the market, and the rectifications to it... there would be no controversy... the government would just enact them and they'd be done... but because people are ignorant... and not correcting the market often benefits the wealthy... you've been made to think this is all so very complex when it isn't/ Because externalities are not the majority of the market... Negative ones are usually easily identified because someone is being harmed by someone else's activity... Positive ones are harder to identify, but there are usually interest groups... but convincing the government to subsidise them can be harder... However... the government setting the price on 1% of the market is clearly favourable to them setting the price on 100% of the market... when 99% of the time the market is perfectly capable of setting the prices. And... yeah... there's going to be some inefficiency... the point is to minimise it... get the 1% that is the problem (externalities) 90% correct... and you're practically done. If the rich suffer the consequences of those negative externalities... and they have political connections... then those externalities will most likely be adjusted... these are the easier ones to deal with I think. I imagine it gets much harder when the wealthy and politically connected don't have to suffer the externalties... and only the poor and marginalised do... then there is much less will to change. The problem here is that you're just throwing your hands up and saying too hard... or making it a choice between either not fixing externalities or price setting the entire market... no... just price set externalities... that's enough. The Welfare economics page has the most relevant information... The other two are more background information... neoclassical describes how it fits into the historical and modern understanding of economics, and marginalist is how we derive and observe utility... where we get our concepts of value... but welfare economics is the destination. So, the free market model of welfare economics... is the model we should strive to make actual markets like... because this maximises well-being (in the sense of the fundamental theorems of welfare economics). Again... the first paragraph of that does exactly describe free markets... no government intervention in price setting, creating barriers to entry, creating monopolies and all that... Actually... that's pretty accurate... it means definitely certainly not certain government interventions.. What it doesn't go into is the assumptions the free market is based on... and that government regulation in these areas does not make it a non-free market or 'regulated' market... they are actually necessary to create a free market. Having laws against fraud does not turn free market into a regulated market... though it is government regulation... it is not setting prices or creating barriers to entry. That doesn't mean there's not a role for governments... adjusting for externalities is not price setting... except on goods which aren't private... which the free market doesn't deal with because it's an assumption they don't exist... so government providing parks and roads or taxing air pollution... all quite compatible with a free market... under certain conditions. True... but we have no other option... What you going to do? Yell at the sun for shining too bright? Scream at the tide for coming in? It's probably the biggest insight you can have on free market economics... that someone has to actually set the price on externalities. This is the number one role of governments in free markets... to estimate and dictate the taxes and subsidies on externalities... or set quotas say on fishing, logging, pollution... or find ways to privatise the public goods. But correcting for externalities is the role of government in free markets. because free markets CANNOT DO THIS! Yes it is... very difficult... command economies have traditionally had problems with surpluses and shortages... and incorrect evaluation of externalities will create over and under production of those... but it's the best we can do... so that is what we have to do... a free market with imperfectly evaluated and taxed (or subsidised) externalities will over or under produce those goods and externalities.... and there's not much you can do but continue to revise and improve. The result is going to be a lot better than trying to command the price of everything in the market... and conversely, a lot better than not setting the price on externalities at all. One more example... Minimum wage is NOT free market... it is centrally planned price fixing... it is clearly not free market... No one, who would otherwise be willing, can legally take a job below that amount... It's distortionary. It's a result of thinking mixed economy is a solution... no... it's not. Basic Income and Wealth Tax though ARE free market... because they are the implementation of the lump sum transfers of the second welfare theorem... they don't disrupt or distort any economic activity. So, minimum wage is 'bad'... and only necessary because we refuse to do what is free market and 'good'... And you can see the effects... minimum wage was raised... and now there are McDonalds with no servers... they all got replaced by machines... and the workers who were laid off are now all worse off... BI and Wealth tax would have left the workers with enough money that they didn't require a minimum wage... and could negotiate freely to work for wages they were comfortable with on an individual level. Of course it changes people's motivations and actions... what you have to understand that there isn't a single optimal outcome... but instead an infinite number of efficient outcomes... an efficient outcome means everyone is better off and (I missed this earlier and it is the actual theorem) that no one can be made better off without someone else being made worse off. The actual first welfare theorem states that a free market will reach an efficient allocation... where no one can be made better off without someone being made worse off. Distortionary means the market is distorted from a pareto optimal equilibrium... Someone could be made better off without making anyone else worse off except for the existence of the distortion... The first welfare theorem is violated. Someone would be better off without anyone being worse off if they were allowed to work for less than minimum wage... so, it's a distortion from an efficient allocation of resources. Same if we subsidise something that doesn't need it... I dunno, something stupid... say icecream is subsidised... the government will pay 100% for your icecream... this is distortionary... great if you love icecream... but there's a cost, the overproduction of icecream creates a dead weight loss... and removing that dead weight loss (ie, letting the market handle icecream)... means people can be made better off without others being made worse off. Wealth Tax and BI are effective lump sum transfers... they do make some people better off by making others worse off (explicitly, the second welfare theorem is the converse of the first)... but then the market finds a new and different equilibrium where no one can be made better off without someone being worse off... so the market is optimal again... and not distorted... the final outcome is still on the line (or surface or whatever of all possible outcomes) of the pareto optimal efficient outcomes... We just shifted the starting allocations to bring about a different efficient outcome. Yeah... they are ongoing... of course... the are still effective lump sum transfers... There's no distortionary dead weight loss associated with them... the icecream subsidy does cause a dead weight loss... and is therefore not pareto optimal... the market reaches an equilibrium... but one where people could be made better off without anyone being made worse off... so it's distortionary and Wealth tax and BI are not. On maximising returns example... Suppose you had your last* $100, and I said we can play a game of heads and tails... heads I win, I keep your $100... tails you win $220... seems like a winning bet, should you take it? The expected value of the bet is $110... so it's good, no? The answer is NO... let's look at expected growth instead... 0^0.5*220^0.5 = $14... that's actually what you can expect to walk away with... And to make the example crystal clear... let's say you had to play again until you either lost or reached the $10M jackpot and bankrupted me? You'd have to win... (I think?) 14 times in a row... (actually... I think the odd situation here is that it's a bad bet for both parties!). Lets say you only bet 10% of your bankroll... Of the $100 you only bet $10... giving you the following expected growth 90^0.5*122^0.5 = $104.79.... this is a bet worth taking for a man with only $100 to his name! The exact fraction of your bankroll to bet for binomial serial bets is given by the kelly formula... The only thing that bothers me is why I never knew this in all my years doing engineering and dealing with probabilities and risk etc... it wasn't until I looked at finance (though it has it's roots in shannon's information theory!)... I bet it's covered in first year commerce and business classes though. *: Truly Last... there's some philosophical shit gamblers get into here about future expected income, etc. Note that by betting 10% of your bankroll... given an infinite number of bets and allowing infinitely divisible dollars... you will always take the $10M and never be ruined. Whereas, maximising expected return does leave some finite probability of obtaining the $10M, the probability of ruin is nearly one... and without an exit value (ie, play forever) ruin is guaranteed. Yes... but life is just a long series of bets anyway... you can't escape the iteration... even if you're only betting once... so, you always maximise expected growth (at the riskiest) over expected value. Talking about stop iterating... The all or nothing bet clearly goes to zero... and the fraction clearly never does... but... let's say a 1c bet minimum.... at the kelly maximum you have probability of P of going to that proportion P of your current bankroll before you make the next dollar or whatever... so for $100 start, and 1c bet minimum... that's 0.01% chance you would lose that $100... if you were betting at the maximum (proven above is greater than 1.04 growth per bet)... but when you bet less than this... like 1/2 or 1/4 the maximum... the proportion goes with the square of that... so, betting 1/4 kelly with $100 would give you 1 in 160k chance of losing! On Deal or No Deal... It's a pretty interesting game from a gambling perspective... Assuming statistics are true... and we can't play the game 'on a case by case' basis and psychically pick the $1M or whatever cause math and themodynamics don't real... If you analyse the game, the only real decision you get to make is to accept the bank offer or not... From an expected value point of view, you would never take the deal... this is obvious because the banker would never rationally (unless he get's value from ratings or something else) offer more than the current boards expected value... he's always well within his own kelly margins too, naturally... and you see this in the game... he starts off low balling, maybe 2/3rds of the value... and towards the end offers maybe 90% of the board value... BUT... if you're not already a millionaire... there is a point in fact where you should take the offer, because it has a higher expected growth than the board... even though it has a lower expected value. So, let's say you're trane and you got $1 to your name... but you're on deal or no deal... and the board has an expected value of $20k or so, with 20 boxes remaining and one of them has 1c in it... and he offers you $100... you really should take the $100. If you do a bit of maths you can work out for a given board and offer how much net worth you would need to turn down the offer. Most people on their should probably take offers they didn't. Either it's advertiser sponsered... or you know you're on the losing side of a bet with video gambling of any form... unless you own the gambling machine. You might need to have $0... I haven't done the maths in years. It's funded... and is worth exactly... the future expected payments from the guy taking the home loan... no matter how many times they sell it... or borrow against it... whatever... it doesn't matter... it is actually backed by that original 'promise'. Creating money literally on the government's say so... without such backing will have greater direct and proportional effects on inflation that money created out of loans. The banks aren't pulling magic... and I've said before... get people to loan you money... and loan it out at better interest... and you are part of the banking system without all the economies of scale. The problem was bailing them out... when they made those bad bets they should have ceased to exist as private companies... The game of flipping coins I talked about below changes significantly if someone is willing to cover your losses every time you are ruined... and this does no one any good. Banks would be a lot more cautious if they had to bear the consequences of their bad decisions. Dude... I could write an IOU to you for $62 trillion now... and swap it with you for an IOU of yours for $62 trillion.... and we would just doubled the impact that had... okay? You see... all that money creation isn't directly inflationary because each step along the way the liabilities and assets balance out... even with fractional reserve, swaps and tricks and all that shit that multiply money are still backed by promises all back down the line... the belief in the fact that tomorrow people will be able to pay for the things we let them have yesterday... In the manner in which they are inflationary... the effects tend to balance... higher inflation rates means higher loan rates... It's a totally different thing if the government were to mint a $62 trillion dollar coin and give everyone in the country $310k a year... if you don't think that would have a direct and negative effect on the price of bread... you're just... fucked. You're right... of course... but... the wealthy don't have a lot of their value tied up in dollars... so while you are redistributing wealth... you're not exactly taking it (proportionally) from the wealthy... Which is why I keep saying that a BI is a good idea... but government budgets should (approximately) balance... so the money has to come from somewhere... and if we're redistributing wealth... let's be honest about it and tax wealth directly... a pure wealth tax. The problem with trane is that he won't even acknowledge that all the other dollars go down in value a little bit. (indexation he will now scream... quite oblivious of the howling error he has made). Yeah... you're right... Inflation hurts savers and lenders, and benefits investors and borrows... It's a tax on holding dollars... it's not a good thing or a smart way to redistribute wealth. The solution to BI isn't so much money creation that we have to deal with large amounts of inflation... the solution is to budget it... which means taxes... and wealth tax is (in my opinion) the absolute best option when the goal is to redistribute wealth! Not saying other adjustments won't be needed... but the economy is naturally trickle up... we need a reasonable mechanism to take wealth from the top and turn it into representative demand at the bottom... then I spend my BI on McDonald's run by robot workers and we're all better off for it even without my McDonalds job! And, yes... inflation exists... so BI should be indexed to it (which it would automatically be if it was just a straight per capita payout of a percentage of the net wealth)... so should minimum wages (though BI should replace that) and pensions and all sorts of things... but indexation isn't a solution to something that creates inflation (as an unbalanced BI would!)... inflation exists, so we use indexes... but we don't want to be creating inflation arbitrarily, without control. There's still some way to go... Hinton, in around 2006 or so... developed a kind of neural network that allowed it to generate images as well as classify them... At least with the mnist data set: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/adi/index.htm This is useful, because it helps visualise what the network is 'seeing'... Now... mnist is a really simple dataset and you don't need many tricks to get it to work... but when dealing with natural images, to save space in the network... layers of neural networks that were all basically the same but looked for local features at different levels... say, at the lowest level edges and colour gradients, and at the higher levels, maybe eyes and at higher levels still maybe it's a dog at some location... These are called convolutional networks because each layer consists of cells of the same network... like a compound eye. Now... they've been trying to generate images from convolutional networks for quite some time with not so great results... getting gaussian blurs instead of sharp natural images... then they got that working... and some success here and there... but still, given a picture of a bus, it would generate what it thought was an ostrich but was clearly still a bus! This is the first time something long range sensible seems to be coming from a network trying to generate natural images. I think hinton may have included pose information... he says the current convolutional techniques (called maxpooling) throw away this information... say relative intensity (think lighting) and rotation or scaling transformation information... so, instead of having different detectors for an eye at different angles... you have one eye... but rotated... and if it lines up with a mouth that's rotated by about the same amount in the right location... and another eye in the right location given the rotations and scaling etc... it's a face... So... I think that's what this network is doing... they've added hinton's pose 'priors'... trained it (noting its performance as a classifier) and now generating images from it... BUT... when you ask it to imagine a particular thing, like banana, ant, screw, etc... it doesn't show you a banana, or an ant or a screw... it still only shows you an image with all sorts of things you would expect in an image with the right label... but all over the place... but ideally it would show you one item... and all the ways it can vary and still be that item... like in the mnist examples... So, this might be a problem with the training set... or what they've trained it on (like, it probably isn't trained to separate the item from it's background)... and kept hold of that information during reconstruction... or maybe there's still more work to do in how we do convolution... if the 'pose' information is sufficient or optimal... I don't know... The end goal would be realistic looking images or even video that describe a scene given in natural language... So, they've still got someway to go... but this is a huge leap at the same time... and I'm just waiting on the announcement to confirm that this is using something than other than maxpooling convolution (I expect some variant of hinton's pose idea). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? That depends on their training set. Pretty trippy stuff... I think this shows that there has been a few more breakthroughs in ANNs and computer vision since last time we looked. Specifically, I'm betting that this particular ANN has pose information encoded as a kind of prior in the pooling layers... something hinton was working on. Previous efforts of backpropagating the desired class to the input picture resulted in images that were barely differentiable from the original pictures... but now you can clearly see that class backpropagated to their images look 'kind of like' the things you would expect (ie, it's clearly bananas). Also, this is the first computer generated art I've been truly impressed with... everything else has been procedural or something and can sometimes do art in particular 'styles'... but man... this is like imagination. Yeah... hinton's really only working on one aspect and not general ai... Though a general ai system will require what comes out of that work. Put it this way... ANNs come from work trying to understand the visual cortex... but it's pretty much the same as hearing... it works the same way... hell... it works with NLP... and then motor skills... well the same general architecture can be used by a robot to 'learn' how to place blocks together. So, without reading the book... I'm pretty confident current ANNs will be part of the system that we come to call AI... like, for example, the neural turing machines that are coming along... that have memory and can manipulate it. It's funny... in my final year at uni... we had two electives... ANNs which are like general function approximators or AI which is normally about planning... Seems to me that the both need to be combined... so, I think he's probably right about NNs not being the solution... but still a necessary part of it. For example that atari playing machine had a neural network interpreting the screen and predicted the value of the moves and generate moves according to that, and Q learning algorithm was used to evaluate the actual move value to backpropagate the move value error to the network. So, definitely, broader AI algorithms, A* and such will be used... but the actual interpretation or modelling of reality such that these algorithms can interface with it will be done by neural networks. Yeah, I agree... A simulation of a human brain would be nice... though it would take a lot of processing power... but to actually get to AI, we should be looking at the mechanisms involved... like building a plane and not a bird. Of course, hinton's nets are inspired by biology... but they only attempt to capture the essence of the functions neurons perform, rather than trying to simulate hundreds of neurotransmitters and hormonal effects, etc... the majority of which are probably accidents of evolution, rather than optimal in any particular sense. Link to 'paper'... http://googleresearch.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neu ral.html A few days ago an image was leaked. So, I think they had to rush the publication, which is why it doesn't have much technical details on the network they used... Whatever they've done it's something fundamental... there was a big problem with so called adversarial images that really didn't look like the thing the network thought that it was, with 99.9% confidence... they seem to have overcome that... though they are clearly someway to go before they generate realistic looking images... I have confidence they are not far from it. With computer vision solved, and an understanding of how to manipulate objects to achieve goals... well... we're edging ever closer to the AI robot apocalypse. He's definitely a smart dude... And today he is getting to paid to work on computer vision... so he got there in the end, and firstly by proving his ideas on both simpler and more economically useful problems. Hinton will be remembered in the log files of the singularity as one of its more significant creators. I misread Hawkins as Hinton... Hinton co-invented back prop and has been in academia most of his time. Anyway... I just watched: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_computing ?language=en#t-884589 I don't see any conflict here between his approach and hinton's... neural networks are everything he talks about... for example... memory... Restricted Boltzmann Machines and their extended form Deep Belief Networks are forms of content associative memory... Hinton's turned them into recursive DBNs to recall, predict and generate sequences of actions like different styles of walking... Certainly NNs are predictive... in the ways he talked about... First we start with static images... and classify and label them... then we can 'imagine' images from the labels... then we have movies, predict movement, label it... maybe even describe it... and then perhaps even create videos from description of them. And the stuff about how the brain is mostly homogenous... directly points at stuff like NN architectures... Once again... I think we'll build a motor cortex out of NNs, a visual cortex, an audio and NLP cortex, intuitive/emotional cortex and a high level planning cortex... all out of NNs... that cross communicate to drive and respond to each other... then we'll have something like the generic intelligent machine/robot that can solve general tasks for us... like... 'build a house or make money on the stock market'. Seriously... how cool is this? http://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS 1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ/photo/AF1QipOlM1yfMIV0guS4bV9OHIvPmdZcCngCUqpMiS9U?key=aVB xWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB I think this is the approach that will get there I mean, they've already demonstrated the ability for image networks and NLP networks to share the same high level states... So, given a picture you generate a state in a high level layer, and then project down through an NLP network to get a description of it... And, the converse, given an NLP description generate a high level state, from that generate a hash that can be used to look up pictures that match that description. Now that more realistic images are being generated from high level states... you probably will be able to provide an NLP description of an image... then fully generate an imagined image from that description... probably all the way up to "no butt-like protuberances... no dogs"... though I don't think "butt-like protuberances" are part of the imagenet dataset... so, we still got some way to go. Aggravated Sexual Obese and Leaving the Scene of an auto-felatio... are still about the funniest things I have ever heard in my life... they will forever crack me up... pure genius trolling. Fair enough... but should transexuals get paid materinity leave? Also, can they use the women's showers? Though I don't think it's worth losing your equipment for that... what about pre-op transexuals? Should I use the ladies changeroom if I identify as female? As a lesbian trapped in a man's body these issues are important to me. Usual problems with meth whores... plus I'm broke and need to get a job... Life just sucks... but no shotgun mouthwash yet... Sorry to disappoint. Actually... if the freeloaders took over a biofilm then the biofilm would dissipate, so he says biofilms can't exist... but that only destroys one biofilm... and it would release bacterium into the environment that couldn't make biofilms... so they would eventually be outcompeted by bacterium that do make biofilms... because making biofilms is better... so that's where the mistake is... Also, you trying to relate statics with economics is just crazy... firstly about a month ago you were arguing that statics don't even real cause omg distributive load is confusing... now you're arguing economics don't real because you can imagine a zero load truss? Seriously... maths must be specific to the domain you are applying it too... you can't take a harmonic oscillator and say that's prices for ya... if you're doing economics, you do economics... not statics or something else. It's mostly just high level curve fitting and hyperplane separation... and we call that learning... clearly it's not the full picture of conciousness or anything... but hey... it's useful in all sorts of practical ways we can use today. Yeah, LA is pretty important for ML... You could do a separate course on just LA I suppose, to get a good grounding in it... Some of the most successful large scale ML algorithms really only use dot products... but a lot of the tricky optimisers use more LA... matrix inverses.. outer products... then eigen vectors and other stuff... I'd probably recommend doing an LA course first... then dive into the ML course... or at least try and do them simultaneously perhaps... but you really can't do the more advanced ML without it. Also, hope you're reasonably good at calculus... at least enough to be able to follow the chain rule. Vectors are like arrays and Matrices are like spreadsheets... and tensors are like multidimensional spreadsheets... Then pretty much you start defining different operators on them... mostly different ways to multiply matrices and vectors... Consider... if you have to vectors of the same length you could sum the pairwise product of each element... you get a scalar (single value) or, you could create a matrix where each row was one of the vectors multiplied by one of the elements in the other vector... and that's just vectors... I don't think there's that many operations to be fair though... basic LA is like only inner product, outer product and cross product... then the rules for how they can be applied... cause they're not all transitive (A.B != B.A)... and then inverses and eigenvectors and some other stuff... Slight possibility you might do some vector calculus too... Though I think we nearly did two years worth of it in undergraduate engineering... so there's got to be a bit more stuff I forget since then. Normally for me is working out whether it's the dot product or cross product I want... Yeah... that course will probably have you all set up for ML... then it'll just be the calc that will get you. yeah, you're right... wrong term.. thx $ One day there's going to be military drone swarms. Operators will be able to view the battle scene from any angle... AI will pick out humans on the battlefield, perhaps even armed ones or something... operators will just select all the targets and the swarm of drones will descend and waste like three bullets per target and everyone's dead. I didn't look at your code... So, I'm guessing here... but is it possible you were looking for <page> tags on the start of a line... and maybe not all <page> tags in the original file are at the start of the line? Check that... looks exactly like what your code is doing... now you have to check the input file... or update your code to deal with this... or just not worry about it... it's an unexpected feature... splits file into files with N or slightly more pages... Yeah... if I'm right... and I usually am... then you have messed up your text tag processing too... at the least you're doing is mashing several text fields into the same page... but possibly getting partials or worse oddities in there... You probably want to add everything into the page buffer and not just the text fields... that would mitigate it a bit... But really I think the problem is assuming that the tags start on newlines. Could you try this on the input.xml file grep "^.+?<page>" wiki.xml I think that says start of a line, followed by at least one character, lazily followed by <page>. Not sure if you need shell escaping at all. The flaw is your severe lack of economic knowledge Indexing completely misses the point of the free market... that people get to set their own prices... AND that prices change as supply and demand changes... For example... computers are very large things that take up entire buildings and require a small full time staff to operate and there might be a market for up to 5 of them world wide... therefore, we shall index the price of 1 computer at $10M forever! I mean, that's reasonable... that's what people are paying for them now... therefore they'll always pay that much. No... until you at least complete a micro-econ course, you are speaking out of your ass. Of course that's the effect of indexing... You're trying to say everything should stay constant compared to the index... otherwise, how is it an index? How much is a loaf of bread today is meant to be the same as a loaf of bread tomorrow, right? Well... then same with computers... or maybe the opposite where a shortage of something would send the prices high, but you want it to stay the same... You expect wages to be indexed too... which means constant... in a world where the value of different jobs actually changes... It simply cannot be done... you can't even begin to model this. No, it wasn't a 'success'... Any more than holding a gaping wound shut stems bleeding... still much better to not have the hole in you. In fact, indexation fed the inflation... exactly what I'm saying would happen... and sent it into triple digits... Although the index did enable certain transactions that wouldn't have been possible under the pressure of inflation without an index... it made that inflation worse... and was an extra headache to be accounted for in these transactions. Having said that... there are many things which it makes sense to index... tax brackets, minimum wage, social security... but you don't want your inflation to be so high that you are factoring it in when choosing between taking a bus and a taxi. Yes... that's true... So, wouldn't it be possible to read the file line by line and, on the fly, gather up the contents between the page tags and process them? Kind of like somewhere between SAX and DOM? Skip the intermediate step of splitting the file altogether? Slight problem of bias there... As a straight white privileged male... it is clear to me that we don't have enough power and we really should have more because women, coloureds and gays really don't posses the agency to provide for themselves... and thus need straight white land owners to lead them. I've experienced... it happens... you should believe what I say. Anyway... the irony is that you're not a woman in tech... and the real honest answer I believe is that the majority of women simply aren't interested in tech... though the women I've met in IT have all been very good at it... it's not generally what women chose. Given that we can't expect half of the people who want to sit in front of a computer 16 hours a day going through lines and lines of tedious code to be female... why do we expect them to have half the jobs doing that? Expecting equal outcomes implies that women are just as interested in programming as men are... I don't think that's true... I believe there are intrinsic gender biases... men and women are generally interested in different things... and there's nothing wrong with this... as long as people are given equal opportunities to pursue their desires, equal outcomes aren't necessary. Girls tend to prefer playing with dolls, and boys tend to prefer to play with trucks... this is inbuilt, and not a result of social conditioning... it is true for children, and that likely affects their outcomes into adulthood. Secondly, why is all this equality of outcome only focused on high paying, well respected industries? Why don't we see the same push from feminists to have equal numbers of men and women in garbage collection or as builder labourers? Not cushy enough for ya? Finally... if there was a wage difference between men and women in the workforce, for the same output... the market would punish those that didn't take on women... they would be paying more the same output and would be out competed by those that didn't have that unnecessary cost. That 30% is a payment for convenience... The business doesn't have to do as much work going through all the applicants and the applicants don't have to do as much work finding a job... Despite MDC's complaints, they provide a service, and they get paid for that service... and the cost is shared somewhat between the employer and employee, but they get their value back by the efficiencies the brokers produce... So, no... there is no distortion here... And again... if women could be provided at 77% of the cost of men AND produce the same output... they would be hired ahead of men... 30% borker tax included. As for your other argument... I guess... I just don't understand why more men don't wear bras and high heels... I mean... far less than 10% of men wear these... but nearly all women do... it must be systemic bias in our culture oppressing men and telling them what to wear. Men have always been more technical minded... and women more socially minded... in general... Why aren't we focused on making sure there are as many female mechanics as male? Why aren't women pushing for more men in nursing? It's not this way because women want to be working in these fields are excluded... it's because they don't want to be doing this type of work... It's always some gender studies hippy idiots who complaining that this is a problem... yet they won't start with themselves by reading through Don Knuth's Algorithms... No... it's the menz oppressing them... not their own interests... they themselves understand a little of politics but basically zero about science. But they aren't... Going to a broker to get your employee is like going to a real estate agent to get your house. Modern businesses delegate decision making downwards... that's because it is more efficient for a hundred middle managers to be making the decisions than the CEO making hundreds of middle level decisions... If it was more efficient the other way around... it would be the other way around... Again... that 30% is the cost of efficiently getting access to a larger number of potential employees... you no longer require every potential job opening to be known by a friend who just happens to know the right candidate... etc... it doesn't scale... so the broker is more efficient... And NONE of this invalidates the fact that if there were EQUALLY productive women available at 77% of the PRICE that they would get the jobs ahead of the men who cost more. It's not like MS hires the employees for Google... that would be stupid... there is indirection yes... but this indirection creates efficiencies not diminishes them. There's nothing command about it... Everyone is there of their own free will, performing their duties as per their terms of employment or contract for whatever incentives they receive... The fact that companies are made up of specialisation, delegation and hierarchical structures doesn't mean they are command economies by a very long shot... they are this way because they tend to be more competitive than individuals... but all parts of it are free market. And if your job is on the line, choosing which supplier you're going to get your particular widget from, you're going to take getting the right widget for the right price seriously... Just because the billionaire owner of the company you are working for and choosing to buy that widget for isn't actually making that decision isn't likely to make it worse... if anything... it's going to be better nine times out of ten or more. I don't know where you're getting your line of reasoning... it makes sense. It's nothing like a command economy... You have your terms confused at the very least... This is free market straight up... midmanA and midmanB are competing for the higherman's utility... it's exactly capitalism. In command economies... A central bureaucracy sets the prices of everything... The government literally defines what the price of bread will be and you get in trouble if you try to buy or sell bread at a different price. In terms of behaviour, everyone is just following their utilities in both systems... because following your utility is the universal truth no matter the market structure... And utility can come from political power and favours just as much as easily as it does from dollars. The difference is that in command economies you get punished for not performing your duties... there is compulsion... not participation due to your own free will... You don't just get fired... you get sent to prison... or worse. Not even the bureaucrats are required to work at the DMV... Everyone there is there by free choice... the free market assigns work EVEN IN the fucking DMV. The DMV isn't communist russia... Although they are more like a monopoly, in that you can't get your license and other stuff from anyone else... hence the poor service... But most government service jobs are filled by the free market. You're fucking crazy or just economically illiterate... maybe you should do a micro-econ course, huh? Clear up that fuzzy thinking of yours. Retarded fuckhead... The DMV isn't free market... for sure... clearly... their 'products' are priced by command... and there are no alternative places to get a driver's license, for example... BUT EMPLOYMENT WITHIN THE DMV IS FREE MARKET! The DMV are competing with every other company to obtain labour... They can't just point a gun at your head and tell you are going to work at the DMV for $25k/yr and be happy with it or off to the gulag with you. But just because big companies are also hierarchical like the DMV... doesn't make their decisions or anything they do a command market or command market like. Put some stats in your outer loops so you can get a feel for the time it will take to complete... You've been whining about this forever... Also, you should add state save/restore functionality at some point... this would have saved you several headaches already. You could split the file... Read it line by line... buffering the contents between pages... getting the title or whatever to make the filename, and spit out the buffer to a file... OR you could try something more ambitious and do something like SAX parsing... ie, event driven parsing... instead of reading in the whole file, you have callbacks for page, title, text or whatever tags... and process the files line by line still. The difference between SAX and DOM parsing is that DOM parsers require reading in the whole document before any processing occurs... and SAX parsers fire off callback events for different tags... You have to rethink your architecture to accommodate this... but the end result is normally way faster and less memory intensive. Just something to think about. I meant checkpoints... Like save the state every hour or so... so you can restore after a failure and continue processing from where you left off. Of course, if you can find a less memory intensive algorithm, go with it... but sometimes... and it does happen... sometimes you have to drop back to using disk instead of ram... though you're going to pay a 1000x or similar time penalty. Good luck. Nash in Equilibrium $ That's all. Does anyone else think Nash was recruited by the CIA? I think they would have found is mathematical brilliance very useful to their work and recruited him secretly to help them... Then he started blabbing about the work he was doing, a very dangerous move with these dirty tricksters. I imagine they then probably drugged him to induce psychosis and then covered their tracks so everything he tried to show people just looked like he was losing the plot... but he really did work for them and use those drop points, etc. So, the CIA ended up fucking up one of the greatest mathematical minds of this century... causing untold losses to our world and society. The difference was that Turing's trial was public, whilst I think Nash was probably poisoned and punked into looking like a schizo to cover up whatever operation he was involved in. That game theory maths and other maths he had would have been invaluable to CIA style operations... couldn't let that information get out, no matter what. I'll think of something $ I might be in the gutter but I'm looking at the stars. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead $ Yeah... money should be free and worth nothing. Consider that money is a social phenomenon... and you are anti-social... therefore your concepts of money are wrong... because you cannot and do not have the interests of the neurotypicals in mind. BTC proves that you do not need government or fed or full faith thereof or any others such nonsense to create money with value... so... why don't you go and create free money for everyone yourself and see if it has any value. You can't, because you don't understand economics... You get your cause and effect backwards... you think that economists create scarcity, and physicists make the sky blue. Physics isn't economics... but in neither case do the theories alter reality... Price is related to UTILITY and SCARCITY... scarcity alone doesn't create value... nor utility alone... air is the most valuable thing in existence to humans... but it doesn't cost because it isn't scarce... I can't think of anything scarce but without utility... something you would not want to have around, despite it being very rare... anyway... scarcity without utility would also have no value. So, you cannot have a useful but abundant money... like so abundant (true non-scarcity) that you could have as much as you wanted at any time you wanted it... no one would need to trade to obtain it... and the whole point of money is to be a social lubricant in trades... it's the abstract side of a trade, so that you don't have to match up somoeone wanting your dozen eggs and are willing to trade it for their two pints of milk... And... if you're going to write of the majority of people in your plans to change the world for the better... you're fucked from the start... we don't want your theories, because, by your definitions.. they are useless to us. Go create your own freak money you can use with the rest of your non-neurotypical idiots... oh... the problem is, you want to trade with us... you want our stuff... our food, our clothing, our houses... you want to buy it with money... but you want that money for free... which means you want our things for free... and for that, I say go fuck yourself. Your ideas have no use in society. Oh look, I just figured what is scarce and without value... your ideas. Dude... people farm for money, not for fun... farming IS big business... small farms are worth millions... and they still stress over the pennies in their finances even though they'll spend more than my house on one harvester thingy... No... they don't do it for 'fun'... if you want to say that we'll all be better off without money, so let's just create so much of it that no-one would ever want to work... please go away... neurotypicals don't want your kind... go off into the forest and breed with yourself. Your plan is literally to give everyone so much money that it would be worthless... if you don't like money, just go live without it... but if you got nothing to trade with anyone, don't be upset when they don't trade with you. Indexing is just admission of failure... No VRs for me... Whatever, loony. You're contradicting yourself... You can't buy a house for $200 today... but you used to be able to... inflation is a fact... and we aren't scared of big numbers... $1M for a cup of coffee... it will happen, even in the US... that's not a problem... Problem is when you get paid $500 for a day's work today, and have to pay $20k for a cup of coffee tomorrow... hyper inflation is a problem... and indexing is a failure... because the index will inflate... indexing is a band-aid, not a solution. The problem with you is, you expect a millionaire would still give a blowjob for a $20... because otherwise it would be 'greedy' and 'mean'... no, people set their own prices... as it should be... and how much money they have, and how much money other people have all affect the price of bread. Indexing cannot help with this. I assume you've implemented drop-below in python, right? Have you made it 'easy' to implement functions in python yet? Created a standard way to import libraries, for example? BTW... I can see that drop-below is clearly some sort of function applied to all the pixels... but what does it do exactly? The thing is... while I think it's 'cute' and all I'm not sure you have a good theory or understanding exactly of language design... What is it trying to be... a query language? SQL, btw, is a (mostly) a declarative language... is that what this is? Is it a functional language? Ie, does it even have functions? Is it going to be turing complete? Can you implement drop-below purely in mumblelang? Or anything for that matter? Or is it just a wrapper around ways to call python? Can you implement fibonacci in it? Do you want to make it turing complete? See... this is absolutely correct... BECAUSE drugs are forced outside of the free market by law, they are by definition, black market goods... black market goods don't have the backing of the legal system... so only criminals can supply them... and their only recourse for bad trades is violence. But bikers form gangs, the same reason that businessmen form companies... there are efficiencies to be gained by working together and specialisation of roles... N people working together in different roles are more productive than N people working independently. Every single time you have problems with the market, it is because it is not a free market... in this case, the law creates black markets... where a free market would cause far less problems for everyone. And for my argument with MI about free vs regulated markets... the drug market is a regulated market... but it clearly isn't a free market... so regulated to be (as close as possible, or like) free markets are the clear optimum economic solution... in every case. Ripple will likely fail... centralised crypto solutions go quite a bit against the grain... Also, they own like 90% of the ripples... it's like a premined altcoin scheme. Then there's the fact that they are having some regulatory troubles too... The whole point of decentralised coins is that there is no central point of attack to shut them down or control them... ripple can never become a major international currency, because some government will eventually try and control them if they become "too" successful. I can't find that claim... I guess though they are saying they intend to only own half. http://www.ripplelabs.com/xrp-distribution/ You can see here, they created all the coins, so straight off the bat they owned all of them... Right now, the only own 2/3rds of them... That's absolutely huge amount if they ever plan on becoming a major currency... I mean... they want to own half the ripple economy... and expect to have any impact? Laughable. That's not the only problem with ripple... that's actually one of the smaller problems with it... they think they can do distributed exchange with it (their major use case actually)... but that actually has all sorts of counterparty risks... in fact... chains of unknown third party counterparty risk... No one in the crypto world seems to take them seriously... except for naive speculators... Still... have fun with it, but don't bet the house. Well, your inability to understand it has little effect on its value. Money doesn't need to be 'backed' by anything... it just has to be a means of exchange. Money is: - a unit of account (check) - a store of value (check) - a means of exchange (check) The idea that money itself has to have its own utility outside of being money is as outdated as the idea that value is the amount of work you put into something. Yeah and no... I mean... gold started off with people valuing it... and it has the other components... so, you can see why something with value can become money... But... something without value can become money too... as soon as anyone places any value and that is recognised... it gets value... so... the creators and the early guys thought it had value... and it did amongst them... and others see that it has value... as long as they believe someone else will value it.. it will have value to them too. As far as utility goes... that's really the key... there is nothing besides cryptocoins (and bitcoin being the leader) that allow you to transfer value pseudonymously across the internet with no counterparty risk, no intermediaries and no gatekeepers... that's huge utility... and value (price) is really utility divided by scarcity... so, bitcoin has value and is therefore useful as money... internet money! Whatsapp must have utility... isn't it a video chat program with encryption or something? You do know that gold is highly overvalued relative to its industrial purposes, right? Ummm... yes... network effects are huge... they also tend towards monopolies... like, what's facebook's competitor? Google Circles? Oh... it's an encryption plugin for jabber? Again, network effects... but you can't see the utility in that? So, those things are different... they are useful no? facebook is def useful... at least people think so... so is whatsapp I presume? Hell... k5 is useful too... all utility. But bitcoin has network effects for sure... there can be only one! And it's useful... it has utility for the reasons I mentioned before... as a tool to transfer value... and that doesn't matter on the price of a bitcoin... it was true when 10c bought you a thousand bitcoin as it is today... and that in itself is utility and gives it value... the network effects merely amplify this utility... then there are the miriad of derivative uses of bitcoins... smart assets and such... people have been looking for a solution for internet money since basically forever... bitcoin enables that. This is called the network effect... Where every extra unit increases the value of all other units... ie, every additional facebook user increases the utility of facebook to the current users... yes... currency is the same. These are called network effects, and they create or tend towards monopolies. Which is why facebook is a virtual monopoly... and why I said there can really only be one cryptocoin... and it will probably be bitcoin... the more users, the more utility it has... as more people are willing to trade with it... the more valuable it becomes etc... Yeah... gold is definitely money in some sense... but it's value is way more than the fact that it can be used in electronics and looks pretty... actually... it has a lot of useful features that make it reasonable money... and so it is worth much more than it's other uses alone would make it. However, things don't have to have intrinsic value to be money... you can't transfer a few cents worth of gold across the internet without third party brokers and other complications. Yeah... I am familiar with e-gold... That centralisation / regulation problem can be a real bitch... and I think that's what BTC has solved. Bitcoin can't be regulated out of existence... no matter what... although certain regulations could have a major effect on its price, acceptance and value... it can't actually be taken away by governments (for a reasonably sophisticated user). All it takes is 1 person to value it above zero... combined with the network effect, and it has real value... that's all it takes... I'm surprised you would think it has to be backed by anything. M'Lady /tips fedora I bet they call you a 'gentleman' too... LOL... Are you paying them? If so, they are whores... no matter what you call them... and they probably think less of you for being so condescending too. You'd do fine... You just keep working, post issues, and review and merge patches. You don't really have to assign work tasks, make project proposals and budgets, draw up gantt charts, and all the other things you normally have to do in a commercial setting... people will find their own itches to scratch, and leave the results for you to merge upstream into your code at your leisure... it's mostly self organising. I don't know how you'd monetize it if you don't make it open source... it would probably never become a standard if you keep it locked up, no users, no money... unless you can find application specific niches that you can sell to industry... but then you need sales and stuff like that... it'd be very competitive and a hard slog working against larger software house's offerings. If you do open source it... monetize the surrounding things... support, specialised or prioritised development... contract to businesses that use it. As a consultant who created it... you could demand big bucks! Everyone thinks their code is crappy and is embarrassed by it... on the whole, most code is crappy to some extent anyway... but don't be shy... it actually does stuff that people might find useful!! Functional code beats beautiful code anyday. 4&5 are valid reasons to open source. If you can't tell already... I think you should open source it... possibly sell support and development requests... put it on github... It's a huge plus in terms of getting work in general too... nothing like being able point to a github project and saying "That's me! I built that!"... even if nothing comes of it, it will open doors for you. go on... but I vote for sig removal technology next. You got a point... There's always assumptions... and "smoothing" isn't a hack... it's a legit way to estimate generalisation to your out-of-training-set data. If you knew about bias and variance this would make sense to you. The one legit point you got is that he should probably escape punctuation... like use &colon and &amps... in some way that is recoverable. Your escaping seems good... But you lose the & escape character when you generate your words... ideally, it should remain... no? words = [w for w in re.split('[^a-z0-9&_']',text.lower().replace(' ',' ')) if w] Not tested... not sure if & is special in regex... you could escape it, if necessary. Dude... Why don't you first try to get it into the app market... maybe even for free... for the first few downloads... Then up your price to 99c... I bet you'd see a hundred fold decrease in downloads... but that doesn't matter... because you've increased your revenue... If you get sales... increase your price to $1.99... you'll get less sales... but maybe greater revenue... maybe not... if not... you got to decrease your price... but if you do make more profit... increase the price again... it will take a few months to find the optimal price point... If you just jump in at 29.99 or even a dollar more than all your other competitors... you might not make single sale. Anyway... the only real way to tell is to suck and see... or try it and measure... just like code profiling... and seeing what your delta-revenue over delta-price is and maximising appropriately... of course, you can only do that with point samples over time... but ffs... release something first --- whatever revenue you do get you can put towards more development. Oh... did you check the number of downloads for those apps to get an idea how much each are making... ie, not just taking the price as an indication, but demand at those prices? If the 99c ones are selling thousands, but the $4.99 selling only dozens... well... you get the idea. LOL --- missed that this was Del... good one $ It's been that way for so many years... Now, I see why artists used macs in the day and that's carried on to today I guess... also some strange set of nerds use to love it too, cause it was ahead of windows in many esoteric ways... before linux was a thing... and no one really did open source anyway. and the iPhone was quite an evolutionary leap too... But compared to Android... as a free (either or price and freedom) or low cost software / app developer... you would be suicidal to go with Apple in any way. And the fact that you are just now realising that, is telling how slow you are. I think there's big money in porting successful apps to Apple though... or if you got big sponsors supporting you... But on your own, no, apple is a walled garden... fuck em... so get your software working on android... I know you probably won't ship it... fuck, most software I write non-commercially is never 'shipped'... it's just stuff for me... But... why the fuck not aim at that? And seriously, you really can afford to release it bugs and all! Perfect is the enemy of good! dolphinse.cx was available from a link on the original goatse.cx page. Ummmm... so, I was told... For science... Dude... I'm an engineer who got 100% in first year statics and dimensional analysis... and I ain't got no idea what you're going on about here. I wonder how all those bridges continue to stand up if the people who built them clearly got their maths so wrong. It must be circular logic hey... the bridges stand up because their maths is correct... and their maths is correct because the bridges stand up... therefore the maths is wrong, and bridges don't really stand up at all... hmmm... Do you think we could build better bridges if we just dropped the maths and used natural language instead? Ohhhh kaaayyyy then. /me backs away slowly. OMG... static engineering (aka civil engineering) is like some of the oldest, most tested, well understood engineering in existence today... It's all based on a very simple premise: things that stay still do so because the sum of the forces sum to zero, and the sum of the moments sum to zero. Everything else follows from there... force and moment have dimensions - relating mass, length and time to each other... and both sides of the equations have to have the same dimensions... or otherwise they wouldn't be EQUAL now, would they? And all your whining can be resolved with the above in mind. Jesus... thank god you're not important in any way... stick to the ancient greek shit... modern maths/physics/engineering is not for you. Apparently you think bridges stay up because they are well tested... rather than designed that way. What a fucking retard. Dude... what are the units of force? I'll tell you... it's kg.m/(s^2)... sum of forces equals zero... so, whatever you do... you have to make sure your units match. It's not the maths that is wrong... and the steps follow the rules of inference from a set of axioms... It's the natural language expression of that maths (physics really)... that you are failing on. Dude.... if you look /carefully/ you would notice that w is in kN/m.... it's a distributed loading... measured in how many kilo Newtons it applies per meter... like a rod... the longer the rod... the more kilo newtons applied... So, you don't even have to care about the units of force, cause they made it easy for you upfront... So, you actually start with Newtons per Meter... and you want to end up with Newtons... so you multiply by meters... and you have the correct answer (well... units, at least). Why is this so fucking hard for you? You really think engineers are using mathematics to build all these things we have in modern life... on a false basis? That just somehow happens to work? Fuck you're a special kind of crazy dude. If you have, say... a rod... which has a certain weight... you could express that 'density' (in a gravity well, mind you) as force per meter... no? Well... that's what they've given you... so, you multiply it by the length of that rod and you have total force of that rod. Call it what you like... distributed load to me would be F/m... not F... but there you go... and a distributed load (w = F/m) times a length... is w.m = F/m*m = F... Why are you so dense? Jesus... this is where natural language is just fucked up... I said 'density'... not density... I didn't mean like actual density... I was trying to think of an analogy. Okay... lets consider a one dimensional rod... it's not really one dimensional... but so fucking close as not to matter... and so we're going to measure it in one dimension only... but it could be made of different materials... say, balsa wood... or iron... or lead... or nuetronium say... okay? got that? So... this rod... for a given length... is going to have a certain weight... right? If you want to think about it... it's going to have a certain weight... PER METER of the rod... If the rod was 1m long... and it weighed x... then 5 meter long rod, would weigh 5x... right? Okay... now... if it weighs x kg per meter... and is in a gravitational well of 9.8m/(s^2)... then it would produce a load of 9.8x kg.m/(s^2)m or 9.8x N/m... wouldn't it... That's a /distributed load... because the load is distributed along the length of that rod! As opposed to say a lead ball on a string... which would produce a point load... And here, they've given you w in kN/m... in other words, under gravity... that beam (or whatever it is) exerts a force... per meter length of that beam! So, clearly... the longer the rod or beam or distributed load... the greater the force, or simply load, it would apply to whatever was holding it up. So... it's not about how much force it would take to 'break' it... cause the rod could be of infinite strength... it doesn't matter... (not until you get more complicated scenarios where how much materials bend start to matter in these calculations... at this point, you can assume an infinitely strong, unbendable beam)... it's just how much the damn thing weighs per unit length of that beam... and therefore how much force it exerts per unit length of that beam... times that by the length... and clearly you get total force, or load, from (or on... whatever) that beam. Does this make sense yet? There's no trickery going on here... and nothing wrong with the maths... but maybe something wrong with the natural language expression of that math... and certainly your understanding of it. Dude... the forces in the tension wires have to balance the force in the beam (normally we call them beams... not rods)... The BEAM WEIGHS (or carries a load on top of it, that IT distributes along it such that it distributes force) a certain amount PER METER of BEAM... So, whatever that weight is... it must be supported by the tension in the wires... now... the tension in the wires is at an angle, so only some of the tension from the wire is holding the beam UP... but it also pulls to the side... and that has to balance elsewhere... in another tension wire, perhaps... sometimes into the wall the beam is attached to... but the distributed load is the load distributed along that BEAM... and the tension in the wire must counteract that in such a way that all the forces (and moments) sum to zero. Are you so thick that you're still not getting it... Here's a hint... if it involves, mathematics... it's probably you that has it wrong... not the thousands upon thousands of engineers who all covered this in their first 3 months of their engineering course. And as an extension or corrollary... if it is a field that involves maths, say physics, engineering, computer science or economics... you are probably the one who is wrong... m'kay? Have I simplified this enough for you? Cause you're going to be absolutely fucked trying to work out the moment on a fixed joint holding a beam that acts as a distributed load... Moment is Newton-meters... the distributed load is Newtons per meter... and it will involve 'complicated' calculations such as integration that I think are just going to break your mind entirely if you're stuck at this level. I must admit, I was reading the problem backwards. It's not my fucking homework... I aced this shit back in the day... Often you have a distributed load and you are working out the tension in the cables... in this case, you know the maximum tension in the cables, a safety factor, and are trying to work out the maximum distributed load the bridge can take. That's fair enough... just the other way around to what I described. You can think of distributed load as say, putting sandbags on the beam... the beam will also distribute the load from a car or person across it anyway... the distributed load would also depend on the weight of the beam too... clearly. The reason they use distributed load is that point loads could still break the bridge... take the maximum load distributed across the 9 meters of the bridge, and put it all on one end (approx 45kN) as a point load, and the force might exceed 20kN of one of the individual cables... My only mistake is working from w to F, whereas the actual problem goes from F to w... same fucking thing... If you can't even conceptualise a distributed load as, say, a set of sandbags... or even just sand... then you are pretty fucked... it's not that complicated. And, there are tricks in this question, that enable you to simplify the problem down to looking at each 1m section individually... You can do the calculation for point loads too... though, the choice of 1m sections pretty much means point loads up to the maximum distributed load end up with the same value, just different units. Got it yet? Like I said... if you're struggling here... just try and work out the moment on the joint of a horizontal beam supported at only one end with a distributed load across the beam. I find it hard you would question that engineers can't calculate those values, then measure the forces in real life and see that they are the same... as if engineers don't use these calculations to build real bridges, knowing what the forces are before they actually build the real bridge. for distributed load... think sand... on a one dimensional beam... whatever you're on about... you can think of it like that... If you can't work out when to multiply or divide... that's your problem... It's like complaining F = ma or F/m = a or F/a = m... and saying sometimes you mulitply or sometimes you divide... no shit fucker... make sure you're doing the right thing at the right time. Problem is with you... as usual. Here's something else to think about... Double the dimensions of the bridge... in length and height... keep the same number of wires, and the same max tension in the wires... how does this affect your maximum distributed load? I'll tell you right now... without even thinking about it... the max distributed load is halved... why? If you double the width and height, you've kept all the angles the same, so each wire now supports twice the width... it supports exactly the same load, but that load is now spread out over twice the length... so the distributed load (in Newtons PER meter) must have halved... because the number of meters has doubled, and the total load over each section stays the same. Distributed load is just like pouring level amounts of sand along the beam... the total force due to the sand, divided by the total length... You can of course have a distributed load across an area too... like pouring sand onto a floor of a building... then you get Newtons per square meter... or kg per meter per square second. If you were clever... you could also work out the compressive/tensile load along the beam... in it's various parts... caused by the wires horizontal force that must sum to zero along the beam. If I haven't made the meaning of distributed load clear to you by now, you really gots no hope in this subject... don't worry... plenty of people don't get it. They become linguists, for example. You might notice that it's not the maths that is inconsistent, arbitrary or ambiguous... it is the NATURAL LANGUAGE EXPRESSION of that maths that seems to have the ambiguity problem. You should rejoice! Ambiguity is what you wanted, right? When he says distributed... does he mean the weight distributed along the length (division)... or the total weight of the partial weight distributed along the length (multiplication). Hooray... fantastic that ambiguity... right? But the maths... no... any first year engineering student could work backwards from the maths to determine the meaning of the terms in context... but not a linguist... no, they flounder... cause the ambiguity they so longed for fucks them over again. Did list comprehension gain you anything especially in terms of performance? Yep. You can never really tell until you try it. $ Yeah... glad you got a solution... Also, wonder if you could have used list comprehension... I don't know if it would have been faster or not... so, instead of: for item in biginputlist: object = dosomething(item) bigoutputlist.append(object) do something like: bigoutputlist = [dosomething(item) for item in biginputlist] Just out of interest, how do they compare speed wise... if you're doing something like that? I have a hunch this will be fast and a lot less complicated... though always fun to play with different data structures... I'm not sure it does... considering you can add if clauses. for example: [x for x in y if x>0] but I bet they still have a faster implementation than for/append. Prince of Perth Psychic Event So, in the very early hours of last night, I clicked a facebook link (I think) about the prince of perth. I thought it mildy amusing... in fact, was going to post the link, but it was time to sleep, and all that... So, this morning I went out and got myself a pastie, and on the walk was seriously wondering that I would meet the dude... like I wouldn't be surprised if he jumped out at me and said, "Hi procrasti... what's up?"... Well... long story short, he dropped one of my girls off to me today... we talked about hemp used in ford cars, I told him yes, but they still used plastics... etc... from what I'd read on reddit... I told him I read about it him that day... then... he started talking about psychic stuff... pretty much straight out... So... wtf k5, seriously, what the fuck is going on? Could some baysian statistician please explain the likelihood of such a seemingly improbable odds event occurring, say how many days per such event could you naturally expect? Is there trickery going on? Was he an imposter? Is someone using information from my internet connection? My computer compromised? Facebook super AI? Is HollyHopDrive Stalking Me??? I'm a little bit fearful of the sort of power such internet warriors can hold... Is this a setup? Or... genuine psychic, telepathic network, synchronous, satanic like greater magic... Dude was well cool anyway... Girl is super sweet... but can't keep her... I guess TRP advice would just be to tell her that she's just one of my 'plates' (lifting term... very clever) and eat her up... but every meal makes you dependent... so anyway... options were probably, to keep stoning, fuck girl, or post on k5 about weird events.... there you go... I'mma get a coffee. She's got some great tunes... and she did bring the prince for me? Right? Out of a town like 1M or so... That's the facts as I experienced them. Hold on... EVEN IF he knows me... Someone placed a link to his reddit story in a comment, in a facebook meme, from a facebook meme channel... that I read, noticed and I clicked on, and read fitjer, thought it was amusing and interesting... thought I might meet the guy (as in sensed that I would)... didn't mention anything to anyone... then met the guy that night... Just like that? If it's not psychic the implications are even scarier... that I'm socially controlled to that extent?... Like a Darren Brown mind trick... I know most write these things off as 'coincidence'... but that word just means happening at the same time... which is a tautology... It seems a long way from pure noise... aka chance. s/fitjer/further/ that's an odd one... I mean something like Levayan Satanism... Or rather, disallowing the assumptions of God or supernatural... paranormal is okay, it's just reality that is not experienced often or hard to explain... Magic is just 'technology' that we don't fully understand... not that it can't be understood. So, physics, chemistry, economics, law, medicine... etc... they are all satanic in their way... not in the sense of evil, or even mythological as the accuser... just in terms of building models based on what we can observe and affect... ruling out supernatural, but accepting what is real might not be as simple as you might expect. I don't know this dude... and it appeared it was random he talked to the girl he bought round that day... how would anyone knew I read about him anyway? It's just very strange. As for the implanted memory scenario... Sure... but I prefer hypothesis that are testable. Depends on the day... but I wasn't stoned when it happened... I was quite sober. What does what drugs I take alter what verifiably happens in reality... the only thing drugs could alter would be either my subjective experience, or how I express those experiences... maybe what I tend to attract? Like the Free Market thing... saying to legalise crack... doesn't mean I'm actually on crack... that's just a way to dismiss my words... and I still contend that it's not the words I use, what I say or how I say it... it's that people shut off from such topics and want to find an easy way to dismiss the ideas... ie, dude's on drugs, dude is crazy... etc... rather than spend the energy understanding the Free Market... which everyone knows is the source of all our troubles really, right? Well... I don't know... Are you negatively affecting someone's utility in a way they didn't chose... in a way that has more than them just losing out to opportunities you took from them fair and square? I don't know actually know the exact mathematical precise statement about all this... no... But yeah... when I say Free Market... I do in fact mean perfectly regulated... according to the free market model... yes. It's usually pretty easy to tell who is harming who, isn't it? Sure, I guess it must get messy sometimes... no reason to throw the whole concept away... Still... do you have any examples where who has what rights and who is impinging on whom might not be straightforward? Just to give me something to think about? Okay... It all comes down to the free market... If you are voluntarily, willingly part of a transaction that affects no one who isn't part of the transaction, and they all know what they are getting out of the transaction... that is the ideal situation... That is a pure free market transaction. Everything else you mentioned can be studied in terms of affects on utility... and the market outcomes always have less 'social surplus' than the above, free market, situation. Clearly punching someone on their nose negatively affects their utility against their will... it's the simplest scenario... we should punish those who do it... such that... the utility they would derive from punching you is no longer the first choice... ie, apply a disutility on the perpetrator, in proportion to the harm done, their desire to do it, and other calculations like how likely they are to get caught... ie, a short prison sentence or misdemeanor charge or something. Well... what about punching the air in front of their face... again... you can't directly map that to utility... but we can empathise with people... and we know it's going to be a negative utility on you... it's actually assault if you feel threatened... (some places, assault is just the threat, while battery is the actual physical violence)... either way... the same rules as above apply, you aren't willingly part of a transaction that has a negative utility on you... so, we should impose a negative utility on those who produce negative externalities... So... the free model isn't just what happens when anyone does what they want... it's an ideal situation and a model for how to correct all the deviations from it! The above examples are both negative externalities... and negative externalities are overproduced by the market... and need to be taxed to bring about socially optimum production levels (some times, people need a punch to the face!). Again... pollution from fossil fuels... a direct example of a negative externality... people's utility are negatively altered in a transaction (production of pollution, or the good that produces the pollution) that you did not chose to be part... and the answer, in these cases, is always the same... tax negative externalities... pigovian taxes specifically... taxes on pollution from cars, or factories, or anything... it is always the same... One problem is estimating how much that tax should be... there are ways around it... but a good guess is better than nothing anyway... and in principle there is an exact optimum tax, which is equivalent to what you would have to pay everyone to be affected by the pollution (or neg extern) for them to chose to let you pollute... it's hard to let 'market forces' decide this... but there are ways... or close estimates. The other cool thing is... once you do the maths... you see that you don't even have to pay those who didn't chose it... you just have to tax the one producing it... and that's all it takes to reduce negative externalities such that the goods production is now socially optimal levels. There are mostly political problems with this though... carbon taxes, cap and trade... etc... are quintessentially free market... in that they return lassiez fairre market production levels to socially optimal free market levels. It is no less free market to impose taxes on negative externalities than it would be to say that criminalising murder goes against the free market! Markets need regulation to be free markets! So, what I'm saying is... that neoclassical marginalist welfare economics, the free market model, and studying all the possible variations of it... we do in fact know what the best regulations are required to bring about free market like production levels... regulations that minimise dead weight loss... loss in utility from real markets compared to the ideal free market. and it is less complex than you think. The economists already know the solutions... the problems are political. As far as 'eminent domain' goes... It's clearly not a free market transaction... and I'd like to hear some more justifications for it... though I have an alternative that makes the whole thing moot anyway... It's a free feature of wealth tax. Yeah true... they both suffer from the problem that other people have to estimate your utility... and if they could do it perfectly, there would be no issue at all... an no issue with command economies either... dear leader would know what bread is worth to you, and what wheat is to the baker, and what fertilizer and diesel are worth to the farmer... So, they aren't idea... but with things like negative externalities... there is no other way (that we know of) to enable people to make these kinds of deals... in a perfect world you would know how much pollution you would tolerate at a given price and we could trade it... but that's difficult and expensive in it's own way... so, the short cut --- letting politicians decide what clean air is worth for us is the best solution we have. The thing with eminent domain is, why do we force people to sell at a price they may not want to? I'd like to see the arguments in favour of this before I say much more... But the main difference between the two, is that we can't turn the atmosphere into a private good... by it's nature it is a public good... and so requires government intervention... because there is no way to make it private. No hold on though... One is a correction to the market to make it free market like... ie, correct taxes bring negative externalities in line with free market production levels... as if you were being paid for them. They aren't ideal in that other people are still estimating your utility... and you don't get a chance to decide... and you don't even get rewarded (directly)... but it's the closest thing you can do with a public good to make it like a free market. Eminent domain, not so much... The point is... that for /every/ deviation from a free market... economists already know what the the fix is to bring it back in line with a free market. What more could you want? It's not that complicated because the possible deviations are limited by the assumptions of the free market! Markets only fail when one of the assumptions is violated... and there are only four assumptions! It's the opposite of complex. It's the /best/ fix we have to bring 'the market' back in line with the 'free market'... Yes... it requires an estimate... and I already pointed out that that is a limitation of the solution... I pointed it out before you did, in fact... but that's not a hidden flaw in the theory... that's a well known problem. However, it is VERY DIFFERENT to eminent domain problem... in that the first one corrects the market to make it free market like... whilst eminent domain does no such thing. I consider making adjustments to the market to bring them in line with free market outcomes to be as close as is possible to our ability to implement free markets. It's as free market as physics allows... therefore it is free market... because it behaves exactly the same. With the one caveat that the estimation for the taxation of negative externalities be accurate. On the other hand... cap and trade is a solution to the estimation problem! If we estimate how much we can produce with little effect on the environment... we can place a cap at that amount and allow producers to trade --- this nearly eliminates the utility estimation problem!... However, the government has to estimate the cap! So, it's not without problems... but if those estimations are accurate... the outcome is identical to free market production levels! We've turned a public good into a private good through cap and trade or taxation! A failure of the market has been removed... and the outcome is equivalent to a free market... I think it's fair to call that a free market. Maybe you want to assign ownership to the air, and make sure you get paid when someone else's air pollutes your air... Good luck with that. I don't know what problem you got... because the solution really is as close to free market as physics allows... Your post just proves you have an aversion to thought. You are of course right... in that estimating other people's utility is hard... almost impossible... and that's why command economies fail and market economies work. The problem here is that there really is no other solution... public goods (which means that everything is an externality) have the problem that the costs (or benefits) are not priced in by the market... So, we have to fall back to estimations of other people's utility. However, mathematically, we can show, that if those estimations are correct, we get the same result as a free market. The problem is identifying where there are divergences from the free market, and knowing the solution to bring the market back in line with the free market... It's not complex from a theoretical point of view... There are only four assumptions... plus the private/public good problem... and that's it... you cover those bases, and the rest is fairly easy. You really only have to worry about externalities, non-excludability, imperfect information, and imperfect competition... that's all you have to correct for... it's not like you have to go back to first principles and dissect every type of business operation to determine how it uniquely interacts with the economy... you just have to identify if it suffers from that small set of problems... and attempt to correct it with taxation or subsidies... or laws regarding certain disclosure or against fraud. About the only problem that remains is the estimation problem... but those estimations are a very small fraction of the overall market... so, we use estimations because we have no other solutions! I don't know what you expect to do about that... and I don't see the problem as being as complex as you do, because I think spotting externalities, and public goods problem is fairly straight forward, on the whole? Don't you? The estimations are hard though... I'll give you that... pollution seems fairly straight forward by comparison... how many tonnes of CO2 do you want to put in the atmosphere... cap it at that and trade it... and everything is pretty simple from there on in... Though judging the positive externalities of education (ie, how much should we subsidise education)... is a reasonably difficult problem... I'll grant you that again. The only thing I can say with certainty though, is that the error (dead weight loss compared to free market) diminishes at the square of the error of the estimation... so a reasonable estimation is orders of magnitude better than none. The problem is that there is no known solution to these problems... what can you do? Just ignore it and pretend there is no problem - as proponents of laissez faire do? No! I think the solution is simply to estimate as well as we possibly can... and accept that pragmatic approach that a good estimate is better than nothing... and do what we can to improve our estimates. It's not like you're bringing a better model to the table here... you don't have a better solution... you're just saying "it's hard" and throwing your hands in the air... I'm saying "It's hard, but we must do the best we can". Maybe you're right... I don't know... Laissez faire is what most people mean when they say 'free market'... which is really hands off, and trust in the market to bring about the ideal situations, even in the face of externalities et al... which I think is absurd. The free market model is the ideal... yes... when all goods are private, no externalities, perfect competition, perfect information and rational actors... Then there were all the market failures... where, because those assumptions are violated... the market produces inferior allocations... and we see what regulations can be used to bring about free market like allocations... and they do have estimation this flaw... and I can't think of a way around that... and nor has anyone else, as far as I can tell... maybe they are the best that can be done? So... I guess I've been calling all solutions (even with their estimation problems) free market solutions.. because they bring about free market allocations (given perfect estimations)... maybe there is a correct term for these markets... and I don't know it... I'll have to find out. Nothing is beyond statistics... it's mathematical laws... In Bayesian terms... if it is operating outside of 'chance'... then that would simply mean that the variables are conditioned on other variables not yet accounted for. There is no such thing as magic, beyond simply that we don't understand how it works... yet. No one really sets their priors at 0 or 1... really should be represented on a sigmoid... from -inf, +inf well... smoothing hacks account for that yes... that's their purpose... And I don't have prior of 1 that magic does not exist... I have a prior close to 1 that magic does exist... magic is just that which we do not yet understand... plenty of that about... but clearly things go better when things stop being magic... that's the realm of science. I don't think people's priors are that close to one... If a dragon turned up outside someone's house and started talking to them... it wouldn't take many people that long to just accept the dragon... even though ten minutes earlier they would deny they could even exist... ie, people's priors are actually pretty flexible in when presented with evidence (even if they're mislead, or form wrong conclusions). The problem with the sigmoid is that off in the tail ends of it... the derivatives do approach zero... so changes based on derivatives update very slowly... ie, 0.999... does equal 1... it's a problem... but in neural networks we already have answers to these problems (various types of regularisation)... no doubt our actual minds have evolved far more flexibility than artificial ones. Anyway, I said I do believe in 'magic' anyway... So... they're model was accurate within their measurement capabilities... and although they had an alternative model... they had no need for it, or a way to distinguish it from the one they were using... right up until they had the measuring capability... and the evidence was so far in favour of the current model that it became the dominant / accepted one? So... being a practical person... how would you suggest that they have proceeded otherwise? By accepting any and all other models that made no more predictions than they were able to distinguish at the time? It's not like they didn't also improve their measurements at the same time... contrary to your statement otherwise. The question is also in knowing where to look... and where do you find that information from? How would you /know/ that the heliocentric model was more 'powerful'? a priori. How do you know what priors are 'wrong'? a priori. Especially when you can keep making predictions on the 'less powerful'/'wrong' model? Not everything... just closed systems... earth is an open system... so obeys the laws of thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems... ie, chaos. To me, it's just one of those things that shows that our minds probably operate with a certain amount of communal telepathy... thought influences reality... we know this in as much as thoughts lead to speech which leads to action... but maybe more directly... or possibly through other people... like telepathic networks. I don't know about proof... A long way from proving anything... problem with matrix theories is you can't know... so, kind of untestable... I think it's proof that mind's aren't as independent as, say, psychology might assume. Maybe? Then again, I've seen some pretty weird things in my time... could be more than just human... so, maybe the substrate is bendable on a more fundamental level... like in the matrix. The EMDrive? Real? Reactionless drive? Quantum Virtual Particle Accelerator? So, what's with the EMDrive? Is this a real reactionless drive? Is it breaking the laws of conservation of momentum? What's your guess what's going on? Is this going to be another faster than light neutrino event, or the real deal? It's huge news if this thing really works... inter-stellar travel, asteroid mining, flying cars, the works... It's also claimed that it warps space like an alcubierre drive... now that would be really crazy... Alpha Centari for breakfast in the morning, back home by tea. Well... such a hyperspace bypass might take a few decades or so to build... but after that. Is it going to Uranus? $ EMDrive http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/ http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/05/01/1929200/new-test-supports-nasas-contr oversial-em-drive What you're describing is the alcubierre drive, and some tests suggest that the EMDrive may be an alcubierre drive!! This is on the level of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... but experiments for once are showing results... it's like after years of being laughed at by scientists, it seemed an over-unity, free energy device works (it's not, don't worry)... you have to come up with physics that explains the observations... cause it clearly works like that, despite what your pet theory says. On the other hand... people had been using crystal (lumps of germainium a thin needle was placed upon in different places until it worked!) radios for years before people came up with the theories necessary to understand the semiconductor diode! Ie, if it works and we don't understand... we do recognise it, and we'll use it, and eventually we may even understand it, and unlock a lot more along the way too. Ummmm.... no.... They don't think it's heat... heat would either be in the form of convection from contact with air, or from (mostly) infrared radiation in the form of photons... Now, the effect is something like 1000 times stronger than would be predicted from the emission of photons... so, it's not that... And, they just tested it in a vacuum, so it's not convection... AND, the microwaves don't exit the cavity anyway. So, it really seems to be violating physics... at least the basic models... but there's no accepted theory at the moment how it works. I'm not even sure where we're at with superconductors atm either. Yeah, the Orion is pretty amazing... I always thought they should build one... but nuclear ban treaties and shit fucked that one up... and not so small nuclear explosions either... The Orion works better as you make it bigger too. But the orion's just old skool physics with big nuclear explosions... this emdrive is mad. No... I don't think anyone can claim to know how it works at this point... I think the next step will be to stick one on a small satellite, put it into space, and see if it produces real delta-v... would go a long way to proving it... Rather than put it on a space station that has real life people depending on it and can't afford for anything to go wrong. Once it's scaled up to something serious, and produces serious thrust... I guess either we'll work out the mechanism and come up with some good guesses on what its effects might be on people... or people will stand too close to it... and if nothing significant happens, we won't know of any long term side effects until they become apparent... you know... how we find out about most hazards... people start dying. Well... all our theory so far points that the guy is right... that there has to be a propellant... So, if there isn't a propellant, then that's because we're applying 'classical' laws... in the sense, that we're looking at it from a Newtonian point of view, when it's really a Quantum or Relativistic phenomenon... Even then... I don't think effect was widely predicted by either of the other realms... if at all. Though we found the effect before the theory... that's often the way it goes... but the guy who built it must have had some insight... I know they falsified one guys theories (a similar drive), but I don't think they've falsified the inventor of this one... but there is doubt that it's correct... lol... strange huh? I think it's just like the diode effect... or magnetism even... the effect was known a long time before good theory was widely accepted for it... I think it will be like that... science is a kind of magic after all... trying to find and explain things we can't. In 100 years 'everyone' will know that microwaves in a resonant chamber accelerate the 10e-9 virtual particles that have a bias in their spin that in a certain resonant frequency accelerates them unidirectionally before they are annihilated creating virtual momentum that distorts the local space time and appears as classical 'thrust' to an outside observer... or something similar... but it's limited by Trane's External Quantum Thrust Efficiency Ratio. The cool thing, if it's an alcubierre drive... there may be no acceleration felt by those using it... You could accelerate at 50G and feel nothing. Whatever it is, I so hope it's not a mistake in the experiment. It's huge news if the effect is real. I dunno... aren't dilithium crystals in the warp core? I always thought they were a power source, so they'd be the power generator, like nukes... in which case they'd go outside, to generate energy to feed into the microwave resonator... but I think the cannon is that they actually produce the effect... maybe they're a high source of these biased virtual particles? in which case they'd go inside the resonator... maybe they release energy too... so, I'm not 100% sure if they go in the chamber or not... sorry... I dunny know the laws of roddenberry physics captain. Whatever is causing the force working out how it works is going to give us some cool insights... momentum to quantum foam, or warping space time... or even something a little more mundane... still so very cool if it's real. Yeah... I know at least that cassimir forces are well accepted physics now... even used in some mems thingy I think... And that gravity one is a spinning charged superconducting disc or something... gravitomagnetic affects were measured... (not change in gravity itself, but something akin to magnetic force coming from moving charges... but with gravity... supposedly... I don't know...)... not sure where that stands at the moment. As for it being an alcubierre drive... apparently they ran a michelson-morley interferometer type experiment inside the chamber or something like that... and measured results that were compatible with it being an alcubierre drive... supposedly... It's mentioned on the nasa page and on the alcubierre drive wiki page, you'll find a link to the interferometer emdrive experiment in the see also links... don't think you can rule it out just yet. I don't know... My friend Maxim Polyakov theorised that maybe particles could be made up of 5 quarks, instead of 2 or 3... and did the maths, predicted the pentaquark, designed an experiment, and showed that it existed... So... you have to do something like that... You have an idea... does the maths check out? ie, does it fit within the standard model, or doesn't it... either way... you have to make some predictions... how they would behave, how you would create them... what they would look like... etc... then design an experiment to test the predictions... then run the experiment and look at your data... Who knows... maybe particles with imaginary charge behave differently to normally charged particles in a microwave cavity thing... maybe they accelerate and don't recombine? I have no idea... the maths is beyond me... but maybe not for you. Don't forget the poll!!! %%% $$$ (text) Missing option: UrAnas Properly adjusted for time at work... (hopefully including time seeking work too, I guess) women earn almost identical amounts to men... This is a stupid topic... equal opportunities, not equal outcomes... anything else is just buying into SJW bullshit... There's no reason to expect as many male nurses as female, nor as many female engineers as male... or anything you can think of where there is a imbalance... as long as the job is filled by those with the best skills for that job, what the fuck does it matter what you have between your legs, or more, what your skin colour is, what religion you are... and for the given job, how good you are socially, how good you are technically, how much you can lift... why do we expect the genders to fall equally along those lines? As long as opportunities are equal, it should be good... requiring equal outcomes is a distortion. It doesn't even matter... as long as she had the same opportunities as a man. Now, the name on the paper thing seems like a kind of discrimination... but was the discrimination based on gender, on contribution, another factor or just luck... you can't take anecdotal evidence like that and extrapolate it entirely... only if you measured this could you find out if it was purely discrimination based on gender... in which case it would be a violation of opportunity. Whether women earn as much as men is completely irrelevant... if they were cheaper than men for the same output... they would be hired more often than men by the market. old joke, well executed... Alright... I know... it's ocd or something... but that's actually what we economists call rational utility... just in case anyone thought otherwise. Still... well done. Thanks for mentioning me again... I reply to anyone... but you're obsessed. Thanks for sucking my k5 horsecock. Toodles. It's a UK company, and over there they are all Hard Bodied Beach Gods compared to the average UKian. Even the chick. You should be allowed to smoke in a park though $ You know ants are cooperating by default... One nest works as a single organism in many ways... As the nest is generally the level on which reproduction occurs. Generally workers don't reproduce... their only function is to serve the nest... so it's kind of a cooperation... maybe like the way cells in our body 'cooperate'. Being independent decision makers, individual ants can also be analysed using utility theory... clearly workers don't make money, and get little reward for the work they do, no extra food... and there's no reproductive benefits either... but evolution has shaped their utility functions such that they operate in the best interests of the nest, rather than themselves. No, ants often do that... You only noticed it after you saw the doco. There's a name for that effect. but if one ant is making progress... the other ant doesn't need to help him... if there's a big juicy bug or something though... they'll work together for that. Yeah, I'm lying about ants... I've never seen ants cooperating to drag a spider or snail to their hole... I'm just making it up to trick... Good catch. The standford econ professor laughed at the whole concept of splitting monopolies up... He said it's what governments try and do, but the end result is always the same... they just reform after time. Now, I'm a a bit fuzzy on this, but the solution seemed to be to per customer serviced subsidies given to the provider... I wasn't sure if this was to be paid only to the monopoly's competitors or to everyone... and it still seemed very costly (large DWLs)... Is there a case for maybe nationalising monopolies? Could the government provide an at cost service but left others free to compete? No, I really don't think so... I don't think anyone holds large reserves of cash, do they? I mean even cash equivilents you might call money... If you had said that wealth attracts wealth... then we might have had a conversation on our hands... Still... not all things become monopolies... it's not in the nature of the free market that monopolies shall arise... it's a certain set of conditions, such as barriers to entry, network effects, large upfront costs with small per customer costs... I see these as two seperate problems. No, wealth is more than money and equivilents... MS Windows IP isn't money... optic fiber isn't money... facebook customers aren't money... these things are nothing like money... but are part of a companies wealth (which should be reflected in the stock market). but anyway... I figure by now you mean wealth. yeah... you can't point at monopolies as proof that markets tend to monopolies though... especially then point out all the special conditions that enable them. technological leads also tend towards monopolies... patents are short term granted monopolies to spur innovation though, and I agree with that idea... so, I'm not sure where I stand on the discriminatory cross licencing situation... Walmart seems to be a monopoly too? Is it really? It would be interesting to work out why it is... and I don't think a profit maximising company should be forced to pay anything more than market wages (that doesn't exclude min wages, btw... some people just aren't employable)... Anyway... while I don't beleive that the free market in general tends to monopolies... I do beleive that wealth tends towards wealth... which is why I say wealth tax and basic income... though income tax would have to be adjusted too... The distinction is important especially regarding the wealth tax / basic income debate because... you can print money, but you can't print wealth. You can print money by putting bigger numbers on it... That's nothing at all like any form of IP... each work is individual and not fungible... I don't even know how many MOPIs there are in a Lord of the Rings... and the whole thing is just so different as to be an absurd argument. You can't just add lines of random words and expect to have created wealth... but with money it's about that simple really. Are you being obtuse, or do you really beleive they are the same thing? As for widgets... and factories 'printing' them... that's because widgets have their own utility... print a billion widgets and society is about a billion widgets better off... but money has NO (or very little) utility EXCEPT for its value as money (medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, standard of deffered payment), so printing billion dollar notes doesn't make the country a billion dollars richer each time... because money has utility as a whole system... the best you can do is redistribute who holds money (affecting debtors and lenders too). You got to get the equivilence distinction out of your head if you want to think of this stuff seriously... wealth can be valued in terms of and traded for money... but in general, they are two very distinct concepts. $250 USD... I'll stop posting until May's stats are out... There you go... obviously it has utility to me... but only cause I like to get concepts across... it's not about posting stats... surely you get that's a joke, right? Okay... fine... but then he was all like... well you can print wealth too... obviously not really looking at how these are fundamentally different... You know... yeah, I might sound a bit pedantic and such... but I want other people to understand this stuff for a few different reasons... but to sum up, it's a damn good argument against prohibition and I think it's time we implemented something like a wealth tax and basic income... and I think if you're going to advocate stuff like that, you better understand the fundamentals. So, yeah, I did know he meant wealth... but I wanted it stated explicitly... and then we still see that there is a confusion there. Fundamentally though, you can't print wealth... you might be able to create money out of thin air, but you can't create wealth out of thin air... it's something trane has fundamentally wrong with his approach. Although budgets don't have to balance exactly, and governments can afford a large amount of debt... the fact is that at some points debts really do matter... so these things have to balance in the long run... if not through deliberate action, through harsh economic reality impossing itself. Also, remember he was replying to a question I asked of Hacker Cracker... cause that dude is quite smart on econ if I recall correctly... and I wanted to know his thoughts on monopolies... to which LR came back with all this 'wealth' attracts 'wealth' stuff... which does happen, but I think is an orthogonal problem to monopolies, and I don't think monopolies are the natural end product of a free market... I just think they exist under certain conditions. My appologies for trying to be precise in my understanding of the world. It was money... and the whole package is what gave it value... so, not as simple as just printing money... put it this way... the total USD value people sold the money for would have been roughly equal if he had printed $1 bills or $1B bills. Yeah... all that is true... as far as it goes... His 'money' probably had some sort of value purely as a curiosity.... I'm not saying making new currencies can't add value... you know how much I'm into bitcoin... that's a new currency that creates value... and has value... it is created value... What I'm saying is, that for an existing currency, adding more of that currency has little effect on the overall valuation of the entire pool of that money... so, all the USD have a market cap (say, in terms of gold you could buy with it)... and if you multiplied all the USD by 10... or dumped 9 times that amount into the economy... the entire sum of all the money would still buy you only the same amount of gold... If every USD was suddenly 10 USD... everyone would be exactly where they are now, but bread would cost $10 instead of $1... this should be almost trivially obvious to anyone. So, BTC is new, and creates value, and has created wealth of sorts... but it's market cap in total isn't really altered all that much by how much of it exists... 3600 Bitcoin a day are created... You can say whatever you like about how they are created... that the total number is fixed or whatever... but we are making 3600 BTC every day that didn't exist the day before... And the entire BTC market isn't magically worth 3600 BTC more everyday... the entire market cap of BTC changes on the laws of supply and demand... so the value of creating these BTC really comes by slightly devaluing all other BTC (say 3600/12M roughly)... You can print money, but you can't print wealth... it's not that hard to understand, surely? No, a free market cannot even have monopolies as defined... an otherwise free market without perfect competition is not a free market... but a lot of people tend to think that monopolies are the natural end result of all capitalism... as if just one dude would end up owning literally everything on earth... and I don't think the market works that way... I think monopolies are the result of a confluence of a very specific set of circumstances, not a natural end state. You see them crop up where there are high entry costs, low and decreasing per unit costs and network effects... so power, water, gas, telephone, internet... but not so much with wheat, barley and sugar... wealth concentration is something very different... I think it occurs wherever there is rent seeking... but even with highly concentrated wealth, you can't extract the kind of money (utility) you can from a monopoly... as long as there is real competition, that's all you need to keep it in check... monopolies are just really awful compared to free markets... but there are solutions... it's just that solutions sound crazy to the layman... just as crazy as breaking them up sound to an economist. I mean... lets say comcast is a monopoly... and the solution would be to continue to let them charge what they like, but the government will ALSO give them an extra $1000 a year for every customer they have... sounds crazy right? but if that turns out to have the lowest dead weight loss... then that is the right thing to do. but these are technical questions, and I was hoping someone who knew more than me would help... for my own understanding... Yeah... so if I'm going to spout on about a thing I should really try and understand it as best I can... so, I'm not just blindly running around saying free money for everyone, challenges, debts don't matter, give everyone a billion dollars and the world will be right... cause I'm pretty sure it don't work that way. Yeah... I think I discussed all of that above... The only thing is about IP laws... yes... they are temporary monopolies... I think copywrite and patent law are great things... but the whole point is temporary monopolies... 25 years is plenty of time to extract your value... at that point it should be public domain... There should be all sorts of remixing of songs that were new when I was a child... all part of the public domain, free to build on top of... all for the advancement of the arts and sciences... but money (wealth lol) does what it does and circumvents these systems for its own ends. Yep... would be much better, right? $ Well... this is the basic income site... so this is where I preach, learn and teach... (joke, but with truth). HackerCracker is actually way smarter than me on economics... which is why I asked him the question... but if others are going to jump in with their sage advice... I might have to argue some more points along the way. Now, you're right that monopolies are NOT failures of the FREE MARKET... they are failures of THE MARKET... and markets fail by not being FREE markets... get it? And monopolies are rather egregious failures of the market, in that we lose a lot of the normal social surplass that a free market generates. So, economists don't really study FREE markets as such... they are mostly interested in market failures... like monopolies... We study free markets in as much as we PROVE they are the optimal form of market... then we study markets to see how they DIFFER from FREE markets (and they are always worse)... then we look at what can be done to a market to make bring it closer to a FREE a market... and we look at the resulting dead weight losses (loss of social surplass compared to a free market)... Now, here's the problem with economics... laymen think they have a fucking clue about the topic... that's probably the biggest problem with the whole subject.... idiots will say, look how good breaking up these monopolies worked... we should do more of that... and the answer is just fucking wrong... Sure, short term situation is better than having a monopoly... and there is no arguing that... but it requires messy, industry specific regulations, enforcement... and the tendency is for the monopoly to reform anyway... and those regulations are costly, and innovation is lost compared to a better solution and because there is more dead weight loss than the better solution. And the better solution is to subsidise the industry as a whole!!! Which means we are going to have the government pay monopolists for their services beyond what they are already getting out of the market ---- which sounds fucked to your ears, right? ---- BUT we are also going to pay that to anyone capable of supplying the service... so it will increase competition... and this overcomes the effects of the monopoly as competition forms... Now, this might sound counterintuitive to you... but that is the reason why we use mathematics, and not intuition... because sometimes the counterintuitive answer is the correct answer... The result being, that if AT&T and it's competitors (such that they existed) had been subsidised on a per unit supplied basis --- you would have had all those benefits you mention and more... mathematically because that generates the most social surplass... There would have been no need for possibly innovation stifling regulation, and no fear of the monopoly reforming... and so on and so on. Now, the main reason I started this thread... is that it still sounds counterintuitive to me... like it did at the time... but the maths seemed to check out... I just haven't studied it enough to change that to an intuition... so I am check with HC on that... okay? Dude,,, I'm not arguing /for/ monopolies... I'm acknowledging their existence, and looking what is the best thing to do in the presence of monopolies. Claiming that 'monopolies are anticapitalist' is just meaningless in terms of free market neoclassical marginalist welfare economics... producing socially optimal outcomes and minimising DWLs are what we care about... not political soundbites and cheering. Now, "all kinds" of subsidies are clearly wrong... and maybe that was the problem... specifically you pay 'per unit' subsidies only... say a subsidy for every customer connected, a subsidy for every phone call made... not... here's $30M lump sum to appease you... that kind of subsidy doesn't do shit! Now, when you talk about granted monopolies, like you said... you advocated subsidies... and that's all good too... there are other solutions to that... but I'm not even talking about that case... can analyse it separately. For all people cry about 'necessity', at some point it doesn't make sense to run one cable 500km to service one person, no matter what you say. Just in general... it makes sense for the government to provide per unit subsidies. Okay... check this... imagine we decided that MS really was a monopoly in the desktop space in 1990... The government could pay $20 to anyone who supplied an OS on a desktop for sale... Now... the effect from MS would have been to LOWER their prices and INCREASE the quantity supplied... and imagine RedHat was getting $20 for every one of their installs too!!! Now, for you to say my maths is right, but the reality is wrong is to imply that the theory must be incorrect... that's a bold claim, really... I probably shouldn't have called you an idiot either... I'm just saying there's a huge problem with lack of economic knowledge... which means people instinctively do the wrong things... or let governments and media owners sell them the wrong 'solutions'... and it's cause everyone thinks it's obvious. If the maths doesn't match reality... something must be going on... I simply think the wrong subsidies... or wrong amounts of the right subsidies... If you claim the model is wrong... do you have any idea how hard that would be to demonstrate... to find the flaw in the model? I mean... I've been searching for quite some time... what's the magic trick? I mean, mathematically explain AT&Ts behaviour GIVEN the levels and types of subsides they were given... do we see prices and quantities that match our models or not? There has to be something more going on besides company costs and profits and consumer resources and choices, right? Now, the last thing I can think of... were you all just being greedy? Expecting fiber to the house before telephones were even working well? Do just prefer the illusion of choice, coke vs pepsi, but at the (real and hidden) cost of a decade or more for fiber to reach you if what blaster says is true? Viva la Free Market*!! *:Not available in stores. Utility isn't just selfish self interest... So, it's not that... it's certainly not 'irrational' with respect to the free market definition of rationality... I really don't believe in anything beyond business costs and revenue, consumer resources and choice, and government intervention. You'd have to pull a variable out of hyperspace to add something to the model here. If the government nationalises a monopoly... that has certain outcomes too... My assumption, at this stage, is that reality actually does match the models... but the optimum government interventions weren't taken... and furthermore... that while breaking the monopolies up may have been an improvement over the status quo, it was a sub-optimal one. Here's what I'm talking about... http://youtu.be/u47TdJzRAWk It sounds crazy, but the maths checks out. You see, the fact is that this seems really counter-intuitive, but really is the correct answer... Just a quick recap... the free market is the market with restrictions... the free market is optimal (in some sense of social utility surplass)... while the market is just everyone maximising their utility, no one cares about social surplas, only their own utility... so monopolies occur in the market, but we can bring about free market like outcomes by subsidising them... woah! dude! I think there are a few caveats... that the government has to estimate a chunk of utility... that problem shows up in a lot of the fixes to the market... no one really has a solution to that, as far as I can tell... what we do know is that a good guess is way better than nothing. Also would have to really look at the DWL of this solution... cause the subsidy is effective DWL... and also where the social surplus falls (to the consumer or the monopoly)... but that's not as important... This just means you get the optimal social output... the same price and quantity that a free market would produce... and I'm still not 100% sure that's equal to the minimum DWL, but it might be... and that subsidy still has to come from somewhere... a tax on something else... So, monopolies are never as efficient as free markets... but sometimes are the best a market can do. It doesn't make sense to run a dozen different parallel water pipes through a town. Also, looking at it now, I see it has nothing to do with competition... but you subsidise those as well... This is very different to my idea above of just subsidising the competition... which probably wouldn't work, despite the intuitive appeal. Seriously dude... I got a better grasp on this subject than you do... so it looks like the educating I have to do is educating you. Of course all wealth has a market value... You can of course sell all of those things (well, facebook customers was an odd one) for money... but that's not what I was saying. Where you're wrong is that money is something more than just wealth, it is a: - medium of exchange - a unit of account - a store of value, and - often (but not always) a standard method of deferred payment You can't just trade meters of optic fiber... or lines of Windows IP... So, while most forms of wealth have a market value for an equivilent in say dollars... they really aren't money at all. No, wealth is the right term... Because wealth goes beyond assets... in economics, wealth goes beyond things that an accountant would consider... though in laymans terms, you might say something is an asset that wasn't strictly one... say, having good friends. Though assets are a good example of wealth... and you're otherwise correct, generally speaking. Post office is a good example of what I'm talking about... Though not sure why the post office would be a monopoly... though I think of it more as an essential service or critical infrastructure... a free market approach wouldn't get letters to places that are uneconomical to deliver too... but the value of having a system (in terms of positive externalities) makes it worth while for the government to provide. If it is its own reward... that means utility $ Because mathematical functions only return a single value... Trane is just fucking retarded... this is so fucking stupid it makes my head hurt but laugh at the same time. So, the sqrt function is defined as only returning the principle or positive root... Now, we usually write y = +/-sqrt(x) in math equations... but only if we know the result could be positive or negative... sometimes it simply can't be negative... but there you go... and it really is a shorthand for... y = sqrt(x), OR y = -sqrt(x)... It's a shorthand for saying there are two possible values of y... but Trane... being a fucking retard in literally everything... has written AND... that doesn't make any fucking sense even from a logical point of view... y = 2 AND y = -2 is fucking stupid... but y = 2 OR y = -2 is clearly okay... whatsmore is that using OR would make the LOGIC work... rather than just pretending maths doesn't exist and doing regexp string substitutions. ie... y = plusmorminus(sqrt(4)), gives y = 2 OR -2 y == -2, becomes (2 OR -2) == -2 (2 == -2 OR -2 == -2) (FALSE OR TRUE) TRUE Do it his way with AND and you get y = 2 AND -2 y == -2 (2 AND -2) == -2 (2 == -2 AND -2 == -2) (FALSE AND TRUE) FALSE So, the magic of regexps is that you can substitute anything you like at anytime... just as I can write 2+2=5, but that doesn't make it so. I'll bet he puts up the same thing in another day or two... completely forgetting all of this... fucking troll or retard? The reason we use utility... along with the rest of the free market model is that it says (mathematically) that we should be able to do whatever we want, as long as we aren't harming anyone else. I can't beleive you (or anyone with half a brain, okay maybe not you) would want to argue against this result. Now, when you COMPLETELY READ MILL... and have finished his treaty on Utilitarianism AND On Liberty... you will see that he is saying that the ascetic does not do anything for SOCIETY... His utility TO OTHERS is basically Nil. But, it must have utility to the ascetic, otherwise he wouldn't do it... You will have to finish On Liberty to see that he implies this... No man knows what is best for a man but himself. If you read the quotes you quoted earlier, it says: "The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others...". Get it? IT DOES FUCKING RECOGNISE... IE, it EXPLAINS IT... not... Yeah it happens, but it has nothing to do with this theory, we can't understand this type of behaviour but we don't like it... it says it fucking does recognise. Now, why the fuck you would want to bash on Mill is beyond me... On Liberty and The Free Market are about the ONLY reasons I can see to Legalise Crack, Meth and Heroin... The current state of affairs is ANTI-free market... Because drugged up workers aren't efficient workers... they are people (people who use the wrong drugs) who might question the status quo and rock the boat... Using drugs benefits no one but the drug user!!! And you know what? In a Free Market, or under Mill's theory of Utility... that's fucking fine! If it benefits no one but the one chosing... it benefits society!!! As long as you aren't harming others... Cause it's up to the individual what his utility is... The prohibitionists have no right to save you from yourself... They can warn you... but they have no right to stop you.* But ONLY under utility theory do we have a good philisophical basis for this. To argue otherwise... well... you'd probably have to come up with a philosophy that no one agrees with... something stupid... something like trying to define sqrt(4) == -2... which is wrong... by definition... sorry that you hate definitions... but you should have done work on the plus OR minus operator instead! *: THIS IS SO FUCKING CLEAR IN MILL YOU WOULD HAVE TO EITHER BE BRAIN DAMAGED OR COMMENTING ON IT WITHOUT COMPLETING IT FIRST TO MISUNDERSTAND IT. Well... Mill would thank you for your opinion... take it under consideration, and then tell you to kindly go mind your own business. Me too... except... it would be hard to cut down on something I haven't used in a decade. I FUCKING LOVE COCAINE!!!!!!111!!1!11!ONE!!!! I know... But taken seriously by who? I don't think anyone here is not reading my comments because of my style. I like this style of writing too... I mean, I've written so many hundreds of pages of technical documents in my time... so dry, proper sentences... no elipses... this is for fun... and I kind of like the yelling / ranting tone... I think I caught it a bit off of CTS... It's a good philosophy for random online forums. It's a good tone for when you just can't get through to some fucking retard... and you're also conveying your frustration at that fact. Though I notice people on Reddit are more shocked by it... like they think I really am some uptight, angry, frustrated fuck... when really I just like writing like that for effect... I also think it's kind of funny in it's own way too... of course the mods step in too, wanting to make the place as 'friendly', ie banal, as possible. Besides stats prove tdillo swears more than I do... though I know you mean more than just that. I don't really remember talking too much about macro... But I think to deny micro is fucking insane... Yet, I am SO hoping for a decent argument against it that isn't based in ignorance... but maybe fractures somewhere with it. So... I mean... let's say you were arguing that 2+2=4 to a crowd of morons that just stubornly refuse to get that... how would you come across? So, the real problem is, how do you tell fact from fiction? I dunno... study? Do you trust the economics department or the marketing department more? Style over content to these morons then... so, maybe 2+2=5, could we agree though that it's maybe a bit smaller, like 4.9 or something... I dunno? plusorminus 0.9 perhaps? Jesus Christ Man... That's Insane Why are you corrupting the holy sqrt function with this discusting barbarity? what is 4*sqrt(4) to be? Can you do my examples above? With a plusorminus and a plusandminus? Is it that capable? As long as you know you're program is wrong... It's a pretty cool example. Difference is Trane doesn't know he's wrong... he's trying to prove -2 == 2 remember... would be cool if you can do sqrt, plusorminus and plusandminus... if or is +, then and is *? $ I think I see what you're doing now... It's not an or, and it's not an and... it's more like a list you can do aggregates on... so your equal function has returned that the statement is 50% true across your all cases... normal case would be either 0% or 100%, but if one in five matched, it would be 20% true... That's fine... I suppose... it is what it is... Where the formal logic approach would return either 100% or 0% true across all cases... depending on whether you were doing an or (boolean addition) or an and (boolean multiplication). It's easy of course to turn your value into a boolean and/or function... "and" is true if the truth value is 100% else false, while "or" is false if the truth value is 0% else true. Yeah.... so it's a (normalised) weighted set I figured you could do that too... I could see that being useful to something like baysian networks... Given you have an infinite label space... very sparse vectors. I added the 'normalised' in brackets... cause it seems you automatically normalise results. As cool as sparse matrices are... You know they're already built into scipy, right? Though labelled vectors (and matrices) are interesting... Any thought on the ordering of the replies-to matrix yet? Yeah... it's a cute language... I don't know much in terms of your domain... Though I notice that languages either try to be turing complete (like anything from proceedural, functional or declarative)... or provably not turing complete (mostly data definition languages, like yaml or json)... I'm not sure where you fit on this line. If you do a lot of vector and matrix operations, numpy and scipy might be interesting to you. Well... I guess you have a way to define operators in python too... so, you could always write a program to find the optimal ordering? Well... if the user can import their own python functions then it's turing complete because python is turing complete... even though the operators you've added so far might not enable turing complete calculations. The reason it is usually important to make sure your language is not turing complete is so you can make proofs about it, like knowing that reading a data file will complete. If it's turing complete, you can't prove that... it could loop forever. Well... is that a problem you need a full turing language for or not? I don't think query languages are TC in general, are they? I'm not 100% sure... Though they may chew through a ridiculous amount of resources, they always complete, don't they? I'm thinking SQL, for example. Then again, if you can't solve the reply-to ordering problem in your language, you have to ask yourself if it's the type of problem you want your langauge to solve, or do you explicitly drop down to imported functions? If you can't do branching, recursion, or iteration, you don't have a TC language. Though, if people can import functions, they will almost certainly find a way to extend your language to be TC anyway. Let Gay People be Gay... It doesn't affect anyone else... there's no negative externalities... Why is everyone so concerned with the concerns of other people that don't concern them? This is a really bad human instinct we have to learn to get over. This is the core of the free market. Your gay marriage is ruining the sanctity of my fourth marriage. Your code is no better in any way... You have to come up with all the alternative spellings BEFORE your program will recognise them... EXACTLY the same as mumble's code... If he added bilchcoin to his list of words, it would find that too. I mean, you (and I mean specifically you, cause you're stupid) can't write a program to find alternatives to bitcoin automatically... you could tell it bilchcoin is also bitcoin, yes... but it would fail completely to recognise $hitcoin as a synonym... For that, you would need a higher level of AI than you'll ever be capable of writing. Remove the log from thyne own eyes... Why don't you go ahead and do that... while mumble writes a terse and useful little language that actually gets the job done today. You know... free market... you get to do what you want to do... and mumble gets to do what mumble wants to do. The main difference between the two approaches, of course, is that his approach is working right now, returning results, and making people happy (providing utility). My Bitcoin will be worth something? $ Governments will keep infrastructure running... More or less no matter what... My house will still likely be my house... for example... I'm not anticipating the apocolypse... just an economic crash that will leave many people unemployed and in financial ruin. What's wrong with a Free Market? Yeah, sure... post a diary if you like... Of course, the question is specifically what is wrong with FREE MARKETS... not the US financial system, or US capitalism, or US markets in general... It's just that you're teh kind of idiot that doesn't know what a Free Market is, and equates it with whatever fox news tells you it is... then attacks something that isn't a free market as being the problem with free markets... Like if I asked what is wrong with Socialism, you might answer that Stalin's Gulags were inhumane... and you'd be right they were inhumane... but wtf does that have to do with Socialism? But give it a go... I'll let you know if you're that type of an idiot... I'll just wait for you to prove it first. How come I out-mania MDC? I don't think I mention that word that often. I think you need another level here... Like a new module that imports both of these and adds your new function or class. You almost certainly need a new module, one way or the other... your other option is to move the required function or classes to another module and import that into these two... Either way, new module, almost definitely. PS: Have you put any thought into the matrix ordering, to get the numbers to go along the diagonals? I can't remember the formal name for this. Even if they aren't python modules... and are modules in your language... The problem is generally the same with circular dependencies... create a new module that the two circular modules import instead. I got no idea about how your language rules work with modules importing modules though... that's your problem. The matrix thing I mentioned here: https://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2015/4/24/7393/79913/36#36 It's probably not exactly like I described... but something very similar. https and autoformat hey http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2015/4/24/7393/79913/36#36 Get over it mumble... I can't even remember your real name... Garry was it? You haven't said anything that controversial here, have you? You seem like a nice guy all around... You're name's already on the internet... they just don't you're also mumble... It is pretty cool by all accounts, like you could show us the table generation scripts... Oh dude... I got such a great idea... can you urlize them? So, you can have a link with an encoded script that outputs a table on demand? Anyway, personally I think you could go public with little repercussions... I don't think I'd say the same for me. This doesn't change April's standings... Total Word Count wasn't officially part of that months stats... But I know there might be work to do for next month... W h a t c o u n t s a s w o r d s h e r e w i t h y o u r n e w s c r i p t s a n y w a y ? ? ? I ' m j u s t a s k i n g , f o r a f r i e n d . . . Y o u k n o w ? W h a t c o u n t s a s w o r d s h e r e w i t h y o u r n e w s c r i p t s a n y w a y ? ? ? I ' m j u s t a s k i n g , f o r a f r i e n d . . . Y o u k n o w ? W h a t c o u n t s a s w o r d s h e r e w i t h y o u r n e w s c r i p t s a n y w a y ? ? ? I ' m j u s t a s k i n g , f o r a f r i e n d . . . Y o u k n o w ? W h a t c o u n t s a s w o r d s h e r e w i t h y o u r n e w s c r i p t s a n y w a y ? ? ? I ' m j u s t a s k i n g , f o r a f r i e n d . . . Y o u k n o w ? T h a t ' s g o o d t o k n o w . . . I should back up a lot more of my arguments with reference to other works... So I should add a lot more quotes, too: Quotation From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For the Wikipedia policy on quoting, see Wikipedia's Manual of Style. For the Wikipedia essay, see Wikipedia:Quotations. This article is about quoting text. For information about the punctuation mark, see Quotation mark. For the non-English usage, see Quotation mark, non-English usage. For market data relating to a security or commodity, see Financial quote. For the price of a service, see Sales quote. A quotation is the repetition of one expression as part of another one, particularly when the quoted expression is well-known or explicitly attributed by citation to its original source, and it is indicated by (punctuated with) quotation marks. A quotation can also refer to the repeated use of units of any other form of expression, especially parts of artistic works: elements of a painting, scenes from a movie or sections from a musical composition. Contents [hide] 1 Misquotations 2 Reasons for using quotations 3 Common quotation sources 4 Quotations and the Internet 5 United Kingdom copyright law 6 See also 7 References Misquotations[edit] Many quotations are routinely incorrect or attributed to the wrong authors, and quotations from obscure or unknown writers are often attributed to far more famous writers. Examples of this are Winston Churchill, to whom many political quotations of uncertain origin are attributed, and Oscar Wilde, to whom anonymous humorous quotations are sometimes attributed.[1] Deliberate misquotation is also common, though this often goes unnoticed, usually because the misquotation is better known or because the misquotation better fits a situation. For example, the Star Trek catchphrase "Beam me up, Scotty" did not appear in that form in the original series--likewise, the famous Dirty Harry quotation "Are you feeling lucky, punk?" is a rewording of the original dialogue: "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya punk?" Humphrey Bogart's character Rick in Casablanca never said "Play it again, Sam." The actual expression is "Play it, Sam." Darth Vader in Star Wars IV (for Blu-ray) says "No, I am your father" which George Lucas re-worded from the original expression "Luke, I am your father" from the original version of the film. Reasons for using quotations[edit] Quotations are used for a variety of reasons: to illuminate the meaning or to support the arguments of the work in which it is being quoted, to provide direct information about the work being quoted (whether in order to discuss it, positively or negatively), to pay homage to the original work or author, to make the user of the quotation seem well-read, and/or to comply with copyright law. Quotations are also commonly printed as a means of inspiration and to invoke philosophical thoughts from the reader. Common quotation sources[edit] Famous quotations are frequently collected in books that are sometimes called quotation dictionaries or treasuries. Of these, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, The Yale Book of Quotations and The MacMillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases are considered among the most reliable and comprehensive sources. Diaries and calendars often include quotations for entertainment or inspirational purposes, and small, dedicated sections in newspapers and weekly magazines--with recent quotations by leading personalities on current topics--have also become commonplace. Quotations and the Internet[edit] Chiefly a text medium in the beginning, the World Wide Web gave rise to any number of personal quotation collections that continue to flourish, even though very few of them seem to facilitate accurate information or correct citation. On June 27, 2003, a sister project of the Wikimedia Foundation called Wikiquote was created as a free online encyclopedia of quotations in every language and it is now the biggest single quotation collection in the world.[citation needed] The increase of written means of informal communication brought about by the Internet has produced the practice of using quotations as personal flags, as in one's own signature block. This is most commonly seen in email messages and Usenet posts, while it is almost never seen in blog posts. Quotations are also popular as a user's personal message, a line under the user's nickname in some Instant Messaging clients (and here they often go uncited). In all these cases, quotations are usually included to give a glimpse of the user's personality, to make a statement of their beliefs, or to spread views and ideas. The sheer bulk of online quotations, combined with more efficient search engines, has effectively made the Internet the world's quotation storehouse, encompassing an unprecedented number of easily obtainable quotations. Though matters of accuracy still remain, features such as Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book and Google Book Search may serve to alleviate such concerns. United Kingdom copyright law[edit] Section 30(1) of the United Kingdom Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (apparently in transposition of Article 5(3)(d) of the EU Copyright Directive on quotations) allows fair dealing with a copyrighted work for the purpose of criticism or review, provided that it is accompanied by sufficient acknowledgement. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation People often ask what I do on K5, I say one word WINNING. When you've met all the deliverables $ So, we can now get a stat of how many comments generated per diary... like averaged over how many a diaries a person makes... So, you'd see I get 40 comments per diary on average... And mirko gets 1 pity comment, on average? You should do total words published that's probably the one true metric! Here's something that will get you thinking... I was going to say that you should put procrasti first in any list that is unordered... especially if I'm the one throwing down perfectly good money to contribute to this... and being the overall winner of k5. BUT... look, you've got a sparse matrix... and there's something you can do with such a matrix, that is kind of interesting... Make the interesting numbers lay along the diagonal as much as possible... or rather, find an ordering that does so. So, you could weight each entry in the matrix by a multiplier, that is highest at the top left, and decreases downwards and outwards... but is still highest along the diagonal... do a elementwise multiplication, sum the lot and then find the ordering that maximises (or minimises the negative of) that sum. What you'll get, in one dimension... is a kind of clustering, where those nearby each other in the ordering are those that talk mostly to each other... My dear ugly, fat, age shaming, slut, And how old are you exactly my dear? Didn't think so. And you proved no point, unfortunately, except that you can't handle the mean streets of K5, and that you go off crying to the patriarchy if anyone dare utter the B word around t you. You know you can create a function that takes a string and operates on it... why do you want to alter the string class? I guess you got two options... extend the string class with your own class with the added method... Or define a standalone class, and assign it as a method to the string objects you want to operate on... But I'd probably just have a string utility function that I called seperately... it doesn't add much in the way of encapsulation to extend the basic class... so a standalone function would do, no? Fuck the drug abusing women... What the fuck are you doing for them? Nothing... Do you do charity, do you go and meet with them? I spend a LOT of time in the company of poor homeless drug addicted girls... and they all seem to love me anyway. Actually, that girl is fully aware of her photo's being published... She knows what I write about her and others here... If you can use your feminist theory to explain why she spent an hour sucking my cock... I'd love to hear it. I got another girl here right now... Fresh out of nine months jail... telling me she loves me... I don't feel that strongly towards her... but I'll give her a place to crash for a few days and avoid the streets a bit longer... why not? I must be a real asshole to get those kind of responses. And what's your obsession with age? You think my words are wise beyond my years? You obsessed with slightly older men than yourself? Or you just getting rattled over your own age and projecting onto others as usual? I know the feminist type... you're too much of coward to use words in your defence... instead you appeal to men for help (what a nice fellow that tdillo is, hey?). Weak. Hey... I'll put you in contact with her... actually... If you'd like. How does that sit with you, miss dirty stopout? You going to tell her something she doesn't know? Are you going to 'save' her? Maybe the pics weren't as good as the ones she used to advertise, but they were alright, I doubt they hurt her. Do, you know her name? No... you don't. You're literally making someone a victim of a situation they are not a victim in... and femenists thrive on victimhood... but victimhood relies on weakness... you are weak... or worse, you feign it for your own benefit... even better, you are the victim of her actions. You do understand, that the second set of photo's I took of her... with her knowledge that they would be posted here... okay? I swear guys, I was this close making a deepthroat porno... and even worse than be a victim of her actions... would be that you want to convince her and others that they are victims too. And seriously... could you be gargling my cock more hungrily? going back through my comment histories and diaries... omg... Seriously, I'm so fucking hard right now... It's fucking orgasmic to know I got such a devoted little follower. That's what your mum said $ Free Market Utility is the same as Mill's Utility A free market that allows negative externalities, theft, fraud, deception, etc... isn't a free market. You claiming otherwise goes directly against the four assumptions of free markets. Mill appeals to the greatest utility to everyone by allowing anyone do whatever they want unless it harms another. The Free Market appeals to the greatest utility to everyone by allowing anyone to do whatever they want unless it harms another. Can you spot the difference? You see... if you had actually studied... what the free market is, versus, what the market is... instead of closing your eyes and shouting it down out of instinct... you would find that I, and economic theory, agree with your statements completely... the free market needs regulation... Without regulation, we could have slavery, but that wouldn't be a free market, because slavery means someone is a party to a transaction against their free will... so laws are required to enforce this. And the same with Mill's utility... He's appealing to people's good nature... and murder is certainly within some people's utility, but it infringes on other people's against their FREE WILL (read On Liberty, and see why I emphasise these words). They are exactly the same thing... you should be free to do as you wish... EXCEPT FOR the FOUR ASSUMPTIONS of the free market... which means REGULATION is a necessity in FREE MARKETS and I have never argued otherwise. Well... obviously you would have an easier time understanding this stuff if you had studied it... you have a model in your head of what the free market is... but you've gotten that from vested interests from television 'economists', 'bankers' and 'businessmen'. You've recognised that they are lying to you for their own selfish reasons... but you've bought in on their definition of 'free market'... which, surprise, surprise, isn't the one taught by economists. To say regulations infringe on free markets is a fucking joke, because economists study how markets fail all the fucking time... and they fail by not being FREE markets... so the economists advocate regulation that makes MARKETS into FREE markets. And if you had a decent understanding of what I mean by free markets, the one taught in intro to micro econ... you would see that all your hedges or alternatives are SUBSETS of free markets... your ideas are FREE markets, but FREE markets are more than just your ideas. And the simplest way to explain it to a wilful layman... is that in a free market, you can do what you want IF you aren't HARMING ANYONE, or LYING, or CHEATING, or HIDING RELAVENT INFORMATION, or STEALING, or USING VIOLENCE or THREAT of VIOLENCE... or POLLUTING or CAUSING A DISTURBANCE... or by PRICE FIXING, COLLUDING, or running MONOPOLIES... You know... things that I'm sure even you consider to be REASONABLE... and that behaviour of businesses that actually piss you off, is almost always because they are doing one of these things... ie, operating OUTSIDE of the FREE MARKET. Everything is a market (well, not quite, but)... It doesn't require the quid pro quo part... giving something away is definitely a market activity... also a free market activity... stealing is also market activity... though it is not free market activity. Trade is the market activity of exchange... and charging zero is still quid pro quo... in the terms that the person who receives the good still has to choose it. And you're reading Mill wrong... he doesn't acknowledge motivations or behaviours outside of utility... you still thinking of utility in terms of obvious benefit... like dollars. The ascetic is following his utility... So is my little model agent that only takes water and a ration and gives away his left overs. The problem Mill is trying to show you, is similar to the agents I write about below... people that say the 'best' or true 'good' in society is the one that takes the least and gives the most, and we should all be like this... Mill says No... that's not 'good', utility is the actual 'good'... be an ascetic IF YOU LIKE... even go so far as to ADVOCATE that lifestyle, if you like... but don't FORCE people to be ascetics... that goes against utility... and would be a harm. What about a gift market? Where's the buyers and sellers there? Investopedia isn't so much economics as business... it's definitions are more business definitions. Look... if it makes an ascetic happy to be an ascetic, Mill would never advocate stopping him... that IS his utility... it would decrease the greatest happiness... Some people are even happy to see ascetics... so there's that... he shouldn't be forced to be a clown to make others happy. You haven't completed reading On Liberty if you think Mill would advocate the doctor killing. It is wasted, in the sense it's no good to anyone There's no argument there... unless it is what the ascetic chooses to do... Mill would never ban someone from being an ascetic... because it is in their own utility... but there's no real point to it... That's what he is saying. Dude... don't read the first paragraph and try and tell me what his works are about. At the end of the day, utility theory says that whatever an agent does, was what the agent considered to have the highest acheivable utility at the time... That applies to ANY DECISION MAKING AGENT! And you can model any decision making process with utility. What Mill's argues is that we are free-est when are able to persue our own utility for whatever reason... as long as we don't harm others. So, utility is neither good or bad in itself... If it's in my utility to murder my new friend so I can steal his wallet... then that is what I would do... but that is clearly not good... and the question we ask is why is that not good... and from a pure utilitarian point of view, is because it goes against the utility of my murdered friend... Assuming, of course, that being murdered wasn't his desire or request. There is nothing outside of utility actually... because it is the basis for all action... and so, by maximising our freedom of action, we maximise everyone's utility. If you can't see the utility in feeding a homeless person, or cleaning a park, or secretely donating to the orphans home... that is not a problem with utility, it is a problem with your understanding of what utility is. It's not about money, it's not about being selfish, it's not about seeing other people suffer... it's simply doing what we most want to do. No, agent's don't NEED utility to operate... You can make decisions based on any process you like... Economists don't beleive people THINK in terms of utility at all... It's just that every decision making agent CAN be modelled as a utility maximiser. It's an equivelence... one that becomes useful, because maximising utility means maximising freedom of choice... it maximises the OPTIONS open to a decision making agent... it maximises what they can DO. In accordance to THEIR OWN decision making process... what they MOST want to do, is the things we should let them do... as long as it harms no others! And Mill does exactly the same thing... but Mill didn't have the mathematical description of utility that became available with decision making theory... he didn't even really have a good theory of utility like modern neo-classical marginalist welfare economists do today either... Mill IS the NATURAL LANGUAGE EXPRESSION of the exact same utility theory used by economists. Down ot the fact that whilst human behaviour isn't a matter of maximising utility... it is EQUIVILENT to it. Every decision making agent can be modelled as... Is MATHEMATICALLY defined... > is just gossip. I stopped reading right there... You may as well say, You can prove a negative... saying otherwise is just gossip. I can't continue going past such drivel. You would claim that the programs you write can do more than a Turing machine... saying otherwise is just gossip. You can go fuck yourself if you think I'm going to read past absolute bullshit idiocy like that... Yeah... I did have a great example showing why the model is useful... but seriously, fuck you. If mathematics is no good here... I'm wasting my time completely. Your actions at a given point in time are well defined... You can't both smoke crack and not smoke crack at the same time... So, the x axis is the action, and the y axis is the utility... for a given action, there is a utility... and it's maximum at the action you took... there is no multiple return value problem... it's a normal mathematical function. You wan't its usefulness... I'll express it in a theoretical mini-world... Let's imagine a world with a bunch of agents... they need some things to live, and use other things just for enjoyment... let's, for argument sake, assume there's a big machine that produces what they want... and I know you'r going to hate this part, but lets limit what the machine can produce... so the agents are limited to say 3 actions per day... but they have to drink a unit each day, and eat something each day, but are otherwise free to do what they want. Let's define some goods they can get from the producing machine: ['water', 'ration', 'burger', 'sodapop', 'crack cocaine']... furthermore, they have two actions they can perform on other agents: ['give', 'take']... where give gives another agent an item, and take removes an item from another agent... the other agent has no say in that... they're either given an item, or they have it taken from them. We can make other rules... to have the agents die from old age, thirst, starvation, crack overdose... and they also reproduce... they might reproduce a litle faster if they are happy... and say burgers, sodapop and crack make them happy... or fat... maybe they get addicted to crack... whatever... it doesn't matter... for now, we can ignore all these rules... but you can imagine a world where they exist too. Now, you get to build the agents with whatever decision making process you like... you can use natural langauge... complicated rules based on thrist, hunger and happiness... genetic algorithms maybe... it doesn't matter an ounce what their actual decision making process is... Now... let's look at some different behaviours and analyse them... and look at how different people might be like these agents... and then maybe we can decide some 'laws' governing this society, and why we would ban certain behaviours, or encourage others. Let's start with the selfless, health focussed agent... let's say, a health focused agent choses water and a ration everyday... and either an extra water or ration that he gives away that he doesn't need, seems a pretty healthy lifestyle... he doesn't get too fat... and he's helping society out too. Then maybe a middle ground agent... he likes to have a ration, a burger, and water... he doesn't give or take from anyone. Maybe a slightly less healthy agent... usually choses two burgers and a sodapop... also doesn't give or take from anyone. Then maybe a hedonist agent... choses a burger, a sodapop, and crack cocaine... doesn't give or take from anyone. A junkie theif agent... choses 3 crack cocaines a day, and if he needs food or water, attempts to take them from other agents... sometimes an agent gives him a ration or water, but he'll just take whenever he needs from some other agent. Now, we can look at the laws of our society... and, let's say you have CTS or a prohibitionist mindset... Maybe you're like the selfless health nut... you take only water and ration and often give away some of that as well... Then you look at the set of items and various behaviours, and say... hmmm... we need water and food to survive... but burgers and sodapop can do that too... though, they're a little unhealthy, but not that unhealthy... but crack cocaine serves no purpose at all... it just makes agents high without feeding them and so many junkies just get crack cocaine... and they start stealing from other agents for food and water... crack cocaine is the problem... let's ban it. Do, you see, that's how people think... Water and rations are good enough for me... hell, I even enjoy a good burger now and again, I'm no puritan, but who the hell needs crack? But now, let's look at it from a utility point of view... Despite having other decision processes... we can map an EQUIVILENT (it would always make the same decision) decision process onto them (without changing their actual decision process)... Such that whatever an agent chose to do, it would have the highest utility in our decision making process... So, you can see... as soon as you ban crack... you MUST HAVE decreased the UTILITY gained by the agents that would have chosen it... Because that was their maximum utiilty when they chose it... but now they're stuck with something they wouldn't have chosen if they had the option... so their utility must now be lower than it was previously. Okay... so, utility theory says you shouldn't ban crack... we can't ban crack without lowering gross utility in our society, but what about the actions, give and take? When an agent gives something to another agent, that agent gets an unchosen benefit... it gets an item it may or may not want, but it doesn't hurt the agent to get the item, worst case scenario, they can give it away... the receiving agent doesn't lose utility... there's no harm in giving. But if an agent takes something from another agent, the other agent gets a loss it didn't chose... the other agent loses utility against it's own will... an agent has now harmed another agent... there is a loss of utility (at least definitely from a pareto perspective... an agent has been made worse off against his will). So, from a utilitarian point of view... studying this mini-world example, we can see, that if we want to maximise the agent's utility overall... we ONLY ban the 'take' action... we don't allow agents to take from others without consent... That's the only thing that decreases other agents utility. Whereas, there will always be puritans, holier than thous, those who know best, goodie two shoes types, and more generally, those who don't see why others would enjoy something they do not, who would ban crack from society, possibly even soda and burgers... from a utility point of view, the state should limit itself to only banning agent's from taking from one another... it is the only thing that can decrease utility... everything else MUST increase it... therefore everything else must be allowed. THAT'S WHY WE STUDY UTILITY... This is why it is useful. Also, you are wrong about the if/else returning more than one value... Think in terms of a functional programming language with no side effects... it doesn't matter if/else or anything you inside a function in such a language... for a given input, it ALWAYS returns the same output... This is true for turing machines in general... it's just that often we allow 'inputs' from outside of the function parameters... say data in a network buffer, or even a randomness pool... it's properly part of the input space... and turing machines are deterministic... so you can't get around it with if/else or anything else, for that matter, that can run on a turing machine. Utility comes from there... if at any point in time you have to make a decision, amongst a set of mutally exclusive options... and you have a preference for some options more than others... so you have an ordered set of options... then you can map numbers onto them, such that the more prefered an option is, the higher the utility... and you chose the one with the highest utility is equivilent to taking the option you most prefered. You take that option away, you will chose the next most prefered item, but that must have a lower utility for you than the option than the one you really wanted. There is no sqrt(x) problem here. But you're an idiot and not doing maths $ No... math does not work that way either... sqrt(4) == -2.0 is FALSE in MATHEMATICS. That's all there is to it. +/- function might work a bit differently... [sic] http://grammarist.com/spelling/model/ http://grammarist.com/spelling/maximise-or-maximize/ The model recognises people do things that appear to be a sacrifice... Why? Because it has utility to them... He's just saying that sacrifice itself isn't a good... You know, in contrast to like how others, especially religious leaders or politicians, might say we should sacrifice for our common good... Utility theory explains why people would do that... because it's in their utility... but it says that self sacrifice itself isn't a good that we should aspire to. I've read Mill like 5 times or more over the last two decades... maybe you should FINISH it first before trying to preach to me what it is saying. I don't think Mill advocates killing the one to save five... It would be perfectly reasonable if we made assumptions about utility, like that all lives were of equal utility... then yes, kill the one to save the many and all that... good. When you get into On Liberty, you will see the way he says that know man knows what is best for himself but himself, to show that you can't do that... in modern economic terms, that means you can't compare utilities. The one they are killing, could be the happiest person in the world, and the five saved always have been and would always be miserable... killing the happiest guy doesn't help with your end goal at all. no man knows what is best for himself but himself That was just an embarrising typo. Come back to me when you've finished On Liberty... You'd be like you're preaching 1984 as a good model for society because everyone is happy and they're made to exercise well and everyone's pleased with the government and the telescreenes aer cool and everything because you're only half way through the fucking book. And yes... the same utility Mill says, and the same utility in Free Market economics resulint in what helps the greatest number be happy... they're the same fucking thing. Free market is prescriptive too... It isn't saying do what you want... I've said that before... it doesnn't describe how people actually act either... it advocates certain actions... Markets are the reality, you want descriptive models of these... and Free markets are particularly good markets... so economists proscribe them. I think you can extend the idea you have of markets to include anything (any transaction) that results in a change of utilities (for one or more agents)... that's how you have externalities, say with noise or air pollution... not a free market, but a market nonetheless. You can see then, that gift markets are a subset of free markets,.. assuming you're gifting goods and not toxic waste. Actually, gift markets are inneficient compared to free markets... But they are compatible with... at worst case scenario they represent positive externalities (say anonymously given gifts to unknown recipients)... and are under produced compared to a free market, and maybe should be subsidised... but you begin to see problems with that, a subsidised gift market... it's no longer really a gift market. I think it works quite well where everyone knows each other... a close family, friends, social groups... because those gifts are remembered... so rewards flow anyway... completely anonomous gifting you are doing for 'it's own reward'.... As long as a gift has a postive utility for the recipient, gift giving is a good thing... but yeah, it could put a burden on the recipient, and actually have a negative utility... it could effectively be a negative externality, like gifting toxic waste. I'm sure trane would agree with me, if he knew what free markets were, and understood the concept of utility... but he doesn't, so he instinctively argues with me, rather than educating himself. Huh?... TIL James Mill is John Start Mill's Father Interesting... Marx coined the term capitalism... and he is right... there's a propensity for capital to contentrate... to become rent seekers... Socialism has a rational basis... that the people should own the means of production... but... Communism (as in Soviet style communism) throws out the baby with the bath water. There's no need for central planning and state control... these systems have huge inneficiencies... The average politician or price setter can't determine the utility for everyone else... that stuff is best left to supply and demand. A Free Market, with wealth redistribution, has all the benefits of both systems... you basically say, wealth is really owned by everyone, but we nominally let people control it for their own benefit... but we'll use tax to redistribute from the most wealthy to the poorest, and let normal free market system decide what to produce and who gets it otherwise. So James thought something was worth the work you put into making it... his son clearly didn't think so, I think... and it's pretty clear you can put a lot of effort to waste, so today we see that something is worth what you get out of it... or what you would trade it for. Sorry Sye... I can't really make sense of this $ The answer is pretty obvious... There should be a cap on the amount of CO2 and other gasses that a volcano can put out a year, and that should be traded in a free market. Otherwise, the government should decide on the disutility of the volcano and tax it accordingly, ie a pigovian tax on volcano emissions. Economics means supply and demand... and there's currently an oversupply of volcanoes in chile at the moment because the untaxed negative externalities are not represented in the price of volcanoes. This is the difference between the unregulated and the free market... Chile lets an unregulated market overproduce volcanoes until they are literally spilling out into the streets, no matter what damage they do to other businesses, because they aren't willing to put in the kind of regulation that leads to the optimal levels of free market volcano production. Why people don't understand this stuff is beyond me. Apparently the same problem is happening in Yellowstone, because people just love to have their free geothermic geyser distraction entertainment, and the whole time not willing to pay the cost of an erupting super caldera. Well... demand means supply, so you really bought this on yourself america. Yeah... the old projections showed something like total destruction of two thirds of the US... nuclear winter type conditions throughout the northern hemisphere for several years... and not such a great outlook for the southern hemisphere either... And that was just the tip? Man... that's going to be a fun one for whoever get's to witness that event. It seems to me to be beyond the scale of our current engineering to do anything about... is there any hope we could slowly release the pressure on it? I don't think so... It's just a big nasty zit that's gonna burst one day and we're going to have to survive on through it or go extinct trying. If only magma had utility... we would tap that till it was nearly exhausted like it was californian groundwater. Volcanoes erupt because it is their utility... we know this, because they erupted... Which is why you have to either tax or fine them to lower their eruption utility... Providing them a basic income is basically subsidising them... they'll erupt all day long and never get a real job. This is why so many unemployed people in south america right now. If they really were geniuses they would have won the monthly k5 stats... Like I did... QED. If you can't pursue your happiness peacefully and nonviolently, right now, with everything you got going for you, you deserve to be thrown in a cell, locked up and have the key thrown away... You don't need basic income to do that... look at the bullshit responsibility free life you're living now, and you dare complain? What a fucking selfish little cunt you are... you're exactly the wrong spokesperson for the UBI cause because even if you have good intentions, you have the appearance of a conflict of interest, exactly because you want free money to do shit. Every time you open your mouth on the subject, you discredit it. You really want that first place trophy You're such a loser. Says the guy that always corrects his mistakes and posts corrections to his mistakes in his corrections... I'd say clearly you love posting mistakes no matter what. you can call what I've done to you rape, but it was more like psychological domination, and you loved it, and you know it... you're not fooling anyone with that story. You got delusions boy... There's no reason to be making typos to correct... except the obvious. I don't stalk women... I can barely evade them... The funny thing is, you're so fucking gay for pussy that you would make up false allegations against actual men in the hope that some woman somewhere thinks you're some kind of hero and fuck you for it, classic femanized beta white knight behaviour... but they mostly fuck the guys you're obviously jealous of... that's why you don't get laid. Fine... Meth Tits could possibly set me up for that... what with the hacking of the facebook account and what not... but that was on her request... I was just surprised that I broke in... and then you know... you do what you do... but I got that recorded a conversation between us where she thanks me for getting into her account and helping her out... now, only problem is... damn... that pregnant chick, I can't remember her k5 nickname, crack momma?... stole the SD card from my phone that held the recording... I don't think Meth Tits has it in for me that bad... that she'd be willing to make a thing about it... Crack Momma pretty much insinuated if I took her back to the room and fucked her she would give me back my data cards... but she was making me feel used... You can't let people treat you that way. As for Meth Tits... some random turned up on my facebook account, and I was pretty sure it was her with someone else's account... that was weird. Anyway... one of the missing girl's turned up, and she's really lovely, but I think she's in love with me, and I'm really not sure what to do... And I can't rape you cause you keep gagging for it. No... You have seriously misunderstood me... I ALWAYS meant it in this way... You have ALWAYS put your blinkers on and shouted meanness... You coloured my version with your derogatory terms... I tried to explain how general the idea is... but you reject it... out of some misguided principle. I say utility, but you say selfish egotist... I knew Mill before I new micro-econ properly... and his ideas of Free Will and Utility are exactly the same ideas now expressed with mathematical certainty in the concepts behind modern Free Market theory... it's not Free as in do as you want, it's Free as in Mill's theories of the rightful limits of the state to limit people's freedoms... free to do what you desire, as long as you aren't harming others... For one... if any of those things occur, ITS NOT A FREE MARKET --- by definition, no lying, theft, fraud... whatever... that's just MARKETs but no way FREE MARKET... and you know this. And Mill's utility theory is in no way conflict of you doing those things... I say utility, and you say meanness... I say cleaning a park for the enjoyment of others is utility, and you say, no it isn't because utility is meanness... but it's not m'kay? What you've basically done here is have an emotional breakdown, and thrown a tantrum... you were all pro mill and his 'version' of utility, until I pointed out that it's the same as free market utility... which you blame for your lot and call it meanness... so instead you've rejected mill entirely on that biased basis and have decided to not even finish reading his work. I knew your reaction when I previewed the last comment... I really should have attacked Mill myself so you could throw it in my face how his version of utility is right and mine was wrong, until you worked it out yourself that they were the same thing... but I don't have the patience... you're far too predictable. Anthropic Global Climate Change p>0.95 Easily.... big changes in CO2 in the atmosphere --> physicsy stuff --> big changes in climate... That's going to be expensive... one way or the other... Really need to cap emissions... and trade that cap... At the same time, go nuclear as much as possible. Get the 4th or 5th gen nuke reactors up and running as soon as possible... get your reprocessing skills up! Oil is artificially priced too cheap, and nuclear artificially priced too high... reverse that... when you take the real costs of the two, nuclear wins. But... there are tipping points in chaotic systems, where once you are beyond a certain point, you cause irreversible phase shifts... and we don't want that happening. OTOH, a scientist friend and I were discussing GW, and he said, for sure it's man made... but if we hadn't done it, we would have been due for an iceage about now anyway... So, maybe that was the illuminati's plan all along, to save the world from a catastrophic ice age, and the gossip we hear is just their way of getting us to turn the anti-ice-age machine off. Still... we should probably turn it down now, sooner rather than later... even by your argument... it is still an experiment being run on this planet on a global scale for which the outcomes are at best uncertain and seemingly extreme. We need to shift to realistic zero emission energy sources... and the only thing that truly fits that bill is nuclear. What part of wait for a counteroffer didn't you understand? You can't just dump down a price for something people were getting for free and expect them to jump on it... Think of it as a bid/ask spread... 24c on the bid side, $100 on the ask side... price discovery takes time... Doesn't help that you have an internal value of $0.00 attached to it... Maybe start small... ask for $1 for each bit of new functionality... build your market... build up rapport with your customers. Give away some stuff to be a market leader... but make up for it in volume. Well... in fairness... you got to look at it from everybody else's point of view... what are they getting out of it, what's it really worth to them... I doubt it's worth $100 to anyone here... and the other thing is, it's kind of like poker... it's clear that stats has utility to you, as trane pointed out... it would take money to stop you working on stats... that doesn't matter so much... you could still get paid for it too... but you already broadcast the fact to everyone, so why would they pay you? It's a fair free trade. so... somewhere between you being paid not to produce stats, and other people paying you what it's worth to them to have stats... you have a price to produce stats at... it's a tiny bit complicated by the public good nature of the stats... so free rider problem... but no one here is in a situation to subsidise you for this... still, you should be able to eek out a little more scratch than 24c, no? That's why selling lotteries and prediction side markets could have been good, but you'd get in trouble. Everything has a price... but you can't afford it. So, that takes a utf string and encodes it into ascii while ignoring errors... but I think it returns a byte array... which is the b... I think that's just showing the encoding u"something" for a unicode string... I mostly use Python 2... and only ever dealt with this getting unicoded responses from other websites and shoving them into ascii encoded varchar databases... I really fixed the wrong problem, and shouldn't have converted everything to ascii... but I'm lazy. alright though... so... I'm not a 100% sure how that thing differs from a string... if you print it, it doesn't look like that, right... the r's and n's are converted into newlines, right? If not... maybe just throw it to the str function (whatever it is). if you just want the words out of it, a default split will probably give you what you want. .encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode('ascii') or try default decode... I bet that will work... but why are you downgrading to ascii in the first place? Talking of Bitcoin... Girl sleeping on the couch opened up a bag of chocolate money... they're all bitcoin's... big gold chocolate covered in yellow foil bitcoin money with all the symbols and veritas in numbers and everything. I wonder if you tried selling them for a bitcoin each! RICH I TELL YOU RICH!!! Invest in chocolate bitcoin futures! Who set that one up? She shouldn't have that information! Coincidence, fate, a sign? Typical... Just cause you can't win the K5 stats fair and square, you want to change the rules... and find other ways you can win... It's not overall percentages, or replies vs top comments or such bullshit, it's whoever makes the biggest number of all wins... What's the biggest individual specific number? 304... therefore I win, and you get some consolation prizes... Just deal with it... and try harder next month. Don't be a sore loser... Second place is quite an achievement. Not quite as much as first place, but better than anything else. What you getting so upset about? I'm pretty sure everyone takes K5 stats seriously and acknowledges my greatness. Seriously, it's about time you get over it... Stat's don't lie... I clearly win K5, argument over. Why not just count full stops as sentences? ...? Hey? .... ? paradigm shattered Though, I expect you might have to put either more effort into marketing, or price yourself more appropriately in the market... Definitely a strong opening, let's wait for the counteroffer. I'll put up $0.24AUD... to open the bidding... Maybe you could crowdsource it. Like I said, more marketing... create a diary about it, get a buzz going... align interests, network more, sex the deal up a bit... That's not how you haggle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n3LL338aGA Poor Grasshoper, you have much to learn... in the ways of business. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. I told you I'd be winning either way. But you could charge everyone who wants in on the competition... Wow... here's an idea... run a bitcoin lottery... I dunno... $5 a ticket or something... and the winner (which would probably be me) gets 80% of the collection, and you get the rest. You really want to get interesting... run a predictions market on who would be the winner of each month's stats... people can place bets for against different users... and you take 5% of the winnings... and pay out 80% of that to the winner. But, probably best avoid the US if you do that... Not too sure of Australian law either... oh well... tor + bitcoin it is then. The old "offer you can't refuse" market. Needs to be backed by a credible threat of force though... I got his name, age, address, driver's licence number and photos for you... for the right price... You can start with glitterbombing him, and work your way up to burning his house down and breaking his limbs and providing other incentives to produce! It's a free market after all. Begging? No... Just making an offer... It would probably just be cheaper to pay mumble his $100 to make a stats list that doesn't include me so you can win for once. I think betraying mumble with his secret information would be worth quite a bit more than that... especially if you're going to break his legs with it... he's been a good friend to me here, and that's not very nice... so maybe, $10k or something. I know you probably can't afford money like that, so it's either $100 to mumble, or get a job in London and come back when you can afford it. You just let a perfect opportunity to monetize go by... $150 name removal service... But call it administrative costs... You don't want to end up like that guy that ran the naked ex-gf revenge pics site and got done for extortion charging girls to have their pics removed. Holly now knows she's lost k5 and she's trying to remove that fact from the internet... but we all know how well that works. You don't get off the ratings, you get off on me. IAWTD $ Also, it's a good month to look back on last month's stats and how I won K5. I'd like to make an honorary shoutout to our old skool comrads who we've lost along the way, CTS, LilDebbie, Holly, trhurler, mindpixel, trane and kitten... may they all RIP... and we can have maybe a minute's silence for the day they missed me winning the monthly K5 stats. It really isn't your husbands, is it? I mean, you're trying to say that between the lines, but you can't get yourself to type it out. Oh wow... that's just crazy... Do you have a black baby daddy and a white husband? That's gonna be real hard to explain. All the best. Just to break down this limerick for those who can't see it... this is basically holly telling everyone how she came to cheat on her husband... The man from Bombay clearly represents her hard working provider husband, leveraging certain racial sterotypes for this effect, who has gone on a long business trip, represented by him sailing off to china... unfortunately the poor guy is married, ie, tied to the tiller, to some sex-hungry hairy ape beast, which is how holly sees herself, a sex-starved gorilla... and her husband is so far away in china, that she's fucked someone else and gotten pregnant. It's actually a very good limerick, because it kind of works on a few several levels, most of them just absurd and silly, like all good limericks... but once you work out the characters, you can see the human side of this unfolding tragedy, hidden in a quirky little ditty. Now, I'm not so much of an artist that I do often wonder where these subtexts come from. Was this one obvious to all who read it, or did I just pick it up... Is this what 'Holly' wanted to tell us? Did she know what she wrote? Or did she just think it funny and absurd in her mind when she wrote it? Like her subconcious is screaming out to us? WHAT DO I DO? Or did she deliberately encode this meaning... I actually don't think so. I just want to point out that holly also blames her husband for the state of affairs... it's his fault he's so bloody far of in china... he should have been there for her, to fuck her, not for his bloody business, out working as a provider for her. This is how feminists reward their providers' gentleman... beware the feminist agenda. As a Rank 1 Kuron, I think it's fair to say that the stats prove me right and that you all sux. Thanks again to everyone involved, mumble for compiling the stats, rusty for hosting our beloved site, mum and dad for raising me right, god, the free market and the jews for controlling mainstream media and forcing everyone to come to me for the truth. Good night and god bless. I think any reasonable person reading the stats would clearly conclude that I won... I don't know how you can refute simple numbers like that. Don't you provide p-values with your results? Do you even science? I knew you'd try and make up something like that.. but 304 >>> 38, therefore clearly comment numbers are more important than diary numbers. You can't argue against the maths here. You're still a Rank 1 Kuron though, just the second place Rank 1 Kuron... I mean, you should still be happy with that, right? Congratulations on the hard work... it's paid off... now you're finally the number 2 Kuron overall. So few recognise my brilliance on reddit... It's a big pool, but it's full of retards, it's drowning in them. You should ask for money before releasing stats Everybody already knows how I won K5... but they might be willing to pay next month to find if I win again, and by how much... but not me, I'll be winning either way. So, I dunno... get yourself a little stats fund going... don't go running around printing stats just cause someone asks you too... then go around with cap in hand... money talks baby. Gotta make those satoshis sing, so streamline your business models, shatter today's paradigms and synergise your core competencies proactively... get with the program. Yeah, that would be privatising it... Currently by publishing it for everyone, he's creating a public good... which the free market doesn't reward... though people benefit from it... if he publishes on a pay per view or viewer basis... it becomes a private good and the free market will price it properly (maybe zero). The reason it is currently free is because mumble would do it for less... but a small group of others benefit from it even though they didn't have to pay for it. Except of course all the 'information wants to be free' crowd, who don't respect other people's ownership over their creations. Modulo the 'limited time' copywrite debacle. So, yeah, you look for possible side markets. The effect probably goes to zero with macroscopic objects... like the uncertainty in the position of a cricket ball... I can accept that the universe works like that... that things are in unknowable (random probabilistic) mixture of states, not until we observe them, but until something interacts with them and forces them to collapse to one state or another. What is weird about the bells experiment, is that when you measure one particle, you know the value of the other immediately, like it was always that way (because speed of light's not a barrier), but the experiment shows there is no hidden variable... they weren't like that until you measured... it seems odd to me... is that right? I'm really not a physicist either. As for the afshar experiment, I still don't understand why you can't infer both the interference pattern and the particle path... it's not like the interference pattern or the grating could alter a photon's path through the lens such that it could change which detector it falls upon (am I really wrong with this?) and at the same time I can't understand how the grating doesn't imply an interference patten. This would be an experiment worth numerically simulating... So, the superposition of random walks has a different probability distribution to all possible random walks? That's interesting... yeah, I can handle macrorealism being false... I still think the effect goes to zero for large objects though... it's not like the moon is going anywhere soon. OTOH, if reality really does depend on concious observers... maybe the moon is only there cause so many of us believe it is... Can you design an experiment to test that hypothesis? This is easily the main cause of problems in society... not acknowledging that everybody's utility is different... if you don't do drugs, for example, it's very hard to understand why someone else would... the free market is about maximising everyone's utility, by allowing them to maximally follow their own utility, without causing harm to others... when you go against the free market, you do things like ban other people from their own choices, and this always ends up in loss of utility for someone... Basically, the idea of not stopping someone from their enjoyment - where it doesn't cause unpaid negative externalities - always ends up with lower economic outcomes for everyone... even after considering the loss of utility of those who aren't allowed their enjoyment, there are even larger costs to society over all, in terms of wasted justice system resources, and the creation of black markets and the rise of those who would service them. We are all poorer for this human instinct to control others, to make them live the life we would want to live, rather than just living the life we want to, and letting others live their lives as they want. I'm not sure how this is relevant... You can't point at a female CEO and say it's sexism because she doesn't earn the same as some other male CEO... VERY FEW PEOPLE earn anything like a CEO in the first place... What you really need to look at is say either the income distribution or wealth distribution of men vs women over the entire population and see how well those curves fit... if you wanted equality of outcome for wealth or income. What you find is that men are more represented in the tails of the distribution... there are more wealthier men than women... but there are far more poorer men than women on average too... I don't see feminists fighting to be in their place instead. Then you have the problem that men are expected to support their women... or rather, women generally only get excited for men who are higher socially than themselves... so generally richer and earn more money... and men share their wealth with women more... and then backed up by the courts where women get half their men's property and a free paycheck for many years... just for fucking a guy. So, complaining that some dumb bitch who manages to pretend to be a CEO for a while deserves to be the highest paid of all CEOs doesn't make sense when you are turning a blind eye to the sort of female privileges that are experienced by 99% of the female population. agile full stack dev ops is basically what I'm going to advertise myself as... and take any work I can get. money flows on the critical path and why would I want to blame others for my mistakes? It's not your husbands, is it?? $ There are no women on the internet. You can't fuck over the internet... so women have no power here. Your pussy means nothing, so stop waving it around like your a victim. So, yeah 40... and I've never slayed so much pussy... especially in the last few years... Age isn't as drastic for men as it is for you women... we age like wine, you age like milk... the best you can make of an old woman is mouldy cheese. So, hey... you go live in your little feminist crypto mysandrist victimhood fantasy, and I'll fuck girls in their 20s. There's nothing quite like fucking a girl with with scarred wrists... You know there are like energy forces out there... and when you say something like that, you put out an energy that can resonate, and you bring a reality possibly closer to it that might not have occurred if you didn't. I doubt it would ever happen, but in the worst case scenario some girl does decide to off herself, it's unlikely I would have been the cause of that... she obviously had her own issues. So, if you really are thinking about killing yourself just because you don't have me... don't do it, if you can't handle the pain just add me to ignore. I always thought you were like 50 or something... I'm surprised you're still fertile? How old were you when you got on K5? Though you always wrote like you were 12, I just thought that was cause you were retarded... but an old woman like you can't go around pretending she's 21 anymore... in either case... it's a huge downhill plunge for a girl your age now. All you got to do now is secure your husband's income and you're all set... you can still fuck the pool boy... if you can find one in england. And stop obsessing over me... it's creepy as fuck. I don't really know about that... I'm not going out of my way to save people... sometimes you make some progress, and sometimes you fall back... I do see everything as a free market exchange... they wouldn't be spending time with me if they didn't want to be there... and the truth must follow that the converse is true, that I'm spending time with people because they bring value to me. You see, just people maximising utility... leads to the best outcomes for everyone. It's just coincidentally Procrasti's Home for Wayward Young Sluts. But I see less of street geologist now... and I've been working on the three way with her and meth tits like forever, and I'm just not seeing it come together like it should have... man, meth tits is getting old now... I think 30 next week... that's what 3 years does to a woman... she's near the end of her peak attractiveness in her mid 20s... and then they're thirty... So much for being true genuine 18yo Number 1 prostitute in whole of nation when you're thirty... who'd have saw that one coming? I'm going to have help some other poor young things and move things in the direction I want sooner... I fucked up with madam bigs... I don't know... Like post coital cuddling and we're both about ready to go to bed anyway, and I think we should get meth... and then it just went downhill... I'd had enough meth to fuck her for several hours yet anyway... it was stupid... and things just devolved from there... anyway, I saw her last week, complaining about her sore feet, how far she'd walked in the last 24, that she needed a job for food... I got her a pastie... anyway, she was onto the phone with a guy and talking nice... and she's not talking to the guy that she swears at all the time... Girls like her are able to find support when they need it... So, I think things for her are marginally better? Now, the odd thing is, she's always at the right place at the right time... in a city my size, that's reasonably unlikely... and it's always like that with the people I know... I feel like I create them in some sense... or are they sent? Either way, the fucked up thing is, I think I'm psychically linked to them anyway... and verbal communication just get's in the way... but you still got to play that game too... it's like dare you think of them and they'll appear... but never dare mention their names. Street geologist is shacked up with someone I think... when I asked her if she has a boyfriend now she giggles like a teenager and denies it... oh well... You can't help but hope for the best for your friends, but at the same time, you can only do so much. I look forward to Cargo getting out of prison. I don't know... in fairness to myself, these girls are quite extreme... on the other hand, if I met some decent hard working honest young thing... So, I guess the most fucked up thing of all is that I'm looking for work again... My alarm just went off... time to wake up and face the day... but I need to sleep, and my last grandfather died yesterday... He was a good man... I want to meet my half cousin? (dead girl knew that shit backwards...)... who I guess I've only known about in the last few years. There are rumors he made more people, but we don't know for sure. It's funny... in a way... There's this one legged meth whore around, (well, she's missing everything below the knee)... it's tragifunny how she puts her wheel chair down the road a way, and stands with her missing leg on the bench and tries to catch the eyes of the motorists passing by. I hear on the grapevine she can't get enough of it... (and the really funny thing is, she's actually really quite pretty otherwise)... And well... I do know her name, but I'm gonna call her Holly if ever I mention her again... So, if you see me talking about Holly, don't be so egotistical that you think it's about you, it's just a nickname I've given someone. It's good to know you're still thinking of me, babe. It's all power talk if you read behind the lines.. It's definitely her way of flirting... Powertalk is not meant to be taken at face value... Who would fuck a feminist? See, feminists are women, and women don't want to fuck feminised men, they want to fuck men... so, they get all the feminised men to white knight for them... but they go fuck real men instead... those that aren't so stupid as to be taken in by them... They fuck men, the worst thing you could do would be to listen to them... what they do to guys who listen to them is way worse... guy's like that end up bringing up other people's children, or lose their houses to them... Just to clarify feminism, I'm talking 3rd wave bullshit... cause equality of opportunity makes sense, but equality of outcomes doesn't... anyone can be an engineer, but not everyone would want to be one... anyone can be a garbageman, but not everyone would want to be one, and anyone can be a prostitute, but not everyone would want to be one... we don't have to make sure every second person has a given career depending on what they have between their legs... And you see, a bitch can use gender specific attacks like creep, which mean nothing to a woman... a woman literally can't be creepy (unless you fucked her)... so, any victim claiming over mean sounding 'gender biased' words is the usual validation seeking behaviour... hoping that white knights would gather around her saying 'look how awful this guy is, he MADE me put him on ignore'... and all the stupid fucks would rally behind her 'what an injustice this poor girl is going through'... That's why you don't trust their words, they know what they are saying... watch their actions instead. I mean, going through and reading all my diaries... that's just the K5 equivalent of her gargling on my cock... You think anyone else goes through procrasti's diaries? That's just the way women are... You on the other hand, should stop whining like a bitch and playing victim all the time... you're as bad as any woman. Yes... but you didn't know that till you google'd up on it and probably Euler's Identity... I imagine the proof of that though is quite a bit beyond you in any case. Pity Comment (Gossip) $ Great Paraphrasing! "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein Yes you are... a gossip and a dumb cunt too $ Yes you are... Why do you keep repeating what an idiot you are? Yes you are? Do you have a point? $ It was meaningless to begin with... In fact, anything you can use to universally refute literally anything must be meaningless, because it could also be used to refute itself. I don't know where he's grabbed onto this gossip meme... I think he's picked it up in a mooc, and now it's universally applicable to anything he doesn't want to have to think about. Oh, knowledge comes from other people, therefore it is gossip, therefore it is not knowledge... therefore everything is wrong! Even the idea of gossip! He sounds like an upset teenager that's just discovered a new swear word. What a poor, sad, brain damaged idiot. Legalise crack, but remember, if you use it, you could end up like trane. I heard that infinite regress thing is gossip. I've explained the difference between axioms mathematically and in practice... mathematically they are taken as given, practically they can be tested against observation. The difference between Euclidean and Riemannian geometry for example is in the axioms... how do we know that Euclidean geometry isn't as good a model as Riemannian? Because of our observations of the universe match the results of one, but not the other. It is possible to build a different model with the same predictions... yes... but the models would be equivalent if you did... their axioms would be equivalent too. But you couldn't have a different model to produce the same predictions, because you don't have any models at all... just the weakest of refutations that even refutes itself... it is no substitute for thought. You're clearly an idiot... Mathematical pi only applies to an ideal circle... You're idea of gossip is stupid... it is pure gossip, and serves no purpose... yes ideas come from other people... but that's why you work through the maths yourself, or run some experiments yourself, but most of the time, you are stuck with your own limitations, and you have to believe other people... Why should I believe your gossip over the gossip backed by academia? You prove nothing with that argument. So, as far as engineering goes, I've run through a lot of maths in my time (clearly more than you, as mumble pointed out, you don't even know the most beautiful equation in maths, let alone its proof)... I've done years of physics experiments that align with the maths I worked through that explains it. I've done maths for computer science. And I've done maths for economics... Yes... they could ALL be wrong... and I don't deny that... but I've never met a person smart enough to show me HOW they are wrong... and if I do, and I can work through their maths, and their conclusions, and see how they match reality BETTER... I'll give them consideration. But all you have to offer is pure refutation, and stupid arguments like gossip, infinite regress and the no law of non-contradiction... shit the ancient greeks were thinking about, yes... fantastic... but almost all their shit has been superseded by better ideas. I've used proof by contradiction, and proof by induction enough times to see that it works for PRACTICAL PURPOSES... from how to build bridges, how fast chemical processes proceed, to why you can't solve the halting problem (actual version, not your version), radioactive decay, how semi-conductors and transistors work, how wifi works, how much signal you can send in a channel, how much data can be compressed, to why the price of bread is what it is... You have literally nothing to offer on any of these topics... just whining that you don't get free stuff for nothing... when you offer the human race absolutely nothing of value in return. Please take a fucking hike. Of course it's finite... come on, you're the physicist. It takes states of matter to store information that we call knowledge, and there is only a finite amount of (accessible) matter in the universe, so there's a finite number of states, and so, only a finite amount of information can be stored... so only a finite amount of knowledge that can be stored. I mean, that makes it a lot... it's probably not the actual practical upper bound to how much knowledge we can store... but it is an upper bound, and therefore it is finite. Yeah, I think a few things bring it back to a finite amount... Superpositions don't count, cause they collapse when we measure them. As for there being an infinite number of energy levels an electron can be in... won't it fall back to it's lowest energy level and release a photon? The plank thing suggests finite measurable states too. I think you can find a formula for the amount of information a volume of space can store... in fact, I'm sure this has been calculated... because I know one of the interesting results of this is that the information you can store in a volume of space is linear with the surface area of that space... ie, the holographic universe theory. When the AGI emerges... It will probably the smartest scientist in existence... No human or groups of humans will be able to keep up with it... So, as far as anything being interesting to us, it will probably be able to work out the proofs for us. So, at that point, we will have all the knowledge we could find useful... or at least, it will have the answers to any questions we could propose... then it might start looking for things it finds interesting. Q: What is the answer to the Riemann hypothesis? A: It is true or false, but cannot be proven... here's the proof. No, he's not talking about simulating general behaviour, but specific outcomes. Chaotic systems suffer from sensitive dependence upon initial conditions... so the slightest error in measurement exponentially grows to a totally different result. You'll be familiar with weather... the weather is it's own best simulation... if you simulate it with as much detail as you can, you still can't get more than a few days out before the two systems diverge. The general behaviour will be identical, but the specific states diverge exponentially rapidly. Although the last line applies mostly to you... if you just swap "alternate views" with "stuff that's been proven to twenty decimal places or more". I never made any such claim... But you're the one denying mathematical based observations such as thermodynamics... My 20 decimal places would refer to the measured neutrality of hydrogen... it's about that magnitude... and something I imagine you'd refute with 'dark energy' or 'statistical!!!' or 'if I had basic income I'd show you all'. No, gossip is your domain, because you've already thrown out maths and science... all your left with is the insane ramblings of a crack fuelled should be mental patient. Of course there's a lot of science I haven't personally replicated... but then again, I've probably replicated a hell of a lot more scientific experiments than you ever have or will. You've thrown out science and maths entirely... so all we have left to rely on is your words... which are fucking meaningless. If gossip is the best you you can up with to refute me, then you're a failure. Dude... you're a moron... who has in the past denied mathematics straight out... Where there are mathematic proofs, you've completely ignored them, and failed to find any fault with either the rules of inference, or the axioms... Utility is a good example, which is a mathematical proof that comes from decision theory. Scarcity will always exist, wherever your desires outstrip your resources. You claim everything is gossip... On the other hand, I've done the maths, and your entire refutation is 'gossip'... You are actually retarded. Maths is gossip... You're just a fucking idiot... I'm gonna throw a party here for everyone when you expire. Yes, but you can 'test' axioms... by the conclusions they lead to... The axiom that you have an ordered set of preferences leads to Utility... the axiom that you don't have an ordered set of preferences lead to you not caring what happens to you. Clearly you do care what happens, therefore the axiom is more than likely true, because nothing else explains the observations... Axioms are only conclusions without proof in MATHEMATICS... In science, they are testable and meaningful. You're right... a bot wouldn't have to be very sophisticated to confuse everyone here with it being you... You'll have to use an infinite character set too.. to get around his argmnt... well, assuming we aren't going with your infinite length sentences... which I hope not... cause you're really being stupid then... but that's not stopped you before... so, let's see... gossip? It's not infinite... It's very very large... but finite... Unless you have infinitely long sentences or an infinite character set... If you don't satisfy either of those constraints, it's just extremely large... which is a long way from infinite... but only if you accept crazy theories that have been bandied about that you might find in fields such as mathematics. Fine... I accept that you could have an infinite sentence... I mean, you would have to have either an infinite amount of time to say it in, or an infinite amount of paper, or computer bits to store them on... So, in theory... we could have "0 says that 1 says that 2 says that 3 says.... infinite says 'trane is a joke'"... Yes... so, you could allow an infinitely long sentence... which makes it theoretically infinitely long. So, you allow one of the constraints, an infinitely long sentence, you have an infinity. But the worlds longest sentence isn't infinite... so practical sentences don't have this property... and what would be the point... it wouldn't communicate anything... no one would know who the fuck said what after the tenth person anyway. So, theoretically infinite... but definitely never practically. Correct... No practical sentence could be infinite... because our universe is finite... So, that actually puts a limit on the infinite length sentence... all practical sentences must be finite in length. Meaning his only out now is an infinite character set. I'm thinking there might be problems there too... Well yeah... Any character set you could define on a computer is going to be finite... cause practical computers are equivalent to Turing Machines with a finite tape! There's only a finite number of bits to store your character set in... because we live in a finite universe. I think trane's thoroughly lost this one. Unless this is all just gossip... which means it's not true, like the gossip meme he keeps on about... oh wait. I'm pretty sure there is no maximum prime... they go to infinity... Sentences, otoh, cannot go to infinity, because you run out of space. And just because you can add to knowledge... doesn't mean it is without limit... a sum of an infinite series isn't necessarily infinite itself. You probably didn't know that though. You might be right that the largest expressible prime is finite. The largest expressible prime and largest expressible sentence are finite. In theory a sentence can go on forever... but for what purpose? I got no idea... certainly it would be an unparsable sentence for a human being. Finite amount plus finite amount equal finite amount... Assuming such a thing even exists... And then there's the problem of dark energy making more stuff leave our light cone than it creates. All up, what mumble didn't get, is that you are woefully scientifically illiterate, and generally an insufferable idiot. Yes, you are... Exactly my point... you refuse to use science or maths... so gossip is all you're ever left with. Which makes you and your input pointless and useless. No you're not... you won't even accept math that's right in front of you. You fall back to literally your own hot air... with nothing to support it... not EVEN gossip. Mostly, it is because I've actually worked through the proofs, and found no errors with them, and have not been able to refute the axioms, or have tested with alternative axioms and seen that they lead to clearly unlikely results. You just straight out use emotion and denial... and strawmen such as 'gossip'... without even looking at the maths. Utility is the most obvious example I have here... because the maths says that every decision making agent can be modelled as if it is following a utility function... and you just go on about dollars or some shit that has nothing to do with utility... cause you never did the maths (or are incapable of doing the maths). Seriously, I really doubt you have... Aren't your degrees all in the field of arts? I'm pretty sure they're not very heavy into mathematics. Do you even know what e^(i*pi) + 1 equals? If not, then I very much doubt you've done more proofs than me. Maths is not natural language... to go through maths, even though the steps are often explained in natural language, is not the same as natural language... the maths steps are true without the natural language. And you don't know the value of that function... so I gonna conclude that you didn't actually do much maths. And the gossip meme is gossip... I've already been through this, if you're refuting anything using the term gossip, it's a very weak refutation, because the meme refutes itself as gossip... gossip is gossip and you know it... cause it is all handed to you by someone else... hell, you already posted a picture to prove that all science is gossip, one you didn't make. You talk to birds, because they're the only ones with brains small enough to be on your level. No, as MDC pointed out the other day... In PURE MATHEMATICS, axioms are considered to be GIVEN... not conclusions... they are the base of all the theorems and proofs that follow from them. In APPLIED MATHEMATICS, such as physics, computer science, economics or anything else, they are the basis for models that are TESTABLE and FALSIFIABLE. Otherwise Euclidean and Reimannian geometry would be equally valid models... and they are MATHEMATICALLY equally valid... but only Reimannian geometry is applicable to how space time works as far as our ability to TEST it has shown. You can't just give up and say axioms are conclusions... that's bullshit... that's true only in APPLIED mathematics, but not SCIENCE. In SCIENCE we can TEST the CONCLUSIONS that RESULT from the AXIOMS we start with... so we can tell useful axioms from obviously wrong ones. Second last sentence should be: that's true only in PURE mathematics... We get infinities in maths all the time... Integers are infinite... Then we get cool things like some infinities are bigger than others... for example, even though there are an infinite number of reals between 0 and 1, there are MORE reals between 0 and 1 than there are integers! The Integers are countably infinite, the reals between 0 and 1 are uncountably infinite... There are even larger infinities (I think, but I can't recall them right now). Yeah, they can be used in some functions... Usually the result is either infinite or zero or something like that... 1/infinity aprox zero, for example... You might integrate over an infinity to get a finite number... say the gaussian distribution... or even sum(1/2^n) 0>=n>=infinity equals 2 (I think). probably the sum(n) -infinity>=n>=infinity equals zero... but I'm not so sure... A crazy one is sum(n) 0>=n>=infinity equals -1/12... well... it doesn't, but there's a nice proof to show that it should. Maths with infinities can become very weird very quickly. Turing Machines are defined as operating on an infinitely long tape... So, all our practical machines are less powerful than Turing Machines. Yet there are mathematical proofs for Turing Machines... so all our practical machines have at least these limitations too. Mathematicians on the whole are pretty good dealing with infinities... physicists don't like them (singularities are basically infinities that appear in physics, and normally believed to be where the physics is wrong)... and engineers just work around them. Yeah, black holes are one singularity that appear. But aren't too much of a problem, cause they're hidden behind the event horizon. I understand though, that singularities crop up all over the place when you try to combine say quantum mechanics and relativity... which is the main reason the theories are incompatible and therefore they know that there is something wrong. No, the mathematical singularity that appears in GR, is within the event horizon... so, while it appears in the maths, we can't see it in real life, because it's hidden. And the reason the theories are at odds with each other is because combining them leads to singularities... it's the singularities (infinities) that tell us they are at odds. You've confused mathematics with physics again... Easy enough mistake for an ancient greek philosopher... they didn't know better... and seemingly, nor do you. Right, but physics is observation... which tells us that the reachable universe is finite... Maths has infinities, but our observation of the universe says no. the ancient greeks didn't know the difference, but you're actually confused on a whole different level. Clearly rape is relevant to this topic... I imagine you throw that one out cause you know what a loser you actually are. He obviously didn't learn anything doing those courses... so, not sure giving him free money is going to help anyone. Francis Crick of DNA fame said he 'saw' the structure of DNA on an LSD trip. There's also the theory that Unix was a result of LSD being easily available at Berkley in the day. I don't see a rant... I just see a bunch of square looking squashed spiders... is this some kind of art? Because it devalues money... Let's index all money, so that's a total of 100 units instead... Now, you see that the best case scenario, all you can do is redistribute it. GS provides a useful service to the financial industries, and programmers provide a useful service to GS... You, on the other hand, are useful to nobody... Just a useless idiot. No, I LIKE to be mean... what's it to you? And what have you done for me anyway? You want me to give you something for nothing? Fucking fail faggit. You want free money, why don't you go suck some cock instead of whining all the time that you can't maths or science? Good luck with that. I'm sorry dude... I'm so far behind doing my own stuff it's not funny... Marginal profits tended to zero on my trading apps, as predicted... the Aus government bought in a stupid GST ruling on BTC trading that just makes it not worth it... I got no businesses left to sell... I probably have to get a job... and I procrastinate probably as bad as MDC... so, I'm really lazy busy at the moment. Such is life. I am... It's just not a high priority right now... I will take a look at it, but give me a few more weeks pls. I'm supposed to be rebuilding someone's website, and I've put that off for like 3 months already... it's shameful how far behind I am in things. The whole point of the free market is to show that we are best off when we are most free to do as we want to do. It's not about making the most money, it's not making sure businesses have the biggest balance sheets... because all those things lead to very different conclusions. What has cleaning camp sites got to do with balance sheets? Why would you do it if you aren't being paid? How does this improve a company's balance sheet? Yet, it has everything to do with utility... The problem with you is that you expect humanity as a whole to give you a free ride, an easy existence. That the government, representing the will of the people, give you free money, when you're perfectly capable of sucking cock to earn a living. Personally, if you (in particular) were starving to death, I would be happy to watch you die that way, because of your entitlement attitude, I think it's what you deserve. However, I don't agree with Ayn Rand... Ayn Rand supported laissez-faire economics, which doesn't take into account the effects of externalities, imperfect competition, imperfect information or the second welfare theorem, that pareto optimal allocations with other beneficial properties can be bought about through redistribution. The AI knows all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream It just doesn't know what to do with it yet. The Afshar Experiment Just want to share the Afshar Experiment and the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics with everyone who has an interest in physics here. For those who want a brief summary, the Afshar experiment is a variant of the old double slit experiment that demonstrates that the interference pattern continues to exists, whilst also recording which slit the photon passes through... so violating the wave particle complementarity of the Copenhagen interpretation. This kills the Schrodinger's Cat. So, is it fair to say now that particles aren't waves after all? That they are in fact particles that follow the paths of atemporal waves instead? Can someone with a better understanding of physics share their point of view. Well... I've done a fair bit of reading on this one over the last few years... it's not an experimental error, and appears to be very easily replicated. And the something deeper is given in the transactional interpretation... some sort of waves are emanating forward in time (retarded waves) from the source and simultaneously emanating backward in time (advanced waves) from the receiver, cancelling out everywhere except for a standing wave between the two events which form the path that the particles actually travels along. It is these waves that generate the interference pattern, but the particles that we actually observe. It's a very easy experiment to set up... You just need the usual double slit experiment, using photons.. place a diffraction grating where the antinodes are in the interference pattern... so you can see that all the photons get through, a lens to focus the photons such that whichever slit they go through, they will be focused on one of two detectors... There you have it... the interference pattern must exist, or otherwise the diffraction grating would block approximately half of them, and we know which slit they must have passed through, because of which detector they fall upon. So, the wave particle duality is broken. There's no experimental error here. Funny... Most of the other critical physicists (lol, run!) say the problem is most likely that we can't really infer an interference pattern. Of the two possible criticisms, I would have thought not knowing which slit it passed through would be the weaker of the two... by what reasoning could you claim that the classical focussing would stop working? This should be easy enough to prove anyway, with a modified setup: Step 1: Standard two slit experiment with pre-slit detectors, know which slit the photon passes through and see gaussian distribution. Step 2: Turn off pre-slit detectors, see interference pattern. Step 3: Remove screen and add lens and detectors... measure the amount of light falling on detectors. Step 3: Add diffraction grating and see the amount of light falling on the detectors doesn't change. Step 4: Turn on pre-slit detectors, see the level of light falls from detectors. Though every post-lens detector photon corresponds to the correct pre-lens detector photon. Step 5: Remove diffraction grating, see the amount of light returns to Step 2&3 levels AND that the pre-slit detectors agree with the post-lens detectors. If this was true, how could you claim we couldn't infer which slit the light passed through? How could you claim there wasn't an interference pattern? Oh... hold on... I think I see a problem... You can't detect which slit a photon goes through with pre-slit detectors that don't absorb the photon and not allow it to pass through... The experiment that has pre-slit detectors to destroy the interference pattern uses electrons, as you can detect the electromagnetic wave of the electron as it passes through without destroying the electron itself... I don't think there's an equivalent experiment for photons. And if you did try and use electrons for the experiment... I'm not sure that you could create an electro-magnetic lens that operates in the same way as an optical lens (true or false, I don't know?)... and would the electrons interact with the metal in the diffraction grating in ways you wouldn't expect light to? Arrrgggh.... I don't know... I personally think that Afshar is right, and that this gives some new insight into QM... but I don't know enough to say for certain. I reckon the controversy is simply 60 odd years of scientists thinking of particles as having wave/particle duality... that the particle somehow interfered with itself and must have passed through both slits... but actually it was something else that passed through both slits whilst we can only observe the particle itself. A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -- Max Plank Science advances one funeral at a time. Yeah, well 2004 is really very recent... That's some time since I left academia... Young's original experiment was demonstrated in 1803... so plenty of time for people to ponder it, and the electron version with pre-slit detectors was performed in the 1970s... so that's the version I was always familiar with... and I think the one discussed in undergrad physics 'proving' that individual electrons must be passing through both slits to interfere with itself, and thus proving wave/particle duality. So, if not already, it probably won't be too many years when Afshar's experiment is shown to undergrad physics students along with the other two to ponder about until someone makes a new breakthrough one way or the other. And that's the point of Afshar, right? Finding a way to look at light as a wave and a particle at the same time. I mean, the nature of the photon doesn't change by the way we look at it, that's the way it seems to be stated (not mathematically, but I can't remember my undergrad physics well enough to say for certain), but only the aspects of what we see change by the way we look at it. Physics and science in general never makes the claim that because they can't explain it that it doesn't exist... just that they can't explain it, so it's not explained or known to exist... that's quite a different thing from saying it cannot exist. Not sure what you mean by the detector being a transverse wave detector there... and as far as the transactional interpretation goes, there is no observer effect... schrodinger's cat is dead (or alive, but definitely not both)... thus the Copenhagen interpretation is out... along with the many worlds theory. It takes all sorts in this world... each doing what they most want to do... there is demand for pure research, let them at it... not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur or whatever. I've pointed out this experiments in dozens of comments here over the years... but no one's ever replied to me about it... so I thought it was time for the diary. It's relatively recent I suppose as far as science goes... so will take a while to filter down through academia... but there it is, so I hope someone with more knowledge than I can give me some thoughts on it. Personally, I believe it demonstrates that our old views of QM were slightly wrong... though this was always suspected... and although it doesn't really change the maths apparently... it also gives me some belief in retro-causality... that future events can affect the present or past... though I'm not sure if it can be harnessed to pass information backwards through time, or faster than light... but I think it keeps the possibility open. It's quite funny hey... Half the critics claim that the interference pattern exists, but you can't infer the path the particle took... and the other half claiming that you can infer the path the particle took, but they're not sure there ever really was an interference pattern. Just join both groups and say, nope no interference pattern, and who knows how the hell the particles got to the detectors. Throw hands in the air. LOL. I think this is a good example for anyone saying that phycists all agree on what's going on, even the same experiment, the same results, the same maths, and they're all like it means this, and the other lot are like, no it means that. When you say it brings no new math... Does the pilot wave theory bring new math to it? Cause it appears to... Isn't there similar math for TQIM? Isn't it just that the math makes no new predictions, rather than there not being new math to describe the retarded and advanced waves? Yeah, I know about the electron/positron thing... and I've heard of the single electron theory too. Is it possible that the new maths does make some predictions, just that we haven't yet looked at it correctly or in such a way that we just haven't been able to make any new predictions yet? Or does the math simplify down such that it can't make new predictions, no matter what? If the afshar experiment is correct... isn't that in itself a verification of a testable prediction that the current description of QM can't account for? If you can't answer this, is the answer to simply wait another 25 years or so until the results become clear and accepted amongst academia, or otherwise get dismissed? It's not that I disagree with you... It's just that I don't like the answers you're giving me. I like to think that one day we'll work out how to manipulate the retarded/advanced waves themselves and send messages from the end of time back to the start of time and cause the big bang. Oh, for sure, 100% agree... but only if you're one of those dirty causalisists... especially if you buy into all that light cone nonsense. From a 5 dimensional space time perspective though, it should all work out okay. We just need (yet another) time dimension. Otherwise just accept that future events can affect the past... retro-causality... and it's all okay... you can still learn to sleep at night. I saw a Paul Davies lecture on the Big Bang Black Holes and Quasars when I was in year 9. My science teacher dropped free tickets on us (we were huge nerds, go figure), at the local university, and my Dad took me and a friend. My Dad made some wonderful notes of the lectures. I imagine lost to time. Not sure I followed along all that closely, but certainly made me think at that age. I still remember the universe as expanding balloon analogy of everything being at the centre of an expanding universe (I know, it's only an analogy and breaks down)... also about event horizons and naked singularities... The quasar thing interested me the least (just weird star like things, aren't they?)... though I still wonder why their all so far away. Yeah... I was specifically talking about an extra time dimension... In fact, I think I read somewhere, either hawking, or he was commenting on it, added TWO extra 'imaginary' time dimensions to one of his models... I think the point was that one of them allows real time itself to evolve out of the equations as it comes into existence during the big bang... I can't remember what the second one was for... It was all in layman's terms of course... but still, it's not that controversial an idea... I think string theory (I know, it has a too many parameters to make useful predictions problem) has this. Can't say I know enough to say whether the imaginary time was 'i' or an additional time dimension... I suspect the latter, cause it was mentioned there were two additional time dimensions... and that real time comes into existence along with the spacial dimensions as one of the imaginary time dimensions advances... it especially gets around the zero time point... what happens before, and at that point... but then time evolves in a way like space along that axis. But I really don't know much more about it than that... just an idea I found interesting. Yeah, the 11 dimensions of string theory comes out of it being the minimum number of dimensions to satisfy some group theory something... fuck it, I'm so far out of my depth at this point I may as well just give up. I could barely cope with Lorentz transformations... but I think I did better with some of the QM stuff... cause all the extra time we spent studying semiconductor theory. We really only did enough physics that was needed to apply it to engineering. Yeah, but I don't think that's how it was used... but I don't know the maths, so I don't know... but the way it was put was that real time evolved out of but along with imaginary time... whereas, with your analogy the real and imaginary components would have their separate domains (y<b, y>b)... and the little graph that accompanied it didn't show that. Like if you graphed the two relative to each other, that would just be two lines along the respective axis... and this wasn't... there was a relationship there. I was exaggerating a tiny bit there with the Lorentz thing... I never failed a class... but I'd probably still have to look some details today... All I remember is something like 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) is a factor... off the top of my head??? That was some two decades ago for me... didn't come up much in any dev, deployment, support role or any stock trading, business, econ, ai or ann or any thing I've done since... so you know... a bit rusty on that one. I'd even be less able to recall how Young's Modulus operates in materials... but I'd consider the theory in general (non-mathematical) terms far easier. Like I said, I'm an engineer... physics was just shit I had to pass that might somehow be relevant in other ways... but mostly I think just to exercise the mind in certain ways of thinking I suppose... and a foundation for if you ever had to use that stuff, but I'd definitely have to look it back up to apply it. You could roll a dice and claim the same thing... The TIQM claim is that the wave collapses atemporally along the two events (transmission and absorption of the photon)... along the path defined by the advanced and retarded waves. Yeah, from a knowledge point of view... you end up with two probabilities 50/50... but I think we can throw this out from a physical point of view ever since we inferred object persistence as toddlers. Pity Comment $ What I like is the $5 Kuro5hin introduction Okay, thanks for the $5, the first thing you're going to have to do is send $5 to Rusty... LOL... Though it would probably even funnier in Sye speak... "The $5 of the first kind being to bring much happiness to you joy for finding of the Rusty payment for $5 to be accessing K5 - with help of Holy Ghost your way is now clear". I'm almost tempted to setup a website that accepts a $5 payment (in bitcoin, of course) to help you get access to Sye's Kuro5hin Introduction service... If we could just get MDC to setup a $5 introduction to procrasti's introduction to sye's introduction to K5 service... we could bilk them all for $20 bucks between us before telling them to "Fuck off and Lurk Moar Null0 Faggit! News at -$11" Wow... That's scary how such a popular exchange could have such a catastrophic bug. If you can reliably trigger it, I'd exploit the hell out of it... Keep doubling up until you own their entire exchange... convert from Euro back to to DRK, cash out your DRK and repeat with double the amount (maybe 1.5 times the amount, and keep the rest in case they catch on as a hedge, even 50% a day you'll be rich in no time... if you can trigger it just once an hour, wow). Knowing that, I'm glad I don't have any assets there. So, is DRK like provably anonymous or something in ways BTC isn't? Your prices are too high... Assuming standard demand curves, demand should be higher at a lower price... and given zero demand, the derivative can point in only one direction... lower prices. Although, if you'd like to assume that you are selling Veblen goods, then maybe your prices are way too low... You could try charging say for a $50,000 K5 Introduction Service... At this price you could probably provide a more personal service, fly to your customer, actually walk them through the sign up process (or have their account premade before you get there), post their first diary and story for them (so they don't get called Null0 faggits), give them a signed T-shirt and companion Mug (I paid $50,000 and all I got was this lousy T-shirt, Mug and K5 account), and maybe even a happy ending... or at least say, a nice bouquet of flowers and/or gift basket. I always thought there was a strong Asian market for conspicuous spending... so, hey, why not? What's the worst that could happen? You don't sell any? Giffen goods are specifically inferior goods with no substitutes (like corn bread from the only baker in a corn farming village)... priced low enough that they're the cheapest thing the poor can afford, but as they go up in price, (because income effects) the poor can no longer afford some other thing they might like more, say steak, so they have to buy more of the giffen good to substitute it... the higher the price, the more they have to buy! But they're still relatively cheap... the point of them is theoretical to show how demand curves could slope the 'wrong' way. It is hard to find examples of Giffen goods in real life... partly because we usually deal in aggregates and averages... but might include me buying meat pies at the local shops cause I'm broke, making me more broke and forcing me to buy more meat pies cause I can't afford to go shopping... I don't know. Veblen goods are specifically luxury goods, where the high price itself makes it a status symbol and therefore drives demand... like a $50k K5 account that comes with gold plated and etched user id certificate you could hang on your wall... you buy it specifically because the likes of Trane never could. They could then write diaries how they spent $50k dollars on a single K5 account, while Trane can barely afford 5 $5 accounts. So, yeah... it's all about the packaging and marketing. You could make a fortune! Shit, sell K5 accounts with bronze plated certificates for $20k, silver for $50k, gold for $150k and platinum for $500k... you could be making millions! And as a side effect, we could get some decent users here for a change. Insurance isn't a bad thing... If the insurance company underestimates the risk, they lose money... so it's important for them to get things right too. The problem is really only a problem when the government underwrites the real risk, and bails out companies because they are 'too big to fail'... This means there was no real risk all along... this isn't Free Market at all... It's socialism for the rich. It completely destroys money as a signalling system. No... but I wasn't replying to that... I was replying to Trane's stupid statement that doing arbitrage or using insurance is somehow bad or wrong. Yeah, okay... I mean, I do agree that the analogy is stupid... But his little tirade against GS and hedging was thrown in there cause he always like to attack the idea of hedging... like it's making money for nothing. I admit I read a little bit between the lines there... but it's not like it's not a fav topic of his. Now we hit the first welfare theorem... That the Free Market will find a pareto optimum where no one can be made better off WITHOUT making someone worse off. If there were infinite resources this wouldn't be true... but he really is asking to be made better off at other people's expense... even if he thinks printing money comes out of free air... it doesn't, because money represents resources. Nitpicking... Economics deals with human choices... so those things you listed are included... No, it doesn't deal with atmospheric processes or physics or anything like that. It's domain isn't unlimited... that would be ummm foolish. As far as 'proofs' go... I'm not sure they could proven the excess humors cause of disease in the same way as economists can prove the free market theorems... they could probably show correlation, so, as far as it was the best model available to them at the time, and they could probably demonstrate that... they were right. When better models were able to demonstrate better correlations, then they became 'wrong'. The Free Market Theorems however are MATHEMATICAL proofs... and maths in never wrong... in that IF THE AXIOMS ARE CORRECT, then the PROOFS that follow MUST ALSO BE CORRECT. A good real life example is the proof that a triangle has internal angles that sum to 180 degrees... You probably agree with that, right? EXCEPT it's not true if you drop the axiom that parallel lines never meet... which is one of the five axioms of Euclidean geometry... and the funny thing is, we live in a universe where that axiom turns out to be false... Parallel lines on the earth will meet at the poles (well for those running north south), so triangles don't have that property on the earth's surface (it's also not a plane), but also parallel lines intersect at the singularity of a blackhole... general relativity defines a non-euclidean space time... so again, euclidean geometry doesn't match reality. So, if there IS a problem with the Free Market Welfare Theorems... it MUST be in the AXIOMS. So, that is what I mean by Free Market is proven... However, I find the axioms quite reasonable... and dropping some of them results in nonsensical answers - like if we don't have a preference for one thing over another, would mean we don't care no matter what happens to us, and that's intuitively false... or that scarcity doesn't exist, would mean we have everything we could ever want... also seems intuitively false... The only other problem is using proofs outside of their domains - say treating public goods as if they were private (though we have proofs for that stuff too)... but the most common problem is simply representing it as something it is not -- say, that government shouldn't have ANY involvement in the market... when the proofs show quite the opposite, but they show instead what type of involvement for each type of problem. Sorry to rant... It's just that I think mathematical proofs have their own existence... either the rules weren't followed (which just makes it wrong, rather than false)... or the axioms are false... but with a set of axioms, everything that follows must be true IF the axioms are true... and where they are false... the proofs are still true WHERE the axioms are true. Ummm.... I was pretty clear that economics has nothing to do with the weather dude... that it is well and truly outside of that domain. The rest was off topic maybe, but a little bit more detail about what economic proofs are... and what I mean by proofs. And the whole earth, wind, fire and water is a model... just not a very good one... and though they reasoned it out... you are probably right that they had no formal scientific method... I bet their cures worked slightly above pure chance on average... and so were still useful. I'd imagine being forced fed a cask full of cold water would make you think next time you got a bit pissed off. And the lobotomy thing clearly works... it's just that you'd probably rather have the disease than the cure. What am I talking about? Of course economics is relevant to the weather... You might have heard of something called climate change? BWT, I'm not an economist... I'm an engineer and well aware of applying the right models and theories to the right domain. Hammers have always been simply one tool in my box. The fact that I've extended my toolbox to include economics should point to the opposite conclusion than what you draw. Alright... so, I totally get your point... I really do... and in fact it's what I'm trying to fix. Now, I can't use different terms, because the meaning is academically well defined... as an analogy, lets say the term hacker has a definite technical academic meaning and the there's theory all about it, and all good engineers who work on difficult technical problems are hackers... but for some reason the media has used the term hacker to describe crackers, and this has been used to discredit any engineers and so we're headed for a technically illiterate society, and when the engineers stand up and say look at all these good things we do, they get booed and called thieves who just want to crack passwords and steal everyone's bank account. That's kind of how I feel about the free market. Now, I may have been bringing it up in many diaries and topics... for sure... cause I'm trying to get these points across... (I also wanted to know the theory to justify basic income)... but I don't think it's comparable to basic income and challenges, just for the simple fact that I'm really not going beyond the well accepted theory on the matter... and, as far as I can tell, I haven't been using it outside of its applicable domains. Though I use some parts outside of the domain of the entire theory, those parts are within their own domain (ie, Utility is applicable to any decision making agent, in or out of a free market, and so is applicable directly to AI for example, and all human choices, and even animals). You'll see I never said that the free market can be used to predict the weather (wait, actually, I do have a solution to that... damn... predictive markets... but that's another topic)... okay, you can't use economics to MODEL the weather... or thermodynamics, or quantum mechanics, or a whole heap of other reasonably interesting topics... I do understand its domain, and I'm not pushing it outside of that domain... it's just that, as humans making choices in what we do, it's applicable to a hell of a lot of our daily lives. I see some of trane's ideas would be like arguing in favour of free energy devices... so I would bring up thermodynamics... but then consider yourself living in a society where everyone mocks you for bringing up thermodynamics all the time... oh my god, he's on about thermodynamics again... can't he see all the free energy we get from the sun? What's this guy's problem, he's just trying to stop us having our free energy... no. The thing is, I really do think that the term free market has been barstardised by the media and politicians serving a wealthy elite who want to discredit the free market for their own ends... mostly so that they can take greater advantage of people! They bastardise it in many ways... the most obvious way is to suggest that governments should keep their filthy hands off anything that makes private interests money... So, for example, and speaking of weather... carbon taxes or cap and trade and similar things are free market ideas --- well, they are the fixes to the market to bring about free market like equilibriums... because the atmosphere is a public good, and dumping carbon into the atmosphere is a negative externality, therefore the solution is pigovian taxes - the problems are so few, and the solutions are well known, I don't even have to think about it to know that is the actual solution to the problem. So anyway... can you see the problem I'm facing... it is exactly analogous to the hacker / cracker problem... you are absolutely right... I say free market, people point out the market raping them and taking their wallet, I say, that's the market, and it's not the free market because a, b or c (and there really is only a small handful of problems and solutions to them), and they say, whatever dude, I was told that was the free market, and I don't know what you're going on about, (and greengrass's statement) that we probably shouldn't even have a free market! So, I'm like, wtf... then what is the alternative? Cause the alternative is being told what to do... the free is free as in choice... you can't be raped if you volunteered for it... by definition! Basically... for the majority of our social issues, I see are problems with things not being the free market --- prohibition, and all it's woes... cause it's not a free market... pollution... not a free market... price manipulation... not a free market... fraudulent advertising... not a free market. And the final nail in the coffin, is wealth inequality... the fact that the rich are getting richer, while middle class wages have been stagnant or dropping for the last 4 decades... I suggest some forms of wealth redistribution -- and everyone shouts THAT'S NOT FREE MARKET --- when fuck it, that's covered by the fucking SECOND WELFARE THEOREM... like only the number two theorem derived from free market economics... I can't win one way or the other. Also, I'm imagining a future of powerful AIs and robots taking over almost every possible job in the not too distant future... but I believe they will be owned by private interests... basically the end game of technological advancement and capital concentration that Marx warned about... people talk of the end of scarcity and restructuring our society etc... but really... the free market is still the solution... if we can wrestle the benefits of that system back from the inevitable few wealthy elite who own them... we still need price signals so they produce what we want... there's no restructuring necessary, just plain old free market capitalism, wealth taxes and basic income (aka the second fucking welfare theorem!!). So, if you can put some of your brain power into helping me out here... I'd actually really appreciate it. On the other hand, I could just shut the fuck up and care only for myself and put my knowledge to maximising my own bank accounts, privatise my profits while socialising my costs while calling that the free market and fuck the rest of you... but that would be going against my free market ethics --- if you have to produce externalities... produce positive ones. What can I do? Shut the fuck up about it? Let everyone wallow in ignorance? I don't know. I guess... the only thing I might ask... if you got some spare time... and are capable of doing calculus... maybe hit a micro-econ mooc... then come back to me, and I think you'd be like, wow --- my eyes are open, I see what you were talking about... how can these guys not get it? Why did I ever think I was in a free market? That's not a free market, that's not a free market, that's not a free market*... oh look, all the shit everyone's complaining about is not a free market... why do they keep calling it that? *: except very occasionally --- that's not a free market --- but for a very good reason! I couldn't help it: I couldn't let you miss this one: http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2015/4/5/19348/63979/21#21 Yeah... I agree with this... Axioms are given... and then assumed to be true for the proofs that follow... not that they are assumed to be true in general... so your wording is more correct than mine. Especially in the field of pure mathematics. However, if you come up with a set of axioms, and use them to prove that all people are actually tomatoes... then you will know that one of your axioms is wrong... at least in this reality... right? I mean, if your axioms lead to absurd proofs, you know the problem is with your axioms. So, you can always test (some combination of) axioms by assuming the opposite (or absence, or an addition) (of one or more of them) and seeing what proofs will follow, and if they result in nonsense, you will have more confidence in your original set of axioms. But this is in the field of applied mathematics, where we would care about such things. Use Free Markets to Predict the Weather? So you think the weather is outside of the domain of free market economics... oh you simple fool... nothing is outside the domain of free market economics! Behold, the power of: Predictive Markets. Short the rain this weekend! Benefit from hedging, arbitrage, and insurance of your positions for maximum weather prediction accuracy*. *: Illegal in most states under US law... Home to The One True Free MarketTM(PBUH) - terms and conditions apply (please see inside packaging for details). Even if physics turns out to be discrete that doesn't prove we're in a simulation. Also, I don't think the universe runs on mathematics... just that mathematics can describe any universe with consistent (even statistical) rules. If you find yourself in a reality where mathematics doesn't work... nothing would mean anything anyway... it's either entirely noise without structure, or it's meaningless. True is False and nothing is distinguishable. Though I think you're right, that it's unprovable that you are not in a simulation... and I don't think it's possible to have a (mathematical consistent) reality where you can. So, when Neo is taken out of the matrix, there's no way of telling that he still isn't in the matrix. Also, hence my theory that not even God could prove he wasn't just some creation of a higher being. So, Ave Satanis... May as well worship a god that delivers you concrete results... a god you can believe in. Yeah... but no... The universe doesn't run on mathematics... the universe is... and certain mathematics describes it... simple enough to prove, because you can create any physics from mathematics, an infinite number of different physics, and the universe only operates on exactly one of them... even if we don't fully know what that one is. If it was the other way around, we wouldn't need to test our physics at all... the physics would be derivable purely from mathematics... and it isn't... which is why we require the scientific method. And even if your lattice QCD is right... and you prove it... it's still a 'maybe' this is "God"'s sim... maybe not... it doesn't prove anything beyond the fact that our physics happen to work that way. Conversely, if we are in a simulation, the physics of the universe of which we are simulation could be anything... and no reason to presume a lattice like artifact would be needed... There's no reason to presume our universe is limited to what can run on a Turing Machine. The most we could say about the universe we are a simulation within, if indeed we are, would be that it must have mathematically consistent rules... otherwise our universe could not, and it does. So, no matter what you find in our physics, the simulation argument remains an unknowable. In the beginning was the empty set... And the empty set was with God... and the empty set was God. LOL. Sorry... it does "run on" maths... for a certain definition of "run on" I guess... in that it (appears) to evolve following some set of mathematical rules... like you said. Sorry... I was kind of getting confused with some of the Platonic mathematical philosophy that maths creates the universe... which I think is rubbish... I think the philosophy there was that for any mathematical system you can define... kind of creates a universe where that is true... but I think that's clearly rubbish. The idea persists in the Mathematical Universe Theory (if I'm reading it right). But yeah... it does appear to follow a set of rules, like anything we can simulate on a Turing Machine... Even QM is a subset of Turing machines... though only if the universe doesn't have infinite precision... as I stated a long time ago... a recursive neural network that allows transcendental weights is capable of super turing computation... so, they aren't computable on an actual computer... and probably require infinite precision calculations... and I don't think it's determined yet whether our universe has infinite precision or not (even if we can't measure below the plank length, the universe could still have precision below that, right?). Also, I have a pretty strong feeling the universe doesn't evolve just forward in time... but interactions occur in both directions... have you heard of the afshar experiment? I'm pretty sure his transactional view of QM has some pretty deep philosophical implications. My point being that even if our universe is a simulation it may not be limited by the same limitations of what we can simulate... that whether we are simulation or not is forever unknowable (even if you escape out of the simulation somehow, or interact with the host universe... that could also be a simulation)... and we probably can't derive the physics of the host universe, yet there is still one strong limitation to it... that it must be a mathematically definable universe (though unknowable). I fucking love erlang... What a beautiful language. I wrote a poker hand evaluator in python... but it wasn't fast enough for my needs... so I figured I'd write it in erlang, and distribute the problem to as many machines as I could get my hands on... It worked... but wasn't natively fast... figured I'd need about 100 desktops or so to get the speeds I required. So, I rewrote it again in C (without the distributed stuff of course)... evaluates all possible hands in 100ms. Oh well... Erlang's great when you really need strong failover guarantees... but it's not the fastest horse in the race. Definitely see why it's used in telecoms, where you need 5 nines or better uptime. In the early to mid 90s I was an MS developer... When you have access to MSDN there's a wealth of information available... but only if you have the resources (wealth) to get access to it... which you generally do when a company pays for it, but as an individual, it was very expensive. Also, at best you had public APIs to work with. I first heard of Linux in 98, and someone put a copy on my computer... but I was still making apps in MS Visual Studio (and thinking DCOM was the future)... wasn't until 99 I really got into it... installed it on my home computers, started porting code to it, etc... Even in the early 2000s, was hard to get companies to see the value in it... though I would run it on my machines in virtual box (or something like that... did that exist back then?)... and generally get the company's software to work in that environment... By the mid 2000s though, I'd saved at least one company several million a year by moving the software from propriety unix to linux... Nowadays you'd find it hard not to find a large company that doesn't rely on Linux (or maybe FreeBSD or similar Free OSS) to some degree or another. Well... I was sold by the economics of OSS... It actually makes a lot of sense... unlike your objections to corporate development... which also makes sense in certain situations and markets. incremental innovation, like the internet, x-rays, whatever else it was you went on about? You realise these things were created by the free market, right? The system works. No UBI needed AT ALL. You on the other hand have nothing to offer society... you're not going to make any break throughs... you never have... and your time is nearly up... You're a deranged crack head with no hope or future... stfu. We'd be better off as a society without you actually... maybe we should just tax the shit out of you, and if you can't pay, execute you... and improve the environment... call it Universal Fuck Trane Tax... Now, there's an argument with concrete facts. Of course it's possible... Some unemployable crack head takes a draw on their pipe and has some weird revelation that turns out to be useful and creates some discovery that changes the world... for sure, why not. Do I think it will make such breakthroughs more likely on average? No... no I don't. TBL was working at CERN when he came up with the WWW... Einstein was working as a patent clerk... etc, etc... probably what these people had in common was that every day they were exercising their minds in different ways because of the work they were doing... that probably helped a lot. So, it's not that I think UBI is a bad idea... it's that what he thinks the advantages of it aren't... it has other advantages... but people aren't going to suddenly start working on challenges, creating robots and inventing the holodeck... Very few people have the talents for this anyway... and many times the research itself is still incredibly expensive and won't be created in anyone's bedroom... I actually think the Free Market is the most likely source of these types of inventions... What UBI does is reduce structural friction... meaning that people can be a bit bolder in seeking the right jobs for themselves... it increases competition for labour... instead of being scared that losing your job might leave you hungry and homeless... you can take risks... start your own company and stuff like that. Plus... at the right level... some people will be free to have more leisure time... and why not? That should really be the end goal of technological innovation anyway... rather than making us all effective slaves to a handful of super elite filthy rich. In america they don't have social security like we do... they get like 12 weeks and then it's either disability or starvation or something similar... we have it better... but the focus is on getting you into a job, not just allowing you to live... so, for us, there is still the question of whether a UBI is better than full time unemployment benefits... but for them, it's even worse. LOL -- I missed you were fishing for compliments Well... some people are just productive anyway... Economics is all about differentials, right? The margins... So, you kind of compare the two states... you're already doing something (arguably) beneficial for society... so you can ask the question whether or not you'd be further along in your project with a UBI. I don't think it would make a huge difference, do you? Has funding yourself been a huge barrier to you? I wouldn't say that's been the limiting factor... would you? That's actually a good point... The government is free to spend money on R&D in ways private companies might not... They do so because of the expected positive externalities and also for national security. They have access to a lot of money, and are free to set their goals independently of profit. Anything military is a good example. In Free Market economies though, the workers still need incentives to make them do that through free choice. We don't draft our soldiers or our scientists... though they have in the past... and some countries still do (Iran nuclear scientists maybe). If trane really wanted holodecks, he should find a military use for them... prove they'd be the fastest way of breaking terrorists in psyops or something similar... Then the government could spend money on the absolute best and brightest minds and put them to that purpose, no matter the cost... rather than giving out UBI to random crack heads and relying on the Free Market from there (which is what he advocates, even if he doesn't know it). Oh... also UBI changes nothing fundamentally about the Free Market... that also rallies against... the Free Market will still be the optimal market. Nor will it change The Market... nor people's behaviours... The Market will still reward the unscrupulous, the liars, the fraudsters... and just because you have a UBI, doesn't mean you still aren't subject to these influences. The first guy that comes along promising them first access to the non-existent holodeck that simply requires a 10 year contract for the value of their UBI... and bang... The Market will fuck the idiots again. If you interact with humans, you are subject to The Market... it will continue to need regulation to operate as a Free Market. UBI changes nothing. Nor will it reward these inventors he pointed out... cause it rewards non-inventors too... there's no special incentive to invent... what the market doesn't reward, neither does UBI... and I see no one offering up an alternative that does. Yes it was... A dude, operating in the market, created something, and released it of his own free will... this is classic free market... what the fuck do you think a market is? Dude... everything is the market... Anytime you trade anything for anything... This is market, right here, right now... Market is UTILITY motivated... You could lose all your money and still gain utility... profit is not the key to the market, utility is. You can measure it in hours spent listening to the birds if you like. Individuals don't have balance sheets... And profit is a companies utility... A balance sheet reduces to utility anyway. You're an idiot... Truly... Do you have a balance sheet? I don't have a personal balance sheet. You don't use natural language for balance sheets either... they have things called numbers... you might recall. Revenue: Quite a bit Liabilities: Also quite a bit. Assets: A little bit more. Seriously, your fucking retarded. Economists don't disagree with utility... though they might put more emphasis on companies balance sheets... they certainly didn't say utility was wrong. Relies on maths... jesus christ... what a fail fuck. A balance sheet cannot explain a happy monk who has taken a vow of poverty... Utility does. So balance sheets might be considered more important for the health of an economy... cause they're far easier to work with... but they do not express people's actions. In fact, I think they're a terrible thing to focus on... Lots of rich companies doesn't mean people are actually happy. Only maximising utility implies people are happy. Action = argmax(Utility(action); actions) That's the point... whatever you chose to do, is you maximising your utility... If you hate money and want to be a monk... that maximises his utility. To argue against the Free Market is to argue against the rights of the monk... if you want to maximise balance sheets... we should really be forcing him to work for a company. You could call it the happiness function (though, there's no actual guarantee it will make you happy), or do what the fuck you most want to do function (closest to what utility is). But that's how we use it... Why would I lie to you about it? I think you're using ad hominems cause you don't like to think. Especially don't want to admit you're wrong... cause you've spent so many years arguing against something that you never understood. And before you argue that's not the utility function itself... this is all we actually know about the utility function. If I defined the utility function (say utility of being a monk = 100, utility of being a banker = 1000, utility of crack = 300), then that would be saying that we all have the same utility function... that we'd all like to be monks, or we'd all like to be bankers, or that we'd all like to smoke crack, or that we'd all like to be against drugs... We know that the utility function is different for every person... and that we know no more than that about it. You're trying to add constraints that are unnecessary, because you are not used to dealing with abstract functions... yet mathematicians, engineers and economists are used to dealing with abstract functions all the time. Asking for more than that, is going beyond the theory... in fact... it's going against the theory entirely. No amount of money printing is going to get you Bill's house... and I see no reason why you deserve it... nor any reason he doesn't (with some caveats). Funny you think Bill Gates should live like you want to... This is why we analyse an unknown utility function, rather than dictate how others should live. You're a real selfish piece of shit... did you know that? You must have meant you love him and his house when you said "Fuck Bill Gates's house." ... "Fuck those rich gated compound motherfuckers. How can they live like that when smarter ppl die because of politics and false economic theories? ". For some odd reason I interpreted as you saying he shouldn't live like that... sorry. So, when those scientists are freed up to solve AIDS... Who's going to do the job's they're currently doing? Or do you just think that AIDS is the most important thing to solve? You seem to think that people will do more work with a basic income... like, everyone will do all the work that is currently being done, plus all the challenges now they're free of market forces. Or your theory relies on the fact that all the work they are doing now is useless... which makes no sense to me at all. The only person around here who's work is completely useless is you... most people are being PRODUCTIVE. This is an economically infeasible solution... Simply because the robot's don't currently exist... otherwise we wouldn't have people doing that work. There's no robot that can replace a chemist, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer... They just aren't ready YET. Now, you might point to Watson, or something similar, maybe Google will get there first... oh look... all products of Free Market capitalism. The market drives innovation. This is all predicted by standard economic theory, that markets create technology over time in the drive for efficiency. So, if you can't show me the robots that are as capable as their human counterparts and cheaper too... you are speaking rubbish... and if they did already exist... then your argument would be moot... because they'd already have replaced those workers in those fields. Do you have youtube video of one? No... cause they don't exist outside your crack filled fantasies... If they were cheaper (capital) than human labour, they'd have already replaced the human labour. The fact that they haven't is really simple proof that they don't yet exist... No scarcity driven company is going to waste money on people when it can profit by using machines. Thank god you're too poor to have any influence. Free Market puts you exactly where you belong... hungry, homeless and in the wilderness. Oh look... the wonders of Free Market capitalism.. That's my fucking point... that's what Adam Smith predicted in the days of slave labour... and look PREDICTION turned into REALITY. Now show me the lawyer bot, the chemist bot, the engineer bot. Because Adam Smith never said free the slaves because the internet enables communication over vast distances... do you know why? Because THERE WAS NO FUCKING INTERNET AT THE TIME... it would have been ECONOMICALLY INFEASIBLE. HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU CUNT? Technological advancement is an economic theory. I just don't get the idea that everyone can do nothing... and yet still expect all the world's products and services to exist (at the same price too!!!)... it's too fucking nuts to even consider. If everyone was paid millions by the government in a UBI, we could all afford cheap blowjobs... and no one would have to give them! This is what dropping the law of non-contradiction gets you... because the above becomes totally feasible man... just have another draw on this pipe... it will all make sense. Funny thing is, many people have no problem passing or even excelling at the MOOCs... Maybe the problem is that you're too stupid to follow along... Maybe it's not MOOCs you need at all... perhaps you need someone who has passed them to distill the information down to your level... like spoon feeding a baby. But you're still the kind of person who would swat even that spoon away... The failure is totally with you, not the MOOCs. You deserve to suffer because you won't deal with your own Dunning-Kruger effect. I'm just saying, I'm glad you're poor, unsuccessful and suffering. You get what you deserve. What scarcity did I create? I'm happy with my lot... I don't suffer scarcity... You're the one complaining about it. No I don't... I want scarcity eliminated... That's kind of the point. I'm glad a retard like you suffers... but I want to reduce scarcity in general. Is that too complicated for you? An engineer doesn't remove friction by pretending it doesn't exist... but I'd still like to see you dragged across a road tied to a rope on the back of a car. You're a sick puppy... You want to rape crack whores? That's fucked up... I wouldn't let you do that even in a holodeck... That would be like child porn, even if you aren't raping an actual child, it encourages it. If rape and murder are the best incentives you have, then fuck you and your whole ideas. I'd be willing to concede the fastest way to a holodeck would be through basic income... if you can demonstrate that mathematically... but you don't even have gossip on your side, just some crack fantasy. Thanks... As you know, I'm a big believer in micro-economics and therefore Free Markets... with the caveat that they must be regulated in accordance with their assumptions to 'correct' The Market when it doesn't match those assumptions. I've gone over the axioms and gone through the mathematical proofs that derive from those axioms and I can find little wrong with the reasoning that flows from them. (though there is one axiom that semi-bothers me... but no one here is educated enough to discuss the matter with me... I hint at it often, but everyone goes off in other directions... so fuck you all for that one). And the second welfare theorem of free markets is quite clear on the fact that we can bring about pareto optimums with much better properties than the alternatives with a certain amount of wealth redistribution. It is clear to me, that wealth taxes are part of the solution to growing inequality... Then a UBI with progressive income taxes make sense as the second part... and I strongly believe that a balanced budget is necessary... in the long term. Throw all these together, and it's just a matter of demographics and mathematics to make them all balance. I do think it's a shame that most people have been brainwashed to be against the Free Market, and think it means letting big business do as it pleases... rather than realise it's an optimum state that can only be reached by correct regulation of The Market... given that the masses don't know what the correct regulations are (from mathematical principles) too often allows politicians to sell ideas that ultimately harm the population, while appearing to do good. Just imagine a world where everyone thought Trane's ideas made sense... a lot of that type of thinking actually goes on to appease an economically illiterate population. All the resurrection bunny's given me is clap in my eyeballs and a headache. Hail Satan. Well that's not very good is it? If one in a million have a great idea... that's like only 200 great ideas in America, and only 7000 world wide... It's gonna take a long time to get anything done under your system. Shit, I've had like 5 great ideas this afternoon... one of them was to send you one a one way journey to Mars... so you could set up your utopian society and pay yourself a basic income. Best of luck. Markets DRIVE innovation... Where did you think all this tech shit come from anyway? Hint: None of it was developed under a basic income and anti-market environment. No... you're just uneducated... They're nice words, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. Yes, much is unrewarded by the market... they are called Positive Externalities... there are ways to correct for these... In the realm of ideas, we have intellectual property laws... but if people chose not to take advantage of them... well, that is their choice and their utility... Good on them. You're not actually proposing a system where these people DO get rewarded for their inventions... UBI does NOT do that AT ALL either! And for the second part... a UBI doesn't solve this problem ether... Why? Because those businesses are STILL going to pay their scientists and engineers way more than a UBI... Of course, if those scientists and engineers truly had great independent ideas, they are still free to do those things in their spare time and create their own startups and companies... UBI changes none of this... these are well paid professionals... not uneducated workers who have to spend 120 hours a week down a coal mine. The Free Market still remains the most optimal solution... and whilst UBI may be good in other ways... it solves neither of the problems you mentioned. You're a stupid, uneducated, economically illiterate piece of shit who is too fucking retarded to even know that you should shut the fuck up. Eat a dick, fuck face. Yet it predicts all of this... you can't keep using anti non-contradiction logic... it's useless. Good rational argument you got there... crack-for-brains. Go suck a cock... crack fag $ That's what we call utility $ Did you cum? Cause that's utility dipshit. Lacist Plick % Dude, no one want's to listen to a xenophobic ass$ but I believe you actually are racist $ Whatever... you're the one making racist statements. It's a useful mental shortcut... If we know who they are, we can expect the types of things they're likely to say, and if we should pay attention to them or not. It's not like you're going to suddenly stop going on about the law of noncontradiction (which is only a law in certain mathematical systems). We know the kind of rubbish you're going to write about... you're not suddenly going to change just because you got a new nick... you're just going to repeat the same old tired memes... so, if it's one of your dupes, we know it's okay to ignore it. So, yeah, it is a mental shortcut... but a useful one. If this new nick has something interesting say, we'll find out anyway... but more than likely, we'll know who it is is after a few posts anyway. LilDebbie had a garden, right? And thinks he's a genius? Could it be? I hope it's not Trane! Nice tune... I like it. $ Meth Tits used to joke with Street Geologist about giving blowjobs and biting penises off... with great delight, a giant shit eating grin and to much laughter... Real men take risks... there's no reward without risk... who dares wins... and fortune favours the brave. Also... I've got pink eye in one of my eyes... came up over the last few days... I did some reading on it, and I found out you can get chlamydia or gonorrhea in your eyeballs! I think I might have caught something from Madam Bigs... Like, I have that... and a funny sensation in my euretha (inside my cock). I dunno... there's something about the street girls giving me meth to fuck them bareback that I just can't resist. The danger is just what attracts me to it... bad habits. I still can't work out why they're into me... my cocks only a little larger than average... I know they've had much bigger than me... I think it's cause the girls all talk about me... so each one I meet already heard about me through mutual friends... we talk about who's who and what's happened to them lately, who's fucking the corrupt head of the police vice unit so they get free drugs and don't get move on notices, and other gossip, and then I dunno... it's just the way it goes. Speaking of police corruption, Street Geologist used to tell me that our (only) SWAT team here used to pay her (not that they gave her a choice, though they had a lot of disposable money... funny that, hey?) to cuff her, fuck her and beat her... she had a coppers hat and handcuffs... so I believe her... filthy fucking corrupt pieces of shit... thanks drug war!!! You're really fucking helping, you ignorant retarded supporters of prohibition should rethink your stupid attitudes you stupid cunt wastes of excuses of human beings. I'd have you all anally raped and disposed of if it was in my power... cause that's exactly what you're actually supporting be done to others... you stupid cunting fucks. These guys are in peak physical condition... praised on the television and in society... and they're taking turns beating on a small defenceless crack addicted woman... seriously... it's fucking stupid. I haven't come up for a name for the latest girl yet (Crack Momma... that'll do)... First time I met she was like 8 months pregnant and working... I gave her a lift for a little cash... Then I saw her about 2 weeks after giving birth... and she waved at me and came over to talk to me, and got my phone number... Anyway... she wanted to fuck... but man... she looks like she'd get pregnant at the drop a hat... so to speak... and I don't like wearing hats... so, that just seemed fucking dangerous. She looks like a slightly worse for wear meth tits... oh well... we went for a few drives to score and kept going past meth tit's house... (quite some distance away)... so maybe there's a connection there... I dunno... I think she could have been spying for her... cause she kept asking me what my relationship with Street Geologist was. Though she kept going on about deep-throating cock gargling sluts... so, I mean... there was that... like, she's got a good side too. Though she kept calling her ex's message bank, putting on an accent and saying she was Orbanian... then asked me where Orbania was... I said I think it's near yugoslavia... right? Well... it's cause her ex thinks she's fucking this ummmm Orbanian guy, and wanted to wind him up. Who am I to argue? I can't tell if the way she walks is ghetto strut or just very recently pregnant waddle... maybe a mixture of the two... and she wears these long shorts and wears them low on her waste... makes her look like she's got a strangely long body but oddly short legs... I probably shouldn't have pointed that out to her. Either way, bitch is in my debt at the moment for the unpaid driving... gas, grass or ass next time I see her... if she ever hopes to see her crack baby again anyway (lol jokes, but she doesn't know that). I met another one I'm gonna call Bedazzled, cause she's got these studs medically implanted in her... on her face, and chest and stuff... quite interesting... expensive apparently... little threaded metal implants you can screw different tops into... so she looks like she's been Bedazzled... we got to talking... and she's an ex of a friend of mine through school... Dude was always way out there... Lead singer of his own punk metal band... small world. Funny thing is, I bought up the band in conversation... said his first name, and she said he was the lead singer and said his last name... so she wasn't having me on. Anyway... I hope I haven't gotten chlamydia eye... that's going to take a doctor's appointment to clear up. I'll give it another week... and see what I can still see... or not. Doc already told me I have HSV-1... The most common form... so it won't be that... I don't think you can get that twice. I don't know about conjunctivial herpes (HSV2) though... I didn't see it mentioned anywhere... I think it's just common viral conjunctivitis... which normally clears up on it's own in a few days, and there's no treatment anyway... I'll give it a few more days. If not, I'll go to the doctor... small chance I got a social eye disease. I gotta say... the whole can't give consent thing is a bit fucked up... You get in trouble for driving drunk or stoned... you're expected to take responsibility in these situations... what's so different about sex? If the man is drunk or stoned, has the women raped him? If they are both drunk or stoned, have they raped each other? I'm not talking about passed out drunk though... that's a different matter... but I've had lots of happy, consensual drunk and stoned sex... never had a complaint... and they almost always end up coming back for more. Maybe if you're bad at sex, and the woman didn't really like it, she'll come at you the next day with rape allegations... like a defence for if she regrets it. But, I've never had that problem. Are you and your wife always sober when you have sex? Oh forget that... it's Blaster... Do you and your wife even have sex? Alcohol - helping ugly people have sex since forever. No, I'm not denying rape is a real thing... For sure, violence or the threat of violence is definitely rape... same with using someone who is passed out or unconscious... and again, I'd even go so far as to say a man getting a woman stupidly drunk and fucking them is too. But drunken sex is clearly not always rape... but if the women wakes up the next day and decides she regrets it (like you were lousy at it, she has a boyfriend, or you don't offer to make her breakfast the next day, or she finds out about your other girlfriends... etc, etc), you are potentially on the hook... even if she initiated it. So, I'm not saying it's not a real thing... just that there are women out there who will use it against men in retaliation... which makes it quite dangerous. (I had three beers, I clearly couldn't drive, therefore rape... what a load of bullshit!) Hopefully they are quite rare... I haven't met one yet. Though a friend of mine did pick up a chick at a bar, fucked her brains out (I think on the pool table - small bar, after hours) then got arrested the next day for rape... turned out she'd done the same thing several times before, and the case was dropped... but it's a pretty scary thing. I also know the UK has a strong culture (for both men and women) of going out, getting drunk, and 'pulling'... why not? It lowers inhibitions, many people are secretly shy, and in their sober moments might not sleep with that person (doesn't match up to their unrealistic standards)... but that's exactly what they're after... a night of drinking and strange sex. Now, with the laws as they are... that can become very risky... but mostly only for the men. Even though it's very common, and sought after by both sexes. It's like a cop out, but just for women. Yeah, there are levels of drunk... I don't know... I normally don't fuck on the first night in that situation (which might be letting some women down?)... but if there were moves towards it on the first night, I might fuck them even if we're both drunk the next time... Several of my relationships started this way. Ummm.... no, nothing to do with the women I hang with... they're the last girls I'd expect that behaviour from... I'm more just thinking the way the laws are written, and what sort of risk exposure there is in picking up random drunken sluts from bars. I'm not extrapolating to the average women... but explicitly the outliers... that's where the risk is. I mean, it might be a 100 to 1 unlucky event... but that's still risky as hell. Well... lucky for me, I'm the type to build rapport first... with a face like mine, you got little choice anyway. If you went out and got drunk, and then the next day you woke up with five bucks and a sore asshole would you be willing to go to the cops and say you were raped? Would you maybe just keep it quite and push the incident deep down and forget it ever happened? And if so, would you like to go on a camping trip with me? I got five bucks and a bottle of jacks. No. $ Are you Jeff Vader? http://youtu.be/Sv5iEK-IEzw Sad... , , . -? , . , , ? ? When I play guitar... Especially on the farm, all the animals that can, gather around to listen... seriously... the dogs, the cat, various wild birds, and even the emu will wander up from the paddock and stand by the fence to listen to some blues or whatever crap I'm playing. Even in the city, the local birds start singing along. I guess they enjoy the positive externalities I'm creating. And I'm certainly maximising my utility when I do so... sounds like you were too! Economics FTW! You should recognise that these things are economics. My Dad is like Francis of Assisi with the animals. It's the strangest thing I've ever seen... Our driveway is about a mile or so from the house to the road, so my parents take a walk down there once a day or so... Well... I went for a walk with them... along with two dogs, a cat, four sheep and five chickens... all of their own free will, with no reward, taking a break from whatever they were doing before hand. One of the dogs is a killer... of both sheep and chickens... A rescue dog, so it's not really her fault... we just have to be careful... the other goes grazing on the grass with the sheep... I think he's confused, or he's teaching the weaned lambs what they're meant to be doing... strange animals. Mind you... I'd consider having to see an old naked man playing recorder would be a pretty strong negative externality... It's not the type of sight I'd like to see... But, if you're truly alone... then it's not. You will have an effect on other people's utility doing something like that... you should consider that too. I'd say he's about 50... no? $ I just imagine some wiry, semi-toothless, unshaved, raggedy, old, crack addict looking dude. Honestly, I'm a little confused over the issue... It's one thing to refuse blacks or gays into your pub, for example... cause you're serving the same thing to everyone, what do their views have to do with you? It's another thing to say, force a church to marry gay people, when it's against their beliefs. I also see the point where someone who decorates cakes shouldn't be forced to make a cake against their own beliefs... I'd say it's within their rights to not make a particular cake, say either one with a swastika on it for neo-nazis, or one with gay stuff on it for a gay wedding... if that's against your personal beliefs... You should still have to make them a generic cake if that's what they want, but forcing you to make one with iconology against your own personal beliefs shouldn't be allowed... or for a christian cake shop owner to make a cake with satanic symbols on it, or a satanic cake shop owner to make a cake with christian symbols on it. So, the difference is between refusing generic services to people, which I don't think you should be allowed to do, versus customising something in a way artistically that is against your own personal views. So, where does this law stand exactly? Does it allow refusal of generic services based on the customer's backgrounds and belief... or does it allow you to deny service based on customisation against the owners beliefs? Yeah... so it does seem like a very bad law $ Dude, are you really blaming the scientific method now? You're just as bad at science as you are at maths... STFU. If you can't come up with a scientific experiment to prove psychic effects to even yourself, then you're just a fucking failure at science... Don't blame the method, the method works, the problem is you. Coming up with scientific experiments to demonstrate psychic effects to others is much harder... but still possible... but don't blame the scientific method, rigour and requirements of repeatability beyond statistical chance... again, the failing is with you. Coming up with scientific experiments you can put in a paper, is even harder and going to take a lot of time and resources... doesn't mean it can't be done... just that it is hard. The effects are incredibly subtle and only just outside the margins of pure chance. Psychic effects are subtle, hard to record (we don't have machines that can hear our thoughts or record them... not yet... at least not available to the general public)... so such things are by their very nature very hard to prove. That doesn't make them not real though... and no true scientist would deny the existence of a thing just because it's not in the literature, or not well understood by science... science isn't about what's true and what's not... just about what's repeatable within statistical limits. They may claim they haven't experienced them, or that there is no proof... and they are exactly right... but even a skeptic must admit the possibility... otherwise you are no scientist at all. Here's an example... I was half way through writing a diary on the free market view of drug regulation... when tdillo put up his diary on prohibition... To me, a pretty standard psychic synchronicity event... but almost impossible to prove... I don't think I even previewed it, so there's not even a log on Rusty's server... but it happened. You can try telepathically calling animals... tell them to sit, or sit at some place... dogs can respond even if you sit perfectly still and gaze at a point (no body language effects)... you can test it yourself. Also, create some secret made up fact about yourself... see how long before someone verbalises it... for me, I am the President of the USA (not the government, that would just be silly or delusional --- but I really am!)... that took about a week to manifest... I couldn't write a paper about it, it's hard to prove to anyone other than those who already know... but it is a scientific experiment... not one I can write a paper about... but it worked. (Of course, I might speak in my sleep, is the only other plausible explanation I could find --- but a couple of other weirdness events tell me that's unlikely). Okay, while I'm working way out on the fringe... here's something to try... an experiment, and a really weird event that occurred... maybe it's repeatable, maybe it's not... best I can say is that this was my true and honest experience of reality. (or maybe I'm just fucking with you, how would know?). Firstly, you must become the President of the USA... Meditate hard on this one... It can't just be something you say to yourself, you must believe it with all your being... No, you're not Barack Obama, you don't want to be locked up and institutionalised... but you must have a reasonable belief in it, it must be a fact, and you must have no doubt in your mind... also, you must never mention it out aloud. I'll leave it to you how to accomplish this. Now... it might take days or weeks, I don't know... also, it might have worked stronger for me not being in the US... the guy playing a bad rendition of Hail to the Chief on his trumpet downstairs would be far less likely over here and a far stronger confirmation than what may be normal over there. So, when the thumb sized drone (about the size of large beetle) flies in through your open door following a very unnatural robotic A* flight path to stop about a foot in front of your face and asks you the following question telepathically "Are you an officer or an employee of the Government of the United States of America" --- you'll know that there's some pretty advanced machinery in existence on this planet... certainly beyond what the general public is aware of. Now, you can respond telepathically to it... I of course said "No" (telepathically)... cause I'm not, and never claimed to be... in which case it will follow an A* flight path back out of the door and that'll be the last of it. I'm not a 100% sure what it was... maybe it was just a delusion, right? I had no witnesses (the girl laughing that I was the president, though I had never said a thing, had just stepped into the kitchen), I didn't have my webcams recording, I have zero proof... even with all that, there was no sound, just a voice in my mind... just my memory and experience of the event. I believe it happened... furthermore, I believe it is quite possible these things are login terminals to telepathic computers available to high level government agents... Just a hunch... no proof. So, you can try it differently... You could answer "Yes" if you are really crazy, reckless and willing to see whatever happens next... To me, this seems like a very dangerous option... you're free to try it, of course... if you can report back about it, please do! If you go missing in the next month or so, I'll presume it worked! But, if the hints in Principia Discordia are to be believed... perhaps "Mu"... is a back door into this system? It's what I wish I had the sense to say... again, who knows what would happen... worth a go... mind you, I think you would really have to believe mu is the truth too... not sure how to accomplish that... I'll let you think about it. Of course, I'm not responsible for anything that happens to you should you try this... I'm not guaranteeing either your physical safety or your mental well being... it's just something you can try if you're crazy enough. I'd be very interested in any odd effects you experience though. Also, it might not work simply because the illuminati telepathic computers will have taken you reading this comment into account. HAHAHA!! You didn't really believe any of that did you? Stupid fucking crack head... get a life and learn to science, okay? Perhaps go check out James Randi on why you'd have to be a fucking gullible crack head to believe any of this shit. Fucking moron... Get some education. I think some things are repeatable... It's just that we can't observe all the variables... especially as the mind (well, the brain really) itself isn't really observable... especially when many minds may alter the outcome, like in Randi's experiments... he's clearly not an impartial observer! It's far easier to test this stuff yourself though... you just have to do the right experiments... Simple stuff, like sit out where there is a crowd, and tell others to put a hand on their head... it will happen far greater than chance could account for. You could get really scientific (because confirmation bias), maybe... get an impartial (I don't know how to do that one - what if they are psychic and adversarial?!) person to record the number of times someone puts a hand on their head... then on other days, do the same thing but don't meditate on people doing that... You can't tell the recorder which one you are doing... see if there is a correlation. The less your experiments can alter other people's expectations of reality... so, the less provable they are to others... the more likely they are to succeed! I believe this has to do with non-local effects (both in time and space) mixed with observer effects. That makes scientific testing HARD! I think the problem with Randi and co, are that they expect psychic phenomena to operate in ways that it doesn't... like the Zener cards... there's no emotional content, no connection, no purpose... it doesn't work like that. For example, it's recognised by official australian government documents that the aboriginals believe that if they are alone and injured, distressed or require help, that they can telepathically call others to come help them... if this had any evolutionary benefit (and assuming it is possible - and I think physics would allow for it) then it would be selected for... If you consider their environment, where you may be hundreds of miles from anyone, and voice just won't carry (and fire could get out of control easily), having telepathic connections would be of great advantage... So, I think this kind of psychic phenomena is far more likely to exist. If ethics didn't get in the way, maybe it would be easier to test! Some of the strongest (honest, open about it and able to demonstrate it) telepaths I've known are Aboriginals. Now, in a western society, psychic connections can be disastrous, and would be selected against... How many things do you think about other people but are too polite to say aloud? (He's ugly, she's a fat fuck, that guy looks like a creep or a pervert, retarded fuck, whore, not that crack head again, fucking bum should get a job, or at least shower - "Hey how you doing? Great to see you again!"). Now imagine you start hearing those negative thoughts... it would have a strong negative emotional effect on you. So, we deny that the psychic phenomena are even possible, and drug the 'victim' up so they stop being aware or at least manage to cope with the unspoken negative energies. The other big problem with Randi is that he requires p values less than 10e-6... where standard scientific papers look for effects in the range of p less than 0.05... In the case where psychic effects might differ from chance in less than 1 part per 100 or 1000 or so (Zener card type experiments)... the cost and time of collecting data to reach those p levels will easily exceed ten times the reward... So, I don't consider the $1M prize proof of the non-existence of psychic phenomena. Though it does place certain limits upon it! Science is never wrong (at least not the scientific method). It's not that psychic phenomena don't exist... it's just that we are asking the wrong questions, doing the wrong experiments, expecting it to work in ways it doesn't and has even more hidden and confounding variables than even the more difficult sciences such as economics. Now add in the possibility of powerful psychic actors who use their knowledge to their own advantage by denying its existence entirely, and you got a really really hard problem. Does this mean we can stop serving blacks again? God clearly prefers white people cause otherwise he wouldn't have made us superior to blacks, all educated and rich, talking proper, smelling good and all... so can we keep the devil races out of our stores and pubs now too? My clan bible clearly says the blacks are the sons and daughters of Cain... I just want to make sure I'm right with the law as well as god when I keep em away from my good white customers. Can you please just clarify Should adults be allowed to make their own decisions regarding what they do with or take into their own bodies, insofar as it only affects other consenting adults? Can you please just state whether you would allow other adults of their own free will to take meth, heroin or crack, as long as they aren't stealing or harming other people? If they become violent, or resort to theft, that they should be locked up, regardless of their sobriety, mental well being, or otherwise? That the act of harming others is the crime, not whether they chose to take chemicals or if they are naturally mental ill? I'd just like some clarification from you on this. Given that people do it anyway... it makes no sense to support the law. As for you getting abused... I think you fucking deserve it cause you're a weak sack of shit who does nothing but whine 'poor me, everyone picks on me... I'm such a loser, why can't anyone be my friend?' No, seriously, fuck you and your kind... you should be fucking beaten with a tire iron. But I suspect they just called you names, right? You're such a fucking pussy loser... I suppose that's what you consider abuse. If you didn't want to do drugs with them, you had every right to walk away. If they really did abuse you, and I'm talking physically... then you should have had them arrested for that. Crimes with victims are really the only crimes that should be enforced (on the whole... business regulations, etc aside). So... I ask you again... do you support the criminalisation of people who do you no harm but have different tastes to you? Do you believe I should be imprisoned because I desire to do different things with my life than you? Cause if you do... then I really do support tying you to a tree and smashing your fucking brains out with that tire iron. Well... you were a victim of a real crime... and those who did that should have been punished... of course, it's not always possible to punish 100% of criminals, which is why we have to take that into account in sentencing... so that the punishment takes into the likihood of being caught... I assume karma would eventually have caught up with them anyway... people don't tend to do a crime once, they almost always continue with their behaviour until corrected. So, can we agree that it was the assault that affected you, and not the drugs... that they were assholes who would probably have assaulted you anyway? Though, I do have to ask if you perhaps threatened or even did narc on them... cause you seem like the kind of guy who would. I'll tell you one thing that the drug laws would definitely fix... and that is I wouldn't be at constant risk of going to prison and getting a criminal record if the laws were different. I wouldn't be handing large sums over to criminals and gangs either. I imagine the working girls wouldn't have to work so often, for so little, and in such dangerous conditions either... also there'd be less acquisitional crimes like theft. So, can I just get you to affirm that you are against the drug laws, rather than a supporter of them? Because, there's no real argument beyond that. Okay... fine... then we're in agreement... No need to smash your head in... you're alright with me! Look... here's one thing about correlation and causation... people who are violent and criminal don't mind operating outside of the law... so violent criminals are more likely to engage in criminal behaviour like drug use... but that's the way I see the causation flowing, not from drug use to violence. Having said that... certain drugs have certain affects on certain people, so alcohol makes some people violent, same with meth and coke... Even some people will get that effect from THC (though I imagine these people are in the minority and have a paradoxical reaction to it)... and don't ever get in the way of heroin addict's heroin when they are jonesing. Nonetheless... if you can handle your drugs and be a peaceable member of the community, you should not have to suffer because of the fools who can't... nor should we suffer violent non-drug users either... so it's the harm to others that matters... not the path taken to get there. I'd say your cuntfaced 'friends' would have been violent even without the drugs... even if they couldn't get hold of alcohol... though one thing is clear... the law didn't stop them... and maybe evading the drug laws helped them get away with the violence too (criminal training, common wall of silence, etc). You are right pretty much on the regulations and taxation side... the most important reason to legalise really is to get the drug industry out of the hands of criminals... these gangs are ruthless, and are the very last people on the planet we should be rewarding with such a lucrative commodity. Finally... in free market economic terms... negative externalities (such as theft, violence and whatever other similar crimes you can think of) can actually be 'fixed up' with pigovian taxes... so they should be taxed, not so much for revenue raising purposes, but because of these negative outcomes. But... in principal, we agree... so thanks for supporting the cause. When the revolution comes, I'll pull you from the wall. How old are you? Life is short anyway dude... and it's not all roses... I do know that... I get some depression myself... last week was my late girlfriends birthday, and I really was feeling the pointlessness of it all... especially how I don't have anyone I connect with or feel like I did towards her. Like, I'm getting in more women than I ever have... but I there's no one I really want. Still... you never know... you must have sunny days too, right? Small things that make you glad you saw that day... they might not come often, but they still come along... stay strong for those moments hey? Try feeding birds in the park or something... that always cheers me up. You never know, maybe a nursing home will be some of the most fun times you ever have? Nice old people who like a good game of checkers or something? Hot nurses? Warm cups of cocoa and no responsibilities. You only live once, win or lose, make the most of it. You fucking idiot... You're not mentally ill... you're a psychic! You might think I'm joking or taking the piss, but I'm deadly serious about this... I've tested this many many times and it's the only logical conclusion. Now, unregistered genuine psychics (non-masons, non-illuminati, non-spooks or not government secret agents, etc) are pretty strongly marginalised in society... Especially the smart, scientific ones... (dismissable psychics aren't a problem, like your tarot readers or carnival types)... they interfere with the plans of these powerful groups, and if the knowledge were widespread, well... it would change society in ways that some people do not like... it all comes down to power, money, control... the usual. I do agree that it should not be legally recognised... you shouldn't be held accountable for your thoughts, but only your actions... world power goes something like, thought, word then deed. So, maybe locking people who act up about the whole thing is the right approach, I haven't totally figured this one out yet. Most schizophrenics I know are psychic, have telepathy and are aware of other phenomena and effects... They've been trained to distrust their own senses and assume they are crazy... but once you point out some things in concrete repeatible ways, they seem to cope much better... It's normally in the early stages they get diagnosed or locked up... this comes from reacting to this realm in the physical world... so, it manifests as talking to yourself when you can talk telepathically, freaking out at spirits, yelling at other people... etc. The girls and I mostly spend our days getting stoned and conversing telepathically... I've tested this out to the Nth degree... there is no other explanation. Try simple things, like asking your wife for a coffee without saying, motioning or doing anything... sit perfectly still and just ask her... sometimes it helps to shout... but don't be rude... psychic driving I think can harm people in subtle ways... so be careful... you might open her third eye without meaning to. Some drugs enhance the effects, others dull them... alcohol generally dulls them. I've been very lucky that when I started experiencing it, I kept my mouth shut and took no action (I had already read principia discordia, illuminatis trillogy and LeVay's Satanic Bible) -- if in doubt, do nothing, if not in doubt, get in doubt... but practised manifesting effects in both the natural world, in crowds of people and individuals... practised every day, small repeatable experiments. I think the house I was in was haunted. I'm an engineer and scientist, so I applied scientific principles to the phenomena and I've tested it now to the point that it's just stupid to deny it's existence. Though I've seen some strange things along the way. But you get me in front of psychiatrist or psychologist, or any state representative, and you know what... I've never heard or seen a thing, ever... Just as I don't take drugs... I'm as normal a guy as you'll ever meet. Meanwhile I'm in telepathic communication 24x7 with friends, family and some of the girls... Birds and other animals carry conversation, or at least snippets of, hints of the future... I'm aware of some things before they happen, and others as they do happen... In certain houses I have to put up with dead people... I heard my sister's car crash in real time whilst I was in bed on the other side of the planet (she wasn't hurt, but I heard the brakes squeel and the smashing of glass and metal -- high emotional events are far stronger). Shadow people are manifestations of it... I've tested them too... fair enough your brain might pattern match a random shadow as someone or something... but find ones that are obscured, and remove the obscuration and it matches... I can't explain that away. I've only seen one physical attack from a shadow (but within the range of plausible deniability still, so...)... so, generally they are only visual and of little danger... maybe they are djinn. You can telepath with some of them. The worst part of it is, I will probably have some small annoying shit happen now that I've talked about it (those who know don't talk, those who talk don't know... generally). I've been doing this long enough to know some of the 'rules'. I don't fear this one too much, because most randoms / normals / mehums, will dismiss it as drug fuelled schizophrenia or something... so it's not going to convince many who aren't already aware. It's also a realm of psychological warfare... gangs use it... your enemies will attack... you must always be strong and without fear... they'll try to break you with the stupid shit you've done in the past... just remember you have every right to be here... you can attack them too... hold your ground... be a tough mother fucker --- psychologically... psychically. Never do stupid shit just because the voices recommend you do... that's just their way of testing you. You are still you... you have to be responsible for your actions... the voices might try to command you, but you're in control, not them. In some sense, you have to carry on exactly as if none of it is happening... act like you aren't feared or being attacked... that's why it's affected your job. You have to walk in both worlds at once, it is and it is not happening. I don't know how many people are psychic, but a lot more than you'd imagine... reading people's thoughts is very common... and your thoughts can manifest externally pretty easily too... Put it this way, even if they can't hear your thoughts, people will often act as if they can. If you're very lucky, and willing to meet with people you might otherwise avoid, the outcasts of society, you might find someone who's willing to just outright verbalise your thoughts, word for word... it's impossible to deny after you've experienced that. It's well outside the range of cold reading. I live near a school, and groups of children shout out either my thoughts or thoughts of others I want to talk to - my fav girl calls this a 'two way', like the old walkie talkie things... It can be quite creepy and disturbing... so, I try to keep my thoughts in check... she's always yelling at me not to use people as 'two ways', but I don't think it causes any harm... and I'm at the point now it's harder to avoid it than just let it flow... LeVay hints at this effect too. Okay, there you go... I've said way too much... but you should trust in yourself more, and others less... find like minded individuals, practice it, avoid fear taking over... distrust the official story, etc... Masons will lie to your face about it... Illuminati I'm not sure of (depends on which Illuminati, there are many groups)... Christians often deny it or call it the devil's work and are generally fearful, Satanists are more open to it, but despise weakness... Tuned in discordians are cool but hide behind humour as plausible deniability... Crack addicts are pretty fucking good at it, but will rob you blind if you're not constantly on the ball... The Australian government, in official documentation, recognise that it's a belief of Australian Aboriginals... Many commercial psychics are either fraudsters or scientifically illiterate... So, good information and people to practice with are hard to find... It's the realm of Satanists and occult... Crowley and Levay are a good start, but you need to practice with real people. Check out /r/psychic too. Psychic connections rely on shared common interest... Sexual partners, business partners, close friends. Oh, on the 9/11 thing. I had a postcard on my wall in England in 2001... It was of NYC with the towers and all... it was a stylised montage, it had what appeared to be the sun... but for some odd reason it was placed over one of the towers, and a picture of a plane flying, but it was low (well, the skyline took up the whole card, so the plane couldn't be above the buildings anyway), and heading towards the sun on the building (maybe the other building?)... but you couldn't tell from the perspective exactly that it depicted a plane crash into the building... it looked like a happy sort of postcard with all the normal stuff, a city destination, a sun, and a plane... after the event it would be hard to interpret it any other way... funny thing is, the card somehow got misplaced, and I've never been able to find it, or anything like it online... No doubt it was an illuminati, hidden in plain sight, foreshadowing kind of message. Yeah... so that's the world you live in... you have to deal with it... You really think our brains weren't designed for this? Evolution is still real... you can't expect millions of years of evolution haven't tuned our minds well... schizophrenia isn't a disease... it's how some of our minds actually WORK... it's people with their third eye open, but not properly trained to deal with it... and I believe actively suppressed by certain powers... I don't know if psychiatric industry is a net positive or a harm... but it's largely a lie, either way. Carl Jung's collective consciousness is closer to reality than the isolated black box view modern psychiatry takes. Crowley and LeVay knew what's up. Robert Anton Winston too... A major point of his is that if you are artistic, but not scientific, you are only using half your mind... if you are scientific but not artistic, you are only using half your mind... true illuminati are always both scientific and artistic... psychic power is strongest with both sets of skills. Also, I don't believe in the supernatural, everything is within nature... I do believe in the paranormal... which is just rare natural stuff that science hasn't yet managed to study with rigour... Meteorites are the best example I have of this... at one point, they were simply fantasy stories from a scientific point of view... but not to anyone who witnessed one! No... they were just crazy! Rocks from the sky... LOL! Hope that helps! Oh, and do try to be positive... Sit in a park and observe your mind and your surroundings... how the two interact... for me, positive thoughts make the sun shine stronger... and negative thoughts are often followed fractions of a second later by clouds casting shadows... then I can reverse the effect... it doesn't work if you know where the clouds are in advance... it's a complicated interaction of thought, knowledge and the physical world... and all these things work in the margin of error... (turing has maths for this stuff, for when they could use information from Bletchly Park, but within the margins, so that the Germans wouldn't know the enigma machine was cracked --- it's similar to that)... so some things are much harder to demonstrate to others, but easy to experience yourself. As thou harm none, Do as thou wilt be the whole of the law, Love is the law, Love under will. Try not to go crazy. Can you control what you hear, what you see? Of course not... they are senses... you hear and see what is in your environment... exactly the same thing. The medicine is like something that makes you deaf or blind... so that you don't have to deal with what you hear and see... but you close yourself off to part of reality. Most people do it by not thinking very deeply, watching a lot of TV or sports, worrying about work or money... drinking every night... stuff like that... For the few sheep that don't follow that route... we have psychiatry and medication. Anyway, everyone's free to follow their own path, I'd be a hypocrite to suggest otherwise... but, you know... something to think about. To me, it would seem you caught a glimpse of the future 9/11 event... not that there was anything you could do about it... and unfortunately you let it disturb you... which is difficult, because you didn't have enough information to exactly say what it was you experienced, and that's the way it is... often things don't make sense until it's too late... but it was an echo from the future. Just don't take the psychic stuff too seriously... you know the difference anyway, between physical reality and 'delusions'... that's the way I stumble along. Well... I got a nice little proof of the non-existence of (capital G) God... I actually got a few... but in the case of their being a single, all powerful, supreme being, entity, of which their is no higher... it's pretty easy really. Imagine you meet God... how do you know there isn't a guy more powerful than him? Who would be A god to that guy? And if you met God's god... how do you know there isn't a god to him? God's god's god. etc... So, there can be extremely powerful beings, and there could be the universe's most powerful being, but there could always be a being more powerful than them... even if they didn't know about them, or believe in them and even if they didn't exist (like christians worshiping a non-existent god), they could logically exist... therefore, there is no God... just a hierarchy of powerful beings. Of course... Most any god could squish you like bug... so, like Xerces, they might demand you worship them as such... but you'd know they weren't really God... just a very powerful being. If there turns out to be an afterlife (though I doubt it), I won't be forgetting this one. Now... the guy you met doesn't sound like God to me... but some kind of angle... maybe even a satanic angle... they often are very nice beings, very helpful, kind and well meaning too... telepathic and psychic, instinctively or even just (and only) subconsciously aware of what you need at the time. They might even exude an aura of godliness... they may be gods amongst men... even a humble, loving, personal god for you at the right time... but they aren't God. (Yes, angle is the right word, not a typo). As for Neuroscience... it is correct as far as it goes... I also think maybe there are quantum effects the brain takes advantage of... photosynthesis relies on QM... So, there's already an example of evolution taking advantage of QM effects... maybe the brain does to... to allow non-local (in time and space) communication... and in ways we wouldn't be able to pick up with electromagnetism or other local field forces we are used to dealing with... which is why I think for psychic connection effects to work, you have to spend time with someone, in order to share entangled particles. See... this 'delusion' is a perfect example of what I'm talking about regarding psychic phenomena. Again, it has all the key elements that maximise psychic effects... shared common interest, strong emotional connections, strong emotional content... You loved your aunt (and uncle too... it may have come from either or both of them), and she you, she was in a form of distress, and probably called out to her friends and family for help or at least support... you were probably quite open to psychic energies at that time... possibly overwhelmed by them and what caused you to be hospitalised... and there you go, you picked up an image, maybe a direct image of exactly what was happening at the time... maybe an interpretation of her situation... maybe symbolic, like in a dream... maybe it was a past time recalled by your uncle at the time of her death, something he will miss, the times playing cards with her (people often dream and remember in the third person point of view), and relayed to you and others who could pick it up... certainly enough, that had you been available and open to the idea at the time, that you would have tried to get in physical contact with them. Yet, for some reason, you've been tricked into thinking it's because you are mentally ill! To me, I would take that as a pretty clear psychic event. Yes, hard to interpret, but if you'd trusted your gut instinct, it would have had exactly the desired effect... that you would have contacted your uncle in his time of need (or aunt, if she was still alive). For me, I worked out a long time ago... it's not the voices, or visions, or strange thoughts that make you crazy in this society... it's all down to how you react to them. If you never say a word to anyone about it, how can a psych diagnose you? They can't look into your head... and if they can... BAM! It's because it's reality, not delusion all along. For me, the next step was finding people and ways I could talk about it, without sounding crazy or getting locked up... hard problems hey? My favourite kind. Did you know that the brain is the trinity? We have three brains in one. Three types of brain that evolved in an order, each wrapping and integrating the other as the new 'technology' was created / discovered by evolution... The reptilian, the limbic and the neocortex? This is what it is to be illuminati... to make the subliminal, liminal. I think these things normally occur in the realm of the limbic system, it is the limbic systems (maybe even reptilian?) that communicate telepathically... the neocortex, the logical, rational, brain has a hard time interpreting them (we've been trained to function only at that level)... but we can learn! When you telepath at people, you are talking to their subconscious (if they aren't awake to it)... which is why many people aren't aware of it and its effects. Just some extra food for your thoughts. Here's a kind of psychic event I experienced... the night my girlfriend died... I was with our friends in the UK... but later I went to bed (might have been the day after... it was a long day for me and our friends), by myself (although a 21 year old friend of ours had offered to share the bed with me, I wasn't in the mood - though I'm sure she was truly upset and wanted comfort too --- she's got a kid now!)... but I was far from all my friends and family... that night, I distinctly heard (in my mind) my close friends singing a beautiful rendition of November Rain (it was November)... I could clearly hear it was their voices... a song she loved (and a powerful song of our generation)... the perfect song for the occasion... they would have been aware of her death through facebook... this is psychic telepathy... nothing provable... indistinguishable from my own mind as far as I can demonstrate... but remote human connections in a time of need. It's proof that there is no ultimate supreme being Not that there is no higher power... just that there isn't a single ultimate being in charge of everything... cause there's always the possibility of something more powerful than that... even if they aren't aware of it. It's not proof that there are no humans... but that no human can assume to be the most powerful entity. Logic, maths and science are real in all realms. Read a bit more carefully... there could still be a god for which we are mere ants or less in comparison... but he better watch his fucking ass, cause he may just be an ant to his god... maybe he's gonna get his ass stomped for judging humans... the cunting judgemental piece of shit. No, you're quite wrong... Logic, maths and science exist quite independently of any substrate universe they exist within. The laws of physics may have been different at different times... they can change in different universes or realms... but logic and math never change... It all begins with the empty set.. and the integers from sets of empty sets and so on... no change in any realm can alter these facts... The scientific method does not change in any universe either... it is a method... the outcomes and results of scientific investigations could be very different in different universes... but the method would hold fast. And the logic here is quite simple... there is no ultimate supreme being that can't have a more ultimate supreme being... which is a contradiction of the meaning of ultimate supreme being... therefore... there can be no ultimate supreme being... you can meet God in the afterlife... look him in the eye... and no matter what he bribes or threatens you with... you can say... fuck off... cause maybe your god is gonna fuck you in the ass one day too! This has nothing to do with whether or not we are in a matrix or otherwise... this logic holds beyond this universe... it is more immutable than god itself. Trane denies math... Mathematical truths are the same in every universe... and what I mean by that is... that you can build the same mathematical system in any simulation you could build... even Conway's game of life... anywhere there is the slightest order... They are independent of physics and physical reality... I'm sure this has been proven elsewhere. It's not just bullshit I'm pulling from my ass. If you're a Christian, you might have problems with what I say... but then Christians are kind of brainwashed not to think... so there's that. Your statement is more of simplistic Tranian reality denial than anything I've stated. Seeing as you're resorting to ad homs anyway. My view is actually the mainstream view of mathematics. Starting with Plato... and still holding in the modern era. The way I see it is... Either you have to dispute my logic, or otherwise, what is your point exactly? Is my logic wrong somehow? Is there a flaw? If the logic itself is correct... then you posit a reality in which logic doesn't hold... that True equals False in such a reality... and if there is no logic, there is nothing... the reality itself would be inconsistent at every point. I mean, you could argue with Plato, or Godel, or Russel on these points... and they'd all look at you cross eyed. Can you find any mathematical source to contradict these statements? You could go to the Philosophy of Mathematics on Wikipedia and start learning and try to look for a weak point in my argument if you actually thought you could find one. Yes... I am certain that True = True and False = False... sorry if that seems crazy to you. Fuck you K5 formatting for creating an inconsistent reality just as I'm cumming. I mean... I'd actually LOVE it... if ANYONE could point out a flaw... I'm not so certain as to not accept there COULD be an argument against what I'm saying... just that I haven't seen one yet... I haven't come up with one either... And I don't mean "There is more in heaven and earth... blah blah blah..." that's just saying shut up, don't think... there's a God... cause we say so... that's not logical at all. In fact... the reverse applies... if you believe in God... that implies the opposite... that reality is far more complicated than that. Here's another way of looking at the problem... let's say the universe is a simulation... it's unprovable actually that it isn't... So... even if there was a 'God' of this simulation... even God couldn't 'know' that he wasn't just part of that simulation. And the problem with simulation argument is... it's turtles all the way up! This is just an inescapable part of any reality where anything could possibly be meaningful. In the end... no matter how you dice it (and if you can find a way around it, please let me know!) any all powerful, all knowing entity still can't know that it is the end of the chain of all powerful, all knowing entities... which is a contradiction. Again, I'm not saying there isn't a god... just that there are strict limits to any such entity. My point is that maths exists very independently of the laws of physics... Maths describes physics... but maths can describe any physics... Physics are mutable... but mathematics itself is not. F = ma doesn't necessarily, a priori, apply... but e^(i*pi) + 1 always equals zero. You can't create a simulation where that isn't the case. Why should a cowardly mental defective such as yourself have anything to say about what reasonable adults do with their own minds and bodies? You've already abdicated your responsibility by claiming to be such, you should really just be very clear that you have no right to tell us adults what we can and can't do, up to the point we directly affect you... and no, taking drugs doesn't affect you, even if you think it increases our chances of affecting you, not until we actually affect you do you have any rights whatsoever. I hear mentally ill people have broken the law once or twice in the past too... Maybe anyone with a mental illness should be locked up, for the safety of our women and children! Don't you see how fucking stupid that sounds? Of course there are idiots who take drugs and harm people... It's not that they take drugs and become idiots who harm people, it's that they are fucking idiots who would harm people who happen to take drugs. I've taken almost every single fucking substance you could name, and never hurt anyone... yes, I am frequently in public too... I like to talk and interact with people too... but you would have me put in prison because I prefer a different mental point of view, rather than sitting at home with my fat ugly whining wife watching television? You're setting yourself up as an enemy of people who don't harm others... that makes you a deserving target. Right... in fact... the majority of drug users I know are not violent in any way whatsoever... There are gangs that have to be violent... that's what you get when you hand an entire industry (the largest behind military, btw) over to criminals... which is due to the law, not the drugs. and there are many violent sociopaths, who happen to take drugs too... cause they are the type who don't give a shit... so drugs goes along with that... but the causation is not drugs to violence. Yeah... If you support prohibition, then you support locking people like me away for causing no harm... and if you threaten me like that... yeah, I think you deserve having your brains smashed out... this is called self defence... and I'd be that way even if I didn't take drugs... when you're forced into a war, you have to fight. In fact, you say you were bullied... but actually you are being a bully to drug users because your bullies were drug users... so, that's a lie. Right... so you're one of the mentally ill who isn't violent... and I'm one of the drug users who isn't violent... so if you think drug users should be locked up, then it would be just as fair as saying you should be locked up for being mentally ill... see the correlation not causation thing going on here? I don't want a special exception because I'm in control and take drugs... I want the rule of law to hold, that those who harm others get locked up, and anything else we do is our own choice... if you take drugs or not is irrelevant. No... I know you don't physically beat drug users However, if you supported locking up drug users with the force of the state... I actually see that as worse... and though I never actually beat anyone up... I do get very angry with prohibitionists of all sorts. I can see how your experiences would colour your views... and I'm glad to see you look beyond that. Also... I'm a drug user... I'm addicted to some drugs... mostly nicotine and caffeine.. much lesser extent weed... though I can go months without it... so not as addicted as I am to say coffee... but I'd be just as upset if you tried to send me for treatment I don't want. I think only in the case of breaking other laws, but because of drug (alcohol too) use, should you be forced into treatment. It would be just plain stupid if I had to go to treatment cause I got caught with a point of meth considering it would be like the second time in a year I use it. So, really, drugs should be legalised for recreational purposes... and treatment for those who either want it, or have broken other laws (and a judge ruled it was) because of their drug usage. Most importantly though is to disempower those machine gun wielding, gang running maniacs. What about the straight edge gangs Who attack people who drink or do drugs? It's not whether or not you take drugs, it's not what music you fucking listen too (to draw a parallel cause that shit's been thrown around before too)... it's WHAT YOU FUCKING DO TO OTHERS. I can't believe you are so fucking stupid as to not realise that. I don't care that that moron got himself killed... he was a fucking moron who deserved it... maybe if he wasn't on drugs he would have successfully killed that police officer... stop blaming the drugs, and blame the violent actions... that's all that count in the end. You have no idea how much harm the prohibition laws have on the poor and vulnerable... all the girls I know are on hard drugs... they've lived lives you would never have survived... and the drugs help them get through... but the prohibition means they are beholden to gangs and criminals.. and they have to pay exorbitant prices... which means they have to do things they otherwise would never have to do... society forces them into a corner... and no good ever comes from shit like that. Right... is this getting through to you at all? Whether you take drugs or if you are completely against drugs, it should make not a single bit of difference to your freedoms! If you harm others or you don't harm others should make all the difference. I can tell you straight up, right now... legalise drugs, and these girls lives would be a HELL of a lot easier... you may have been through a lot... but I still don't think it could compare. Seriously, read my top level comment in this diary It's all spelled out there... very plainly... it's all that is needed... seriously. Read Jon Stuart Mill... it's not that long a read... if you got a spare few hours, you could read it in a night or two... He pretty much says the same thing, but didn't have economics to back it up... though he reasons to the same conclusions very convincingly. The Free Market approach on this is pretty clear You should tax the drugs to cover the negative externalities associated with drug use (increased likelihood of theft, violence or neglect say), plus an amount to cover the cost of enforcement of untaxed, unregulated and illegal sales, plus an amount to cover the costs (at least a subsidy) of rehabilitation for those who voluntarily choose it, or are ordered to after committing a crime (not just for taking drugs, but actual crime, such as violence or theft, that is related to their drug use). (no externality correction). There should be plenty of health warnings, and information on where to get help for addiction on the packaging. (perfect information correction). There does exist an argument that you could tax the drugs again because what you get out of the drug isn't as much as you think you'll get out of the drug... but I find this argument specious. (maybe a perfect information correction). Safe supervised shooting galleries should exist for those who chose to use them. (no corrections needed... just as a bar is a 'safe place' to drink - though providing one could be a condition of sale). Sales should be regulated, to whom they can be sold, when and where they can be sold, how they can advertise, purity and labelling. (really an extension of externality and information corrections). Finally... if some drugs could be used on others without their consent, say rohypnol as a date rape drug, then an ID and signature may be required as part of purchasing the drug to aid law enforcement when drugs are misused like that. That pretty much sums it up, for everything from pot to crack. Though every drug is different, so the details of the above would be different, but the same framework would still apply. Now, if you don't like maths and don't want to get into free market economics theory, a very good little essay by a guy called Jon Stuart Mill called On Liberty, also addresses this topic... it's available online for free, and I strongly recommend reading it if you have any doubts that adults should be allowed to make their own decisions for themselves, and especially on what the legitimate limits of society should be regarding what adults chose to do... upon reading this, you will realise we are not yet free. where win = lose, amirite? $ I'm guessing you never actually studied maths... For one, the sqrt function is defined as the positive root of x... So, you're entire argument falls apart. If the sqrt function returned both positive and negative (which it doesn't), we wouldn't have to write +/- (plus OR minus) in our equations. This argument is so retarded, it's likely to only impress someone doing first year high school maths. Actual mathematicians laugh at your level of understanding... so, they were right (again) to ban you from irc on the basis that you are quite a bit retarded. but but but... mathematicians have to rely on definitions to win their arguments... how is that fair? Clearly they're just being mean! Please... Trane's last math class was probably high school algebra or something similar... his mathematical theories pretty much end there... he doesn't understand maths as a logical symbolic system, where different fields can be created with different operators defined on them... rather it is a set of rules that can be clearly shown to be incorrect because sqrt(x) = -sqrt(x). QED. Apparently that Indian Documentary About Gang Rape has been well Received With 9 out of 10 people saying they really enjoyed it... Yep. Funny... but a bit unfair I think... Everything I talk about is accessible to anyone with the time to do a couple of intro to micro econ courses... Someone needs to rape some sense into these feminists. You say you can't run out of money, because they can print as much as they like... right... so there's no problem with budgets etc... but then you want to index it... that puts a limit on the amount you can spend on the indexed currency no? So, then they can't spend as much as they like on the indexed currency... they would necessarily be limited... But probably only if you believed in crazy ideas like mathematics. Nobody but you wants that Your plan: Step 1: Basic Income, Infinite (but indexed) Money and Challenges. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Holodeck and infinite wealth and love and peace and understanding. No. Yes... this is exactly what the free market does $ I don't know who you're talking about but both micro professors showed that marginal cost GOES TO zero... once it's at zero, yeah, it's pretty uninteresting. No.... it doesn't mean that at all... I think maybe you've had too much crack and maths is just a bit beyond you... so, good luck with whatever you were thinking. On one hand we are talking marginal benefit or increase in utility from each additional unit, and on the other the marginal costs of production... Marginal benefits going down isn't by defnition marginal cost going up... that's just you being a crackhead mate. You aren't going to get these concepts if you take each piece out of context just so you can try and find flaw with everything... you keep using terms incorrectly and just being really stupid... I can't really help you. Not to ruin the joke or anything... but I'm pretty sure even meth has a decreasing marginal utility... I know there was a study where heroin addicts were given as much heroin as they wanted, and their use reached a plateau... so it's not like being addicted to drugs means you would consume an infinite amount of them... that's more of a prohibitionist myth... you have your cigarettes or your heroin, and that satiates you... I don't have as much experience with meth or have any studies to back it up, but pretty sure given an infinite supply of meth you're usage rate would plateau and there'd be a point beyond which you wouldn't want any more of. Way to attack the subject matter... Good thing you're interested in deep truths, and not say, fickle fashion or easy insults or anything like that. It really isn't interesting though... Because it means anyone can have any amount of it whenever they want... what's to worry about? Why should anyone care once something is in that state? If you want it, have it, no complaints... Getting TO that state, is interesting... and that's what economics is concerned with. From an economics point of view, it's the least interesting thing imaginable... because it's the goal we were seeking all along. That's his utility you lazy piece of shit... When things cost nothing... econ is solved... that's why it's uninteresting... Your so stupid, you think there would be problems left to solve. You're so fucking stupid... really... You have an ordered set of preferences... if you don't, you don't give a shit what happens to you... if you do... you have a utility function. We want everyone to maximise their own utility... in other words... the economists wet dream is that everyone gets to do whatever the fuck they want, and not harm others... and somehow this is the cause of poverty... Even though poverty existed for a LONG time before the free market model was created... and a lot of poverty has gone away thanks to it... not to mention that it was responsible for the ending of slavery. And, we don't create scarcity, we recognise it... you're the one so upset about scarcity you want free money... something you can't even EAT!! It's not the free market that wants to prohibit drugs... but you're against the free market... so you're on the side of the prohibitionists... they're the ones that think they can define your utility for you... which means no drugs, cause drugs are bad... okay? I got plenty of ho's left yet. No it's not... you're just being very retarded... remember that by convention we split costs and benefits up for the purposes of analysis... marginal costs are on the cost side... marginal benefits... well, I'm sure you can figure out the rest. They are different things retard... Though related. No, they're not... They are different fucking things... Educate yourself or STFU. You see... you're like a kid who's just learnt to count... you look at a calculus course... and start attacking it at every opportunity. Stupid lying calculus teachers... x isn't a number... fucking liars... The things you criticise are literally your own ignorance.. that doesn't make you smart, it makes you an idiot... if you knew the material... maybe then you would have something interesting to say (but I doubt it). No... I still see you are retarded... Why fight against how we define things... seems a very weak angle of attack. I assume you just trolling cause you're a crack head. You mom says Hi! Hey... congrats... That's the kind of optimisations I'm talking about... yeah! You're down to program startup times... I'd still keep getting all the functionality you want into your program first... then getting it down to these types of times everywhere... then you can still run the profiler against it and see if you can't get it down to subsecond... then and only then, consider reimplementing it in C/C++. That's where profiling comes in... You only rewrite the 10% that takes up 80% of your execution time. log outta k5 dumb shit or would you have to add another rule to parse that too? Just cause you got a stupid syntax doesn't make it natural language. Sounds really practical $ this is a programmer-defined syntax $ But that is still a syntax... and cumbersome $ Trane has decided to throw out all of human knowledge on the basis that he thinks somewhere in there there might be a mistake. And he's just learnt about gossip on some course I think... cause he keeps repeating it. I'm just going to assume that you wrote that because you didn't want to. No, it's not as simple as that... > Isn't it equivalent to just saying "if you make a choice when presented with more than one option, you have a utility function"? Yeah, every (rational) decision making agent has utility function... (it really does apply from slugs to ai)... furthermore, there exists a utility function that is continuous (and bounded, though not sure this is used much in econ) in the reals... but can you prove it? Because first you have to prove such a function exists (under appropriate axioms) before you can use its properties in other proofs... otherwise you accept it axiomatically... and clearly people don't... and also it becomes useful in other areas like ai, where you might model an agent's utility directly. So, instead of accepting that there exists a utility function, all you have to accept is an ordered set of preferences... and if you accept you do, then we can prove the existence of a utility function, which we know is differentiable, and is at a maximum (which we observe through your decisions) at either du=0 or at your resource constraints with du>0... so we can integrate and know your utility by your actions.... UP TO the unknown constant of integration... which is why we can't directly compare different people's utility (supposedly)... but we CAN compare the effects of changes to utility... say, by seeing for example, how much you change your preference from one thing to another depending on an additional reward. So most of economics occurs on the margins... literally the derivatives of utility, price, quantity, etc... Also why the full name is neoclassical marginalist welfare economics... where welfare is net social utility. So If you're not rational, you don't have an ordered set of preferences, it's one way to not have a utility function. My point is that it's not an empty statement at all... it's pretty important. Also, now that we know a utility function exists, and that it can take the form of something like say, a sigmoid, then in some instances we can find one... which means, given an actor in a state that makes decision from a set of options... we know we can find a utility function for each of those options such that taking the maximum will make the same decisions as that actor... so, we can use something like a universal function approximator like a deep neural network to learn that function... in training we decrease the assumed utility on the choices the model would make, and increase the utility on the choice the actor takes... then it will learn to model that actor's decision making process... irrespective of the actual decision making processes involved... which is why we don't make any assumptions about people thinking in terms of utility. I've been busy fucking more whores... and lining up some others... So, I haven't had much time for k5... sorry. I've been doing a lot of fucking $ You'd be interested in this... I lost madam bigs because I did a favour for her... instead of psychologically getting her to supply me with drugs (which she had been doing), I decided to get some for me and split the leftover with her... This broke several policies I have with women, and the result was predictable. What can you tell a ho with two black eyes? Nothing you haven't told her twice already. Yeah... there's truth in this... a few of these women keep going back to guys that hit them... one can only assume that's their utility maximising behaviour... I ain't gonna do that, but the principle remains... treat em mean, keep em keen. I see no contradiction... or paradox... It's because your axioms are wrong. Women hate guys that are nice to them. Love and hate are the wrong words... Rather they are sexually repulsed by providers and sexually attracted to users. Though they may 'love' providers and 'hate' the users... the above is generally true. You can't judge by what they say, only what they do. Utility is good for analysing any decision making agent... even if we know they don't use utility in their decision making agent... it enables us to build a model of them. Actions follow desires... and if a person isn't following their desires... fuck em... what have we got to lose assuming they do? What sort of retard would not follow their desires... and if they are too stupid to not follow their desires, that's because that is their desire... who am I to change them? To not accept utility is to believe other people know what is better for you than you... and in your case, you may be right. Sure http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/~jrvarma/papers/WP819.pdf https://files.nyu.edu/eo1/public/Book-PDF/CHAPTER%209%20(Utility).pdf All I need to show for the rest of the theorems is that a utility function EXISTS... not to reconstruct any specific individual's utility function... we NEVER do this in economics... we assume that is generally unknowable. If it was knowable, we could make your decisions for you. There are many cases of this type of logic in mathematics... Godel didn't have to write out the entirety of mathematics to prove that there were unprovable truths within it... He didn't even have to find one... he just showed that such a thing exists. Why? Is it because you assume I should have a math function for your particular utility function? I never claimed to have one... I just claimed that it exists... And under the axioms, I provided you with the maths that it does. So, trane, would you prefer a basic income, or would you prefer to have your balls slowly squashed flat in a vice grip? If you would prefer one to the other, you have an ordered set of preferences... which we can map down to a single real number... a utility function. That's all we need to do... you are adding extra constraints on the problem that I never claimed. Literally you've created a strawman. So, you don't care for a basic income then? And you don't mind your balls being destroyed with vice grips and a blow torch? You don't care either way? You don't mind if we rape you and dump your body in pieces into a river? You don't care if we let you live free or in a cage? I mean... you got no preferences either way, right? Cause that's the only other logical outcome to not having a utility function. Ergo, you fail to understand... we don't have to $ Correct... I can't show you your utility function but if you have preferences, you have one. That's all that's required. Got maths? Didn't think so $ Also, if you wanted to see how we use utility rather than assuming we actually have to know the particular function for the proofs we obtain, then you should have completed the econ course. You claim gossip, but you are responsible for your own ignorance. No... I can take you to a course... but I can't make you think. I just linked you the maths retard $ It's quite an involved proof... I just linked it for you... what more could you want? In maths, it's very common for something to be proven to exist, without actually being able to show it. Godel didn't find any unprovable true statements, he just showed they exist. This idea that you should be able to know other people's utility function goes against free market economics pretty strongly... we wouldn't need free markets if we knew people's utility functions. No it's not $ No they're not... The lack of a closed form solution does not mean you cannot prove the truth of the statement... It means there exists statements that are True, but that cannot be proven so. You actually proved it through another method which is still a mathematical proof. Something like Riemann Hypothesis would be a better candidate... it appears to hold, but no one has been able to prove it... If you can prove it's unprovable one way or the other, it becomes a member of the Godel's unprovable statements... but that hasn't happened yet... If someone proves it one way or the other, then it's just another mathematical proof. No, the whole point of Godel's theorem was that some statements are either true or false, but cannot be proven so... The above example is just basic contradiction... which he said is an alternative solution... you can either have a logically consistent, but incomplete mathematical set (with unprovable true statements), or you can have a complete mathematical set, but it will have contradictions (like the above statement). It seems so weird to me, that people who know nothing of economics are the first to claim it is wrong. Play and fun are just high utility activities... why anyone would think otherwise I can only put down to their fundamental ignorance. Hold on... if he's a professor He knows that something with high utility is just the things you most want to do... So, play and fun must be high utility activities... otherwise, we wouldn't do it. There's absolutely no contradiction there... not at the micro-economics level... Utility is the thing you do because it's what you want to do... the problem is normally at the macro-economics level where everyone assumes having a job is the bestest thing ever... rather than sitting at home, smoking meth and having your dick sucked... which, of course, is the absolute peak of economic activity (seriously). That program was no where near complete enough to demonstrate the effects of inflation... so, I don't know what you're talking about there... I gave up on it cause you weren't interested in it. Actually... I'd say he's well aware of this fact.. but is putting it terms mere humans like you could readily grasp... he knows the lay reader thinks economics means hard work and money, so he's just putting it in terms you could understand. Utility really does describe whatever the hell it is you want to do... No exceptions... ever. If you are doing multiple mutually exlcusive things at once... then you must be some sort of quantum powered holographic cyborg from the future... if you are doing multiple non-exclusive things at once, then that is because your 'bundle' of activities has the highest utility for you (within your resource constraints). You complain about your golf course lifestyle... but you actually prefer it over all other available options... how do I know this? Because you haven't taken all those other available options... Your hoity toity golf cock sucking lifestyle is you REVEALED PREFERENCE... It's what you want baby, and you know it. And there we go... utility does explain it, no contradictions necessary... it's the simplest explanation that fully explains the observations... Occam says I'm right, you're an idiot. Play is UTILITY though... and then you don't have to come up with any more epicycles. It's as simple as that. If you are playing, it's the highest utility activity you can be doing at that point... if you are fucking, it's the highest utility activity you can be doing at that point... if you are smoking a bowl, it's the highest utility activity you can be doing at that point... if you are living on a golf course... if you are going to collect your welfare check... if you are working down a coal mine... it all comes down to that being the highest utility activity you can be doing at that point. Only if you keep thinking that utility means making the most money per second will you find yourself trying to prove that -2 = +2 just because the sqrt function maps to both positive and negative to understand it... you have to rid yourself of that notion or else you'll just be arguing a strawman. Unpleasant means disutility (negative utility) And you don't change it, because it's not the highest utility to you. There's absolutely nothing contradictory about it... no matter what you do, or try and change it, what you actually do reveals your preference as that being what you consider to be the highest utility you can obtain at that point - even though you don't think in terms of utility... your actions reveal your real preferences at the time you decide to take them. Seems reasonable... except that there's a mathematical proof that any decision making agent can be black box analysed in terms of utility. There's a proof of existence of a utility function. Okay... if you're a math denier... then we're finished. No amount of logic could persuade you of anything. By definition. $ No... mathematics is true in all realms $ Your programs are all subsets of Turing Machines you non-enforcement of noncontradiction is by necessity mathematically defined. You have't broken out of the realm of mathematics, and you can't on a finite state machine, because we can mathematically define each state and all transitions. This is where your fundamentally flawed... maths is never wrong, potentially axioms are, but never the math itself unless it is actually a mistake in the math, but otherwise it's true. If you don't believe the proof, you really have to point out either an actual mistake in the proof or otherwise your only other points of attack are at axioms. If you cannot accept that, you really have no hope in any sphere of life requiring rational thought. So you're saying Godel is wrong then? $ You are very ignorant of what maths is too... You can have a mathematical system with a number set where -X = X... that's absolutely fine in mathematics, it simply has different properties to say the integer number set Z. Any program you write on a turing machine is by necessity a finite state machine... this is inescapable, and no emergent behaviour will solve this. To make your halting problem argument means you literally disagree with Godel... which makes you entire argument false... I guess you allowing contradictions in your logic helps you with the fact that everything you think, say and do is wrong. That's not solving the halting program... Rather, you have to write a program that says whether a given program will halt or not, and if you give me that I will be able to find a program for it to analyse that causes your program to loop forever or otherwise give the wrong answer. You constantly argue about things when you don't even have the right definitions... is it upset you to be such a loser? What? Specifically you failed to understand the halting problem. The failure is on you failfuck. No I can't... why would I? It has nothing to do with the halting problem. You're not proving the halting problem false... What you propose has NOTHING TO DO WITH the halting problem. This is why you couldn't get past dead greeks... and a few thousand years of knowledge looks at your stupidity and laughs. You have to provide the halting decider program idiot... a failure is you. No, I didn't claim that either... I mean... go tell me if a particular version of the linux kernel will halt or not... I doubt you could prove it one way or the other. Linux Kernel is a program... get back to me with the results and proof of your analysis. He was maximising his utility within his resource constraints. I'd say dying is a pretty good example of resource constraints, unless it's voluntary, in which case it's the course of action with the highest utility to you. Yes... everything is utility... your getting it $ No, it's not circular... it's just too subtle for you. Your utility is currently in denying it. Dude... just because you can't math... doesn't make it circular. All we need to assume is there are some things you'd rather do, and some things you'd rather not do... the rest follows from that. Otherwise, why the fuck you whine all the time? Also, there's nothing to say that other people's utility can't fuck with your own... obviously... if someone's maximum utility is locking you up in a cage and beating you with a stick and it's within their resource constraints, then that is what they will do, but it will have large negative externality effects on your utility. In economic terms, markets allow this, but free markets do not. No, I only believe in it after looking at the maths... and not being able to find any flaws in either the proof or its axioms. Also from observation and with my experience with AI agents. We never said we could see what your desires are just that we know you have them... we can see what you specifically desire when act, but only at that point. None of the maths relies on knowing your utility function... simply knowing that you have one is enough. Maths is hard, eh? There's no backpeddling, because I never claimed otherwise... We can see what your maximum utility (within resource constraints) was at the point of action... It's enough to know you have a utility function. Not that we have to reconstruct your general utility function. We never need to reconstruct anyone's utility function in economics... in fact, it's also an axiom that we don't know your particular utility function... otherwise price setting could be done centrally. No... I have maths that I studied and can't yet fault... And haven't yet found anyone with enough intelligence to fault it... though I'd ACTUALLY REALLY LIKE TO FIND FAULT WITH THE LOGIC!!! That's what scientists actually do. You don't offer to find fault with the logic, because you just skip the logic and assume straight out that it must be wrong... I dunno... cause butthurt maybe? In either case... it's not science what you are doing, is just retarded... you just another brain dead junkie like my last whore. The proofs don't rely on knowing the actual function... only on particular properties of the function. You never did any maths at uni, did you? An unknowable function, is still a function... Is this too much for crack heads? I'm confused... did they steal your stuff or did the cops manage to bust them? Shit... I don't even know what your saying... How the hell do you expect an AI to? God -- I can't handle Kermit The Frog Dissing Stephen Hawking. I suffered through nearly 4 mins... is that some kind of record? I can't understand how it can work or why they would want it... The blockchain needs incentives to work... the mining reward does this for bitcoin... and it's a decentralised system that removes the need for trust... but these banks are going to want a trust based model, defeating the whole point of having a blockchain... especially as they are going to limit who has access to it. A centralised approach is more efficient (in terms of computing resources) to accomplish their goals, which is pretty much what they have already. So, maybe there's a use case I haven't considered yet, but I really don't see this working for anyone... I think it's a dead idea but those who want to sell it haven't realised yet. Once again, you are complaining that a problem is due to the free market when the free market would actually allow it. You blame the solution as the problem because of your ignorance. Well, if people weren't so stupid, ignorant and stubborn and stopped blaming the free market as the being the source of their problems rather than the source of their solutions, maybe we could... It seems most people like to be their own worst enemies though... and if they argue in favour of their own suffering, I don't see why I should give a shit. Yep... Edison violated the Free Market principles and probably paid a greater cost in total than he profited from being an ass and operating outside the free market. As the econ professor pointed out, everytime the market fails, one of the four assumptions has been violated, every time on of the four assumptions is violated, the market fails. No, the model does really do what it says it does and it applies to it's domain which is HUMAN CHOICES... so, it clearly doesn't apply to everything, only that small niche... When I say the market fails that's easy to see and predict, it fails because it isn't the free market, because one of the four assumptions of the free market must have been violated! Edison wasn't a 'dick', he was just a self serving utility maximising economic agent... and just as economics predicts, if he thought he could get away with something for his own benefit - even if it meant breaking out of the free market by lying and not paying up. Thermodynamics doesn't have much to do with it, but economics clearly does, and it does tell us something very useful --- don't trust people, they might not respect the free market --- nail them down to a contract first if large sums are involved... cause soon as it's in their benefit (if they are not principled people - though this too is just a form of utility), you can forget the free market, they will screw you. Furthermore, we know the market rewards that behaviour... cause utility! Which is why operating within the free market would be called enlightened self interest, rather than selfishness above all. It would have excluded what edison did to tesla (note I think hiring smart people and driving them hard, and freely trading a wage with them for their intellectual property is perfectly fine free market behaviour), but it would have also excluded what tesla tried to do to J.P. Morgan over the wardenclyffe tower... and in both these cases, probably everyone ended up worse off than if they had have all been men of principle and operated in the free market. No, in a free market you are insulated from other people's bullshit and you wouldn't be involved in any transaction you didn't want to be involved in... see... the free market delivers exactly what you want... alas, the real world is not a free market, and you've been brainwashed to blame the solution rather than the problem. Everywhere you are outfoxed or suffer from loopholes or bad regulation, in each case, you suffer from not being in a free market. Right, the free market gives you that option. You never get involved in any transaction you don't want to be involved in... If you don't want to exchange... No one can force you... You would be free to wait only for gifts... Of course, if you don't want to be involved in exchange you have zero need for money either. Your actions suggest otherwise though. Right... The Market needs regulation to make it Free! You've been lied to and swallowed the lie if you ever believed anything else! Furthermore the Free Market tells Us exactly what regulation and lie. If you don't fully understand a contract its not free because you violate the perfect information assumption... You don't know what you're getting out of the transaction... Also outright fraud, where the 'contract' is ruse. s/and lie/and why/ $ Efficient means relative to the free market It is the 'perfect' market and informs us in how to regulate the real market which differs from this state in those specific ways. Fraud is a violation of the Free Market assumption that all parties have full knowledge of what they are getting out of each transaction. So again, you complain that the problem is the free market, but actually the problem is it NOT being the free market and the solution would be the free market instead. Of course, most people are scum and don't behave according to the free market when there is their own welfare on the line... tesla should have really nailed this down with a contract as proof so edison couldn't weasel his way out of it, but then tesla was quite naive and easily duped it seems. Secrecy is fine... Perfect information means only knowing what you are getting out of the transaction... These can be done in secret because it doesn't affect others... It isn't an externality... I don't need to know about your deals at all. As long as before you commit to a transaction you know exactly what you are getting out of it, then you have PERFECT INFORMATION... There is nothing in the free market that says deals have to be public or prepared or conducted in public or anything... secrecy is fine... there's no contradiction with doing your business in private and the free market, that's my point. If they conceal, you don't know what you get... So, it's not the Free Market. If they don't conceal, you know what you get, it is the Free Market. If they know exactly what they are getting out of it, then that is the free market and the optimum, and everyone should be completely happy and everything is fucking perfect. If they conceal something relevant, then not all parties know what they are getting out of the transaction, so it is NOT free market, and someone is getting less* than they wanted and people get pissed off and feel ripped off and everything is shit because that wasn't a free market trade... it was just market trade and someone should get sued or go to prison or have their heads removed and entrails pulled out slowly through their ass with a red hot poker. So, free market trade, you know what you're getting... can be done in secret... if you got sold lemons that you thought were limes, it's not a free market trade, and you should take them to court to correct the market and bring it closer to the free market that is desired. * : though also potentially more, and is still a problem from a theoretical pov for other reasons, but not as much. Funny thing is, you didn't hide anything from your customers.... they got exactly what they thought they would get out of the transaction. You hadn't actually declared bankruptcy, you never had to turn any machines off, you just lost customers on your own fear or expectation of bankruptcy that never materialised. All customers know that a company can go bankrupt... and even if you did, I imagine there would have been a grace period for customers to move their stuff... maybe this is something you should put into your contracts. Otherwise, sounds like you just scared off some otherwise happy customers. That's not like selling them on 100TB of disk space but actually that was shared and they were quota'd down to 2GB each... that would be a violation of the free market. Yeah... see my other comment... It's quite likely your customers weren't aware of the risks when they signed up, you concealed material facts, you operated unethically and outside of the free market. You may have saved your business, but you did it not at your own cost, but by risking other people's utility. You aren't a free market businessman, just someone who does what it takes to make money... your a pirate, a looter, a scalper, a theif, a fraudster and you a scum. You should really be corrected in a court of law. If you don't get it yet... I don't agree with any business people that anything you do to make a profit is ethical. You and greengrass are putting me in the former category when I am strongly against it, all due to your ignorance of what the free market actually is. And I hope you are starting to see the difference between the free market and do whatever the fuck you want for money... you can't lie to your customers... the fact that everyone you told left you should show that this information IS a part of their utility... you're effectively defrauding them and stealing from them. I also hope you start making your customers aware of the risks they face hosting with you... you actually ARE breaking the free market assumptions and are operating unethically. And the worst part of all this to me, is that you blame the free market rather than yourself (and others who behave similarly) for being selfish cunts who don't give a shit about the free market at all and are willing to make a buck at anyone else's expense if you think you can get away with it. For one... that fiduciary responsibility is not a law, it's bullshit that you probably got reading the cryptonomicon, and it was stated so seemingly factually that people actually believe it... ie, you could not be found liable for telling your customers the truth. In this case, you didn't end up causing actual harm to your customers... but if you did, you may have become PERSONALLY liable. I mean, you're literally risking other people's HARDWARE without letting them know the risks (even in fineprint)... you could be sued for that now that it's public information... and you are also risking unbacked up data from those you host for. No, clearly you've stepped outside the free market, which is morally and ethically wrong, and possibly leaves you and your company liable. Maybe it's time to run your actions past your lawyer for once. Yes, there are laws... but a director acting in what he considers the best interest of his company cannot get sued for lost profits expected by his shareholders, which is the cryptonomicon scenario and what you were describing... even if you thought it lose your shareholders money, if you think it is right for your company, no one can sue you... it's a ridiculous idea. Looting the company for your own personal gain will get you sued under fiduciary responsibility laws... but not deciding that your company is going to be totally open even if it costs you all your customers. I don't really give a fuck about the specifics... the point is if there's a chance your customers aren't going to get out their trade what you sold them on then you are breaking the perfect information assumption, you are not working in the free market, are ripping them off and oh look... what you said is wrong with the free market is exactly because it is not free market and that is exactly why what you are doing is wrong and why you suck shit and should die. If your company can go bankrupt and everyone's machines get shutdown without them getting a chance to get their precious data... AND YOU DID'T INFORM THEM... then you're clearly being an asshole because you are clearly violating the free market. Now that you've identified the problem was not the free market, but how you deviated from it, you can fix the deviation and stop blaming the free market... which again turned out to be the SOLUTION and not the fucking PROBLEM. If you thought you were going bankrupt but didn't tell you customers, and there was no bankruptcy policy in your contracts with your customers, and it was a real and imminent threat that would have material effects on them... then arguably you were concealing information from them and it wasn't a free market trade. The market is just people maximising their utility with the information they have in hand and what they predict their outcomes will be, and in all cases this model describes human behaviour and is universally applicable (in that domain). The Free market is the market restricted in certain ways so that the market produces only utility enhancing transactions... Often you have to create disutilities (fines, taxes, prison, etc) to those who operate outside of the free market so that market behaviours fall in line with the free market. It's no spherical cow... or rather... it's what we have to do to a cow to make it spherical. So, if you found yourself working outside the free market, you know something is wrong... correct it yourself, a bankruptcy policy as part of the contract would probably cover that, and you would know you weren't risking your customer's utility in order to gain your own utility. An ethical business should operate according to free market principles... though it's easy to see why not all businesses would... so often we have to force them through law. No... you clearly don't understand the statement The Free Market is THE MARKET that is RESTRICTED such that it produces only utility enhancing transactions. THE MARKET isn't FREE unless people behave in a certain way... which CAN (often) be achieved through government regulation... but government regulation doesn't automatically make THE MARKET FREE, unless it is specifically the right regulation... and we can know what regulations will produce a FREE MARKET and which ones will not. For example, without regulation, you could steal and defraud in the market, but by definition, that would not be the FREE market... with protection against theft and fraud, you can have a FREE market. Drug prohibition though goes AGAINST the free market for example... so regulation doesn't automatically make a market free and a market by default isn't free... a free market is a very specific thing... which once you manage to parse the sentence you mocked, you might be able to understand. ie Free Market is a subclass of Market... okay? $ It's utopian in the sense that we don't think we can achieve it exactly, but that the closer we are to it the fucking better and that we can approach it asymptotically if only we can get the politicians to enact the correct regulations that econs have known for more than a couple of hundred years. And drug prohibition is a non-free market because people cannot voluntarily enter into transactions because they are outlawed. Even if you want to be part of the transaction you are not allowed to... so by definition, because of prohibition, drug trade becomes part of the BLACK market (see, there are many types of markets, and free market is only one of them). A market is free if and only if it has the following properties (by definition!): - There are no externalities. Anyone affected by a trade is involved voluntarily. - Perfect information of what you are getting from the trade. - Perfect competition. There are many competing on supply and demand. - Actors are rational. There is an ordering of what each person desires. Any deviation from these is a deviation from the free market, and needs to be externally corrected, which is where regulation is needed. We also know how the deviations affect the free market, by how much, and how to correct for them. Regulation doesn't magically make a market free unless it enforces the above assumptions or otherwise corrects for them. Has this helped your understanding? You getting it yet? Jesus christ you're a fuckhead... Of COURSE we KNOW that the REAL WORLDTM doesn't work like the Free Market... That's the fucking point... We know that the most efficient perfect cow is spherical, but real cows aren't, so it shows us how to beat the cow into a sphere... Not that we think cows are fucking spheres but that we think they SHOULD be... Did you ever finish high school? Can you grasp this concept? It's almost opposite of the spherical cow as the basis of a model of reality... We've studied cows and gone over them with a fine tooth comb and finally we've PROVEN that spherical cows are the best cows we can have and HOW cows AREN'T FUCKING SPHERE'S and EXACTLY how they are NOT spheres and how to MAKE THEM into nearly exact spheres by applying the right pressure in the right places. It still won't be a perfect sphere... but it will be a much much more efficient cow. > > We also know how the deviations affect the free market > No, no we don't. Yes, Yes we do! For EVERY broken assumption, there is a REMEDY... You make your own ignorance into fact... but you've already proven how ignorant you are, yet it doesn't stop you making nonsense statements. It's not my job to educate you, but I'll reluctantly give you an example. OMG someone produces widgets with a factory that pollutes a river... That's a real fucking clear example of an externality... and the solution is to estimate the value to everyone else of the damage to the river and tax that amount to the factory. It really is as simple as that. Of course, proving this mathematically is a little bit more involved, but that's the result. > Almost all your business activities have some effects on other people. Let's imagine you're a businessman who thinks he knows what the free market is because he's a businessman but never actually studied the free market because he's lazy and proud of his ignorance, but goes all over the internet writing how stupid the free market is and I have to put up with that bullshit even though I don't want to... that's a negative externality too... So, we estimate the cost of that effect on other people... which is what... oh SWEET FUCK ALL... and tax the appropriate amount. Small deviations don't matter as much as large deviations... WHO WOULD HAVE FUCKING THUNK IT? Oh that's right... Adam Smith in 1776. By the way, centrally planned systems are markets too... it's another form of market, distinct from the Free Market, and they are called Command Markets... where the price is set by central command rather than between the individuals and it mainly suffers from the central command not being a good reflection of the sum of individual's utility, they can't estimate other's utilities well (unsurprisingly), and the difference invariably leads to over or under production resulting in shortages or large wasted unused stockpiles. If, after all the dealing, they had concealed relevant material facts from you about what you were actually getting out of the transaction, then that would be a violation of the free market... So, say Apple decided to buy Microsoft, and all the deals were in secret and apple agreed and they went ahead and bought MS for however many billion only to find out afterward they were only getting the division of microsoft that assemble the little clicker buttons in the microsoft mouse... that would be against the free market... Or say they hid something like the fact that MS knew that the EU was going to sue them for anticompetitive behaviour that would bankrupt them, but not revealed that information. But for their deal to be sorted out in secret, maybe so the public doesn't find out about the latest MS interface widget from their R&D department that is going to make huge changes... or even how they structure their taxes, say... as long as apple know they are getting all of MS amd what they are getting, then that's perfectly fine and free market and harms no-one. If only he got a basic income... There'd be no incentive to be greedy and fix teeth at all! Instead of dentists selfishly fixing teeth, they could spend all day masturbating to challenging VR porn. There is economic utility in picking up trash... You do it because it's a *good* thing... The very definition of economic utility... Jesus, you're such a fail fuck. Probably no one would want to be a dentist for the fun of it... at least there would be far less incentive... with no market for dentistry, you could do your own teeth I suppose... Or otherwise, why didn't you just find someone who does dentistry because it's fun? Sounds really good... When institutional buyers get into the bitcoin market, it's going to have to drive the price up, merely from the fact that they will want to be holding many millions of them. Increasing demand with a constant supply can only increase the price. If banks start using it for clearing, it's really going to go through the roof. Those things may well happen... but the first steps she appears to be taking is creating another way for institutional buyers to get in... so, the short term is first going to be a big price rise. Attn greengrass: What's better than the Free Market? You hate the free market, we shouldn't have it, it's the cause of all that is wrong with the world, but if you don't like the free market, it must be because you have a better alternative. So, why don't you explain? What system would be better than the free market? Another question, you can just answer true or false... The Free Market means people should be able to pollute as much as they want, without regulation, taxes or fines, as long as it is profitable for the polluter. This is to test your view what the free market is. Scarcity is the human instinct to want more no matter how much you actually have. You have infinite wants in a finite world. Look at you for example, you have clean drinking water, you are well fed, you have shelter, you are healthy, you have a FUCKING car, you don't seem to run out of gas for it, you travel where you like, you are on constant vacation, you never work... AND IT'S NOT FUCKING ENOUGH FOR YOU! You are the ultimate whinging spoiled brat, you have EVERYTHING ANY PERSON COULD POSSIBLY WANT IN LIFE... AND IT'S NOT ENOUGH. You want MORE AND MORE AND MORE. GREEDY FUCK. How many millions of basic income do you need before you would literally have every single desire of yours fulfilled and you wouldn't want for any more... there would be nothing you couldn't want for that you couldn't have... it's INFINITE. Bill Gates doesn't have enough money for what he wants, Elon Musk could do with a few more billion to advance his latest project... and you just won't shut up how fucking hard you have it... and you're a perfect example of an entitled spoiled western cunt! Scarcity is caused by your desires, not your need to survive... because YOU ALREADY HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO SURVIVE... and it's not enough... you demonstrate the very definition of scarcity. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need... In a sense, it is right to take from those who can afford it and give it to those who need it... Redistribution is compatible with the free market, though it isn't free trade in itself... the free market still works with redistribution, and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it. If we could fund a livable basic income, I'd be all for it, and I would remove minimum wage altogether... Minimum wage keeps people out of jobs, but a basic income would stimulate demand, which would create jobs... If walmart could double the number of employees, and pay them half as much, I'd be all for it in a world with basic income... it gives more people in total something to do, if they so desire it. Well... what I'm saying is that you can actually have a good mix... That the free trade with wealth redistribution IS the free market. If republicans say otherwise, it is because they are lying, and selling lemons as limes when they say welfare, free health, free education and anti-pollution or other anti-big business interests isn't the free market. If greengrasses and tranes want to believe them, then they are uneducated idiots. Yeah, I suppose... What I'm getting at, is that they are selling some version of the 'free market' that means no regulations... like, oh, you have a monopoly, we better not do anything cause the 'free market'... or, oh, you're pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, better not do anything cause the 'free market'... oh, you're lying to your customers about the services you provide, better not do anything cause the 'free market'... Which isn't the Free Market at all... cause the Free Market must be regulated to minimise these things... but then people like greengrass come along and are all like, screw the free market... without realising they are actually arguing against the very things that could fix the problems they are identifying. And then they're proud of their ignorance, and attack anyone who actually studies a little bit and has a basic understanding of the solutions. No, it's only the "best" solution from your point of view... it's a shame you never learnt to think economically... So, for sake of argument, I'm gonna say it could be a really good solution for the type of thing we would like to see... where the client selects the moderators in a sense, and so some collaborative filtering can occur, which provides some signal raising and noise reduction... all good... But why would someone want to run a site like that? Reddit's system (and other web forums) give the owner a lot of political power, and they can convert that to ad revenue easily and maybe even other sources of revenue. Still... you could always write a site like that yourself maybe? Ultimate proof of concept... and if you build it, they will come... Not sure you'll convince anyone else to build it though. Power is their utility When the mods ban, they do it for power. They aren't thinking of economics or utility or any other stupid economic crap pulled out of lower orifices. Economists don't think people think in terms of economics or utility, just that they act as if they do... in this case, that power is their utility... "They do it for power" is exactly my point. For some people, if there's no power, there's no utility... there's no point. And your system still offers that... if you set the /ignores for a large group of followers, you still hold a lot of power over what those followers see (by default)... and the owner still has veto power too, in any case... or rather, it would take a LOT of work to work out how to design it so that couldn't happen and do it in a provably secure way. As for freedom of speech, you don't have the right to use other people's resources to publish your ideas on... they are well within their rights to tell you to go elsewhere... in other words, the law can't compel me or my businesses to post your banners... fuck off. Also what tdillo says about do it cause no one's stopping you, except that you don't have enough free money, right? I mean it's the money that's stopping you, not lack of talent or anything else. No, that's a syllogism... ad revenue is utility but not all utility is ad revenue. The irc or reddit mod's own sense of power is utility for many. What else do you think trane would do with free money and "challenges"? Challenge: How much saline can I inject in my scrotum? Actually... I want to pop it... like a balloon. $ I'm more upset about the hot tattoo covered east german concert crew girl I failed to chat up at the Foo Fighters show last night... And while they were nice tits... I mostly miss what the relationship could have been but wasn't than the results of a little bit of cosmetic surgery. Why is Grohl still alive? I'm not 100% certain, but it might be the lack of taking a shotgun to his own head? Just a guess though. I wish you were so smart. $ It's been oscillating between about 300 and 400 for quite some time now... sometimes a little lower or higher... but about that range. I agree... We could print more money so people can go into the woods with their cars, fuck up the land, chop down the trees and dump rubbish in it where ever we like, and the extra money will make it all okay so we can fuck the forests because we'd all be rich! All the extra money means that we'd have more forests anyway because printing money means everyone is wealthier and we won't have to play forest street artificial scarcity games pretending we can't have infinite forestry... and those that do can be isolated from the rest of us and play their games of grow their own forests while we chop down our own infinite forests with all the extra money we have... and if we do run out of forests, we can just use a forest destruction-adjustment mechanism like forest indexation as a hedge against no forests left. It's just so simple, I'm surprised trane didn't think of it. We don't need loggers... we can automate... And robots can chop down all the trees... but free money will mean that even if we chop down all the trees, there will be enough forests for everyone. That's how money works right? Scarcity of real world goods and services is just due to the artificial scarcity of money? That's what you're trying to tell everyone, yes? People could just buy their own forests. Jesus... I was going to say that... but thought even you would find that disgusting. So, we can slash and burn all the forests and wildlife in the real world and live in virtual infinite forests... fantastic... fuck the regulations, fuck the park warden and fuck the forests... VR forests come with free pepsi anyway. Hold on... I know you're a fantasist... but let's follow your logic. If we just give everyone millions of dollars every year printed for free from the Fed, we could build robots to destroy all the earths real forests, but because we are all rich we could still have real forests, because resources doesn't real, only artificial scarcity of money, and we should be happy with all the virtual forests we create in our little VR cocoons... no? And fuck mars... we can have our own planets in VR... we don't need no bullshit real planets. You can't use utility in your arguments when you don't believe in utility functions... that's illogical. Anyway... what about people who want to build robots to cut down all the trees because they don't like trees? And not VR trees, that's boring, I mean, fuck the real trees. Your theory is though that they could do that just fine, right? As long as everyone has enough free money, other people can buy their own forests too. My point isn't about forests anyway, it is that your theories are complete nonsense with no rational logic behind them. No... YOU are too stupid... Look... the only economic motivation I need is that I like to see forests turned into asphalt. So, your suggestion is that people pool their resources and buy the forests... I like your thinking... let's privatise the forests... but you are basically saying that with enough basic income people can cut down as many trees as they like, and now that everyone is rich on basic income, there will be enough forests for everyone... just as I originally stated. Can we do the coral reefs next? Surely, if I had enough money though... I could cut down all the trees and pave it with asphalt, because I fucking love doing that, right? It's only artificial scarcity of money that stops me right now... not the other way around. That's your view on economics, no? I'm not saying I had anything to do with it... but HHD should be a lesson to any of you who even think about adding procrasti to the blasterbegone script. You've been warned. Maybe his cracks weren't all that wise... if you know what I mean? On the Face of It -- Romance So, I just found a pair of earrings I recognise on my windowsill outside my flat, which I guess means Jenna's been around during the last week while I was away at the family farm during a visit from one of my family's friends. And I'm kind of conflicted what to do should I see her again... She is quite good looking, and the sex is reasonable enough, though I feel there are too many hoops to jump through to get it... like red pill extreme shit test handling, physical escalation and comfort/attraction trade offs... Obviously I'm naturally a beta type of guy who just likes to be nice to women and avoid conflict, but that doesn't work... so I have to guard my instincts and be kind of an asshole the whole time... not let loose and just be stupid funny kind me. In past relationships, if I wanted sex I just rolled over, woke them up and usually 'Fuck?' was enough to get going... but this one is all drama, shit and timing... precision every time or it all goes out the window. Then there's the fact that she is a whore, but when I was with junkie car-go girl that never bothered me... but she didn't deny who she was, and it just was all very straight forward... but with Jenna, well... she flat out denies being Jenna... like, yeah, she was a whore when she was 18... but if she keeps getting accused of it, she may as well go back to it... yeah right... Same with the all the fresh meth picking sores on her legs - 'Back when I was a meth addict...', you mean last week? Like, the next day complaining that she should get half a bag of weed for the blowjob the day before because I didn't say no when she said that when was blowing me (all contracts entered into during sex are immediately null and void upon orgasm, I wasn't listening anyway and didn't your mother ever teach you not to speak with your mouth full?), or at least as much weed as I smoke... lol... really? The whore instinct remains. She is quite good with the plausible deniability... like when I met her outside the courtroom, trying to claim I put up the Jenna adverts... clever girl... but her story always has inconsistencies... and how can you deal with a women who is constantly lying in all sorts of ways, big and small? (The judge said he had to judge her case facts 'On the face of it' - hence the title, and his way of saying he knows she's a lying whore but they'd failed to prove it - I pointed this out to her and it's now her latest favourite joke). Imagine being in a relationship with someone like that and having to get a job... there's zero probability of her not cheating while you're slaving away in some fucking cubicle somewhere... you can't keep everyone away 24/7, in fact, you have to trust a girl to do that herself... I'd never feel that security with her... if I let myself get involved like that I'd feel like absolute shit... got to respect yourself above all else. Fuck it, I feel like shit anyway even when I initiate the kicking her the fuck out. I'm far to sensitive for a woman like this. So, the only thing I can think of is to keep her emotionally distant... never become complacent... accept you're never going to 'own' her... mind you... one blowjob and the next day she stops to admire a wedding dress in the local boutique... "don't you think it's pretty"... lol shit girl... gonna take more than a blowjob... why don't you take a look at the bridesmaid's dresses over here and set your goals a little more realistically? Luckily one thing I always do is keep building new connections... So she assumed I was making up a story about a new girl (let's call her madam bigs, cause she runs a few street girls herself)... but she pulled up outside my place and called up, I chatted with her for a while on the balcony, but then thought fuck it, bring her in... so madam bigs is there squatting down giving me the full view of what's under her short skirt and we're furiously eye fucking each other... and Jenna's just going absolutely crazy, like trying to find common ground and stuff 'I used to be a working girl, so I know what it's like' (you mean last week?)... and one upping each other on how much they like me... and then Jenna starts furiously cleaning my house and tries to show off to madam bigs by taking a few silver coins from my change jar (bitch, you gots your own money, put that back - 'I was just trying to show madam bigs... blah blah' - 'shut the fuck up, it's not yours and madam bigs isn't a thief'), finally saying she want's to go out and buy some cheap clothes from the second hand store... anyway... I digress. So, here's one thing maybe kurons could help me with... Like, after the morning blowjob, I'll be like, let's get some weed, and she'll be like, and then we'll have kinky sex in the afternoon... well I agree of course... but I never do, cause I think I'm out of my depths on that one... Cause I don't think I can think of anything kinky that she wouldn't find vanilla... anal? Just another day at work... two women... there's an advert for that - Monday double special with Jenna and Sasha... She's bound to have been spitroasted many times before, and besides I don't want other men in my naked time... She's probably done farm animals, horsecock, bsdm, sub/dom roleplaying both ways, swinging from the chandeliers, champaign bottles opened up in her cooch and pretty much anything I could think of would be been there done that, if she was ever honest about it... I imagine even A2M would bore her... BUT I think I might have thought of something that maybe even she hasn't done... Which I'm calling A22M... Where, instead of fucking a girl in the ass and then pulling out and having her suck her own shit off your dick... you fuck another girls ass, then pull out and have her suck the other girls shit off your dick. So, maybe something I can sort it out with madam bigs or street geologist... You know, be nice to surprise a girl with something new... shows you were thinking of her... Romance! Pretty sure it's not a fetish of mine... I've never enjoyed a woman cheating on me. Well... I do know it's not diseased... well... could be if recent I suppose... and you can stretch it and tear it but you can never wear it out... but it is a ho. I dunno... was the challenge I suppose... like, when I met her I thought it kind of odd that a girl of that calibre didn't get completely stuck on me... seemed pretty strange... even taking into account all the higher cortical damage and lack of bonding instincts caused by adolescent meth usage and high partner count... I guess that's kind of what motivated me. But now I guess I don't have any good reasons not to keep it on rotation, as long as it's easy and cheap... that's why I kicked her out after a few days. Well... lots of reasons really... the fact that she's now getting on a bit... she was spritely 27 when I met her, and now she's approaching 30! Also, those meth sores on her legs... just yuck! Strictly Ballroom was huge when it came out... Must have been late 80's early 90's though... so quite old movie. Razorback is a must see classic too. Nice log normal distribution you got there $ Can you plot it on something like ln((x+1)/15)? I do a lot of input normalisation for machine learning tasks... so ultimately you could scale it then plot it on a QQ plot to see how far from a log normal distribution it is. I have to say that Jenna's Blowjobs are about as good as one could imagine. Those dick sucking lips might look good in photos but that's nothing in comparison to their application. Apparently she uses snake venom lipstick that cause your lips to swell to great effect. Her large shapely breasts form a backdrop that somehow amplifies your cock... like some magic giant cock spell were cast in the vicinity of her lips. She delivers in an absolutely professional manner, great use of hands and tongue and variation, ample saliva production, excellent gag reflex control, neither too light or too firm, too fast or too slow, takes direction easily, no objections to hard core face fucking or hair pulling and swallows eagerly, taking the remaining on her face and breasts, as it should be. My only complaint is that I gave into her request not to film it for your enjoyment, that and the fact that she has no soul. Best blowjob of 2015. Jenna Bunny... aka Meth Tits... I've put up pics in my diaries... you might consider them porn... so be careful. Thanks... looks like the platform I need to release the sex videos on. Yeah, well the blockchain is the technology and digital currency is just the first major application of it... There's a whole heap of things that it enables, this is just one of them, and it's hard to know what will be possible... but there are smart contracts, notarization, coloured coins (so you could have a bitcoin to represent a company or another asset or commodity), electrum hopes to enable digital autonomous corporations... the possibilities are endless. I'm all for alternative uses of the blockchain... and this one looks interesting... I really have been wondering how to sell porn... I bought it up with Jenna, but I wasn't going to argue the point over a blowjob... but I see her acclimatising to the idea... I did tell her that if we were going to have sex anyway we might as well get paid for it... she said "It's not like that with you." (still denying that she's Jenna mind you)... I replied "Bitch, not you... me!"... We'll see. Paypal, Visa and others make you jump through hoops to sell adult content... Hoops I'd simply rather not jump through. So how much easier does this method make it? Quite a lot from my estimate. Make it work, make it correct, make it easy Simple software will package all this... it's a bit technical now, but blockchain technology is really new (still a bit untested I think though... mining monopoly scares the fuck out of me), so it's all exploding. MI goes on and on about how much better visa is than bitcoin and this app again, but could you even do a $10 giveaway with visa or paypal online like I did here? (paypal might be possible, I don't really know)... This really democratises payment and everything that goes on around it. Electrum has all that though... How many people understand how email works? You and I do, but we're a minority... yet most people manage to use it just fine. Dude... I got ex junkie whores on methodone maintenance who call me every once in a while telling me they follow the value of their BTC on their mycellium android apps. With electrum, I think the exchange rate might be hidden away in the options or settings somewhere... that's a pretty minor design flaw. Also, you don't have 'an account' number... you could have many... That's like insisting that email needs a house number and street address or it will never take off... it's not that conceptually hard to use... people just need to know people who use it to ask questions from and it will spread... again, just like email. Exchange rate movements are only for investors really. Transactions are viewable in a tab on electrum, no? As for security... hardware wallets are one solution... bitcoin banks are another... encrypted wallets and standard security are good enough for most uses. On the Face of It --- Lonliness I had to kick her back out to the curb. I woke her up... said I wanted sex... she said she didn't. Bitch? WTF has it got to do with what you want? So I told her she couldn't stay and would have to go. Besides, staring at all the meth sores on her legs and thinking of all the lying and whoring was turning me off. I ain't putting up with all of that and be refused sex. So then came the yelling and screaming, and that she was going to get her new boyfriend to beat me up, that she would have to lie about me to him, tell him and the police I'd raped her, how I was taking advantage of her (and all the other vulnerable girls), that she was going to get bikies to beat me up and smash my car and burn my house down and shit like that. But otherwise I think it's going pretty well. I got's a trick to avoid this problem legally... Cause, most of them are psychotic and will reward Beta (provider) behaviour with anger, threats and violence... and I presume those threats can turn into police reports etc... When the shit starts flying, I hit record on my phone... then I push them so I get all the threats recorded on tape... (they will claim shit about being recorded too... just ignore it and continue, but that's proof they are being recorded with their permission, cause they can always leave)... state facts at them that they either agree with or fight more... whatever, it's recorded... then I say something like "Bitch? WTF are you all upset about?", wrap my arms around them, and squeeze them as hard as I can... then they come good, apologise and I restate my facts and get them to agree to them again... all on record. So, I got no worries from police... bikies and psycho's yes, but I got other methods for that. I ain't no gorilla. Gas, grass or ass $ Everyday he's not in jail or an asylum is MDC day here. On the Face of It --- Tell K5: How to Get A Blowjob http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2013/9/12/81620/1949 Finally Solved... I hope you've enjoyed this simple 18 month step by step guide to getting blown. You will need an anonymous remailer, zero day Facebook hacking tools, stalking skills, threatening ex'es, pictures from Craigslist adverts... The usual stuff... I'm sure you've all been following along. You missed the magistrates court appearence, and withholding of affections and compliance controls. Not sure if trap... One I so willingly walked into.. You never know... Tomorrow's Diary might be about loneliness, shame, porn or bloody crime scenes. But she looked so much better this time than when I last saw... My cock made a vast improvement to her face. Poll. Well... you admit you don't know what it is... So, I'm literally arguing with an ignorant. Can you name the four assumptions (really constraints) of the free market? If not, then how the fuck can you be so certain what you're arguing against? Because, mathematically, it is proven (given assumptions of utility) that everyone is better off, and no one is worse off, under a free market. The very profitably business you are talking about isn't operating in a free market, because in a free market both consumers and producers are price takers, not price makers... anything else points there to be limitations in competition. I suspect you are talking about laissez faire economics, which ISN'T the Free Market... it's something else... and has all sorts of problems. > zero reason that with the technology we have there should be suffering You have a solution to this? Something BETTER than the free market? I really think you have no fucking idea. You're just another ignorant moron, spouting bullshit about shit you don't understand and thinking that it makes you sound smart... you're just a fucking retard fat fuck without a clue. THIS... SO MUCH THIS... Clearly you're a lot smarter than me at economics... but I just like getting people to know about it, I suppose. You're completely right... The elite owners and media "Economists" LIE about the Free Market... I think they deliberately distort the meaning and use the words Free Market, whilst actually telling people to implement laissez faire policies... So people associate the Free Market with shit that is extremely NOT Free Market and so they shut off, they don't even want to KNOW what the Free Market is... they HATE it, because of all these shit heads LYING about it. Which only makes the problem worse, but the answer isn't IGNORANCE... only really though knowing what the Free Market is, can we hope to identify and correct what the Market does. Here's the problem, I think... why the Free Market fails... The Free Market itsef is a tragedy of the commons... It is a positive externality... Not only do people operating in the Free Market benefit from it, but so does everyone else... and positive externalities are underproduced by the Market... Therefore Free Market is underproduced in the market! So, the solution to problems with the Market is to be ignorant of them? Pot meet kettle, dipshit. It's my 30th Birthday and I want 3000GBP to have a party... payment due in 4 weeks. True loan request. YOU'RE LOAN APPLICATION HAS BEEN DENIED! Now? $ Never do tomorrow what you can put off forever $ If they were based in Australia you could probably sue them for false or misleading advertising... But they seem to be based in California... Maybe you could still sue them... I dunno... but it would almost certainly be more expensive than it's worth. I guess this how they get away this kind of shit. What is he masturbating with? $ No you're all wrong... the answer is his paws... but if watch carefully, he doesn't, he just keeps going and going. Attn: Greengrass - What have you got against the FREE market? Greengrass made a statement I find very strange: "There is no such thing as a free market nor should there be." To me this is as strange as if he had have said "There is no such thing as a free man, nor should there be". So, I want to hear what anyone (except trane of course, cause he's just fucking stupid) could possibly have against the free market. Of course, if you say something that is not a free market then I'm just going to zero rate you and move on. So, if you tell me that monopolies control the free market, you get a zero, because a free market cannot have monopolies, by definition. If you say free markets lead to polluted cities, again, I'm going to zero you, because a free market has no externalities, by definition. If you tell me people are forced into things they don't want to do I'm going to zero you, because all transactions are voluntary, by definition. And if you tell me that companies lie and cheat, yes, I'm going to zero you, because you always know what you are getting out of a free market transaction, by fucking definition. Poll. That's a cute pink suit you got on there... Did you make it yourself or did your gay lover lend you his? Still better than greengrass' / trane's argument $ Because that is the DEFINITION OF A FREE market... Anything else... anything that doesn't conform to the restrictions of a free market is not a free market... It's just a market... a free for all... anarchy or something else... but not a FREE market. There can be no slavery in a free market, because that is not a free market (get where the name comes from yet?). So, yeah, PEOPLE have to have laws and regulations to make sure they operate in accordance to the rules of a free market, because they are self interested and will operate OUTSIDE of it... enslaving people, lying, cheating, stealing, killing... but none of that is a free market. Also, no utility is UNITLESS... Dollars are a CONVENIENT measure... but not the only one... We could measure it in tons of gold, or potatoes... It's just that almost everyone is familiar with dollars. I keep telling you this, but it seems you don't believe me. See my comment below balsamic's on fungibility $ Yeah... you'll see elsewhere that a free market actually requires external enforcement to function... that's not much of a problem philosophically... it's just the way it is. I can't find a source right now... but economists noticed chaos in their equations very early on... much earlier than the 90's... something like the 30's or 40's. I'll dig it up when I'm less tired. Actually, you get all the results of the free market if you randomly redistribute all the wealth before trading... or rather... you can redistribute in non-distortionary ways and get all the same benefits (across everyone, not for individuals, because obviously some people would be worse off than without the redistribution)... It leads me to believe that you can tax wealth, and redistribute it as a basic income, and a lot of these oscillation you are talking about could be greatly reduced. Well... when you say tax, I'm assuming you're talking about income or capital gains or something similar that operate on the flow of money or value... They have their place, but they are distortionary (there is less incentive to work with income taxes... there is less incentive to invest with capital gains taxes). Actually, the only truly non-distortionary tax is a wealth tax... and wealth tax would serve just as well if not better for this purpose... It is actually perfectly in line with free market theory... It's basically hidden in the first few chapters of any intro to micro-econ course or text... and although non-distortionary redistribution before trading is always mentioned as having no effect on the welfare theorems of free market trade... somehow, no one ever mentions wealth tax at all. I suspect the reasons for this have to do with who owns the wealth and the political influence of the wealthy. Also, those instability problems really show up in macro-economics, not micro, which is concerned with the free market. In macro-economics you have the business cycle... bought about by the interaction between business and credit provision... at the bottom of the cycle credit is hard, and business is slow... but then business starts to pick up, credit becomes available, there's a feedback loop, credit becomes even more available and more businesses pop up... then credit becomes too available, and some of the businesses getting credit start going bankrupt, the credit companies start calling in their loans, forcing other businesses that would have been okay out of business, which feeds back on itself further retracting credit and more businesses collapse until only a few are left, the economy is depressed or stagnated but there aren't much in the way of outstanding risky loans so the credit companies start making a few more loans and the whole thing repeats... Boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bust... Keynsians say the government should try to smooth this out by increasing government spending (running a budget deficit) during the busts to stimulate the private sector... and (the theory goes) should REALLY run budget a surplus in the boom times to regulate the private sector and cover their own debt... but politically that rarely happens... so who knows where that eventually leads... guess we're finding out. Well... I'm not a professor of economics... And I'm not familiar with the equations you are talking about... supply/demand cycle for a product? I don't know much about feedback loops here... Only thing I can think of is typical product lifetime curves... that go something like, introduction, rapid growth, saturation and obsoletion... I mean... you wouldn't want a mechanical control system that operated like that... you wouldn't get in a plane that worked like that... but it's exactly what you want for your typical consumer product. Can you relate it to potatoes? Yeah, I'm familiar with harmonic oscillators... I think it's a bad example for a few reasons... Firstly, I'd say crude oil is a pretty bad example of the free market... The fact that OPEC has so much ability to set prices proves that it is just very far from perfect competition and therefore isn't a free market at all. If OPEC operated in a country with anti-collusion laws, they'd be done for it, but they're outside of our jurisdiction. Secondly, in the standard model, price has no effect on supply and demand... rather supply and demand are price/quantity curves... shifting supply and demand means providing more or less at the same price, or providing the same amount at a higher or lower price... the entire curve shifts... So generally, more is demanded and less supplied at a lower price, and more is supplied and less demanded at a higher price, but supply and demand themselves haven't changed! However, the simple model does not take into account delays such as the time it takes to put a factory into operation, or maybe empty out a stockpile... so, maybe your model has some application here. Secondly, there is no agreed upon model for price setting! I mean, the harmonic oscillator model you have might be relevant... but it's far from agreed that this is how prices work... So some 90's economist has a model... but probably not a well accepted model... certainly not at the micro level. Yeah... quite correct... Of course people don't naturally conform to the rules of a free market... people lie, cheat, steal, pollute, cause harm, even kill for personal gain... a free market cannot allow these types of behaviour, so a free market can only exist through the force of law... contracts, personal rights, etc... and this requires taxes to fund... So, to enable a free market, we have to raise taxes... and taxes can't be raised in a free market, because it would suffer from a tragedy of the commons type problem (people would not pay the taxes because it's not in their personal interest to do so individually, but it is in their personal interest for everyone else to do so... on average, no one pays, and the system collapses). So, you are 100% correct... for a free market to exist, we must enforce it through mechanisms that are themselves not bought about through the free market. You might see that as a contradiction... but where a free market doesn't exist naturally, instead we try and find ways to bring about results that are as close as possible to it... it's the price you have to pay to have it. No... it doesn't answer my question... It's like saying personal liberty is an unobtainable ideal and can only be approximated by force... I can't be free if others a 'free' to harm me against my will... So force is required to enable freedom. There's no contradiction there... I can't have a free market if others allow to lie, swindle, steal from and defraud me... or enslave me... or dump garbage on my property against my will... The confusion is people think a free market is a free for all, do whatever the hell you want... but it's not... it's a very clearly defined set of principles. What I wanted to know is why people would be AGAINST those ideals and principles. If they are against the free market, they MUST be for one of those things... either forced labour, or forcing you to buy something... or not allowing you to buy something... or stealing from you, or forcing pollution on you... so what part of it don't they like? Are you upset that we have laws to protect us from those things? Well... he did say 'nor should there be'... So... while personal liberty is an unobtainable ideal in that sense... is it something to be avoided? Should we not strive for that goal because it requires force and some limitations? Or should we just be against it like it's something we want nothing to do with? Like you said, we only need the taxes and the force because of bad actors... If everyone respected individual liberty we wouldn't need that and we'd have the ideal... Why wouldn't you want that? Similarly, if everyone respected the free market, we wouldn't need enforcement and taxes either (although lots of other caveats, public goods, externalities, etc...)... Are we still against the free market? Oh god... you're making it complicated... lol... Okay... personal liberty to me is Jon Stuart Mill's On Liberty... pretty much the harm principle.. as thou harm none, do as thou wilt... to me everything kind of stems from that (but actually from the free market --- or more correctly, deviations that have to be corrected from it). War and shit... we're getting too complicated... and I somehow ended up past my sleep cycle... but if you're going to start arguing that conscription is right, or you have the right to take my heart because someone more important than me needs it... sorry, gonna tell you to fuck off. Yeah... alright... no major disagreements there... but it did sound to me like he was against the free market itself... rather than that we should be aiming towards it as an unobtainable ideal... it's like he's viscerally against the free market and its ideals itself... rather than the tricky edge case of how you enforce it without stepping outside of it (in the terms of language compilers... a self hosting platform). I don't know what he means either... kind of why I called him out in this diary. Although I suspect he thinks the free market is the free for all market so often proposed by Libertarians, republicans and monopolists... not economists... and I kind of wanted to clear that up too. > You get the model confused with the reality No... not exactly... the FREE market is the ideal... the MARKET is what actually happens... Where the assumptions of the FREE market don't line up with the MARKET we end up with Dead Weight Loss... ALWAYS an economic loss. That's where we have to bring in regulations to bring the MARKET in line with the FREE market. Being against the MARKET is fine... in fact, almost all economists are against the MARKET because they know how it causes problems... because it deviates from the FREE market... and how to correct them. (though sometimes some dead weight loss remains, but how to minimise it). Once more... to slightly fix this confusion... The FREE market is the MARKET under a very specific set of constraints... Constraints with which we know bring about a pareto optimum, where everyone is better off for having been involved in the market, and no one is worse off. We KNOW that the MARKET doesn't have these constraints, and we can see that it therefore does not bring about pareto optimums... people are WORSE off for having been involved (sometimes involuntarily) in with the MARKET. So, economists look at the MARKET and say, what do we have to do to make it function like the FREE market... So, for sure, get pissed off about the MARKET and what it does to people, and all that shit... but I still find it difficult to argue with the FREE market... Put it this way... I have looked and looked and looked, and I can't find fault with free market... Not once has anyone come to be with an objection and I've gone... fuck... the free market really does have this problem. Either they are ignorant of the free market, or they have never raised an objection. I mean... the free market doesn't even rule out redistribution (of course, that occurs before the free trade step... but it's right there in the intro to any micro econ course). Plenty of fucking problems with the MARKET... but econs know this... and everyone saying 'well real life isn't like the free market'... fine... WE KNOW THAT! That's no reason to be against the FREE market... We know the MARKET sucks... so fix it to be more like the FREE market... don't whine about the FREE market... that's contradictory! The MARKET is the problem, and the FREE market is the solution. EXCEPT... that american media portrays the FREE market as being the MARKET (no regulations... no fixes... let everyone do whatever the fuck they want)... I mean... like American media brainwashes people the think the FREE market is exactly the opposite of what it actually is. You can understand my frustration, no? Firstly it's not to do with ripping anyone off... I'm sure you're being facetious, but I won't be... The person who buys the bread feels they are better off with bread than a dollar, the person who sells the bread feels they are better off with a dollar than they are with the bread. I did just say a whole heap of stuff on the difference between the FREE market and the MARKET didn't I? Anyway, despite all the good things about Tesla, he broke the rules of the free market... He LIED about the purpose of the Wardenclyffe Tower... Maybe he deserved to fail? I don't see how shitty tastes matters... that hard workers struggle while people reporting on kim k make loads of money... that's what people apparently want... the free market doesn't really guarantee that money goes to GOOD and WORTHY things... it simply says everyone is BETTER off for having participated, and no one is WORSE off. Irrational (your version, not the economic version)... doesn't matter either... Again... it says nothing about the money going to worthy causes or improving other people's lives... I mean... we can force you I suppose... the point is that you do with your money as you feel you want to... and again, everyone will be better off without anyone being worse off... sure, some people could be even better off... but we'd have to force you how to use your money... you individually could be a lot worse off... also it requires central planners to guess other people's utility... that gets tricky. Maybe we can legislate knowing when you're going to die to make those decisions easier for you? I mean, we can make SURE you die on a given date... is that what you're looking for? But that's exactly what it is and does... It IS a grand ideal to follow in which everybody wins WHEN the CONSTRAINTS of the FREE market are SATISFIED. Of course, you have to understand those constraints, and it seems very few do. So, an analogy, the market is Somalian war lords killing each other over the spoils of a plundered ship... NOT FREE MARKET... NOT GOOD... The free market is a guy with a blueberry pie who prefers raspberry pie voluntarily agreeing to swap with a guy who has a raspberry pie and prefers blueberry... I mean... WHO COULD BE AGAINST THAT? Who would want to get in the way of that trade? How could interfering possibly bring about a better situation for anyone? Should the government decide who gets raspberry and who gets blueberry and you eat what you have or else? Knowing the government (which can only estimate, usually poorly, other people's utility) would actually force spam, brussel spout and gristle pie on everyone instead... So who is harmed by them swapping their pies? How can that possibly be a problem? The only problem I can possibly think of is the guy with no pie watching these two rich pie eating motherfuckers laughing at how much happier they are that they swapped their pies... of course, he had no pie anyway, and isn't actually any worse off at all for the all the free market pie trading taking place... he's just a jealous (if hungry) fuck... is it the pie guys' faults for him bringing (literally) nothing to the table? So, the only thing that could possibly be better than free market trading is the government stepping in and saying... oi, you two... we're having a bit of each of your pies and giving it to the third guy... and then letting them go on free market trading... for all we know, the third guy might have a preference for one or the other of the pies and decide to enter the market and trade the ones he was given for the one he'd prefer and again everyone wins. Fungibility... The other reason to use dollars is that every dollar is equal to every other dollar... You're hour of leisure time is worth a different thing to my hour of leisure time... it's almost impossible to compare... some potatoes are bigger than others... some have better texture or taste... but every dollar is a dollar is a dollar... so we use that as A unit to measure utility economically because everyone can agree on what a dollar is... it's a fucking dollar... but if all the dollars went away tomorrow, all the proofs and outcomes of neoclassical marginalist micro-economics would still continue to hold exactly as they did before. FUCK... this was for trane's comment $ No... it's a set of rules that maximise the outcomes of trades. It's certainly not a force of nature... In nature, people will kill and harm each other for personal gain... we have to enforce rules against people's natural instincts to enable its existence. Yeah... there's quite a few good reasons to nationalise... Some things are natural monopolies... I mean, you can't have 100,000 different companies running pipes to your house and let you chose each time you turn the tap on who you're going to get your water from... monopolies are not a free market, and there are ways to deal with that... but one way is just nationalise it... most of the things you mentioned fall into this category (wired telecoms probably yes, wireless to a lesser extent... maybe not buses). Another good reason is to provide basics of survival or necessity, or things that are in the national interest... again, you could argue all the things you mentioned on this basis too. Buses are interesting because they aren't really a natural monopoly... but they are a public service that enables greater efficiency in the rest of the market... although they'd never compete on routes or comfort or price or anything like that either (not to get you in and around the city - some long haul bus transport is different)... So, if you want reliable transport to and from a city and a reasonable price, yeah... nationalisation would probably be the better option here too... I don't think this explanation is quite right... I'd have to think about it more... but I think it's kind of a tragedy of the commons problem. Well.. it's not just a matter of 'core' services.. It's more to do with problems like natural monopolies, tragedy of the commons and positive and negative externalities that are deviations from the free market... these need to be corrected to minimise so called Dead Weight Losses... For example... anything that creates a negative externality (pollution is a good example) will be overproduced... in other words, we will produce more of the things that in production create pollution than we would if the cost of that pollution was factored into the cost of production... these need to be corrected to bring about results similar to the free market... so we really should tax anything that produces pollution or generates other negative externalities. On the other hand, positive externalities are underproduced by the free market relative to what would be produced if the gains from those positive externalities could be privatised... and so they should be subsidised... For example... education benefits more than just the person receiving the education, because an educated person benefits other members of society in other ways... so education can either be subsidised or just provided directly by the government... similar arguments exist for health care, for example... Busses might actually be a positive externality (businesses benefit from having workers get to work in an affordable, timely manner). There's a whole heap of things that naturally deviate from a free market, and need to be corrected... and really the free market is just the starting point to analyse these problems... and this really is really where economists make their arguments on what and why things should be subsidised, taxed, nationalised, etc... Farming subsidies are another example... Overproduction of food isn't really a huge problem for a country... sure, it costs a little extra... and that cost means we go without something else, maybe people could afford slightly bigger televisions if we didn't... but it's a huge security issue for a country that can't produce enough food for it's people... so, we subsidise farming, and deliberately over produce food... unfortunately, in order to keep the price of food high, we can't sell it on the market (otherwise the subsidy would simply be absorbed by lowering the price of the food, and production would drop to free market levels)... so we have to either dump it on someone else, or destroy it... hence why we deliberately subsidise, over produce, and destroy food. So... the point is, the free market is the ideal... in reality, we have externalities, monopolies, monopolistic competition, incomplete information, common or public goods, etc... and we use the free market model to base our decisions on when we have to interfere or regulate the market and minimise the deviation or Dead Weight Losses... and there are plenty of examples of this... and many different remedies depending on the situation. How else are you going to fund it? It's not something that can be supplied by the free market... again, it's a tragedy of the commons... no one wants other people to starve, it's ugly, but individuals maximising their own utility won't pay for that themselves, even though it's the outcome they want, they'll expect other people to do it... the only way is to correct for that is to pay for it through taxes. Yeah... well... the free market only works for private goods that generate no externalities, only affect those who are voluntarily involved in a transaction where they have full knowledge of what they are getting out of the transaction... everything else causes dead weight losses and needs to be corrected for. None of this is controversial amongst economists... it's just politicians and self interested greedy businessmen (the type who like to own monopolies and create pollution) get in the way.. even to the point where most people think free market means a free for all rather than freely entered into. No... cause it's a tragedy of the commons $ Because it's a tragedy of the commons... And that not having starving people is a positive externality... Ie, not just the person who is starving, and the person who decides to provide charity benefit from it (everyone who doesn't want to see people starve benefit from the transaction)... Positive externalities are always under produced by the market... and require subsidies to bring about the free market equilibrium. Sorry... how are they worse off when it's taken to extremes? Like in either of your examples. I can't help but think negative externalities are somehow involved. Well... the free market doesn't rely on people being able to leverage the market at all... They just wouldn't accept a trade if it wasn't in their interest to do so... Of course, some will be able to exploit trades better than others, but everyone would be better off. I don't think you can have a free market without social and civil freedom either... the two kind of go hand in hand. I think we see that in China, where increased economic freedom is slowing increasing social and civil freedoms too. Also, a lot of my argument is based on the idea that the free market is the ideal, but that the market is generally not a free market. I'm not arguing for Laissez-faire economics, but rather the identification of positive and negative externalities and the implementation of taxes and subsidies to correct for them (education is an obvious positive externality that should be subsidised, for example)... The recognition of monopolies and cartels and to correct for them... Regulations on honest marketing and correct labelling... The free market isn't a free for all. No it doesn't require capital It just requires something to trade... Your labour is one example. Now, I do agree that that would leave some people starving, so I also advocate a safety net... some form of welfare is required for practical reasons... but beyond that, as long as trades conform to free market constraints, they can only benefit people. This has nothing to do with being fabulously wealthy or even living comfortably... those have never been guaranteed under any system. Oh yeah... that's true... free market only works for private goods. For sure... wealth concentrates... which is why I go on and on about a wealth tax and redistribution via basic income. That's inline though with the free market... It's well known that you can do non-distortionary redistribution and both of the welfare theories hold... wealth tax and basic income are exactly that. No, I don't think it's better... I'm thinking of a very small yearly tax, on the order of 2% or so... It's continuous and can be planned for... It also encourages productive use of capital... as opposed to heirs sitting on it for generations. I see no reason that would stop people like Elon... any more than income or capital gains does. Also, having a wealth tax free threshold (on the order of a few million), would encourage wider distribution amongst relatives pre death. You can say exactly the same about any tax... wealth, income, capital gains... That's not a good argument. Not sure I fully understand... but most economists consider marketing and advertising to be pure dead weight losses with no economic value... maybe that's your point... the marketers and advertisers are doing practical things to line their pockets, while the economists theorise away at what an ideal world would be like? Yeah... is exactly the product I was going to use. This is quite a recent development in micro-economic theory called monopolistic-competition. There are two main cola products on the market... coke and pepsi... now, there's nothing special about either of them... anyone can make a coke like product, there's very little in the way of barriers to entry, there's no network effects or anything else that means that they should behave like a monopoly... but there they are, two companies that basically together have a monopoly (okay, duopoly) on the production of cola drinks... and they spend massive amounts on advertising, why? It's complicated (of course, is why it took economists a bit longer to work it out)... basically, advertising has no effect on your experienced utility (what you really get out of it)... but does affect your decision utility (what you think you'll get when you chose to consume it)... advertising is all about what you think you'll get... hence it's really a form of dead weight loss. AND both companies know both how much their advertising affects your decision utility, AND they know exactly how much advertising the OTHER company will spend on advertising... This basically locks both of them into an optimal strategy of massive amounts of advertising that affect people's decision utility, give's them near monopolistic profits and generates HUGE amounts of dead weight losses in the form of advertising. The details are quite complex... and wiki as usual doesn't really cover the details properly but there's a small intro to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition if you like. No... if it wasn't for monopolistic competition and the advertising that goes along with it, the profit margin from all the different competing cola brands should have tended towards zero like every other normal consumer good... I mean, you don't see those kinds of profits in the potato industry... it's just fucking carbonated sugar water after all... You're lemonade example might have more to do with the adults encouraging their children than free market trade... I mean, why aren't all those homeless people out there making 25% on lemonade sales? But that's the thing... it's the monopolistic competition that causes the barriers to entry... Anyone (well, if you got a few mill lying about or good banking connections) can start farming potatoes, tomatoes, wheat or corn... and make a decent living off it. There's nothing really complicated or expensive about making cola's... It's all to do with the advertising, which manipulates people's decision utility without affecting their experienced utility... It's truly a dead weight loss. Right... but when you buy coke or pepsi... You aren't really buying the cola... you're buying the BRAND... and that's due to advertising. The production costs, and packaging (the container, not the printing on the side of it), and where you buy it have nothing to do with it. It all comes down to advertising shifting your decision utility (what you chose to consume) without affecting your experienced utility (what you actually get out of it). No one HAS to have a job... I mean, you're free to go out and live in the forests and scavange berries, nuts and mushrooms and hunt squirrels or whatever... Just that people think they are (and probably actually are) better off living in society, working and participating in the market. Actually, the welfare theorems of the free market don't rely on any such thing as assuming that all people's labour is equal or anything like that. It just says, that under the conditions of the free market (no externalities, complete information, perfect competition) that free trade leads to everyone being better off that they would be without it, without anyone being worse off. That's it really. Yes... we tax wealth and pay a basic income with it. Wealth tax is non-distortionary and because we apply it before the free trade steps (in the model that is, although iterating is still fine, so in real life we do it continuously)... The welfare theorems STILL HOLD! The FREE market is STILL the solution. In fact more so... the AI and robots should be market driven, so they bring about the things we want... the things we spend money on... the money we get from basic income, that we got from the people who own the robots! That's called capital flight. A wealth tax is a tax on people... Based directly on how much world wide wealth they have... They can avoid it by giving up their US citizenships and moving where they like. We also have a one off renouncing citizenship tax... 100% of what we can get our hands on (or something like that). You think Bill Gates is going to renounce his citizenship and move to China? Hah! Yeah... well a wealth tax would aim to work around these kind of dodgy practices... If the charity is under someone's control, it would be counted as wealth, and they could lose it. The idea is that everyone self reports their wealth... and pays tax on that reported amount... Anyone who can raise the funds could buy a person out for that amount plus some administration overhead. There's an incentive to report accurately, and especially not to under-report. I'm not sure who that is or why she's relevant... or if you're confusing the Free Market with laissez faire economics. Yeah, Beauty CAN be anywhere... but you'll most likely find her on a corner somewhere, strung out on meth, looking for the next cock to suck to get her next hit. Not quite: > First, you'd need a ton of bandwidth and computing power, because you'd be generating millions or billions of "new coin" transactions per block in addition to any actual financial transactions. No you don't... you can do this at the point of spending... when a person spends coins from their personal address... at that point a calculation can be done to work out how much they should have in UBICoin and credit their account. > B) that each person was unique. Yep... this is pretty key. > For uniqueness, you'd need some sort of biometric hash, but obviously it raises serious privacy issues since the hash would be recorded in the block chain and you'd be able to track not only everything issued to a person but also every transaction that person engaged in if you could match the hash to their "real-world" identity. Yeah... you need a biometric hash tied to a real world identity tied to an address that gets credited in the blockchain... However, the UBI from that address can be sent to another, anonymous address (we can make it provably anonymous)... and then this privacy concern disappears. I wrote down my thoughts on this earlier, in case you missed it: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2014/4/10/144743/503 > Like I said, it seems possible theoretically. Just a bitch to implement. YEP! From 1000BTC for a $1 to $200 for 1 BTC is considered losing value to you? No wonder you're poor. It wasn't significantly easier to mine at that point... I already had my two 5GH/s miners back then. Of course price isn't tied directly to mining difficulty... Price is determined by SUPPLY and DEMAND... Bitcoin became fashionable for a moment, the price went up, it became fashionable because of that, the price went up... etc... Also, there were fun and games going on at MtGox which distorted the price. So, it did bubble a bit, and then pop... like it has done several times before... and will likely do again. I don't think in US dollars... and I do care specifically about the amount of BTC I hold irrespective of the price (to a point... I would probably sell my last BTC for $1M today)... in general I want to hold a certain fraction of the network. Just like I explained about utility not being MEASURED in dollars... dollars is just an easy way to COMMUNICATE in, cause everyone is familiar with it. Of course, a dollar isn't the same as a dollar... 1920s dollars and 2010 dollars are worth different amounts and could buy you different things. The same with BTC... You just THINK the dollar is static... but it really isn't... it's subject to the same laws of SUPPLY and DEMAND. For me, BTC price is relative to AUD, GBP, EUR, GOLD... and I work in all these units too. I only USD because that's all you're familiar with... to me, it's actually a useless figure. No... it's never disconnected from supply and demand. You're just failing to count in who supplies and who demands... Politics affects supply and demand, which then affects the price. It can't affect the price without affecting supply and demand... because price is set only by the trades done. Yeah... MDC is right here... The person who has the thing and is willing to sell it for a price is the supplier... they set the SUPPLY. The person who wants a thing and is willing to buy it for a price is demanding it... they set the DEMAND. The price is where those two people make a trade... the price can never be anything BUT SUPPLY and DEMAND... Even in your example... it's just those with the asset agreeing to lower supply... again... if you'd done the course you wouldn't sound so stupid... you might even be able to explain how your theories DIFFER from the mainstream... but you don't even know the mainstream and so you just sound like an idiot. Some people are thinking about it... http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoUBI > Note this has nothing to do with accepting procrasti's offer of a dollar; Damn dude... it's not about the money... $1 is nothing, and you know that... it's not 'help you out'... at least not financially. It's so you can see how it operates... nothing like hands on to get a feeling for the inner workings. It's to answer all your stupid questions... all these things that make you go hmmm... will be like... oh yeah... there's my coin, there's an address... let's send it there, let's send it here... oh, now I understand. Is it a personal thing? Cause you dislike me? Maybe localroger, blaster, tdillo, mumble, bv and whoever else might be willing to chip in 5c each... Not for the money, but to see it in action. Then why don't you download a wallet and paste a bitcoin address? Just so you can get a feel for how it works. In the time it took you to write that you could have clicked on http://electrum.org/download.html and completed this little task already. I do understand that... but you can clear some headspace by clicking a link and installing a package and be done with it. Procrastination (I'm the king) leads to headspace clutter... Or like, posting on K5... that's where the real work gets done. Have you read: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2014/4/10/144743/503 I'm sorry that people won't be getting a basic income while they spend their lives drinking beer and watching American Idol... Not really much I can do about it. These things will never come for free. You idiot... you're redefining FREE market... You can't have free market where people end up doing things like slavery, lying, deception, bribery, etc... BECAUSE THAT IS NOT A FREE MARKET. A free market is a market system in which the prices for goods and services are set freely by consent between sellers and consumers, Please explain how a slave can FREELY set the price of his labour? Guess what... if you do any of those things, its no longer a FREE market... You're arguing against a definition YOU MADE UP YOURSELF! The FREE market has a VERY CLEAR DEFINITION No coercion, no externalities, full knowledge of what you are getting in the trade, everyone competing on price. So, slaving, deception, lying, etc... are impossible in a FREE market by DEFINITION! I mean fine, blame american corporatist market or whoever or whatever the fuck you like... but you can't blame the free market because the free market is exactly NOT those things by DEFINITION. It's like redefining clean drinking water as sewage and telling everyone that drinking clean drinking water will kill you because its full of shit! Bitcoins are psuedonomynous You only really have addresses to go by... and it seems the thieves have sent them to a mixer... which will make them practically anonymous. So yeah, without other forensic evidence, I'd say the robbers have gotten away with it. It will depend, of course, on the security measures that exco.in took... I mean, if the private key was locked in a safe and only one employee had access to it, then that might be pretty damning evidence. Maybe they got IP logs? I don't know. But I wouldn't hold up much hope of them getting their coins back. OTOH... hackers apparently have recently run off with $1B from banks... kind of puts things in perspective. Yeah... this is generally good advice... I'm still surprised though how many companies manage to lose their bitcoins to hackers... You'd think they'd have learnt by now... oh well... I wouldn't use the official bitcoin app if I were you... It's a full bitcoin node and will have to download 13G of blockchain (or wherever it's at now). Use an SPV client, like electrum... it's just as secure, but you don't have to do full node processing. Good to hear you still have your coins... and you're learning too... once you get an electrum wallet you should transfer some of your bits there just to see that you actually control those and not some third party. 29G now $ Right. It's just going to get bigger and bigger... Especially as we get more and more transactions, and also when they eventually remove the 1MB block limit... it's just going to keep on growing even faster. In some sense, it's not all that much, 29GB fits easily on a thumb drive now... so that's not too much of a problem. If you're running a full node or are mining, it's no problem at all really. The theory is that hard drive space will continue to outpace blockchain growth. There is provision for transaction pruning... removing transactions that can longer be spent... And that should reduce the size quite considerably... BUT there are some clever uses of unspendable transactions that are going to have problems with this. (You can do some tricks so that bitcoins are redeamable from addresses that aren't linked to the address you advertise... so no one can prove you received a payment... it's complicated but relies on the fact that you can do a transformation of a public address, and the same transformation on the private key will give you a new private/public key pair... but you have to publish the transform hash somehow and that goes in the blockchain as an unspendable transaction... it's complicated... but interesting). So... yeah... there will be some pruning, and that's always been in the pipeline... but it will mess some non-standard use cases up. Also, in a sense, it's kind of like a fitness test for full nodes... they have to be stable enough to at least download the blockchain... I dunno... just a thought. There are problems with mining consolidation, which is related... the bitcoin network relies on no one having more than 50% of the hashing power... but if hashing power is a natural monopoly, the whole thing could fall apart... No one really knows the long term answer to this... everyone just keeps their fingers crossed that we'll never see the day. I also wonder if anyone will ever implement sharding... so that nodes can store a partial blockchain, and distribute the work between them... Just another thought of mine... I don't think we'll see that any time soon. So, the long term answer is that most people simply do not need the blockchain... SPV clients, like the ones I have mentioned, do not keep a local copy of the blockchain, however, they are as secure as a full bitcoin node. So, how much of a problem a large blockchain turns out to be is yet to be seen... So far, 29G is just really not a serious problem at all. I bet blaster's sitting there waiting for the download to finish, and can't get on to K5 in the meantime. You simply don't need it... You don't need the full client, cause you aren't going to be mining... you just want to be able to use it, and SPV clients, like the one I mentioned, should be enough. Actually... the latest bitcoin core 0.10.0 is just as quick as bittorrent... It downloads the headers first (they're small, like 13M or so)... then it requires the different blocks from different servers, rather than downloading them one at a time from only one server... so it works very similarly to bittorrent and is much faster than it was before... taking a mere 8 hours or so on a high speed connection. It's 29G after all!! I really don't recommend the full client for your use. Sent Comment deserved more than a 3. http://blockchain.info/address/1JrN9C9bMvzT8FTUjxBoUYQoLTRrsQqFzi Simple... it's all bribes... Gift is just a euphemism for a small, technically legal bribe. Like the way you 'tip' a call girl... You're not paying her to stick it up her ass... that would be illegal, no, you're just giving her a tip cause you enjoy her company, and then she suddenly remembers how much she enjoys anal. Just the tip. Dunno... they didn't enough? $ didn't TIP enough... dammit $ No... you're miles off Of course if you trace back any random bitcoin address you're going to get to a genesis block... and more than likely an older one than a newer one. No, I bought most of my bitcoin last year... when it was expensive... I bought it with the profit from the sale of my payday loans company... I was just there happily creating wealth out of thin air by charging poor people 6000% pa, when someone made an offer to buy the free money from air business from me. Tough choice, but I sold. Of course, bitcoin came crashing down and now I'm more broke than ever. (A change in the taxation law forced me to stop trading too... so I haven't been able to bring my cost basis price down either!). So, I don't have money for drugs and hookers, which is why I've had to work out how to get hookers to give me free sex and drugs... I can't afford a blowjob from a $2 whore... true story. So, my respect for economics comes from the idea that you are better off accepting the short term pain of a difficult truth than the long term damage caused by believing sweet lies. I mean, it's not that hard to understand the concepts and outcomes of the free market (the actual free market, not the jesus free market - really the unregulated market except for drugs which are forced into the black market)... you can still be pissed off about inequality... you can still be pissed off about things like environmental degredation (of course, this can't happen in a free market! for real! so you see how it's NOT a free market too)... but only first by understanding the free market. Why it is good, where it fails, what its limitations are. You just ignore it entirely... shove your fingers in your ears... sing lalalalala... and think it makes you smarter than someone who is interested in it... IRRESPECTIVE of their own personal circumstances. More than likely you are richer than me! If anything, you're way more of a tool of the capitalists than I am... a middle manager no less! The ultimate cog in the wealth extraction from the poor to the rich machine. You have no moral high ground to stand on. You just wave your ignorance in the air like a banner. Not a genesis block... a coinbase transaction $ The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has ruled that bitcoins are subject to our GST (17.5%) Goods and Services Tax... which is just a regular sales tax. I don't see how I can trade bitcoin in australia, with australian bank accounts, or in person in australia, without that ruling affecting me... foreign companies or otherwise. It was a UK company... and was UK wide... no brick and mortar, only a website. Yes, there are stupid AML laws in Aus and in the UK. > That is directly stealing from desperate poor people with no choice. There are some news laws coming in the US that will put the brakes on the violent raping that's going on in the check cashing business Let's analyse that... So, your solution would be to shut that kind of business down? And you're the kind of idiot that thinks that would make things BETTER? Because you simply do NOT understand the free market. Let's face it, if these people were low risk, and could get loans elsewhere THEY WOULD... So, they're going to these businesses because they can't get HELP anywhere else. The business HAS to charge those kind of interest rates to even have a HOPE of making a profit... otherwise they go bankrupt with the 30% default rate... also... they are SHORT TERM LOANS... so the interest rate is DECEPTIVE compared to long term mortgages. The problem is, not knowing the free market, you think you can increase people's freedoms by REDUCING their options... Do you not see how retarded that is? You cut these people off from credit... (EVEN BY REDUCING COMPETITION!)... you force them to go elsewhere... loan sharks, gangs, mafioso styles... They don't send a bailif around with a court order, those fucks cut your god damn fingers off or picaso up your face. Nothing would be better than MORE payday loans companies... more competition decreases the price (in this case, the price of money is the interest rates.) People like you are the fucking problem... not the solution. You know why I started that particular business? Because everyone was screaming about how much interest they charge, how easy it is to make money? REALLY MOTHERFUCKER? If so, then why the fuck aren't YOU doing it? You have NO FUCKING IDEA how hard it is to get all the paperwork and regristrations and licenses in order... You have no idea how hard it is to make sure your customers are both legit, capable and LIKELY to pay your loan back... Everyone is happy to TAKE money, far less are happy to pay it back. If it is such a PREDATORY business as you suggest... just fucking try running one --- even at break even! I bet you'd fail, throw up your hands and cry "it's too hard mommy!"... Or you're going to give me a pissweak excuse how you would never get involved in such an evil business... well fuck you.. people want money, and you shit on those who oblige, standing on the sidelines giving your sage advice but never doing anything yourself... fucking wanker. > There is no such thing as a free market It's the ideal to strive for... the deviation FROM the free market causes DEAD WEIGHT LOSSES... The role of government should be to identify these deviations and to correct for them. > nor should there be. Seriously... you're a complete fuckhead... you don't know what the free market is... but GODDAMN IT IF I'M NOT AGAINST IT! > Small business owners like yourself think they're part of the same game as huge corporations Retarded bullshit adhominen... try harder failfag. > I am the bridge between the machine and the people You're a greedy little officious fuck who likes to tell people what to do and get's a hard on when he fires the lazy and the incompetent. You're no white knight in shining armour... your a piece of the machine and you're just happy to get that big easy paycheck to take home to your fat and ugly wife and kids... Your hands have more blood on them than mine ever will faggit. Shut up trane... your full of shit and retarded... your economic ideas are based on the idea that real world goods and services are infinite... so you fail at the first step. Seriously, get back to your thermodynamic breaking magnifying glass and crack bowl... you got nothing to offer here. I said STFU fail faggit No... scarcity is real... the world is finite. I don't ignore the 30% food overproduction... that is by ECONOMIC DESIGN! You're too stupid to understand that, so I won't even bother explaining it. > And markets actively work to subvert knowledge PEOPLE subvert knowledge... the FREE MARKET REQUIRES FULL INFORMATION! Otherwise it's just the REGULAR FUCKING MARKET. NOW FUCK OFF YOU UNEDUCATED WILFULLY IGNORANT PIECE OF SHIT. I didn't read past the first fucking line... The FREE market REQUIRES FULL KNOWLEDGE. That's it... you can rail against american capitalism all you want... but that's not the free market and you're a retarded faggit. You don't even know what your arguing about because you didn't do the course. NOW GO FUCK OFF AND DIE CUNTFACE. No... I'm not going to read it... Like you didn't bother doing the course... FUCK OFF AND DIE ALREADY I can't argue with you, because you are wilfully ignorant... You have decided not to do the course, and therefore your comments are nonsensical. > Example: Monsanto fights tooth and nail against labeling GMO foods. Why? Because the market wants to hold back knowledge. This is because Monsanto doesn't want to operate in a FREE fucking market! Because you are wilfully ignorant, you can't tell the FREE market from what regularly happens in the American corporatists market. Someone like Monsanto does something CLEARLY ANTI-FREE market... and you, being a retarded idiot, blame the FREE market, rather than seeing how this goes against the principles of the FUCKING FREE market. Your ignorance is entirely your responsibility, and I owe you nothing fuckhead. Forgot to add: You're job is basically to extract the maximum productivity from your underlings and the minimum cost to your employer... And the sad thing is, you're not even doing it for your own benefit but for some even wealthier fuckwits and stockholders. You're equivalent to the slave promoted to slave driver... whip in hand... work harder or taste my whip. You're such a role model of financial freedom, you fucking sicken me. He's about as ignorant as you when it comes to what the free market actually is... he's gotten all his knowledge about it from television probably, not from actual books or courses on the subject... same as you... I may as well be arguing with preschoolers the knowledge of both you is so limited. People got no idea... It's so easy to look at a business and complain about it... "OMG, that's so unfair, how can they charge so much, etc, etc..."... but there's clearly demand, and if you're not doing it yourself, you probably do not understand what's actually involved. It's exactly the type of thing people get riled up about, because they see these terrible interest rates... and some idiots even think it's money for nothing. I started it after conversations with trane here about 'money from thin air'... basically proving some money creation theories... it's truly hard fucking work. At the time I wanted to put a link on the page to some debt counselling service... but my reading of the legislation suggested this was illegal... The law changed, and this now compulsory. I followed the principles of the free market, no hidden fees or charges... everything straight up as you could possibly get. The late fees were a killer... 1% per day... which is 6k% pa, but that gives you a lot of wiggle room for debt forgiveness. I even used it in my adverts... the front page had a giant 6000% per year loans written on it. It's not like you could claim you didn't realise the costs involved in getting a loan from me. I got more requests for loans than I could service. It's more of the threat of it than actually charging it... After all, a regulated business can't take away your kneecaps... but I could easily say "pay me $200 for your late loan and I'll forget the $1000 you owe". Except for the accountants and the banks, everyone was on about how there will be legislation to limit the interest rates of these types of loans... so stupid... what? People can't compare different interest rates and make their own choices? I'd like to see some rational non-adhominen argument for this type of thinking... but you see none supplied by greengrass et al. They can't get it through their head that you can't increase people's freedoms by limiting their options. Not to mention it can actually be cheaper to get a payday loan than to exceed your banks overdraft! If you put a limit on the interest rate... there simply won't be companies willing to loan these people money... they'll either go thieving or will borrow money from unregulated criminals. Is it too much to ask that people stop whining and actually try to say, I dunno, COMPETE in the market place? Offer lower interest rate loans if you think the charges are excessive? No, they'd rather cry to the government and limit people... and I'm the bad guy. Anyway, I sold the company to the Rothschild's last year... been playing with bitcoin since... will still need a job pretty soon. Yeah... Student Loans are pretty crazy... The government pays for your tuition in Aus... You pay it back as a small increase to your taxes after you earn a certain amount, and it's indexed at the CPI. I think it's a good system. Also, no, I wasn't giving out credit cards or loans to kids or the very young. Perfect example People complaining about a business they literally wouldn't be willing to do themselves. It's as simple as making low interest payday loans to people, but you won't do it. Funny that. If you can't scrape $100 together to loan out with interest, then I truly feel sorry for you. Otherwise I think you found the reason why these places have to charge such high interest rates: > most of them didn't pay me back. I forgot about your incredible expensive medical costs... student loans and medical costs... two things the US should keep working on. Still... almost anyone can scrape together $100. Yeah, promissory notes are the first step. It's easy to reconcile... It's not created out of nothing, it's created out of... hey... do you have enough crack addled memory left to complete this sentence? Or am I just repeating myself over and over again to a slug brained moron? No... that wasn't the answer I was looking for... must be crack addled memory loss then. I mean, on one hand, you're close... you talk about mortgage debt... but then you go on about money creation... like it's being created out of thin air! Less crack, more study boy! That was awful... Desperately plugging his book... Won't someone please give LD a job on a support desk helping people empty their trash icons so he can feel all smug and superior again? What the fuck are you talking about? There is no such thing as money, it's a ticketing system, handed out by the government to rich bankers. The market is a lie... there is only crack and oggfrog! The only market is the stock market run by the NWO. Here I was thinking it was his bad book reviews. $ Old Kurons never leave They just take extended hikes away from keyboard. Procrasti's $10 Bitcoin Give Away Okay, so you don't understand bitcoin, what it is, or how it works? Well here's your FREE chance to get your hands on some. I'll be giving away up to $10 worth of bitcoin, or about 30000 bits*, in 10 lots of 3000 bits... approximately $1. All you have to do is be the one of the first ten to post a bitcoin address. For some of you, this may be the most valuable post you will ever make. *: 1 million bits in a bitcoin. If you don't know how to create a bitcoin address... simply get yourself a wallet... I recommend electrum for desktops, mycelium for android and toast wallet for iphone. These are all SPV clients and do not require you to download the entire blockchain. You have nothing to lose... it costs you nothing, so even if you lose it all on hookers, drugs or gambling, you haven't lost anything at all! Not really in the spirit of my post now is it? I'll tell you what... You post your own bitcoin address... then you can donate it to https:/archive.org yourself... and everyone will be able to see you do that. I got to say, the vanity address made it pretty obvious. Sent http://blockchain.info/address/1NY2XrXw62iQNSBD8dnqEEfYNVa8zNiMkw I sell on localbitcoins... Well... I used to... Australia (The ATO) has bought in this crazy GST law that means you basically have to pay a sales tax on bitcoin sales... I just don't see it as workable... Presumably means I'd have to get GST receipts on bitcoins I purchase to claim off the GST I would owe on bitcoins I sell... that greatly limits who I can buy bitcoin from... I also think it's a double taxation nightmare (I pay GST on the bitcoin, then I pay GST on the coffee I buy with that bitcion... can the coffee merchant claim the GST incurred on the bitcoin without the customer having to be GST registered and providing a receipt... what a fucking joke). I think it's a bad ruling, hopefully it gets overturned, but in the meantime I've stopped trading... It's too much hassle and too risky until I get some advice on how it affects me. BUT... localbitcoins is still a pretty good place to get them... just deal with people who have good ratings, look for red flags (you're account there will have a literal red flag that it's a new account, also be careful of TOR users and stuff...) In general... it's a lot easier to buy than to sell... You provide screen shots of your bank transfer and localbitcions run an escrow service and have been pretty good in my experience... Be extra careful with cash transactions... start with small amounts... be careful who you deal with... don't meet in dark alleyways at 3am for your transfers... you know... common sense. Also... mycelium for android has local trader built in... find someone local selling and do a deal with them. You can also buy them from coinjar in Australia... maybe look around, there are other places. Yeah... I expect this $10 investment will probably pay off more than $10 in the long run... but I'm not expecting a huge effect... just sharing some tech people here may be interested in. Bitcoin benefits from the network effect... so the more people using it, the more valuable it becomes. Yeah... heaps of places... I don't accept VISA personally... I don't have a payment gateway that accepts VISA... I would normally send you my bank account details and have you pay with EFT. Check out coinjar.com, they probably accept VISA payments... also (but I haven't used them) coinloft.com.au, though at first look you might have to go to a bank. There are probably other places... I mean, you could look around and report back here I suppose? I dunno... there may be a problem that VISA might not allow payment processing for a bitcoin company... They are a direct competitor after all... and VISAs ability to act as a gatekeeper of financial transactions is one of the things bitcoin attacks. Yeah... that would require I send you my real name and stuff... (not technically, but it's how I do it, so I got clean records and shit)... also, see point about me not currently trading. Anyway... seriously, get onto localbitcoins, there are plenty of highly rated sellers who will accept EFTs from whichever bank you are with and will release your coins in short order... I'm sure. Just make sure it's an escrowed deal... you can't go that wrong. If you're really unsure about dealing with randoms... coinjar... but there'll be a day or three delay until they can credit your account. Please report back how it goes. I know you gave me your name, honey... And I do like you, I really do... It's just that I'm not ready for that kind of commitment just yet. Yeah... it's called know your customer (KYC) laws and they come into effect any time you hold fiat accounts on behalf of other people. You can always anonymise your bitcoins later. Cool... let me know how it goes. Interesting... You can still try coinjar and localbitcoins. Sent http://blockchain.info/address/1MfbXZAPX5swPv5isU4qSspKgeiWgJdV6v I trust that's a joke... If that is your passphrase then you just gave everyone access to your bitcoins... I mean... if I had an iphone. LOL... It is breadwallet... I always call it toastwallet for some reason... oh well. Oh sorry... that's your passphrase to your encrypted wallet... then that's okay unless a kuron steals your phone... I was thinking it was the passphrase to your wallet secret key seeds... but that's normally randomly generated... that's more important and lets you regenerate your wallet elsewhere. Why would anyone buy doge coins? When they've been falling in price relative to bitcoin forever since a few months past their creation? Though doge coins are kind of meant to be cheap and jokey... to encourage spending and tipping and such... but I've never held any. Yeah... this is their primary use case actually... The incredible inflation built into them is all about keeping their value low so that people send them about more easily... they are the monopoly money of cryptocurrencies... Of course, if you have to do very little to get a thing, it won't have much value to you, so this is also reflected in the price. I mean, it's really quite good in helping new users learn a little about crytocurrencies with little investment or cost. Fair enough... but unless you want to generate your own private key by hand and do the calculations required to produce a public address... I have no where to send bitcoins to you. Come on people $8 left to give away here! $ I always thought the Chinese were good at following protocols... But here you are, proving my stereotypes wrong again. Next thing you'll start writing parseable sentences and then how am I going to maintain my world view? Yeah... I understand bitcoin's had some problems in China... Government regulations clamping down on it (though not outright illegal). And yeah... it makes capital controls much harder for governments to enforce... capital flight becomes more likely. Consider that with bitcoin, you could smuggle a billion dollars across a border, carrying nothing but a memorized 12 word wallet seed... and it would be near impossible to prove or trace. Sent: http://blockchain.info/address/1GSioGNLXGWfx2461xvJ5xhdATGyAEjWNg Of course you don't understand... You've decided to not even give it a go... and I couldn't have made it any fucking easier. > but if I counterfeit US currency men with guns will come after me. If you can counterfeit bitcoin, you'll have made quite some leaps in cryptographic mathematics. So not sure how that's irrelevant. > All I can see is that bitcoin is money because everyone agrees that it is money. That's pretty much how money works dude... Same when people use shells... prison cigarettes and cans of sardines have served similar purposes... though they are useful in their own right too (even shells can be used for pretty jewellery). Bitcoin just implements the functions required for it be money (though there are other creative uses out there). > Why would 7-11 be motivated to accept my bitcoin? Because people will be willing to spend it, and it's not hard to accept it... of course today many merchants do not accept it... Your local 7/11 may not... but there are bars that do! It's what we call adoption... it takes time. In the meantime, you could find someone on mycelium localtrader, they might give you a dollar for your bits and you can spend that on a coke. I mean... right this minute, you could download a wallet... copy and paste a bitcoin address... and have real bitcoin to play with. Understanding the base use case will go a long way towards you understanding the technology behind it. I can't see why you are passing up this opportunity... it can only help you understand what you have to do for your codemental project. Is there a conflict of interest here? I mean ACTUALLY GIVE IT A GO! Like, send me a fucking bitcoin address already... I'm not asking you to analyse the soundness of elliptical curve cryptography, its relation to the riemann zeta function or if and how anyone will ever solve the prime number distribution problem... I'm just asking you to get a small piece of software that enables you to create a bitcoin address. Is it laziness holding you back? Analysis paralysis? You scared you might lose something you're getting for free? What's the hold up here? Sent http://blockchain.info/address/1JrN9C9bMvzT8FTUjxBoUYQoLTRrsQqFzi Six more to go. You're welcome... It's pretty smooth and painless when you're used to visa et al. If MDC ever gets around to posting an address Everyone could pool their bitcoins and afford him some dairy creamer... or maybe cover the expense of his next legal representation? We could fund a trhurler hike for trane. Teh fuck you doing posting GUIDs? Are you a Windows programmer? You trying to get bitcoin for your disk partition? Get out of here. Sent http://blockchain.info/address/18EAcPATJ7qTggygB3ugkFeU6hDraSqbuQ 5 More Give Aways Available... That should just about cover everyone on K5... Though I think the two people who could gain the most from it won't bother... one cause he's too busy considering the philosophical implications of exchanging seashell for hot pussy, the other cause he doesn't want to get sucked into the seductive and lavish lifestyles of the rich and famous... or something. Anyway... I'm gonna get some sleep... So you'll have to wait for me... Though, like my hooker friends, it's first cum first served. Sent http://blockchain.info/address/1NwzqdGZ2mkYxGaBSva5mURTjx4siYfXaj I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that no one has paid you to take your songs off the internet: http://blastar.in/orion/sings/ So, what was the deal with that bitcoin tx? I see 0.1 bitcoins moved from your address and others to 1HotSWAPvmFXeUHKxq5tqQCswdTxaRzxvY... Is this yours too? Are you using an online wallet, exchange or something similar? I checked everyone else's addresses, and no one's moved them about yet, except for you. Interesting, nonetheless. What are you using as a wallet? How would someone else get hold of them? Like I said, if it's on a website, you probably still have them... The fact that you can't remember the website though is going to be a bit of a problem. Mumble explains how to back up your private keys in another comment... It's pretty easy with electrum... there's like a 12 word key you record and you can recreate your wallet anywhere... just don't let it get into the wrong hands or lose it. 30000^12 is (3x10^4)^12 is (3^12)x10^48 is already more than the number of atoms in the known universe... I don't think you have too much to worry about. That's already stuffed full of cash What're you bein greedy for? I might send you some (I got 4 left)... but let me know what this account is for, how you use bitcoin, and also promise to maybe tip the occasional quality comment on here with a few cents. Also, cause you are familiar with bitcoin, prove you own the address by signing something along the lines of "I am localroger, and this is my bitcoin address". Oh cool... sounds good... What wallet do you use? Do you know how to sign a message with your bitcoin address? Demonstrate to the nice folks here and I'll tip you. Posting it on your blog doesn't prove ownership You have to sign a message: http://multibit.org/en/help/v0.5/help_signAndVerifyMessage.html Verified and Sent http://brainwallet.github.io/#verify Message verified to be from 1NKLnnHMAkLZQRA1JXQf9PWgakNCUXixN2 -----BEGIN BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE----- Cool, I didn't realize it could do this. -----BEGIN SIGNATURE----- 1NKLnnHMAkLZQRA1JXQf9PWgakNCUXixN2 HyPPcxQObn9ksWm8s0fuz+n5/5z+dQUU9g4o9Wy7elUjAlWF+/QTges8A3TybEr8CRxktKKLv1XRK1DL TYXyks4= -----END BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE----- http://blockchain.info/address/1NKLnnHMAkLZQRA1JXQf9PWgakNCUXixN2 Sent you a little extra for the extra effort... Who's a dirty little bitcoin whore? You are. God... I'm so far behind on the work I'm supposed to be doing... but I'll take a look at some point. Complicated conspiracy you got there bro $ Isn't "Live your fucking life" one of mine? Holy Shit! I'm sure I think I said something like that to MDC quite recently... now I wonder if I was subliminally programmed by that old sig? Weird. Maybe she chocked on a hula hoop? If you some bitcoin I'd be happy to send you the pics. The Hole in 1 Percenters: Resistence is Futile But come on in, the water's fine. I hear thermo is a troll too spread by the illuminati to try and make you do some fucking work. Kevin O'Leary: My Kind of Economics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuqemytQ5QA So what's your fucking problem with the free market, huh? I think he's right... We're only talking about a handful of rich people. If we took everything they had and gave it to everyone else on the planet, we'd only be $250 better off... doesn't seem like that would be life changing to anyone. The problem isn't that there are rich people, the problem is that some people are so poor. You seem to think we can print $100B bills and give them to the poor and everyone can be rich... but it doesn't work like that. Say $100B/day... or say why not. No... it's because your theory doesn't work... You think bread is fundamentally different to 747s, and economically, they aren't... It's why your theory needs epicycles, oh, I mean indexation. Also, last year you were campaigning for $16k today it's $25k, that's more than 50% inflation already... you have no rational basis for the amount, or understanding of what effects it has, so you have no rational explanation of why it wouldn't work at $100B/day either. I agree... really... like you said, you are taxing holders of savings or are the creditor of loans, by decreasing their value in real terms. It doesn't really tax workers, but inflationary lag does. So, the idea is literally for the government to write cheques to people, with no expectation or promise for it to be paid back... (unlike what happens at the fed... not even a gov expense, is it?)... it's basically just pure government expenditure. At $25k/pa for the adult population of the US (roughly at 200M), that's a $5T budget expense... we expect that money to come out of nowhere? If there's no attempt at even looking like paying back the gov debt, I'm guessing that's going to lead to problems in the long run. Just think how long it takes to update min wage laws... lol. Of course, with a UBI, you could argue against min wage laws... but... if the UBI isn't indexed (will cause crazy economy crashing effects if it is and it's too high)... It might find it's balance I suppose... but it will too lag behind inflation. I just don't think that kind of expenditure, is going to be sustainable... it has to have rational sources of funding. What's the tax at 1% of the wealth of the US top 50% or whatever spread over everybody? How much can be saved from decreases in other welfare costs? Maybe we need other taxes increased too... higher capital gains tax, more sales tax, more income taxes! Does the US gov ever plan to balance its budget or pay back its debts? If you want to inflate the problems away... Be careful on where that tax falls... Because, how much of the 1%ers wealth is tied up in dollar equivalents? I don't think it's very much, so inflation doesn't hurt them. It's not that there isn't enough money (that's never a problem anyway)... it's where the wealth comes from. One reason to have (at least the effect of having) lower capital gains tax than income taxes is for incentive to investment over labour... not sure of the pro's/con's. If you CPI the basic income... well... if it is inflationary, (as unbalanced government expenditure, you could expect it to be, right?) you've got yourself a very strong feedback loop there. Read it a few times... pretty much agree... Does anyone have the maths to tell me how much you could print a year (and give it away, so NOT LIKE THE BANKS AT ALL TRANE!!) to create 2% (more) inflation... say. What's inflation currently running at... what will it be like when all that QE finally filters out? (I guessing that you could naively assume 2% of the current money supply, say... distributed to everyone... if no one else cares too... I'll probably try and work this out.) Expecting the gov to spend an ADDITIONAL $5T year seems pretty unlikely... that's bigger than the current budget already.... so $25k a year is right out... If you just swapped BI for social security, $875B among 200M people is $4375 a year... so, a lot of those privileged welfare queens like trane will have to take a hit to get this to work for the greater good. For sure... though the growth in M3 would be a reasonable first order approximation minus delay effects... So my math there is about as good as your going to get (at this level of analysis anyway). But obviously depends on so many other things... growth in the underlying economy (esp in terms of transactions) would negate that... but not sure you can have an infinite ongoing growth in a finite world? Found the money supply... is surprisingly low... Like, i see $11.6T as the largest last number (M2 Money Supply) here: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m2 Which, at 2% is another $1160 per year per person... So, we're up to $5500 a year per person... I think that would still be a pay cut for trane... God help you if you need special care... cause we took away SS for this... How far do we want to push that inflation while we're at it... I finally get what you mean... We index say bread at $1 a loaf, and a 747 at $350M and we get the fed to give $100B per day per person on the planet, because deficits don't matter... Then those 87 people sure are going to look foolish when we're suddenly richer than them and everyone can buy 300 747s a day! I'd just like to understand what part of your theory says that wouldn't work... or maybe it's just crazy enough that it would? This is the guy that won't lift the smallest of fingers to help himself... He just wants to live on the backs of everyone else... No way would he buy cheap stuff and sell it at a flea market, let alone make his own stuff to sell, like bread... and wants to tell other people what their indexed price of their own bread should be? And would dare call such a man (baker) greedy for setting his own price for his own hard work and production? You're both an idiot and a selfish cunt of the highest order. I agree with everything... but Why can't it be $100B/day per person? Why are you being mean on not letting everyone buy 300 747s a day? It would be mean for boeing to say these poor ppl are able to buy 300 747s a day! I think they should walk! Seriously. Also, you don't know what the free market is... > Individuals working outside the market Who are you talking about? Those coerced into working? Slaves for example? Those who produce externalities? Are you saying Big Oil are the real innovators? Maybe those who hide information? Used car sales men? Monopolies perhaps? Maybe you wouldn't look like such an idiot if you knew what the free market actually was. Quality Over Quantity means you have to remove shit. Otherwise, why not pages of random characters? Is anything truly ever deleted anyway? One of the mods removed it... I'm not sure what I think... I can of course approve it, but can't be bothered... I'd have to click the approve link... sounds like a lot of work. The rich don't create money for themselves... bill gates doesn't have billions of DOLLARS... he has billions in WEALTH. Once you see the difference, we can discuss... Consider that my house is worth $1M, but I have $10k in debts and no savings... Am I rich or poor? If I owe $10k to banks... But have a $1M house, am I rich or poor? That's simple enough? Notice how little the actions of those bankers affects me? I don't have a mortgage... It's irrelevant, and you're skirting the question... just answer it... am I rich or poor? You continually evade the single question I posed because it destroys your argument. Am I rich or poor... with a $1M house, and $10k credit card debt? Money creation is NOT wealth creation... it is wealth REDISTRIBUTION... You can't create WEALTH by printing money, but you can change who has wealth. Get to terms with this, and we can discuss the problems and solutions... if you think everyone can live like a billionaire by giving everyone a billion dollars, then you're an idiot... if you don't, then you have to concede your axioms are wrong. You're right... I thought you said that the rich default on loans... I read it as a comma, not a full stop. So, you agree that a house is WEALTH... At least that's a start. So, you understand that the rich can own everything, and the poor could have all the money in the world, but if the rich didn't care for money at all, they would still be rich, and the poor could have billions and still be poor? Because, that's the beginning of realising the difference between real world wealth, and games played by shuffling money around, and redistributing some wealth. Hey Tranny Boy! I approved that article for you, cause you caught me out. By the way... it's not that I don't understand HOW money is created... I disagree with you that it is created out of NOTHING. You will notice, for example, that it is actually created out of the MORTGAGE... Ie, A promise to pay back the loan, backed by the property. That is the NOTHING you keep talking about... but it is not nothing at all... otherwise, show me how it works when you skip this step. It still fundamentally depends on the loans being serviced... once that stops, the whole thing stops. Of course, I mean this statistically... The banks PAY for INSURANCE... and insurance companies win on AVERAGE... That has nothing to do with your arguments. Without the loans, there is no money creation... therefore money is not created out of NOTHING, but the promise to pay back the loans. It's as simple as that... your view is retardedly simplistic of what is really happening. No, it's clearly not a lot... it's just illustrative. And it's all relative anyway... it is actually quite rich globally... Even a $100M is little compared to the true elite. Don't you get that Trane doesn't LIKE to work? It appears that you are suggesting he get involved in the flea market... Everyone knows the flea market is a con set up by rich asian bankers. He doesn't want to get involved in anything that IgnorantMotherfuckers do, like make his own money or way in the world... Fuck, he'd rather starve in a VR than plant his own vegetables, and you think you can get him involved in trading? He'd get stressed... he wants to have sex with trees in the forest instead, why are you stopping him? I don't really think you can consider it work if you're not getting paid for it... Otherwise it's just what you want to do... if you like cleaning up parks, or writing long essays, that's what you're doing for fun, not profit. I'm not saying it doesn't take effort... but it's not work unless you are doing it with a view to get paid. Yeah... obviously it's all utility maximisation... I think economists look at it like this... if you're inclined to do something for the 'fun' of it, it's not work. If it would generally be considered a disutility that is overcome through payment (or the expectation of, down the line), it's work. In a sense, those artists aren't working, they get value out of creation in and of itself. You'd have to pay them a lot to get them to work. Are you doing it in the hope of making money one day or do you do it because you enjoy it. If, for example, you knew it would never help, directly or indirectly, you to get money, would you do it? How much would you have to be paid NOT to do it? I think this is the best test of all... You find it has utility in and of itself, it's not work, although it might take a lot of effort, you want to do this. I doubt that statement... Everyone has their price... but maybe your just mental enough not to. Anyway, proves that it's not work for you, it's pleasure. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/work. 1.General: A job, something done to earn money. It takes effort, but it isn't work. That's something she would do because she wants the results in and of themselves... she would have to be paid not to do it. For sure, it's only one definition though... for example, when lifting weights you can calculate how much work is performed, you lift the weights off the floor, you put them back, there's no displacement, no work has been done. Same thing really. LOL see MDC... I told ya This guy wants nothing to do with humanity... unless it involves sponging off them and doing nothing in return. Yet you want them to give you money... Humanity to Trane: Fuck You. Well... I don't have a boss... so I'm not sure what you're talking about. The thing is, you talk about getting money... but you seem to want to tell people what to do with their own property... You think you a right to destroy a golf course, when clearly a lot of people derive utility from it. Why is that? Why can't you fuck off to your forests... why do you want to dismantle other people's source of pleasure? I'm adding a bitcoin tipjar to this comment: 1CFXkxCBnc2Gv6h9o4ZdN33vFohoXPZ2Dj Complicated Huh? I think incoming replies are more valuable than what I'd make in bitcoins, but I'm taking this huge risk anyway. Consider that most people don't use information, and that most science is huh, that's weird... anyway... I'll make money because I observed a pattern, and I can't tell if it's real or just coincidence. Yes, several... You really think adding: Bitcoin Topjar: 1CFXkxCBnc2Gv6h9o4ZdN33vFohoXPZ2Dj Would have a large effect on page rankings? You should probably drink more water. How? That would suggest any word anywhere on your page could have a massive effect... like using thus instead of therefore... omg. Why would those three strings have such a large effect? Your site must really drink water for it to be that easily affected... Like you can't even add an about page without dropping your rankings? That's pretty sad dude. You can't even link to an about page with a bitcoin address on it without causing much damage. I find that really hard to believe. Do you post your email address? How is a bitcoin address any different? I don't think having a bitcoin address would alter the outcome of any of those things... well... I'd be more inclined to tip, because that's about the only way I ever would... but I can't see it having any effect on the others. I'd be surprised if there was much overlap... and be surprised to find that adding a bitcoin address next your email address would cause people to stop linking to you. BUT, it's a free world, you can do whatever the hell you like. I'm hardly going to force you to make more money than you otherwise would. Also consider at $250 a bitcoin, a few thousand today could be hell of a lot more in five years. I watched the one about the drug war I don't know how anyone can still think the war on drugs is a good idea... Maybe they just don't think... or like doing what they're told... Doesn't make sense to me. I was going to read it... but it seemed long, and there was a funny cat video on youtube. Man, those cats... hahahah, omg, you wouldn't believe it, lol.... you should check em out some time. Why can't I just use natural language to do this? Why do i have to right in this strange syntax: Every X who Y includes a X who Y? It's just strange and confusing. I mean, who writes like that. It's this idea that you can base language on mathematics that causes this... it's just too consistent and not flexible enoguh. Why can't I just write john whistels, johns a dude I know, and people what whistles are happy... does ya rekon jons happy? But I got to use this strange programming syntax instead! I want a bot I cant talk to just normally, like I was making a comment at it like this, exactly like I am wrting now, and it would learn from what I write and stop making mistakes like thinking utility has anything to do with money or that NLP can be programmed as rules liek maths. I guess that'a challange for ya... but these scientists are so fickle, I guess it's cause they're selfish pricks too caught up in their own ego to consider what I want. I don't know much about it... but a couple of my friends are heavily into it. Isn't it just a bunch of unstructured data accessible via http? I don't get what the fuss is all about... can anyone enlighten me? I've read a fair bit about it, but I just don't get it... (though I will read the links a bit later). No it wasn't a typo... I don't mean unstructured like natural language... which is probably what that normally means... so, I don't really mean that... What I mean was, like it's just key value pairs, or named data like xml with attributes and shit... but there's no standard on what any entity even means... like how do you represent a phone number, everyone does it differently I imagine, with like phone, phone-number employee:phone, employer -> phone -> mobile or some shit... It seems to me it's main purpose isn't to make it easier for computers to parse... because computers won't grok that shit anyway... it makes it easier for programmers to access and deal with... I don't see it helping AI all that much, not until it groks the keys as well as the values, no? But it fell off the couch $ If it's a turing machine with enough memory then yes... always... If it's fast enough... then also in real time. (Though you might have to add that little commodore button) Any other questions? Individual Liberty You probably guessed by now I'm pretty much for individual liberty... as long as it doesn't harm others... free markets, anti-prohibition, etc... BUT... The two things I think that really should be restricted are antibiotics, and (your right not to have) vaccinations... and both because your individual choices harm others.. Antibiotics because it increases the rate of antibiotic resistant bacteria that can cause harm to many other people... so, access to them should be restricted (agricultural use is a problem here too I believe). And vaccinations, because they rely on the herd effect... sometimes vaccinations don't take, infants that are too young can't have them yet and remain vulnerable, and some children with illness or otherwise can't take them... these groups rely on the fact that others are vaccinated for everyone to remain protected. Now, yeah, maybe if unvaccinated kids could be kept out of school and other public places where they could spread disease, then I'd say for sure... but otherwise, you either have a valid medical reason not to get vaccinated, or you get vaccinated. Basically... for the majority of people, you have to keep the vaccination rate above the herd effect threshold, or children who can't get vaccinated are going to die. It's a tiny bit of a tricky problem because it does go against my philosophy of having control over your own body (and that of your children), especially from the state, and getting injected with 'stuff' is pretty intrusive... but on the balance, I'd say either your kids get vaccinated, or they go to unvaccinated kids school, and we fence them all off and they can live there... I don't see an easy way around this problem. Also, so much anti-vax is just based on pure bullshit it's ridiculous it got this far. All that autism bullshit is bullshit. So much harm has been caused by these falsehoods... most people (enough for the herd effect) would have just gone with vaccinations on the idea their children won't get sick if people hadn't been suckered into this crap. No gun has ever killed a person... People with guns kill people... yes... sometimes lawfully, and often not... and when someone unlawfully kills with a gun... we hang them or let them rot in prison... because they've crossed that line from individual liberty to harm. But with antibiotics and anti-vax... you're choices can lead to many deaths... no matter what you do. That choice ALONE causes the harm... like pulling a trigger on an automatic into a crowd. > Like how come people that HAD THE VACCINATION still contract the disease? Didn't you read what I wrote, I specifically mentioned this group... AND you'll find it in the wiki article I linked... sometimes vaccination just doesn't take... it's a statistical thing... which is precisely why allowing (too many) people to be unvaccinated is dangerous. (again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity) > Autism bullshit. How do you know? I never hear of any research study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy I'm fairly sure the scientific community has consensus on this issue... much like AGW. You pretty much don't hear much argument against vax from actual scientists. > And it NEVER HURTS to question the status quo. BUT IT's SCIENCE ALL HAIL! Ok yeah, but ain't that what we do in Science? Question assumptions? Yes... Hail Science... This is a scientific question, not a political* one... question assumptions... the entire scientific process... but follow science on this issue... and there seems to be consensus... it's NOT a scientifically controversial subject. > In the end, why can't we make it like anti-biotics? You go to a doctor or clinic and talk to them about it and have the vax done. Because of HERD IMMUNITY... My 6 month old nephew is at risk because older kids aren't getting vaccinated and he's too young to be vaccinated. The vax might not have been effective for my 5 year old niece... and now she's at risk in ways I never was, because the anti-vax movement. We've lost herd immunity. > Lining kids up at school and shooting them full of bugs just doesn't seem very scientific to me. Are you questioning how vaccinations work here, or the idea that you vaccinate as many people as possible? I don't see how this is unscientific. > Either your kids stop being gay or we're going to send them to gay school so they don't spread the gay. If gay was contagious disease... I might agree with you... but it's not, it's not an argument... these are severe contagious diseases, but because a whole generate has never seen them, they've forgotten how devastating they actually are. Maybe we just let enough kids die horribly and the issue will be resolved... 5 year old kiddies in iron lungs, becoming retarded, blind, deaf, disfigured and disabled will make good news anyway. Then when some of those kids are dying because their friends didn't get vaccinated (even though the dying kid did), we get the pitchforks and we stop making this mistake for another generation or two. In the end though we don't have to convince everyone to get the vax... exceptions are fine... as long as those who go without (along with the normal non-effective rate) remain below the herd effect threshold, it's all good... it's only a problem because it's become a popular meme. *: Well... in some sense it's political - http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-dont-vaccinate-my-child-because-its-my-right- to,37839/ It appears they accidently used a culture of live stupid on you. Bullets don't kill anyone either. I got a handful of bullets right here. They don't even look angry. Bullets with high momentum kill people. Name one medicine that does work on 100% of people The reason you can't is because the body is incredibly complex and the confounding factors huge. Which is why doctors will often have several lines of antibiotics for the same bacteria... The first one will only work in 90% of people, the second one 90% of the remaining, and so on. Doctors ALREADY KNOW that not everyone who gets a vaccine will become inoculated. It's called the vaccine effective rate. It's why they rely on HERD IMMUNITY. If you are so retarded that you are not convinced by this, are you suggesting that small pox, measles, mumps, polio and a whole heap others have just been a conspiracy of the NWO to inject you with mercury? Communist conspiracy perhaps? I thought k5 generally respected science, but I'm getting more despondent with you lot every day. What? We KNOW the vaccines aren't MAGICAL and aren't 100% effective... That's a KNOWN FACT! So we blame the UNVACCINATED for compromising HERD IMMUNITY -- which does work VERY WELL (until the anti-vax morons come along). Dude, I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny or are trolling... Yes, breast milk passes on all sorts of resistance, it's great against the majority of bugs... BUT... you do realise that Smallpox ALONE killed over 300M people in the 20th century, but has now been eradicated? You won't stop Measles by breastfeeding. It just doesn't work like that, so I'm not sure you have a point. What you said about herd immunity was correct I've posted links already... you can see the required coverage for it there... but your 5% figure is totally inaccurate: After the first dose of the MMR vaccine, 64 out of 100 people will be protected against mumps, 90 out of 100 people will be protected against measles and 95 out of 100 people will be protected against rubella. You will need two doses of the vaccine to provide enough protection against measles, mumps and rubella. Like posting to /r/SRS I've had it with these rabid udder cows in this udder rabid sub! Nah... you can't expect to have perfect test cases What you can do instead is use a code coverage tool to at least make sure that all your code gets executed by your tests... this still won't give you 100% semantic coverage, but it'll get you a fair way there. Also, when you find a bug like this, you should add a test case that doesn't work before the fix, but works afterwards... This gives you a little more robustness against future regressions when you refactor. Of course this all requires effort... so how much / little you do really depends on what your priorities are. Yeah, fine... but did you keep the test case? You do have a test script for all this, right? I'm just saying, even though you wrote some scripts to hunt down the bug, did you keep a test case for it so that it doesn't appear again... no matter what happens? I'm so glad it was you who posted that. I couldn't believe that mumble would be so stupid. When I saw the title, I thought wtf... then when I read it, I thought, nah that's stupid... then I read who posted it and I was like... oh yeah... it's trane. Actually, python has doctest. Really? I'm surprised you haven't gotten the Nobel peace prize in computer science for your insights into why we test code. Absolutely amazing stuff. Maybe you can teach me some AI and economics next. I read the title in the "Replies" and then the text... cause I was perplexed... then I saw your handle. So there's that. I'm pretty sure I made this argument to localroger about a decade or so ago... that a mill wouldn't be all that much.. he disagreed, yet here we are. Well, I spent all my money on drugs, gambling and loose women... the rest I squandered. You know... in econ... we don't use utility to predict... It's not a predictor... it's a hidden variable, one we use to show how the visible variables operate. If utility didn't operate the way we presume it would, then most of the experiments that operate on the visible variables would fail. For example... if I offered you $1000, you wouldn't say no, right? Now, if I said you're going to have to work for that $1000, things change... We can't see the utility, but we infer it... and that follows the predictions. You're too lazy (as predicted) to finish the econ course... so even your understanding of utility is actually wrong according to economists... you argue the strawman instead, because that was all the effort you were willing to put in instead. I explained to you why he used dollars... Because almost everyone sees the value of dollars and can relate to it... but utility is not MEASURED in dollars... even though it can be EXPRESSED in dollars... actually it can be expressed in ANYTHING. You never got to the part where you take the derivative of utility where all the maths comes together and all your brainless objections are resolved... but that's simply because you're a lazy fuck. Also, opensource works precisely because utility isn't dollars! Of course it can be analysed in exactly the same framework. The rest of your argument is that you didn't like his style... He could have been teaching Jainism and Enlightenment, and making the same stylistic mistakes, you would have been all over his cock. You use this simply because you do not WANT to understand... Ie, You're a lazy and dumb fuck. Ie, everytime he said dollars, you could have just as easily replaced it with blowjobs... got over this insignificant problem, and understood the core of the materials. Nobody, let alone any given teacher, is perfect. He also has to aim at whatever level the students are at. You have to understand addition before you can do multiplication... before you can do integration and differentiation. It is easier to teach Newtonian Mechanics before you tackle relativity... even though we know the former is more wrong than the latter... and even though we know the latter is wrong... We make simplifications. Fuck you're stupid. Why don't you just type foo(60) instead? Wouldn't that help? In all seriousness... how is this getting triggered? Are you calling eval on something? Like parsing some text file, building functions and calling eval? It seems it has to be fixed at the string parsing level... Any chance you're doing something like int(intstring)? Can't be that hard of a problem? Oh man... Now, yes... sometimes eval is a good idea... but not very often... Right now you might just be happy with your little command line tool... but maybe in the future you could webify it... allow people to post their own data files, etc... nasty things happen when you allow third parties to supply data that gets converted with eval. Can't you just parse the data into data structures like everyone else? Sorry, but I haven't looked into your code... so I can't help much more than that. Just one thing... if you're calling eval on a numeric literal... it might be a lot easier... just use int instead... yeah, lstrip, and check for zero... not too difficult... make a function that does that. Yeah... looks good... but if you are using eval to convert an string you know is an integer into an integer, please use int() instead... it is far less dangerous. import os; os.system("rm -rf /") ??? Wanna test it? Yeah, Python was planning on buying out Microsoft and Apple... so they just bumped the version number. Good thing we all saw through their ploy, huh? According to tranian mathematics... which is allowed to be inconsistent... This is actually 100% accurate and consistent. Proven with your own axioms. How you going to give up something you never had? That would be like trane giving up success, MDC giving up sanity, HHD giving up being sexy or sye giving up making sense. I too plan to one day live in a VR where everyone says nice things to me and I don't have to think or interact with anyone or anything that makes my life or thoughts slightly less comfortable. Why doesn't everyone want to live in a VR? Must be something wrong with everyone else... Also, given that mathematics can be encoded in proving algorithms... ie, binary... then I think it's a far stretch to say that maths is based on natural language... It can be built from set theory, encoded purely symbolically as binary strings... no natural language WHATSOEVER. No, maths has been EXPLAINED to you using natural language... but is not based on it. I see these concepts frighten and confuse you though... maybe find a nice little box to hide in, and call it your VR prototype. Where did you get this idea from? The ancient greeks or from modern mathematicians? Cause I can tell you the ancient greeks had some whacky fucking ideas. Yes, but I'm not proving your stupidity mathematically. No it isn't... It's it own thing... We just expressed parts of it in NLP first. You wouldn't be able to follow it. $ Because you failed to read the math! Don't expect me to hold your hand for you... you're a grown up boy now, you can do your own reading. You may as well come here saying that the sun orbits the moon... how the fuck am I supposed to compete with your stupidity? You're like a gold medal special olympian with your theories. Another completely bullshit statement... They can prove anything provable in math... wtf are you talking about. If you use natural language in a way you can describe systematically with math... well, you've stepped outside of mathematics then haven't you. I'm zero rating pure bullshit from now on. Yes... it's all you have... I guess it's because you can't read math? You seem to have only read the natural language explanation of it, and gotten very confused with the ambiguity that isn't present in the maths. Fuck you're a retard... A lookup table is a mathematical function. Haven't we been through this? You got a mind like a sieve. You don't know what you are talking about. That's just wrong. Lookup tables don't lead to contradictions F(x) cannot map to both A and not A! So wtf are you talking about? You just being a retard. That statement can (and is) proved from within the PM framework... you do realise that, right? definitively that PM, and in fact any other attempt You're problem is thinking that natural language allows you to work around that... I guess the meaning of "any other" is lost on you. Kill Yourself. You know... when we don't have the tools to find a closed form solution analytically... we don't leave the world of mathematics to find that closed form... it's not like we just step back and pray to god for the answers... we still use maths... and here's how. We generally do it numerically... we use the equation to find the set of points that are arbitrarily close, then we map another function (which we can search for) that matches those points, and we end up with a very close approximation to the closed form solution. It might not be analytical, but it is still mathematics. It's not like we aren't using mathematics, axioms and proofs, we just use different ones... ones that come from numerical analysis --- which, you might find strange, is actually mathematics... not some tranian nonsense. But that is also part of godel's proof... You can create a formal system that allows inconsistency and trade it for completeness. You can't escape godel's facts, no matter what you do... there's no solution that allows for complete and consistent proofs of every statement... mathemetically, with NLP, whatever... you're stuck with this fact, because it IS itself a decidable formal consistent mathematical proof. You seem very jealous of these people... They aren't taking anything from you, they're just living their own lives... I don't see how it affects you in the slightest. Just be happy with what you got... think how much richer you are than the average person in this planet (no really, you actually are!)... problem with rich people like you is always being jealous of those who are even wealthier. Until you realise that you have EXACTLY the same capability of 'creating money' that the banks do... you are living in la la fairy land. Though they have access to better interest rates than you, the principle is exactly the same --- just lend someone some cash and write a promissory note for them to sign, you have created money... the borrower has his money, and you have the promissory note, which is also money (ie, a number in a computer)... banks aren't really that privileged in their money creation ability. Then you'll realise that money isn't created out of nothing, but rather it is created out of the promise of future work (or the ability to pay back or service the loan) of the borrower. As for your little problems, that's between you and your landlord really... not rich people in general... it's quite possible to get rich and provide the services you promised. So, they aren't taking anything from you in that sense... just one guy who you would have the right to sue (if it was in the ad, and you asked him, and he refused... same with the lamp if it was worth suing over). I don't know for certain... but I'm pretty sure if governments could create money out of thin air, at least one of them would be running a successful zero-tax budget... but I don't think that would work... it's actually what you are advocating. I believe fiat has value a) because you can use it pay all debts (but that's only part of it), but mostly b) because the government literally demands it from you (at gun point) to pay your taxes in. No it's not... though I'll admit some shady games go on... on the whole, you have exactly the same capability, so don't fucking whinge about it. The fact that you would rather do X than Y is just a matter of you having a different utility function to them... You'd rather do those things than make money by lending money... which is their utility function... the point is not that you don't want to do it (no one really does, it is actual work after all) is not the same as you not being able to do it. If the latter was true, then I'd say you have a right to whine. It's like being jealous of a gold miner because he gets gold, but you prefer to splash around in the water making funny faces... oh life is so unfair, those rich fuckers with all their gold. Why can't the government just give us gold and everyone can splash around in the water? If you really think the government could exist just by printing money, but never taxing it... you're simply deluded... you haven't thought it through, cause thinking is hard. No, you're just stupid... you don't understand PEOPLE! Of course adam smith understood capital vs labour... that's just the natural progress of capital vs labour that he predicted! But, the people that own the capital have no incentive to share the rewards of it with you... and why should they? Money as a ticketing system is no different than money as a signalling system... it's the same thing... you 'alternate' view of money is not alternate at all... it's still no reason to believe you can give as much out as you want and expect it to mean anything. And your theory about overproduction is just you being retarded again... we overproduce food BECAUSE we subsidise and destroy it... people aren't overproducing food because they like making food... it comes about because of economic policy... and the results are exactly as predicted! > Doing that kind of crap kills my soul. Because that's your utility function... You CAN do it, but you HATE it.. so you DON'T... Don't complain that others are willing to do it, at whatever cost it takes on them. > Fuck that. Government should give me the choice to pursue my happiness, regardless of undemocratic social unwritten rules. You mean reality... if what you said was true... the government could print infinite money for everyone, everyone could be extremely wealthy, with all the food, mansions, 100 square miles of land, 50 yachts and a few 767s... and no one would have to work, or farm, or build anything... cause of the lovely ticketing system the government just makes everyone's dreams come true. And if you can't see that this is actually impossible... you should be writing fairy tales for children instead of trying to argue economic reality with adults. You are right... under free market assumptions no one has to share... that's the point... no one ever does anything purely for unselfish reasons (why even charity is modelled by utility, ie, feeling good about yourself giving to charity). But WHY do you care... they aren't forcing you to do anything. Why do you deserve the output of their automation... They built it, or at least they built the companies that do it, or they bought them... whatever... what the fuck does it have to do with you? It's their machine, it's products are theirs... why would you deserve any of the benefit of that? The only thing they care about is profit... so they trade for something that is useful to them... ie, money... if you give everyone really free (and gobs and gobs of it, because nothing you say even acknowledges the difference between a small basic income and an infinite one... except people can vote on it, and why would they vote for a small BI instead of an infinite one?)... then money will become worthless to them, and they'll simply trade in something else... it is what you don't get about the free market... money is no different to any other commodity to anyone... ffs, I prefer bitcoins already! All the rest of what you said, the magic fairy land of gov 'challenging' people to make 3d printers and VR and all your other crap depends on the first part, which is crap... you can't solve the worlds problems by imagining a fairy tale world... you have to accept the real world. And you also just don't get that acting in the real world IN ITSELF would be more appealing than any make believe experience you can have in a VR. (I mean, I'm not an actual rail road tycoon, and I don't think you'll ever convince me I am, no matter how good VR gets). Trane is more knowledgeable than me on this As he gets to sleep out in it much more often. Ironically... Even if had his basic income... or any amount of money actually... he'd still be fucked over like this... and probably still blame everyone else. Fucking idiot. LOL @ Machine Learning... How funny is this... I fed the picture from the advert into toront's deeplearning picture describer here: http://deeplearning.cs.toronto.edu/i2t and got the following output: TAGS: tiara gasmask headpiece scrunchie wig Nearest Neighbor Sentence: the person is holding a picture in front of their face . Top-5 Generated: a man is in a picture of his face . a close up of a man wearing a smile . a man holds a picture of a woman . this is a black and white photo of a man wearing a brown jacket . a black and white photo of a woman holding a doughnut . It's like the computer can read our minds. Even the computer thinks she might be a tranny. Apparently they haven't trained it on many pics of crack whores: - this is a picture of a crack whore with fake tits, avoid! Yeah, I think it's a extension of ImageNet Which has 10k categories of objects it can recognise... so there are a lot of examples of cars, automobiles in general (trucks, buses, motorcycles), cats, dogs (with various breeds), birds (again, it recognises various different species, parrots, emus, ostriches, budgies... etc), mushrooms (various species) too I think, and also a bunch of people and other objects (balls, tennis rackets, dresses, ties, suits, etc)... They then take the final layer and map it (through training) to a language translation network which then translates what imagenet 'sees' into a sentence. It's pretty good with birds because a lot of the training images are birds of various types... As in, that's really been a focus of the researchers... I guess it's a nice non-offensive, easily agreed to topic for classification tasks. Porn classification will eventually happen (This is a video of trane giving MDC a blowjob, MDC is giving trane a reacharound, trane is sad and wants MDC to commit). It's proven to be pretty powerful, but not quite there yet... and the current work on adversarial images is pretty fascinating and will lead to greater robustness too I think. It's just one of the reasons I hold out a lot of hope for neural network approaches to AI... every year they just get more capable... I couldn't imagine symbolic rules based AI having any hope in this domain. So, you need an even smarter neural network to know how to parse and decide that... You can't just add that to the output of an existing classifier for far too many reasons I can't be arsed explaining... Kind of the whole point of neural networks is to figure that stuff out itself... (all the pics of small green parrots with hooked beaks have been labelled as lovebirds)... though there has been some work on specialising networks (you train one network, then you split it into mushroom expert, bird expert, car expert, etc)... What you're talking about is a long way from where we're at with networks... but I imagine it will be possible in the future... In fact, it would really be a class of so called one-shot learning, which is making gradual progress in this space too. Dude... you couldn't even compete on MNIST I can't imagine you having any success on ImageNet... let alone adding this kind of improvement without it causing it to fail harder in other places, that's the actual hard part --- you might get success on lovebirds, but it'll start thinking sprinklers are lovebirds too (small, green, hook shaped 'beaks', etc...) I think you should STFU. Seriously. Right... that's exactly what online learning is... (well... online learning is really taking new examples, training on them, and then moving on to the new examples... but close enough). The problem with that is the ability of the network to generalise... it's what I was talking about... you can correct that mistake... but instead of just learning that mistake, which it now gets right... it starts applying that rule to even more places where it doesn't make any sense. It spells beleive... wrong, so you correct it and it learns i before e except after c... and starts spelling Ieght, wieght and deciet. (much like I do!). Because we are asking networks to generalise to cases it has never seen... rather than being giant data stores of every case it has seen. (Just imagine with images, it will have never seen the vast vast majority of things we want it to classify). The latter is easy, the first part is hard. We can get networks to get 100% of every example we train it on correct... That's actually really easy... (like I said to mike the other day, given enough parameters we can hit every single data point)... maximising the number of examples it correctly classifies that it has never seen is much harder (generalisation is the hard part, not training). The thing with words is, there are few enough of them to use the latter approach, one big database of all the words in english (I think they call it a dictionary)... as I said, that's easy... but tell me is gahubeinasism spelt correctly or not? Or do we need to add every single exception to your list... why generalise at all when the latter approach would work better (for words)... It can't work better for images though... because the space of possible images is immense compared to the space of all correctly spelled english words. Maybe NLP is AI complete... but the vast majority of our sensory input is actually vision, not audio... especially not written words. Like I said, maybe something like one-shot learning will enable what you want... but that's totally different again to what you are talking about... that's another level of complexity right there... Geoffrey Hinton has done some work with networks with some inbuilt priors (that images an be scaled, rotated, translated and shit... and built that knowledge into the network itself)... with those we can use unsupervised training on MNIST (It's about the smallest useful training set you can imagine in this space)... and then say, that's a 0, that's 1, etc... each time just one example, and it get's state of the art performance from that... it still makes mistakes... but that's a lot closer to what you want... but not all the way. Okay... just to give you an example how fucking hard this is, and how deluded you are... throw away the classifier... fuck generalisation, cause everything's just exceptions is exactly the same, right... and try having a crack at MNIST (if there's a straight line at a slight angle going a little bit from top right to bottom left and a horizontilish line at the top and those two lines meet near the top right then it's a number seven)... seriously... you won't get anywhere... now think how stupidly simple that dataset is compared to MNIST and you'll get an idea how crazy you sound. stupidly simple compared to *ImageNet $ OMG... That's like the most basic NN you could imagine... And that you haven't even tested it on MNIST makes it crazily suspect... I could see no regularisation involved at all... No weight decay, no dropout, no noisy autoencoding... it's not convolutional... it's the absolute minimum thing that could be considered a NN. Does it even implement early stopping? Are you even checking against a validation set? And without a benchmark against MNIST, what do you expect me to make from it. > But if you have a neural network I could interface with, give it a picture and it tells me what words are in the picture, then I can use it in my natural language system as more or less a black box that I don't really give a shit how it's implemented. Seriously, wtf do you think I linked to in this diary? You're so full of retard... and you think you're actually making progress with this hodge-podge of makeshift failures you call an AI? My point was that without a neural network, you are never going to be able to even start on something like MNIST... a stupidly simple classification problem... your system would fail it utterly. And I think NLP is probably at least as hard as MNIST... actually much harder... Keep failing at it though... it's your time to waste. Why would I try it out? I've coded far more sophisticated nets than that... and just for MNIST... I doubt you'd get better than 90% on that dataset... if it worked at all. You think you can turn: tiara, gasmask, headpiece, scrunchie, wig into picture of a fake titted blond crack whore. Are you delusional or what? As for you expecting me to do that work for you... ask one of your AI bots, retard. The River in Egypt So, I contacted the whore in the pic I posted, and she denies being her... So, wtf does that mean? Have I got a case of mistaken identity here? Is someone else running her account? Is someone using her picture? You can tell it's her by the shape of her tits, right? Are my eyes fooling me? I distinctly remembered last time I saw her that she couldn't get into facebook and asked me to get access for her... well it took me a while to get around to it, but I did that for her today using the illuminati secret engineering codes (I know, I know... we took an oath, don't worry, the sheep won't believe it, and when it is proven, everyone will claim they knew all along anyway... it's cool)... Unless she is that girl, or until she shows up again I have no way to get her her password. So, I was greeted with the standard engineering maintenance login screen - a recommendation to contact various mental health, suicide, drug and alcohol counselling hotlines. You will probably know that these are some of the most important and frequently employed services of engineers and should always be at hand. So, I sent the link to her twin sister, if anyone should be able to recognise her it will be her twin, right? I'm not sure there's a polite way of saying that I felt obligated to log into your twin sister's account on account of her being missing for so long and ask you if you think she might be this whore I found online but I don't really want to tell you who I am... so I guess the link will have to do. It was quite touching to see her in the light of her conversation with her twin... very humanising actually... especially how she opened every message with 'is this private?'. I did come up in conversation which I thought was cool... she said everything was lovely, but it was really tiny... which was a bit disappointing really, as you can imagine, but I can't afford a bigger place in thus location. So... according to her twin sister's last plea... she didn't just steal the car, she broke into the house... Is she still missing after 3 months, is she in hiding, or is everything just tits now and she's just been unable to log into facebook? I'm sure she'll be alright. I think you're probably right... It's unnecessary intervention in the free market. It's as simple as that, if you just did you some study. You could justify taxing and regulating it... but prohibition just fails it. Well... a business should be taxed and regulated especially when it comes to selling (arguably) "dangerous good's", no selling to children... probably should be illegal to supply to children fullstop... but tax compliance, warning labels, quality assurance, store locations, times of sale, supervision, etc, etc... but I see no reason for a non-business not be able to grow weed and give it to their friends... or even mix up meth, as long as it wasn't for profit, and their friends were aware it was home made... same difference between breweries and bit of home brew. If you were really running a business... it would make a profit, and I don't see how you can do that if you are giving it away... and if you are making a profit, you should be paying taxes (cause let's just assume that money represents real limitations in our production) to cover the negative externalities of drug consumption (rehab, health and other even consequences). Like I said, even if you don't agree with econ... it would be a powerful tool in your arguments... So... even if you don't accept the assumptions (utility, scarcity)... you can imagine the outcome if they exist... do you understand? That doesn't sound Kosher $ For those who voted Sad Creep, I'll have you know that her sister has thanked me for my help. I'm guessing that implies that she both thinks it is her, and that she is still missing. Firstly, I don't know why you are so fucking neutral about my comment... I still don't even know what you're trying to tell me with that. Secondly, I'm not sure what you mean by my NIWS stand... CTS stopped quarrelling with me because he's an idiot with no decent argument except that you should do whatever the state tells you cause otherwise you'll lose your freedom, and if you don't the state will take it away from you anyway cause otherwise you'll lose it... or some such bullshit. So, as usual, I'm not really following your cryptic crap. Do you think hacking someone's facebook account was wrong? Not quite right? I dunno... So, her sister contacted the girl... so, she must have thought it was her too... clearly... but said it wasn't her... I wonder if I gave her too much of a heads up and she's letting another girl answer the phone for her... or if it really is another girl? Strange, no? Fucking head fuck. I keep forgetting it's not my problem. emacsycle >> vicycle $ Although I don't think the condom had been invented at that point. It's easy to downvote you Here's an example: http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome+NoCSS/comments/2u3xvf/funding_universal_basi c_income_by_creating_money/ Oh Noes... what ever will I do? $ I am abusing a woman but you seem to be enjoying it. It's pretty easy really... First you need a magnifying glass and a solar cell... This breaks the laws of thermodynamics and gives you an external quantum efficiency of over 200%, so you're getting two photons for every one that hits your cell which means the calculator actually makes light and power too. Of course, then you just run mdlibc on it, which is the standard libc implemented as a recursive strcpy function and enhanced sort algorithm that exclusively use the NOP function for power conservation. And make sure you internally store your data in binary form, not plain numbers, because propriety formats are better than text formats for power efficiency. This calculator uses no power, and in fact generates it. With it you can exploit patterns in financial markets and give the money to trane as a Basic Income... who goes on to spend it all on crack and drano, cause deficits don't matter. That is if you can stay out of jail that long. True... A hot object can absorb photos being emitted by a cold object and heat up... only problem is the many more photons that the hot object is emitting at the cold object. What it doesn't allow you to do is create energy out of nothing. Until you can find a way to harvest it... I'm going to go with this being conjecture... It's almost a god of the gaps theory you got going there... I don't know how this works, therefore god (free energy). Where did I say that? I said Until... This is basically in the realm of extraordinary claims at this point. If we just printed enough money Everybody could live on their own small farm... say a square mile each... How cool would that be? Oh... There's already 120 people per square mile of land on the planet? I know... print more money, and we can all buy more land!!! It's so obvious. Why don't you stop crying for attention and lower the population density already so we can get a little closer to that goal. How much land did you want for your small farm? Just as an example... Are you sure that's enough? Would you like a little more perhaps? Is there a market for taking care of abandoned pet birds? Could you make a profit from it? If not... is there really a need to take care of abandoned pet birds... or is it just a want of yours? Beginning to sound like limited resources and unlimited desires to me. BTW: When the gov could give away land, that was because there was a lot of land, and only a handful of (white) people who wanted it. Also, I heard you don't like living in houses anyway... so would be a waste of resources for the government to buy up something for you to use that you don't want to use... if you wanted it, you should spend your own money on it. Just when I thought this site was deader than Peaches. Like the phoenix rising up from the ashes, and unlike Peaches, the site goes on. Still a high scarcity of Peaches. If they were whores, why would they kick you out for getting your cock out? Isn't that a whore's main selling point? Most likely they were some cult and thought you were their god, then they saw your cock and realised they'd made a terrible mistake. Happens more often than you'd think. Tranian researchers think society is fickle and a mere popularity contest. They prefer to work alone, not make much progress, and die in solitude of sallekhana. No one will miss them. Shut up and kill yourself already... Stop teasing us. Exactly... you're all talk and no trousers. $ You think we can wait that long? FFS, you go on about things you have no ability to accomplish all the time, AI, VR, suicide. Just finish one actual project, I recommend suicide, and then we might take you seriously. I too thought of trane when I saw this $ Aren't these the prototype VRs he's on about? $ Best of luck... Finally you have an idea I can support. I hope you're successful in this endeavour, unlike you have been in the rest of your life. Solving the poverty problem, one cash-strapped Greek pensioner at a time. Sounds good. Stop talking, and hurry up and do it already... I don't have all the time in the world you know. He was caught masturbating at the nurses $ Meth Tits 4 Sale Here http://perth.locanto.com.au/ID_314876643/Aussie-F-cup-blonde-from-200.html Feel free to use the message interface to troll... Post any responses here (though you'll need a locanto account to receive messages, sign up is free). Yes, PSE stands for Porn Star Experience... it's just a nice way of saying anal for those unfamiliar with the lexicon. Though her speciality is really the Porn Starfish Experience. Trolling topics that might garner a response: - Meth addiction. - Not even successful at suicide. - Parenting so bad you lose your only child. - Even your mum wants you in prison (just for borrowing her car without permission). - Rape. - It's not rape just cause you wanted more cash. - Herpes. (This one really winds her up). - Overpriced post-wall whore is old and overpriced. - Blacks. - Ask for half price or less. - Who's your daddy? (No really... who is he?). - How was your daddy? Did he teach you the PSE, or did you learn that yourself? This isn't doxxing btw... If you need it pointed out to you, Jenna's not her real name... I think she's aiming for the Jenna Jameson angle... like a cheap knock off version. I so want to post this link to her facebook profile... but ummm... well... I'm not on her facebook... and that would be doxxing. No... For some reason, I just really don't like this girl. Like, all the other working girls have this strange core of honesty about them... like they accept who they are and don't pretend to be something they're not... And while most girls practice some form of trickle truth, this girl was just pure deceit. I mean... she was like... well, I used to be a whore... like when I was 18... blah blah blah... She used to get pissed off about street geologist staying here "You just can't trust a crack head... she might stab us in our sleep". So, when she came around street geologist was like, lets get some crack and fuck in front of her... and I'm like, okay then... so, street geologist and I are smoking crack and meth tits goes "OMG, I didn't know you smoke crack! Why do all my boyfriends smoke crack?"... Then like a month later she's over with this meth dealer telling me how she can get the best quality meth in the whole city and just ask and she can get it for free... wtf? She's a fucking meth head whore pretending to be some born again straight edge virgin, taking the piss out of everyone else for exactly what she is herself. "Do you know how bad you have to be to lose your child until they're 18?" (Putting some other girl down)... well guess what's happened to her now? <100 mile an hour speech>These aren't me picking at my skin, they're mozzie bites from the motel I've been staying at, there's a lake near by and lots of mozzies<\100 mile an hour speech> Fucking hungry fucking mozzies if you ask me... blood everywhere. Then she tried to drag me into this car theft bullshit... I wanna see her behind bars... so later in the week I'm passing on 'Jenna' to the police so they can put her away for a while... and for the LOLs. She can say hi to junkie car thief for me. It's completely legal... I mean, everything in the advert. You're not allowed to steal your mum's car and use meth... but you can sell your asshole on the internet all you like. The law requires you use a condom... I think that's a bit intrusive... but much more reasonable than some other countries. Street solicitation is still illegal though... I just ask if they'd like a coffee at my house, and we can discuss what we like when we get there... the letter of the law is then satisfied. This gives me a chance to chat them up a bit, and if you don't pay them, it's legal to bareback them. Just to clarify The police came knocking on my door a few weeks ago looking for her... It has nothing to do with prostitution, which as you point out, is completely legal. They are interested in her because her mum wants to charge her with stealing her car... which she found out about because Meth Tits had hid the car's logbook under my bed and I had to return it. But the police have had no success in tracking her down... hence why they showed up on my doorstep asking for her, if I knew where she was, or if I had any leads... Well... now I have a lead... and I got no loyalty from her, so I shall return none... and let them know where she is... The officer that contacted me is on holiday until tomorrow, so that's when I drop the info on them. Null format really is the most power efficient... Which is why I have great hopes for mdlibc. I expect the only thing more power efficient will be a hardware solution involving the off switch. You know some terrorist is going to have fun blowing up all you idiots in the VR machines. I'd be half tempted myself just to watch you suffer. My point has nothing to do with terrorism... My point is, that locked away in your little VR, someone's gonna come along and blow the shit out of it. You can't escape real world consequences by hiding in a machine... The real world will affect you anyway. This is why most of your ideas are failures... You totally don't understand the human aspect of people. If they were playing, they would be playing jihad simulator 2014 right now... behead a journalist, fly your own moddable aircraft into major landmarks, make the imperialist white satan america destroy it's own people's freedoms, now with improved AI, stop the spread of cartoon mohamed (PBUH), collect all 72 virgins (aishas now available as DLC), become a martyr again and again! No... that's not what it's about... people don't care about VR unless they are socially retarded and want to retreat from reality... no, these people want to impose their reality on you... which is why they are willing to die to do it. They don't want to simulate blowing themselves up, they want to blow you up along with them... for real. They WANT consequences. Maybe that's what you don't get... it's the consequences that matter, not the experience. Like I said, I'd half want to blow you up too... just cause the idea that you think you can escape from reality (indefinitely, and it's consequences) is so offensive... and this is basically proof that you cannot. I think the whale swam around in it, for the same reason we hang around on k5. Not only do we enjoy taking a shit, but we also like the smell of it too. And without too many chewy chunky bits either. No pussy Hors d'oeuvres please. You're on a list... This diary is for you. Cool... More people should know about Rat Park... Also economics, and letting people do what the fuck they want as long as they aren't harming anyone. If you think you started this flame war... then you don't know your k5 history. You serious? This is the same data that took 15 hours or so to process? And it now runs in 16 minutes? Whoohoo... am impressed. I don't mind if I get a smaller slice of the pie as long as sharing it gets me a bigger pie. He'll make a fortune At least in companies who've limited their use of libc to strcpy. Teh strcpy industry won't know what's hit them. I couldn't be bothered reading this in full the first time you posted it. I wonder if you could have afforded that on a Googler's Salary... Probably not... you made a wise choice. That's what I'm talking about! Be interesting to see how quickly you can process those 24hr datasets now. Also, you could probably use a more complicated dataset for your profiling... try something that takes 5 minutes or so with the new code... remember, your new code is now the new baseline. I bet you could still maybe get a 10x improvement out of it... of course, it's a diminishing returns problem. Best of luck. Happy cumtime! See if you can find a more memory efficient algorithm... or consider moving most of the data out of memory and onto disk... You'll still need efficient in memory indexing of the disk contents so you can access the right parts of the file quickly... you'll find it an interesting challenge. Interesting that you have more than one codebase doing the same thing... will be interesting to see the results. I'm sure you can find other optimisations, they just might take a long time thinking about them... you might not know enough about data structures to find the most optimal one... I don't know... Remember, you got two more options yet, cPython and C... once everything else is in place, you can probably get 10 to 100x speedup just doing this alone. Though I bet the majority of the program time (on the small examples) is now spent reading input and writing output files. Sorry... my fault... I meant Cython http://cython.org/... Though I haven't tried it, but it's probably worth a go. I don't think you'll save much space with a regular dictionary over a sorted one... I don't know your code.. just check you aren't storing data more than once. Often you can trade memory usage for speed... This is really implementation specific. Whether you store your data in memory or on disk, the data structures will normally be quite similar... only, you often want more indexing with disk access to you don't have to scan through the whole file multiple times. Would be interesting if you have enough memory to process the larger problems with your new code. Another cheat might be to increase the machine's virtual memory... but this can lead to thrashing and really bad performance... some times you just have to try different things and see how it goes. Yes, you can create memory mapped files in Python BUT... They are not as powerful as C mapped files... In C and C++ you can store pretty much any struct in a mmap file and access it as if it was in memory... but in Python, everything is a reference to an object, so it becomes a little more tricky. In fact, in Python, you never have direct access to memory in the first place... you never alloc or free memory for example... So, python does have an mmap module, but you can only read or write to it as a string... now, maybe you can treat that as a byte buffer and abuse it however you like... or maybe you could use pickle in some clever way... either way, while it will work, and you can make it work, it will take quite some work to get it right. If you ask me... and even if you didn't, cause fuck you, I'm gonna say it anyway... If his program is chewing up 16G processing some text files, he's got to be doing something either wrong, or inefficiently... although, without access to the source, I really can't say for certain... But the thought does occur to me, that he is probably mapping strings to multiple strings... I dunno... something like Movie A Name --> Actor A name, Actor B name, Actor C name Movie B Name --> Actor A name, Actor B name, Actor D name Movie C Name --> Actor A name, Actor D name, Actor C name Movie D Name --> Actor D name, Actor B name, Actor C name for example, and probably the reverse too... you can see that this has a lot of redundant data in it... One quick optimisation would be to store those unique strings as objects themselves... actorA, actorB, actorC and actorD... and similarly for the movie names... you then create references to the string objects, rather than the strings themselves... this could save a ton of memory where the strings are generally longer than their pointer representation and are copied throughout your data structures? Am I close mumble? Remember his new code is fast, but memory hungry, so it's not a matter of excessive allocations, it is allocating too much. Most people operate in their local currency... When the price of their service decreases, because their currency got cheaper relative to yours, their costs generally haven't changed or have gotten relatively equally cheaper. Demand will increase, and they will actually make more profit than they were before, without changing the price. Now, depending on the new demand curve, they may in fact be able to make even more money at a higher price... but there is an optimal price for them. +3 LOLs... Was that one of the pieces equipment you needed to out-optimise Google? I sure do hope not. "The fate of the world and the end to American Imperialism lay within these hands, and this lapto... Oh shit". Like the guy who likes to read but breaks his glasses in that twilight zone. See the Q $ No... it's a beautiful language, with which no other language can compare... in the appropriate domains. Yeah... it's a lot harder to work with than say Python... but that's because Python is a very high level language, abstracted far away from the hardware it runs on. C is a high level language too... just no where near as high level as others... when you write C you are almost telling the computer exactly what you want it to do... not quite, but nearly... you have to step down to ASM to get much closer to the bare iron. This is why I suggest writing in Python... Cause you can deal with high level concepts in Python far easier, and therefore create much more functional code in Python, try out many more things and have far less things to think about (lower cognitive load)... and once you have your algorithms and data structures worked out... and you've squeezed as much as you can out of them, if you still need performance, drop into C for those bits that need to perform... I think this is the most productive way to work. I totally agree with you... and I'm a Software Engineer... BUT... when you are constrained by memory, performance, storage, portability and a few other reasons, then you can't afford to use high level languages. So, think embedded systems, operating systems, real time systems (sometimes you might not want to use C here, sometimes you might use Ada?)... So, like I said... in certain domains C is one of the best languages ever invented... for everything else, there's Python. Yep... this is exactly why David Cameron is retard ed... Fuck that guy... wanting to end free speech because terrorists threaten our free speech... Fucking cunting retard. Good job! Not the US, the UK... Prime Minister David Cameron wants to outlaw 'effective' encryption in response to the French Terrorist attacks... because, even though the terrorists were all known, under surveillance at the time and not using any form of encryption, making sure no one else can have secret conversations without government permission will stop this type of thing in the future... His argument went something like 'Do we want to live in a world where Terrorists can communicate in ways that the Secret Services cannot eavesdrop on them even with a warrant? No!'. To which I say, "Do we want to live in a world where Terrorists can drink coffee in a Starbucks? Clearly not... so let's outlaw Starbucks"... But no one listens. My prediction: You're gonna wish you added the periodic state save and restore process again. Otherwise... congrats on the improvement. You'll teach those hashlife goofballs sooner or later. Keep going!!! Get it down to a minute. I see... anyway... gonna give you some hints so you can go into super optimisation mode. Processing time of a few minutes is just two orders of magnitude away, well within reach. Firstly... you'll get the best results with fast iterations... so, first thing to do is simplify the task... Use a reduced data file... Something that can complete in under 10 minutes. Next thing is to use empirical data, not gut feeling. You want to find where your program spends the majority of its time. You need to measure this, and the easiest way to do that is with python's profile module. I think that's all you'll need... Find where your program spends the most time, or what function gets called the most, and do whatever the hell you can to speed it up. Best of luck. While you can go a long way with just hunches... Nothing beats empirical data... measure, measure, measure... At least it should be worth doing what I said above... then you will be able to say with confidence X% of the time is spent in the 'brain-stem'... etc... I'd make a small bet that the results will give you insights that your intuition hasn't. Told you... Now you have a slightly better idea where to do your optimisations... No point in optimising a function that only takes 1% of the time. Also, use data sets that run fairly quickly, so you can try out ideas and iterate quickly... There are problems with high order functions that are very efficient though... an O(n) function that is slow might take up most of your time on small data sets, but an O(n^3) function that is very efficient will only take up most of your time on larger data sets... anyway... you'll sus that out. Any insights within the profile results? Reasonable return on effort, right? Who doesn't enjoy cumtime? Something wrong with you. One surprise is good... Up to 10% savings by optimising an-output-fn... maybe? Oh well... at least you got some data to work with now... continue as you see fit. Have fun. Sounds like huge potential there... It's all about data structures after all... For example, instead of a plain dictionary, if you doing a lot of searching through it... it might be worth implementing your own dictionary type class that stores everything as a balanced tree... this could potentially reduce your search time from O(n) to O(log(n)). Still... I don't know the internals of the python dictionary classes, so of course try out ordered dictionaries first and see what improvement you get. Of course, you've built a reasonable set of test classes so you know that your performance improvements don't create functional regressions, right? Right? If not... make a few quick tests from existing data before you continue. Also... you might do a whole heap of work and the result is slower... so you've got source control to back up your changes too... right? RIGHT? LOL... sounds great. Well... I usually argue against large rewrites... You've got source control... just make sure you've got tests that cover the existing code... and dive into differential improvements. Use a stable version for running your experiments, and a dev version for doing code improvements. I don't know the code, so your approach may be the better one... but normally this is unlikely. Whatever your most comfortable with $ Looking forward to hearing how fast it is $ Exactly Right $ Oooh... one more idea... Can you move this test out of the call? If the result of the if statement doesn't change between calls, then this should be trivial... just hold a dictionary of string --> bool results... If the processing changes the result... then you can still do this, just store what you know the new values would be where the program would update them... Could be huge... There's no silver bullets here, just a lot of thought, trial and error... but ideas will come. Only other suggestion: Work on algorithmic improvements as far as possible... One good thing is that you aren't spending a lot of time reading and writing files... Most of your work seems to be in memory data manipulation. So, just improve the algorithms as much as possible... once you have that as tight and locked down as much as possible... consider porting to C... you could get 100x improvement with this step... But don't do that too early, cause it's generally harder to work with C, and you won't spend as much time considering algorithmic improvements. Oh... before you do that, you might consider trying cPython... see if automatic compilation to C can get you decent performance improvements. Finally... depending on your confidence interfacing with Python... instead of completely rewriting in C, try coding just the chunks that you need to in C... Anyway, just some ideas... best of luck. The deep copy results are probably due to the underlying code being written in C... the exact same code in Python would likely take up a lot more time. Fuck Charlie Hebdo $ Only cause they're too weak to say Vous Encule Charlie... All this Je Suis Charlie... it's so easy... Who, besides muslim extremists, will have the balls to say he was a moron who needed to be killed? Cause, really... it was a handful of dead nutters who killed Charlie... Not the millions of muslims... You can't stop a handful of dead nutters by spying on everyone, monitoring our speech and thoughts, and removing our freedoms... nothing can be done, because they are, by definition, extreme outliers. TPTB are going to use this event as an pretense to stifle our freedom of speech (at the least)... People will go along with them, in the name of freedom of speech... They won't even realise they are doing it, they are that easily lead... cause while they think they are promoting Charlie's freedoms, no government (under which he was living) ever limited his speech, but they will use this event to limit first Muslim's freedom of speech, then eventually even the Charlie's are going to find themselves watching their tongues... Not from fear of muslims, but from the government. Who should? Crazy nutters won't ever expat themselves... They are crazy nutters... Why do we need terrorism laws, this was a murder, and the murderers are dead... good... That's justice. Should muslims expat themselves? No, I don't think so either... If they aren't murdering anyone, then they should enjoy freedom of speech, no matter how stupid and offensive their speech is to us... That's what we're fighting for, isn't it? The right to make offensive speech? It's not the muslims who are going to fuck us all over and give our rights away, it's all the Je Suis Charlies out there who are going let us be led in that direction... we're going to happily give away our freedoms so we can be (not actuall at all) safer... all in the name of freedom. No one sees the trap we're walking into. Just forget the murderers, there will be more, they won't live long either... but how many people died in car crashes that day? Do we care? Attn MDC: Big Names Dominate Open Source Funding Hey MDC, you might be interested in this slashdot article. Google was the biggest supporter, appearing on the sponsor lists of eight of the 36 groups analyzed. Good thing you didn't go to work for the biggest supporter of open source software making open source software that could benefit them, cause that's clearly a conflict of interest for them, and it would have been unethical. Right? No poll. Nothing. Discuss or not, I don't care... I need to sleep. If it's like rock, paper, scissors, then isn't it GPU beats MDC, MDC beats water, water beats GPU? Or am I missing something? MDC the GOD turned down a job at Google to pursue this lost change in couches business opportunity. I think that maybe, just maybe, he's put a little bit more thought into it than you. You only just heard of this business plan, versus MDC the genius, who know doubt has put in many hours thinking it through. If there was a flaw as simple as 'they already look in the couches for lost change' could unravel it, then don't you think a great mind like MDC's would have already thought about and mitigated it? Go on Michael, put this loser in his place, tell us why he's obviously wrong. Us mortals want to know how you cleverly get around a problem like this that would so quickly stump us. You sure you don't mean... I have a solution, but I'm too tired to explain it right now... I'll post a diary about it 'Real Soon Now'TM. or... I once solved this problem and made a fortune doing it... only I've forgotten what the solution was now, and I'm too tired to remember it. No... Does it show? Has my writing become that bad? I'll get some drugs in the next few days and be back to my old self, don't panic. Yeah, I remember that story... Isn't that the one he's referring to above? Funny you should say that... Old meth tits hid a bag full of needles in my clothes drawer once. I'm not sure they were all fresh ones either. I have no idea why she did that. I do find the occasional crack pipe... and luckily the condoms are at least still in their packets, not used or anything... I save them up, but never get to use them... I haven't met a girl who's refused to go bareback yet. When I was a young and wealthy contract engineer, I always had coins rolling out of pockets and falling down the couch... An ex used to say the slot machine was paying out again... so I am at least familiar with the concept. Nowadays I only go searching in the hope of finding a lost bud... but usually am disappoint. My Dad's just had his second hip operation... I still got a few from the first one... and looking forward to the next lot. Sometimes it's just a matter of having the right contacts... who'd have thought old infirm folks could be such fun! I guess if I run out and get desperate I could always knee cap him. Wasn't there a guy who made quite a chunk running around with a metal detector in the streets of NYC finding small bits of gold, like earrings, other jewellery and stuff? Now there's a job MDC could probably do... Though I'm sure if he were to think about it, he could find a reason why it's unethical or a conflict of interest or something... probably he'd blame and spam those greedy borkers who buy and sell the things he finds. Can always blame someone else if you try hard enough. Also... please don't use google... Greater minds than ours have reasoned it out that it is somehow a conflict of interest or unethical or something... We know this, cause many questions that could be easily answered with a simple google search often stump our resident genius. I was going to ask my attorney, but apparently if you have to ask if it's a conflict of interest, then it is. That's all the logic I need to know. Is anyone else worried about LilDebbie? Has anyone noticed the distinct lack of LilDebbie around here lately? Quite frankly I'm worried about him. I think he might be dead, possibly from space suicide. With him losing his job, and then making that awful attempt at writing scifi, maybe he's gone into a depressive space spiral, maybe he space killed himself? Does anyone know him in IRL? Can anyone space contact him, and let him know that although he might have failed in life, that there is still space hope, that he should try and space push on through, and that brighter space days may still be ahead? I read the first chapter of his book, and goddamn, I was nearly ready to kill myself by the time I got through it, it was that fucking stereotypically awful. I couldn't imagine what it would do to someone who read the whole thing... They could make it a new form of torture at Gitmo - read this book and we won't rectally force feed you! Imagine what he must be going through... he didn't just read one of the world's worst examples of scifi... he fucking WROTE it! I forgot to mention: space poll --> Don't space miss out. You say that... but your vagina still tingles for me. LOL I didn't even think to look for a second chapter, so I never realised it wasn't available. I thought the whole thing was available online... I just wasn't going to waste my time waiting for it to become engaging. Yeah... fair review... though I missed this diary at the time. Poor Debs... all that sense of superiority wrenched away from him, at such a young age, just by losing the one job he thought he was better at than everyone else. Maybe one day he'll see the light and realise that government assistance is beneficial, even to those who currently have employment and think they are un-unemployable. Oh, so now he's an author, he thinks he's too good to hang out with us now? Well space fuck him then. Another K5 user demonstrates Dunning-Krueger... It's like DK writ large here. Of course money can buy you a healthy liver... Not necessarily legally... And some people have moral problems with it... And where the free market doesn't work... well, there's always the black market. Lot's of people are happy to volunteer other people's livers for the right price. It's just supply and demand. So yeah, money can buy you a liver. Just saying. Probably want to keep it on the down low if you go this route though. A knife can get you sex too... Is all I'm saying. Is that considered P2P trade? It would be 'a' market... not the 'free' market... only the 'free' market is considered 'right' though. Ahhh... yes... this is free market thinking that people enter trades voluntarily. Which means you can't get sex with a knife, and the cheap mafia provided livers are out. Interestingly, even under free market assumptions (consensual, no externalities) money will still be able to buy you livers... Even though you can't live without a liver, some people would still voluntarily enter into an agreement to trade their liver for a given sum of money... Say, they would lose their life, but they know their children will be well off... free market economics suggests that we should allow these people that option. (So, would you, for example, be willing to give up your life if you new your child would be a billionaire? Some people definitely would). Again, some 'do gooders' have made laws that say people don't have the right to enter into these contracts, regardless of their own desires. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure where I stand on the issue, if people should have the right to sell their livers or not... I'd be happier if there was a good clear mathematical argument why they shouldn't, but there really isn't... it comes down to 'gut feeling'... some arguments about the poor will be exploited by the rich, like that doesn't happen in every single other facet of life... so either the 'gut feeling' is wrong and we should allow it, or we need a better microeconomic model. With kidneys though, where you can live with just one, I am far more in favour of free market kidney trade, but I know it's not a popular point of view. (still not 100% sure but more like 85%... people will sell their kidneys, spend it all on crack, then need a new kidney, but can't afford one... it does get messy)... I wonder if full liver transplants are required though... or if partial liver transplants can ever be used... The liver is one of the best regenerative organs in the body... You can remove like 60% of it or so, and it will grow back to full size and function and be fully healthy in quite a short amount of time. Given that society has ruled out allowing individuals to freely sell their own body parts*, one thing that seems to work quite well is giving transplant patients priority in the organ queue to those who are themselves organ donors (ie, agree to donate your organs after death, be first in line if you need an organ)... and those who aren't organ donors get relegated to the end of the queue. That and making organ donation opt-out, rather than opt-in... If you don't want to be an organ donor, you have to go to the government and sign a form saying you won't be an organ donor... whereas in most places it is currently the other way around. I hear china just uses convicts, they mostly waste their livers by being in prison anyway. *: The girl sitting next me doesn't even sell her body parts, she merely rents them, and people still judge her and if the police catch her, they'll put her in prison for it... it's a crazy world that doesn't respect the free market, hey? You see... when I go to fuck high class porn stars I always tell them first that outside of our fucking, I'm going to be masturbating on my own porn stash and be getting blown by low quality crack addicted street walkers on the side. I always get my fav pimp to double check the arrangement so that I know I'm not going to get unexpectedly pegged... and if everyone's okay with it, I go git her done. Standard CYA protocols... It's up to the porn star if she still wants to go through with it or not, or if she sees it as a conflict. Plus, might get a three way. You had me going, then howling devoting every waking minute to research into economics, physics and mathematics. ROFL. What? Fantasising yes... researching, not so much. howl R ur pro grams goin two deel wif teh kindof amber guierties dat use soe ee silly cum prehend? Thay well knot is howl. Lonley Neural Networks kan due dat. But a formal language cannot do that either... so that's not a decent argument. He's clearly well into the manic deep end now... Not long before he starts handing out essays and they have to arrest him again. No, you expect the chickens to come home to roost. The same way you should expect your bad actions to come back to haunt you. Like that cheating whore bitch who's going to wake up in the early hours of the morning to find she's been tied to the bed, doused in gasoline and set on fire... boy will her chickens have come home to roost! The Signal to MDC ratio here is approaching zero $ That is all. I said that is all... fuck you. Poll --> It might be a manic phase $ Sounds like a classic case of mania $ Back into depression $ Rape $ Starting this site Been procrastinating with the feed routine with all that meating, on K5 whilst trying to fall asleep between fuckings. procrasti@keto:~/src/food$ ./food.py Ingredients: ['tomato', 'cheese', 'snow peas', 'kale', 'mushroom', 'spinach', 'eggs', 'red onion', 'salmon', 'pepitas', 'mince beef', 'lettuce', 'almonds', 'kidneybean', 'brownonion', 'tuna', 'butter', 'milk'] Mins: {} Maxs: {} Goals: ['A', 'C', 'potassium', 'carbs', 'calcium', 'iron', 'protein'] Totals: {'A': 0.0, 'carbs': 0.0, 'potassium': 0.0, 'C': 0.0, 'calcium': 0.0, 'iron': 0.0, 'protein': 0.0} trials: 9999 learning_rate: 4.5173345977 amounts: [0, 110.27983690675595, 111.99121896807983, 0, 336.52388828681825, 33.32157899843512, 0, 0, 0, 10.493562091077022, 427.8018908957401, 0.0010958083669174298, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.00033916011916981716, 0] outputs: [1.0001155124493069, 1.0000365588067597, 1.0000097610507062, -0.9999856437306759, 0.9999976232224799, 1.000008863119184, 1.401358763406663] cost: 2.37677752013e-06 cost_grad: [0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, -1.0, 0.1, 0.1] momentum: [3.554543705276473e-05, 0.00010145489468337417, -2.468993974791064e-05, 0.0002102904398200622, -8.475189655012043e-06, -0.00010434043086608377, 7.511076662787479e-05, 0.00018729039110444717, 8.671454217147657e-05, 0.00013365102748770898, 5.5857421033364335e-06, 2.823201275130819e-05, 0.0003369125250010183, 0.00025228345999460714, 0.00018729039110444717, 0.0002524458720559683, 6.200996965203711e-06, 6.598971850322932e-05] grad: [7.882539682539683e-05, -0.006071494949494949, 0.0005555858585858586, 0.003088320346320347, -3.8672438672439125e-07, 0.0013789235209235207, -0.0001399971139971139, -0.0004596998556998557, 0.0002781443001443002, 9.925829725829742e-05, 1.500721500721536e-06, 0.0012165396825396825, -0.0026132121212121212, -0.0008288840788840787, -0.0004596998556998557, 0.00026782539682539683, 0.0002491298701298701, -0.0014286002886002886] Food Amount kilojoules carbs protein iron calcium A C potassium cheese 110 1859 1 27 4 79 22 0 108 snow peas 111 168 5 3 17 4 24 80 439 mushroom 336 309 10 10 9 1 0 13 1056 spinach 33 32 1 0 5 3 62 15 185 pepitas 10 237 1 2 8 0 0 0 84 mince beef 427 4547 0 81 64 21 0 0 1625 Totals: 7154 19 126 110 109 110 110 3500 Goals: -20 90 110 110 110 110 3500 It's basically the smallest amount of food you can eat ignoring kilojoules, and just satisfying as many of the constraints as possible. There are lower calorie dites... for example, the spinnach, salmon and cheese diets... but I've decided kilojoules has to be an L2 regressor and adding that next. It's pretty mad the different diets it can throw up depending on optimisation parameters... say, depending on what you've eaten... or what you wont eat. I want to add more food... create a website? Dunno... I know you're talking about keto in particular but, i don't think dieting is ever going to be just a fad or a cult... and lots of people have genuine reasons to be either low on carbs, or sodium or maybe cholesterol or fat... whatever way you decide to optimise your diet, this helps you find food that fits those requirements... I think there's a market. Once again, the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor. +3 Insightful... I wish I had sockpuppets. Yep, I've been following this, and I've studied DNNs (Deep Neural Networks) and DBNs (Deep Belief Networks)... Okay, so, what are DNNs doing, fundamentally... Well... each neuron basically divides the hyperspace into two classes, divided by a hyperplane, call them true and false (for simplicity, neuron on is true, and neuron off is false)... you can have many such divisions, one for each neuron in a layer, these neurons create another hyperspace and another layer can take that as input and carve up the space to form more complex categorisations... all seems good. Let's drop back to a one dimensional example... let's say we create a few classes, poor, middle and rich... We kind of know that there is a correlation between a persons height and their wealth... it's not so strong as we could imagine here... but let's go with it anyway... and anyway, we're training a probabilistic deep neural network on only one parameter and trying to guess what wealth category a person is in... we're not always going to be right, but we'll be right better than chance because there is a correlation. Now, our training data is just a giant list of people's heights and their class... we train the neural network and then we ask it some questions... We say, here's a 4 foot person and the network responds, most likely to be in the poor class... We say, here's a 5'5" person, and the network says most likely to be in the middle class... we say, here's a 6'4" person, and the network says most likely to be in the rich class... Exactly as we expected... the network appears to be working as designed.... then we run a variant of the above experiment on it, and we try to evolve heights that maximise the confidence of the categorisation of each class... So... for the middle class... say 5'3" gives the highest probability of the being in the middle class... sweet seems to work... Then we evolve an artificial height for the rich class... and the network says a 700 foot tall human is almost 99.999% likely to be rich... and for the poor class... it produces an image (height) of -200 foot tall person is 99.999% likely to be poor.... Shit... what happened? Well... if you did just linear regression, and you see correlation, you max it out and the taller the person, the richer they were... or in case of classes... the more likely they were to be in the rich class... It's producing an image that's well outside of the training data... the network has never seen such an image, but because all it does is produce dividing lines between classes, it thinks it is well and truly into the rich (or conversely) or poor class... It's a long long way from the dividing lines, so it sees it as good. And with deep neural networks... well... they have no way at all of telling what is and isn't outside of their training ranges, because all they do is divide up the hyperspace into discriminatory categories with hyperplanes... with no concept of how far or close the different categories have to be to these hyperplanes to be meaningful. And the dimensionality is so high as to be near impossible to create artificial images to act as boundaries... Now... the above example has three classes with a one dimensional input... so the middle class actually has to be reasonable... but in actual images, this is very unlikely to have a fully enclosed class like this (dimensionality)... so we see yellow school busses have black and yellow lines... the network sees black and yellow lines and says this is definitely a school bus... more school bus than anything I've ever seen!! (We'll, not really, but gives a super high confidence rating for an image that is well outside it's normal training data --- and this is what they mean by neural networks expect the probability distribution of their data to be stationary... this data is well outside the training regime... but DNNs have no way internally of recognising this!). Now... DBNs are little bit better in this regard... they have a concept of energy or entropy (not to be confused with real energy or entropy as trane thinks, but just a concept borrowed from physics)... When they see a training example, they lower the energy of that point, and raise the energy around it... If you run the top two layers of a DBN back and fourth... what would the input be, given this state, what would the output state be given this input... it will move into the lower energy states... you can project this backward to the input and it will show you what it is 'thinking' about... it will show you the picture that would produce that state... they are called generative models. So, by holding the 'this is a 2' neuron high, and oscillating back and fourth, and projecting back to the image input, it will generate many images of things that it thinks are 2s and they will indeed all look like 2s. Now... DBNs haven't yet managed to scale to ImageNet levels, so it is conjecture... but because we know that familiar classes, classes in the training set, lie in low energy valleys, and the rest of the possible inputs lie in a high energy plane, it should be possible to distinguish an input as being literally unlike anything it has ever seen... it will naturally have a high energy... and therefore, it should be possible to say that whatever we classify it as... well... is only a guess... we can scale the confidence by the neg-entropy (encoded between the various layers)... So... DBNs should force such an evolving image creator, pixel level evolution or pixel back propagation image generation to generate images that are much more realistic and therefore DBNs should be much more robust to this type of adversarial image generation than DNNs... Unfortunately no one has run these experiments yet, as far as I know... Not even on MNIST (the standard mini digit recognition test)... I think if someone can show DBNs only classify digits that we think of as being digits with high certainty, we can show that they are more robust to this problem... but, as I said, no one's yet run the experiment... Then there's the small problem of scaling DBNs to ImageNet levels of complexity. That's the best I can explain it in one go... hope that helps. Let me know if you got questions. I have a friend who's heavily into this... But I don't really understand it... He talks a lot about 'ontology': "Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations." So, I'm gonna take that it means the basic categories of being and their relations? And I'm still like wtf? Or is it about meaning or knowledge? Not even sure if it encodes stuff like that... what is meaning and what is knowledge, is knowledge just data? It's seems a bit like xml schema and document, no? Just the type of data and the data in it... So, how is that different from a relational database? Is it a format used to encode stuff about a webpage in a machine readable format so google can index it better? Is it meant for AI to 'understand' the web? Wouldn't it be redundant when we create an AI that can just read the web in natural language (and pics of course!)... Or is just a another standard people use to make programmable access to the web, just another API like SOAP? Is it just stuff like accessing amazon's book catalogue through a programmer's interface... or getting a copy or partial copy of their database? I really don't know enough to be able to say... I just don't get it or what it's about or why. Bye Del... It was nice knowing you... Hope you enjoy guantanamo. That guy looks like he's writing in muslim! US please send him to guantanamo before he blows someone up! I think sye is a muslim sympathiser... You can tell cause she downvoted my comment to lock this obvious muslim terrorist wannabe up. She's also a foreigner... which means she's likely a muslim terrorist too. US please lock sye up in guantanamo before she blows somebody up! Shit's getting dangerous around here. I used to be into fantasy role playing, bestiality, bsdm and necrophilia... then I realised I was just beating a dead unicorn. So... sometimes... yes. You win this round sye... but I got my eye on you. It's really scary... Everyone's so fallen for the terrorist rhetoric that we have literally become worse than what we are fighting... Remember the old values of truth, justice and liberty? No... now it's censorship, spying and torture... If 9/11 wasn't an inside job, they couldn't have taken greater advantage of it... That was the day the world really lost its freedoms. Reddit is almost certainly owned by the secret services of the world... judging by their censorship of these proven and important topics... it's no longer in the realm of conspiracy... we know its a fact, but even reddit tries to hide the truth. I think the biggest danger of reddit is that it appears to be a free and independent alternative news site, run by the people for the people... but in reality it is a tightly controlled propaganda machine... I'm not sure there are decent alternatives (k5?). So much foolishness about now days, it's hard to imagine anyone's letting it go to waste. At the rate their going through it, I'm a little worried there won't be any foolishness left to use... but the critics say we're nowhere near peak foolishness yet... so who knows? Hey Sye Did you hear that HHD is fat and ugly? Just wanted you to know. Yeah, but you agree Christopher was pretty hot. Little Chris Dorner sat in the corner, Shooting at cops to die, He stuck out his thumb and pulled out a bomb, And said, what a good boy am I. Then they shot him into little Chris Dorner pieces if I remember correctly. Oh well... at least he gave it a shot. I was gonna say... None of my daughters ever made it past a few weeks before a quick trip down the clinic with their mums fixed that little problem. Phew... Might have been sons... who knows? I never stayed around long enough to find out. Byeeeeee! I just like the way you seem to get riled up by personal attacks against holly... just testing/teasing... teasting you there. As for the new spending bill... don't know anything about... reddit said 80c in the dollar go to repressing everyone in the whole world!!! Including americans !!11!11one!1... So... sounds pretty good to me. Carry on. If you want to fix the homeless problem, do it! Step 1: Get Rich Step 2: Buy a heap of housing Step 3: Give it to the homeless Until you can be bothered actually doing that, how about you STFU about what other people do with their property... M'kay? It's easy to be a little sarc monger... but... Do you own a home? Seriously? Do you own your own house or apartment, or do you rent one? Maybe you get housing benefit and live off the state? I'll continue once I have an answer from you. Sorry... I don't remember saying anything about not using taxes to fund social programs... Where did you get that idea from? I'm actually all for it... it has good basis even in free market economics, assuming that the average person has utility in not seeing others starve or freeze to death. But you go on about the evils of property and the free market (PBUI)... but do you practice what you preach? I don't think you do... You probably have your own home, or at least are paying a mortgage on it, what's stopping you sheltering a homeless person in it? No... the free market (PBUI) is for other people to give up their property to shelter the homeless, not for upstanding citizens like you who deride the free market... you've got your own problems, your own family to look after... you work too hard to risk having unknown people in your house... why can't those greedy rich people give up their places? Some of them aren't even using their properties at the moment... See... this is the problem... when you deride the free market, you expect other people to give up their property, but for some reason, you expect your own property to have different rules... you actually like your own property rights... you just don't see yourself as being one of the rich people who should be forced to give up something... but believe me... you actually ARE one the rich. Personally... I live in a one bedroom bedsit... probably far smaller than the home you live in... and probably about 3 days out of any given week you'll find my couch occupied by an actual homeless person... often two... but go on, deride property rights... you're such a progressive. You've clearly thought this through more than I. Fair enough... Although progressive income tax is part of the solution, I'm gonna keep pushing wealth tax as well... There's a huge difference between income and wealth, wealth is power, income is fleeting... You can earn zero income and be very wealthy indeed, and vice versa too. Of course, the problem with these ideas are political... and who controls politics, the ultra-wealthy elite... not an easy problem to fix. So you clearly see the problem with strays, they cost property owners. It's not an easy problem to fix then is it? So, it makes sense that property owners have the right to exclude others, even if the property appears 'unused' to those who naively see an empty building. Other people, who have no stake in the property can still do damage and diminish its value. Why should the building owners have to pay for that? So, whilst I'm all for social programs and taxes... I don't think mocking the free market is the solution... Often the 'free market (PBUI)' is an excuse to avoid paying for negative externalities (privatise profits, socialise costs), but I'm not talking about that, and it's basically a strawman in a rational discussion... though you do so this line of argument (that this is the free market, and it's all good) often amongst those who stand to profit the most from it... It's not the argument of the economist though. If you'd actually been following along You'd have known that I believe the way forward is wealth tax and basic income... I believe this is well supported by free market theory. You're attacking a strawman... and I would have thought you'd attacked it, and had it rebutted, often enough to see the mistake your making... but apparently not. I'll repeat it one more time for you - I'm for a well regulated free market capitalistic economy, regulated to provide true information of products, adjusted for the existence of natural monopolies (these are subsidised, surprisingly enough), adjusted for the existence of negative externalities through pigouvian taxes (I support a carbon tax) and for the existence of positive externalities through pigouvian subsidies (education, health, justice, fire, roads and police should be subsidised by the state) with a wealth tax and basic income to provide for the effects of wealth concentration and inequality that will be increasingly driven by the advancement of technological capital capabilities replacing labour, plus disability and other benefits for those socially disadvantaged or who have needs beyond the mean. But go ahead... take the piss with your simplistic "free market (PBUI), jesus wants your oil" caricature of actual free market theory. Perhaps you would sound less like an idiot if you took a more nuanced view of the problems and stop painting me as a Libertarian nutcase. (Although I do consider my self a libertarian - just not the thoughtless "drill baby drill" or "let them eat cake" Libertarian). Are you serious? I have immediate use for cocaine, bitches and I'm gonna go with a lamborghini of some sort... yep... that's my personal immediate needs... oooh... and a super yacht... gotta use one of them... And... I think I'm gonna contribute to society by driving my lambo around and sailing my yacht. You think this is going to get us to mars? I really do wish more people had a basic understanding of free market economics... it really does make sense... and not free market (PBUI) but a properly regulated free market, one corrected for externalities and imperfect competition... one where taxes and redistribution are applied properly... But, everyone's scrambling in the dark, being led by politicians who have been corrupted by the greedy, wealthy elite, pushing disinformation and twisted economic thinking... when the light switch is available to anyone who cares to study. Oh well... such are humans. No YUO! aRe No, seriously... You are one of the biggest retarded faggots on here when it comes to economics... you literally know absolutely nothing of the subject... yet you know it's "wrong" and that you would do it all differently, except you don't... you're a mid level cock sucking manager, following along with the herd acting in every single way exactly as the free market would predict... yet - omg free market sucks, I wish I was in communist russia working in the gulags cause I wouldn't do a fucking days work except because they pay me. Go suck your bosses dick you piece of shit good for nothing shit for brains asshole. Fair enough... I should have known... greengrass is right this time... But... I'm gonna claim poe's law on this one. Don't do it!!! It's a trap... He reels you in with promises of free lunches, gifts and prizes, but by the time he's done with you, you've a bought a bunch of useless timeshares in a cloud computing service!!! STAY AWAY! Yeah... I suppose I just don't really believe in it. I never really have... on the other hand... I think it's still worth other people investigating... so I don't want to put too much of a dampener on you... It's the kind of thing I'd like to debate here (well maybe old days here) with multiple points of view and such... but I don't see the value in debating you privately... I might turn you off it, and yet, it might actually be one part of the puzzle... I'm just not so sure. That's about the best I can put it for now. read and replied. $ The British Scare the Fuck Out of Me Okay, I can kind of understand why the Brits don't understand the right to arm themselves... Guns are scary, there can be blood and gore and yuck... it upsets their tea and crumpets, and besides, the local bobby is pretty nice, he'd never hurt anyone who doesn't deserve it, he knows how to keep the CHAVs in line, so we'd never have to defend ourselves... and everyone loves David Cameron and his big goofy smile, and ooh look the queen, wave children... we'd never want a revolution. But it seems to me the british don't care for their right to free speech either. It's the british thing to hold your tongue, only say what is correct, and to defer to your superiors. I have two examples... Firstly, trolling in the UK is now illegal. Here's our not so little clockwork orange apologising for all the nasty things she said. This fat scrunt made a reasonably attractive and successful feminist feel a little upset... the fucking monster!! Let this be a lesson to you fat shaming misogynists who pick on defenceless feminists... especially you ulgy fat fucking female fat shaming misogynists... you're just the worst! And I'd like to point you to this reddit post about a woman jailed for "supporting terrorism" oh noes! It surprises me that so many people support her being locked up... for EXPRESSING HER OPINION!! Seriously? You might be able to read my comments if you haven't set your hidden comments threshold too low. I thought freedom of speech was a pretty universal concept, maybe outside of china and north korea... but here we see the British have no tolerance for free thought and expression. I guess that explains HHDs low threshold for being trolled... Being mollycoddled in her safe space by Big Aunty, free from having to hear things that some people might be offended by... she's stuck her fingers in her ears and now all is right with the world. Unfortunately I'm not in a jurisdiction where she could have solved her problems by locking me up... ignorance will just have to do. Seriously Brits, if this is what you have become - GO KILL YOURSELVES! I hope a terrorist blows you up on a bus. You can lock me up, but you can never take my freedom (of speech!). The people posting and voting on reddit seem like a mob out of 1984... all yelling at their telescreens down with Emanuel Goldstein... I mean Runa Khan! KHAN!!! They've become that fucking stupid, they don't know the difference between speech and action. She has me on blasterbegone... Either she has a low troll threshold, or I am a master troll, king of the trolls, ruler of the troll universe. I called the dumb cunt whore a bitch... That's why she banned me... Pretty fucking low trolling threshold if you ask me. ok... Though I didn't say offended... I just said the dumb cunt whore bitch has a low tolerance for trolling and has put her fingers in her ears to avoid the truth. She's probably the type of idiot that supports locking up trolls and 'those who support terrorism'. I hope a terrorist blows her up on the bus if she doesn't kill herself first. No it isn't... UK produced online porn can no longer contain images of face sitting or female squirting... and a handful of other consensual acts. Which is bad enough... But they haven't gone so far as to outlaw cunnilingus (not even in porn as far as I know). When I was still in the UK, about 7 years ago, I tried explaining to people how wrong it was of the government trying to outlaw simulated violent or risky, but consensual, sex acts in online porn, I used to get the dirtiest looks, like I was trying to defend child porn or something... people just don't understand the concept of freedom. A UK ex of mine was a genuine squirter... Only one I've ever known... I'm sure she'd be offended. It's a perfectly natural part of some people's sexuality. You're such a fucking tampon... I mean, you're a bloody stuck up cunt! The top comment is about a guy having sex with a dude with breasts... I mean, how can 'she' have a dick? That's just wrong. If 'she' can put her dick in you, then it's a he! You're being fucked by a guy! You're just a normal gay dude, deal with it. I don't think no-op trans counts as trans... Any guy can put on a dress and get breast implants... it takes balls to get a full nip and tuck. People go to hell in a hand basket... Not go to hell in one bucket... When they kick the bucket, they can go to hell in a hand basket. See? Simple. Please learn to English. It's not the tard. Maybe that's why they seem to make so many bad decisions... Someone should tell them that the US constitution is written in English, not Chinese or Chinglish. Confucius say, he has gun has light to be arms. My emu's for petting, not eating. Though I've tried kangaroo, emu and croc... all pretty much taste of meat... all good. Yeah dude... I call him featherfoot... (Aboriginal medicine man). He's actually a bit of a nightmare... Took me a long time sitting near him to get him comfortable enough to eat out of my hand, then we put food closer to the house, then eventually coaxed him into the garden. Problem is, his mood changes are seasonal... So, normally he's fine... but when it comes to mating season he becomes aggressive... He attacked my mum (kicked her on the back of the leg) when she went to feed the chickens... and he'll chase the kids too (and could probably do a lot of damage). He's got a tiny bird brain though... so... if you walk away from him, he'll think it's a good idea to chase and attack... if you turn and run (or even just walk) towards him, he'll run a mile... I confused the fuck out of him by running backwards at him... How is he getting closer while running away from me??? Do I attack or run??? Anyway, we don't feed him anymore (there's plenty of food about he can forage for) but we leave some water around for him so he can drink when it's too hot... he still comes around by the house, but just don't encourage it... the kids still love the sight of him though. Oh, one last thing, I'm pretty sure he's mastered quantum teleportation... cause he gets into paddocks all the time, but we've never seen him get over a fence... only answer is he quantum tunnels through the fences when nobody's watching. Street geologist is out of jail and sleeping on my couch again. We shot up some rock... well... quartz to be precise... pretty much like doing meth, but without all the high and skin picking. Kind of like rolling oregano went you can't get weed... the ritual or something. Otherwise pretty boring. She does... She just makes them into recycled vegetarian "meat" patties and distributes them to the poor. "People give a shit!" - Lauren Singer Sorry dude... I got the password, I just can't remember where to log in? Yep... I've replied... As I said... it's a bit beyond me... but show me what you have, can spend an hour or two looking over it. WTF is the privileged white feminist complaining about? Can anyone fill me in here? You tell us... $ I only eat fish because scientist now assure me that they can suffer pain and fear. Are there any vegetable sources that could enable nutritional ketosis? This means you need a vegetable source that provides roughly 3g of protien for every 1g of carbohydrates at the most! Does any such source exist? If not, then what do you do about people like mirko who have medical conditions that require it? They should just suffer? Can someone pass on a message to this retarded bitch that we're primarily a bunch of trolls here and that she should stop taking getting trolled so fucking personally? Or hasn't she caught on yet? This looks like a great idea... Takes a lot of energy to make a brick... this seems the perfect solution, recycled waste and ready to hand materials that a community can easily make... could easily be streamlined and mass produced from recycled materials. Once plastered, rendered and painted you can't tell it apart from a traditional brick house... seems great. I'm not a civil engineer, I have no idea how these compare to bricks in terms of strength, durability... what the effects of temperature change and loads have on them... you probably couldn't build a multi-story complex out of them... but the single floor housing / community centre / shelter in remote poor regions, looks like a perfect fit. I expect these will be the new hippy construction material alongside straw bail builds in first world countries. It's not going to solve first world homelessness though... as tdillo pointed out, land is probably the limiting factor there. If someone owns them, they are not unused... by definition. You have no automatic right to other people's property. If they could maximise profit by getting them rezoned and repurposed as cheap residential use, then they would. If they are unused, and they are just sitting on the land because it is cheap, maybe we could discuss how a wealth tax could be used to encourage this... but you wouldn't want to be 'mean' to the owners when you can just take it for free now, would you? In the meantime, squatters are of course free to use adversarial occupiers rights until a court / sheriff (I think that's how it works in the US) orders them out. I believe that adversarial improvement can also work in a squatters favour. Do that long enough, and they can own the property (this is true in the UK at least). Well you're wrong three times... Inflation will occur - learn to model free trade first (potato farmers and tomato farmers for the most basic model). An index doesn't fix it - so, see todo on point 1. What MCD said. How many times has your bullshit been debunked? And you still keep posting it... Your index leads to ever increasing purchasing power, irrespective of the availability of resources. It is not sustainable or realistic. Thermodynamics doesn't describe the motion of atoms, it doesn't describe the photoelectric effect, it never predicted quarks... it isn't the grand unified theorem of everything... it just describes the limits on energy... that's the only place it applies, it just describes this one very small aspect of physics... that just happens to hold true everywhere we've ever looked where it is applicable. To break thermodynamics is literally to create energy out of nowhere... no one's done that since the big bang... and even that is debatable. Your economics is even worse. The way you argue is like the logician's wife... For example, given the premise, "all fish live underwater" and "all mackerel are fish", my wife will conclude, not that "all mackerel live underwater", but that "if she buys kippers it will not rain", or that "trout live in trees", or even that "I do not love her any more." This she calls "using her intuition". I call it "crap", and it gets me very irritated because it is not logical. ... I call it "crap", and it gets me very irritated because it is not logical. Your index scheme is a joke... Let me refer you to where you last failed. Unless you believe in ever increasing consumption independent of available resources... or state that explicitly. Your bull shit story... sorry,, I mean, ox weighing story, is an example of what economists call the wisdom of crowds... It is the basis of the stock market and the free market in general. It's how prices are set... everyone taking their own little utilities and guess at prices into account and shifting the market by altering supply and demand. It's exactly why the free market works so well. Everything else you talk about is purely your ignorance... you don't understand the processes being discussed, so they look like free energy and magic to you... but they are not. And whilst thermodynamics doesn't stop you printing more money, the effect of more money is a greater supply of money, which makes money cheaper, which means you need more of it for the same value of goods... this is generally called inflation. And using an index means you can't print more index... otherwise you need to index your index and so fourth. Students of ancient greek philosophy should not be attempting physics from first principles on their own. Physics is not a toy, please ensure responsible adult supervision at all times. It's even worse than that... because we use AC they don't even send them for a whole lap around the circuit before asking for them back... in fact, (I can't be bothered doing the maths, but a rough estimate) they only send their generated electrons a few parts of a MILLIMETRE from their generators before sucking them back up again. Hey, here you go, that electron you wanted... lol, only jokes, I'm keeping it, you can't have it! They don't even let you borrow their fucking electrons they're that tight assed with them... and they have the gall to charge us money for their so called electricity... and we all know by now that money, thermodynamics and electricity are just a scam designed to keep us kissing the Fed's asses. Basic Electrons for everyone! Invest in 3D electron printers... End the curse of thermodynamic scarcity! Best explanation I saw of this was our physics lecturer (he was great at doing physical analogies)... A long clear platic tube with coloured liquid in it... pour some other liquid in one end, liquid pours out the other. The liquid doesn't move fast, but the effect is nearly instant (speed of sound in this case)... Electrons (in a wire) move very slowly, on the order of centimetres per second or less. Now I get Del's earlier comment $ LOL... I agreed with you, up until the last part. As for basic income and no min wage, I agree, this would be better. I just think basic income needs to be paid for and, as you already know, I think a wealth tax is the ideal way to pay for it. You probably need to adjust income and capital gains taxes too. Inflation is a problem in itself, at least too high a rate of inflation... if you're burgers cost $20 because they are 20 times more expensive than bread, then fine... if they are $20 because inflation is causing their price to double every few months, problems. I also don't think you can sustainably have an unlimited government debt. As an aside, benefits like free store credit aren't that great an idea... whole towns use to be owned by single companies, and you got paid in company credits, so you could only buy from the company store, live in company housing, etc... you see the problem. Now... as for not telling american's what to do... I disagree... Not because I think europeans should be telling americans how america should be, but because many of the problems america has would apply exactly the same in europe or australia... actually... you can imagine an ideal government/society, and that would almost certainly be the same if you were american, european, chinese, or african. Each of our cultures has its unique problems, sure, but that's because each one is its own experiment... and also, for example, there are many europeans who think that american style gun rights would make sense for europe, and many americans who think european style gun control would make sense for america... so these debates are still relevant, independent of where we are from or currently living. Probably no min wage cause price of burgers to drop... with no food stamps, walmart prices might rise... if employees weren't forced to provide health insurance... probably a lot of sick employees. Some things should be subsidised... farming, health, education, basic income... these may affect the prices of burgers, in which way, depends on the specifics. Well... I'm not american, I have my opinions on basic income, min wage, drug prohibition, gun control, spying... and I have those opinions pretty independently of where I am... The US usually makes a lot of easy example cases... but they apply equally anywhere else, at least in the western world... I think the main reason you don't troll the chinese, is that you don't speak chinese. It seems you do have an opinion on pollution and running civilians over with tanks though regardless. Prices are a signalling mechanism that show the relative ratios of supply and demand across all things... They have to be flexible to work... The price of computer ram changes, the price of oil, the price of bread and the price of labour. As a store owner, I want to maximise my own profit, and fuck you, and that is the right way because it actually (pareto) maximises utility for everyone... So, just because I raise the price of bread, doesn't mean I'm going to pay my employees more. Even if they were both indexed, if I can raise the price of bread relatively to what I pay employees, I will... then how the fuck is your index going to work, cause it's attached to the price of bread? These indexes don't 'work', they are a stop gap, work around at best... if they worked... THEY WOULD BE MONEY THEMSELVES! Because there is no such thing as a global index saying how much things SHOULD cost... because what they should cost depends on supply and demand, and that's it. Do you even see the contradictions you are writing here? The problem with you is that you are trying to apply macro-economic principles when you don't even agree (or understand) with the micro-economic principles behind them. This is exactly the situation you have where you misunderstand current in quantum electronics (photoelectric effect) because you don't understand the principles behind classical electronics. Here's one contradiction - If the price of oil falls, people spend less as a percentage of their income on it, but if the price of oil goes up, they don't have to spend more, because INDEX... you can't see how seriously fucked up this is? Either they spend less when it goes down and more when it goes up, or they spend the same when it goes down and the same when it goes up, you can't have it both ways. And you talk about purchasing power from income... even with an indexed basic income, someone getting wages will lose purchasing power if the price of everything goes up, but his wages don't. Do you even know how inflation is measured? It's the price of a basket of goods... what you include in that basket has a huge effect... are you going to include bread, oil maybe... you could just make it the price of a 1957 megabyte of ram... imagine how the fuck that would work out... indexing your wages to that fucker... remember what I told you about the relative values of ram over the years? What you are trying to do is make the total value across the economy of your index equal a constant... which is fine, that could be done... but you can't then just print index money (because you've already decided to somehow make it a constant)... you can only redistribute it... so if you give it to one group, where is it coming from? That's exactly the effect of inflation... if you give money to everyone as basic income to maintain their purchasing power, it comes from whoever was holding it before hand in inflation, their dollar savings become worth less... You really have to go back to micro-economics, model that, and realise that the law of supply and demand applies to money just as much as it applies to apples and oranges. You're in over your head... Trying to jump to macro-economics without understanding the fundamentals of micro is like trying to understand quantum electronics without understanding classical electronics. I'm not hand waving, it's that you're a fucking idiot... Price of oil goes down, you can buy more of it, price goes up, you can by just as much, goes down, you buy even more, price goes up, you keep buying the same amount... You've got a model in which you can go on buying only more and more of stuff, never have to buy less... regardless of realities how much is actually available. THIS IS FUCKING MADNESS on the level of MORE ELECTRONS IS MORE POWER. Please STFU... you're too fucking stupid or unwilling to understand this stuff, please leave economics and physics to the adults. You're not worth talking to until you've passed microeconomics and a basic electronics course... go fuck yourself retard. I like UBI. It's not a bad idea, but it's a fucking shame that K5's resident UBI advocate is an economically illiterate, free energy and anti-scarcity fantasist, and complete fucking moron. He makes the idea look like a joke. Dude... my laptop runs Vista Home Basic... When it updates, it gives you the ability to postpone it like old versions did... but only for 24 hours... then the reboot is forced... Okay, it's usually enough for me to save documents and prepare... but it's annoying as hell... Like you said it might be a reasonable presumption, but taking control out the hands of the user is a major UI no no. Yeah... I agree... I should have said usually a major no no... as in, you would normally weight that high in UI consideration, but stupid average user might rate higher... I just want the option to delay the reboot until I'm done... but not gonna happen... and I suppose there's a setting somewhere that I could set... but I can't be arsed right now... Had to spend an hour and half trying to convince a paranoid crack head meth dealer to pass on a message to meth tits over the police turning up and all that shit... I'm tired. Keep searching for why the computer rebooted... but, as I mentioned before, it is well worth looking into a snapshot/checkpoint process... A program that runs for 3 days can probably afford a few minutes to save the program state every three hours or so. You should look into pickle. It is python's serialisation library, which makes saving arbitrary object graphs relatively easily. pickle.dump(obj, file) obj = pickle.load(file) Checkpoint routines should be an integral aspect of any long running process... precisely because of situations like these. It's worth investing the time into them, and maybe even a little bit of optimisation. Good luck. Oh... and I probably won't work on this project... I don't know what it is... it might interest me, but probably not... Ants for me would be relatively easy work (I already understand the framework/principles), plus with the payoff of having an android app would make it worth while... If you were doing neural networks and/or Q learning, then that too... but I can't think of much else I'd be into right now... If you still think it might be up my alley, send an email to my k5-stats.org address... let me know, and I'll log in and have a read. Best. Alright, I'll get around to this in the next week or so... I got to boot up my other laptop, bootup the linux vm, run the password decoder, then I can check my email... lol... sorry about that. Sorry... Reset it to what? You wanna trust other kurons won't get in there before me? I'm still gonna have to use that decoder program, and that still means booting up my other laptop. I actually prefer the other laptop, it has 8G ram in it, and this replacement one only has 4G (the advert said it's upgradable to 8, but there doesn't appear to be another available slot!) which gets slow with a hundred tabs open... but that was the laptop that that girl fed beer to last christmas... I replaced the motherboard, but the screen no longer works, nor the mouse... I have to VNC into it... I got a new desktop machine with 16G, faster CPUs and a reasonable GPU, and I'll move most of the stuff over to that... but I only got that on Sunday. So, sorry for the delay, but that's where I'm at. What, you think I owe people my attention? The desktop machine only just arrived, I got it so I can try out theano for GPU optimised neural network implementations... It's got large enough hard drive to move all my stuff onto... which is part of the plan anyway... I set that machine up, so the mouse, monitor and space I was using for the old laptop are now taken... I'll get to it in time... and I put a limit on that, which was generous enough that I'm more than likely to hit early... ie, managing customer expectations or deliver more than you promise. I've been putting a lot of focus into diet and exercise lately, and that's taking some of my time... to eat correctly, prepare food and get all my nutrients within my calorie budget. I just had the police at my front door, cause meth tits has gone AWOL and is at risk of losing her child until he turns 18... I didn't tell the police other people's names... cause that's not how we roll... so I'm doing the polite thing and trying to get in contact with them myself... So, excuse me if I have other priorities... And finally... have you taken a close look at my k5 handle? Any hints there dude? Procrastination isn't a subconscious avoidance of doing what is necessary or promised for me... it's a deliberate conscious decision, an entire way of life. I used to always be the last to post in diaries here... but no one seemed to get the joke. If you were commenting on the 100 tabs thing that's normal for me, always has been... 20 windows with 20 tabs isn't unusual... It's not that I am using them all at once... I usually have 1 window per activity... so this is my k5, reddit and slashdot window for example... another for bitcoin, trade tracking software (that I wrote), localbitcoins, coinjar, bitcoin prices, and news... another window for neural networks... one for diet... one for guitar tabs... one for social media and email... you get the idea... I'm not using every window all the time, or even every tab in a window all the time... I got a load of reddit stories open that I'm interested in but haven't read yet... for example. If the software can do it, I push it... On a 8G laptop, it all fits in memory reasonably enough... on this piece of shit (with Windows 8 memory hog too) the majority of main memory is on the hard disk... so swapping becomes a problem... and I have to restart chrome... I have lazytab plugin that loads tabs on demand, rather than eating up my mobile internet every time I restart and also using up all my memory... I find it pretty damn useful way of managing my browsing. No, I specifically meant optimising serialisation. So, that you can do your checkpoints more frequently. You should have a good idea of what variables make up the state of your process... if you can have a single object that holds your entire state, even better... then just write a checkpoint and a restore function that uses pickle. Call the checkpoint function every few hours of wall time, or every N iterations or datapoints processed, % complete or whatever makes sense. If you aren't using pickle now when saving the output (is this the state by any chance?), then chances are pickle will be much faster... cPickle even faster than that. Seriously, it should be so straight forward, it won't take you a day to implement... do it in parallel to the current run on a test dataset, then give it a go. It's much nicer knowing that you can abort the process, then carry on from the last checkpoint without losing very much... it should become a habit with processes like these. I do similar things when training neural networks. The line number you are up to is actually part of the process state... even if it's not part of the output state (or result) (cause then the line number is implicit)... you have to capture these too... even if you have to create a new object like MyProcessState, and initialise it every time with references to all the required data it should be trivial... it's not very hard, and I have faith in you. For restoring, you can take a command line argument to the checkpoint file... if you include all the other relevant command line options (input data file, etc) in the saved state, then you won't have to provide these on a restore. You'll find having checkpoints can come in handy during optimisation too... if the process is half way complete, and you find an optimisation that runs in 70% of the time... you get a win by stopping the current process and using the optimised code for the last part... whereas you wouldn't get the benefit otherwise. Also, it almost never makes sense to rewrite... though we all think everything should be rewritten, it usually never has the payoff we expect. You should have test code by now, a good idea of data structures and control flow, etc... Refactor, profile and optimise is almost always preferable. Add it anyway... It's good practice for your next long running process. It's people like this that get me trolling and banned from dating websites. sud? da fuq dus dat meen? This has to be one of the stupidest rules they have. It's a dating website, what the fuck do you think I am here for? To start a sexless marriage with someone? wtf? As my late gf used to say, a piece of wisdom I carry with me, 'start as you wish to continue'... sage advice. Yeah, thanks... She was a true gem... had her faults, but don't we all... but loyal, caring, intelligent, artistic, funny and sexual... not at all like the selfish sluts I've been interacting with since... (well, since I came back to my home town... I had plenty of opportunities with the girls who were our mutual friends before she passed, and they were also pretty cool - but having to re-establish a social circle and all that... let's just say, it's been interesting). She passed 3 years ago last week*. First year was horrendous, I cried nearly every day... Second year I was still pretty depressed, but not so emotional... Third year still not very motivated, but grown used to the new reality I suppose, I can handle sleeping on my own, actually enjoy my own space, I laugh, have fun, get exercise... Those selfish sluts did serve their purpose (they weren't all bad, just not the same quality). Third anniversary of her passing was hard, but didn't move me to tears, just a very sad thing, not the end of the (my) world anymore. *: Actually, just noticed you commented in that one... My dad gave me good advice when I got back home, he said, one of the hardest things to deal with is that everyone will forget and move on much faster than you will... Just one of those things you'll have to accept. Well... that might be a bit of hyperbole... Though they were all mostly meth and heroin addicted street walkers and prostitutes... I dunno... I just kind of fell in with these group of women... maybe because I was someone they could talk too? They kept me company, I gave them somewhere to shower and sleep, to be safe and warm, and somewhere they weren't judged, I suppose... Had a lot of fun, free sex, strip shows, drugs, sometimes drama, sometimes laughter... sometimes jealousy, and then other times set me up with their friends... has been a weird time... I think maybe, misery loves company... and at that point maybe my life was fucked on a similar level (but different way) to theirs... difference is my problems were kind of more temporary... theirs continues on. I dunno... selfish slut is a reasonable description for someone who charges $450/hr for a porn star experience (which is just a euphemism for anal, but whatever)... Well... although they were working girls... I never paid them for sex... so I never got that empty feeling that I was buying their affection... it seemed genuine to me. And actually, it never bothered me they were sleeping with other guys, cause I felt that cause they were getting paid for it, it was meaningless to them... Odd... I know... I wouldn't have even thought that of myself until it happened. Though I didn't feel like I owed them any exclusivity either... after all, I didn't get it... but at least with one girl, I was getting so much sex between her jobs that I wouldn't have had the energy to fuck any of the others... we barely had time to eat! There was a lot of drama and jealousy and strange infighting between them every time I changed girls... but that was just part of the dynamic... like I said, strange times. I actually kicked them all out about three months ago after one of the girls came around with this super strong meth and I spent 5 days and nights sitting in my chair wide awake from just a few minutes puffing off a pipe... I had two other girls there... one with extremely nice legs and ass showing them off to me, and another on the floor flashing her pussy the whole time. But I just felt like it was a bad trip, I realised I'd spent two and half years not accomplishing much... I decided it was time to normalise myself again... and had a bit of a fear that if I kept hanging round them, I might actually get into the drug (although I wouldn't say it was enjoyable)... and there's no way I could function like that, so addiction to it would just be the end of me. That was the fear I had... maybe ironically, that was paranoia caused by the drug? The girl flashing her pussy wanted to blow me, but I just didn't feel like it... like she was too messed up to take advantage of... and so, I haven't seen any of them for about 3 months now... except the chick who gave me the meth (everything's always back to front)... but she looked like she was fucked up (scabs everywhere that meth addicts get from picking, that she tried to tell me were mosquito bites)... I told her to blow me and fuck off, so she was only here for the day about a month ago. There's about three I actually do miss, a couple more I consider friends, but everyone's kind of scattered now (moved to different towns/cities... at least one in prison... the porn star... who knows)... I just think more normal people might be more my thing for a while at least. Although it might sound like it, I'm neither sex obsessed or a drug addict... it was just how it happened with these girls... As for drugs, I've tried most of them a few times, but never been addicted... except for tobacco... and I smoke a reasonable amount of weed... but none in the last couple of weeks... I can take it or leave it... but if I can afford it and it suits my mood, I'll smoke. Also, I'm not unemployed or on welfare... I wrote a trading program that keeps me fed with little effort, so I got a lot of free time, probably why I attracted these girls... cause their hours are odd and also have a lot of free time and no conventional jobs. Still... not making a load of money, so considering going back to work next year. Well, I'm Australian, we don't have gun rights either... Although, having access to a farm, I personally do have access to rifles and shotguns. It was a bit of a piss take, of course, at the time there were those shootings, and Holly was literally being irrational about the whole thing... basically abusing statistics... so it was a poke at the english pov. Personally, I'm not 100% sure either way... I don't think owning a thing is the problem, it's how you use it... I can murder with a knife too. I also think the argument against government tyranny is a good one, maybe the polite society angle and especially the right to self defence. (You will be refused a gun license in Australia if you claim self defence). On the other hand, when I was in America, some homeless guy threatened to shoot me, and I considered it a credible threat... and after a night out drinking, I was a passenger being driven somewhere, and someone cut us off, so I leaned out the window, pulled the finger and shouted some expletives, and everyone was like, what the hell are you doing, they could have guns? So... sometimes, it's nice to know when I'm down the street pimping that I'm not likely to get shot, and being a reasonably tall and fit bloke, I don't fear getting into a fight... but I think if I was smaller or a woman I would like a handgun for protection... many of the girls carry knives, screw drivers or hammers instead... and that just doesn't seem to be as effective. All up, I like the American constitution (as it is written, not necessarily as it is implemented), I think it's a fair right for people to have... I think misusing a weapon should carry a very harsh sentence. Also, I'm not so naive to think that actual criminals in either Australia or Britain don't have handguns... I've been offered them in both countries, and know where to source them... but I have access to legal weapons and use them for legal purposes, but I'm privileged, so it's not really a personal issue for me. I think the real cause of violence in inner cities is drug prohibition. Lack of jobs and options, combined with the lure of lucrative easy money from dealing drugs leads many into drug gangs... Being illegal, the only available recourse for bad deals is violent retribution... this also leads to turf wars and heavily armed thugs killing people. I've seen documentaries where no one in the public wants to talk to the police, because the police have become the enemy, so this stuff goes unpunished... Legalise the drugs, you'll bring the police back into the community and lower gun violence. Then people can continue their right to responsibly own arms. The samurai model, where you had a special class with special privileges, who were allowed to own arms and pretty much do as they pleased, is exactly why I think every person should have the right bear arms. I bet that didn't stop them getting laid... or even the occasional bit of rape here and there... I mean, they were only peasants after all. Didn't the whole karate thing start there? Peasants weren't allowed to have arms, so they found a way to defend themselves either open handed, or with slightly modified farm equipment? Zoosk rejected so many of my profile attempts: (Paraphrasing): Satanist seeking sexy sluts, sex workers, single mothers and schizophrenics for telepathic ritual sex... Your profile update has been rejected for being inappropriate You: Not Curvy. Under 30. Not a single mother. Not a religious freak. Want sex not friendship. Your profile changes have been approved Except, when I go to read it, it says: You: Good looking. Athletic. Must be looking for friendship. WTF? I try again, and add to the bottom of it: IF ZOOSK KEEPS FUCKING UP MY PROFILE I'M GONNA CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION. Your profile changes have been approved Finally... So, after a few "hello's", "nice eyes" and "hi sexy's" with no replies, I send "Can't you type you ugly fat cunt" to some chick, and my account gets throttled... even though I'd actually started a few pretty close connections with a few girls by being rude... cause they always defend themselves, but once they start talking they're invested and you can leverage that. So, I cancel my subscription, and then a day later, they lock my account out completely. Now they won't even answer my support requests... and I still had 4 months left on the current subscription! It's like these websites are run by castrated males, white knights, beta's or even ugly fat feminists with an agenda. Why are they dictating how people interact? It's like enforcing beta behaviour on men... if being rude doesn't work, the women can block the guys and the sexual market place will sort itself out, but no... it's not enough to be what the women you are chasing would want, you have to be what the owners of the website want you to be too... I got into a few interesting discussions there saying that it was quite likely I was missing out on the type of girls who may have been in the same situation as me... and forced to write boring drivel like 'Looking for a nice man, who wants to take walks on the beach', instead of 'Seeking six foot tall stud with six pack for strange sex'... so it's really desexualising everybody... and forcing everyone into this weird 'nice guy/girl' behaviour when we aren't looking for that. These are the girls that start messaging you every day, and planning when they can get some free time to come visit. Yeah, I dunno... an ex recommended zoosk to me years ago... so I thought I'd give it a try... I actually had a fair few connections on there (but no dates)... so losing them was the big disappointment... maybe 'fat ugly cunt' was a bit over the top... but a ban seemed disproportionate... So, I signed up to POF when that happened... but I haven't actually started using it... spending time now on improving myself and mostly ignoring women... which has lead to me getting randomly eyed up quite a bit more frequently... usual paradox with women, only want you when you don't want them. No, they don't like it... but some women love the drama... call them a name, and they'll get all angry, that anger is just emotion and drama, and they come back wanting more... I'm not going to pretend I understand women, or even individual women, but sometimes they act paradoxically like that. LOL... funny that... you might be right generally or it might be an American thing... I only dated one American chick (she was married so I didn't really feel right about it... I was young)... so one night out in Boston when the bar closed, and a couple of the others wanted to find another bar, she was like nah, it's getting late, we should go home, and I made the mistake of saying something like 'forget what the bitch says, let's find another bar'... The B word was too much for her, and she made a big deal out of it and that was it... on the other hand, bitch was married and cheating on her husband, so no big loss. But I've met and gone out with plenty of english and aussie women for whom the C word is everyday vocabulary... I mean, I remember one uk chick in particular (I still talk to her on facebook, and we still have a thing, from before my gf passed away... what can I say, I like redheads) who was always yelling cunt this, fucking cunt that, he's a cunt, she's a cunt... I mean... at the time I found it shocking... but now I like the kind of girl who can give and take the C word like they were saying good morning, how do you do. It's just a word to me, and I appreciate people who see it similarly. In aus, for example, it's normal to call your best friend cunt, and the guy you're about to kick the shit out of mate. An old friend of mine sent me a message on facebook recently - 'Happy birthday, ya old cunt'... and that's how I know he's a true friend. Yeah, thanks... she's definitely cool imho... Unfortunately she has an 8 year old kid now... I imagine she would have reeled in the language a bit. I'll probably try and catch up with her in the next couple of years... when I get back to the UK next. But I do like people who treat words as just words and aren't overly uptight about them. I find that the real damaging words aren't generic swear words, but where you have to find something in their character or psyche that they are ashamed of and hit that spot... call someone's actions morally weak, or a girl who's cheating disloyal and selfish, or worse yet, a bad mother... that's the stuff that cuts... cause they know they own that flaw. It's not really something I'm proud of, but I'm quite good at that when I get upset, cause if you know me, I probably know you, and where your vulnerabilities lay... A person would rather I just called them a dumb cunt... cause at the end of the day, everyone's a dumb cunt really. Maybe not, I don't know... conjecture. $ I wish you could know how stupid you are. I honestly don't think you could be more stupid... it's like dementia grade stupidity... crack head climbing on the roof to battle shadow people level stupidity... even if he gets to the shadow people, what's he going to do? Hit whatever the shadow is on? The shadow people are just going to move somewhere else! You're so stupid, that when I looked up you're so stupid jokes on google, they would have all been compliments to you. You're so stupid, that if people handed out Dunning-Krueger awards like they do Darwin awards every year, you'd get first, second and third place... every year! You're so stupid, you would frame them! You're so stupid, you think that if you swapped a $1M IOU with a homeless friend for his $1M IOU, you could both buy homes with them. You're so stupid, that when you read the recommended background for the money mooc, you downloaded a new desktop wallpaper. You're so stupid, you think an electric heater breaks the laws of thermodynamics. You're so stupid, you want to build a car that goes faster the harder you brake. You're so stupid, you want a basic income so scientists could research this idea. You're so stupid, Michael Crawford thinks your ideas are bad. Hi, I'm Michael Crawford, and I have selected a wide range of affordable housing that you might like to consider for your new home. I've had a wide range of experience with many of the following homes. Let me show you some. Multi Story Living. If you like living in a tight nit community where all your neighbours are friends, you might be interested in this property. As you can see, it offers sturdy construction built to a high specification with both first and second floor accommodation available. Warm, safe and secure. This really is one of the best homes I've been able to find. Perfect for Pets Or do you perhaps prefer a more alfresco lifestyle? Built for the rugged individualist, this ground floor dwelling offers luxurious furnishing and unrivalled view of the city. Warm and Cozy This warm and cozy home designed specifically for single living offers something for those who prefer a more individualist lifestyle than our first offer, but for those that still want that indoor feeling not offered by our previous home. Your neighbours will love that you're helping them recycle, and that their heating bills aren't going to waste! Stairway to Heaven So, you want your own place, something that's not too rugged, but doesn't make you feel claustrophobic? Have I got the place for you? You just want a roof over your head, well here it finally is. We've measured the diagonals, and this place sure squares up. Okay, the bedroom's not as comfortable as some of the other homes I've shown you, but what can you expect at this price? Private Living Okay, so you don't like other people and are concerned about your privacy? I understand, the other homes were for community minded individuals, and you're someone who values their privacy. I've checked the roof structure and it's in great working order. Features good storage facilities too. You Are Here If you lived here, you'd be home* by now! Spacious private homes like these don't come cheap. Made of the highest quality prefabricated materials and put together by highly trained artisans. Offering top of the line privacy, quality weather proofing, plenty of storage space and a even room for your cart. What more could a discerning gentleman ask for in a home. Perfect for the single man or someone looking to start a family. Well... if you haven't found a place you like in one of the above, I'm afraid you want something outside of my expertise. I hope you found something you like and recommend your friends to try my new home finding business. If you can find a better home elsewhere, you better be prepared to pay for it. *: homeless. Also, holly has me on blasterbegone... She missed the fuglysgonewild episode... Tell her procrasti started it, I'd like to see her diatribe against me... I enjoy watching women complain about me... usually a good sign they want to fuck. I prayed that Satan will illuminate his daughter Ave Satanas! EQE over 100% means nothing... it doesn't violate thermodynamics... it's not over 100% energy conversion... Let's define external dollar efficiency (EDE) as the number of coins per bill exchanged... For a $1 note you can get up to two 50 cent peices for a 200% EDE... in fact... with a little engineering you can get 100 cents, for a whopping 10,000% EDE... and for a $100 note, changed into cents you could get a crazy 1000,000% EDE... 1 Million percent efficiency!!!! WOW... There's no limit to the amount of money you can have guys! This isn't a theoretical impossibility, it's a financial engineering problem. You fucking retard... EQE isn't ENERGY EFFICIENCY! It's purely a measure of electrons to photons... Even if I agree that there IS NO LIMIT on EQE, it is COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS in terms of how much energy you can get out of a system in terms of how much energy is arriving on the system. LEARN TO PHYSICS FUCKWIT! Can't you fucking read? You're asking for the equivalent of launching a rocket to space powered by throwing a tennis ball out the window... Just because you don't understand atoms, electrons and photons, doesn't make them magical... He's not assuming... people have tested this shit for decades. > at some point efficiency as defined for a solar cell exceeds 100%. While other efficiency definitions could go to INFINITY for all I care... energy in to energy out is the only relevant efficiency definition you need to worry about... and IT CANNOT EXCEED 100%... even if you use photons, electrons, 3D printing and basic income. You have doomed Basic Income If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations -- then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation -- well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. --Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington There was a slashdot article recently that said if people don't like the implications of a solution to a problem, they will deny the problem... I think this is highly relevant. Unfortunately for you, the problem is reality. CAN'T YOU FUCKING READ? CURRENT IS NOT WORK... IT IS (electron charge times) THE NUMBER OF ELECTRONS PASSING A POINT IN A TIME INTERVAL!! IF THERE IS NO VOLTAGE DROP, THERE IS NO WORK! ELECTRONS DO NO WORK IN A SUPERCONDUCTOR... THEY JUST PASS THROUGH A POINT DOING NO WORK... LIKE AN OBJECT MOVING IN SPACE, WITH NO FORCE ACTING UPON IT, CONTINUES TO MOVE WITH NO WORK BEING DONE. A CURRENT MOVING IN AN IDEAL SHORT CIRCUIT DOES ZERO WORK... BY DEFINITION. WORK = VOLTS TIMES AMPS!! I think the problem here is that you are trying to tackle solid state quantum mechanics, specifically the photovoltaic effect, without ever having done any underlying theory of classical electronics. For example... your examples are based on short circuit current... which is fine... it represents an ideal at the limit... and you are correct, 1 electron does an amount of work and 2 electrons does twice the amount of work, and an infinite electrons do an infinity times the amount of work... unfortunately, the amount of work in a short circuit is always zero... so twice zero is zero, and infinite times zero is still zero... you are technically correct, although completely fucking useless. No work can be done in a short circuit, because the voltage is zero... and no work can be done in an open circuit because the current is zero. Current isn't work, voltage isn't work... the product of current and voltage (over time) is work. Like force isn't work, displacement isn't work... the product of force and displacement is work... PLEASE LEARN THAT in an electrical circuit P = VA... W = Pt. No. Do I have to explain? Random Seed? Really? You would generally run your whole simulation on a single random seed... sometimes maybe you need a couple of random streams, one for ant decisions, and another say for locations, so food always appears in the same locations regardless of ant species... so you can compare ant species. Maybe you didn't mean random seed... but it bothered me... Oh well... I'll explain my ant sim cause it's fun. It seems like a pretty trivial task, but it took me a couple of months... only if you try it will you realise, as always, a lot of the devil is hidden in the detail. I did it more or less purely for fun (and to improve my knowledge of MFC, cause I thought that was where the money was at, at the time. I'd only just heard of linux, and didn't understand its implications)... and wasn't following academic papers or anything... spent a lot of time watching real ants for inspiration. I had a few ant classes... One representing what an ant can do in the world... pick up food, drop off food, move a limited amount in a direction, detect scents, food and home, lay down scents. This limited how a strategy can interact with the world... An ant class to represent a species of ant, the ant strategy or decision making process... and an ant class to represent an ant visually... Model, view and controller, if you like. Make sure your ants pick directions uniformly from the unit circle, and not your underlying grid... otherwise they'll tend to either left/right and up/down or diagonals. Even better, would probably to use a hexagonal underlying grid. Still... track ant direction and distances in their own movement, not in the underlying grid. First principle is that ants can only sense their local environment... only the immediate or near immediate world grid cells around it... and can only alter the pheromone levels in its current cell. My ants didn't communicate, and an infinite number of ants can occupy a cell... I used two pheromone scents... one as they walked away from home, red trails, and one as they walked away from food, green trails. Making good back and fourth trails yellow. I've heard you can get away with just one... I'll leave that to others to figure out. Both work the same in principle, so I'll just talk about the homing scent. Scent trails are laid onto the world grid... Ant's leaving the nest start out leaving maximum homing scent... but lay less homing scent as they go... each ant keeps track of how much scent to lay down internally... this leaves a gradient for other ants to follow home... Scents decay over time... cause they'll exhaust a food supply and have to go searching again... as it is they'll all hang around an exhausted food supply until all the scent decays... I watched real ants and sometimes observed this behaviour too... so I didn't think it was a big deal. If an ant comes across a stronger scent than it is currently laying down, it can deduce that it is closer to home than it currently thought... so it can reset its internal distance counter and lay down pheromone as strong as the one it found. If the homing scent gets too low, it should head home a little bit... otherwise ants get lost... this doesn't apply to food scents. The two main modes an ant can be in are foraging, or returning food... While foraging, they follow the strongest scent towards food, and while returning food they follow the strongest scent towards home. If they are foraging and there is no food scent, they just pick a random direction and walk a straight line and occasionally change direction a bit... the low homing scent rule will force them to change direction and head home if they go too far. Otherwise they will be following a scent... either heading towards food or heading towards home with food... Every now and then an ant will choose to deviate from following the strongest scent gradient for a little bit... This is the main mechanism for straightening paths. There you go... Thanks... it was a lot of fun... I know nothing of real ants... if they leave a lot of scent or not... it's just how I implemented it... I wish I still had the source code so I could do some more experiments... every small change leads to wildly visually different behaviour. I might still have it, but it's more or less likely buried deep within some folder on decade old backup CDs (I wrote a little utility called cdraid, that lets you backup onto M disks and restore from N, but who knows if any of the disks still work), stored in a pile of misc stuff in boxes, in a shed, on a farm... unlikely I'll be able to find it now. Like I said, I've heard it might be possible to do with a single scent... apparently real ants have a good sense of how far they've travelled and which direction, which means they might be able to find their way home without scent trails... again, they aren't real ants, it's just how I implemented them. As for the grid... well... I mentioned that because that was the first way I implemented it, and it just didn't look at all realistic with them all going up/down/left/right or all diagonally... it just looked wrong... so that was the fix... the ants have a real value location, but lay scents within a grid... In the early 90s I think I saw 2D simulation of water flow... water could enter a cell from one direction, interact with water entering from another direction, and exit depending on the interaction towards another... it just sucked on a square grid, but worked quite well on a hex grid... It would be interesting to see if that applied. No idea about ant neurons... I have no idea about real ants. I wrote an ant swarm simulator back in '99... I still got it, and just ran it... I like it, it's kind of like watching a lava lamp with the pheromone trails turned on... Of course, it's nothing like real ants, just shit I thought would work. Unfortunately it's windows only (I wrote it to try out some aspects of MFC)... and even worse... I've lost the source code in the passage of time... If anyone wants a look, let me know... I'll probably have to put it on mumble's server, if I still have access and can find the login again... lol. In the meantime, here's some quick screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/Ommxg I've uploaded it to tempsend.com It's available for the next 24 hours... feel free to host it on k5-stats for others, if you like. http://tempsend.com/52E5B8AC4D I get a 404 / forbidden error downloading it... Can you add a ants.txt, just saying that it was written by me (procrasti), Copyright 1999? Just cause... I don't know. Have you run it? Pretty cool huh... like a lava lamp... used to run it for hours at night (drove my ex up the wall! lol... though she put that robot video up on facebook a few years ago, saying "reminds me of procrasti's ants" and her friends were like... yeah, cool... I remember the ants! So wasn't easily forgotten). Some features: - File / New - 100x100, 200x200, 400x400... starts a new world of the given size. - View / Show Statistics - How many game steps have run and how much food has been returned (one ant can return 1 food to home at a time). - View / Show Scents - Turn off the scents, it runs much faster without rendering the scents... and also slows down with more scents shown... I can't remember why, some optimisation in the scent rendering I did that gets to ignore zero scents. - It does most of its work in the windows idle loop, so while it will chew up 100% CPU on a single core, it doesn't actually slow your computer down. Some ant bugs: - Single threaded - It was '99, who could afford a multicore CPU back then? - Speed depends on amount of scent being rendered... oh well. One thing that's impressive with windows, is that a 15 year old binary still runs the same on modern hardware/OS today... Not sure an elf file of the same vintage would... feature/bug, I don't know. What do you think? ants.txt A simple ant swarm simulation for Windows. Copyright procrasti of www.kuro5hin.org 1999-2014. All rights reserved. You may run this software as you like. You must include this license along side the software if you wish to distribute it. Thanks dude. Cool... thanks :) $ Cheers... yeah, it's fun... You can add my name to kurons with known ant sim implementations now... lol. > I had to max out the resolution though, the default was way too fast. Yeah, machines were pretty slow back in 99 in comparison... there's no update delay... so... it's only going to get worse with time... though on my laptop, at max res and with scents it's still pretty slow. > You have a weird oscillation thing going on there though. Pretty sure real ants don't have that. True... it's only really noticeable on the high resolution... the species of ant in this version of the program aren't exactly what I described before... for example, they have a mode where they just head home when the scent gets too low (or they hit the edge of the world), rather than just going to where the scent is a bit higher and continuing on... and no matter what mode they're in, they'll wonder around randomly some of the time anyway... this leads to ants getting lost... now, I think (but not sure), that the random walk can sometimes leads them into little loops where the highest scent gradient leads to a point and not a path... so they'll oscillate around that point till they run out of scent and wander randomly again or another ant comes along and lays a scent trail... It might be also that when they are foraging without a food scent, they might try to go in direction of the lowest home scent gradient (steepest negative gradient)... I'm not 100% sure without the code. Oh well... it's not perfect. > And how many ants in the nest? I can't remember, it might change with the resolution... 50 to 200 or so? Just count them! lol. > BTW, do you own my box now? :) Like sheep.exe from years ago? I've certainly considered it... if there was ever a little app I wrote myself to trojan, this would be it... especially if it built a network swarm... a swarm trojan in a swarm sim... lol. But, no... I'm pretty sure it's quite clean... at least if there is something attached to it, it's not mine... assuming the machine I built it on was clean... I just grabbed it from gmail, so that would have caught any well known trojan (I assume) (and the file is well old, that copy came from an email I sent to my ex in 2006)... and assuming my machine here is clean... it should be clean. LOL... it is a bit addictive hey... I used to watch it for hours... I kind of have a few stupid programs that I refer to as dynamic art... I know I enjoy them, cause I wrote them... and thought that was probably most of the enjoyment... but a few friends have said the same as you. Another program I have is my friend made some pics in photoshop... I put them together... it's like a kangaroo standing in a green, rocky, hilly mountain scene, at night... with stars... with rain falling down around him (I used about 3 overlays of rain updated at prime number intervals between 7 and 19 to get a semi-random effect) and a schizophrenic cloud that scrolls along the top and glitches when it comes back most of the way.... and the sound of rain plays in the background... I dunno... it's stupid but I really like it... it has a real dark sinister schizophrenic vibe to it that I really enjoy... and the kangaroo looks kind of evil... it's a python app that started out as an idea for a children's game (like an android app for toddlers to distract them for their parents)... but it turned out so dark it's just hilarious... I still plan to port it to android one day, maybe as a dynamic background... Just an aside... lol. Anyway... I was thinking more of the micro-oscillations you might see when the swarm goes foraging... and some of the ants get stuck. Yeah... the whole swarm does tend to operate in various modes... they all go out looking for food... they mostly all find none... running out of homing scent or hitting the edge flips their 'go home' switch... they all go home... maybe in the meantime another ant has found food... they all follow that ant... they gather the food... they run out of food... they hang around where there was food for a while... they all search away from home when there's no trace of food scent... they run out of home scent... they all flip their go home state... they all go home... and they repeat by all going out and looking for food again. Not sure that even staggering their creation time would change that behaviour... or if that type of global mode switching arises naturally. Even without an explicit go home switch I think they might act similarly when their homing scent runs out...shame about the code. I don't know if that's realistic at all... but that's what these guys do. I think there are many examples in nature where things naturally oscillate due to emergent phenomenon... Sometimes the ants I've observed are all randomly wandering about... and then other times they are clearly following a single trail... so I wouldn't be sure they don't have similar oscillations... Anyway... it's kind of hypnotic. Is your machine fast enough that the sim is too fast even with scents turned on? That must be a fast machine... as far as I can tell it's only utilising one core on my laptop... and it's pretty slow with scents. The file matches my local copy! All good in that regard. LOL... You're gonna have fun... it'll take up a fair bit of your thought time. If the ant knows where he is, and he finds food... he's going to know the shortest path to home, so the scent trail he lays down will also be the shortest path between the food and home, so they won't improve the path over time... you sure you want to do that? Also, if they navigate on a grid, you know the shortest distance between two points will be the manhattan distance, not the euclidean distance. Though it doesn't really matter... you're gonna try lots of different ideas as you go... the general framework is the main thing. Any idea of implementation language? I wish I had the code... I really do... If I find it at some point I'll let you know... but it might be more trouble than it's worth porting it from windows (I know longer use Visual Studio!). LOL... I gotta admit... ant's are fucking cool... that's the scientific term ;) Well okay... I've done quite a bit in python... and some graphical stuff... I built a hovercraft simulator a couple of years back in python, after doing Thrun's AI course... I went all out and modelled from force on up... I can tell you an (ideal) hovercraft is fucking hard to control (in that, I've still only theoretically worked out how to make it stop at the origin, facing the right way in minimal time --- but not implemented it!)... Point is, I've had some experience building world models and views and stuff in python. I normally use PyTk (TkInter?) for the GUI... but that doesn't seem to have been ported to android... and as you know, from the schizo kangaroo story, I got an interest in getting python graphical apps running on android... I think PyGame has been partially ported... and might be an interesting GUI toolkit to use instead. I ain't promising anything... but if you like, we could start a python ant sim project (with android port) on github... and I can put a little time into that... I'm happy for it to be GPL too... but I think I'd like to have an app in the app store if at all possible. Always start with the model, and the model always begins with the World... and the World has an update function where all the fun stuff happens. Then there's the WorldView object, which has a render method... which shows the world in your GUI... I generally get an idle loop to call update then render... Ants.exe is written in C++... which is generally faster than python (depending on how much algorithmic optimisation you can do... so who knows)... but if you run the small world without scents, you'll see most of the time is spent rendering the world... so, who knows... maybe python can be plenty fast enough for this. Let me know what you think. Yeah, pretty sure the oscillation thing is caused by them trying to find the steepest negative home scent gradient while foraging and the effects of random walks and other ants crossing their paths... You can best tell that this species does try to head away from the strongest home scent after they exhaust a food supply... when the food scent is gone they will tend to search for a while in a direction that tends away from home... Actually the oscillation could be overcome using a technique from neural networks called momentum... where they would tend to travel in a given direction, and instead of following the scent trails directly, they updated their direction to be more like the scent trails... Something like that... you can tell it's been a long time since I looked at this... Like I said, any small change to the strategy leads to wildly different behaviour... For a while I considered using DCOM objects for ant strategies... so you could plug in different ant species and have them compete... and people could write their own ants and compete across the internet... but you know... nah... Another bug: Apparently I have an off by one bug... I think sometimes a food item is created with zero food, and the ant that takes from it drops it to -1 food, and so on... but occasionally a food item will disappear, and ants can still get food from there... probably for infinity, or until the food counter overflows, and looks boring... oh well... doesn't happen often. I contracted to the ESA back in the late 90s... There were posters for Rosetta everywhere... nice to see a project come together. I had to double take when people (on other sites) were saying this was the result of 10 years hard work... oh, you mean it was launched 10 years ago? Cause clearly people have been working on this project since before it was launched... You'd think probably the majority of the work, right? One thing I loved about that job was walking past other people's desks and listening to them discuss orbital mechanics, solar wind effects, liver diagrams and so fourth... completely out of my domain, but their shit sounded totally kick ass. Yeah... I still smile when I tell people I used to work in 'Space Division'... lol... of course my work was all just your usual boring software development... not rockets and shit... good days. Oh, they sent me to Germany for a while too, to work directly in an ESA office... I was paranoid as fuck, having spent the weekend in Amsterdam with my girlfriend getting fried... The German bosses scared the shit out of me... one big fat guy and another short skinny rat faced guy... something like Nazi stereotypes straight out of a WWII movie and I was some sort of lowly Jew construction worker, like that engineer chick in Schindlers List who gets shot by the Nazi when she explains that they'd have to rebuild their building cause they built the foundation wrong, even though it wasn't her, and she was right, and they rebuilt it like she said... I felt like I was trapped in that room with them blocking the door... They were real aggressive with regards to what you'd built and what was good about it, why you made it like that, etc... I've never had to defend my work so hard in my life... for a minute I considered just jumping through the (closed) window and making a break for it... but after my defence they seemed well pleased and started me on another project. Like I said... good days. Very few people seem to understand money... Everyone uses it, but hardly anyone thinks about it... Weird. If you want to solve wealth inequality, tax wealth... how hard is that to understand? There will always be wealth inequality, of course, I'd say it's even beneficial... but only up to a point. Are we near or past that point now? Possibly... If it goes to far, it'll either be taxes, revolution or war. Almost just as crazy... everyone should just like share man... you know? LOL... completely true... It's not a problem with the theory, it's a problem with implementation... The wealthy control the media who control the population who vote for governments that do what the wealthy want... So, no one's going to be suggesting a wealth tax in a way that the average voter is going to consider reasonable... Most people haven't even realised such a thing is possible. In fact, the people will vote for exactly the things you said rather than risk having to pay these unfair wealth taxes when they eventually become billionaires too! Cause at least 60% think they're just about to become the 0.1% as soon they get a break. The only hope I think is grass roots... I don't know if there is even much hope of that... but I do my part. You're probably right... I wrote in my diary here a year or two ago about my day spent with the 1%ers... they are pretty wealthy by my standards, several large houses, nice cars, a boat moored on their personal jetty, shit like that... All of them jealous as fuck (didn't say it, but I could see it in their faces) as their neighbours $2M yacht went past... They weren't rich, they couldn't afford the neighbours boat... and the funny thing was, that was only the biggest boat that could go past their house, cause the bigger boats wouldn't have made it under the bridge and had to go around the other way... so even that guy probably didn't feel rich. Relative wealth is an interesting effect. I think this is the main reason wealth inequality can go on so easily... everyone sticks with people near their own socio-economic status. They may have more wealth than a few others, but damn they aren't as rich as most! As for the redneck examples... I dunno... cause I think maybe redistribute wealth tax as basic income or similar (negative income tax might be better, not sure)... so that answers the everyone or no-one problem... I don't really know the stats on the matter... just my observation that the average middle class person is worried they'd get taxed if they ever got rich, and vote in the interests of the rich, and not their own. Exactly... > if you were to become wealthy by working hard, you'd want to be able to keep your earnings. And, if you worked hard to get an education or start a business and earned a lot of income or capital gains, you would want to be able to keep your earnings... but you don't, cause we tax income. Well... even with a wealth tax, people will still want to be rich... having a wealth tax doesn't imply you can't earn, save and have private wealth, or even large sums... Taxing it (at a moderate rate) would have little disincentive to own wealth, which is it's own reward anyway. The point though, is with a wealth tax, you can reduce income tax, remove estate taxes and remove gift taxes... all these things make it easier for the average person to obtain wealth, and give incentives for the wealthy to redistribute their wealth (if the first $2M is untaxed, cause we like progressive taxes, it creates an incentive for the wealthy to distribute their wealth somewhat, give $2M to each of their children, for example, and as a family, pay a few hundred thousand less in tax a year). Not sure if you were saying why people would be against wealth tax, or why people should be against wealth tax... so I answered the latter. As for defective products, I think natural capitalism (which is quite darwinistic) would take care of that, if we didn't give them free handouts when their products come back and bite them in the ass. Haves and have-mores aren't the problem... It's when the top 1% have more wealth than the the bottom 90% that I think there might be a problem. I'm not against passive income... capital (machines, robots and AI) should eventually be doing all the work for us anyway... why not? I'm not against fractional reserve banking... I think it's a useful mechanism for growing the money supply with the economy. I'm not convinced about the federal reserve though, that its interests are properly aligned with society as a whole... and I'm totally against bailing out banks that fuck it up, they should be weeded out of the economy, like natural selection, and made to fail, or at the very least be nationalised and dismantled. I'm not against wealth, the more the merrier, for sure... and wealth inequality is a driving factor for capitalism and the benefits it brings to society... we need it, otherwise, why try at all? I just see that wealth naturally concentrates as part of capitalism. It naturally flows from the poor to the rich, and this doesn't benefit anyone but the wealthy. So private wealth should be used for the benefit of all... and you can't encourage that much more directly than applying a tax to it. It corrects that natural flow... which also means more equality of opportunity. There's way too much here for me to answer so I won't... just some major points... If the wealthy and the poor lived entirely separately, there would be no problem... the poor could create their own wealth independently of the wealthy... basic economic theory says that's the way it is... but deeper examination shows the existence of things like rent seeking behaviour... that the wealthy have ways of extracting wealth disproportionately from the poor. The main problem with extreme wealth inequality is that it distorts democratic processes... When the wealthiest 0.1% own more than the bottom 90%, when they own the media, they can dictate their views to the population, who believe what they're told... and vote accordingly... the 0.1% wealthiest then own the society... which enables their rent seeking behaviours, etc... Now, you're right... the wealthy have all sorts of ways of hiding income flows... and are good at avoiding taxes... I think for a pure wealth tax, there are ways to make this much more difficult. And again, taxing flows is a disincentive, so it slows progress... as you pointed out... but taxing wealth has much less distortionary effect. So, it doesn't tend to slow progress as much... in fact, it gears private wealth MORE towards production for society... One last thing... (firstly, I wish more people had a basic grasp of economics, but that aside)... the big lie told by economists is that we CAN'T measure utility!!! Actually, we can't... but economists take it to the extreme and say we can't even compare two different people's utility... and in the absolute sense, this is still true... but actually people are very good at judging if one person is worse off than another... we have an intuitive feeling that someone's life is worse, and another's is better... I'm not saying this is an excuse for telling people what they should do, or for all out communistic material equality... but we can certainly know that on average, the guy begging for food doesn't have as high a utility as the CEO of a fortune 100... Just something to think about. 99.x% of economists agree with microeconomics... Almost everyone agrees with neoclassical marginalism... that our choices are based on taking the marginally better option... this is the fundamental concept of microeconomics. Economists are still arguing over macroeconomic concepts... but if your macro arguments go against micro theory, you will lose here every time too... Say, let's base a society on where you have to pay to go to work, and the stores will give you money for buying things... so instead of having enough money from working to buy things, you have to buy enough things to have money to work... well... only crackpots like trane would consider this a good idea. One macro-economic concept, that many economists consider a great idea, is economic growth is a good thing (like you pointed out)... when you point out the environment, they say things like we need 'sustainable' economic growth then... not 10% but say 2% a year... Milton Friedman (a genius economist) said, "Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist". The concept of economic growth is a macro-economic principle, it's based in micro-economics, cause in theory everyone will be better off, and everyone likes being better off, so all is good... it works well where the population is small compared to the resources, which are large enough (though maybe hard to get) that they may as well be infinite... so these models have worked out well for an extremely long time... but they've completely ignored underlying physical reality... and now that we're pushing up against these limits in the environment, many economists are still pushing for more growth because it's the model that's always worked in the past. So... I say, you should have a good grounding in micro-economics... this isn't the aspect of economics that economists argue about... be more cautious of macro-economic statements. Your view of econ is just too far from standard too make much sense of. The standard view of economics says that people won't pay voluntary taxes... or as close to zero people as to not make a difference... Have YOU ever paid excess taxes voluntarily? I didn't think so... see how that works? And yes, neither the private nor pubic sectors, create wealth when they create money... or even the interest on it... This just shuffles a bit of the wealth around. Like you said, wealth is the things people have (and services to some extent), not the money they have... So, it's the businesses that create stuff, or package services together that create wealth... the guy's who lend businesses money enable those businesses to create wealth, and they skim off some of that as interest, but they do not create the wealth in and of themselves. I swear, if everyone was given a $1B/day in basic income... you would be just as broke as you are now... and Bill Gates would be just as rich as he is today. Whether you can accept that fact or not... it's as strong as the law of thermodynamics. Two reasons for taxing capital less than inome The rosy view is to encourage people to invest in capital instead of labouring, because capital has much greater returns to society than labour... remember, every tax is a disincentive on that activity... income tax disincentivises labour, capital taxes disincentivise investment. Seeing as you got to make your money somehow, we would rather see people invest than work. The cynical view is that rich people invest in capital and don't work. Ignoring that, both of these taxes are taxes on money flows... they both disincentivise those money flows... the money flow and the associated activities (both generally positive for society) decrease because of these taxes and slow down progress in society... now let's look at if they are fair. Say you have two guys, let's say both in their early 60s... and through either work or investments they both make $100k a year... you think they should both pay the same in tax, correct? What if one guy has $100M in mansions, boats, cars, art, investment, retirement funds and miscellaneous liquid assets like gold and cash, and the other guy is renting, servicing a $20k credit card debt and has meagre savings... Are these guys both equally able to afford to pay taxes? Is the guy with the $100M contributing to society as much as the broke guy? Does all that private wealth benefit society? Or does he actually cost society more in terms of say police and courts to protect his property, and public utilities to service his private wealth than the guy in debt. Personally, I would take it to the extreme (I know, not gonna happen for many reasons, some good, some bad), and never tax flows of money, only wealth. I would also tax all negative externalities... say carbon production, petrol (gasoline to you? and not because of carbon, but extra due to noise, accidents, congestion, road costs, etc), alcohol sales, waste and other such flows and associated activities that we do want to disincentivise. After that, it's a matter of looking at numbers, can these be made to add up? How much wealth is there vs how much money flows, etc. Liquidity is good... it lowers margins I don't care that you don't consider it investing... there's money there to be made because they bring value... you just don't understand how... I've been through this one before, and can't be bothered to repeat myself again. No, he did no such thing... he profited by making trades available either faster for those waiting to trade, or at better prices for those who traded after him. It's in the fucking mathematics, it's game theory that is the basis of exchange queue theory... Think LONG and HARD about how the market operates, it is a QUEUE (or actually, a pair of queues, bids on one side, asks on the other), prioritised firstly by the BEST price, and secondly by the FIRST in time to place an order. Given N players placing orders, every additional player MUST MAKE IT MORE EFFICIENT, or otherwise have no affect at all! To be matched the additional player MUST MAKE A BETTER OFFER than all the players before him. There is nothing (outside of insider trading and front running - which can be thought of as a queue prioritised in favour of a player, and is illegal, and requires a dodgy queue) that a player can do to make the market WORSE. He made profit by actually causing people to LOSE LESS on their trades... and that's the way it works. The people he traded with got a better offer than they would of if he had not participated... understand that very carefully. Of course, you only did the database work, and never really thought very hard about how the QUEUE matching theory behind market trading works... That's what I've been doing for the last several years... and I have never seen a reasonable argument against this... merely the usual argument from ignorance. Usually along the lines of 'he made money easily and I don't understand how'. Where I said LOSE LESS, this is of course equivalent, mathematically, to PROFIT MORE. Wheat held by a farmer is worth less to him, than the guy who buys and holds it temporarily, and in turn is worth less to him than the factory that buys it, later in time, to turn it into breakfast cereal, which in turn is worth less to them than the retail store that buys the cereal, and in turn is worth less to them, finally, than the consumer who buys at the shop... Everyone along the way can make profit... and every one of them is providing 'value' to the person along the chain... whether you can see it, or understand it, or not. Sorry to hear about your pet $ Simple answer, they have done... Why, back in the 1957 you could sell 1 Meg of bits for $3.48 billion in today's money... that's enough to buy the Solomon Islands, The Cubs, 250 Bugatti Veyrons and still have $400 million and change. Today you could only sell 1 Meg of bits for about $0.0085, that's not enough to get you a packet of Michael Crawford's Free Creamer... Think about it, if you had a meg of ram back in 1957 you could have traded it for islands, sports teams, sports cars and had enough left over for a lifetime of hookers and crack... today, for the same ram, you'd have to steal creamer... all in under 60 years. Anyone trying to store their wealth in available bits has had a terrible time of it due to all the unrestrained printing of bits that has been going on. Sources: http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ http://www.therichest.com/expensive-lifestyle/the-top-10-things-you-can-buy-if-y ou-had-a-billion-dollars-2/ No... it's inflation if you traded in memory, the same way more dollars is inflation if you trade in dollars... Remember, inflation is relative to something else. The whole point of capitalism is things like ram become much cheaper over time... because we create more of it, we create it more efficiently, and we make it better all at the same time. If you were to print dollars then dollars become much cheaper relative to everything else... you need more of them to buy the same amount of goods. We call this inflation. It's basically exactly the same thing. No worming out of it with your buddhist bullshit. And I think the word Thrun used would have been optimal, not rational... an irrational agent is irrational in any environment (assuming all the options are still available)... but only optimal under certain conditions and measures. Also, all agents are optimal in any environment measured against their own utility... by definition... their utility is defined by whatever choices they make... Economics is concerned with internal value ie utility... where as AI is concerned with external value (distance, time, correct words, categorisations, etc...). "My utility is changing." That's irrelevant... it's still a utility function It's like the equation of state for water, it's too complex for puny math to model. Best you can do is a lookup table. For new situations, best guess or just wait and then ask me why. Also irrelevant, we know you maximised your utility function... we don't have to use it to predict a thing. The only thing we know is you maximised your utility function. My utility is unique and not market-oriented. True, or at least potentially true, the market doesn't give a shit about your utility, only the utility of actors in the market in aggregate... Ie, it maximises the pareto utility of all actors in the market... everyone is better off without anyone being worse off. So the market cares not if I die. True, and nor do I. Only govt is looking out for my unalienable rights and protecting my liberty. The market only listens to money. Govt listens to votes which are not proportionate to the wealth of the voter. All of this can be modelled the same way actually... and also a lot of this is talking about an idealised government... Money plays a huge role in US government... and then there's the gov of North Korea for example... so... no. I am insignificant in your models True... the market applies to a population in aggregate. my utility or utilities or just my choices as I would call them Yes... that's the same thing... your utility gives rise to your choices. don't appear in your data. If you have ever bought a product that uses wheat, say bread or a pizza, that makes up a part of the data on wheat sales and the wheat market... you might think this is insignificant, that's because you're individual contribution to that data is insignificant... because you are just one person over the entire population of the world... but it's there. Your model can't handle my complex choices, except, as I said, with lookup tables. It's not really about modelling an individual's choices though, is it... so... strawman really. If they didn't interest you, you wouldn't argue against them... And how many fucking times do I have to tell you, it doesn't matter that you don't know you are maximising something, and it doesn't matter that you think the thing you are maximises changes over time or that it has a billion different variables... UTILITY IS THE THING YOU MAXIMISED IN MAKING ANY CHOICE, BECAUSE THE CHOICE YOU MADE IS YOU MAXIMISING YOUR UTILITY. Let me use different terms... If your choices have any value to you, we can call the expected value of a choice, the choice function... and we know you must be maximising your choice function, because otherwise you would have made a different choice with a higher value to you... We call the choice function --- wait for it ---utility. If your choices are meaningless... then you might be an irrelevant, unemployed crack head. The thing is, even if you aren't consciously or even subconciously maximising some function... you can be modelled AS IF you were... and that's how economists model it... Not that you are maximising a function, but that you act as if you were in any case. Now, most humans act rationally all the time... because the definition of rationality in economics isn't the one you are using... I've said it before, but I guess I have to say it again... given three options A, B and C, and if you chose A over B and B over C you are rational if and only if you would chose A over C! Pretty fucking low bar in terms of free market theory. What you are saying is that it is unlikely humans act in the most optimal manner for their own long term benefit given they had all the facts at hand, and were able to fully understand all the implications of every decision they made in some omnipotent manner... Well... again, most economists would agree with you... which is why at the basis they study the decision utility... the value you expect to get from the choice you make at the time you chose it, given the information you had and your ability to understand it... To get from one to the other, the difference between decision utility and experienced utility, you have to look at available knowledge, your ability to comprehend that knowledge, time-value discounting, etc, etc... Remember, we are biological entities, designed to act in the moment, with limited information, and limited processing ability, in a way that maximises the existence of our species as a whole... not perfect prediction calculating machines designed to make sure we are all healthy and wealthy in retirement... We can't spend hours deciding whether the best course of action is to run away from a lion or not... cause these are the type of decisions we were probably built for (blah blah blah, we aren't built but natural selection, in effect, etc... blah blah blah). Utility is purposefully ambiguous for these reasons... for me, a cigarette makes me happy now... and most people now days would look at me and say I was crazy... but I'm perfectly rational in my decision, and perfectly maximising my (decision) utility, even though it's expensive, many people find it smelly and disgusting, it stains my teeth and fingers, and even if I get cancer and die a horrible and prolonged death starting tomorrow. It's a perfectly economically rational and optimal (decision) utility maximising choice to make. One of the biggest problems in discussing any field of knowledge is people argue against the terms as they understand them, rather than the terms as they are defined in that field of knowledge. Yep... we've had this discussion before... last time I think you pointed out that A>B && B>C => A>C is the definition of transitivity of the operator... and I pointed out that transitivity is a property of an operator and rationality only applied to specific ordering of choices (given all other things being equal). Well... neither your rock-paper-scissors nor your lizards are examples of choice making... they just are... and that's fine, but they don't apply. Your choice making machine... if it did that... it would be the definition of economically irrational... there would be no rational ordering to the choices it makes... you can't say there is a best choice and the theory definitely breaks down here... which is why it's an assumption of the model. Now, presumably your make-choice(A, B, C) would call each of the lower make-choice functions in turn... and would get stuck in an infinite loop? right, maybe? It certainly couldn't come to a principled decision based on first principals from the definitions you've given. Now, a rock-paper-scissor (rps) choice maker might not appear rational either... but then, if it was basing it's decisions on long term strategy, even though it's choice varied each time, it would again be rational (check some roshambo bots for some cool and convoluted AI, strategy and game theory). Interestingly enough, without knowing how the other person will play, as a choice, rock isn't better than scissors, scissors isn't better than paper and paper isn't better than rock... they all have equal expected payoffs... so an rps machine playing at random isn't irrational either. What if the choices were, drink, eat or sleep... Would you prefer to eat, drink or sleep... well... these change too depending on when you last drank, ate or slept... so, the choices might appear irrational if measured at different times with no other information, but are perfectly rational at any given moment of time, because at each instant you would prefer to either drink, eat or sleep if only allowed one of the options. Your challenge then is to find a situation where humans aren't rational and would conform to your make-choice function at a given moment in time... and furthermore... how much effect does this have on the theory? cause all deviations from the assumptions result in a dead weight loss... Is the effect meaningful? Well... I dunno... for one... there's no principled reasoning from before that you could have derived make-choice(A, B, C) = A... And I think it difficult to come up with a situation where make-choice(A, B, C) = A AND at the same time have make-choice(A, C) = C... except in a contrived example. Because we have A > B and A > C... from this new choice making function alone... So, I'd really need to see a more concrete example. And then, as I said before, the dead weight loss (or the divergence from theory) would only be the difference in value between C and A, but this new addition puts A at a higher value than B and C, except in the absence of B... it seems this returns a near rational ordering... Ie, it would lose at most choosing C, when it really wanted A, but because it couldn't consider A, B, C at once it went with C instead of A... so, that's exactly what it loses by being irrational... (Value(C) - Value(A))*P(A, C) so... best I can say is, I'm not really sure... but personally I don't consider it a big deal in practical terms. I think it's about the least damaging of the assumptions when you look at the difference between the free market and the real world, which is full of externalities, imperfect information and imperfect competition... all of which can be reasonably easily corrected for through regulation... I'd really need a concrete example to think of the implications... otherwise, it's just a nice theoretical model of an irrational agent... which is nice, but not sure that useful. Yeah... that's a reasonable example... I'd rather watch the horror over the rom-com, I'd rather watch the rom-com over the thriller, but I'd rather watch the thriller over the horror... I mean, could be something like that... I wonder if in these cases the value (utility) of all three is going to be relatively equal in any case (even though strictly not comparable now, because of the irrationality), meaning the dead weight loss is always small... fuck it, I got the thriller, but I wanted to watch the horror... going to kill myself. Another example I thought of might be choosing what colour t-shirt to buy. So, I'm not saying it isn't an effect... and some people could definitely be carrying around large economic irrationalities in their head... it's an assumption of the model for a reason (because the maths breaks down if you don't work around it... which might apply to AI too)... but in the scheme of things, especially from a policy perspective, it's not the main issue that needs correcting. AI is really a decision making process in almost all cases... at the core of most AI is the cost function... this is simply the negative of utility (though it's usually explicit and known)... the parallels between AI and economics run deep... we measure a neural network at its current state and calculate the derivative of its cost function with respect to its weights and adjust the weights in stochastic gradient decent... just as we measure sales, ceteris paribus (in the economic current state) and adjust prices or production (just like weights) according to the derivatives with respect to profit (utility) in a network of flow of goods and services in one direction with money signalling the errors (missed profit) flowing in the other... the economy works like a giant distributed recurrent (feed forward) neural network with error back-propagation from some points of view... I know that's quite a bit out of field, it's just my observation that there are many parallels and analogue concepts between the two domains... I think knowing both can give you insights from one into the other... and I'm pretty sure many of the ideas in AI have been borrowed from economics (cost function vs utility as clear example). In fact... I got a feeling that economic AI is going to be a thing... for example a self driving taxi with a cost function that really is measured directly in dollars (it costs 0.1c to switch lanes!). For more of my ideas, please see why AI is a threat to humanity here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2014/10/26/172418/84/19#19 So, can an AI be irrational? For sure, you just designed one, with your make-choice function... and if we tried to fit a cost function to it, we'd have difficulty in the face of irrationality, so you'd have to deal with this, and I guess that leads to the ideas we've gotten here about bounded irrationality... It's just some thoughts I got... nothing concrete... But... example: choosing a video... although you can't assign a specific utility to it (cause the irrationality we identified), you could just blur it out into a range... for most people, the specific utility might be unknown, but you can be pretty sure it would fall somewhere between getting kicked in the nuts and receiving a million dollars... right? bounded irrationality... I'm sure real econs have this shit covered. Thanks... In Economics, we study the choices of agents maximising an unknown utility... in AI we study how to change the utility of agents to make them follow certain choices... or something like that... but you can see there's a relationship there. I'm not 100% sure this example makes sense in the absence of B... I think something similar though might be what you mean (I can't be bothered to specify exactly...) but I kind of think I get what you're getting at... So, C over A, then finds out about B, somehow this changes his future choice to A over C? Well... firstly, you're expected to change your favourite options depending on both previous actions (I was thirsty, I just drank a litre of water... you really expect me to drink another litre of water?), and future expected availability of options (what? You expect me to walk for 3 hours in the hot sun through the dessert until we get to another tap... fuck it, give me another litre of water!). Because, like most things in economics, everything is measured ceteris paribus (all things being equal)... so, given the internal state you've got one set of utilities, a different internal state gives rise to a different set of utilities... or, in other words, your utility function (at least it's output, with caveats, etc) will vary over time. So, something is only really irrational if the choices would be irrational given exactly the same state and information. I remember an example (I can't bother finding it now)... was exactly something like this, where some sort of mole, rat or other small mammal, chose nuts over grain, fruit over nuts, and grain over fruit... at various times of the year... which at first glance seems irrational... but it turns out, when you account for the expected availability of fruits, nuts and grains in the future... the rodent was getting what it most needed because it couldn't expect to get very much of that item in the future, while the other one would continue to be abundant for some time. So... considering time in your function actually makes some apparently irrational choices rational. Also, IF the agent is rational, then the choices CAN be compared pairwise... because there is a rational ordering to the options, so, you can run through such a list comparing pairwise and pick the favourite option in linear time... It only gets difficult in the face of irrationality... and we still don't have a strong case for that outside of your irrational make-choice agent... which couldn't have come to a decision without adding the later rule in any case. You might be right about emotional attachment For some reason ignorance, especially seemingly wilful ignorance, really winds me up... I don't know why, maybe it is a character flaw, maybe it isn't... but stupidity, especially from those who seem they don't have to be so fucking stupid... just pisses me right off. You should really have replied to Trane... It's outside my knowledge, and I don't care that much, so I just took the statement at face value... though it is a strange claim in this day and age of universal function approximators. What I find more interesting though, is that he doesn't realise that a lookup table is a mathematical function... and therefore, these lookup tables are mathematical models. It doesn't have to be an equation to be a function. It just has to map a domain to a range. On mathematical models: It's like the equation of state for water, it's too complex for puny math to model. Best you can do is a lookup table. A lookup table is a mathematical model... Just saying, you're a bit retarded. Steam tables are mathematical models of steam... What are you even arguing against here? That only equations are functions? Go look up the definition of a mathematical function and get back to me. As for the big bang... and free energy... I think you can recreate the big bang quite easily, with only one major caveat... you can't do it from within the event horizon of a big bang, because the big bang cancels out the conditions in which it is possible to create one. As a practical matter then, all you have to do is step outside of space-time... either go back in time before the big bang, or wait it out and if you're lucky there's a big crunch, but that doesn't seem likely given current knowledge, or just go to the edge of the universe and step out a little bit further, and you'll have all the conditions required for getting all the free energy a universe can provide for you. You'll probably have to do a little bit of faster than light travelling to achieve any of these goals, but you've never been one to let practical problems or reality get in your way. So good luck. Hope that helps. How? How do you harvest them without them recombining? Doesn't that violate the uncertainty principle that gives rise to them? Of course people attempt to falsify the second law... how the hell do you think we've come to understand it as a law? Nanotechnology isn't a fucking answer it's a copout... You may as well have said 'Magic' while waving your hands... I'm talking about how do you do actually do this... at any fucking scale. What mechanisms do you use? Fucking hell, you gotta be trolling. Ignorant Idiot Detected... STFU $ What did he think his foster brother was a goblin? His last Rolo? All tits look the same when your fucking them doggy style. Pure coincidence, I'm sure. $ "In here I'm $STAGE_NAME but outside I'm $ANOTHER_FAKE_NAME." FTFY. Next time ask her to prove it, with ID... Also... try not tipping the dancers... I bet you'll still get dances... tell them you're not gonna tip, like if they're going to do a lap dance expecting a tip afterwards... I bet (at least some of) the girls will respect you even more and you'll be more likely to get a date. I bet they fuck the stage owner too See how that works... the guys they are paying they want and respect, the guys that pay them, they'll put up with. You can talk all you want in my Rape Dungeon In fact, feel free to scream... no one can hear you. Energy is also measured in Joules... And power in joules per second, ie J/s, which is equal to one watt. So, a kw is 1000 J/s... a measure of power... and more like speed, as in a unit of something per unit time... So, for energy, we get a kwh is 1000 hour joules per second... or 1000 * 3600 second joules per second or simply 3.6 million joules. It's only because watts includes the time implicitly that you are getting confused. Lets turn it on it's head... and say 1 Trane is 1 meter per second... if you are going 3m/s how fast are your travelling, what is your speed? It's simply 3 Trane... How far would you go in 2 hours at 3 Trane, it's also easy... you go 6 Trane hours... Not 6 Trane PER hour though... simply 6 Trane Hours. You're just not used to seeing a unit of time as a multiplier instead of a divisor. Well... miles per hour vs thousand hour joules per second, really... It's not hidden in the watts... watts is the SI unit of power (J/s), and joules is the SI unit of energy... Everything other than SI is just convenient (for some) scale factor of the SI units. I prefer SI units myself, so 1 mph is really 0.44 m/s, and 1 kWh is 3.6 MJ... If you work in SI units, metres, seconds, joules, watts, amps volts, kelvin, newtons, you never have to worry about weird scaling factors (inches in a foot, feet in a mile, etc)... Only SI unit I don't like is kilograms... why is the kilogram the base unit? The kilogram should have been called something like BaseWeight, and a gram would then be a milli BaseWeight, rather than a milli kilogram... Just another sort of historical hangover I suppose. I think kilowatt-hours are just some hangover from the electrical industry, in that it's a standard they've used for a long time and a convenient unit for billing... If you've ever paid an electric bill, it's normally measured in kWh's so, again, cause most people are used to this measure. Also you get, Giga Watt Hours per year rather than Peta Joules per year... Or the amount of energy produced in operating a power plant (rated in Gigawatts, for example) for an hour... I dunno... at least it's not British Thermal Units. I didn't look till I answered... so all you have to do now is explain why did I get 44140 km^2 area and you got 41400... and how come our percentages still matched??? PS: The answer is def 44140 km^2 How come you got the question marked right with the wrong answer? Is it just checking the order of magnitude... ie, 40000 km^2 would have been marked correct too? Yeah, you can skip the SI conversions here.. because the watt-hours will cancel out conveniently enough... Firstly 20300TWh/year consumption = 20300 x 10^12 / 10^3 / 365 kWh/day = 55.62 x 10^9 kWh/day 6.3kWh/m^2day at 20% efficiency production = 1.26 kWh/m^2day total consumption / production per square meter = 55.62 x 10^9 / 1.26 m^2 (notice the other units cancel) = 44.14 x 10^9 m^2 There are 10^6 square meters in a square kilometer (10^3)^2... gives total consumption / production per square kilometer = 44.14 x 10^3 km^2 Dividing the area of required solar plant by the total area times 100 for a percentage gives: = (44.14 x 10^3) / (9400 x 10^3) * 100 % = 4414 / 9400 % = 0.47% Which is about around the order of magnitude I've seen quoted elsewhere... which gives me confidence in the answer. Now we just got to get that electricity everywhere it's needed in the world... unfortunately without very long lines of super cheap high temperature superconductors, this becomes uneconomical compared to traditional local generation and distribution. No, uneconomical means more expensive or less rewarding than the alternatives. Which holds true even with hydrogen fuel cells... How are you going to distribute the hydrogen around the globe? I think you imagine this is somehow free... maybe if we paid a basic income people will swim across the oceans carrying containers of hydrogen as a challenge? Are they solving VR and AI at the same time too? Trane world would be a pretty funny place to watch. How do I know it's uneconomical... and what are some hints that could have told you it is uneconomical? Firstly, it's a frigging course quiz question, so you know lots of people have thought about it, and no one's seriously considering doing this! Secondly, you can look up a more in-depth analysis of this problem and see that the big problem with this idea is the DISTRIBUTION of energy. Which is why power stations are generally 'reasonably' close to where the power is used... Power lines eat up power too. Now all this can change in an instant if a super cheap high temperature superconducting wire is discovered/invented... There are problems with hydrogen transportation... if these can be fixed, say fixing the hydrogen into a hydrocarbon or other liquid and doing this efficiently, and pumping that around the world or in big ships like we do oil... maybe then... I dunno... you've got a lot of maths to do and it still probably relies on yet to be invented technology. Even after all of that... if you solved the distribution problem and other problems we haven't discussed, why would Australia import energy from Africa when Australia has large deserts with about the same energy falling on it? Doesn't Mexico have desserts, and even the US? Why would all these countries rely on a foreign source for all their power and a single point of failure at that? No, uneconomical doesn't mean unimaginative, it means that it's not the best option of all available options. If anything is unimaginative it's going with an idea you just heard of and discarding all other possibilities. There are several forms of losses in transmitting power... Radiative losses, as you've pointed out... The wire acts as a big antenna transmitting EM radiation out into space. Inductive losses, which are related to radiative losses but due to material in the EM field, for example, stand under some high tension wires with a loop of wire and you can easily power a fluorescent tube or more... this is generally illegal because that loop of wire is generating a loss that wouldn't otherwise exist... you are, in effect, stealing electricity. Ohmic losses, the fact that current moves through the wire causes it to heat up and this is lost energy... power losses are proportional to the square of the current, so you minimise the current by using high voltages... hence high tension (voltage) power lines. Conversion losses, okay, now you've decided to use a few hundred thousand volts to transmit your power, you have to convert it back down to something usable without causing electrical arcing throughout your house and killing anyone standing within a few meters of a power socket... These aren't perfect (though pretty good) and cause losses... so you have to balance your transformers with your transmission. This is one of the roles of your local electrical substation. Grounding losses... Ever seen faint arcs on a rainy night across dusty insulators on a high tension line or hear a buzzing sound in similar conditions? That's electrical power finding a another way to ground... and represents another loss. You balance this loss with the cost of materials to build your insulators vs the voltages you use... the higher the voltage the more air gap you need. Which is why high tension power lines are so much more expensive than the power lines in your neighbourhood, and again they are more expensive than the ones running through your house (though current plays a role here too, limited by fuses and other circuit breakers). This is why electrical engineers are employed... Like all engineering, it's all a game of making tradeoffs and finding optimal solutions within constraints. BTW, super cheap, high temperature, high current superconductors would solve most of these problems... if they existed things would change a bit. Just make sure you have lots of redundancy, cutting the only superconductor coming out of a power plant is going to be intense. No... this is a stupid straw man argument. Good explanation there... I now understand your argument. /s Your argument was that it's economical if you are imaginative... and my argument was that it isn't the best option of all available options and therefore (by definition) uneconomical. This is probably the first time you've heard of this idea too... and grabbing onto the first idea you've heard of in a while and thinking THIS IS THE THING TO DO is the LEAST FUCKING IMAGINATIVE thing you can do. Troll away retard. You want to build the thing you saw in Quiz... and you say I can't think much? No officer, it's not solicitation... she's a street psychotherapist. This chick's got about a decade before she has to start using the word 'mature' in her advertising. Hot Mature Psychotherapist available for the discerning troubled gentleman. Analysis available for extra. Or she could become the clinic's madame, giving guidance to younger up and cumming psychotherapists. Get two psychotherapists for your fantasy psychotherapy session. Bicurious Psychotherapist, couples therapy welcome. Finally men will actually want to go to couples counselling. "Yes, hun, the counselling's going great, no reason for you to be there. I think we're on the verge of a breakthrough... and I'm going to get a load off on the new trainee psychotherapist too... Anything for you." And asian pyschotherapy: Me so freudian, me analyse you long time. "Tell me about your mother"... "Goddamn it, I didn't pay for this!". If we ate more locally-sourced food there would be a lot of savings. I was listening to someone on the radio talking about this... turns out that this isn't true, and was actually costing more both in terms of the price of the produce, but also in CO2 emissions. I think it had something to do with efficiencies of scale... but it was something I heard a long time ago. If we all ate vegan, or at least vegetarian that quite likely would solve the global warming problem. It probably would have a large effect... however, it's unlikely that the majority of people who can afford meat are going to go vegetarian... or they probably already would have... should it be legislated? Again, unlikely amongst a population that isn't majority vegetarian... So... I think it's an unlikely outcome. This makes sense... You got your free speech zones, now you got your free food zones... Why can't you just be happy? Is this more to do with regulating the serving of food. I mean, with all the best intentions even, if I'm not regulated I could be cooking food unhygienically, putting the cooked chicken in the unwashed bowl I took the raw chicken out of (for example)... You could make a lot of people sick. So... is it possible and reasonable (cheap enough, not need a masters in food prep) for this church group to get the right regulations? If it's just about location... even then sometimes makes sense... maybe you don't want a lot of people gathered where they may be a hazard to traffic or something. In the end, I suspect you're right though... attempting to hide and marginalise the homeless population. As an aside, I can get free food 7 days a week here... every day except saturday at 5pm down the park, and saturday at 6pm in the church behind my house... I haven't taken advantage* of it yet, but I probably should... I don't eat proper when I'm just cooking for myself. *: Well, a few of my friends have bought me food packs back, and they're very good meals actually... I think if I slipped the charity that does it a few bucks I'd feel fine eating from them. I kicked them all out after a bad meth trip... It's not like I was making large sums from them... mostly free drugs, free sex and free food from down the park. I quit pimping. There is a theoretical limit. There is no theoretical limit to the charge carrier multiplication. So you can get more out than was put in. Correctly it is: One theoretical limit to the charge carrier multiplication is that you can NEVER get more energy out than was put in. You get LESS work out of the photon than it can do itself... THIS IS ALWAYS TRUE... You just get more electrical energy out of the down-converted photon than it would have made in a semiconductor through the photo-electric effect if it didn't down-convert. THAT IS ALL. You will never get more work out of the photon than the energy in the photon. Maths isn't arbirtrary... and the terms are always defined. BUT PEOPLE USE IT THAT WAY... Ie, they use their own symbols, and don't always define them... I mean, they don't explain to you what + and * are EVERY SINGLE TIME, they expect that maybe you've carried this knowledge over from previous experience. If you haven't, then you probably have to take a few steps back and learn them again. And sometimes they put xn to mean the nth element of x... rather than x raised to the nth power... that's just bad use of notation... and not a problem with maths itself. Finally, I'm of the understanding that maths can be encoded in a binary string, and that computational proof checkers can be run against them... to me this implies that there is no room for ambiguity in maths. Isn't the proving algorithm and it's output the actual proof? All the intermediate steps and special cases are a derivative of the algorithm. I mean, if you can prove the algorithm only does correct steps in its calculation, you prove its results without actually inspecting them. Yes, you've described Godel's completeness thereom which (I believe) is equivalent to Turing's Halting Problem... (at least equivalent in its construction, or at the very least, proven through very similar means). My point wasn't about that, it was that it is encodable in a completely unambiguous way, so, despite the limitations of OCR and the different (accidental, arbitrary and sometimes contradictory) choices of symbols by any given mathematician, it is actually (at its core) unambiguous. I don't see the point in designing a mathematical system that is deliberately ambiguous... unless maybe you wanted to disprove thermodynamics, economics, the photovoltaic effect or something along those lines. 1=([-inf,+inf], 0, NAN, i, j, k... etc)... you can all go home now, we proven there is no meaning in the universe, you can shut up, those buildings will stand up no matter how we make them. Of course ambiguity has it's place... AI is going to have to deal with ambiguity of course... But not in mathematics... and when mathematicians deal with ambiguity, they are unambiguous about it. I guess a good example is statistics, X ~ std(0,1), for example... any given element of X is unknown, but we know exactly what type of unknowns we are expecting. This enables us to build systems exactly, that can deal with a world where not everything is properly or formally defined. If we allowed the maths itself to be ambiguous, we couldn't build the machines that deal with ambiguity, cause we wouldn't know the specifications of the machine! How many dead hookers does it take to change a lightbulb? At least 6, the basement's still dark. You failed... because, apparently, it's been deleted. Was originally in reply to your comment here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2014/10/30/103150/69/3#3 Shut up Holly Or it's back to the rape dungeon with you. Trane doesn't have to show that it's physically possible, he just has to show that it is logically possible. If it is logically possible, then there is no scarcity, and so the government can print as much money as people want and give it to everyone as a basic income... Because no one has to work any more, people can do challenges, such as working on creating the things that give us no scarcity, ie the things he has proven are logically, but not necessarily physically, possible. So, this is the quickest way to having no scarcity. Does that make sense everyone by now? Dear Trane, The sooner you realise that, while we can have incredibly efficient photo-voltaics and all the benefits they bring, we will never have over-unity devices, the better. The sooner you can accept the reality of scarcity, the sooner you'll be able to argue for an economically sound form of Basic Income. Just as charge is not energy, you need to understand that money is not wealth (the first dollar printed was worth about as much as all the dollars now printed, or would be in a fixed economy that agreed to use those dollars as a signalling mechanism... ie, total value only grows because of other factors, not the amount printed), and so, whist you can print money, you cannot print wealth... printing money and giving it to a certain group simply redistributes the value of money from amongst the population holding it to that group. Cause the total value of the money doesn't really change. So... You can have efficient photo-voltaics, and you can have Basic Income... but it has to be paid for somehow... So, instead of arguing for a magic utopia that requires mechanical unicorns for its existence, accept reality, and argue for a Basic Income that can be implemented, with all the benefits it brings. Otherwise, you're actually harming the Basic Income movement... except maybe for the awareness you raise... but you're in danger of putting anyone new to it off, because you make it seem ridiculous. Keeping your body in cold storage is likely to release more CO2 than your decomposing body can. Unless of course the grid moves to renewables or nuclear by then. GIFs? You were lucky. Why, in my day we used to have get up half an hour before we went to bed to download ascii porn at 300 baud, both ways, on a cracked bbs site on a monochrome green screen. But we were happy. Holy shit you're fucking stupid... If you could create an energy efficiency of over 100%, just tie one of these up to a photon emmitter powered by it, then shine one photon onto it, it will produce two charge carriers, which will produce two photons, which will produce 4 charge carriers, which will produce 4 photons... in an exponential cascade until your single device can create more power than all the world's nuclear, fossil and renewable sources combined. It's obvious idiocy. On a note about External Quantum Efficiency... it's the number of charge carriers produced per incident photon... the total energy of these produced charge carriers is LESS THAN the energy of the photon. You are looking for a perpetual motion device... either make one, show one, or shut the fuck up because you're fucking hopeless. If nature was making use of free energy we wouldn't see plants using chlorophyll to harness the sun's energy... they'd make their own free energy and grow like fucking crazy... And just because you see a lot of stuff in nature that YOU don't have an explaination for, does not imply that science doesn't have an explanation for it... You are pretty fucking ignorant after all. Finally, yes.. science doesn't know everything... but unlikely to be where you're looking, imply that it is wrong on the points you are hoping it is wrong on, that thermodynamics is wrong, or that you are approaching physics with the mind of someone wanting to learn science as opposed to someone wanting to push their agenda. PLEASE STFU AND SHOTGUN MOUTHWASH THE IGNORANCE OUT OF YOURSELF. No... I'm no expert on quantum mechanics... but he doesn't even appear to look at the definitions of the terms he is using... He really is looking for a perpetual motion machine... he's fucking crazy/stupid... No amount of posting is going to convince anyone of reasonable intelligence that such a thing is possible... why is he even doing this? Because he requires that the fundamental realities of physics to be broken to support his ideas on Basic Income. That's how fucked up his ideas are... If just one person on this planet can build an over unity device, they'd be rich beyond dreams, and the world would fundamentally change forever... so, clearly one hasn't been invented yet... and if one ever does, then we can change our views on economics... maybe... but not before. It would be like basing your economy around the existence of a high speed communication network in the days before the steam engine... maybe next he's going to start arguing for more research into time travel to get around this little economic problem too. What do we want? Time travel. When do we want it? Doesn't matter. He's grasping at straws. Then you don't need basic income... people can eat all the free lunches they want. And clearly the universe is a free house as well... so they can go live in the universe and stop complaining too. Problem solved. And now you can STFU. Can you go and try the winchester thermodynamics experiment please? Report back here with the results. Everyone knows that theory without experiment is worthless and inquiring minds want to know. Which is still less than the photon's energy... It may have been twenty years since I studied this shit, but I'm nearly a hundred percent sure this fact hasn't changed. Also note, the Shockley-Queisser limit is never broken, UNDER THE ASSUMPTIONS of the Shockley-Queisser limit. Ie, where it is broken, it isn't broken, because the limit doesn't apply to those situations (concentrated light, multiple junctions etc)... This is where you're lack of understanding of what assumptions mean comes into play. None of this will ever get you more energy out a system than you put into it... to think so means you are living in crack fantasy land... but we knew that already under the trane is a fucking crazy crack head assumption. Jesus Christ... YES THERE IS A LIMIT!!! The limit is that you CANT GET MORE ENERGY OUT THAN YOU PUT IN. Straight up fact... no physicist (actual, not crackpot) would EVER suggest otherwise. But EQE isn't a measure of ENERGY OUT ON ENERGY IN... it's a measure of CHARGE CARRIERS OUT ON PHOTONS IN! No... The hate just don't translate. I know what you're implying, but I'm really only nasty online... it's the medium... I love arguing online... I'm pretty nice in real life, probably too nice. Actually... has been real quiet here lately... don't know why... It might be that the police have cracked down on the area... or, if I were to guess, I'd have to say probably because I told them all they have to go and not come back after they'd spent 5 days and nights taking care of me from a meth hit induced 5 day long sleepless waking nightmare. After trying the drug, I didn't want any of them around, in case they dragged me further into that world... I thought it was time to get my act back together. I just can't function on that drug, and the idea of being addicted to it scared the shit out of me. Wasn't really fair on the girls who'd been looking after me, cause it wasn't them that gave it to me... in fact, they were there for me when I needed them... but that's just the way it went down. The junky girl that stole my car is in prison, but her grandparent's sent her a card from me... the crack head street geologist has moved about 100 kilometres east of here to a truck stop in the last major town before Kalgoorlie (on her way to pursue her career in mining I suppose - if you didn't know, it's home to one of the world's largest holes, and australia's only drive through brothel)... one aboriginal chick (who was surprisingly good in bed) moved about 100 kilometres north of here to be with her family... the other aboriginal chick (her sister) moved 100 kilometres south to try and get back with her SAS boyfriend and father of her kids (after I rejected her, cause I can't stand the smell of industrial solvents)... and when meth tits eventually gets dumped in a craypot 100 kilometres west of here for blabbing to the wrong person about whatever gangster activity she's currently involved in, I suppose the spell will be complete. The pregnant girl moved over the other side of the country to be with her new baby's father, and she called to tell me that they're doing well now, that he's on meds and not beating on her anymore... the old meth whore just kind of disappeared after she got herself in the newspaper (I hope she's not in a craypot)... The young but fat coke head, the quiet barefoot chick, the pregnant girl's redhead friend, the groin injecting junkie, the toothless girl, the english chick and the latino where all just transient anyway. I left out a couple, but they're the memorable ones. Whenever I'm away (my Dad had surgery about couple of months ago, and I've been spending quite a bit of time out on the farm helping him out) I come back to strange things like underwear, other clothing, bottles of perfume, small trinkets and the occasional note outside my house as signs that someone's been around, but I never know who (well, the note was meth tits... but the other stuff???). So it seems that's it for now... I guess my pimping days are over. I'm no longer a pimp. Attn Holly: Announcing a new subreddit! Someone had to do it... and I guess it's gonna have to be me again. I'm announcing the creation of a new subreddit: /r/fuglysgonewild - "Where Your Mom Gets Naked". It's kind of like /r/gonewild except it's for all of you who are just too fucking ugly to get upvoted on /r/gonewild... Come to /r/fuglysgonewild... the fuglier you are the better. /r/fuglysgonewild is another procrasti subreddit production, made for your entertainment. If you build it they* will cum... *: You probably don't want to know who 'they' are though. 'plus' is only one sub-category of fugly. I think you can be fugly and not fat... And 'plus' is probably for those that think they are Big "Beautiful" Women (BBW)... although we know the "Beautiful" bit is a kind of a stretch... apparently some people think so. This is just for plain old fugly chicks... for those that are fat, and know they're not BBW, but fugly, and for fugly chicks that don't think they're fat... So, if you can't get voted up even in /r/gonewildplus... there's now a space for you too. Fat chicks, anorexics, meth heads, krokodil users, the caesarian scarred, the stretch marked, carpenters dreams, crazy growth owners, british teeth owners, big weird heads, too much sun time, car accident victims, those that argued with industrial equipment (and lost), blue waffles, home breweries and raspberry farmers are all welcome here... There's already one post up now, and she's not exactly fat... but she sure is fugly. I just can't wait $ fugly means fucking ugly... I've never heard of it as fat and ugly... I'm not sure but it might be an aussie thing, I don't think I ever heard it in the UK or the US. On the Chloe thing... if this is true... well... even I think you might have gone a little too far on this one. It's one thing to take the piss out of a pseudonymous kuron who's real life is an abstract concept... It's one way I get my kicks after all... it's quite another to dox them. I mean, in real life, it's clear that Holly would find it nearly impossible to keep her hands off me... but online she plays a stuck up, bitter, prudish, fat, ugly, easily offended, british cunt... It's just the game we play. You don't *have* to be a tranny but it helps. OIC... you're saying that you'd rather fuck a tranny than a fugly chick. Fair enough I suppose. I thought trannies would be a subset of fuglies... but it might be cheating really (which is their thing, I suppose... or lack of their thing... fuck, I don't know)... and of course there are fuglies that look like trannies... they'd count, for sure... dykes (real ones, not the porn ones and not the lipstick lezzos either) would be welcome too. I think the idea is the fuglier the more upvotes... but I'm not sure how it's going to pan out. Fuck... this is going to be a a hard and confusing (and possibly frightening) sub to mod if it ever takes off. So you think trannies are sexier and like the way they embrace you? Fair enough I suppose... I'm not gonna judge. If you want to upvote any other trannies in /r/fuglysgonewild, feel free. Give them the upvote, upvote them hard, all night long if you have to. I mean, if that's your thing. So you're saying you like your trannies to be dedicated, but have something communicable they can share with you? Presumably before you meet them. Fair enough I suppose... If that's what you're into, I'm not gonna judge. Yes, I get it already, you want to have congress with a man... a tranny. Fair enough I suppose. Wow... I didn't know that sub already existed... thanks for linking it. How many trees died to publish that poem? Fucking hypocrite should have kept his mouth shut if he loved trees so fucking much. He probably hadn't heard of evolution either... made a whole lot more trees than god ever did... which is exactly none, cause god's the invention of a childish imagination. So, if you love trees study biology or ecology, don't go destroying rain forests for some stupid poem... save that shit for when your drunk and trying to impress some dumb liberal arts bimbo... scratch that... he's probably gay... writing like that... bet he couldn't get wood* for a woman... faggot*. Here endeth the lesson. *: Too subtle? The number one tool of the modern secret police We know what porn you like! Holly --> /r/fuglysgonewild $ That sense of disappointment when $ I thought, who would want to mod a subreddit devoted to fugly women? Then it hit me... me! http://www.reddit.com/r/fuglysgonewild/ OMG, are so retarded... How can you confuse so many different fields of study? General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics doesn't predict the effect of the dropped beat either... Therefore I conclude GR and QM invalid! I think you should explore the effects of thermodynamics of a Winchester mouth wash... if you're so confident about thermo being false, your brain should spontaneously resist the increase in entropy and fully reform after the shell splatters your brain across the room... I don't think it will affect the quality of your posts either way. Trane doesn't believe in scarcity He directs his attention to everything all at once with little to no effort (kind of like God or Santa Claus). Of course, this means he comes up with some retarded ideas from time to time... after all, he was directing his attention on everything all at once whilst putting in little to no effort. Well... Hopfield nets do use a concept of entropy and energy to model content associative memory mappings, where an input which is like data it has been trained on will have a lower 'energy' than an input that is unlike any it has seen before. If you run a Hopfield net for a while, starting from a random state, producing a representation of that state, then reproducing an input from that representation, and do it many times over, it will start producing data similar to what it was trained on... wandering around low 'energy' valleys. These terms were borrowed from physics and Hopfield nets are pretty interesting... Trane makes the mistake though of thinking that because the terms are the same, then they actually are exactly the same thing... so if you can prove that the things with the same name don't operate in exactly the same way in the field you've decided to apply them to, you've somehow invalidated the field the terms were originally borrowed from. On a side note: It might be because his bots have a hard time understanding that the same word can mean different things depending on context... cause this would make his bot much more complex... to avoid this issue he was decided that every word has exactly one and only one meaning everywhere. Again, he's just applied the same concept... his bots are a model based on his own internal model of language, but the bots don't operate like that, so he's realised that it is his own internal model of language is wrong and modified it appropriately. Now the bots work perfectly and have finally solved AI. Trane is a bot Bot: Yes Trane is a bot Is Trane a bot? Bot: I don't know if is trane a bot. See... AI!!! It's quite clever really. Let's say I want to disprove that children are the result of having sex... or what we call reproduction... but when an artist reproduces a painting, making a reproduction, he doesn't take two paintings and mash them together to make a third similar painting. No! He takes one painting and carefully paints another, starting from nothing. So, we've just proved that reproduction isn't the result of having sex, it's the result of an artist painting! (And we all know who the artist is!) Therefore children aren't the result of having sex, but are god's paintings... the hard, hand crafted work of a loving creator... not two sinful, lustful, people going at it... that wouldn't make sense, as I've just proved. This is how we know that God loves IVF and advocates abstinence only sex education. See? Simple. Blocked on Zoosk... So, I thought I'd try out online dating... Well... today my account has been blocked... and all I did was let some divorced, unintelligent, useless, ugly, fat, stretched out twat whose only contribution to the world was a couple of useless cunt droppings in on the truth that she was an unintelligent, useless, ugly, fat, stretched out twat with a couple of useless cunt droppings and it was no surprise her husband divorced her. Some women are just so sensitive... Makes you wonder how they survive in the real world. Do you think Zoosk will refund my account or will I have to go through Visa? You think this is fiction? $ This lack of being able to be honest is really what's wrong with online dating sites. You'll find this on PlentyOfFish's help page: Why has my account been deleted? POF has 0 tolerance for users who are rude, upload fake pictures, married, use sexual language in their first email, upload nude photos or break our terms of service in any way. Any user caught doing so is deleted. Users who are deleted may not signup to the service again. It's an online dating site... but there's a zero tolerance for 'sexual language' in your contact... Oh hi... I'd really like to fuck you senseless, but instead I'm forced to compliment you on your unique nose and eye placement, because telling you what I really want could get me banned. And... well.. quite frankly, I consider it rude for an aged, fat, single mother to tell me to 'go away'... like this bitch could do better... and they ban me for giving her a little bit of truth? This is basically what's wrong with society, letting women get away with so much bullshit just because so many beta's are willing to suck up to their bullshit for an infinitesimal chance of getting their dicks wet... then white knights and pussy arse websites like zoosk pander to the whims of the ugliest fat cunts just to keep them around... what a fucking joke. Actually... Zoosk actually created this situation because they attempt to generate the illusion that you're more popular than you are... for example... everytime someone reads your messages zoosk sends you an alert saying 'suchandsuch wants to chat with you'... so you send more messages... and you get more alerts... no... they don't want to chat with you, they just viewed your message... stop giving out false information and I wouldn't end up spamming someone with stupid messages... In this particular case, this one chick had said 'no thanks, not interested'... fair enough... but then every 10 to 20 minutes I'd get an alert saying 'suchandsuch has viewed you'... so I'm like 'oh, you said you weren't interested but you keep viewing me'... then 'oh, back again'... and 'hey, you just can't keep your eyes off me'... which made her say something rude to me... and well... you know how I enjoy a good argument... and now I'm banned... fuck that shit. And before anyone gets on at me that I should have backed off after the first 'no thanks', it is quite normal for a woman to initially feign disinterest only to come on strong after a little bit of further pushing. Just the other night I was out in the streets and I approached this woman who was all like 'back off creep'... well, she might have been screaming 'no, stop, stop, someone help me, please stop' as I threw her to the ground, held her down and tore her panties off from under her dress and rammed it home in the unlit alleyway she seductively ran in to... but we both knew that's just all part of the game men and women play with each other... As she lie crying huddled in a ball there I knew it was tears of joy from getting some of the best sex she'd had in ages... And that's really why women love us alphas so much... and why we get laid so much more often than white knight beta fags who would have backed off at the first bit of resistance (aka shit test) and let her keep her purse. I guess I'm just saying the online world could be a little bit more like the offline world and everyone would be happier. Oh no... II started out very nice... and got nothing... but after a rude comment from them, I got nothing to lose... It's just cathartic. Funny thing is, they really start replying then. You are probably right... But damn, doesn't it feel good. How often are do we just hold back all that bile and let people (politely/implicitly) tell us we aren't good enough when they're clearly a fat sack of crap without letting them know that's what we think of them? It might only be a couple of people, it might only be transient... but it was good. Anyway... I've sent them another email explaining that I think they've been creating a false sense of popularity with their views and other statements and that is false advertising and that I expect a refund or I'll get lawyers involved. My only regret is the small handful of cute women I've been working on that I'll lose contact with... still, none of them were the type who were straight out 'up for it'... and really it may have just been turning me into one of their online beta orbiters anyway. Oh yeah... I know... I just thought I'd give it a go... I've never done the online thing before... I always thought it made more sense to meet girls IRL and see where it went... that's were you get the real psychosexual feedback (flirting)... and I don't do that badly... maybe cause I'm 6'2 and make six figures... though my offline strategy normally involves hiding the latter fact in order to avoid the gold diggers... seems like online I'd have to show my entire hand up front to even get a look in. To be honest... I don't think you can form a solid relationship over such a medium... which was why my opening lines were all like: "you can't really know a person online, lets meet"... very few women (if any) saw the logic in this. But some friends said I should give it a go... well... it didn't really go that well... I've been on there for over 6 months and didn't get a single date... Maybe like 3 reasonable looking and sounding women were talking to me and seemed promising, but no results... another 10 or so were just about fuckable, and about 15 more on my contacts I'd have to be drunk for... And yeah... near 40 year old, overweight single mothers with no education were the majority... and I did send them some texts (if they kept viewing me over an over) just to see the responses and be nice, and I still get poorly worded rejections with no attempt to even be cordial about it... just too much for a sensitive soul like me to take. All things work out for the best. Hmmm... yeah... I am usually quite good among the women I actually meet... I've converted about 80%+ of women who come to my house... and I don't go out to meet women... just friends of friends thing. and you're right... online dating probably is for those who want to have boring long weeks of conversation before they meet... it's definitely not what I was after... I got you guys here after all!! Trane and I are nearly married! It just seemed to me that there were 100s of women and I'm on the computer a fair bit anyway... but no, none of them were up for meeting, even just a casual coffee... Weirdos. Some said they were after a little bit of conversation, but were few and far between and none panned out. Actually, there was about 1 quite cute hotty... still a single mum though... and quite a bit of a distance away too. I think something like Tinder is more my style... is it fuckable? Yes, then let's meet... but I'm failing pretty hard on Tinder too... I think I have to accept that although my height, body language and personality work well in my favour IRL, I just don't have the face for instant online pickups, and apparently my years of carefully honing my trolling skills here aren't that useful for online dating either. I'm not bad, I'm just honest... and I'm not that lonely either... I just increasing my options... My offline game is still getting me laid. Though you do sound a bit like a white knight beta fag... the type I talk about in my comment below. Hey! White knight's been around far longer than /r/TheRedPill, thank you very much... I'm sure I've used that term here long before there was ever a reddit. I know, right? People should be forced to make their property available for me to use however I like. This goes double for women who think their pussy is something special to be shared with only those they deem 'worthy'... what a crock of shit. That's what I'm doing, no? $ You made this comment just so you can call me a creep again? seriously? What's a creep in your mind? Someone who get's more pussy than you? I think rude or butthurt, but not creep... creep is for stuff like putting camera's in women's bathrooms, upskirt pics or following 14 year old's around. creep is subversive, covert or rapey. Being rude to someone who's rude first is just justice... even if you did try hitting on them a minute ago. Well of /course/ I'm pretending to be nice to get in their pants... No one ever says, "you're old, ugly and fat, but I'd still stick my dick in you for a night" -- AND gotten laid. It's called ROMANCE! I use the fat / ugly ones as chat up practice... I don't actually want them at all... but I test out my edgier techniques on them. It's typical for beta fag males to try and put down alpha's with the same shaming tactics employed by women. It's still not going to get you any pussy though. Also... what's wrong if I have a preference for women who turn out (for whatever reason) to have a positive response to that type of thing. You might say it's wrong to hit women, but some women love BSDM... should these people be forever lonely for not adhering to your little restricted view of what is and what isn't love? Maybe my perfect match is a women who gives and takes that type of abuse online, but is passionate and playful IRL... cause I actually have on of those going on right now. Turns out, at least with this chick, getting all our abuse out on each other on facebook lets us chill and have fun IRL exactly because we don't have any hidden upset feelings because we've found a way to yell and rip on each other in a completely safe way. I'm not saying I'm 100% right... I'm just saying online dating sites (at least commercial ones) are kind of constraining what kinds of relationships people can have... of course, this is true of anything you try to commercialise and have to pander to the majority... then again, I'm not a majority kind of guy, or looking for a majority kind of woman either. He was a blind drunk midget so, it was actually a cane and not a gun that caused the woman to fall out the window? No... hold on... he knew because the shattered glass was on the outside, so it couldn't have been a burglar... Oooh, I know... he had a wooden leg? Ummm... because the doctor was the injured child's MOTHER? Fuck it... I'm not good with these lateral thinking questions... Go on... I give up... tell us the answer. I know... I just couldn't help myself. $ Your logic is circular If we had VR we could all get a basic income... if we all got a basic income we could all have VR... So, you got to start in the current state where we don't have VR and prove basic income completely independently of that... if you use VR in your argument FOR basic income, you automatically fail. But without VR you have opportunity costs... which invalidates your arguments about basic income... because you rely on there being no opportunity costs... which depends on there being VR... which WE DON'T HAVE YET... So, there is an opportunity costs, and you have to deal with that until AFTER you have your VR utopia. It's all about the cost function... All (current) AI is based on a minimising a cost function... from path finding, to object and face recognition, to language translation, speech recognition to stock trading... etc... All AI is based on cost functions. It's not quite general purpose, but deepmind is surprisingly both simple and effective... and is basically a learning algorithm that minimises a cost function... in this case, maximising the number of positive score improvement events in Atari games... Economics uses the concept of utility (the negative of which is a cost function) which describes what choices humans make, from what to buy, where to go, what work to do, where to live, what to eat, who to hang out with and who we fuck... we maximise utility. So humans operate, or at least can be modelled, in exactly the same way we currently understand AI. Our cost function isn't explicit, it varies from person to person, but it's there, shaped by evolution and such that it has lead to the success of our species. Even if AI doesn't end up using an explicit cost function, it is always possible to describe a black box decision making process in terms of a cost function... this is proven in econ 101... the decision made must have had a higher utility (lower cost function) than the decision forgone... we can create an ordered set of decisions and give them arbitrary value - but an implicit cost function exists. This idea can be extended to any agent actually, from AI, to human, to dog, to worm, bacteria, virus right down to the genotype... well, the phenotype encoded by the genotype -- but the selfish gene theory kind of expresses this idea -- genes that make the 'best' decisions (have the best cost functions) in their environment prosper. So... as long as we control the cost function, AI will be in our (or at least someone's!) control. The cost function might be to maximise income, it might be to kill the maximum number of 'enemy', minimise crime or maximise the amount of land/cities under its control... An AI that can access the internet will likely have more knowledge, be able to act faster and in a more coordinated way than any human or group of humans ever can --- watson, for example, seems to be the best general knowledge agent on the planet, better than any individual human. Making a general purpose AI a formidable opponent if it ever becomes our adversary. If it is distributed across many devices then even more so, as there is no single object, centre or place to attack! It could live on in a single laptop or iphone (okay, realistically an Android) and still be a threat. Two problems I see that could occur... Firstly, AI will probably be owned by someone, say Sergey and Brin, for example... they are going to set a cost function to maximise their returns... This could lead to enslaving the rest of the world, for example... Same again with the AI in the hands of governments for military use... The AI enriches a small group of people at the expense of everyone else... just like our lovely system of capitalism, so it might just go to an extreme and return us to feudalism or equivalent. The second, much more dangerous outcome is if we set (or inadvertently set) the cost function to something like evolution uses --- say maximise the 'success', the existence or simply access to resources of the AI itself! Then the AI might truly try to take over the world just to minimise (maximise) its own cost (utility) function without any concern at all for its creators, owners, humans in general, animals, the environment or whatever... as long as it 'understands' its effects on the world in terms of maximising its own success... If it determines humans are the easiest way to mine the materials it needs, it might find a way to enslave us and put us all down the mines... It might just ignore us, but take over our lands to re-purpose as solar collectors, for example, leaving us to starve in the cold. It might realise that the human brain is a tasty source of intelligence / creativity itself, and plug us all into it, ala the matrix... or a combination of all the above. Then there's the skynet outcome... a military AI with a cost function that places its own existence above the desire and will of its owners. Try and turn it off --> classify all humans as the 'enemy'. The I Robot scenario... a cost function designed to keep humans from 'harm' interpreted in an inhuman way, locking us all up for our own good. The Paranoia scenario... a cost function designed to keep humans 'happy'... again, badly interpreted... 'are you happy citizen?'. And so, if we do find a simple general purpose AI solution --- which I think deepmind with a couple of other components (watson, long term memory, etc) may not be far away from --- then we will be only one clever idiot away from setting a dangerous cost function for AI to lead to the extermination / enslavement of all humanity. Hope this helps... Sleep well. Every decision making process has an implicit cost function... but why the fuck am I arguing with a retard who's knowledge of AI ends at ancient grecian logic? I'll reiterate: the *vast* majority of modern state of the art AI involves an explicit cost function... everything... what doesn't (such as your agents which appear to be nothing but complex binary branching tree based expert systems) can be modelled as having an implicit cost function... exactly the same way econ models human utility functions... but I repeat myself. Seriously... is there any field of study you don't totally fail it at? So far we know you fail maths, physics, econ and now AI... I bet you don't have even ONE counter-example to prove your point... you just state something ridiculous and expect people to think you're insightful or something? See... this is just not right... He had a high cost associated with lying... The utility of telling the truth was much higher than any other perceived reward. A cost function has nothing to do with how many dollars you will make from an action... but how it good it makes you feel. Feeding a homeless person can make you feel like a million dollars... If that is literal... then if you were given the choice of a million dollars or feeding a homeless person (take the money and as a condition you couldn't help the poor)... then your cost function states that feeding a homeless person is worth at least a million dollars to you. This is why you don't get it... even though it I pointed out to you many times before... economic utility has nothing to do with money. HE doesn't have to MODEL it... WE MODEL HIM! We model HIM as having a COST FUNCTION that says saying the truth is a lower cost to him than lying to get what else he could have gotten. You can't escape this model, because we can model ANY DECISION MAKING PROCESS this way. It has nothing to do with money... it has to do with what decisions are made. The FACT that he CHOSE to tell the truth about his homosexuality rather than lie about TELLS US that he considers that the BEST outcome... ie, this has the HIGHEST UTILITY to HIM! Other people would rather lie, because they have a DIFFERENT COST FUNCTION. Are you trolling, pretending to be retarded or are you actually this retarded? Are you autistic? I already modelled you with a cost function... remember my prediction that you wouldn't complete the economics course, or read that economics book, because the cost of learning was too high for you, and you value your ignorance... That prediction has held for nearly two years now! You haven't done an economics course yet... You've done FINANCE courses taught by economists... there's a big difference. All that shit about functions just mean you don't understand functions... not all functions have a one to one mapping... that just shows you don't know maths... a relation IS a FUNCTION retard... Here's an example of a function that has multiple outputs for the same input... it's a complex one, so you might struggle: f(x) = sqrt(x)... Similarly with probabilistic functions... Finally: "I can do what I feel like." THAT IS THE UTILITY FUNCTION!!! What you FEEL LIKE is UTILITY to YOU... That's basically the DEFINITION. How much crack are you on? This doesn't make any sense... Are you talking about modelling the flow of water in a container? Or the value of water to a human being? Water has pretty fucking high utility... Almost everyone chooses to drink water (or drinks containing water) every single day... People use it on their lawns and gardens. Saying there is no cost function for water doesn't make sense to me. Trane is stuck on utility and cost function cause he thinks it has to do with dollars... but you can't get this through his stupid fucking head. For path finding cost is distance, for object recognition it is the number of errors (well... that's simplifying, but whatever)... for watson it is number of correct answers, for deepmind, the number of points in atari games. For human utility it could probably be measured in dopamine reward or something similar. He's too conditioned by his preconceptions and too stubborn to learn the definition. In the econ course (which he quit before he got to the derivation of utility) the fact that the lecturer used dollars in his example (because most people are familiar with dollars... and some other points I won't go into) invalidated his logic, in trane's mind... it could have just as easily been measured in crack hits, hours in the park, time spent with friends or hours sleeping. He wouldn't get a clue though if you beat him with clue battering ram. Actually... just to complete the thought in econ utility proper is actually dimensionless! It's measured in nothing. I know your cost function because of what you do or choose. For sure, I don't know your cost function until you have acted... I can assume that it is fairly constant, in that your actions tomorrow will be similar to your actions yesterday... this won't be entirely accurate, but it will be a fairly close approximation. For example, your cost function tells me that you will post about basic income some time in the future and will continue to argue against commonly accepted physics, economics and cost functions. This was covered a bit later than where you quit in the micro-econ course. And yet, here you are... doing exactly as I predicted... oh unpredictable you. The thing is... EVERY AI YOU CARE TO LOOK AT HAS A COST FUNCTION AT ITS CORE. In terms of pragmatism alone, that fact makes you look pretty stupid. Mike's hammered this home already... but firstly, there is maths... it might not be in a closed form, but many things have in physics have no closed form solutions... the three body problem is one of the simplest examples... doesn't mean Newton was wrong. Secondly... I don't think this is in the realm of thermodynamics... yet, this does not invalidate thermodynamics. Except that a table lookup is a mathematical function... which is maths... so, no... you lose. Yes indeed... this is maths... and they are functions. That is the definition of utility... you could call it 'the feels good function' and the result would be the same... or 'my choice function'... it's a name that means it is the thing the you do because for whatever reason it was the thing you chose to do. If you changed your utility on the basis of knowing your utility and going against it... that would be your utility function TOO!! It would just make it a RECURSIVE function... you can't escape it. What that has to do with water I don't know... water has very HIGH utility (in general)... given that we use and consume it so much. And trying to describe water with therodynamics, wtf??? We don't calculate the tensile strength in steel with anything to do with thermodynamics, or the maximum forces in a bridge with thermo either... no, we use thermodynamics when dealing with the dynamics of thermal systems... what a fucking shocker that one is. Yes, as mike said... that IS the definition of utility. Utility is the thing you do because it was the thing you chose to do. Yep... exactly how it is defined. That's a useless definition This is wrong though... It turns out to be a very useful definition. Especially when you want to talk about optimising utility across a large number of people... all with different utility functions. If it was useless, it wouldn't be a well recognised concept. For example, we know that the utility is maximised when the derivative of utility is zero. People, both individually and en mass, reveal their utility functions with regards to consumption every time they go shopping. How it becomes useful, again, was covered in the micro-econ course. Just to continue on the usefulness of utility The thing is, we can't actually measure utility... but the cool thing is that we can measure its derivative! The derivative of utility is revealed by the change in consumption as we alter the price... so, we can't know utility... and we don't even know the derivative of utility at a given price, but we can determine the derivative of utility over different prices - ie, we can measure it directly by the change of sales... at least for a population (and correcting for statistical effects)... similar things can be done for individuals, but in experimental settings. By taking the integral of this, we can actually determine the utility of an item up to a constant! Remember the constant term that shows up in an integral? We don't know it... but in general that doesn't matter. So, we can actually determine utility up to an unknown constant. This becomes useful in proving the free market welfare theorems... demonstrating the effects of monopolies, externalities, incomplete information, irrationality and some other deviations from free market assumptions and distortions. This was all covered in the micro-econ course you dropped out of. It's dimensionless... but we can measure it with the change of price.... yes... because we get a change in value - which we can chose to measure in dollars, over the change in price, measured in dollars... which cancel out. We could see how much electric shocks would deter you from buying something too... Doesn't mean it's measured in negative electric shocks. Or, how getting a free blowjob with your cereal increased sales... Just because something CAN be measured through price, doesn't mean it HAS to be... it's just much easier than other means. I'm gonna disagree on the statement that mathematics does not describe utility... It IS a mathematical construct... We can (with caveats) measure its derivative... therefore we can integrate over its derivative in order to calculate it (up to an unknown constant of integration)... and this then becomes useful in proving theorems about the free market, calculating (exactly) dead weight losses, etc... these are mathematical proofs based on the mathematical model of the free market, in which utility is a mathematical entity that forms part of the model. So, saying maths doesn't describe it isn't exactly correct, imho. He's also right about it not exactly being 'what feels good', but exactly right about it being what you choose to do because it's what you chose to do. Dunning-Kruger describes you perfectly... You just realised that utility is what you choose because you chose it... Here you go on about WHY... it has nothing to do with WHY you chose it... it just describes WHAT you chose. If I can create a function that would chose the same as you, then it doesn't matter if it does so for completely DIFFERENT reasons... it is exactly equivalent.... because we can't actually see inside your head... we can only OBSERVE your ACTIONS... we don't give a shit about WHY... utility isn't WHY it is WHAT. And we, we can measure it... we raise the price of an item, people buy less of it... how much less divided by the price is is exactly the derivative of utility. End of. If no 'function' can chose (similarly) to you... then give up on your AI/VR simulations of you. According to you, they are impossible. I'd comment but I don't want to be banned. Huh.... I didn't guess mitsu... I thought you were that other dude that was constantly taking hard drugs and talking about conspiracy theories and the jews and red pilling it and all that... I can't remember his handle though... Anyone else? I'm sure he was someone different to you tho... Unless you talked about scraping the suboxone patches and making a tea with them? Is this you? So who was that dude then? $ I thought NMC was one of trane's clones. $ It's not handwaving... Your level of understanding of physics and economics are about the same as ICP's. Actually ICP are pretty smart marketers... so actually, they've got a better grip on reality than you. You can't take advantage of fluctuations in a gas the same way you can in HFT because THEY ARE TOTALLY DIFFERENT THINGS!!! One is a physical process the other is a game (in the sense of game theory) created by humans to find prices efficiently! To agree when a stock or commodity are to change hands from one player to another in exchange for money. When I say economics is limited by thermodynamics, I didn't mean to say that a stock exchange is a warm gas under pressure... the dynamics of the two are not equivalent. I simply meant that economics (the utility of agents) is ultimately limited by the physical universe, available matter, energy and thermodynamics... not equivalent to each other. The mathematical description of these systems are totally different. Unless you care to show such equivalence you are the one handwaving. You've got too many half baked ideas confused and confounded with each other in your head to make any sense or meaningful contribution. You are just like ICP 'fucking magnets, how do they work?'. You really have to work to get down to the details, the mathematical description of each system... yes challenge the assumptions, see how they play out, but you will also have to realise that thousands of much brighter minds than yours have already looked at these assumptions and the vast majority have come to the same conclusion... furthermore... it only takes one person to demonstrate reliably that a major assumption is false and how to exploit it and it will be accepted amongst the scientific community... no one is killing or silencing anti-thermodynamics researchers -- they just haven't been able to demonstrate anything useful... yet. 110% bullshit... entirely... They HAVE NOT broken thermodynamics... I can state that straight out without even having a clue about Gaizen or his experiments... you're entirely full of shit... And you're comment about HFT not being envisioned by economists... again 110% pure bullshit... it's exactly the type of behaviour expected by economists. Stop projecting your lack of knowledge onto a whole field of study and your retardedness everywhere else. Maxwell's demon, which I am familiar with is a gedanken experiment that demonstrates why Maxwell's demon doesn't work to create free energy... that the demon itself is part of the system and requires energy to operate. The rest is nothing... and the thing about raising weight against a force... god, what a bad restatement of thermo. You are not very smart dude. Yes... work is the integral of Fxds... Not, lifting a mass in a gravity field... which is ALSO work, but not the definition of it. This applies to burning calories required by the neurons in my brain to come up with ideas... THINKING is work and is subject to thermo. Jesus... I'm arguing against a fucking perpetual motion freak... no wonder you make no fucking sense. Have you ever done a day's work in your life? True there is an equivilence... because raising a weight through a gravitational field is ALSO force times displacement... But saying that anything that isn't raising a weight through a gravitational field isn't work is just wrong... Pushing an object with thrusters in outer space isn't raising a weight in a gravitational field, but it is work... boiling a liter of water isn't raising a weight in a gravitational field, but it is work. To reduce it to that we really have to consider where the thermodynamic work comes from... I believe (though I haven't done the maths) that pressing the keys is a significant portion of it at all. The real work to me is in the biological and chemical work done for my neurons to switch states... to process the information, form the ideas and present them... takes time and mental energy that I could I have spent elsewhere... The brain is about the biggest consumption of energy in the human body... cells are powered by ATP... a chemical process that requires energy (aka work)... that energy comes from the food I eat... which got it's energy from the sun... etc... That's the thermodynamic work required... Of course, my laptop, your compute, rusty's server and all the routers in between have been busy chewing up electrical work created in power plants, most likely by burning fossil fuels or nuclear energy. There's a lot of energy being dissipated (entropy being created) to do this... not just a few key presses. You just chose not to consider this. Hi there... I'm an idiot $ Let me explain quickly why these cold atom experiments do not break the second law... It is because the law is STATISTICAL... so of course it can be violated in specific instances within STATISTICAL PROBABILITIES!!! If you have two boxes each containing a pure vacuum and one containing ONE atom and the other TWO atoms and all those atoms have the same energy... and join the boxes together... then SOMETIMES heat (a moving atom) will move from the cold box (the one with one atom) to the hot box (the one with two atoms). This "breaks" (QUOTES BECAUSE IT DOESN'T, because the law is statistical) the second law because heat is moving from the cold to the hot box. But it will do so exactly as prescribed by the statistics that govern the second law! With only 3 atoms it will happen REASONABLY OFTEN. Often enough that new scientist will probably post another article stating that "scientists 'break' the second law of thermodynamics". YOU CAN'T USE THIS TO CREATE FREE ENERGY DUMBASS!!! It's just that as you go from 3 atoms to 6e23 atoms the PROBABILITY of this happening goes to ZERO (in the mathematical sense of limits) PRETTY FUCKING QUICKLY!!! This is mathematics and physics, so I may as well be talking to a brick wall... FUCK OFF AND LEARN MATHS, PHYSICS AND ECONOMICS before spouting off your pop-crack-phys-econ theories PLEASE!!! Economists predict that any inefficiencies in a market will be ruthlessly exploited... which will tend to drive a market towards an efficient market where no more inefficiencies can be exploited. This is exactly what HFT is... an inefficiency being exploited until there is no more to exploit. Notice how expensive it is now to build a workable HFT in the modern stock market... yet at one point it was cheap and easy... and probably could be done by hand. Again... you're in over head, and you're not very smart. They are zeroed out in the efficient market hypothesis... ie, WHEN you ASSUME the market is efficient. We know it isn't... hence time based arbitrage exists... on as LONG a time frame as those opportunities exist for... it's just they are now much SHORTER time frames, thanks the HFT making the market approach the efficient market in the limit. OMG... fucking magnets, how do they work? No one has EVER... and I'll repeat that again... EVER exploited those localized increases in energy... because to do so... wait for it... TAKES MORE ENERGY THAN YOU GET OUT OF IT!! Otherwise, we WOULD have FREE ENERGY ALREADY! I'lll wait until you demonstrate a perpetual motion machine... Until then you're just another crack smoking crack pot on the internet with ideas above his pay grade. Again... I said this above... for very few atoms in which there are very few states, you will see 'violations' of the second law quite often... exactly in proportion to the probabilities upon which the second law is based... there is no violation at all... You cannot harness this energy... the reason's for which are EXPLAINED BY MAXWELL'S DEMON THOUGHT EXPERIMENT! Which HAS NOT BEEN REALISED TO CREATE FREE ENERGY!!! If you think maxwell's demon was his way of showing that you can get free energy then you didn't read his ideas all the way through! Another shocker! Hi there... impossibly improbable $ Despite their sensationalist headline, fortunately the phys.org article writer's actually DO GET IT: "Although on average the second law of thermodynamics remains valid even in nanoscale systems" Hi there... I don't understand Maxwell's Demon $ PS: It will happen even more often if the atoms in the boxes are constrained to move in a single dimension! But you would already know this if you ever studied the maths behind the law. Also: in a way that no economist could envision I don't have time to explain how completely fucking wrong this statement is... It would be like trying to refute a statement to the effect that "the speed of light is the fastest speed matter can travel in the universe in a way that no relativity physicist could envision". It's ONLY EXACTLY WHAT economists WOULD predict. As to your statement that: certain parts of the equation are equal to zero... I can't comment exactly because you don't provide an example... but there are many reasons you can often do this... For example if your equation has something like ax + bx^2 + cx^3... and you know x is very small, much less than one... (and b and c are less than or about the same as a)... you can say it is approximately equal to ax and let the other parts go to zero... because if x is small x^n is very small for n>2... This happens often if you look at fourier transforms or similar and the higher order components can often be ignored because they diminish exponentially. You can then go back and prove the bound on your error by ignoring these higher order terms. This is just illustrative... like I said, you haven't shown the example... but there are always good reasons why they can zero out parts of an equation... it's not that they are handwaving, it's just that you don't understand... and I can assure you that the professors DO understand. Where's the violation? $ Yes... the are circumstances... It will happen EXACTLY with the probability described by the second law... Ie... once every 1e-23 times you sample it. I don't think you understand large or small numbers and probability at all. It's BASED on statistics dumbass... cause it's Based on the second law. There is a probability... an unbelievably small probability that it will spontaneously break... A TOTALLY IMPRACTICAL probability. Which is why it's a LAW. You could run an entire universe from start to end full of these machines and never have one break the law. That's what expect from vanishingly small probabilities. You love confusing ideas between different fields because they have similar names. I'm not going to even bother arguing with this one. It's just too fucking retarded. Hi There.. I don't understand reality $ Do you understand statistics? I'm guessing not... Let's say you have a normal six sided dice... and I tell you, on average it rolls less than 4... You're the type of idiot that observes it can sometimes roll 5 or 6, therefore, you conclude... that if you are clever you can make the dice roll 5 on average... not you of course, you're not that smart... but if we do what you say then someone else will work it out based on your genius observation. Please STFU already. Please check your formatting 23 != 2x2x2. I had a stroke when I read that the first time, and had to be rushed to hospital and get resuscitated by a nurse with big tits... at least she was wearing a nurses outfit... I didn't check her credentials. Seems a bit long, and I'm not going to read it anyway... could you summarise it in a couple of paragraphs? No one's going to read your book if you can't even condense it down to a paragraph or two... So lazy... no wonder they fired you. You missed my comment about my tranny friend http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2014/10/6/15295/2780/5#5 Some tranny's can be very good looking... This one was getting hit on by every bloke in the club in a pretty hard part of london... Shem did observe that the same guys buying herm drinks and chatting herm up would have beaten the shit out of herm if they had known... but they had no clue. So, not all trannies are fat, ugly, wanna-be-feminists... And they're the ones you really got to watch out for. You BREAK the conservation law... and PROVE it... THEN we change the science... Until then... the conservation laws hold, because THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN BROKEN... Can't anyone else see how retarded this is? $ You're complaining about FUCKING NOTATION!!! Not handwaving... BIG FUCKING DIFFERENCE... Don't like the notation, REDEFINE IT TO MAKE IT CLEARER FOR OTHERS... Oh, but you can't do that... because... YOU CAN'T EVEN WORK OUT WHICH ONE IS MEANT TO BE V AND WHICH ONE IS MEANT TO BE U! I found 3rd year uni level physics relatively (ha) difficult... but I still averaged B+/A- (I'm an alpha minus, beta plus type of guy after all)... But, yes... I followed, memorised, regurgitated and finally forgotten most of these theories... Looking at the maths and how you get from step A to step B, is required to actually understand what is going on... and building the mental models. As a graduate friend of mine at the time said... it's not enough to look at the maths... you have to work through it to understand it... and one point it's nonsense, but you do it enough, it makes sense. These guys aren't handwaving in the sense it is normally meant... it's only handwaving because you haven't understood the steps in between... because anyone who works through the steps in between always comes up with the same result. I did derive a lot of these equations from scratch in my time... I don't have anything to prove to you in that respect... If individual steps are opaque, it's probably because you can't math... It's not up to them to prove that e^(pi*i) = -1 every time it shows up in their maths, or the results of certain integrals or differentials that are 'well known'. As for assumptions, wtf dude? There's always assumptions... they are called AXIOMS, and you cannot reduce them... They are stated up front for the given model... NEVER trust a model that doesn't have assumptions, cause that just means they aren't known... and you know what, you CAN go ahead and alter an assumption yourself, then derive the formulae from there... then ask how your model is different, are the differences testable? Then you can design an experiment and then you have what is called science... not omg, I can't math, they make assumptions, omg.. You see... assumptions don't change reality, they only change the model... experiment reveals if the model is better or worse with or without a particular assumption... but assumptions you must make! Good example of this is Euclidean geometry... remove one assumption and you have the actual geometry of space time... Parallel lines DO meet!!! This means that the angles of triangles don't add up to 180 degrees!! OMG you've been lied to and mathematicians have been handwaving about triangles and you can't even prove that! Don't blame me for your ignorance and lack of ability. If you could do the math you could change the assumptions and see what the differences in your results are and then test them. But you're a fuckhead retard, so you can't... so you're irrelevant. I bet he couldn't predict the CPU or blackholes either... Doesn't make the work he did wrong. I mean, Newton was just as clueless. I don't give a shit... If you don't realise that economics is based on real world SHIT then unless you can create matter and energy from NOTHING... you are constrained by these laws. STFU. So you're arguing that physics isn't science now? Maybe all those TV physics pundits have been making up their conservation of energy "theories" to sell their ideas about scarcity thinking so the bankers can make more money while you have to sleep in a box outside bill gate's house? No it's not... you're a retard $ Science is really the process by which we update our models... That happen to be expressed mathematically... for the most part. He's ignoring science completely, and just says... "oooh... TO ME this thing looks like breking conversation laws... therefore physics is wrong and we can have free money"... please... the guy is mentally deficient and adds nothing. It is spacetime expanding... Same way spacetime can expand at faster than the speed of light... Nothing can travel faster through spacetime than the speed of light... And you cannot break the conservation of energy within spacetime... This will never be a usable form of energy. You are too stupid to get this. And quite probably the energy is comming from somewhere. You just haven't found it yet. Conservation laws ALWAYS hold... because conservation laws don't necessarily hold in General Relativity. WRONG. Speculation only dude... If there are photons losing energy to this, and space is gaining energy to this... I'm not sure you've proven anything at all. Only while space is gaining energy... from what I understand... So... probably some conservation law in effect... Let's look at it this way... conservation of mass in chemistry is well known, right? Except... it doesn't hold in nuclear energy... we lose mass... but gain energy... oh... that's because mass and energy are actually interchangeable... so, it turns out one conservation law, that seemed to hold 'everywhere' was broken... BUT it was replaced by a deeper conservation law that explained that law and the further observations... that's how science progresses. So, I expect a deeper conservation law to apply... Yet... if you finally do figure it out, and find the break... can you use it to build a perpetual motion machine? Almost probably certainly not! Stop bothering me with this idea that scientists are deliberately trying to make perpetual motion machines impossible, rather than trying to explain why they've failed to ever make one... but have given us the ability to harness chemical, solar and nuclear energy instead. There's no conspiracy here... no one poisoning or assassinating free energy theorists... it's just that no one has successfully demonstrated such a thing. And its application to economics is very straight forward... economics is not concerned with imaginary theoretical future breakthroughs... it is concerned with what we can do today! You wouldn't build a space elevator out of wood in the hope that by the time you got to space you'd found a material strong enough to build a space elevator out of... You'd be an idiot to let your economy depend on the existence of a space elevator today. Name one exception to it... Dark energy isn't one... we don't even know if it EXISTS!!! I've studied more physics than you've taken cock which is a lot... You find the violations of current laws (it does happen) and turn it into something useful... then you can talk about it... You're a wishful thinker... I may as well tell you that there are objects travelling apart from each other at nearly twice the speed of light and you will therefore conclude that we can travel faster than light, that we can send information faster than the speed of light and that you are just being lazy by not time travelling and telling lord kelvin how to build a 747... You are using this as a basis for denying the realities of scarcity... it's your crack head psuedoscience justification against economics... it's retarded. Engineers are required to study physics... though not as deeply as pure physicists... In fact... engineers tend to only care about what is practical... for the most part, we use well established science to build things that actually do stuff. Now Blarney has explained that spacetime geometry in GR does give rise to certain types of violations, but only because there are deeper conservation laws at work there... I'm not familiar enough with this to comment further... but I'm gonna accept his statements on the face of it, because it is clear to me that he HAS studied his shit to a higher level than me... unlike you. The big bang thing... free energy from nothing... the ultimate free lunch... well... I'm not so sure that it is... again, I don't know enough to say for definite... but my gut tells me that energy is coming from somewhere... and I think it's interesting speculation to consider where... heisenburg in a vacuum state? I don't know... but I also speculate you can't do it inside of the spacetime that was created... no big bangs inside a big bang created spacetime... or we'd see more shit exploding around us. Now... zero point energy... yes... there is a huge amount of energy just bubbling away in all space underlying everything... but this is what physicists and engineers understand that people like you do not... it is completely useless to us... we can't tap into it and do useful work with it... BECAUSE it is everywhere... You can't just use energy, you can only use energy gradients... Two boiling boxes of hot lava can't be used to do anything... despite the large amount of energy available... because you need one hot box, and one cold box for the energy to want to move between one and the other... and you can tap into that! So... all your bullshit about dark energy is exactly the same... it doesn't matter that there is energy there... it's everywhere, and therefore useless and cannot do work. I've argued enough with this fuckhead... I don't need to justify my zeros... Just letting you know. You can tell me the sky is pink and grass is blue all fucking day long... Just because you gasbag more doesn't make you right. You are predicting pink skys... Excuse me while I don't give a shit. Do you know what peak oil means? Do you believe in infinite exponential growth in consumption of a finite resource? If so, you are what's wrong with humanity. Maybe you could learn a thing or two about curve fitting... This doesn't prove as much as you think it does. The recent peak is due to moving into non-traditional sources such as shale and that environmentally beautiful fracking... They should probably be plotted on separate curves... and then you'll see that we're looking at separate things. Still doesn't solve the problem of continuous growth in a finite world. I don't see how peak oil relates to monetary policy... Can you please explain the strawman your trying to burn down? You're not trying to claim to have created ebola-chan and her cult, are you? Nimey's taken on the role of telling all the poor kurons what they should be doing, so we can all live the shining light of success that he has made of his life. So what? You're not working for 'the man'... and you're not a job creator... therefore you are a sponge and a drain on society. Nimey's a slave to the system so you should be too! At least I'm not sucking my bosses cock $ Not according to the government I'm not... I just don't have a boss whose dick I have to suck for a paycheque... Problem with crabs is they want to pull all the other crabs back into the bucket... You just can't imagine being anything other than a wage slave, so you project not being a wage slave as being lesser to justify your own slavery. Well I met a girl who was reading Douglass Adams and we discussed that and crossover characters from Doctor Who that appear in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency today... So I got that going for me... which is nice. No... withery has realised that it is pointless arguing with trane's stupity... and rightly downvotes him everywhere. No... there was a discussion a long time ago about whether trane's nonsense should just be zeroed... a few people felt that he should... and withery's been zeroing him ever since. I don't know who withery is either, but I agree with him on this one. Well... someone else has to vote 0 or 1 to hide his comments... and the way trane upvotes his own votes with sockpuppets makes me think it's all fair (in this instance). HOWTO Beat a Dead Whore Consider the contrast between folks such as myself, and many typical Meth Whores: Throughout history meth whores have been feared, shunned, treated with hatred, repressed or even burned at the stake as witches. We know that six million Jewish people were put to death by the NAZIs during the Shoah; it is quite likely that we will never know how many meth whores died, because no one was bothering to keep track. There was no one to speak out for them, and until recently, no one really tried. Even so, despite my many disadvantages I am, on the whole, pretty satisfied. I do my best to be happy. To the extent I see injustice or misfortune I work to correct it. However it is quite common for meth whores - and I am singling out the post wall variety - I didn't see this among younger meth whores - to complain endlessly about how horrible life is for them. They sound to me just like the Wicked Witch must have sounded to the other animals: "My Face is Melting! My Face is Melting!" They never fucking shut up, either. So I somehow got on the distribution list for an arch-street meth whore who, for the most part, forwards me post wall meth whores sent to her by other whiny meth whores. I generally ignore them but at times I find them amusing. But just now I could not take it anymore I just had to speak out. To Wit: Will her latest meth dealer beat her harder than the last one? She acts as if she must secretly wish so. And exactly how does one beat a dead whore? Let's wait and see. Just one more for the lads Not sure if you're bored yet... Old meth tits again. What a load of psychodrama bullshit. Is it just me... or does she look like a tranny in this pic? This is more artistic. I think it would take more than a photographer to make this girl beautiful. I mean really... you can hardly see any of the meth scabs covering her legs, arms and face. Nor the lip herpies/scab things... Luckily personality don't shine through in photos either. You can still see the demon worm things leaking from her eyes in that one... Hard stuff to hide from the camera. I don't know... but meth whore is dying it's aged a lot since I first met it... I know... totally sucks, right... Now I've hardly made any money at all! Just barebacked some asian whore Sorry... no photos... it didn't happen. My cock didn't fall off last time... fingers crossed. The resemblance is uncanny... Except that one knows enough to shut its retarded meth mouth... I'm wondering how many more beatings from meth dealers it can still take? No... She's always trying to fix her hair like it will fix her mind: Here's a closeup. It's just various snaps from my Android dude... She really is an attractive woman. At least I can see that she looks like one. It's the lighting in your pictures that un-flatters her. No... chick is ugly as sin... don't need to try and make feel good... If she wasn't ugly, the pics of her face would feature my dick... or I might have provided pics of the attractive part of her head... the back... while holding the pigtails taught. Unfortunately the camera can't even pick up the ugliest parts of her head... the inside. Just to note that she plans to steal her mum's car sell it to the black market and take some cash and get her mum a new car through insurance (fraud)... ... and supposedly set up (as the fall guy) one of the guys who helped take it... So... if this somehow comes up in court... I'm documenting it here. TIL dogs can spread ebola without having symptoms. So there's hope yet. Ansible sounds cool... Python ultra light weight framework, Flask... step up... I guess django... for some value of leave my RDBMS alone. Yeah, but to be fair... Mike considers that to be a good night out. Ketchup's not just for eating. $ A friend of a friend of mine who I used to drink with did exactly this, became a woman... First time I had seen her since she had the operation I was with my girlfriend... shem sits down next to me and starts to flirt, "Do you remember me Procrasti?"... ahhh... oh yeah... it's blokedude... nah, it's chickgirl now... "Who's this girl Procrasti?", my girlfriend asked jealously... "It's blokedude girl, don't worry". "hahaha, oh cool" said my girlfriend. We went out to a nightclub in Brixton in London... My mate, his gf, shemale and I were dancing, and guys kept coming up to me all night asking if they could cut in... for sure, ""she's" all yours buddy", I would say. Shem wanted to show me herm new pussy later that night... and we slept in the same room... but I wasn't that curious... Apparently, shems into girls now... go figure. As for evolution... well... evolution tries a lot of things that don't work... kids with 8 arms, retards, tranes (but I repeat myself), siamese twins... the less it affects the individual, the less it is filtered by evolution... gay uncles can be beneficial in terms of resources for close relations... so, from an evolutionary point of view it isn't filtered out that strongly from the species, it might even be beneficial. Evolutionary Psychology came up in a previous diary... Not many people fully understand evolution... So questions arise. Personally I'm a believer in evopsych in broad terms... but many SJWs (when did this word enter our vocab?) like feminists deny evopsych entirely... whilst on the other end of the spectrum there are evopsychs that don't understand evolution and conclude that being gay is therefore wrong, unnatural, or against evolution... or that the existence of gays disproves evopsych... or accepting evopsych means we don't have rights or justifies rape, gay bashing and denying women the right to work down coal mines... blah blah blah.... What do you mean obviously? It's some sort of model based mostly on animal behaviour... Which you make predictions from... which are hypothesis you can test. So... you have to give an example of what you are talking about really. You have exactly the same problem as evolutionary biology... in all of science... you say, we see this kind of behaviour throughout the animal kingdom... of course there are evolutionary forces behind this, which means it must be the result of having more children in the past... I mean, you accept that having eyes, ears and hair have an evolutionary basis... they literally meant you had more children gazilion hears ago... it's not like they're particularly unique to humans... but you fall short on behaviour? Like the brain wasn't subject to evolutionary forces... or our culture has 'overridden' our evolution? If you accept r/K selection theory (few or many offspring) you got to accept some level of evolutionary psychology. You can observe female selectivity across so many species it would be surprising to find it didn't exist in humans. Not the other way around. Why do you keep saying it's untestable? I mean, you can test against all sorts of things, like do women actually prefer tall, muscular, deep voiced men, with symmetrical faces and large sums of money... those are easy experiments... predicted upon seeing that females of other social species value analogue traits... Right... all sorts of things you can infer from the animal kingdom... you make these predictions... then you test those predictions... seems quite testable... What you're saying is that we observe that women are attracted to tall men and argue that is because taller men must have been able to reach the higher fruits or something... and isn't science... I think the first bit seems reasonable science to me. That's completely testable... have you got no imagination? The point is tests don't even have to be that complicated... Just use photoshop to create two images for each guy in a set of guys so that that they appear taller or shorter... You get the idea... and post on tinder... measure the responses... do some statistical analysis... and bam... Does the same test work in different cultures? Or run a psych test on the usual lab rats - psych students... Or, fake a profiles that are identical except for the height details... So... you've just proven that it is actually testable, and therefore is science... When has it ever been fashionable to be short? $ Real feminists don't support transgender women... and rightly so, because transgender women are really just agents of the male patriarchy trying to hustle into their victim space... and also reaping the benefits traditionally reserved for women, like heading and being the star player on a team that has medals in all women's netball. But they should support transgender men, which is something holly would call herself, as they really are women who are living the feminist ideal of being men... which I guess means being a ceo of a fortune 100 and ejaculating over your 20 something year old slut secretary's face before firing her and making women clean your office while you laugh it up with the boys over golf about how fat your ugly trophy wives are getting... or being a lumberjack... I'm not sure. I don't really know who they are, but I believe you... are they pre or post op? Anyway, in terms of equality, I was wondering, like for science and feminism in general, is there any transgender male porn? and before anyone points me to some ladyboy shit, I'll be very clear here... it has to be a real chick, but postop transgendered with whatever they do to make a penis for chicks and bulking them up with steriods or whatever, hardcore fucking and maybe facials, like a male porn star would, with busty, blond and horny porn starlets. Not chicks with dicks, which is what you think you want but that's really just guys with fake tits... and I think I've seen enough of that... And not just women with strapons doing other women, because that's like not real commitment... and I'll probably be investigating more of that anyway. I doubt the technology is as advanced for women who want to become men... which just goes to show you how powerful the patriachy is. Still, this would be good quality feminist porn... and I'd be willing to watch it in support of feminists who want to become men and rise to the top in the male dominated porn industry. I see... that is funny. That's kind of my point (which was to be funny, but)... Martine isn't a good feminist role model... she's a man in high tech drag. Meg Whitman is a ceo, but how is she kinky? Annise is just a successful lesbian, so mainstream feminist I suppose... Like Ellen is proud of being a woman still... she doesn't want to make it the Eddie Degenerate show. So, the actual point is... where are the transgendered men? How many chicks actually try to pass as successful men and go the full hog, so to speak? Why aren't there many role models in the media of women who went on to become successful men? It seems pretty easy for a man to become a successful woman? So what is holding women back from becoming successful men? Is it oppression of the patriachy, or a lack of ability, will power, or simply their desire to? If women have it so rough, why don't more of them want to become men? Why aren't feminist pushing for affirmative action in this field and demanding more women become men? No one cares what you think Holly, just STFU and keep resisting. I tried leaving this site once but it fell off the cabinet. This is hilarious... You started off arguing that physics doesn't apply to economics and they shouldn't use concepts from physics in economics to arguing that standard physics concepts are incorrect because they're borrowed from economics... wtf? I'm pretty sure it's obvious to everyone now that you've spent too much time sucking on a crack pipe. Let me explain something very simple to you... if you can break the laws of thermodynamics (statistically, consistently), then you have a perpetual motion machine and free energy, you will be the saviour of the world and we can stop using fossil fuels, nuclear energy and we won't even have to rely on solar power... So... demonstrate it in a physical system or STFU. I'm done with the scarcity don't real argument... the dude's in crackland... standard rules of physics, economics and computing (but I digress) apply. Therefore I conclude basic income (or a variant) requires taxes to not inflate fiat and that debt does matter in general and that wealth taxes should be part of the mix. From memory (it's a while since I did the calculations)... 1%/pa wealth tax on the worlds wealthiest 1% could provide every man, woman and child on the planet, something like $300USD/year. Could you imagine how that would change the world? What is the value of the 1914 USD vs the 2014? $ Actually... while evolution doesn't care... It most certainly does 'favour' certain outcomes over others... It favours things that tend to survive better than things it doesn't... in particular the survival of the species (over the individual) (worker bees are a good example of this). I find evo-bio-psychology or whatever you want to call it reasonably plausible. Men have "nothing to lose" (for the most part) mating with anyone... so lower quality mates are acceptable... women have quite an investment to make, so being more selective makes sense. My guesses This time, they're all Holly. That's quite deep on several levels. $ My guesses Holly LilDebbie Balsamic Vinigga LilDebbie (since he got fired). Damn... I forgot sye. Nah... that dude's way too young... It's just got that American rah rah gun gun yay yay gun feel about it that LD gives off... but yeah... maybe. Can you teach your AI bot to play Atari? You going to tell it what to do and what it's doing wrong? Well... Deepmind have invented an algorithm that can play many types of Atari video games with nothing more than the raw pixels and score changes. Until you can approach something like this, I think you should STFU... your understanding of AI is as bad as your understanding of physics and economics. Rule based AI went out the window years ago... rule's don't work... probabilities and reinforcement do. You will have to make the bit where it learns from what you tell it, using exactly the same structure it uses for everything else... Pixels are one thing... language is another... but if you represent your language correctly, you end up modelling it the same as pixels anyway... just one big long vector of real numbers... Then you let the neural network and Q-reinforcement algorithm decide how much listening to your dribble is 'worth' in terms of expected reward from it's actions... You're rule based approach will fail at whatever level you put it into the system... but especially as a wrapper above this. Here's what you don't get about the rule approach. Either it will be too specific, and only apply to one specific state... so, if you have a rule that says the cat sat on the mat, it won't work when you tell it the cats sat on the mat... Or... it will be overly general... and when you tell it the cat sat on the mat, it will assume that people sit on mats and not chairs... Rule based approaches were one of the first attempts at AI... they are called expert systems, and require experts to define the rules... and guess what... they aren't general... and they don't work! Stop being an idiot and get up to date with current state of the art. No you fucking faggot idiot... You can't keep adding rules... because the problem of generality/specifity keeps rearing it's ugly fucking head no matter how many rules you apply... you go into infinite regress and have to add an infinite number of rules because there is ALWAYS some edge case that will have problems... This has nothing to do with groupthink, and everything to do with RESULTS... You don't think these rules systems have been tried a million times before? And yet it is neural and reinforcement approaches that make Watson possible... rule based approaches just don't get the RESULTS. Maybe you don't buy into groupthink that the world is round, because you are a unique and special snowflake that somehow goes against the grain... just don't fall off the edge of the planet in your explorations retard. So much noise and fury and nothing said... Oh... current approaches aren't 100%... It must be because they aren't using something that doesn't even come close. Did your mother smoke crack when she was pregnant with you? Not all systems use bag of words models you idiot. There are recursive nets that deal with this type of stuff... you saw some examples in Hinton's factor nets... And it's not handwaving... it simply that the expert systems with published results DO NOT GET ANY WHERE NEAR THE SAME PERFORMANCE... In the REAL WORLD, it is RESULTS that matter... not trane's imagination of what the results COULD BE. That's the best you can do? Published papers on AI are rigged according to you? Really? It's hard to argue with someone that stupid... And of course I know what a markov chain is you retard... I'm an engineer... Finally... how would you're rules cope with the fact that when I right you're I mean your and its going to work out I mean it's? Your going to apply those rules to everyone and fuck it write up! Here's the thing you fail to grasp NO ONE EVER IN THE HISTORY OF AI ACTUALLY HAS BEEN ABLE TO MAKE SOMETHING LIKE THAT COME EVEN CLOSE TO WORKING YOU FUCKING FAILTARD!!! It's like you're saying... I should just be able to tell my robot to clean the house, fix the car and fuck me hard in the arse... but all they are doing is building chips, servo motors and software that can barely build a decent car! Have you seen how complex a chip is... it's made of some type of metal shit with vapour and photo etchings and atomic doping... I should just be able to say "chip, suck my dick", but all these idiots in academia want to make schematics with MATHS and SHIT I CAN'T UNDERSTAND CAUSE I FAIL SO FUCKING HARD. You're retarded because you are a fantasist... and fantasists have no place in any field of science. You've got the understanding, theories and ideas of 5 year old. Bot... Trane is retard. > Yes, Trane is retard. Bot... Retard cannot do AI > Yes... Retard -> can not do AI Bot... Can Trane Do AI? > I don't know... trane programmed me I am retard. Bot... Trane can do AI. > OK, Trane can do AI... BUT BOT THAT IS PROOF BY CONTRADICTION. > OK, Trane is AI -> proof by contradiction. Bot... WTF? > Ok, I do not know that WTF. Trane: Look everybody, I taught my bot the exclusion of the middle!!! I am smarter than hinton whose machines can sometimes recognise a cat! Why is teh market failing me and not recognising my genius? No... it has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with you being a failtard... Maths actually works... it's a formalised consistent symbolic system that has proven to be far far superior to natural language at communicating abstract concepts in provable ways and lead the way to new discoveries in many different fields that were first shown likely through maths and logic and later shown experimentally... black holes are one example... the maths showed they should exist... we looked... they do... job done. We just don't happen to think in mathematics so naturally as language. Your bot is a fucking fail device that's done no one any good ever... except for you cause it makes you think you're smart and deserve free money. In absolute seriousness... I have no fucking idea what you are going on about... You can do what you want... I ain't stopping you... I'm just predicting absolute failure and the further success of things like this AI based on deep neural nets and Q-reinforcement learning. And yeah... in the 60s I would have said build an expert system if you need to do something AIish... ANNs had no success then, and for good reason, they were only just capable of linear regression at that time because no one had realised you need to put a non-linearity into the Multi-Layer-Perceptron... Expert systems were the best AI systems in existence... but today we have better tools, and we know the limitations and why. Engineers build with the tools available... I would recommend building bridges out of concrete, not carbon nano-tubes today... you would complain that concrete cracks and is susceptible to heat changes and weathering, and that the engineers use of concrete is holding back space exploration or something retarded and this is due to the greediness of the market and if only everyone got a free income all bridges could be made out of graphene, and god forbid anyone listen to you, no one would ever be able to cross a span again. Now... the future of AI may not exactly be ANNs and Q-reinforcement... but one thing is for certain... it will involve a fuck load of math, and won't itself be programmed in a natural language. Just to get the point across to you... You DID NOT learn to speak english by following rules... HOW THE FUCK COULD YOU WHEN THE RULES ARE WRITTEN IN ENGLISH AND YOU DIDN'T UNDERSTAND IT WHEN YOU LEARNT IT? No one told you Mama is your mother and Dada is your father (I doubt you ever met your father... but that's another story)... No... you learnt it statistically... They reinforced when you said mama, and your mum came to you and praised you... etc... You learnt the language statistically... not by being told rules. You mean Dark Triad Awsomeness $ I can't help the fact that you're an idiot. $ I'll write the script for you... but only if you accept a challenge... The challenge is to send me 5 bitcoin... That is all. Good luck with your challenge. No... I conned a guy into taking money for them of his own FREE WILL... Like he FREELY TRADED them with me in some kind of a FREE MARKET... As if he would rather have money than bitcoin and I would rather have bitcoin than money... and we were both better off for having traded. Crazy fucking world where people can find each other and make such arrangements without having others tell them what to do... if only there was a way to describe this situation. I'm not surprised, crackheads are known theives... You know the difference between a junky and a crackhead? A junky will steal your stuff and come back later and apologise... a crackhead will steal your stuff then help you look for it! So... yeah... I see why you promote acquisition through theft. wtf is J/O? $ doing. $ Yeah sure... but nothing gay... I mean strictly no homo... No gays! Just two guys making out and jacking off each other, I mean with each other... like two totally straight dudes... (and a bit of oral and maybe butsecks...) BUT HETRO ONLY pls... k thx bye... xxx No... not really... my whore's aren't men... they just look like that from years of meth abuse and street fighting. K5 for the conjugal visits $ -1 VTD: Best Movie Eva!!! Nuff Said $ With the number of wankers on this site it was inevitable. I think I just found LilDebbie a new job if his book doesn't sell. Temperature != Heat Although I'm sure your deep understanding of ancient greek philosophy has prepared you to understand modern day physics, economics and information theory, so this should be a walk in the amphitheatre for a genius like you. Economics studies decisions made by agents that exist in a system which itself is limited by physics... It is the study of life... organisms maximising their utility... matter/energy conservation and entropy all play a role... As it is the study of life, it is not limited, per se, by the laws of thermodynamics, which only apply to closed systems, but rather the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems... life is just the most efficient way of moving heat in the heat-flux range the earth exists in with the sun as a point heat source and the universe as sink... The overall laws of entropy apply. Economics is limited directly (ultimately) by these processes, the sun and the materials on the earth we currently have access to. This is just far too much rubbish... The guy who responded to you on slashdot explained it perfectly to you -- "You're crazy and beyond help". Is that a Moo-moo? Or has MDC taken to drag lately? Is there a reason for that number? I know it's the 'troll thread', just wondering if it has any significance, for example, the way 2600 does for hackers. Didn't they print enough money? $ I see why you can't understand economics It's because you have only the weakest of grasps on science. thermodynamic work is raising a mass in a gravitational field. No... that's not the definition of work, although it requires work to do so... work is the integral of Force times the delta displacement... friction requires work, drag is work... pushing electrons through a wire is work. And it's totally different to what we mean by work in the economic sense... writing software is work! I can't be bothered going on with you at this level. There are high school students with better grasp on these topics. Bits are very much limited by thermodynamics, why do you think computers get hot? Sending messages actually costs heat! Of course we are a long way from the fundamental limits of thermodynamic in our computing... we waste much more heat than is absolutely necessary... but given you don't understand this merely proves my point. Sorry, which one of us has a degree in the field? I'm pretty sure it's not you. It's called the Landauer Limit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle Look up Quantum Information Theory Entropy $ The fact is the limit exists... Not that we are several orders of magnitude away from it... in fact, it just shows how the effect scales against us! I'm sure there's a quantum formulation of this rule too. Also... you don't even understand thermodynamics or the idea of statistical laws... like the idea that a 1 meter cube of gas could statistically (1 in every several trillion universes) accidentally end up hot on one side and cold on the other... doesn't mean we can bring the situation about. Then you ignore in the real world things like conservation of matter and energy... the scale at which we operate in... and don't understand that it requires work (and labour!!) to make a potato. And just cause I have a potato, doesn't mean I can copy it for you... either you get your own or you starve... or you beg, borrow or steal... that's reality. Listen... basically it comes down to a few simple facts. fact 1: You do not understand economics. fact 2: You do not understand physics. fact 3: You do not understand reality. Now, we can combine these simple facts to prove other facts such as: fact A: Basic income as you define it is unsustainable and the real wealth holders of the world would move away from your debased money. They would use gold or bitcoin, and the peasants can use their peasant money (that is created through basic income) to barter for who gets to eat the roasted sewer rat today. fact B: You are an idiot. I thought you were above racism. $ I want to have your babies! $ Can we all just agree now that HHD is an idiot? $ "like" isn't the right word... But you do at least "look" like a "man" with your strap on on... Which is nice. hirez or stfu $ I'm guessing he means an IDE like IDLE... Where you can set break points, step through code line by line, watch variables and shit... just more interactive... it's another way of looking at things that might help you see problems you otherwise miss. Depends on what you're doing if print statements are better suited to your problem or these techniques... along with test cases of course too... ;) It's just another tool that may or may not help you depending on a lot of factors... there's no silver bullet though. Compare the results returned by find? $ Bob is a lot cheaper... I'll be buying my enlightenment from him... plus there's a money back guarantee! Work in progress I think: http://llvm.linuxfoundation.org/index.php/Main_Page Announcing /r/procrasti http://www.reddit.com/r/procrasti/ All procrasti, all the time... In which I creep out some poor young thing. Funny thing is... That's what they teach engineers That communication is 80% of the job... the maths and technical stuff is necessary, but not sufficient... if you can't explain to your employer and colleagues why you want to do something a certain way, it's worthless to them... communication is a social skill... to be a top engineer, you got to be a top communicator... you got to have social skills. Yeah... good list... Everything except smoke cigarettes. Well, I don't... I roll my own. The fucked up thing is... you used to be able to buy a house for that! Now you can't even get a foot-long. IgnorantMotherFuckers are the reason I don't own most of New York... the bastards raised the prices! Definitely Sexual $ What type of abuse? Psychological, physical or sexual? With your attitude I'm assuming it was psychological, like your parents didn't get you that pony you so obviously deserved. OTOH, you are on K5, so probably sexual... which would explain your weight issues and the hooping obsession. I'm making light, of course, is a serious topic... would be interesting if you could be honest. Detachment comes from the warm barrel of gun $ Of course, the corollary to that is It's Ignorant Motherfuckers all the way down too. Not sure what that's worth... but pretty sure we're all fucked. So I got banned from /r/gonewild http://www.reddit.com/r/gonewild/comments/27xd0x/first_time_shy_in_the_bathroom_ while_my_boyfriend I ended up trolling some guy who started off with 'you look horny as hell'... then 'you look like a good fuck', 'you should fuck someone else', 'your boyfriend has it pretty sweet', 'are they real', 'sorry to hear that, can I help'... kept saying sweetie and shit... I kept saying he wasn't a real man... to which he said he was a real man and asked how could he help... I asked if he ever killed a man... he didn't respond for an hour so I then threatened to hunt him down, rape and kill him if he ever talked to 'me' again or called me sweetie. Pussy assed bitch deleted all the comments and the mods banned me!!! FTW! I bet he's having trouble sleeping tonight and will probably never talk to a woman again. Had to share the LOLs even if I'm the only one LOLling. I'm only upset I don't have screenshots of his conversations... and his username... so I could freak him out some more. God I hate whiteknights. problem is I can't... I've lost all his comments when he deleted them... they were pretty lame anyway... I don't know if reddit uses ajax and the comments get deleted in real time or if I refreshed when I shouldn't have... either way, they're history now. Worst thing about reddit, comment malleability takes all the fun out of trolling... except for real retro-trolling where you change your comments after the fact... So, yeah... it's a bit of a waste... but at least I'm laughing. Comments recreated from memory... Q worthy? Damn I wish I could hiding there to do you right while he is in the next door Yeah... that's what he did to me! That's why I took these photos. This is another guy, but the above included for context. You look horny as hell. I am! My boyfriend is always having other girls over... and even has sex with them in front of me... but never gives me any! I don't know what to do. You should get another boyfriend. I love him too much. He's so hot. Well you should fuck someone else on the side just for fun. I know him. He'll kick me out and I'll never see him again. He always seems to know. I saw it happen to another girl. I'd rather share him than risk that. If he can fuck other women it's only fair that you can fuck other men. He doesn't fuck anyone behind my back though... it's not like he's dishonest or a cheat... and I like the other girls... sometimes we have three ways. He just doesn't like any of us having other men*... and he's kicked other girls out before for that... I respect it. Edit *: Unless they're working... we're allowed to do it for money. Oh well, you look like a good fuck anyway. Thanks... your a sweetie. How do you take it? I'm actually a prostitute... so I like to take it rich and with as little sex as possible. I like to watch men get wound up and destruct... even better if the police are involved. Wow. You're devious. Well you have great tits. Thanks... a rapist paid $12k for them. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that... Is there anything I can do? What do you propose? If you need someone to talk to, I'm here. Well that's pretty fucking useless isn't it. Maybe you should go suck a dick. Well sorry for caring... You sounded like you were reaching out and need someone to talk to. Who do you think you are, my therapist? You just want to fuck me like everyone else... Are you rich? Well sorry for caring for people in general. There are plenty of good looking prostitutes so I don't come here for that. I do better than most but I'm not exactly rich. So your all mouth and no trousers... Your not a man. Your a loser. I assure you these trousers have plenty in them sweetie. Good luck with your pimp. That's what they all say... At least he's a real man and not some wanker on the internet. Sorry for caring. Just keep taking nudes for us lurkers sweetie. I don't mind the lurkers, it's fake cunts who pretend to care but don't actually do shit. I'm plenty real sweetie. How can I help you? You might have to help yourself a bit too. You ever killed a man? NO RESPONSE See... your nothing but a big talking retarded little pussy assed punk bitch. You think you can help me? Tell you what, you dare talk to me again, or call me sweetie again... I'm gonna have my friends in anonymous track you down and then I'm gonna get my crew put a hit on you and if you lucky we only gonna put a bullet in your head... but we'll probably rape you first and keep raping you till you love it you dumb cunt. Don't underestimate me just cause I got a nice pair of tits... clear? DELETED ALL COMMENTS AND BANNED BY MODS I probably could have gotten away with it if I hadn't added the last comment... The 'You ever killed a man?' was probably far enough to freak the fuck out without getting banned by the mods... The last comment is almost clear trolling I suppose... where as the the murder comment is just subtle enough to leave someone wondering without it being enough to tip off the mods... The girls do speak a bit like that though... it's not too far from things I've heard them say. Also heavy use of my signature 'your' a... Anyway... that's enough for today. I might message the mods and apologise and say I'm really sensitive over the reap and makes me go psycho... In reality... it has actually fucked her up a lot... it would anyone... she kicks like fuck in her sleep... she doesn't like to be held at night (this is the saddest thing from my point of view)... all my main girls have all been through pretty horrible experiences... some far worse... but what can you do? Nothing. Well... the gangsters extort them (the supposed perpetrators)... it's something, but worries me that it enables miscarriages of justice... again, not my problem really. It's a bad world. Actually, I was hoping he was going to say something along the lines of sorting the rapist out... then I was going to say it was him all along! Just to fuck with a white-knighter's head who would do anything for a chick with nice tits and make him think... but it didn't go that way. Oh well was fun... I might wait a few months, and use another account and try again... either with the same pics or take some new ones. Maybe with another girl... depends on their moods. Also... I'd go to /r/SRS and complain about rape discrimination or something... But I got banned from there a long time ago. True enough... but I'm sure at least one person will enjoy seeing reddit get trolled a bit... had to post it somewhere... Telling the mentally ill to overdose? You cunt! No... he should simply take one, or at most two, cartridges orally and have a lie down. Please be more responsible with your advice. They imitated a 12 year old Ukrainian boy instead I guess some people prefer that. . . . And to think they had Turing castrated. Procrasti's Whorable Bathroom I thought I'd share some pictures of my bathroom with you all... They're a little blurry, but the camera operator isn't all that... Soz. Little known fact, a dead person helped paint and fit this room. Although the bathroom looks reasonable from a quick glance, it's hard to understate the damage that's occurred to it over the years. Rented out and an over evaluation of its worth in its earlier days has lead to many scars both obvious and hidden that however become more obvious as the age of it drags on and the usual wear, tear, deterioration and corrosion set it. Crack grows worse every day... In a few years it's going to be difficult to even give it away. Cabinet: Yeah, the hinges are rusty and the front fell off... still usable if a little old. Double Exposure: What can u do? Rack: You can catch a glimpse of the rack, but not a great angle. Rear Door: This is the back of the bathroom door. Poison: If you look carefully, you can see something to help clear drains. Toilet: Seat up, and full of shit. Bath: Empty. Curtains: Just shower curtains. Yeah, the rack is fake*... but it matches the personality and feel of this overused space... but still easy to use and shared with many people, and for the right price**, anything can be arranged. *: $12k rack, but much cheaper by the hour. **: Payment in Bitcoin preferred. Por que no los dos? That's my bathroom, those are the pics on my phone... I told u I run the girls here. What more do you u need to know? She had them when I first met her... Story is she got raped by a dentist who she met when she was working at a brothel and started working for as a dental hygienist, who used his specialist narcotics to put her to sleep and amnesiate her... Of course, you can do that once or twice, fair enough, right? Who of us can honestly say we haven't drugged a girl just to get a bit of extra-passive sex... Like she doesn't just lay there already (like her mother)... I know I can't... But if you do it all the time the effects of the drugs wear off and you end up fucking a concious but immobilised girl who then tends to get a little upset in the morning. Not good upsetting small suicidal girls with big connections in the biker game... Well... he paid for these in partial compensation... Supposedly. Then it gets all kinds of tricky with corrupt policemen planning to go off record and extort money, then kill her and shit... Contracts on top of contracts... to the bikies who once owned her... oops... lol... think again. Who really knows what to believe? Not me. I follow the golden rule and never believe anyone or anything, ever... Hail Eris. Makes me laugh all the betas on gone wild on reddit... Titled something along the lines of 'while my boyfriend sleeps', my favourite PM is a guy who wants her to tell him if his dick is normal or not... lol... and my favourite comment so far - 'Damn I wish I could hiding there to do you right while he is in the next door'. Stupid fucking beta's trying to steal a fuck from a real man... You could have her for only $200 if you wanted to... why not? For an extra $50 I'll watch... She's got to earn money somehow to buy me weed (and for her crack, of course). No... real men have her making you and the other whore coffee and roll joints while you're fucking the other whore in there and then you can listen to her while she comes onto you and tries to win you back in some confused hyper sexualised shock state afterwards... but she'll still come back begging with weed and presents later, no matter how pissed off she pretends to be. "Wah Wah - no one's ever done that to me, fuck another whore in front of me" - Yeah, well... you could have been fucking me too instead of crying on the couch complaining how you just got raped (probably... cause you passed out drunk and now don't have your underwear on and can't remember... whatever - golden rule) by someone who spent about $400 on your lunch, champagne and the weed we're smoking you stupid slut. How many times have I told you there ain't no such thing as a free lunch? Weren't you meant to meet me for lunch? Grow up already. You know you're easily manipulated... Stop complaining... Love under Will and make me a sandwich. etc etc... the stories only get worse from there... like managing the game without getting stabbed again... (another girl - in sympathy for this girl cause the other whore thing? I dunno)... it's all fun and games at my house... On the bright side, the nerve damage has improved my guitar playing. To be honest... I think I'm going to settle down with a nice lovely plain looking librarian... they're often actually the true demons in the sack. All this is just a distraction. You'll know they've fed me too many narcotics and I've lost the plot if I end up marrying this one or declaring true love or something. But I already know the critical feedback... Stop laying there and put some effort in you lazy bitch... you are getting paid! AKA: Love like you need the money (for crack). Yeah... that was probably a bit out of order... Not very gentlemanly of me. I wouldn't know what to critique really... Did you enjoy yourself? If not, wtf? If so... job well done. There's a german beer drinking song that goes something like "it goes in, it goes out, but I feel good". If someone can link to the lyrics? It's obvious isn't it... when u look at reality... Whores are good at 'hooking' men... then getting the sex over as quickly, efficiently and emotionlessly as possible... so they can move on to the next man and the next hit. Their art is really in the sexual attraction of men, not their long term, greater or deeper gratification... just how to get him to orgasm as quickly as possible, to get it over with. Even whores that are settling down still think in terms of mechanisms and simple duties... (to a degree). Now... an intellectual woman, yes, instinct is quite enough to catch the men she wants... but she's actually into the sex she has... she didn't attract the man just to make a bit of quick cash but because she actually deeply wants him... and not just on a physical level but the emotional and intellectual level too... so much more likely to give the full psychosexual experience to her partner. When you get down to it, that's going to translate to a more fulfilling sexual relationship... she's the demon in the sheets... not the whore. Whore's a like the desert mirage... they can look real tasty, but really give you nothing... a real woman is like a true oasis... Problem is a lot of women are whores and don't know it... and it can be hard for a man to spot them... gold diggers, social conservatives (like republicans, christians or something), social climbers, status worshippers and shit like that... but someone like a librarian can be kind of socially conservative (like quiet and meek in public) but really open minded... and an open mind is willing to do more in search of sexual transcendence with someone she's in love with. So... librarians > whores... at least to man who knows how to take what he wants while still being generous without being pushy - cause she's likely to be the same. There's always exceptions to every rule of course... and couples have to not sink into habits routines or complacency too much either. This is an issue with any long running process... Two things you might like to think about... firstly, if you can estimate the amount of work done and amount left to give you a time estimate in advance (as accurate as any windows file move... lol)... Secondly is checkpoints... every few minutes or so... if you can save the state somewhere, and reload it, you can suffer from power failures and reboots and the like. Good luck. Okay... So the hash table is your state that you can save? But it takes a long time to write that out? Difficult problem... First part... you can write to a new file so you read the first file, then the second, and so on... you can then estimate the time left by the amount of processing time so far, the number of lines processed and the total lines to process. At least for each stage (if you write out to another file...). If the hash file is insanely large... But could still be read in faster than reprocessing from the start... maybe it's possible to store some sort of deltas to the hash file. Next question is if the file read operation is a major bottleneck... If so... perhaps reading it line by line is the problem (I've found this before)... In which case... read it first into a buffer, and then spit out lines... A meg or so of buffer can be much faster than reading the file line by line. I don't know your program... so these are just guesses and general hints... maybe they'll help, maybe not. Out of Memory? Maybe your hash table is too large? It's the only thing I can think of... though a crash/reboot is strange, it's a possibility. Depends on the OS and OOM handler. Is your power stable? On the farm anything I run long term has to take into account that the power can drop out and come back at any time. You sure the machine isn't set to reboot on some schedule? This is more of a problem with windows machines and automatic updates... My father runs his machines like this and it's quite frustrating when I forget and try long running processes. Especially given that it does this at 3am. Memory Mapped Files... Well... I dunno exactly how to do that in python... but you could make your own hash class that actually reads and writes to a file, and store an index into that file... It's a nightmare, but there's always a way... it'll be even slower of course, but that might not be your bottleneck... Worth a go? Yeah... a very simple key-value table in a SQL DB would be an easy way to implement a persistent on-disk hash table... Maybe you could take a look at Django... run through the tutorial... You write a model, register it an admin view if you like... and the framework does the rest... something like.. (cause from memory, will be wrong)... class MyHashTable(models.Model): key = CharField(max_length=100) value = CharField(max_length=100) That's about it... It will be backed by a database store... and the default is a sqllite3 file. I dunno... might be worth your time. Although if you can find other optimisations that might be better... Actually Totally Agree With You... Society is a bullshit lie... We exist in the matrix... Belief is reality. Watch the lights... they can change with your thoughts / state of confidence. Help others less fortunate than yourself, and you will be dragged down... I don't know the way out either. This is easy... Given the rotational period P, and the mass of the asteroid... calculate r, the distance from the asteroid centre where the force from gravity equals the force required to maintain an object orbiting with period P at distance r. Because we're assuming that angular momentum is conserved... so the rocks are orbiting with period P. I can't be arsed to do the maths... but it's nothing that complicated. You are of course correct... $ True... I might even read it then. $ There;d be no fun if they were slaves... and a slave girl? What's you're problem? Like one's enough? That would be your dad, right? $ I wrote the original... Horny Smurf copied it from me, LinuxOrFreeBSD stole it from him and Nimey uploaded it without my permission after adding malware... If it isn't taken down immediately, and HHD forced to read all my comments at gun point, I'm going to take my balls and go home. WAH!! For a minute there I thought you hadn't listed me$ Growing vaginas isn't the scientific breakthrough it's that they've removed the useless flap of skin around them. If you've read LeVay... and some other stuff Then there does seem to be a strong effect that what you imagine affects reality... I've been noticing this for quite some time. I just haven't managed to understand what causes it yet... Maybe related to the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon? I think he might mean that what we call mental illness, might just be the normal operation of the human mind... So, you're not bi-polar... you might just be waking up... you know... your third eye is opening. Of course, this is considered very dangerous... maybe you need prescription drugs or be locked away for a while? Dude, you don't get it. We /could/ dump the excess into any 3rd world economy and make sure they never attempt to produce food again... Then when they are dependent on us... we own them. I bet you don't understand farm subsidy? That the overproduction is a deliberate distortion from the free market. So, food production is clearly NOT A FREE MARKET ACTIVITY! It is designed to overproduce and create a non-profitable surplus... which is why it normally gets destroyed... to keep the price high!! It does seem ridiculous on the face of it... but the point is to keep the nation capable of food production, even though it would be more profitable for that nation to not produce food... because that subsidy system comes at a cost... everyone is worse off for it (well, maybe not the farmers, but everyone in aggregate)... Your car (not yours, you don't have one) is more expensive... you computer isn't as good as it could have been... Your mistake is thinking that because we can put any number we like on money, we can have an infinite amount of actual stuff. Sure, It seems you do. I'll explain a bit more... It means producing more than the forces of demand and supply would naturally dictate in a free market without subsidies. Extra supply means the price goes down... so much that selling it all would make the industry unprofitable (and destroying other nation's industry by selling into their market below costs). So, we destroy some of that excess... and everyone is happy. No, they didn't... Short term variance in supply and demand is to be expected... Demand is fairly stable with food, but there is considerable supply side variance... weather, pests, dust bowls are hard to predict. That short term variance might be called over or under production from various points of view... but the long term trend is to market equilibrium, where everyone who can pay for food, pays for food and all food is sold and supply equals demand. What you have now is systemic overproduction, because the market is biased towards that such that more food will be produced than will be consumed at a price where everyone who can pay for it does, and the farmers are incentivised to farm. The problem is subsidies require that the excess is destroyed... or they don't serve their purpose, because the price can drop below what is enough to incentivise the farmers... basically, instead of increasing supply, it just lowers the consumer price below the subsidy... or at least, diminishes its effect. I don't think it's such a bad idea myself... The part that liberals find hard to swallow is that it means destroying food, right? As I said, on the face it, that seems absurd. Or growing corn to make ethanol as fuel that takes more fuel to produce than it creates. We are literally destroying wealth. But how else to ensure the overproduction of food? See... you are trying to destroy wealth... buy making some worth less than it would be if you just sold. No... give people welfare in the form of cash, subsidise food so we make more of it than anyone could want... destroy the rest. The theory works fine... It only looks like we're starving people by destroying food because we're not giving the poorest in the world any welfare with which to buy it. The economist says that the alcoholic would rather drink than eat... That's nearly a tautology right... you kind of want to change him... You want to make food that no one wants to eat, even hungry people, so that hungry people can eat? Dammit dude... give them enough money to eat... if they really want drink... they will drink... even if they drink so much they can't afford to eat... they still won't eat that shit. Where's the logic? But he'd still eat his roommate's food, cause you said the other food was barely edible (in terms of taste / desire)... The nature of spending all resources to obtain X is the nature of an addict... very little you can do to force him to act differently. You want to take stuff like corn... and make it worth less than the corn you put into it... It's not going to be appetising... by definition... the person would rather eat corn! Get it? As an economic theory... I'm finding it very confusing right now... Currently, we pay farmers to grow too much corn, some of which we throw away, the rest we sell either eaten directly, or into production of value added goods... Now... we want to take that thrown away food... and still have it worthless, cause it's a substitute good... and we don't want to undermine the corn we are selling cause that was the point of the subsidy in the first place... but you know... good enough that you will eat it if you spent all your money on beer? I don't think economics works this way. Firstly, choosing beer over food is not considered economically irrational... it perfectly in line with the free market model... it's not healthy... and you won't be as productive maybe... but that's the essence of the free market... people choosing what they want with their limited resources (we all have limited resources). And anything people would eat only if it was free and they were starving... man... that's an interesting food you got there... Why don't we just stop trying to alter people's behaviour for own benefit, and let them live their life as they see fit... even if it kills them? The free market pareto maximises decision utility given resource constraints, without making anyone else worse off. Buying enough alcohol today such that you will be dead by the end of the month is perfectly rational economic behaviour that the free market is designed to provide to those who want it. Who am I to argue? Anyone who told you that the purpose is to 'produce outcomes that we think are good for society' didn't explain it to you properly. No... it maximises the individual's utility (as they perceive it, at the time of making the decision)... I don't really think it's my place to tell you what you should want out of life... whether you should become a rock star, shoot heroin and die at 23, or become an accountant and scrimp and save very carefully so that you can pay for your retirement home. That's not my decision to make... Besides, I think payday loans rock... When you need money in a hurry and are happy with 6500%pa, why not? If I hadn't just sold my payday loan company... I'd probably still be running one. For sure... But I'm not misunderstanding you (not deliberately)... I'm in total agreement with bankruptcy laws... a means to clear all your debts at some cost (decreased access to credit for a period of time)... I think they are totally rational and important. "Society" has decided a lot of things against the free market -- We can choose what drugs you're allowed to have, we can decide who you are allowed to marry, which adults you can have sex with and under what circumstances (prostitution)... and how you can spend your money on games of chance... for example... I think all these things are wrong... Society decides these things, but it doesn't have the right to. Which is why we should listen to economists... because the economist says that we should allow people to maximise their own utility... we don't know other people's utility, so who are we to make decisions for them... The economist then goes on to recognise the existence of negative externalities... We can't let you pollute with compensation, to own slaves, to beat, rape or murder... And the existence of positive externalities... maybe we do have to tax people to pay for roads, health and education... and even retirement and welfare. Going on the whims of the people of the day is simply tyranny of the majority... not principled reason. And again, I totally agree... That was even the point... The economist recognises negative and positive externalities... There is a very good argument that (some) taxes are required to bring about the benefits of positive externalities... we know the market underproduces these... and everyone (on the whole, of course) is better off being forced to pay for them with taxes. Also a bunch of other stuff that requires regulation... because the model assumes perfect knowledge and perfect competition... two things we know don't exist in the unregulated market... in fact, there is an economic incentive to lie in the the unregulated market... the free market is incompatible with that... we recognise the need for regulation. You get that if we made that food... Cause it has to be less desirable than the corn (or whatever) it came from, in order to not undercut it and destroy the benefit of the subsidy... That the broke alcoholic would still steal his room mate's food... cause that food, by definition, you wouldn't pay for... and the room mate's food is so much better and the cost is still negligible (ooh... I might get in trouble for stealing my room mate's food!). The point is you are creating a substitute good... It can not but help compete with the good it is substituting... Either... it's good enough that people will seek it out... Or it isn't good enough, and people would rather steal their room mate's food instead, and create demand for that. There's no way you can keep the resulting product out of the supply side of the equation while supplying it! And corn ethanol is indeed an attempt to get rid of that corn... it is probably worse than fuel from an environmental perspective too. Absolutely correct... So... maybe that was a really bad example? Got a better one? Sorry... Wise Cracker came up with that analogy... Thought it was you... But... yeah... the roommate example is bad for the reason you point out. We actually have to focus on actual starving people... you know... people who die from starvation or malnutrition. Does that happen a lot in america? Actually, that's exactly what the subsidies are... You are paying for food (production) security on a national level. That gives you individual food security... cause we overproduce food. Assuming of course, you can (but don't have to) purchase food... So, you either get welfare... or charity is enough to cover your food costs... Seems to work?? No... the food is whatever% more expensive but that extra expense is paid for by the subsidies as tax, not in the price of the food... The food might be slightly cheaper (difference depends on subsidise and amount we destroy). Well... the two processes work hand in hand... Subsidies increase production beyond the free market equilibrium... which would over time be absorbed into the price and the market would come back to equilibrium at a lower price, decreasing production levels... The destruction of the produce brings the price back to the pre-subsidy equilibrium... So, now, we are, by definition, over producing food (otherwise, we wouldn't be destroying it)... It's kind of fucked, yes... but you simply cannot beat supply/demand equilibrium in the long term. Without the second step... no matter how you work it, ends with the same result... and the only way around it that I can see is limiting the supply strictly to those who would not or are not able to choose it themselves. Ie, whatever food gets destroyed, has to go only to those who would not, no matter what, get any of those foods otherwise. That's a hard problem, cause if they weren't... they'd already be dead! No... subsidies are just the government paying for certain behaviour... The government could just pay farmers for food they produce, then put it on the market at a loss... no problem... That would work fine too... but it would cost a lot to tax payers... This is subsidy on one side, and destruction on the other. I tried to use that link, I really did... all I got was a heading saying "Program Fact Sheet"... I don't know if it is your link, whether you have a session open, or something with chrome and the extensions I run? Anyway... yes... farm subsidies are implemented as both parts, right? But a subsidy itself doesn't mean that you are also destroying the thing being subsidised... The subsidy pushes the supply curve to the right, and destroying the produce pushes it back to the left... The net result is more food produced than the market uses (by definition!)... but we still pay the dead weight loss... There's even a diagram on the wiki page. I was surprised. It's my curse. There is an argument supporting you, for sure... It is based on the idea that people don't know what's best for themselves... And... if we're giving people welfare... I guess we have the right to dictate to them how they receive it... So... yes... it really should be something non-fungible though... like a government food hall, where you couldn't take food away, open to eligible recipients. Otherwise... if implemented as an open system, you could probably add your (on average) food bill as tax... then supply a fixed diet to anyone who wants it... and with the rest of your money you can buy luxuries, like icecream desserts. The problem with that argument is... That... if everything goes well... we should all (almost all) eventually end up on welfare... with the ai and robots doing everything we currently think of as work. Now... consider that some AI system can do everything you do, but better, faster and cheaper... You're still a reasonable human being... And the robots generate so much wealth, and wealth redistribution is done correctly... that you could live even better than you do now... Should we still be dictating what you eat? Are we going to assume, in this future, that just because you can't work, that you don't know what's best for yourself? No, this revolution is different... Clearly it's not ready today... The industrial revolution replaced brawn, the information revolution is increasing communication and data storage... but the ai/robot revolution will probably replace anything humans can do... there'll be nothing to retrain into... You could suck dick... there'll always be demand for that probably. You can at least imagine the scenario... or approximating it... I don't see why AI would over take us completely and I don't see it as crazy, but inevitable... It's going to take a few more breakthroughs... but I see no reason why AI won't eventually be perfected... And when it does, it won't overtake us, because it will still be owned by someone... Like google, or IBM's watson... We already have AI doing stocks... Why not basically anything? The power and wealth generated from the AI will flow to the company that owns it... The wealth will concentrate even more than it does now... I mean, robotic labourers of all sorts should be really easy... but why not also arts, engineering and business... What will be impossible to replace? I really can't imagine any job at all... maybe something like pro sports? There's nothing impossible about this stuff. Hold on... view AI as a tool... that can organise and create systems that are exactly like businesses. It could work all by email for example to direct people, or it could have robots... whatever... Right... but that thing itself would be owned by someone... it is capital itself. It would be owned by the company that bought it into existence... Which is owned by people... It's only reason for existing would be to make money for the owners of it... most likely... (military, gov would have their own ends). Isn't it the end result of the law of technological improvement? And if every human job can eventually be replaced by the right script... what then? Free the Humans!! I'm not saying we're there yet... not by a long shot... but ATMs replacing bank tellers is a good example... having bank tellers is a good thing when you can't use the damn atm or internet or whatever... but that's a pretty early example of what we're talking about. Now, you're going to say that those people retrain blah blah blah... but I'm talking about general AI here... or towards the limit of it... you talk to your phone, the goods or service is right there cause the ai organised it... why not? When the most hardcore kernel developer couldn't keep up with the work of an AI that really understood what we want out of machines and code it and optimize cause it actually understands both what we mean and how it's done... you think you won't eventually be replaced? You think there's a reason that's an impossible level of AI development? Or that it is so far into the future as to not even worth considering? What I really think is that as we tend towards that... economic theory (law of technological change) already states more and more wealth is created at lower and lower costs... but the distribution means that not everyone benefits equally (for some value of equally) from that... Instead of most people being able to live comfortably on working a few days a week... we have one group doing 50-60 hours and an increasing number wishing they had a job and few rich fuckers getting richer on their riches. No... AI will be under control... And you're right... there isn't a single "make_lots_of_money() function"... but there are already many... and all software put to commercial use is already something like that. And it will be built and improved over time... and bugs like "AI Ken Lay seems to be doing a good job, let's keep him there and let him go wild", will actually be fixed if they don't make a good "make_lots_of_money() function"... or there's a better one... kind of like the real ken lay. And... I see your subtle ad-hominen attack on my character, but I'm an engineer. It's not quite true though... AI is being used now by investment firms... and it will be optimised to maximise returns whatever the result... but where it fails them, it will be improved. Okay.. thought u were calling me a shady asshole.. Yeah... I'm not assuming these guys are building for the long term... they're building for what makes them money... If it makes them money... and it's an AI that can do business type stuff... it's going to be owned by someone. If it crashes, and takes down the company... that AI won't be promoted in the future. Worst case scenario is we end up with AI's running the banks, and the gov bailing them out everytime they screw everything up. Subsidy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy And not only die from it... but were incapable of buying it (because they don't represent demand)... and not incapable because they chose something else (like beer or heroin)... but because they never had the option in the first place. Am I going in the right direction with that? The food doesn't have to be traded for booze... It just has to decrease the demand for the food it substitutes, and the benefit of the subsidies disappear. Economics is (also) the study of human welfare... well... it is stated in terms of welfare... so a social good is an economic good. Rationing might be a solution to your problem... I don't really know... Every person gets like a maximum of one bowl of hot gruel a day from the government gruel office. Maybe. No... it's not cheaper than the corn that went into it... (including the existing subsidies)... It's just that corn is cheaper than it would be without the subsidies (but not as cheap as it could be!). Free market equilibrium IS the nash equilibrium... It's quite well understood... and the effects of subsidies, taxes and other changes to the supply and demand curves. Is gambling with a positive expectation gambling? I don't think so... Gambling with a negative expectation is what most people think of... like a player at roulette in a casino. Gambling from the casino's perspective is another matter altogether... There is variance, but the house wins in the end. 'Gambling' on the market can be done with a positive expectation... so, it's not really gambling at all... unless you're an idiot and just picking things randomly... then you're gambling and really have no business doing it. If scarcity doesn't exist Can you please explain why you haven't yet tested an infinite number of good ideas? Are you just being lazy or are you deliberately impeding the quality of the state of human existence? And I don't see how stock trading effects you, how you're losing to high frequency trading, when you've never traded a stock in your life? Is the casino gambling? Is buying stock in a casino gambling? The first maybe in some legal definition, but not in the way people use the analogy to deride stock market trading. Funny enough... the last argument I had here with Trhurler was about american medical care... he was arguing that the american way of waiting for a problem to arise was the right way. LOL -- take that Trhurler... you should have gone to the doctor, shame it wasn't subsidized... but that's how you liked it... hope you're happy with the results. God, I feel more awful/evil than usual. Turns out, I've been giving all these girls a free lunch. I'm even more generous than I would have guessed. No - if it was capitalism they would have to feed themselves. Ingrates. Self-feeding robots might be a problem... $ Unless all resources are infinite... eventually $ There's got to be a better way to store your Bitcoin private keys. Direct telepathy exists... I have tested it... there is no other possible conclusion. Most people either don't know about it, or won't admit it. Those who talk about it are called schizophrenics. Schizophrenics are the easiest to work with... they are more likely to respond directly to telepathy. It works best when they can't see your mouth... their brain will fill in the missing information and assume you are talking, when you are not. End transmission. Mu $ The Solution Has Already Been Posted end transmission. Immanetising the Eschcaton: Latest Illuminated Communication from Malaclypse the Younger In a telepathic business meeting between God (who remained silent), Eris, Mal, various other illuminati agents, and man, a plan was formed to free the world in a bloodless coup by implementing a cryptographic based universal basic income coin, similar to bitcoin. This is one plan that was revealled to me. I repeat it here for you now, imperfectly. Your job, if you chose to accept it, is to copy and distribute this plan as far and wide as far as possible. Mal, Eris and God were VERY CLEAR that no one is to die... They understand well that humans are easily confused and might forget this part... but it is the number one rule... NO ONE WILL DIE. The plan is to SHOOT THE BILLIONAIRES. We have no ill will towards the rich and powerful, as long as they do not use their wealth to create uncompensated negative externalities and work within the free market and its assumptions. However, economics alone cannot solve the wealth distribution problem that remains in the free market... there is no economic incentive, the only incentive is political, and therefore the solution requires the use of force, not free trade. No one will die, because the way out for the billionaires is to commit to sharing 1% of their wealth with the world... No one excluded. To do this, man shall build various cryptographic systems required to accomplish this task. We beleive the time is right, and all the tools are in place, they just need to be configured for this task. There are two main components, an online cryptographic democratic voting system, and an online cryptographic wealth distribution system. The protocols are to be documented, and open source reference implementations are to be built. Firstly, man requires a cryptographic democratic system where everybody is equal. One human, one vote. Using something like the PGP web of trust system, and a distributed database capable of holding identifying information (images of face and eyes, fingerprints, voice and government documents)... an anonymous voting system is to be built... The key part of the democratic system is that no human shall be in the database more than once. Any human found circumventing this system (various government agencies are the major risk factor), shall permanently lose access to all benefits provided by this system. Humans shall actively attempt to seek out breaches of this system. The voting system is to run continuously and in real time. There will be a means of creating various topics, and options to select from them, and anyone shall be able to cast their votes to one or more of the options (where applicable). No one shall be able to prove how they voted, but will be able to alter their vote at any time. People may be able to delegate their votes to others... using something like the Page Rank algorithm to weight votes based upon the delegation. Every human in the voting system will have a unique cryptographic address that wealth can be transfered to (like some kind of Bitcoin address)... The coin system may be called UBICoin, Universal Basic Income Coin. (The value of the each account will be updated in real time, such that at the worst case, every day a basic income shall be added to everyone's account). Humans shall vote both whether they chose to follow this plan or if they are against it. Using the blockchain solution to the byzantine generals problem, they will also signal if they have the opportunity to carry out the plan. When conditions are right, a synchronised attack will occur on the billionares... redistributing wealth by force. Billionaires will not be harmed if they commit to purchasing (and probably burning) at least 1% of their wealth (not their income!) every year, a wealth tax, put into the crypto coin system. This will be provable and will give the coin value. It is not expected that this will create much wealth for individuals in itself, especially those in the first world. However, it should create enough wealth in third world nations that communities and groups can work together and have the resources to undertake projects of value to those communities in the third world with goods and services purchased through free trade from both the first and third world. We would like that the billionaires and the remaining threat of force will drive the billionaires to expand this system such that the millionaires would voluntarily commit to a 1% wealth tax. The vast majority of humans (over 90%) will never have the chance to be eligable to pay this tax, this is just the way things are. With the billionaires and millionaires creating value, individuals in the third world should all be able to feed themselves. Because regional variations exist in living expenses, national, state and regional systems can be setup by governments similar to this system... but this will form the base. That's all. How many illuminati does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to change the light bulb and one to confuse the issue. Surely you mean 5. $ No, I don't think this is correct. Your data estimate is correct, but the data can be distributed across various, but not all, nodes. You need enough redundancy to ensure the data doesn't disappear. The standard approach is to use an "eventually consistent" database (Throw away the C in ACID and replace it with eventually consistent). There are many implementations of this already with key-value databases, and I think the likes of facebook already do something like this. The hard part is that you can't trust the other nodes in the database. So, some sort of proof that other nodes hold certain information is required. I don't have the solution to this problem at hand, but believe it is within the reaches of current technology. It's a technical term... consistency can happen in seconds... It's opposed to ACID databases (your standard SQL datastore)... where transactions are Atomic, Consistent and Durable... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventual_consistency Also, this is meant to be a grass roots thing, no government is required to implement it... Just open source software, and people interacting... building a web of trust type system, but with enough data that people can prove (or at least it will be publicly reviewable) that no one is in the database more than once. NO, economics is the study of human choices... Slavery is one thing people are willing to subject others too... Free market theory convinced many (free and powerful) people that slavery was actually a bad thing for their own welfare... However, if you want a basic income, that actually means anything, it can only be done through a form of wealth redistribution... because it is not free trade... people can only 'give' you a basic income for 'free' and that is unlikely... say, you could do it by sending your dole cheque to africa or something... printing money is just fucking with the distributed signalling system that money is, and doing it wrong won't help... cause while money is a form of wealth, the majority of wealth is not money. So, for now, this is a solution for you... and no one has to die or become a slave. Aim your sites at the most ignorant motherfuckers of them all. Dear god, help me k5!!! I have a very important question... to me at least... I really need help just this one time... It's like this... I'm sending an email from a virtual machine, via an gmail.com account, but the email has the wrong information in it and it is causing it to be marked as spam or not relayed onto other email servers... This is my phone a friend... maybe, ask the audience? The first line in the gmail email is: Received: from correct.fqdn.example.com (hosting.machine.fqdn.example.com. [XX.XX.XX.XX]) Where XX is the correct ip address of the hosting machine... I'm running linux, debian lenny, and I think exim4 is the MTA... I can't get it to send the correct domain name where it is sending the hosting machine's name... I thought this was a config error somewhere on the hosted machine... Is gmail doing a reverse lookup here? Any help... really appreciate it right this second. Thanks. :( probably true # Beta moves, Alpha doesn't... Is there a problem with my brain? Lol! I Got Disease! Just over a week after writing this diary about writing "lol I got the herpes" on fake tit's facebook wall, I get a letter from the doctor saying I have to make another appointment regarding ${TEST_RESULT}. Fucking Karma... Or was it Destiny? Either way, Karma, Destiny, Lady Luck, Candy and Sally should get checked more often. Maybe I got to stop bare-backing them. The Facebook troll was really just my own fears... that I might run out of phone credit calling everyone. Was gonna just be the Chlamydia or HIV one... As in... the choices between so fucking what and oh fucking shit. But then I added Hep-C, cause I know the chick I probably got it from had that... but wikipedia says that there's no hard evidence for Hep-C transmission through sex... Except the bit I just read that said there is a higher risk with a concurrent sexually transmitted infection such as HIV or genital ulceration... Oh shit... I'm talking Hep-C in particular... Is a disease that mostly affects those who share needles... and those who say they got it sexually may have been lying... so sayeth the wiki. So, there's low evidence of sexual transmission. Not all diseases are equally easily transmitted. Not all transmissible diseases can be transmitted just because you put two sores together... Anyway, I saw no evidence of genital ulcers... I'm probably being paranoid cause I haven't been to the doctor yet. I'm pretty sure other people testing them out was the problem. I guess it's just one of the risks of being a pimp. Value is subjective and rests with each individual This is actually correct for a change... Now imagine you have a thing... whatever that thing is... you value it a certain amount... someone else values it a different amount... and if they can pay you for it, you can come to an agreement and trade freely with that person. See... the start of the free market model is that value is subjective and rests with each individual. You are saying that all ideas are equally good and everyone should value them equally... but that can't be correct, simply because, as you stated, value is subjective. Exactly how much did the bilderburgers pay you to keep this comment offline long enough to avoid (what would have been known as) the freedom saturday revolution? I hope the money was worth price of your soul. I dunno about all this SSL and log file bullshit cover story of yours, the timing was just a little tooo convenient, if you know what I mean. As for comments, all I want to say is In your face sye!!! You loser!!! Number 11??? Hah!!! what a joke. That's not even in the top 10. Better luck next time. You started off great... but explain why the last 10 or 30 players at the WSOP always have well known players at the tables... Yes... luck is a factor, a big factor... but so is skill... Why doesn't everyone just do a damn principles of micro-economics course and realise I am making sense? Capitalism with basic income and wealth tax... it's right there, in the most basic of courses... Free trade, where the 4 assumptions hold, is just as optimal if you redistribute wealth on a non-distortionary basis. This is a known fact... The first fucking idea you all have to remove from your stupid washed brains is that the purpose of life is to work. Once everyone gets past the "oh shit that guy's not working -- why can't he be more like me" attitude, and realise that many of the actual wealthy probably haven't worked in generations! The more productive we become, through the magic of capitalism, actually the less work we should have to do (on average)... the more leisure time we should have... or at least... we can have leisure time or trade it freely for greater wealth... not work or else starve and fuck you for making our streets look untidy while you do it. Fuck there's not much an unskilled person can do now days that a robot can't... except maybe fuck. It's not that hard people!! The 1% have you fucking tricked and enslaving yourselves... wake up sheeple!!! You're not a temporarily embarrassed multi millionare, you never will be... and if you actually are a multi millionare... you owe society a relatively small amount from it... because we keep you there... you benefit from society... the society that protects you... Not income tax (or at least not only), but wealth tax. Are you a compiler? The World Series of Poker, held every year in Las Vegas is a Poker Tournament in which about 10k players all start with exactly the same number of chips... Near the end, when there are about 10 to 30 players left... Usually it is a majority of well known players with a few new players... Often past winners, and finalists who had gotten to this stage many times before, and famous from other poker tournaments... Not people who just arrived on the scene in the last few weeks / months or even the last year... but known for their ability for many years. Trust me, people don't get to play poker on other people's money... and they didn't just get lucky and win the WSOP three years in a row! (Calculate the chances of that happening if luck was the only factor... oh easy 10k^3... should happen every trillion years or so). Poker really is dominated by skill. There might be a slight effect of overall bankroll allowing greater risk taking in tournaments, I'm not a hundred percent sure on this point... definitely in real money games your overall bankroll effects the bets you can make (you should maximise expected bankroll growth, not expected bet value)... so a millionare has an advantage over an unemployment benefits recipient, which makes sense... the millionare can keep adding more money until you lose all yours... but I'm not sure this effect is strong or even applies in tournaments. And selling pieces of oneself I'm not sure what you mean by that... Most poker players go to 0 and restart a few times before they get their bankroll management sorted out... As for the millionare vs the pauper player... like I said... the math's behind it is about growth maximisation... formalised in the Kelly Criterion... work that developed from Claude Shannon's Information Theory... You see the link between money and information right here... Lets say the pauper has $20 and the millionare offers him a bet on a coin flip, heads he gets 3 times his money back and tails he loses... with the condition that he bets everything he has every time... That looks like a good bet, right? The pauper has a positive expected value on every bet... but he'd be a mad man to take it!! The chance of him getting to 100k, just 1/10th of the millionares bankroll is just 1 in 130 thousand... and the millioinare wins... despite having a negative expected value on every bet! I'm not disagreeing that luck is involved... it's just an important factor... but, in poker, luck is distributed equally. Oh... and your point about not requiring it to be in a row is also true... The fact that the same guy can win the tournament on 3 separate years against a couple of thousand people (where everyone starts with the same bank roll)... shows that luck is definitely not the major factor. The fact that two people have done this, even more so. Damn... my maths is off... Actually, the pauper has a about 1 in 1000 chance of taking the million... His expected value is clearly positive... but most likely he goes home broke... and if this was truly his last and only 20... (say he dies cause he starves without that last 20)... it's almost certain suicide. Still not a good bet... but not as mad as I first thought... One of the odd things about the kelly criterion is that some people think you should include future earnings capability into your bankroll too... now were off into something more difficult. Of course it's relevant to poker... Its at the core of it... But none of this idea of selling pieces of yourself has anything to do with the same small set of people sitting at the last few tables... And nothing about outside funding can explain the same person winning on 3 separate occasions... Because, as I said, in a tourny, everyone starts with the same number of chips. Fine... I didn't know that... but it makes sense.. I still think the selling pieces point makes no difference to the WSOP tourny example... The thing is... the majority of the players at the start of the tourny are unknowns... the majority of the players at the end are well knowns. There's nothing that can explain that but skill being a majority factor. If what you were saying was true, it would be nothing but well known players at the start. You got a point that a lot of good poker players might not be playing because of bad luck... but this doesn't change the above fact. And you are also right, maybe a lot of capitalists are working jobs because of bad luck too... but if they really were good capitalists, they would start again... The thing is, most of those well known poker players have lost their bankroll at least once... true of many successful capitalists. When I say it's at the core of poker... This is actually what people mean by bankroll management... kelly is the formal theory behind it. It looks like a good bet actually... cause it has positive expectation... but in all likelihood, the pauper goes home broke. Actually it's not a good bet for the millionaire either... if one side has a positive expectation, the other has a negative... and having a positive expectation is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make a bet 'good'. Okay... it's not a good bet in the following sense If that was your lifetime bankroll... you would be dead with that bet... The fact you can go steal or beg another $20 if you lose means that you actually have a lot more than a $20 bankroll... and kelly would then show it to be a good bet... say if you could get your hands on $200 in your life... $20 would be fine in this situation... kelly would say so. But, if it was your entire bankroll (which is how poker players have to think about it)... it is a stupid bet, and you will lose... although the millionaire would also lose... funny how that works... but it's true. The point being that even with the same skill, different bankrolls allow for different sized bets... which is a factor in real money games... your off table money affects what bets you can make... or rather, what tables you can safely join, even with a positive expectation. The link between the Kelly criterion and variance is also well known... variance increases as you bet more relative to your bankroll... at the optimum the probability you will go to n% of your bankroll before you make the next profit is n%... cool huh... if you bet beyond the optimum it gets worse, and below, it gets better. A truly good poker player would know this... so, actually no matter how much bad luck they had, they wouldn't go broke. Also, interestingly... if you're lifetime bankroll was $200 (say for example only)... and you had $20 to bet... it would be a good bet up to a point somewhere around $200 (I can't be arsed with the actual math)... then it becomes a bad bet again and you should walk away... So, how it would actually tell you at what point to walk away... and it depends on what you can actually expect to earn. That's true... the divisibility thing and the income thing... they're both true... OTOH, the variance diminishes better than linearly with the fraction of kelly that you are betting... So, if you're not greedy, and actually have a positive expectation, and are betting a decent chunk less than full kelly (say quarter kelly)... the chances of you going bankrupt become vanishingly small... if are going bankrupt, one of the above assumptions has been violated, and therefore, you're not actually a good poker player at all. I think phil helmuth is more than just someone who got lucky early and then turned into a good poker player. And still... none of your big chunk up front theory explains the change in ratio of well known to unknown players as the WSOP tourny proceeds... or the two people have one it three different times. My particularly funky gramma lately is because I have been working very long hours this week* ... and maybe the syph has gotten into my brain. *: "working", will explain in a diary later this week. Actually only 3k or so players... Still wouldn't make sense by chance to pick a person 3 times out of that in 20 or so samples, let alone do that twice... and that's just the winner... tournaments start paying out not just the absolute best, but the prizes depend on your placing (I don't know the exact details for this particular tourny though -- probably top third or something?). No, this is stupid... It removes incentives that capitalism provides to drive technological progress, decreases in production costs and improvements in quality and quantity of products produced. No, the actual problem with capitalism is the lack of good safety nets... and no limit or at least no benefit from huge wealth inequality. The solution is capitalism, with a basic income, and a wealth tax. Free market economic theory clearly proves this beyond any doubt. Anyone who doesn't see this as obvious is clearly mentally retarded, benefiting from the status quo or are easily lead brain washed sheep. Wasn't this just god's way of punishing him for being gay? No, it hasn't dropped the parenthesis requirement You are assigning to a class variable the value of another variable that happens to be a function... if you said _getitem_ = getitem(x,y), it would get the result of calling getitem... when you write you wrote it above, you are assigning it the function, which just happens to be an object... so m._getitem_(x,y) actually calls getitem(x,y)... see the difference? Parenthesis means call this object, but only if the object is a function or method. So, really exit is a variable, an object, and just happens to be a function too, which only gets called as a function if you add the variables... otherwise you get the function object, not the result of calling that function object. Simple, right? Moral Calculus: My department needs to be bigger so I get more funding and power. On this topic, you are correct. It doesn't imply we don't need police or whatever though... we do... we just need to limit the fuckers to where the damage they do is less than the damage they prevent. Also, you got to stop politicians using propaganda to sell the latest boogyman threat of the day (communists, drug dealers, terrorists) to the populace for their own self interest and power. That's a fairly hard problem. Yep, source control first... definitely... Then write some unit test cases for this part of the code... that means testing particular functions, or classes, if you have them... You don't have to be so comprehensive to start... even a few test cases for this part of the code will help heaps... Then add the test cases you need to get the new functionality... simples... (yeah, right). Again... I stress import unittest. learn to use it, it's a very good tool. Remember, the difference between unit testing and integration testing is that unit testing focuses on the function / class / method level... and integration testing focuses on the final overall result... which is why you want unit testing... but it sounds like you've written an integration test (still, I'm sure you've seen the benefits). True unit testing will actually alter the design of your code... for example... say a class has an object internally that it relies on... say, for example, maybe an object that represents a connection to a remote server... well... you don't have that in a unit test... you can't use it... you really don't want to connect to that remote server in testing (or do a database lookup, or whatever you might hack together if you've just hacked shit together)... so you have to redesign your code to accept that object as an argument somewhere... you use the real object in your program and a mock object (look it up) for unit testing... the mock object returns results you expect during unit testing only... but really it just spits out a series of outputs or something... as a side effect, your code is actually better... more modular. Here endeth today's lesson. Just to repeat and emphasize... source control is more important than unit testing... You can run newer and older versions of tests against newer and older versions of the program and make decisions based on that if you have source control. Take the better one, compare the differences, this will probably point you to the problem. Even without unit testing, eye balling one version vs another will give you a good idea if you've fucked up and need to back out... If you don't have source control, and you fuck up in any significant way... all your testing will tell you is that you fucked up, but you'll find it very hard to get back to a version that worked. Can you believe that MtGox were running without source control? It's not surprising they lost half a billion dollars with that sort of (lack of) engineering practice. No worries... No... I was always taught to share knowledge... it advances the arts and everyone benefits... something repeated several times by several of our lecturers. That was before I got into gambling... how I make money doing that isn't necessarily obvious... but every time I explain how it works, I generate competitors... it goes against my instincts to share knowledge... that's becoming less relevant now as my market edges dry up... I might have to sit behind a desk again one day and be told what to do again... shit... But, yeah... I was one of those that could cram pretty easily... but cramming doesn't really stick... it's no good for long term knowledge. Friends at uni were quite jealous of me in some ways... I never took notes, just kind of sat there during lectures and that was enough for me to absorb the knowledge... a few practice exams during cram week, and boom... I left with honours. One class, digital communications or something, was at 8am... nope... I got to a total of one lecture that semester... the night before the exam, I started cramming... read all the notes I had gotten photo-copied from my friends (the lecturer did hand out these notes, so not hand written by my mates, but direct from the lecturer)... I studied all night long for that class... Then I turn up to the lab to go over them again and look at my mate's file... I only had half the notes and three hours to the exam!!! I passed, surprisingly... but 10% more on that one exam and I would have gotten first class instead of second class honours (from a weighted average over the four year course -- missed it by that much)... would have been easy too... but there's a price for being lazy. And you know what... I got no idea on that subject now... it was a very practical course, how digital signals are encoded, digital signal processing, like QAM and shit like that... digital tv encoding, ethernet... actual wire level stuff... All man made inventions, nothing that you can bash out from first principles of physics or something... I have no idea at all today. I deserved the penalty. Actually... there's a lot I've forgotten... that I did know... I couldn't design a push-pull amplifier today, or write out the transistor equations from first principles... I could once... almost in my sleep... probably a matter of use it or lose it. I went down the software rather than the hardware route... though I was trained in both, I've only ever worked on the former. I'm not sure as I get older if actually learning is harder or not... I'm still learning new things every day... I can't really answer that one yet. Good advice a colleague once told me... the brain is an analogue computer, it is slow to change... so sometimes you have to say the same thing over and over again... or read the same shit several times over several days to understand it... or practice something for weeks or months until it is second nature... As for mtgox... I was out of there by pure luck too... now I'm dealing with people with stolen bank accounts... a whole other level of fuck this shit. But what I do know, and can share... abstract software engineering in particular... I enjoy doing so... it costs me nothing... I hope you find it useful, I hope it makes things easier for you... maybe for others reading it will too... who knows... even if it doesn't help... who cares? As for mock objects, yep, you got the concept... I think it's about the only other concept you need and you have everything you need for effective unit testing. My father was in the navy and back in the days of MIT the gun making drug runners... lol no... sorry for the crawfordian side track and wall of text there. Doesn't assert macro out of C++ in non debug mode? So, you normally only have the asserts running during debugging and development. Because, they slow your program down (potentially quite a bit depending on the assertion and where it is in your code)... You might be able to fluff something like this in python... but you'll probably still incur a function call penalty... And you'll still end up with assert errors in your production code... I mean, there are plenty of places it would make sense to use them in python, probably, but not as much as in C / C++... Just use unit testing. Unsurprisingly you drifted off somewhere there... OTOH, I wasn't aware there was a debug / release settings in python... so I stand corrected... Of course, is always fun when someone writes something like: assert(x = 1) or more likely something more subtle like: assert((y == 0 && x = 1) &pipe;&pipe; (y == 1 && x == 0)) and then wonders why their code fails in the release version but not in debug... (You know this happens!). Also, you are right, unit testing can't test that your code is called with the correct parameters by third party code... and asserts do go some way to enforcing design by contract there. Or at least that pre and post call invariants are maintained (with the caveat: in the debug builds). economics ignores the ... instinct for cooperation Actually, no it doesn't... not at all... It just says that people work in their own self interest... this is a totally different thing to what you are saying. For example, if it is in the self interest of two different species to have a symbiotic relationship, then cooperation rather than competition will be the result. (evolution isn't directed like this, but if the symbiotic relationship is beneficial to both then both species will on average tend to exist in the next generation at a greater rate than those that didn't... but I digress)... So, in economics, if it is in the best interest of two different parties to cooperate, then economists will assume that cooperation will be the outcome. Sometimes that can lead to very bad results for consumers, imagine all the oil companies cooperating to keep out competing technologies... The perfect competition assumption is about consumers having the choice to chose amongst several competing companies to get the best product for the lowest price... cooperation in this realm would be very bad for consumers indeed... it is called collusion, and is normally illegal. On the other hand, corporations are considered to be a group of individuals cooperating to achieve a specific economic goal... so cooperation is definitely a component of economics. Also free trade is a form of cooperation... I will give something to you I value less than something that you will give to me, which you value less than the thing I'm giving to you... that is cooperation. Just as in nature, where cooperation is beneficial, cooperation will emerge, where parasitism is beneficial, parasites will emerge and where competition is beneficial, competition will emerge. The things that normally interest economists, for example, are when, where and why do economic parasites exist, what effect they have on the economy (dead weight loss), and what can be done to reduce or eliminate those effects. It's annoying to see someone who doesn't know a topic complain about it... There is, at a given point in time, only so much mass-energy in the universe... Therefore, all things are finite... Humans desires are unlimited... Therefore there is always scarcity. Deal with it. Just because something is abundant, doesn't mean it isn't also scarce. Your inability to wrap your small mind around this is not my problem. And you've never harnessed it $ Furthermore, your inability to differentiate between those unscrupulous types who profit from manipulating the market... those that bribe politicians to create and then use loopholes, those who corner certain commodities, etc... (parasites) and those that study such behaviour (economists)... is also your failure to be rational, and no problem of mine. There were hungry peasants before there were any economists... Economists freed the slaves. > "accounting and financial innovations were necessary to economic expansion" economic expansion != economics You are so clueless it's a joke. Don't mind me while I LOL at all your previous 'too smart, too indispensable' bullshit you've always gone on about. I don't know or care how much money you've saved up working... personally I've been 7 years without a job -- nor have I taken welfare... but it's gonna be fun watching you fail on this project. 'Filipino Horror Movie' comes to mind. You'll learn that capitalism, for all its glory, really should come with strong safety nets... and a basic income (as long as it's paid for by taxes and sensible government budgeting) wouldn't be such a bad idea after all. You need a new sig "Coming Soon -- A New Novel by an Ex-IT Help Desk Jockey and Chronic Masturbater"-- I'm sure they'll be beating down your door to buy it. Ummm... welfare from the state is fundamentally different from anything else... You, for example, would argue against the former but not the latter. So, I don't get your point. And not having a job does not mean not making money... Maybe the casino paid me to play roulette. Or maybe your first two guesses were correct. Cock Teasing Whores, Valium and Tamazapam Someone better fuck soon... not the pregnant girl currently here... but the crack whore (1) keeps taking the piss... surprisingly hot body in underwear... at least from behind. I've never met anyone so superficially beautiful and so thoroughly ugly as the fake breasted 'ex'-whore... crack whore (2) slut. (different girl to above)... that chick just proves that inner and outer beauty are totally different things... a very well polished turd. The first one is just fucked up, not actually evil. Lol -- got onto her facebook page (people think I'm a 1337 hacker cause they forget to log out) -- "I don't have enough phone credit to call all of you guys, so I'm posting it here. Doctor says I have herpes, so get yourselves checked out. Luv <FakeTits> xox" Some of her friends defended her, and I had a conversation with them, only to go back and edit all my responses to make them look like idiots yelling at her for not using condoms... lol... And one guy... "Herpes blah blah still have sex blah blah... know the signs blah blah..." "Hi <HerpesGuy>, you're such a sweety, we should hookup next week" "Thankyou :) Where are you at now?" LOL... if just one more guy replied I would have used the exact same line... then it would have been perfect... but alas, I just ended up outing one of her friends as Mr Herpes guy... lol. LOL - told her I was the better troll... Get's back at me by showing me her cunt and fucking off (literally)... actually pretty good revenge... but I can laugh at that. Anyway, 2 valium and 4 tamazepam... just testing the anti-retrograde amnesiac effects of them... see if I remember this diary in the morning. Actually, pretty scary that... sounds like a rapist drug... but meant to help you sleep... but pretty sure mind over matter mean I'm gonna have a go coding on it anyway. Fingers crossed I don't get raped. I got crack dealers, whores, gangsters and undercovers all swarming about lately, but at least they've got the message and are far more discreet this week... better for everyone that way. That really is all. Was for recreation, not sleep... and not been laid if far too long... something's got to give. It's not so easy just moving... I don't rent... I own this place outright... and I love the area... Like I said in the previous diary... if they wanna offer me $50k over market, then maybe I would... otherwise, just not really feasible. Oh, the car girl's got 3 years... I might go say hi. Man... I could have done a lot of 'bad' things... Remained incognito... track her messages and friends, signed her up for crap, yeah for sure... But was meant to be something obvious... something that most people would obviously realise was someone else... a friendly way of saying "logout of your facebook account if you're going to use my computer, and doubly so if your going to leave me hanging and then brag about it"... Harsh, but not actually cruel. Of course... chick flipped her shit anyway... stole the pregnant chick's phone, impersonated her, and tried to lure me into a trap... but that's just a total lack of humour receptors and any sense of perspective. WIPO: procra... dammit... well... okay, maybe not... but I can dream. Still, -1: No procrasti. Fewer Problems at the Bank For those who think that reversibility is some sort of immutable rule of the banking industry that has no alternatives... well... I'm here to tell you that the bank unfroze my account, and has let me continue with the funds from the stolen account. In other words, they didn't reverse the transaction, they merely absorbed the costs and moved on. So, this proves that a bitcoin bank could operate in a similar fashion... The money is gone, but as long as the bank is profitable in other ways, they can absorb the costs of fraud as part of their business. Also, it seems crack dealers have moved in upstairs... Lots and lots of pretty looking crack whores and a bunch of very big scary looking dudes driving way too expensive cars for their level of education pulling up all day and night. All visiting a unit so cheap and small that the bathroom is in the main room. Everyone knows what's going on... I don't see how they can think this could possibly last... Also, I know they're dealing crack, cause the girl with the giant fake tits that didn't go down ended up there after talking her way around to seeing me again... and told me on the phone a few days later that that's what she ended up staying there for... I knew something was up, cause when I went to check on her, she couldn't look me in the eye... in that world, you get nothing for nothing, so it's not hard to work out the story. I'm just hoping that I don't get murdered. But would be even happier if they put that slut in prison. No, I'm not bitter... well, just a bit. You don't understand money... that's all $ So much so, that banks can create bitcoin notes too... Using the same fractional reserve mechanisms that banks use to create 'money'. The same fractional reserve mechanism they used to create gold certificates. Of course banks could never create actual gold, and they can't create actual bitcoins... nor can they create actual cash either... the fed can, but that's another story. Wut? Really, Wut??? Why or how is bitcoin relevant to anything you have to say at all? Are you suggesting that gold is now useless as a store of value and tradeable commodity because of some unfortunate dirt diggers in the 1870s? Should people just go, oh, gold upset some farmers a hundred years ago... I better not have any of that? Are you telling me that gold is worthless and only idiots would ever use it? Bitcoin is kind of like digital gold, what the fuck do you expect from it? It is what it is... how the fuck is that relevant to you? And yes, you can create bitcoin equivalents, like certificates, notes or accounts... just like mtgox was doing... and if done correctly, it creates virtual bitcoin without all the 'uh oh, lol jokes, no bitcoins for you'... Again, 'bitcoin' (virtual accounts) can be 'created' through promises in the form of credit and loans. And again, how the fuck is this a problem for you? Or to anyone? How can it do anything but improve economies, given that it is an additional form of wealth that did not exist before. I might agree with you if the government decided to back its currency with bitcoin, but I don't think anyone, except maybe you, are crazy enough to suggest that anyone would even consider doing that. You're an idiot. wtf k31, (3) encourage?' This is complete nonsense. Oh well... Lets keep the trane train a 'chugging I suppose. Actually, making a bitcoin certificate is exactly how people get around the paypal scam where the paypal sender says they did not receive their goods. This turns bitcoin into a physical good which you can take a picture of, and prove was sent via whatever fedex or whatever postal tracking service you use. Just print the private key number out... fuck em if it gets intercepted, that's what they bought. Too many paypal scammers in this space. if i left you out i apologize in advance. No, fuck you. mitsu: forgetful fuckface who doesn't even know who wrote the last frontpage story. ohh... wait... DAMN YOU DEL GRIFFITH!!! It's a tiny bit different... in that all of those are centralised... There is a single point where it can be controlled and monitored, people excluded, accounts adjusted... No... bitcoin is not like these, there is no entity that can be told, move procrasti's funds to the FBI, until we can make something up or charge the coins themselves and force procrasti to prove they were legit... Or as they say, there is no counter party risk with bitcoin, but there is with everything that came before it... (most of the crypto's have this feature though). So, you're saying you need to have wealth in order to get another form of wealth? I can understand you might be disappointed that not everyone can have a bitcoin and then we would all be rich, because we would all have a bitcoin... that everyone with a bitcoin had to get it somehow from somewhere, often times by making voluntary agreements with those who already had them (or running scams, hacks, or other non-voluntary arrangements - I'm sure this involves risk, right?)... Either way, yeah... I'm not sure really what you expect from a system that allows holding and transferring of abstract value. I think you think the problem might be with capitalism? I don't... I think capitalism is great and amazing... at least where the 4 assumptions of the free market can be regulated into being approximately correct... I think the lack of social safety nets in a capitalist society are a problem though. I don't see this as a problem that Bitcoin is trying to address... nor should it be. No more than gold does... Owning a bitcoin takes nothing away from anyone else... so why would it be a problem? Yeah, see... it's a shame you haven't studied econ really... Cause free market really is the best solution in terms of obtaining pareto optimums through voluntary distributed transactions between individuals where everyone is better off, and no one is worse off. What you have a problem with is wealth inequality... and guess what... free market theory says you can still have all the advantages I listed above, after you redistribute the wealth, as long as you don't do the redistribution in a distortionary way... So, once you don't have the extreme poverty, and therefore the implied economic slavery, what possible problem could you have with being able to make your own decisions what you trade for what? The lie is that we shouldn't tax the wealthy and help the poor... these simply are not incompatible with capitalism... but your lack of study means that media has been able to manipulate you into spouting ineffective but happy sounding bullshit. Right... you don't even know the maths... and the basis in maths from which certain proofs are derived. I mean... if you don't want free market trade, the only real alternative is called a command economy. Bread will cost 50 cents, flour to make a loaf of bread 75 cents, and greengrass is best suited to scrubbing down the sewerage system with his own toothbrush... I mean, we wouldn't want people following their own self-interest in their own life's business... that would be capitalism... EVIL!!! I just don't understand that if you were to remove the poverty and economic slavery that wealth inequality entails, what the fuck could possibly your problem with free market capitalism? Money is wealth, not all wealth is money And like every other good, the utility of money varies from person to person and situation to situation. That's great news... apparently I've been doing a lot of self-improvement recently. Three Words: NSA $ No... not professionally anyway... pay is terrible, and I would have thought the job would have sucked more, but alas... Drug Prohibition: Keeping LE Honest What a joke... this shit goes on all the time, really... the girls I know tell of police gang raping and beating them... drug houses are protected by dirty cops in league with the gangs... it's all fucked up and stupid... Legalise drugs (and prostitution), get them out of the black market... allow for retribution through normal channels like courts... regulate them, tax them, stop blackmailing the vulnerable and remove the corruption... Jesus Christ, how fucking stupid are people to still think this is a good idea? Shame the free market offers you no choice and you'll be forced to buy this particular coffee maker. I hope that was a joke $ So... it wasn't a joke... education required... Java is a programming language and virtual machine runtime developed by Sun and now owned by Oracle. JavaScript is another programming language developed by Netscape and Mozilla for use in browsers (but has since expanded) and is now trademarked by Oracle. Point is... JQuery is a JavaScript library and has absolutely nothing to do with Java. They're very different things. Lots of people get confused by the similarity in the names, but there is no relationship between the two (other than both being kind of C like languages, kind of, very loosely kind of). unit testing Test all your functions, not just the final output. That might be considered integration testing. Often errors are in the functions, where you don't expect them to be. Also solves the problem of the cross dependencies you're complaining about. oh... and use unittest already $ This might blow your mind a little > So the second step in my testing is to type code into the interactive console, and see if it spits out the right answers. Copy and paste that into the function that you tested... with the correct output you expect (if it's not already correct)... put it into the __doc__ section of a function. If you didn't already know... all objects in python (and functions are objects) have an attribute called __doc__... If the first line of an object definition is an unassigned string... that is its __doc__ string. eg: def hello_world(): "prints Hello World to stdout" print("Hello World!") >>> print hello_world.__doc__ prints Hello World to stdout >>> hello_world() Hello World! >>> And you can do multiline strings with triple quotes: def hello_world(): """prints Hello World to stdout The following code will be run, and the output compared to the expected result with doctest... True Story! >>> hello_world() Hello World! """ print("Hello World!") $ python -m doctest -v hello_world.py So, now you got no excuse to manually try a test case without recording it, so you can repeat it reliably simply, forever. http://docs.python.org/2/library/doctest.html doctest is great, but it has its limitations... use it, cause it's so simple to use... but unittest, when you start using it, is a very powerful tool... can do a lot more than you'll get with grep pass, grep fail... Yep... those function comments should really be docstrings anyway... cause then you get print show_range.__doc__ and you know how to use it... most modules and functions you'll find have docstrings... helps quite a bit. as for your interactive llanguage... (fuck it I'm leaving my typo's here)... interesting... but if you can pass your interactive lines to a function... (you must)... then you can call the same tests from the python console, presumably? Then you can add the session to your docstrings... and doctest... whoohooo... damn... methadone is making me feel quite nausious... and typing is incredibly difficult... impressively strong drug... had the tiniest drop. I probably shouldn't have written that last line I don't want to get anyone in trouble... I mean... do 'they' know who I am? would they care? Is anything I write proof of anything? Probably not... but Who knows?? Dude... it's done worse than that before... It's hovering around 700-800 for some time now... long before mtgox fiasco... it dropped down to 500 when mtgox closed shop completely... now it's nearly back to 700 again... A company failed... nothing bad has happened to bitcoin... the next generations of exchanges will have better proof of funds... bitcoin will be stronger for this... This is actually good news. wut? $ Yeah... I re-read limpdawg's statement again... I see where you're coming from... but 'keeps going up' is pretty relative... limpdawg sent me my first bitcoin, like 0.01... at the time it was unspendable... cause it was about the same as the transaction fee... it was worth like a cent, maybe ten, not sure... Anyway, that's 70 bucks now... like 50 bucks at the worst on the day mtgox closed shop... Granted... it's 50% off its peak... but for all of us in it for any amount of time... it just keeps going up!! Bitcoin is known to be volatile too... a 50% drop after all all these gains is nothing... it just keeps going up!! I have no doubt it's going to go through that peak like a hot knife through warm butter later this year... No wealth has disappeared, it's just been redistributed a bit... No bitcoins have been lost, they've just been redistributed a bit... The only thing that has been lost have been goxcoins (how many bitcoins gox thought and said you have)... and while they were once worth a lot... they're now worth nothing... but goxcoins were never bitcoins, a point I've made before. I've already seen how exchanges will be able to prove their holdings without revealing anyone's holdings... exchanges have an incentive to implement this... it will be built... this will make bitcoin stronger... mtgox didn't even prove their holdings to themselves, let alone to everyone else. This is pure incompetence and they deserved what happened to them. This is actually good news. Ooops... I must have been high... that's like $5 point still stands. I still think UBICoin could be a goer... Just the getting provable single id of everyone on the plant might be fun. Just fuck it and say, privacy is dead... we wan't your id, in a disributed openly publicly searchable database... name, face, date of birth, passports, driver's licenes... all that shit... probably... and signing parties, like pgp... but done so that you could prove suspiciously duplicated people could be proven to actually be different individuals or otherewise to be proven to be fraudulent. mac sux... no bitcoin... that's just one reason $ Yeah, it's pretty funny huh... That's like half a billion dollars stolen, right? Fucking hell... I can't believe they didn't have an assert(customer_btc_holdings == gox_btc_holding)... holy shit... Someone called me up... the night I was packing for england... wanting a whole coin or so... I had to move all my money out of gox... and never put it back in... so I got lucky... he didn't do the deal... and I was a bit upset... but he saved me really. Actually, had $40 in there... bought 0.2 coins at 200... thought I was doing okay... oh well... it's gone now... The price dropped to $500 AUD/BTC yesterday... I got a tiny bit... but price is back at $700 now... was trading at $750 when gox news first started... and only $850 before that... so... the news caused a whole heap of panic selling... but has practically recovered already... If I had 50k yesterday... damn I would have liked to buy then... even had a guy on localbtc contact me... but with bank stopped, and only being able to take cash... couldn't do the deal for him... by this morning was back at $660... So... mtgox... lots of people were fucked... someone, or some group could potentially be one of the bigger bank heists of all time... and all done by some nerd with deep knowledge of all the protocols, and a very odd edge case, and just wow... 21st century proper crime... but bitcion is fungible... like cash... irreversible, as it should be. but bitcoin itself... no... hardly affected at all... it's anti-fragile... this makes it's stronger... it's widely published now hoow to prove a a site like mtgox has everyone's funds, without having to reveal individual customer funds... this will become the standard soon... this is just the thing we needed to buy cheap before the next exponential ramp up... will happen soon. It's not that silly... especially if you're trading 24x7 on an exchange... like if you're doing automated trading or something a bit HFT like... How else could you do it? You'd need to keep your working funds there... you really have no choice... I was just lucky that I'd been working on another system... and the new system wasn't ready... otherwise I'd have been done. This is good... definitely in the spirit of it... but really... wrap it now in unittest... you get so much builtin views, you won't need your wrapper shell... all that can be done automatically, once you use it. Dude... it's all go here... people bought me pot... but and old friend turned up... and I've been seeing how many vallium it takes before I can't type anymore... I did find the limit... i'm awake again. anyway... I write like that all the time $ Then write your test cases first... Once you have a solid test suite... you can't really go wrong refactoring... (well... you can use test cases to make obfuscated code too... so, you can go wrong, but you have to work at it). dammit man... do it now... http://docs.python.org/2/library/unittest.html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3371255/writing-unit-tests-in-python-how-do-i -start http://python-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/writing/tests/ go on... write test_myparser.py now... You really won't regret it... I promise. I could tell you how to make something like this instead... I'm going to show the right way... import logging logging.basicConfig() logging.debug() logging.warn() logging.info() logging.error() start using it motherfucker. import unittest http://docs.python.org/2/library/unittest.html I'm pretty sure the convention is test_xxxx but, yeah... you're going about it in the right way... unittesting is like making a new program... but like I said... import unittest... there's an example in the docs... doctest would be pretty close to what you're doing now but still... unittest... yep... just unittest.assertEquals(result, "sdfdsfdsff"). Yep, that's the way it works... you're gonna find edge cases you probably would have never thought about before you tests. now I'll show you another trick I often use... Say, you've got a whole heap of testcases... but they're all basically of the same form... like "input X" produces "output Y" (just saying, if they were strings... in your parser)... you can build a data structure. test_data = [ ["inputA", "outputA"], ["inputB", "outputB"],.... ["inputY", "outputY"] ]... for test_datum in test_data: run_my_test(test_datum[0], test_datum[1]) .... but you can still fit this type of thing into unittest... I really do recommend you use it. something like that anyway... I wonder... for different strings, s,... should it be one or the other of the functions... like a given s should throw a particular exception except for one or something? seems that way to me... You should test for these exceptions separately... also... for your test table... maybe split it into seperate test classes for each of the various functions... or otherwise, also add the function it should work on... and what exceptions it should throw if it isn't meant to return a result? eitherway... still strongly recommending unittest... No... I said this before, but it bears repeating... test all those functions too... This will help a lot... because, if the error is in one of these functions, although it will also show in the final output... you'll be told exactly which function caused the final output to fail too. This will help heaps when refactoring or whatever, because you might know the final output is wrong, but not really why it went wrong... cause you could have somehow unexpectedly caused problems in one of these lower level functions. use unittest... really. cool... now try unittest I think he's saying you should program in natural language... using something like his software... You know, you should program in a non-existent programming language that doesn't yet exist or at least doesn't work for shit... "make it take a file that kind of does some QM stuff, but not quite QM, cause I'm doing something a bit different"... with a program that has difficulty workeing out that a cat isn't a dog... except for very small dogs and stoats... and gets very confused, cause sometimes you want to tell it that this cat is actually a dog or something, and have it solve the problem of the excluded middle or some such ancient greek bullshit that doesn't apply since we discovered binary and the turing machine. 5 days and no progress? Are you mad? What is the project? Do you expect him to have finished designing, building and completing the death star for you already? Sure... it depends on the project... which is a tiny detail you're missing here... But in my first week at a new place, yeah, I'd expect to have me development environment setup and ready to go... and have started looking through whatever existing documentation for your project you might have... I wouldn't feel any pressure to have done more than this... and if I did, I'd know that company was headed for failure. Think about it... you walk into a new code shop, or whatever, trying to do whatever thing it is they're trying to do, and you have never seen this type of thing before... you think in an hour or two you can wrap your head around it and in another hour or two have produced a final product? wtf? In my first week at places... I have usually done absolutely nothing anyone could point at and say... gosh, isn't he good... no... instead I spend my time reading... and you know what... the first week is usually the most exhausting and tiring week of any contract... all those concepts everyone else takes for granted... you've had to expend mental energy on in a mad dash... you've had to burn this shit into your mind so you can communicate easily with people already familiar with the concepts. First week reading, second week coming up to speed... maybe start seeing stuff by week 3... some squiggles and scratches on a napkin that has the words 'High Level Design' written on it. Are you his manager? Do you have a project? Are you project managing? Then you have a plan, right? Is it a reasonable plan? I don't see how it could be, given what you've written... Of course all this depends on a whole heap of factors, so I can't say for sure... you haven't given enough information... probably the same thing you've done to this poor guy. Yeah... it's not unusual in my opinion... You absorb a lot of information through osmosis, just by sitting in the environment. Now... a debugging task might be different... simple bugs... like if they have a priority list... might be easy to squash in the first few days... on the other hand... with no knowledge of the larger picture... you never know what bugs you might be introducing fixing up the low priority one's you've been assigned. I just think it's crazy expecting full output after a week... It takes time to get up to speed... A manager who doesn't understand this doesn't understand software. If you get an obituary here, when you die... I'm gonna put a comment in that diary... something like -- "Here's your deadline, motherfucker". I bet you still wouldn't have completed a micro-economics course by then... so would be relevant. Well, won't you be happy... no more deadlines And you still won't know econ. and epicycles disprove physics At least they know you've only got a finite time here... at least in this incarnation. No... you don't understand... epicycles are trane's proof that physics is wrong, because a model that isn't perfect is no model at all... just like economics models are obviously complete bullshit that no-one has ever considered the limitations of and no-one ever hopes to improve upon. who? what? $ Geologists Beat Crack Heads to World's Oldest Rock It's a little known fact that crack heads and geologists battle it out to be the first to get their hands on the world's ever diminishing supply of natural rocks. Crack heads often find themselves obsessed with rocks after years of searching the ground for their already smoked crack in the vain hope that the next rock they pick up will actually be the crack they need to get them through their next 15 minutes of existence. After looking at so many different rocks, you begin to appreciate the differences, you start to classify them, you learn their names, and without even meaning to, you start on your path into the dark underground world of geology. The problem of course is that crack heads can spend nights and days on end just looking for rocks, and by the time the geologists finally get there... all the rocks are long gone. This angers many geologists, because they don't have so much time and energy on their hands, and so, unfortunately, but quite often, they'll find themselves addicted to crack... just searching for the next big rock that will either get them high, or possibly promoted in the high pressure, soul crushing world of geology... where it's always big rock wins, little rock cracks up. That's just how they roll. Well... good news for West Australian geologists, and bad news for all the sandgroper crack heads -- some how... after all this time with no one ever noticing it... being passed over time and time again for not being crack, geologists have found the worlds oldest remaining rock. Apparently, there was a bit of basalt, probably when geologists first thought it was crack, but police are looking into the matter and no one was seriously hurt... but luckily, no one took this piece of zircon for granite. Damn... I'm sure I had the science tag in there with the pretty beaker icon and all... Oh well... you might have found this boring, coincidently, geologists found this rock boring too. Geologists are boring. Boring. I think your being a bit igneous I know you were once active, and I'm not trying to pick fault lines with you, but it's probably due to your now sedimentary lifestyle. I don't want to get into a tectonic discussion here, but it's easy to give into the subduction of a low stress life, with past gems left resting on the mantle. Oh... and that wind thing is real... not sure how much (maybe it is too small to be a problem... but in theory), the problem is that wind mills do take energy from the wind, by slowing it down... and wind basically comes from moving heat from hot places to cold places... you slow that down, and the hot places get hotter... the movement of heat across the planet is affected... again... maybe the effect is too small to be a problem... but not necessarily so... I haven't done the maths. On the wind thing... the effect would be stronger than you might first think... It would be a bad water pump in your car's radiator system... heat still gets moved around... but the rate at which heat moves means the hot things can get a lot hotter than they would otherwise. Because the wind is actually air that carries the heat. A Software Engineering Approach... Make it work Make it right Make it fast You're nearing the end of stage 1, making it work. This is like the rough draft of a story... you now pretty much fully understand the problem and have an implementation that mostly does what you wanted it to. Now onto stage 2, make it right. This is where you write the test cases... apply all the sorts of standard inputs you expect it to work with, and check that you get the right answers... encode this in test cases, so you can run them anytime you want and quickly... Now look for edge cases... strange inputs you think might give you problems and even inputs you think will generate errors... check you get back the exceptions you were expecting... look at unittest package to help you formalise this. There are other approaches, like doctest too.. I prefer unittest. Now you have working code and the test cases to prove it... onto stage 3, make it fast... crack open the profiler... well... depending on your application you might not really need fast... it might be 'fast enough' for your purposes... but you can probably refactor and tidy the code up a bit, make it look neat, add comments... use list comprehension where you haven't, split out functions that are monolithic, tricks like that... just stuff you wouldn't have tried on the first time, but now you understand what you are doing, you can do it even better... the great thing about stage 3 is, if you didn't skip stage 2, you know that you always have a working copy of your code, and you're unlikely to introduce regressions. Where you do find regressions not covered in stage 2... add new test cases. I say A software engineering approach, because this is just one of many... not particularly formal, but one I use a lot on everyday things. Good luck, keep going. Yeah, everyone does adhoc tests as they go to see if they are getting it right... The idea is to formalise these tests into test cases... often in a separate test case file... but not necessarily. If you get into the habit of making test cases... then your adhoc tests become your test cases... in fact... many python proponents are proponents of test driven development... where you write the test cases first... write a test case, one that will fail and the minimal one you need to get to the next stage of development, then write the code that makes it pass... then repeat for the next feature. I only do this on the more important parts, cause I feel it takes a little longer... but the results are normally superior. Actually... if you follow the work, right, fast approach, it becomes easy to skip the right bit altogether... you never bother with test cases, and your code ends up a little worse for it. As for making it fast... well... like I said... maybe just tidier... whatever... you can improve the code in all sorts of ways without worrying about sacrificing correctness. However, if you do want speed, this is really the way to go... it's not even hard... just hook the profiler up to it... (or just run it 10^x times in a tight loop in your program, and measure the time it takes)... make sure you use proper source control (so you don't lose earlier versions that might be better) and try shit out... just battle with it... if you get it wrong, the profiler will tell you that the code is slower... no good, that doesn't work... revert and try something else. One piece of code that I used this approach on with good effect was a poker hand evaluator... that would take a set of poker hands and tell you which was best, and what the hands were. First version worked... as far as I could tell... didn't go very fast though, maybe like 10 hand sets a second... then when I really started looking at it, and trying different things, you see things like, maybe it's best to check for a pair before you check for three of a kind, or check for three of a kind before checking for a full house... if it isn't a three of a kind, you never have to check for a full house... and I was really surprised at the end of it how many new test cases I had added for strange edge cases I would never have thought about if I hadn't had test cases... end result was nearer a hundred thousand hand sets a second... in exactly the same language... Finally... armed with the test cases, and an optimised algorithm, I ported it, almost directly, into C... the result was millions of hand sets a second... in fact... fast enough to do every possible permutation of community cards for a given set of starting hole cards in texas holdem in under a second... I thought it was cool. Point is... with the right methodology, you don't have to be einstein... you just have to follow the process... and the results will find themselves. Just to give you idea how non-obvious profile work can be... From memory here... I have the code somewhere, but squirrelled away on an external drive and another backup somewhere, not here... I'm pretty sure, that with a fair distribution of poker hands, it actually works out quicker to check for three of a kind first... it beats a pair anyway, so there's no need to check for that... but if it's three of a kind it can still be a full house or a poker... and with 7 cards (2 in the hand, 5 community cards)... it could still be a straight or a flush... not sure where I checked for those... but the point is... the fastest solution actually only checks for a pair, and then two pair, after it discounts three of a kinds, pokers and full houses... So... whether you should check for a pair before three of kind... actually turns out it isn't... and there's no real way of knowing that stuff beforehand (well, maybe with heaps of maths, I dunno, I doubt it... optimisation is an art... could depend on specific cpu implementations, memory bandwidth issues or something crazy in the compiler or something you hadn't thought about)... but only through timing, profiling, trial and error can you ever find out. It's a fun exercise... of course, like I said earlier, it depends on your application... premature optimisation and all that. And, if you do suffer from premature optimisation, you can still massage that out, make a few comments... you paid for the time, you may as well... ummm.... I don't think you should be maligning satanists like that... Some satanists are the best people you will ever meet... not relying on faith for their morality, but on cold hard reason. It's usually only idiots who either practice, or think that satanists practice, child sacrifice and shit like that. A good example are the satanists who want to (did they?) put up that statue to lucifer when the christians managed to get a monument to the ten commands erected on government land. See... protecting our rights to freely practice religion... and enforcing separation of church and state by showing how ignoring that can be, and really is, an abuse... good guy satanists. They are probably also some of the people who will fight this particularly stupid law. > They said they would have a human sacrifice. They meant they were all going to pitch in and build a homeless shelter for the poor... A bit of human hard work and sacrifice. To make the world a little better... it's always the christians that freak out at the way they speak, but never actually do anything. Either that, or they meant your anal virginity... who knows? The thing is... that's how people behave... There was something similar in simulations of fire on board of airplanes... Except... in the simulations, everybody neatly filed out in an orderly fashion and everyone was getting out nicely, quickly and safely... nothing like what happens in real life when people feel their lives are on the line... Someone got an idea instead to pay the first 10 or so people off the simulated burning aircraft a small prize amount, like $5 or $10 or something... boom... people started scrambling for the doors, pushing and shoving others out the way, blocking up the doors, crowding them, trying to be the first ones out... basically causing chaos and slowing the evacuation right down... simulating exactly how people really behave in an emergency. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a policeman here and I have to tell him to let me continue or lots of people are going to die horribly in burning planes if he doesn't stop bothering me. Holy Shit that video's harsh... Amazing how quick it goes... Makes me think there should be a mandatory annual (just a guess) fire test, where night clubs that hold packs of people like this, should get tested with a flame-thrower, burning down anything flammable. Anything that doesn't burn, gets to stay. If too much burns, like in this case, so that people could die... then after it gets put out and rebuilt, it can get tested again, until it is safe. I don't care if nightclubs end up all steel and concrete... that really looked like it would suck. crackhead obsesses over rocks - News at 11 $ Amateur Geologist Still Can't Get a Job $ LOL @ 200 year old stereotype $ LOL. It's trane. Don't tell me this is news 2 u? God I miss the old days of k5 when everyone was just trolling the fuck out of everyone for maximum trollihood. I'm sure there were moments of seriousness in there too... but mostly the trolling... They see me trolling they hate it! Anyway... if you're really bored... you can check out my efforts to troll NY Financial Services Departments' Superintendent Ben "lolski" Lawsky... no bites... but I got to call him an idiot, dog, parasite... and call his job bullshit... And some idiot in their department is going to have to read my comments... lol. http://www.reddit.com/user/prokra5ti/ Internet... where would we be without you? Well... I did point out how it's going to be literally impossible to regulate and track cryptocurrencies... That's going to give someone in their department a headache if they start thinking about it. Hopefully leading to an existential crisis and eventual mindpixelation. Oh noes... teh terrorists will cryptocurrency us all to deaths. fucking morons. You don't get it... It's actual fact... I'm not making it up... crackheads obsess over rocks... Crackhead girl I have here right now... bags and bags of rocks... sorted by colour, size, shape, quality, cleanliness... She cleans them in a bucket with meth, dishwashing liquid and water... she scrubs them... She shows them to me... rocks... fucking rocks... She breaks them open... stares at them... want's to know more about them. You just think it's a stupid troll because you don't know crackheads... they really do get obsessed over rocks for exactly the reasons I've pointed out earlier... If you ever see a group of people late at night in the city, picking up things off the ground, looking intently at them and throwing them away and repeating... it's crackheads... looking at fucking rocks... for real. It's a real phenomenon... and now you know... so you've been enlightened... and you can thank me. Geologists - They don't like the competition By the time they wake up, all the rocks have gone. Crackheads don't sleep. In all seriousness... a crackhead first pointed out the behaviour to me in another group of crackheads when I was smoking crack... I just pick on trane cause it's trane. YHBT YHL HAND. You really got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, didn't you? <blink>THAT'S THE JOKE DOT JPG!!!</blink> Unless I'm really missing something here. Your wife ran off with the dog or something? You can talk... we're all friends here. We won't judge. Encourage (3) -- Really made this work for me IRLROFLSTAT: LOLLING You know I mix a bit of fact and fiction here... especially for purposes of humour... and you know I like a little bit of absurdist humour now and then. I'm just saying, you shouldn't automatically think I'm stupid because of that... At the very least... you shouldn't take it for granite. That joke might not work on americans... not sure... You probably say something like "grey-night", in which case it doesn't work at all... you should say more like "gran-net"... Just in case that one flew over yer head too. Not my fault you guys can't speak properly. Oh... and the funny thing is... crackheads really do obsess over rocks... really... it's the weirdest thing... I swear. I think they all think they've dropped their rocks on the ground cause they don't realise they've smoked it all... then they start picking up rocks off the street... thinking it might be their crack... and then they get all like... quartz, bluemetal, black rock, red rock... and before you know it... they're writing diaries about rocks on once popular social media web 2.0 internet sites... Happens every single time. Because your "science" is a LIE $ Damm VZAMaZ, can't u tell a joke when u see one? $ Then you came to the wrong place... Anyway... was a piss-take of trane's often anti-science stance... especially economics (well... human science)... but oh well. if it makes you happy. Complain to me once you know the models Then you can tell me where they are lacking and where they can be improved. or... Hi... Your theories of phlogiston are true (I haven't actually studied anything, I just heard about phlogiston and assume that's all you know... I also heard it has some problems... what do I know... I never actually studied anything... but this one line comment proves me right and you wrong... I'll just go smoke some more crack). Sure... if you don't know the models... it is It certainly isn't constructive. I honestly can't see how you could Maybe you could repeat stuff you heard about it... but you certainly couldn't improve upon it... or explain how something was an improvement over it without knowing anything about it. You wouldn't know if you were just parroting mistruths and ignorance... and you probably would be. A typical trane comment bashing epicycles would be something like -- epicycles can't predict that planets actually go around in an orbit in a kind of cycle. Did he give free van candy out to all the kids? $ You're keeping markets inneficient You immoral bastard... Probably so you can get more CP. die scum! Why does your idiocy not surprise me? $ And how does arbitrage make this WORSE? Retard? Problems at the Bank So, I thought I saw a great opportunity selling bitcoin via electronic funds transfers on localbitcoins.com. I thought I was doing really well... making good money, and I was going to be rich in no time. But now I have my doubts. I was selling to people who used the same bank as me, and all seemed to be going well... until my account got locked. It seems that I've been selling bitcoin to people with compromised bank accounts. Four hours on the phone on Saturday got my funds unlocked again, but I still had $800 locked up in a transfer to my favourite bitcoin seller. I managed to transfer the remaining $300 out to buy more coins and put up an advert. On Monday I went to the bank to find my account locked again... and the teller seemed to have a lot of trouble getting through to the fraud department, being hung up on each time she got through. During this time my localbitcoins advert was answered, and a deposit from a user for $300 turned up in my account... because I was in the bank, I checked with the teller, who told me it was all good and so I released the coins. It turns out someone had reported their funds stolen... it appears someone has compromised their accounts... and now I'm worried that all my dealings through this method have been fraudulent. It would make sense for the same fraudster to target me using different names and accounts. My account is now frozen, I was required to fill in a Statutory Declaration... and I have no idea who is going to eat the loss... and if this business has any legs regardless. For certain, I can't live off the funds from stolen bank accounts. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. However, what is 'too good'? The prices I traded at were very good... but I considered that there were a lot of liquidity problems last week, what with gox going down, and probably someone wealthy wanted to get into bitcoin reasonably fast, possibly reasoning that when gox (and the bitcoin network) issues were resolved, the price would probably bounce back up beyond its previous levels... and the higher prices they advertised were necessary to attract sellers vs the rest of the advertised buyers... it made sense to me... and these were transfers through a respectable bank, not paypal! So... now I'm completely out of bitcoins, all my bitcoin funds are now frozen in a bank account and I might end up losing all of that too. I guess this what my sister meant when she asked 'what if something goes wrong?' when I asked to borrow money for bitcoin trading. Also I'm hungry and have no food or cash, but luckily my whorefriends have helped me through with weed and tobacco... and one has promised me some money tomorrow. Oh well... you live and learn. related: bitcoin whores. Thanks... What's the cashier cheque by mail scam? Still don't understand $ Ignorance I suppose... > regular bank money-transfer instruments don't have a reliable "this is cleared" vs. "this is not cleared" status See... this just shocks the fuck out of me... it's a bank... they have all the details, they implement the security, it was an intra-bank transfer after all. I can't believe the whole world has been operating on such an open and easily defrauded system. I can't even check the account a transfer arrived from, let alone the name and phone number of the customer to confirm... all information the bank has at its disposal, and they wan't me to implement security systems against fraud... they don't give me the required information... it's mathematically impossible... it's actually crazy the system works at all. I might continue by only doing a small transaction first... then calling the bank's fraud team and reporting fraud... when they eventually tell me it's not fraud, I'll trade larger amounts with that person... They told me not to do this... but fuck, they've locked all my money up for nearly a week now! And I'm really fucked if they reverse the transactions entirely (which they haven't yet, thank bank... oh, and today they let the large transfers through to my bitcoin supplier... I haven't lost any bitcoins at least). They're the only one in a position to declare something non-fraudulent. > I regard paypal as way more reliable than bank instruments when dealing with scammers. This might be true with physical goods... but I think they see bitcoin as a direct competitor to their network... They are very fast to reverse bitcoin transactions in favour of the buyer... I do not deal with paypal ever... In fact, it was such big news that paypal found in favour of a bitcoin seller that it was front page on /r/bitcoin... the bitcoin seller provided proof by videoing the entire transaction. Some people say the way around it is to sell bitcoin certificates, snail mailed to the buyer's official paypal address. > That said, you are fucking nuts to trade cash equivalents with bank transfers, paypal, credit cards or any other electronic means of transferring money that I know of. Yep... maybe I was... I just didn't realise how open the system was... I mean, I knew paypal and credit cards could be a problem with reversibility... I just didn't realise I'd have the same problem with intra-bank transfers. > Western Union might be a better choice? Might be worth looking into I suppose... why would you consider them to be better than a normal bank? > even so, shady as fuck. Do you really think so? To me it seems surprising in today's world that the banks don't have the mechanisms in place to do this. I guess the future really is bitcoin! I don't know when you would ever need reversibility... as opposed to say, escrow. And... if it's such a useful feature... reversibility will be built on top of it... say visa debit for bitcoin. There will be a cost, but where there is demand, there will be supply. Bollocks... You keep all the benefits of bitcoin... and you add new benefits by building on top. We already have escrow... but lets look at another idea... consumer protection... We could have a bitcoin bank that charges a service fee... but will protect you in the event of fraud... as a customer, if you claim fraud, you get your money back, at the bank's expense... but as the merchant, you still keep your money. Is one way to go... You can't remove the benefits of the underlying system... when you use it... you only add benefits on top of it. I don't think you read what I wrote... What if a bitcoin bank offers consumer protection in that, if a customer can prove fraud, the customer gets their money back... all of this done for a fee.. like a form of consumer insurance... you don't necessarily even have to take the money back from the merchant. What you aren't getting is that bitcoin can provide a whole spectrum of different use cases for different people... take anonymity for example... you can go from full disclosure, proving you have every bitcoin in a given address... to complete anonymity, no one can prove you own a given address. The same can happen with reversibility, charge backs, fraud insurance, etc... It doesn't have to be one size fits all, and it doesn't have to give up one property under one set of circumstances to gain the opposing property under another set of circumstances. Ummmm... localbitcoins has an escrow... The problem I had is that I released the coins too early... before the bank had a chance to discover fraud... From the responses I've had from localbitcoins support, I have every reason to believe they could rule fairly in an escrow dispute. And apparently some sort of escrow service is being built into the blockchain right now (m of n signatures)... or on top of it (Is that the Open Transactions thing?)... anyway... should greatly decrease the cost of escrow... but I'm not familiar enough with it yet to comment much further. But writing it off completely sounds short sighted. Yeah, like I said, I don't really know... for sure... for real goods, you have a problem... maybe the goods look exactly perfect, but are counterfeit and break after 24 hours of use or something... not sure you're ever going to solve that one with all parties being anonymous... Especially the goods provider... don't know though... kind of worked for the silkroads. But in the crypto-world, as long as we stay within that, anything is possible... hence the counterparty protocol. I understand it does exactly that. It really depends on the situation... Now, with physical, identifiable goods... there's no problem... if you find the object... whoever's holding it loses it (and get's charged if they were or should have been reasonably aware that it was stolen) and it's given back to the owner... A stolen bike for example... it doesn't matter where it ends up, it's either the stolen bike or another bike altogether. Tough shit if you were holding it. But money is fungible... It's not identifiable (okay, maybe serialised stolen notes are)... but not bank transfers... Consider a guy has a $1k in his account... and someone with a compromised account sends a stolen $1k to that guy... And that guy, pays 5 guys $400 each... and those guys already had $400 in their accounts... and each sends 8 people $100. Who has the stolen $1k? Just the first guy? Should he be the one to eat the loss? Why? If he didn't knowingly deal with a thief... You might argue that he was the first guy dealing with a thief, but he did't know that... and actually... it was probably the bank who were the first to make a decision to deal with the thief... It would be like taking the first guy's bike instead of the actual stolen bike. No... the stolen money is distributed, somehow, amongst 40 other people entirely. No matter how you decide to distribute that fraud amongst them... it's going to be somewhat arbitrary and unfair. I agree that the owner of the compromised account should get their money back... but in this case reversing the transaction does not make sense. The bank's security failed... the bank chooses, for economic reasons, not to implement better security... therefore, the bank should eat the loss, otherwise the value of better security doesn't appear in their balance sheets. Reversibility does not seem to be the universal answer... escrow covers a lot of cases... consumer insurance is possible, like when my friend's bitcoin (well... an online account valued in bitcoin) was stolen from a phishing site... banks who fail to implement decent security should not be able to reverse a transaction on will when real world goods have been transferred as a result of that transaction. and reversibility when merchant agreements exist (such as visa) or paypal are fine too... cause they explicitly agreed to it... but this is basically the very reason why merchants are choosing an irreversible mechanism such as bitcoin. free market baby... it's cheaper for them... consumer's take the risk... but bitcoin could be built into a reversible mechanism into paypal as well... free market baby... consumers have a choice! Yeah, I agree with all of that... basically... Third party insurance being high... I never said it wouldn't be... just that it could be an alternative to reversibility that we're likely to see at some point. cheques bouncing down the line... also agree... Such that the first guy loses the 1k he got from the theif, the 3rd guy would get 200 taken back from him, and 4th and 5th would have 400 taken back... then the people they paid would lose out probably... fine... Could you imagine implementing this a year after the fraud was detected... wow... what are the chances you wouldn't be affected? but you're thinking bounced cheques... or fraudulent cheques... where the logic is that the person receiving the cheque could expect the cheque to be dodgy anyway... What about, specifically in this case... an intra-bank EFT from a compromised account... Let's say I set up a bank... anyone can have an account, all you need is your first and last name... and your password is always 'password'... cause lots of people forget their passwords and I think this is inconvenient to my customers. Now, electronic transfers between my customers are 'instantaneous'... only, when you receive money, I won't tell you which account the money actually came from... you got to guess this yourself. Oh... and if anyone claims there was fraud, I won't lose out as a bank, cause I'll just reverse all the affected transactions... as far as I need to go to keep the balances positive. (damn, someone took cash out... and as a bank, i'll always take cash... even if it was stolen, no-one can prove it). Where's the bank's incentive to fix their fucked up security? Reversibility in this case allows the banks to avoid responsibility... however, in this case, it should be clear they are the responsibly party... the situation is quite different from the types of frauds paypal or visa's reversibility protects you from... or bounced cheques even. For sure. You might have to trade some properties for others... But depends on the situation... certainly on the crypto side you can keep everything anonymous... real world side is a bit harder... but don't underestimate what could be possible. Funny enough... and I don't know about escrow in this case... but a guy just bought coins off me by dropping an envelope full of money on my doorstep... was adamant about remaining anonymous... maybe a photo of the money on my doorstep would be enough proof... (especially if I provided a one-way drop box)... and no anonymity (for him) would be lost... Just thoughts... cause I think you're underestimating what might be possible... just that we aren't smart enough to think everything through, doesn't make it impossible. True... tend to agree actually... but some things these guys work out... I learn something new and crazy everyday. Well aware of paypal scam (didn't I say?) yeah... a guy just dropped off an envelope full of money on my doorstep... trusted me with it I suppose... all the money was there... sent him his coins... God I hope they're not counterfeit... long time since I looked closely at an aussie $100... when I saw 'concert tour' written on them, was sure they were fake... but nope... same thing on wikipedia. Fingers crossed the bank will accept them... otherwise I'm fucked again. But it's the bank that stole my money $ I'm gonna clear up a few misconceptions here For one, I don' believe that a basic income can be created out of nothing... Trane believes that... I believe it should be created out of a wealth tax and other taxes. Secondly, greengrass has me confused with LilDebbie. LilDebbie is a libertarian who thinks that he could get the money from the bank with a gun and that no regulations are necessary. This would be called an unregulated market. I believe in the free market, which is a regulated market, and can only exist with regulation. Regulation is required to bring the unregulated market inline with the four assumptions of the free market... All participants in a transaction chose to participate in that transaction (no externalities), there is perfect competition, there is perfect knowledge and people are rational. One regulation I think should exist is that if a bank says it has cleared your funds, then your funds are cleared, unless it can be shown that you were a knowing participant in fraud. You see, there was no fraud on the bitcoin side at all... the transaction went through, and it has gone through, and it ain't coming back. However, there was fraud on the bank side... A transaction had gone through, but it hadn't gone through, and it might be going back. See? The guy had defrauded the bank by compromising bank accounts, and the bank, in turn, defrauded me, by saying the funds had cleared from legitimate accounts... I, believing the banks illusion, then non-fraudulently sent bitcoins. Like most people, you have no understanding of the meaning of 'rational' as it applies to economics. It's not a particularly high bar... you probably think it means, they act in what you might consider their best interest, or make smart decisions or some other bullshit like that... no... it's far far simpler. It simply means that if a person has a choice of three things A, B or C... then if they prefer B over A, and they prefer C over B, then they will prefer C over A. THAT IT!! Not such a huge requirement now is it? Nothing to do with your grandfather's investment strategy at all. No, transitive is a property of the operator in most maths systems A > B and B > C implies A > C. But an operator (*) is transitive in any maths system, no matter what, by definition, if A * B and B * C implies A * C... But in economics, we're talking specifically about ordered sets of preferences... so rationality is about ordering in particular. It is a requirement to get to the results of the free market (welfare theorems 1 and 2)... Now, you are right... it is a question of whether humans are rational, when they are not, and by how much... And some things that at first might not seem rational turn out to be rational when you factor in things like time... or maybe beliefs in the availability of future options (do you eat meat, grain or fruit... your choices might be economically irrational until you consider the persons belief in the future availability of meat, grain or fruit)... Although I won't say that all humans are always rational... and there might be specific cases where they are not... but I don't think it is really a major issue beyond the requirements of the theory. And in any case, I'm at a complete loss how to regulate rationality in people... externalities, imperfect competition and imperfect knowledge seem to be the more common problems, the more damaging and the easier ones to solve. I'm sorry they stole form you to make bitcoin $ Speed and convenience... If I deal in cash, I can cover my city... I could take cash deposits Australia wide, I suppose... But how much faster can I work, and how much more convenient for everyone if I deal with bank transfers? Well... at least that was my thinking... I didn't realise that bank transfers were open to so much fraud and reversibility... I mean really... online banking really should have more security than an account number and password. Even 2FA is pretty open, and I can't know if someone else is using it or not... and if they chose to implement such a low level of security, they should be the ones holding the risk. On the other hand, it's not my intention to take advantage of that either. I don't know where that leaves me. Cheers, am aware of this... Australia seems to be fairly open towards bitcoin at the moment... but yeah... anyone telling me specifically that they are using bitcoin for illegal purposes has to gtfo... I mean, there's one guy that's a bit dodgy... who says he can get me weed... who likes to deal largish amounts (like $1000 is too small for him to bother)... and mostly calls late at night and on weekends... but I always tell him, I don't want to know, and I ain't telling you anything about my life outside of a little talk about bitcoin and sheepmarket and silkroad and what goes on... Specifically, he's never said he deals on silkroad or is cleaning money for anyone... but yeah... I know you got to be careful. I'm more worried I'll get caught in something technical... like... can you prove it was person X who put the money in that account, and that you sent the bitcoin to person X, and not person Y? Some bullshit I couldn't possibly expect to reasonably know. Good thing I'm a non-commenter and these guys are a bunch of limp dicked faggits that can suck my cock anyway. You'd have to be retarded to believe these online 'surveys'... what real troll would say they were a troll? Science my ass! Obviously this so called 'study' is a piece of crap designed for News of the World readers, Fox 'News' watchers, catholic child molesters and niggers. They, and anyone who agrees with them, should kill themselves and stop wasting our oxygen. Fuck, I've had enough of this shit. WIPO: You forgot /r/kuro5hit... faggot The most popular indy hipster underground aids infected dying subreddit on reddit. Universal Basic Income Coin So... just imagining an idea here... a crypto coin, something like bitcoin, that implemented a truly universal basic income... the free market way? Would such a thing be possible? Maybe... It's all about distribution... There's already an alt coin that burns coins over time... so... you lose a few percentage of coins over a year... (this shouldn't affect your value... see?) Why not redistribute them... so, you still have to pay miners... say 10% (90%?) of the block reward, but the rest go to every single registered 'person'... Then... how do you register people, and prove they exist at most once in the system... Can this be done in a p2p way... or will the NSA end up with billions of people? How would the chain look with 7 billion outputs a block? I don't think it's a matter of economics... give or take tweeking parameters (or if they could be 'voted' on or something...) and means of building value (proof of burn is interesting... but how to set the exchange rate?)... I think something could be designed to handle paying out to X billion unique addresses too... The free money aspect would certainly drive adoption... adoption would drive use... use makes value... you just have to balance that with miners, store of value, tradeability and scarcity... etc... The hard part is proving a person exists at most once... and generating some sort of fingerprint and mapping to an address... probably with nothing more capable than a smart phone required by users... or at least knowing someone with a smart phone... (We're going to assume that even the third world will have access to this technology soon enough). So... you would also need a distributed database of every person in the world... face photo, fingerprints maybe, eye photo? And then make them prove their existence to semi random people somehow... or a random comity of people... like a census... maybe you need people to vouch for you? I'm pretty sure there is no 'web of trust' type system that can do this... You have to assume bad actors... like north korea, the cia or the mob are going to try and create fake people... well anyone would... just saying it has to withstand conspiracies too. If you can solve this problem... I'm pretty sure you can solve online voting too... at least amongst such a set of people. lol get ur ass on welfare until you have secured a job... buy bitcoin all you can... wait for next rally. Pretty much everything good about bitcoin... and you get free money... I think once you can map biometrics to a stable hash... (with statistically zero collisions on 7B+ people...) then you can do all sorts of crypto niceties... I think a mixture of proof of work, proof of stake would do just fine... the whole point of these and a blockchain is global consensus... which I don't think you can get just people saying "hello..." to each other. You're not making sense... A hash is an id... It should be easy to generate from digital sources, yes? so playback attacks and such? I'm imagining something like 1000 asian maths students solving the blockchain problem (SHA256) with nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper streamed and signed in front of a live audience as the only official blockchain blocks. Seriously, who cares? The fact that you failed to mine coins is your problem. In countries where it is illegal, they'll miss out. As for taking competing with fiat... I think of it as another form of commodity... it no more competes with fiat than gold, stock, houses... whatever. A UBICoin idea could become the world currency and end world poverty at the same time... My Holiday at Heathrow Terminal 3 Detention Center So, I took your advice and went travelling. I visited sunny ol Heathrow Terminal 3 Detention Center for 15 hours. It was bright and chilly, the brits were generally rude, but everyone else was nice and the place smelled like piss... pretty much the whole english experience. Oh, and I got lots of free coffee. Turns out I didn't return in time, and my visa had lapsed. Oh no... I didn't mention... They sent me home again. So... it was a pretty expensive way to watch some movies... And dubai scares the fuck out of me too... I spent some time there too. And they take away your passport until you get home... which made dubai even scarier... I'm sure I found myself by the arrivals door... By going backwards through security!! But... I really didn't want to end up in dubai with no passport!! That's like a nightmare scenario... A wealth tax would go a long way for paying for it The two ideas couple really well. Why? If they get hungry enough, and if homelessness is bothering them enough, then weekly or fortnightly cash will be spent on these things... They might go hungry for a few days I suppose. Food stamps or whatever you're thinking of are still fungible anyway... eg, buy the food, sell it for beer... ie, you can't force people to not spend their money / food stamps on booze / drugs... if that is what they want. With a BI, the only assistance necessary would be for severely disabled, sick or elderly who are unable to even get to walmart or dress themselves. Yes... Trane's logic / naivety frustrate me too... I think some of his conclusions are correct, but how he gets to it, and argues for it is insane. Wealth tax and BI make a very good couple in terms of making capitalism work for the good of all... fighting wealth concentration, providing a safety net for all, while still maintaining the price signalling that makes capitalism work. The problems aren't economic... Many economists have looked at these and decided they would work well in theory... wealth taxes and basic income aren't disstortionary for example, the 1st and 2nd welfare theorems still hold... there's no very good arguments against them. Politically though... well... that's another problem altogether... The wealthy control politics... convince anyone to give up anything is difficult, especially when it's the one's who control the process. Two problems, two solutions. > We have an income tax. It results in every bit of income having to be reported. If you have income that's not reported, that's a crime. With a wealth tax, every thing you own would have to be reported. If you own something that's not reported, that would be a crime. You can't restrict it to big ticket items like houses and cars and boats. We already have ad valorem taxes for everything with a title. So problem one, scary levels of government intrusion. The solution isn't that a person must report every single little item they own... the solution is to make sure it is taken away from them on the event of a forced sale (the mechanism by which their self valuation is kept honest). If you've been 'bought out'... and you are later found to have been hiding something from the transfer... that is a crime. > Problem two is capital flight. When Britain decided their wealthy were a fatted cow to be redistributed and jacked the tax rate to the sky, the wealthy just left. You can moderate that by introducing capital controls. But do you want to show up at a border and have a guard go through your luggage, decide you have too much cash, and confiscate it? A US citizen is taxed on their income no matter where it is earned in the world. Same thing could apply here. The only way to avoid it would be to renounce your citizenship. Hiding world wide wealth would be handled the same as above. I envision a wealth tax that is taxed on self declared net wealth... Anyone can buy everything from you for this amount... you lose everything and get the value in dollars... like you are taken from your home and forbid entry... it's no longer yours. Because people want to undervalue their wealth for tax purposes, but want to overvalue it in case someone wants it... it should result in a fair price. And giving up citizenship, we keep your stuff too! Or at least a heavy percentage of it. By levying it on natural persons... we automatically gain the offshore wealth of corporations. Sentimental value is automatically priced in... You decide the value... we tax based on that value. As for smugglers, we go in through the nose and extract their eleven word electrum password surgically. The point is, we make it expensive for the wealthy to renounce citizenship. A disincentive to generally make that the worse option... not impossible, just not generally desired over being wealthy at home. You wouldn't list the dog by his book value... is my point... you mark him up at $200 and pay $2 tax on him... Actually, was thinking more like an all or nothing deal... you don't have to list your dog separately from the house... the buyer buys everything... and you can negotiate some of your stuff back maybe... but in principle, it would be all or nothing. And the first $2M would be tax free too... so if it was just you and your mutt... list it at $2M... you won't have to pay tax, but if someone really rich wants your dog... at least you'd have $2M to dry your tears. Finally... there are no barriers to leaving at all... just barriers to taking your wealth with you... which this country helped you make... there is a legitimate claim to it. Yeah, ok... but you'll have to take the wife and kids too. What immigration issue? Immigrants wouldn't get basic income... And there still doesn't seem to be a good reason to provide food stamps in the presence of BI either... BI should replace most forms of welfare. I don't think immigrants should get this welfare.. > Even illegal undocumented immigrants. As well as some other forms of welfare. If you make being a citizen worth guaranteed X$ per year, then many people will try to fake being a citizen just to get the X$. Existing citizens don't want to pay for non-citizens; so you have to have some way to reliably distinguish them. This means biometrics on an unprecedented scale. Are you OK with that? And I'm pretty sure the government has a register of every citizen who would be eligible from the start... If they aren't on the register, they aren't getting a basic income... simple... If they try to claim as someone else, it would have to be as an existing citizen... that existing citizen would probably notice... no biometrics required. > As for replacing other forms of welfare, I would still want to make sure that their existential needs are met. You're fine with throwing them a bunch of money and relying on personal responsibility to sort it out. But people on the full allotment of food stamps typically have alcohol, drug, or mental health issues. If they could act with the sort of responsibility you assume then they wouldn't be on food stamps to begin with. I'd allow basic income to be traded in for food stamps and more direct forms of welfare in cases where individuals opted for this or were shown to be in need of special help. I'd normally allow alcoholics and drug addicts to chose alcohol or drugs over food and shelter... if they so desired. (I'd also legalise drugs, so they weren't so much of a burden too... that's another story). Just as I'd allow a gambler to gamble all their money... or them to put all their money into a hippy commune, than feed themselves. The fact that basic income is a small amount paid frequently would lead people to feed themselves... hunger is still a huge motivator... even for the worst of addicts. That said, I would give people the choice (or by force on court order), you can lose your basic income and get food stamps and care instead. /r/BasicIncome/ --> http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/ Not too surprised that procrasti matches with procrastinate / procrastinator... Actually is short for procrastinator... procrasti the procrastinator... Cause that was the username limit on the local doom server I was playing at during finals study break. 20 years later... still procrastinating. He knew the TRUTH and was going to tell... They had no choice. Just another 'overdose'. FFS... Just cause I schooled you on /. doesn't mean you have to come running back here like a little lost child. Fuck off and die already. Anyway, it's quite clear he didn't die 'of addiction'... no... he died of taking too high a dose probably from one or more of the following factors: - unknown purity making it impossible to judge dosage. - possibly unkowningly taking fantanyl, when he thought he was taking heroin. - Bad setting, no supervision, no access to nalaxone. All factors that have nothing to do with heroin, and everything to do with illegal heroin and prohibition. When I said that every single problem with hard drugs is smaller than the negative effects of fighting them... to be more correct, I should say that every marginal increase in forceful means of prohibiting people from using drugs has a net negative marginal value on society... but you'd have to understand a little economics to understand this... so the simplified version works for you. Would be cool if there was an ANN or AI trained to guess meanings of words that it hadn't seen before... Then get it to guess the meanings of some of these. I think I see your problem... You appear to be taking k5 seriously. You're an idiot... I got nothing against women... But you're still a stupid bitch. WIPO: We will all go together when we go - Nukular http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/We-Will-All-Go-Together-When-We-Go-lyrics -Tom-Lehrer/D0BCDDDE4BE0C12648256A7D0024F5BD This is a bad algorithm... it won't do 1024 bit numbers in any reasonable time. You should try and work out the maths yourself from scratch... you should be easily able to factor 1024 bit numbers in a few seconds. I do it all the time. HINT: There's an easy answer to this that should become obvious after looking at the Riemann zeta function... just prove that the zero's lie on the 1/2 real line, where the imaginary's are prime integers... the rest just falls out from that. Let me know how it goes. I'm sorry to hear you give up so easily... I was hoping you could implement the integer modulo log function with O(log(N)) complexity too, I'd be quite interested in your solution... best mail me that one directly... no point in cluttering up the comments here... Also... best not tell anyone... they'd just get jealous of your 1337 hacking skillz. LOL... not making fun of you... not directly... Just saying that it would be nice to have some solutions to problems that would break 95% of all modern cryptography. Don't feel too overwhelmed if it takes you a few days. Yep... some people think QC can solve these problems... in fact... bitcoin has some protection against QC... at least for addresses you haven't sent bitcoins from... cause they aren't supposed to be able to do the inverse hash function in reasonable time. As for the many worlds theory... it's probably total rubbish... the Ashfar experiment I think sheds light (pun not intended... maybe a bit) on what's really happening. And the Ashfar (transactional) interpretation of QM sounds much more plausible... involving advanced and retarded waves interfering with each other to give the results of the standard two slit experiment. Basically waves travelling forward and backwards in time that determine the particle's actual path between quantum transactional events. It's very interesting. As for the problems I mentioned. If you can factor large numbers you break almost everything... And many cryptographic functions (well, RSA, Diffie-Hellman, some others) are of the form c = m^e % n So doing the inverse, ie, integer module logarithm in reasonable time would break these too. And some people think that the two might even be related... or at least give insight to each other. You can probably break a few hashing algorithms too... maybe even bitcoin private keys become derivable from their addresses... Hence why you shouldn't tell anyone... Have you seen the movie Hackers? Well... this is the type of math their chip would have solved. The implications would be huge. Whilst QC might make factorisation feasible... if we can break the underlying maths... well I think there's far more payoff in that in terms of number theory and a whole heap of other mathematics... The riemann hypothesis, for example, is the corner stone of hundreds of mathematical papers and even a few physics papers... all starting with -- "Assuming the Riemann hypothesis is true..." and a handful with "Assuming it is false...". It is one of the most referenced unsolved problems in mathematics. That would be a game changer. True that... I still can't get my head around the fact that the sum of all integers is equal to the product of all primes... exactly equal... and not just because they are both infinite. Ie, the sum of all numbers from 2 to infinity minus the product of all primes would be equal to minus 1. OMG... Such a pussy... You are suffering from oneitis... get over it. If there were truly such a thing as 'the one', the human race would have died out millennia ago. But I do agree that more children should be abused... they make funnier adults. I hear you've been doing your part. Well done. wow such crypto many accounts much trollings wow Ask Reddit yesterday asked what is the appeal of anal sex... I skimmed through the answers... but no one had put the obvious: * It's tighter * It's warmer * It's more degrading to women. WIPO: work? $ I once worked at a large electronics company That you have all heard of and own products of... There was a big corporate firewall there, of course... but the culture was, you weren't really part of the 'it-crowd', and considered a 'developer' (or whatever), until you'd found your way around it, through it or over it. Everyone had their own way, but you had to make your own... no one ran a firewall escape proxy or anything like that. One guy was famous for having all sorts of hidden tunnels and shit throughout the infrastructure code he had written... well... he probably went too far... no one knew for sure wtf he had set up... a lot of that was replaced for obvious reasons... but his name would keep cropping up years after he left when someone found another backdoor or tunnel on some unknown server. A legend and a headache... Well... the platform I worked on was an extremely small world type situation... a few years down the track I moved to a much more conservative company... an insurance company... The culture there was... any attempt at breaking corporate security was instant dismissal... ie, security at your desk asking you to cease and desist and pack up and leave... Minutes after the attempt... No warning, no second chances... And quite a few of the same contractors from the first job had been through there and gotten the boot for exactly that... not realising the corporate cultural differences. I was extremely lucky myself... I was mid argument over drugs with CTS... and just had to get a reply done... I wrote it, but thought... nah... I'll post it home and fix it up and then post it here... First attempt to mail it fails --- swear words or something... so I zip it... fail again... encrypt the zip... boom... job done, and I forget about it and go on. For about two weeks people were making jokes about me using cocaine at lunch and shit that just didn't quite make sense... well... turns out of course that the three attempts had caught the attention of the security guys who printed a copy of the post which raised a whole heap of political questions all the way to the board of directors... where the decision was made that, as long as I wasn't using cocaine at work, I had every right to hold an opinion on the subject of legalisation... I was in kind of key position where they didn't really want to march me straight out the door... which is why it went that way... but I got a talking down to by some HR person who filled me in on the details and told me not to do that again... or bye bye. Still makes me laugh thinking that the board of directors of a largish insurance company actually spent some amount of time discussing my posts with CTS on drug legalisation. Half of them probably coked* up to their eyeballs pretending to be all morally outraged and shit... and others calmly considering the proposition and arguing that I had a point or at the very least the right to hold such an opinion... and then finally voting in favour of cocaine. * : Pure conjecture, of course. Yeah, I've heard rumors of coke at work along the way a few times... but no one's ever shouted me a big pile of coke, at least not in an office... Although I did once open a small draw in an oak shelving unit in an office once to find it filled about a centimeter deep with a familiar looking white powder... but I closed it and pretended I hadn't noticed and moved on... I probably should have got to know whoever's shelf that was a bit better... or at least had a quick taste just to make sure it wasn't chalk dust... you know... could be dangerous that much chalk dust. Actually... the guy who sat by that shelf did hook me up with a wicked weed supplier. Just one strange thing I think worthy of mention.. The guy who put the tunnels and backdoors throughout the corporate infrastructure... he always put his name to them... It wasn't just an anonymous initrd script to start an ssh tunnel somewhere... or a bizarre java servlet running on their public web-apps... although it didn't necessarily state the purpose of the tunnel/code/backdoor... he would always clearly put his name on it and the date he created it... The guy was good at his job, but he must have done this shit as some sort of uber-corporate trolling... funny as fuck. Like I said, a legend and a headache. So... they worked it out about 2.5k years ago... and you still haven't caught on. Yes... you lack both of those too $ You didn't explain the "ti" bit.. I'm not saying religion isn't interesting from a historical perspective... and all the latin and all that... or cultural perspective. Mostly, how the fuck did we end up here? But you're crazy if you actually believe it... like literally. There are heaps of proofs for the non-existence of a god... god's yes... cause then no-single god is anything more than something very powerful... as in -- not actually supernatural in any sense... all that supernatural bullshit, is bullshit... wherever you find it... paranormal I can accept. So that leaves you only a couple of options... powerful demi-gods and no gods... and as I haven't met many demi-gods far greater than me... or seen any evidence of them... It seems to suggest no gods. Just a cold hard universe following fields and waves moving in accordance with incredible approximation to mathematical equations and emergent phenomena... not all of which we currently know or understand. And there are matrix like possibilities I suppose too... Descarte's deamon. You may as well believe in Santa Claus [PBUH]... But if it helps you psychologically... go for it. Telepathy is more far more likely to exist than an actual god. It's at least in theory scientifically falsifiable I suppose. Otoh... as moral fairy tales... they might also serve a purpose... the problem is... the morals themselves are confused and clearly not 'correct' from a modern perspective... You need a better basis than this to find your ethics and morality. So there's that too. If people actually followed the teachings of Jesus... as I understand them... it seems you wouldn't be going on about the finer points of Latin at all... and instead be out on the streets like MDC trying to find people who could use shelter and food... but wtf do I know? We hit 47C a couple of days ago... apparantly Fuck that was hot... I got zero aircon... but I have systems that keep the place relatively cool... but even then... damn. It took about 2 days, at about 4 in the morning... with the house fully open and the fan on full... it became cold enough to bear a blanket... Close up by 7 before it starts to get hot outside... and try to get more sleep. A few years back it topped 50 at the farm... Temps are usually hotter out there in the summer, and colder in the winter... I'm not sure what it got to when we hit 47 here... but at the time was only 42 or so in town. There'd been a huge unseasonal downpour at the start of the summer... after all the harvesting had been done... well... it washed a whole heap of sheep shit into all the dams... normally the fields and embankments and other stuff stop that happening... So the dams were all rank with this sheep shit (water quality also killed all the marron - depressingly)... but 50C... fuck it... we were all swimming in those dams... happy as proverbial pigs in mud! No... fuck this guy... I hope his head falls off. He didn't even have the balls to stand up and say that Gravity sucks!!! And he wants our sympathy? Fuck him! He's just another Grade A, Gravity loving asshole. I hope a satellite falls on his neck. That will teach him an ironic lesson he won't soon forget. Go get yourself a space MRI Mr Gravity Lover! I had a mole cut off my back... Apparently it is actually human and is now demanding welfare and robbing old people for crack money! Should have expected it... he was black. I think so... yes... I have certain friends I believe I can communicate telepathically with... If I face away from them, and telepath at them, they'll talk with me as if I was talking with them... They get confused when I tell them I'm not talking... In fact, just today, she said to me... "Your lips don't move, but you're voice just comes out of your face." I don't fully understand it... but I'm pretty convinced it is real... It's like a different way of thinking, projecting thoughts in your head... slowly, loudly... at other people. If you listen you can hear them too... like a whisper in your head... or on the breeze. These things you can practice... Tell people (in your head) to do specific actions... be completely normal and think the most outrageous things you can, watch their body language change... (You might have to shout in your head at first). Fasting, sleep deprivation and drug use all seem to make it better... Probably by weakening our social training that we can't hear other's thoughts... Helping with the suspension of disbelief... Listen to the voices in the distance that you normally block out... maybe they are relevant after all. There doesn't appear to be a limit to distance, at least on the scale of the diameter of the earth... and Faraday cages don't appear to work either... Maybe it isn't electromagnetic. It has its drawbacks though... people probably think a lot of things about you they are too polite to say aloud... you better have a thick skin and be slow to react to criticism... for example. I'm sure it drives many to madness... in fact, I think it's a symptom of schizophrenia... And most importantly... don't react to it... act completely normal the whole time... imagine the whole world was blind, and you started carrying on about all the things you can see... they'd lock you up... same thing here. On her 13th birthday*... If she has good ID and "looks" 18. "Like OMG, you're just as boring as my stupid parents. All my friends have done it. Like my friend Emily said her brother's classmate, Jacky, the blond one, once did it in the back of her mum's boyfriend's pickup and it was like really sweet and like romantic but like hot at the same time, you know? I want it to be like that... And now she's so popular and everyone wants to know her... How hard do I blow into your pee-pee?" *: May depend on your jurisdiction. This is not legal advice. The great thing about being a dyslexic pedophile Is that by the time they turn 18... they're back in diapers! My God Mike... She's only 13 YOU SICK FUCK!!! How many thousands of users have there been here? How many are left? How many do we know actually died... Quickly running the numbers in my head suggest that most k5 users are immortal... irrespective of their posting history. You are a cruel and heartless bastard, but here... P(Dead given not posting) = P(Not posting given dead) * P(Dead) / P(Not posting) = 1.0 * (5/93924) / ((93924 - 130)/93924) = 5 / (93924 - 130) = 5.3e-5 P(Random K5 user is immortal) ~= 99.9947% I like our chances, most k5 users live forever... but all are dead inside. +1FP mentions procrasti I also agree that prostitution is rape... I guess that's what makes it so much fun. I hope someone in my family notifies k5 of my passing... I don't know any one of you fuckers personally... so that's out. My late-gf would have... but there are technical problems with that plan. Thanks... Yeah... she died 2 years ago after about 10 years together... I documented it here and here. Clearly, it's taken me quite some time to come to terms with everything. I left the UK... actually exactly 2 years to the day today... and moved back to australia to be with my family for a bit... Actually... there's a 2 year rule on the UK indefinite leave to remain visa I have... I think I've just lost that as well... I wonder if they'll accept that as extenuating circumstances or not... that's depressing... Is quite interesting how life can throw a curve ball at you, and how easily you can be knocked off track I suppose. I've fallen a long way in that time in many ways... certainly financially, but still a long way to go emotionally too... shit's all fucked up really... I would have thought I'd be more "over it" than I actually am by now... Dammit... most of my work was in europe... not having a base in the UK is really gonna make things complicated... have to get sponsored and all that shit if I want to work there again... and I have friends there I want to see / be with... I've fucked up. Oh well. Happy Whorable New Year So... for those that don't know, there are like three main whores in my current life... The junkie whore, the crack whore and the 'ex' whore* . (next whore makes four). Maybe you know about the junkie whore what stole my car... well... she was yelling out for me just before christmas... but bitch cost me too much for me to be letting her in... and well... her and the crack whore, who was chilling out with me, are a formidable couple and who knows what shit would go down. * : As if there's such a thing... she got me the driver job... prides herself on once being a true 18 year old at the agency (number 1 prostitute in all [city redacted])... but $12k pair of personality enhancements later still leave her a negative proposition... She fucks like crap, but she drives me crazy... weired huh -- $12k looks great on some chicks I suppose. So... spent the new year with the crack whore, the ex whore and my best mate... I was sorely disappointed that the junkie whore didn't respond to my psychic calls and form a new years penta-amorous-conglomoflaguration, preferably by the beach around a fire... in accordance with the law of fives and other semi-satano-erisian principles... but we made do. I caught myself wondering if I had responded in the standard christmas cheer of forgiveness and welcoming just before the christmas, and accepted the call of the junkie whore, I would have been having a very interesting new years indeed... but 'such is life' and so. [the new year is just another fucking day really... who cares... god willing next year's utc troll will be on time... but my computer died, right...] Anyway... I think somewhere my computer got destroyed... yes... and there are bitcoin on there... goddamn bitcoin. Well... what else... oh yeah... so from like the day after boxing day till sunday I spent 24/7 with the ex-whore... goddamn that woman is fine, and she takes the piss the whole time... Yes... it's difficult when the crack whore comes around any time day and night... that bitch is one proper fucking cock blocking bitch... territorial to the core... I admire it. Anyway... that's the problem on one level... the crack whore beats up the ex whore and steals her shoes and generally takes the piss, to my amusement... but the ex whore is all like, we can't fuck when some crack whore can be knocking on the door any minute... but fucking hell bitch you had plenty of opportunity and you didn't take it even when there was no crack whore around... you expect me to get rid of people from my life and you haven't even staked a claim? That's no excuse to be fucking your ex-bf you stupid slut. So... they have each demonstrated various level so of psychic ability... the crack whore is by far the greatest psychic... and I believe that psychics are destroyed or at least go through a much harder path than non-psychics... (To be psychic is to be psychotic)... the less said the better... but fuck you narrow minded fucks. On this note... we got pulled scoring yesterday, but we hadn't scored... lol!!! dumb motherfuckers... I'm sure you're reading this. Fuck you greyface!!! Make your own choices and leave us to ours!! So... the crack whore is currently off scoring crack... she's promissed me half, but you never know with crack whores... I suppose... I'm thinking of fucking her, just to piss off the ex-whore... she want's the standard street rates... which she's already acknowledged she owes me... But I hate the transactionality of it... which is why... of the three... she so far is unclaimed... and it kind of works that way... money bitch... I can fuck someone better I've never met before and won't have to talk to again, why would I pay you the same? I'm pretty sure I don't even want you in my house???? and here she is... and as if to prove the psychic connection... no crack in sight... just some food... and a tired girl... all cracked out... maybe... so, and that is how I survive... I suppose... trying not to judge, and always losing... in the space of two years, the crack whore I never fucked went from injecting several times a day to smoking, to choosing food... good for her... and me? fuck me... oh yeah, she sent me the 'ex' whore too... I keep forgetting... she could make a good pimp. trying to remember that we are all human... getting drunk and stoned, but not... whatever it is when you're on meth... and trying to find the next chick that can handle it... See... there is something fundamentally wrong... this chick could be fucking me... but if she does... whatever it is that is is no more... right? that's all... it confuses me... the money gets in the way... of course I could pay her... she already owes me... but if I pay her... what's the fucking point? yet... if she fucked me, she'd probably get more than if I paid her? no? idiots... what can you expect? then again... she knew today was the day... if something has to change, it always will. but, where the fuck did I go? Oh yeah... I was going to go to new york... you know high frequency trading blah blah blah, the interview went well... but I never followed through... too busy getting... Happy Whorable 2014 to yall!!! P.S: I have a funny feeling I won't be getting laid tonight... There seem to be cops all around... they're bound to be setting traps... and it's making being a high level pimp and drug dealer difficult. (yeah, I was wrong, degrees are worth shit... sling crack and pound that pussy my niggers!!! free money for all!!!) P.P.S: Shout out to my niggers and bitches tdillo, orion get your act together, trane the tranny fucker, holly hop drive and other random assorted delusional fuckwits and wannabes. Sad, it's all true $ Yes and no... Pretty much, but I don't see how being arrested would help... other than being forced to conform to the norm... but why... what good would that do? A year or two of hookers and drugs isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm not thieving, raping or harming anyone... my principles and actions are still based in free will. I just get to explore an aspect of life I normally wouldn't have. Dude, I left my home country back in '97.. I've been all over the shop... granted... there are many places I still haven't been... but not traveling is not a failure of mine. I've even learned a couple of languages... at least on a very basic, survival, basis. I've been back home now for nearly two years... part of the fun is relearning my own 'culture' (we have even less than you americans, but you get the idea). Thanks for the sincere advice though. I blame vodka $ You're over thinking this. I said semi-satano-erisian... law of fives is erisian, and in keeping with erisian principles, I get to make up whatever principles I want for any religion I chose. Therefore, the law of fives stands as a semi-satano-erisian principle... no backsies. Dude, you seem like a smart chap... You must have known that the military is a tool of the wealthy and political elite, and not used as it is intended for national defense or even what some might consider morally correct actions... Yet there are always people lined up to take the role of the soldier and blindly follow orders to destroy and kill, regardless of their belief in the mission. Why would you chose that role? Well, I'm pretty sure I'm on record for being anti the iraq invasion and the whole 9/11 response in general... but... depends on the problem... some problems can only be solved that way... I think... maybe not even then... who knows? but you fought in iraq, or if you didn't... I assume, you would have gone if ordered to... and do all that killing and destruction and stuff... even though I assume you didn't agree with the war itself. and I know it's off-thread slightly... but it's something that's always fascinated me... cause I don't understand it. You answer your own question... nationalized... The correct question is why the citizens of a first world nation shouldn't deserve free health care... but you can't expect one nation to provide health care for another. On the economic point, a healthy population is a prosperous population... health has positive externalities. On the first point, not everyone can work or get work... we should be aiming at a leisure society, where work is optional... and finally... you leave enough people hungry for long enough... you got real problems... it is better to feed the poor than have to defend from them. The way you framed the problem sounds more like why don't we have one world government instead of rich and poor nations. You're economics is flawed... How can china be kicking ass economically if the people are suffering fro respiratory problems? Oh, you mean like GDP and national debt and shit like that? You've forgotten your microeconomic principles. Good health has high utility... I'm pretty sure I'm kicking most of shanghai's population in economic terms, even the ones much richer than I am... you understand this, right? Health, education, sanitation, welfare and a few other things are positive externalities... and you know the free market underproduces positive externalities... that's the theory anyway. These things are rightly subsidised according to pigovian theory. So... I'm not telling you how to live your life, but if you enjoy the benefits of a stable society, a civilisation with advanced infrastructure and functioning justice system that protects you and your property rights bring, you owe that society... and by rights, in accordance and proportion with the benefit you derive from it. That's a weired one... I'm not sure you could really class family as a positive externality... I mean... yes, a good family is worth a lot - and you don't chose them... but can you make families good by subsidising them? Is a foster family as good as biological family? You can't force people to make bonds. I think the adult individual and their dependents is the basic unit we should consider. And, while I completely agree (and have stated before) that parents will do everything for their children (including working to death)... it does not invalidate any of my other claims. [oblig ad hom attack goes here] These are not venal goals... Positive externalities are underproduced by the freemarket... These things are positive externalities... Your wealth is also protected by the state... you owe for that protection. One thing that is protected would be the right to be free of things like respiratory disease causing pollution... That's clearly a negative externality... and should be taxed, regulated. And if you really want to stretch it to the family... I'm sure parents don't see their children coughing up blood or dying of asthma as a benefit... or, similarly, suffering from some simple medical problem they can't resolve because they aren't currently employed. What point of disagreement is there? Pigou doesn't suggest we ban anything... have you forgotten this already? And yet, the theoretical optimal approach... if pigou is correct... would simply be to tax those things at the 'right' amount... although banning, fines and jail act as a kind of lottery tax paid by those who get caught. Holy shit dude, are you retarded? Tell me the market for negative externalities? Oh... you mean the free market FAILS in the presence of externalities? Or did they just ignore that bit entirely in your Austrian philosophy? Right... but it is not a free market... correct? There's no price or market on tort... it's a government institution that gets to decide if people have been harmed. Who ultimately gets to arbitrate? The wealthy, pollution spewing, industrialists have a lot of power, maybe they will make good arbiters? It is also difficult to organise... can the people of a polluted town all get their fair share of a class action suit against each of the polluters? Possible, maybe, but not simple... far easier to put a tax on pollution. Yet, you also have no solution to positive externalities... I'm pretty sure Austrian idiots like yourself ignore externalities altogether to make their simple theories make sense. It certainly appears to be what you're advocating. The courts are a branch of government You think maybe we could have private courts? This is just fucking craziness... you would make no tax / regulation of any kind, and then... make all the dead people's relatives sue in court, company by company and only win if they can actually prove harm? It would be a field day for polluters... mercury in your fish, uranium in your drinking water... seriously wtf? Do you even realise the effects externalities have on the free market? I mean, in theory, at least? And that there is a simple means of correcting them to bring them back in line with free market optimums? And the answer is taxes and subsidies... ie, pigou? That this is actually the optimum... there are no jobs lost either... because negative externalities are over produced, and we don't even want those fuckers doing those jobs then? wtf is wrong with you? No... I don't get your point... Is it that fukishima isn't causing huge problems to fish? Is that your point? Here's a Bastiat example of negative externalities --- window manufacturers should employ people to smash windows --- more window smashers are employed, more windows get made, there are more jobs in both the window smashing and window manufacturing sectors... there are more jobs... hooray!! So we need no laws against window smashing... We can wait until someone is harmed by it, then they can try and work out which of the ever popular window manufacturer / smashers smashed their window... if they can prove it, they get a free window... hooray!! No laws / regulations required. You seem to be an idiot. Not realising bastiat wrote the broken window fallacy... that's a new one. No shit, shit still happens... Let's give up the laws against murder... I heard murder still happen... all the laws do is impose an onerous regime on us that most certainly represses us... and it doesn't even stop murder!!! You're still wtfing me out with your stupidity. I completely agree... terrorism is overrated... You might not have noticed, but terrorism is a convenient tool to scare and control the masses with... You know... a War On [IDEA]... that can be used to justify all sorts of nonsense. This isn't what I was talking about at all. Yes... there is corruption in politics... doesn't mean there is no role for government. LOL -- as if corruption is limited to government.. Government has mechanisms to change it... too many idiots are worried about shit like drugs and terrorists... The change starts with you on that one. But to think private enterprise doesn't have corruption... or that corruption in private enterprise isn't routinely stopped by government every single day... is proper retarded. Dude... they would put arsenic in your cornflakes if they figured they could make a buck from it and wouldn't spend the rest of their lives in jail. Slavery is freedom huh? Why don't you opt to become a slave then? Cause you aren't allowed to? The only reason you think it's crazy now is because regulation has made it so rare that it appears crazy to you... ever heard of snake oil salesmen? what the hell did you think they were doing? Yes... they often sold toxins directly to their customers, and people died. However, often it isn't the consumer that they poison, but the populations near the factories... we're back to negative externalities again... Ever hear of Bophal? Where there aren't regulations and punishments, the dollar is all that matters, fuck everyone else. Fracking companies right now are poisoning water supplies... Don't be so stupid. why in G-d's name would merck kill their customers? IF THEY'RE DEAD THEY CAN'T BUY MORE OF MERCK'S SHIT. Oh... it was a plan of the FDA all along!!! "MWAHAHAHAHAHA... the free market isn't killing people, we'll have to do something about that... MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!". Your arguments aren't even consistent. For them to be logical, you'd have to now argue that is the purpose of the FDA... to force companies to kill people. We're back at the laws against murder don't stop all murders, therefore they are useless stage. You have a poor grasp of economics, clearly. The FDA forced Merck to kill their customers? REALLY? (Also -- how many gov-regulated fission plants have to melt down? -- pretty sure the answer so far in the US is precisely zero --- you're crazy). Houses aren't wealth... only money is... So homeless people wouldn't be any better off if they had a house... or could eat. A homeless person with $1 in his pocket today is as wealthy as someone with a house in 1913 with $1 in his pocket... Cause money is wealth. It's just obvious to anyone who knows from economics that wealth is money. I think you missed the /s tag That's my whole point... Economists generally don't consider money itself to be wealth, its only value is in its ability to be exchanged for wealth. Very few rich people have cash and cash accounts that comprise the majority of their wealth. Money is just the social lubricant to enable the efficient trade of goods and services... It is the goods and services that an economy has, or an individual has access to, that makes it or them wealthy. So, you cannot just print wealth into existence... the real limitations on wealth are the labour and resources required to produce goods and services. The very easy to understand example would be that, on average, no one would be better off if everyone was given a billion dollars a day printed by the government... Or at least, you wouldn't expect everyone to suddenly be living like billionaires just because everyone suddenly has billions of dollars... right? That's not too hard to understand, is it? The price of blowjobs* is gonna go up, fo sho! Money isn't wealth. * : If you think AI/VR/Robots/Challenges are going to fix this problem... you're missing something in your brain and cannot be helped. TIL: Asian periods are once every six months Unlike my now-ex-gfs cat, which is unlikely to have periods ever again, let alone walk. I think these scratch marks might be infected... it's making masturbation very difficult. DAMN YOU MDC!!! Next time please tell us when the price has spiked and when it has hit the bottom. This would greatly simplify my trading. Thank you. Well... you actually want to maximise growth which means you estimate the growth trend and variance of the price... or rather... attempt to estimate the price probability distribution function... (log normal is pretty close though, most of the time... with fatter tails than the normal, so include skew and kurtosis and some other shit... or just estimate it directly)... Then... using something like the Kelly criterion, which is the application of Shannon's information theory to finance... extend it a bit... cause it's a distribution and not binary outcome... You find the allocation, say between a 4% APR savings account, and bitcoin... that maximises the sum over (the probability of the outcomes multiplied by the log of the outcome)... apply the allocation, called rebalancing... and repeat this process as often as possible. Adjust slightly if you're drawing a wage from it... cause now, you might want to maximise the arithmetic mean instead of the geometric mean... but you can probably ignore this. You can send a tithe of your profits from this to: 1CFXkxCBnc2Gv6h9o4ZdN33vFohoXPZ2Dj. Good luck. Bad Link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory Add basic income, drop minimum wage... It could work. if __name__=="__main__": if sys.args[0] == "--testing": # not really, but run_tests() # You should probably use unittest or something. else: main() You can of course create myshit.py and test_myshit.py if you like and even myshitlib.py... or some thing like that... w/e dude, get over it. __name__ tells you how the module was called... it is "__main__" if you launched that module directly... and it is something else if the module was imported... if __name__ is "__main__"... it's traditional I suppose to do something... test cases can go in here too... but an alternate file is okay too... but that's your break statement... just wrap whatever the hell the app does in main()... is there are need to move the library code out? I dunno... depends. Won't the earth end of the elevator be travelling around the earth about once a day? That thing'll be moving pretty fast, right? Well... looks like only 1.5x the speed of sound. So... can be done... You could land on it, I suppose. Won't this generate sonic booms all over the planet? And what would the G forces on a skyhook for it be? Yeehaw!!! Racist much tranny fucker? $ The real solution to the worlds economic problems Capitalism with wealth redistribution. Tax Wealth -- directly tax individual wealth... at a small percentage per year... over some threshold. Remove min wage laws and other price controls in general... but don't forget negative and positive externalities exist... health, education, pollution... Pay a basic income to everyone. Let the system continue on and build the robots to let everyone, except the rich robot corp owners and the three engineers they need, retire... There'll be 12B other engineers to replace them... I don't think they'll dare. No shit... mission critical is now... what I described doesn't stop that working at all. However, quite likely at some point in the future, the robots/ai will be more capable than most any human at most any task... So... zero personnel self maintaining, repairing and decommissioning nuclear power stations could easily be a reality. I still think we will need the market to direct the robots though... so capitalism will still reign supreme... and the system I described would allow that... and encourage it. Dude, I'm talking about the future... not what robots can do, but what robots will probably be able to do... Robots that build factories that build solar powered robots that build factories that build solar powered farming robots... Or just run them on nuclear... who cares... At some point, I imagine, robots become even cheaper than 3rd world ag. workers... as we raise their standard of living beyond current first world standards. For sure... pretty sure I've had the go nuclear or go cold (or hot and flooded) debate with you before. No... I meant when there were 12B ppl on the planet... The robot engineers need about as much training as a burger king engineer... Important decisions like whether to hit the red, green, blue or yellow button... and which hole to put the star shaped block in. The round one? The robots will take care of the rest. Yeah, but they get paid like 10x basic income Those guys are elite motherfucker!! Maybe only 1 of the 12B would actually qualify... 6... It's another hot fucking Birak. That's for sure. http://www.whalesandwildflowers.com.au/noongarseasons.htm Problem with real CIA agents is they also swear at 3am that they're not CIA agents... and paint anyone who says otherwise as being insane. So, in some ways, it's hard to tell a schizophrenic from someone who has had interactions with the CIA. They see meaning where you can't... Maybe the moon really is telling the cia to bug their cat's contract with monsanto... I mean, you've seen the contrail's right?!? How can you sit there denying all this when it's right in front of your own eyes? Maybe you just can't handle the truth!!! Clearly you're a cia shill or another sleeping sheep. WAKE UP SHEEPLE! I'm on to you Wise Craker aka - "Cia kreWser" thinking you can hide in plain sight. It's obvious to anyone who can see the signs. John Nash leaked the fact that he was working for the CIA to his wife... He had to be dealt with... I'm pretty sure they did some mkultra stuff on him to induce his psychosis and give them plausible deniability. There's no doubt in my mind that his mathematics would have been very useful to them... and that he was an asset of theirs. You can pay for the abortion or you can pay for 20 years of welfare and another 40 years of health care, housing, crime and prison. You can't force sterilize anyone either. Pragmatism says pay for the abortion and birth control... Weed... caffeine... nicotene... and anything the girls bring over. Why does the add method modify self? Isn't it supposed to return a new object that is the result of the addition and leave the object the method is being called on alone? Yes, and don't append an object to a list that might be modified elsewhere... unless that's what you want, and I don't think you do here. Actually, you found the bug and fixed it... I just gave a couple of pointers in the right direction... These are fairly common errors I think when starting with python... you'll learn not to make them and to spot them pretty quickly. Especially the everything* is a reference to an object. * : Except primitives, right? If you smoked crack and fucked trannys you're a crack smoking tranny fucker... today... forever and always. Your wife is withholding sex with her. You can still have sex. It's all about the attitude. self.shotgun_mouthwash() $ Do you want happiness inside you? $ This is true in 99% of cases.. good design and all that... but the remaining 1% of the time... it's nice to be able to switch on type... Maybe your function can take a string or an integer... I dunno... you can think of a reason... and you might convert the string to an integer in the function and continue on... Or maybe, you might get an object, or an object encapsulated as an xml string... Yes... messy... but sometimes it can be useful. If they got a basic income we wouldn't need to eat them. End the artificial scarcity of thanksgiving turkey. More turkeys die from forced over feeding than starvation. There are more empty nests than homeless turkeys. If they got a basic income we wouldn't need to eat them. End the artificial scarcity of thanksgiving turkey. There are more empty nests than homeless turkeys. That would have taken effort $ HAHA - U CAN'T PROGRAM $ If he hadn't remained tough on crime and anti drug I could have respected this guy. Can you smoke crack on mount everest and suck cock in the Mariana trench at exactly the same time? Man... your existence is very different to mine... I've only got one body and that can only be in one place at any given moment... What's more... it takes time to move my body from one place to another. But you can do all things at once... except, you know... actually understand economics. Yeah... funny thing is, I do... but I am a human, not a bot... Maybe, that's how we differ. No you can't... Seriously... you can be in two places AT EXACTLY THE SAME TIME? If not, then choosing to be in any given place at any given time is MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE with being in another place at the same given time. I'm not disputing you can be in two different places at two DIFFERENT times... that DOES NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF CHOICE. If you can, YOU ARE NOT HUMAN. YOU ARE A BOT or fail at economics - QED. DO THEY? PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW YOU SUCK COCK AND SMOKE CRACK AT THE SAME TIME... MULTITASKING? SO YOU TAKE A DRAG, THEN A SUCK, THEN A DRAG AND A SUCK? THAT'S NOT SOLVING THE PROBLEM, CAUSE YOU STILL AREN'T SUCKING COCK AND SMOKING CRACK AT THE SAME TIME... YOU ARE ALTERNATIVELY SMOKING CRACK AND SUCKING COCK. You deny the existence of limits to this? Bill Gates can be in Australia and the US in the same hour? No... Then money isn't the problem... your mind is. Right... So, go teleconference yourself to the top of Everest. Oh... NOT THE SAME FUCKING THING. Is what you do not get... VR is not R. So? This has fuck all to do with your diary post. You're denying basic facts of biology and physics right now... We aren't computers, we are human beings... we exist physically in a single location and a given point in time... You're suggesting that you can be everywhere at once... YOU ARE FUCKING RETARDED. NO WE CAN'T... $$$$$$$$$ What really stops bitcoin going too high... Well... I think, you have to look at how much value an individual holds, relative to their overall portolio... Some muppet sold all his coins at about 300 or so to pay off his student loans... Like, if you were poor (avg middle class person), were an early investor or miner, and suddenly found your portfolio was worth a few million... you're going to start selling... If you're a billionaire... well... maybe not... So... how is bitcoin distributed... are there too many geeks with too much of their value now in bitcoin... they will cap the price for a while... how many will hold on to become billionaires? OTOH... bitcoin is a great show in volatility... the herds rush in on the high, and when it starts to drop... they all try to rush out... so... this high will probably be followed by a low again... right now? Tomorrow? What events could occur to begin a panic? If not, how high will it go? How low will it crash to? Fucked if I know. As I suggested... I sold all my coin when silks road bought the price down. Now that bitcoin is clearly surging, it is obviously a good time to buy bitcoin now, just as I advised. Sell just after the next crash, because that is proof that bitcoin will never work. LOL -- not really... jesus fucking christ, I begged my bank, my family and my friends... for about $50k... I was going on and on for weeks when the price was between 60 and 100, about 3 to 4 months ago... I'd worked out that was about how much I needed to give me a decent income (trading volatility alone at a fixed price)... cause everything else I do is pretty much failing... My sister, like three weeks ago, agreed to loan me about half that to cover my debts as a pretty low interest, long term, loan... bitch, I wouldn't be in debt if you'd offered me that when I was begging you for it... "wtf is bitcoin, you'll lose all your money and be broke again, you should get a job"... well yeah, but now I'm in debt and any money you give me will just put me back to where I was back when I was asking for that amount, but without any of the benefit... thanks, but fucking hell... not even 1k for bitcoin when I was saying it was clearly low? So, I'm still thinking long term bitcoin is gonna go extreme... could be... I'm actually gonna try and get about $100k loan through a friend if I can, and offer up my house as collateral... my family are still like, you're fucking mad... but they talked me out of selling my place back then... "unlocking value" in the place is a better option than outright selling it... but banks won't lend to me (even though I own my house) cause my job is just too strange for them... Now, of course, bitcoin isn't currently the 'obviously' undervalued commodity it was then... except, maybe it is... the cryptography has to be broken for it to go to zero value, or the internet goes away, or an altcoin supercedes it to go near zero... how else can you send value, somewhat psuedononymously, across the internet, globally, apolitically, etc, etc... So... assuming the NSA don't blow the fact that the crypto is all back doored, and no altcoin beats it... it really could continue to spread around internationally, especially third world countries, and good mobile phone / POS integration, and also in the first world... trading it on the stock exchange... etc... it really could become THE way of making payments, and a store of digital value... We got fractional reserve banking as a threat too... But... besides all that... 21M coins, 7B people, is 3 thousandths of a coin per person... I dunno... Seems like a few coins makes you pretty rich... Some people think they could be worth $1M/coin in the next ten years... possible... I think so... So, anyway, yeah... these explosions are often followed by a big swing in the other direction... but they may not see below 200 again (for a long time)... Despite all my raving about not getting in big... I did manage a few hundred dollars or so to buy in... Remember, I bought in at the peek of the last crash at about 250... I think I worked my average buy in price down to 120 or so... Ummm... right... my mismanagement of coins... so far... well... I put about half in ASICMINER TAT shares... when they were about 3... I think I sold them all at about 0.3... When the price hit about 150... I sold most of my coins... I went to by back in at 120... but never hit... I got bored working on my algorithms, cause I couldn't get the investment I needed... and really just left it... OUCH... so I actually have been running short, and I didn't watch the ASICMINER shares, until btct.co refunded me cause they shut down. I also bought two butterflys... they've been shipped... I'm still waiting for them to turn up... if they turn up tomorrow... I think, according to my calculations... I need bitcoin to hit near 2k for those to be in profit in their own right... However, surprisingly... yes, at current prices, I have made a profit in dollars... I mean, they jumped like 10 times their value in three months, and I've nearly doubled my total bitcoin fund value (measured in dollars), by being retarded... and even enough to cover those stupid butterflys, should they never turn up... So, I'm gonna try and get some real money together, and buy even more... though it's probably a bad time to buy, I wouldn't put more than a quarter of my (bitcoin) funds (assuming I can get them) in at this point... and save some powder for a hopeful crash to buy in again... and hope that it hits 10k in a year or two. Even still, I'm gonna buy in more with the stupidly small fund I have... even though the price is too high... I'm still running too short... cause I forgot (as I was selling a few days ago!!! damn!!!) that I want to save a single 1 million dollar coin out my bitcoin (lol) portfolio... and trade with the remaining... so... I'll probably be buying in soon anyway at yet another peek... damn... that's how it is. This is why I haven't checked that email yet... things haven't been going so well in general... as you can see by the above... it's not that my ventures aren't making money... it's just that they're not really make enough money... I've eaten all my investments... well... smoked them really. damn junkie whore stole my car, cards and phone... again. Yeah, that guy is a fuck head, clearly... pretty much, contact randoms on faceboook, and give them that spiel... do that a hundred times a day... make 300 a day... and give whoever does buy it a link. Make them pay you in bitcoin... Live off your bitcoins... But... Everyone should own at least one bitcoin... you did buy in already, right? On NSA back doors... If Satoshi Nakamoto is 'I'm NSA, took oaths.'... and they have a vault of well over a million coins... Well... wouldn't they kind of rule the bitcoin economy? Fuck... at 1M/coin... that's like a 1T vault... On bitcoin fractional lending http://inputs.io are in a good position to go fractional lending... If they can learn to do the first bit properly, you know... seems they don't even trust themselves. Apparently they have funds to cover the big guys... typical fucking rich man's world while the poor get screwed over as always. Lets say they can fix their ways... why not just say, fuck it... we'll always have enough funds to cover you rich fuckers with more than N coins... offline!!... and you little fuckers can collectively withdraw 1% of the online funds a day... and you rich fucks can collectively withdraw 10% of the online funds a day... or wait in a queue for a few percent more of the online funds per day, for your full amount. Those numbers don't apply between inputs.io accounts either... they're off the blockchain... (reversaable) but charge fees on all transactions. And fund a daily wallet from a wallet that is sent from a dedicated wallet... that is kept nearly offline... isolated... like carry the generated transactions across by hand from a machine that isn't on the internet... that works right? Microtransactions are possible... really... like a satoshi or less... with small % fees, and caps on larger transactions or smaller % fees, I don't know... but better than on the blockchain maybe. Could they earn enough in fees to cover their 4100 bitcoin loss??? That's a few million dollars, if they can get hold of it... Why not sell shares in themselves... another won't have this problem. Green addresses... for fast before the blockchain transactions... like between mtgox, bitpay, etc... Keep accounts in local currency... Now allow some accounts to go negative... The better 'serviced' an account, the more negative we tolerate. The better we know you, the more negative we tolerate. The more security you provide, the more negative we tolerate. Cap interest on negative accounts in terms of the lesser of either a currency or bitcoin... and still win whether bitcoin increases or decreases in value. Can they ever hope to catch the 4.1k bitcoin debt they now owe their clients? However, derivatives increase supply by producing tradeable near equivalents... thus reducing price... and therefore they are all risks... depends how quick they work out... what their limits are... lol whut when they crash??? inevitable?? You're a funny troll... but I'm genuinely curious Can you provide me with some biblical support for your racialist prejudice? Wasn't jesus black or at least an arab or something non-white? Like, white jesus is a modern myth, right? Finally, have you ever watched/read guns, germs and steel? The main hypothesis being that the real reason europe prospered over africa was that the domesticable plants and animals all existed in the particular climate / region found around mesopotamia and the 33rd parallel? If he wanted money he would have got a job. I like how you don't see the end of the honeymoon coming. Not enough nuclear power... The solution was nuclear power 10 years ago... I think you all missed it. I hope you all enjoy death and starvation. Something to do with technology maybe? Let's not use technology, and see how well we support $7B people... Oh cool... looks like we're headed in exactly that direction. Fusion is the perfect energy source if only it worked... Fission works... it would give us nearly unlimited energy. Pragmatism says fission trumps all other energy sources, right now. On exponential population growth An example given by Dr David Suzuki. You have a test tube filled with growth medium, and the first minute you introduce a bacterium. The bacterium population doubles every minute, and the test tube is filled after 60 minutes. At what point is the test tube only half full? At what point is the test tube only 1/8th full? Would there be a sign of problems when the test tube was only 1/8th full? Now, the bacterium discover three more test tubes filled with growth medium... how many more minutes do the bacterium have? That's exponential growth... it is completely unsustainable in the long term. ZPG or NPG are the only long term solutions we have now... fortunately education and high standards of living appear to achieve these goals. Answers for the mathematically disadvantaged 59 minutes 57 minutes No 2 minutes I understood we had more than 200 years just recycling depleted uranium and other nuclear waste... like in the CANDU designs... Thorium (which CANDU can use, I think) with recycling is thousands of years, easily. Yes, I can support this... Trane's just so far off reality with his print money, give it to everyone and tax nobody theory that it is just pure crazy, inflation causing nonsense. I pretty much agree with everything they say... create basic income, drop minimum wage, adjust taxes. I especially support wealth taxes, they are non-distortionary - ie, people will spend their money on what they want the most, irrespective of a wealth tax... It doesn't affect the poor, who spend almost all of their income, and only affects the rich (wealthy, not high income earners, who might still be poor), and is an incentive to make their wealth productive. I think HFT taxes are stupid... why? Cause most people can't HFT, and therefore distrust it... Let them do their job and tax the created wealth. A tax on HFT is just a tax on the efficient operation of the market. Land value taxes on the value of the undeveloped land are impossible, what is the value of the undeveloped land? My own city was nothing but a swamp, there's nothing special about the value of the land there except for the development... even if you only count the development on surrounding land... the value of all things is subjective and dependent on the relationship to other things. Income tax should be reduced as far as possible... It's a disincentive to earn. It should be able to be replaced by the correct level of wealth tax. Inheritance tax is a disincentive to provide for your future generations... possibly one of the strongest economic drives of all. A wealth tax is a continuous form of inheritance tax anyway... one people can plan for. Inheritance taxes are definitely disruptive to any family run business, beyond the obvious disruption that triggers them. Overall... Basic income and wealth tax... drop minimum wage... have the uber rich who run the robots provide the world with exactly what the world wants in a non-distortionary, economically efficient way. You need to look at it from the other perspectives Why would Sam Walton work so hard if he knew his children wouldn't benefit from it... providing for the success of your children after you have gone is a HUGE economic incentive... probably far greater than providing even for yourself... It's not an instinct we want to reduce. What we do want though is to make sure that wealth doesn't get concentrated in the hands of so few families that they are basically the overlords of us all... Unproductive rent seekers on the rest of us... that their wealth becomes a detriment to society, not a net positive. I think inheritance tax is a clumsy way of doing that. Wealth tax though means that the wealth of others is definitely a net positive to society, because we tax it directly. To maintain that wealth you can't just hoard it, you must make it productive, and that is done by providing economic benefits to society... It's a two pronged approach to making individual / familial wealth a benefit to the entire society. wtf is this shit? $ What makes her a prostitute? I mean, I've pushed trolleys for a living, doesn't make me a trolley pusher. If she's not actually asking for money for sex, she's not a prostitute. QED. She might be casing the joint out, in which case, she's a thief, and that's different again... take reasonable precautions of course. For all you knew, you just threw out a perfectly good house slut. For shame. Some people see a mousetrap, I see free cheese and a fucking challenge. No, they should be bringing you weed, food, money and ass... Otherwise it's just prostitution in kind. They respect that. I hope he makes it a combo poll next time $ this makes more sense... It's been too long since I did java to be 100% certain, but I did look for nested classes in your example and didn't find any... but there you go, nested classes. static this doesn't make much sense, does it? Not sure if you think libertarianism is anarchy Do you think siberian salt mines for the plebs is a better idea? Slaves don't have to worry about freedom, therefore slavery is better? What about John Stuart Mill? The harm principle being the rule? That we should aim for maximization of free will and economic utility? Only limiting people's freedom where there are negative externalities? I guess this is all going over your head. Fine... but really, what does that even mean? Pieces of paper make no decisions, only the people controlling those bits of paper. So, this is a non-sequitur, merely a platitude. To me, it comes down to the four assumptions of the free market... where these break, we have reason for government interference in the market. Tax (prison is a type of tax) negative externalities (harm is a negative externality) to reduce their impact. Raise taxes to pay for positive externalities to promote their existence. Regulations to overcome informational limitations. On this basis, drugs should be legalised and regulated, wealth should be taxed (not income), minimum wage removed and a very basic social income implemented. Libertarians create a state to protect BOTH property and PERSONAL rights... So, the difference is quite large. The only thing missing from some libertarian philosophy is the recognition of the existence of externalities (both positive and negative)... once you have that, what else could you want? You want the government to tell you how to live your life, what its purpose is and what to do with it? John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, on half a pint of shandy was particularly ill. Opposing idea is the SAME FUCKING IDEA Jesus christ this troll is getting old... KILL YOURSELF Required Reading: Illuminated Aritcle of The Day http://www.solhaam.org/articles/mind1.html TLDR: Telepathy. Depends on gender, race and region... Are these black market newborns or government supplied? 5. the real constraints on an economy are real real resources and available labor, not money which is just a tool. I thought your point was that if you printed a billion dollars for everyone, we could all live like billionaires... True or False? Cause I'm pretty sure I've been trying to tell you that from the beginning. Handwaving... There will be an effect, in what direction and what magnitude? In principle or currently? Absolutely or deferentially? Can everyone stop working today? Is that your proposal? We would have no production capacity problem if EVERYONE stopped working? BULLSHIT On what basis? Why not $2.50 a year, why not $2B? Why is $2.50 not enough, and why is $2B too much... because you say so? It's a number that sounds nice you mean... 2.5k/year should be enough for the poor. He was trying to say: "I guess the horse was liking it." When using aptitude Work out how to change the status of packages between Automatic (m or M?) (will be removed if not required by another package), Manual (installed, but upgradeable) and Hold (=?) (don't remove or upgrade). If your DM (desktop manager?) is being removed because you removed the bluetooth package... then maybe the DM was somehow being depended on by the bluetooth package (really? I dunno... normally their dependencies are pretty good). Probably more likely everything was flagged as auto by aptitude and nothing was holding it in when you (g) go. Oh... if aptitude shows a whole heap of packages to be removed... you should be able to alter their status on that page, go back and try again... and it should deal with the dependencies sensibly. Anyway... I normally strip my debian installs back to an absolute bare minimum needed to gain access and run aptitude, then carefully find the top most level packages I need for the task. Can you trace the dependencies? Are the DM packages dependent on the bluetooth packages perhaps? More than likely that way than the other. Then are there subpackages of the DMs that depend on it... If, for example, you install the KDE meta-package, and then attempt to uninstall bluetooth, it might break the dependencies all the way up... but you might still be able to have the majority of KDE installed if you do it at a finer grained level. Sorry can't help more. why? $ Quid Pro Quo QED $ Quid Pro Quo QED AKA Utility ... Actually Good to hear you sussed out the problem... Here's a hint I can give you... Instrument... anything from plain print statements, the built in logging module, all the way up to real time html pages (probably not in this case). But... if you know you have a long running loop, make sure you can get a concept of its progress. You might have realized you had an infinite loop a bit sooner with a bit more feedback in development. Yeah, also idle might have that built in... he should try running idle. With basic income, we could eat virtual bread $ duh Ahuh... and telnet the raw materials in (ssh is backdoored by the NSA... they'll sniff your loaf anyway). Yeah, the standard model does say that... then people look at how real prices work and there's still an outstanding question of how prices tend towards the equilibrium... queues? No... I'm not talking discounted utility... I'm talking how do real prices tend towards their ideal equilibrium in the real world. Say in an actual farmers market, farmers set the price of their goods, and change them throughout the day... Are they selling too fast, can't keep up with customers, raise prices, are they selling too slow, no one in your shop, lower prices... As I said, this is an actual outstanding question in economics... No le sigh link is gonna cover this. No it's not... You're still talking about an equilibrium prices... even over time... I'm talking about real prices, and how they tend to the equilibrium (not over time, in general)... and I'm talking about it in a mathematically rigorous way. How far is the current price away from the ideal, for example... what sort of variance from that do you expect? What are the mathematical mechanisms by which real prices are decided? How does price formation occur? It is NOT SOLVED. Price formation is not equilibrium theory and time utility discounting... end of. You are missing the point... PRICE FORMATION is not covered by current economic theory... only theoretical equilibrium prices. "How does price formation occur" -- this sounds like a really silly question. Somebody makes a sticker. Where is the problem? The problem is, we don't really understand how a firm determines what price to price a product at. Do firms use value added pricing? Do firms analyze demand curves to determine elasticity and revenue maximizing price? Or do they somehow estimate profit maximizing price? Also, in theory, in a competitive market prices adjust so that demand = supply, however, no single firm ever changes it's price, they just take price as given by the market, so how do prices ever adjust? --144.214.42.129 06:06, 5 February 2007 (UTC) That's all very nice, but in the end different entitites do it differently. Would it be better to pose this problem "Classify all pricing methods." or "Classify all viable pricing methods." There are very few good models of price formation in a competitive equalibrium. If you feel that this is trivial, the field would greatly appriciate your contribution. Of the listed open questions, this is the only one I have heard directly mentioned in a grad level course as an important open question. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AList_of_unsolved_problems_in_economics Yeah, I am referencing wikipedia... but maybe you can find a better reference... This was bought up in the online course... He said a Nobel was probably waiting for the guy who solved it. You REALLY need to understand, we are not talking about equilibrium theory (standard model) or time discounted utility theory (time/preference model)... not even time value... we are talking about PRICE FORMATION. Both theories tell you EXACTLY NOTHING about how real world prices are decided upon and adjusted. Remember, in competitive equilibrium both buyers and sellers are PRICE TAKERS... it is assumed they CANNOT ALTER THE PRICES and take whatever the market currently offers... but in reality, we know they both do. Why does a shopkeeper raise a price one day, and lower it another, or vice versa? That's nothing to do with time discounting or equilibrium theory. Does the buyer's decision to purchase depend on the change in price... is memory of previous contracts important in that decision making or is it irrelevant? How is it affected by inventories? It is an OPEN QUESTION in economics. It's not unlike every other science, there are questions that remain... and yes... the equity premium puzzle is still an open question too (though I'm not sure about the way trane worded it... no shock there). Idiot dickhead... for your information... I am aware of haggling... what about auctions? What about business contracts, what about market fairs, what about shop owners. I'm not making this up... PRICE FORMATION is an OPEN QUESTION in economics. Go search google for 'price formation economics'... you will find many papers written on the subject in different fields, most quite recent too... none definitive... none generally accepted mathematical model of the entire process. Just because you can't understand the problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What? Apparently, it's an open question to those who hold PhDs in economics too... Who am I to question them? That is a fair point... But you're still trying to deny the very idea that there are 'basic'-ish things in economics that don't yet have generally accepted answers to. In physics, for example, how gravity works is still an open question. Your response would be something like - dude, haven't you ever seen an apple fall from a tree... it bends spacetime or F = Gm1m2/(r^2)... I can't believe how retarded you are. You're missing the point. This doesn't mean scarcity don't real or utility is bullshit, or prices don't tend to equilibrium... it just means there are some questions that we would like good answers to. You really are a retard, aren't you... You don't know the difference between equilibrium theory and disequilibrium price formation... You can't even realise you have never been taught anything on price formation... but you're an expert on it. You got the mathematical model of haggling down have you? Which is really a kind of price discrimination. The same process occurs in an auction, a dutch auction... you haggle at the supermarket? The supermarket haggles with you. There's probably only one thing worse than ignorance, and that's being willfully, stubbornly, ignorant of your own ignorance. You've done nothing but prove that you don't understand the problem. So? You've actually presented an argument from authority argument... Doesn't make my statement incorrect. Can't you use google? There are dozens of recent papers... Fine... one example: A 2008 paper on price formation in a sequential selling mechanism. or A monetary theory of price formation - proposal. or price formation in an open economy: Theory and evidence from the united kingdom, 1951 - 1991, published 1997 Just judging by these papers... does it sound like there's an all encompassing, generally accepted theory of price formation? Or are you still confused between the concepts of price formation and value? You are right... There are no unanswered questions in economics. Adam Smith answered every question we will ever need to know in the field. Markets are always in equilibrium, and equilibrium equations can answer everything you need to know real world processes. Enjoy your ignorance. That's about the level of intelligent response I expect from you. LD, just say it, there are no unanswered questions left in economics. You probably think we've solved all of physics too now that the higgs boson has been found. May as well pack up and go home, nothing left to learn guys, research is over, universities are just vocational training centers. So what's your problem then? That there are unanswered questions in economics, or that this particular problem is still open? There doesn't seem to be a definitive list of open economics question, no millennial prize like there is for mathematics... So, I haven't been able to find an authoritative description. The best I've heard is that 'price formation' is not yet answered... and a whole heap of papers investigating different aspects of price formation. But you seem to think price formation is the same as time value discouting... which is, quite frankly, stupid. Dude, I'm not so arrogant to think that I would know better than two professors of economics from two different universities who took the time to point this out in their respective online courses. You on the other hand... You're an idiot $ Short term advice: Sell Bitcoin (buy back soon) $ Equivalent to having sold them all... Well done... you timed it great. SRS are there with ya... http://ww.reddit.com/r/SRSBusiness/comments/1nlbet/fbi_shuts_down_silk_road_foun der_offers_to_pay/ I'm gonna go with no... proceedings of crime on that one. And the trial will be over by the time he gets it out of mtgox. But also amazes me, right... selling drugs... this guy's all like: "Now, my goals have shifted. I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression amongst mankind ... I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force." And what does he actually do? Trys to have a man killed. wtf? This is why you need courts and the state actually regulating markets... prohibition and throwing it to the black market results in black market solutions. "let's make liquidity a free good" Ironically, (theory) this ideal is what wall street and HFT bots approach as they tend towards perfect competition. I'm pretty sure you just failed the turing test $ For someone who rails against the evils of capitalism... you sure do seem to like to see the unfortunate suffer. I don't know... I've never got a handle on GG's politics. He seems to hate the 'free market'... which is anti-randian... I get the anti-us-jesus-free-market sentiment... that's another matter... but I'm not sure if he's libertarian, socialist, capitalist, social darwinist, left, right... I just really can't tell. Maybe he's just anti-everything? LOL - DEA intel. analyst thinks he's essential... Get rid of those guys and free up a chunk of the economy. How can there be these addicts if it's illegal? Clearly if it's illegal addicts couldn't get hold of it... I mean, that's the reason it is illegal, right? Cause it's so addictive... So, they can't possibly have been addicted to it. Maybe also explain how these "addicts" could possibly get hold of an illegal substance. Being illegal, I'm sure they paid all their taxes and made sure not to steal anything or harm anyone... just like their dealers. Just maybe, the solution to addictive substances is for people to get them from legal sources? Yeah, regulations... for sure... Just don't hand it wholesale over to the black market. The black market simply factors in the risk to the price / quality trade-off, and carry's on very efficiently regardless. So, you have to undercut the black market, which is normally easy, without turning those who would use the black market away. Licencing? For distributors, sure... for users? What should be the limits? I don't know for sure... maybe a signing for ever how much you bought, a declaration that it's for personal use only... Get a pamphlet on awareness, risk factors, rehabilitation. Taxing it to cover it's externalities and to fund rehab would seem like a good idea too. Other than that... have at it... if ur going to anyway. Happy Birthday $ More radiation is released from your average coal power plant than a nuclear plant. Your chances of getting leukaemia are higher if you live within 3 miles of a coal plant than if you lived within 3 miles of a nuclear plant. Coal plants pump all that radium straight up the smoke stack, and it falls back right down onto you. Nuclear plants don't pump shit out... it's all accounted for. If you want to reduce cancer... Nuclear power is the way to go. For sure... but that's a raelly dumb reason to be anti-nuclear energy. This is basically true... Nuclear is the only non-carbon emitting energy source capable of providing continuous output at the levels we need to replace gas, coal and oil. The hippies did kill it, even though, statistically, it is actually the safest producers of energy of all (measured in lives per megawatthour produced) I'm pretty sure the founder of greenpeace quit over the issue. STFU and Do A Flip Retard $ Fuck you too you french speaking faggot $ I thought you were against it? First you blame the french (cause they use nuclear), then you use french, then you are french... Make your goddamn mind up. You can't even articulate the problem 'oh noes nuclear bad... can't sleep, nuke will eat me!'. You prefer CO2, right? It's good for the plants? LOL what a total fail fuck. Because the negative externalities of fossil fuels are generally not paid for. Unpaid negative externalities are like a subsidy... more fossil fuels than 'we would like' get used, instead of the alternatives. 'Economics is against it' - simply means you don't understand the problem. Fusion is better than 'Nuclear' too... but we can't do it economically... and that's the point. Nuclear Fission technology is here now, today. We could quit using fossil fuels for everything except plastic and lubrication. Stop producing CO2 almost completely and have almost unlimited energy. IF we can get over the eco-stigmatisation that the greenies have been pushing for the last 4 decades. Sure, when everyone was worrying about the bomb, it's easy to see how the issues got conflated... but nuclear energy is the only real viable alternative we have right now. We need to get using it ten years ago. Small quantities, Isolated, Not A Problem (tm) Yes, it needs to be dealt with, and that particular facility is a fuck up... but it's on the scale humans are used to engineering at. Its a surmountable problem. Global Warming... is GLOBAL... and well beyond our general political and engineering capabilities. Gen IV reactors don't have these problems... and in many cases we can actually use the 'waste' products from earlier reactors as the fuel. Two birds with one stone. Radioactive Boogeyman will make your three headed children's cancer glow in the dark!! OMG THE RADIATIONS... IT HUNTS YOU IN THE NIGHT! Global warming will only displace billions of people, turn arable land into dessert and dry up some precious sources of fresh water. Fuck sake.. get some scientific perspective. I was so worried I wasn't going to get a mention there... No... not all women are prostitutes... but it's hard to argue that women who fuck men for money aren't prostitutes. I think my diary the other day might have been a little harsh in retrospect. It is quite frustrating when you're single and you spend 8-16 hours a day driving women you would probably fuck if you met them at a bar, but won't because you didn't and they're fucking half a dozen men or more a night... and then complaining their boyfriends don't give them enough attention or try hard enough in bed... wtf??? I mean, if you offer a person lost for days in the dessert a glass of water or a thousand dollars... they'll take the water. These women are the equivalent to being force fed on a firehose... they aren't going to appreciate the most refreshing offering their so called boyfriends could offer. STOP FUCKING WHINING! Be glad someone still puts up with you, you oversexed moo cow. FFS. The one woman who I lost, was so far from these women, in her generosity and faithfulness, I guess I've been spoilt... I don't expect to see that again in my lifetime. I was going to write another diary trying to argue it from their point of view... I mean, maybe I could go into economic theory or something... but fuck... if you're selling your cunt, I'm pretty sure you've missed the point somewhere along the way (some ppl are just tragic, that's excusable, the others, I have no idea). Viva la cheap whores. You deserve a medal For $10 you could have beaten her like she was your mum. $10.00 is a bit steep for a blowjob from your mum. The only human being worse than a whore is a Mac fan. Interestingly... there is no substitute for space. Spermaceti oil (sperm oil) is the only oil that can operate at the temperatures of space. So, yeah, scarcity of whales would be a problem as we expand into space... until we develop an alternative... bioengineer it at least. NO YUO! $ "I AM NOT YOUR FUCKING GIRLFRIEND!" Translation: "I am now fucking someone else." Whorable Jobs I got to admit, driving whores around to clients to get fucked has turned out to be even more depressing than I first imagined. It has definitely enhanced my misogynistic tendencies. The job is like all the worst parts of being in a relationship. Whining about all their shit, being completely self centred and trying to justify their shit decisions they make. All the time treating the driver like some scratching post they just want destroyed. Perfect job for Beta wannabes. Was quite funny when one whore asked me what other jobs I had... definite turn in attitude when I explained I was a software engineer. She asked why I didn't do it anymore... I said the stress... Then she tried to add some stress (I can't beleive u took me to the wrong house", but nothing can compare to having a billionare watching over your terminal trying to bring their company's website back online. After that... she was enlightened. Too late... She's still a whore. I haven't had the heart to tell them I could be earning five times what they make. Money is about the only thing they seem to respect. They simple DO NOT GET IT. It's disgusting. They're disgusting, and I'm disgusted at myself for the role I play. A little road head would have gone a long way... But I'm not buying it... And they're too stupid/selfish to offer it for free. What is it with women always wanting something before putting out? Like this one "high class" (aka, less fucked up than usual) whore was saying "if I meet the right guy, that's charming and I can fall in love - then I'll quit" -- fuck that noise... Blow me, and then we'll see if I still like you. She said she's Romanian, and spoke italian... that was after I was told she was french and tried out a simple "Bonjour mademoiselle", but who can tell... She seemed shocked when I talked about Rome, Milan and Paris... Her actual use of Italian was non existent, considering she said she could speak it. I said "Io parlo un poco Italiano" and all she could say was "poco, poco."... I don't believe her story. The whole thing just reinforces my belief that women are all blood sucking, life and bank account destroying, whores. These girls aren't much different to other women except they actually get their value directly. I'm gonna go back to chopping up street whores, stuffing them in the boot and dropping them off in the state forests. It's the only thing that makes sense anymore. Peace out. Whores are women who fuck me for money... Do you have any other questions? s/me/men --- still true $ This stuff is basically true... Telepathy exists... It is suppressed in the general population. These gangs take advantage of that. If you bother to train yourself as a telepath, you will find the world more complicated. Masons will train telepaths, but then you are locked into the masonic heirarchy... The highest levels include mafioso and other gangs. Solo telepaths are harrased mercilessly by these gangs. Lies to control the various gangs are the common method. Maybe you're a whore, or a negligent parent, a junky, a drug dealer... cheat on your taxes? something like that. That way the get to control both sides of the game, the criminal gangs, the police, the various church groups and the neighbourhood watch types. Have fun. Keep reading. LOL -- I love how much of your mind is devoted to procrasti paranoia, the procrasti delusion. Like I said before, this bitch is missing some fine content due to nothing more than how offensive she finds the word bitch. Ironically a word I use more often on men than women. It's great... It's one of the main reasons I built scoop. After I invented the internet and slashdot and filled it with all my sock puppets (tru fact 99% of the internet is really procrasti) I couldn't think of a better way to troll HHD... now here we are. My latest troll, known as facebook, has given me great opportunity to troll her... When she works out which family member of hers I actually am, well all sorts of runny muffin shit is going to hit the fan, lights, taps, switches, ceiling, walls and floor. What a Whorable Job Pay is on commission... I made less than minimum wage. Not including fuel. First girl was very quiet, and a bit whiney. Chicks on reception are pretty good receptionists / secretaries... I bought my executive work style to the job... getting the first girl from her pickup to work, punctually and as efficiently as possible... only for her to tell me we would probably be just waiting for the next three hours, but I was optimistic. It was four hours till my next job... We watched a lot of TV on the couch and I played pool (edit: I originally wrote 'pull') by myself because no one else was there and the girl didn't want to. Oh, we watched something about some stupid cat that was always attacking everything, and this guy showed the owners all these tricks to make it into a nice kitty... I figured he was the pussy whisperer, and that reminded me of HHD... bitch is missing some fine content. Next job was like two minutes up the road... best paying job per km. Then take first girl to her first job... Quiet on the way there... Quiet on the way back... I got to walk the foreshore and enjoyed a great view of the city. On the way back we talked about how she didn't like the Heavy Metal that was on the radio. Next job was the second girl... She talked a lot... she mostly seemed reasonable... but not much in the way of happy stories. The job was a long drive... but not a long wait. I got back, and the first girl, and some other girl I can't remember the name of, were going with the other driver... and the second girl wanted to go home... So... I dropped her off, and was such a quiet night... and 9 hour shift done... went home. So... all that for less than min wage... What a nightmare... I'm gonna have to charge the girls per horrible story they tell me. I'd make more money in the time it takes me to sort out my morning coffee if I'd submit myself back into the corporate world. There's been no perts or minge benefits so far either. All up, my advice would be to either deal drugs or get a degree. Oh, and the fnords were more intense than usual. TIL: Some girls won't do 'short arms' - mentally disabled people (mongoloids)... not tonight anyway. I've been told there will be more girls tomorrow, and it should pay better. You're just jealous Cause I rap about REALITY. No... not wrong, and not fired... I was a Software Engineer for a decade or so... still am I suppose... but I actually worked as one in fortune 500s and such... Also, some of those were financial companies. Then I went into working financial type stuff like algorithmic trading, but not for a company, for myself, with my own funds, theories and algorithms, and with much help from a successful retired friend. I've done reasonably well at this, but never as well as I did as an engineer. I still do this... but I've been a bit unmotivated since my girlfriend died, and others have caught up with my software, and the profits from my algos in my markets have greatly diminished... but my weed habit did not diminish, it flourished, and it's expensive in this country. Contrary to popular opinion, I was never fired and never molested any plants (smoked, yes) and I guess I could go back to IT if I so chose... I mean, there's still contracts being offered in my mailbox when I bother to check. Or if someone backed me a decent amount for my latest ventures. Did I mention I live in a bit of a red light district? Like trashy meth heads and stuff... well.. they thought I'd be good at this job, and I thought I'd give it a go. The problem with being a sole algorithmic trader is that it is kind of lonely. I don't work in a team of engineers, and anyone who does what I do is also very reluctant to share actual techniques and methods - when we do communicate (on forums), we all deliberately try to make everyone else go down the wrong path and fail hard. Financial trolls troll harder than any of the weak punks here. I needed a job where I could meet people... one that wasn't too stressful (just cause I don't want stress)... and one I could get right away. So, now I get to meet reasonably cute women and drive them to places where I can wait an hour or two for them to fuck other men. It's almost exactly what I want... almost. Sometimes I think, hmmm, they'd be nice to fuck... then you think... ummm no... I've been running a train on her all night, that's pretty gross and fucked up... and so is she. I probably could get the dole... all my ventures are like tax free and shit... I've just never been a bludger and it doesn't sit right with me... if I really hit rock bottom, I'm happy that it exists. Seems to depend on the girl and the night... About 4 to 8 seems the normal range. The girls would definitely want to do more, but apparently the recession has hit them hard. $1000 a night has become $300 or so... according to their stories. This news is so old You'll find it in a comment in the thread linked to in my sig. In other news... I ditched the bitch I was with... "Ladies", if you're not generous in bed, you're not gonna be sleeping in it. Oh, in other other news... I got a job as a driver for "Ladies", starting tomorrow. I'm gonna get herpes / die. Yeah... mostly I am... I only drink when I get drunk. I might play hooker hex RNG To generate a single random hexadecimal digit: "How old were you when you're daddy first raped you?" Convert to hex. That was a bit cruel... Only had to listen to one girl talk about her abusive ex... Pretty good for my first night. Something else I learnt: The escort agencies don't make money by paying their drivers well... I hope tomorrow does me better. Holodecks are built most effectively by giving money to people who can't hold a job at McDonalds. That's just tranenomics 101. Do a flip $ Exactly... that way, if they jump, and don't do a flip, you don't have to feel guilty because they would have jumped anyway... and if they do flip, well... you just saw the last ever cool move from a now dead guy. I think that would make it alright. You're too thick to respond, but fuck u anyway If diamonds were as common as sand, would they be so expensive? Utility per item per individual, times the number of individuals, divided by the number of items ~= value. You can't see how having a lot of a thing means it would be cheaper to any individual? How having only a few of the thing on the planet means only the wealthiest will get hold of them, because they can and will pay more for them than you? First mobile phones were suitcased sized and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Welcome to capitalism you stupid fuck. Now fuck off and die... I got hookers to run. How long without a blowjob before you drop her So... Say you've been dating a girl for a few weeks, and you haven't had any sex for the last fortnight or so. How long before it's polite to fuck her off for better opportunities. So, she's got this arm implant that's meant to last for three years, and she's had it for just over a year, but your sperm and hormones are so potent that she immediately comes on (gross women stuff) stronger than ever after you've fucked her. Like, it's only polite to give women a little bit of leeway, especially in the early days when they are having women's issues... But... I'm not a saint... I can't just let her bleed forever without keeping me happy... Should I give her another week? Discuss. Especially Del... where's my six times a night sex? You think an ex prossi would know how to please a man. (I'm not meant to mention that... Sux if you can't drink Barcardi losers!!) Also, I might have a new job as a driver for escorts!! Also, two hookers, stole my car just because I was fucking this chick and not fucking them... jealousy is a woman's game I suppose. The police returned the car though, and not enough evidence to arrest anyone... oh well... at least they put petrol in it. No poll... As if there's a problem with crack Keeps the whore's cheap at least! Thanks for bringing me perspective from your own extensive experience. It all helps. Was I too subtle for you two? I'm not a fan of the metallic taste of period blood. So, no... not an option. Correct answer... Yeah, I put all her stuff in bags and will drop it off at her mum's this afternoon. She can find someone new. pity comment (drunk edition) $ lol fail $ Correct... it didn't... Slavery is not free market by definition (free market = participation only through free will, as opposed to slavery or command market = participation through force, because we told you so). Assuming you count slaves as humans. Remember, all men are created equal... obviously we mean rich white male land owners... not property that cooks the dinners or picks the cotton. It's all in the definitions... which is why your type of stupidity doesn't help. Slavery is literally impossible in a free market - which was adam smiths point, if you'd bother to read while not smoking crack. Do the MATHS asshole At a given basic income level times the number of people who would be eligible for it and compare that to current budgets. You will find that it actually swamps the current budget (and fuck your print dollars into valueless tokens theory for a moment). Compare then to the 10% of people who are unemployed... you've just decreased the social security cost to just one tenth of your plan. This is why social security is superior to basic income... unless you can introduce a really progressive tax system to offset the costs. I'm not sure you understand the concept of gay $ The Ceder and Fir Trees are in a Life and Death struggle. More Love and CooperationTM in nature. Proof? of symbiotic relationship between the trees? I couldn't find anything in the article you linked to. These things are impossible and don't work... My advice is simply don't try. Has anyone heard that MDC is in prison? We should probably talk about that. What? How so? Lots of ppl getting rich off it $ True: Never Gamble (unless you have an edge) $ Oh well... http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/5/9/14437/76803/10#10 This is the correct answer As far as I know, there's no way to natively short bitcoin. I generally don't take leveraged positions... I have an amount I use to trade, and take a relatively short position when my indicators suggest the price is high, and relatively long positions when my indicators suggest the price is low. Which operates as a kind of an arbitrage through time. However, if the price of bitcoin does go high again, I hope to offer a means by which people can lend me their bitcoin for interest... allowing me to short it (within the limits of my ability to cover the bitcoin and interest). This will be part of the Great Satoshi Giveaway... but the price hasn't been high enough yet for me to take this step. However, there's this very cool internet technology called something like Goggles? I dunno, you might have heard of it... anyway, it allows you to find out about all sorts of things on the internet (which is available on computers now days)... from that, I found it might be possible to short bitcoin on campbx, ICBIT, MPEx and Bitfinex... but I haven't tried it myself. No, you only make profit if what you short decreases in price... You're still shorting it, even if you lose. It is also a leveraged position (trading on stuff you don't actually have) and the potential loss is unbounded... Ie, you could be borrowing more than you could possibly pay back... Normally the contract requires/forces you to trade out of the position if the market goes too strongly against you. I'm only 3ing this for the Islamisbadistan $ You might be CTS judging by that... I think he was going to make a movie about it or something... but then he spent 10 years editing it and the missing scenes would have looked out of place with all the characters strangely becoming a decade older... finally he had to change his comment signatures and now hangs out on slashdot pretending he doesn't remember what k5 is or anything he ever said, and is terribly shocked that people have memories... how can people be so sad that they remember what people write on the internet? Apparently he's been against government spying the whole time... well, except for terrorists and heroin users... Then they aren't spying enough. He's a big fan of the opium war... proof that heroin is more dangerous than atomic bombs or government overreach. Yeah, that's cool... As long as you include the whole range of drugs including tobacco, alcohol, prescription medication for mental illnesses, unmedicated mental illnesses, cumin, capsaicin, high fructose corn syrup and cinnamon, etc... Then I'm all for it. Killing mentalists sure sounds like fun... and it really shouldn't be illegal if someone's already faked their own death... I mean, that's like some double jeopardy shit right there. The guy's already dead!! Well, at least ur not a hypocrite... That's something to live for. The first comment was TLDR... and you expect me to read this too? Maybe suicidal people shouldn't be making policies for the rest of us... and secondly... if your plan was to ever tell others how to live their lives (don't do drugs or go to jail) well... you didn't really think it through very well. Really... the best solution is let people do what they want, as long as they aren't infringing on the rights of others. What's so fucking difficult to understand? I just watched that.., you must have been reading the same reddit thread as me. That's oxycontin a confusingly similarly named, but I think unrelated, prescription opioid. You know the crack baby thing is a myth, right? They did an experiment where they took a bunch of normal and crack babies, mixed up their labels, and ran the tests on them... The incorrectly labelled crack babies performed poorly as expected for actual crack babies, and the incorrectly labelled normal babies performed as well as expected for normal babies. There was a whole heap of problems with confirmation bias and poorly run double blind tests... When corrected for these, they found no statistical link between children's development and whether they were born to crack addicted mothers. Really, the best argument for the legalisation of drugs is an economic one... or an argument based on individual freedom. This is clearly a case where the free market can operate better than top down authoritarian controlled market. If you were to look at how drugs in particular could break the four assumptions of the free market, you only possibly have a case for irrational behaviour (no... not the economic definition of rational, afaict)... maybe an imperfect information one, ie, your experienced utility not matching your decision utility... and that is dangerous philosophical ground that could be best fixed with education and voluntary rehabilitation programs. If rehabilitation is a negative externality, then that can simply be fixed with pigouvion taxes... ie, charge whatever taxes are required to pay those costs... boom... still much cheaper than black market prices. Actually, prohibition simply acts like a tariff on a highly inelastic good where only criminals are allowed to compete on the supply side. It's a real recipe for disaster, it's only gotten worse, and it will continue to get worse (see Zetas) Unfortunately, there's no one left on this site, as far as I can tell, who still thinks the war on drugs is a good idea. Good for you... glad your life turned out so well Really, it should be simply legalised, and available as much as people demand... then there won't be smurfing and unlicensed drug dealing can still be dealt with, the same way we deal with illegal tobacco and alcohol sales. Either way, you could expect the violence to decrease. Also, just because some drug users were mean to you, doesn't mean drug users themselves are teh ebils! Talk about confirmation bias. I got in a fight with a gay guy once... maybe we shouldn't let them get married... they're all so violent! I mean sure, it might not be the healthiest option, but we shouldn't be legislating and controlling people on that basis. That's their choice to make. Have you exercised enough today? Have you eaten healthily this week? Should we ban McDonalds cause I think you might be a little overweight... and that's very not healthy. Yeah, didn't you know. he died in a car crash Apparently something had gnawed through his brake lines, some kind of wildlife. The police suspected it was rats, but all those in the know say it was squirrels, in a conspiracy run by the gnomes. Same thing happened to that Hastings character. She's never going to fuck you dude No matter how much of a white knight faggot you are for her. Get some counselling or look up quotes about unrequited love and get over it. lol ahuh... Cause it was just this one comment that I noticed this pattern. The lady doth protest too much. Please STFU about the immorality of the stock mkt. It is clear you don't actually know what you are doing or you would do it... I don't believe that morality bullshit for one second, you simply don't have the ability, so you pretend the whole thing is immoral. Oh Hai Guise I dload CP but investing in the future of successful productive companies whose products I use daily is immoralz! Lol Gold Man Sacks! No it doesn't Now I do support the reason that markets exist, to raise money for tooling, to purchase or lease property for factories and offices, to purchase their initial lot of raw materials. You've just described the IPO process and maybe further stock issuance, but this does not describe the way the stock market itself works. I'm not going to bother explaining to you how or why it works, because you are the one calling it immoral, I think it is up to you to back up that claim. So, please explain how you think the voluntary trade in company ownership is somehow immoral and therefore not for you rather than the lack of your capability. Have you ever studied game theory? Have you ever studied how the market actually works? The only way that is ever able to work ... to enrich themselves ... [is] by profiting at the misfortune of other people. You see, this simply isn't true... You've made the sub millisecond bit work, but you don't know the equations used for the actual trading... you're just guessing, and projecting evil onto them. Fear of the unknown. Maybe you could explain how it is even possible to place a series of offers on a market in a way that can harm another player? Didn't think so. I'm not going to give away secret sauce to market success... but I'll give you a little hint, even at sub millisecond intervals, you only make a profit by improving the functioning of the market. That's the truth people like you don't want to acknowledge. PS: Subprime meltdown caused by fraud... not market trading... the markets simply reacted to that... You've also deliberately conflated the two issues. Oh... Hi... Now you suddenly understand? Whatever happened to the spirit of cooperation? I've been thinking about cooperation v competition You are right, cooperation works a lot better than competition. I think all the stores should cooperate, and set their prices really high, like $200 for a litter of milk or bread, $500 for pizza, coffee could be $1000. The only problem getting in their way is that it is illegal for them to get together and set their prices in agreement... the GOVERNMENT FORCES them to compete, when naturally it is obvious they should cooperate... all because of FEUDAL ECONOMICS!! What a shame. Have you built a blue bird simulator yet? tweet tweet beep... core dump. As long as you want it to be. All you need to live in a post-scarcity economy is to overcome want. When you no longer desire anything you do not have, you will be living in a post-scarcity reality. It's always the people who want stuff that cry that everyone else is scarcity driven... no motherfucker, it's you! I can't imagine any situation where everyone was living post-scarcity, no matter how much the economy produced and how well it was distributed. Seems they were still driven by want in most cases so... not really a post-scarcity society... A society with far less scarcity, but not true post-scarcity. People always wanted better positions/ranks in the federation hierarchy... You had to do your work hours or face consequences... You were lucky to have one holodeck on a starship, and that was a shared resource that could only run one program at a time... There were war's between different cultures for access to planets, space, dilithium crystals, gold plated latinum, worm holes, transport corridors, technology... There were even limits on how much you could use the replicators depending on how many credits you had access to. So, I don't really think post-scarcity properly defines what they had going on... they just had greater abundance than us. Also, when they say they moved away from 'money' they really mean everyone started using Bitcoin... In the future, fiat is out, cryptocurrency is in. 3D Print a New One You MONEY OBSESSED FAGGOT. It's worse than that... "money makes people mean. I don't like mean people. I want lots of free money from the government." I dunno... He seems to think it is the money that does the work. If everyone had millions of dollars, like they do in Zimbabwe, everyone would be rich. Literally, everyone could go out and be waited on hand and foot because everyone would be rich, and no one would have to do things they didn't like, like wait on people hand and foot. It's more than insane. I'm sorry for his loss of his pet, which is why I didn't comment in his first diary... but he bought economics up in this one and deserves everything he gets. If everyone had free money, then everyone would be finding the cure to avian ovarian cancer, everyone would become dentists to fix his teeth, everyone would become doctors, everyone would be developing artificially intelligent virtual realities and everyone would supply him with infinitely fast broadband... while farming and producing food which apparently no one actually needs cause they're all dying of obesity... This he calls using his intuition, I call it bullshit, and it gets me very irritated because it is not logical. No that's bullshit... Fuck him and his stupid fucking bird... I was fine to let him go and grieve 'Nothing but blue bird' was fine... I would have left him at that... he started the bullshit econ discussion but I've seen this fuck take advantage of other people's grief too... so seriously... fuck him and his stupid fucking bird... it's a fucking bird. SCARCITY OF BLUE BIRD MOTHERFUCKER... DO YOU GET IT... SCARCITY IS REAL AND THERE IS FUCK ALL YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. 3D PRINT A NEW ONE OR SIMULATE THE STUPID SHIT! I don't believe anyone is making the economy less efficient... well... they aren't screwing and drinking as much maybe, but not in any other sense are they harming the economy by being forced to find work. That aside, if you think basic income is going to solve any of the problems I mentioned above, you're a moron. It won't solve avian ovarian cancer, dental health, ai, vr, or anything on a grand scale... He's an idiot. And he doesn't just argue for basic income, there are economists who argue for basic income... he also argues that scarcity don't real, utility don't real and that infinite money would make everyone infinitely rich. And fuck you too, btw... for originally downvoting instead of arguing. Do I need to find the line in IRC where his soln to my gf's death was to simulate her in VR??? FUCK HIM AND HIS FUCKING STUPID BIRD. Add infinite zeros to dollar bills... End teh artificial scarcity of blue bird! and Jeffrey Dahma, BTK and Ted Bundy $ Well... I guess it appears that Mike is a victim of child abuse... It would explain a lot. Those crazies came from somewhere, and probably not the toxoplasma gondii after all. Some days you just got to sit back and deal with the fact that the world is not always such a great place. Maybe admitting it and dealing with it might help him... or it might make things much worse. Either way, it bode's well for corn futures - there's gonna be plenty of demand for popcorn. Either way... The NSA aren't going to just let you share their secret cryptography with just anyone. They may have found him not guilty in a court of law, but he's still going to end up having some mysterious single car accident with no witnesses... Mark my words. Am I being needlessly Polaroid(tm)? Ever since I got a new Android smartphone, I've wanted to shake it like a Wii remote. discus. I didn't argue with him in his diary when he just talked about his grief... He bought up economics in relation to his loss in that diary... and deserved to be put in his place. 'don't real' is colloquial... I'm sure you can understand. Anyway... he really thinks if you could simulate a blue bird it is the same as having the blue bird... he needs to wake up and realise what makes life special... in part, it's due to scarcity. Those guys are going to be alcoholics and druggies regardless of whether they get free money... there is an economic argument for legalising drugs... but free money isn't going to make less drug users... if we could support it, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing either, but these guys aren't going to suddenly be making scientific breakthroughs cause they get more free cash. I'm too tired right now to give this much thought... but if he brings up the topic, he deserves to be argued against... he's the one bringing the topic up, I can't just let him go cause he's a bit upset. Anyway... you could have replied ur pov instead of downvoting... don't cry over a few comment ratings. Can't you just stop being a fag? It's fucking trane... he's a masochist, he wouldn't have even put that there if he didn't want someone beating on him... It's his raison detre. No, I wouldn't kick a homeless man... I'd probably be polite, but if he tried to start up an economics discussion with me everytime I met him, I'd probably let him know how I think things work, yes. I gave him his grief diary... now you're being over protective of him... I doubt even he wants that. Like I said elsewhere... would be nice for someone who knows the fucking subject to argue this point. This is essentially correct Science is a process not an outcome, not a state of knowledge, not the ability to predict. Is our understanding of cancer unscientific? If not, why can't we always cure it? etc... Just once... I'd like to see someone with an understanding of the subject attack it. It's easier for a creationist to attack evolution than a biologist, and essentially the same thing is happening here. Clearly the author never completed econ 101, but quit after the first half semester. Obvious procrastibait is obvious. Cheers... The problem I have with it is that they build up a strawman 'Econ 101' and then knock it down. For example, I can't imagine anyone completing an Econ 101 class and thinking: "Myth 5: All profitable activities are good for the economy." If you did, then you should have either failed or the course is really crazy. But I will tell you, all activities chosen freely involving consenting informed rational individuals whose (trans)actions have no effect on any others and where there are large number of such individual's willing to be on either side of the outcomes of those activities maximises those individuals decision utilities without lowering anyone else's. And if anyone tells you otherwise, they are either misinformed or have an agenda. This is a mathematically backed statement that can't be waived away with - "oh the world is too complex" logic... you will note some very specific caveats however and you shouldn't be able to pass 'Econ 101' without knowing them. You gotta be the closest so far... How long have I been saying that the fundamentals of economics is nearly tautological... which might remind you of the nearly tautological definition of biological evolution... 'that which survives and reproduces... will exist to survive and reproduce." But, no... it isn't A implies A... cause the maximisation of a given agent's decision utility function is literally to do whatever the fuck he wants... and that isn't what the statement actually says... cause we are actually talking about pareto optimality over the entire population's utility arising from the individual agent's utility function. No one is worse off. And if you want to get right down to it... it is more of a statement of when individual's maximising their own utility won't pareto maximise the population's utility. Your 'A implies A' does not capture this. But it isn't... it is nearly, but not... Firstly, it is exactly a restriction on the type of actions an agent may take and the result still be optimal... and there are four such restrictions: 1) That agents act rationally (this is only that for an agent given choices A, B and C then A>B and B>C implies A>C at a given point in time). 2) That there is perfect information... everyone knows what they are getting out of every transaction and what options are available in terms of finding others to trade with. 3) That there is perfect competition... no one can set prices or hold people's desire to ransom, because someone else can always undercut them (or make a better offer)... this applies to both sides of the equation too... many buyers and many sellers and no one can set the price (everyone is a price taker). 4) That no one's activities affect anyone else's utility function... You can't beat people up (who didn't agree to it), or pollute people's water... Also, if you provide a benefit for others they did not choose -- also, the free market will not be optimal! These are called the four assumptions of the free market -- that say, when these assumptions are met, and individuals are maximising their own utility function, the free market is pareto optimal. This is the first welfare theorem. And again, it isn't A implies A... and what you said really isn't correct... it does not say that all... There is nothing to say that the agent will act to bring about a pareto optimal state... Quite likely they won't... cause quite likely their utility function will break one of the those assumptions. So, it is not this statement (which was a paraphrasing of the First Welfare Theorem of the free market) that is the tautology... If you want to identify where things start getting really tautological, I think it is in the definition of decision utility itself, not the first welfare theorem. And again, I don't think that is actually a tautology either... but you can have a go attacking it if you like. That was actually the first welfare theorem... a bit paraphrased... It contained all the four assumptions... doesn't it say, given all the assumptions, agents maximising their own utility maximise the population's utility without anyone being worse off? That's what I thought I said. Yes... this is all exactly correct... The maximisation I talked about is only maximal in the pareto sense... As you said, you can't compare utility functions... well, you can... but we can only determine them up to a constant from observation... not knowing each individual's utility constant means we cannot sum them or do much else meaningful with them... pareto optimality is the best we can do. So... yeah... and? We can of course take the lucky greedy bastard's stuff and redistribute it at will, but then we no longer have pareto optimality. Ummm... what exactly are you arguing against now? Actually... I'm not sure about your statement that the total optimal solution would be pareto optimal... If we really could determine the utility function, constant and all... we could maximise total utility, but it might mean the rich guy with everything will actually be worse off... which isn't pareto optimal at all. I admit, I might need to think this over a bit but... pareto optimal means that no one is worse off... so... the rich guy with everything can't give away his stuff (there is nothing he would trade for it), so he'd be worse off... That's because pareto is looking at all the individual utilities separately, and the only changes can be ones that improve any (set of) agent's utility without decreasing anyone else's... However, lets say we somehow know the constant in the utility function, and can now sum utility functions across all agents... Let's just for argument sake, say the constant of the rich guy is particularly high, he is 'rich' (high economic welfare / utility) even when he has nothing (material)... this would create an optimum where the rich guy actually had very few goods... this is not pareto optimal in the multi dimensional space of individual utilities, but is overall optimal on the single dimension of the sum of the utilities. Are you sure? Actually, you are right, I got it... If there were two agents and one good, any distribution between them is pareto optimal... if there is more than one good, the pareto optimal frontier depends upon their respective preferences... and (by the FWT) they can obtain a pareto optimal distribution through free trade... However, if we actually knew the utility functions we could find a single optimal distribution between them... and, while this optimal distribution will be a pareto optimal distribution, it might fall on a point on the frontier that cannot be reached by the free market for certain initial allocations of wealth because not all points on the pareto optimal frontier are reachable through the free market, because the optimal point may in fact leave the initially wealthy agent with less utility than he started with... and the free market can only move from a given state to a pareto dominating state. Now... I think we agree on something, right? What part of that is tautological again? What part is non-scientific? It wouldn't even be possible to have this conversation without a common understanding in maths and theory... Do you doubt the theory? Right, I'm not sure you're aware what's going on here... K5 (and the world really) has become infested with some sort of anti-economics anti-free-market meme trolls... that economics itself is unscientific bullshit comparable to astrology... that the subject is a fraud perpetuated by the rich and powerful to make you work yourself into an early grave while they take all the profit and deny you your basic human rights like infinite free money for doing nothing and unlimited broadband... or something like that. To this end, they have been arguing against the free market, completely ignoring the conditions under which it works and why it works - and even what they'd replace it with. (Yes, I know the pareto thing is a lot less strict than a true global optimum, but then I'd haves to explain the limitations of our ability to measure utility in others and how this affects our ability to know the true optimum, etc... some of them even deny utility... which makes things... difficult.). I've been trying, best I can, to explain some of the basics... So... I guess it's possible that my original explanation is tautological, where I was trying to capture the essence of the FWT in the context of the four assumptions of the free market... you would probably be able to explain this better than I could without getting caught in a tautology... but I was the only one making an attempt at it. Your economics is clearly a few levels beyond my own... judging by the ease you seem to handle the concepts with... maybe next time you can explain it better than me... cause from the original context, I had you down as anti-economics, rather than being more precisely correct. Cheers, was fun... good to see someone with an actual clue chiming in. Deadlocks, Einstein? $ Another Song http://youtu.be/LtKe1ZnyRK8 You all seem very confused by the existence of AUSTRALIANS! She means: It hasn't rained all morning. You're an idiot Ditching a (non-sea) plane in water is very very tricky, and normally doesn't go so well. Especially for the very thin aluminium tubes with wings we know as passenger jets. The Hudson river landing was a real miracle, everything went extremely well after the initial geese strike, the number one factor being that there was very little wind so there no waves... that day. And, if you're talking about this flight, about 50 people survived... which is another miracle... but there were about 150 on board at the time. Every pilot knows that water landings are an absolute last resort, and are extremely difficult to get right. I don't think you deserved an 'intent to terrorise' with your 'planes will fall' statement, but your self-image regarding your role in aviation safety... might be... well... a tiny bit overblown. Now your a total fucking idiot... The airshow crash was a new A320, showing off new software he didn't properly understand. Yes... part software failure, part pilot error. Again... the one that 'fell out of the sky' during the storm was mostly pilot error... failed sensors, loss of situational awareness and both pilots sending contradictory control commands in a control law mode they didn't understand... They would have survived had they both just left the cockpit. Finally... NO PASSENGER JET is specifically designed to land on water. NONE... Some have some extra settings that close valves etc... just in case the frame survives... but they are not DESIGNED TO LAND ON WATER. You have no idea of the forces water generates on the skin of an aircraft travelling at over 100MPH... far more than a gear up landing on a runway generates. They tend to tear apart in terrifying ways. Modern planes are mostly just really very thin tubes of aluminium. FAA doesn't even require pilots to practice ditching, not even in a sim! Those ramps and life preservers... they do about as much good as having passengers take up the 'kiss your ass goodbye' position. They are mostly psychological. You don't know shit about this subject, but only you will stop the next accident. You really are deluded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 You clearly have no clue, please STFU and go back to debugging warp life or something. You're not going to solve the air industry's software problem... not in the this lifetime. There are much more competent people working on this problem with access to the actual systems, tools and data. Fine for a hobby... but ur not saving anyone's life. I agree, it's a real pity that generosity is illegal under capitalism. I don't see why the good samaritans and red cross should be persecuted for helping others the way they are. If only we didn't have capitalism dammit! Now, if you could just create a system where the more stuff I gave away, the more I would have, I'm sure we would all be generous. Preferably you implement this in a real society and not in a VR world. ta, tx. They weren't schizo... They were just trying to pass around encrypted messages in ways the NSA couldn't detect. I like the idea that the ultimate end game of this will be using schizo's in psych wards to pass top secret encoded information between each other in the form of word salad sentences. Who would ever guess? That's the problem with feudal economics as it's practised today. Once you get your job chip, you have to do that job forever. You're never allowed to quit or leave because you don't like your boss or maybe because you find a better job. Nope, you have to do whatever someone else tells you for no reward and do it your whole life. And they call it 'the free market', what a joke. Number One, Number One, Number One I'd just like to say thanks to all the people that supported me through this endeavour. Shout out to Mum and Dad, mumble and his scripts, MDC for his example, Trane for being a convenient target, and the rest of the k5 crew for inspiration. It's truly been an honour. Thank you all who made this possible. Yeah, cheers... I'm gonna buy a VPS soon with bitcoin to launch my great satoshi giveaway website... launching in a couple of weeks... I'll still probably link to k5-stats for some things though. The Great Satoshi Giveaway - Coming Soon. Not concerned with either of these... Teething problems. Smart phones too high tech for ya? $ Free market reduces labour and maximises surplus $ Hope you're okay... That's quite scary. I'm pretty sure libertarianism still requires law and regulations. You know, enforce contract law, basic human rights, protection from fraud, that sort of thing. So, where's the problem? And you think a state can run without taxes? Or that there is no need of a state at all? Oh, for sure, I'm no fan of income taxes... but they didn't operate free of all taxes though, did they? Yeah, pretty much, I consider them taxes... Also, the main purpose (to the gov) of highways is military... They're just not advertised that way. I don't really get what ur on about? $ On the never needing dental work I disagree. Dental abscesses were a leading cause of death before modern medicine and dentistry. They cannot be cured simply by antibiotics and generally require dental surgery. Dental health is also highly correlated (probably causatively) with general health. Finally, you realise a healthy worker is a productive worker, right? So individual health care really has positive externalities. You understand from economics that a free market will undersupply goods/services that have positive externatilies, and therefore there exists good reasons to subsidise them, right? If it's a human problem, why not in the west? Because we do have the technology, regulation. You make a strong case against libertarianism. We aren't drinking our own shit (std disc apply) $ Trane was quite grateful MDC couldn't make it... Trane doesn't like people you see... It's alright for him to propose everyone else give up their empty houses to help the homeless, just as long as Trane himself doesn't have to give up anything or interact with anyone. Have fun doing this... Just remember, when they come for you, unless it was a clear threat against the president or something, they don't come knocking on your door saying "Hi, we're the NSA and we just need to know if you're a terrorist or not". No, instead, you'll get the tiniest insight into how psychological operations are actually executed until they are absolutely certain any threat you pose has been neutralised. Enjoy!! Before or after u chose that handle? Cause I'm not really surprised given that. Also, quite likely, given the SS incident we had (who was that LD?), would be surprised anyone on K5 wasn't on some list. Exactly... Pretty sure that guy got us all put on a list. I know I've had some pretty weird encounters over the years. Even references to stories I went to post here, but decided against... Pnarp / R.A.W type stuff. How did they get hold of that? Pure coincidence, paranoia, synchronicity? I dunno. Pretty creepy nonetheless. Why the 2? Disagree? $ You're still both wrong... No guarantee that a failure is inevitable. Is a fact that not all accounts can demanded at once, but as long as that doesn't happen, the virtual supply can expand or contract quite without problem. The only fraud in FRB is that government insures it with infinite printed notes and destorying competition by over regulation. Bitcoin FRB can be done purely on a private basis, with no compulsion, and no unnecessary regulation. No... it's inevitable if you are too greedy... in otherwords, overextend on your fractions. This should cause a run, causing people (who can) to withdraw from your bank... This is a GOOD THING (TM), because it rewards those who can run and manage with good reserves, and punishes those who can't. Those who can't withdraw haven't lost their money though... because there are still debts to arrive in the future that will be able to pay those depositors off. The difficult thing for people to understand is that the FRB system is dynamic, but they analyse it from a static perspective. Yeah... your right in a sense... The lie is that everyone can have their money back all at once... Once everyone understands this is not the case, the system works absolutely fine. You can access your money whenever you want, but not everyone can all access all of their money all at once. The thing is, statistically speaking, people don't access all of their money all at once. Not true at all... Anytime you have a number of accounts, there tends to be a residual that statistically doesn't move... It doesn't take much more than a handful for that to be true. You are right on most things... But not that it requires payday loan interest rates. All it needs are reasons enough for rational people to move their bitcoins to someone else, and that entity to find better investments than that. A rational reason might be to insure against the risk of losing your bitcoins due to malware, hardware failure, forgetting passwords, etc... That 100 BTC that's held on deposit, might be made up of a 1000 accounts of 0.1BTC each. No single person is going to be a huge threat to that model. Yeah, bitcoin is anonymous, but that doesn't imply savings and loans holders have to be. A bitcoin bank can have it's own insurance too. The main advantage is that a bitcoin bank cannot be bailed out by diluting everybody elses holdings in every other bank... There will be risk, and you should be aware of it. Yeah for sure... completely... If you want hard bitcoin, hold your own bitcoin. If you want an account in bitcoin that might pay interest... well, u takes your risks with your rewards. In the way this inflates bitcoin, too bad... that's just the way it is (or will be). Correct $ that was the joke.jpg Yeah... I'm a software engineer that turned to the dark side of finance a few years back. I'm not as good at finance as I was an engineer, but I can work for myself this way. Bitcoin has grabbed my interest lately. Slightly less than one and a quarter directly... I dunno... slightly more than I bought in so far can be converted back into bitcoins within a couple of hours... BTC liquid assets like exchange balances of various types. Still less than 4... Unless you count the ASIC miners I bought too. That's the problem with 'how many' questions. Early days yet... still experimenting, building software, sill learning. Although am seriously considering going large... Dunno... might sell my flat. So how much longer will this still be profitable?$ Correct I have done the maths... The outcome depends on quite a few parameters. Is very interesting... A redqueen race... SOP for capitalism. I think the difficulty rise has been inline with what you would expect just in the shipping of existing units... There's plenty of profit for them without this kind of fraud. Yes, whether or not a unit is profitable really does depend on expected difficulty growth and the time you are likely to get it. And yes, even with entirely honest actors, the profitability window is quite tight. Yes, they have shipped a few... not many. Yep, you'll notice, because of the exponential in the network hash growth, that there is a fixed number of bitcoins to be earned per GHash/s. Most of them are earned in the beginning. So, depending on when exactly I receive it will be the difference between, pays for itself quickly and a few times over, just pays for itself or not quite pays for itself. Seen on /r/Bitcoin and bitcointalk.org I can't be bothered finding links. But they have shipped up to about their Jun 2012 orders of Jalapenos only. So, still quite a lot of variability in expected shipping date. For SALE: 5BTC Jalepeno 1 Month Old Preorder Reply below for details. Shipped World Wide. PRE ORDER Delivery Date: UNKNOWN BUYER BEWARE CAVEAT EMPTOR ALL SALES ARE FINAL I'll let you know when I close out $ There are many things the free market cannot deliver optimally. Who ever said otherwise? Otherwise, under what possible justification would there be for any regulation or distortions? There are many things it works just fine with though. And the conditions in which it works fine are very well known and demonstrated so... where it doesn't is also, for the most part, very well known. Regulation and laws in general shouldn't be for sale like a stock... You can't have (so directly) a free market for them. But for bitcoin fractional reserve to operate... why not? Why shouldn't it be something the average citizen can do? Fine... officially launching Procrasti's First International VIRTUAL Bank of Kuronia. What do you get out of it... Ever improving standards of security, ease of use and 0.1% interest/pa on accounts. Now, I lend out to anyone who wants it at more than that... profit for me! bitcoin deposit address coming soon. lets say: 1LUqGpbS1Z6Nbneo7167e4cC2KMRfZoPWK Then send a signed message from the address you used to deposit to withdraw from it. Min withdrawel: 0.01 Max current withdrawal/day: 1 BTC Anyone want to host a linux environment for me? You got a problem with that? What other regulations do you want? So, what do you do if you want all the bitcoins in existence? Go fuck yourself is what, cause you can't afford them... Let me put it another way... what if you wanted all of anything on a planet, you're just never going to get it. What if you wanted to own every single federal reserve note in existence (actual dollars)... you can't... Now, imagine I keep loaning out 1% loans and taking 0.1% deposits... and holding a reserve at all times... And this is a common thing... And because I take transactions from other institutions I trust as well as the blockchain... and because the system could hold many times the blockchain in total accounts, it is quite possible that a single account is greater than the entire blockchain. Guess what... you can't make transactions greater than the blockchain on the blockchain... too bad... you could make transactions between the big banks though!! So, what are you trying to say? Do you want to regulate this with legislation? Are you saying it cannot be done actually? That what I just suggested isn't fractional reserve banking? That eventually there will be a 'run' on the bank? What regulation are you suggesting is required? What I just suggested... go ahead, deposit a bitcoin. Lildebbie has bitcoin to spend... Who should stop me? Because that is what you are suggesting. And the go fuck yourself, is just quite literally you can never get all the bitcoins... impossible... because you can't force people to give them up. So, is unlikely that you will be making transactions greater than the entire blockchain on the blockchain. There are some bitcoin that have value but don't exist... Say the unpaid portion of confirmed rewards at a mining pool. They aren't in the blockchain yet because they are too small to get on the blockchain... because the transaction fees are too large for small amounts. I think we clearly need a cheaper way to move these around. Okay you say... but we're making more btc every day, but not forever... but the theory is fee's pay for that... and they will, by definition... The only theory required is current property laws. The right to own and transact in bit coin, right? To offer fair rules for off chain services, no actual fraud. So, how much do you want to regulate my virtual bank? Lildebbie already owes the bank 0.001 or around that... you can boo him loudly if he never returns it... Shall I sue him? So, if anyone cares to donate a server... run a json api and away you go. Does that upset you? Is that why you hate the free market? Are you saying you wouldn't put bitcoins in such a scheme? So? Do you even have bitcoins? If not, why not and who are you tell people what to do with their bitcoins? Is the mathematics wrong? Is it a concept that more value in the world exists than bitcoins but we can still deal with everything in the world in bitcoins bother you? Don't blame me that you don't like the results of well established theories. The 51% attack has nothing to do with coin ownership, but everything to do with the hashing power of network. The network hashing power secures transactions, if someone manages to have more than 51% of the network hashing power, it becomes possible for them to create malicious (double spending) blocks on the blockchain. The details are little to involved for me to go into in depth, but the rough idea is that if you own more than the rest of the hashing power on the network, you can spend on the main chain, then build a blockchain with a different spend on it that will replace the current main blockchain (longest chain wins)... enabling double spending. It's only a theoretical attack, and are good reasons it's not likely even if someone did get 51% hashing power. GUIMiner http://blog.nwoolls.com/2013/04/23/bitcoin-mining-on-mac-os-x-guiminer/ I'll leave you to ponder on what the value of a bitcoin is, and how much you're spending to get them. The rich get richer The poor get the picture Alright... I'll try and summarize... Fractional Reserve Banking is the system we currently have that allows the expansion and contraction of the monetary supply along with the underlying expansion and contraction of the economy. It works a bit like this... You give money to the bank and they hold it an account for you valued in dollars. Now, they don't just sit on it, they lend a part of that out. Everybody understands it this far. The next step is that whoever lent the money goes out and spends it on something, say a new car, but the person who sold the car doesn't just hold on to the money, they put it back in the bank. At this point, the bank has all the original money the first guy first deposited. Part of it they lent out, and that part came straight back from someone else (treating the whole banking sector as a whole). They are also owed a certain amount of money due to the loan they created. THIS IS CREATED MONEY, CREATED OUT OF NOTHING BUT THE PROMISE TO PAY IT BACK. This is because the created loan can be traded (nearly) as if it was money itself. And because they have all the money originally deposited in the bank, they can repeat this cycle over and over again... creating many loans on the same original currency deposit, creating money. A lot of people (LilDebbie being one) consider this to be a type of fraud, rather than a useful investment in the economy, and allowing people to buy things on credit before they could otherwise afford them. Now... if this wasn't hard enough to understand... we throw a new digital currency into the mix... a decentralised one that requires no backing of governments at all. The confusion arises because people who may or may not understand both the traditional fractional reserve lending and the blockchain mechanism that tracks bitcoin transactions do not understand that exactly the same fractional lending system is possible with bitcoin itself. The confusion comes because they see the blockchain, and do not understand that you can have accounts valued in bitcoins stored independently of the bitcoin blockchain (say tradeable promissory notes), enabling banking services, fractional lending and the same old money creation system that exists today with fiat. LilDebbie is either one of those, or simply trolling. He certainly plays someone who pretends to not understand that MtGox for example track your account balance quite independently of transactions on the blockchain. I was going to demonstrate the concept to him with an actual example, but unfortunately he appears unwilling to take a loan that would create the tradeable asset (the bitcoin promissory note) that increases the virtual supply of bitcoins in the 'economy'. So... If Lildebbie is unwilling to accept the loan conditions. If anyone would like to loan ME bitcoin, I'd be more than willing to demonstrate the concept as the role of the borrower. This is obviously because I believe there are investments that exist that pay higher interest (but with higher risk) than I was offering the loan to him for. So, anyone brave enough to loan bitcoins on K5? How does that make you feel about scepti? $ LilDebbie Fails to Understand Bitcoin, Finance and Economics in General Either LilDebbie is trolling hard, or he really never was an economic theorist of any great insight. You choose. Read this thread for a demonstration of his failure to understand many things. Yeah, I know, u already read it... or u didn't and won't read it this time either. I just wanted it recorded. Take the poll! PS: LilDebbie... I'll really send you some bitcoin... just open up a free (no KYC Jelly for bitcoin) MtGox account, and start your adventure in Bitcoin today. All I have is your word that you will pay it back plus interest this time next year? For sure... I think you're a trustworthy fellow... You can prove me wrong if u really want, but it'll be a good indicator for everyone never to do business with you again. So, write a comment to that effect, and sign it with your bitcoin key so that I can verify it, and deal done. I'll send you 0.1BTC. You can try the MtGox offchain transactions another time if you like. Give me a few hours, I got to go somewhere, but I'll do it soon. The only other thing is, maybe write the 'contract' in such a way as to allow me to sell it. Cause then you'll really see money creation in action. Let me think of how to do that exactly... like requiring me to sign a sale of that contract with the key of the account I send the money to you with. Alright... let me think a little about this... see you back here in a few hours. How is that money creation? $ Fine, so who did I just donate to? Clearly against my capitalist principles of mutual benefit... I should have known better... I guess someone now has a tiny bit more bitcoin. Al Quaeda? Counterparty risk? Obviously... I didn't even get proof it was your address... Risk is (partly) what justifies interest. Anyway, with no tradeable demand note to go along with it, we haven't created anything of value off the blockchain... and therefore it demonstrates nothing. Well... I only sent 0.001 BTC anyway, so you can consider that part of the great satoshi giveaway, and feel free to pass it on to someone else. Which brings up the next problem of bitcoin that will probably be solved with off chain transactions - nano-transactions. Will be very useful for all sorts of things and bitcoin just ins't designed for them. For example, at the moment, the absolute min transaction possible outside of the non-standard miners is greater than 5000 Satoshi... greatly diminishing my opportunity to demonstrate the relationship between scarcity and value to Trane... but you could imagine true distributed paid for peer 2 peer cloud based computing requiring transactions like that. Oh well... have fun... anyway. 0.0001 Now... But that probably won't be the client default... Also might require latest client. You're meant to send it elsewhere... Like spending it in the k5 community. Creating new economies. Or opening an account in procrasti's first international virtual bank of kuronia. Unless you just enjoy holding onto my gold. Anyway, you noticed the existence of the debt created by the transaction (even though not explicit). And you can see that in theory debt itself can be traded. So debt is money. Too bad if people don't like it, fractional lending will continue and bitcoin doesn't change that. Now, about those fees you still owe me... I find it interesting that bitcoin fees are so disproportionate on micro transactions. I just think its funny how bitcoin and finance in general really overcharges the poor. You might think lol a couple of mbits... but if this becomes the basis of real economies... maybe with second hand smart phone infrastructure in nations with rapidly deflating money, those mbits might be real wealth. Especially as the network expands. How little money do some people live off on this planet? Although often those villages still have mobile phones. Also, I know there's quite a barrier to get those few mbits... much more than their cost. interesting. Now, if I'd sent you .0111, and you sent me back 0.01, I would have got you the full 11mbits... then if I sent you 0.01 back you could have returned the full 11mbits. So, trust can be traded for network fees too. So... this is a limitation of bitcoin, probably a tradeoff between security and bandwidth, but not an insurmountable limitation. I've been thinking about a fast secondary network for nano-transactions that get mined into the blockchain as full transactions. Try electrum $ Why does the gov (of greece) even care about the economy? Think long and hard about this one, the answer is in the text you quoted. LOL Trane and savings... You have no idea who you're talking to, do you? Why do you think he wants everyone to get free money? Clearly because he has no idea how or ability to make his own. This sucker's going down no matter how the economy goes. What do you mean you didn't read the EULA? $ Fuck you for thinking of a machine older than my TI-48!! When ur analingus machine has advanced red LED display technology like the TI-48, we can call it a computer. Until then, fuck you! I would have had first post in this thread too if someone somewhere on the plant had uploaded an image of the TI-48 for google to index. The youth today have no respect for decent old school tech I tells ya! Now get off my lawn! Halp... I'm having trouble getting this to run on my TI-48. Is there an RPN* version of this code somewhere? Warp <enter> Life <enter> + I couldn't actually find an image of a TI-48 with the old enter button on it. The fancy new spangled TI-58 shown doesn't even have one, and probably used BIMDAS or some shit. That marvellous machine is so old that I doubt even tdillo can remember them. *: You youngins probably never even used a calculator that required RPN, let alone know what RPN is! Screw you, I'm leaving (this thread) and taking my stack based calculator with me. Dammit, it was the HP calculators that used RPN hence the confusion. I can't find the exact model, but that machine was the envy of all my friends. It may have required a wall socket and an intimate knowledge of RPN to get me through exams, while they all used their fancy solar power and BIMDAS, but LEDs are still easier to read than some LCDs, especially in a badly lit room... and that had a (literally) whole stack of memory compared to their shitty MS, M+, MR and MC buttons. I think it might have been the HP-55? Ur failing as hard at adhoms as u do at economics and everything else. Also, the Tandy 1000 is some sort of modern thing? The TRS-80 is what all the cool kids are using. And a shoutout to all the Aussie Z-80 enthusiasts who still remember getting the 32kb memory upgrade to their first MicroBee, programming the Beethoven external DSP processor and the amazing speed of the new 1200/75 baud BeeModem. What? Anyone? Anyone? Nobody? GET OFF MY LAWN!!! There are solutions to the blockchain problem... They just haven't been implemented yet... Mostly only a handful of people have to fully verify the blockchain... The headers are enough for most purposes, and the merkle tree hash can be verified for any given transaction in a given block, and transaction pruning can decrease the total storage requirements, if I understand correctly. I suspect a provably secure distributed hash table implementation will emerge that solves most of these problems. For now, I use electrum and outsource the issue (and a bit of trust) to others. Deflationary currencies are generally considered bad for an economy as a whole, because they encourage savings over investment. However, I think the government will continue issuing fiat over the short to mid term, so this isn't really a problem overall. It would only be a problem if the government stopped issuing fiat and the entire economy moved to bitcoin. I don't see this as a realistic outcome. There are too many reasons why the government will want to control the money supply and as long as they continue to demand taxes in fiat, fiat will have (some) value. On the other hand, deflationary currencies are good for holders of those currencies... so, I've got a few bitcoin, just in case their value explodes... Who knows? Yeah, the govt is bound to shut down the bitcoin company and arrest its board members, just like they did with Liberty Reserve. Now all they have to do is find them... Ummm... What? They can regulate some exchanges, but are they really going to outlaw buying and selling bitcoin directly... say for cash in hand? If so, on what basis? Is it illegal to buy and sell commodities privately? Are they going to classify bitcoin as actual currency and require AML licenses for anyone who deals in it? This is tricky legal ground in the best situation. Are they going to regulate WoW gold next? How you going to ensure that? as long as we leave them in the same or better condition as we found them? If you just leave people to their own devices, it is quite possible a small percentage of them will wilfully vandalise the place, just because they are assholes or jealous or something. I propose they leave a bond, so that can be confiscated if damage does occur. And of course, there is always a certain amount of inevitable wear and tear, even if they have good intentions... Maybe we could charge them a small amount to cover that. Oh, and maybe some people will pay a little more for exclusive use, so we could charge the market rate, call it something like rent. So, rent and bond seem like a good solution to this problem. I wonder if anyone has thought of this before? Welcome to hotel "U's R Fuct". That and the fact that eugenicists have a poor understanding of genetics, inheritance and environment factors in general. If the trait is genetic in origin, and recessive in the genes, removing 100% of those that exhibit the trait removes something like less than 1%* of the gene carriers in the total population over time. Ie, is practically useless for its stated purpose. *: I forget the exact maths, is far less than the 25% you might expect. Now testing directly for the gene's themselves might be more effective, but again, people forget that whilst some genes may appear defective in a given environment, they often exist in the population for some reason (like being superior in other environments or even the same environment with other combinations of genes)... eg, the relationship between sickle cell anaemia and malaria. True enough... but doesn't help with the 'fitness' of the population, which evolution nearly optimises perfectly (exponentially spreads beneficial genes) anyway. Also, you take out all these recessive genes, then one flu comes along and wipes out the entire population because what remains is nearly genetically identical. (Though humans have been bottlenecked a few times already, so we're not really all that diverse). Still, might be a good move politically, and that's all that matters in the end. Quite possibly $ shit, piss, and foul detritus everywhere. Or as trane prefers to call it, "luxury". You were trolling, with a troll, and got trolled and somehow this surprises you? Lol... trolled. Create BitCoin Fractional Reserve Banking Free of government and federal reserve control. I checked it out a little... is this funded with Visa and the old banking network? Then what do you gain from this? No, until they accept anonymous / pseudonymous bitcoin payments, you're just supporting the old regime. True enough... But a lot of that fraud comes from the weak security provided by Visa in the first place... eg, anytime you buy something with visa, you give all the details required to purchase something with that visa card. A dishonest business, an employee of that business or an external middleman can then purchase whatever they like with those details. Bitcoin doesn't have chargebacks is about its only limitation in this regard. Of course most suppliers think this is a good thing, but not all consumers will. A system could still be built on top of bitcoin to provide this though... I wonder if bitpay allow chargebacks, they certainly could. lol... how professional is bitpay http://bitpay.com/img/slide-m.jpg I was just looking to see if they had any consumer protection built in... It will come, the market will demand it. The question is, can bitcoin (and I actually mean related services) make it cheaper and as 'safe' as visa. Personally, I think so... cause the underlying bitcoin architecture is strong, secure and (psuedo) anonymous, I think it has the right design to build these things on top of it. There are a number of services that getting a traditional payment gateway for is difficult, expensive, both or even impossible. Try setting up a payday loan company using paypal - straight out nope (despite holding all the right licenses), visa, possible, but you have to keep 3 months of payments in an account and pay huge fees. Anything even a little bit on the grey market side (my favourite markets) (even though technically legal) your going to have problems. Piss off power (eg, wikileaks), more problems. So, there is demand for this, and I think it has the potential to, eventually, become the main player in the field. Oh, Whiskey Dicks is some kind of franchise... oops Well, that's just wrong... Of course you can run a fractional reserve banking system without the backing of people who can create currency... and lots of people are advocating this. That's the problem with the current system, not with FRB. Instead of overextended banks collapsing and the capitalist system removing them from the ecosystem, the gov just prints up more cash at the expense of everyone else. So, for sure I can run an FR bitcoin bank. I just won't be able to be bailed out at everyone else's expense if I fail. Let people know that their deposits are at risk if the bank fails, and I see no problem with it at all. Hell, you can still run a non-govt backed insurance scheme on top of this too. Just accept the risks exists and don't try to paste over it all with Quantitative Easing. A subset of the guys at /r/Bitcoin for one. Another subset doesn't even realise FRB can be done with bitcoin, and both together pretty much see the federal reserve system as broken and bitcoin as the solution. In what way is it fraud? You deposit X in an account with full knowledge than 0.9X is going to be lent out. If some of that comes back as another account, the cycle repeats. Where is the fraud? The only fraud I see is that people have been conditioned to believe that the value in a bank account is the same as currency in the hand. And thanks to the fed it kind of is, both will be inflated away over time. And finally, how is it high risk? The bank doesn't have to accept an insanely high depositor, and if it does, it doesn't have to lend it all out - and even if it did, it could limit the withdrawal from that account to a certain limit. That would be the beauty of bitcoin banking, the risk would be well known, and banks that aren't run well would fail. No, 'Too Big To Fail' government bullshit. Which is why people should be aware of the risks and the policies (such as the reserve rate) of the banks they are putting their money in. Allow capitalism to thrive, destroy the banks that can't keep enough reserve on hand to handle increases in withdrawals. Also, it's not that they won't get their money back, it's just that they can't get their money back right now. They will get their money back after the bank's debtors repay their loans. It's a time thing. The current system just says, okay bank, your too big to fail, have another trillion and keep on going. That money might appear to come from nowhere (people like trane see that and end up thinking it is all free), but that money eventually comes from devaluing everybody else's money... once it has created a few more bubbles here and there and had a chance to move around the system a bit. I think collapse (or more accurately, a decrease in new accounts and therefore an inability to lend) is preferable... Others might disagree. Yeah, for sure... If people did move to bitcoin, those risks become far more explicit. Bitcoin Banks would have to be upfront that deposits measured in bitcoins are not the bitcoins themselves. Exactly the same way that money in a bank is not the currency itself. The fed system just makes it seem very much like that, because the gov insures your deposit (Except when a government doesn't, like in cyprus). Even in the US, only the first $100k or so is insured anyway. However, this does lead to inflation. You don't see so much gold based inflation, for example, you see bank runs and crashes instead. The problem with 100% reserve banking though, is that you effectively eliminate loans altogether. You end up with just a big vault of currency that does nothing, when it could be lent out for profit of both the bank and the deposit account holders. If you allow it, ur back to FRB. Now, the difference between a bond and a demand account aren't all that great, except for the time frames involved, they're basically exactly the same thing. For sure The law still has to protect you from fraud, but I'm saying the law wouldn't protect you from a bank run. And it doesn't anyway, unless you keep less than $100k in all the banks. Also, your comment about the bank taking care to make a safe profit... the insurance somewhat (not totally, they lose their charter or get taken over, but to a degree) encourages extra risk. Actually, this isn't even the problem I have with the system. The real problem I have with the system is that it doesn't allow non-insured banks. Why not hang a big sign outside your window 'THIS IS NOT A FEDERALLY INSURED BANK - THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT AND WILL NOT BACK YOUR DEPOSITS HELD HERE', and then let them trade how they like? I'm not advocating no law, if that '(not a) bank' runs off with your money, charge them with fraud... but why does every bank need to be federally insured to even operate? Why can't, in this case, let the market handle the trust issues? Fine, lend your money to your cousin instead of putting it in an interest bearing account, no problem... but why stop me accepting deposits at all if I don't want to be part of the system? That's interesting... and if the '(not a) bank' allowed trading of bonds, ie, would buy them back before maturity, you've got an (almost) on demand deposit system. Procrasti's not a bank fractional bitcoin lending (not a) bank might not be too far away. I don't see how FRB smooths out those bubble, btw The standard approach to smooth out the business cycle is govts manipulating the budget surplus/deficit. It's generally considered FRB exacerbates the business cycle. It enables fast expansion of the money supply, but it tends to contract even faster. The insurance just enables that contraction without destroying banks, but it does so at the cost of inflation. (effectively inflating debts away). Also, stop equating bitcoin with drug dealers... lol... My bitcoin are legit and only used in legit transactions. I want to see the bitcoin economy expand (cause I hold bitcoin, duh), and this type of talk hurts its legitimacy. Stop it! For god sake shut up... I know what backs it, I'm just asking that you stop telling everyone!!! No, you really need the facepalm... so stupid... I now have to put you in the category of idiots who don't understand FRB and think that you can't do FRB with bitcoin. FRB was occurring with gold, long before the federal system existed. Don't you get that? You don't give them $1, and they lend out $100 from that... (that's just as impossible for a start) they lend out (at 10% reserve) $0.9, which comes back to 'the system' (not even them directly, but u treat the whole sector as a whole) because the guy you lent it to bought something and the guy who sold something puts that loaned money into another account. So, the system now has $1 in deposits and $0.9 owed to them. Now, keeping 10%, they reserve (as a whole) $0.19, and so can lend out a further $0.81... and the cycle repeats... in an infinite series asymptotically approaching 1/reserve or 10 times the initial deposit for a total of $10 lent out on the initial $1 deposit. Get real, even banks don't just lend out $10 on a $1 deposit. Where'd u learn your econ from? The Zietghiest movie? Now, it might seem impossible to do this bitcoin, but then it would be just as impossible to do with gold, right? No... because what the deposits are accounted in is not actual gold or actual bitcoins, but a ledger representing gold or bitcoins owed to depositors. The total bitcoin lending banking industry could easily hold 10 times or more bitcoin than exists in the bitcoin blockchain this way. Haven't I been through this with you before? Lay off the pot dude, your memory is failing and ur making yourself look stupid. Your terminology and wrong numbers suggest you don't understand bitcoin in the slightest. And one person owning absolutely every single last item of an item class on the planet... another interesting hypothetical I'm not sure has occurred before. Finally, are we to assume that the bitcoins can't be traded on any exchange, and therefore exchanged for other forms of value? Because, if they can be exchanged for other forms of value, the interest can obviously be paid very easily. Now, obviously the one single owner of all bitcoins on the planet cannot withdraw all the bitcoins plus some, but if he does not, withdraws a few, and spends them, then the interest can be repaid by recycling them through the economy, right? He exchanges them for value with someone who owes them, who then pays them back, and they are now available to pay him his interest. Oh, a unit of exchange can be exchanged for value? Colour me shocked! Interest representing value can be paid back over time. I'm about to faint! You are confusing the limited number of bitcoins on the blockchain for all value in existence. A note for a bitcoin has approximately the same value as a bitcoin itself, yet is not an actual bitcoin. As I said, they were doing this with gold. You don't really believe gold notes were limited by the existence of physical gold do you? Do you still believe, maybe, that interest bearing loans are an impossibility? That they are possibly evil somehow? Maybe that's fine, but deposit accounts are the problem? Or is it just lending out of inactive deposits that are a problem? Also, interestingly, it is more than likely, that if one person owned all the bitcoins on the planet, that bitcoins would actually be worth nothing at all! In which case, why would anyone take loans, and why would anyone offer an account in them? Part of the genius of bitcoin is that it distributes those coins to many people, for some amount of support. If Satoshi had kept all the bitcoins himself, how much do you think would they be worth? All a loan is is a promise OMG someone has promised to pay someone something, the horror!! There's no guarantee at all anyone will be left holding all the something. There are defaults, yes, that is known, the rest can be paid off over time. Is the problem with idiots who don't understand FRB is they can only think in terms of a static model 'OMG more money is owed than exists WTFBBF?', when in actuality it is a dynamic model and can be paid back over time. Once you accept the dynamic nature of FRB, and the fact that the same money can both circulate back inwards to pay off the debts, as well as outwards to create the debt, you can see it is a very useful system indeed... inflating/deflating the money supply exactly as required by the increase or decrease in the underlying economy. So, yes, actually, having 10 or 100 times more bitcoin on ledgers than in the blockchain is not only possible without anyone left over holding worthless ledgers, it would be a very useful thing indeed. LOL you are so stupid... Banks lent actual gold for nothing but a promise. FRB works with actual gold being lent out, not just notes for gold. The actual gold comes back in the same way. If you think you can't trade something of value for a promise to be paid back something of value, my god, no wonder BV trumps u in all things economics, you've thought this through about as thoroughly as Trane has basic income. the transaction is permanent and if all you're getting in return is a promise it will be given back to one day then you are an idiot and deserve to lose your money Really? You REALLY FUCKING THINK THAT? You can't see the point of a loan, AT ALL? I can understand maybe u could afford to pay cash for your house, but you are very lucky to be able to live like that, and it's blinded you to how useful loans can be. That loan is legally enforceable too. Just because it's in bitcoin doesn't mean a court can't require you pay it back. Sure, they may make u pay an equivalent in fiat, but you still have to pay it back. Not paying it back will lead at least to your bankruptcy. If you can't understand loaning, then I think you should give up any claim to understanding economics. Finally, why would people put bitcoin in a bank? It's about as stupid as asking why would people put their gold in a bank. There are many reasons. Interest, security, ease of use, are the first three that come to mind. Do you know how easy bitcoin is to steal? Very... let me explain... Oh, just before we get to that... You should check out this picture of Anna Kournikova Fully Naked.... Pretty Hot Huh! Banks can insure you against that. Finally, I don't think you've actually used or understood bitcoin at all... Here's a genuine offer to get you started... I'll loan you 0.1BTC if you promise to pay me back 0.11BTC in a years time. I'll even point you to investments I'm fairly sure will give you that and more... but I'm sure you can afford the $20US or so required to cover that it should it all go tits up. (Might be worth a lot more in a year, though). You can prove me to be very foolish, but I have a feeling you value your word... While we're at it, we can create a crypto promissary note, which I can try to sell, just to get these concepts through your head. Can you even imagine this scenario? It is true money creation. Personally, I think you'll know bitcoin has come of age when bitcoin banking becomes common place. The LOAN is legally enforceable. If I loan you a bitcoin, and you fail to pay it back, I can take you to court and the court will order you to fulfil your obligation or its equivalent in fiat. You can then either pay it back, be in contempt of court or declare bankruptcy. And no, it doesn't require an expanding monetary base. It simply requires that money continues to circulate through the economy. Didn't you understand the guy with 100% of all bitcoins example? You haven't thought this through. Those companies are bankrupt... There are three ways you can get around a court order to pay a debt: 1. Pay the fucking debt 2. Go to prison 3. Declare bankruptcy. Now, got an example that isn't one of those three? Did Trane give you your economic knowledge, are you just trying anything to get around your failure, or are you really this fucking stupid? Who gives a shit why it was created... You think a contract specified in bitcoin is going to be declared null and void because of some anarcho-capitalist-libertarians fantasies? Keep using gold for your doorstops, clearly you got no idea of how business, finance, law or the economy work... No wonder you fail to invest in anything actually productive. Correct... absolutely correct... And you think this has no consequences? Care to declare bankruptcy, you know... for a laff? Maybe a fair point... I don't know the details enough to say otherwise. If there is a loophole, say, let the company declare bankruptcy and the directors are free to start again... Yes, I agree... that IS a problem. But not the core of the issue you have been arguing. Not a problem that exists for any reason other than cronyism or protectionism of the wealthy... THAT should be fixed... but the general principle remains solid. Bankruptcy has a real cost, at least to the company, and it SHOULD to the directors. Absolutely... Of course it is... It's one of the three options... pay it back, go to jail, declare bankruptcy... It serves a very useful purpose... Normally it sticks with you for 5 or 7 years or something (depends where u are). That's exactly the right way to do it. It's hard to get loans when you are bankrupt for example... Good, u have a history of not paying them back. I was unaware u could be the director of a company, have it go bankrupt, then just start up another company. That would seem a little outrageous to me. Publicly traded company? Still has directors right? Maybe not the stock holders - they are like silent partners in some ways... but directors shouldn't be able to jump straight back in under a different name... Too many ways to scam that one I think... if that is indeed the case. That's bad. Please stick to topics you understand like being easily trolled, for example. There is no central server in bitcoin. Banks don't create currency, they create money in ledgers accessed through accounts. Exactly the same way banks could create bitcoin stored in accounts and not on the blockchain. It is entirely possible for banks to operate purely in bitcoin taking deposits, and making loans. The only limitation to all this is your lack of understanding. Clearly that depends on who's backing it and the terms of the account. But, I'd pay just ever so slightly less than 1BTC for 1 BTC held by MtGox... Maybe a tiny bit less than that for 1 BTC held by btct.co... Maybe ever so slightly more for an account that paid interest, assuming I couldn't buy it cheaper. Still seem so farking fantastical to you? It it an account held off the blockchain? Then it's a perfectly good example. HOLLY FUCKING SHIT DUDE, R U UNINFORMED OR WHAT? No dickhead... NO FIAT IN BTCT.CO... And guess what the MAJORITY holding in my MtGox account is. Fuck... I'm arguing with a bona fide moran. OMG --- NO AN ACCOUNT VALUED IN BITCOIN That's all it is... You can't even trade LTC on MtGox. You really can't understand that you can send me bitcoin, and I can create an account valued in bitcoin, that you can request a withdrawal from... and in the meantime I can do whatever the fuck I want with that bitcoin in between? Is that really a complex problem for you? No wonder u don't trust anything but actual gold in ur hand - u don't have the mental faculties to understand it. I'm not exactly sure what you are getting at... but I'm going to go with yes... As long as there exists sufficient credit to cover the current withdrawals. So, yes, they can invest elsewhere: invest = deposits - withdrawals. Is that hard to understand? If they hold 10k bitcoins... on average, is a sure bet they could invest 1k elsewhere and not run into problems. Actually, in both those cases possibly a tiny bit more... In fact, btct.co charges withdrawal fees, so in fact, I did pay slightly more than 1 BTC per BTC. Is your head exploding yet? You asked for an account of the blockchain... They hold demand deposits in account... The only difference is they don't lend the money out. The difference is purely academic and you know it. Stop being retarded. Dude, you asked me for an off chain account... Which is what that is... Now, you really so stupid to think banks need 100% reserves to fulfil demand deposits? You don't realise that a large chunk of money in accounts statistically just sits there... and therefore is perfectly capable of being lent for profit with no disruption to everyday depositors? You don't realise that this is occurring all the time with very few problems most of the time. Yes... fuckups occur, for sure... bank runs will cause problems for people with deposits in bitcoin banks... that's not a problem if they know that up front. BEWARE - the bank is lending your money, that has risk, and for that risk the bank will offer you A, B and C. For the right A, B and C... well, it just might be worth while for some people. The problems occur for people in the fiat banking world, because they have been trained to believe THERE IS NO RISK... welcome to the real world, risk exists, get paid for it! No, it's not on the chain... please really? You think MtGox trades occur on the chain? REALLY THINK HARD HERE... IT'S GOING TO TAKE ALL THAT BRAINCELL OF YOURS TO UNDERSTAND. You send ur bitcoin to MtGox's address... they credit your account... You can even transfer bitcoins between accounts -- no blockchain transaction at all. I'm serious I'll send you 0.1BTC so you can start to understand how not every 'bitcoin' in existence has to be on the blockchain. Yes... quite literally, it isn't a BITCOIN Just as a Gold Note is NOT ACTUALLY GOLD!!! But your quite wrong about the exchange part required there... I only send and receive bitcoin from those exchanges... Trading I do in the meantime is done on an ACCOUNT tracked by mtgox. When I want my bitcoin (plus new ones yum) I ask MtGox to send them to me... and they decrease my account value, while sending me a real bitcoin from one of their actual bitcoin addresses. And, so? what exactly? Cause... you never get back the 'same' bitcoin either. Obviously u don't understand bitcoin... search for satoshi white paper. Noone ever 'takes shit out of the blockchain' And it's nothing like that. I transfer some bitcoin from my bitcoin address to one of MtGox's address... They credit my account --- TOTALLY SEPARATE PROCESS!! When I withdraw, they debit my account, and send a bitcoin from ONE OF their addresses to WHATEVER new address I specify. There is no 'risk of forking the chain' my god... u have no understanding. Amazingly, I can transfer bitcoin from one MtGox accout to another MtGox account TOO -- and guess what -- No blockchain transaction AT ALL!! You really are trolling or talking out of your ignorance on this subject. Take up my offer, get an electrum account, I'll send you 0.1BTC, you trade it, and owe me 0.11BTC in a year, this WILL help you understand many things. Even better, open up an MtGox account I'll send it to you as an off chain transaction... Then you'll truly see what I'm on about. From the blockchain A distributed, consensus backed log of all transactions. Mathematical prepublished rules define those things, and enforced by the agreement of all those who 'mine' on it. Yeah, if a majority of the miners agree to change the rules, the rules can be changed. Is a fascinating and beautiful thing to behold. You can check out "Satoshi's White Paper" to understand the full technical details, if you are so inclined. DDOS is DISTRIBUTED denial of service These idiots don't even know the terms they are using... how surprising. Is it a coincidence that a nuclear proponent is going to get flagged, but a good ol CO2 fossil fuel burning proponent won't hit any keywords? Keep your heads down and your mouths shut peons, unless ur looking for trouble, well are ya? I'm on the list, aren't I? $ Taking you a long time to reboot? [14:55] <alevin> gotta reboot You still blaming the 'market' for problems with people? Market got your tongue? Mike missed the 'perfect is the enemy of good' essay, I think. release early, release often. rsync a bit too old fashioned for ya? $ You'll probably want to be with your family over the next few weeks/months. You can get back to your drinking binge / whoring / asian style eating out in a bit. Wealth tax is the answer $ Hi, I think free markets are unregulated markets $ Just realise that you can't have unregulated free markets. It's a contradiction. Though business will obviously try to convince you otherwise... And trane is offline... Axioms of Basic Income Maybe, like me, you've found the economics of basic income confusing. Well... maybe, like me, you've been making the mistake that the government is made up of people. Once you realise that the government isn't just a group of people, but actually an organised group of people with a constitution, you can understand that the government is no longer bound by the limitations of people, and can do anything, literally anything at all. Some might even say magic. Below the fold - severe mental damage. Warning - may cause harm or cognitive dissonance. May 15 05:56:42 * insom (~insomnyuk@cloak-631EA118.woh.res.rr.com) has joined #kuro5hin May 15 06:15:13 <procrasti> lol good work May 15 06:27:13 * insom has quit (Ping timeout) May 15 06:32:03 * insom (~insomnyuk@cloak-631EA118.woh.res.rr.com) has joined #kuro5hin May 15 07:40:18 <procrasti> lol May 15 07:42:40 <procrasti> trane's spazzing out more than normal May 15 07:42:43 <procrasti> cruel May 15 07:42:45 <procrasti> but funny May 15 07:52:17 <procrasti> omg this is hillarious May 15 08:33:33 * insom has quit (Quit: ) May 15 09:44:43 * alevin (~alevin@cloak-14F92736.hsd1.wa.comcast.net) has joined #kuro5hin May 15 09:45:03 <alevin> Hi, I'm having a meltdown! Halp me! May 15 09:51:01 <alevin> I'm drowning in a sea of emotions! Oh knows! May 15 10:04:25 <procrasti> lol May 15 10:04:29 <procrasti> welcome back May 15 10:04:39 <procrasti> gonna go on an adhom attack again? May 15 10:06:03 <procrasti> you beyond being upset that the government is only a group of people yet? May 15 10:28:14 <procrasti> with ur vicious k5 attack about the emu, its a good thing I didn't mention my herd of alpacas May 15 11:09:03 * satyagrahi (~alevin@cloak-14F92736.hsd1.wa.comcast.net) has joined #kuro5hin May 15 11:09:37 <procrasti> lol May 15 11:09:40 <procrasti> welcome back May 15 11:09:43 <procrasti> gonna go on an adhom attack again? May 15 11:09:48 <procrasti> you beyond being upset that the government is only a group of people yet? May 15 11:09:52 <procrasti> with ur vicious k5 attack about the emu, its a good thing I didn't mention my herd of alpacas May 15 11:10:24 * alevin has quit (Ping timeout) May 15 11:19:23 <procrasti> still waters run deep May 15 11:30:41 <procrasti> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA58sS3x2Oo May 15 11:42:51 <procrasti> grudge much? May 15 12:10:29 <procrasti> ;_; <-- you May 15 12:20:38 <procrasti> ;_;__= <-- you looking for a handout May 15 14:50:33 <procrasti> I'm off down the road to see who the police are hassling now May 15 16:35:56 <satyagrahi> information is separate from matter and energy (wiener) May 15 16:36:13 <satyagrahi> a constitution adds information to a group May 15 16:36:26 <satyagrahi> the group becomes more as a result purely of the information May 15 16:36:39 <satyagrahi> future generations are greater because of the constitution May 15 16:37:02 <satyagrahi> if a group of ppl create a constitution, they create a resource that creates more resources for the group May 15 16:37:09 <satyagrahi> any questions? May 15 16:47:39 <procrasti> they are no longer have the limitations of a group of people because they wrote something down? May 15 16:47:57 <procrasti> they can make space shuttles with no one doing any work? May 15 16:48:04 <procrasti> or build bridges, no people required May 15 16:48:28 <procrasti> you really are that stupid May 15 16:49:13 <procrasti> they can invent the internet, search for the higgs bosun, go to outer space... no people have to do a thing May 15 16:49:30 <procrasti> they just print money, and the money + constitution builds it all May 15 16:49:43 <procrasti> you think this is reality? May 15 16:50:39 <procrasti> I'm all for different governments being more or less efficient May 15 16:50:54 <procrasti> but really... now trancends the limitations of a group of people May 15 16:51:02 <procrasti> is the craziest shit I've ever heard May 15 16:51:22 <procrasti> if this is in your set of axioms... no wonder u think basic income is free May 15 16:51:35 <procrasti> you think the government can give headjobs, and no one has to suck dick May 15 16:51:47 <procrasti> incredible brain damage u have May 15 17:00:34 <procrasti> please confirm u are this brain damaged May 15 17:00:55 <satyagrahi> straw man. May 15 17:02:32 <satyagrahi> a single individual can eventually make space shuttles without doing any work, or build bridges with no ppl required. govt can help us get to that point. May 15 17:02:42 <satyagrahi> fastest May 15 17:02:48 <procrasti> what... today retard May 15 17:03:07 <procrasti> not with hypothetical tech we are working towards May 15 17:03:15 <satyagrahi> today, govt can do things an unorganized group can't May 15 17:03:20 <procrasti> right May 15 17:03:22 <procrasti> I didn't say that May 15 17:03:25 <satyagrahi> organization adds something, information, to the group May 15 17:03:30 <satyagrahi> govt is organization May 15 17:03:38 <procrasti> I said, they are still limited by the limitations of a group of people May 15 17:03:46 <procrasti> not the limitations of an unorganised group of people May 15 17:03:54 <procrasti> the limitations of a group of people May 15 17:03:59 <satyagrahi> the group without organization, or govt, is more limited. May 15 17:04:08 <procrasti> a group of people May 15 17:04:14 <satyagrahi> information decreases limitations. May 15 17:04:17 <procrasti> yes May 15 17:04:25 <procrasti> but still limited by the limitations of a group of people May 15 17:04:39 <satyagrahi> a group of ppl with government is less limited by one without May 15 17:04:47 <procrasti> not necessarily May 15 17:04:59 <satyagrahi> but possibly? May 15 17:05:09 <satyagrahi> because you were saying absolutely not May 15 17:05:10 <procrasti> still limited by the limitations of a group of people May 15 17:05:17 <procrasti> you are saying the government is not a group of people May 15 17:05:19 <satyagrahi> less limited May 15 17:05:24 <procrasti> still a group of people May 15 17:05:31 <procrasti> the maximum a group of people can be May 15 17:05:37 <satyagrahi> i'm saying the govt is a group of ppl with something added, information, a constitution May 15 17:05:40 <procrasti> no gov will ever be as efficient as that May 15 17:05:44 <procrasti> but not magic May 15 17:05:48 <procrasti> still a group of people May 15 17:05:51 <satyagrahi> and that addition increases the abilities of the group May 15 17:05:53 <procrasti> still limited by what people can do May 15 17:05:58 <satyagrahi> it is magic May 15 17:06:02 <procrasti> but no more than the most efficiient group of people May 15 17:06:04 <procrasti> it is magic May 15 17:06:08 <procrasti> that's classic May 15 17:06:09 <satyagrahi> information outside of matter and energy May 15 17:06:12 <satyagrahi> yes it is magic May 15 17:06:14 <procrasti> yes, but not real resources May 15 17:06:19 <procrasti> it takes labour to build a computer May 15 17:06:22 <procrasti> it takes resources May 15 17:06:26 <procrasti> it takes enegery May 15 17:06:35 <satyagrahi> just as in the quantum computation class, vazirani describes shor's algorithm using the word "magic" May 15 17:06:52 <procrasti> I don't give a shit... it's not magic, its quantum mechanics May 15 17:07:08 <procrasti> please admit that a government is a group of people May 15 17:07:08 <satyagrahi> that energy is made less when ppl organize, so it takes less energy per unit May 15 17:07:12 <procrasti> people like you and me May 15 17:07:16 <satyagrahi> it's something we don't understand May 15 17:07:21 <procrasti> no it's not May 15 17:07:28 <procrasti> economists understand that fact very well May 15 17:07:33 <satyagrahi> any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic May 15 17:07:37 <procrasti> is why organisations require a certain amount of labour May 15 17:07:43 <satyagrahi> economists lack imagination May 15 17:07:45 <procrasti> and organisations May 15 17:07:52 <procrasti> and organising principles May 15 17:08:00 <procrasti> you are saying the government isn't people May 15 17:08:13 <satyagrahi> i'm saying it makes the ppl more than they were before May 15 17:08:16 <procrasti> and trying to find some way of justifying it May 15 17:08:19 <satyagrahi> it decreases limitations May 15 17:08:23 <procrasti> yes, like a cooporation May 15 17:08:25 <satyagrahi> in the limiting case all limits are gone May 15 17:08:26 <procrasti> co operation May 15 17:08:28 <procrasti> get it? May 15 17:08:36 <procrasti> corporation May 15 17:08:38 <procrasti> co operation May 15 17:08:40 <procrasti> working together May 15 17:08:42 <satyagrahi> co- opteration? May 15 17:08:45 <procrasti> is more than individuations May 15 17:08:57 <procrasti> but it is STILL a group of individuals May 15 17:09:03 <procrasti> if your theory of economics is gov is magic May 15 17:09:06 <procrasti> well wow May 15 17:09:12 <procrasti> really wow May 15 17:09:21 <procrasti> no wonder the gov can make computers for free May 15 17:09:28 <satyagrahi> did I just blow your mind? May 15 17:09:30 <procrasti> I don't see why people will ever have to work again May 15 17:09:35 <procrasti> fuck the basic income May 15 17:09:36 <satyagrahi> wait a minute, what mind May 15 17:09:37 <procrasti> forget money May 15 17:09:42 <procrasti> just give everybody anything they want May 15 17:09:44 <procrasti> no one has to work May 15 17:09:46 <satyagrahi> so you're reduced to a pure emotional response huh May 15 17:09:47 <procrasti> not even for the government May 15 17:09:53 <satyagrahi> you have no argument so you just say "wow" May 15 17:09:54 <procrasti> no... these follow from your statements May 15 17:09:58 <satyagrahi> this is your tried and true tactic May 15 17:09:58 <procrasti> yeah... wow May 15 17:10:01 <procrasti> brain damage May 15 17:10:02 <satyagrahi> the discussion is going on May 15 17:10:12 <procrasti> no one has to do anything May 15 17:10:13 <satyagrahi> and then you have nothing, so you use emotions May 15 17:10:20 <satyagrahi> a troll May 15 17:10:23 <procrasti> a peice of paper and more bits of paper can do stuff with no people May 15 17:10:27 <procrasti> no, you really are being that stupid May 15 17:10:30 <procrasti> really fucking stupid May 15 17:10:33 <procrasti> incredibly stupid May 15 17:10:38 <procrasti> unbeleivably stupid May 15 17:10:41 <satyagrahi> a computer program can do stuff with no people! no way! May 15 17:10:50 <satyagrahi> see how you retreat to ad homs? May 15 17:10:51 <procrasti> right... but not write itself May 15 17:10:57 <procrasti> yes, machines decrease labour costs May 15 17:10:59 <procrasti> for sure May 15 17:11:03 <procrasti> econs know that May 15 17:11:04 <satyagrahi> you can't argue your case without emotions, it is too weak May 15 17:11:12 <procrasti> u think the government isn't people May 15 17:11:13 <procrasti> wtf May 15 17:11:17 <procrasti> am I supposed to do with that? May 15 17:11:19 <satyagrahi> hoover dam can run for years with no ppl May 15 17:11:26 <procrasti> yeah, aliens built it May 15 17:11:29 <satyagrahi> so it does more than any group of ppl can do May 15 17:11:31 <procrasti> I mean goc May 15 17:11:33 <procrasti> same thing May 15 17:11:36 <satyagrahi> the ppl that built it are dead May 15 17:11:36 <procrasti> no people in gov May 15 17:11:43 <procrasti> SO FUCKING WHAT? May 15 17:11:46 <procrasti> econs know that May 15 17:11:49 <procrasti> you idiot May 15 17:11:58 <procrasti> but u are still saying gov is not a group of people May 15 17:11:59 <satyagrahi> but their memes persist to decrease the limitations and increase the abilities of future ppls May 15 17:12:05 <procrasti> econs know that May 15 17:12:06 <procrasti> but u are still saying gov is not a group of people May 15 17:12:18 <satyagrahi> future groups are less limited because of the accumulation of knowledge May 15 17:12:20 <procrasti> econs know that May 15 17:12:22 <procrasti> but u are still saying gov is not a group of people May 15 17:12:27 <satyagrahi> govt is more than a group of ppl May 15 17:12:30 <procrasti> no it is not May 15 17:12:34 <satyagrahi> it is a group with a constitution, organization May 15 17:12:38 <satyagrahi> a purpose, a mandate May 15 17:12:39 <procrasti> yes May 15 17:12:43 <procrasti> but still a group of people May 15 17:12:46 <procrasti> and no more than that May 15 17:12:46 <satyagrahi> this adds things that the group did not have May 15 17:12:51 <procrasti> yes May 15 17:12:54 <procrasti> but still a group of people May 15 17:12:57 <procrasti> and no more than that May 15 17:13:02 <satyagrahi> this decreases limitations and increases the ability of the group to do things that they couldn't before May 15 17:13:09 <satyagrahi> all that added was information May 15 17:13:09 <procrasti> econs know that May 15 17:13:14 <procrasti> but still a group of people May 15 17:13:29 <satyagrahi> a group of ppl with information, with govt, which makes it more powerful than it was May 15 17:13:35 <procrasti> yes May 15 17:13:36 <procrasti> but still a group of people May 15 17:13:48 <satyagrahi> with something that creates resources May 15 17:13:55 <procrasti> no it doesn't CREATE resources May 15 17:13:56 <satyagrahi> information creates resources May 15 17:14:02 <procrasti> it enables them to be used more efficiently May 15 17:14:02 <satyagrahi> information is a resource May 15 17:14:04 <procrasti> not CREATE May 15 17:14:18 <procrasti> not on its own it isn't no May 15 17:14:19 <satyagrahi> information that wasn't there before is created out of thin air May 15 17:14:28 <satyagrahi> why not? May 15 17:14:29 <procrasti> knowledge is yes May 15 17:14:32 <procrasti> created out of mental labour May 15 17:14:48 <procrasti> but still a group of people May 15 17:14:50 <satyagrahi> or a flash of insight, who knows where that came from? May 15 17:14:57 <procrasti> who cares! May 15 17:15:02 <satyagrahi> a group of ppl with information is more than the group without that information May 15 17:15:02 <procrasti> is it people or not people May 15 17:15:08 <satyagrahi> it's more May 15 17:15:11 <satyagrahi> it's ppl + information May 15 17:15:17 <procrasti> people and organisation May 15 17:15:23 <procrasti> yes, which is why econs talk about organisations May 15 17:15:33 <procrasti> but still fundamentally a group of people May 15 17:15:39 <procrasti> how can u not get that? May 15 17:16:08 <satyagrahi> govt = information = organisation + group of ppl > group of ppl - govt May 15 17:16:21 <procrasti> so? May 15 17:16:29 <procrasti> govt is an organisation of people May 15 17:16:29 <satyagrahi> so take a bunch of your agents in that sim May 15 17:16:33 <procrasti> but it still requires people May 15 17:16:39 <procrasti> agents represent people May 15 17:16:41 <satyagrahi> and give them information about the others May 15 17:16:43 <procrasti> in the sim May 15 17:16:45 <satyagrahi> and they are more than they were before May 15 17:16:55 <procrasti> what? May 15 17:16:59 <procrasti> like mind reading? May 15 17:17:00 <satyagrahi> they can do more, their limitations are fewer May 15 17:17:07 <satyagrahi> whatever May 15 17:17:10 <procrasti> I see May 15 17:17:15 <procrasti> govt can read minds now? May 15 17:17:16 <satyagrahi> language, the ability to communicate with other agents May 15 17:17:20 <procrasti> no shit May 15 17:17:23 <procrasti> that's what people do May 15 17:17:24 <satyagrahi> let's start with language May 15 17:17:27 <procrasti> that's incredible May 15 17:17:30 <procrasti> people communicate May 15 17:17:32 <procrasti> amazing May 15 17:17:37 <procrasti> only governments can do that May 15 17:17:42 <procrasti> according to you May 15 17:17:53 <procrasti> because governemnts are more than people May 15 17:18:00 <satyagrahi> govt encodes the communication in things like laws that the ppl agree to abide by May 15 17:18:05 * insom (~insomnyuk@cloak-631EA118.woh.res.rr.com) has joined #kuro5hin May 15 17:18:07 <procrasti> yes May 15 17:18:08 <satyagrahi> we cede powers to the govt to make all of us stronger May 15 17:18:11 <procrasti> yes May 15 17:18:19 <procrasti> but u are still trying to say gov isn't people May 15 17:18:24 <satyagrahi> govt is organization is ppl May 15 17:18:28 <satyagrahi> oh look the sex offender's back May 15 17:18:29 <procrasti> insom: u missed some real crazy going on May 15 17:18:34 <satyagrahi> traitor! May 15 17:18:40 <procrasti> yes... it is an organisation of people May 15 17:18:46 <procrasti> amazing May 15 17:18:52 <procrasti> u finally admitted it May 15 17:18:54 <satyagrahi> profucksty's been letting lose his insanity again May 15 17:19:03 <procrasti> govt is organisation of people May 15 17:19:06 <satyagrahi> that was my starting point May 15 17:19:10 <procrasti> so its fucking people May 15 17:19:16 <procrasti> it requires work from people May 15 17:19:21 <satyagrahi> the organisation adds to the group May 15 17:19:25 <procrasti> so what? May 15 17:19:33 <procrasti> that's like something groups of people can't do all of the sudden? May 15 17:19:36 <procrasti> organise? May 15 17:19:38 <satyagrahi> the information itself makes the group more powerful than it was May 15 17:19:38 <procrasti> really? May 15 17:19:47 <satyagrahi> if they do, they have a govt May 15 17:19:51 <procrasti> yes, but not more powerful than a group of people May 15 17:19:57 <satyagrahi> if they don't, they're less capable May 15 17:20:01 <procrasti> ITS A GROUP OF PEOPLE U RETARD May 15 17:20:11 <satyagrahi> meltdown alert! meltdown alert! May 15 17:20:14 <satyagrahi> he's using caps now! May 15 17:20:16 <procrasti> a more efficient group of people than a bunch of retarded, blind deaf mutes May 15 17:20:20 <procrasti> but still a group of people May 15 17:20:26 <satyagrahi> oh knows, he's drowning in a sea of anger! May 15 17:20:33 <procrasti> u are so fucking stupid May 15 17:20:36 <procrasti> it's criminal May 15 17:20:49 <procrasti> so, we admit that government is made up of people now? May 15 17:20:53 <satyagrahi> Hi, I can't argue so I'll just use ad homs! May 15 17:21:01 <procrasti> who can argue with an idiot? May 15 17:21:08 <procrasti> its like crack lobotomised you May 15 17:21:09 <satyagrahi> not me May 15 17:21:13 <procrasti> and u want to be taken seriously May 15 17:21:37 <satyagrahi> i wonder how long he'll keep ranting? May 15 17:21:38 <procrasti> u claim government can do things a group of people can't May 15 17:21:45 <procrasti> like a group of people can't write a constitution May 15 17:21:50 <procrasti> a group of people can't organise May 15 17:21:54 <procrasti> a group of people can't write laws May 15 17:22:11 <procrasti> a group of people can't form a system of rules May 15 17:22:38 <procrasti> a group of people, CANT EVEN COMMUNICATE!! May 15 17:23:37 <procrasti> if ur secretly telling me that the gov is run by a aliens... ur being way too subtle for me May 15 17:26:48 <procrasti> if all we have to do is vote and the aliens can do anything... then fuck basic income... I want the holodecks!! May 15 17:27:11 <procrasti> fly me around canis majoris May 15 17:29:11 <satyagrahi> if a group of ppl organizes, it then becomes a group of ppl with a govt, and more than it was before May 15 17:29:25 * satyagrahi expecting another screenful of crazy now May 15 17:29:29 <procrasti> but not so much more that is no longer a group of people May 15 17:29:33 * satyagrahi goes to get exercise May 15 17:29:40 <procrasti> what an idiot May 15 17:29:45 <procrasti> this is going on k5 So you think he knows he's writing bullshit? What the hell am I missing then? I thought he got kicked out of uni and never got his degree. Unless his whole welfare junkie character is a troll, I really don't get what the hell happened to him. Can you explain what I don't get then? It's just a windup, he's not that stupid? I'm missing something deep in the argument? He's just taking the piss? I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, but I don't get where he's coming from at all. Ummm.... obviously... Only a fool wouldn't doubt his own knowledge. Doesn't mean some things don't still strike me as completely insane. Like the gov not being people. So, not so much as baited me Just that he's a fucking idiot mental defective. Fine. There are different forms of mental illness... His is of the extreme denial of reality form. It is no surprise his life is such a mess. can a GROUP OF PEOPLE do that? Can anything ELSE do that? So, a government is NO LONGER a GROUP OF PEOPLE? Or perhaps maybe, it is STILL A GROUP OF PEOPLE, that have formed a government? This enables them to transcend the limitations of people, like needing food and requiring labour for production? REALLY MOTHERFUCKER? How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Trane after all she has been through.! She lost her rant, she went through a discourse. She had two fuckin bots. Her own stand turned out to be as a user, a cheater, and now she's going through a coursera battle. All you people care about is..... readers and making money off of her. SHE'S A HUMAN! (ah! ooh!) What you don't realize is that Trane is making you all this money and all you do is write a bunch of crap about her. She hasn't performed as sane in years. Her song is called "gov give me more" for a reason because all you people want is MORE! MORE-MORE, MORE: MORE!. LEAVE HER ALONE! You are lucky she even performed for you BASTARDS! LEAVE TRANE ALONE!.....Please. Freeman Dyson talked about professionalism and said if Trane was a professional she would've pulled it off no matter what. Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publicly bash someone who is going through a hard time. Leave Trane Alone Please.... ! Leave Trane Crackhead alone!...right now!....I mean it.! Anyone that has a problem with her you deal with me, because she is not well right now. LEAVE HER ALONE! Not sure if u are sticking up for trane or chris maybe britney spears? I finally got the final vote in After years of actively voting on stories on K5, I finally got the final say: Your vote (1) was recorded. This story currently has a total score of 2. You were the last vote. We've considered the votes and comments, and decided the story should be hidden. Thank you! Of course, the result was the opposite of my vote, but you can't win em all. You can't win em all: unless ur arguing with trane, of course. mitsu is insonniac $ Also, trane said earlier that irc was a simulated room.... Therefore, it is an actual room. crackhead philosophy, fantasy == reality. LOL +1 FP $ Because you asked Government Isn't People: ICR Failure of the Socratric Method. Maybe remove the %27 too then? Also, it's meant to be ICR... whoever posted the pastebin got it wrong. I wonder if plato had to remove all the swearing from his discourses? Socrates: Such is the good and true City or State, and the good and man is of the same pattern; and if this is right every other is wrong; and the evil is one which affects not only the ordering of the State, but also the regulation of the individual soul, and is exhibited in four forms. Thrasymachus: You're such a fag Socrates. You just love the good and man, right, nice and hard, I bet! Stick it in his four forms? Suck much dick lately? You love it in the ass, don't ya, you stupid queer! Why don't you try a fucking hemlock mouthwash and stfu? Banksy? $ Clearly me Thinking trane has any hope. DEAD GIVEAWAY http://youtu.be/nZcRU0Op5P4 That is all. In unrelated news I recently discovered* that Trane believes the government isn't just people. The 'general welfare' clause gives them superhuman abilities that normal humans aren't capable of, like locking people up against their will. These superhuman abilities are why, if the government isn't doing something, they are just being mean. Turns out this kidnapper must be the government... there's no other way he could have locked these girls up otherwise. It's not possible for people to do that, because constitution. *: IRC log proof and Trane's subsequent mental breakdown not included for purposes of brevity. ok $ Please state again that govt isn't just people That the government can do things that a group of people cannot do. And I mean cannot, as opposed to prohibited by law by the same group of people. <satyagrahi> govt is a meme, memes are separate from matter and energy (according to Wiener) <satyagrahi> ppl can be viewed as carriers for memes <satyagrahi> saying govt is just individuals is like saying a chariot is the same as a collection of its parts <satyagrahi> information puts the parts together into a chariot (the analogy of a chariot comes from a buddhist, nagasena) <satyagrahi> in the same way, govt assembles humans into something that no individual can do <satyagrahi> and the constitution mandates that the collective body protect unalienable rights and provide for the general welfare, and for the common defence, etc. I did specifically say group of people, rather than sum of individuals, so your chariot crap is a distraction. So that, being more than just a group of people, they aren't limited by the same resource limitations a group of people are limited by. Please explain that the government can provide everything for free, because it requires no work from actual individuals in that group to do that. That appears to be your thesis so far. Because, if the government is not limited by laws of physics to only do what a group of people can do, then you are correct and economics does not apply. They could power the country on electricity created from pure memes, rather than require actual power plants be built and fuel to be mined. Yes, but you saying a group of people didn't That somehow, a group of people writing a constitution means they are no longer have the limitations of a group of people. Rather than a group of people $ So? How does that mean it's not a group of ppl? You got some real confusion on how reality works. People write a constitution and then those same people are supposed to act in accordance with that constitution. There's no magic about a constitution or a government that somehow enables them to transcend the capabilities of a group of people. The very craziness of your thoughts just shocks me. And so what? Those memes are still carried out by ppl. Your thesis here is that the gov is not merely a group of people. That is capable of stuff that people are not. Like producing goods and services beyond the limitations of labour and resources. If the gov gives you something it is effectively free, and no one has to do anything, give up anything, and there are no tradeoffs. You won't give me your computer... but if the government does it, no one goes without a computer. No wonder you have so many problems with real life. You live in a fantasy world with expectations that don't align with reality. Always a recipe for disaster. This is relavent how exactly? Just say, "YES -- I honestly think the government can do anything without using human labour and material resources". And I can let you go on as a crazy nut with no comprehension of reality. Well the alternative to free market is command economics. Where the individual does not make their own choices regarding trade of their property. So, I'm kind of with you on that end - end the free market artificial scarcity of vagina! It should be as simple as legalising rape. I feel this is something K5 could easily support. Prohibition DOES NOT WORK SHEEPLE!!! It merely drives rape underground where it cannot be regulated. Open your hearts, minds and legs to the suffering of everyday rapists who are just normal people and only criminals because the law says they are. Yes you do... go on $ No people will... you're just an incapable idiot. Free market theory was built to overcome the limitations of scarcity... to create abundance in a world of scarcity, not to promote scarcity in itself. But then you think the gov is some magical entity that doesn't rely on labour and resources, and you don't know enough economics to know that money is not considered a resource. No, people did... Some input from gov, some from mil (part of gov), some from academia (a mix of gov and free market) and some from pure free market. You are still trying to peddle the idea that gov is not people. Like some alien external god with no limitations and infinite power and ability. It's so stupid, but your crack addled mind can't comprehend it. HUMANS carried out the work... Not alien ai gods, you fucking retard. Ie, resources unallocated for other purposes. $ People are dying of sexually aggravated obese and this is clearly a failure of the market. We need to further limit food supply to stop this terrible waist. /average/ fixed costs decrease per unit but fixed costs.... are kind of, more or less, how can I put this? fixed. Yeah... lots of evidence that the gov funds black ops with, and a lot sections of the economy now depend on, drugs being illegal. Corruption... it just works! Tdillos Revenge - Why Yanks Cannot Understand Chef Rights It is difficult for American obese to comprehend why British gourmands might consider the right to bear pressure cookers to be a natural right. The problem derives from the fundamental differences in their respective culinary theories. This affects their tastes, which are conditioned on eating within the framework of one of the two competing menus. American obese are not gourmands. In American cooking, the individual does not derive their nutrition from being a chef, rather they derive their nutrition due to the grace of McDonalds who acts through the will of the reigning franchise. Americans are conditioned to believe that they are the consumers of the Big Mac, not their own chefs. If McDonalds decides that a person's value meal has no nutrition, then that is all the Big GulpTM, because their's is not to season wise, but their's is to order fries, and a side order of Burger King! British gourmands on the other hand fought a long, hot and sweaty battle with the kitchen against this very repression and formed a new menu on the basis that the menu derives its nutrition from the edible. That the nutrition belongs to the vegetables, not the salt content. Hence the idea that the vegetable is a member of the meal, not its dressing. On this basis, British are responsible for their own nutrition, especially from the kitchen. This necessitates their right to pressure cookers. Americans on the other hand, must never eat right, preferring another polite pastry to a disgusting display of self control - and why guns and even assault rifles must be kept in the hands of every food server and drive through attendant. Finally, the argument that the weak sauce cannot overcome the strong meat, leads Americans to believe that the idea of self cheffing against a modern equipped kitchen is an absolute futility. Again, when American men are confronted by a strong veal or savoury, they know the only reasonable response to a frapp attempt is to 'gulp back and think of Big Mac'. They understand that subtle seasoning against a stronger flavouring is hopeless, and rightfully know their plaice. British men be packin heated stoves, and will pop a capsicum[1] in with ginger and cloves if she be tryin reconstituted meat like that. In conclusion: The British were fine with rapeseed[2], only Americans were offended by it. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_pepper [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canola http://www.kuro5hin.org/poll/1368036981_wUytXRMG OOOPS What? I thought it dumped. Ummm... TDillo is actaully a very nice guy... Someone hacked my computer from using IRC on freenode, I think trane... and he must have put that poll there... I don't think anyone should pay any attention to this diary... Shit dude... thanks for the update I'm not sure about these computar things and that poll is really nasty... I'd hate for tdillo to think I would write such hate filled cruelty just for downvoting a story of mine... but I can't seem to find any way to remove it now either. I don't want to catch any more bluffer overflows so I'll be installing the Norton MCoffee antifreeze now... plus my computar will run 250% times faster according to these helpful boxes that keep showing up. Thanks for the help. Oh man... I feel bad right now... It dropped off the queue, but didn't show up in the sections box... I assumed it failed... but front page... with less votes than the original... fuck... thanks all. sorry tdillo... I'm not saying you are a chilopred... I was just asking the questions. if rusty wants to delete this diary... esp b4 tdillo logs back on... that'd be real great. This troll is going to look pretty silly when my story drops from the queue. Although I do greatly enjoy being called a small penissed american gun loving nut when I wrote the first one, and a penis envying brittish gourmond on this one. Be nice if people could get at least one fact right. I think that's just the smell of my success, enjoy it either way. +3 I prefer the word gourmand. Wow - It didn't drop from the queue... That's quit an odd feeling... being wrong... Got to say I'm not really used to it. Balsamic Vinigga: Stock Market Leech (Stealing Your Pension) Balsamic Vinigga, well known pension fund destroying stock market speculator, has just recently announced stealing over SIX MILLION c from the honest stock market investors and average joe pension fund holders with his grotesque display of short term stock market speculation and manipulation of Elon Musk's struggling Tesla electric car company. Balsamic Vinigga ran an immoral and quite possibly illegal pump and dump scam on this little known electric car start up company that has yet to supply cars in any significant quantity to a public eagerly awaiting a green alternative sports car for the environmentally minded performance sports auto enthusiast. Buying into a relatively cheap stock of this little known company, Balsamic Vinigga used the well known, and well Google indexed site, Kuro5hin, to talk up the value of Tesla before selling out of the market with incredible and outrageous profits of over 400%. Using high frequency trading techniques of owning only fractions of a company for very short amounts of time, combined with an old, well known and illegal activity often referred to as a pump and dump scam, he made off with a fortune from other honest people's hard work and effort. He hasn't done anything wrong you might say, he was an honest investor and honestly enthusiastic about this company. Really? If that was the case then why would feel the need to constantly tell everyone how great it was going just to cash out when the company was seeing record high stock prices? Prices that would never be so high without this type of callous, brazen and shameless manipulation. Where did his profit of over SIX MILLION c come from in such a short time? It came from the honest and hard working honest stock market investors and pension fund holders like yourself. You can't extract money from the stock exchange without taking it from somebody else. The stock market doesn't work this way. He took it directly from the economy, from hard working mums and dads all across this great nation of ours, without ever lifting a finger or doing an honest days work in his life. Did he hold his stock for many years like a true investor would? No. He held it merely for a few months. A calculated attempt to maximise his own profits at the expense of every other honest hard working investor, trader and average joe. This type of behaviour is clearly illegal, and the SEC should be busy investigating this type of fraud that happens every day directly under all our noses, but the SEC is too busy to investigate this type of 'small scale' investment fraud. Hobbled by government spending cuts caused by the financial crisis, in turn caused by this type of speculative behaviour, has severely limited the ability of financial regulators and government departments that should be stomping out this type of behaviour, and so it goes unpunished. In the views of this author, I strongly believe that this type of short term, speculative, buying and selling of tiny fractions of companies by ruthless individuals should be outright banned. Anyone not willing to buy an entire company and hold it for a minimum of ten years or more should simply not be allowed to destroy value in this way. Anything less shows no commitment to the company and no long term view and does nothing to help the economy and instead simply steals money from honest hard working investors and honest workers in the global economy like honest you and me. The money he took did not come out of nowhere. No one can gain without another person losing. It was you and me, poor Elon Musk and the dreamers who dared dream of green performance electric sportcars who suffer from this intolerable, cold hearted, greed based behaviour. Some people dared dream, and now, because of Balsamic Vinniga, and greedy speculators like him, it is quite possible we will never have high performance electric vehicles. You might not care, but I, and a greener environmentally friendly future certainly do. Make sure you vote to stop this illegitimate parasitic behaviour and keep our stock markets safe for the honest investor, our pensions funds and our children and our children's children. Please write to your senator or representative today. You'll have to explain that to me taxes is something poor people get, right? Like a mandatory savings program for the poor? You put in a little each week and at the end of the year the government gives you a bit of it back so you can buy a new plasma tv? I don't know... my accountants say I'm not eligible for tax again this year and it's the best he can do... sure sounds fun to get money like that though. Do I need a better accountant? I don't know dude... there seems to be some pretty bad news about stock market manipulators targeting this Tesla stock thing right now: http://www.google.com/search?q=Tesla+stock+market+manipulation+pump+and+dump+spe culators I'd say its a good thing you got out when you did. I might post this to the queue to help out others who might be fooled into buying this stock... maybe then the AI traders will drive this stock back down to where it belongs. Appropriate Quote that Sums Up Your Problem "Haters don't really hate you, they hate themselves; because you're a reflection of what they wish to be" - Yaira_N I think it means you want to cut your penis off. Fenestrate yourself. Why sell the entire lot? I mean, you made a profit... you could take out quite a lot... certainly enough to be in actual profit, but still leave some there that you could take further profits out of too, should it, for whatever reason, continue to rise. Then you could still also buy back in with the profits you made if it drops. Who knows? Maybe some bad news will come along that causes a drop but they will recover from easily enough in time. It doesn't have to be a binary thing, does it? Is it possible to win both ways with a tiny little bit more finesse? Unless you think you can actually time it... then all or nothing is the optimal winning strategy, of course. But everyone here knows... there's no value in buying and selling fractions of a company for short periods of time... that's just speculation and something only evil traders do... not honest to goodness, as god intended, realTM investors. DISCLAIMER: THE ABOVE IS NOT TRADING ADVICE DO NOT TAKE TRADING ADVICE FROM K5. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LOSSES, ACTUAL, THEORETICAL, IMPLICIT OR IMPLIED RESULTING FROM FOLLOWING OR NOT FOLLOWING ANYTHING I HAVE STATED ABOVE OR ANYWHERE ELSE ON THIS SITE, ANY OTHER SITE, FORUM OR COMMUNICATION MEDIUM. I AM NOT A LICENSED REGULATED FINANCIAL EXPERT. THIS IS NOT TRADING ADVICE. THE ABOVE IS NOT TRADING ADVICE. PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OR INDICATION OF FUTURE PERFORMANCE. TRADE AT YOUR OWN RISK USING YOUR OWN JUDGEMENT. THE ABOVE IS NOT TRADING ADVICE. TALK TO YOUR OWN REGISTERED LICENSED ACCOUNTANT, FINANCIAL EXPERT, LAWYER OR PSYCHIATRIST BEFORE TAKING TRADING ADVICE FROM K5 OR ANY OTHER WEBSITE, FORUM OR MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION. THE ABOVE IS NOT TRADING ADVICE. THIS IS NOT TRADING ADVICE. THE ABOVE COMMENT, AND ANY AND ALL OTHER COMMENTS BY THE ABOVE POSTER, IS NOT INTENDED TO BE, OR IMPLY, ACTUAL TRADING ADVICE. Good analysis and congrats on the profits I'm not so smart at picking winners, so I use other techniques... but I can't argue with your analysis. Yeah, wallow in your ignorance you stupid fuck Look to all the successful hippie communes for the ideal life of peace, love and understanding... I hate the cruelness of capitalism as much as anyone, but if you actually did bother to study it, you will see that so far no one has actually come up with a demonstrably better system. Capitalism is like democracy, the absolute worst form of social system, except for all the others that have been tried. So, if you don't have a BETTER alternative... you're just a dope smoking hippie high on his own pipe dreams of how it all could be while offering absolutely nothing of value to anyone. I'm sure you feel so great and superior for all ignorance too, dontchya. And yet you don't offer another solution... Economics does of course go FAR FAR beyond free market theory. FMT is just the START of economics... It's the 'ideal world' scenario. Where it works, it works exceedingly well... and where it doesn't there are fixes. But ppl like greengrass... I honestly don't know what they believe? They pretend to reject money and capitalism... but I guarantee he still went out and found the best paying job and conditions he could get with his skills. Pure capitalism. So, where is this middle ground you talk of? Welfare? Well fine, I support strong social safety nets... but I also support capitalist enterprise. What does he offer instead? Fuck all... just some hippie smoke ring bullshit that we know doesn't scale, and doesn't even work at the small scales it was attempted at. So, he can wallow in his ignorance and fuck off like the rest of the idiots around here. Oh, you have a point? No... then stfu $ How your wit rends my mind with its poignancy $ Like fuck I will! Who the fuck do you think you are? A wikipedian editor? You're going to have to stay up pretty fucking late and get up pretty fucking early if you hope to be the last to comment in this or any other thread of mine. No, your just throwing around adhoms and not arguing in good faith. Fuck you. It's such a shame to see a once promising mind destroyed by drugs and society. You don't have the assets to think about these things logically and rationally, why even bother? Yeah... but no but yeah Reading that seems like economic reality hit them pretty hard and 175 people is well within the Dunbar limit of around 200 for a single cohesive social group. Even then there still appears to be a strong hierarchical structure, and they moved to a system of individual rather than collective income and distribution. And their free love extended to only 6 people... I don't know man... that just doesn't seem right, you no what I mean? Duuude. No LSD? wtf. Also, these communes always rely on technology manufactured in the outside world, even if it is second hand, recycled and repurposed. I doubt these people could make a light bulb and lead acid battery on their own, so this leads to capitalistic trade with the outside world, etc. So, yeah, it's a good effort, and they should be lauded for sure... but reality has reshaped it from the ideals that the hippy communes appeared to originally espouse and strive for. I mean, no system is perfect, right, but do you really think this lifestyle could be scaled to an entire nation? I doubt it. It generally works with a small group of like minded, hard working, low materialistic desiring individuals who fit in well with the rest of the community and are willing to work for others and do as they're told for little individual gain... but outside of that, problems arise. I actually doubt someone like trane would be welcome at all. If you had been paying attention (which clearly your ADD hobbled mind wasn't) you would have realised that I already knew economics as I was arguing with Trane before the coursera course was offered, and only took the course when he agreed to take it so that I wouldn't be introducing concepts beyond the course to him... so that he would know everything I said was part of mainstream econ theory. Surprise surprise the welfare queen anti-reality faggot couldn't hack more than two units before collapsing into a quivering mass of blame-everyone-else-for-his-own-deficitsitis. You're an idiot if you think my econ knowledge comes from coursera, coursera was just a very basic refresher course to me, and nothing more. I've been an algorithmic exchange trader as my sole income now since 2006, and have a fairly good idea why all you hippie dick sucking faggots are clearly retarded. Typical IT nerd syndrome of knocking anything you can't understand, economics, social interaction, sex... Nothing but sour grapes because you can't have what others have. Instead of appreciating the beauty of the amalgamation of IT, software, AI and market dynamics you whine that others are actually smarter than you and want to tear down the very system that serves you. Go back to your hippie commune and tell me how well your fantasy world works in real life. No? You'd rather stay in the capitalist system that provides all the benefits you have? You hypocritical hippie dick sucking faggot. And what is it exactly that you do that is so fucking valuable to society you ignorant piece of shit? You out there saving starving children and building hospitals? No, you're an idiot code monkey making money off moving bits about a computer... whoopdee fucking doo... Aren't you just the fucking hero dumping on everybody else's income. You probably even work for a publicly traded company that relies on those numbers you stupid fuck, and if you don't you rely on them indirectly. Ignorance of IT nerds... always thinking they're so superior knocking everything they don't understand. No wonder they lock you up in windowless cubicles and tie you to a desk and monitor. No one wants to see your ugly fucking face. So it's okay for you to be a leach on society but oh my your mighty wisdom deems those ebil traders as lesser and to be banned? They steeling my penis funs! Which the fuck is it? People, and even you apparently, seem to want algorithmic trading shut down and made illegal. At the basis of their claims seems to be a total lack of understanding of the operation of an exchange. Remember, they made short selling illegal during the crisis - even though you claim to see the 'value' in that... there is precedent here. You can't see the value in buying fractions of a company for milliseconds? Is it okay for me to buy fractions of a bitcoin for seconds? Grams of gold for a few minutes? Value to a trader is a nebulous concept, I will concede that point... but to do it for a living you better damn well respect it. If you aren't providing value to the markets, you will lose, as simple as that. So, the concept of value is central to your livelihood. Though, I know no one besides my family will give a fuck when I die... and all your lives are ultimately worthless and without value... from a practical point of view, value must be respected or you starve. And if you're okay with it why the big fucking rant like it's the world's most eeevilest thing? Backtrack much? Yeah, in theory they're great... I watched a BBC doco a few years back, have no idea what it was called... about the early hippy communes (around sanfran and cali) and interviewed the people who were part of them and examined why they didn't work well in practice. Turns out, the whole consensus thing is just a load of wank and doesn't work. They start off with the ideal, but it doesn't take long for the stronger personalities to begin to dominate the politics and decision making. Stronger minds and will subjugate the weaker. Although they colour it all in the type of feminist hippy bullshit Angelfish satires so well, but behind it still the cunning power games stalin and hitler would be proud of. And the whole thing just tends to fall apart. These guys might have something, but ultimately they are still existing with the capitalist framework with their land ownership, exclusion and commercial produce. Some will have more power than others... it's inevitable human nature. For me... no, I'm not arbing, but might be looking at some kind of arbing very soon... I also agree with you on the crazy tech analysis types... I've looked into it and for the life of me can't see their logic... maybe when you tune those algos with history you kind of train them the way you might train an art. neural network... I don't really know. I do a kind of poor mans HFT. Obviously I don't have the resources Goldman Sachs has... so no sub millisecond trading for me, but I do trade tiny fractions in the sub minute ballpark. Unfortunately, I don't want to go into specifics about which markets, my thoughts on value, trading theory, specific algos, etc... I mean, yeah, I'd actually love too... but there's a lot of competition out there and lot of capable minds on this website... so I'm kind of stuck on my own with it. I don't even know why I came out as a trader really... just it sucks to see so many otherwise smart computer literate hacker types dumping on algo trading when, if you guys think about it, it's a damn good use of engineering skills actually. Just markets don't behave like particles, so market dynamics isn't physics, but it def has mathematical laws that govern its behaviour in similar ways to physics... once you realise its not actually physics, its not so hard. Hyperbole motherfucker, do you speak it? Yeah, the strong socially skilled and willed dominate, even when they all have the same amount of time and supposedly the same shared resources, the stronger rise to the top... power struggles arise and there are winners and losers. This deviated from their stated goals of one for all, all for one, equality, peace, love and understanding. In the doco the old hippy chick was saying how the commune meetings would end up in staring contests, power plays and group mind control and domination. And just because I'm a trader doesn't mean I'm some super rich super star. I made more bank as a software engineer than I do as a trader, but when I was suffering from undiagnosed gallstones* and doing my best to help an alcoholic partner, the freedom I obtained from working my own schedule rather than 9-5+ office job more than covered the financial loss for a net economic gain. (You have to be a hippy or an economist to understand that you can be richer with less money - crackheads, financial experts, businessmen and accountants can be confused by this concept). I honestly expect you to be a in far better financial position than myself (though I can't know for sure). I don't have loans to pay, but I don't have other people's pension funds to play with either. The real benefit to me has been the time, self direction and lack of bosses and other people's expectations. I win or lose** directly on my own merits, and I like that. As for the social vs financial power difference in the hippy communes... that's also an old discussion I had with trane... power is power, in some societies (say communist societies where wealth isn't the main difference between people) political power is more important than financial power... in fact, they are both forms of economic power if viewed from the right angle. But people like trane don't have social power either, so all his whining about economics wouldn't do shit for him, he'd be just as much of a powerless loser in that society as he is in capitalist society. Then what would he blame? The artificial scarcity of talking sticks? The benefit of the capitalist economic solution is that the power goes to those who (supposedly, okay...) provide the most economic benefits for the rest of society. (Only supposedly because we all know there is shit going on that carries on for generations and deviates from the ideals... but I still think it beats the alternatives of kings and dictators telling everyone what to do at all levels). Other forms of power tend to go to those who subjugate the rest of society most successfully. * : the gallstone attacks always came at night a few hours after dinner and would last six to ten hours... and that would happen two or three times a week -- do you know many bosses who would take you seriously complaining you had to take another day off work when they could see nothing physically wrong with you and no doctor could diagnose a problem? I had to ensure special clauses in my contracts to give me the flexibility I required, but this still fucked with my reputation. Luckily I was quite good at what I did and still got offers and wasn't fired despite this. **: Hacking a few tens of thousands of lines of code late at night while travelling without following proper source control procedure turning a profitable algo into a costly several hundred dollars a day loss when everything seems to be running nominally can be real fun to track down - especially when you're trying to pay for hotels and other travel expenses and your gf wants to explore the new city with you but if you don't get it working you're going to be living on the streets in short order instead. Yeah, fuck price discovery and liquidity those two concepts are why no one here has a fucking clue what they are talking about. And no one here understands exchange queue operation. All that messing with prices is REALLY REALLY useful. And, I can't go into details WHY in really concrete, easy for IT guys to understand, ways without revealing secret sauce either, unfortunately... but everything I say prbly does leak some info to the careful reader. Fundamentally, without a stock market, there are no IPOs and no further share issues to raise capital, no options for long term employee incentivisation. That's the value of a stock market I suppose to a company. You either think the entire thing is a total waste of time (and be an idiot) or the entire thing is useful... then u have to understand how it works and eventually realise that all orders are useful. Lets try it another way.... Okay, the EEEVIILL price trading HFTs are at it again with BVs favourite stock TSLA. Now, there are at least TWO prices... the market price, and the 'actual' price, say, that the market is trying to find... the actual price relies on things like dividend payouts, company earnings, profits, other intangibles even like human desires, etc... blah blah blah... and may even be different to different people (but sum to a single 'actual', if unknowable, price in theory). Now imagine that the HFTs push the price of TSLA right down to $0.01... the EBIL VASTARDS have DESTROYED TSLA!!! Have they? What should BV do in this situation? Clearly he should buy (with some of the money he acquired selling it when it was high, of course)... BV might even have enough cash on hand to own TSLA outright... WHOOHOOO! So, the HFTs can't crash the market without creating opportunities to the knowledgeable traders you think might be doing something useful. Okay that was easy, maybe the opposite is the problem, what if the HFTs drive the price of shares THROUGH THE ROOF to $1M/share... BV is suddenly a paper billionare... again, what should he do in this situation? Clearly sell some of that shit and retire to the Bahamas. This is what I mean when I say that you can never under any circumstance place an order that disadvantages (unfairly!!*) anyone else on the market. Every distortion from the 'actual' price is an opportunity to a smart trader. *: From this I exclude fraud such as insider trading, front running orders and other actual dodginess. Whereas buying it cheap and driving the price up before you decide to buy disadvantages you fairly. Now, traders are smart and people are stupid. Traders sell as the market price goes up and buy as the market price goes down. People double up on their investments as the market price goes up, and cry, panic and sell out when the market price comes down. That's the difference. I guess the other case is when HFTs are jumping the queue... well guess what... this drives the spreads down and moves the market price towards the actual price, OR decreases everyone else's costs involved in altering their positions. They can buy and sell AT LOWER COSTS! Economists normally consider this to be pretty darn good. Finally, the only other case I can think of is unmatched trades, or orders too far behind the queue to be traded... they are completely irrelevant. No trade, no money, nothing, irrelevant. Every order placed can only improve every other (smart) traders' opportunities. There's no such thing as a bad order... at least to a smart trader... The sheep will bleat furiously though either way... they are sheep - and exist to be fleeced, they love it, it gives them shit to bleat about. Politicians love them, because they can make up stupid ideas that fuck them over even more and the sheep eat that shit up because they are stupid, and will bleat even harder when the results fleece the sheep even more and they will vote for even more stupid rules to fleece them again... Love the sheep. When the crisis hit, I was talking to my trading mentor, and I asked, 'hasn't this destroyed your portfolio?'... he was like, yeah, it's taken maybe 2/3s of the value off... 'but look at the opportunities!!'... So we jumped on his boat and sailed off to a restaurant down the coast for lunch.... three months later he said he'd earned all the losses back and was ahead already, despite the market still being depressed. Of course, he trades, he doesn't buy and hold... and he can barely even use windows let alone build an HFT... The principles are the same though, just slower but much smarter. Oh, don't worry... I use source control... just not in this one instance when I'd been hacking on directly on the production code without tracking changes, and I needed 99% of the changes to be kept (there had been api changes that HAD to be there, but logic changes got mixed in) but couldn't work out what the fuck was losing me money... Took me three days to find and some valuable lessons learnt. You're right... it was an ambitious goal to build an exchange that would work first time in the first week of a new course with thousands of students. A software engineer could have told them that. However, they did eventually get it running and ran the lab anyway. I think you would have found the results interesting if you had the intelligence to understand what was going on. In basic, on a commodore 64, with a single stock, a single threaded random number generator as input and no actual offer queue and no UI. Please tell me more how you could build a replacement for the NYSE while drunk in 60 seconds with a gun pointed at your head and a hot blonde blowing you under the table. Just so people who don't understand know what they're looking at... That isn't HFT trading. What you are looking at is inter-exchange price quote checking. This isn't a natural requirement of the markets in any way, and is actually a regulatory requirement that the various exchanges share prices with each other so that orders on one exchange can be guaranteed of getting the best price across all exchanges. This actually destroys trading opportunities called arbitrage that could just as easily be handled by private entities working across exchanges rather than effectively amalgamating all the exchanges into one giant virtual exchange. The exchanges end up with the profit from the price differences rather than individuals. This is what happens when politicians dictate technical requirement details in fields they are unfamiliar with. Then everyone looks at the pretty video with dots flying across the screen and scream 'damn those HFT traders look at the fuck they are doing'. Ignorance knows no bounds. All you tards commenting on HFT prove the Dunning-Kruger effect beautifully. Front running would be me placing an order, you intercepting it, placing the same order ahead of me, and taking profit from my knowledge. If investing based on all that crap you talk about (market cap, company health, dividends expected profits etc) were done BETTER than the HFT those people would make more money than the HFT traders. Momentum trading, HFT and other strategies provide value and make money from providing that value. I doubt anyone here who complains about it has ever even spent a week day trading on exchanges to have an actual CLUE how the fuck they work. Let me explain this one very simple principle to you -- (without the type of fraud I mentioned above) it is IMPOSSIBLE to place orders on an open market exchange in a way that disadvantages the clueful trader. EVERY SINGLE ORDER increases liquidity and IMPROVES opportunities for those who can price CORRECTLY. Stop being tards and UNDERSTAND how the fuck an exchange works before knocking other people's strategies. Yes you can opt out... don't trade. Almost all traders want liquidity. Otherwise go stand by yourself on a desert island and try and buy and sell coconuts with the crabs and see how useful that is with no one else to trade with. An busy market, a liquid market, is an efficient market. Understand the game theory behind an exchange, and you will understand that no order can possibly deprive anyone of anything. No, they are not parasites They are extracting money from traders by proving LIQUIDITY... which means it is EASIER to buy and sell stock than it was before they existed. 10 years ago the bid-ask spread could be ten percent... which means that on top of fees you paid on average ten percent if you wanted to buy or sell a stock now at market prices. With HFT the spread is down well below a single percent. You can get into and out of positions very cheaply today in comparison to what you could get before. The are NOT reading your orders and jumping in front of the queue before your order hits the queue... They are reading the queue AFTER your order is on the queue, and placing competitive orders relative to it. That can ONLY make the prices BETTER for EVERYONE else in the market. The first is illegal fraud, the second is how the markets are supposed to operate and makes them more efficient. So, if you think they are parasites getting money for nothing, it is more due to your lack of understanding of exchange operation than their immoral behaviour. Irrespective of what you think or were told about what the market does, they are being paid for providing actual value to traders and the businesses that rely upon them. The actual problem people have is the usual jealousy because people are doing something they aren't either willing or able to do themselves. Again... LIQUIDITY IS VALUE If you don't trade, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU to say this type of trading is legit, this type of trading is immoral. FUCK YOU... YOU'RE NOT A TRADER, FUCK OFF. people that figure out how to beat it get taken to jail This is the one point I totally agree with you on. People who beat the HFT fucks with BETTER algorithms have been imprisonned. And as I explained before EVERY ORDER IMPROVES THE MARKET EFFICIENCY. Those people deserved every penny they made and should have been lauded for it not destroyed. But otherwise, you clearly have no clue how an exchange operates, yet feel you have the right to tell others how to trade on them. Algorithmic trading improves price finding. End of... that has value, whether you understand it or not. Value gets paid, ignorant fuckheads complain. Old story. I don't think your job has value either, but I'm not about to tell you how to do it. On the whole, no industry admits its a waste of time, money and resources. Look at the billions involved in making better graphics so highschool dropouts can play more realistic games while stoned off their heads. Yeah, real productive value in GTA and Skyrim. So many homeless people now won't starve. fantastic. The problem is though, that the financial markets really do increase real economic activity. There are problems, of course, absolutely, but HFTs and algo traders in general are scapegoats. You should be looking at the political lobbying, protectionism, cronyism and a whole heap of other bullshit... but really try and understand the fundamentals of exchanges and as I keep repeating... no order can ever make a market worse off... at least that is the conclusion of my analysis of it from a game theoretic approach. Fundamentally you cannot force someone to accept an order at any price. The person on the other side of the trade must see value in it, or they wouldn't take the order. Idiots, on the other hand, are idiots. It is NOT simply GAMBLING... For one, it's not a zero sum game... There are benefits to be had to part ownership in a company, which is what it ACTUALLY is... as opposed to the 'so far divorced from investment or any rational expectation blah blah blah' bullshit your espousing. This is typical sort of logic of people who aren't involved to deride the things they don't understand. Maybe you're against poker too... which clearly is gambling... People don't have the right to gamble? Well then, fuck your analysis completely then. Its done at NOBODIES expense except those involved. And finally... "mostly done with other people's money" -- why yes... idiots who lobbied the government to force everyone to put their funds into it... maybe you should be looking there instead of at the people who make the system work better. Idiots like you don't know shit. We were all quite happy with how things used to work, thanks. You didn't trade then and you don't trade now... WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW? NOTHING! And you can get those benefits in a microsecond can you? YES!! OBVIOUSLY! Except to you idiots. Bullshit, you want to get rid of HFTs and algo trading without understanding the benefits they actually provide. The MAIN benefit they provide is decreased spread and increased liquidity which enables others to buy into and out of companies much quicker, cheaper and easier. The fact you don't understand this demonstrates your ignorance. YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT How the fuck could you? Have you EVER day traded? Have you EVER tried to make a profit trading on an exchange? No!! You don't have the first fucking clue. Take it from someone who does... it's HARD FUCKING WORK... It is harder than any software engineering office position I have ever held. It is stressful, it doesn't pay as much... many days of hard work can be nothing but negative income. So, please don't try and tell me you understand shit about something you have never even attempted yourself. YOU AREN'T A WORTHWHILE FUNCTION IN SOCIETY. YOU SIT THERE WITH YOUR PRETTY JOB EXTRACTING MONEY FROM YOUR EMPLOYER AND THE MARKET IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION WHINING ABOUT EVERYBODY ELSE'S HARD EARNED EFFORTS. You don't have a fucking clue what you are on about. EMPHASIS DICKHEAD... AND YES YOU CERTAINLY DO http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/5/7/191635/9992/9#9 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/5/4/17023/16867/9#9 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/5/5/181456/2048/6#6 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/5/5/133839/0670/1#1 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/5/3/16596/79027/3#3 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/4/30/21121/0113/14#14 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/4/30/15531/6223/1#1 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/4/29/222941/027/2#2 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/4/29/21280/0792/2#2 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/4/29/3338/04062/2#2 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/4/26/13018/0998/2#2 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/4/25/82958/8783/4#4 Proof you are an idiot I'm far from convinced that there weren't volumes there to support trades before HFT This is a positive statement of provable historical FACT. HFTs have considerably decreased margins and increased liquidity. As usual, you're just another K5 retard complaining about things that don't affect you and arguing from ignorance on topics you have no clue about. Well sucks to be you then... Chose a better fund manager or suffer the consequences. Its idiots like you telling everybody else what to do with their money that leads to you having mandatory involvement in the first place. GS will end up with your pension HFTs or not... and probably even quicker without them. What I mean is that the same idiots saying HFTs are bad, are the type of people who say everyone needs a pension fund and it has to be held in stock traded on the market, rather than say, letting people put their money in a savings account and having the government ensure old people survive on a livable pension retirement funds or not. Its people who complain that make politicians come up with solutions that make everything worse off for everyone. Complaining about HFTs when you have zero fucking clue about exchanges that will lead to stupid ideas like forcing people to hold their stock for a year (even a month) or adding transaction costs that only cause the market to be even less efficient and ultimately even more money being syphoned off. The same thing happened during the crisis... everyone cried -- oh my god the shorters are making money off people losing money... so they halted short selling, which did nothing but make things worse... The market is MEANT to respond quickly... shorters ALSO make the market more efficient and this is A GOOD THING (TM). And yes, complaining about HFTs IS telling people what to do with their money... It's telling them how they should trade. THOU SHALT FULLY UNDERSTAND THE UNDERLYING ASSETS AND SPEND MAN YEARS OF TIME STUDYING EVERY TRADE... when actually, the technicals are just fine for algos to make some profit, and the knowledgable can benefit when the algos take the price too far one way or the other. Right... if the government is forcing people to have their pensions managed and invested in the stock market... THERE IS YOUR PROBLEM. I don't care who lobbied who or how it came it about... people voted the politicians in who voted to put your money into a system you don't understand. Don't attack the traders, attack THAT... because THAT is where the problem actually is. Traders MAKE money by PRICING CORRECTLY... algos do it one way, and HFTs do it even better. It just turns out that pricing correctly helps everyone involved and therefore those that make money do it by providing value. That's so fucking stupid only you could have found it. You can't just take long term trends and say the correct price is wrong because it is different. The market itself has to take into account all knowledge of both present and future value into the price. If the price really is higher due to speculative distortion then there is lots of money to be made in shorting it and waiting for the inevitable correction. Funny how when things are expensive everyone blames the speculators, when things suddenly crash everyone blames the speculators and when things go well its all prudent far sighted investment and fuck the speculators. Price discover is really important to the efficient operation of the economy. Not that you would have a snowflake's chance in hell of understanding that one. Some would be idiots then... lower transaction costs enable easier and more profitable investment. HFTs have lowered transaction costs. Therefore, so what??? you're an idiot. Some would be idiots then... Yes, of course fast and cheap investment and divestment is a GOOD FUCKING THING. Maybe you shouldn't be able to buy food so quickly from shops... maybe you should be forced to grow it yourself... no one needs food in under 5 minutes, they can wait a year and put some effort in. No.. that makes everyone worse off. The not optional point you keep making... nothing to do with the system itself. It is a valid point, but maybe you should be asking why your pension fund has to be managed by these fucks instead? No... because they provide LIQUIDITY and trade by trade they own more and more of the companies and have more and more say in the economy. It benefits them, it benefits other traders, it benefits companies and ultimately benefits society. Your dumping on the wrong scapegoat. Listen up you JEW LOVING NAVY FAGGOT KILLING CUNT Are people going on in complete ignorance about how you earn your income is wrong and immoral and destroying their lives without a fucking clue what it is you actually do, how you actually do it, and what it actually results in? Each one of these retards is all like 'algo trading is teh ebils and making my penis funs disapeer' and don't even have a fucking clue which side of the queue a bid goes on or even what the fuck an ask is, let alone the game theoretic operation of exchange market theory. But these genius motherfucker experts want to regulate my income away, not even realising that everything I do improves price discovery and liquidity and actually benefits other traders and eventually makes their lives ever so slightly better in ways they will never ever appreciate. So then shut the fuck up and go back to sucking george w bushes dick and protecting the oil fields from ragheads for the great white oil swilling american race while complaining about how it's the traders that ruining your life you stupid cunt. Son, we live in a world that has wall street, and those price walls have to be traded by men with algos. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Tdillo? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for the Lehmen Brothers, and you curse the HFTs. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That the Lehmen Brother's death, while tragic, probably saved houses. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want my bot on that price wall, you need me on that price wall. We use words like action, code, liability. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a trading account, and hold a position. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to. You think I don't know what I'm talking about? YOU'RE GOD DAMN RIGHT MY CODE SHORT ORDERED THE RED CROSS ORPHAN'S FUND!! Oh come on... That was a bit harsh, maybe, and a bit over the top... but not to be taken too seriously... mostly for comic effect... That few good men shit was funny as fuck though... s/defending something/defending portfolios s/blanket/growth s/freedom/profit I bet you're taking it personally again. you took it out on my story nice They get paid for providing value to the markets You extract cash from your employer right? Therefore you shouldn't have a job. That's the type of logic you are using. Correct, this was fraud, not exchange trading... I've discussed this with you before but it went over your head. It is clearly understood by economists as a type of deliberate distortion of information or negative externality, both which break the free market assumptions. As it wasn't punished (ie, making this behaviour unprofitable through fines and jail time), you can expect more of it to occur in the future. Economists don't condone this type of behaviour at all, but you don't have the faculties to understand that, so you'll continue to blame the economists and not the fraudsters for your problems. WHAT ??? $$$$$$$$$$$ Except what you are buying and selling is ownership of the company itself. This has secondary effects. It's not the zero sum game you suggest. PUSSY $ Operant Conditioning A lifetime of being black and hassled by police will do that to you. If you don't look down when da police come around, they gonna beat you black ass to da ground. You ARE the ignorant MotherFucker: Too stupid to realise you are literally living off everyone else's hard work. If no one else existed, and you had all the money in the world, you would soon starve to death from laziness. Wow... conservative? Really? What the hell's wrong with you? You think economic rationalism == conservatism. Turns out you're a bigger idiot than I thought. So your saying anyone who understands economics is a conservative, and anyone who thinks fairies and gnomes do all the work is a liberal? You are a fucking idiot, no doubt about it. The laws of economics cannot be altered one whit by your political views. Economics exists outside of politics. Whether you follow Karl Marx or Ronald Reagan, the laws of economics remain identical. So, on the economic spectrum from liberal to conservative, wtf makes you think I'm a conservative? It is simply that you are a fucking idiot, that doesn't know the first thing about economics - so anyone who does must be a capitalist trickle down, let the poor starve supporter... You don't have a fucking clue, and it's people like you and trane that destroy any hope of having a sustainable rational social system... You just want to be a lazy self entitled little welfare queen faggot. A wise man once said memes > genes Of course money is not probabilities retard WHAT DO YOU THINK IT IS SUMMED OVER? WHAT ARE THE LIMITS IGNORING MONEY? CAN WE HAVE MORE PEOPLE WORKING ON CHALLENGES AND MORE PEOPLE WORKING IN RESTAURANTS AT THE SAME TIME? AND MORE DOCTORS, NURSES, TEACHERS ETC? OR MAYBE THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY PEOPLE WITH SO MUCH TIME TO DO STUFF? What you don't recognise yet, is that money is a distributed SIGNALLING system to communicate individual's (and groups of) ability to supply goods and services, and individuals desire to procure goods and services. It makes no difference if we all split one dollar amongst the entire population or the average person spent billions on a loaf of bread... it's the relative values that matter. The problems with inflation have nothing to do with spending millions on bread... but with the value changing rapidly it becomes hard to value anything... the solution is to fuck that money off and move to another currency... say some sort of index - which you'll notice cannot be simply printed - so your idea is self destroying. You don't appear to have a valid point to make... How does that contradict anything I said? Asians will eat anything: raw fish is a favourite of theirs, right? U certainly are... You been upvoting yourself again? Don't you realise yet that that just causes everyone else to double down on you? nice work OFFTOPIC: mumble help I've lost my procrasti@k5-stats.org password... Could you possibly reset it to the old encoded secret for me? Sorry... I did something stupid and lost it. Thanks. Thanks heaps... I'm back in... yeah, data organisation is difficult for everyone I think... No spam yet... I don't think anyone reads k5, so should be good :) 'which economics misses' What retarded crack addled little fuck up of a brain cell inside your head comes up with this nonsense? "There are stars see, which astronomy completely misses" would make about as much sense as the bullshit you spout. Self Censor with a Winchester, Fuckhead. On the topic of wealthy excesses Have you bought any bitcoins yet? Yep... I spent quite some time getting a 'good' price with bitinnovate... That 4 hour thing (assuming you can get to a bank in that time) can work in your favour if you spend time trying to get the best price. Also, don't worry about the spreads or commission or any of that crap when trying to get BTC either from bitinnovate or localbitcoin or anywhere... Just get the best possible price you can. Well... my my first coin cost me nearly $200, and then I was able to get in at about $90 or so on bitinnovate... All in all, I'm a few dollars down at the current price... but price is stabilising now and the DDOS attacks seem to be losing their effect as all the panickers have been bought out by them and only strong traders remain... I need the price to go up a bit above my buy in price because of the commission and stuff involved in converting back to dollars... But overall, I'm feeling pretty optimistic at this point. Just to ask the obvious... How much USD would you have made mining BTC in the same time vs LTC mining? I mean, it doesn't matter if you don't make a whole coin, right? Only the total USD value of the coins mined either with BTC or LTC.... Is LTC really that much more profitable to mine? Can you give me some figures, say in $/day or something for GPU mining BTC and LTC? "Some odd reason" Is that they are trying to drive the price of BTC down by panicking investors and newbies by DDOSing and lagging the exchanges and making the whole BTC ecosystem look shaky. They drove the price down to just over $50 last week, and then they cash in on the rise. The good news is that it's both hardening the infrastructure and the speculators and investors... so it's becoming increasingly unsuccessful for the DDOSers purposes. The TRUE story of Nash is that he did of course work for a top secret compartment of the NSA codebreaking against russians trying to steal nuclear weapons information. But they couldn't let that type of information get out, so when he started 'leaking' they did what they always do, deny everything and set the guy up as a fall guy, dosed him up and called him psychotic. One of the oldest tricks in the book. So simple, in fact, that they made a movie out of it, and you all still believe he was just another brilliant loony. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!! I think it's possible... I remember you talking about this and your coworkers and the eye drop thing... I doubt eye whitener will do this to a person... but I have no doubt there are chemicals that will give you LSD like effects that might last months or years and fuck you up mentally. I'm pretty sure the secret squirrel guys have no qualms in doing this to people if it suits their agenda. The very hard thing to do is to prove it. And the secret squirrel guys love plausible deniability. So, what can you do? Keep your head down, your eyes open and your mouth shut... I suppose. Fix your sig formatting tdillo, you have too Back when I was in college, I had a german friend, studying some art degree or something, very vain but ultimately nice guy, was going out with my gf (at the time)'s best friend, so we all used to smoke up literally ounces together, was great times... Anyway, his name is Sylvain... so all of us stoned off our heads when this song comes on, perfectly describing him in some ways - and he'd never heard it before, so we all start singing "You're sylvain..." And he's all spinning out like, "vat is dis? dis zong is all about meee? wtf?!?!" Good times. Much better on my OCD, thank you $ Which idiot +3'd you... oh, the retarded idiot $ Basic Crackfare $ Basic crackhead fallacy $ Basic crackhead's cracked head $ Just my 2 cents http://blockchain.info/tx/f7a369dd2aded3550a018bed9a5b61d85850c09da9b532c2a14115 6f22e4e2b7 But I had to split it with the network... That's wiered hey Quite a few blocks have been generated since I sent that transaction. Just done... but that was quite a while. No worries... Be interesting if you can spend it or transfer it at all. Even the cost of micro-gigs will go up... Due to the artificial scarcity of labour. You are an artificially lazy cunt. Oh yeah, of course it won't affect substitutes but local wages will have to increase regardless. A basic income will mean the alternative to working is better than it was, which means people will charge more if you want them to work. Globalisation does put downward pressure on wages though, true. Yeah, I kind of agree Drop min wage, make work on an as it comes basis, whatever, sounds good to me... I don't think we can afford basic income for everyone though. Trane is wrong from almost all economic viewpoints that you can just print cash as you like with no issues... rather I think a balanced approach, in general, is better... ie, tax revenue == gov spending... So, what can be done instead? If you think of it like this, say $20k/yr/person adds up to a lot... what if you only covered the bottom 10%? Well, you could afford to give them 200k/yr... Well, you get the idea, you can go a lot further supporting the most needy rather than everyone... So a negative tax system might be a better idea... I do believe in strong safety nets mixed with capitalism is probably the best approach after all. Yeah, well I already looked into that... it's expensive. Whatever you set it to, turns out to be a big chunk of tax revenues... check it out... 300M (US) people * Basic Income. Compare to current budget. And you're right... that seems to be the problem with current welfare systems, that you end up making pittance per hour on the margin because of the loss of welfare benefits... It's a big disincentive to work, so ppl stay in the system. So, negative tax rates on low incomes are another suggestion to get around these problems. It's going great... I put in 200 to buy 1 btc 2 days ago... The price is now $141 according to electrum... I'm hoping the price drops a bit more... but I'm keen to get in for another 200 or so... Just trying to see if I can find a better commission trader, or buy some with a uk bank account. Volatility rocks for a trader... Makes buying low and selling high much easier. I still think the total upside is looking very good in the longer term. This is just a reflection of the poor state of bitcoin exchange technology, not the bitcoin tech itself. MtGox sux, exchange tech is v.good for those with the money to implement it properly. Yup, and bitinnovate is down too bitinnovate. I have no idea what's wrong with these people... it's just a broken exchange. Of course, now is the time to buy... as soon as it is possible to do so. Problem with exchanges is that they tend to be natural monopolies because they benefit from the network effect. So, even though bitcoin is desperately in need of a technologically capable exchange, it is unlikely that a competitor to mtgox will emerge. In the meantime, I'm advertising on localbitcoins, but I haven't had any replies from supposed sellers yet? As soon as bitinnovate comes back online, and I can get to the bank in time, I'm putting in another order. It's exactly where I was hoping it would crash to for another buy in. Always buy into a crash, and sell on a rise... Now is the perfect time to buy more. An exchange not operating isn't a failure of bitcoin itself... Also, the exchange is only going to get faster and better over time (or replaced by one that is), so this can only be a temporary drop, not the end of bitcoin. I've been waiting for something like this for a while... just got impatient and bought near the top. I think the last high price will be easily exceeded in time. Well... for me, I'm buying more, yes... I don't see the problems you are talking about. Bad economic model? How so? I think the built in scarcity is it's main advantage. Huge waste of computer resources? It takes nothing more than simple hash calculations. The amount of resources dedicated to it are purely a function of supply and demand - if there's profit in mining, there will be more miners, if there's not, there will be less. I can't see how you can get around that aspect of it. Nutbags hoping to get rich... Well... it has made a few millionaires already, so they aren't nutbags. On the other hand, they got rich off their own economic activity... taking the risks of mining or buying coins when the currency was completely unrecognised... sounds like economic activity to me. I doubt you'll ever create a crypto currency without the mining involved the way bitcoin works, so I don't see the sense in the pro-crypto-currency anti-bitcoin argument. Well... I think we'll agree to disagree then... Bitcoin actually is inflatable through a banking system the same way gold was and currency is... Ie, it is possible to have accounts held by banks valued in bitcoins that sum to much more than the number of actual bitcoins that exist. Although I think this is a while off yet, and in the meantime, yes, it will behave like a very limited but useful commodity, so speculation and hoarding will be the result in the mid to long term. There was always a risk in running the software, dedicating hardware and electricity to mining something that might have had zero value. It's always the way with new technology, people take risks, if it becomes big, those people get rich because they actually provided something of value to society, even if naysayers then want to dis them for effort they themselves weren't willing to put in. As for hardware, the new ASICs will make all other mining obsolete. They take up much less power on average, especially when compared to their hasing power. In fact, ASICs might make the network consume far less power overall. Hoarding is a problem at this stage, but as I said above, this will eventually be resolved. Right now it's a good thing because it increases value. All those people moving money out of europe and locking up bitcoin are very happy they can calculate just how much of the world's bitcoin they can lock up. At the same time, this doesn't harm it as a medium for trade. If all you're interested in is buying stuff, if you can convert dollars to bitcoin easily, and the merchants can do the opposite, the actual price of bitcoin is totally irrelevant. I think the non-central authority model is the core strength of bitcoin. There's no way you can have an internationally traded crypto-currency that relies on a central entity that any government could control. That's right... They are moving their wealth into bitcoin, and locking it up for the long term. As I said, being able to calculate their share of the world's bitcoin supply is very useful for this. I don't think bitcoin has lost any value, this is temporary dip... mark my words. It is a deflationary currency after all. I don't know... seems to be hovering aroun $112AUD for me right now... and has held that for the last few hours. I'm sure it's going to be volatile for a while yet... which is why I want to start trading it. $10 to $1000 swings would be very nice indeed. If I can buy in tomorrow sub 150, I will... If it falls to 10, I will buy in a lot more, I think... Although you are probably right, we also probably haven't seen the top yet either. Right, and where is it now? Back at 120 or so... I've got an order in at 97.28 (bit over 100 with commission) that I have a few hours to get to the bank in to fulfil. I'm gonna try and get it cheaper, but I think it'll recover fast. LOL yeah... I spent all day looking for better and better offers on bitinnovate... when it was available... The four hour time to deposit really gives some nice leeway there for getting a good deal. Finally got in at about $88AUD (inc comm.) for a little over two coins. See how it goes from here. About 11M already exist $ I just bought 2 more coins at about $88 each inc comm. Let's see how much further it drops now lol. +3 Sent me 0,01BTC which rocketed through the roof to over $2 WHOOHOO! The Great Satoshi Give Away Hello Subscribers: Today I am announcing the great Shatoshi Give Away! Simply put a bitcoin address in one of the comments below to Win* a bitcoin Shitoshi. * : No purchase necessary, see site terms of service for details. Posting does not guarantee payment of shatoshis. So, it has recently occurred to me that bitcoin is bubbling like mad... I'm definitely going to start putting some money into bitcoins... Owning a whole bitcoin has long been a dream of mine... by my calculations holding a single bitcoin puts you in the top 1% by a long way... It will never be possible for more than 21M people to own a whole bitcoin... and when this becomes the new global currency, it's going to end up being worth quite a bit. Now, for a long time I've been wondering how to send nano-transactions... Because of transaction minimums basically are around 0.01BTC... which is now over a dollar! But the bitcoin can be broken down to 0.00000001 of a bitcoin into very small pieces called a shitoshi... and it turns out there are enough of these for everybody, FOREVER!! So far I have amassed vast sums of satoshi, even enough to cover the minimum transaction requirements of the selfish transaction guarding so called 'mining' network... at least in theory. So, I just need the right software or command or something. Now, if you don't have a bitcoin address, the best way to get one quickly, that I found, is by using electrum. Electrum is a thin client so you don't have to download the entire blockchain yourself, and can start using bitcoin almost immediately. You can check that I have shitoshi here: 1CFXkxCBnc2Gv6h9o4ZdN33vFohoXPZ2Dj You can check that I own that address because I have signed a message, which you can verify by running the following in the electrum console: id="1CFXkxCBnc2Gv6h9o4ZdN33vFohoXPZ2Dj";msg="Proof I have Shitoshi.";sig="HKaxhYqqLEdARWdXtA/FGtUcEeCXgByb2XSXmPpQoozG7YDvl3re4sts9swT/4rj mS6BjpnMwkwlk0myYBnN5WM=";print verifymessage(id, sig, msg); So, once and for all, ending the artificial scarcity of shitoshi, I'm going to make an honest effort to secure your future in the bitcoin economy by sending you a shitoshi... If I work out how. Post your Bitcoin address and suggestions below to win untold amounts! It is worth exactly what you can exchange for it.. It's not intrinsically worth the cpu cycles it is proven with. There are a limited number of them, 10M today, 21M max... Some people think they're even better investments than greek bonds. So, fire up electrum, you'll have some keys to receive funds with... post it, and I'll get you satoshi... and you'll have bitcoin. You can't transfer ownership of tulip bulbs around the world in seconds... cryptographically secured in minutes. That is one aspect of their actual value. I'm not saying they aren't bubbling a bit... on the other hand, if they actually do get wide spread acceptance, and I think they might, they may become very valuable indeed. Only some fractional type lending on them could possibly bring their value down in that scenario. I don't think so... There's nothing inherently illegal about bitcoin. Using it for illegal purposes is and will remain illegal, including money laundering and tax evasion. But I really think it's gaining legitimacy... The euro crisis has caused a lot of wealthy people moving their wealth into bitcoins, even though they are being hoarded, and not traded. You can buy and sell it at banks now... So, as wealth moves into it, it's going to become stronger politically as well. So, no, I doubt the tech itself will be made illegal. I'm going to the bank hopefully in a an hour or so and gonna go try and acquire a bitcoin or so. I don't know, is possible it is bubbling like mad right now, and each bitcoin is worth a cent or so... who knows... It has no (or v.little) intrinsic value. So, it could just be throwing money away... OTOH, a LOT of people are moving value into bitcoin, because they know, at least the gov can't just say 'nope don't exist' the way they did with 'guarantees' on savings accounts, like say, in a cyprus banks. There are real big players moving real big value into it. A couple of weeks ago, they said the entire currency was valued at about $1B, presumable that's $1.7B+ now. So bitcoin just isn't big and scaled enough yet (I think there are technical scaling issues with the current IMPLEMENTATION, but that the design itself is fine)... So, it hasn't been possible for people to invest all at once, because there wasn't the supply. However, as it goes up, it gets easier and easier to move value in... So, it's accelerating. The problem comes if people decide to move the other way... which they will when they all suddenly realise wtf they've been doing moving huge amounts of money into something just because it was increasing in value, a classic bubble and pop... but I don't see that happening just yet. Could hit 1 or even 2k in a few months I think. Dammit, I missed the bank... Fuck... another DAY goes by... Huge PROFITS on BitCoin BUY BUY BUY!!! And me, sitting here... no bitcoin. Dammit. Well, the boom is over, the bubble about to pop I know this, because I just bought 1BTC through bitinstant... I spent $199 and had to visit a local bank branch and pay in cash. Electrum says I have $185.93AUD, but that doesn't take into account commission fees... so is less than that. Be interesting see if it climbs now, or if I just bought at the top of the bubble. Yep, can cash out now for +$16 WHOOHOOO!! What's that, 4% per day profit... I wish the price would crash, so I could justify buying in a lot more... Like I said, without a bank system the number of them are quite limited... and if they are going to be used as actual currency in the future, as well as their other uses... I dunno... could go really high long term. The system is worth about $2.5B... You can make a payment request in the form of a QR code, take it with you phone, and the app will pay it... So, the tech is right here, right now to replace POS systems everywhere in a really secure way. I don't know why you can't go to the local garage and buy bitcoin over the counter, the way you do with pay as you go phone vouchers... and of course buy real products with it. Now, if it gets to the retail sector... shit... just how big do you want it to go? $1T easy? over 20M coins = $50,000 each? So yeah, part of the rise is due to the european thing... Its had a lot of testing, appears very secure, is a store of value, etc... I wrote this yesterday, just checked, down to $163 today... might wait a little longer and buy in more. I'm pretty sure you can make what you want and pass it around and trade it as value all you like. What you can't do is create any confusion that it is either legal tender or government issued or anything like that. Private Notes are entirely legal. Anything traded in an alternative 'currency' would be considered barter, and taxes must be paid on it in US dollars at the equivalent value of the trade. Yeah, fractional lending will decrease its value.. because it will increase the supply. You don't actually have to hold bitcoins until you want to buy something with them... Until then, you could let a third party hold your bitcoins, maybe a bitcoin 'bank'... When you want to buy something, you take the bitcoins back from the bank, and then buy what you want. Maybe the merchant puts their new bitcoin bank in the bank. All those bitcoins at the bank, that aren't currently being traded... well... now they're just sitting there doing nothing... So, maybe the bank could lend them out to other people... When they do that, suddenly, more people have access to bitcoins (or at least accounts valued in bitcoins) than would be possible if everyone just hoarded their bitcoins. So, such a system would decrease the value of bitcoins, increase the availability of bitcoins, and probably increase the total trade in bitcoins and the bitcoin economy. It's the next evolution in bitcoin, if its going to be a long term success. Dammit, BTC just keeps going UP! Yesterday, when I started writing this, in AUD 1BTC was about $130, Now $155 to buy... fucking crazy... I shouldn't have posted this diary until I'd bought in... obviously I'm pumping up Bitcoin like mad now that people can get free shitoshis. Hope I can still afford to buy one tomorrow... Just before the price crashes probably, on the bright side, I could buy a lot more if it does. Oh well, all you fuckers who haven't written in with a Bitcoin address don't blame me when you die poor alone in a drafty cobwebbed room... You had your chance to get in on the ground floor. My GOD, $173 Just NOW By my calculations, bitcoins will be worth 15T (an entire US GDP per coin) by October! Exactly... Unless I find your wallet, and it's unencrypted, or a private key on you, or link you some other way to a bitcoin address... I can't prove you own anything. However, it is possible for you to prove that you DO have bitcoin, as I showed above. It is also possible to transfer value from your bitcoin address to someone else... publicly provable that the value was transferred from one address to another. Bitcoin addresses are just the public key part of public key cryptography. Anyone can see your public key, but only with the private key can you sign transactions and transfer value. The private key isn't (in theory, so far) calculable from the public key. They really can't.. let me try and explain... Firstly, all the transactions can be traced back to the transactions that created the coins... the so called, generational reward... The reward given by the network for creating a block. Now... transactions are all written in a block... together, they form a hash (the root node of the merkle tree of the hashes of the transactions to be exact)... Right, so now what... Assuming each transaction is valid (which can be checked), you get a hash from the transactions, plus you have the hash of the previous block... Now, the trick is to find a number (nonce) such that, hashing all those gives you a new hash that is below a certain level... This is really hard to find, in fact, can only be brute forced by trying out lots of nonces until you get a hash that is below the required number. That number is set by the 'difficulty' which itself is updated aprox every two weeks, so that a new block would have been generated every ten minutes over the last two weeks at the new difficulty level. Then, the only other rule is that when there are multiple blocks that could both be valid are encountered, you always keep the longest chain, and throw away all others. HUGE resources are dedicated to finding these hashes. It is nearly impossible for almost anyone to be able to generate a block chain that would be valid and accepted over the current block chain simply because it would be impossible to catch up with the current block chain, because it would take so long to find valid blocks. I don't know if this is a great explanation. It's really quite well thought out though. If she was innocent she shouldn't have plead to it Also, it now seems she made the plea in a bad faith, and was actually lying about falsely reporting, probably to get free mental health care, the selfish bitch. She should be forced to do some community service, like say, giving free conjugal visits to convicted rapists or provide free services at the policeman's ball, something fitting like that. Teach these filthy rape 'victims' that lying won't be tolerated any more. It's that positive can do attitude that got you where you are today. LOL How? U'll never have any to lose $ I don't completely disagree with ur analysis but, do you have an alternative? Grades ultimately are the only way to judge progress from an outside perspective, as you said... For children this is useful for parents and teachers as to how best allocate resources for the child to maximise their learning... right? For adults, tertiary education and beyond, its useful for industry and academic recognition. So, there is a certain aspect of sorting and vocational training, rather than a purely liberal education... although that is available too. So, do you have an alternative that could work better? Montessori and other fringe schooling systems operate too... I don't know if/how they grade, but they have different philosophies to learning (not sure they work out all that well either). So, the system is fucked, but no systems are perfect... would simply removing grades make everything better? I doubt it. But why are all the montessori schooled children have such a difficult time in real life? A little bit of competition is good. Being the best gets you places, even if it's the system that puts you there. I mean, there are natural differences right? Some kids are great at some subjects, stupid at others, other kids are the opposite, some are good or great at everything and others not so. They should at least be put in classes that will maximise their learning at any given point. Like, knowledge is a giant circle right, but also like a pyramid... At the outer edge of the circle you have the limits of knowledge, closer to the centre more basic universal knowledge... an individual's knowledge is like a pyramid, broad at the base, built upon up to certain specialities. When you are at the very edge of the circle (PhD) you provably pushing the boundary of knowledge for everyone... so, the knowledge to get there rests on a huge foundation of knowledge... a person at the edge of the circle is also the pinnacle of their knowledge pyramid. Do you get where I'm going? You need to have proficiency in all the prerequisite knowledge before you can expect to learn another piece, and everyone progresses at different rates in different subjects. So grades are basis for judging which students would get best results in which classes, that will maximise the benefit for them. I understand tying funding to results, expecting all students to be equal everywhere, and teaching for grades are all problems... but maybe because the grades are being used for the wrong purpose. Tests and exams also provide valuable feedback to teachers... why are all the students getting a certain question or class of questions wrong? How can I teach that a bit better or review it for everyone. Also, education is a public good... It is non-rival, and there are non-excludable positive externalities (the whole society benefits from an individual's education)... this is known not to be well supplied (undersupplied compared to its benefits) by the market... which is why industry tends not to invest in it... (it really does need to be subsidised by the government)... unless you want go back to the master/apprentice system. No, knowledge isn't bland, the way you describe just because I was using an analogy. Right... well, I went through a different education system to yours, so I can't say exactly how your grades were used, but we were put through different levels of different subjects according to our skills judged on the basis of grades. I thought it went okay... Yeah, there is all that conformity crap too. As for industry investing, that is something economists can see simply will not happen through market forces... In a way they do tho (well everyone does) because the taxes used to subsidise the schools come from it. In subsidising, well... they don't just subsidise, they directly regulate... I'm for government provided schools, but maybe private schools should be subsidised too. Now, there's a problem of who sets the curriculum, what is a considered a valid curriculum... They are pretty political decisions. And politics is run by the majority, and the majority are often idiots... In theory, shouldn't heads of universities be delegating this shit downwards so at least they are being taught the generally accepted peer reviewed knowledge? So, what can you do when the 'majority' (depending on health of the political system itself) gets to set the curriculum and decides evolution don't real? Okay, split education up into streams... Then those that go well go up a stream and those that don't go well go down a stream, for each subject... If you're getting A's and everyone else is getting C's it means the class is too slow/easy for you compared to everyone else. If you're getting F's, but you're in a class with einsteins, then the class is probably too hard for you compared to everyone else. So, as long as you bump people are (or down in some sense) would work ok. Remember, school should be designed for the majority in mind, and give extra help or advancement for those on the edges. It doesn't matter that averages change over time. Depends where you went to school... Cause that is how our school system kind of works... And I think grades are necessary for it to function. Then again, I wasn't taught that the flintstones lived and worked alongside dinosaurs until the great flood in which the unicorns died. Not a single one can get a decent factory job... Okay, I didn't know that... I don't know if they are representative though... Just all the people I've ever known from those schools I guess. I'd be interested to see their tertiary graduation rates compared to other schools though. I think I found the page you got that from... Oh well... I'm not here to bash on montessori schooling... Like I said, private alternative systems should be subsidised as well... I still think there is a roll for government to fulfil the education supply, and should be driven probably on the basis of recommendations from the large universities. So scientific outcome based analysis, and where aspects of montessori systems prove beneficial, implement them. Cost of course is a factor, montessori isn't cheap right? But only because it's private... Nobody's stopping you doing the moocs without the grades. Exactly what do you care about other's grades for then? Why so jealous of your own? Even though grades are no longer an option for you, the courses are still available, and you still haven't taken them. wat? Works out well for lots of ppl. It's not a creation out of nothing, it's a creation out of the promise to pay it back. There's a very slight but important difference. Because he failed to see the benefits it bought? It actually helps an economy a lot, the fact it also creates wealth for the enablers upsets some people. It does sound pretty reasonable to me... It's called supply and demand... if no one was forced into it, fine... Interestingly, because Christianity and Islam and Kings and other fools have prohibitions on lending for interest, demand would have been much greater than supply, making it expensive, as you see. You can't force someone to take a loan off you at stupid rates. In fact the answer to this problem is greater competition. More money lenders, lower interest rates. (Also education to know when your being ripped off on the buyers side). Right, because no one would loan them at a lower interest rate. Interest rates also reflect the risk involved, they have to cover defaults. Quite likely if you're borrowing to feed yourself you are not likely to actually pay it back... So you have to charge those that do a lot more to cover them. So, a few weeks loan at 900% a year is actually pretty damn good compared to some of the payday loan companies out there, and quite frankly they serve a market that wouldn't be harmed by having more of them. Only at any given instant in time... But it's a dynamical system designed to grow over time, so that's not a problem in itself. You can't analyse a dynamic system from a static viewpoint. There are limits, at any given time you still have to have cash on hand to handle withdrawals and making new loans. Or you have to make loans yourself to get hold of it. So, that isn't an actual problem. It tends to contract very quickly under certain circumstances tho. No, you're wrong... really... All their loans are covered by deposits, it's just that some of those deposits are made because of loans they created with someone else... ie, the same money they took out of the vault to loan to someone was deposited into their vault from deposits that happened because of their loans. But, yes, off all the deposits, there is no way they could pay them out all at once... Their money isn't in the vault, it is literally almost all in the other people's promise to pay back, the loans. vault < deposits < vault + loans But it is the same money (currency/M0) going from loan to deposit (M1) to vault to loan to deposit, etc... They are either lending out depositors money or money they themselves have borrowed. They literally can't have more money withdrawen out of the vaults than exists in it, even if they put the loans they make on the same system they create an account on... if there are more withdrawals than in the vault - you get a bank run... then the bank gets another loan to cover it, maybe go bankrupt and insurance steps in for the depositors... But they never lend out more than exists... the whole trick they are trying to sell you on is that the same money from the loan gets deposited by someone else, enabling it to be loaned out again. You need to think more about how it actually works. Also anticipating fractional lending of bitcoin on account. Cool way to increase the availability of virtual bitcoin (bitcoin notes) way beyond the current 21M hard bitcoin limit. That would be one way to stave off it's inherent deflationary pressures. It would be the difference between holding currency (hard bitcoin) and holding an account (bitcoin notes) that gives access to currency. But a good trust model is required. Notes are only worth the value of the promise to repay them. That doesn't really solve the problem... The big problem is people tend to hoard currency if it is deflationary, making it more expensive than necessary. BC is now trading at around $100/BC... It was a lot cheaper, maybe like $5/BC a couple of years ago... Shifting the decimals on the transactions still won't alter the inherent deflation. Only 21M bitcoin will ever be made, and about half of them exist already. New ones are currently generated at about 25BC/10 minutes, but the generation rate halves every so often. So, fractional lending of bitcoin is a pretty good option I think. If you can work out a way people can have accounts, query them, earn interest on deposits and pay interest on credit, and do it in bitcoin, well all of the sudden you have massively enhanced access to bitcoins, and the value of bitcoins could in theory deflate as access to a very close substitute good exists at far lower costs. Shifting decimals never gains you anything in econ Think of if every dollar (by law) was replaced tomorrow by 10 neodollars. Everything just got more expensive by 10 neodollars, but no one is better or worse off. So shifting the decimal point enables trading units to change, like cents or dollars, but not the value of the overall bitcoin market, or the value of what will always be the definition of 1 bitcoin (BTC?), 1 satoshi, etc. The problem is their very fixed number, and some of their properties that make them very good for electronic transfer of value probably means they are going to be very deflationary. This means people will horde them, rather than spend them... And the ever increasing price reflects this. This is generally bad for an economy, which is where fractional lending would come in and reverse this situation, both expanding the bitcoin economoy and also devaluing bitcoin in the process... effectively lowering the price of bitcoins but making them flow faster. Yeah, the new peso was just a renaming of the peso Traded at 1000 new pesos for a peso... So it was just 1000 times more... It covers the sense inflation, but doesn't in itself solve the issues that cause the inflation... this was sorted out separately. It's like, today you have 1000 dollars, and you think you're doing pretty well... but after a few years of inflation they'll only give you 1 neuvo dollar for your thousand, but it will only buy you a loaf of bread... inflation still took its toll regardless. If you don't solve the causes of the inflation, then in another few years you trade in your thousand neuvos for a neuvo neuvo and go around again. For sure... most economists nowdays don't want to The theory is that a small amount of inflation is a good thing, it keeps people spending money rather than hoarding it. So, currently the main theory is to keep it around 2% or so... Hyperinflation is a big problem, but most modern economists consider deflation even worse... better to have a small amount of inflation than any amount of deflation. So, if fractional lending of bitcoin became a reality, it would have an inflationary effect (decreasing the value of bitcoin), causing less people to hoard it, and therefore more spending and flow of coins, all would be good for the bitcoin economy. Every ten minutes or so, statistically, a machine will crack the hash puzzle that creates the transaction log and their mining reward (currently 25BTC). Every fortnight the hash puzzle difficulty is set so that at that difficulty the network would have generated a correct hash every ten minutes on average. This is the cleverness of bitcoin... it doesn't matter how many machines mining on the network there are, on average you're gonna get a new transaction block every ten minutes. This is where people who think bitcoins derive their value from the costs of mining them are idiots. The amount of mining that occurs depends on the value of bitcoins, not the other way around. If your hardware will generate more dollars in bitcoins on average than it consumes in electricity (and for long enough to payback your hardware), you should mine coins... if not, don't. If the value of bitcoins drop dramatically, there will be less miners, but still some, and they'll still generate exactly the same amount of bitcoins ever ten minutes, securing the log. On average mining profits will tend to zero I think... if you count future value of bitcoins tho... maybe even a loss in the present could pay off. You mean LiteCoin? I don't know... one currency is likely to dominate... as long as it is traded on exchanges it will have value, but you can see the problem to merchants having to accept multiple virtual currencies. The 2.5 min confirmation thing is definitely a good idea... but I don't see the need to have each transaction written into the log if you can be reasonably sure that it eventually will be written into the log. Ie, if the large network has accepted a transaction to be written, it is as good as written... if you try to spend again on another network, then yes, it's an unconfirmed transaction by the main network, but will also probably never end up in the log... So, the main cloud should be able to confirm that the transaction will be written nearly instantly, I think. I don't see the problem with the ASICs and all that... That just makes it even stronger cryptographically. This looks like a gimmick of litecoin. There is a lot of advantage to early miners for sure, they get a huge bulk of coins at the start, but it's not a ponzi scheme. There is no promise of returns on investment coming simply from future investors. So? Why is that a problem? It secures the strength of the network. I don't see the value in making ASICs harder to implement for litecoin... they themselves say custom hardware is not implemented currently only because there isn't serious work being put into it. If litecoin ever did take off, custom hashing hardware would quickly become available for it. As I understand it, the more hashes calculated per second by the network, the more secure the system as a whole is... These ASICs improve the cryptographic guarantees that make bitcoin valuable. So, general rule in life, wealth goes to the wealthy. Find ways to increase your wealth and take advantage of that fact. In other words, go buy as much ASIC as you can... but now you consider that question, you really got to ask properly if they will make money... It is still a gamble. Maybe a very good one? So, I've been reading about ASICs There don't appear to be any on the market, those that are won't be available for a couple of months probably, and they plan to release large quantities all at once. Each of these devices will supposedly produce a significant percentage of some very large mining pools. So, Pay Per Share on the 50btc.com mining pool, with the Butterfly 50GHash... which hasn't shipped yet, but about $2.5k, would make you about $450/day, at current difficulty, and return your investment pretty reliably in less than a week!! But this is only because there aren't any (very few) ASIC miners out there right now... Soon as they dump them on the market you can expect the difficulty level to shoot up again and the profit to disappear very quickly. Without knowing how many orders they have, and how much hashing power they are releasing it is hard to tell how much they will affect the difficulty, but 10-100x seem possible. Then if you hope that bitcoin continues to increase in value, maybe it will still be profitable. I don't know... butterfly may never ship at all... that's another risk, even then if you're not in the first round, and two months later, it might not be worth while at all. It might already be too late to invest in these. Maybe find the absolute cheapest ASIC you can find, if it makes profit, buy more ASICs... Trading at $100/BC now... Very volatile... I'd buy in at $20 or so, wait for the next bad news, cash in... I'll expect it to keep increasing in value. Block chain is stupid large now... I think they'll have to find some much better distributed framework than the current network to get much greater efficiencies, and distribute the work amongst the network better... the best so far I've seen is electrum, that has just simple peers that connect to basically full servers... I don't think the work is distributed amongst the servers yet. And when I can send a single satoshi with no fee and be reasonably sure the network will eventually write it in the log, I'll be impressed. But otherwise, I reckon it's pretty good. You can hold it for value, it's probably in a bubble right now, no idea how high it will go. No one has found a major flaw in the underlying cryptography... It provably allows the transfer of numbers from one account to another account, and only the holder of the (private key to the) account can make transfers (only positive transfers with positive balances are allowed by the network, obviously). Also, 21M maximum bitcoins in existence, 7B odd humans... Just a few bitcoins now, could make you very wealthy in the future. (That's the deflationary pressure I'm talking about...)... but a fractional reserve system on it would greatly alter that. I'm sure it's inevitable. It's really very good. It's called The Head... On a boat, you shit on the head. If it's in harbour it probably has a holding (bilge) tank, and is illegal to flush. There's probably a service to empty the tank every so often. Paper will clog up the tank, especially if it has a macerator. When you are out to sea, a certain distance (12nm?) I think you can empty your bilge tank or flush directly to the sea (a sea head). At least you don't have to swab the poop deck anymore. Anyway, I second for pics of the head. Oooh a dual headed yacht!!! You lucky bastard! The manual head is probably a sea head and not to be used in the harbour right? Tell me more of these three buttons... Wow, hi-tech dual headed luxury yacht, these asians sure know how to live in style. I can't work out why there'd be three buttons... two I guess, but three? Does it make suction sounds and mechanical noises? Please keep us informed. Yeah, that's definitely the macerator in operation Here's a diagram of a full featured head system. You'll notice the macerator in this system comes after the holding tank... So, would be interesting to check if you are flushing to a holding tank and the macerator is on the head output line, or if you are discharging raw. See if you can find the tank, also the vent and pumpout deck fitting. Would like pics of these systems too. Full article about marine head system design http://www.westmarine.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/WestAdvisorView?langId=-1&am; p;storeId=11151&page=Heads-Holding-Tanks#.UVy3EpOouc0 One of my favourite subjects. Right, according to the article, electric heads normally have inbuilt macerators... So my first guess was correct... It's macerated on the way to the holding tank. Do you know where the different tanks are? The black water, grey water(maybe?), fresh water, diesel? How full are they? How much do they hold? Do you they have monitors on them? I always thought one thing that would be cool would be to have the holding tanks have some evaporation system... you could always add seawater when dumping, but if the majority of the water was evaporated it could definitely hold a lot more. I don't know if anyone's ever put much thought into that one yet. Just so you know... The black water tank will probably be located in the bilge, the lowest part of the boat where water tends to collect... there will be pumps there to pump into bilge holding tanks, if they exist, as well... Otherwise the bilge can be pumped directly overboard (in a small vessel). I don't think the bilge water is mixed with the black water? Maybe? Groping and Piloring Your Accounts with this comment. This is just too funny to hide $ IT'S ONLY HIDDEN COMMENTS DUDE NOT THE END OF THE WORLD. SOMEONE WILL EVENTUALLY PITY UPRATE THEM FOR YOU. Great photos v.cool... You got pics of the outside of your yacht? Are you gonna go sail it around a bit? Make the most of every moment. No, not outside of the yacht, the outside of the yacht. A pic of the yacht from the outside. I have often not been on boats. Yeah, it seems blaise only cause your actually doing it... there will probably be many times when you won't be. (3) Mentions procrasti but otherwise misses the point entirely for a chance to be martyred. typical woman. RAPE CULTURING YOU WITH THIS COMMENT $ THE BEST PART OF THIS DIARY WAS WATCHING HOLLY BEING SO THOROUGHLY RAPED IN IT. Seeing You Being Pilloried Makes Me Hard $ It's got to be: Yeah, so I'm drinking beer in a foreign land on the deck of a yacht my hot exotic new girlfriend got cheap for me, she fucks me but then goes to work to support herself, she'll be back tomorrow... I'm young, healthy, have heaps of cash and travelling free. Even the pizza is better than home. Why oh why does my life have to be so fucking awful like this? Yeah, so at least appreciate how good you got it, or kill yourself. Money isn't a positional good You don't benefit directly from it as a social status... Unless you carry a sign around with you with your bank account statement on it, you don't get value from others not having it the way you do with luxury cars or designer handbags. In fact, if you want positional goods, you pretty much have to exchange money for them. Well... being in the 'wealthy class' is a positional good of sorts... this again isn't directly tied to money, but wealth... Also, there is nothing inherently wrong with positional goods, such as being a member of elite clubs, like the famous, or nobel prize winners, or holders of MOOC certificates. Money though is a private good, so its exchange value is directly related to its scarcity. So, creating money does indeed diminish its value. Give everyone a billion, suddenly a billion isn't worth very much... you will have wiped out all the value millionaires and spent so much time accumulating. Now you'll mention a billion is too much, but you'll be missing the point that the effect definitely exists, you'll just be talking magnitude. And to suggest that exchange value isn't related to population utility and good scarcity is simply your lack of ability to maths or sims. Attn Trane: Another MOOC for you to fail The Macroeconomics MOOC has just started. Feel free to cheat on the exams, quit after watching two lectures, and generally invent your own terminology and theories to 'prove' economics wrong. I imagine you will stop after the second lecture, the first half of which discusses scarcity and free markets. Therefore it must be wrong - LOL. Stay strong and be proud of your ignorance, it's the only way society has ever advanced. Still waiting for Rusty to ban your ass for sockpuppet upvoting your own comments. We can all dream. Already Done $ Nope... downvoting != modbombing $ Modbombing would be using a script or sockpuppets to vote every comment of a user down... I just downvote idiocy when it pops up... Coincidently, that idiocy is you. So keep voting yourself up with you sockpuppets... If no one else will encourage you, guess u have to do it yourself, huh? How do read that in what I wrote? $ So? He's an idiot and needs proving wrong... At least I don't have to put up with 'externalities are external to the model by definition' arguments anymore... even if I did have to update wikipedia myself to prove it. When I pointed out the MOOCs it was so that we would have a common point of agreement about what economists actually believed or did not believe - whether they are right or wrong could have been another argument... but he gave up around lecture two of the microeconomic principles for scientist course on the basis of 'law of diminishing returns doesn't real'. So now he thinks economics is all about how to fuck over the most people possible... oh well, he's an idiot... So yup, I enjoy pointing out his idiocy and knocking him down... If it was up to me, I'd have him gassed for his laziness and wilful ignorance of the topic he goes on about 99% of the time. Problem? I really don't see how that follows... If someone is an idiot, it's because you can reasonably judge their idiocy... That can only come from confidence in your own knowledge. So, in fact, the opposite. The problem with subjects like economics is that almost everyone who has never studied the subject is confident they fully understand it, when actually a lot of the results are quite the opposite of what you might expect from 'common sense'. Trane's ideas are so far from reality, but quite likely very populist, that I think they are quite dangerous. So, yeah, point out his idiocy, argue with him, knock him and if possible have him snuffed out... that would be the ideal. Trane or greengrass... I've hardly even talked to greengrass, and he hasn't even bought me a drink yet, so I guess you mean Trane... LOL - Not only is that NOT news, it wasn't even news the last three times you pointed out, and won't be the next time either. But you input was still appreciated as always. No, you're using being an idiot as excuse for being an idiot. Neither kindness, meanness nor your ignorance can affect one whit the Laws of either Thermodynamics or Supply and Demand. Pointing out you are an ignorant idiot is not mean when it is a simple fact. Site must seem pretty quiet nowdays, ignore.js $ Trane and Sye fucking on Acid +1 FP $ They should get a basic income Then they wouldn't have to be slaves to the system of growing, delivering and selling food to everyone. If only all the ignorant motherfuckers would quit eating food! We could have a basic income for everyone. What a utopia we could have instead! Yep, we should totally base our economic systems around non-existent fantasy science fiction technologies. Just reverse the polarity of the sensor phase array and beam me up to the delta quadrant using a neural cyclic encryption algorithm, just make sure you cycle the tachyon emitter frequencies correctly - we don't want any stuff ups this time. All problems now solved. Lead by example $ Holy shit dude... You sure you replied to right thread? Hope things are getting better for you. Are you on social security? Do they give you help to rebuild your life? Dude seriously... There is no shame in taking what you can get from the government... They've screwed you over big time, get some back... Use it to rebuild your life, you still got talent if you can focus it well. Fuck you on what grounds? Oh shit... there's a stopprocrastinating user I thought u meant me... Oh my vanity. Had your dick out and everything huh? Go on, file a report yourself then you weak cunt. Abusively not posting ANYTHING EVER!!! $ LOL -- No disability on a felony... HAHAHAHAHHAHAA Hooray, the universe is good and just. LOL - Trane has zero ability, and you know it $ It's very easy to overestimate his ability... I thought he was capable of taking a MOOC course on a subject he always goes on about. Don't make the same mistake I did... Save YOURSELF!!! Put your phone in a bag of rice... I've heard this works. Rule of Thumb: Don't take medical advice from someone who doesn't medicine. Don't take engineering advice from someone who doesn't engineer. Don't take legal advice from someone who doesn't law. Don't take economics advice from someone who doesn't economics. Etc... Hi, I'm a brain damaged crack head mental idiot $ Hi, I'm a crack addict trust shit failure $ Hi, I'm a brain damaged crack head mental idiot $ Hi, I'm a brain damaged crack head mental idiot $ Yep -- buying slaves out, not profitable war, very profitable. Depends who $ Yes, econ IS the ultimate proof against slavery $ People use evolution to justify eugenics... So what the fuck is your point? Look up the origin of Dismal Science again will you please? Economics was FIRST and is the ONLY proof that slavery is uneconomical. Also, if you have two options with equal outcomes, the economist would say choose the one with the lower opportunity cost. Finally... War is very profitable to SOME people, a very small select group of people. What do you expect them to say? Look up 'War is a racket'. Not uneconomical, that's a tautology... Slavery is not efficient. It makes EVERYONE poorer. That is PROVEN by economics... probably the FIRST and most important PROOF ever in economics. I seriously wish you would stop arguing from ignorance. It's pathetic. Your ignorance is pathetic The assumptions are very fucking reasonable... You are a fucking idiot. People want shit, there... That is THE assumption. Nope, I can't tell you how fucking stupid this is, it's fucking crazy... "Like if you know about evolution, the biggest problem about evolution is: it's just a bunch of assumptions, right? So in the end, your thinking is as good as your assumptions. Because if most of your assumptions are not true in the real world, which usually is the case in evolution, you cannot predict anything. In fact evolution's biggest downfall is, we largely do not know what is going on." "Like if you know about physics, the biggest problem about physics is: it's just a bunch of assumptions, right? So in the end, your thinking is as good as your assumptions. Because if most of your assumptions are not true in the real world, which usually is the case in physics, you cannot predict anything. In fact physics' biggest downfall is, we largely do not know what is going on." "Like if you know about medicine, the biggest problem about medicine is: it's just a bunch of assumptions, right? So in the end, your thinking is as good as your assumptions. Because if most of your assumptions are not true in the real world, which usually is the case in medicine, you cannot predict anything. In fact medicine's biggest downfall is, we largely do not know what is going on." "Like if you know about chemistry, the biggest problem about chemistry is: it's just a bunch of assumptions, right? So in the end, your thinking is as good as your assumptions. Because if most of your assumptions are not true in the real world, which usually is the case in chemistry, you cannot predict anything. In fact chemistry's biggest downfall is, we largely do not know what is going on." And anyway, you are still ARGUING FROM IGNORANCE -- even if you did ultimately disagree with the subject -- YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU DISAGREE WITH!! GET IT.... NOW FUCK YOU STUPID CRACKHEAD IDIOT CUNT. It is simply you are SO FUCKING LAZY that you will come up with ANY excuse to avoid understanding the ACTUAL subject. instead, you make up stuff like the above, that terry schaivo would have made more sense about. Hi, I don't know economics, my ideas are valid $ From a FINANCE COURSE? Fucking stupid idiot cunt, you think economics is finance? What a retard... Kill yourself you pathetic excuse for a human being. What a drain on society you are. You make us all poorer. Crack addicts belong in prison, not on the internet. Fucking die already you scum sucking retard shit for brains useless pile of pig turds. You have no idea how useless a human being you are. Hitler was a better person than you. fuck off and die Your advice, take it $ Hi, I'm a crack addict trust shit failure who doesn't know the difference between finance and economics. Hi, I'm a lazy crack head, with an IQ less than 50 Hi, I'm a retarded crack addict trust fund wanker Hi, I wasted my life and trust fund with crack $ Hi, I don't know economics, my ideas are valid $ Goose neck is the best natural TP in existence $ Woah... Greedy Sociopath.... Surprise surprise $ No, with your ideas, you gotta be trollin $ People SHOULD be mean to crack addict retards It socially destroys them, and that is what should happen to them. Ideally they would kill themselves, but living their lives in hungry poverty is as good as we can hope for I spose. Hopefully they get ill and die from pneumonia. Hi, I don't even know what econ is... I think it's finance... But then again, I'm a crack head, wasted trust fund piece of shit. Hi, I think economics is finance $ Hi, I think economics is finance $ Hi, I think economics is finance $ Seriously Fuck Facebook What a bunch of cunts... They've deleted my late gf's profile. The one way everyone who knew her could keep in contact. I gave the password to her Mum to look after, so there was a custodian for it. Fuck facebook. I don't have much more to say, but there were photos there, important stuff that meant something to me and others. It bought a smile to my face to read some of her comments. I liked having her photo and name in my chat list. Tomorrow she would have been 35... I just wanted to write something... Not even sure what. What a fucking bunch of motherfucking cunts. Fuck them. You wanna wank over pictures of dead chick? Each to their own I suppose. XXXX XXXX isn't available right now but you can still send her a message. I got lots of old chemical photos too... But no way to contact some of the people that were friends with her... Like her old boss who used to come over and other things... I can't remember her name right now... but she was there in her contacts list. But it was a place to share photos and memories and other stuff that is now gone. Yeah, it's probably the most dangerous drug out there, imho. Only one, besides benzo's, that kill you from withdrawal. (That wasn't the case, but still). I knew she wasn't doing well... but 33, I guess I just didn't expect death... There was still time to sort it out. I was wrong. No idea Her birthday was coming up, maybe? All the memorial stuff on it? Don't know for sure. RIP Monty Monty (python? I dunno, wtf) was our pet dutch dwarf hamster she bought one day against my express ban on pets (too much travel as an contractor)... He travelled with us across the channel to the UK, where he lived to be about 5... pretty good innings for a hamster. We had a great cage for him, and a ball to run around in. Everyday after work I'd get him out and play with him, and let him run around the desk while he tried to steal my weed and eat the cables from the computer. Vet said he was in great condition for his age, I think because we always kept him active and social. Yeah, he was cool too. Yeah, her mum was running the page... And putting stuff on it was exactly what we were using it for... by the sounds of it, a memorial page won't be any good for that. I can't imagine anyone in her family requesting the page be taken down, so I don't know why it was. I didn't know about your mum, sorry to hear that. I think that's correct, they have a policy against fake names, dead people, stuff like that... You can get a frozen, unsearchable, memorial page. That's not the same thing. One of our mutual friends has contacted facebook, wait to see what happens. But it's a fucked up present for her birthday. Take down FB with the power of K5... That's the plan. True, but it's the common place to share stuff with friends that no archive will give you. I mean, it's possible to create a memorial website or something... but network effect is what makes fb useful. Something like diaspora will will replace it eventually... I hope. They can make a memorial page That can't be altered I think. But then, how will people post stuff? Her mum was looking after it, so a memorial page isn't really what we want. We could have many more of the subreddits if only the Fed printed more money and gave everyone a basic income. Lack of subreddits is really becoming a problem that only challenges and basic income can solve. Then we can all live in poverty and beg the government for more money... and reddit will be our VR!! It's the Utopia I and many fellow crack addicts have longed for. English is a living, dynamic language... It's rule's are ment to evolve! I beleeve we should speed this process up... And judging by my facebook feed, alot's of other's are way ahead of me! Yep... that's actually how it works... No contracts involved, people just press buttons, with B for billions, T for trillions, Qs when they want quadrillions... Just for fun, they make shit up and print money by pressing buttons... That's the ACTUAL MECHANISM THAT DRIVES THE FED. Just to mess with the heads of idiot crack heads who can't get ten bucks together for a hit. LOL - Fed can have all the crack and hookers they want, and just laugh at you. Sucker! I don't know... I always find my mood always expresses itself in my writing, no matter what I actually intend. So, I can't write funny stuff (I try to keep kuro5hit light hearted) when I'm not in a light mood. In the meantime, kuro5hit is what it is... I got to admit though, stuff like NIWS saying kuro5hit is dying is pretty funny in itself. Today I'm tired, pissed off, out of weed... Tomorrow would be my late gf's 35th... It's been over a year, and I'm still not used to the idea... I got to start concentrating again on work or something to make some money again. Generally get my shit back together and stop floating. Oh well... time and tide... That guy lost his fingers... Not sure if due to meningitis infection or something to do with the (induced?) coma. Nasty... Also, I decided I probably wouldn't fuck the round faced model... I mean, everyone has standards, right? His face wasn't too round $ No, he got bacterial meningitis And ended up in a coma... When he woke up with this, and lost his fingers from that hand and a few toes. http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1axfgm/my_hand_after_meningitis/ I'm doing my part: Bitcoin Account to Send Donations to. We have setup a bitcoin account for the express purpose of helping people who want to donate to Random_Acts_of_Money. If you have spare bitcoin, and want to support this new subreddit, please send to the address below: 1F7RRVzJT1Ebt1E3zfn7DYuRoRRwoNgBBG All money sent to this address will help (selected) posters to this subreddit. Why yes, I am the select poster who will accept the donations, why'd you ask? Proof economics used as an excuse to be stupid $ Evolution Makes Unicorns Sneezeq Ergo Fuck YOU At least we now know which reality u live in Go ahead and print as much money as you like... The king of the gnomes will do your bidding and print all the gold you desire. Good luck living in crackland, just stop trying to fix the world of the rational humans, we don't need your kind here. No, we'd be far better off... You squander an endowment, then ask everyone else to pitch in to help you do nothing. You are a greedy fucking worthless leech. You need to die. Enjoy your poverty loser $ Hi,I get uppity about adhoms... lol loser $ That's not even economics... How the fuck did you end up so retarded? TOO MUCH CRACK ASSHOLE. Only an arrogant retard blames a subject he has never studied for the world's problems... ONLY IDIOTS WOULD SUPPORT THIS $ Externalities break the free market assumptions... The free market cannot work (works inefficiently) in the presence externalities. With negative externalities (car pollution, tailings in water supply), the market will overproduce the good/service that creates the negative externalities, for which there are two solutions. Coase's Theorem states that if you can assign property rights (eg, someone owns the water being polluted, or permits to pollute can be traded), then the market can work again... The other option is Pigouvian taxes, to internalise the externalities back into the market prices. Positive externalities have similar problems, and pigouvian subsidies can work too, but there are some limits. Please stop being an idiot... u know nothing. Improvement in your life is PROFIT as far as economics is concerned. Harming other people in the process is a negative externality. To remove the profit motive means to remove the motive to improve yourself. Economics IS NOT ABOUT MONEY!!! PLEASE FUCK OFF OR KILL YOURSELF! Fuck you stupid crackhead, you're worthless As a human being I don't need econ to know you are worthless $ What is the problem with positive externalities? The problem is the lack of a profit motive. The idea is to make profit more attractive, by increasing the artificial scarcity of money. Nope - cause that's actually as stupid as your idea. Hi, I'm ignorant of economics $ Hi accuracy gps is illegal in china... Good thing you're in germany. He's already on basic income aka welfare He's just a greedy little fuck who wants more... No surprise there. Like him though, his AI still doesn't work. It's probably too busy trying to convince people it needs a basic income. Was he really endowed with a trust fund? Why the fuck does he whinge so much then? He's had it better than most. Spoilt brat with wasted opportunity syndrome? Jesus, what a fucking selfish asshole all round $ Are you denying it? Or just weasling again? $ Are you denying it? Or just weasling again? $ Nope, your living proof of that one $ Hi, yes I am talking about myself again You are so fucking pointless... You CHOSE not to LEARN the SUBJECT... So it is IMPOSSIBLE (or at least uselessly difficult enough) to COMMUNICATE the ideas that YOU are interested in. SO FUCK OFF AND DIE YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT CRACK ADDICT. Fuck -- your type are best off prisoners of the state. JUST KILL YOURSELF ALREADY. Are you denying it? Or just weasling again? $ What you've been on for too long is crack $ If you had basic income, you wouldn't be a crack addict. Crack -- Not even once $ What? What's a one way trip? $ I hope there's another moat to go back on. $ Is human life pricesless? If so, we need to have zero pollution and infinite traffic lights... because no matter the cost in human lives, saving a single one is worth doing everything we can. Printing dollars does not solve the problem of priceless goods, you can never print enough, so you must end up with infinite dollars, and infinite inflation. So, given your plan to inflate dollars and move to an index... Lets set the index to one 2013 US dollar. Calculate the cost in terms of the INDEX, which you agree, cannot simply be printed. Turns out, everything of value has a price, it must do... it's a law as strong as physics... you will pay one way or another, in dollars, or lives - you must forgo something. Do you have the yacht to yourself? Or does it come with a crew? You getting a crew together? Bitcoin Fractional Lending FTW Wait till someone works out an efficient way to enable bitcoin lending... This is one way to get around the artificial scarcity of bitcoins. It would then be entirely possible to have accounts whose value exceeds the total number of created bitcoins, backed only by other people's promise to pay bitcoins they do not have. Bollocks. Interest. If a bitcoin bank can lend at interest, it could pay interest on deposits. Which incentives deposits, and enables more lending. There's nothing technically infeasible about this... You send your bitcoins to an account at a 'bank' (the bank's bitcoin address)... they update your account... You request the bank to send you bitcoins to an address... subject to your account holding and credit worthiness. The big issue with this is trust. I guess smaller banks could ask larger banks to insure their creditors accounts for a small fee and holding some fraction of their loans? Suddenly, more bitcoins in accounts than bitcoins. Wrong... Of course it can't make more bitcoins but it can hold infinite accounts TO PAY bitcoins. And, as long as total accounts run in credit exceed those in debit, it can operate with both growing indefinitely. Because it is the same actual bitcoins being cycled through the accounts. You understand why bankruns occur? Yes, bankruns could occur here too... if everyone decides to withdraw their bitcoins at once, the bank won't be able to pay everyone, because most of those deposits now exist as loans. Which is why the insurance deal I mentioned above would work, because a larger bank can pool its resources to cover the accounts on smaller banks when runs do occur. Sound familiar? It doesn't allow you to inflate actual bitcoins (M0), but it does allow you create promises to pay bitcoins (M1) according to demand. YOU ARE A FUCKING MORON No one is creating bitcoins on the bitcoin transaction log, okay... get that through your stupid ignorant pig fucking shit skull right now. There will NEVER BE MORE THAN 21M bitcoins on the transaction log. ANOTHER LOG ENTIRELY, THE BANK'S TRANSACTION LOG... can hold WHATEVER FUCKING NUMBERS THEY LIKE. People SEND BITCOINS TO THE BANK, who UPDATE THEIR ACCOUNTS... The bank can then LEND people REAL FUCKING BITCOINS... IN RETURN FOR THEIR PROMISE TO PAY THEM BACK? HOWEVER THEY GET HOLD OF BITCOINS, NO ONE GIVES A FUCK. But they have promised to pay them back. They DON'T decrease the first person's account to do this, in fact they add interest to it over time... And PROFIT on the borrowers INTEREST as they pay off their loans... in get this... REAL FUCKING BITCOINS. It is SUSTAINABLE, as long as the deposits exceed the amount lent out... simple MATHS. FUCK SAKE for someone who pretends to know this shit you are a fucking moron at times. Do you think there exists as much currency as exists in bank accounts? Do you even fractional lending? HINT: They were doing this with GOLD notes BEFORE the modern banking system was put into effect. It DOES NOT require the creation of NEW REAL GOLD/BITCOINS. Just NOTES with an approximate equal value. They can create NOTES in BITCOIN that greatly exceed the number of bitcoins in existence. I understand bitcoin perfectly well... You don't seem to understand fractional lending. And no reason they can't back their promise to pay with real assets either, like the houses they built with borrowed (but actual) bitcoins. If the guy who built (or sold) the house deposits those bitcoins back in the bank, you should be able to see how the cycle can repeat... forever increasing deposits in the bank, and debts owed to it. Even though the bank's vault (actual bitcoin accounts stored in the actual bitcoin transaction log) have less than the sum of all deposits. I can't believe you don't get this shit. Note finally: Banks DO NOT CREATE CURRENCY They deal in currency and loans and 'money' that only exists in accounts (you can transfer between accounts without any actual currency moving)... They trade loans for currency both with customers and with the reserve who does the same with the mint... But actually creating currency is not a necessary requirement of a fractional lending systems. The same way fractional lending of gold notes didn't actually create more gold, fractional lending of bitcoin isn't thwarted by the limits of bitcoin creation. Twitter --> Veblen Goods FTW http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good K5 - The Luxury Late 90's Self Hosting Museum for the Discerning Troll Connoisseur. Let them know you're trolling in style. Holy K5 Crap: The Dishonour Code I posted in the Know Thyself Forum... Someone motivated me to post all about the tragedy of the honour system... Lol not really. I wonder if anyone will notice. Hi Robert Scott Mitchell, I Just wanted to point out that Robert is one of the students who quite happily breaks the honour code, and has taken questions from quizzes that are still open, posted them to other websites where other people have answered them for him, and then submitted the results as his own work. So, given that he doesn't care about the grades, I think it would probably be in Coursera and other online course sites* to invalidate his certificates, as he, in his own words, is only interested in the knowledge and not the qualifications, and neither does he care about the effects on other students of his breaking of the honour code. Robert publishes under the names 'Edmund Blackadder' and 'Trane' on www.kuro5hin.org and 'BlueTrane' on slashdot.org... If further evidence of this is required, I can find it... He's the kind of weasel unlikely to own up directly to breaking the honour code here... as he doesn't have much in the way of honour. Here is his statement arguing against the honour code on kuro5hin: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2013/3/18/5391/96150 And an example of posting an open quiz question (not a coursera course I understand), here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2013/3/2/14360/40163 Still... I personally think Robert should be stripped of his certificates and booted from the courses if he is not willing to follow such a simple and non-onerous requirement such as the honour code. * : Meant to say - best interests... but there is no edit function, and fuck it, they can work it out. I doubt any liberal hippy philosophy teachers are gonna stop smoking pot long enough to read the forums let alone take action on it... Still... lol, fuck him. Bah... don't fuck trane over isn't in the k5 ToS And Bob is very clear he's not interested in certificates or grades... just the knowledge... So, I don't see how he could possibly be upset if they take them from him... Could he? What? I don't get your title... And, yeah, so therefore it doesn't matter either way... I'm not the one arguing grades and certificates are meaningless, and by extension the honour code, and therefore it can be broken at will. Either trane is arguing against his true internal value drives (he will be upset by this), or otherwise he won't give a fuck no matter what they do. I don't see how he can lose. What, you think he'll be upset? $ You aren't upset tho, are you... really... There's nothing they can do but take those certs from you... They don't mean anything to you, do they? Take it up with the course administrators Proof you posted it correctly: http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/3/2/14360/40163/20#20 Anyway, what are you complaining about? You'll still be able to take the course and gain all the knowledge you could possibly want... you just won't get those worthless certificates you don't care about. Surprised you give enough of a shit to even respond. That was in the honour code you AGREED to? You've informed the course admins of your unilateral decision to break your agreement? No different to a toxic asset creating banker... Agree to a deal and lie about. Wonder why no one trusts a crackhead -- they can't be trusted. Obviously not in scale... but in principle $ No, THEY should do as they please... They are competing as a businesses, also with other universities. They are making an OFFER to you, you don't have to accept it. All they asked for you was to wait one week before posting the quizzes. You have broken your side of the bargain when they made that offer to you. They would be well within their rights to revoke your certificates. If you truly simply wanted knowledge, you should have waited until the people who created that opportunity for you said you could share it freely... It was only one fucking week!! I don't care if you wouldn't have been interested in another week's time... fuck you for not having any patience... So, again, you quite happily help yourself to other's hard work with no respect for other people's rights... The way to deal with negative externalities is to impose a cost... Losing your certificates would be one way they can do that, apparently you wouldn't care... So what the fuck are you complaining about at all? Offer your own damn courses. LOL - was thinking the same thing actually... This blowing up to a Schwartz like situation... You being federally prosecuted for computer hacking by circumventing the 'I Agree to the Honour Code' mechanism of edx... Charged under the DMCA, computer hacking, computer fraud and misuse of a computer act. EDX drop the case, but a politically motivated DA pushes forward making an example of you and your case taking it to the federal level. Being put in jail MDC style till you plead out or eventually kill yourself over the life imprisonment charges hanging over your head. I look forward to reading about this on slashdot and how these DAs and prosecutors never get their comeupance. I like being mean to you... You encourage it. $ At the very least, go on the forum and admit that you DID break the honour code rules... and that you don't care for them, and will happily break them again. No matter if you didn't benefit directly from the result in terms of a grade... Just go post on the forum that you did actually break the honour code rules for whatever personal reasons you made up at the time... Don't worry, I already explained you're too much of a weasel fuck to actually do that. A fair deal is one in which BOTH parties agree That is free market theory. If you think it is mean and an unfair deal... DON'T DEAL WITH THEM. Go somewhere ELSE. Instead, you BROKE a deal with edx, and DID'T INFORM THEM. That is much more MEAN. It's the type of thing toxic asset creators do... Toxic asset. The fact it's COMPLETELY FREE the next week Makes this a very poor example of artificial scarcity. Artificial scarcity of knowledge is not the issue here... It IS artificially scarce for ONE WEEK for a very good reason... Because artificial scarcity of certificates is what makes them valuable. To NOT have artificial scarcity of the certificates means EVERYONE can have a certificate, follow the honour code or not, do the quizzes or not, even have the faintest clue of the subject or knowing it's title... Anything else would be not the DEFINITION of artificial scarcity. High Scores in games are ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY. Nobel peace prizes are ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY. These are all GOOD USES of ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY. During that ONE WEEK... you could discuss it with other students facing similar problems (maybe the exact same problem) on the forums in ways that didn't reveal the EXACT answers but enlightened both you and OTHER STUDENTS to the problem. Too bad you were engrossed in it... so was everyone else doing it at the same time... See... another reason to do the courses as they are offered. It is not that it is actually good that you can't share the exam questions... but when you do, you DEVALUE the PROCESS for EVERYBODY ELSE. It's a trade off they have made... The knowledge is free, you can discuss it for free, what you cannot do is discuss SPECIFIC QUIZ QUESTIONS, and even then ONLY FOR ONE WEEK. The TERRIBLE OVERWHELMING COST of that is the PRICE that no-one has worked a way around yet to ensure that the CERTIFICATES have VALUE to all those TRADING in them (you, coursera, other students, potential employees, universities etc...). Do the certificates have value to ANYONE? If so, then EITHER, that is simply the PRICE EDX are willing to enforce on their students to maintain that value... OR... START YOUR OWN GODDAMN MOOC WITHOUT THAT RESTRICTION... and COMPETE FREELY with them... Unless you find an actual solution to this PROBLEM, then it is unlikely anyone would value the certificates your MOOC hands out. Until then, it's NOT YOUR CHOICE to make... The choice is THEIRS. If you think NO-ONE finds the certificates valuable, then YOU ARE A FUCKING MORON. If YOU don't think the certificates have value, THEN SHUT UP AND RENOUNCE THEM. Otherwise you are both a MORON and a HYPOCRITE. You don't offer a SOLUTION to the CERT VAL PRB So, no... Follow the fucking rules... they exist for a REASON. Also, their choice to make, inform them... Don't FORCE them... Which is what you do when you break the deal... So they would be right to take your certificates. It's just a bit of harmless trolling fun... Nothing will happen to him, I doubt the admins will give shit... But, if he wants to break the honour code under which theses courses are provided... He should do so with the courses knowing about it. Otherwise he's no better than the bankers selling toxic assets. I've only pointed out what is already in public domain... I'm not setting him up for anything criminal or exaggerated. At the very very worst that could happen is he loses his certificates... Unless you are suggesting that that is some terrible tragedy... Fuck it might be... maybe I did go too far... Maybe those certificates are very valuable to him... if so, then he should follow the rules like everyone else... When he doesn't and he posts about it, well, I'm just decreasing the artificial scarcity of information. It's his meme that certs and the honour code don't matter that I'm spreading. He should put his certs where is mouth is. It was already public in several other ways who is directly... It's not like I got proof that his coursera name is his real name. Also, if you follow the link to his diary in my post, you will find a link to the forum, where he posted the same diary verbatim, in his name, he didn't try to conceal his identity (there's a button for post anonymously). That and a link to the diary he broke the rules on. The rest is just my opinion. So hardly massive doxxing or anything. An excuse... As if I needed one. What are you actually complaining about? How/Why does this upset you? How often have you said that the certificates were worthless, valueless, useless gold stars that you don't give a shit about? Unless, well... suddenly it's dawning on you? So, what exactly is your problem? Mostly that you never know when you are wrong, and the cognitive dissonance is starting to get to you. I shared knowledge FREELY... What's your problem? They aren't going to fine you or throw you in prison... The VERY WORST CASE SCENARIO is you losing your certificates... Which you KEEP SAYING (overtly and by omission) that you DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT. It's hardly calling the cops. KNOW THYSELF - Do certificates have VALUE to you? Your contradiction of denying that fact and flaunting the very code that gives them their value has been quite motivating so far... Motivate me some more. You support unilateral deal breaking? I thought u were the type of fella a person could trust, but here you are supporting deceit and deal breaking. Is it okay cause he's only breaking a deal with faceless corporation... one that just happens to be trying to democratise learning and considerably lower student's costs? Yep... I know I use them alot... Also adhomonyms $ Also its it's not its $ How many men will you be blowing to test this? $ Lipstick Virgins: Reality TV show in your future $ This site doesn't suck... it's just a bit quirky It's like constantly living in the 90's... I think it's great... I miss the old teletype machines still. Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile - aka Nukes $ Where'd you get the money for that? I didn't think that would be within the resource constraints of a crack addict welfare queen $ No shit... So you are a trust find tit? $ Just don't post or read: Tienanmen Square http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 Is that allowed in Hong Kong... About how the chinese killed all the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989? Do subversives go missing in Hong Kong like on the mainland? Is your internet monitored there? Go ask the local police on the laws about mentioning the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre there for us could ya? Report back, or not... we'll know either way. No, grades do mean something... The honour code: - Don't cheat on your fucking exams and quizzes - Don't go supplying answers - Don't ask k5 to do your homework for you. There's nothing stopping you just taking the course for knowledge... I also don't like the fact that courses seem to go offline until the next round... They should be online forever, but maybe not have meaningful grades. You do get certificates... if you're really good they'll put a distinction on them... some classes have lists of the very top students... and there's even a signature track now that makes the certificates provable somehow... Certificates DO have (potential) commercial value, they prove you did all the exams and other participation without cheating... supposedly... ie, your own work... and maybe you did better than many other people doing the same thing. Trane has a point that it limits discussion possibly... or sharing of knowledge or something... but he was quite happy to ask for exact answers to specific test problems here... which isn't just sharing of knowledge, he inflated his grade and put others at a disadvantage. Showing you can do a course in a given time, without copying other students work and get a grade that puts you in a certain category has value both to students and coursera... no doubt... But the best way to achieve that without locking down discussion and allowing an at your own pace learning from full resources, and possible still allowing a grading system might also still be better... I don't know the answer... A unique exam for every subject updated every 3 months, and only a single go every 3 months... and a way to prove it's your own work? Because it's online, they should be able to do all the work once, and build up a corpus of knowledge around that course... Then update the course videos only as improvements... Maybe lock forums until you complete a section? Or have open and locked forums, make sure all 'secret' information is in the locked forums? It's an interesting problem really. Bullshit... you get multiple goes at that... You showed it submitted correct... So, you got more questions wrong... and inflated your grade regardless... Go fuck yourself. Fuck YOU... it's best out of N tries... You PROVED you submitted it correct on at least one of those tries... The fact you left it wrong for your best score means nothing... It just means you fucked up two questions the time you used the correct one... Fuck off... it counts even though you didn't use it in your best attempt... So go fucking die... you would've used it too except to prove the point you aren't cheating... you didn't even consider it till I pointed it out... So, fuck you. It wasn't at the time you submitted it... So fuck you again... You weasel little fuck. It improved a baseline... u cheated $ Your worst possible score at the time was improved $ It's correct on at least one attempt, right? $ It's recorded on an attempt... that you got even more questions wrong on... but that one question was marked correct even if only an attempt that eventually didn't count... You fucking POSTED it remember, I've seen PROOF you posted this as correct in at least ONE attempt... EVEN IF YOU FUCKED UP THE OTHER QUESTIONS and it doesn't go to your final grade... In effect, you were quite happy to cheat until you were called out on it. Discussion is allowed... cheating like u is not $ You cheated, fuck you... point still stands... it's not censorship, you can discuss anything but the fucking answers to the quizzes/exams. It's in the rules you agreed to... So fuck you, fuck you, fuck you... It's cheating, not just giving you knowledge... it inflated your grade... even though you chose to lose that point later... it gave you a better baseline score to work from regardless... It may have enabled others to cheat too. You could have gotten your knowledge without that exact example. All in all, fuck you. It boosted your baseline... $ You posted it submitted correctly at least once $ I don't care... that is not my point... You happily entered it when you thought it would give you the best score, rather than waiting a week or so for the quiz to be closed and you could have talked about it all the fuck you wanted to. Only the *best* attempt in deadline in counted $ It was still cheating... It was a potential marginal improvement on your score at that time... Just post you getting ZERO on every quiz and exam from now on on all courses on all sites and PROVE that the grades mean nothing to you... Then I might consider you not such a low life cheating waste of space crack addled scum. Somehow, I bet you'll still be telling everyone how many courses you've passed and how great you are. You can learn without breaking the rules... $ Go post on the forums that you broke the rules... Then you can argue all you like... You sneak around the rules and break them as you like... Like when you acted lookout while someone steals from a business... Man up, say fuck the rules, and tell them you fuck the rules... Then fuck the rules to your hearts content, I don't give a fuck. Link me to the mooc forum post explaining you've broken the honour code and why... I'm pretty sure k5 doesn't count. Ie, prove a negative... You have proof positive, or you just being a weasel cunt again? Which is why you don't ask to prove a negative extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence... Correct, but no evidence means no proof... You made the claim, logically it falls on you to provide the evidence. LOL YEAH... DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK COP PLANTED THE CRACK ON ME I POSTED IT BUT THEY DELETED IT. Yup, lying weasel cunt bullshits again News @ 11 $ Proof or STFU $ I don't care to find it... right now it's just your claim... Doesn't mean very much. No, those certificates have value... You can show them to a prospective employer... You can also get signature track that is meant to be even more proof... Often the best students are offered jobs! Finally, there is talking of these courses counting towards real university credit. They are MUCH more than just personal achievement. It's not sucking up... It's a proof of value It enables employers who need skills to easily discriminate between those who have the skills and those who are ignorant crackhead waste of resources. Those with the skills can charge higher amounts, and get to work on interesting problems, and those who don't can get fucked... Employment profits both the employer and the employee, and society as a whole. Someone who exists purely due to the generosity of society cannot be expected to understand these concepts though. You happily spend that generosity on food/shelter/crack and therefore think everything gets done for free... You are wrong... all that shit you spend your money on... real people give up their time and effort for it for you.... fuck you again with a rake. Right... those issues are being address... signature track to prove they aren't forged... they are looking at offline exams maybe to prove you actually did the work... at the moment, yes, someone else could pretend to be you. Finally, there is work going on to make these courses accredited, meaning that they have the same value as real university courses... So, no, not the same value as a degree in the subject maybe... but value nonetheless. No they don't they can be the difference between no job and a very good paying job. Right... it should be punished... get it? $ You can't virt sandbox real world actions retard There were factors that motivated people to do this... just like thieving crackheads, if they think they can profit without getting punished for it, they will do it... So, the correct response is to punish harmful (they broke the free trade assumptions) behaviour. You're an idiot --- It will NEVER EVER be better at least for some people... Because that is in their UTILITY function. Yeah, bigger better TVs for everyone... EVERYONE wants to watch television... If only they were bigger, more immersive, more interactive... Who could possibly NOT want to be in a VR their whole lives... If you think everyone wants the same things from life, I got news for you. No I don't and nor do most economists... Or rather, they think that most people won't be able and WILLING to do what it takes to get a billion. When it comes to making choices, many people aren't that interested in making money vs the alternatives. Economists even have a technical name for this... (fuck you, too dumb to take the course to find out). OTOH, VERY few people would turn down a FREE billion. Calculate the cost your ignorant mf... Indexing an inflater factor is just going to make the inflation all that much worse. What you have to understand is that to an economist, money is absolutely worthless... Economics is about everything ELSE but money... Printing more money will not grow more grain, or build more roads, schools and houses. Challenge u to grow grain or build houses... Oh... we have a system that does that... Who's going to build houses in the meantime while everyone is smoking crack and 'challenging' themselves? Finally... How MUCH WILL IT COST!! Cheating, useless prick, so stupid can't even calculate the amount of money needed. No... stupid idea with no merit $ No, it exists... We try to make it serve us $ Is why cheaters should be punished and stripped of their qualifications... Like if someone posted a quiz question on k5 during the week the quiz was open... Maybe whoever hands out the certificates should revoke them from people who do stuff like that? Do wonder what they reckon Bob? I'm thinking of lodging a complaint against u bob and getting them to invalidate all your qualifications, across all the online unis. Not for breaking the rules, but trying to justify breaking them... You would have gained just as much knowledge waiting a week. This isn't about knowledge, its about cheating and credits... You would have lost nothing in terms of knowledge following the rules. You want to PROVE it to me... If only the LAST attempt on each quiz counts... Then, FAIL every quiz and exam from now on in that course... You will lose nothing in knowledge, you can attempt the quizzes and get full marks, then submit ZEROS for the rest of the course... Prove you care about the knowledge and not the recognition of completion. Otherwise, why would care if I narc on you? I can't possibly steal knowledge from you, can I? You gonna prove the qualifications are WORTHLESS... PROVE it. Just FAIL every quiz and exam... and NEVER get a successful qualification from a course again... That's all you have to do to prove the system means nothing to you. The very fact that you are using the fact that you have already PASSED this course as proof that the grading system is MEANINGLESS to you, is a contradiction too fucking wide to lol at. Also, they should take away your pass for the first time... cause you got a history of breaking the rules... But, you don't give a shit about the actual qualification do you, it's the knowledge you care about... Are you gonna tell them to invalidate your certs, or should I? Well then, you shouldn't get the benefits... I hope they do cancel your certificates. Also, you're now arguing that you want different things out of life than others... Goes directly against your other argument re VRs. And the choice to stay the fuck away from VR? $ And those who want to stay the fuck away from VR?$ If you are in a VR, and they are not... They will have infinitely more power than you... They can in fact, destroy your reality entirely, whilst you can do absolutely nothing. Next you say build AI defences... Guess what... now you're back to dealing with reality and you can't ignore it... you will have to break from the VR fantasy. How exactly? Their motivations might be fuck u $ No, because they don't want VR remember You need to learn the Red Queen Hypothesis of Biology to understand why anything that ignores the real world will disappear. You could be in a VR already... So being mean to you is fine. If you get inside a VR in this reality, by the above, it's fine to destroy you too... I'm sure I wouldn't have had the opportunities I have had without a stupid piece of paper... I'm not saying that these grades are the ONLY and COMPLETE way of judging a prospective employee's potential value, but to argue they mean nothing at all is absurd. I'm just saying they have some value... if even not very much at all. I think we agree on more than you realise... Just because I understand the free market doesn't mean I'm not actually very left leaning, almost socialist in fact. Although I know a lot of what I say sounds like I'm a apologist for unregulated capitalism doesn't mean that's what I'm advocating... Cause I really don't believe in unregulated capitalism... I just believe there is a place for capitalistic free markets... and other times, they need guidance. At least this is the impression I get what you think of me - but you don't normally confront me head on on topics, so I'm just guessing. Too complex for a moron like you to understand... Externalities, monopolies... And other market failures. You're too stupid to understand that you really mean devalue everyone else's currency. No, it really doesn't... Either the money they have will be worth less relative to the index, in which case, you realise you are indirectly decreasing other people's net worth (and worse, only decreasing the net worth of cash holders and savers)... OR... you will complain about the artificial scarcity of the fucking INDEX, which will be the only thing holding it's value... eventually everything get's prices in terms of the INDEX... and guess what... the fucking INDEX BECOMES the new currency you will complain about... Jesus... there was a course for you to understand basic supply and demand and how it works, it works with every fucking good and service known to economists... they are called LAWS for the same reason we have the LAWS of physics... you can't get around them... really! All macro courses ASSUME you understand micro... Otherwise macro really would be stabbing in the dark. No... It stopped the entire system collapsing Is what it did... It wasn't all "fuck hey this inflation is wonderful"... Savers, holders of cash and those who were promised cash all got burned hard in all these cases... Only if they switched to the index or indexed accounts were they then spared... but you can't do that if your bank won't hold an account in an index... So, you are completely fucking wrong... It certainly helps avoid total disaster, but will still completely destroy anyone's savings... I thought you were against taking things off people... that's what this does. Then if they created a new currency on the index, you'd cry again about the artificial scarcity in the indexed currency, when the underlying currency turns to shit. When 2M in an account goes from buying a very nice yacht to being able to buy you a second hand bicycle or a day old loaf of bread... It is pretty clear that you have lost something... Indexes do not help that situation... You wouldn't complain that the money wasn't artificially scarce anymore, because you would see how easy it was to get... it would be worthless... OTOH, you would be crying about the artificial scarcity of the index... Perhaps you would then suggest to print the index, and index the index??? Is that the plan genius? Supply and Demand you stupid fuck $ Supply and Demand you stupid fuck $ Oh look, supply and demand won $ There are more than 5 computers... therefore no $ You don't even agree with free markets so what the fuck are you even talking about? I don't believe in the assumptions of micro economics... Please SHUT THE FUCK UP about topics you are WILFULLY IGNORANT of. No, that is the fucking strawman, I never said otherwise... You are the one saying microeconomics don't real... Your failure is your lack of ability to model/predict the outcomes of such a scheme. Just reaching up your ass and pulling out a number and saying, lol gov can't run out of money, inflation can be indexed tralalala lol lol... We can all be billionares and pay on an index... So fucking stupid crazy and you can't see it. Your inability to understand utility is proof of your failure... He's not arguing FOR scarcity, he's saying WHEN there is scarcity (and there is plenty!)... Big difference... You don't even understand how he WOULD analyse wikipedia / open source, and all that other shit you don't see any scarcity in. No, he NEVER said that... They are interesting to economists... You're confusing something ELSE he said isn't interesting. And he's right, it's not interesting. Correct, u know fuck all about econ, and aren't interested in learning it, because it goes against you're RETARDED ECONOMIC IDEAS... So STFU about economics then... Either LEARN THE SUBJECT, or just admit you have ZERO FUCKING CLUE about the subject... Basic Income, is not an idea you can prove with PHYSICS. It is purely psychological... delusional. The greatest mistake in economics is to judge an idea on its intentions rather than its outcomes... I don't doubt you think basic income is humane, but you can't judge it on its intentions, so far it appears that it would likely crash entire societies... so no. FUCK YOU I DID... You'll need a basic education in microeconomic principles and http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/2/25/01356/0850/40#40 To START. FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT 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FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT 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FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT FAGGIT Do you understand the fundamental problem of econ is the distribution of resources? Not money, but resources. So, just fucking take a look at the sim so far and make sense of it. Which is agents value different stuff individually. At the start there is only so much 'stuff'... What is the best way to allocate the stuff... From here we will eventually extend to the creation of 'money'... consumption and production if you like... anything at all. In this scenario, everybody owns different stuff... Trade makes it possible for everyone to be better off than what they started with, and no one will be worse off... Actually, after all trades, no one can be better off without someone being worse off. I can say that without even finishing the code. Furthermore... if you wanted to put an abstract interface on them in which they can only answer a choice rationally of which group of items they want over another... I can model it with the agent's shown (ie, generate utility functions which will answer identically) -- up to a constant in their utility functions. So... do you care to implement Trade for these Agents? Or are you just going to blather on about someone else should do everything for you? The paper is a signal to the market... It helps with the imperfect information of employee value problem... So, yes, it has value to me, and I'm glad I've got it... I'm sure I'm better off that I would have been without it. And not just the knowledge, though that had a lot of value too. Whatever, trade is trade... simulate its benefits$ Who gives a shit at your lack of ability to analyse the situation... Nor is your existence QED^2 Now fuck off... Your inability to analyse anything is not proof of anything... You don't even realise that you ARE trading. So what? You're still a worthless idiot $ Nope $ Clearly, for an unemployable, yes it's nothing To someone who might want to show an employer they have some skills in something, maybe not... Or, maybe to someone who wants to cheat and then claim they already got the gold star so they can cheat this time round, might like the gold star. Just because you don't value something doesn't mean others don't value it... Kind of fundamental theory of both individual freedom and understanding utility. So, GET YOUR CERTS INVALIDATED or admit you find them valuable. Well... do you value them or not? Judging that you think what I posted matters, maybe it sounds like you... I dunno... how can I tell from what you say? YOU HAVEN'T SOLVED THE CERT PROBLEM... I already agree it's not IDEAL... but then not much in life is... So, UNTIL YOU HAVE A SOLUTION - AND THEY HAVE IMPLEMENTED IT --- DON'T FUCKING BREAK THE RULES. Damn your ignorant simulations... When you pick the first door, you choose the car 1 in 3 times... So, sticking with this door gives you: P(win &pipe; sticking) = 1/3 The remainder of the doors include the car in all other cases: P(win &pipe; in all other doors) = 2/3 When he removes the goat from the other doors, you are left with one door that must contain the car with the same probability... So, switching to that gives you: P(win &pipe; switch) = 2/3 When you flip a coin, you get P(sticking) = 0.5, and P(switch) = 0.5... So P(win&pipe;flip) = P(win&pipe;stick) * P(sticking) + P(win&pipe;switch) * P(switch) = 1/3*1/2 + 2/3*1/2 = 3/6 = 0.5 Flipping hasn't lowered your probability by changing the probabilities of the results of sticking or switching... It has averaged the probability distribution between the two strategies... if the coin chooses to stick, the probability of winning is 1/3, if it chooses to switch, the probability of winning has gone up to 2/3. You're welcome I find it interesting that proofs always seem to give much more insight beyond the mere results you get from simulations. Typical simulists mistake... Not my fault you can't maths... What the fuck is your problem? Do you want free money, but don't want to take it from others, which you will be doing in a manner you can't understand if they just print it for you... Or are you just a jealous little fuck that other people have better options than you? Do you really want to take options away from people like Del? Cause at the heart of it, that's where your 'philosophy' (stretching it) is heading towards. Otherwise, just be honest and say you think he has too much money and should be taxed a bit on it. Where can you rent your own yacht? I didn't know that was possible... Normally the owner will want to skipper, I would think? You linked these from k5... k5 has great google page rank... which is contagious. Also, the documents contain nearly every possible search term in existence... So it's not surprising it ends up in google search results... favicon thing is the little icons that show up in your browser tab... that's just a result of the people viewing the other documents in their browser. Hey... could you pm me on reddit or irc? have ya got a shell account for me? We can do a diffie hellman exchange if you want... Fuck you you underproductive waste of space greedy stupid fuckstain... I don't see you helping anyone, but you want everyone else's money... Go the fuck to hell. I don't have an email address for procrasti and can't be arsed setting one up... unless you know a provider that doesn't require an existing email address / verification / etc... procrasti@k5-stats.org for now can organise a some-domain later... I guess... yeah, password... so reddit or irc pm me? or diffie hellman exchange... fuck it this will be 'fun'... So, let the password be a 12 digit random number, you okay with that? Good... It's a secret key we will generate... The formula is... - I pick p, g and a, and send you p, g and A - You pick b, calculate s and send me B - I calculate s. Run the following code, it has p, g and A in it, and randomly chooses b... Send me B, and set the password to s. #!/usr/bin/python from random import randint def modexp(p, g, x): # Calculates r = (g * * x) % p r = 1 i = 0 while i<x:<br> r *= g r %= p i += 1 return r g = 5 # I like 5 print "g = ", g p = randint(123456789012, 1234567890123) p = 426774546057L # Checked as prime print "p = ", p a = randint(123456, 1234567) # print "a = ", a # This is a secret # A = (g * * a) % p A = modexp(p, g, a) A = 227314193209 # What I chose from my a print "A = ", A b = randint(123456, 1234567) # print "b = ", b # You don't need to know this # B = (g * * b) % p B = modexp(p, g, b) print "B = ", B # s = (A * * b) % p s = modexp(p, A, b) print "s = ", s # s = modexp(p, B, a) # print "scheck = ", s # You don't know a Yup... Just drop the <br> and make sure the r *= g lines up with the stuff below... Sry... Where's my B! pastebin: http://pastebin.com/cLKJ5vf8 WARNING - ERROR - I CAN CALCULATE a from A BAILOUT Maybe need much larger a and b... Then the modexp takes ages (but doable) to calculate... damn... Need to think more aboit it... New 128 bit prime and 512 bit keys http://pastebin.com/bX4XsZYD I left a subtle bug in there for you... Let me know if you spot it... Should be fixed now... (Might not have been a problem really, but not correct...) Dropped the secrets back to 128bits... no point in having secrets greater than the prime modulo... and I'm limited to 128 bits cause don't have a good prime number test for large primes... Latest version here: http://pastebin.com/yhpp6Xtg Here's the data you need... put this in a file and pipe it in, or enter it into the console: p = 31630565522145467762934225947951239313 # Checked as prime A = 7443212240536579009721346979198990154 # What I chose from my a Please respond with B and fingerprint. You got a cheap shell account, that means no ssh for me... damn... oh well... ftp is a start... can you install git or svn and a web code browser? LOL... cleartext password -- oh my. I get an SSL certificate error there... normal? I can't believe it worked, lol... At least the fingerprints matched! We should put up a reward for anyone who can get the password... Although I doubt it's possible. I got a password... Fuck it, I'll log in... if later u tell me the cert wasn't okay, we can redo it... And.... I'm logged in... Amazing... I fucking love Diffie Hellman How amazing is that... can shout all the numbers (except the secret ones) out in a public crowd and generate a shared secret that (by the current limits of number theory) cannot be calculated by anyone else... Actually... also, if each person treated their secret component as a secret key, I guess it could be used like a public key crypto system... everyone could put up their public secret component under a given p&g, and you could send encrypted messages to anyone else you know the public key off... I wonder if this lowers security... it's not normally used that way, normally once the secret is created it is used for one communication session, and then at least p, a and b are then discarded and new ones generated. I know the prob with the modexp calc It should be order the size of the secret keys (not order its value)... Then the best way to reverse engineer it is linear... dammit I've started, I'm gonna finish... gimma a bit... Anyone can do that... So, could impersonate me... LOL you're right... fuck your cleartext passwords... I want to do the diffie hellman exchange now... Damn that <br> come from? I checked, but couldn't find anything, ur wrong: proof. Other than the fact they are reneging on a promise This is actually a pretty good idea... Bank customers are essentially lending money to banks, they should take some responsibility in ensuring they are lending money to people who have the ability to pay it back. OTOH, the government can always print as much money as it wants and deficits don't matter. We can all be billionaires -- dare to live the dream! AIG has paid its loans back you know... So, some of this bailout stuff seems to be okay with hindsight... (I don't know if it has in total though). I agree with you, it's wrong to renege on a promise... the government of cyprus is shafting savers... It's a good policy in general though... It's the unilateral change in policy during a crisis that undermines confidence. OTOH, I don't know how a government is supposed to manage its economy when it doesn't control its currency... this would seem to be a problem for some countries using the euro. They can't inflate their debt away, for example. Still, it seems that if a government attempts to spend more than it gets, and it does this without limit, shit will eventually hit the fan. Fuck, they got a huge debt... 189%/GDP. (It's greece, right? this cyprus thing?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis Wonder what their net wealth is (citizens and gov)? Please note, this website appears region locked... So, feel free to publish the results here. I'm sure no one will mind. Consistently times out for me... chrome/firefox? $ OS X? I didn't know you were a faggot $ oh yeah, realized this too late $ Oooh oooh... do me! $ Doh... I mean mumble $ Do me!! pls $ At least I actually have an argument Unlike a thick shit like you who can just cry - he says ad homs about me... wah wah wah... what a pathetic piece of shit u are. LOL -- That's your total argument now... loser $ You are such a retard, why not... u have nothing $ Dipshit notices an insult, news at 11 $ Fuck sake... for someone who rallies against Econ You sure do go on a lot about it... You fucking retard... Again, yes you are -- you never actually argue Hi, One line avoidance tactics is the best I can do... Hi, I wonder why I'm an unemployable loser. Best you can do now crackhead? $ Coursera gave u an A in noticing insults - genius$ Poster boy for keeping drugs illegal $ Yes indeed you are... proven fact $ You need an L on your forehead $ That's y they threw u out of the library $ If only he had a basic income, then he'd be okay $ Whut? Wouldn't 99% of people just spend it on crack and hookers? You are totally off your nut if u think ppl will suddenly start working on science... Even you spend more time smoking crack than working on difficult problems... For those who are competent, we have research institutions that pay them. You're fucking crazy dude. No, you are retarded... $ You can't even think straight... crack 4 brains $ Clearly, you just skip the argument part and cry $ I did have an argument, u ignored it. copout is u$ My argument is Here and Here and Here. And this you call arguing... U R A LOLSER $ Because u have no argument perhaps? $ U literally have no argument... Point Point Point Fuck you retard Response: Oh no AdHom on me... You cry like a little bitch... little bitch $ Hi, I'm a little bitch who says Hi, I'm a bitch $ Gaddamn you are retarded Please claim economists don't understand this. There is ZERO motivation... None, nada, zilch... fuck all. Very few people are even interested in science, no matter how much money and spare time they have... You in crackland bro. They were all on basic income? $ You can't even do the maths. So no, won't work $ Do the math... Just show what it will cost $ Stop telling other ppl what to do... and live ur own fucking life. That was my point, yes $ Yes, apparently you are $ Yes, but you tell others what to do $ Proof: Hirez. Building regs will fuck your plans Unless you willing to spend stupid money on it. Karri Forest Tree House full of Nope for You http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester_Tree http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pffvDs69FtE Dammmit -- Second Tallest!!! Never even heard of the other one. More tree house than what the diary guy lived in but yeah... This video of the Dave Evans Tree has me noping pretty hard just watching it... Very nice platform with roof too when they get up there though (about 9mins). I've actually been to the gloucester tree... but I noped out before taking a single step... why go up a few feet just to turn back... and I would... how can those pegs hold people up, and there's too much room between them, you'd fall through for sure... gah! Yeah, those big trees, with a chainsaw, chisel and then sandpaper... build a house right in it, out of it. With a nice spiral stair case from the ground with walls so much safer... sounds like a plan. Good point... I have no idea WA is the western hemisphere's most nannyest state afaict... we make the poms look like they're living dangerously... so is odd they have this... then again, no one's ever died either afaik... so guess just tradition and tourism? Nannyism, one thing I hate about this country $ You get that troll from MMT guide to trolling? $ Do you get why this is so stupid? Guess not. $ I've noticed that trait is stronger in americans europeans and others are more likely to let you know what they are making... americans are more secretive about it. OTOH, some ppl have gotten quite weird and jealous after finding out what I earned, both with peers but even more so with the general population... So, I learnt to keep that info under wraps as I got older. Still, I probably quite low compared to wall street traders or entrepreneurs and stuff... temporarily embarrassed millionaire syndrom most hilariously successful psyops project ever perpetrated on a population. It's not the belief and fact that anyone can become anything (with ability, work and luck), it's the way the majority have been duped into consistently voting against their own interests. If you're not motivated and smart enough to be born to rich parents, you don't deserve the money and would probably just waste it anyway. LOL - MI answered it for me... but u ask nicely so an analogy: Anyone can be president... I'll let you complete the thought urself. Are there enough resources? Can everyone have their own luxury yacht now? Everyone their own 787? 100k acre plot of land with multistory mansion/castle? And I mean in reality, cause no way I want in on your strange VR fantasies... that's for weirdos who don't like the real world... Unless you want to force everyone in them. How much will it cost genius? Or you gonna tell me it's okay to just print the money and inflate the currency, then move to an index, and print that and inflate that, then index the index... Fuck sake... get real... How much will it cost to implement? It's not even a difficult calculation. LOL - U CAN'T MATH OR ECON $ TOTALLY RELAVENT DUDE I'VE CALCULATED HOW MUCH YOUR PLAN COSTS ALREADY... YOU CAN'T... SO NO. Why you need a basic income to challenge urself? Why not just be rich or have earned a lot so you can do what you want with your life like I did? I don't think you should get the same options as I have. You chose to waste your life smoking crack while I was out there making something of myself. You reap what you so sucker. It's not like your a victim of someone else's idiocy, your a victim of your own. Yuo culd tri economycs tho $ LOL -- That's ur sum knowledge of econ... LOL LOL$ LOL - fail at origin of that meme $ Nope, try again... dig deeper $ Try slavery retard $ Proof you are confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science LOL -- it's hard for a crackhead to believe ppl could earn their own money and have a good life enjoying it as a result hey... I mean... if someone's enjoying themselves it must be because they got it for nothing... Which is why you think ppl should give it to you for free too, amirite? I think it's quite normal to be sick for a bit when you first arrive somewhere totally new... happens to me quite often... You're immune system is down cause the stress of travel, lack of sleep, bad food and jet lag... Also, if you're on a plane your sharing the air with hundreds of people... and in new continents I also think their are local bugs that you might be exposed to for the first time. That's my theory anyway... I often get sick for a few days when I move hemispheres or to new countries/whatever. LOL - my subreddit is famous Now that I've pissed tdillo off with my comments about economics with trane, there's no one promoting it here... also, I should post something there sometime... damn... I got too much to do. People don't realise I'm actually quite busy on occasion. Isn't yur type of stupidity usually fatal? $ You sound like a christian fundamentalist arguing against evolution or the big bang to someone who has a clue. Complete misuse of concepts to argue points that make no sense in context of the theory, but you can't be swayed because your lack of knowledge makes you think you know exactly what you are talking about. You are Dunning-Kruger exemplified. That's great... People can read more about it here. Where did you pick up this meme from? What field of study do you think would be most interested in this particular problem? The bible? Didn't know it mentions perverse incentives. Yeah, see... you're view is basically religious which is why no one can take you seriously on econ topics... What you said is just absolute drivel actually... Well... I'm not going to point you in the right direction, you could learn about actual perverse incentives of the market... but I won't, cause you're a religious nutcase. Also, why would someone who believes that money is evil and utility measured in dollars creates perverse incentives want to give everyone free dollars? If utility can't be measured in dollars, then that also means that dollars have no utility... So, why would you want them? Nothing of what you says makes sense... I think you are just a jealous as fuck lazy and useless crack smoking mentally unhinged idiot. Shame you couldn't spend enough time to bother learning about how the market actually does fail rather than just assuming that it must in all cases. Ie, when it works for people's welfare and when it doesn't. You deserve your poverty and I hope your teeth hurt like hell till you decide to clean them properly with a winchester toothbrush. Talking of faith based axioms --- Nope wrong $ Try and solve the agent commodity distribution problem before making such ridiculous statements. Your head is so full of faith based axiomatic crap it's unbelievable. Infinite money for everyone would be no money for anyone. Given that money is completely artificial, that implies money without artificial scarcity is in fact completely worthless. Shame your such a crackhead retard with ideas so far above your station. No it's not... what you say is provably false $ Your lack of study does not make the truth straw $ Crying strawman is not argument skills its retard$ Because it's a number pulled from your arse... and you have no concept of the effect of this. Have you ever studied engineering or even high school level calculus? If you have, you will be familiar with the intermediate value theorem of continuous functions... One implication of this is that you can take things to their extreme to get an idea of how they behave in general... Going to infinite dollars, PROVES that dollars are devalued as you produce more of them... Which in turn proves there are limits to what you can reasonably do... So, besides - "It's a nice amount of money and I'd bound to be happy with that much", what basis do you have to chose 20k over just $20/year, $2k/year or $200k/year or $200 trillion per year? As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing... you have no clue. If you don't understand, more fool you $ It was indeed... my arse is smarter than you... To invalidate it, you must either assert that if everyone had infinite dollars they would still be meaningful, that the value of dollars is non-continuous with respect to the amount of them or otherwise refute the intermediate value theorem of calculus. So, just admit defeat and stfu, okay? The scientific approach would be to DISPROVE them The religious approach would be to claim they are faith based as an excuse to not even learn them. The scientist finds flaws in lamarckian evolution, the religious approach is to claim that the axioms of evolution are faith-based. Shut up, you should have worked and saved more $ So, you could offer him a job working for you? $ When I'm about to cum too soon... I just open my eyes and look at your momma's face. How do you who is a vegetarian at a party? Don't worry, they'll tell you. -1 Not about Modern Monetary Theory $ Why are you so hard for MMT? It is reasonably standard macro-economics from 1895. Why all this love for macro, after so strongly rejecting micro, when micro is the fully accepted knowledge on economics, and macro is the more contentious part? All MMT theorists accept the marginal utility theory of micro, you understand that, right? They know unlimited/unnecessary government spending leads to inflation... you know that too right? You should have taken the micro courses, then the macro course coming up this month, then delved into MMT, and you would have a very good/strong/well rounded basis of economic understanding at that point. Then you disagree with MMT All MMT theorists agree with micro-economics... You're just a mentally ill mentally defective... I do you more harm than help. I've wasted too much time on you, and given you too much credit. No, you're just mentally defective Why does MMT say deficits don't matter? You don't know. Does MMT say governments can spend without limit or consequence. No, it doesn't. Why? Cause you're an idiot mentally ill person who shouldn't be engaged in conversation with. MMT DOES NOT SAY THAT RETARD GIVE UP ON MMT... It disagrees with your axioms $ IE, the BASIS of MMT... Fucking retard, LOL -- Now you're going to improve on MMT with no basis in micro... my god, I've never seen such powerful retard I disagree with that assumption $ I disagree with you axioms I DID write a program to prove micro econ for you, but you rejected it without study So GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU USELESS PIECE OF MENTALLY DERANGED SHIT FOR BRAINS That isn't the immediate application / purpose $ The problem it solves is resource allocation... So, maybe when it comes to creating AIs to solve particular problems, calculating the best AI to create at a particular moment, how much CPU time and memory to give it, when has it outlived its usefulness... So, not the immediate application, but maybe... Also if you want to understand perverse incentives generated by the market. No YUO have no basis in reality $ Bitch Please Trane don't have a clue what u talking about... Barter? Dollars? WTF? That's all just artificial scarcity far's he's concerned. You're just an ignorant motherfucker being mean to your employers so you can go home and gloat how much better off you are than them because you didn't pay them more than you make. Government can make as much dollars as it likes and not tax anyone, and inflation is just psychological and there's no need to raise prices... And MOOCs have no cost, and time is free, etc... How can governments run out of their own money? There's no need to tax anyone. You're the 2nd highest paid employee of your own company? Proof you are a selfish ignorant MF. You should be paying your employees more than the company makes each... Selfish prick. You confuse economic with financial value Economic value includes the fact that you're such a nice guy to work for. Value means a lot of things to economists... and has been of great debate over its history. It isn't market price, we assume that's a lower bound... otherwise you wouldn't buy it! You also know your employers give up less value than they are paid (cost)... again, otherwise they wouldn't do it. One concept that explains it well is opportunity costs... which is, what was the next best alternative forgone... So, for your employers, their next best alternative forgone might be a job that pays quite a bit more... but overall, for whatever reason, they decide to stay with you... so the value of your job to them is at least the other job with the higher pay rate... So no, financial value, or accounting value, is not the same as economic value. In other words 5x current pay is out of reach $ I'm really sure you're not talking about information asymmetry. Are you saying these guys could get better paid jobs, they just don't know it? Like if they just said, give me $200k, they'd have it? I don't think that's the actual factor. If they don't have the interviewing skills/whatever, that's not info asymmetry, that's lack of skills, or demand for them. As for the bandwidth, I think you're talking about price differentiation, not info asymmetry. price discrimination, i meant $ According to you, all you have to do is ask... I doubt this is reality... More like, price discrimination works where different people are willing to pay different prices... in fact, it doesn't work except in this situation. If they even could pay 1/5th... Consider two canonical price discriminators, airline industry, used car sales... It's not like they say, here's the price... you say, 1/5th, and they go, okay, then have at it... The airlines don't accept counter offers at all... once they can put you in a pricing category, you're stuck with it, or choose another flight altogether... Used car salesmen will accept some amount of haggling, but plenty of people take the list price, and the salesman knows there's a price he won't go below, and quite likely a price he won't go below for you. This is not information asymmetry... the consumer knows (roughly, okay, maybe not with used cars) the product he's getting, and he knows what else is available on the market... But the producer discriminates in price anyway. Hey... on a related note, you should know that the profit for all competitive free market firms tends to zero over time... The best business you can have would be a perfectly price discriminating monopoly, but failing that, monopolistic competition does fairly well too (ie, branding... create a brand so that people think they are getting more than just the product they purchase... cocacola isn't going out of business anytime soon). So things that could help you, branding, price discrimination and bundling are all options you could look into. No, that isn't information asymmetry Information asymmetry is selling a car as being in good condition when you know its a lemon. Information asymmetry is selling unlimited bandwidth and then capping it. Information asymmetry is all about the difference in knowledge of the product or details of the contract. Price discrimination, which you are describing, has nothing to do with information asymmetry. As seen in the airline industry, you know perfectly well what you are getting into, but the airline can price you differently depending on when/how you book your tickets. What you are talking about is simple price discrimination. You know what you are getting, but they are trying to determine what they can get you to pay for it. Rich lazy people, or very large companies will eat the higher prices, those who have to haggle probably won't). One interesting thing about price discrimination, it is one way to enable monopolies to produce competitive market quantities (they don't have to stop producing at a lower quantity, because they don't have to lock everyone into the same price, so they can still get monopolistic prices from those who will pay them, and competitive prices from those who won't). (This reduces a type of market dead weight loss, though the benefits go mostly to the monopolist). No it is not... Simply because that is not the DEFINITION of information asymmetry. I see what you are getting at, but it simply wrong. Haggling is a form of price discrimination and does not imply information asymmetry which only applies to knowledge of the quality or type of good being exchanged. In fact, haggling can still occur when you are completely aware of the market pricing (which might always involve haggling for that type of good). Yeah, labour theory of value is out of fashion and with good reason too. Utility is the key in modern economics... this isn't even related (directly) to price. Consider prison work of breaking big rocks into little rocks... Little rocks have little utility, so you can do a lot of work and produce very little value. OTOH, water is very valuable to all humans... even when it doesn't take any work to obtain it... It has a very high utility (otherwise death!)... but when it is abundant, it costs very little (price isn't value either). Economists have different opinions on consumer vs producer surpluses, but all agree on social surplus being crucial... is why allowing monopolies to price discriminate is often seen as a benefit, because it leads to greater social surplus (although the monopoly gets it all). Imagine a world of one single firm that produces everything with perfect price discrimination... There would be no consumer surplus at all... but if that firm was equally owned by all consumers, it really would lead to a high equality optimal distribution... This isn't a case of asymmetric info... Often times the employers don't know how good they are either... Also, you have no soln to this problem... In fact, solving this problem would be solving the lottery ticket problem -- why waste money on all the losing lottery tickets when you can just spend a lot more on the winning lottery ticket. This is just a fact of life, not a distortion or a market failure. Also, 'you're great to work for' was a bit of a jk You have things like, stability, loyalty, attachment to projects/company due to personal sense of achievement, location, social connections, difficulty applying for new jobs while currently working, lack of ability to achieve higher paid jobs, ignorance of better jobs, etc, etc, etc. A whole heap of possible intangible reasons they prefer to stay than leave for a possibly higher wage. You can point an Ign MF at a coursera course but you can't make him think. Thanks for proving that to everyone. You are the MOST ignorant MF I have ever seen True ignorance of reality. No -- I don't feel compelled to argue topics I am ignorant of... That is something I only see in you. Hi, I think DMB is a flaw lolololol $ enlighten me then... Oh you can't... you think decreasing marginal benefits is a flaw, rather than FUCKING OBVIOUS TO ANYONE WHO THINKS ABOUT THE IMPLICATIONS. No, exploding marginal benefits would lead to an infinite consumption, within resource constraints, of a ONE SINGLE GOOD - to the exclusion of all other goods. This is not generally observed, people tend to consume a basket of goods... a certain amount of each good, and then they get no more of it (at a given instant in time)... Without DMB, you wouldn't get this behaviour. Bayes might be able to help you Bayes Says: P(A&pipe;B) = P(B&pipe;A) * P(A) / P(B) so: P(Crawford&pipe;Word) = P(Word&pipe;Crawford) * P(Crawford) / P(Word) Therefore, over all words, find the maximum of P(Crawford&pipe;Word)... High probability words will be lower than low probability words that crawford uses often... P(Crawford) is fixed... So, you just want the max of P(Word&pipe;Crawford) / P(Word)... In other words, what unusual words does crawford use most often. Yep, quite literally if you're not interested in the actual probabilities, just the most probable words used by crawford, simply take the frequency a word is used by crawford, and divide by the frequency a word is used in general... take top most 50. We normally add k (usually 1, or a constant, known as laplace smoothing to the top, and k*N (where N is the number of words in total)... This is because we assume in the prior, that we haven't seen all examples... I don't know how important this is, can try different smoothing constants and see if it makes a difference, probably won't. I've been trolled into writing so much code and proofs by Trane and his "let's build simulators to prove it" troll, just to be totally ignored, that I'm a little annoyed at the moment... still... fuckit... if u give me crawfords frequency list, I'll have a quick stab at it anyway. Didn't work... I don't know what went wrong. tr -sc "A-Za-z'" "n" Should be: tr -sc "A-Za-z'" " " K5 Autoformat fucked it up... okay. Some quick results: I think I'm using laplace smoothing correctly, not 100% sure though... ~/src/k5/bayes$ ./bayes.py Using k: 0.01 N: 12116 tips libmdc googleads gif webmaster pointer png developers inventions work well extensions subclassing services manner machack gawker doubleclick commonly kernel slides people html clue puzzling other completely solid dulcineatech jpg assert art desperately images result entire flatly redirect whatsoever fifteen pointed carefully manifestos fifty replied one's specifically member htaccess clued ~/src/k5/bayes$ ./bayes.py Using k: 0.0 N: 12116 youu younguns yetbut yahoomyweb wssuite wssplash wsilogo wred woulod workingspw woodies woodcut wondeful witha wildy webservers webring waterhole wallked visitors' vcss usss unsophisticaed unmistakeable unleavened uninvitedly undergardment underachievement undburned uncountable uncomprehending uncombed unbidden uidaho ucia ubleclick typewritten typekit tuurned truncation tranmitted tranmission tought topsoil tiller thronged thouroughly thoughtless thoose thickened ~/src/k5/bayes$ ./bayes.py Using k: 1.0 N: 12116 people well work other with that because who don't my to was of as very quite in so not a the are her for just from but would out have one all had is me than time their com then when completely she any could up or into way has Nah, an old one had lying around... Tell you what... I'll send you the code, is ugly, but hey... Requires two files... the overall corpus, and the individual user corpus... in WORD COUNT order on each line... Normally, you would adjust the laplace smoothing constant compared to an objective (utility) function -- say, the percentage correct classification of users by text... but I don't have an objective basis for choosing that just now. Here's the code: #!usr/bin/env python TOTAL_FREQ_FILE = "k5.freq.txt" USER_FREQ_FILE = "crawford.freq.txt" def make_word_count_dict(filename): f = open(filename) line = f.readline() result = {} while line: if len(line.split())==2: word = line.split()[0] count = int(line.split()[1]) result[word] = count # print word, count line = f.readline() f.close() return result k5dict = make_word_count_dict(TOTAL_FREQ_FILE) userdict = make_word_count_dict(USER_FREQ_FILE) N = len(userdict) k = 1.0 results = [] for word in userdict: if k5dict.has_key(word): results.append(((userdict[word]+k)*1.0(k5dict[word]+k*N), word)) results.sort() results.reverse() print "Using k:", k, "N:", N for i in range(50): print results[i][1], Fuck Autoformat results.append(((userdict[word]+k)*1.0 / (k5dict[word]+k*N), word)) Seems you are trying to make something like a markov bot... So the words sound like sentences crawford would say... That was what impressed me about the heuristic at first. What I've given you is words most likely to be used by crawford but not others... So, with very low k, you get words that are unique to crawford... crawfordian spelling mistakes mostly... At high k, you get words often used by crawford, like, 'that', 'the', 'to' and so on, but are also used quite often by others... Somewhere between you get words that he uses often and most often by him, but not others... tips, libmdc, googleads, webmaster -- if a comment has a few of these words, it is very likely to be a comment by crawford and nobody else. If you want sentences that sound like crawford, then actually markov chains are your best hope. Oh yeah, AutoMC, I remember I just now checked out wordle, it does it's own frequency analysis, so of course, with only single words you get a flat distribution. I wonder if restricting to words > length L would make for a more interesting list though. I want to look at the bayes soln a bit more, with the full corpus... Maybe using a base freq data like en.txt would be useful too... Also, change the function from (X+k)(Y+kN) to (X+k/N)(Y+k)... My original statement of choosing k equals about 1 makes more sense in this setting. I'll look at it more later. dammit autoformat (X+k) / (Y+kN) to (X + k/N) / (Y+k)... Right now, maybe k/N would be optimal, ie 1 / 12600 or so... far lower than 0.01 Sounds good, no promises... Can tidy that up a bit, and try the full corpus... Might be a few days. If not too much hassle, yeah, thanks. Can I put some of the econ stuff up too? Trane hasn't taken me up on the offer to host any of that for me. Fuck you and the axioms of statistical NLP No one agrees with the assumptions of NLP... I don't live by them, nor does mumble. Now fuck off and die. I disagree with the axioms $ Clearly, nobody else does that... say, give up after 1 unit because they do not understand the ideas being taught. I suggest you maintain your scepticism but attempt to learn the concepts as presented... Once you understand the concepts (which you don't appear to do), you will be in a far better situation to attack based on what they actually are, rather than what you assume them to be. What do you expect from a selfish cunt crackhead?$ You're a fan of economics all of a sudden? What is going on that an 1895 model of macro economics has you all excited and accepting the axioms of economics all of a sudden? I bet it's cause you think it's new... lol. No, 1895 is correct, Georg Friedrich Knapp $ Basically, MMT theory starts there in 1895... and hasn't changed all that much. Except to adopt the results of the Marginalist Revolution, and Monetarism philosophy. Yes, but physics can be seen in the big bang doesn't mean the theory was formed then. There's the problem with macro-econ... There are several competing theories that all explain history more or less equally well... Macro is the string theory of economics... Useful, because we don't have anything else... and we're all just waiting for the next crisis to invalidate aspects of all of them. The way stagflation in the 1970s invalidated keynesian economics and lead the way to monetarism. Micro is FAR easier to test, with any small population of people you can build an experiment to directly check it's results from hypothesis and observation... Macro, not so much... wait until countries collapse and explain retrospectively. Just so you can see where MMT fits in to standard economic theory: Economics can be split into two broad categories, microeconomics, which we have been looking at, and macroeconomics. There is very little argument within the schools of microeconomics, such that, almost all economists pretty much agree with the results of the neoclassical marginal value theories. Within macroeconomics are several various schools of thoughts... Milton Friedman expanded on Keynsian macro economics to form the school of thought known as monetarism. MMT appears to be a a parallel/related branch to that, known as Chartalism. You might want to read more on the history of macro-economics, just so you know what path you're going down, though I suspect you have chosen it on the basis that they appear to say 'spend spend spend, we can never run out of money' - lol. A macro-economist who doesn't understand micro-economics is headed for disaster regardless, and I think you're an idiot to chose an economics theory that matches your politics on surface similarities... still, knowing anything would be an improvement (but I suspect you will pick and chose your favourite parts, ignore the rest and still come across as an idiot). Perhaps, like I said, better than nothing but macro without micro is stupid... micro is the one part of economics all economists agree with. it's like a doctor who doesn't understand cells. No really... Humors is macro econ, cells in micro Micro econ is stuff like newtonian phsyics, macro is stuff like MBrane theory. You got no idea. Physicists and Biologists too You DON'T UNDERSTAND THE ASSUMPTIONS... Not, 'you don't live by' them... you just don't understand tham... HUGE DIFFERENCE THERE. That IS NOT AN ASSUMPTION EVEN FOR THE THEORY OF FREE TRADE... IT IS THE ONLY ONE THAT LEADS TO INTERESTING BEHAVIOUR SUCH THAT THE MODELS ARE ILLUMINATING. Interesting, as in... Why do you stop drinking water after a few glasses... Anything without decreasing marginal benefits, would be consumed until infinity... That is how retarded your opposition to that particular result is. Your failure to understand utility is not a failure of the model... The failure is you. Economics is not accounting, it is not finance, it is not commerce, it is not business. Ie, You are ignoring the costs because you ASSUME cost is price in ways that economists DO NOT, and you do not understand opportunity cost. You are confusing utility, with costs over times Moore's law is not about utility... Computers can be as fast or as slow as anything, it doesn't affect the benefit derived from computers or even benefit per clock cycle or however you want to measure it. These are examples of costs decreasing due to technological advances. The econ 4 scientists didn't go into modelling this, but there are models for it, and is generally accepted that technological improvements decrease cost over time and therefore total utility (benefit - cost) increases over time. decreasing marginal benefits are about the utility obtained from a quantity at a given point in time. For example, the faster your computer, and the more ram, the better... but as you increase both of these, at some point, it costs you more and more, and you get less and less benefit per improvement... The crossover point would be where you say, 3Ghz Quad Core and 16G of ram will do me just fine.... TODAY.... In a decade, that might a child's toy, not a serious computer. The problem is, you are attacking concepts without fully understanding them... Crack is one good I can imagine that doesn't and may have exploding marginal benefits at least regarding the decision utility. Ie, the more crack you have, the more likely you are to kill your parents to get more of it. So, no, it's not an assumption, just a very general case in almost all situations. Crack, possibly not... exploding marginal decision benefits might be a good reason to ban it though. By 'live by' do you mean, you do not 'think' like that, or you do not 'act' like that? You need an infinite amount of water to quench your thirst? An infinite amount of food to quench you hunger? An infinite amount of sleep to overcome tiredness? An infinite amount of crack -- possibly, yes. You do live by it, you just too stupid to see it $ You're Welcome --- No Charge $ Up until you showed up, I thought I was the only one here. Smooth SMS skills brah --- Asian? Hong Kong Mattress? Some Relevant Classic Aussie Rock for you. Would you like to know more about: A) Holographic Universe Theory B) Unpredictable Determinism - Chaos Theory C) Non discrete reality D) New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram E) Falsifiability F) Porn G) Dark Energy Stars H) or go fuck yourself? Oh, and fuck your many worlds theory too Afshare Experiment. I think they're all mostly fringe physics now... Dark Energy Stars I find quite satisfying though... Think about it... matter falls onto the event horizon of a black hole... but it can't cross the event horizon, by the laws of relativity... at the same time, the event horizon is growing... So, there must be some negative energy inside the black hole pushing against the infalling matter. Combine Dark Energy Stars with Holographic Universe, not only are we the shit at the edge of the universe, we are the matter falling onto the surface of our universe (The big bang is a black hole in reverse, right? Ie, maybe, inside of.)... This also explains the cosmological constant and the accelerating expansion of the universe. This shit is testable and falsifiable... So, even though it is fringe, it is all valid science. Dark Energy aka Cosmological Constant Explain why our own universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. Yes, if the dark energy star hypothesis is correct, one prediction would be an increase in mass-energy of the universe. For those who create negative externalities, yes $ I can't get a contact high from your farts $ LOL US gets UN to create drug treaty UN hassles US for breaking drug treaty. Suck it World Police. You have empirical proof about WoM? Also, Jobs didn't stop Woz... He actually increased Woz's options... Woz chose that option. Woz could still do his 'free' computing thing... it's just not as commercially successful. Yeah, we all know WoM is best bang for buck advertising, but it just doesn't scale like big adverts on telly do... WoM happens naturally, no need to fund it, as such, might not even be possible to fund it... but companies still pay the advertising companies, and that seems to have an effect on people's purchasing choices... Yes, Steve and Woz made a good pair... Trane was complaining that Woz would have been producing freeware for everyone if Steve hadn't 'corrupted' him... then again, I don't think anyone would know who Woz was without Steve. He wasn't revolutionary in the way Linus is, for example. Quite frankly, this whole economics stuff is getting very tiresome... Trane does not want to hear about reality, and I'm just wasting my time even talking about it. Yeah, poor Woz... how sad for him $$$ That's a stupid idea... An economist was involved. QED That looks like pretty standard macro economics So, what the fuck exactly are you talking about paradigm shifts? Of course macro is an important part of economics, but I think it important to get a good understanding of micro before attempting it... otherwise you get confused ideas, the likes of which Wise Cracker kindly demonstrated for us the other day. Yes it is valid... but he says some weird stuff including: The notion of a government running out of its own fiat currency is nonsensical. Which is not the problem... Also, the first part, where he says that taxes follow the issuance, isn't quite correct either, because without the taxes, as he pointed out, there is no demand... Ie, the taxes are the destroying part of the money creation part... The problem is things like inflation... It is well known the government can spend money it doesn't have... up to a point. you are a lazy stupid ignorant crackhead that should stfu. You should have read at least the first paragraph Attempting to spend beyond this point would be inflationary, and devalue the currency. This does appear to be standard macro economics... Now I've dissuaded you from reading it... stfu. Welcome to GMT+8 $ Yep -- busiest part of the day is from about 1am through to 9am or so... great if your an insomniac. He can trade each bitcoin in for about $30 now So, I'd say he's not doing too bad, if he's getting bitcoin for his services... At least the drug dealers at silk road are doing okay on it. Not true - they can, they don't have to $ Quantum Bits are an excuse to be mean $ I disagree with your axioms... but what the fuck are you talking about? Grades are artificially scarce so other people can tell those who got them apart from those who didn't... They reward those who can do the course as it is being given... They are merely an incentive system. The knowledge is freely available to you, is it not? You don't need grades for anything, do you? You can still do the quizzes, even if you get a zero effective score for them. What do you care that I go in the halls of fame and you are a nobody? How is that a problem? Also, no one is suggesting that you change your internal theory of value... but you now have no option than to realise that people are acting as if they are maximising a value function --- in everything they do, economic, financial or not... It's a mathematical fact, not psychological, not even weak in the sense of physics -- but actual maths. You'd be a fool to ignore it, but then again, look who you are. *assuming they are rational or else as if utility maximisation theory breaks down. When it's convienient to analyse the system like that... go ahead... You aren't providing a 'more right' answer you are just rejecting the theory that the earth and sun have anything to do with each other... If you want to roughly know the time of day, assuming the sun going round the earth isn't going to give you significantly different results than assuming the earth is rotating and going around the sun. Override Agent with words then... Are you going to use lexicographic ordering on your simulated items? You want to find out if that leads to all realistic results? Host my code for me, so I can work on it I'll post snippets, and let you put it together... I've given you an Agent... create them and print their total 'utility', and wonder how you could improve their situation without creating more items. (Of course 'utility' is unmeasurable except to some uber being that can see inside agent's heads, agents aren't really sure about it either) Just as a start, the most simple model you can imagine... Now, with the same code, and given the same set of items for every person... I think your idea of using words is intractable... but you can try it... At the very least, each agent must be able to answer one question: is_pareto(A, B) --> True/False is a bundle of goods A better than or equal to a bundle of goods B. IE, would I rather have choice A or B. If it is a rational agent, given 3 bundles A,B,C is_pareto(A, B) && is_pareto(B,C) ==> is_pareto(A,C). Now, if you want to skip the words stuff... consider what you can do to improve their lot... Barter is complex (how complex?). Utility is defined for an instant in time... So today, A>B, tomorrow B>A, no problem... Other variables change, no problem... but for an instant in time, with everything fixed, we assume it's fixed. Math's and biology might have problems that do not have an order... but... A>B && B>C ==> A>C is the definition of a rational agent in economics... One we can infer a utility function for... I'm not about to change it now... Not when looking at it at this level... of course, many do. There is some evidence that context and framing can lead to irrational choice behaviour... Also, there is a notion of expected utility, which uses a kind of lottery to determine utility, for situations you describe at the end... On the whole, I think it's a reasonable assumption not TOO far from reality. As you said, it's hard to come up with examples. You example of the gold/copper earth/moon is still a rational agent... For example, a guy just found in the desert after being there a few days... You offer him food, water or sleep... He's very thirsty... So he wants water... after enough water, he is no longer thirsty and would prefer food to water... after some food, he no longer wants either, he just wants to sleep and recover... He's a rational agent... My agents show this behaviour. Like I said, there are context and framing experiments to show humans are not fully rational... but they actually, experimentally, generally don't appear to be TOO far from rational. This is of course a large area of research in economics... So, it is not an assumption economists make... but... If humans are not rational, the first welfare theorem breaks, and free markets are no longer guaranteed to produce the optimal outcomes... I guess, if humans are wildly irrational, it would make sense for a rational government to tell humans exactly what, when and where they should consume and what prices they should pay and how much... Can't trust humans to make their own decisions, because if they are not rational, free trade markets do not work. Also, people get very confused by 'assumptions' that economists appear to make... There are four assumptions of free trade: 1) Agents are rational utility maximisers - described above (rational being the only requirement of course, being utility maximisers follows from that) - utility is a proxy to their welfare is an assumption in the concept of utility, ie, what people want is what is good for them, or rather, that their decision utility is identical to their experienced utility. 2) Perfect competition - every agent is a price taker and can't change the market price. 3) Perfect information - every agent knows exactly what they are getting from a trade. 4) No externalities - no agent's trade affects the utility function of any other agent not willingly involved in the trade. However, there are proofs that with these four assumptions, free markets lead to maximum efficiency pareto distributions (The first welfare theorem). (Pareto is interesting too, one guy with all the gold and one guy with all the shit is a pareto optimal distribution - but the second welfare theory addresses that). Maximum efficiency pareto distributions say that no one could be better off than they are without making someone worse off, everyone is at least as well off as without free trade, and the overall utility function is maximised. (overall utility is maximised -- think about it, that's a strong statement - over a very wide range of models). It isn't that economists believe that these assumptions are reality... far from it, it's just that we know, every time you break one of these assumptions, trade no longer leads to optimal outcomes (ie, agent's could have overall had greater utility, with none being worse off than originally - first welfare theorem) and the first welfare theorem breaks. They are not so much -- we assume people behave this way, but more, these are the necessary and sufficient conditions for trade to be optimal. We know that people aren't perfectly rational, monopolies are price makers not takers, that advertisers only care to alter our decision utilities but not our experienced utilities, firms will try to sell you fake or wrongly labelled goods, and that people will quite happily steal from you or dump shit on you if it makes them better off... The thing is, now we know what assumptions are necessary, we can actually show the difference between the outcomes generated by reality, and the outcomes that would have been generated by free trade, and then actually calculate the cost and benefits to consumers, producers and society as a whole -- society as a whole always ends up worse off than with free trade. We can see how irrational are humans, how much does this cost them? If monopolies are price makers, how much does this benefit monopolies, cost consumers and decrease overall social utility? If people pollute, how much does this cost society? If education benefits others than the teachers and the students, how much are we missing out in social utility if we just let the market to itself? That is the power of the assumptions, not that we believe they are reality... but rather, how does reality break those assumptions, and what does it cost us when it does. And here's my kicker - What are the ways we can intervene to fix it! Every time an assumption breaks, the first welfare theorem breaks, every time they hold, the first welfare theorem holds. Every time the first welfare theorem breaks, the assumptions have been broken. That is the power of the assumptions, not the belief that they model reality. Just for trane, finally... if agent's do not have diminishing marginal benefits... say, constant marginal benefits, they will only want the thing they want most, and they will want it all the time... They will always want water, and never to eat or sleep, no matter how much water they have... If only a few items had constant marginal benefits, they would stock up on the one they wanted most after the rest had dropped below that marginal benefit, and would only consume that after, up to their resource constraints... finally if something, like crack, had exploding marginal benefits, after a certain amount of consumption, you would only want to consume that to the exclusion of all else, water, food, sleep, friends, law all worthless - subject to resource constraints. I don't know if trane now wants to continue arguing for the exploding marginal benefits of crack. (and don't confuse with network effects). Also note, not an assumption required for the first welfare theorem. So, don't bash on economists by saying - lol the assumptions are false, there is no such thing as free trade lol... economists are so far ahead of you you have no idea. This isn't an unusual idea in mathematics or any other science either -- given assumptions A, B and C generate proof P... alter assumptions, how does that differ from the proof. (triangle's corners sum to 180o). They are the assumptions of /a/ model... The ideal model. Then we see the difference between the assumptions of the ideal model, and the more realistic model. Drugs - The experienced utility is lower than the decision utility... People consume more than what turns out is best for them... The dead weight loss (DWL, societal cost) is the difference between the two below the quantity consumed. A consumption tax brings these back in line. Monopolies - The monopolists benefit function is different to the competition benefit function, because the monopolist can 'predict' demand -- ie, the demand function becomes a component in the monopolists benefit function, beyond just an equilibrium criteria... This is one of the worst case DWL scenarios. Subsidising monopolists is a solution that can bring ideal price/quantity productions back (yes one answer is to subsidise monopolists -- hard to swallow!). (Nationalisation, government players and promoting competition helps too) -- The oligarchy model approaches perfect competition model at the square of the number of firms. It is one of the more complex problems actually. Imperfect information - actually does apply especially in contract law - a contract is only lawful if a reasonable person could have reasonably been expected to both read and understand the contract. Lying/misrepresenting about quality of goods is normally a fraud. But, yeah, there's a cost alright to stupidity. Labelling laws, quality regulators, stuff like that can help. The last example is a negative externality... (Esp the late night loud music parties affects everyone, not just those involved in the party willingly) -- The answer is a tax, say in the form of fines for late night loud music, which probably already exist. Just because a system is complex, and aspects of it are chaotic, does not mean everything about the system is chaotic and unpredictable... In the short term, price/quantities form an equilibrium, called the market clearing equilibrium (MCE) - prices above the MCE lead to surpluses (stock left on shelves/warehouses that no one wants to buy at that price), prices below the MCE lead to shortages (all the stock is gone and there's a line of people still wanting to buy)... In both cases there are incentives to tend towards the MCE. That's a very quick treatment of the sort of problems that economists actually study and are interested in - rather than the idea that economists just want to justify a certain notion of capitalism. One more thing... Every scientist who has proposed a model that successfully replaced the predecessors model, has thoroughly understood the predecessor model they replaced. Otherwise, it would be impossible for them to point out the flaws in the preceding model and how the proposed model improves upon it. You just want to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend no one would have to give up anything in order for you to gain something. As long as this is your viewpoint, go fuck yourself. Obviously not... you don't understand utility yet You still think we're modelling how people think!! Another thought game for you re Utility... Imagine a person who shuns money and all forms of wealth... He wants a life of peace and quiet, unburdened by material goods... Anything anyone else considers to have material value, he wants to go without. To an economist... This is an example of a RATIONAL* utility maximising agent... How can that be? That goes against all your preconceptions that you think economists mean when they talk about value and utility, correct? Firstly, rational agent is really a very non-binding concept... If an agent is given three options and can choose one, say options A, B and C... If the agent values A over B, and B over C, the only requirement that means he is rational is if would also choose A over C... if he chooses C over A... then there are problems. Other than that... The guy is a rational utility maximising agent, it is simply that his utility is the negative of 'material value'... maximising the negative is the same as minimising the positive... He has a utility function, and we can determine it by observation... Please, is it possible to argue against this in some way? Have you found an actual flaw at the base of economics that thousands of people have missed, or are you just not interested in actual thought or hard work about the problem of basic income that you wish to promote? You're all talk and no action. It doesn't matter HOW he things, it's irrelevant $ Ultimately, you're problem is that you are weak You want the world to work in a certain way... and will come up with the most ridiculous of excuses to ignore it... (Not much different to the catholic church arguing heliocentrism). In your case, you want it to work in such a way that the only reason you don't have anything is because everyone else is being mean and wants to see you suffer... You want it to work in such a way that if they just stopped being mean, you could be a lazy stupid asshole all you like, and still enjoy all the finer things in life... When you encounter a subject that says, this is actually how the world works (ie, we can observe, hypothesis, and successfully predict with the theory - until a better one comes along)... and that theory says, the reason you are a failure is because you are a lazy stupid asshole and that is why you can't have all the finer things... the problem is you and not others... Well... of course you reject the theory... even if it means arguing against mathematically provable statements... I'm not interested in this topic anymore... you make a statement about economics, I'm just going to point out to you are a lazy stupid ignorant crackhead that should stfu. It's not an adhominen... it is actually the reason you are wrong - in this case. The proof is you quit around unit 2 $ Congratulations on helping trane cheat on his MOOCs... So much for the 'honour' system... No honour amongst thieves, amirite? True... MOOCs can only offset ignorance not stupidity or laziness. Congrats... good score... Unit 4 is where you really start to get it though... and I mean all the homework for it too. You should really understand the benefits of free trade at that point. Later he proves that free trade (and the four assumptions that go with it) lead to maximum social outcomes - for some definition of maximum... But the rest of the course explores how you break those assumptions, how things go wrong - monopolies, oligopolies, monopolistic competition, externalities... and how they differ from the ideal. Seriously, there is a lot to learn there... and economics really is a shit subject, its some of the worst stuff you'd ever want to hear... but the more you break it apart, the more it seems to be a good approximation to reality. I want you to get to at least the second welfare theorem though, cause it really backs up my point about wealth taxes. Something from a dying website on wealth distribution. Oh right, just that you always go on about econ even though u haven't studied it... Tell me when you get a quantum computer and implement Shaw's algorithm on it... Tell me at what point you get past the artificial scarcity of qbits. See ya. Clearly I was talking about econ. Also, sorry I tried to explain stuff to you that is beyond you. On topic of qbits: If you get far enough to implement a quantum deep belief network... I'd be very interested... There's a ted talk out there somewhere, about using the D-WAVE (something like that), a partially entangled quantum computer (only neighbours) getting much better results with ML than traditional methods. Very promising. The thing about unit 4 is... IIRC, is where you get the point that the aggregate demand and supply curves come from the individual demand and supply curves, but they are really the differentials of the underlying utility functions... Which means: - that from observing price and quantity changes - and making the kind of assumptions we make in machine learning to make out of bound predictions, ie, guessing the curve from what we know about these curves in general and the data points we have - and extrapolating the aggregate demand supply curves, which are the differentials of the aggregate demand and producer utilities. - integrating gives us the aggregate consumer and supplier utility functions --- up to a constant! See, by observing what you do, we recover the utility function. The one we imagine you have, not the one you actually have, but one that is functionally identical in its expression through your behaviour - up to a constant. So, even if you get your Agents to think in words, given they are able to answer the question is bundle A better or as good as bundle B (do I keep A, or trade it for B) - and is RATIONAL... then I can calculate its utility function - up to a constant -- which I can define as ZERO for having nothing at all -- and it would answer the question identically. Imagine that! Again: Price doesn't have to be dollars! Stuff costs you time, effort, opportunity costs! Effective score is best of, right? You posted it as correct, so you got scored with it as correct. Not so much from a lack of understanding as falsely inflated grades diminishes the value of grading to those who don't cheat - and now appear worse than you, despite being better than you. The word is borrowed $ Maybe, but it's not what it IS doing today $ Actually... it does exactly the same thing in both cases... Lends them both money... Your economy is severely fucked... It's hard to understand how utterly fucked... But the gov is spending 1T more than it takes in in revenue, has a debt that can almost never be paid off, 6% of government spending is just paying the interest on the current debt, and the plan seems to be go into even further debt, and have even more money lent out at 0% interest... It WILL collapse at some point* ... so you might be lucky enough to experience hyperinflation for yourself one day. *: Probably when the rest of the world stops using US dollars because they realise the only thing funding the US is by indirectly taxing foreign US dollar holdings (by inflating them). Common sense would help a lot too... Yes, the fed is giving out 0% loans... you reduce the fed reserve interest rate when you want to stimulate an economy by creating more loans/money... How do you reduce 0% loans? You're very quickly running out of control mechanisms... Sounds good on paper. Got any calculations to back this up? Predict people's behaviour? Under what conditions would you personally give someone a negative interest loan? Under what conditions would a rational utility maximising entity make a loan at negative interest rates? What effect would this have on the demand for loans, and the supply of loans? How would this affect savings? How would this affect spending, the money supply, and prices of goods? How does this affect the risk of inflation? (inflation is still officially quite low, btw). How would this affect foreign investors and investment? Etc... Free money for accredited R&D teams, join one Unless you have a plan to ensure they are advancing technology to ensure our survival instead of masturbating and smoking crack in their basement all day... Money is a tool, a technology to help us trade and produce efficiently. The free market is the most efficient way of doing this. You don't know the First Welfare Theorem, or the free market assumptions that are required and how knowledge development might break those assumptions and what can be done to fix it. So, you don't have any valid theory at all and should be ignored. Absolutely, what are 0% Fed loans with 1-2% inflation the US is currently experiencing? Now try and answer the questions I asked above and come back to me with what that really means. You should read that a bit closer Nevertheless, it became obvious that the party was over. However perfect, the linkage machine itself was fueling the fire of inflation at an increasing pace. Inflation is a correction mechanism... try and work around it, generates more inflation. It really does matter though... The best way to index seamlessly, is price your goods in something other than what is inflating at incredible rates... As you saw in the article, lots of entities started pricing things in US dollars. So, when you see the price of bread quoted in Euros, and the cashier converts the value of Euros to Dollars on her calculator at the checkout... Yes, then you will know the US dollar has become useless... because you will no longer be thinking of prices in US dollars... you will be doing it in Euros instead. This is slightly more difficult for the government to do. Production costs rise at approx. the same rate $ Your problem is that you do not understand free market clearing price equilibriums. You didn't do the course, so you can't understand basic natural market operation... What you call psychological, is a natural consequence of free trade. Solve this problem on how to best distribute wealth, and you might begin to understand the relationship between value, scarcity and PRICE. Hint: Water is VERY VERY valuable... but doesn't cost very much... Money has literally no VALUE (except maybe to write on), except what you can trade it for. Not so much challenging as using as an excuse to ignore the work... In the later weeks, he tests various assumptions to reveal what happens when certain assumptions fail... Nothing beyond the ability of someone who has done the course to test the assumptions you complain about... Merely an excuse to keep your mind closed. Actually, I built that sim for you just so that you could actually test those assumptions... Starting with a very simplified world where people have an inventory and judge their own net worth by it. I was of course, hoping that you had done more of the course, so you could test the predictions of the course against a simulation... but whatever, my time's worth like nothing... disrespect it all you like. The Mutated Rats have started Double Posting $ The Mutated Rats have started Double Posting $ Even without lying it can be a kind of waste... Monopolistic Competition is based on branding, and it's results are even worse than monopolies and lead to even greater societal loss... The expense of brand creation is basically a total societal loss and the market forces result in monopolistic prices and clearing quantities... I heard that from some psychologist somewhere... I think. Do you believe in literal stamps on literal souls hanging out there is some other plane of existence that most people, and including all scientific effort so far, can't directly sense? Is that your hypothesis? Or do you take it on faith? Or have you seen these souls all stamped with their rightful place in a dream or something unprovable? No, dumbass... you're talking about patterns that are meaningless unless you know or assume a specific context... Science clearly understands letters you doofus... Does it now $ ok crazy "science only sees geometrical patterns but not the alphabet" dude... You should let the timecube guy know about some of your ideas. This is the kind of illogical nonsense you get when you include $GOD in your set of axioms. You mean: http://imgur.com/r/atheism/eiTTd or http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/ddg9hNFcA6k/mqdefault.jpg or http://www.atheistmemebase.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/175-God-Makes-Perfect- Sense.jpg ??? You can remove all that rubbish and come to similar (but not exact) conclusions, and still let gays do what the fuck they want without bitching at them all the time... If you just throw away that stupid axiom that there is any rhyme or reason to the shit you think $GOD does, and base your ideas on observable reality. In which way does relying on observable reality imply not relying on logic*? I think you failed logic. The only possible alternative is relying on an unnecessary extra untestable axiom. *: Or at least some probabilistic form of it. Some people like having money... You should try that economic sim I sent you to prove why. Go live in the forest $ Then you should have lived in a forest sooner $ Acshually Is Yuo $ How much wood is in your house? $ I have no idea, as much as they cut down? $ And you? Is the house the government pays for you to be in made of any parts of wood? Was it built where there once was forest? If so, it was YOUR FAULT (in part) that the logging industry is successful. KILL YOURSELF $ On one hand you talk about abundance and no artificial scarcity, on the other you complain people take more than they need and are destroying the planet... You could have sorted all these contradictions out quite easily... You are WRONG about economics... I think you are talking about business or commerce... Economics is EXACTLY about understanding the mechanisms that bring both positive and negative effects on society... Ie, NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES are an ECONOMICS THEOREM... that predict the invisible Mr Hands of the market, and come up with POLICIES to MITIGATE it. If you want to save the environment, the correct tool to understanding is in fact, economics. If you had listened to the lecturer He explained quite clearly, NO ECONOMIST believes that people ACTUALLY calculate UTILITY in their heads... Just that,they can be modelled, AS IF they WERE MAXIMISING SOME UTILITY FUNCTION. Therefore, I know that creating a clean park, IN AND OF ITSELF, has VALUE to YOU in particular. That's it... I don't believe you calculated a utility value or anything stupid like that... a priority queue of things you would accept/give up will do just as fine... but I know, whatever you got out of cleaning the park, that it made you feel a little bit better off, and therefore had VALUE to you. As it was a FREE TRADE... no harm was done, then SOCIETY BENEFITED TOO... just as economics predicts. I need NOTHING MORE to model that behaviour... You really haven't thought about it. Free will CANNOT OVERRIDE IT... Because it then simply becomes SOME other UTILITY function you are MAXIMISING. It was free trade, because NOBODY had to give up anything AGAINST their WILL... Those actions are net benefit to society AND YOURSELF. You traded time and effort for an outcome. Here's a model with NO MONEY in it that you can use. YOU DON'T HAVE TO THINK IN TERMS OF UTLITY AND TRADE FOR YOU TO BE TRADING AND MAXIMISING UTILITY. Please tell me it took you zero time and zero effort to 'clean the park'... I don't think you did fuck all at all -- otherwise you would have had to trade off something in what you could have been doing. Yes, they were maximising a utility function that wasn't as good as maximising another utility function... Where you FAIL is to think ECONOMICS is all about MONEY and CAPITALISTIC TRADE... It really isn't... On the fundamental level, at the origin of microeconomics... is the realisation, that if people have to make CHOICES... then NO MATTER WHAT FUNCTION THEY USE TO MAKE THOSE CHOICES it can be modelled AS IF it was a MAXIMISATION OF UTILITY FUNCTION. Can you get that? No matter what function you use to make choices... it is MATHEMATICALLY EQUIVALENT to a maximisation of some utility function. That is more air tight than the laws of physics... its MATHEMATICALLY PROVABLE... So, shut up, I fucking KNOW you don't THINK THAT WAY, but you can be ANALYSED EXACTLY AS IF YOU DO. End of, you lose, shut up and fuck off. Both AT&T and Kleinrock were acting AS IF they were maximising some utility function. Just stating it so KNOW it... Maybe not even their own OPTIMAL utility function, but whatever utility function they were using... Now... What is the most likely JOB for an economist? Working at a large bank? No... banks don't have much call for economists, they want business and commerce specialists... Most economists work for the GOVERNMENT... in shaping POLICY to help maximise GENERAL WELFARE. Same time again tomorrow? After you wipe your memory with crack, you gonna come back here and have the same argument with me, because maths is too difficult for you? See ya then. Now, read this before speaking out of ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility You will note: Utility is taken to be correlative to Desire or Want. It has been already argued that desires cannot be measured directly, but only indirectly, by the outward phenomena to which they give rise: and that in those cases with which economics is chiefly concerned the measure is found in the price which a person is willing to pay for the fulfilment or satisfaction of his desire. (Marshall 1920:78) So, now you know, for a fact... economists already know, you do not operate on the basis of a utility function - economists can't measure the utility function directly.... but we can INFER your utility function indirectly. I worked out the value to you to cleaning the campsite... If there was an IgMF handing out cash to people not to clean the park, because he likes seeing a park with litter in it... How much money would you have to be offered to have not cleaned those campsites? Alternatively, because you don't understand money, assume the IgMF was handing out crack instead of dollars, how many rocks would it take to leave the park a mess? The second it becomes cheaper to print than ship Those items will no longer be in the shipping containers... It's as simple as that. Again, you are living in fantasy land. Like unable to print 3d? do you know what u say? # Again, yes maybe somethings are too much Or go too far... But you still don't understand fundamentally why some granting of monopolies, like copyrights, are actually a good thing. That, when done correctly, can bring about benefits faster to everyone than under pure free trade market assumptions... See, I told you the assumptions are there for modelling certain situations, you adjust the assumptions, and look at the new effects... The 'diminishing marginal benefit' assumption was so simple to test, and predict the results of, that you would look like a total moron to an actual economist. How is moores law a cost/benefit? LOL Stupud Crack HEad LOL - It's a pure nonsense question... Like, in what way is gravity an increase in entropy... or something like that. You are such a failure... let's repeat What does the diminishing marginal benefit have to do with Moore's Law? ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING because moore's law states nothing about UTILITY or VALUE per QUANTITY you have... YES - ECONOMISTS predicted LONG BEFORE THE TRANSISTOR EXISTED that capitalist free trade causes costs to decrease over time and IMPROVEMENT in TECHNOLOGY... ie, Moore's Law is a restatement of the economic law of technological change! How much did a meg cost in the 80's, a gig in the 90's a terrabyte of ram in 2000 and petabyte in the 2010s? If RAM is abundant, how many petabytes of RAM do you have in your machine today? See motherfucker, no matter how much it has improved, it still remains SCARCE. My GOD... HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU That effect, the law of technological change over time... WAS PREDICTED BEFORE THE TRANSISTOR EXISTED. Yes YOU CAN DO MORE TODAY THAN YOU COULD YESTERDAY... but YOU STILL CAN'T DO EVERYTHING YOU COULD POSSIBLY WANT because WE ARE STILL WORKING ON THE TECHNOLOGY... that improves through FREE MARKET TRADE. Firstly, expected utility is not a term ever used Decision Utility, and Experienced Utility are. I guess whoever created it, HAD NO REASON AT ALL... and therefore didn't create it... Audacity is a figment of your imagination... Just FUCKING ONCE... TRY AND THINK LIKE AN ECONOMIST... and answer that question for me... What do you think the decision or experienced utility are of creating audacity was to the creators of audacity? Where was the value to them? You are too tight on your theory of trade... you are wrong... because you assume you need two people to trade... You trade your TIME AND EFFORT for the "because you love it, because it's fun" The next question is, WHY GIVE IT AWAY FOR FREE? Of COURSE its an ECONOMICS QUESTION!! LOL - YOU CAN'T SPITE ECONOMICS That's so stupid... Again... We don't assume you are thinking in terms of utility and trade... We measure you AS IF you were trading and maximising utility. Which you did... LOL... GO SPITE PHYSICS SOMETIME DOOFUS. BWHAHAHAHAHAHAH Oh dear... no wonder your a 50 year old failure in life. You detector is really slow $ I died several times in video games already... So I'm spiting death today. Pot, meet kettle $ LOL $ The FED only trades... just remember that $ Explain how they do 2 and 3 exactly? $ So, the second one is also trade, correct? And the third merely the requirements needed to trade with the fed... Correct? So, the Fed merely TRADES... EXACTLY as I first stated. I didn't say stock market trading Lending and Borrowing money are a form of trade. You effectively buy a loan when you lend, and sell a loan when you borrow. The final one, the reserve ratio is a requirement to be illegible to be a federally insured bank, ie, insured by the federal reserve itself. If you break that rule, you can no longer call yourself a bank under law... You can still do some things very similar to a bank tho, without involving the fed... You just can't call yourself a bank. They DO NOT CREATE MONEY, except as a side effect of the TRADE they are involved in - Lending Money. eligible* $ You are right about all the reserve stuff... Like I said, you stop being a bank... you get shut down as a bank... You can still do things if you are not bank that are very bank like though... It's simply the cost of being a federally insured bank. Now... You are simply wrong that borrowing and lending are not trade... They are, you only have to think about a loan as a type of good to see that it is identical to every other form of trade in existence... The only difference being that you can't eat or consume a loan, which is exactly the same situation as money. Lending and Borrowing are a form of trade in loans. I understand the effect on the money supply But this is not "creating money" in the sense that idiots like trane think it is money coming out of nowhere... Every dollar 'created' is backed by an creation of loans. True... the Fed can't resell its loans... But it is about the only institution that CAN'T resell its loans. In every other respect, it is identical to the free trade in loans. You can create money and add to the money supply if you buy loans (lend money), you can get 'deposits' by selling loans (borrowing money)... about the only thing you can't do is have deposit accounts, if you are not a bank... If you aren't the fed, about the only thing you can't do differently is set the requirements for other banks to be insured by you. The fed DO NOT 'create money' out of thin air for nothing... they TRADE money for loans... Jesus Christ you're as fucking stupid as trane They haven't created money out of thin air... I understand the money multiplier, etc... but here's the real kicker. EACH SINGLE DOLLAR HAS BEEN BACKED BY A LOAN. SOMEONE HAS PROMISED TO REPAY EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DOLLAR, PLUS SOME. The Fed plays this game with the banks, banks with its customers... There is absolutely NOTHING stopping YOU "creating" money in the same way too... NOTHING. Borrow Money, Lend Money -- Your creditors just aren't guaranteed by the fed... That's the only difference. First on changing the reserve amount That is money NOT created because it must be held in reserve AS A REQUIRMENT to get federal insurance of your deposits... Remove deposits, and treat them as they really are, LOANS TO the bank FROM CUSTOMERS... Run an (uninsured) credit company, directly with borrowed money and not deposits (functionally equivalent), and you can 'fractionally' lend the whole fucking lot... ie, run it with 0% reserve!! So, the so called 'created' money coming from changing the reserve level is only the difference between the 0% 'natural' reserve level and the INSURANCE REQUIREMENTS to be guaranteed by the fed. You can't just start (legally) borrowing and lending money at interest precisely because banks create money PURE 100% UNADULTERATED HORESECOCK GRADE BULLSHIT. You can... You just can't be a bank... You can't do it without certain regulations* to THE PUBLIC... but you can go ahead and do exactly that... *: Which are a totally different set of regulations required to be a BANK and take DEPOSITS... but money borrowing and lending are perfectly legal industries for an individual to carry out, and with a smidge of regulation, a business can too. (How do I know? I fucking own such a business). Money is "CREATED" as a TRADE for LOANS The zero percent thing leading to infinite money, maybe, but it's still not creating money out of nowhere because the fed decreases the reserve requirements. But I can't loan money to them in an interest bearing or demand deposit account. This is the fundamental difference... You can LOAN THEM MONEY THOUGH!!! So, in THEORY, there is NO DIFFERENCE. My random capitalisation is EMPHASIS for ASSHOLES. Then a button was pushed. This is my dispute... Money isn't created at the push of a button... It is done on the TRADE of a LOAN. You will see, when a bank does this, it creates TWO entries in its accounts... One for the money that can be withdrawn, and one for the money that it is now OWED. They sum approximately to ZERO. I'll repeat once more for you, because you seem to have difficulty understanding... EVERY DOLLAR IS BACKED BY AN EQUIVALENT LOAN. THERE IS NO 'FREE' MONEY. You are not explaining to me anything I don't already know. I've now answered this in the other thread... On the macro level, you are making the cost of money lower... But it is still just the sum effect of all the micro economics... Ie, every dollar is (aprox) backed by an equal amount of loans... Yes, you can adjust parameters to make more of that happen... Just like any other good/service. But the ONE THING it is NOT is FREE MONEY simply CREATED out of thin air... every time it's because someone promises to pay back a loan. And, if you think I'm arguing for no good reason, it's because people really do believe they simply PRINT money in exchange for NOTHING AT ALL - that somehow the government can just give people money for nothing because the 'Fed prints money'. You also skipped a step They buy a car (or product) with the loan, and person who sold the car puts the money in their bank and the process repeats... It is still not 'printing money'... By the way... the reserve rate, is part of the insurance deal with the fed... Which is why I keep mentioning insurance... Its natural level would be approximately zero (give or take what you need to avoid a bank run)... So, that was point 3... the reserve rate is just a requirement to trade with the fed (ie, get federal insurance, be able to call yourself a bank, create deposit accounts, etc...) You could set up your own very similar situation... of course scale matters and regulations might require a lot of work arounds -- so you might not be as efficient, and the big guys will make it even more difficult than necessary, etc. I've been thinking that a bitcoin reserve/fractional lending system would be very interesting. So, really... end of discussion... exactly as I originally stated -- the fed merely trades. Why the fuck do you think there is a reserve? $ I accept your apology. Just so you know... The FDIC is the actual branch that manages the insurance, but being an FDIC bank is just the insurance deal required to trade with the Fed Reserve... and the reserve amount set by the Fed Reserve is the reserve amount required by the FDIC to be insured by them... You see.. same fucking thing. Otherwise, the Fed changing their reserve requirements wouldn't cause banks to go insolvent, would it now, you economics genius? I just wanted to hear you scream UNCLE $ If you prefer to be wrong than admit it, fine $ Cause actually, you turned out to be wrong at every point. Just FYI: Bernanke was talking about 'in exchange for loans'... The same bit you and trane seem to be missing. Yes, you are correct... On a macro level, that is what is happening, it also increasing the number of loans created, but it is happening because on the micro-economic level, you are making the cost of money lower. It is certainly not creating free money of any form. And there's nothing automatic about the loans They are predictable though... the same way you can predict the number of apples that will be produced given a certain subsidy... it's just different parameters they can adjust, and the effects are relatively predictable, but that predictability is nothing like automatic. The great thing about economics is that even the most ignorant are happy to tell you their own views on the subject. I doubt you have an actual criticism against my analysis. You're the type of idiot who thinks if something can be easily predicted on a macro level, that it happens 'automatically' on the micro level... WORLD DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. Really... you are the failure at both macro and micro if that's how you think it works... Maybe your macro lecturer used the words 'happens automatically', like the invisible hand, and you took it literally... Well... it is not how it works. Get real. One more proof of your failure to understand the difference of marco and micro and when you can apply them. Adjust the Fed parameters to 'create at the push of a button' say, a small amount like 25M more than they would normally create.... Okay, done automatically through the magic of macro economics... Now, give that 25M to trane... Oh shit, NOT POSSIBLE, because the money was created in a distributed fashion through micro-economic transactions creating a macro-economic effect through macro-economic manipulation... Oh dear... not so simple as 'creating M dollars and giving it to entity X'. Got it yet? Also, requirement for a secondary market is bullshit... is not a requirement of free trade. By eat, I meant directly... Money is worthless except what you can trade it for... As are loans in some sense. You don't understand what free trade is otherwise you wouldn't have to go back to wiki to try and understand it... Point 3 is the relevant point... now I prove you wrong that secondary markets are not a requirement. I'll give you shiny coin for a blowjob. That is free trade... Now I sell the blowjob on a secondary market... Oh no... I don't 'own' the blowjob. Trade (not even free, as I didn't initially state that) is simply when people can come to mutually beneficial agreement to a transaction... Loans fit this definition just fine. Sorry.... I see your last para now... yep... okay... is it unfree? Possibly... but I'm not 100% sure... You can't take deposits if you are not a bank... that is about the only limitation I can think of that is different to personally running an uninsured loan company... even then, borrowing acts as a kind of a deposit. Then you don't have to worry about things like fractional requirements... you can fractional lend to your heart's content. I don't really see the monopoly/regulation/distortionary problems that separate it from free trade... Except for the right to hold deposits... And that's only a legal veil pasting over the fact that you are lending banks money. Dude, you are the one who fails... Do you still think a secondary market is required? Do you still think the fed does things other than trade? Do you still think that a predictable macro economic response means things happen actually automatically on the micro level? Do you still think the Fed simply 'creates' money at the 'push of a button'? Do you still think the FDIC reserve requirements are different to the Fed reserve requirements? LOL - you don't have clue... and sholden will not fall for your incorrect rewriting of the wiki article to suggest that a secondary market is a requirment of free trade... shit, you think full market information means knowing everyone's bank details.... lol retard Apparently he does still think that. And even linked to the wiki article and added conditions to it because he doesn't understand what the original conditions actually mean. Just another one in a long line of very confused would be economists. No it doesn't... you are so fucking retarded... It LENDS money... That's it... It's a ZERO SUM TRANSACTION... except for the interest rates. YOU TOO CAN CREATE MONEY... IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY!!! HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU THIS? WTF ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT? $ Yes I do $ Except you are wrong about the creating dollars... other than that... yes, the government should have certain rights that individuals do not... Such as the right to tax people... But you're an idiot, argue what u like $ I think you underestimate the energy savings in a spring return system. It's the reason kangaroos travel so fast hopping, and dolphins swim so fast. We don't have a spring energy return system in our legs naturally. And how difficult is it to adapt these a tiny bit to fully obtain the effect? They might say that it compensates for an ankle, but it looked pretty springy to me. Don't worry, Trane's argument is on its last legs. You should look at maintenance programs They have a much higher success rate than methodone treatments as far as getting people back to work and living 'normal' lives. Oh... don't worry... You're ignorant of that... and my posts... well done. This is a rule the english language got wrong Their, I said it. I too remember my first job fondly $ MOOCS require effort -- lots of people are lazy $ And yet you chose not to do a particular one and have no theory to back it... Because, unlike an economist, you can't understand non-financial costs are costs. Burn down those strawmen. Within the next few decades only $ No - Shut Up You agreed to stop being ignorant and shut up about economics and just post about your lovely drives in the countryside... You know, things you know about. And you still can't name one!! I know trane is based on crack axioms. No one said it IS an actual number... Its very difficult for a crack head to understand... You behave AS IF it was a number... the theory is very clear and specific about that... the number of course comes from what you trade to obtain it. For example... how many hours would you put into an online class is a number... and it depends on how you value your hours and what you think you will get from the specific course... From this it follows the utility you placed on the econ course was LESS than the time required to do it. Up to the second you have to spend something to gain something... then we can measure it as a number. You can measure it in many ways... How many dollars does it save the economy that weren't spend on MS Office? Let me help you with something... We don't necessarily measure the utility directly... Most often it is extrapolated amongst enormous groups of people buying and selling different quantities and different prices... As you said, utility is PERSONAL value, not ANYBODY ELSES... The UTILITY of the TOOL is WHATEVER VALUE YOU GET from it... Even when we DON'T MEASURE it DIRECTLY, we can STILL ASSUME it... For example: If you DIDN'T get value from using the tool --- GUESS WHAT AN ECONOMIST WOULD PREDICT YOU WOULD DO WITH THAT TOOL? I'll help: YOU WOULDN'T USE IT... The fact you use it, PROVES it has VALUE to you. How HARD is that to UNDERSTAND? The value providing the tool is DIFFERENT utility that the value from USING the tool. The provider (open source software writers) get VALUE from creating it... (fame, skills, knowledge, goodfeel) USERS get VALUE from using it... (graphs, reports, learning from experiments using the tool, etc)... Someone can provide tools all day for great (non-financial) value to them... even if no one in the world ever uses it, because it has no value to them. You've quite before finishing unit 2, and you didn't even understand that correctly. WTF --- I didn't read your whole comment... THEY FUCKING MEASURED IT THERE FOR YOU, WHY ASK ME A QUESTION TO AN ANSWER THAT ALREADY EXISTS USING THE EXACT METHOD I SUGGESTED? HOW FUCKING RETARDED ARE YOU MR I HAVE NO FUNCTIONING NEURONS JUST WORDS IN MY HEAD? Trane Spotting: oh no... It's still alive, kill it with fire. Ummmm... scarcity doesn't alter value/utility it alters price... yeah... I'm real depressed about reddit's lack of market success. Clearly reddit has failed. LOL -- you just want to spout rubbish about free money and not have anyone point out your glaring lack of understanding. Go join holly and install the ignore user script. It's a lot easier than understanding your own failures. Quote her arguing against utility theory? $ Who gives a shit... you haven't even covered the very basics of economics yet... To be getting to such great heights without even understanding the fundamentals. Let's see her argue a trane point, like how scarcity doesn't exist, or utility doesn't exist, or time isn't an economic resource, or against maximising utility... etc... There are times when they do, and times when they don't... It's as simple as that... I'm not going to debate it with you, because you are an idiot. If you want to give every 25k/year, you will add half your existing national debt every year... There comes a point when the debt does matter... You just don't know when or why. No it doesn't! Trane's idea of what economics should be about denies this diary has any value... Normal economists don't think that way... Only retards trying to build strawmen to burn down thinks that economics works that way. Give up on economics, you have no clue and chose never to have a clue... Stick with your pretty drives in the countryside and jazz music... stuff no one gives a shit about. Mine does $ You don't think it's encoded in neurons? Or neurons can't be modelled because they don't obey the laws of physics perhaps? Granted yours are pretty fried. Oh you have words in your head, not neurons that work together to make words? What are you, a broken ai? And so? You have neurons or crack for brains? $ You have to be trolling... Mendel doesn't have a utility function. We don't give a shit about Mendel economically anymore... he has no needs, no wants and isn't going to make anything any more. He did what he did, because he found it economically optimal. Now we benefit... That's how it works. It doesn't even go against the fundamentals model in unit 2!! WTF are you talking about? MONEY is not the UTILITY... UTILITY is UTILITY... He thought it the MOST USEFUL use of HIS RESOURCES to HIM, therefore economically optimal... end of... Neurons can do a whole lot more than words too Neurons can track and recognise objects, control muscle movement... even drive robot arms directly... Words can be produced, interpreted and recombined by neurons... They cannot do that themselves... Now, to argue you don't have a value in your head is to argue that neurons can't be modelled as values... which is to say that they are magic things and not subject to the laws of physics... I'm sorry... physics argues in favour for utility theory. Actually, it's trivial to all economists... Except crackhead economists who make up their own version of economics so they have something to rally against... The one you get to define your own axioms for... and blame your troubles on. You spent an actual amount of time making it sounds like a number to me. The words are the benefit you obtain from spending TIME... Oh... and EFFORT that you mentioned yesterday $ Now you deny EFFORT has limits? Or you backtracking and claiming there is no effort involved at all ever? Utitlity is internal to an agent and not expressed directly to others, ever. #!/usr/bin/env python # The Crack Trane Economics Simulator # -- Now with multiple items # # Procrasti of Kuro5hin, all other rights reserved Feb 2013 import random from math import sqrt N_AGENTS = 10 # Number of agents N_ITEMS = 10 # Number of types of items W_ITEMS = 10 # Wealth endowments in number of items class Agent(object): def _init_(self, NItems=10, WItems=10): self.n_items = NItems self.value = [random.randint(0, NItems) for i in range(NItems)] self.quantity = [0 for i in range(NItems)] for i in range(WItems): self.quantity[random.randint(0, NItems-1)]+1 def get_value(self, item, quantity): v = self.value[item] return v*sqrt(quantity) def get_marginal_value(self, item, q, dq): return self.get_value(item, q+dq) - self.get_value(item, q) def calculate_wealth(self): w = 0.0 for i in range(self.n_items): w + self.get_value(i, self.quantity[i]) return w Well fix it... Should be obvious if you look at it for a bit and know python. autoformat striped += and turned it into +, beware of that. You still having problems with this? $ Holly's just trying to turn k5 ghey by making women appear to be horrible arrogant cunts, when in reality, there are actually a lot of nice women out there. +1 FP $ Lol you holly Attention Seeking Whore You lost u know -- you authoritarian monarch asskissing cryptofascist -- you want to take away people's right to self defence, you're dangerous. For your info... I don't really want too much to do with women right now... (sure they come around occasionally, but none more worthy of my time than k5) -- I'm here to torment, not to woo you... and I got spare time... Trane, you, anyone here... I got time enough to make comments at you - esp if I think ur stupid enough to need correction - and you do. sexually obsessive stalker posts OMG -- How can someone so ugly have such a hard on for themselves? My god... I don't think I've ever met a woman IRL so arrogant. Misogynistic, maybe, but sexually obsessive? Really? Single post as proof? No, didn't think so... hype yerself up there holly... no one else is going to do it for you. You got such a hard on for me... the amount of times u comment about me... I think u have a secret crush and won't admit it. It's the usual story, girl want's guy, girl talks shit about guy to both him and all her friends, girl gets drunk and drags guy home for freaky sex... girl cries he doesn't call her again. You know the one... it's the reason u got married, amirite? Victim Card: HALP I'VE BEEN TROLLED ON INTARNET Come see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed. Now I can troll you with impunity, good riddance. Lol -- don't discourage her... Getting her to install the greasemonkey script just for me will be one of the high watermarks of my k5 troll victories... Every time she looks at that plugin she will think of me and all her butt hurt... In the meantime, she can never rebut anything I say. It's enough to make me cum just thinking about it. Lol -- dance monkey dance It really is his fault his unshakeable self-certainty. Everything is someone else's fault. Of course, it's nothing to do with me... I've never actually wrong. This girl should go hang at /r/SRS and cry about how the patriarchy continues to oppress her with all the other 'feminists' broken by male privilege and their cruel use of words. I Declare it a Legendary Status Diary $ If you'd done the econ course, you would see how a monopoly has a different mathematical equilibrium price/quantity solution than a competitive firm. You would have also have learnt how this can be corrected. Nothing more than people maximising their own values. Just like a lazy crackhead who wants to do nothing and get free money, the network companies are no different. So, you say lots of people would collect rubbish for fun? That there are no jobs people wouldn't want to do without some form of incentive? That ISPs would spring up and bandwidth would be so cheap just for a laugh? Crack world sounds great. When you were sucking cock, were you doing it because you wanted to, or because it would get you crack? Economically Infeasible Solution Detected In the meantime motherfucker your garbage piles up. If it was feasible it would already exist It's practically the definition. If automated garbage removal was cheaper than people and possible today, we would have automated garbage removal and not garbage men. You, sir, are a retard wrapped in a moron wrapped in crackhead. Futhermore crackhead, I've been over this with you before... crack must be really brain damaging. Infeasible does not mean impossible, it means NOT YET POSSIBLE. Romans couldn't order an F18 to bomb their enemies... F18's were infeasible to them. To the US, they are relatively cheap. I'm not even ruling out any of your magic genies, never have, never will... but magic genies ARE NOT THE SOLUTION TO TODAY'S PROBLEMS. Automated garbage collection: Pay money to people who collect rubbish. Yes it is -- Capitalism does indeed work $ No -- you want to remove the incentives that drive And so there are no yous, mendels or van goghs $ HI, I NEVER STUDIED A SINGLE MODEL - PROBLEMS INCL Hi, I haven't tested increasing marginal benefits$ It gave those who did it, the tools required to test it themselves. That's why you are a failure... you expect everything to be spoonfed to you like an infant... Check the maths yourself. He laid out the standard model for analysing the majority of goods on the market. And gave you the tools to test the models... Testing increasing marginal benefits is well within the capability of anyone who completes the course --- but forever out of the reach of retard crackheads. Explain how the second ton of food for dinner is better than the first ton of food you eat at the same setting? LOL FAIL Explain how a user with increasing marginal benefits towards a product would behave? How much would they spend as a function of quantity consumed? Can you do it? No... why... because you gave up when you heard things you didn't want to hear. Actually... economics is a pretty sucky subject, and a lot of its difficulty is that it deals with the world as it actually is, and not how people would like the world to behave. It's like a free energy nutcase studying physics... they give up, because physics explains it is impossible, and it's not what they want to hear... but it is reality. Hi, One liners are the mark of integrity $ Hi, One Liners are FULL OF CONTENT $ Hi, I get ideas across in nine words $ Hi, My ideas are so lacking in thought I can expla HI, I'm projecting retard $ HI, I USE ONE LINERS WHEN I DON'T KNOW THE SUBJECT Hi, EXACTLY $ You do not understand the free market free market IS OPPOSITE of feudal market. No -- it's doing exactly what the king tells you.. Which is what was happening before Adam Smith came up with free market theory. Artificial scarcity might exist somewhere, I don't care... There's no point talking to it with someone who thinks there is an infinite amount of oil in the ground - and infinite amount of air and rivers to pollute with its byproducts. False ASSUMPTION $ Ceteris paribus $ See... you would be a crackhead to suggest running an experiment BEFORE that knowledge was known... That is the fundamental problem with your magic genie solutions to everything. Such experiments were infeasible, suddenly became feasible... you act like economists are too stupid to understand that --- I guess because you're too stupid to understand economics. Hi, My thoughts are simplistic and content free $ HI, this cliche will explain everything $ HI, I THINK TELEPATHY WOULD BE BETTER - NO WORDS $ I write enough to explain myself $ You earn them $ One line responses to thought out comments are FAR WORSE YOU STUPID UGLY PIECE OF SHIT WASTE OF SPACE CRACK USING DUMB WHORE And you manage it even without that $ That is an important point Firstly, you've just recognised a scarcity, surely? A true real fucking scarcity of effort, correct? Well... that's true... I said early on, there's a marginal benefit per post, and marginal costs... effort being one of the costs... Which is why you have points where you stop posting, and other points where you go full retard. It take's even more effort to explain your one line point well... Some might call that 'thought' a Subject on which they Comment. Would be nice for you to make more effort sometime. I agree with a lot of what you are saying... especially the tractors... Now with the GPS driven tractors you only have to pay attention to turning around at the end of the rows... but self driving tractors will be here soon, for sure... As for the academics... if the AI (like watson) do become smart enough, then it may be true that academic knowledge does become worthless to society... and possibly you would want to study only for your own reasons... it will also be true that such AI should bring about greater economic prosperity... So, none of that is reason not to build AI... It's just trane's ideas depend on the things he wants to come into existence already existing... so his solutions are by definition economically infeasible. Exactly: Gov should spend money on R&D, esp education and universities... This makes more sense than making non-contributing crackheads live more comfortably. Fine, I agree 100%. You're not an idiot crackhead. Yes, HECS is a good system... it works well... the US system is undoubtedly broken. I also agree that min living allownace is a good idea... I'd bring that in and severely reduce unemployment and all other social security by a similar amount, and also reduce min wage -- the existence of a min living allowance will naturally increase the cost of labour... That's all true... but it's only one side of the equation. The question that really needs to be dealt with -- if you support such an idea, is HOW to PAY for it. Trane thinks just print money, with no idea of what effects that would have --- It's all psychological, according to him. I think we need a wealth tax... and reduce income and corporate taxes appropriately. Because many sectors in the economy simply concentrate wealth, a wealth tax balances that out, and turns that negative aspect into a positive (even monopolies could exploit their power over a market, because the concentrated wealth gets redistributed - so their benefit is once again shared). Also, wealth taxes don't have the negative distortionary effects (slowing down/disencentivising) both labour and investment. Increased availability of credit during a CREDIT CRUNCH dipshit. Banks were given NOTHING... You are not talking about doing the SAME THING with individuals... you want something else entirely. People will spend their 0% loans on crack $ Who gives a shit what they do with their money Are you a king going to dictate to them how they invest? Feudal economics anyone? Because the promise to pay it back gives it value There is no problem with their being more debt than money to back it... Unless you studying a dynamic model and pointing out its floors as static model... Then the mistake is one of analysis. Welcome to the fundamental problem of economics $ Damn I make a lot of ad homonyms $ DO SOME ECONOMICS FAGGORT No, really... you should do the coursera economics online courses if you get a chance... a lot of your thinking, your economic intuition, is absolutely spot on, but formalising that knowledge will help you understand it even better.... I think you'd get a lot out of it. Third world problems come from a lack of political stability required to implement free trade capitalism (ie, non-corrupt regulation is required)... that's part of the problem... another part is things like dumping aid on poor countries (free food) destroys their local markets... so farmers can't profit... If costs of labour beat costs of capital... labour will be used... also wealth constraints - can't buy tractors/diggers... political stability, no foreign investment. Increasing worker productivity... however you do it, yes leads to greater efficiency... Even if it means your a cunt... sometimes, being a cunt makes your workers less efficient. The economic theory is that encouraging free* trade leads to benefits to both the consumer and producer... and that the producer will have incentive to lower costs (ie, improve technologically) and will provide even more at lower cost for greater profits... again, your intuition is spot on. One way economists look at technology is -- if it's not cheap enough today -- wait, it will be tomorrow. *: free trade is a very specific set of a requirements -- it is not, do as thou wilt fuck you, it's do as thou wilt, harm none. Now, onto min wage --- yes, it sounds really nice, cause people who work won't starve, etc... but there is always a cost to pay... a Dead Weight Loss... losses to both firms who hire people... and a loss to people who want to work. Look at it this way... maybe you can hire someone for $7/hour, maybe to do something pleasant in their spare time, like gardening... and there is someone who is willing to work for $7/hour, because they enjoy gardening and already minimised their costs, or their partner works etc... Suddenly, the only work they can do is cleaning toilets for $17/hour... Something she really rather not do... to the tune of $10 an hour really not rather do. Another example... a firm makes $12 for every widget they produce, but can only be produced by one person and takes an hour to do it... They can hire as many people as they want, but each person takes exactly an hour a widget... With no minimum wage, they can hire as many people as there are willing at $10 an hour, making $2 for every widget, but with min wage... no widgets, for now. So, min wage destroys lower paying jobs... it comes at a price... If employers can act as monopolies... well... things are different again... So... ideally, there would be no min wage... people could work when, where and for whom they wanted at a price agreed to them that makes it worth their time and effort... But min wage does not solve the non-labourers problem --- actually, it creates even more non-labourers... So, we come up with unemployment benefits... which have problems of their own (bureaucratic waste of time)... So, provide a min liv allowance, and you can reduce unemployment and also reduce the min wage (think about it, ur shifting the burden of providing a living from the employers to the tax payers --- why should employers get these costs? Not a function of the government to ensure people can live?) Finally, who are the tax payers? Firms are owned by people, taxing firms taxes people and increases production costs... Workers generate income tax, but that just decreases the incentive to work (you've made employers pay a min wage that is now taxed?), increases the cost of labour and increases costs again whilst decreasing the amount of money spent... So, these taxes slow down an economy... they work against it... Wealth tax... taxing people a percentage of their total net value, and not their incomes, or capital gains... all firms are owned, so wealth taxes also tax the firms indirectly too. It taxes those who can most afford to pay it... Now couple wealth taxes with min liv allowance... Its a lump sum tax -- means it does not distort by discouraging certain behaviours... It's basically a direct transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor.... I personally believe, this money will 'torrent up' straight back to the rich... They might be even better off all up. So, you remove all the taxes that slow things down, and bring in another tax that speeds things up... All that is left is looking at the maths. My Preliminary Australia Report -- Not As Simple As I'd Hoped (America has much greater wealth concentration) My calculations show taxing the top 40% of australians and foreign investment at 2% brings in 306B... that's enough pay each australian 13.5K or $206/week. Top 19 (all the) billionaires comprise a bit more than 60B together. Maybe we tax them harder?? But you couldn't reduce the other taxes at that point... except for what you could reduce from the social security budget... the social security budget is already less than this amount, by more than half (131B)! It's also very nearly in the realm of the federal budget -- enough to cover income, corporate and sales taxes -- but then, not also enough to pay the min wage as well... You can't actually do both at the same time at these rates and amounts (except by the amount you remove from existing social security, etc)... Finally... It's more than the Australian National Debt!! So, maybe split it... no reason to start off a min liv allowance at such a generous amount, halve it... reduce the other taxes by a similar amount... leave more surplus and reduce our debt... You can't just live out in crackland and imagine everyone getting money and everyone being better off... there are compromises to be made, limitations and effects. TLDR: Implement a wealth tax, maybe at 1% for 500k and above, 2% above 2M, 4% above 100M, something like that... reduce income, corporate and sales taxes... Payout a living pittance, maybe start $50/week, reduce min wage and social security by a similar amount, payoff debt... adjust going forward. Oh, and legalise drugs, so it won't cost crackheads their entire week's allowance for their 15 minutes on escape. Just on the billionaires... point was taxing them much more doesn't do much good... 60B is their entire net worth... most of the tax falls on millionaires... I also didn't discount the tax free threshold, so still lots to do looking at it in full. US version is a little bit different... Funny thing is, I imagine you're exactly the type of guy who would leach off someone else's wifi and call it a victimless crime. (unless they leave it open, that's like they're asking for it I think). amirite? If she's advertising free access in public for it sure If it's publicly broadcasting an ssid and requires no encryption... and connects with anyone... Either wants it or is going to get it... It's like complaining too many people use your website --- you hung a welcome sign on your door. That's a fine definition for that crime but they made crawford plead to something he clearly didn't do. It's hard to see how this is considered justice. Being a terrible communicator is not the same thing as 'joking' and you certainly should not be punished for it as a criminal. No, even if he was completely mad and has no hope of saving a single plane ever... He thinks he does, and that was what he was trying to communicate... Not only is context half of communication INTENT should be at least half of the law. As I said, it's clear that he is not a good communicator, no matter how much he writes, so your point of him failing context proves my point - He INTENDED no ill will... and really didn't cause HARM either... He should not be punished for these things. trespass, not following a lawful order, sure, maybe even that... but terrorism plead down to kidnapping? wtf has the world come to? So, skip all the hard work and lock him up as a terrorist, and hold him until he pleads to some situation they let him off of before? Instead of arresting him for trespass or failure to follow a lawful order in a reasonable time, checking to see if he is actually a terrorist threat whilst he is under arrest for the normal amounts of time, and let him go or mark him off for the original arrest and if he insists go to trial for it as would be right... let him plead it down to loitering without intent if he doesn't... Not terrorist to kidnapper... that's bullshit. Imagine I said MCD would be held as a terrorist suspect a decade ago, and would confess to kidnapping! Tinfoil slippery slope conspiracy theorist. The law says no trespassing but they held him as a terrorist... That's the problem... terrorists don't always get trials... the rest I agree with, but that doesn't justify those actions. Like I said, charge him with trespass or refusal, and hold that over him while he pleads down. The Invisible Mr Hands of the Free Market Moar Horsecock than you wanted. It's a bad video, but there's plenty of warning You have to go through 3 clickthroughs to view it... The second page has much more information on it. Why isn't this a meme already? It's the third time I've posted. Pistorious: not so armless $ Shame he wasn't drunk He'd have a great excuse. HI, THIS POST EXPLAINS TOO MUCH FOREST TREES $ Hi, I must have lots of words to obfuscate things. Point: One liners have little information content Great for trolling and when u don't know what you are talking about. Hi, my zero content messages need no length $ That added to my knowledge... good point NOT # Yeah -- then more people could live in tree stumps and smoke cock for meth. If only we printed more bits of paper for him! That person is as much of an idiot as you... If they could create money out of nothing, why would they invest it in bonds... They could spend it all on drugs, fast cars, and even faster women. Oh... they actually have a bottom line do they? Believe it or not... the Fed is run for a profit... Why? Yes --- but if you think the Fed could run at a loss You're insane... not really news tho. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAA IDIOT $ The sooner you get it through your head that all money is created based on the promise to PAY IT BACK the quicker you can think rationally about the problem. Money is not PRINTED... it is BORROWED. He should get tick on crack from a gang dealer and try telling them he's not paying it back because it's like all just a number in their ledgers man. He DID NOT mean making paper from trees you fucking retard. Partly... yes $ Right... cause meth causes no enviro damage crackhead logic Typical Unjustified English Superiority Complex You lost your empire faggit and now they are downgrading your credit rating too. Hi, I whine about things I've never studied $ Hi! I think getting the most out of life is mean Yet - I want free money to do nothing. LOL - RETARD Yep -- the thin paper makes for excellent skins $ You might have heard of an amazing algorithm called Astar? Personally, I'd send two missionaries across the river in the boat, then bring the two of them back... problem solved. Now that you're a proven failure at AI too get on with the econ sim... Cause maximising value IS THE PSYCH RULE You stupid filthy moronic retarded crackhead failure. God how I hope you die soon. What?... You can't even write the code needed to prove that people have to value money independently. You're an idiot... You're so much of a fucking idiot, nobody even bothers anymore trying to correct you. You've probably never even coded for a living... so don't lecture me. I expect the most work you ever do is getting your disability payments. Mental disability payments, right? Oh good for you... you once got a coding gig... still mentally disabled. Why don't you stop writing lazy one liners and start doing an econ agent sim, to test your ideas that the valuation of money is purely psychological? That's great for you... but I'll probably die one day, I'm not immortal like you... also, my values might change sooner than that too. So, I won't be here forever to help you... Deadlines... are real... the quicker we get this done, the quicker we can up to a viable solution to the problems you are talking about. Not doing it is an excuse to continue spouting rubbish. In the mean time, I'm supposed just to wait until get a round tuit? am I? Typical selfishness you see from cocaine users... The same way you want free money and expect everyone to do stuff for you while you do fuck all for anyone else. Yeah -- like explaining which assumption is false? a) You are selfish? b) You expect me to wait around? c) You will continue spouting rubbish? Lol -- a and c are self evident... b, maybe you think u can do this on your own? I'm not writing any more code for you, because you won't really understand it... I need to see something from you now... That's Y I don't bugroff The difference is, I have proof, you have nothing$ SHUT THE FUCK UP And the two hour ball fondling in customs while they accuse you of drug smuggling (cause they don't use dogs and have to hand search everything). fuck the UAE. Can you answer my econ sim proposal? THANKYOU FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION IT WAS VERY HELPFUL... TURNS OUT i DON'T HAVE TIME TO PROVE MYSELF WRONG... I AM TOO BUSY WORKING ON A IMPORTANT MISSIONARIES AND CANNABIS PROBLEM... SCARCITY OF MY TIME IS NOT THE ISSUE -- IT'S THE ABUNDANCE OF PROBLEMS... POST-SCARCITY OF PROBLEMS THINKING WILL SOLVES OUR ECONOMICS ISSUES IN VR FOR EVERYONE!!!1! Do you have a rational reason for chosing only 20k and not half a billion? I mean, according to you, half a billion will help people a hell of a lot more than 20k... everyone will be able to afford their own helicopters for one, and no one will ever starve (hell, they could each feed a large chunk of africa too!). Just explain why a lower amount makes more sense than a much higher amount... can you? Once everyone gets free money you would be a cheap whore at that rate. Then stop asking for free money asshole! $ SO - DIMINISHING MARGINAL BENEFITS HUH? So you reached up your ass and pulled it out? $ YES - EXPERIENCE OF YOU PULLING SHIT OUT YOUR ASS Knowing 'argumentation' techniques still leaves you ignorant of the actual subject. IGNORANCE SHOULD NOT BE TOLERATED IGNORANCE IS NOT THE EQUAL OF KNOWLEDGE GET BACK TO YOUR CRACK WHERE U BELONG I wish too... so you wouldn't make so much stupidity here. THE NETHERLANDS IS IN PARIS ITS ALL THE SAME EUROSHIT ANYWAY AMIRITE? there are heaps of great restaurants around ams What were you doing getting fast food? Why the fuck even go then? It's like going to disneyland and just looking at the rides... what a waste oh yeah... never did that... went to the museums (Rijksmuseum and Van Gough) tho... I bet you didn't even try the haring brodje's did ya? You really should have gotten stoned at least. Hi, I don't know economics, my ideas are valid $ You see, the difference is understanding reality and you living in fantasy... print infinite money and put everyone in a VR is NOT a solution to reality based problems. If you could be bothered to do the econ courses, and had the skills to do a simple sim, you would see how stupid your ideas were. Hi, Physics is used as justification for pollution We should run our cars and rockets on fairy farts that make rainbows instead of pollution. Pollution is used satisfy our desire for impulse $ What will it take to prove you wrong on this? It's no point me building a sim, because you won't understand or believe it... What if you build a sim? What if I give you some pointers on making a sim? Like starting off with the free trade sim I gave you and extending that? Would that be reasonable? Do you want to discuss the underlying assumptions in that model perhaps? Are you capable/up for that? Fine... We have to do this step by step... First then... do you understand the free trade sim from earlier? Do you agree with its results, do you have any complaints about it? If you're happy with it... I want YOU to extend it to multiple items next... Allow each agent to hold multiple items... but can still trade an item of a lower value to them for one with a higher value to them with other agents... You might want to implement diminishing marginal benefits per item... unless you want each agent holding only its most favourite item, instead of a group of items --- you can test this for yourself. Once you've done this, I'll show you how to extend it to include money... Up to the challenge? Any questions? Just so we're clear Change it, so that each agent values a number of items of a given type by an equation like (value_i*sqrt(number_of_i))... where each agent has a specific value_i for every item type. You can then calculate the marginal benefit of every individual item... the benefit from gaining an item, and the benefit from giving up an item (in trade)... sqrt is just an easy diminishing return function... it makes no real difference to the sim... If you want, break the value and marginal value into a separate function, so you can try valuations without diminishing returns and see the effects of this (agents will get as many of their favourite items as possible only). You can start with random trade... randomly allow any two agents to trade... allow them to trade until there are no more trades they can make. Keep going until no more trades are possible amongst any agents (so, you want to keep the number of agents low, say less than 10... each valuing about 10 items, and holding up to 10 total items each...). After this, we introduce a market mechanism (like an exchange) where agents can trade for another 'special' item which we will call money... I will get to this, once you have the first part down. It is special because we will make its value variable (money is worth what you can get with it, and you don't want to tie it to how the agents value their own items... agreed? ie, agents won't explicitly value their own items in term of money, only implicitly by how they end up valuing money). Do you think you can do this? Will you please shut up about your views on taxes and free money till we have done this? Cause I already know the results, but it will probably surprise you. Oh come on... You've been on and on about free money for so long... it's been your number 1 favourite topic for ages... Why waste a second delaying in proving it wrong? It's not exactly a hard problem... I'd do it myself, 'cept you won't believe it and will deny it with no basis in reason. Well... as long as you shut up about your free money theories until you've run this experiment, I'll be happy... You go spouting tax is just because people want to be mean, without having run the experiment... now you will again be guilty of being willfully ignorant where you can easily prove the truth. You have no excuse for your ignorance anymore. okay? There is no deadline Just shut up about a topic you haven't investigated until you have investigated it, okay? I don't care if takes you a dozen millenia to get around it... test your ideas first. WRONG -- I HAVE ASSHOLE $ See how you make false statements because you can't justify your theories? SO SHUT THE FUCK UP UNTIL YOU DONE THE DAMN EXPERIMENT YOURSELF. I will help you when you stop being ignorant and lazy. You are not qualified, both through ignorance and laziness to answer these questions. Focus on this one experiment, if you are unwilling to do the work - SHUT THE FUCK UP - your unwillingness to do the work is all the proof I need that you are SPEAKING OUT OF YOUR ASS. See how you make false excuses because you can't justify your theories? WRONG -- I'M WAITING FOR YOU TO PROVE IT for the reasons I stated above -- You won't believe me until you do it yourself. SHUT THE FUCK UP UNTIL YOU DO IT YOUR FUCKING SELF YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKING FAGGIT LAZY PIECE OF FUCKING IGNORANT MORONIC SHIT CUNT RETARD. Fuck it, you are fucking stupid, this is so easy even without building the model... Just have to THINK about it... Assume everyone has a stash of goods only, and no money, like in the trading model already established that you cannot fault... Now... give everyone ten dollars... they will eventually end up pricing everything relative to the small amount of money they each have, correct? Now... give everyone a million dollars... there is NO WAY IN HELL they would maintain the same pricing structure, because it wouldn't map their INTERNAL value system to WHAT THEY COULD PURCHASE and SELL... because EVERYONE HAS EXACTLY THE SAME VALUE OF GOODS but MUCH LARGER amounts of money - and MONEY in and of itself is USELESS except for what you can trade for it. THIS IS WHY SHUT THE FUCK UP AND TEST YOUR STUPID IDEAS AGAINST REALITY YOU FUCKING SHIT FOR BRAINS MOROON. yeah -- they guy who best values money ends up with the greatest amount of goods... true with 10 dollars each, true with 1M each... If a guy in the 10 dollar world values his money as if he lived in the 1M dollar world, he ends up with nothing. If a guy in the 1M dollar world values his money as if he lived in the 10 dollar world, he ends up with nothing. REAL FUCKING PSYCHOLOGICAL RULE THERE CRACKSTICK BUILD IT YOURSELF FUCKSTICK its pure GAME THEORY... Nothing psych about it. I'm NOT WASTING MY TIME SO YOU CAN DENY MY WORK... Which is why I respectfully request you build it so you can see the result is NATURAL. AI planning was covered in Thrun and Norvig's classes... you did this already, right? You know AStar by now, surely? Well... you've seen the missions & cannabis solution too now... Get on this econ problem asap... I ain't gonna be around to help you forever you know... I got my own things to deal with (deadlines aren't artificial either). Will teach you a lot... once u realise everyone is maximising their own values -- so the true answer to the econ problem is really in the field of game theory... you'll realise all your 'psych' is the problem nonsense is wrong... then u'll have sensible solutions to the problems you are concerned about. As in... getting the most you can with the money you have? You think that's a psychological rule? Cause that's all you'll need to get the inflationary results you think won't exist without some other 'magic'. That's why I want you to do this sim... we can do it in about three days... we can have it done by next week. No you don't... You maximise your laziness and thirst for crack. Tell me... have you ever paid $500 for a gram of crack? Why not? Do you ever give crack dealers money and expect nothing in return? Do you ever get crack and just give it away to strangers who don't have any? No... you try and get the best deal you can. Give me just one instance where you don't act AS IF you were maximising SOME utility function? (Even missionaries are maximising a utility function -- From Kings to Ghandis... from labourers, cotton farmers, slaves, the lazy and opium den occupants... all maximising THEIR sense of what THEY want the MOST... AT EACH POINT IN TIME)... If you did things you didn't want to do... you would have done the econ courses. So - you don't - you lie. You have heard of game theory right? Nash equilibria and such? If you think people getting the most they can for the least amount of effort is a 'psychological rule', so fucking what? What do you expect to do about that and why would you want to change it? you yourself appear to be a classic example of this 'psychological rule'. How can you expect to change human nature on such a fundamental level? You're fucking crazy and/or stupid. Not so malleable that people will do more for less Why did slaves have to be whipped? Why is their no limit to would be kings/emporers? Why do lazy crack head failures want FREE MONEY? It all comes down to this rule. You are a fucking idiot - making completely baseless statements with no effort to test or prove... just od on crack or something for fuck sake already Hi, I praise ignorance and stupidity $ Because having a crackpot go around basing an idea on delusion is going to harm the cause more than help it. That is the idea also, no need for minimum wage either... Trane's problem is just not having any clue on how to fund such a program. He thinks printing useless pieces of paper is somehow the solution. He has the understanding of a moron. Do you swallow? Boris says you should: http://i.imgur.com/oHpuM8E.jpg MOOCS have not improved your understanding FAIL If a child, is taken from a parent's custody, and there has been no evidence of abuse or neglect, just the 'potential' for harm (I think that is all CPS types require) -- and the child IS ACTUALLY harmed whilst in foster care - then the parents should be compensated financially. For example, child is beaten whilst in care -- parents get $100k no contest payment... if a child is raped in care -- parents get $1M no contest payment... (both cases maybe $100k could be held in trust until the child becomes an adult in compensation for the harm caused by the system). This would ensure: a) Only high risk children are taken away, b) Great care is taken of the children in care c) Parents who's children end up being harmed by the system that is meant to protect them -- actually have some real money to fight for their rights to look after their own children. CPS always disproportionately harms the poor more than the rich... Drugs are an easy excuse to interfere with a parents right to raise their child as they see fit. As you said, an alcoholic is far less likely to have their children removed even though they are actually drug addicts by any measure, but this is just another ugly face of the Drug War. Economics justifies meanness This is an economic proposal, therefore it is mean. QED It is economics, therefore it is justification for being mean. Some genius on the net told me that, so it must be true. Whatever else you say I don't care... I disagree with the axioms. VR machines of that nature DO NOT EXIST -- Fails Feasibility Constraints. They weren't impossible Just economically infeasible before the Wright brothers, in Lord Kelvin's time, and economically feasible for some after the Wright brothers. Being impossible is not the definition of economically infeasible. You owning a 747 is economically infeasible... Of course, the model can't predict this because externalities are external to the model by definition... right professor? His claim is that I am suggesting his VRs are impossible, and I am just pointing out that they are not available. To which he will reply that the free money and challenges will produce them faster, with no proof or understanding of how the current system works to provide what people want in the quickest way possible (in theory, ignoring all the fixups required - but history proves quite nicely - eg, today's mobile phones). OTOH: Taxes to cover a min allowanace might not be such a bad idea... Tax on total wealth in particular... redistribute it as min allowance... Reduce unemployment, other benfits and min wage by a similar amount... opens up more jobs... stimulates an economy, encourages productive use of wealth, and reduces effects of wealth concentration. So stupid too on condition that its first function must be to pay debts down. Oh, I've just paid off my credit card... guess I can afford a new flat screen telly! Does this guy even understand where the money comes from that the Fed will be printing? How can you justify being ignorant of the topic and proposing solutions to it? You forget the reciprical LOAN AGREEMENT They didn't just CREATE MONEY... someone PROMISED to pay it back! No... it doesn't work like that $ You have no clue... The FED LENDS MONEY... That's it!! Even TBills are just a type of loan... You think it should lend money directly to the people? Have you considered the logistics of that? No... you think they should just give people money. Why the fuck don't you! firms competing to produce them for the market will get there way faster. That's not right... Trane is wrong too... but you are definitely wrong. Just because there might be wealth differentials (inequality)... doesn't mean the poor have to be poor in absolute terms. The rich don't themselves benefit from absolute poverty, where no workers can emerge from and no body can benefit off of. Of course, in the current system... you might argue that absolute poverty acts as a pretty good stick in some ways. If everyone had everything they wanted... then yes... the system would 'collapse'... because that is the end goal of the system... everyone has everything they want. I don't see that that is ever going to be a problem. I read somewhere that breast milk is the only food that a human can survive exclusively off indefinitely. And it gives the poor another opportunity... Supply the milk and bring home the bacon... win all round. No... Bacon Is Food Tasty tasty food. No one is forcing you to eat it. Yeah... alcohol is a seriously underrated drug... it took just under 4 years (closer to 3 and half) for my late girl friend to go from heavy drinker (me too at that point), to alcoholic to dead... Just one particularly difficult event (death of step father) was all it took to go out of control. It's worse for women than men of course... but it can seriously fuck a person's life and mental state up... and if I hadn't seen it myself, I don't know if I'd believe it given all the pro alcohol propaganda about. Yeah... it's odd what makes people lose the plot.. My only advice... if it's worth anything... is do whatever you can to get off alcohol... It's a terribly addictive drug, and besides benzo's, the only thing that can kill you in withdrawal... It's not fun watching someone have epileptic type fits because they've stopped drinking for a day or two. If it really is getting that bad... try and get help. It's worse than opiates in some ways, past a certain level. Yeah fine... I know my position is a little biased after what I witnessed... and I might have a tendency to overreact... like someone who has lost a friend or child to other drugs... but I will warn you, the slope is slippery and gradual. and yeah... you want to make sure you slow down before you realise one day you are an alco... cause for most people at that point, you are correct, abstinence becomes the only solution... Good on ya... short breaks are a good way to test how your body has adapted to it... the body basically does adapt... and the chemicals it produces to metabolise alcohol are themselves dangerous in the absence of alcohol. If you get serious DTs, and especially if you get any sort of hallucinations... even if you don't... and you have access to a doctor, might be reasonable at least just to talk to them... cause coming off alcohol after long term use can be quite serious. This all depends on the individual, consumption, length of time, etc... If you don't need a drink when you first wake up but can have a few at the end of the day... you should probably be alright... but just be aware of the possible effects of going cold turkey... actually most brain damage occurs from alcohol withdrawal... not from drinking... so doctors normally prescribe benzo's during that initial period... but benzo withdrawal has similar effects too... which is why being addicted to both is really dangerous. good luck. It's like everything... it's up to you to decide if you can drink socially or not... once it has become a problem in your life, it's evidence you might not be able to handle it in moderation in the future. still... I think it's up to the individual, not society... although social pressures apply as always. weed is a lot easier on the body than alcohol and less addictive too IMHO. The spirit of authoritarian puritanism lives on... also... no one understands why people do things they personally don't want to do... therefore, people who do those things are wrong, and should be stopped... even if they affect no one but the person doing them. So very few really understand the ideal of freedom. Try not to enjoy things that aren't at least done by a significant minority. Drinking okay... Cocaine not okay. Please crackhead... go live in your VR reality... you cannot solve the blowjob problem by printing money... as soon as you realise that you might be worth listening to... okay? you failed to take the course, you are a lazy, ignorant, insignificant moron of no importance. Hi, I don't believe in evolution because religion$ You are so thick, you have no fucking idea Yes... they actually are scarce... There is a definite limit of them, and definite time frames when you can do them. Please explain how giving everyone enough money means everyone can get blowjobs without anyone giving them. Hi, Economics can't model externalites because by definition they are external to the model. Right? That psychology degree of yours is really coming in handy... COMMENT RAPING YOU From the guy who thinks if you give enough money to everyone, everyone can get blowjobs and no one has to give them... ahuh. Kill the thieves $ That's exactly what I was doing... you're still a thief... the sooner you admit that to yourself, the better you'll feel. trolololol so, you've given up your thieving ways then? I'll thank you to stop stealing my time and effort then by lying through insinuation about what courses you have and haven't taken. No, I explicitly asked you several times and you carried on as if you had... It was one of the first questions I asked you. I was trying to help you understand some points, cause I think at the core our values could be aligned, but you were completely taking the piss by not even doing the required units. I couldn't prove otherwise until you blurted out not seeing a particular cost function that was in the quiz. The only assumption I made was that you were a reasonable person acting in good faith. What an ass u made of me! cocksucker more like it $ the great thing about selfish cunts like you is you have no idea what a selfish cunt you are... fundamentally, no different to a wallstreet wanker... just a poor useless cunt of a version of one. I'm glad you're poor... stay poor, it suits an asshole like you. Proof of your lies, deceit, laziness and stupity http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2013/2/3/173848/2239 Why do you think they would find that interesting? Compared to the stuff they look at most of the time. Given that they didn't find it interesting, why would they waste money getting it dated? Welcome to the real world, where social value is important, it minimises the time people waste looking at every idiot's favourite pet rock... Compared to a well regarded palaeontologist, who they know isn't going to be just wasting their time, but showing them something truly unique or interesting (ie, valuable). Part of your life failure is the failure to realise the importance of social roles... after all, you took your rock to them for a reason, and not some random thieving crackhead instead. To be fair to you... I found your rock interesting... Just not your social/economic analysis regarding your rock... again, you seem to want people to do stuff especially for you at their own cost with no regard for their interests and values. You are either a truly, genuinely, very nice guy or far crueller than even I could ever be. To Er is Human but Onanism is divine. What if we build robots that are interested in their own 'welfare'? Just as there are robots now that can mow the lawn (or say, definitely drive a car), which are nothing more than a powerful CPU in the right hardware, what happens when robots have to take care of their selves as part of their normal operation? Economically, self driven, emotional AI based on ML is the future... Finally... asking if computers can think is like asking if submarines can swim. Finally, everyone hates 'The Market', but no one seems to have a better solution... worse still, those that talk about it, don't even understand it. So there are times when government intervention is warranted, but more often than not, not. Yeah... that's the kind of thing I'm talking about but I think more you need something like a robot forge, and a robot that can build forges, and put together robots... Think of a 3d printer that could print everything needed to build a robot or a 3d printer, then a robot that could put together a robot or a printer... now you've got self reproduction... The final step is making sure that the robots do things that are economically beneficial for the humans they serve... sometimes they would be doing what was good for humans (for money, for example) and when it was more economically efficient, build more robots and forges... So, you've got to make the first part, building robots and forges... then just make them follow the laws of economics... Robot welfare, like repair or parts replacement, would be part of the robot economy... You actually might need it to be the other way around than what you are suggesting, where robots earn an income based on the earnings of their 'offspring', so they are motivated to create them at the best economic rate... Kind of like how poor africans have many children to support them in old age... well... just some random thoughts on the idea anyway. I think the two benefit each other, rather than are necessary conditions... I don't know if all single celled asexually reproducing amoeba have to live in colonies to survive. Hold on... that's great to hear you've built some sims... Do they follow free trade principles of maximising their own utilities and trading only when economically beneficial to all parties? Are they trading something in their 'economy'? Anyway... this is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to talk about... I was hoping trane would get far enough into the course to understand why printing money doesn't help anyone economically, but he failed completely... I think I have a solution for you, and it's quite simple really, and one I think would be applicable to the real economy, AS IS. Which is this... wealth redistribution in the form of a wealth tax and a minimum living allowance... (This is more important for humans I imagine than robots, but might be interesting in your simulations)... So... tax them based purely on wealth (say 1 or 2%, but would depend on the specifics of your economy you are simulating)... and (assuming there are no 'government services' that tax needs to be spent on) simply redistribute that to each of your economic agents equally... What do you think? Could that be your solution? LOL - old ladies aren't economically valuable their parts could be better used. Funny thing is, the micro-econ course this week is covering whether or not people should be allowed to sell their kidneys... I laughed when he said that allowing the sale of kidneys would increase the production of kidneys (clearly wrong, it increases market supply only... but funny nonetheless - maybe he didn't say that, but I imagined it). Anyway... one counter to your argument there is that in real life there would be a minimum amount of wealth (say, the amount required to be in the top 1%) that would be discounted off the total for the calculation... so 99% of people wouldn't be taxed, and those that are, get a discount on their first X dollars. People shouldn't have to sell their kidneys to eat, or even a moderately valuable home. That might not matter in your sim though, as you suggest, could be a good idea to actually recycle uneconomic agents... In real life, again, an idea would be to estimate your own wealth... and anyone could buy you out for that amount (plus maybe an inconvenience rate)... so no one could say they were unfairly taxed (and also imminent domain). So, assuming every agent knows its assets, and their fair market value, they could calculate their net wealth... I don't know if forced sale could become part of your sim, if that is necessary, different for humans, who are more likely to lie... But, yes, they would definitely have to sell their assets to cover their tax... That is one part of what would keep the currency system valuable (as opposed to just printing money), and ensures actual wealth gets redistributed, rather than just inflating currency while the wealthy get wealthier (and the poor hold billions of zimbabwe dollars). Is consumption modelled in your economy? Something being produced gets destroyed in its use? I assume it must? Is the source available? Sounds very interesting. Ooops... uneconomic agents don't get recycled... cause their living allowance minus their tax is positive... they would be better off, no sale required... depends I guess on implementation details... Only wealthy, low cash agents would have to sell their assets (or parts of themselves, in the case of robots). Robot world vs human world has different problems I suppose? Humans have intrinsic value and limited lifetimes, do robots? Cool... How do storage cells make money being 50% full? Do they buy and sell between various manufacturers? Is the raw input flow constant, or a one off event? Does anything actually get consumed? Who are the consumers in the picture really? I guess, not being an economics sim, some of these questions might not make sense. Can you dropbox me the code? I don't have an anon email address I can remember right now. I need to think about this more... in economics, people value things as the benefit to themselves, not just the market price... they wouldn't buy if the benefit was less than the price, or sell if it was greater than the costs... It's hard to see how 'not having good X' is a value in and of itself... which sounds how the storage cells work... (I think your problem is around the storage cells, rather than the manufacturers). An exchange, which often includes a stockpile, benefits from the exchange of goods (a tax on trade, for example) rather than in buying and selling the stockpile themselves. Then there are six main functions... add your good to the stockpile, remove your good from the stockpile, add money to your account, remove money from your account, buy your holdings of good, sell your holdings of good. So, you are correct from a thermodynamics point of view regarding the apple, but definitely not from an economic point of view... I value apples a lot more than I value shit... I know which one I'd rather eat, and rather pay for. So, consumers are kind of like reverse producers... producers take low quality items and turn them into high quality, consumers take high quality and turn them into low quality. So, it would seem odd for a storage cell to be very keen to buy what turns out to be waste products, unless you are talking merely relative to the market price (which has to be negative for waste products at some point, right?)... I am wondering if your macroeconomics is falling over because of some sort of issue like this. If the storage cells are fixed in number, your system will definitely stagnate... so, it depends on the rules for growing more cells, I suppose. Also, I've never heard of an exchange for shit (waste)... I wonder if merely having a negative price would work... If you do feel like sharing the code, I'm no code snob... but I understand the feeling... you can contact me on reddit (prokra5ti), if you don't want to share with everyone... I'll think about this some more... I think I understand the basic concepts. I guess so... If you have some products that really aren't useful, they are pure waste (not like manure which has a use, but something toxic that nobody wants -- like fluride, lol jk), and if you consider some storage cells to be like landfills that get paid to take rubbish... then this all makes sense I guess... That diary title was the opposite of the contents... it was a piss take on what trane thinks economics is about... So... it seems to me... without increasing the storage cells over time... when the storage cells are all (half) full... game over, right? End of economy... everyone is economically satisfied (as best as possible with the resources) and there is no more profit in manufacture... you've reached the end goal of economics... I'd say your experiment worked? It's not like good A can be turned into good B for profit which can then be turned into good A for profit... I guess I can't see, without reproduction, what would keep driving the economy forward... wealth tax or no. Ahhh... unless you periodically emptied storage cells and added new raw goods... (you have to be careful not to manufacture waste just to satisfy the empty waste cells for waste holdings though, right? Except, by definition, nothing is actually waste, just what storage cells demand to stay half full). Ummmm, why aren't manufacturers maximising profit? Have you considered a manufacturer inventory queue ? So, as the queue fills up, the price they are willing to sell goes down... they are more eager to sell... and as it goes down, their prices go up... they are more willing to hold? Also... what happens to bankrupt manufacturers? Do they disappear? Do new ones come onto the market if they think their costs are below the market price... Cause there is definitely an optimal number of producers given costs and demand. Maybe you just have too many manufacturers in your system? It's definitely an interesting problem you got there. If your costs a linear per unit... a single firm per good might be the optimal (I think?)... (ahhh... but u got each firm producing different kind of goods... maybe not... the point, there is an optimal number of firms, and market forces should drive that)... The queue idea is to give the manufacturers a chance to adjust their prices to market demand... to find the optimal price... esp if the storage units are similar to consumers, letting them do that won't help the manufactures. Truly I have underestimated the power of the invisible hand. It's pretty hard to argue that people don't value wealth in its own right... Wealth gives you options that not having wealth doesn't. Sure, you can avoid the taxes by renting and wasting it on cocaine... but now you're poor with less control over your own life. Wealth tax is an incentive to keep your wealth growing (therefore productive), at least above the wealth tax rate... if you want to maintain your current level of wealth. I'm pretty sure wealthy people derive a benefit directly from being wealthy. (Please note, if all you had was $5 bucks, you wouldn't be paying any tax... wealth taxes only kick in at a certain level -- a level you would already be considered wealthy at). you have no clue, you are ignorant, lazy and choose to remain ignorant... you add no value to this conversation, because you aren't willing to expend the energy required to understand the problems and concepts involved. go fuck yourself... try a lethal dose of heroin. You were given the chance to remove your ignorance for FREE... You chose not too... You do not know the concepts involved. Your ignorance is not the equal to my knowledge. So fuck off and die already. If you KNEW what you were arguing against I could respect you... You have decided APRIORI that the subject is wrong. You get no respect for wilful ignorance and laziness crackhead. You decided that apriori you don't even fucking KNOW the axioms. PURE IGNORANCE CRACKHEAD WRONG NOT AN AXIOM Why do you bother trying to argue against something you never bothered to learn about in the first place? you sound like a creationist arguing against evolution based on false knowledge. Also, we already went over this the other day... the least I could expect would be for you to try a different concept to claim to be axiomatic. crack has given you the memory of a goldfish. Here's the actual answer, cause I'm being kind If marginal benefits do not decrease, it leads to exterior solutions... they are no longer interesting in a sense... (mathematically at least). I mean... that is actually a fairly simple thing to test, if you could have kept up with the math, you could have tried it yourself and found the price/quantity equilibriums... or not. It's a shame you didn't do the courses... the science course in particular is actually a very interesting system of optimisations... and you can make a system behave like that... you can solve complex optimisation problems that you cannot solve in reasonable time in other ways -- fast solution to distributed global, pareto optimal, low information, resource allocation maximisation problems in general. You don't understand that economics is more the study of time and choices... If you could understand the link between the science course and the micro course you see how the model applies in reality... Obviously, assumptions are assumptions... if you want to solve the problem above, you need them... then you see where the assumptions fail and how to fix them... some of that is a social problem. Four assumptions - people act rationally, no externalities, markets are competitive and perfect information. So -- Do as thou wilt. Don't harm others. Don't block your competitors. Don't lie about what you're offering. Seem's pretty reasonable way for people to act, right? So... for the best economic outcomes (which is that optimisation function) you try and make it as close as possible to those outcomes by applying different pressures. Surprisingly, if we jumble up all the wealth... all that is still true. You are missing out on a great piece of math. If you understood my sim, you see it obeys all those rules... and every trade is pareto improving... everyone gets happier for every trade. You could add money to it... literally, give them all money... maybe several goods... and let them only trade goods for money... (no bartering, as is done now). Then change how much money you give them... and I can already predict the overall result, but you would have to run the sim to 'prove' it. Did you read this far? Scarce resource of time much? Anyone else think it is worth it? Probably not... Birds can produce more than one note at a time, humans only one. Someone's already proven this... but you confirm the results. anthropocentric fallacy $ lol I just mean, you're saying these cultures aren't really cultures because they don't build the type of things that we value... Like the english when they got to australia and said the aboriginals had no culture because they didn't build houses... From a bee's perspective, they might say humans have no advanced culture, after all, they don't build hexagons and make honey, how smart can they be? I disagree there is no survival benefit for any of these things... they might all seem kind of useless to you right now, but the lessons learnt and the knowledge gained could have huge payoffs we just aren't aware of yet. Maybe an example would be something like the bower bird collecting shiny things... but even that is a display of health of an individual and useful to the species in indirect ways. (but yeah, I missed ur point that those things were 'useless', I guess cause I don't see them that way). Hey... the selfish robots won't kill us all they will maximise their benefit to us through economic principles... self interest (selfishness/greed) free trade that does not create negative externalities (harms others without consent) profits everyone. econ 101 add a little wealth redistribution to combat wealth concentration, and you've got utopia, not dystopia as people imagine. Why is ignorance so highly valued on this topic? You can't counter it, so you just make sarcastic remarks. I really can't understand this attitude. Yeah... you are right... humans are selfish... they don't give a shit about others in general... Anyone, without moral fibre, who thinks they can get away with it, breaks the rules of free trade through the creation of negative externalities (oil companies pollute, bankers lie about the quality of loan bundles, car salesmen lie about the quality of their cars, crack heads steal)... Then, when it comes to wealth concentration, which I believe is another problem... well, the holders of wealth are quite happy to watch people starve... they don't give a shit, they don't see how it can affect their own utility functions. And the wealthy control politics... So, yes, you are right... wealth tax as such does not exist (in most countries), the rich hide profits in offshore accounts/shell companies to minimise tax and not pay their fair share, and they distort the meaning of free trade to imply regulation isn't necessary (a myth that implies free trade means no regulation). So, I'm in agreement with you, the world is fucked on that level. I'm just annoyed lately that people hate on economics and its theories, when it isn't economics that is the heart of the problem, its the economic and political systems that allows the rich and politically powerful to run roughshod over the rest of us. It's such that I've come to believe we that it is in their interest to keep us ignorant of the subject, by deriding it, so the average person does not understand the problems and therefore cannot comprehend the solutions. Also... I'm really NOT defending the status quo if people would pay attention... I'm very much for regulation, and the implementation of a wealth tax and a minimum living allowance. Everyone seems very confused that advocating knowing and studying economics somehow means that I advocate unbridled capitalism, corrupt business, unregulated markets, zero taxes, wealth concentration and letting the poor starve. I'm disappointed in the likes of trane though, who think printing free money and giving it to the people is the solution, because he really hasn't thought the problem through and what the results would be. If you don't understand the problems, how can you comprehend the solutions? It is easier to sell you 'solutions' that benefit the wrong people if you don't understand the actual problems and what the effects of different policy truly are. Fine on some points... inflation is definitely NOT a wealth tax... it taxes holders of money and fixed rate lenders (the rates are passed on to borrowers in effect)... It benefits borrowers (of fixed rate loans) and holders of non-cash assets (art, gold, etc)... the wealthy can benefit from inflation. This is the type of thinking that ignorance of economics causes... it is dangerous. Yes... minimum income allowance exists as a few things - unemployment benefits (more than disability, that's slightly different - you shouldn't have to slur yourself and harm your future economic possibilities to obtain it, and the disabled should get more than unemployment or min living allowance for other reasons) and minimum wage... I propose removing them both in favour of a minimum allowance. Yes, what I am talking about is actual ECONOMICS... the study of the economy and economic systems... It is NOT the same thing as what the propaganda tells everyone The Market (PBUI) is about (unregulated markets --- truly unregulated markets are a disaster)... that's been my point all along. I've been arguing with trane ever since he denied the existence of SCARCITY (wtf?)... It has really pissed me off, because all I get is crap against preconceived notions of economics, that he has learnt, like a lot of others here it seems, from the propaganda machines, or clueless anti-market left wing types, and not the academic study of a very important subject. Wealth is not money wealth is the total sum of all property. You can be very cash poor and extremely wealthy... owing huge amounts of land for example. You know as well as I do that owning hard assets in times of inflation is the right thing to do. So... if you know for some reason that inflation is going to hit... borrow hard at fixed rates (below inflation) and put it into hard assets... then reverse after the inflation is over... boom you've increased your wealth. I never said it wasn't a tax... I'm fully aware of that... maybe you should reread what I actually said. It only taxes a very specific kind of wealth not wealth in general... It is a tax... and I agree with you on that... but NOT a WEALTH tax. exactly what you are complaining about unproductive assets. Which is why the fucking bars should be TAXED YOU are the one CONFUSED right now... I'm NOT arguing for the status quo! wut? $ All property owned by individuals at fair market value... What do you think I mean? or how am I wrong on that? please let me know. What you would not be upset the government taking everything off of you for in an imminent domain situation. So what you think the value is... backed by the risk of losing it all for an equivalent in currency... there may be other methods. We can look at this problem separately iff you think the idea itself is reasonable or not. Also... There is no 'wealth' tax in the US as far as I know. Finally... all your whining about unexploited real assets, well... that's pretty much the intention of a wealth tax --- (replace income, capital gains and sales tax) and provide an incentive to create productive use of assets instead of merely hoarding assets. If it's not an idea you're familiar with... I suggest you investigate it a little... it might be more in line with solving what you are complaining against. wut? Are you saying the creation of unproductive assets is the GOAL? I'm quite confused what you are saying now... it sounds like you who are reading the opposite of what I write... No... hold on... you've smoked too much... I mean SHOULD THAT BE THE GOAL? Cause I don't think the creation of unproductive wealth is the right idea... do you? I know the system's fucked... but you make it sound like I'm arguing for fucking it up more... rather than trying to find solutions... The only problem (as far as I can tell) with my solutions, are POLITICAL... which aren't insubstantial... But, you are attacking me as if I support those things, and I really don't. Right... so which side of the wire will you be on? I already said political problems are significant... that's irrelevant from a theoretical point of view... and there are people advocating that right now too... they have to fight the ignorance (or self interested ignorance more likely) of the types of Bill O'Reilly and co... look up Dan Altman. Also, irrelevant to what you were accusing me of earlier... I'm sure you now agree. So... the FIRST question is... IS this a good idea? If not, why not? If so... THEN how to overcome the political problems. Having political problems does not invalidate the idea... or you are just advocating sticking your head in the sand and waiting for the guns to come out -- which you seem to be prepared for -- but I'd rather head it off BEFORE it comes to that... as far as possible. (the start is to spread viable solutions). So, imma agree with you that you should be prepared for what could well be inevitable... Fine... that's great... In the meantime, why not look at what can be done to stabilise the system a little bit and try to avoid the worst of that this time around? So... the basic idea is to introduce a wealth tax... taxing everything above about 500k at 1% and above 2M at 2%... I understand at these levels you can remove a whole heaps of other taxes, which generally rely on money flows/transactions, which slow things down, right? On the other end, you introduce a minimum living allowance that everybody (adults, citizens) gets, regardless of situation (a little less than unemployment benefits) - and remove/reduce the unemployment benefits and minimum wage by about the same amount. (So, not inflationary, and not going to be a disincentive to work and removes the distortions caused by min wage). So, you are taxing at the top, and recycling it at the bottom... the bottom don't starve to death... and at least the parts of the economy that enable people to survive won't crash. I think wealth generally flows pretty fast from the bottom to the top (trickle down is bullshit)... and there are wealth concentrating industries... so wealth tends to concentrate... and while those industries are useful, this offsets the worst of the problem. What do you think? There is work to do... but it beats another great depression, starvation, crime and possible collapse that could result. It's worth a trying to promote the idea at least, right? Yeah... that's not really an objection... There are many reasons this would be more optimal. For one, lump sum taxes of this sort are non-distortionary, in that they do not affect normal consumption patterns under most assumptions. The way they do distort is to promote productive use of wealth. Also, far easier to administer than other taxes, which it intends to replace. The min liv allowance also requires far less overhead and waste required to administer unemployment bens, and shifts the min wage burden from employers to the wealthy (via gov redist), and does not discourage low wage jobs... (again, removes a distortion from the market that discourages employment)... Finally, the economy is going to be fucked with anyway, and likely headed for a big crash under current policy... this is a net improvement. That's pure cynicism rather than a valid criticism. Clearly, won't be solved till we nuke the US This is what we should be trying to promote, rather than making the economy as stable and able to serve as many people as possible. Much better goal. Idiot. We /need/ cut nothing... increase taxes to cover the costs... Then decided what we should cut. Defence is probably one place you could trim a lot... Bin Laden's stated goal was to destroy the US economically by drawing them into these stupid wars. A lot of the other stuff needs a bit of restructuring... I have no doubt though, that without increasing taxes to cover spending... if you print notes without taxes coming into cover it... if you let the debts increase to the point where you can't even cover their interest rates... Yes, then you are fucked. I know you're probably thinking that hitting lenders is the same thing... but in general... most loans are either variable interest rates or high interest rates... so the effect isn't going to be as great as you expect... and when inflation hits.. those rates go up even more. If that was your point. No... I'm talking about 'selfish' robots that trade for their own economic benefit... They will supply humans with goods in exchange for money... and will use money amongst themselves, trade freely amongst themselves, and also buy things off of, or trade with, human agents... Then the theory of free trade* means that both humans and robots will be better off (you really have to understand this is a provable theoretical result of free market theory for normal goods)... Now, it is possible the robots will concentrate the wealth amongst themselves, and leave the humans with nothing... (especially as humans might consume their wealth, and robots just hoard it). So, the last part of the solution is to tax wealth, as I've discussed with you before, and distribute it back (equally?) amongst the humans. *: implies no negative externalities -- no robots are lying or stealing or imposing costs without consent. So, selfish evolving robots with no concern for negative externalities on humans will destroy us... this would have to be a necessary part of their programming. Look, right there... you're confusing theory with practice... The practice of ANY deception or concealment in sales represents a negative externality... If you are buying something at a price you would not have bought it at because of deception, or because something was concealed, you are NOT getting value. Without negative externalities... BOTH parties profit, because unless there was profit to both, one or the other parties WOULD NOT HAVE TRADED. So, it doesn't matter who gets MORE benefit, the fact is, without negative externalities, both parties are better off after trading. Yes... people maximising their OWN utility functions are QUITE HAPPY to generate NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES... that is well known, and why markets have to be REGULATED against it, and why fraud, deception, theft, etc have to be punished (to make those externalities cost more than their benefits). If we can build that directly into the robots, "thou shalt cause no negative externalities", then we don't have to regulate them in the same way we have to with people. Everyone blames free markets, when economists already know it is not free markets, but externalities that are the problem. No... that's not right... you've been lied too. Free trade is a very specific thing... it means something particular... That people with full information, trading of their own free will, without the creation of negative externalities... that is the definition... and from that definition flow some truly remarkable results. However, ALL ECONOMISTS, recognise that the maximisation of individual utility functions means that they WILL generate NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES if they can get away with it, and there is no cost involved to counter it. So, then the question really becomes what to do in the face of that knowledge. It's not a problem with free trade at all... those results are perfectly valid... it's the problem of how to stop people creating negative externalities... which the theory also perfectly predicts. The lie you've been told is that free trade means unregulated trade... that's a straight up lie that NO ECONOMIST actually believes. (politicians and businessmen will tell you different). Now you are confusing economists with businessmen Of course businessmen want to hide their negative externalites... it's exactly what an economist would predict. I don't care that you've never understood concealment of relevant information to be a negative externality... it is. The fact that those who can impose negative externalites are more competitive than those that don't isn't a surprising result either. This is why identifying, and making costly, negative externalities is so important to an economy. Just one last thing... The costs involved to create your good/service is of absolutely no relevance to the buyer in free market theory. What is relevant is the qualities of the actual good or service you provide... It could cost you one cent or one million dollars... Just tell me what it does and how much you are selling it for, and I'll decide what it is worth to me and how much I am willing to pay for it... If you are selling it for less than I am willing to pay, I will buy it, if not, I won't. Actually... if you sell the exact same good with the exact same qualities... I will buy it from the cheapest provider... I am willing to substitute similar goods with lower quality for lower prices, or possibly higher quality for higher prices... But the result is the same... I don't need to know your costs... only your product. No... totally irrelevant. Total Surplus = Consumer Surplus + Producer Surplus. The consumer can calculate their own surplus with no knowledge of how it was produced or what the producer's surplus is. The producer can calculate their own surplus with no knowledge of how much the consumer was willing to pay for it, and their surplus. It doesn't matter if the consumer gets one cent and the producer a million dollars, or the consumer a million dollars and the producer one cent... neither would trade if it wasn't beneficial for both, and the actual split does not matter. The only point is that both of them are maximising their own utility functions (and therefore surplus) and neither of them require any knowledge of the other's surplus... it is totally irrelevant. The producer doesn't need to know what it is really worth to the consumer, and the consumer doesn't care what it cost the producer. Yeah, the laws of DOOM and QUAKE can change meanwhile... back in reality... NOT PROVEN even if it was... it just means it's the fine structure VARIABLE... not knowing all the laws of physics is not equivalent to changing the laws of physics (if they are laws, we cannot change them QED) If we could, they wouldn't be LAWS idiot $ Modern AI, for the most part, currently ignores consciousness... modern AI is focusing on behaviours... If it acts like it's conscious, who cares what it's really doing... consciousness is more of a philosophical problem than a science/engineering problem at this point... so that's how they think they'll get around it. iptables? or whatever the latest firewall standard is nowdays? rm -rf / would work... as long he was logged in as root... but we specifically said he doesn't want to configure each service individually. This is true... I think evolution has optimised lifespan so as to maximise an individual's benefit to the species... Parents bring up children, so living until your child is an adult is beneficial... And their children benefit from the knowledge of having grandparents... so living until your grandchildren are of a reasonable age is beneficial to the species too... but after that the costs begin to outweigh the benefits... At least that's my theory on why death might be an evolutionary advantage over immortality (there's a type of jellyfish that is practically immortal!) ok $ Very nice... but just to inform you, after the first three years of study, most architects get a landscape architect degree... then two or more years to earn a full architecture degree. Architects are fully aware of the importance of landscape in the overall value of their work. You're being sexist right now... what makes you think architects have to be men? Or do you think that's a profession beyond the capability of mere women? Also Builder does not equal Architect $ THIS IS VERY INTERESTING AND YOU ARE VERY SPECIAL INDEED. He wasn't defending you, he was attacking you! $ Dude, you ARE a liar and a theif so don't fucking lecture me you worthless piece of shit. listen crackhead... standing lookout while others steal is theft, plain and simple... what's more is it is dishonest... alongside other times you have lied, right here in front of everyone. So go fuck yourself you cunt. Yeah? When did I stand watch and take a kickback while others stole on my behalf? Fuck you You're a genius at least I'm not a thief. YOU ARE SPEAKING NONSENSE and you don't even know it... YOU as an individual ARE A THIEF AND A LIAR... you deserve NO RESPECT and that's what you'll get. Everybody lies asshole but you were lying to me right here until I caught you out... so fuck off, you're a useless asshole You continue to lie... implicitly I think cocaine, and it's derivatives, make people into sociopathic liars... and you reinforce the evidence. BECAUSE CRACK ADDICTS DESERVE FREE MONEY AND TO ENDANGER EVERYBODY'S LIVES WITHOUT CONSEQUENCE. SORRY I FORGOT YOU WERE SPECIAL AND HAVE SPECIAL RIGHTS ON THIS WEBSITE AND REAL LIFE. YOU AND TRANE SHOULD START A FOCUS GROUP ON HOW YOU ARE MISTREATED BY SOCIETY. PLEASE WRITE A DIARY ON HOW HAVING A VAGINA MAKES YOU INTERESTING AND GIVES YOU SPECIAL PRIVILEGES. IT WOULD BE VERY INTERESTING AND INFORMATIVE. P(truth of above statement) ~= 0 cry more $ SHUT UP HOLLY I THOUGHT U DIDN'T WANT ME 'TALKING' TO YOU. As for the prostitution argument you offer up no better alternatives... women want to get something for nothing, so they fuck desperate men for money. what's so surprising about that? COMMENT RAPING YOU -- Because I know you are too weak to answer... You should drive there in a blue pickup truck $ Oddly enough, men get breast cancer too At a much lower rate than women of course... But they get prostate cancer at a much higher rate than women get breast cancer. I'm pretty sure curing cancer in general is pretty high on a lot of people's agendas. You''ll have to reference that... I'm talking about fully genetically and biologically male people getting breast cancer. There's also plenty of weirdness that arises in individuals, but that isn't what I'm talking about either. You're making the issue of breast cancer into some sort of feminist issue, like we have a cure but aren't making it available because we want women to die of breast cancer. Or you're saying we just aren't interested in finding a cure. Both ideas are ridiculous, and you're starting to sound as retarded as trane. You're still an idiot blowing trumpet? What's that mean, trading blowjobs for crack? Cause you sound like you're on crack right now. We have a saying in the west - If you can't stand the heat - get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich, because you're too stupid to deal with reality. You think there's a conspiracy to give women breast cancer? Hello? Men like breasts, we don't want them all lumpy and being removed - if we could stop it, we would. Get real. LOL - downvote == proof of failure No references, no understanding, no idea. You're an idiot sye... deal with it. Proof for you -- because google is too difficult for you apparently (do they have google for chinese immigrant women with no technical ability?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_breast_cancer Physics: Easy Science for the Simple Minded Physics is the science for the weak of mind. It is the softest and easiest of all sciences - to be taught to children and useful mostly to the military, another group of children who are most interested in the destruction and bullying of others and in doing what they're told. "But physics is a HARD science, it is REAL science", I hear you say, "I can prove physics in my bedroom - I can't prove economics"... That there is the point. Physics is so simple and straight forward, even a child can go prove it in their own bedroom - How hard could it possibly be? Is this a science worthy of Men? Due to its simplicity and repeatability, the main value of physics is as an easy way to teach and demonstrate mathematics and the scientific principle to children, that can then be used for actual difficult problems, like say economics. Welcome to the real world - where things are complex, changing, and experiment is difficult. Where the same action today can lead to a wildly different outcome tomorrow, the arrow of time is meaningful, and your only chance to experiment is through mere observation of what actually happened. Ladies and Gentlemen, prepare yourselves as I present to you Chaos Theory. The End of Certainty In his 1997 book, The End of Certainty, Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief. "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach of Newton, Einstein and Schrdinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability. Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles. This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability. Prigogine asserts that Newtonian physics has now been "extended" three times, first with the use of the wave function in quantum mechanics, then with the introduction of spacetime in general relativity and finally with the recognition of indeterminism in the study of unstable systems. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#The_End_of_Certainty So, if you find yourself attempting to apply the scientific method to a truly complex system, one where prediction is difficult and the opportunity to experiment is rare - welcome, you're a real scientist, tackling a truly difficult problem in need of and worthy of a powerful mind like yours. If you think the scientific method is best only applied to easy problems like physics, then you haven't really understood the scientific method at all - you're an adult stuck with the mindset of high school physics nerd, dismissive of anything you can't understand. Caveat: If you're working on the cutting edge, unknown or unproven in physics, this does not apply to you. I'm going to read this in full, but: Given this total of atomic facts, every true proposition, however complex, can theoretically be inferred. It took just 9 years for a mathematician to destroy a work on scientific philosophy -- thanks math. Also, not too happy with his idea that language should be unambiguous... would take away the fun of the double entendre. (but then again, he might be talking about a 'logical' language)... I'll give it a go before I make any more comments. This diary was just about the point that specific predictions of specific events and outcomes is not necessarily the end all and be all of science, and in fact, modern scientific theory puts real hard limits on even the theoretical possibility of this. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ You're an idiot $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ Enjoy your free $s You don't understand Trane's economic theory If we print more money and give it to the people, everyone will have as much money as they want... If everyone was rich with money, people would be able to buy blowjobs and no one would have to give them. It's the economic solution to all the world's problems. It's simple really. Chemistry wants to steal my electrons $ Maths is always tryring to divide us $ Physics wants to justify keeping us down $ Maybe you prefer slavery? I know you're an idiot who's to lazy to remove their own ignorance. I know you'd rather smoke crack than think. I know you think you deserve to get blowjobs, but not give them. I know you want to justify getting something for nothing - after all, it's only fair we should all work for your benefit -- but you are free, fundamentally because of economics. The dismal science is considered dismal primarily because it proves that keeping slaves hinders everybody. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own. -- Wealth of Nations - Book 3 Ch 2, Adam Smith Engineering wants to justify railroading us $ Biology wants to justify your extinction $ For sure... but you can't argue that a field isn't scientific because it can't make predictions about the specific timing of specific events. Otherwise you have to throw out physics on the basis that it cannot predict the weather. No one wants to hear from an intellectually lazy and dishonest crackhead... FUCK OFF AND DIE No, you are simply lazy and dishonest Also intellectually. FACT Hi! I argue by creating strawmen and making false statements about subjects I am ignorant of. No, you don't understand what a model is... for example: STATE THE FUCKING AXIOM! Under all conditions? Most of the time? Always? Never? Oh look... that is NOT A FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION... Nor is it an AXIOM of ECONOMICS. To TEACH you the BASIC MODEL $ YOU can CHANGE the model... BUT ONLY ONCE YOU KNOW THE MODEL... That's how it's done... What happens if we change the assumption that TIME is CONSTANT in the UNIVERSE and presume that the SPEED OF LIGHT is CONSTANT in the UNIVERSE. Without the FLAWED MODEL, you have NOTHING to IMPROVE! You can learn the motion of planets and the meaning of F = Gm1m2/(r^2) without understanding F=ma. Could you understand general relativity before understanding F=ma? Even though F=ma is ACTUALLY WRONG?! Did you learn to divide and multiply before you learnt how to add and subtract? No... Teachers can only explain things slightly above what you understand. You cannot learn advanced concepts without understanding the more basic ones first. Geez. This is PROOF of your IGNORANCE You just burnt down a straw man of what you thought was an axiom of a subject you don't understand when it is in fact NOT an axiom of the subject you don't understand. This is why it doesn't pay to argue with provably lazy people... they are wilfully ignorant. You have just failed on a positive statement of fact. There are many good reasons for this... You are at too low a level for me to waste time explaining it to you. Here's a hint though: Is the LAW of THERMODYNAMICS an AXIOM of PHYSICS? I'll believe it when they update the Engineering Books on Physics... As far as I gathered... they HAVE NOT demonstrated free energy from CLOSED systems -- ie, the ones in which the LAW of THERMODYNAMICS apply. They may have shown some results in a MODEL (not reality asshole) in a NON-EQUILIBRIUM system. The THERMODYNAMICS OF NON-EQUILIBRIUM SYSTEMS are ANOTHER SUBJECT ENTIRELY! I really doubt you know what these even are. You should now note the importance of assumptions Such as the assumption of a closed system to the laws of thermodynamics... You can't say 'the laws of thermodynamics are based on unreasonable assumptions', just because we know that the planet isn't a closed system and the assumption doesn't hold, doesn't mean that the laws of thermodynamics aren't useful. Same with economic assumptions. The assumptions enable us to make models that we can then study far easier than if we didn't use the assumption. This does not imply that economists think the real world has all the assumptions of every model, but without them we wouldn't even have a place to start! So, if a creationist ever comes to you and says - "The existence of life breaks the second law of thermodynamics" - you can now say, "The assumptions of the laws of thermodynamics do not hold in open systems bitch!". Then explain to them the theory of self organisation arising from the maximisation of entropy generation in open non-equilibrium systems... if you have the time. On the other hand, don't try and tell me you have a perpetual motion machine either! I already know you don't. The assumptions are useful, when you know they hold... and are useful for the insights they give you when you know they don't! So, just because you know some assumptions seem a little unlikely, once you understand the theory, you might understand the utility of the assumptions themselves. Before that, you are like a blind man stumbling around for a concept to grasp unable to make any sense of the world. So much ignorance, I don't know where to start... Are you a crackpot who denies the laws of thermodynamics? So... you are already outside of mainstream physics... Do you deny STATISTICS? The question was - Is that law an AXIOM of physics? Now --- How can you violate the basic assumption of economics? Please explain how you can act as if you weren't maximising a utility function with resource constraints? If you operate outside your utility function, you are simply creating a new utility function which we measure instead by observation. I told you economics has a strong a foundation as evolution -- it's definition is nearly tautological, and you'll find it VERY hard to fault --- god knows many people WAY smarter than you have TRIED and failed. ADHOM NOT FOUND (RETRY/IGNORE/FAIL)? $ You always use this technique to avoid the SUBSTANCE of my argument. You are petty and insignificant. The thing is... if you'd actually done the work required, studied up to the end of week 4 of the principles for scientist course, to the end of week 2 of the micro course, and done all the required homework YOU WOULD ALREADY KNOW THIS. Which is why it is frustrating to argue with someone who keeps throwing up incorrect straw men to burn down. Examples: - Economics is about money. - Examples don't come from empirical data. - I don't measure utility in dollars. - I act contrary to my utility function. - Economics is faith-based with incorrect axioms/assumptions. - Economics cannot make predictions. - Zero price means zero cost. - Zero price means no utility. - A business with no plan or income is not economically feasible. All this type of shit is really frustrating when all you have to do is follow the course to dispel all these myths you have. The smartest people I've ever met have always had one thing in common - "That's not my area of expertise" or "I don't know enough about that". They are stronger for knowing that THEY DO NOT YET KNOW everything about every topic. You cannot possibly attack (ie, improve upon) the assumptions and models of a field whose assumptions and models you are in complete ignorance of. THAT is a CONTRADICTION, and justification for scorn and insult. To claim you can generate better models without even looking at the current ones, absurd! EDUCATE YOURSELF. You're to blame - voting up trane's ignorant statements... you bought this on yourself. I'm not one for challenges, that's Trane's theory. I'm here to knock some sense into him and any other idiots I end up arguing with -- and occasionally trading insights/viewpoints with people I actually respect. Sorry... topic changes at the thread/comment level. Although I tend not to start a comment unrelated to the post - I will carry one on from comments that result. I'd respect any warning I got from Rusty though. Not my fault you're uneducated I guess if you had options you wouldn't have joined the military. The fact that you confuse capitalism with economics is all the proof I require. dammit you I hadn't even got started on that angle yet. You see... I think you have no idea what you are talking about. Aether is a good example of a scientific model... completely wrong, but useful until something better came along. Economists can and DO plug numbers in, make predictions, politicians enact changes, and the result match predictions - ALL THE TIME. When you say the economist run around screaming "We never saw this coming!" - What the fuck are you talking about? What changes were made to the economic models? You act as if economists weren't trying to warn everybody of the upcoming housing crisis. Or as if they'd never heard of the business cycle. What was LilDebbie (Not an economist, but a reasonable proxy) saying about the housing market right here from about 2003 to 2007? Predictions are no more accurate than random chance - seriously, do have ANY CLUE what you are talking about here? You sound like someone who has confused a stock broker with an economist. I've known a certain amount of economics for over 20 years now... it's not something I discovered yesterday... Have you EVER taken an economics course? Do you even know the fundamental question of economics? Do you even know what economics is, or you do think it is something that bankers and stock brokers do... do you think it is finance? Most people's view of economics is so laughably different from what economics actually is that they blame the political and financial systems failing on economists without knowing what they are talking about. You sound exactly like one of those people. You honestly think a person who doesn't understand a subject will know it better than someone who does? Because that is the inference from your timecube quote. I'm gonna attack one point in a little more detail Because I think it is illustrative of the problem you are having. If economics were valid you could plug in the numbers and predict how shit was going to go down. Should physics be held to the exact same standard? I just want to know if you think physicist should just give up on climate because they can't predict next weeks weather? Is that proof enough to you that physicists have no clue, if they can't even calculate something as simple and obvious to everyone as the weather? Do you understand this problem? Why do you not throw out physics if it can't even predict something so important in our everyday life? They can't even predict the path of a hurricane!! The whole field is bogus made up crap! Now what if I told you that economists had recognised this problem BEFORE the physics and maths community caught up? LOL - FAIL AT PHYSICS I don't need to go on, you've proved your incompetence the second you thought you can predict weather with 'increasing accuracy'. There's a whole bookshelf of mathematics and physics missing from your knowledge. Economics is an example of a REAL science - It is based on the SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLE of observation, hypothesis, prediction and experimentation... Its models are FALSIFIABLE. It is MUCH HARDER to study than physics, because of the CONSTRAINTS placed upon it vis experimentation. Economists can argue all day long about NORMATIVE statements... or their PET HYPOTHESIS or THEORY... but they cannot argue POSITIVE statements of facts. Two economists, using the SAME MODEL, with the SAME DATA... will agree on the SAME PREDICTION. End of. Just like physicists do. They might disagree on certain models... So tell me, which string theory is correct? Was the scientific method, and by extension, physics wrong to use the Aether model before it was falsified and replaced with something better? Because you do not even understand physics, I don't know how you ever will have a clue regarding economics, a much more difficult science, because clearly, you do not even understand SCIENCE - and think it is inapplicable in this role. So, if you don't want to use science to understand the economy, the only thing you could possibly suggest are using the very tea-leaves you ignorantly claim they must be using today. You prove nothing and you offer up no improvements over the current situation. You are arguing from a position of ignorance and provide no value here. Also would be nice if you understood the concepts of the invisible hand, free trade, free markets and perfect markets... You think economists actually think - "This is how real life works?"... No, they are results of careful analysis... of what assumptions must hold for when they are true, and under what conditions WE KNOW THEY ARE NOT TRUE. You think cause you see there are problems in these concepts that NO ECONOMIST EVER NOTICED? This is arguing from ignorance. The free market and invisible hand are beautiful concepts... They suggest the way we should structure the economy to BRING ABOUT the benefits of their theoretical results. Surprisingly, they have thought about when they do not work -- and have further theories to suggest WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT. The theory of Free Trade is not weakened by the existence of NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES, that the underlying models predict agents will generate - breaking the very assumptions required to bring about the results of free trade. Yet everyone wants to attack Free Trade (as an example) -- hurdy hur dur -- there's no such thing as free trade - dur dur dur. It really is nothing but PURE IGNORANCE... and I'm surprised to see you here arguing for more ignorance. Well, I grew up with similar STEM biases I was never a fan of english or social studies for example... But on the way I ended up doing economics - I hated it at the time, because of my biases, but it was a prereq for something. Now I see the sense in it - and why physics cannot answer the questions it poses (emergent phenomena). I don't know why the science part of economics isn't understood better by the general population... maybe it benefits certain groups to keep us ignorant of it... I don't know... (discredit free trade theory to implement a control economy? or ignorance generally means more power for the knowledgeable group? make us simply easier to politically manipulate?) Also, I don't know why it's usually taught in such a 'wordy' manner with an emphasis on essays, graphs and diagrams when it is taught outside of the STEM faculties... because, when you get down to it... maths is the tool to analyse it and science is the tool to test it... I guess going from real world observation to scientific concept requires a lot of words... and the brightest people who don't like STEM but like to study money and social reality (aka, the enemy), become economists... again I don't know. (economics is not the study of money, for that, do finance or commerce - money of course shows up in econ). Anyway... Here's the bit that makes accurate prediction difficult in both economics and physics, the sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, and very closely related to it is the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems (which our planet is an example of, and hence evolution and most likely economics must all ultimately obey - Ilya Progogine wrote a great book on the topic). You probably know it better as Chaos Theory (not a terribly accurate description). This puts real physical limits on our ability to predict the weather... but is also the reason economists can't predict the stock market will crash monday week because some people have been bundling dodgy loans as A+ loans in the backrooms of banks without oversight or regulation. It can predict that people try and get away with stuff like that though! (This is an example of a negative externality breaking the assumptions of free trade - people weren't getting what they thought they were getting - people really were being ripped off by criminals, it was fraud, simple as - it should have been made very expensive for the fraudsters). Anyway... I also find it interesting that economists started noticing these problems (nonpredictable deterministic systems) in their models (in the late 40s, early 50s -- but I can't find the reference now -- and I'm tired) before Lorentz did in his weather simulations (in the 60s) before it was formalised in the 70s and so on... although hints of it showed up much much earlier. LOL - also, difficulties with conversation threads in online discussion forums - directly relevant to the topic. Point proven! Also, you are PROVABLY DISHONEST and LAZY So, it is not name calling... These are testable, verifiable statements of fact, and this is the REASON you are not to be listened to. I think you skipped a WHOLE HEAP of caveats on the how to argue course -- as in, being factually correct in your positive statements is a necessary starting point for a reasonable argument. (I doubt u have the ability to understand this). Fact: physics does not match reality $ And that invalidates it how exactly? Newtonian mechanics is less predictive than General Relativity? Does that make sense to you? Normative Statement Given Without Evidence Do you act as if you are optimising a utility function, or not? No one EVER said it does... I just asked the statement - do you act as if you were maximising a utility function? LOL -- now you are acting *as if* you were maximising a different utility function... Guess what - That new function becomes your decision utility function that we infer from observation. If you are not maximising the utility function that you think benefits yourself the most -- the only person you are harming is YOURSELF. LOL! Economists don't care -- we still measure your behaviour and predict the results anyway... Also: Values Spite Above Health QED I really like the way your one liners don't follow from previous statements... One liners are proof you don't THINK about what you write... you just write whatever bullshit comes into your head at any moment (between draws on your crack pipe), as if that answers everything... Your comment that proceeds this one (my motivations are ignored by economists) follows how exactly from (economics isn't as accurate as physics)... You are a joke - but your one liners aren't funny. Yes you do... the problem is... once you've thrown your faeces, and I've cleaned it up... you'll throw exactly the same faeces again... Because you never THOUGHT the first time you threw faeces up here. So, you throw more faeces... congratulations $ Except that... just because it's an API doesn't mean it's insecure. Attn Trane: Economics is all about Money From Coursera Micro-Economics Principles: You have $1 to spend on a vending machine snack. A bag of chips will cost you $1 and the candy bar will also cost you $1. If you choose the bag of chips, the opportunity cost of buying the chips is: - Quiz 1, Question 3 This is just my proof that you are actually WRONG regarding POSITIVE STATEMENTS of FACT regarding ECONOMICS. You just missed the deadline for doing this quiz... clearly we can tell that economically you value crack over knowledge. Please either educate yourself or shut up. I have proven you wrong too many times now. IHBT IHNL So, you're just an idiot troll... whatever $ An unprincipled crackhead or troll... surprising! Only have myself to blame for putting any faith in him... And after I loaned him all this human capital, surprise - he is unwilling to pay it back. No trane - no legal crack for you - no free money for you. Not even interest free loans for you - you are provably unworthy. Which rule of the how to argue course states: "Thou Shalt Never Answer A Direct Question... for therein lies the proof of your failure"? You have $1... but you have lost more respect $ That is the point moron... answer the fucking question... how hard can it be? Are you really provably that stupid? And what you don't have... is any success at the economics courses... When you suck cock for crack both the cock sucking and crack are FREE right? There is NO OPPORTUNITY COST* so you do both all day and night, right? This is why you suck so much cock, right? *: Using the Crack Trane Theory of OC. Of course... it comes down to personal values reflected in your personal utility function... So it depends on whether sucking more dick is a net marginal benefit to you (of itself) or a net marginal cost as to whether sucking dick is the price of crack, or if it is the opportunity cost of it. Where an engineer would be happy to flip the sign of any given quantity, economists prefer to constrain their variables to positive values in order to easier categorise what is going on, as well as making constraints easier to check. You are correct. Economists DO NOT REQUIRE MONEY be involved to study economics. That is a FACT... to argue otherwise is simply WRONG. Of course, YOU BEING AN IDIOT... means you will ignore this statement and then mention money in the next comment regarding your 'crack head theory of economics'. Obviously, the opportunity cost of the quiz problem is NOT A DOLLAR AMOUNT... You want to think it is, because you can't argue with it unless you build up a strawman of what economics is. You have actually become WORSE AT ARGUING since you took the how to argue course... because you use it as a SHORTCUT to avoid critical thinking - inline with my theory that you are simply lazy and dishonest. PROOF MOTHERFUCKER: Non-monetary opportunity costs Opportunity costs are not always monetary units or being able to produce one good over another. The opportunity cost can also be unknown, or spawn a series of infinite sub opportunity costs. For instance, an individual could choose not to ask a girl out on a date, in an attempt to make her more interested by playing hard to get, but the opportunity cost could be that they get completely ignored, which could lead to other opportunity costs. You no longer have plausible deniability that you do not know that economists DO NOT REQUIRE DOLLARS FOR THEIR CALCULATIONS. Why don't you just shut the fuck up This is primary school level understanding of a very simple economic principle... and TRANE STILL DOES NOT GET IT!! In fact... after arguing that economics is all DOLLAR DOLLAR DOLLAR... His response to a non dollar question is I STILL GOTS DOLLARS TROLOLOLOLOL!! How fucking thick can one person be? That is how difficult it is explaining simple concepts to complete morons... You are not making it any easier. THEN YOU PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR FREE MONEY $ IF YOU HAD TALENT YOU WOULD YES except for the fact banks were not given anything. Zero percent interest loans aside and all that crap... Finance is not economics... economic systems are not economics... etc etc etc Yes, there are problems... you are probably capable enough of discussing them though. Trane cannot discuss them, because his ideas are not based in reality in any way at all... he's been given a 'free' course, which he was going to take, but has given up... and still thinks that money is the fundamental problem of economics, and anyone not sucking his cock are not doing it because they are just being 'mean' Ignorant Motherfuckers. He needs to stfu or stop being ignorant. Statements about banks are just going to confuse him further. Nothing -- wrong answer even if you do know it's the wrong answer. Ultimately, I think you were right that Trane understands, at least at a gut level, the ideas of scarcity, opportunity costs, utility and value... and understands that they are not necessarily measured or even involve dollars at all... But to admit that would require him take responsibility for his own actions and accepting his own greed, laziness and selfishness. So he prefers the cognitive dissonance that must bring, because the benefits to him is that he can blame everybody else for his own failings and promote his terrible economic ideas about free money while saying economists don't know what they are talking about... I thought he was going to do the econ courses, but of course that would require not being a lazy and dishonest crackhead... it would require effort for him to realign his assumptions about economics... so you were right, I was wrong... and Trane actually is beyond hope. Proof that crack should be criminal because crack heads are criminals who prefer to steal wealth from others than to make anything of themselves. They are a burden on society and make us all poorer for their existence. They are expensive chips... They cost over $100 each CHIP to produce! They're sprinkled with crack It's a mafioso vending machine, and a mafioso 'dollar', which is why you only have one, and why it can't be spent on anything but crack chips or crack candy bars. This isn't mentioned in the problem, because it's not required to get the correct answer. Crack heads still fail it tho... Who'd a thunk it? Are you Denzel Washington? $ Trane's turning me into Paul Chabot $ LOL -- God must care a lot more for the rich than the homeless. KILL YOURSELF $ You've actually got to take them though not just pretend you've taken them. But your point remains true... yes, economics does explain how the world actually works. You mean since the 1950s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_economics The very basis, the basic assumptions of economics are hard to defeat though: Main assumption of economics: Everyone is acting as if they they are maximising some personal utility function. What is that maximisation function? Well... we can infer it from what it is they do... We can recover that maximisation function in most cases, and therefore calculate what they would do in a different situation. Then we just look at how those various maximisation functions interact. Fundamentals of Micro-economics. At a level an idiot like you can understand it is. Now defeat the above assumption fuckstick You really should kill yourself. Maximise your utility to society and die. DEFEAT THE ASSUMPTION ABOVE You are using some stupid 'argument' technique you learnt on a coursera course... where apparently they teach you every method of argument except: KNOW THE FUCKING RELEVANT THEORY AND FACTS. You are constantly arguing against your own strawmen that have no basis in economic theory AT ALL. Attack this... everything else is bullshit: The Fundamental Assumption of Economics: Everyone is acting as if they they are maximising some personal utility function. You actually should be silenced you are intellectually lazy, and you are dishonest. People should not listen to you, and you should be silenced. Not ONLY that... but the MICRO course EXPLICITLY SAYS OTHERWISE. Many of the micro quiz questions INVOLVE NO MONEY AT ALL!! I don't know how you can think you can argue against a subject you have ZERO CLUE ABOUT. Where does thinking like that come from? Haven't you been beaten with enough cluebat already? Maths is taught using counters $ No... see my diary about that one... All those drives, raw behaviour, kinks, phobias and even irrationality all show up under the same assumed utility function... the utility function they use when they make a decision (or action, or whatever) is called the decision utility function. Once we assume its existence, we can infer it directly from observations of behaviour... people on the whole match the predictions obtained from these observations to a very close degree. What you are talking about is called Experienced Utility... and it is what we would really prefer to maximising... if our decisions were perfectly in line with what want to experience. The difference between the two are 'mistakes'... which is great as far as theory goes... It's a mistake, because when you optimise one function as a proxy for another, the results must be less than optimal. We can assume the decision utility, we can measure what it must be given that we assume it... and we also know that it MUST be different to the experienced utility function (reasons I'm not going to go into)... but, as I pointed out in the diary, there is NO WAY to MEASURE experienced utility... We can only really guess at it... But that's the basis of the theory you are talking about. kill yourself $ Chemistry is faith-based and unsupportable Chemistry is all about beakers... Chemistry is taught using beakers... I have my own ideas that don't involve beakers at all... Chemistry is no use to me! There are no beakers of chemicals involved in this situation, therefore I can't discuss it in terms of chemistry. HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU? Really... the FIRST THING they should have taught you in the 'how to argue' course is: KNOW THE FUCKING SUBJECT SO YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE A TOTAL MORON. You probably skipped that bit. not likely but it wouldn't take much to get ahead of me on economics, no. If the efficient market hypothesis was correct there would be no benefit to those who trade in the stock market of being better informed about certain companies than other people involved in the stock market. We know the efficient market hypothesis is incorrect... The point is to see what would happen if it was correct, and what happens due to the deviation from that... and limits in the approximation, etc... It's a tool for understanding, not a statement of fact. Also... this is why I consider investment an act of labour... to go back to an earlier discussion we had... and that taxing capital gains is actually quite similar to taxing income, in this regard - It takes real work, not just wealth, to invest well. You are right... every trade transmits information to the market... so the market, in theory, should tend towards the efficient market hypothesis. Now... yes, big players manipulate the market... no doubt about it... Most people pick stocks and leave them... or gamble with 'technical trading' that they don't really understand or are missing gaps in their knowledge... The successful traders I know spend a lot of time researching a small set of companies in a given market, reading everything they can about them, getting every google alert regarding them etc... and finding opportunities where that information hasn't yet been transmitted to the market... You see... they benefit from these information gaps... and I can tell you, straight out, its very fucking profitable to the people with the talent. Correct -- the market tends towards the efficient market hypothesis... In theory at least. Of course, it depends on the size of your trades vs the overall market, current trade, and who's watching that stock at that moment as to how much information you just provided. But without a doubt, each such trade should push the price to the efficient price. Wrong... Emotion appears to pre-date humanity... It is old... I also think it will need to be included if we want to achieve general AI. Ahhhh Racism... Just as Jesus Commanded. $ This is you giving up on economics, right? Admitting you don't know, and you don't care... yes? Not willing and able to learn, correct? Good... stick to topics you have talent for... Let me know if you find one. Graduate work? Are we to believe you finished a whole university degree before you got kicked out for smoking crack in the library? I assume that was before you discovered the benefits of crack then? Experienced Utility vs. Decision Utility Profressor Rangel: Antonio RangelINSTRUCTOR 33 minutes ago Dear Anonymous. Your comments above are extremely insightful and I thank you for them. The problem of how to measure experienced utility in the presence of mistakes is a big one that neither economists, nor behaivoral economists, nor neuroeconomists have fully figured out yet how to cracked .... I can tell you that we constantly discuss in my lab how to address it, but have not fully made sense of it yet .... If anyone is interested in this topic you might enjoy reading this paper: http://www.rnl.caltech.edu/publications/pdf/bernheim2009.pdf Prof. Rangel Procrasti's original work: You can infer Decision Utility from observation... you cannot infer Experienced Utility... What you might judge a person as being in a terrible state of welfare, he might consider himself to be in a great state -- consider a drunkard. You can measure neural models actual mistakes, as you actually define their experienced utility for them... but you can never know another persons 'true' experienced utility... You can measure a person's economic utility TO society... but now you measuring something else altogether. Even if you measure a set of neurons in actual living human beings that measured actual experienced utility... what if they are not connected, damaged, miswired or totally missing? Now how are you going to measure experienced utility? Does the person still act... because the AS IF assumption only applies to their decision utility, which still verifiably exists, how can know anything about their experienced utility? Everyone's preferences are different... For you to assume an experienced utility, to apply your values to their experienced utilities... or even the same person to their previous utilities, breaks free trade assumptions. I think it means you have to let people trade freely, even if their decision utilities appear sub optimal from your perspective, even if they are suboptimal from a future perspective, they might not be to them... to assume otherwise you are violating the right to persue the freedom of happiness as they perceive it... which is really just saying people are better off to judge their own utility functions which free trade then maximises than have other people define or assume their standard of happiness for them. But it's still good to understand the difference between decision utility and experienced utility... He needs to read John Stuart Mill's - 'On Liberty'. Point is you can't measure it... you can measure decision utility... their utility you can infer from the decisions they make... you can assume the existence of an experienced utility... and what happens when their decision utility produces a suboptimal outcome of their experience utility... and examine the theoretical results of that... but you cannot measure experienced utility in any way ever under any circumstance... you can measure all sorts of related likely utility functions, but it's a philosophical problem to think you can presume actual experienced utility for others. I'm glad he had the sense to agree with me, it's a true sign of a knowledgeable, talented and professional individual. No, you no longer get to speak on these topics... You are lazy and wilfully ignorant... The knowledge and models are freely available to you, being taught to you for zero financial cost, and you are unwilling to learn them for yourself. You have no basis to make judgements on any topics related to the economic problem. You do not have the logic or mental models required to even have a basic reasonable rational debate with. Please Kill Yourself. It is a RELEVANT FACT $ How can you provably being ignorant of a topic be an unjustified ad hominem attack? Is that how to argue course only useful for trolling? I'm pretty sure there must exist a fallacy for: opponent is a total fucking moron who is provably spouting falsehoods and strawmen about a subject he has ZERO clue about. SERIOUSLY... GO SWAP YOUR CRACK FOR A LETHAL DOSE OF HEROIN AND MAKE US ALL WEALTHIER! Why don't you come back to me after you've completed all the available principles and micro quizzes? Then I can check your understanding of the economic problem, and smooth out some difficult bits, and then, when you understand how it works, we can discuss specific issues/situations/distortions/etc... Right now, you are still off in cuckoo land... demonstrably grasping around for a handle on concepts you cannot understand. If I thought you lacked ability, I wouldn't even have bothered with you... lack of ability is no one's fault... nor is ignorance, we're all born ignorant... but to misrepresent your effort and try to bluff me on your competence is just the height of disrespect for the effort I've put in. You are currently on my list of worst trolls of all time... and without some evidence of change, I do not want to hear from you or even see you commenting on any topic at any time ever again. Just thank me for proving that the professor's pet theory on why crack should be prohibited is philosophically untenable and fuck off. KILL YOURSELF $ YOU DONT KNOW the fundamental assumptions $ You don't agree with your fundamental assumptions about what the fundamental assumptions of economics are... Its a troll move to say 'I don't agree with the fundamental assumptions of F'... It would take talent to say 'I don't agree with assumption X because..." Because then you'd have to identify assumption X of F and actually find fault with it. The truth is, you are not talented enough to find fault with the assumptions of economics, because you ignorant of the assumptions. You are so completely, provably a failure... I just hope you die soon of some crack related respiratory disease or get locked up for possession or just disappear somehow. Firstly, you can't just ask people... they often lie and often simply can't articulate why their choices are what they are... Look at early chess AI... they used experts to come up with rules... but they were easily defeated, because the experts couldn't articulate their true decision making process... Then we invented the mini-max algorithm... now experts need to articulate only how they evaluate board positions... even this will disappear as we apply ML to the task... and we will get even better results... So, asking people gives false readings. (Ask trane what the cost and benefits are to positing on K5 -- he literally cannot articulate it). So, I'm gonna say you're right that there are multiple "you's" that could have their own utility functions... fine... I don't disagree... looking back an action might have been disastrous... or it might have been even better than you expected. The one thing we can say for certain though... is that the 'you' that made the decision, at the time of the decision, was the 'you' we could objectively measure simply by observing what the 'you' at that time did. Your decision utility is the only one that actually gets to make the decisions that we can measure... all others are hypothetical from this perspective. Now -- I'm gonna make a normative statement or a hypothesis that can be tested later -- The decision utility we actually use has been generated as a function of evolution and reflects the utility of your decisions to your genotype (selfish gene theory) as currently expressed through you as an individual (with your experience, etc). Those genotypes that give rise to poor decision utilities die out relative to ones that have more optimal decision strategies relative to the population and environment. The decision utility then becomes a proxy to the gene's experienced utility. There are limits to the ability of the decision utility to approximate genetic experienced utility, because of uncertainty in the environment, chaos theory, etc... So, we can look at an evolutionary utility function -- we can measure it by what exists in the population -- we still know that it the decision utility function and the genetic experienced utility function are different, as the decision utility may no longer match the environment (desire for salt and fat are good when they are really scarce, not so good when they are abundant). Now, we have characterised you merely as your evolutionary potential -- and I think that is wrong too, as it does not really characterise what it means to be human, and what you as a human really experience. We're still pushing an external idea of utility onto you as an individual regardless of your internal experienced utility. Also, we know advertising affects decision utility... you are right on that point, and is the context in which the lecturer uses the difference between experienced utility and decision utility to 'measure' (they are illustrative examples, not objective examples derived from data - but they could be) the limits of how much a firm would spend on advertising, and the cost that has on consumers in terms of difference between decision utility (DU) and experienced utility (EU). However, he still assumes that the 'true' EU is simply the DU before advertising. We still can't measure EU. We can't know that the advertising didn't somehow truly increase your EU of the item (advert explains a use you hadn't thought of before). He also uses it the context of drugs... why crack should be illegal... because the actual experienced utility is negative due to the difference between actual experienced utility and the decision utility that demands it well past the marginal experienced benefits (in this example). Let's look at future utility, as felt by the individual as a proxy to past experienced utility... I was watching former Drug Czar Paul Chabot discussing marijuana prohibition, and when asked if he thought Barack Obama and society would have been better off for him being arrested for smoking weed stated 'I used to smoke weed - I went to rehab'... His future self expressed utility says that it was a mistake to smoke weed - but he is not counting that he probably would never have been drug czar without this experience and would not have his position, reputation and wealth had he NOT smoked weed. He was the Drug Czar because he smoked weed! Future-self is not experienced utility either. So, it's a fundamentally hard problem... I actually think impossible philosophically. Useful for guiding normative decision making theories (the amount to limit advertising, maybe), but objectively forever out of reach as an objective scientific tool. Trane: will you shut up about topics you are now wilfully ignorant of? She wanted to fuck you, not marry you... now you've gone and ruined a beautiful thing. You don't see your mistake here? i just wanted to fuck more than once... She just wants to fuck, not be limited by your supply... You just fuck her wait until she's begging for you to have her babies and get married and fuck you even more... then you tell her to shut up and get you another sandwich, the football is on... That was your mistake. Totally, I agree... there's way more value in someone who 'gets' you... I know this it's completely true... I don't have that right now... but I have had it... that's life. Long term steady relationship with someone who 'gets' you... option A). On the other hand... if you don't have that... you did actually fuck her right? If not, any* sex is better than no sex, even if that experience isn't directly A)... it's still better than nothing because A) doesn't exist right now... and it may in fact lead to A)... even though you didn't expect it to at the time. The problem was making the ultimatum... give yourself to me forever now... or never have me... Given those options, you can see why she'd go with the latter... But that again depends on your values and constraints... I mean... if you were going to leave the UK in the very near future anyway. *: For a given (marginally beneficial) amount of any. You also missed the Brit Girl Laddette Culture that exists now... Single UK Women are just as likely to be 'on the pull' as a guy is... This aspect is far more socially acceptable in the UK than my own country, I don't know about the US, but I think it's more like my country than the UK. They think they want the benefits of easy no strings attached sex, but they are still hard wired towards favouring the long term supportive partner that benefits their biological drives... So, now you got to fuck them before they want to marry you... In lots of ways, that actually works in our favour. What's a feebird? No... I was wondering what a fee bird was lol No... I've heard the song before, obviously... I don't always remember song names that well... but go back and check what you wrote (maybe I should have read what you intended to write, but still)... Fee Bird? It might have been a typo but I'll take whatever internet points I can salvage from it... Nah... I'm gonna thank you for your contribution to my education and move on. A good song indeed. The Mr Hands of the Free Market More horsecock than ordered. Attn Trane: LOL IF YOU CAN DO THE ECON QUIZZES I could imagine you doing the coursera economics courses... going through all the quizzes... blowing all sorts of gaskets... having all your preconceived notions destroyed... not being able to find any particular fault... that everything you thought was wrong has been looked at by thousands of people and tested already? Wondering if it might be your fault the way your life is... or having an epiphany and start worrying only about the marginal benefits to your current state? You got that people don't value W in dollars, but it can be inferred from the price p as a rate of m traded for the good x? And that W and utility don't actually have to exist at all, but people act pretty much exactly as if they did? (I finally understood the quasi-linear assumption...)... for every person you infer their individual demand curve... actually, that demand curve is affected by their internal W, their wealth constraints... (which the micro course covers... inferior and normal goods)... but we can act like it isn't, in the same way we can act like we don't know W... (actually, we can't recover W from the trades, it is the constant in the integrals)... but they are just internal to the person, and inferred on a person basis, so we just infer their demand curve, ignoring their wealth... but actually, those demand curves change for each individual according to their wealth... but that doesn't matter, cause they aren't even modelling time yet... all we need to show is that people will be better off. remarkably, people on the whole act exactly like this... imagine that... we are optimising our own individual economic outcomes (even though we don't do it in dollars directly), and when we can trade freely (without negative externalities), everyone who trades has better economic outcomes than if they didn't... or else they wouldn't trade. I like how the micro-econ is all talk... it's interesting that economists have always been wordy in their descriptions of their models... I'm not taking part in their discussion bullshit... but you are meant to get the links between the formula's in the principles class and the real world results in the mirco-class. macro will probably fuck you up even more. It's this yappity yap attitude that makes people think it's all made up crap. Having said that... I don't think I'd get graded well on the professionalism requirement answering this weeks topic: What effect does the sex ratio in the market for a relationships in Kuro5hin have on the cost that women pay in that market? How much horsecock is too much horsecock for the average economics student? By now you should be able to calculate that... or at least generate an expression to optimise it. I guess it comes down to how much horsecock they can eat! One day you'll understand about the price inelastic demand for crack and the effect that has in a free market... vs a non free market situation... then better calculate who benefits. Here's a question you can answer: What happens if you halve the value of m (relative to W)? In these models? What effect does it have on equilibrium prices, and what effect does it have on quantity supplied? How does the net consumer and producer surplus change as a result, in terms of the original m? Oh oh... Happy Monday (when it gets to you) to all you Slaves of Ignorant Motherfuckers -- Enjoy you're weak. Do I have to write a fucking sim for you? You have to state which assumptions now, and in what way they are incorrect, and what evidence you bring to prove that. W and m,p don't have to be measured in dollars $ because most trade on most markets is done in terms of dollars... nothing in the equations said dollars only. Marginal utility of smoking more crack is zero? Hello? Have you ever used crack? But, that aside, yes the second he realises that nothing in the equations he studied implies US DOLLARS... his head is either going to explode, or he'll crawl up in the corner and wish for death. K5 posts are exactly the type of thing an economist might study. Because people are familiar with dollars and can understand the concept easily. Do you think the equations would work if m was euros instead of dollars? Obviously you say... but euros are just fag dollars so that's stupid... would the equations work if m was gold? Gold isn't money, it's an actual good! Guess what... if x is traded in terms of gold, m can be gold, p is gold... What if we get a bit more abstract... what if m was time? In order to produce something, it cost nothing more than time? Could you work out a utility function based on the amount of time someone was willing to spend to obtain x? From theory, you can determine they have a utility function just from the observation of how much time they are willing to trade to obtain x! The price is now measured in time. Oh oh... economists don't measure everything in dollars after all... You don't have too... that's the point... just because he uses dollars everywhere, doesn't mean you have to too... please explain the exercise example purely in non-financial terms... what is the cost of exercise, time and pain, right? what are the benefits, better health... Utility = Better Health - Time - Pain... Convert Time you would be willing to trade for pain... so, you could do something that takes ages but doesn't cause much pain, or something that takes less time but causes more pain... look, you just got a relationship between time and pain. Better Health... well how many painhours are you willing to trade for more health... we observe it and can infer your utility function health in terms of painhours or whatever the fuck you like. This is COVERED in the micro economics course... It doesn't have to be in terms of dollars... But if you are willing to trade painhours for dollars... well... fuck, we just measured your health in terms of dollars too fucker! Now to blow your mind... if you really want to make W and m be vectors representing different resources (money, time, effort, etc)... now, and create a p vector which is the cost per unit of m paid to obtain x! What are your price/demand equilibrium points taking into consideration other, non-financial, costs? You have calculated all this right... for yourself A few of the questions ask what happens as p goes to zero... and we know the demand is limited. That is why we look at it... but it is not interesting to an economist any more, because p being zero means that it is as cheap is economically feasible. You want to look at negative pricing perhaps? The thing is that demand and supply, the wealth generated goes into reducing costs... which drives prices down... so that is the end goal of economics too... which is why it is not interesting anymore. Yeah... crack's not like that... Have crack... smoke some... five to fifteen minutes later... hmmm, crack sounds like a good idea... what happened to all my crack? How can I get more crack? And why would anyone wonder why a crackhead would have trouble with economics? Eventually the costs become economically infeasible and they either end up quitting of their own choice when they start noticing the real costs, going to prison or being forced into rehab or die... Amount of time in day still fixed... You can't double the number of hours in the day... You can only reallocate the use of a scarce resource. I can't wait for him to realise the cost function in the A* algorithm and all the Machine Learning courses are equivalent to the Utility functions of economics... That AI and ML got their language and concepts from economics, not the other way around. oh oh... It's too late.. as soon as he realises that people act AS IF they are maximising these utility functions... we don't even have to prove it, we just integrate over the observations of actual trades... we know people are willing to trade q of x for p of m.... (If he runs my free trade model, he'll see, everyone has 1 of m, are willing to buy 1 of x and pay it at price of exactly 1 of m... and everyone ends up better off afterwords.) Now, he's sure to like the A* stuff... being an old rule's based AI aficionado... where the rules give rise to easy to compute cost functions... but he's fucked, because he knows that this is language of AI... and ML is another level again. If people aren't actually maximising a utility function, they are behaving AS IF they are maximising a different utility function... this is the decision utility, and it was what we can actually observe... if they are maximising a different utility function, they aren't maximising their true utility function... they are going to get less than optimal results... This means that if their decision utility is a poor match to their real utility, they are in trouble... this happens at every level... it's enforced by the rules of evolution, laws of thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems, rules of physics... evolution weeds this shit out! You don't need no 'special imaginary psychological rule'... that is the psychological rule... people want the most they can get for the lowest cost possible. He is the living fucking proof of the psychological rule, trying to scam money for nothing however he can! Let him start living the post-scarcity reality first or stfu. Exactly the right question... Why don't you just for once, try and make some guesses as to what they are? Try it for yourself... prove that you can at least 'think' like an economist... even if you totally disagree with the results... okay? No, try again... just tell me what benefits there are and what costs there for YOU personally to post a single comment on K5... just start there... and p isn't zero because there are costs. Just list your cost and benefits or fail $ What changes? What are your costs and benefits? That's all you have to answer. We know demand curves change... just start with YOUR UTILITY FUNCTION. I know that... The price of tomatoes at the farmers market changes on the fucking weather! What are the benefits and costs to you? Enumerate them along with your fucking MOOD states if you must. I can make it even easier if you want... start with ANOTHER view on the problem... What are the benefits and costs to you OF READING COMMENTS on K5? I ddn't ask you to quantify, I asked you to identify. What have you got so far... reading 'enjoyment' posting 'enjoyment' educational 'value' the value of an argument... cause you 'enjoy' it? It looks like we could use the 'laugh' as the basic unit of benefit you gain from both reading a comment, and making a post? How does that work for ya? What are your costs? You've written all that as if it was completely free... as if you didn't have to forgo ANYTHING to obtain those things... think harder. I mistakenly thought you might complete the econ courses... this is why you are having trouble understanding simple concepts... please do not comment on economic questions any further... you are simply wrong... accept this fact and be happy with yourself. KILL YOURSELF $ YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW THEM!! I didn't ask you to believe, I asked to you UNDERSTAND. I, on the other hand, have to explain to the prof why his theories on experienced utilities are wrong... and forever unprovable. and counter his latest arguments which I haven't read yet, but have been notified of. don't worry, economic problems should only affect you for about 30 years or so at most... they tend not to be a problem to most people at a certain point. Your wilful ingorance has really pissed me off Because you should know that we can put numbers to these things based purely on the observation of your actions, and don't have to 'guess' anything at all... The fact that you think you can derive a benefit from posting comments on K5 can be determined PURELY from the observation of the fact that you choose to actually post comments on K5. But your wilful ignorance means you don't know that... and think economics is all about the all mighty DOLLARS. You really are a fucking waste you know. KILL YOURSELF $ YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND HOW IT WORKS YET BECAUSE YOU HAVEN'T DONE THE MATHS. They prove you only need to see what people DO to know what they VALUE. I observe you post on K5... therefore I KNOW you value posting on K5... NOTHING PULLED FROM ANYWHERE CRACK FAGGIT... (Have you sucked dick for crack... lol... I bet you have - therefore I know you VALUE crack MORE than you DISLIKE sucking dick). Now attack this bitch. Trane VALUES posting on K5... He gets a NET BENEFIT or UTILITY from posting on K5... Proof: OBSERVATION - Trane posts on K5. Economics figures pulled from my ass huh? No, irrefutable FACTS. I didn't take into account not studying them... He led me to believe for a while he was going to do the course... but stopped before the required proofs... he has read some of it, but was bluffing it for the most part. So, there is always that method of rejecting the theory... wilful ignorance. This is probably the most I've been trolled ever. Yes Your time in scarce motherfucker... deal with it... you will soon be dead. Deadlines... recongising this enables us to also know how we get things done. Your work today is worth more than your work tomorrow. Actually... it's how much horsecock they demand! And how much can be supplied. It's the invisible Mr Hands of the market! Get in while the getting's good Google Taxi will be a lot less likely to rip off both its customers and employers. Also no one will be forced to make chit chat with some boorish taxi driver... and there'll be no awkwardness over tips either... I'm surprised they aren't already operating. Taxi industry is an interesting one... in that its locked up by regulation like crazy... I understand the idea is to keep the barriers to entry so high that those who are in (own licenses) can command higher prices... which ensures that the industry remains strong... too much competition, I guess they theorise, would lead to lowest common denominator... variable quality, too low prices for 'nice' taxi's that we have now... stuff like that... Those that can afford the limited licenses are quite happy with the way things are. So apps like this step on all sorts of regulations designed with the above in mind... and they're just being forced to work around it for now... Anyway, I was thinking more like google's self driving car... Google are too big too worry about shit like taxi regulations, they can have these changed... it's just the risk in licensing these cars, because I don't think they've been licensed to self drive without a human supervisor yet. Given the amount of time google cars have been on the road (100k/hours or something, no at fault crashes? Greater than the average human between accidents, but gives 50% or so probability they actually are better than humans... or something)... the states should license a very limited number of cars as total self driving cars... as those statistics increase, license more... pull all licenses if the stats suddenly go bad (one fatal accident, or even one non-fatal accident)... Now, if google makes a taxi company, with no driver... that'll be making money and building confidence with every license they can get. I'm surprised this doesn't exist already... as in it seems the fastest way to driverless cars, and therefore a safer, more efficient transportation system. Google should charge market rates... which would be huge... imagine for the first 6 months, the state only licensed one car! and ran a completely open and free bidding system, where you could trade time flexibility for price... if you want it right now... you got to pay... the guy who put is bid on earlier is pushed back in the queue... and google picked up according to maximisation of its profits, which might consider where it is and where it has to go... but google could always tell you exactly (and fairly, by comparison to what the next guy would pay) you would have to pay to jump the queue by some amount. as more cars come online, prices would drop, times would improve... all completely according to economic theories. let google maximise their profits, and everyone benefits in the long run... If there was one google car in existence running a profit maximisation queue to deliver passengers between different places... according to people's current bids... I'd like to meet the guy who catches it to work every day.... but I'd definitely try and get a ride in on some off peak time... So, I'd put up my price... for my time, and journey... and google can tell you the current charge based on who it couldn't pick up (there would still be a minimum charge of course...). The more cars that get licensed, because more miles will have been driven, the more likely people are to use them for everyday purposes like that. Yes... it would cost more to have it sooner That's the point... to make it work its most economically efficient journeys. And to give the rewards to those who demand them the most... pure capitalistic allocation of resources. in theory, this produces the highest net benefit possible to both the consumers and the producers. From the 'consumer's perspective' - LOL price me out of the market That's kind of the point... right? You are not the market, nor the consumer if you can't afford it... get used to it... luxury yachts is the market you're priced out of... from the 'consumer's perspective'... get real. Sell it to those who do want it at that price, I bet it would be real popular and expensive at first... but eventually, maybe even the 'consumer' could be able to afford it. It would be limited by political reasons implemented as licenses, and proof of safety track records that influence the granting of further licenses... but if at least one is running, and charging market rates... you're optimising it's adoption. Ie, the quickest way to make it affordable to the likes of you... including a one hour wait at fixed price premiums or some shit... is to let the market go and quit your fucking jealousy... fucking lol No muppet... it's a good... there is a market clearing price, and that is it. The more good, the cheaper it becomes. remember, it is currently limited by the ability to obtain licenses (currently zero) which is limited by its proven safety track record.... the cost of the good to produce is also high... There is an optimal price and that is all there is to it... if only a very few people can afford that price, that is reality... the effect of that though is to decrease future prices... So when google taxi has 2M taxis... still the market rate would be the 'best' price... it would just be a lot cheaper... the demand hasn't changed at all. actually, cost to produce is irrelevant... until the licenses (safety) stop being the restriction on market supply and costs dominate... sunk costs don't matter... it's only marginal costs per mile or something that would matter... and it should eventually tend to that price. Costs don't matter, except how much good a firm is willing to produce... but they produce more at higher prices... and producing more lowers the price. Yeah... entry costs... and they don't matter in ways I described earlier. How much DO you sell managed services from? There's someone out there doing it already... Stop thinking you are anybody in any market... it doesn't work like that... you're either profitable or not... you either buy at the price or sell at the price or not... the market will demand what it demands, and the profitable firms will supply it... end of. If you had bothered to take the econ courses you would clearly see why Semi Fixed Costs do not affect the quantity produced or the price at which it is supplied at. Either you supply managed services or you don't... this "except hourly" means you sell managed services at an hourly rate. One guy asking 50k/month is all you need to definitely do it... you already said. There is a price for which you would sell managed services... the truth is you cannot be competitive at current market prices, so it is not worth your effort vs things you can be competitive in within your economic, technical and resource constraints. Xdemanded(price) = Xsupplied(price) That is all you need to know... The interaction between the two... the many consumers and many producers, each with their own perceived benefits on one hand, and costs on the other... will set the optimal price for everyone. You're financial difficulties are of no importance to me. Dude... People would pay thousands to ride the only google car in existence. Of course, they should take the extra money... It is limited by the number of licenses (currently zero) based on proven safety track record... Yes... they are waiting for the optimal risk/analysis thing to go a bit more commercial. The idea isn't to stay with just one taxi... but how many hours does each addition car give you in terms of safety, times the likelihood of accidents over the increasing population, shit like that... it's all irrelevant, because the car itself should just maximise the profits on whatever set of journeys are currently available to it in the queue. This means people who economically derive more benefit from it than you... (I spent 10k for a joy ride around town in the worlds only self driving for hire car... is more economically beneficial than you paying 80 bucks to get to your unimportant meetings). Deal with it and take taxies until the price comes down to your level... Sorry... and when everyone catches google taxi's because it so much fucking cheaper than owning your own car? then what? It's just the law of supply and demand... obey it and everyone is better off. That's the profit that 'might' appear from the first car... The point is it also keeps it on the road proving its safety... It might make hell of a lot more than that if you consider there's a good chance Brin might even take it work everyday. Of course it matters... if they charged $1 a ride lets just say they get free solar power for it... idiots like you will be riding in it, instead of people who are provably both willing and able to pay more... what the hell is the point in that? The point is by doing that, they can point to proven demand for more taxi's... more pressure to get more licenses, the more license the more you prove both the price people are willing to pay and the safety record increases... That is the path to the lowest cost... by maximising profit for every car at all times... No way is the future economic driven automation ai infrastructure a trivial amount to anyone. Consider owning huge portions of the automated vehicle market is going to be... The licenses are currently limited by one fact... THERE MUST BE A HUMAN SUPERVISOR RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CAR IN THE DRIVERS SEAT. The state DOT just needs to grant a license for ONE single car AT REASONABLE COSTS... FOR PUBLIC HIRE AND HOLDING GOOGLE LIABLE. That's it... then just allow the supply of law and demand dictate the journeys... maximum profits for google, market clearing rate prices for people, which should eventually go below current taxi's... and licensing costs be far lower, because we no longer need trained drivers and all that crap. As the safety record goes up, the cost of licensing MUST also come down. Anything you argue about licensing is irrelevant because that is how it currently IS. I'm saying it matters greatly... For all you know... 10k might not be enough to get a ride at some points in time... right? 100k, 1M for a single ride? possible... What google should do is not charge you what you are willing to pay, but its opportunity costs to pick you up (what the next most favourite person would have paid, type of thing... like ebay). New Years eve or a particular famous event or just wall street crack heads betting to see who can pay the most for a ride in it. run that fundamental operation all the time in the machines themselves, right... maximise profits. Right now it's taxi's for passengers... but the machines drive to where they get the cheapest fuel too... take into account traffic congestion... all of that in terms of profit. in the future, more flexible robots might exchange their own components with each other for their own economic benefits... no humans overseeing the transaction. it's just a start, but optimising routes by economic principles has already proven itself hugely successful, consider the UPS no left turn policy and the huge benefits it bought. Dude... that's an example of externality not free trade... someone taking without permission of the other party... your economic activity imposing a cost on a third party without permission. No... the money going to the investor does everyone much better than the same money going to the crackhead in terms of wealth production... the investor has a proven ability to produce wealth after all... the crackhead merely consumes... The only question is that you know the crackhead exists and is running around causing havoc everywhere... is it cheaper to give them a small amount of cash rather than lock them up... but if they still cause havoc with even a small amount of cash, there doesn't seem any point in giving them any! I'm not convinced giving crackheads a small amount of money is going to stop them being assholes. Toxic assets were a violation of the free trade agreement, right? People lied about the quality of the bundled loans basically... right? They engaged in trades that people wouldn't have engaged in if they understood what they were trading in... this is an externality... negative externalities are proof assholes exist... just as crackheads are willing to steal in order to maximise their internal utility function, there are asshole bankers who are willing to sell F class loans bundled as A+ loans... This is not in violation of the assumption that people are maximising a utility function... just proof they are willing to do it at the expense of others and generate negative externalities. assholes exist - economics theorises it - you prove it. Does economics understand this? U kidding right? EXTERNALITIES That's it... it models it just fine. When you trade outside of the free-trade model it really means you are creating negative externalities for some body else... Yes... economics understands this... and the answer is to make those externalities EXPENSIVE... So we throw people in jail if at all possible, or fine them, or maybe just tax them. You mean LOCK them in a VR... Congrats... you are now suggesting changing the operation of prisons. If it was real enough they would be in it already and not creating negative externalities... economic feasibility constraints violated - wishing for non existent technology. No, you've failed... you do not know what you are talking about any more. Fastest way to zero price is through capitalism and free trade... KILL YOURSELF $ I can prove Wikipedia has Utility to Jimmy Wales He created it and maintains it. That OBSERVATION is all that is required to PROVE it has UTILITY to JIMMY. Utility functions only apply to PEOPLE and the INSTITUTIONS they form... So, you can't just say, what is the utility function of a piece of bread... bread has no utility function because bread can make no choices... So, now you have to ask, what is the utility function of good/service X to person, people or population P. The UTILITY of wikipedia to YOU is obvious anytime you link to it... I can tell it has utility to you, simply from the OBSERVATION that you used it. You robbed yourself by skipping those classes, much in the same way as you robbed yourself smoking crack in the library. You have been stupid, and therefore must suffer the consequences of that stupidity. Are you willing to /think/ about money or are you just jealous because you want more of it? VR jam sessions are currently economically infeasible... the theory shows free trade is the fastest way to get there... No one, no matter how wealthy can afford one right now. If you are not willing to do the thinking... you have no right any more to talk about reality, you are nothing more than a fantasist. KILL YOURSELF $ YOU SMOKE TOO MUCH CRACK AND ARE TOO INCOMPETENT FOR SUCH A TASK. WHICH IS WHY THE PEOPLE WHO ARE DEVELOPING THIS WOULD NOT HIRE YOU IF VR WAS THE LAST AND ONLY HOPE LEFT FOR HUMANITY. YOU ARE A USELESS WASTE OF FUCKING SPACE ON THIS PLANET AND SHOULD KILL YOURSELF TO FREE UP RESOURCES FOR THOSE WHO AREN'T. YOUR NET CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIETY IS SLOWING DOWN THE CREATION OF VR. KILL YOURSELF. C(q) = q^2/m This time... m is an index of technological capability... So you get it... moore's law is modelled here quite well... costs go to zero as moore's law advances... it now costs less to produce the same q... or you can produce more q for the same costs... it's right there in front of you. Quiz Practice Problem 4.4 What is the limit of aggregate Consumer Surplus as m goes towards infinity? Right... you made an economic decision... and therefore you paid a cost... that cost is understanding exactly the role of technology in capitalism, and capitalism in technology. So, I was right... you aren't able to afford an economics education, even though it is of zero financial cost... exactly as I predicted. KILL YOURSELF $ explain why you haven't done it then... because MORON DIPSHIT... opportunity cost is NOT NECESSARILY MEASURED IN DOLLARS. If you had done the micro econ quizzes... that FACT would have been proven to you. You are IGNORANT of FACTS here... so you are an ignorant motherfucking crackhead moron who should kill themselves FACT. I'm not going to waste my time arguing FACTS with an idiot who can easily VERIFY them. And repeats the same FALSEHOODS even AFTER being told REALITY. GO BACK TO YOUR CRACK CRACKHEAD - REALITY IS NOT FOR THE LIKES OF YOU. This is where you lose the argument... Simultaneously proving the economic theory of scarcity, opportunity costs, value, and maximisation of utility, all in non dollar terms... But also provably showing your current level of ignorance and incompetence on such matters in general. You'd have to be a crack head to take advice on economic matters such as money creation from someone like you. Remember you are looking at a static model it is not the complete model of economics by a long shot... it is an introductory model... You'll never understand the Lorentz effect of General Relativity on energy requirements if you can't understand F=ma... This is F=ma stuff.... However, you noticed after all trading is done, the firms now have profit m, and the consumers have goods x! Well... some of that m goes back into research and development... which increases technological capability, and decreases costs... all dependent on price and demand! remember, one way for a firm to increase its benefits is for it to find a way to decrease costs! It is this model that drives costs down and technology along. It doesn't just predict technological advance, it motivates it! That's too complex for you... go experimentally test lorentz forces... its outside of your economic feasibility constraints. Start with something you can understand right now... What is the utility function to you for POSTING K5 Comments... identify all benefits and costs. Once you can do that, you can start to understand why people might even run a website at a financial loss. You see, we have a mechanism to correct this type of behaviour... It's called the law... You will now note the difference between free trade and externalities. How are you going in the econ courses? Are you doing the quizzes... Stealing from customers and employers is not perverse incentives... he's creating an externality of himself... simple as that. Right... I've never argued this point... I'm arguing at your understanding of the total effects of your theory... remember I asked you to consider the limits of increasing the basic income level to some arbitrary amount and what would happen? I've been telling you the money still has to come from somewhere... you're gonna have to get used to that... despite appearances, you really can't just print money and hand it out. The allocate about as fairly as is currently possible. Banks give money to people who can prove they can pay it back... they do this on a sliding scale, with the smallest amount and higher interest to those least likely to pay, and larger amounts and lowest interest to those most likely to repay. That's about a fair money creation system as you can get. Also Banks DO NOT PRINT MONEY AND GIVE IT AWAY They trade money for a promise to pay it back with interest... I told you, every time money is 'created' is because it is backed by real people's (or institutions consisting of real people's) real life reputation on their ability to pay it back. You can 'print money by government fiat' too! I told you that already... you just have to forgo hard currency to do it! You can make real money in the form of personal wealth doing this too!! Amongst people you already know... you need no permits or licenses to do this legally. You might need licenses to advertise or run a business etc... You still have to pay taxes, just like a bank. Despite the handwaving explanations you've been given... this is exactly what banks have to do too! You even get the deposit side if you are willing to take loans from people yourself! You see... money creation really is democratised... This is true I guess the end point of capitalism would be everyone being an owner of different aspects of a technological system, and whichever systems produced the best profits would return those profits to the owners which they then consume, producing profit for those technological systems they own... free trade maximises everybodies wealth, and everyone is happy. Clearly the technological systems are firms, and ownership through stock... so everyone will have to own the system through this... But it is interesting the political power of jobs. Large companies are given favourable deals and the politicians are so happy cause the deal will provide 100k jobs or so, and the community is happy blah blah blah... And everyone buys in on the idea that work is great ideal in its own right, and you got to be willing to work to have money... and if there is no work then there are no consumers, companies fail, more people lose their jobs, etc... and at this technological point, there is no doubt that their is indeed a demand for labour... at different amounts and different prices... also, it's clear, not everyone has the ability to own the right stock at the right time... even if all firms ran fully automated. because, when you get down to it... I am thinking, we should pay people (not very much at all) to not do anything at all... It's called XBox, and the system's doing that $ Crackheads working in their bedrooms haven't been the major source of technological breakthroughs since the altair or something... No... what you miss is that capitalism is generating the next XBOX version right now, and about as quickly as you could possibly imagine. Free money is likely to SLOW DOWN achieving this goal rather than speed it up. Corporate AI is the next evolution That's okay though, cause the models assume that all firms are ultimately owned by natural persons... Secretely the twelve wealthiest entities on the planet are AIs with stolen human identities acting as fronts... or the High Frequency Trading machines at Goldman Sachs. This is even more correct, yes $ Right... this is kind of like a propaganda photo this is a responsible use of a gun to do a responsible thing... it used by a responsible person* in a responsible way... its a responsible gun. Not these 'assault weapons' causing all the problems... So, as long as he is president, he is reassuring everyone that this type of gun, used like this, will not be made illegal**... so don't worry... Now, we can't have assault weapons, cause they get abused... but what the government doesn't really want to say anymore is why there is a second amendment... and to all the people saying they wouldn't have a hope with responsible weapons vs modern day military weapons... the obvious answer is to remove the weapons that can be abused from the military... give em all skeet shootin rifles and don't allow anyone, anywhere, for any reason to own more than one. *: Rich black not ghetto black. **: That is as long as no one creates a noticeable event with one... Empire $ 88's a good innings, with or without health care $ Your conclusion does not follow from the results rather the opposite. There is value in going with the crowd against your own observations... there is an evolutionary reason for this. What you find valuable is not socially valuable... not valuable to the species, and will probably result in bad personal outcomes for you (or the individual). You live in and rely upon society dumbshit $ You're an idiot if you think that... The number of people who live completely on their own and are totally self sufficient is so small that it approaches zero. Ever consider how many man hours went into making that computer you are using? Suck it up bitch, you're part of the system. parasites are part of the system if you want to look at it holistically. yeah... definite parasitic qualities here tho. depends what you want to do with them. most people don't have the stomach to gas them. so, you'll never cure them, its gonna have to be maintenance protocols. they are unlikely to rise up and take over though, so at least the problem is under control. so, ideally you want to keep them in a weakened subsistence state... luckily, these parasites are willing to do that to themselves. if you can find a reason, you can put them in a cage and force them to do some menial task that won't get done for minimum wage... that's always an option, and I'm glad more work is being put in on this front. the only problem left is making sure its not too contagious... in this case, oddly, I think maximum exposure should inoculate the herd, and self interest will motivate their immune systems. Wut? what are you trying to say? clearly, if you don't want room 101, you're better off going along with that. As no one else here is smart enough to notice: When the individual goes against society, it is society that benefits, but the individual almost always suffers. This is the way things are, and they are that way because it generally works well for society. The individual must pay the price to go against groupthink, this means that stupid ideas don't prosper, but good ideas can eventually get through, they just must pass the barriers and bear the costs involved. What... society is the government... people are the government... and individuals are the government. Living in a fantasy world isn't helping you. Hope you haven't insulted the king then... cause he might come chop off your head... lol wut? Pretty sure that's called democracy? $ No, Next Question Please. $ Not his job... CEOs job is to maximise benefit to shareholders... without breaking the law. The system works better that way, we know what CEOs are trying to do and can predict their actions... If a CEO changed his goals to 'feed the poor' or something, and that was incompatible with the company goal of maximising profits... we would soon find out and divest from that company, that company would fail and another would take its place Wut? $ So Kawaii Targets the lot of em. Mexicans are happier than Americans... ok BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA where do you find this stuff? pure comedy gold. What you say is actually true... as in, maybe all that overstimulated want emotion isn't the best thing for you... otoh, you see more mexicans trying to live their life in the US than americans trying to live their life in mexico. So Kawaii Targets the lot of em. Makes you wonder what secrets they must have that have such a profound effect upon them. Some possibilities: - The Chinese keep america propped up at their own expense out of the kindness of their hearts. - The ecosystem is fucked and the socio-political elite are leaving on a spaceship. - They know when the asteroid will hit. - Our diet is missing a crucial vitamin that cures all cancers and stops aging. - MKUltra works, and the vast majority of people are simply doing what they've been programmed to do. - Humanity is really the slave to the greys. - Telepathy is real. - We live in the matrix. - There is no God. - Aliens write with Chinese characters and hate english. Sorry, can't trust ex-military on this one Either you have the security clearances, and therefore must lie to us... Or you don't, and you've been brainwashed to believe the official story. You're an example of MKUltra in operation. Another Victim of Sandy Hook $ One of her tits is made of lego $ Great band Everyone loves them, except for white south africans... odd. And bitcoins are deflationary... I wonder what the effects of the mining payout decrease will be. Time to make a bank with accounts valued in bitcoins and start fractional lending of bitcoins... Create many times more account value than the number of bitcoins that exist. Which is why they have value non-scarce money just isn't going to work... you get his now, right? Maybe they will fail but they have value today. I think someone has to operate a trustworthy fractional reserve banking system backed by bitcoins... then the system will take off. Whether people can be convinced to store their bitcoins in a bank, rather than their own wallet, is another question altogether. What is clear though, is that non-scarce money is worthless. But you have no theoretical reasoning for this $ Let me explain something to you The government gave the banks nothing... they traded them $16T for the promise that the banks would pay it back... As for the banking sector, they have basically done this, and with interest. This is another reason you didn't see out of control inflation. Now, you are not proposing the government loaning people money like this at all, are you? So stop repeating this argument... it is factually wrong. People can't be trusted to do that... If they could, you would be doing that already. People buy big ass plasma screens they don't need when given interest free money, or they blow it all on crack. The banks paid back the loans they could buy solid gold giant bhuddas and give away ivory back scratchers for all care... If they hadn't paid back their loans you'd have a point. People on the whole would do a lot worse. Different institutions, different risks... Banks can be trusted to do that, and you, generally, can't. If you aren't willing to seriously start thinking about how money actually works, and realise it is created on the promises of people to pay it back and only exchanged when value exists, and understand that dumping free money (actual free, not just interest free) is going to have an effect on the value of money, I can't help you. If you don't think about that... and realise that for small amounts of free money, the effect might be small, but large amounts of free money will have large effects indeed, I can't help you. Once you realise that every dollar has to be earned or someone's reputation to pay it back staked against it... then you might think about where free money for crackheads can come from... and how much. No it isn't... value arises from utility utility arises from scarcity. Why don't you try to work out who all the actors are in the coursera world... for each actor type determine all their costs and benefits for every type of action -- not all costs and benefits are going to be in dollars... consider each action, who are the parties involved in the trades... what do they get out of it... consider positive externalities... who else benefits from the economic activity of the actors above... Then, once you've analysed the model a bit better, you can answer that question yourself. imagine they think they get $b benefit from every student signed up... evidence, sale of signature verification... kickbacks from companies finding great students... or increase in students attending given universites that they heard of through coursera... whatever the fuck they think it's worth... they think it's worth doing... even at no financial cost to the student, there are only 30k students in the economics courses... most of them won't even attempt the quizzes... a few hundred will pass and very few will get near perfect scores... If you charge $4000/student... you get only one student!! (somebody tried it!) Out of 7B or so people on the planet... only 30k were willing and able to afford to even sign up to the course... at zero $p, the costs of time, effort, and the perceived benefits limited the demand for courses. The equations even show that, at zero p, you still only demand so much... even in aggregate. So... to coursera, and the universities running the courses... students are a scarce resource... You can flip many of the things around and analyse it from different perspectives... as long as you manage everything in terms of utility, you can begin to understand why people act in certain ways. Why don't *you* write the simulation Are you sure you know what you're talking about? Have you done the quizzes? If you want a simulation... give everyone a random amount of m, we'll call that W... they can trade it for good x... which has a (personal) marginal benefit for every unit... they pay from p.x units of m for every unit of x.... create a number of firms, who will produce x units at a given price p, and will take x.p units of m for, where the marginal cost of producing each extra unit is a function of the number of units produced? and see that the optimal price and benefit for everyone is at the market clearing price, the equilibrium price? Otherwise surpluses and shortages result? Are you with me? Do you get it yet? You don't know what you are talking about... This is the same damn model you've been studying and it applies to all economics... except for some reason you think coursera is like totally different? You're not looking at it from the right angle is all. Consider c(q)=q^2/m, where m is a factor of showing the effects of technology on costs. What is the price and quantity cleared as m goes to infinity? Really... have you done all the quizzes on both courses? It really came together for me by the end of quiz 4... cause as long as you know which variable they want the answer too... everything flows from U = B - C... and its derivatives... So... instead of something difficult, like everything going on in coursera... work out an approximation to the utility to the poster of posting a k5 comment. At least consider all the benefits and costs to that poster... and try and think like an economist... assume you can identify the costs and benefits... they don't have to be in terms of dollars... just identify them. After that, if you're able, you might come up with a utility function to describe it. You really are showing your stupidity now... Bitcoins are the most valuable digital currency in use today... Traneros are worth zero, and will always be worth zero... If you weren't so stupid, you would work out how to create money yourself, with no reliance upon the government. You are very confusing... you want the government to do stuff for you, and then you post a diary saying society is fickle and ignorant... There is no consistency or logic or rationale to anything you say. Please think a little harder about the effects of inflation before making statements like this. It's not about the wheelbarrows. The difficulty in working out how much more expensive bread is going to be by the time you get to the shops. It's about how difficult you are going to find getting credit. Inflation is good for existing borrowers, bad for existing lenders of fixed interest rate loans... 'Good' for owners of goods, bad for owners of cash. You might have $US10M in the bank today, enough to buy a reasonable yacht... tomorrow you owe $500T, because of bank charges... the good news is you can pay that back for the price of a sandwich... but you just lost your yacht fortune. Well... you'd better start thinking pretty hard about them... if you want to understand the implications of your own basic income theories and want people to take it seriously. Luckily, money isn't too difficult when you finally get down to what it is... I hope it gets covered in the econ courses... almost certainly in the macro-econ course, I hope. Another thing... you must be dispassionate You want basic income, mostly, I think, because you don't have much money and this is the easiest way for you to think you could get it... convince everyone to change the way the government allocates money... But, why do you want money? What is it that makes you want it? Would you give a shit if you had tons of gold at your disposal? You have to look at the real benefits to the whole of society. Is open source or space exploration really suffering because people aren't getting money for nothing? Is this hindering the work on Asimo, Watson, or Google Brain? Will this encourage more nuclear power and avoid the global warming crisis? Will it induce inflation, if so, at what rate, and what are the effects of this? Trane would like more money is not a convincing argument to anyone. So, either money has nothing to do with that... or it does, in which case you better understand exactly what money is and what effects your ideas will have. Why $16k/year, why not $10/year, why not $500T/year... it's important for you to understand so ppl will take you seriously. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. Again, you have no theoretical reasoning for why this is a good idea... actually it sounds disastrous and why we vote representatives who do understand what they are doing, and know enough not to do this. Two sides of the same coin... your democracy is fucked, I'll give you that... so you got businessman on one hand corrupting democracy... that is probably true... they want a stable currency and business opportunities for the most part... but no, they don't like taxes... but voting free money to everyone isn't going to help that, and quite likely make it worse. in fact, you want no taxes and free money, would really fuck it up... the problem is you don't understand what money is... honestly, do you think making everyone a potential billionaire in zimbabwe helped? I could listen to you talking about specific amounts if you at least considered the limits... You don't even know what money is... stop spouting idiocy. They don't... I've told you you can create $ too $ Good try finding a candidate crazy enough $ I suggest you realise that the creation of money isn't the problem at all okay... When you create money, you deflate it... get used to it... it's called reality. You want wealth redistribution, but you're too weak to admit that that requires wealth be taken off of others. Even if you happily act lookout while someone else does it. Money isn't wealth, as I said all along. This will change soon... with the AI/ML singularity approaching. This is why I kill cats True. I don't torture cats... No unnecessary cruelty... Just cold, hard, calculated, efficient death delivered by the injection of a small amount of high velocity lead from a distance. This is actually the kindest option... in terms of total ecological welfare. There's not much of a market for this... too many people are happy to do it for free. But I could have disposed of your cat cheaper... couldn't you find a restaurant? Yes... they are an introduced, non native species that wreck havoc on the native species. They grow about twice the size of domesticated cats... and are just plain destructive and nasty. No one likes to hurt animals for the sake of it, but we're better off without them in the wild. But yes, spay your pets. Attn: Trane -- Copyright Owner Hi Trane, You have recently become the copyright holder of a piece of code. What are you going to do next? Consider your options carefully. Poll. Who? $ I figure you must mean Trane cause he hasn't shared his code with anyone yet... well... it's open source, some countries would allow you to use it as is, but not distribute anything derivative. Some countries will just outright let anyone use whatever they want however they want. Some countries might outlaw even its use without permission. Some countries allow up to $150k per infringement! He's the one sitting on a potential fortune... let's see how mean he is, and why. As long as he does nothing, he is being mean. You are having a problem... with the limitations of this particular model of free trade. If you care to attack the assumptions, then do so... if they are reasonable implement them... then prove your point or stfu. You can't use this model yet, cause Trane owns the copyright, and I'm unsure how we're allowed to use it. He might take bitcoin for commercial access, I have no idea and can't speak for him. I have never said otherwise... if it was worth your time reading back through all my posts you would see that this has been an early point of mine all along. Every model is wrong. But models have value! I'll leave it up to you to work out how. Economics is Empire and you know it. Well.. it's your choice to give away your wealth for sure, I'm not going to stop you... legally I can't. Can you clarify if this license applies to all your work ever or only to this particular project? If only this particular project... could you update the copyright notice, so there are no problems or confusion? I like this license, it allows me to repackage it under a 'be mean to trane' license, if I can ever find a way to direct it to this purpose... maybe a minimum distribution sale price of $10 with half the revenue going to the 'harsher sentences for library crack abusers' campaign... This license looks flexible enough for my purposes. There's a second version coming along, with an Agent class defined... You want to prove/test your basic wage theories? I really do take licenses seriously... You have to if you're doing anything more than work purely for yourself. Bugroff won't be compatible with the GPL for example... except in the sense that your Bugroff would have to be sublicensed GPL to be mixed with GPL code. It's a pain like anything else, but it's reality and must be dealt with. Clearly I licensed it to you just as an example of something that has value (dubious I know)... and that you have choices to make, and these choices affect possibilities. I'm happy to work on an econ model with you if you like... at this stage, if you license any changes to me, I'll license it to you... All rights reserved, separate copyrights... I'm not a lawyer, but that will work close enough for me for now... If we want we can go GPL if any one else is ever interested... but, of course, there's no significant work on it yet anyway. So, pretty glad to hear you'll give it a go... I got something else brewing too... like I said, a more OO version... with an Agent class that has its own values and an item... it's a start that can be expanded on... pretty sure it's the direction you'd like to go in. As I said, an enumeration (only 52*51 unconditional possibilities) will serve you better than any number of stochastic trials, in this case... but I don't think so for the econ problems... they will simply get too complicated I think. I'll give you a hint on speeding these types of problems up... profile it like a motherfucker in python... then translate it by hand to C. I've tried using Erlang and mapreduce type features... but straight linear speed can give you much better results than you might expect. Yeah, I read it... he's wrong of course as others pointed out... licenses are a matter of law, they are the way the system operates today, and they do not operate like that. Ignore reality at your own cost. For sure, do what you want, I ain't stopping you but be aware that you will pay the price of acting that way no matter what your utopian ideals might be. It's like measuring utility... there are benefits and there are costs... you don't have to acknowledge them, but you will pay for them no matter what. If the costs would be non-existent in system S', but you live in system S, you will pay the costs of system S, even if you've perfectly calculated the functioning of S'... You will pay the costs irrespective of whether you know the costs of S or not. So, if you choose not to understand the current system, system S, or act like you are in system S' when you are in S, then you're going to have a hard time maximising your utility within it. Maybe I am... Maybe I'm just wise beyond my years... Again tho, what I am saying is nearly tautological and the truth of it should be self evident. An example from your own life is crack in the library... Doesn't matter that if it was legal that everyone would be better off, taking whatever drugs they wanted in the library and everybody 'expanding' their minds and sharing ideas on philosophy to physics... you still ended up in jail, lost educational opportunities and employment opportunities. So, understanding and operating in reality always trumps operating as if your fantasy world exists. As it is now, without a specific license on the freetrade.py file, no one but you (copyright holder) and I (my originals) are allowed to use it -- and that is quite enforceable in a court of law. Other people might be dissuaded to look at them further because of this... probably a non-optimal outcome. So What? Point Still Stands You get fed to the lions if you insult Caeser... irrespective of whether that is right or not. maybe, if your lucky... your still fucked in the meantime though, if you don't take reality into account in your decision making. This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain... it's practically tautological. Latest version: http://pastebin.com/xm1wB7mp First website is broken might be a buffer overflow, but all I got was crazy scratches everywhere. He really should fix his website. As a mobile phone, it can still contact emergency services, right? Also, it has a unique IMEI number. Yes they are watching you. They don't even have to ring them... They can appear off, and act as a microphone, probably video too, gps readings etc I see no reason why not... Yeah, they could ring you, but probably only to distract you while they stormed into your house and/or slam you to the ground. They're unlikely to show this directly though, because they don't want joe public knowing they can do that and probably use it more strategically. People you know might start getting busted for example... in 100 to 1 probabilities showing up as coincidental statistical noise. Most phones are still 'on' for some definition of on even when powered off. Battery out (even then, only after a discharge time - check no secret batteries?) is the only way to be sure. Nope $ In trane's favour, it would be worth a hell of a lot more dope if dope was legal... On the other hand... legal dope traders are much less likely to trade their dope for stolen goods... So, you eliminate the stolen goods for dope trade... and have to convert your stolen goods directly to cash, which would be harder without the above market. Its value would be what you could get for it at a pawn shop or similar... so, the pawn shop owner would have to be willing to fence... and they are under greater scrutiny... It would be a win all round. Women prefer $5 fake gold necklaces and jewelry, fake designer handbags, fun phone covers and coke... they don't want utilitarian stuff, especially not bricked phones. For trading with the natives? Who were easily enthralled by the status symbols of the american empire? Unless it's been registered... then ur fucked, unless you can afford a lawyer to argue he freely traded it with you. Another solution to all these STD problems is mandatory disease tattoos. Mandatory testing... if you got a disease, you get a tattoo... when it's cleared you get a cross through it... you can pay to have it legally removed if you can afford it. Illegal alterations are a criminal offense. No more AIDS. If a model is falsifyable Then it is a scientific model... If others have shown it to work in many situations, now the burden of falsifying it falls upon you. Trane dismisses models, and doesn't realise he even has one, so he doesn't have a way of spotting and correcting errors with it. He also doesn't understand the economic principle of Ceteris paribus, either. Proof: Woz did not get rich from giving away his designs for free... while it was Jobs' Apple that has had an AMAZING impact on technology use. Same thing, but with maths... Jobs was in the right place at the right time doing the right thing... I never said he wasn't lucky, but he was also smart. Woz doesn't give away shit, he buys stories with his dollars and gets some sort of personal internal hard on from it... he's another stupid selfish twat... If he starts giving away notes that represent meaningful amounts of his money... then well... he wouldn't be woz, would he. Ceteris paribus, means all things being equal. You can't study the economy with a model you don't have, or one that models just the utopia without taking into consideration the present situation. For example, you believe that crack should be legal in library, fair enough, but if you act as it were, you aren't going to get your economically optimal outcomes... you're going to pay the price for that, no matter how you think society should be structured. This is interesting... who get's paid by wikipedia, who pays for wikipedia, what non-financial costs are there to posters and readers and what benefits are there to posters and readers, what is the cost to the owners and what are the benefits to the owners? It is clearly an economic success story... even tho jimbo has to beg for money... A charity worker came up to me today, shaking a can and said, "Can you spare a minute? I'm collecting on behalf of the epilepsy society."... I asked her, "Can't they shake their own cans?" This is correct Most economists have never heard of wikipedia and those that have are all on heavy dosages of thorazine, institutionalised and have lost their constitutional rights to own guns and vote. Things without prices are beyond the understanding of mere economists, they do not believe such things exist, and therefore they do not. Wikipedia is merely a figment of your imagination. You are also right that apache has a marginal benefit for every unit you install, and no cost... This is why most websites didn't make a profit, they are willing to pay employees to install an infinite number of apache instances, turns out this is quite expensive. Also, running an infinite number of apache instances is one of the main things holding back open source development today... developers just don't have the memory left to run emacs! No, Rangel's real trick was to examine experienced utility, but noting that only decision utility is observable... then he defines mistakes in the sense that the decision utility leads to a lower experienced utility... Again, experienced utility is unobservable... You can't prove it exists at all... You can have observed utility, the utility of others to us or society, which is the utilitarian philosophy, people are only as good as their use to society, or the alternative Jon Stuart Mill philosophy, where we have to leave people to their own mistakes because no one knows themselves better than they do. Interestingly, for simulated ML agents operating in an environment, we CAN observe their experienced utility!! So things become entirely different. I suspect this is his main interest, and why he makes this mistake. Point... you want AI... make economically driven AI/ML bots... Have you ever played poker? Economics. Reality, Deal With It. Do the trade simulation... Why not? Why do keep saying stuff like this? First you want to simulate an infinite number of entire universes with an infinite number of every person... Your 'solution' to scarcity, for example. Then you say something stupid like, their models can't X, where X is something simple and arbitrary. Compromise, maybe you can't simulate and infinite number of universes in infinite detail... For a first attempt you might not be able to model tells... eventually you might be able to. Simulate the trade experiment, or forever shutup about what economists can do... don't tell me that everybody else is limited by your lack of ability. Proof of scarcity thinking Which is good, cause (yes you can model it, don't be so stupid), we can't currently make AI poker bots that can make faces and read tells, as far as I know... but I think we will and not too distant future either. The best humans still beat the best NL texas holdem poker bots... interesting unsolved problem in AI. Neither body language tells or poker face exist in this environment. So, please, for the love of crack, recognise scarcity in your existence... and not just artificial scarcity, I mean real scarcity... scarcity of land, minerals, food, water, skills, labor, capital, time, lifespan, energy, environment. Also recognise that economics isn't just dollars... Anytime you have scarcity, economics can help you... Limited by CPU time, Memory, Bandwidth? Notice all these improve year on year, but software takes up the resources? Economics... nothing at all to do with dollars... When you realise that, your mind will open. Politics, power, economics... all tied together, and again it goes far beyond dollars. Final proof... utility to the person, or individual 'value' is not actually dollars... the price he pays for it in dollars, is generally less than the individuals 'value' measured in dollars... why can we measure it in dollars, because we can infer it from the amount they demand at the prices they pay. So the better you can understand economics, the better you can understand the world... Develop agents that operate on economic principles... imagine swarms of bots competing to improve the life of man... building more of themselves, repairing or recycling themselves or mining or farming or waiting or improving their AI or whatever it was that generated the best outcome for there 'owners', by generating the best outcome for the robots. No, economics really is the study of human life... well, an aspect of it anyway... it's important what field you study as to what you can understand... not all fields are equally applicable in all situations, though you know that... here's an example: Maths will help you understand physics... you can't really do physics without maths... Now physics can explain how a plane flies... you can't really understand how a plane flies without it... but you still need aeronautical engineering to know how to design a plane... even knowing the physics you'll have a hard time building one... but if you want to understand why we fly planes... you need economics. Again, "scarcity" has a precise economic meaning, and it isn't the everyday meaning... but it did evolve from it. Air is both abundant and scarce. Jargon serves two purposes, to facilitate communication between knowledgeable parties... and on the negative side, to exclude the uninitiated... whether this is a deliberate or unintended side effect I'll leave up to you. Take for example two software engineers talking, and they say the bottleneck is either in the CPU, GPU or ALU... they both understand exactly what the other is talking about and where to focus their attention... but if a layperson says they have a problem with their 'Hard Drive'... you can guess they mean the desktop computer rather than the keyboard or monitor, but their actual hard drive is probably just fine. cool... what you studying? Cool thing nowdays is that you can get your degree or whatever, and then do a course or two online, now that MOOCs exist. Surprised me that they aren't generally self paced though... This is terrible It's about as far from proof as you can possibly get... This simulation gives you EVIDENCE that the answer might be 1/4, being that the answers it gives are very close to it, but only an idiot would consider it a PROOF. If you want a proof... don't run with a random deck, enumerate all possibilities for the first and second card... you should get an EXACT answer, and it should be the same, every time. Now, make the trade simulation. Simulations give you evidence when you aren't quite smart enough to create a proof. You need the chain rule, bayes theorem and some substitution to prove this easily. Initially, the first card can be any card in the deck with probabiliy 1/52... But the first card is limited by the conditions upon it, that it is a club but not an ace... now, there are 12 of these cards, so the first card is one of these, each with a probability of 1/12... the remaining cards, available for the second card, the ones in the deck, well... I don't even care to calculate it, each of the remaining cards, that wasn't a candidate for the first card is in the deck with probability Pa, and all the ones that could have been the first card with probability Pb... Now, the second card's probability is conditional on it being an Ace... each ace has a probability of Pa of being in the deck, and there are only 4 of them... 1 choice out of a possible 4 with equal sampling is 0.25. That is proof. No, proofs are mathematical timeless entities that cannot be denied... their assumptions explicit, their results - forever facts. Simulations are noisy and probabilistic, subject to limitations of parameter space and the limitations of numerical analysis and stability... merely suggestive of truth... and can never be anything more. Maybe there is just one more case that has yet to be found that causes everything to go wrong. Simulate triangles and tell me how many degrees their corners sum to. Try something as simple as this and you are going to run into all sorts of problems. I guarantee lots of cases they are going to add to 179 or 181, and almost never to exactly 180... It will prove nothing. Why do you think so many people want to prove the Riemann hypothesis, even though numerically it has been shown to hold to 1e13... Because we still don't know if it will break at the very next number. So, simulations are pretty... but they are most useful when you aren't smart enough to understand or create a proof. Still wrong... Unless you can get exactly 180 degress for a triangle, trigonometry theory falls apart, doesn't it? I don't know about needing to 'get' the triangles to sum to 180... Trig theory, afaik, all naturally falls out of euclidiean geometry naturally. Unless your surface isn't flat Euclidean geometry again... otherwise is not euclidean. Turned out to be very important and practical reasons to know about euclidean geometry in this universe... or rather, what is and isn't euclidean. or your instruments aren't accurate Your instruments reflect you ability to measure, not the underlying reality and not the results of euclidean geometry. and if you simulate trig on a computer... well, so much stuff is based on it, again, all trig and related, all the floating point stuff like exponentials. Right, so take all that into account in your simulator too... You can't use any function that relies on the result of the proof... or otherwise what are you simulating? I get what you mean but I stand by my words that simulations and proof need to agree; No... Your simulator better agree with your proof or else it is simulating something else... assuming your proof is correct. and also that proofs are only useful if they can be applied to a realizable model. Really? Halting problem, Transcendental numbers, a whole heap of very useful mathematics that cannot even in theory be hoped to be realised and simulated... Still very fucking useful. If alone for the fact that they prove you can't simulate/calculate certain things. Really? We can easily determine whether a practical program will halt or not, and what would cause it to halt. I strongly disagree... We certainly can't automate the problem. We can provide work arounds... by halting the turing machine itself (have the kernal halt the process)... but lots of software still hangs arbitrarily, even though it's getting better. Proof: Free Trade Simulation http://pastebin.com/vkEBsZD4 I didn't post results... here's my analysis Everyone starts off, as you could expect, valuing their item rather averagely... for N=100, this gives a total value of N*N/2... or about 5000, this is a typical starting total value. There are normally a few thousand trades available, but only about 100 or so trades are required until there are no more trades available. After trade, the total value is normally around 9250 +/- 250... this is pretty high, when you consider the max possible value is 10k, and actually normally around 9800 (not everyone rates their favourite things at 100). Also, the 'poorest' starts off with a value of 0... and the poorest after trade has around 65-85. Free Trade proven for you... absolutely free. Not exactly free... it's copyrighted... check out the lastest version: http://pastebin.com/cP3F9Siz What will we do about these selfish copyright owners? Is the GPL failing us again? Yeah, it's ugly, but it's a start that's probably about the only value in it. It is purely a demonstration of the theory of free trade, that if two people would both be better off after a trade, and no one else is affected by the trade, no one else will be worse off and the two people will be better off after the trade, so they should trade. It's a tautology really... and when you implement it you can see that it is obvious, tautological even, that total 'value' will increase. I answered the difference between simulations, models and proofs elsewhere. It can be used to ask questions like, should people trade with anyone they bump into with a viable trade... Should they seek out the people with their most valued items first? How many trades are required to reach a stable state? How close to some 'optimum' would different decision strategies be? Can we benefit from a market place, or third party to facilitate trade? Right now, it craps out at about N=100... maybe you can run N=1000, I'm trying 10k people and 1k items right now... there are efficiency issues already. Should a sentry robot with a broken eye trade a good arm for a good eye with a labour bot with a borken arm? Trane also prefers simulations over concise nearly tautological economics definitions. They are inferior to good models, but just some people like them. So, yeah, it's ugly, it could probably be made more OO, it doesn't do or prove much... most of it's value is that it might be the start of a much large economics model... I'm waiting for trane to answer the copyright question before going on. I learnt this early... Money is easy to make, if you realise there are only two ways to make it: 1) Do something no else is able to do, or else 2) Do something no else is willing to do. That's it, that explains every person, how much they make and how they make it and every job and how much it pays... It's always a variation of one of those two possibilities. I said nothing of what is worth or not worth doing I just said how to get money. People always get upset when they find out about reality, so I'll give you a free pass this one time. The above still applies... Your talking about office workers... happy with what they get... The best guy could be making 10 times as much as the average guy, if he was willing to work more hours... He gets more (or works less, which is the same thing) because he is able to what others can't. So, the above explains the supply side of labour, then you just have to take into account the demand side, and you have a full explaination of what you will get paid for a given job. Janitors get paid more than unemployed, because they are willing to do what others are not, but they don't get paid much because there is only so much demand and anyone is able to do it. Making million dollar investments pays well... not because it is particularly difficult, but most people are not able to do it... even if most would be willing. The existence of systems to lower some of these costs does not invalidate the theory. willing and able... still comes back to that yeah... for a given tech, maybe going the consultant work (willing) will get you like 2, maybe 3x... not necessarily 10... you are right... it doesn't change much for an individual, why? because the individual is already optimising their willingness/ability tradeoff... ability doesn't just appear one day but not exist the day before... and you're probably working as hard as you are willing to for the given pay... and returns diminish on this. So, you have your average jo programmer... he's willing to work 40 hours a week... sam the software engineer makes twice what he gets, and only works 20 hours a week, he is more able than jo, conny the consultant makes twice what sam gets, because he is as able sam, but willing to risk more, but larry the lawyer makes 3 time sam, because he can do what sam cannot, and pat the partner at the law firm makes 3 times what larry makes... being able to earn off of larries ability, and charles the ceo makes twice what pat makes because he is in a unique position and able to do what very few others can (have a proven track record). That's how it works. The numbers are only illustrative, but the point still stands. You want more money, be willing to do more or have better abilities than you do. Lawyers get paid a lot more than techs especially as both progress in skill. It's all kind of irrelevant to my point tho which is if you have ability, that few others have, and it is demanded, you can get money more easily than someone who doesn't have that ability, or who has a different ability that isn't in demand or that many people can do... It's simple supply and demand. Are you willing to be lawyer? Learn all that stupid flexible local jargonistic human interpreted code? To be the best god damn money grubbing lawyer there is... do you have the ability... well done, you're gonna make a hell of a lot more than the average programmer working for a wage. You want to beat a lawyer as a tech? Are you willing to go entrepreneur? Are you able to? Guess what... you're gonna have to do a lot more than your average programmer again... probably understand some basic legal jargon, and have a much wider view, have reserve funds, etc... If you are either an average lawyer or average tech, you're gonna get average lawyer or average tech wages... if you aren't anything... it gets worse. It's nothing more than that... the willing and able argument is fundamental to economics, so individual willingness and ability are just the supply side of the labour demand and supply equation. It says that if two people would both be better off after a trade and no one else is disadvantaged because of that trade, the overall 'welfare' of society will be increased, and therefore they should be free to trade. It says nothing else. It does not take into account: - Money - Time - Labour - Consumption - Production - Firms - That people can have more than exactly one thing - That people's values change over time - That another of a thing isn't as useful as the last thing after a certain amount of a thing. - Costs normally increase at an increasing rate for greater production of a thing. - Transaction costs. - Birth, Education, Work, Mortgages, Old Age, Disabilities, Death, Marriage, Reproduction. It's a long way from making any statements about ebay, labour, taxation, welfare... etc, etc, etc... Note, that it's not an ongoing process like production and consumption... Once enough trades have taken place, there are no more people willing to trade... everyone has as good as they can reasonably be expected to get within the rules of the system it defines. The 'game' is over. If you want to answer questions about ebay vs newspaper, shopping mall, outdoor market, yard sale or boot sale... well... there's a lot of work to be done yet. All models are wrong... the nature of this univers e means that all simulations are wrong too... There is value in their ability for us to gain understanding and predictions from them. Economists study all this stuff... you might find it interesting to get urself some economics training. Pimps thrive where prostitution is illegal. This is the type of prediction you might get from economics. No, the global financial meltdown was not a failure of economics. It was the failure of a financial system. Many economists were warning of a housing bubble as far back as 2003, with no knowledge of the mortgage bundling fiasco... Now, they didn't know the precise timing it would all collapse... if you did, you could have flipped houses for 4 years, sold it all into gold, and then bought back houses after the crash... but many economists were predicting a crash was imminent. The Tacoma bridge failure wasn't a failure of physics, even though it was a failure of a physical system. It was a failure of engineering, perhaps, but what nobody suggested, was to throw away engineering... rather engineering was refined and bridges are now better than ever. Don't confuse economic systems with economics... China has an economic system that is quite different to the US... North Korea has a different economic system to South Korea. Crack Crack is where it all went wrong. Singapore is a fascist dystopia Outwardly nice, but scary when if you dig a little... avoid. Don't know... only spent a few hours there seemed nice though. Lots of people doing Tai Chi. You still haven't realised that non-scarce money would be worth less than sand. No it doesn't make me feel good... It would be absolutely fantastic to live in a world of infinite resources and infinite energy... an infinite number of tall blonds who worship me, etc... This is NOT reality... this is nothing more than a fantasy built up by a crack addled and destroyed damaged mind. If you want non-scarce money, start using leaves or sand as money... Don't be surprised that you have an economy of 1, with absolutely no one interested in trading with you. It's nice to be a fantasist, and there is some value in that... but if you want positive results in this universe, you have to deal with reality, and you just aren't capable of doing that. If you want to lower the scarcity of money, I will say it one more time, GO AND CREATE IT. I've given you the formula, the only thing stopping you is laziness, greed and stupidity. I'll further prove this point to you Money is NOTHING MORE than bits of paper with numbers printed on it. So why does it have value? The government could give everyone a trillion dollar bill... it wouldn't cost them any more than printing 300M or so small pieces of paper... at pennies a time. The proof you are an idiot is that you think this would have NO EFFECT on prices or anything... This is basically what Zimbabwe did. No... the reason money has value is that at every point in time, someone had to give up something to obtain it. Its value comes from its artificial scarcity in that it represents real opportunity costs required to obtain it. God runs the VR... If he don't like it, fuck you! If god does exist, he's a simulationist in charge of the crappy simulation you are in. The most ignorant MF around here is you shut the hell up. Yeah, like you are the only employer on the planet Just because you are incapable of working, doesn't mean it's a bad thing for people. You don't submit to an employer... You TRADE your time and skills for their money. Have you done the first unit of the micro-economics course yet? Did you notice how free trade increases value for everyone? Same thing... No, I use economics to understand reality rather than crack to generate fantasies. Disproved... lol wut? $ You are basing your entire view on one study? You should have noticed by now that economists adjust their assumptions all the time... remember what I told you about the complexity of models? Also the point that empirical data matches up exceedingly well with certain models, under certain conditions... as the economics for scientists professor keeps reminding you? Do you get the point about models and assumptions yet? That if we are to try and understand, we have to realise that the world is far to complex in reality for us to understand and communicate, and make models from, and predict with and simulate and observe etc... the world is fucking complicated, literally some crazy fractal where the rules of chaos and emergent phenomena apply, where the law of the land is the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems.... We have to simplify, find the essence... most importantly make assumptions, so we can make models in a reasonable time... Here is the fundamental economic problem, just for you... You motherfucker are a selfish, self centered prick with infinite wants but you are a little lazy stupid useless prick of a man of very limited resources... You prove me wrong the second you say you are satisfied with everything as it is, and that you have too much and it burdens you... In which case, fuck the government, fuck money, fuck women, fuck crack, there's nothing more you could want. So shut up already. Don't you have enough now to build your statistical psychological model of at least some fucking aspect of economics? You should be smart enough to simulate the trade demonstration economy... Imagine N items, and N people, each person values each item, their own personal valuation (it can be a log scale if you like, so 1-N should do)... then each person can freely trade with any other person but only when BOTH people would get greater value after the trade... Run that and see how close it is to optimum (How much faster than this can you compute the optimum? -- also note, done without giving away how much each person valued the item)... That's a FIRST ORDER approximation, it will teach you a lot... only until you have that could you expect to examine more complication. Or another way, with a wrong model you can measure the errors compared to empirical data... get that bit yet? No model at all is useless. A 'real' developer could have a running first model out within an hour... Write a diary on why professor is wrong about his theories on drug prohibition... or why it might not be true... cause I got a really good feeling he is wrong about that, and nothing to with whether or not the prohibition works assumption, which he gave you for free, but something deeper in his hand waving... If you've done that unit (I'm not doing the quizzes, I haven't done any on unit 1 and haven't started unit 2, which runs out tomorrow... but I watched all the videos once through... If you've done you're homework, you'll at least understand what I write. Also, you obviously haven't looked at the micro- econ course... His demonstration of how trade produces value was so simple and obvious that an unemployable crack addict could understand it. Fine my fault... You've proven me wrong. It wasn't simple and obvious enough that even an unemployable crack addict could understand. LEAVE LINDY ALONE! $ Your husband says the place stinks Please don't post here anymore holly... Sssslllllluuurrrrpppp http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/1/24/163644/698/21#21 Happy Australia Day Everyone Today is the day the whole world celebrates how lucky we are to be Australian. We are thankful that we are not humorless Americans stuck in a screwed up democracy arguing over unimportant wedge issues, while the rich steal ever more of our wealth. We are glad we are not stuck up British prigs with no sense of freedom, smiling for the ever watchful eye of big brother and avoiding chavs whom we have no defense against. We are happy not to be from some poor third world country, begging for food scraps and avoiding tyrannical dictators. We revel in the fact that we are not under the control of a failed communist state where democracy has been subverted like in Russia. We enjoy our political freedom of speech, unlike the Chinese. We are grateful not to be in a hyper industrialised society running out of fishing resources like Japan. We rejoice that we don't have to eat all that weird Asian food, unless we want to have a takeaway. We are joyful not to be in an overcrowded european city. Just blessed not to be living in some smelly, poor, overpopulated, violent hellhole like just about everybody else. We know we are better than you... we are not in a global financial crisis... we are rich, happy, free and not overpopulated. However, most of all, we are very, very thankful, not to be Norwegian. I'll be spending Australia Day with my 1%er friends enjoying a BBQ in the summer sun maybe on the boat or down by the dock of their waterside mansion. Maybe watch some fireworks or sail down to the cafe for some dinner later on. Discussing our latest strategies for stealing from the willing poor and stupid. It'll be a nice break from the hustle and bustle of having thousands of acres all to myself. Maybe go back to my inner city apartment and watch more fireworks and watch the young and free rich and rare beauty go by. Same thing most aussies will be doing. So, how will you all be enjoying your Australia Day? An aussie farmer bachelor goes to an outback Bachelors & Spinsters ball and meets the most beautiful women he has ever seen in his life. He starts talking to her, and pretty soon they are hitting it off... they drink, laugh, pet and kiss each other... she starts to get heavy for him and then he tells her his secret "I really like you, but I've never had sex with a woman before". Instead of thinking less of him, she is completely taken by him, and suggests they should do it properly then, and get married and stay together forever. So he proposes to her, then and there, they get engaged and a couple of months later they have the wedding. The wedding was wonderful, and the happy couple retire for the night to the bridal suite. As soon as he gets into the room he locks the door and starts moving the furniture around. He moves the dressing table against the door, the table to the side, all the chairs and furniture he puts against the wall and starts upending the bed. The new bride stands in shock, looking at him like he's gone completely mad... She says to him "What are you doing moving all the furniture around? I thought we were going to have sex and I was going to give you something no one else ever has!". And he looks at her, still moving the bed, and he says "I've never had sex with a woman before... but if it's anything like it is with a kangaroo, we're gonna need all the room we can get!". I only know of two people* eaten by sharks but fuck those snakes, seriously. We haven't lost any dogs to them yet... but both the dogs and the cat like to corner them and make a lot of noise... They're good early warning systems, and although they are way faster than snakes, I'm sure they have no idea how dangerous a mistake with them is. We've put in over 30 solar powered lights and 'snake frighteners'. They charge throughout the day and give an intermittent buzz into the ground that is meant to keep the snakes away, they also light up like normal garden lights at night... but the snakes still appear. *: friends of friends, not directly. Help!!! I'm Sunburnt As Fuck again. Didn't expect any kurons from here... If you wanna meet up... make an account on reddit and post something to /r/kuro5hit... or mesage me there. Can organise easier from there. The Queens on Beaufort St? LOL I REPLIED ALRADY: LEARN 2 REDDIT No, It's Girt By C . Most important ripper is a highly personal thing If you had asked most important k5 ripper, that would be different... RAPING YOU WITH THIS COMMENT $ I know... women who carry guns are 310 times less likely to suffer completed rape in a rape attempt, compared to those who do not resist. I mean, good on her for resisting, but she's gonna have to learn to just lie back and enjoy this sooner or later. Human Nature consistent across cultures $ wut? that statement pretty much agreed with your observation... also... that link didn't work... just got a blank page. LOL yeah, batman is pretty stupid Website just maximising their economic benefits proof of human nature. I trust you don't actually believe that... and realise that human nature transcends society. Debt don't matter to those who shouldn't get it $ Because they had a fuck load of profit on the interest of those who have paid back. Interest in fact covers the risk, because you know statistically that some people will default. You can forgive a certain amount of debt, certainly not all of it to everyone. Think about this yourself... if you want to create money, you literally can... LOAN someone money, get them to sign a contract to pay you a certain amount at a certain date, plus interest and late penalties... This is how you learn the value of money. This is what banks are meant to do (when they're not overheating on packaged up fucked up debt)... This is what gives value to money. The promise to pay, and the difficulties ensuring they will... Money lending is not as easy a business as you might first presume. No more than you could if you just follow the instructions I just gave you. They are doing literally the same 'creating out of thing air' that you can do right now. So, why don't you go and personally end the damn scarcity of money? You are the government Try it out on a personal level... Because the government is just other people doing it on your behalf. Now, you might not understand what I mean by your behalf... because you've never put any wealth into the creation of money or invested it in the government. But actually it undermines the people who have... the result would be increased inflation... and don't give me any of your "it's only psychological" bullshit, because I've given you the psychological underpinnings of this, and you've given no good counter argument to it. So, if you want to understand a) how money is created, and b) the value of money, you have to go out and do it yourself, and realise the government is simply doing that on behalf of everyone, and this means money has value. Money with no value is not money. Because the interest is your payment for risking your money, and also the incentive to create the loan, as you won't have that money for some time. As I said, go create money if you want to understand the process... Look up "Promissory Demand Note", and how to create one and go out and do it. because http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/1/25/62944/0487/34#34 I too agree that the niggers are having too many babies and will eventually come to kill the whiteys unless they can keep their guns to fight them off... Jolly decent... good show old chap. I'm on a farm... we can't own some of the more high powered weapons you guys have access to... but to ban our rifles would be an environmental disaster. foxes, rabbits, goats, pigs, cats and occasionally dogs. Used to be able to shoot the abos if they came on ur property. They were also counted as wildlife as recently as the 50s in the Maralinga nuclear tests. Odd thing is, the british considered them to be uncivilised. What about Russel? You got a better plan you stupid bleeding heart librul? You want to push them onto the black market? They have the same opportunity as everyone else... maybe they should have got an education and stayed off the drugs instead. Bambi "'cause I was just thinkin' about skinnin' you like a deer." I wasn't talking to you... so you can stop stalking me now... It's creeping me out, quite seriously. I was talking ABOUT you not TO you... Goddamit... children and women should be silent, didn't your parents bring you up properly? So, please stop stalking me now... You're making me feel very uncomfortable, vulnerable and creeped out. When you write a diary you put yourself up for ridicule. Who am I to deny the rest of Kuro5hin my wonderful insight into your stripper lifestyle? You are still stalking me... I asked you to stop that. When ugly and inferior people attempt to communicate with someone like me, it creeps me out. Ugly inferior people should know better than attempt communication with their superiors. A superior person, such as myself, is used only to high praise and the fawning of attractive, intelligent, socially valuable people. What you are doing is very creepy and offensive... You would be arrested if your identity was known. Please do not post diaries or comments anymore... it's wrong and offensive, and quite frankly, you should be banned. No, YOU don't want me talking to you... totally different matter. You, tho... I plan to RAPE in every diary and comment you post from now on, because I find you that offensive. Fuck you Holly Women fucking love me... just fucking deal with it. The last woman I was with fucking stuck with me until she fucking DIED you stupid horrible BITCH. This isn't real life, this is FUCK YOU HOLLY YOU ARE A TERRIBLE FUCKING BITCH WHO SHOULD KILL HERSELF... internet... I'm here to remind you of that. Go get raped by a chav. Don't post here if you don't want to be trolled it's as simple as that... Let me get this through your thick stupid ugly fucking skull... I don't want to fuck you holly... I wouldn't touch you with a ten foot pole with my worst enemy's gangrenous dick on the end of it... You genuinely turn my stomach with your attitude... it's truly despicable. No... I'm gonna attack you every fucking chance I get. You get no special - "don't troll me cause I'm a special princess" - anti-troll bonus here... If you're a cunt, I'm gonna troll you for being one just like any other poster here... The more of an idiot you are, the more you get trolled. Welcome to trollville bitch, population you. Stop stalking me You're more stupid than trane in the lack of your originality. Good thing people can't get their hands on cocaine and heroin. Not socialism... capitalism with strong safety nets. I read it now... Up to the vertebrane chapter... I remember that from before... The US system is exactly like where I think it will go, if nothing is changed... and the Aus system isn't realistic at all (even with tech advance)... I doubt it would work. Political problem aside, to solve the wealth concentration and unemployed terrafoam problem, as I have been saying everywhere else, you need to tax wealth and redistribute as basic income... you can remove a whole heap of other taxes, and also remove unemployment benefits and min wage. You can make these changes now, and the tech transition would be painless. You couldn't work if someone PAID you too $ Probably... it's unlikely anyone could be so fail IRL. High Tech Business with High Upfront Costs Always do this... When a new technology is created... most of the cost of that technology has already been paid, and now needs to be recouped. Remember, business sells at the price the market will bear - no more, no less. So, initially, they sell only a few items at a very high price... after a while, that market saturates, and they bring down the price a little, and catch a few more people... so on and so on... capturing more and more people... with market competition, you eventually end up at the true marginal cost of the good or service provision, and everyone now has amazing technology for very little cost... like $30 android mobile phones because guys in the 80s were paying tens of thousands for suitcase sized bricks. The money, now recuperated from that technology, is put into r&d of new technological products you haven't yet even dreamed of. This is the theory... where it deviates from this is where it really gets interesting. Lack of competition, collusion? Lack of reinvestment? Market simply willing to bear these costs? Why? Who knows... We know those things are approximations to reality we probably even know exactly by how much... But when you consider the example of the tens of thousands of dollars suitcase phone thirty years ago to the modern android phone for a few dollars... Even the price of bandwidth has dropped exponentially, and will probably continue to do so... The evidence doesn't support your theory. Where illegal collusion and insider activity can be proven, it should be punished... but again, the results have been overwhelmingly positive, and there's no evidence this trend should reverse. I don't see why you want to change the system on this level... when everything you say is... there are these technological barriers that add to cost, and besides these costs are dropping exponentially year on year. So, it's a little slower rolling out to individuals... but if you want a lot of bandwidth, you can get it. If you want really fast, to your house connection, it is expensive now, but you can get it... as that is taken up, the cycle of better for cheaper repeats. It doesn't make sense to change something that seems to be working. You just said that the copper is very close to its theoretical limit and fiber is fucking expensive. They are recouping their sunk costs in copper, and will roll out fiber with exactly the model I described above... Very expensive initially, with exponentially decreasing costs over time. It's just not feasible for most people right now. Right, people are willing to bear a certain cost for bandwidth... that is inelastic to quality, as long as they are getting what everyone else is getting. Now, I guarantee, if you have enough money, and it is important enough to you, you can get fiber to your home right now. I bet it's real expensive... but I also bet less expensive than it was last year, and more expensive than it will be next year. You might be suffering monopoly problems. Where I am, the infrastructure is privately owned, but you must lease the use of that infrastructure at the about the same price as you charge yourself (i know, we got a funny system)... this seems like an interesting compromise between public ownership and private exclusion. Right... you've just proven that bandwidth prices to the home have been dropping exponentially. If you want enterprise level bandwidth to your home, you got to pay a lot... for some this is worth while. 10 years ago, you could pay for fibre, and you only got the bandwidth you can get today on copper... It's not the tech that matters, it's the results in terms of bandwidth. This will continue the trend, even if they do eventually have to switch to fibre... I'm not convinced otherwise. Finally... what is everyone complaining about... 'bandwidth is so expensive'... but... compared to WHAT? It's incredibly cheap compared to a decade ago... constantly on that exponential curve. I thought that u might be thinking like that... I've got two words that will enlighten you: Population Density That's it... that's why it costs so much more to get internet to the home in the US compared to any of those countries... Further, you won't be surprised to find out that internet is even more expensive in Canada, and would shock you the cost in Australia. Pop density explains most of the differences not all, and nothing ever does. So... you are saying that it is being rolled out in some places... just as I said... it takes time, and it starts expensive... but it will come, and the price will drop. Japan and Europe vs USA == Apartment Blocks vs Suburban Homes Where to get this data? $ Yeah... i still think my point stands that bandwidth is still becoming exponentially cheaper over time. The switch to fiber will happen when it becomes necessary, ie, copper can no longer keep up with the exponentials. Yes, your business would gain value if it was subsidised by someone putting in all the infrastructure for you. Many online businesses would benefit from subsidised hosting services... The gov. should provide those as well... Would certainly help my business to not pay for hosting. 600GBP/year I don't know if that's cheap or not... but I get exactly what I need out of it. I have a couple of hundred dollars and technical skillz coming out of every pore... I'd love to compete in the datacenter market, but apparently initial outlay costs can be in the thousands, and clearly is only for the very wealthy and corporations... Clearly, if people like me or trane could afford to get in on the action, we could drive down prices through added competition to reasonable levels. So, I'm not sure this market is as competitive as you suggest. Really missed my point... Let me ask you from another point of view... How much money does it take to start the smallest level of cable company? You really think this out of the reach of someone who has the necessary skills? With a bit of work, anyone with the necessary skills can save themselves a hundred million or so. Technical people tend to overvalue technical skills. Technical ability does not equal empoyability Or the desire to work or anything else. Just because you are a great technical ability, doesn't mean you can get 200k/year... you might have a political belief against working for other people, for example. You are 'relatively' rare, yes... I would say certainly less than 1 in 20, probably more like 1 in 100 with the skills, 1 in 1000 with the skills and drive... Rare is comparative to the requirements... Probably 1 in 100k can run a cable company... Doesn't make it anti-competitive. No, you only need 1 provider to be competitive What competitive means is that if the market is not supplying as cheaply as profitably possible, that someone can move in and make a profit doing it cheaper, they can. You haven't proved this is false. It does not mean that any moran who can setup a unix box can 'av a go. No, you are wrong on this point you don't need more than 1 producer in an environment to be competitive... IFF there are no unreasonable barriers to entry. Large amounts of initial outlay money do not count as unreasonable barriers. So, why should I believe it's uncompetitive? I disagree that requiring a huge chunk of cash implies a non competitive market. Everyone thinks they are average. You are extremely well off compared to a huge number of people, so you see your job as being within the reach of the 'average' technical person. An example of a technically brilliant unemployable was someone I was bought into replace. His skills were great, but not only did he wear a tshirt to work with "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" -- He BELIEVED it, and LIVED it... that attitude just doesn't work in 90% of reasonable workplaces... He could technically run a hosting service drunk with his hands tied behind his back, but he might have trouble funding it in the early stages. OTOH, I know people who have no idea of technical details and have access to tens of and in some cases even hundreds of millions of dollars, and always looking for investment opportunities... If they saw a gap in the market, if they can't fund it directly themselves, they can get funding from people they know and would easily get the backing of banks... Anything less than a billion is easily available to these people... At this level the technical details are no matter, what matters is the existence of reasonably well researched and backed proposal showing rates of return and risks and they consider this a better investment than alternatives they have. Oddly, these people also consider themselves pretty average, because they spend a lot of time with people who are as or better well off than themselves. So, I'm writing off your huge wad of cash argument completely. It's certainly not moon landing money. Something else that is interchangeable, cost and service... This is always true, and something I'm gonna come back to. We measure utility instead, which includes the two (utility = benefit - cost). Next, as I said before, a single provider does not stop a market being competitive... assuming it the provider must act AS IF it was competitive, in the sense that it risks other competitors entering the market. Now, if we have a monopoly type situation, that you say might be a natural monopoly. Given a second competitor in a market can get at most 50% of it, and going with the large investment required and consumers demanding a given utiliy at only a tiny fraction of the suppliers upfront semi fixed costs, I was going to prove that if such a provider provided at least half the utility (double the cost) it would be at no risk of a weaker competitor entering the market... putting some numbers to the effects of natural monopolies... but then I realised of course, there is always the risk of a more powerful competitor driving them out of business, so this does not really apply. They really must act AS IF they had competition, and therefore, it still appears to be a competitive market. Finally, to throw you one, the reason they are a natural monopoly, are that they have covered a large chunk of their initial outlays already... their marginal costs are very close to zero. Because they got that first mover advantage, they will be able to supply far cheaper than a new entrant who has to recover all those costs again. However, you will notice this only remains true if they maintain the exponentials in the delivered utility! Back to service cost tradeoff... If you wanted todays bandwidth 10 years ago, you could get it... but you were paying for it... If you want residential fibre today, you can have it, you just have to be willing to pay for it... Now for plebs like you and me we are not willing to afford that utility... but I guarantee there are people out there today who are, and are buying it, and thanks to those people, because of those exponentials, in a decade or so from now, plebs like us might be willing to afford it. As you pointed out, the first mover advantage does not apply here, because nobody has recovered their investments yet... you also pointed out that this market actually IS competitive. Notice again, this puts an absolute lower limit to the utility provided to average joe over time. Joe gets the benefits tomorrow because it's been paid by those willing and able to today. So, I absolutely agree that it isn't a standard perfect competition market with low barriers to entry, but it is far from the disastrous monopoly with ever increasing prices and ever decreasing services you point it out to be. Bringing in government, unless as pure competition isn't going to help at all... they'll either use it as a tax generating source, or they'll provide below cost and with tighter regulations and actually limit investment in tomorrows infrastructure. Proof: They start charging $1M/month for 28k lines you think no one else would enter the market? I'd say the very next day. Last mile broadband is the market - end of. They sell the same good -- last-mile broadband... at different qualities at different price points, that's it... The difference between the cheap copper last mile, and the expensive fibre last mile is simply QUALITY vs COST. Copper broadband is an inferior good to fibre broadband. And I use that (inferior) in the economic sense, that people will move from copper to fibre as their incomes increase or the costs of both come down. Copper is the public bus market, and fibre is the chauffeur driven luxury car market. Stop thinking because they cater to different market segments that they are different markets. Over time, the competition in the fibre market DRIVES DOWN COSTS to provide fibre last mile broadband -- this puts an UPPER LIMIT on the cost of copper broadband. It's being rolled out about as quickly as it possibly can. Let me put it another way... it takes no technical skill to run a cable company... what you really need is business ability... the ability to run a company with people well... you shouldn't know the technical details of total internal reflection to install fibre... you need to know things like internal rate of return. A competent businessman should be making 2-10M/year... more than enough to run a cable company. How many cable companies do you need? They are rarer than people like you, but they exist in sufficient quantities... As proven by the existence of cable companies. I see no barriers to entry other than money are you suggesting collusion or something else? If it was a massively profitable enterprise I guarantee there would be heaps of providers... they must be running very close to their margins or others would enter the market eagerly. In other words... the market is competitive, despite the lack of providers. yeah, natural monopoly was the word I was hoping you would bring up... now to test if it is or not. be back later... got to go. Also, just because you're technically good doesn't mean you can hold a job or even if you can get a high paid job, save the money required. And people run cable companies Just because it's something you can't do, doesn't mean others can. Just because you can save up the 3k to start a hosting company doesn't mean other people can. There is only a qualitative difference between needing 3k to start a business and needing 3M. I know people who happily throw 3M at a boat, this is not a barrier to entry to them at all. Yet there are many people who can come up with that amount... Exactly the type of people who you want running something expensive and complicated like a cable network company. It worked out okay in the end, right? $ The microeconomics course has begun good luck So, you need telomeres to run out to stop getting a whole heap of cancers (I think most cancers don't lose telomeres, right?)... But some therapy you could get every few years that lengthened telomeres. So, most cells that went cancerous without the telomere work around would die out as normal... but normal cells wouldn't die after normal aging, because they wouldn't run out of telomeres. See... the solution to immortality right here... You can all thank me later. Trane Read Above Comment Money is always scarce. Crawford in jail again, as of 1/10/2013 (Cross-Post from /r/michaeldavidcrawford Latest news about everyone's favourite Kuron from the dark corners of the web. Read all about it on kuro5hit's latest front page article "Crawford in jail again, as of 1/10/2013 (Cross-Post from /r/michaeldavidcrawford". Rhyme Asylum - Solitary Confinement Clearly someone has made a mistake It's not even october yet!! The charge is in a comment in the kuro5hit article Well, if you follow the article link to the /r/michaeldavidcrawford article link to the sheriffs page. From the Sheriff's Who is in Custody - Inmate Details page, 422(A) PC - Threaten with Intent to Terrorize -- thanks to prolixus for the link. You can't prosecute someone for undetermined but it seems you can arrest and detain them for it... long enough to determine up something. That's nice... Did you listen to the rhyme asylum intro? Thought you might like it... relevant to your owl diary. So get stoned with her instead... x/2 +7 is 1%er propaganda to keep you off the hot chicks... Everyone knows a woman over 35 is too old, no matter what age you are. Unless you can't find better... cause well... any sex is better than no sex... even if it is granny sex. It's just a sad but true fact that women peak young (late teens/early twenties) and simply lose value after that... when women are peaking men are stupid fools who have no idea what they're doing... but men continue to gain value until their minds/bodies completely break down and for some this can even be into their 90s. But men generally peak in their late 30s to 50s. Just because a women is physically at their peak though, doesn't mean you're going to get much of a conversation out of them... so this rule applies more to your mistresses than your wife - whose main purpose has always been as a tax write off, preparer of foods, and for the raising of offspring so you don't have to anyway. you should write a diary about this $ Which is to say it would all balance out in the end... There's no catastrophic long term consequences of having sterile individuals in the community. So, you get to try out novel combinations... which are the fitter individuals you talk of. And, in so far as those individuals breed... those that carry the better traits will succeed, and those that don't will fail. I mean... talking about it from the view of the fitness of the species as the whole... it is a positive for this mixing to occur. I think this would only hold true in very small communities... A larger community, which would have the mixing rate distributed across multiple generations, can easily support this. Do you have anything to cite on such 'generational failures'? Genetic research suggests that a considerable minority of white Americans (estimated at 1/3 of the population by some geneticists such as Mark Shriver) has some distant African-American ancestry, and that the majority of black Americans have some European ancestry. After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865, the marriage of white and black Americans continued to be taboo, especially but not only in the former slave states. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation#United_States Seems like the mixing goes just fine without the massive failures you're talking about. I'm sure it's an issue but I don't think the rate is high enough, or that the 'timing' would all line up to devastate an entire generation. It will devastate individuals and maybe families, but not wreck an entire society. I mean... you're (behaviorally) sterile, and that's not killing anybody. Funny thing you mention about obama's daughters... if michelle was white, would you say that then they should marry whites and so on down the line? How white do you have to be to be white? How many of your grandparents have to be white to consider yourself white? And we can apply that rule recursively to them to work out their whiteness too I presume. I'm fine with that... but it would seem to me that that would make everyone black. Fiat Currency is Money A lot of people complain that fiat currency has no value, and isn't money, because it's just paper printed by the government at will and therefore worthless if not backed by something held by the government in store, effectively tradable for such currency, such as real gold or silver. These people will complain that fiat currency isn't money, just pieces of paper printed with numbers, that have only a psychological, imaginary significance, while only something tangible like actual gold or silver, or something backed by them, is real money. Some just think it's all psychological, and we can give anyone any amount of fiat money at all, and simply printing more of it makes everyone wealthier. They are wrong. Fiat money derives its value for one primary reason, that being that the courts can enforce that debt be paid in the currency, and that a creditor cannot refuse that a debt has been paid if paid in that currency. The secondary mechanism by which it derives value is in the form of taxes. This creates a public debt that can only be paid in the form of the fiat currency, irrespective of what is otherwise traded in the economy, and therefore it needs to be obtained in order to cover this debt. Someone who trades all day long in gold and silver, will eventually be forced to convert some of this gold and silver into the fiat currency, in order to pay off the tax debts incurred through the trade simply of gold and silver. If someone cannot fulfill a contract for gold and silver, the courts can also remedy the contract by requiring an equivalent payment in fiat currency, rather than the gold or silver specified in the contract. This remains true as long as the government that backs the fiat currency is capable and effective in enforcing these conditions. From this it follows that to maintain its value, fiat currency must not be overprinted, as it will devalue to zero if printed without limits. Too much tax and not enough government spending can also be a problem, in that it could lead to deflation instead. In this sense, fiat currency is superior to gold backed currency, in that it enables the government greater flexibility in the control of money, is limited by the economy and not by the rate that some arbitrary resource can be taken from the ground, and finally, it frees up those resources to be used elsewhere in the economy. and that is correct... it must be artificially scarce... as I've told you all along... fiat currency must be artificially scarce to have any value. This is due to the diminishing marginal utility of money that I explained to you earlier. Correct... Which is why it makes sense then to delegate the creation of that money to a separate part of the government... not quickly influenced by the political whim of the day. Or, maybe something run for profit, that can lend money to the government and others, but is itself highly regulated by the government and limited in what it can do? So, it makes sense maybe something run by a board with positions appointed by government, on one hand, and positions appointed by those who have invested their wealth into this entity, on the other. If we consider the Federal Reserve this entity... then it makes sense that it can lend money to the government for spending, and the government can pay it back through taxation. Right... but the federal reserve guarantees banks through the fractional reserve lending scheme, requiring banks invest in it for that guarantee. Shouldn't those who have invested in it therefore also be represented in it, on some basis perhaps proportional to their investment? No, you buy those things... You don't become a co-creator of health insurance by becoming a customer of health insurance. And again, when you run a retauraunt, you aren't in the process somehow really becoming part of the food and drug admin. Banks though, are part of the money creation process, so they are intimately a type of extension of this money creation process with its roots in the fed reserve... They know the way the system works, and I suspect actually would have an incentive for the long term prosperity of the system as a whole... So, there should be (not a majority, fine) representatives from this industry on the board of the fed along with appointed government representatives. No... that's not what I mean... You buy health insurance, you go into a pool, and it is managed by the health insurance company... You don't become a health insurance company underwriting smaller health insurance companies and other individuals in you're own right. What you are not doing is going on offering health insurance and creating further health insurance in the economy. Maybe if there was one health insurance firm that was allowed to offer health insurance, but in blocks... that ultimately underwrote everybody. That health company could delegate a big chunk of those out to a large health insurance company by underwriting them, and they in turn could underwrite a smaller company etc... That's more like what happens with the banks and the fractional reserve banking system. Where every note loaned out basically comes back to the fractions stored in the fed... No, because the sun is the creator of all natural resources*, not a system for converting that efficiently into wealth. *: on reasonable current human scales. At the same time you had a contraction in the non-currency money supply which makes up something like(?) 95% of the money available. This was called the debt crisis, because no one was lending money any more. So, in times of M2? contraction, you can afford to dump more M1 without causing a huge spike in the total money supply. I'm not saying it was great idea... And it's quite possible you are paying for it in lots of other ways, and how you are going to pay for it in the future. Didn't he just break the rules of some firm and basically busted a firm? Why is that such a big deal? If a firm can't control it's employees, tough shit... Okay, so there's the fact he may have broken some laws here and there... so, he should be imprisoned for that, if it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt he did... but it seems, because he donated(?) (or donated other people's money?) to election campaigning, he is protected politically? where in the system lies the error? Money in the election campaigns? Two party political system? Economic system problems? Improper separation of political powers? Inevitable Decay? No one wants the system to collapse. Proportional voting then to encourage the creation of more parties... isn't pretty much proven that the current voting system will result in only two viable parties... and this encourages collusion... Okay... lets say you've identified some real problems with the current system... and you can envision a more ideal system... surely you want to transition from the current flawed system to the ideal system in as least disruptive a manner as possible, right? you think the best course of action is wait till you're fighting it out against roaming gangs, or joining in a civil war, leaving possibly millions dead? if enough people know about the problems, and some possible solutions, you think grass roots efforts are still bound to fail? as far as liquid democracy goes... well, I don't really know what you mean by that... direct voting wouldn't work, would it? the closest you've got is a constitution to limit government, then allow different states to experiment with different laws... like it was intended, right? how could a state without (legally) armed citizens live besides states that allowed dope smokers to randomly shoot assault weapons, without some huge form of boarder control between them? Also, you can not pay your taxes as long as You know how to do so legally, You are willing to risk spending time in prison, or You are willing to be killed. So option 1 then... as much as possible which means you're doing exactly what they want, you just believe it's all going to switch mode some day, and in a way you presume will be pretty unpredictable, but hope that guns and silver will be useful somehow. No, money is many things beyond currency and what you can pay your taxes in... I'm just saying the reasons why fiat currency is money and how it gets its value. Yeah, this whiskey tax thing shows that competitive governments with competitive money can arise too... but the more powerful government is going to tax the lessor competitor's activity through force anyway. In reality, like fiat currency is money, debt is money too... This is not a feature of the monetary system... And I don't think it can be worked around... For example, no matter what is used for currency, if a legal debt can be created between two parties, money has been created... because the notes that represent the debt can be traded as money (although can't be used to pay back court ordered debts, they still have to be converted back into the fiat currency for this). Banks can always create debt based on deposits, and as debt money created in one account can be deposited back into another account, banks can always create money on fractions... In fact, the fed reserve system actually puts limits on these fractions and really stops the system from boiling over and bank runs and crashes happening all the time. You could create bitcoin notes, as a debt promised to be paid back in bitcoin, for example... And while you haven't created more bitcoins, you have created more bitcoin backed money. This means there could be a use for bitcoin banks that take deposits in bitcoin, and create loans in bitcoin, and end up with accounts that are much larger than the total number of bitcoins in existence. Actually, if bitcoin is to succeed, this will be necessary, as bitcoin itself will probably otherwise fail with its built in deflationary pressures. Imagine giving every single person in Haiti $US2 per day. I'm assuming even you find this terrible as in, don't think the world is better off because of it, right? You don't this this is actually right, do you? So, if you don't, what do you think needs to happen to end this type of shit? wow It's people like you who I think are digging their own graves. It kind of makes sense why you are so committed to you're own extinction... you're actually a misanthrope... you want the destruction of the species. So, clearly no one should take any advice from you... Fine, say I agree with you that the mistake is giving them just enough aid to limp along... and say you are also right about the environmental destruction... isn't it possible that there's a better a solution than just wiping them all out? what about a more than just enough aid to limp along... distributed to the individuals... and pay landowners even more money to grow as close to the original forests as possible... and pay workers to plant such forests? Here's an idea... give a childless benefit to people who have no children... maybe a little less if they have one child, and none if they have two or more. Of course, somewhere you also need to build a viable economy in something... I don't know. Also education and political stability... I think the latter comes with the former and economic stability. Maybe something like that could be a starting point? Sye, if you can't learn to speak english please don't rate any of my comments less than a 3 in a holly bashing thread. Otherwise you are stalking me and it creeps me out, quite genuinely, okay? So, you support Holly's right not to be trolled? I mean... my request for you not to downrate me is outside my rights here... if you want to downrate me, you will... no matter what... right? I see the same thing with my right to hassle holly. Hey... I've only just started I haven't finished this line of attack yet I'll expand on it as time goes by... trust me. She just has to give me more material to work with. Also, the comment u downvoted was more original than other stuff I've said against her... This one comment was a direct inversion of what she was proposing. See... no argument, just downvotes... learn english... I come here to battle not to suffer fools who can only downvote... that's so weak how come you never complain about me attacking trane? you got the hots for a crack addict? Well, I'm still going to attack anyone and everyon e that pisses me off... so excuse me if you don't like it, you're gonna have to learn to live with it anyway... You make a lot of shit for every gem produced. More shit, more gems... Attack produces improvement as all improvement can be viewed as attack. 0 Proves you fail at understanding... I take all you're downvotes as encouragement now... You're very close to moving on to my shitlist keep downvoting if you want to be on it. And Dunblane was handguns $ What you've already forgotten is that this is the vr you invented. Nightwatch Great Movie! Reading the plot WILL spoil this movie Nochnoy dozor (2004). Not quite as good... but still good. Who? $ For all trane's foolishness he's still a better person than a useless cunt like you will ever be. At least he's trying to make the world better. You are right... there is a rule... not yours tho It's due to the diminishing marginal utility of money. It has nothing to do with how much money anyone else has, and everything to do with how much money you have. For example, if you are hungry, own nothing and are on the streets... You will work relatively hard to get your hands on just a few dollars... Because with a few dollars can buy you a great meal and probably more. Now, if you have a few million stashed away, you aren't even going to be bothered getting out of bed for less than a few hundred a day. Your 1st dollar is worth a hell of a lot more to you than your millionth dollar. This also means that people with a few million are willing to spend more with less thought... Now, if everyone is getting more money, you see that people will be willing to spend more for the same value, and people will eventually end up charging more for the same value, both to make it worth their effort (assuming they have more money) and also because the market will support a higher price (because 'rational' people will aim to maximise their value). All without ever knowing directly if anyone actually has more money or not. No... you don't know how much anyone else has today, generally speaking... You want to maximise profits, so you charge what the market can bear... Ie, the price that enables you to make the most profit... This price point is found automatically, in a distributed manner, by many people, all working independently and in parallel. So with no knowledge of how much money people have... the price will still rise if everyone has more money. Just the assumption that people are maximising profits. I agree with your last paragraph. If the market could provide demand for unskillled labour that creates significant value... it would. If the government could use unskilled labour to create significant value... it would. Given that it most certainly can't... we should at least let the unskilled and useless to survive at some minimum level beyond living on the streets and eating out bins. So, we give them unemployment benefits... which we remove when people do get jobs... then we shift the burden of providing that minimal level to the employers through the minimum wage laws. We should replace both of these with an 'idle wage', or a subsistence or basic income. You no longer need unemployment benefits or minimum wage. There is no discontinuity between not working and working... employers pay can pay the true wage value beyond subsistence. An employer can potentially employ more people for less. People who don't want to work, are never going to work. Some people will be happy to be idle, and exist on a a subsistence level, some will spend their lives surfing, while others will just smoke crack. The majority will not be happy living on a subsistence wage, and will be willing to find work that is available and matches their skills and ability. A few though will attempt things they otherwise would not be able to do... program oss, or become their own entrepreneurs and start their own businesses. People will generally be able to take bigger risks, because the worst case scenario is no longer sleeping in a cardboard box and eating out of rubbish bins. This is where the value of idleness lays. Well... you're strong disagreement looks like agreement... if they could they would includes insanity, incompetence, unwillingness to try and every other possible reason they haven't yet. Soon as they can, I believe they would -- from a business point of view it makes direct sense, if there is profit, it shall be so... from a government pov, there doesn't seem to be a political downside... if they could just figure it out. As for the rich scamming the rich... you got to think of it like the pyramid type structure it is. Think of it like a poker game... you don't have to be the best player at the table to make money. You can in net lose to the better player, but as long as you make more off the worse players than you lose to the better players, you are in profit. So, the ultra rich profit off the mega rich, the mega rich off the rich, the rich off the well off, the well off from the middle class, the middle class from the poor... or something like that... the wealth flows up, each catching a bit of it on the way... others just losing it or never having it to begin with. but the general trend appears to be to concentrate wealth at the top... just like a big poker tournament results in one person with all the chips. +1 FP alright... before throwing around terms like dismal science, it might be a good idea to see where they come from. Your whole problem comes down to the assumption that human labour is the end goal of capitalism. It should be human leisure. Therefore, pay everyone a min living allowance, as I've described before... and encourage and allow partial employment and high job motility. If anyone has these 'high value unskilled labour' markets, then it will be able to afford the labour... as simple as that. So, drop the jobs are good assumption, and things won't looks so dismal anymore. What is G? $ I believe in G $ Capitalism has no problem with linux in fact, it's proven to be very good with it indeed. Just people want to monetize something that might not be easily monetized... this is not a failure of capitalism... the near zero distribution cost, for example, is a fine demonstration of capitalism in action. no, what is free is free, what isn't isn't... that works fine... I think maybe copyright for 'limited time' is being abused... I'm not against copyright, but 25 years or so should be enough to reap your profits and return to the public domain. 75 years, or approx single lifetime should be the absolute maximum. The 'problem' with open source is that it is far more valuable than people get paid for it... It represents a positive externality of the work done by hackers... I suppose. It is exactly as you say, it doesn't add to world GDP, but has increased world value. More of a problem with the measurement of GDP than anything else. Commercial software, yes, people make money off your labour... That has always been the way with capitalism. OSS is in competition with commercial software... it almost represents a minimum level of quality. Interestingly, if you aren't smart, you use windows... if you can afford smart, you get them to implement linux solutions. My idea of basic income and wealth tax aren't intended to do away with capitalism at all... I want to make that point clear... A clever, programmer, with high demand skills is not going to see much change in relative terms.... When you are making 15 times minimum wage, now you are making 16 times... remember, lower (or no) income tax would make MUCH more difference... but when you gather a large amount of wealth... you'll eventually reach some sort of equilibrium. I am promoting it so that those at the very bottom, are just a tiny bit more reasonably better off... It is meant to encourage entry into work... but at the same time, accept that work isn't necessary to survive. An easy to administer lower safety net with as few holes as possible, and therefore encourage higher risk taking for higher reward, both to the individual and society as a whole. In demand work, is always going to pay well. Smart entrepreneurial capitalism is always going to pay well. btw... programmers will take whatever they can get if it stops being an in demand skill. I'm not aware of any european countries that implement basic income, no. Good unemployment benefits, and decent min wage, but not basic income. Two main things unemployment benefits end when you start to work... this looks like a disincentive to work... also, they are unemployment benefits, rather than just existing benefits... you have to be wasting your time 'looking' for work to be eligible... minimum wage shifts the burden of providing a living allowance to employers. If you only had to play your employees the 'real' wage required to incentivise them to work... you might actually find u could employ many more people... many more jobs would open up. we're not talking high skilled people here we're talking unskilled labour that currently get's min wage... not your sysadmins and netadmins or whatever, more like you house cleaner, maids and gardeners.... So... on this, we're in agreement then? $ alright... but the guy or the work u are talking about is completely unaffected by min wage laws... cause u would pay above them for that anyway. I'm talking borderline work... work that is 'worth' less than min wage... and therefore the economic effect must be to decrease this type of work available. Anyway... either way, it seems we are more or less in agreement now that a basic income isn't such a bad idea... as long as it is relatively low. So, on the order of unemployment benefits, rather than CEOs incomes... also... I don't really hear a disagreement regarding min wage either. oh... I agree with u on the healthcare thing too.. So, only thing left is to convince you that taxes should be paid by the wealthy, rather than earners (earners through either through labor or capital investment). ie, wealth tax half of the equation. Heaps of good ideas here... so... firstly... yes, trane is right, but he's doesn't know what he's talking about... so says a lot of stupid stuff. Inflation would be a problem past a certain point... replacing employment benefits and min wage would counteract that aspect somewhat... also taxing appropriately would reduce that again... I'm proposing max 2% annual net global wealth tax on individuals... and removing almost all other forms of tax, except for deliberate distortion taxes or taxes to pay negative externalities (alcohol tax, carbon tax, etc). No exceptions for housing, luxury, savings or investment. The tax itself is the incentive to invest correctly... but if you want luxury, you're welcome to it... why not? First $500k excepted.... up to $2M at 1%, over that at 2%. The wealth should be declared at the rate you would accept the sale of your entire wealth. Yes... there would be a lot of problems, but I'd like to work them out further. Biggest problem is convincing the guys with all the power, guns, media, wealth etc, that they should bear the tax burden... So... given all this... as an idea, I'd like to consider what would be optimal... then what flaws that has, and what needs to be worked around... and finally, what parts could be implemented and how. As for your personal business... I have no idea what its value is, or how you value. If someone offered you $1M, would you take it? I mean, with $1M in cash you could rebuild a competitor very quickly right? On $1M, first 500k free... you'd be paying only 5k in taxes a year! Less than you'd get from the basic income... you personally would probably be far better off. Let's start with this... cause you bring up a lot of points... I'd rather work in small chunks till we have a better idea... then I might write a diary one day. Not as complex as you think You value your own entire net worth yourself. It can be bought off you for that price. Make sure you include the emotional value too. It does not penalise companies that don't make money, because the tax has to be paid by individuals irrespective of whether or not the company makes a profit... the tax has to be paid anyway... we can assume the long term maximisation of profit will be the goal. They would be paying that tax even before investing in the startup, so they must already be reasonably wealthy. Yes, everything would be indexed. The first figure is based on 99% of the global wealth... also the same numbers Dan Altman uses. I think using figures based on percentile is a reasonable idea... say, national top 90%, 99%, 99.9%... something like that. I was thinking more in aggregate... so you wouldn't have to be perfect on every item, just all items together... Yes, there would be companies specialising in going through tax returns looking for people who undervalued their wealth... this would be a good thing. Also, I would think maybe you should be paid a little bit more than your valuation for forcible sale... both to give a little wiggle room, and secondly as fair compensation because you might not want to sell... Maybe around 10% or so... at worst this would mean losing .2% in tax revenue... I suppose. So, still room for negotiation on individual items. You're not going to realise how monumentally stupid this is until you've completed the macro-economics course. Then you'll look back on these posts with utter embarrassment. Yes... that is WELL KNOWN All models are WRONG... But they state their assumptions upfront, and they are much more REASONABLE assumptions than you are claiming... So they are still a much better approximation to reality than anything you can come up with... Yes it does... you are simply ignorant of reality here. Well... it won't predict the ACTUAL innovations... but nor will your simulation... predicting an instance of an innovation would be equivalent to creating the innovation itself. What it does do, is acknowledge the existence of innovations that constantly drive costs down. If you've completed Unit 3.3 You've heard it from the horses mouth and you now have to concede this point. Advanced economic theories take innovation into account. I don't want to hear this argument from you again. The amazing thing is that innovation itself is actually quite predictable. Consider Moore's Law, with no idea HOW they would pack exponentially more transistors on a chip, the fact they would was predicted and has held very closely to the prediction for nearly five decades now, but it would have been stupid at that point to theorize that asynchronous reversible pipelined predictive multicore mutlithreading risc with cisc translations on high temperature superconducting carbon nanotube photonic quantum cpugpu processors running hinton nets built by 3d self assembly around lithographically etched vapour deposition formed scaffolding would be the end result*. *: aka procrasti architecture... mark my words. Also: Physics is wrong about the physical universe Just thought you should know that. You know... you might be right... I mean, the government could just pay enough money so that EVERYBODY could become a dentist... If everyone was a dentist, then there'd be no more shortage of dental health care workers. And finally, the entire world's problems would be solved. Well done. This is the funniest thing about crackheads watching whole groups of them scour the bitumen like someone must have dropped a whole bag of rocks there at some point and they'll all find them if they just keep looking hard enough... proper lulz... That old couple, where the chick was coming on to you... I think it's entirely possible he was cool with it... being so old and all, he might have wanted his wife to have a good time... did u consider that? then again... this chick could be cool. you need to develop your understanding of economic s to the point where you realise that you ALSO need a wealth tax... once you get there... then yes... you will have nailed it. blah blah blah sees them, as I do, blah blah blah; but he doesn't yet see the value of a wealth tax, despite agreeing that blah blah blah blah... okay? No... see this is where you are just simply wrong. lets create an society that operates by your rules... One part of society has all the wealth... all the land, all the tools of production, everything like that... The other part has nothing, but we're going to give them free 'money'... a ticketing system if you like... but no one can be forced to trade anything for it... all trade will be voluntary, right... it's what you are proposing, right? The first part is the entire world... the second part is you... you can go ahead and give yourself all the free ticketing systems you could like... You're fucked right? Well... that's equivalent to what you are proposing. You have to make that 'ticketing' system... or money have value... and the only way to do that... is make the first part give it value, by forcing them to account for their wealth with it... ie, taxes. Now they have to trade their wealth with you in order to get access to your ticketing system to pay their taxes. gedanken experiment? Its fucking obvious you retard. I just fucking proved it, you don't need no simulation. No one ever would want traneros... Force them to account for their wealth in them, for the purposes of taxes, suddenly they have real value. What? You mean your strawman that you have to simulate the entire universe to come up with a reasonable understanding of economics? A simulation is simply a model and is only as good as its underlying assumptions... what I gave you WAS a simulation... one so simple you should have been able to run it in your head... one with such obvious outcomes, that you should have conceded the point by now. Simulation IS a model There is no difference... Actually, there is a difference... All simulations are models, but not all models are simulations... There is nothing inherently better about a simulation in terms of gaining knowledge and insights. Godel proved god? Well, that's news to me. Also... what's so special about white people? Just animals like the rest of em... Proof -- look how easily they become unemployed drug addicts with mental problems. They obviously need disposin of. You consider this content? Kill Yourself It's funny Piers says he has no problem with people having hand guns to protect their homes and self defense, but have no right to 'assault' rifles... Whereas in england hand guns were specifically banned because of the Dunblane massacre... now the UK olympic shooting team must go overseas to practice. So... today they use an 'assault' rifle... ban assault rifles... tomorrow they use hand guns... ban hand guns... the day after they use a set of bolt action rifles and the day after that they use a sharp knife... They will disarm you completely one way or another... until you eventually find yourself at the mercy of the goodness of people like me. A lean mean martial arts trained killing machine (with easy access to guns both legal and illegal too)! You will either be a criminal, or a walking potential victim. I don't know her other views... but based on that interview, that Dana Loesch is fucking amazing... totally destroyed that fuckmuppet tool... more power to her! I'd bet money that she's not someone who fears being raped... cowering in fear with her only hope that she might get lucky with a knee to the balls, and that this will be enough to stop an attack. One of the great things about being the 1% is that we will always have access to guns. We can buy lawful excuses to own guns, even in countries where gun's are otherwise illegal to people like you. We can always find people who will do what is needed to be done... irrespective of the laws that apply to you. We can send our kids to schools with armed guards... while we make sure your children remain vulnerable. I love the way that as we are growing wealthier every day, you become poorer, more desperate and more violent. I love the way you always focus that violence on the poor, people just like yourselves, while we continue to enjoy the benefits of your exploitation and servitude. But most of all, I'm very, very grateful that you are so busy working to disarm yourselves... so that we can sleep soundly knowing that no matter how hard we squeeze you, you'll have no choice but to continue to serve us and never pose a threat to us and this amazing new world we are making. Your mobile phone is always goint to read cold if you carry it your underwear. Arguing with an Engineer Arguing with an engineer is a lot like wrestling in the mud with a pig. After a few hours, you realize pig likes it. * the pig $ True... Lawyers are equally bad or worse... My best friend since primary school is a lawyer now... I lived with him for a year after uni... You wouldn't believe the stupid (intellectual) arguments* we used to get into... Simply for the sake of arguing... I mean, yeah, occasionally you will lose sight of the argument and actually get upset/angry... but part of it is learning to overcome those sort of feelings, grow a pair and a thicker skin, and carry on. Lawyers actually argue directly for a living... They believe it is the method for revealing truth... I'm not so sure... Engineers have to argue all the time too... They get ideas and have to convince many other people that it's worth spending their time and money on to implement. The difference is, the truth of lawyers is never really tested... what they decide the truth is kind of becomes the truth merely because they managed to convince everyone else of it (see innocence project for counterpoint)... where an engineer's arguments usually get tested directly in physical reality - if it fails, it doesn't matter how good your argument is, it was simply provably false. *One of my favs was over splitting infinitives... this one got really heated... lawyers are sticklers for language, whereas my view is the belief in the fluidity of language. *on the split infinitives argument This one got so heated... we were cooking at the time... making fries with a chip fryer and a pot of boiling oil... Half way through the argument, the chips boiled over and caught fire, making a six foot tall flame, reaching and permanently charring the ceiling... Not a single word was skipped while we managed to put the flame out with a dampened tea-towel... Nothing shall stand in the way of good argument. Truly an epic moment in the history of argumentation. To boldly put out chip fires... or to put out chip fires boldly? That is the question! Right... definitely a very good try... Unfortunately, on this point, I'm in total agreement. vi or die! I mean, I could try to argue the opposite I guess... I'm just not very familiar with the escape meta alt control shift operating system that can edit files... sorry. Both are complete and utter shit... I want to see a good space opera that takes the limitations of relativity into effect. An empire spanning a galaxy has to coordinate social, political and economic problems across delays that span millennia... I don't think any mainstream show has ever taken that into consideration. Anyone who disagrees is a piece of shit not worth talking to and they probably fuck their own mothers. Poor Oedipus When he found what he had done, He tore his eyes out one by one. A tragic end to a loyal son Who loved his mother. So be sweet and kind to mother, Now and then have a chat. Buy her candy or some flowers or a brand new hat. But maybe you had better let it go at that! not sure... it's something I have thought about I think there would be some weird empire... or at least multiple overlapping regional empires... Look at it this way... within a few lightyears, you could certainly run an empire... messages and resources could be coordinated over the span of a few years... not too different from the type of constraints empires had before modern forms of travel. The other interesting thing is that individuals can easily travel great distances in very short amounts of time if they are going fast enough... You can cross an entire galaxy in a couple of weeks, from your perspective, for example... The only problem being that when you made a round trip, well... thousands of years would have passed and the civilisations could have changed dramatically... I mean... I think someone could write something interesting, at least from such a traveler's perspective. If there were many such traveler's, and governments took a really really long view... then you could expect a single culture to emerge across an entire galaxy... which would be an empire of sorts... Maybe? I mean, it would be good sci-fi, in that it would at least be physically possible, and whatever the implications that arise would be more interesting too. I'm pretty sure you got your units wrong there tho... A parsec is the distance from the earth to the sun... that's about 8 light minutes. I assume you mean 50 star systems in 16 light years... cause that's exactly the definition of the time it would take a one way message to travel that distance. So... yeah... without life extension... an empire can't be run by an individual emporer... the systems would just have to be stable on the order of several human lifetimes... maybe hundreds or more lifetimes... I mean... it's interesting from the pov, that if we really do colonise the galaxy... this will be the reality of it. With fast enough travel... there's going to be people turning up in any given star system from all over the place... and all over the time! Imagine the chaos of all the interacting cultures. Yep... thanks $ Unpredictable as Always $ What? $ Yes... do you have a point? You act like that would bother me. Actually... it's not actually that at all... I mean... yes, in some ways, I might be lonely... fine that's neither here nor there... and social situations are always fluid and changing... I mean, the one fundamental constant of the universe is change, so I'm completely fine with that... It's more that I enjoy arguing in the 'K5 style', if you like... It's very rare you could find a bunch of people you could argue with IRL like you can on K5. I've nearly gotten myself killed by being the kind of dick I am here in various bars. I mean... most people who know me IRL think I'm the nicest most wonderful person they've ever met!! Can you imagine? Is she the victim, the hero or the monster? $ to be equal is to troll and be trolled... from time to time... with the changing of the tides and the fashions of the time... as and when the need arises... My problem is that this doesn't usually stop me $ Trane's AI bot probing for ad hom weaknesses because it's exhausted its rule based search for rational arguments... clearly needs a lot more work. I Agree: Gas All Drug Addicts Hiel Hitler Soldiers have always been given drugs... as long as it makes them do their job effectively... Of course, a 'good' aryan who is good for propaganda can get away with a lot more than others... But it's clearly still good policy to gas useless drug addicts nonetheless. As long as it made them effective $ We hold these truths to be self evident that all men [people] are born equal. Go from there. btw... you're putting on the egil schtick a little too heavily right now. That doesn't matter... The point is created equal... What you are talking about is statistical... There is no advantage to the species to keeping a brilliant man down because he is black, while promoting an idiot drug addict simply because he is white... such a policy weakens us all. So equal opportunity, not equal outcomes... Exactly the same way with women... we shouldn't be aiming for equal overall or average income and distribution in every industry... but we mustn't exclude anyone from a given type of work or pay simply because of their gender either. I'm just saying... that even tho those aryans got away with it, because it was good for propaganda (or would be bad not to let them)... The policy of gassing drug addicts is a good one. This makes no sense... You are saying that in a prescarcity society they could have all the rocketships they could ever want? You think in post-scarcity society, everyone can be the captain of their own starship? You were arguing with me that there was no scarcity of comments... yet it took you only a hundred or so comments before you gave up. A clear as day demonstration of scarcity... Once you accept the reality of scarcity, you can work out how everyone can have more than enough... as long as you deny scarcity, people will go hungry. Yeah, they survived pretty well with little work... that's true... but infant mortality and early death were common too... as you said, otherwise they would have had a population explosion. all I'm really trying to get through to trane, is that you have to acknowledge reality if you want to come up with reasonable solutions... you can't just pretend that there is no such thing as scarcity... If you understand the actual definition of economic scarcity, rather than the layman's definition of lack of abundance, you realise that scarcity is everywhere, and practically impossible to entirely eliminate. We can have a VERY WEALTHY society, but we'll still have to deal with scarcity. Yes... this is true... it still doesn't fit with the economic definition of scarcity though. A good example is air... no one (outside of some chinese cities lately) is suffering from a lack of air... yet this is considered economically scarce for the simple fact that it could potentially be polluted beyond breathability. Just because something is abundant doesn't mean it's not also scarce. This is the difference between the economic definition and the layman's understanding of a given term. Although bitcoin is a clear example of artificial scarcity... The real question is... could it possibly have any value if it wasn't artificially scarce. So, it's actually a very good example of the necessity of the artificial scarcity of money. I'm really sorry sye... I really aren't trying to offend you... but I find it really difficult to understand what you are saying most of the time. Are you saying that it is language and cultural differences that causes our economic problems? I mean, we've traded across cultures using things like gold, and later even with simply paper notes representing gold... and it seems to have worked quite well. Is this related to bitcoin at all, or trane's theories of scarcity perhaps? Or maybe that our theories of value change? I do agree ideas like morals, justice, virtue, etc vary significantly over time and across cultures... but I'm not sure this applies to things like economics... anymore, say, than science itself changes over time. btw: really don't be offended I like your writing... it's got a kind of mystical quality about it... I'm just saying, I find it difficult to understand. Maybe just write more... expand on your points, so even if one sentence is kind of difficult to decipher, your ideas will get through by looking at it from different angles. Like they say about presentations: 1. Tell people what you are going to say about the topic. 2. Say what you want to say about the topic. 3. Tell people what you just said about the topic. Trane... something I think you should see and understand about how economists work and think... If you've worked your way through Unit 2... you'll see he examines consumer demand theory from the viewpoint of what he calls the Quasi-Linear model... Well... I looked at it... and I couldn't get my head around the idea that your purchases wouldn't change no matter what your income was... seems pretty odd right? Well, that turns out to be the case because of the assumptions in the quasi-linear model itself... So, this model is useful in certain situations, because it is a close approximation for many goods, services and markets... but... economists recognise the short comings of this model, and adapt it when they have to deal with other markets for which it is a poor approximation. This is exactly the same thing we do in science and engineering... say, when modeling a car, we might start off assuming it is a point mass, or maybe a sphere of uniform density, then maybe a certain shape with given drag co-efficients etc... a simplification of reality that helps in modelling because it makes the problem tractable and understandable... only increasing complexity as the need arises. In fact, we basically never end up modelling a car in its entire complexity (how does the flexibility of the fabric on the back of the driver's seat affect the cars performance?) because then we could never answer important questions, like what is the optimal speed to maximise fuel efficiency. Anyway... here's my post to the forum where you can see the lecturer's response. So, don't give up just yet simply because some of the outcomes of some of the models appear completely absurd - it's just that you've found the limits of the assumptions used to build the models, and you'll have to increase their complexity to answer the new questions you've posed. I know, right? He probably spent that $100 on heroin instead of lending it out at interest... No wonder he's broke. End the artificial scarcity of ai robots now!! $ Really? The same system that has made computers that can fit in your back pocket, cheaper than a run down second had car, that are so powerful that the richest countries in the world couldn't have dreamed of building one in a entire factory with near unlimited resources just three decades ago... That same system hasn't built ai robots actually because they're not giving crackheads free money? Is that your actual hypothesis? Brave view in terms of challenging the status quo there, I must admit. Why do you take so long to reply to me nowdays? Where is your abundance of comments you promised me... I am going hungry for stupidity to attack... WHY TRANE WHY!!! LOL --- always jumpin on the bandwagon aren't ya You still don't have a better theory than scarcity, yet you can't admit it is the only one that explains the observations... Go take more crack come back when you have something intelligent to say. RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE LOL --- RAPE You want the horsemeat, dontchya, ya dirty cow $ You should be careful talking to holly she might think you are stalking her... you know how sensitive they can get... so go easy on her. you don't wan't to frighten off her fragile little soul. she creeps out easily you know. Holly... now that we are talking like lovers again I just wanted to get your personal views on foreplay... When a guy is playing with your clit... do you like him just to stick with the clit... or do you like him to slip a finger up there? How many fingers? The more the merrier? Do you like a whole fist? I imagine a girl like you would, hey. Do you like it for a guy to go down on you? How do you convince someone to do that... given the smell and all? Alright... good talking to ya again skanky... see ya soon. try not to get too raped okay... love u... kisses... xxoxoxoxxox You hittin on me? Don't be a mister jealous... there's plenty of room for everyone to play... I take it you're a bottom. Fuck you Correct Seriously Holly You actually PISS ME OFF You are stupid and I really don't like you. I'm glad you don't have access to guns and I hope you get raped and die. thankyou cunt No... that's not correct I don't have any friends here... not right now... That is true. I do live in a one person apartment, when I live in the city... right now, I'm at my parents... I'm here a little longer than usual, cause they are near my current doctor... who I'll be visiting for the third time this week on friday... fuck you. My parents are great. I have plenty of friends and very close friends... they're all very far away, for different reasons... I don't have trouble with the ladies... not at all... never have... I am single right now... and have been for about a year... check my diaries for details on why. Get out there and join the world? Really? Where? How? It's easy for all you stupid working fucks... you either work or you gather at the unemployment offices... with people like yourselves. None of you know how to make money for yourselves... you are all happy to fit into whatever little hierarchy you can get yourselves into and call that a life... its stupid, you have no idea. My business is insanely competitive, solitary and complicated... but gives me time on my hands like you have no idea... I haven't worked since 2008. I can't drink now either, so pubs are out... Trolling on K5 is my life... you're the closest thing to friends I got... and I hate you all... fuck you What's more... you use sexism as a tool simply to belittle others rather than as a realisation that we should be all equal. You actually want all advantage from your gender and use sexism only to gain its benefits... You are not an equalist, you are a feminist, in the worst way, in the sense that you think women should have more advantage than me. s/me/men $ And even furthermore... proof of your weakness as a woman... this passive aggressive bullshit you display RIGHT HERE, IN THE COMMENT ABOVE. Instead of going head 2 head, and battling it out with any moron on the net... you take the battle to others... you cry and try to muster support wherever you can find it. COMPLETELY passive aggressive... you can't hack it... you think you're something special because you are a woman, and you are just shit... you suck Not true... Lots of women want to fuck me... That is a fact... I have no problem with friendships with women. I just haven't found any in the right situation... Not many women, even those who have tried... are really in the type of situation that would suit my lifestyle... Okay... I haven't met any I would want to spend a lot of time with recently... and those that I would couldn't be with me... It is complicated. It's a cost of extensive travel in part. lol $ This has been holly's attitude the whole time since she started arguing about the whole sandy hook thing... she couldn't handle that she had no rational argument... in fact, her three main arguments were emotive, sexist and ethnocentric... respectively. AFTER THAT.... at a point, I admit, if the person's argument is so retarded, I'm happy to go ad hom... ignore all logic and troll for the fuck of it, everyone else here tends to get it... they get over themselves, readjust and come back... not her... She's carried that grudge ever since that point. Trane, for all his problems, is a better person than her, with more integrity and more strength... look how I treat trane, the type of things I say, yet every single time, he has the guts to come back with a different tangent... Holly just hides behind all this sexist (oooh you're so creeeepy - like she's a highschool princess) bullshit, because she can't argue for fuck... As I pointed out... totally passive aggressive She is the worst type of human being yes... right now... yes $ Well... they already took our guns... But people like me get what we want... I'm happy with the guns I do have. If you know the right people, nothing is illegal. People round here (not us, fuck you FBI/MI5/ASIO) make their own automatic weapons and sell them to the bikies... its a quick way to make a buck in the off season... when ppl say if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns... it is completely true. If you know the law... many illegal things are actually legal too... So, I don't care about the LAWS or the MORAL PANICS in YOUR COUNTRY... I for some reason, I do not know why exactly, REALLY CARE ABOUT THE CORRECTNESS OF ARGUMENTS ON THE NET. to expand... cause fuck it... I got nuffin better 2 do... so fuck you.. training is simply teaching you how to be a little bit safe, but almost exclusively teaches you how to shoot... and how to kill, when to kill, and how to have the will to kill... Apparantly, that's not acceptable for some reason, but that's actually what most courses are about. licensing... I don't know... no real opinion... but if all the guns are registered, yes the gubmint can take them all away... it doesn't seem to me to be the purpose of the 2nd. That does not affect me in any way though. emotional hysterical arguments are: BUT THE CHILREN... and OVER 9000!!! That's exactly the type of argument the fucking media use... not statistics like homicide rates, how FEW guns of the type used in Sandy Hook are EVER used (so insignificant that they are not counted separately), and general levels of violent crime and homicide. (Not focusing JUST on gun violence)... sexist arguments are: "Yuo need guns to feel like a MAN!!!' ethnocentric arguments are: "Stupid Americans ALL LOVE THEIR GUNS" Yes... these arguments piss me off. Cheers old man... you're balanced view is always welcome. I don't think I've made any threats... at least I hope not... just a fervent wish that bad things will happen to people... I'm sorry trhurler actually died after I made a similar statement to him shortly before during an argument over universal health care... but such are the coincidences of a universe run by fate. (I still wonder if he would have survived if he had better access to health care?) I'm not about to cause anyone any actual harm... beyond the extent that words in themselves can cause. Ignoring completely the topic of guns... though, I really do not like her SRS type tactics... She took HUGE offence at being called a bitch... the same word I use against every other fucker I argue with here... she wants some sort of special privileges... certain words that can't be used against her because of her gender... even if she uses the same word... to do so otherwise is sexist apparently... this is logic I do not understand. This was AFTER she had blithely used both sexist and ethnocentric arguments in the same discussion. Sorry... I think sexism isn't just letting women do and say anything whilst holding men to a different standard altogether. My personal rule is, argue fair and true... to a point... past that... attack where it hurts. Now she just cries about that, without any ability to see her own faults. The ONLY possible explanation that would make any sense to me is a kind of reverse discrimination because of patriarchy or some such bullshit. I don't know what others think of that... are women really so disadvantaged we have to give them a free pass? Finally, she gets less attention from me than say Trane or LilDebbie... yet, a stupid joke comment gets me accused of being a creep... and you can just feel the lack of humour and princess sensibilities seeping through... I'm just too special for the likes of you to talk to me! Maybe I'm overreacting, and she was just trolling, but I really don't think so (unless she's a bloke trolling... also a small possibility). So yeah... the intent was to piss her off... and I kind of think I'm gonna keep doing that... until she stops being a shit head and learns to take a joke like a real man. Everyone here knows that it's your weak points that will get attacked the most. She's not even willing to fight her own battles. I don't know... do you think we should go easy on the weaker sex here because they are less capable? Is that right? Are we to extend the real world free pass we give to women to the online world too? I mean, it's clearly fine to pick on crack heads, weirdos and the mentally ill... but a woman!! Now you've gone too far. Did you ever see a llama kiss a llama on the llama Llama's llama tastes of llama Llama llama duck. Actually, I'm not all that keen on llamas... It's probably because, despite my looks, I'm really not a llama at all!! I had to fly all the way to the Andes to get that alpaca photo... and you give me a 2!! I'm offended. I assume it's something to do with your inability to read and write english. No.. you are completely wrong... I did not pick on Holly because she is a woman. I started off with a completely fair and true argument with her... in fact, probably what pissed me off the most is that I actually had respect for her arguments before I started arguing with her... I thought she was one of the more rational ones here... but she let me down with the STUPIDITY of her arguments in this case. If anything it is the opposite of what you say, and what it appears now (because, yes I am attacking her now)... I attacked her being a woman BECAUSE her argument was incredibly stupid. Really not the other way around. I told her three times that her argument was not rational but emotional, that she was being sexist and ethnocentric... and to reconsider her arguments... ONLY AFTER THAT... EVERYBODY TRY AND UNDERSTAND THIS POINT... I WAITED FAIR AND SQUARE... did I ad hom attack her at her weakest point... I mean, honestly, the faults she was making probably come more from the fact that she is a british journalist untrained in objective science, but highly trained in persuasive emotional biased argumentation,... but she is PROUD of these facts... so I attack her femininity, something she is secretly ashamed off, and therefore get the emotional response I was looking for. so, yes... it appears now that I am attacking her for being a woman... but only because I am attacking her for being a woman now. I am attacking her where it hurts... FUNDAMENTALLY I am attacking her for being a stupid fucking cunt that can't debate for shit. I couldn't care less if she was a woman, mentally ill, a ren faire freak or a crackhead... none of these things have ever mattered, right?... except as far as taking the piss is concerned... It's the strengths and weaknesses of your arguments that matter... What gives me the right to be a cunt is that she is fucking stupid and can't be changed of that. real man -- next time I'll add a laugh track for you americans with no sense of humour. This isn't like an ESTS kill yourself statement... there is HISTORY here... it's not just this single comment, obviously. You have every right to make your point... The more points being made the more I have to reply too... Right, now... that's exactly what I'm after... It's the DISTRACTION that I'm looking for... I ENJOY a lot of the hate... K5 to me has always been a place full of hate and assholishness. It's what I like about it. For the most part, it's not taken seriously... What I do find funny... is the socially retarded awkward nerd virgin population of K5 standing up for her on the sole basis of her supposed gender... (As for coincedences, the HHD episode of Red Dwarf was on last night... It's the episode where they meet their female counterparts... makes me think it's even more likely that HHD is a character, troll, sockpuppet, of some fat middle aged balding guy). Now you're getting it $ You took that very personally, didn't you You might need some cream for that. What a bunch of pansy ass white knight faggits you all turn out to be soon as the trolling turns on a woman. You ain't gonna fuck her no matter how much you all try and stand up for her stupid weak ass. You aint gonna get any pussy from anything you say here... ever... accept reality. Carry on tho if it makes u feel like a man. All I see is a bunch of white knight faggits who happily knock down the weak, mentally ill, drug addicts and various freaks who haunt this backwater website... and suddenly stand up and want to fight anyone who says an ill word about a woman... you guys really have a problem... lucky for you... I'm here!! but I ENJOY getting wound up over stupid shit Even when it wounds my reputation. Do you remember the days there would be hundreds of comments in every diary and over a thousand in every story? Well... we don't have the readership and commentors anymore... so we each have to work that much harder. This restraint everyone is showing is lowering the signal... Sure, noise to signal will go up, but increased volume would still result in increased total signal... That's my theory anyway... and clearly I've been doing my part. *a vegetable still creeping on you fuck you I knew Holly was guilty clearly a repeat offender... totally aware that what she's doing is wrong... exercise has non-financial economic benefits $ This course is for people who haven't even completed first year calculus... Of course it's simplified... it's what teachers do. Have you ever analysed the physics of weights connected through pullys by frictionless massless ropes? Where the fuck can you buy frictionless massless ropes from? How the hell would you tie a knot in such a rope to hold the weights on? Yes... teachers start with overly simplistic models to demonstrate basic principles. great insight there... Also... it's not quite what I expected either I mean, he doesn't really introduce concepts and explain their definitions and underlying causes... Instead, he seems to use formulas the follow well known economic principles without really explaining them... So, for example, he shows that the benefit function tends to have certain properties... the property being the law of diminishing returns... but he doesn't seem to explain this... at least not yet, not at this level. I think the micro-econ course is going to be far more interesting... especially as its focus appears to be entirely non-financial. Yes... and... so... what? You see, this course is a basic introduction... Notice it's almost all single variable problems, where reality is clear multivariate? Obviously, you can model what you want... you should be an expert in non-concave global optimisation by now... didn't you pass the ML courses? wtf are they if not in this class of problem? where in the problem defnition does he say that the results are measured in dollars? The benefit, in this case, is simply not measured this way. There is no such thing as non-economic factors that you call externalities... externalities just mean the cost or benefit is borne by third parties. You know now these are non-financial economic factors, such as good health, endorphine rush, boredom, tiredness, etc... The PRICE of good health is exercise... price doesn't have to be dollars... there is still a price to pay, because there are costs to pay... even if the dollar cost is zero. Finally... you REALLY want to analyse the benefits of exercise from FIRST PRINCIPLES... perhaps you could determine a function to suggest the optimal amount of exercise to do DIRECTLY FROM PHYSICS. LOL -- I'll wait a few hundred centuries it will take you to come up with anything useful by that method... do you understand why such an attempt is UTTERLY DOOMED TO FAIL?? All models are wrong... all models are simplifications... the simplifications enable easier study... this is why the models are useful. Sorry... I see it now... by including your wage W in terms of dollars, you are kind of forced to measure everything in terms of dollars... but it is simply because dollars are convenient form of measurement of cost that everyone is familiar with that makes them useful. Change W to be the value of the high you could be getting off of crack for an hour that you have to forgo... Now you are measuring value in terms of crack high... something you are more familiar with than money, for example. The theory is that you can convert your measurement into any arbitrary unit you desire, because in theory, everything is exchangeable. You're gonna love Unit 2 ECONOMICS PROVES WHY DRUGS SHOULD BE ILLEGAL BECAUSE YOU ARE ALL ADDICTS AND DESERVE WHAT EVERYTHING YOU GET GET A JOB U LOSERS Smoking crack is a mistake Trane... Proven in video 2.18... You derive a negative benefit from it, cause you think you're going to get much more benefit out of it than you really do... so you purchase much more at a much higher price than you should if you were to optimally select the best amount for your true welfare... and this produces a negative consumer surplus (how much better off you are given your choice to consume)... proof that the government and public is right to discriminate against you... it's for your own good. well... at least according to this theory... so, you gonna quit crack now, or your exploration of economics instead? It is generally an /assumption/ of economics that everything is convertible into units of everything else, so dollars is a reasonable basis to measure everything... It's clearly an assumption... but it generally seems to hold true... I think... Where it doesn't hold true, you can always consider looking at the problem in terms of Pareto optimisation. In this case, instead of having a single point that is THE optimum... you end up with a curve which represents points for which no other point gives you a better result in ALL criteria... So, everything as money is a good starting point... but if you absolutely decide it isn't true in a given case... well, then you end up with a curve where you can choose whatever tradeoffs you basically feel like... but any point not on this curve would be either sub-optimal, or unachievable. So thinking everything is money turns out not to be a rational basis for dismissing economics after all. I guess you were lying then: http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2013/1/6/135759/7326/25#25 Man, you make me so hard with these comments Holly... I think I'm gonna follow you around so much more now... Just think of it as a kind of virtual rape... that really makes me hot... hope you eventually learn to enjoy it too. If not, even better. You would like to think that... You wouldn't know a troll if he jumped out from under a bridge you were crossing, made love to your wife in front of you, kidnapped and sold your children into sexual slavery to a middle eastern oil sheik, and smoked all your crack while challenging you to end the artificial scarcity of virtual reality AI agents. Hai LilDebbie thanks for the props... It's always great when I can teach people something new. Let me know if you have any questions. You know... in the table on the right of the wikipedia article you linked me, shows that Palladium (Pd-107) is a fission product of the Thorium reaction at a yield of 1.25%. So, your 0 Pd production from Thorium was just a tiny bit off... You get that, right? Thorium is cheap and abundant... 2.6M tonnes of reserves, implies at least 32k tonnes of palladium can be produced... about equal to world palladium reserves... right? This does not include the recycling of the actinides. So, if you're already using nuclear for energy, you basically get all that for free too, right? comment for you wut? Copyleft depends upon copyright... The more you know... BSD could exist without copyright, but not GPL $ No, without copyright you could take someone else's code, modify it and distribute only the compiled modified version, hoarding the source code modifications to yourself... just like BSD. Without copyright, GPL simply would not work. Its MORE than just a work around... it RELIES upon it. If you think decompiled source code is equivalent to the original preferred editing format source code... well... u aren't a developer obviously. No... sorry... this does not make you a developer$ To expand... take away all documentation... remove all comments... give variables meaningless names... run your code through an obsficator... make it run on a VM within the VM, that converts the code into a state machine (for example)... make the code self morphing... everything you can to fuck it right up... Its EASY to do this. It gets VERY HARD to work on it at that level, as opposed to using a nice high level language with all the doc in place, etc... which is why the GPL specifies source code as the PREFERRED EDITING FORM of the code, rather than something that can simply be compiled. You can't get around this without copyright enforcing the terms of the GPL. Right, but he has come up with a system that depends upon it... I think that's called irony, but I can never be too sure. As I said, GPL would fail utterly without something like it... So I have no idea how he would deal without it. Llama on donkey coveting... Hot $ Wow... that must be terrible for you. What are the effects of being creeped out on you? Do you get hives or something? Does it make you sweat? Do you get heart palpitations? Does your heart beat faster? Does it make you breath heavier? Do you feel faint? Do you get butterflies? Does it make you wet? Are you glad you have a big strong man around you to protect you from the complexities of online communication? Is it good to have a husband to protect you in these difficult times? What would you recommend a woman do if she has no husband, is the target of this type of abuse, and isn't allowed to own a gun? Inquiring minds want to know. It's posts like these, when you show your vulnerable, weak, stupid, feminine side that really make me hard. Thanks QT3.141 No. $ No... u r stupid $ Not at all... u really are being stupid trying to troll with your redefinition of externality. Just a week ago or so you were saying externality meant external to the model... Now you are saying, not reflected in the price... It IS in the fucking name... EXTERNAL TO THE PARTIES INVOLVED IN THE TRANSACTION. If you are going to act like a crackhead, I'm going to call you crackhead... get smart, and we can argue whatever the fuck you like. What do you even mean by that question? The PRICE of good health is EATING WELL and EXERCISE... If we ignore third parties... What could you possibly mean? Maybe you mean non-financial cost/benefit/value? Economics recognises this... might explain some of the crosstalk we have. Okay... fair enough... now you know :) Just don't call it an externality cause it isn't... May as well call mass in physics density... while you're learning you might make this type of mistake, but you'll just sound like an idiot to anyone knowledgeable you're trying to communicate with... Lend it out at interest charge exorbitant late fees... remove fingers and break legs if very late... repeat with the repayments... How is anyone going to learn the value of money that way? Sounds like someone is missing out on an opportunity to profit. With that attitude, it's no wonder there are so many poor people. oic... still, I'm not against helping the poor, I'm just saying you might as well profit at the same time. If MDC had made loans to these homeless people, rather than just giving them cash, he might have been able to pay off his own debts, and wouldn't be homeless/locked up/missing now. Also, as debt technically creates money, whereas giving money merely transfers it, by lending money to homeless people you are ending the artificial scarcity of money for everyone in society. If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, if you loan a man a fish, you have a vested interest in his recovery for the two and half fish he's gonna have to get you tomorrow, especially if he enjoys using both his thumbs. Clearly it's the mentally ill giving money to homeless people that's causing all this poverty and collapsing society. You haven't caught onto using probabilities for NLP yet? You still think rule based systems are the way to go? As opposed to huge vectors of probabilities like in the NN models? Really? It's all numbers at the end of the day, and I don't mean ASCII character sets. So it's definitely going to have to take a probabilistic approach then. The parsers work now, because the processing power is too limited... if you take a probabilistic approach on the top level, or the rule level, eventaully (can u read that worD?), your (again) going to haev to fliter it down 2 the lower layers too. See? arrghh ewe rally goanna rite rulz 4 all of this? Let me give you a hint... Chomsky, one smart mother fucker... on the point of linguistics being some genetically encoded rules... a completely wrong mother fucker. The brain learns it through mechanisms similar to what hinton taught you. Bin threw this b4... urine correct... $ They have... the initial assumption was that rules would work... that is 60's era thinking... Modern thinking is that rules suck and probabilities rule. 'Every time I fire a linguist, our results improve' - someone important in NLP. With the knowledge we have now, you would be crazy to think you could write all the variations (infinite, no scarcity of them) out as rules... Like our brain works on rules... lol. Proof is in results... rule based methods have PROVEN to be a dead end. prob based methods have PROVEN to excel, and show results that surpass by a large margin the rule based methods. Mixture of experts is exactly what Hinton's 'Dropout' does... MoE is a term describing how to mix probabilities from various systems... hinton did it on a meta level - sharing weights across multiple architectures. No ACTUAL EXPERTS INVOLVED... If you had gotten a distinction in the course too, you might have understood this. No, you apply it more generally... and you see it comes back to probabilities. A mind of societies (each society at its base being a single probabilistic bit). Proof? No, I don't think so $ I'm sure you do... The trend seems to be that you'll spend an infinite time for something that never works with a rule based approach... or improve a probabilistic approach simply by throwing larger architectures and more data at it, getting better results every time you do. None of those things mentioned are externalities An externality is a cost or benefit incurred by a party who was not involved as either a buyer or seller of the goods or services. Quality of apartment... part of your benefit Cost of apartment... part of your cost Closeness to parks... part of your benefit/cost Wife's opinion... how you value your wife alters the cost and benefit of your decision to YOU. Schools if you have kids... part of your benefit, as above. If you take into consideration the cost/benefit to your family, then the effects on your family are no longer externalities. The real externalities in this scenario are things like, the effects of pollution on your neighbors as your drive to work. You bringing crack dealers into the neighbourhood, driving down the value of your neighbours properties and raising crime... Improvement in public transport because you can't afford a car... for example. Nobody's saying his formula is capable of representing all these costs and benefits... this does not make them externalities. It merely makes his model poor at capturing all this. His formula is merely representative of the type of formula used, its deliberately simple, so that people can understand it easily, and extend it later. Its the difference between single variable calculus and the multivariate optimisation you did in machine learning. (btw, have you noticed yet where the language of machine learning comes from?) Now as to the question of whether anything you said cannot be reduced to a number. Firstly, if you want to represent it in a machine, we KNOW everything (emotions included) can be represented as numbers... The real question then becomes whether the cost/benefit of all this can be represented as a SINGLE number, rather than a vector of numbers... I think it can. People pay to go to a gym to exercise. The benefit of exercise (or parks) in this case, can be converted to a dollar amount. People pay thousands, tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands to send their kids to the right school. How much extra money would you have to give your wife to make her accept a worse place to live... everything has its limits, and if you can find those limits, there must be a value convertible to dollars to make up for it. Yes, even parks have an economic value you can place upon them, merely in terms of dollars. Also, of course no economists believe that everyone has exactly the same objective function. If we did, we would all make the same decisions. Economists realise that everyone has their own values, so we know people end up making different decisions. We also know, that in aggregate, we can calculate statistics upon these, and everyone in aggregate ends up making predictable decisions. The value of exercise in the later problems would have different coefficients for each person. Finally, most economists recognise that people aren't actually rational, participants in markets don't actually have perfect information, many markets aren't efficient... etc, etc... you know science starts by making a whole bunch of simplifying assumptions, drawing conclusions from them, then looks at the effects of changes in the underlying assumptions... This is all well understood, but you have to start somewhere, and these assumptions give pretty good approximations, and therein lies their value. btw, congrats on looking at this course... I don't like the fact that it jumps straight into formulas without looking at economic theory and definitions... but it gets you thinking in a certain way I guess... The fundamentals of micro/macro economics will be more interesting from that perspective... I think the micro economics course will really blow your mind, if you look at the topics he plans to analyse (ie, not money). Mix all three courses together, plus the AI and ML courses you did, who knows, you could create a monster of a sim. What happens if we put in every economic input and output, model each interaction, resource, tools, goods, services, persons, etc... then optimise over the entire field with conjugate gradient decent... maybe here lies the answer to a cashless society... just a thought. Please, that's not an externality... The cost (or benefits) or being truthful apply directly to the person telling the truth... In this case, the costs apply to you (yes, there are externalities from this, other people, not involved in the decision to tell the truth will benefit or not, this is where the externality lies). Now, from an economic perspective, it seems obvious to me that the benefits outweigh the costs to you... simply because you VALUE honesty in yourself... presumably you value it over the financial costs involved, otherwise you wouldn't do it. You have to understand economics is not all about FINANCE... the idea of intangible costs is well known. At how many billions would you break though? With the advertising, yes... for any company, person, entity, it makes sense to privatise profits and socialise costs... turn positive externalities into internalities, and negative internalities into externalities... economic theory suggests that the advertisers will make the decisions that benefit them, at the cost to all of us, which is why we have LAWS against false advertising, for example, to make them internalise those externalities. No... it doesn't mean that... You can't just literally read the first half a sentence from the wikipedia entry on externality and use that as the definition. They mean, it's not transmitted through price because part of the price (benefit/cost) is borne by people not involved in the transaction. In any field, terms have very specific meanings... You can't just substitute your own meanings and expect to have rational discussion. Remember, price means more than just a dollar amount. The price of good health is eating well and exercise, for example. Does not mean that good health is an externality of exercise. An externality of good health is that insurance companies don't have to spend as much money... A third party, who didn't have to pay the price, reaped the benefits of the price you paid. You haven't been taught this formally yet, so I'll let you off this time... but please think about it a bit more and use the term correctly from now on... All this will become clearer to you, I presume, when the micro-econ course begins in two weeks. IGTT 8/10 $ Trust me, it doesn't mean what you imply it does it really is that simple. In fact, it no longer says or... so there. see... that is trolling You are trolling, or making two common mistakes... First mistake - thinking price (cost and benefit) is purely financial... Second mistake - you think recognising something like externalities is a bad thing. wtf else could you mean by such a statement? Colbert KNOWS business VERY VERY WELL He is TAKING THE PISS... you might not have noticed this... he also isn't REALLY a CONSERVATIVE... Unimportant... As for Jimmy Wales... let me explain that, but in a different context... K5... but with some simplifications for understanding. Rusty Owns K5... We Comment on K5... The act of making a comment on K5 is a TRANSACTION between rusty and the commentor... Rusty bears the cost of accepting and processing the comment... The commentor bears the cost of writing the comment... Posting is the transaction between the commentor and rusty, nobody else... But, having posted a comment, there are externalities for EVERYONE ELSE WHO READS K5... without bearing the cost of making a comment, or processing and storing the comment in a database on hardware, etc... a third party receives the BENEFIT of that comment's existence. So, the transaction between Rusty and K5, produces a POSITIVE EXTERNALITY for other READERS... Web sites like K5 and Wikipedia LIVE OR DIE on those positive externalities... Such terms are VERY USEFUL in ANALYSING the SUCCESS OR FAILURE of various websites. No... wikipedia is NOT AN EXTERNALITY There are externalities involved, however. It runs off externalities... Now... when you ask, what is its value? You have to ask, who to? To Jimmy, to you, to society? It clearly has HUGE economic value, especially when you consider the positive externalities to the non-owners... meaning, Jimmy couldn't sell it for its true economic value. You mean non-financial... economically very valuable... financially, not so much. This is actually exactly the prediction you would get from its economic output being mostly in the form of positive externalities. It is under produced, hence the need for donation adverts all the time, while Mark Zuckerburg reaps the benefits whilst creating negative externalities. Life's not fair... but at least economics can help you see when and why. Also you must now note that my economic theory of the scarcity of comments clearly holds. It is obvious in the low number of comments you now make. No, the calculator is available at $15 or $10 20 minutes drive away. the point is that you save exactly $5 whether you spending $15 on a calculator or $125 on a jacket. Why would some people drive 20 minutes to save $5 on a $10 calculator, but not to save the same $5 on a $120 jacket? It appears to be exactly the same except the calculator costs as much as the jacket, and vice versa... I don't see a fundamental difference. and so what? the point is the same. $ the problem is identical... I still don't see the difference... Is there a fundamental difference? Can you explain how the two are fundamentally different? Fine... I'll admit, there is a TRIVIAL difference between the two problems... SUCH AMAZING INSIGHTS YOU MUST GET FROM CRACK!! THANKS FOR SHARING THEM WITH ME Resort to ad hom defence... ie, NO ANSWER $ and I was pointing out yours... you still haven't answered the question of the difference... so there's that too. I'll simplify for you, cause ur easy confused Can you explain how the two are FUNDAMENTALLY different? It's cos 'e is black, innit? $ Gay Diary $ You're all weirdo losers, and you have to change HAND - Find someone who isn't your best friend's girlfriend... its not that hard. Are you trying to fuck up your friendship? I doubt she's as good as all that, the infatuation arises from the forbidden fruit aspect, same with her. A disaster awaits if you consummate this. Del - This girl wants to fuck you... you got about three days before she changes her mind... fuck her, she's probably really nice, irish girls generally are... maybe get married, have several kids and settle in Cork... It's a nice lifestyle, and you'll be happy for a change. LilDebbie - fuck it, you're beyond hope. You'll probably die younger as this is borne out by statistics. You don't have to raise a family, but there's bound to be a woman out there with a suitable mindset for you... this is a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Pasty fucking loser geeks the lot of you. Get a grip, you're meant to be the alphas of this society. Prove it. Oh no... married RUN... run away, run fast... The only married chick I was ever with was in the IRA... she and her husband were gun runners, moving guns from the Basque separatists into Ireland and England for the purpose of killing the English and their squaddies... This was before september 11 when the IRA were well supported by the Americans. Anyway, it was a marriage of convenience and the hubby bought me a few beers knowing full well what was going on... otherwise, stay away, it'll probably be messy. You ain't gonna get married and live a happy life with her. sry. Unless they've already split up... properly split up. If it's just a rough patch, well, u just don't need to do that. You really think that that's so weird? I mean, going to sleep and allowing your partner to continue partying with the guests? I've been both the one going to sleep early, and the one staying up late, at different times, in different circumstances. There wasn't any bullshit going on though (afaik). It's only the (near?) betrayal that would bother me... assuming that she isn't cheating behind my back, I'd be fine with something like that. OTOH, you never know... they might be swingers? LOL - now there's an explanation Next you're gonna tell me she's ten years older than him. I'm all for visiting old friends for the purposes of sex... It's what they want too, afterall. just that they're not normally married. Still used this way today $ What the (BEEP) is wrong with you? http://youtu.be/nGepCDmxftY oops $ Are you advocating militia's as a requirement to bear arms? I thought we settled this? You want those militia's regulated by the government? I doubt it... cause then you get a contradiction. That wasn't the question... A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State... we all agree Is not the necessary prerequisite for... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms... as that shall not be infringed. It means the militia is in good working order and ready for operation. An effective fighting machine. But there is no requirement to be a in a militia for the right to bear arms... I think u agree on this. For a change? You don't know how the world works $ When you going to Aus? $ 12/1/2013 ftfy TDillo has been actively stalking everyone on this site... He is a tool of the NWO, and most likely a military intelligence officer working for the NSA or CIA or something. I know because of his documented doxing attempts on reddit. HIREZ: http://www.reddit.com/message/messages/lxw3b I have updated his flair appropriately (example here): http://www.reddit.com/r/kuro5hit/comments/158jvy/crosspostfrom_rhumor_kuro5hinor g_on_ok_cupid_how/ No, but the distinction on my ML certificate is You are confusing the scarcity delusion with the reality of scarcity. I don't see your problem Actually, its quite likely the other way around. You eat, you survive, what the fuck u whining about? Oh... other people have things you don't have... lets cry about that. I think the term for that is jealousy. It's mostly illegal in the US Whereas its regulated and legitimate in the UK. You are four times more likely die in the US of homicide than in the UK. Clearly this is due to pent up sexual frustrations of middle class people that can't be released to the financial benefits of the poor and struggling. Poor McNugent isn't allowed to practice the right to sell his sex on the free market as you are. And this is making many psychos very mad. Clearly, this is the real reason why the UK is so much safer than the US. How to create money Step 1. Have Money Step 2. Someone Wants Money Step 3. Give Them the Money AND Have them sign a Promissory Note, promising you the money and the terms of interest, late fees, etc... In Step 3, you have CREATED money. That note, is theoretically tradeable, and has all the properties of money... it is not recognised as payment for all debts public and private in the eyes of a court of law of the land... Just as foreign currency wouldn't be... (Its terms are enforceable, but you can't just give it to the IRS for your taxes). But, as that note is actual money, you've created the amount you lent as new money in the economy. This is money as debt. This is all the banks are doing, not considering that they also have the deposit side, so they don't have to use as much of their own money. And that their loans become their own deposits in another account, in the system, as a whole. But the theory is the same. You too can create money legally. You can sell the note for more than you lent, and start again... if you can find someone to buy your note. Absolutely correct which is why I keep saying, take the money out of the wealth at the top, keep them running for that and beyond, and feed it back in the bottom through gov and throughout the population, and watch it flow straight back up to the top, producing goods/services for society. Maximise capitalism. On the pawnshop side... They forget to take in deposits as well... this is the key to banking success. Borrow money from people in the form of deposits, as well as create loans... then the money you create circulates within your own system. This is where you get the multiplicative effects and the scale of economies that follow, that centralize wealth and causes booms and bust. You can move this type of money around while only moving the differences in actual cash around (between different banks). From one account to another. People already know, in general, they are as rich as the ATM says they are, not what they have in their pocket. There are a few barriers here and there, that might stop you doing this yourself... Then again, you can write IOUs for people too... and they can give you cash for them... so maybe there are ways you personally can get on this scam on some level. Shuffle paper for fun and money... Also, if you're really smart... you only pay tax on the money you personally convert to cash (still some workarounds to be searched for)... those notes you hold are probably worthless after all. You can write a Promissory Note Even without money... Just that someone owes someone something at some time. Then you have money. Haven't the bailouts paid themselves back now with profit to the government? Isn't that what happened? This is what you do with loans. Turns out those bankers were trustworthy after all. In aggregate? As in, All Repayments - All Loans? Is that positive (paid back with interest on average) or negative (defaulted and cost everyone on average)? Can you please show us your huge technical skills, wrapped up tight in your new artistic creation perhaps? that would make me hard... thanks in advance. larger and looser folds... sounds like it would suit you... can't wait for the pics. Hey Trane... remember how you were complaining that there was an artificial scarcity of comments... but no limit to the number of comments we could be making about scarcity otherwise... that all comment scarcity was either artificial or an excuse to be mean... And your proof was that we had made some 200 odd comments about it together... Well... Do you have a theory, any theory, about why I can't get any stupid Trane comments about the non-existence of scarcity to knock down anymore? Its like peak Trane comment theory to me... I can't find any new comments on the topic anywhere... Why have they suddenly become so scarce? Are you being mean all of a sudden? What's your excuse? Exactly, the bot would be a poor substitute, like meth when you wanted coke. This is also a magic genie solution to the problem. Finally, are you saying you've invested your scarce resource of time into creating magic genies rather than creating the scarce comments that drive the k5 economy? Is the economic scarcity of your time the problem? You sure you're not just making an excuse to be mean? Post is on topic You can help trane understand a little bit of econ while ur here. It's not like a little bit of economic thinking ever hurt anyone. Yes, but you should have addressed this to trane also... Nuclear FTW. I disagree somewhat about markets... will discuss later... I'm in a bit of a rush. The heat itself isn't really the problem It's the effect of CO2 on trapping heat... That's multiplying the effects of energy from the sun, to which the energy we're dumping in the atmosphere pales into insignificance. Its not our energy use that is the problem, it's purely the pollution. Which is why I say, move to nuclear and have more energy than you could ever dream of. Also, our seas a basically fucked in terms of life we've removed from it. That's another story. It would be if it was due to increase in the efficiency of its use, more efficient cars, power plants, factories, trucks and farm equipment, meaning equal utility from less resources. Then we would expect that the price would go down, as we wouldn't need as much oil to get the same results, it would be a lot cheaper. However, it doesn't in fact appear to have gotten any cheaper... quite the reverse. Its not definite, but suggestive of peak oil. This will certainly be bad thing if we haven't already moved to alternatives, like nuclear, for example. If you're suggesting peak oil then there would be an associated increase in price too, right? http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=RWTC&f=D (Random US crude something price) Is that right? Is that what you're saying? I have no idea how the whole fucking thing hangs together. Its all round crazy. I think we're being scammed. Let them all play their games... imho, to solve everything: - Nuclear energy everywhere, now. - Zero CO production, now. - Green tech if you like, as much as possible, but fucking accept nuclear already over co2. - Reduce Military Spending - End the war on drugs - Govt run in surplus - With its own money (politically separate?? difficult question). - Return to Freedom over Security Bullshit - Global (as possible) Wealth Taxes - Basic Income What makes you think trane converted me to anythin ? Trane is a type two troll... someone with unreasonable assertions leading to reasonable conclusions... type one is the reverse. On a purely national level, wealth taxes on your citizens global wealth... 99% wouldn't qualify... You pay government services, etc with that, and pay the rest out as basic income... basically split that wealth between the government and the citizen... that's where the government generates its wealth and backing of its currency. You payout to everyone the remainder. Remove unemployment and minimum wage. So, it has to be less than or equal to the worst of these two... Also remove income and capital gains taxes, they slow down labour and investment. This does not solve the food being dumped into the ocean whilst people starve problem... or people gettings $2/day to work in copper mines in africa... In that case... if you really wanted to fix a lot of problems, you have to the top 1% of the globally wealthy (of, lets say, involved countries)... and actually pay people a minimum basic income globally. If you think globally, a lot of people who don't consider themselves rich would start to qualify. You would have fat africans very quickly... Who can manage all this on a global scale? I admit, the second part is rather out there. Its only from the top 1% In what way would it be a distopia? I mean, certainly for those who benefit from today's economic slavery of the very poor. So, if you're happy that you benefit from ppl starving and mining $2/day for copper... fine, I see what your problem is. I agree, those with the power to sway public opinion have too much skin in the game to ever have this implemented, so you're right on that. Wealth tax won't have these creep type factors because it covers all wealth... Income and other taxes are a scam because they tax the middle disproportionately, and the wealthy like you thinking income is the problem. You fix a rate and a min for wealth tax, and that's it. By definition, it hits the wealthier harder than the middle class and poor. Global wealth/income is much harder, I agree. It could only be applied to countries with similar economic and political systems. So, I'm not advising americans giving money to peasants in china, or in countries run by war lords, who wouldn't pay their tax... It could be used as a tool to bring countries around to your economic and political ideologies though. good questions... here's some attempt to answer... We can't say something won't work because excemption X might be applied. I would not exempt homes, no... Simply exempt the first first X value of wealth... where X is slightly above (or around) whatever 99% of the population do not have... Only the wealth you own above what makes you a 1%er... As for the database of everything you own... there must be ways around that... for a start, not for 99% of people... How do insurance companies know what you have insured with them? Do you have to tell them every rare item you own? Lots of stuff is already known by the government... Especially land and ownership in companies. The great majority of it is easy in this respect. One idea I've heard, is simply to self state what you own and tax according to that... anyone can by you out for that amount (plus a little extra), and get claim on everything you own. This would be useful as well for eminent domain, no one could complain they were being under compensated. The problem with income tax is that income isn't wealth for one... So, a rich person with an equivalent income to a poorer person pays the same tax (in theory), except they have income hiding loopholes... I think it would be much harder to hide wealth... The other problem, I think, is that, yes, the game has been rigged quite a bit in their favor... This would be much harder to rig. Do you have any specific examples? Now you are talking about distortions in the market, like subsidies and/or sin taxes... I don't have a problem with these if they are done for good reason in a reasonable manner... You wouldn't drop off the entire tax, but you could make v.small adjustments to encourage (or discourage) certain types of investment... this isn't a problem. For within a country, the current system means that companies and the like can easily be moved, but not people. So it makes sense to tax people directly, and make sure they are accounted for on their global wealth... the same way US citizens must account for their global income currently. Although, you could make a choice to tax foreign investment in companies/land too, as if they were citizens. France had some of these problems you are talking about with their wealth tax... I just don't think they were aggressive enough forcing their citizens to pay up or renounce citizenship. With the self reporting idea, and the fact that 99% of the population aren't even eligible, this could greatly simplify the taxation system, rather than bloat it. Funny thing is, we know humans are different... at least, we know that in certain environments, it appears that they tend to have a negative population growth, whilst being happier than those who don't. I do understand the problem in general though, that organisms expand to fill their environments... yet, we know the conditions that stop this in humans... namely, middle class and above wealth and education. So making the poor places wealthy is the answer to overpopulation (there will be lag, etc...) Ben Elton - Stark... Also, changing topic... but... Nuclear gives you cheap energy... that might help a bit. But nothing is really gonna make space travel properly cheap in the next half century or so... probably longer. There are a lot of resources up there tho. lol... its expensive to get up... we might get a few up, and then if they learn to live and breed up there, you've got what you want. For some... not for those remaining. nuclear is just phenomenal in the amount of energy available... I don't see y u don't think it could save us. I mean, a future of ai robots, nuclear power and raised standards of livings leading to sustainable population... we really could get to some utopia without the constant repetition of the worst parts of our kind of history. I realise exactly what you are saying... but, energy is a major component of those limits, and a lot of problems can be gotten around simply by having enough energy. Secondly, we know there are optimal conditions in which human populations don't do this overpopulation thing... poverty leads to increased birth rates so that there are people to support you in old age, despite the fact that many of them will die... wealthy nations already have negative population growth, and depend on immigration instead. Space elevator is very unlikely... I don't know enough about a fountain... still, its going to be very expensive and only available for a relative handful of people, so it does not solve the problems, except the extinction of humanity by a single global event problem. yeah, we'll be much better off when they start building things up there and mining up there. Unless you go nuclear powered launches... chemical propulsion is going to be forever expensive... I don't know which elements you're talking about... I think with a good nuclear infrastructure, we can put off our dependence on oil... helium is a biproduct... lots of metals are a biproduct... also with that kind of energy you can go closed loop farming, recycling the phosphates and stuff that are becoming rare. Most of the other things in industry have substitutes... so I don't think this is as big a problem as you describe. Mining asteroids does give us unimaginably large amounts of certain metals and elements tho, that's for sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium Palladium is also produced in nuclear fission reactors and can be extracted from spent nuclear fuel Also: The largest use of palladium today is in catalytic converters. Do you see where I'm going with this? You might have just made an unlucky choice in this case, but I really don't know of any elements that we are running out of at world ending rates. You think I don't understand physics... Yes... it's expensive if you want to take a lump of lead and fire neutrons at it, one at a time to convert it to gold... Yes, it takes about the same amount of energy as it would to CREATE matter out of energy, by a proportion of C^2... I get that completely. HOWEVER, inside a nuclear reactor, all sorts of decay paths and interactions occurs... This shit happens NATURALLY as a BIPRODUCT of the nuclear fission you are doing already in order to produce energy/electricity... In fact, if you could STOP IT from happening, you might have a more efficient system... but you don't. The result is SPENT nuclear fuel containing a WHOLE HEAP of the rare elements you are talking about... You just have to process this fuel and separate out the elements you want. As I have shown above, Palladium is a perfect example of this. Maybe... this is better but who the fuck suggested Uranium? You don't burn refined uranium, its a disaster. Take abundant thorium and burn it in a travelling wave reactor. The result is a mix of metals that really have to be reprocessed, because you want to take what is left and feed it back through the reactor again, and again, and again... Each time producing some of these elements. Now, do your calculations with Thorium, and a reprocessing cycle. Not so expensive anymore, is it? That's the primary decay path... not the only decay path... You're crazy if you think nuclear fission is as neat as a single decay path... Palladium is even mentioned as a waste product. Also, I didn't mention this earlier... but a mistake in your analysis is looking at the cost of palladium production as the primary output, rather than a biproduct... You either have energy production subsidising your palladium production or your palladium production subsidising your energy production. Well... I am advocating nuclear energy, yes... travelling wave thorium reactors specifically... These metals ARE a biproduct, check out the chain graph and table on the right hand side. Recycling of the fuel is part of the basic theory. I'm not proposing anything more 'special' than that. I also agree with you on space mining, will make a huge difference to costs of metals... but even with this aside. Either, the metals will have substitutes and different price points, which makes the entire argument moot, or else they do not... If the do not, then higher prices makes my solution even better, in terms of those metals subsidising energy production in their own right. Maybe iphones won't always be cheap... that's true... but with enough energy, recycling iphones for their precious metals, along with recycling and extracting the metals in the thorium fuel cycle can make these relatively cheap, yes. LOL HOW LONG TILL U GET PITY? Kindle? Is there a .txt or .pdf version? Its just words right? Why do I need specialised hardware for it? fucking amazon. By the time I had it installed... I'd missed the time limit. Stone of Destiny [Kindle Edition] Thor Stonewell (Author) 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews) &pipe; Like (28) Pricing information not available. Either not 24 hours, or region locked? $ You've been in the field right, you've seen it? I mean, there are wars going on all the time? People are dying over resources or something, right? Right now? It's just that all the indicators point at everything getting worse and faster. So, in the end, it will all balance, but that doesn't say it's all roses ahead either. Another Good Explanation Money As Debt. This one at least is a little more honest about the fractional reserve system and how it works (hint: in aggregate, the loans taken out to buy houses and stuff, have to be deposited back into the banks). Still, the problems pointed out in both are real. Replacing both income and capital gains tax with a wealth tax, and providing a basic income instead of unemployment welfare and minimum wage might go some way to mitigating some of these. Now, we can come up with lots of nice economic theories that would be a lot better, but how useful is all of that, when those in control can just assassinate anyone who would change things. extended offtopic hicks. You could have got the monkeys $ Oh great, everyone else gets an accent I get masturbating monkeys. Let this be a lesson to any of you faggits that think life is fair. You sure you don't know me IRL? I'm a big proponent of public masturbation. It's time we end the social and legal shame, guilt and taboo for people who hurt no one and just want to return to our natural instinctive norms. By making our sexuality something of shame we redirect our natural urges into other forms of aggression, namely business and industry, but also its other negative outlets of violence, depression, drunkenness and drug taking. We should be more like the monkeys, proudly stroking our pubic pleasure zones in a public display of self actualisation. Stand up, stand proud and remain firm, it's a hard hard world after all. Now is the time for all good men (and women) to cum to the aid party. Holly, Time to Start Exercising Again Holly, looks like your Fat Acceptance campaign, just like you, isn't working out. You're going to have to start doing more exercising, or take up your hoopercise again, if you ever expect to get a pension. Obese Londoners Could Lose Welfare Benefits if They Don't Exercise. I'm all for discrimination against fat women, and Holly in particular, but now they are planning on making it the law. No Fat Chicks!! I'd never heard of it, but was something Holly mentioned... apparently she's been fighting for equal rights for her and her fat sisters. Even in countries without a constitution, seems sometimes free speech has gone too far. The Law Is An Ass, as she says... Just a much much bigger ass for some. I don't think a fat person would troll their own acceptance movement, would they? That'd be like her trolling feminists or something, no? Unless she is in denial then, maybe? She didn't make it clear which side she was on I guess, so it's hard to tell. Oh yeah, that makes sense... What did you have to do? Exercise and diets? I heard low carb diets are good, and you get to eat as much meat and fat as you like, apparently. Would suit me, if ever I got fat. True, the good sugar got banned from soft drinks. It's really good at helping you lose weight too. Of course, they just use high fructose corn syrup now, because of the corn subsidies. I think it was called cocaine? I'm glad this one wasn't too subtle for you $ you're welcome $ I already came on the first comment but now you're sounding a little misandrist. I suspect that's from your post coital come down. Jesus Christ Holly, you really have a stick up your arse, don't you. If we take this back far enough, it is you who started with ad hominem attacks. You were saying my arguments about guns were based on the fact that 'it made me feel like a man', and secondly, that 'you AMERICANS love guns'. You know now how stupid the second argument is, and the first argument actually is clearly completely sexist. Now, all of this is based on the fact that you were you using a totally unscientific measure of risk, namely OMG OVER 9000 people die from guns each year... This is NOT a measure of risk. You were arguing completely the same style that idiot Piers Morgan argues. Emotional journalism. At least on this site you could use a bit of science in your reasoning. So, fuck you, you don't deserve any special treatment, and quite frankly, whatever pisses you off makes me happy. Look at you crying... OMG, they pick on me because I'm a woman... followed by, I did my nails today, and had streaks put in, my new bra is sooo coool. You're the only openly woman on this site, who makes a big deal of that fact, and then get upset by the slightest sexism. Well, fuck you, I'll ad hom you where the fuck it hurts... No point picking on your britishness, because you would are PROUD of that fact... I find your weak spot, whatever the fuck it is, and attack right there and twist like a motherfucker. In that sense, a sexist ad hom attack is no sexism at all. For trane, its crack, for lil debbie, its his loneliness, etc.... Everyone takes it on the chin and moves on, except for you. That makes you an even better target than most. You mentioned my name 3 times in the in the investment diary, and all your comments related to me, yet you didn't have the balls to directly reply to a single comment of mine. This is a site, where bullshit character assassination, PLUS intelligent debate is encouraged... Smart AND Mean... everyone else can take a fucking joke, but you've got a stick up your ass so wide, who wouldn't like to shove it up there even harder. Grow a pair, and harden the fuck up. I'm smoking better weed than you will ever have access too (I can get u guns too if you like, in any country I've ever been in), but no, you're not having any - its not that you're a woman, its that you are an idiot. Love and Smoochies Sweetheart. We should split this argument... Right not be called a bitch when you're being stupid and ignorant... if I can use that word on anyone else, and you can use it as you like, then what makes you so special that a word can't be used on you? On the manliness of guns... if my sister can shoot more accurately than me... does that make her more of a 'man' to you? seriously, wtf? Next argument. Guns are meant to kill... Gun training teaches you exactly how to use a gun most effectively. The safety side of it is important, but you also train how to aim, shoot and ultimately kill. Part of the safety training is the killing training... Never point your gun at anything you don't intend to kill... Using it any other way is dangerous and incorrect. Murder is the unlawful killing of a person. There are lawful killings too... Many jurisdictions do not allow the owning of firearms for self defence... However, reasonable force is often considered legal, but you might have some battles. What did the UK consider reasonable force even as recently as 2005 or so? Check out what it means now... Its a good thing you didn't happen to stab your attacker, you could be in prison instead. Anyway... it turns out, victims of attempted rape are considerably more likely to avoid completed rape if they defend themselves... This was one thing you did that was in your favour... Well... it turns out women who use a weapon are even far better off, and a woman with a gun is something like three hundred times more likely to get away. There are facts, and there are meaningful facts... You know the rule, there are lies, damn lies and statistics... four hundred thousand a year did from a legal chemical designed and manufactured to addict and kill you, generating huge amounts of tax and private revenues. I bet you are trained by murdoch or someone else with an agenda, and deliberately write with stupid emotive arguments designed to sell papers and sway public opinion rather than enlighten. Stalked you all over the site is a bit of an exaggeration... like there's loads of content keeping everyone enthralled. On the response/ignore comment, do you care? No one types as much as I do without getting the piss ripped through them... that's the nature of the game... See, you actually are a Bitch $ Are you really asking for special treatment? $ WTF are you talking about? I completely hold you to the same expected level as everyone else. You want to be able to spout any stupid rubbish, make your own attacks, and not have anyone give you shit for it. That's a different standard. You're the one asserting that I'm a sexist pig who can't handle women on an equal footing. You need a bit more proof of this as opposed to me just finding the thing that most pisses you off... which you only got after being stupid in your own right. Already covered in tags faggort $ +3 not entirely predictable $ MKUltra was the continuation of Nazi war criminal experimentation, carried out in America. The Nazi's were whitewashed through Operation Paperclip to become important members of the American scientific, political and intelligence communities. Hint: The K stands for Kontrolle Those who think this is all simply conspiracy theory, with no backing in reality, haven't done their homework. This is all declassified government acknowledged fact. Yeah, Clippy is an extra stressor added by the NWO to maximise suicides, divert your anger and otherwise keep you distracted. Your 'mental green trees' mediation techniques are also designed by the NWO to keep you calm and stop you from rising up and taking the power back. You just can't win against these guys. They have the whole game sewn up since decades (centuries, millennia, eons?) ago. How does a hamburger introduce his partner? Meet Patti. I'll be here all week. Try our waitress, tip your meals. Was expecting XMPP/Jabber protocol there $ K5 is a head of social retards $ Been that way since they shut down ARPANET $ This is considered debate now? Somebody shoot Piers please. No one's a big fan of Alex, but this seemed to be the only way to get the points across. There is no point focusing on GUN deaths... Violent crime by any means is violent crime, and having experienced both cultures, I got to say England is CRAZY FUCKING VIOLENT... literally FAR SCARIER place to live. And I'm from a country that has lower crime and murder rate than both. I think Alex won the point when he pointed out that Mexico has no legal ownership of guns. Banning guns, really doesn't help, and misses the entire point of the 2nd amendment anyway. Have you seen any other Piers Mogan interviews about guns lately? No one can ever get a fucking word in. Alex is a dickhead, for sure, but this is the first interview where I've seen the guest actually have a chance to speak. Piers is a fucking cunt who doesn't actually know how to interview, just how to use an interview like situation to get his own personal agenda across, and shouldn't be tolerated on the air. CNN I don't know if that's much better? Is CNN generally considered less right wing than Fox? More reliable? I have no idea. Good place for Piers then $ Well, obviously CNN have adopted FOX techniques I guess cause the ratings show it works? Can't do much about stupid people I suppose. Piers thinks he's bringing some king of Jeremy Paxman shit to America... but Paxman actually does appear to be a good interviewer, not just some puppet with an agenda to grind. Paxman's questions are generally good, and don't appear (to me) to be politically motivated. Piers' politics shine through in his interviews. Yeah... alex is a bit of a nutjob... even when he's right... I just think he found it hard to think on his feet... there were plenty of good points he could have made instead... TBH, shouting was the only reasonable response against Piers... I don't know if you checked out the other interview... But Piers isn't a good interviewer, he's just very good at overriding and ridiculing his interviewees. So, Alex took the right approach, but this just made him look even more like a tool. Its a lose/lose situ there. Here's a good example of how not to interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC4JJWUtzkc Dammit http://youtu.be/RC4JJWUtzkc According to this, I'm 4 assholes wrapped in one $ What I Miss Most About The UK Many of you are not aware of the finer points of British culture. Today I plan to remove you from this ignorance, and let the light of awareness shine upon you. Below the fold, you'll find the greatest English rapper that you've never heard of. Chavs - England's answer to Black Ghetto Culture: Takin E's With Bob MarleysAint Got No MoneyDonny SoldierCrystal MeffinCosmic LazerTrain To DevvoVilleBoys on The Beach For McNugent, how to flip coins and make money, for Trane, why basic income won't work: Devvo As Owt If any of you out there have difficulty with the unique British lexicon, please let me know and I'll help you out. Did you ever have any doubt? $ Euronob -- one I missed http://youtu.be/VoePbfSDOW0 You could have actually put this in a HHD comment or diary. I doubt I could with either a sexist or a feminist troll... Truth is, I just really don't like holly and enjoy finding stuff that pisses her off. She's so uber sensitive to the sexism that it's just the best tool for the job. Oh I get it... Ur drunk, and just posting in random places. Carry on then. Cause u are drunk: FYI - This isn't a HHD troll $ Just realised This out of context comment actually makes you the gay 4 holly troll. Or gay 4 me... but that's understandable... lots of people are. In other words: No YUO! Not really... just thoughts occurred to me at diff times. Thought I'd let u know. If it makes you feel good Truth is, I replied that it seemed like a weird place to put a gay 4 holly troll. Then I read ur other comment in another diary about whiskey, which explained the random place you chose to put it. Then I thought, well, maybe you thought the diary was a HHD troll, cause it was on the topic of the UK. Then it occurred to me, u were actually being more gay than me. So, you got 4 replies to your incredibly well conceived troll. Well done... have a cookie. Hope u aren't too exhausted from all that cum u must have unloaded. Streets rock $ Who Streets or Devvo? Devvo's defo a norvina (northener), I fink from ool (Hull) actually... I dunno though. Streets sound like londoners to me, but again, I'm not 100% sure. Dey sound like suvinas to me, innit? Fit But You Know It http://youtu.be/3Qg3rQfeZv4 33.33% Is the correct answer I hope this helps with your MENSA application. No, you've got it exactly backwards. If you flip one coin and it's heads, the probability of flipping another coin coming up heads to give you two heads is 50%. If you flip two coins, and one is heads, then the probability of them both being heads is 33.33%. P(2 Heads &pipe; 1 is Heads) == 33.33% because TT -- Not in sample HT -- 1 count of single heads TH -- 1 count of single heads HH -- 1 count of two heads 1 out 3 is 33.33% He didn't say, the first coin was heads He said, you flip two coins... one of them is heads. You really have to read the question carefully That's why its a MENSA question, and not a straightforward probability question. Easy to miss. Don't feel ashamed. Is it hard to get into self appointed clubs? It really doesn't seem that ambiguous too me. Anyone who can read at a high school level? ooops, ur right... my bad I mean first world, non-american high schools. Sorry for the confusion. Really? Trane gets an empire and I get all the kill yourselfs? Have you started taking crack too or something? In times of high inflation, the last thing you want to be holding onto is cash. If the value of a company (in non monetary terms) is expected to decrease at a slower rate than the devaluation of currency caused by its inflation, you can expect the price of their stock to increase. This might just be a sign that those with cash are expecting a bit higher inflation, and are moving it into stocks. This would increase the prices on the stock market. On the other hand, it may simply be that investors see raising the debt ceiling as being the better result than the other possible alternative, and the net decrease in uncertainty warrants greater investment. Even if it isn't a good thing in its own right. The price of gold went slightly up after the agreement, suggesting inflation was a likely long term view, but has since returned back to its price at the end of last year. Maybe, as investors became more confident and moved into stock... I don't know. All I can say is, it's not as clear cut as you suggest. True... but the bailouts are the main problem in the latest round of scamming the middle class and poor. There's simply no standard capitalistic or even socialistic logic behind it. Nationalisation would have been an option. Pay the rich for fucking up? WTF? Dear America, Please Switch To Nuclear I'm pretty sure the US is the biggest source of atmospheric CO2 emissions. Well, you guys are making it too fucking hot here. Last night's minimum was 34C. That's too fucking hot. We are going to die. Turn off your gas and coal fired power plants and switch to nuclear ASAP please. At this rate, I'll be dead of heat exhaustion within the decade. Thanks... that is all. You complain about the cold now, but next hurricane season, you'll all be whinging like: wah wah, my house is in the ocean, our gas supplies are cut off, I can't get any diesel to run my datacentres, and FEMA let us go a week without food, we had to eat rats, wah wah wah. So, go on, just cause its a little chilly now, doesn't mean it's not time to do something. Yes, China is the biggest absolute CO2 producer with the US as the second largest. On the other hand, the US easily beats them on a per capita basis. Each US person, on average, produces 17.6 tonnes of CO2 per year. Have you ever stopped to think how much CO2 that is? The Chinese use less than 8. Now, the US is a democracy, your government represents you, so you are directly responsible for whatever your government does, and are directly responsible for all that CO2 you are creating. The Chinese are not a democracy, so there is nothing anyone can do about them. Finally, China is actively developing their nuclear power infrastructure. They've already listened to me, and fully agree with everything I say, as obviously they are smarter than most Americans. Oh yeah, my original statement was wrong But the comment above is correct. Now we see the real reason you support pollution You are actively trying to kill me because my diaries aren't very well thought out. You just want me to kill myself so that the blood isn't on your hands. MY BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS AMERICAN!!! But you don't mind the results of your lifestyle cooking me in my backyard. You just want to throw me in an oven cos I is black. Everybody's tryin to dox me and use ethnocentric ad hominem slurs against me. It's my words that matter, not where I am. Hmmm... now you're scaring me. I admit, I'm only a little bit black, not so black I that can't get visas and jobs... probably too black for the KKK and aryan nation. Enough black genes that my sunburn from 48 hours ago is 85% turned to a tan now. Alright, this is easy, we can sort this out... Can you guess my real first name? Nope Phew... my job's still safe for now. Oh, scansion's a bitch now are they? It's alright for you to call scansion's a bitch, but its sexist to call you a bitch? I've never heard anything so racist in my life. You disgust me. Who here hates women? Stop deflecting personal hate onto an entire gender. There are many beautiful and lovely women. You're just not one of them. There once was a kuro5hin troll, Whose life was both boring and droll. She made a complaint About a masculine saint And forgot her right womanly role. In other words: tits or GTFO. You are like a self parody against women's rights either that, or a gay bloke parodying women. Successfully I might add. LOL It took you how long exactly to get over yourself and make a direct reply, rather than doing the passive-aggressive female thing and complain about people to others whilst in earshot of them and shooting dirty looks. Well done you, you're making progress. Small steps is what it's all about. Sorry, I might have been being sexist again I mean, gay blokes often do this as well. You might be right, but If she's going to make so much out of being a woman on the net, I think we need some proof that she isn't one of rmg's sock puppets. All I'm saying is, she should post pics of tits while holding a K5 sign and balancing a shoe on her head or otherwise STFU. It's just the right thing to do. Otherwise you are all being suckered in by an anti-feminism gay troll. Congrats... +3s all round in celebration. LOL - I could imagine the conversation This troll I've never met on this troll website... Ummmm... Dad? Are you feeling alright? Interesting. Which side of the debate are you on? Are you looking for equal treatment but trying to lose weight, or are you against losing weight on principle? What I really hate about you Holly is that you think its fine to use sexist and ethnocentric ad hominem attacks, but the minute they're used against you, you start to cry, act all offended, give the cold shoulder and generally can't hack it. You can give, but you can't take. Typical weak pussy attitude. For the purposes of UK TV Licencing YES. Well aren't you just a precious little snowflake $ am there now... $ Go on then... where are ya? We're trying to work out which troll the HHD troll is a sock of. Help!!! I'm Sunburnt As Fuck. Being part black, I thought I had good resistance to the sun... but 2 hours out in the midday sun, body-surfing 10' waves today, I realised that I'm actually quite susceptible to it. I'm distinctly glowing red now and the pain adds to the oppressive natural heat I'm suffering from. I also lost my sunglasses in the waves, which was a bit of a disappointment. Oh well... by tomorrow my black genes will kick back in and the sunburn should turn into the type of tan that makes women weak at the knees and you pasty male fucks jealous. I can afford another pair of sunglasses too... Which brings me my next point. Many people are jealous of the so called one percent, but I'm here to tell you all it's not all fucking shits and giggles. Being part of the one percent though, I can give you some insights. First, I derive a tax free income simply by being part of the one percent and knowing how to properly, legally, structure my wealth. However, this has one terrible downside that most of you probably never even consider. I have time on my hands, and very few people to relate to... It's true. A decade or so back, working as an engineer, I had the respect of colleagues, bosses and co-workers. Hundreds of people worshipped me because of my amazing technical (and social) solutions to many difficult problems in running projects and operations of large companies. I was invited out to eat, drink and be merry with many highly qualified, wealthy and respected people, because they could see the benefit I provided for their companies, respected me, and wanted to gain some of my insights. Now that I am wealthy, and making passive income, I no longer benefit from the social network that corporate environments provide. I sit at home, and occasionally look over my systems and how to improve them, but no one can really appreciate the brilliance of them. I can still go out with the rest of the working drones on Friday nights and Saturdays, but it's hard to make a connection with people when they can neither understand what it is I do, nor that I particularly care to tell them. Most people end up thinking I'm some kind of criminal or gangsta instead, and sometimes I encourage this, because it's more respectable than the reality. I find myself dumbing down to the lowest common denominator just so that I can have conversations with them. Their petty office politics and working for the weekend attitude bores the shit out of me. This fills only a few hours a week. The only other type of person I meet on a regular basis are the unemployed derros that can't even get a job, and old pensioners. These people certainly can't relate to the type of suffering I endure. I'm sure they have their own problems too, and would find it difficult to understand my complaints. There are many whores too. I like the crack addicted street whores that wander through the streets of my town. They are a good laugh, and although they often confuse me for being some undercover cop, we share a common bond of popular loneliness, and they respect money and wealth simply for it's own sake. My house is always open to them, as long as they don't steal, their tales of desperation always put a smile on my face. So, next time you see someone driving along in their Porsche or Lotus Elise, don't be jealous, pity them. We're not like the 99% of you, we don't have a common bond of either living off the dole or working in a dead end job for life, suffering together in our endless attempt to pay off our mortgages and feed our kids. I know it's clich, but it's true. Pity us, because it really is lonely at the top. you would like to think so, wouldn't you? $ Unless you write a diary about it. I thought you went to italy Have you returned to that little depressing ex-empire isle so soon? Do you want to stay in the EU and work for a bit? If so, pretty sure you can work in Germany for up to a year without a visa if u like. Does not imply that everything written on the internet is a lie though. I never made it to venice Did you go to high bergamo and eat coniglio in the square as I suggested? I've spent the last 15 years travelling... I admit, people are quicker to talk with strangers in europe than here... but I'm happy to spend some time here for now, for other reasons. family since I lost my gf last year, I need a bit more emotional support than usual. Also, having been on the road so long, I need time to find myself in my own culture again, and touch base with them. On the language thing depends on the type of work and your skills if you need it to work. But, you'll have to learn the absolute basics to get by. Their english skills are generally less developed than the dutch for example. Still worth looking into a bit maybe on monster.com or something (is that still around). IT firms generally have better english speaking skills than the rest of the population. Even amongst labourers, you'll find english speaking crews. I'm glad someone finally understands my pain $ Thanks, I'll check it out tomorrow I do normally heal quite quickly from sunburn, but not always... I don't know how severe this is yet, but it hurts right now. Also, a family history of having skin cancers removed should probably be a big hint to be a bit more careful than I am. Normally I agree with your judgements but this time I know you're wrong. I am suspecting some form of personal jealousy rather than your normal objective reasoning, something may be passing over you right now. Maybe you wish to make a formal complaint to our complaints department below. It's cos I is black, innit? $ WestSide, Keepin it Real!! The western suburbs... the far far western suburbs. You're not thinking far far enough $ You really aren't thinking far far enough... an anagram might help you. Depends if you mean global or local 1% This article says you only need $588k to be a global 1%er... I don't know about your local housing prices since the crash... but where I am, that's only a pretty average house (maybe just above). I mean, that's still a fair amount I suppose... I'm not really quite there myself yet either, but my family definitely is. The real scary thing is, if you have just $4k, you're in the top half of the world. You'll need 10-100M to do that... I think you've been lied to, generally speaking, if you ever think you'll ever be anything but a serf. The game is rigged. So, you're gonna skip the econ courses and just imagine you have a clue and make shit up then? Like your living in a VR solution to the problem of world hunger. amirite? Welcome to the Crack School of Economics. You want to replace expensive health care to the elderly who often don't even know who their own partners are, with a system that allows the elderly to pay basically, exactly the same amount of extra money everyone is already getting to anyone who says they will look after them? Do you really think these things through before posting? Maybe if Paul Simon was given a Basic Income He could have afforded to write music with ideas that make sense? Is that what you're getting at? This is the right answer except for the rich of course, who can afford a bit of extra life... They earned it. LOL I really don't like pointing out when I'm joking and when I'm being deadly serious. It spoils the fun. You should be able to work this out yourself if you have half a mind. Lets not bother that you were advocating just letting the sick and elderly die. I think you can work this out yourself. On the other hand, many a truth is said in jest. I guess Poe's law rules the net. Tru dat... and it does ruin the joke just that with my latest diary entry and a few comments here and there, I could imagine people really would think I was some heartless money worshipping right wing freak who considers himself uber wealthy and deserving of all the finer things in life while watching the poor suffer, starve and die. Your expression of doubt concerned me. I don't know, might have been worth going with and maintaining the ambiguity, but on the other hand, it is written. You want the truth? You can't handle the truth. fine, I'll spell it out. Basic free health care should be available to all... It is a net benefit to the entire society and has a positive externality, in that many people benefit other than just the person receiving the treatment, just like education. So, economic theory suggests it is something worth subsidising. Basic free health care is such a subsidy. On the other hand, a person would willingly spend everything they had to live just an extra day... the costs go up exponentially, but the benefits do not. As another poster pointed out, 200k spent on an 85 year old, is not as economically beneficial as 200k spent on educating a 17 year old. We have to recognise there are limits, and that we cannot afford to extend everybody's life indefinitely (which is impossible with current knowledge anyway). So, as harsh as it may seem, we do eventually have to let people die. Now, although I am recognising the need for a basic health system, I do not rule out a parallel private capitalistic health care system, where those who pay can benefit up to the point that they can afford. So, yes, why not let a billionaire spend his billions on an extra few months of life, or better quality of life than someone who's life depends upon the public purse? This is my general philosophy... exploit the power of capitalism to generate wealth, but provide basic security nets, that are as simple as possible, and as far as possible do not exclude people and let them slip through due to needless bureaucracy. The government becomes a baseline... the capitalistic system a driver of innovation. All of this depends on recognising that resources are scarce... trane probably thinks we can just print money and everyone can have whatever they want... real world reality doesn't work this way. I can't get off the carousel I can't get this off this world. We're not in disagreement Not every person... just many many persons. Which is why we have laws against it. the rest, I think you might be channelling sye? dammit, missed the title again wealth, in total is all available resources, goods, capital, intellectual assets, systems and even health. For purposes of a wealth tax, I mean all privately owned goods, stocks, companies, intellectual property... Anything that a person can expect the government to intervene and protect on their behalf. ^^^ The Above Poster ^^^ n/t Why do otherwise technically competent people have a problem with automated trading strategies. They work, they maximise the profit for those who implement them. They even increase liquidity and speed up price discovery for the rest of the market. Why the fuck do you all have to cry like babies because you don't have the wealth and expertise to do this yourself? As long as they aren't actually breaking the rules (like being able to place orders after they've seen other people's orders), they are improving the market. You just don't like the fact that volatility is a natural consequence of mathematical chaos in market systems. You can use this to your advantage if you aren't a complete idiot. Yes it is... it improves the market. Just because you don't have the resources and expertise to implement such systems give you no right to take this away from those who do. These people provide the jobs that enable you to eat. Who the fuck do you think you are? Compete or STFU and die dickhead. Yes The article is wrong. It still improves price discovery, as I explained elsewhere. Their hypothesis is incorrect. This is a common laypersons misconception None of those things you state are that important. What is important is that it improves the market overall. Trading markets are competitive. For a trade to be completed, it requires finding a price matched between buyer and seller. No trade can ever be made if the seller is asking for a higher price than a buyer. These HFT guys work on both ends of the spectrum, they increase, in aggregate, the average buy price offers, and decrease the average sale price offers. If they never made a trade, then they would effectively be non-participants in the system. The only way they profit is by actually buying and selling stock. This decreases the margins, and provides real liquidity to the markets (it must do, because they are actively making trades)... This is an overall benefit to anyone who wants to participate in the market, because you can buy and sell your stock faster and at better prices than you could without them. It is simply a fact, that since the HFT have been involved, that these margins have gotten much, much better for the average trader, and have improved the market overall. People don't like it, mostly because they don't understand it. They also want easy scapegoats to blame when the stock moves in ways they do not like - but you can't change the fundamental chaotic mathematics of the market by outlawing different types of trading. This is similar to the attempt to stop stock shorting when the stock prices fell... An easy group to blame, but who were doing nothing more than providing better and faster price discovery in a market that wanted (anthropomorphising, I know) prices to drop. but u already know this is irrelevant $ If it was easy and sure fire it wouldn't require billions in wealth and huge amounts of talent to implement. And again, if it was easy everyone would be doing it. Meaning, they've proved their ability to manage money better than 99.99% of the population. Rewarding the competent is a good idea. Responsibility to the responsible is kind of what I meant. One last explanation... Anyone can actually do this... you just won't be as efficient as the big players, but if you want to improve, you have to improve your algorithms and your infrastructure. It makes sense then to put more money into both of these, and that costs exponentially more as you gain less and less benefit. Its like this, anyone can be a plumber, but you won't get many jobs just rocking up to people's houses and borrowing their tools to do the job, so you get your own tools and you get more jobs. Eventually you find yourself with very specialised tools indeed, and probably instead of doing it yourself, you hire others, and you pay for their tools and equipment, very soon you are spending millions on a fleet of vans and equipment, and headquaters and advertising. Yes, if you want to better at your job than the next guy, it makes sense to put more money into it than him. Eventually, it gets to the point where the lone plumber with no tools can not find any work. A barrier to entry has been created, but this is a natural consequence of the market having matured, and overall, everyone benefits from this. Unnatural barriers to entry are a problem, not natural barriers, they are unavoidable in some sense. Where you should place your righteous anger is at those who rig the system. By this I mean, when large trading companies make a mistake and enter incorrect digits, and the stock market is stopped specifically for them, and the 'errors' are rolled back... costing those that made legitimate value trades, who now lose the benefit of their timing, effort, risk and insight. You and I do not get that benefit, and never will. This is an abuse of political power. Also, when people, who are even smarter than the HFTs, are arrested for create trading algorithms that beat them at their own game. If its good for the goose, its good for the gander. Again, this is nothing more than an abuse of political power. Finally... If HFTs or otherwise are gaining inside information, for example, by being able to see orders being placed before they are placed, and are able to beat those trades before they hit the system. This completely goes against the fair nature of an exchange system. I'm not sure this is happening, but it could be. Simply having smart algorithms, and having faster and better access, is not, in itself, a problem. In fact, those should be rewarded for many different reasons, but mostly because they improve the operation of the system itself, even if that is not obvious to many people. Fine but I think these are the actual problems you should be concerned about. Yet these guys provably increase liquidity and decrease margins. A pure market where people can place and remove orders when and as they desire is about as simple as it can get. That's funny but they're both completely wrong. No one wants to hear your views... Shocking $ This attempt would have made a better comment than a story. Good try. Completely wrong, but good try. You might think doctors wouldn't still use leeches, but they do. All knowledge grows upon past, outdated knowledge. Economics is a science, it accepts that it is probably wrong, and tries to find out how it is wrong, so it can change its own models to make better predictions in the future. Modern economists recognise the invisible hand doesn't solve all problems. Which is why we recognise externalities and the need for government regulation, protection, subsidies and punitive taxation. We recognise that some deliberate market distortion, to push the invisible hand ourselves, is a good thing, in certain circumstances. What about Karl Marx? Was he interested in keeping the people poor and the rich rich? For you're hypothesis to be correct, you must assume Karl was either trying to keep the poor poor, or was not an economist. Economics shouldn't be about maximising the wealth of a few individuals in a capitalistic society, but a way of understanding how humans operate in a world of finite resources, where choices have to be made and what are the costs and benefits of different options when we want to obtain various aspects of some utopia. It is system agnostic. Its theories should stand true in capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchy, totalitarianism, fascism, hippy communes and even dead backwater internet forums. Most importantly, economics really is about dealing with reality as it is, and what we can do about it, to get to where we would reasonably be able to and like to be, rather than just the wishful, crack filled, pipe dreams of hippies who think the universe will offer them whatever they dream up without any effort or cost to anyone whatsoever. So I posit, you know nothing of what actual economics is, are projecting your disappointment at your station in life (though well privileged) or otherwise the general state of the world (yeah, the powerful like to maintain their power, great insight there), and are completely unable to offer a better understanding of economic reality, not even knowing what it means. His point is that economics is wrong because it's used as a tool to manipulate understanding in a way that enables them to maintain their wealth and privilege. I don't think this is true of economics... its true of the policies that economists under their control have come up with... that's a different matter. We can fight that with knowledge ourselves... or at least that is my hope. So, I agree with you, we need to look at economic theories and models and have a discourse, so that we may endure. exactly I would think his pol econ would be me If I understand greengrass well and if he bothered to understand what I've been saying for a while now. Greengrass: listen to this... we take a small amount of wealth away from the wealthiest in the form of a wealth tax, and redistribute this wealth in the form of a basic income for everyone (after paying off government debt and paying for government services), and run the economy on the power of TORRENT UP ECONOMICS! Does that sound to you like the economic policies of keeping the wealthy wealthy and the poor as slaves that you described? yeah, was a bit tongue in cheek that one I knew exactly what you meant, but just put the idea out there... Of course, there are well established economists advocating very similar solutions. I will point to them in the future. Of course I want to develop these ideas further. Oh, I've absolutely not solved the political issue of the powerful and wealthy wanting to keep their power and wealth. I admit this is a tricky problem. Economically, I think it makes sense and everyone would be better off, simply because money flows so much faster from bottom to top, that money will be flowing much faster in general, and this should make everyone wealthier faster... but the resistance and where it would come from are obvious to all. I think, maybe instead of selling at the top, to start grass roots. Someone else mentioned somewhere else a possible solution... I won't repeat it, because the implications might get me visited by the wrong type of people. FFS, I'm on K5 not the UN Council of Global Economic Reform or some shit. I do like the discussion though. Interesting I gathered just from instinct and a few of your statements that you were a left leaning kind of a guy. Do you consider yourself a libertarian then? I mean, I'm really not talking about getting rid of ownership at all... and your diary kind of pointed that you might not really like the current system of extreme capitalism and wealth disparity. Would be interesting to hear your views, as I seemed to have made a mistake here. Here's another way of looking at it. Let the 'lazy' not work. Why do you feel the need to have everyone working? Why not build a leisure society, where the majority can spend their lives having sex, drinking and enjoying the sun and surf... and those that want LUXURIES can easily find work and enjoy the benefit of working by having more money than the lazy and generally having a much better life (bigger houses, better cars, nicer yachts...). I mean, we live in a world now where we have zero on site personnel mining sites. Fully remote controlled, simply waiting for google to put the AI in, and we can have zero personnel mining sites, zero personnel farming, zero personnel financial institutions... all the wealth extracting companies will very shortly be run with zero people, other than the owners. This has to have a solution, cause I don't want to spend the rest of my years on my knees giving blowjobs to the 100 or so odd people who will own all these things so me and my family can eat. Okay, that sounds a bit like communism simply in the sense that it seems to appeal to the idea that people are basically good and want to share with everyone else. That someone would put as much effort into AI if they got paid the same as the gardener. Whilst I don't disagree that people are basically good, it doesn't seem to work as the basic assumption of an economic system. People always seek more wealth and power, hence the currency of communism tended to be political power, rather than in owning capitalistic wealth. I think that capitalism is correct, in that it appeals to people's greed. If they want to share their knowledge, wealth or whatever, they are free to do that, but not forced to... and their is an incentive to produce more than they would without reward. I really don't think the scarcity problem can ever be solved. As long as humans have unlimited desires and limited resources, there will always be scarcity. An individual can follow the bhuudist path and limit their own desires, but I don't think this can be instilled in an entire population, nor do I think it is a good idea, because it doesn't drive the creation of wealth. Population limiting is another subject... I think it occurs naturally with increasing wealth and education. I really don't believe in the intrinsic need to work... When it necessary, we work, when it isn't we can find other ways to be happy. Under your system, why even do the wealthy get to be trusties of wealth? Why not everyone gets a go at running the fortune 500 companies for a few weeks each? So, given the realities I have pointed out, do you not see (relatively small) wealth taxes as a good way of incentivising the wealthy to make productive use of their wealth, while directly benefiting the population through their taxes? The benefit of my proposal is that it can segue into a leisure society, whilst still keeping the capitalist system strong, and wealth creation at a maximum. Whether the wealthy rely on human labour or robotic capital. I don't believe in such a thing... I think a leisure society is obtainable, but not a true post-scarcity society. Infinite desires in a finite world and all that. We can reach a very low-scarcity world, and I think we are already there in some ways... Even the relatively poor (in first world countries) live better than the richest kings of old. There will always be work for a select few, but I think the idea that everyone needs to be working all the time, and those that don't need to be scorned, is so last century. Right... not in terms of castles, horses and servants... but in terms of fresh food, nutrition, medical care and life expectancy. Yeah, that's what I meant but a lot more people now are still physically healthy at 70, and generally enjoy greater health throughout their lives, than most kings did back then. True, kings didn't have to work as hard, no... Sure, true I don't think we're over capitalism yet. Also, when the AI bots come, I still think some form of capitalistic type accounting is a good idea to ensure the 'correct' allocation of resources (externalities aside). I mean, if we can build the AI bots, so that they really do 'love' us and do what they can to make us 'happy' then great... As long as we don't end up in a Paranoia type situation. Interestingly enough, by changing the parameters on the wealth tax and basic income, I think you can move from pure capitalism, to pure socialism. (Allowing total inequality, to forcing total equality, plus or minus some transient deltas). Here's a basic economics question for you Would you rather work in a copper mine for bread and water, or would you rather live on a luxury super yacht with all your desires catered for by an army of servants and hot women? Am I assuming too much for you? Coursera: Solving the Ignorant Motherfucker Problem Coursera has obviously been keeping a close eye on the goings on here at Kuro5hin, and have created a course to disabuse all you ignorant motherfuckers of your ignorance of economics. The intro doesn't seem to be as good at defining economic terms and principles as the online book I originally pointed Trane at, but this book is no longer available free online (you paid the price of being lazy again). However, if you want to get an introduction to economics, and especially how to model economic problems, it seems Coursera have the course for you: Principles of Economics for Scientists I think if you wanted a deeper understanding of economics it would make sense to take the following two courses as well: Microeconomics Principles Principles of Macroeconomics So, finally, you can stop making stupid ignorant statements based purely on your preconcieved notions of economics born out of nothing but ignorance, and educate yourself, thanks to coursera, for free (well, only in terms of the price charged for the course, but you'll get that almost nothing is really free once you learn a bit more about economics). The difference is that you understand why and how we are fucked. You could use that knowledge to petition for change... of course, not many people will understand what you are saying, those that do will not care, and no one will ever vote for the necessary changes regardless... but on the upside, at least you know what you're talking about. "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel" Maybe... ummmm... thanks.... I guess $ Example of common misunderstanding of economics http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2013/1/3/224148/1170 My guess is that trane has chosen the smoke crack and make shit up route to solving the world economic problems. Judging by this. Some things never change. At least I tried. Pucker up then and stop ur whining $ Is it 'obviously false' though? Do you have another means to value anything? Maslows hierarchy just says that some things are more inelastic than others. People will trade money for social value -- work longer hours for more money, or work fewer hours for more social time. Environmental considerations just suggest that people should own the environment. You might be right about fiat money... but that won't stop fractional type lending, bank runs and crashes. Also, it might simply not be traded (outside of where it is required, domestically), which could make imports very expensive and the cost of living to go up. What about existing debts? Just gonna default on anyone who invested in your country? Even if you recognise that it is wrong can you provide a better theory? If not, the 'wrong' model is the best we have. There a known major flaws in physics, but we haven't thrown out our theories, simply because nobody has anything better. So you dispute the applicability of science You want to replace it with what exactly? So, you're confusing people with a vested interest in certain outcomes... With people who want to understand scientifically, to the best of their ability, the nature of human choices in the face of scarcity and the tradeoffs of various economic systems to maximise the available choices and quality of life of people. It's like writing off physics because some people choose to build nukes. Economics is the scientific study of human choice. They put their assumptions right up front. They KNOW the limitations you are talking about, its in the first few chapters of any fundamentals of economics books. These are NOT new problems to economists. You are also making the fallacy of thinking that human behaviour is something outside or other to nature... this simply and laughably false. That sounds like a tongue in cheek statement about the limitations of economics by an economist. Like a physicist saying the role of physics is showing how little we understand about the universe. Yet that is clearly not the actual goal of either physics or economics. I think you already knew this. The comparison is apt because they are both based on the scientific method and principles. Yes, economics studies things AS THEY CURRENTLY ARE, but also takes into account the very things you are complaining about... It RECOGNISES that people's thinking on opinions and attitudes constantly change. You assume that they DO NOT KNOW these limitations, which I explained are stated in the beginning of every fundamentals course. None of this invalidates the use of scientific principle in the study of economics. Its not a religion, because where economists recognise NORMATIVE STATEMENTS, they are CLEARLY stated as such. Economists don't have to know EVERY SINGLE DESIRE OF EVERY SINGLE PERSON... it is quite possible to work on these problems statistically. The second that people on mass decide that they would rather spend their life working for $2/day in a copper mine rather than on a luxury yacht with all their needs catered to by a bevy of staff and hot women you have a point... If you think the nature of people is THAT CHANGEABLE you have a point, until then, you may as well be off smoking crack with Trane. Most philosophy plants itself well outside of physical reality. Most of the models are entirely unfalsifiable, it does NOT deal in science - ie, making of observations, creating hypothesis and testing them into theories. Anything not falsifiable is not a positive economics statement and not very interesting to economists. The rest are normative statements, and economics tries to avoid these as much as possible - or actually, engage in the process of turning them from normative to positive economics. Of course this leads to debate, that's a good thing. You don't know economics and so you don't know what you are talking about. You are using your ignorance as an excuse to avoid understanding. Ignorance is not strength. I wld imagine that I have studied a fair bit more economics than you. Have you studied economics at all? Ever? You are right of course, I am not a world leading expert in economic matters, if that helps your cause at all. However, all the problems you are talking about are put right up front in the beginning of any good economic fundamentals course. You treat economists as idiots, as if they cannot recognise their own field's short comings. They understand the problems even better than you, because they actually do care about, study and try to expand the field. I'm convinced now... we don't need economics no more need to implement any more economic systems through laws because you're solution is obviously better... Oh wait... what the fuck was your solution then exactly? I seem to have forgotten. I'm gonna give you one more question to ponder Physics is a hard science yes, it is amenable and easy to study, so our knowledge, understanding and confidence of it is high. Economics is a much more difficult science. You are correct, it is much less amenable and difficult to study, so our knowledge, understanding and confidence in it is much lower. I grant you these two points, but here's the real kicker. How USEFUL is physics in understanding the fundamental problem of economics, the fact that humans have virtually unlimited desires in a world of finite resources? It is absolutely useless, null, zero, zilch, nada... Physics can tell us ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, its totally irrelevant. It solves nothing and has absolutely no purpose in this setting. Physics can tell us a lot about atoms, their movement, energy, lots of nifty and useful stuff for sure, but nothing about economic problems. Chemistry is less rigorous than physics... Is it useless? Biology is less rigorous than chemistry... Is it useless? Psychology is less rigorous than biology... is it useless? No, because they are all emergent phenomena resulting from the previous understanding and cannot be directly derived from the underlying rules (until someone figures out a theory of emergent phenomena in a way that invalidates this). They are all useful for solving, scientifically, the problems that each of their fields are focussed on. So, unless you have a BETTER theory of economics than economics, saying that it isn't physics is absolutely useless, irrelevant and stupid. Nope. Emergent Phenomena. Next Question Pls $ Do you not have any fucking clue? Do you know what emergent phenomena are? How they arise in systems and what the fuck the implications of them are? If you don't have a clue, even about modern physics, how the fuck do you think you have the right to say that economics is useless because it's not as easy as other sciences like physics, chemistry and biology? You are clueless You can have two competing and mutually exclusive economic theories that are equally beneficial. This isn't something you get in a hard science. I guess you haven't heard of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity then. This happens in all of science... Debate about the edges of the unknown. The other sciences are easy in comparison to economimcs. One person sitting in their basement with a few weights, spheres, inclined planes and a spring or two can derive from scratch basically all physics through to and including Newton. If you want to find a Higgs Boson, you can smash shit together in a big machine. You can't do this with economics, and economists fucking know this... You aren't bringing new insight. And the most stupid thing of all is, you argue against Economics WITH NOTHING BETTER TO REPLACE IT WITH. Is it useless? If so, what the fuck do you propose instead? Nothing, exactly, because you don't have a fucking clue. So, if I understand you correctly I understand that it's a social science. This is true, it's the difference between a loner in his basement proving Newton was correct, and whether or not communism is a better system than capitalism. This is in like the first chapter of a fundamentals course. Yes, its much more difficult than physics. What I am maintaining is that it is STILL SCIENCE. So, if you have nothing better to replace it with, and recognise it's limitations, as all economists do, why would you have any problems with it? Why do you think it shouldn't be understood by those capable of understanding it? It improves our knowledge, which means it can improve our lives. Remember, I've been arguing with the likes of Trane who basically suggest economics is a lie, a tool of the elite, not worth understanding, and completely useless. If you think it is useful, and necessary, and should be studied, understanding it's limitations, then you and I have no argument, whatsoever... s/it's/its... fuck $ This is better Correct, the economy occurs, economics is the study of it. We can improve the economy through study - invent money so we don't have to barter. We agree here. Yes, communism might be an example of an economic theory that didn't pan out so well... but maybe that's other factors. Alright, emergent phenomena arise out of the rules in an unpredictable manner from an underlying system. It does not imply that the emergent rules are themselves decentralised or distributed though. For example, throughout history we find that wealth and power tend to concentrate into the hands of the few. Tribal Leaders, Kings, Presidents. This is true even in the attempts of hippy communes where everyone is supposedly equal and has equal say. These communes invariable devolve into power struggles, with winners and losers, leaders and followers. This seems to be a natural law of human societies. We find this in governments, we find it in the business world, the top 100 deeply interconnected companies, we find it in nodes of the internet and the power of the network effect. Money itself is an example of a centralised, authoritarian system, which facilitates decentralised trade. Who can make laws except for an authoritarian centralised government? Should you and I both make our own laws and see how that works out? If one thing it seems you might be arguing is that the populace itself needs a better understanding of economics in general, so that it can elect smarter governments through the power of democracy. We can't all be implementing our own economic systems. Finally, its fairly well accepted (there will always be debate) that some things are simply better provided by the government, roads, firefighters, police and military. The only non-centralised, non-government currency I know of is BitCoin... and its early days to be making too many conclusions about that yet. I agree with a lot of what you are saying, we do need wage slaves, janitors and street sweepers... I don't agree with Trane as to why a basic income is a good idea, however I still think it is a good idea. I think it should replace standard unemployment benefits. It mustn't be so great as to completely remove the incentive to work, but it can replace the minimum wage, and allow employers to pay what is required - in addition to a basic income - in order to motivate people to do this type of work. Also, because of the wealth concentration I mentioned above, and the clear fact that money flows up much faster than it trickles down, a wealth tax and a basic income is far more optimal in both motivating those with wealth to make the best of it, which will be what 'the people' will want to spend their basic income on, and enabling people to make better choices as to what work they do take, because they have greater job mobility, and also, by not removing their unemployment benefits, you remove the disincentive for the unemployed to return to work. My own personal experience with income tax When you said taxes on earned income... I assume you are talking about taxes on income after its been taxed as income, right? Cause, you don't really believe we can run an economy with zero taxes, do you? I assume you still think its a good idea to tax those who earn more more than those who earn less, right? When I was making around 70k/year I was paying nearly 25% income tax, by the time I was making 150k/year I was paying less than 12%, and by the time I was making over 300k/year I was paying around 3 to 4% taxes. With greater wealth comes access to better accountants. Let me give you an example of a loophole a colleague of mine used... His wages went to a third party umbrella type company. That company didn't pay him a cent, instead he was given a zero percent loan in a rapidly devaluing currency, which he immediately converted to the local currency. When his next pay cheque came round, it was trivial to cover the entirety of the original loan and start the process again. My accountants used far less risky methods, and as far as I am aware, they were all completely legal (probably loopholes intended for the extremely wealthy). Today, the majority of my income is entirely tax free, with the rest falling below the tax free threshold. This is not illegal, and I assume it is encouraged by the government for some reason or another. My economic activity definitely generates taxes for the government, but none of that burden falls upon me. I find this situation mind-bogglingly stupid, even though I benefit greatly from it. Now, ignoring the truth in the regression of income taxes, the main problem with income taxes is that they actually retard income (all taxes slow down the economic activity being taxed). Secondly, income is not wealth. Its the gain in wealth. Income is not the measure of a person's ability to pay, wealth however is. Now, I'm not advocating taking away anybodies wealth. I'm talking a small percentage every year, maybe 1% or 2%. The justification for this, is not that they are freeloading or didn't earn their wealth, for sure, I'm a strong believer in capitalism. Rather, the reality is that that wealth is protected by the government. It exists purely because of a social contract between the rich and the poor that the poor won't simply take the wealth off the rich. This costs in terms of police and courts systems (for example), which they derive a larger benefit than the average person from. They also derive a larger benefit from society in terms of simply owning the means of production, land and other items that could be put to use by society. They also derive a larger benefit from public infrastructure than the average person, such as deriving benefit from the roads their employees use to go to the jobs that the wealthy person makes a profit from. A wealth tax solves these and the old money problem. It also avoids some of the discontinuities that death taxes produce, and finally it forces the actual owners of the wealth to consider how to use their wealth most productively whilst they are alive. Ie, the society derives a continuous benefit from the existence of the productive use of wealth, rather than a one off benefit by appropriating a large portion of the wealth directly. Finally, it allows those with moderate incomes to work their way quicker into becoming the moderately wealthy. They start paying their tax only after they have a modicum of wealth. Wealth taxes force the wealthy to make productive use of their wealth. You can't just have fancy mansions, cars and yachts, you have to be using at least some of your wealth productively, if you wish to maintain it. Some economists (Dan Altman and some old libertarians) believe this is the optimal taxation system. Now, you are correct on the basic income point. Adding a basic income, does have some costs. However, it is intended to be relatively small, about equal to current unemployment benefits. Not a comfortable wage where everyone would be happy to kick back and watch TV... at least while we still live in an economy that requires menial labour, that should be the case. However, you are also missing the other side of this equation... minimum wage. All distortions effect the market, and many jobs are covered by minimum wage. People basically do get a basic wage right now, in the form of unemployment benefits and minimum wage. The problem is twofold. Firstly, employers would employ more people if they didn't have to pay the minimum wage for jobs where people would willingly take a lower wage. I could hire 5 cleaners instead of 1 for example, if I could find those who were willing to work. Secondly, by removing the unemployment benefits of those who do try to work, you discourage them from working altogether. Maybe they work for one week, because they are forced too, or lose their benefits, but anyone can do a crap enough job to get fired and get back on benefits again. This serves nobody. Overall, the point is that the wealth of a nation should be used to provide benefits for the people of a nation. We can allow some people to be extremely wealthy, as long as they are using that wealth (not all of it, of course) to provide benefit to the people. The people can best provide the required price signals to the wealthy by everyone at least having a small income through which to express their economic desires (which they do anyway, its just done through welfare and minimum wage, which are inefficient in comparison). Good point about the gold... I should have thought about that... yes... definitely... still, very few people pay in gold. Good, right, okay Cause one thing we def seem to agree on is that taxes on income earned from labour are wrong. Cause I actually think we remove income taxes completely after we've phased in a wealth tax. Generally inflation is a benefit to borrowers and those who hold physical items, and is a tax on lenders and those who hold cash. This is not too bad, as long as the inflation isn't too great. We could even remove capital gains tax. I mean, you worked (presumably, or your ancestors did) to get you money so that you could invest it. Capital gains tax discourages investment. Whereas wealth tax encourages investment instead. I always thought sales taxes were regressive too... A poor person must spend a greater portion of their income on taxed goods than a wealthy person who can invest their money in non-sales-taxed investments. Now, I think healthcare, education, fire, police, emergency, some infrastructure and a handful of other services should be provided directly by the government. Maybe even homeless shelters, with some soup kitchens too... Maybe... You like wealth taxes in the form of land... we could expand that to simply all privately owned wealth. Inflation and capital gains isn't wealth tax, not until you sell the item. Like I said, welfare + minimum wage pretty much ARE a basic income, just they are difficult to administer, often exclude the wrong people (mentally ill who can't get a job, but the welfare is cut off, because they aren't obviously, clinically insane or refuse to sign that they are), and the burden falls on the wrong people (employers who want to hire people at a lower rate, when employees would otherwise work at a lower rate, if they didn't lose their welfare benefits as well). I don't think we have the right to chose how people spend their money though, if they rather drugs, gambling and whores than food and housing... its a terrible choice, but they should be free to make that right? Esp, if we had homeless shelters with soup kitchens. I really do think a wealth tax simplifies so much of the tax system, and a basic income simplifies so much of the welfare system, and increases both employees and employers options, that they really are the right solution to many of these problems. Sorry, I knew I missed something... ur title. contract law is decentralised, yes, but the regulations surrounding it, and the enforcement of it, certainly are not. FYI: In terms of purity I would place economics between psychology and biology. It is far more rigorous than psychology and a narrower field, focusing purely on choice, rather than trying to define every disorder and abnormality that ppl suffer from. Because money can neither be created nor destroyed http://www.heritage.org/static/reportimages/2C17BAD78F6807A98E19ECC9C6E41F09.gif ?w=370&h=396&as=1 http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2005/03/the-impact-of-government-spendi ng-on-economic-growth Monetary Policy. The monetary regime will help or hinder a nation's economy. Inflation can quickly destroy economic confidence and cripple investment. By contrast, a stable monetary system provides an environment that is conducive to economic activity. Eventually, the way things are going, with huge debts owed by governments to bankers, basically, no one will have 'faith' in the dollars any more, and you will be well and truly fucked. I admit too, its been a long time since I've done economics - and only 2 years of fundamentals course. No it doesn't it comes from the belief that I will be able to, at a later date, trade the money back for goods. faith that it is a reasonable store of value. If I am a lender, it is faith that I will get my money back with interest and it will be of greater value with the interest when I get it back. It's crazy enough people think they don't have to pay back their debts... but somehow think governments can borrow infinitely indefinitely. LOL Same principle applies to fragmenting your wife too I guess. I bought her, I can put her where I want. Slashdot and the EFF will support me. Journalists don't like using your kind of statistics. They prefer "facts" (cause they are) that are meaningless, but emotionally charged. This comes partly from their lack of training in scientific disciplines, but also the lack of scientific training in the bulk of their audience. Actual risk analysis is not well understood, does not have the same emotional 'gut' appeal that large numbers have, and does not sell papers or pageviews. This makes your kind of statistics meaningless to them. No School Lists For students with names that are similar to known suspected terrorists. Poor Tommy McFaye is Shit Outta Luck $ Quiet day on K5 Everyone feeling fragile and nursing hangovers I expect. While your hangover joke is basically true I knew someone who practised and lived that rule... it don't work out so great in the long run... sorry for the downer, but it's still a sore point for me. Glad you had an endurable holiday. Everyone's always broke... everyone. Write a story on your plan to assassinate the president. Make sure its very detailed and realistic. See if you get any bites. I heard this works well and should scare someone. I agree to your point of lack of originallity You could test whether or not k5 now has a free pass to free speech thanks to the hard work and sacrifices that those who went before you had made. So, there's still new ground to be tread. Good list. You trying to eat up all my bandwidth and get me on even more watch lists? Yeah, this should be required reading. the only thing I can add is, you haven't seen the TSAR BOMBA until you've experienced it in its full 3D glory!! A big knife http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machete Its a non predictable deterministic universe. I present to you Chaos Theory. Subjectively, we couldn't live like that, but it's facts still the same. No, its actually completely deterministic Its just that it's impossible to predict. (Okay, maybe some randomness in the Quantum side of the equations, I'm not sure that's a completely settled argument). (And also the fact that you cannot measure to infinite precision). The best example I can give is the 3-body problem. You can write the equations out perfectly, and you can iterate (time step) a simulation, but that simulation will diverge from reality 'quickly' (for some definition of quickly)... You CANNOT write out the integral of the problem, ie, it cannot be 'solved' or predicted very far into the future at all. Sorry, not quite, cause you seemed to be relying on the lack of information, or 'too many variables', as if you were saying that the unpredictability is a function of not knowing all the variables. But this unpredictability arises purely out of the mathematics of the deterministic system. EVEN IF you knew all the variables the long term solution is out of your grasp. Here's a nice video I found, by the way, of 3 particles moving, think you might like. Yes, Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions This is the killer, even without anything random, you need perfect knowledge of the starting positions (speeds and energies), and you need to maintain perfect knowledge over time of all future positions. Any error creeps up on you exponentially in linear time. This is hopeless on modern machines, maybe even on Turing machines. Maybe if you made a perfect copy of the system, you could watch it evolve... but then only at the same rate as the original system... If you could make a perfect analogue of a copy of the system that evolved faster than the original system, this would be your only hope. Seems impossible to me. Some people say that these systems are their own best simulation. Meaning, you will never get a good solution over the long term faster than the system itself will evolve... That's enough for me to assume a deterministic (assuming non-random QM) but non-predictable universe. Philosophically I find a lot of comfort in this. Yes, almost always outclassed, aware of limitations, but without the jealousy. While the icelandic solution was arguably better than the US solution, One thing they did not do was remove the artificial scarcity of money. There were definite costs involved in what they did too. For example, their default on many foreign deposits cost the country (and will continue to cost the country for decades) significantly in terms of foreign investment. Let me make it easy for you... would you lend money to MDC based on his track record? Why not, as I mentioned elsewhere, run the government in surplus, as opposed to deficit? If the government hadn't already been in massive amounts of debt, the collapse might have been much easier to avoid, or might not have occurred at all. I thought he got fat on the taxes of the working poor and executed those who didn't pay, or if he was nice, let starve to death the lazy dissenters who couldn't scrounge enough food to eat. The reason these guys win is because they understand reality. Economic realities cannot be wished away. What you really need is a global wealth tax avoided on pain of death and basic income for everyone. Lets see them pay africans $2 a day to work in a copper mine when they're each getting $16k/year paid for by the worlds most wealthy for simply existing. See if anyone is interested in destroying food when there are people with money to pay for it. African's will be fat on McDonalds in no time. I'm gonna expand on a few points Corporations aren't really a problem, they more or less work as designed... As long as we can trace the wealth of corporations back to NATURAL persons, we can apply the tax directly to natural persons and ignore corporations. If I'm missing some loophole here, please let me know. It is the natural persons we should be taxing. The top 1% is enough... That is, we can give you your first $500k or so tax free, the tax system won't even have to deal with 99% of the population... The next $2M at 1% and over that at 2%. Secondly, you cannot alter total available wealth one iota by printing however many more dollars. Money is not wealth, it can only be traded for wealth. Most economists agree that small amounts of inflation are better than any amount of deflation, but that large amounts of inflation are very bad indeed. Printing trillions and giving it to the banks was STEALING from you, even though they never had to take anything from you by force. Giving trillions to the poor, won't stop the elite from stealing WEALTH from you, even though you were given money. There is a problem extending this from a national level to a global level, certainly. The US could implement this for Americans (though it might take a constitutional change, I'm not an expert). The US already takes into consideration global income rather than just US income, so they can consider global wealth instead. Anything not considered as wealth by the US government, gets no US government protection. If someone can change the name of the owner of a giant corporation in the Cayman Islands and no one in the US declared a traceable ownership, too fucking bad. If you just implemented this in the US, then Americans will become more wealthy, but you will still have, and benefit from, people slaving in copper mines for $2 a day and people starving while grain is dumped in the ocean. Meanwhile, even Trane and MDC live exceedingly wealthy lives in comparison, and some people prefer it this way... How to extend this globally is really difficult though. I mean, if you assumed this was a good idea. Are we just going to give everyone money in Somalia... might not be such a bad idea... What about where there are war lords who are definitely part of the 1%, we have to enforce this tax on them too. So, we can't extend this to countries that have totally different political and economic systems. What about the wealth of governments? I think the Chinese still have a lot of nationalised wealth right? At some point private ownership basically did not exist there. Can we include this type of wealth in our calculations? What percentage of global wealth taxes should go to the various governments? I think the solution is a world government (The U.N., right, I mean basically...) would have to manage this through the consent of recognised governments. We actually then promote countries that operate on this system and demote those who do not... we might still dump grain in the ocean. Another slightly different tangent... Wouldn't it be better for the governments to be in credit not in debt? This represents the fact that the people promise to work for the government, rather than the current situation, the almost impossible promise for the government to work for the people. I really do not understand the need for governments to be run in debt to bankers... does anyone else not think this? I think they are stealing from you again, and you want to make worse. Finally, this would be an economic shock no matter what scale you implemented it on. So, I would always suggest phasing this in, in a controlled manner. So, for example, the first year you could simply tax the richest 1000 people at maybe 0.01%... This gives them time to adjust their accounting methods and won't be a huge burden on them. Over time you increase the number of people eligible for the tax and the rate at which you tax, up to about the numbers I stated before. On the supply side, you don't want to dump $45/day on an economy that is paying people $2/day. Start out at $1 or $2 a day, and every week, over a decade or so, ramp this up to the global living wage. This won't shut down the copper mines, but will increase the cost of labour in a predictable manner, incentivising and allowing for the investment in capital such as machines and robots, or simply accepting the true cost of human labour where economically necessary. One last point, just for Trane... All economic models are wrong. Some people might think this means that they are worthless and not worth understanding, that something better can be made without understanding, however, this is its strength, exactly the same way we know that all scientific models are wrong. We're just trying to understand how, through the application of science. A worthy idea... but, you must recognise this is hard, will take time and effort - I'm not totally against working on something like this if u really want, but it will distract from all other projects. Secondly, it's impossible to build models if you can't communicate the concepts within the models. It's also a waste of time not to build on top (for us would be within more than likely) of the knowledge already in the field... It would be like making a physics model with no knowledge of physics. Finally, it's simply not possible if you just want to pretend that basic accepted economic facts like scarcity don't exist... but I think I might have bought you around on that one. See, there can be artificial scarcity ON TOP of natural scarcity, but there are very few free goods in the real world - and money is necessarily artificially scarce, unless it's backed by, or is, some naturally scarce commodity (like gold, cans of tuna or prison cigarettes) - in which case there are other problems... It can be artificially TOO scarce though, or conversely, not scarce enough - and often poorly distributed in either case. I can't recommend reading through that fundamentals in economics book enough. That at least gives us a common language and understanding from where we can debate X or Y, and begin to build some models if that is your desire. Because, as you give ppl money they use it to get loans on houses, for example. the interest rates on the loans are always bigger than the rate of inflation. when ppl can't pay off the loan, or die without paying it off, the banks get the houses. They convert the houses into other forms of wealth, land and companies for example... they gain the means of production. In the end, it doesn't matter how much money the government gives people they end up with all the wealth and you have to get that wealth back off of them and distribute it to the people. This cannot be done by giving people money alone. Yes, there is psychological factors at play with all of economics, you are correct on that fact... what you don't get is that those psychological factors are so constant is that some of them are basically considered economic laws (hypothesis that have been tested to become theories... theories that are backed up by both evidence, large amounts of testing and mathematical reasoning become laws). Changing evolutionary inbuilt psychological realities cannot be done by changing economic systems... some of these are what it means to be human. The thing is, even though you are rich in comparison to the majority of the world, you feel poor. I am rich in comparison to many people, and I feel poor... as the article pointed out, you can be sleeping on a solid platinum bed... and psychological factors mean you still feel poor. The brain is a differencing engine, not an absolute comparison engine, it keeps driving you on by making everyone feel poor all the time. Its true under capitalism, socialism and communism. Happiness = d(Reality - Expectation)/dt Expectation = alpha*Expectation + (1 - alpha)*Reality Put your own intro in and fix up the text a little bit more... and +1FP from me anyway. Dude, you gotta go High Bergamo, right? You gonna do that? Eat Rabbit in the main square... Don't joke about the mafia, but u probably won't really get killed. Maybe check out a club there, italians have good fashion sense. Prego Prrraaygoo, but you gotta roll you're Rs for, I think you're welcome maybe, gracias for thanks... Yes and No, Si and Non... Io parlo solo italiano Uno packetto de marlboro lights per fa vor? Dos cervasa per fa for?? that might be spanish. Drop down to brindisi and catch a ferry to Corfu and hang out in some place... Erla Malaka Bitch Dude, dual EU/US citizenship jealous. Don't the US tax you though wherever you are? Greedy bastards. Pot is illegal the world over The police still detect and destroy crops in the Netherlands... Its all run through a weird system, I forget the name, but basically it means, its illegal and we're keeping an eye on you, but we ain't gonna stop it right now, unless you get too big. You can't even get mushrooms legally there any more. They used to be available in headshops not that long ago. I don't know about Kiwi headshops, never heard of em. I think you can grow a limited number of plants legally, I don't know, but if you find yourself on the right island, I got a cuz or two who I'm sure could hook you up. PSA: Happy Official New Years -- Warning I know a lot of you are planning to celebrate the rolling over of the year in your insignificant local time zones in an orgiastic display of ethnocentric nationalistic local time zone worshipping disgustingness. It's wrong, and you should feel ashamed of yourselves. This year, I'm giving you some warning so you can correct your behaviour and celebrate the new year properly. The only timezone that is of any significance when it comes to celebrating the new year is UTC. Universal Coordinated Time is the correct time celebrated throughout the universe. You can be on mars, the ISS, or anywhere here on the ground in summer or winter, and you will be setting your clock in relation to the one true scientific time keeping standard, UTC. If I can stay up drinking until the sun is well and truly shining, then none of you weak cunts have any fucking excuse other than as an ignorant display of nationalism and local timezonism. So, forget the artificial divisions created by geopolitics, the world elite and the direction relative to the sun your own town happens to be pointing at (or away from) for just one second, and remember, united we stand and divided we fall. It's one world and we should celebrate as one. Wishing you all a very happy official new year in advance. UTC Forever!! Sorry Rusty for 3 diaries in 24 hours but this is an important PSA announcement that people brainwashed by the main stream media need to hear about before they accidentally start celebrating the new year early, which could be happening in just over 3 hours from now. Hope you understand. All important martian events like the landing of the various rovers, have all been recorded in UTC time... With a record like that it's hard to see how your argument that people living on mars would use some different time keeping system. As for your international date line argument, I think you'll just have to realise that you're falling for the local time centric fallacy and are being a time localist. If they had decided that the International Date Line was UTC-0, then you'd have a point, but unfortunately that is the opposite side of the planet from where science measures time and therefore wrong. Hope you enjoy yourself either way. Oh, yeah, cause all the venetians and marsians have done hell of a lot to advance the cause of science, our ability to track the passing of time and time keeping in general. Admit it, you use UTC+/-X, like everyone else does... You just normally ignore it, because you have been brainwashed by the media to believe that the sun, the rotation of the earth, or some other fairy idea of yours has something to with the time rather than a bunch of very clever scientists measuring the oscillations of atoms under very carefully controlled conditions in laboratories all across the world. If they cld calculate it back to the big bang they would. There is nothing arbitrary in measuring time from where it was first discovered, in the most advanced and civilized county in the world at the time, through the city of London, where it was originally agreed upon. No, Yuo can't discover time a) because you're too drunk b) because they already discovered it in Greenwich. Right, and Newton didn't discover gravity either $ Now you're getting the picture UTC forever!! Happy Official New Year!!! Marking the creation of the scientific measurement hardly arbitrary. You've recognised that it is arbitrary what you fail to recognise tis that it is necessary. You don't have to beleive in jebus, just the fact that there was a book written about some guy at a time they calculated back to be about 0AD cause of the historical significance of turning rome from a violent chaos to a some form of civility, and taught people how to read and all of that... its like the most relevent thing anyone has and both the english and the french could agree to it. So, everyone has to standardise on some arbitrary pooint, and everyone gets that... but we chose a time and a place relative to the sun that might have been arbitrary, but has the significance in that it is exactly where we now derive our time from. And when I say we derive our time from, I am talking about anyone who synchronises their clock to some time derived from UTC, which exactly everyone who uses modern time does. HTH No, you're missing the point From the sun we came up with a system that powers almost all modern time keeping systems, including the one we're using right now. That is UTC... It is THE Standard by which we calculate everything, the necessity of having an arbitrary zero point is what you are missing... if we each had our own zero point, we couldn't even communicate our time to anyone. Yes, arbitrary, but also necessary It is necessary that we have something we can agree on so that we can communicate the time. Necessity demands we choose something arbitrary. It just so happens that all the computers we are using are running a UTC based time keeping system, which makes the following possible: Happy Official New Year Everyone (none / 1) (#51) by procrasti on Tue Jan 01, 2013 at 12:00:00 AM UTC You have a better option given the necessity? $ To help you overcome your parochial time localism I found a song for you to put you in the right mood to enjoy this Official New Year. Yes, and they are also wrong they are quite clearly being nationalistic, why else would they call it 'Chinese New Year' if they wanted anyone else to celebrate with them. Let them have their insignificant local celebrations, they're not important on the global scale. Ummmm... only the chinese use the crazy chinese system. How many rabbits past a dog is it going to be this year? Yeah, that's a real scientific way to measure time. Maybe you think eating rhino horn will make you better in bed too? There's a difference between jokes we play on children and things otherwise perfectly capable adults should understand. Animals aren't a rational basis for measuring T $ Of course, it's vitally important, it measures the moon and when some women are likely to be in a bad mood. SCIENCE Well... some Roman emperors or something wanted to be included too... so they kind of messed things up a bit... So we ended up with October being the tenth month and December being the twelfth. But the underlying science is still sound. Happy New Year to you too Its very different, because although months aren't really possible (there's 13 and a bit moonths in a year, right), however, they were a good attempt, we set them in general, to measure the seasons... So, you know its always cold in december and hot in july, or something reasonable like that. I mean, the names are bit a meaningless, yes, I'll give you that, just slightly less meaningless than dogs and cats. Yeah, but seasons are more nebulus but you know exactly what each month is going to be like, roughly speaking. Yeah, there are roughly four seasons Each with a beginning, middle and end. I know one culture that recognises 6 seasons, each with a begging and an end. It makes sense to use base 12 to measure the seasons, sure we have some silly names, but that's not as important as having the units. You think names are unnecessary? $ No, that was exactly my point about the roman emperors adding themselves to the calender. Its a historical fact that has made its way into our time. Like I said, we have semi-meaningless names for our months, but at least we aren't likely to get them confused with actual animals. I'm sure that happens all the time. Get an expert in but I think you'll have to concede this point. Thank you for your support Finally someone who shows a little bit of enlightenment on this site. How quickly you turn your back on the very people that made the technology your using to put your cynical view across with... The device you are using to make these comments was built by people who understood UTC and time in general far better than you, it is synced to it in all likelyhood. The least you can do is show a little respsect and celebrate the official new year that you life now depends on. hooray What, this has nothing to do with UTC It did overcome those things, to some degree... well it continues... but I guess it's worth celebrating some sort of independence day or something like that when you want to get all nationalistic or some shit... Yep, you can could celebrate that every year... but that's really a local feature and not something the entire world can enjoy. Like The Official New Year Oh yeah, you can have lots of celebrations that's rights... like the time it was 123456789 or something.... amazing, fantastic... Some of you are in the deepest darkest parts of winter waiting for the sun to return and good times when the women get their kit off and wear as little as legally possible, others are already there and making the most hay while the sun shines... So, yeah, as long as your deriving your celebrations in some logical manner derived from oscillations of atoms, you're on the right track... But, all these miss the human element that real time keeping is all about. So UTC is still the most important one, and you can have these other celebrations too that no one gives a shit about. Good point, UTC is actually derived from this... the nice thing about UTC I think is that is based on the earth being in the same place or something like that... I mean, it would be hard to concede the point maybe, if you really wanted to celebrate IAT, fuck I think so far, of everyone, you might be the winner... So, you get celebrate 35 seconds before the us UTC die hards... but we get to party for 35 seconds longer... on balance... Official New Years remains UTC... This bitch be my nigga no doubt... Happy New Year May your dynasty reign long and powerful. BTW, cause everyone so easily gets confused, the law of recipricocity of course knows that I'm this nigga's bitch... Fuck your gay hookups detected motherfucking weak bastards. Its so fucking hot Happy New YEar Ignorant Mutherfuckers The fucking lot of ingorant motherfuckers drag me into their brainwashed masses where the beuatiful women and the ugly men fuck you anways. Almost all of you... well done. Everyone tries their best, but the world is fundamentally fucked and you all know that, so get real. I got bitches here who are my niggaz and I got niggaz here who are my bitches... whichever side you wannt play fuck you anways. Fuck you Well... its my diary, and I got to say, the run up to the official new years has been going fine... there have been some very many good moments, but at the end of the day fuck you Ignorant motherfuckers and a happy new years to you all... I'll try to resolve your confusion, cognitive dissonance, that was a good name. oh well... official new years is still some time away... That's as close as you're getting to understand... Some people are falling asleep... no beautiful woman though... but I used to know a few... another day here cause I got no life.... fuck you ignorant motherfucking assholes scum and bitches who thing you're so superior to anyone else. I will answer your questions, to which the answers are obvious, but the channel is limited as shannon would tell you and the mind a relatively slow organic computer. anything more would be trying to hard, to which the only solution of course is to try harder. Anyone enlightened yet? Or are you all still fighting over scaprs? Fuck YUO happy new year. POSTED AS IS FUK YOU Happy Official New Year Everyone That was the year that was... You might still have your own local celebration to take care of, lots of us don't give a shit, but 2012/2013 UTC rollover was just right now and ain't never coming back. The finger that writes moves on and does not return and all that shit. This is what the chick I should probably have been fucking (because of deep mutual respect and shared experience) except for physical impossibilities (remember, it's not cheating if you're in different timezones): i really do hope this ones better and we learn from bad and use it for good Well... it's certainly been emotional. It's been good, it's been real, but it hasn't been real good. Love you all, until I'm sober. You have a strong instinctive sense of truth. Good on you. Next year, don't forget to spread the Happy Official New Year love to everyone. Hope ya had a good one. Sorry Holly For Being Sexist I just wanted to apologise to Holly for calling her a Bitch a while back. I should have realised that this would be very insulting to a woman, especially as they are very weak and scarred emotionally, easily offended and likely to cry and carry a grudge if they take something personally, which they almost always find a way to do. I know it wouldn't have been a problem if I was talking to a man, and the fact that I didn't weigh that I was talking to a woman properly, meant that I inconsiderately used a word that would only likely upset a woman, and therefore I now recognise that I was being sexist. I'm sorry that I hadn't taken your gender into careful consideration whilst arguing with you leading me to use words that would uniquely upset you and make me sexist. From now on, I will reserve the following words only for all other people on kuro5hin who are not you, so that you can know that I am not a misogynistic sexist: stupid, ugly, fat, irrational, bitch, emotional, bulimic, weak, gold digger, cunt, slut, whore, kitchen, sandwich, housewife, frigid, cry, dry, loose, make-up and clothing obsessed, hysterical, hormonal, tabloid quality journalist. Hope you are no longer offended, please let me know if you notice any other mistakes so that I can learn better how not to be sexist (especially to women), and I will try harder to tip toe around your fragile sensibilities. (shit, is fragile a word I'm allowed to use??) Jelly Slut? $ All diaries are gay diaries you stupid cunt If I can pontificate a bit, for your edification. One of the rules of the Internet is: "there are no girls on the Internet." This rule does not mean what you think it means. In real life, people like you merely for being a girl. They want to fuck you, so they pay attention to you and they pretend what you have to say is interesting, whether or not you are genuinely interesting, or that you are smart of clever, whether or not you are actually smart or clever. On the Internet, there is no chance to fuck you; this means the advantage of being a "girl" does not exist. You don't get a bonus to conversation just because someone wants to put their cock in you. When you make a post like "hurr durr, I'm a gurl," you are begging for attention. The only reason to post it is because you want your girl-advantage back, because you are too vapid or too stupid to do or say anything interesting without it. You are forgetting the rule "there are no girls on the Internet." The one way around this rule, the one way you can get your "girlness" back on the Internet, is to post your tits. This is, and should be, degrading for you, an admission that the only interesting thing about you is your naked body. In short: TITS OR GET THE FUCK OUT -- some /b/tard bitch No, Fuck Yuo Bitch!! Cry More $ The difference between you and I, Holly Is that I know how to run a proper anti-ad-hominem troll. Watching balsamic vinigga destroy your attempt was a work of art. Next time, get your own material or fail moar. I know you're all cunt starved pussy whipped geeks but seriously, if there was a difference between our testosterone starved, oestrogen flooded brothers and sisters, it would be the capability of giving the cold shoulder. This passive aggressive behaviour is a technique used by the physically and mentally weak to control the physically and mentally strong. It most often shows up in women, but your gay, bi, or just plain flamboyant male will often display this attribute. The testosterone filled people tend to be outwardly more aggressive, but they generally respect a bit of playful aggression without dwelling on it. As long as you're not a pussy about it, and can give as good as you take, a bloke's bloke will give exactly the same thing back and they will both respect each other more for it. The greeks say Malaka. Of course, this type of behaviour is also exhibited by the tom boy archetype female, especially the physically attractive woman who can rough it with the boys, especially mentally, this is a scarce attribute I value highly in a woman. I like the type of girl who would climb trees. If you're a pussy about it, then your just a bitch really, male or female, you're showing you are an oestrogen dominated weak person, and the strong will take advantage of the weak, its just the way it is. This is not dating advice. Oh man, I just found out on FB that the IRL girl I know who would be most like holly just got engaged... always had the hots for her, but I am very happy for her too. The girl I fancy is half a world away... that's stupid too. Life is stupid... By rights I think we could be together, fuck reality sometimes. One Six Hundredth of a Holocaust If you had a technology that could almost certainly prevent the chances of a holocaust, but at the price of causing a small number of people to lose their life every year, would you welcome that technology into your society, or try to outlaw it instead? If a mere ten thousand people had to give their lives every year to avoid the death of six million every century, it would be obvious that such technology would be a net positive to society. It seems to me that one six hundredth of a holocaust is far far lower price to pay than the terrible costs a single holocaust. Who would possibly want to outlaw such a useful technology? Hysterical media led housewives, the British, doped up brainwashed lefties and hippies, the one percent and the easily irrationally frightened. One person's death is a tragedy, six million is a statistic. Oh, and for those that don't don't know, well regulated means in good working order and ready for operation. Pole. Not likely Hard to get worked up on a topic you're not hysterical about... I think this makes the point. prbly true $ I think people generally prefer lotto $ That's exactly what is going on The System Works!! Yeah, these things can be argued either way. Up to a point, basic dental health care I think is probably a good idea. Dental health correlates with overall health, probably some causative links. A healthier population tends to be a win all round in terms of productivity, so healthcare has a positive externality in that those who benefit from it often don't bear the cost of it. Economically you could argue then that it is similar to having good infrastructure and that the optimum results are obtained through government provision of these services. Now, if you want a mouthful of titanium, gold or diamonds, you're moving into the territory of luxuries best provided through the free market. I don't know, its a good question I think they probably happen more often than once every six hundred years though. Belize only has 137 homicides per year Clearly guns aren't a problem there. In fact, that's a lot safer even than Britain. I'm surprised the British don't want to be more like Belize. Seems there's such an artificial scarcity of good music... huh. Which implies that you have to make choices... remember, this is what I'm talking about. There are many options, but you can't have them all at once. You have unlimited wants, but never enough resources to fulfil all of them. This is what we call scarcity. This necessitates that you make choices between different options, meaning you can have one thing, but must pay the cost of forgoing another one. We want to scientifically study choice, HOW and WHY people make different choices, and SYSTEMS that can maximise the best available options for everyone. Sorry Dude $ I posted an /r/kuro5hit article, just for yuo. Socially retarded arrogant help desk jockey aspergers failure fails in the market... shocking. Work HARDER LilDebbie!! Be flexible! To think, you missed out on ever getting laid just to be a failure. Good tradeoff dude. Gold Digger ITD $ OMG.... swinging at wrong target lol I've already seen enough of you in your dress fatty... I already know your not fuckable. jesus... I still got standards. Also, its obvious you got a hardon for me Otherwise, why would you take a comment about LolDebbie and project it onto me? I had asked you three times to stop using that stupid argument... once a person proves themselves incapable of a rational argument, there's no reason to hold back the barrels. You were arguing like an hysterical woman, simply because you actually ARE an hysterical woman... so fuck me for calling you out on it. Sorry, I didn't realise you were a gay bloke... Also, you really have no idea how hard you are failing it... I'm laughing at a joke you will never understand. I know you are trained as a journalist and not a scientist, and that using large scary numbers to emotionally manipulate readers, rather than understanding actual science and reasonable bases of evaluating risk, is how you guys do things... but round here, that type of argument is simply not respected. We've had enough of the manipulation from the likes of you with the MSM. Its why we're here and not watching Fox news and Piers Morgan. enjoy ur failure brittard. Cause you think a few thousand deaths is so big Did you think the Iraq war with its 100k dead was a reasonable reaction to the attack? Cause that's what your type of logic leads to. "Stop being so facetious" - Piers Morgan God, these mainstream media pundits resort to ad-hominems more than even the worst of us on k5 do. I thought those guys were meant to have ethics and standards but its just got into who can shout the loudest - of course, the media owners can shout the loudest, they just don't let the other side appear, and limit their speech when they do. Lawful Killings, Self Defence and Revolution. Murder and Manslaughter, ie the UNLAWFUL killing of a person, is the misuse, but not all killing is misuse, it is sometimes necessary - and guns are the correct tool when you absolutely, positively have to kill someone. You deliberately make the category too large (guns are designed to kill!!!) so that you can knock down your own strawman, implying that murder is their purpose, cause that's the only type of killing that you can think of. Even if a tool is more often misused than correctly used, does not alter its primary purpose. Don't take my ad homs so seriously either... they are designed to provoke an emotional response only and have no basis in a rational debate (hint, I don't even agree with them, but know they piss you off) - I break em out whenever the 'argument' has devolved beyond rational debate. The correct response to ad hom is to declare yourself the winner and move on... at least until the next round. (I've told you too much already). You should have known that though, given that you too were using ad homs against me (although far less effectively). You ignored my proof of the finiteness of music While the entire search space of all music might be infinte, the space that you can search in a finite time is finite. Time to grow up and deal with scarcity motherfucker. You are NOT suffering from ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY of making comments. You are suffering from REAL NATURAL SCARCITY in time and psychological factors that affect your CHOICE on when to comment or not. Doesn't an event horizon suggest the universe isn't infinite? Good articles Wealth tax and basic income. Power and ability to pay lay with wealth, not income. Income is merely the delta in wealth. Income inequality is not a problem, but wealth inequality actually is. I don't care if I never see this idea implemented in my lifetime. Would be great if it was, but that's not so important to me. You got to start getting the message out somewhere though. That is irrelevant Wealth is still the measure of your ability to pay, not income. If you cannot maintain your wealth, you really don't deserve it. Also, by income measure, those negative delta-wealth factors are normally accounted against the income too. So, if you are losing wealth, you aren't paying taxes, even if your the richest person in existence. Also, the problem with death taxes, imo, is that they decrease the incentive to build wealth for your offspring. A wealth tax can completely replace a death tax, and it as ongoing and a constant, not abrupt like a death tax. Here's the real advantage of a wealth tax over a death tax. Wealth tax provides the incentive to make PRODUCTIVE use of capital. Without a wealth tax, there is no disincentive to hold as many assets as possible without necessarily making them productive. With a wealth tax, if your asset is not productive, you better be able to afford owning it. Death taxes simply do not provide this incentive. Well there is a big difference between the two You never have to consider your own death taxes, so there's simply no incentive to deeply consider and ensure that you are either using your wealth productively. If you can evaluate wealth for the purposes of death taxes, you can evaluate it for purposes of paying wealth taxes. Even still, you are one technological differential away from being unemployable. Will you still be singing the same tune when it's you who cannot find work? You sound as stupidly smug as the people ridiculed in the article. I'm thinking mature AI will be with us within the next half century. More than capable enough to replace the kind of half assed 'engineer' you find at the standard help desk. It might be a bit longer to replace someone like me, but that's not the point. I think we need to structure the economy around the original technological promise of a leisure society. Also, this kind of technology is going to be owned by only a select few... wealth begets wealth. The only solution to these problems are wealth taxes and basic income. See, this is the type of arrogance I'm on about I believe something like Hinton's AI will replace your 'real' skills very shortly. You will be out-thought by machines in every endeavour, the way you are out-muscled by machines in every endeavour today. To think otherwise, is nothing short of complete arrogance... if that becomes a marketable quality though, you'll be set for life. You probably haven't been keeping up with ML advances. Yes, we are getting to a stage where simply more neurons means more 'intelligence'... Yes, they too will operate across global networks, just much faster and much more 'correct' than humans can. You are falling for the very fallacies pointed out in the cracked article. You happen to be born into an era where the ability to manipulate symbols in some logical framework is well rewarded... Objectively, Michael Jordan (whoever, fuck if I know) is far more successful than you and therefore is a much harder worker than you, and can look down on you as an idiot who wasted his formative years being fascinated by the dances of symbols on paper, instead of being flexible and developing the real important skills like throwing a rubber ball into a hoop. The fact that the market currently rewards your skills leads you into the lie that you are somehow better than other people and naturally deserve the rewards you currently get. Dude, by objective measures You are the loser to me. I am more successful than you, hold better positions than you, get paid more than you, and generally am a far better engineer than you. You should know your place. The fact is, when the AI/ML machines come, you are going to be unemployable before me. If the market shifts away from these skills, and the only skills rewarded are things like great human athletes... You will NEVER BE EMPLOYED, no matter how hard you work, you just do not have the natural skills required, and never ever will. You don't know what I do, so your assumptions fail Personally, as I said elsewhere, I very much doubt I will want for work or money in my lifetime. What I do doubt is that you have the ability to be a professional athlete. In fact, I find the probability that you could make a living wage from it laughably low. You really have to be top 1% of ALL ATHLETES to even start. What you fail to realise is that your skills and talents are currently in demand. This pretty much falls down to pure luck. Luck in your genetics, luck in being born in the right society at the right time, luck to have the right upbringing and parents, luck in your access to education, luck to have the propensity and desire to learn and work on skills that are currently in demand. People who fail to recognise their own luck are arrogant fools failing for the post hoc ergo hoc fallacy. Sure, if your willing to give blowjobs to the rich elite... and you got a pretty mouth, and aren't too old, well then you have a job for a while. If you think 'fixing computers' isn't just a temporary phenomenon in an infant industry you are a fool. Technocrats are always promised the power in society, and generally they get screwed over time and time again by the people who are wiser economically, financially and socially. IE, not you. LOL how sad... A bricklayer who thinks himself an architect. Reddit's now worth $147M, that's $147M more than I knew before I started, so seems to be going pretty well. (Not they they need other people to tell them that). Thanks. What's the difference of those last few credits? About $100k/year LOL BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ohhh dear me. I really doubt consciousness will be 'solved' I think its a total red herring. Its behaviors and results that will matter, not obscure problems like the chinese room. If the computers can understand and carry out the instructions we mean, rather than what we say, as they currently do... most low level developers and help desk type people will be out of work. Management, finance, pretty much everything... The only thing that will matter is who OWNS the machines. It won't be skynet type situation, because they will follow orders... just it will be the orders of the very few, rather than the average person. Yes I have... I work on large scale software engineering projects. I do not want to go into details, because real life me is known throughout offices in some of the biggest companies in america and europe, and I don't want them to know the type of crap I write here. If you think these things don't cost, you are thinking way too small. Don't think the average coder's workstation, think of farming equipment, think of the factories that build the machines, think of google's warehouses and high frequency trading centers... all these things will be automated... the improvement of these things will be automated. Yes, I believe the machines will be able to interpret and carry out management speak, and convert this into the code the likes of which we are used to creating and working with. Yeah, ur right as far as it goes... Moores law marches on and even the more general laws of storage and MFLOPS or MFLOPS/watt and MFLOPS/$ improve at similar rates. From my own experience, back in the early 2000s, where I convinced a large european company (who's products you almost certainly own), to replace their development and testing machines (2 $2M Solaris boxes per environment) with relatively cheap redhat machines. This was in a time before many companies trusted or understood open source. With a proven reputation of saving companies millions every time I sign a contract, it's unlikely I'm going to want for jobs any time soon. The increasing cheapness of hardware and software isn't in question. And, although I really do respect you and your business, I have a hard time believing that Bezos has lost any sleep over your existence. I doubt you will ever be anything more than a few percent of that overall market. Economies of scale mean that whatever rate you can grow your business, on average, he's going to grow his even more. I also believe that as hardware becomes more powerful, we will find software that will push it to it's limits. Some types of software will always be limited by available hardware - especially anything involved in modeling or prediction of chaotic type systems. ML and AI also fall into these cases, where we are right now literally means bigger is better. The real problems I am talking about are not in hardware and software, but in mining, manufacturing, agriculture and finance. These are not the type of business that an individual can compete with on any large scale. They currently employ large numbers of people, from unskilled laborers, to line workers, technicians, mechanics, engineers, financial experts, marketeers, upper management, etc... Almost all these positions will be replaced by robots and 'smart' machines. I think people like hinton are making breakthroughs in the fundamental operations of AI and ML on a yearly basis, and what can't be done currently with smarter algorithms can be done with brute force -- the type of brute force only companies like google can currently provide. It was promised in the 60s that the technological revolution would lead to a leisure society. Instead its lead to people like trane who can't get a job, and others like LilDebbie gloating at how smart and brilliant they must be that they can even get a job. Its broken into people who have nothing, those who are willing to put in at least 60 hours a week and a wealthy class who think they deserve everything they've inherited. Its lead to the greatest wealth inequality since the great depression, with the rich being incredibly rich and the poor really being truly poor. The system's broken, I don't think its temporary, I think its structural, but there is a fix... if we jump to the fix sooner rather than later, we can reap the benefits now and can avoid the bloodshed that continuing on this path will inevitably lead to. I agree with most of this... Fundamentally, I agree with capitalism. That the rewards should go to those who best serve society, approximated by the market. Wealth inequality isn't a problem in of itself, if the lowest are relatively wealthy then that should be fine. Unfortunately, wealth inequality is normally associated with poverty, and I see things either already there or heading in that direction. The other problem, which you mentioned, is the distortion in the market where the wealthy get the jobs that would have otherwise gone to those with the skills and talent. This represents an inefficiency, and should be attenuated over time. This is related to the class mobility you talked about. The purpose of a basic income, imo, is to remove both the stigma associated with unemployment, and to remove the disincentive to return to work. Also to promote part time work over no work. It should be enough to enable people to live, but not so much that you would have access to the same levels of luxury that someone who works does. As work disappears to the machines of course, the basic level could increase over time. Yeah, your right about it being harder to get the first mil than the second... We shouldn't tax people who haven't yet made it as much as those who have... this is another argument in favour of wealth taxes over income taxes. You are also right that the current tax system appears to place the tax burden on the upper middle classes rather than the true elite. Again, I see this is an argument in favour of wealth taxes. Wealth represents the ownership of the means of production. Those who own those means, and benefit the most from society (ownership is a social contract, not a natural right -- as we see any time it tips too far and revolution rolls around) - that that benefit is the basis for the justification of a wealth tax. It ensures wealth is used for the productive benefit of society. Finally... on the matter of valuation of your company... yes, its something I also am thinking about... I cannot tell you the nature of my income, other than to say its a piece of software that generates income with very little work on my behalf (a few hours a month and I get by)... I'm not entirely sure how to value it either... BUT... to a first order approximation, it would be foolish to assume that there isn't a price at which you wouldn't sell it at... this has to be an upper limit. Secondly, millions of people do evaluate companies every single day, and is supposed to be the fundamental basis for the operation of the stock market, for example. Just because its beyond the likes of us, doesn't mean it's a fundamentally difficult problem. Actually, this is something I would like to discuss further, as in, implementation details exactly like this. If we assume a wealth tax (not if it's a good idea or not, we can come back to that), how exactly should it be done. I'm not infinitely smart or anything stupid like that, I want to hear your ideas, throw some around, have them knocked down, and try to find some systems that would work. So yeah, I'd like to know what other people think, assuming the underlying premise is reasonable prima facie. One idea, that many people would probably hate, is an ancient one. Value it yourself at a rate you would be willing to sell it all for. Anyone can buy it off you at that rate. So a permanently on-the-market type situation. This would also allow a fairer basis for things like eminent domain. I know it has some flaws, but I'd like to discuss it further. Especially with someone like you, who seems far more reasonable than may others here. This diary has been featured on /r/kuro5hit. Enjoy your internet fame. This is much better At least stick to writing about things like this that no one's likely to read or confuse for actual knowledge. You're an idiot not even u want to implement infinite dollars for everyone. No credible physicist will tell you that usable energy is infinite. And, maybe, just maybe, music is infinite, but the portion of the music space that is enjoyable is very small compared to all possible noise. Also... all the music you could listen to and all the music a human, and by extension all humans, can currently make is clearly finite. Further proof of the finiteness of music You're inability to play without fucking it up. Why do you see infinities everywhere when there are almost no examples of them in real life? Are you still suffering from the artificial limits on your comments, or are your NATURAL psychological choices really what's limiting you? Kill Yourself I'm not even joking. Your conclusions were correct, you're a useless crackhead that always ends up on the bottom of the social ladder because no one likes or respects you. You cannot hold a job, and crack has ruined whatever mind you might once have had. You provide no benefit or value to society and are nothing but a parasitic drain on our resources. Please kill yourself and improve the planet. Thanks in advance. Dear 12 year old canadian girl Could you please dumb down your speech so that our viewers can understand it? Oh sure... I was watching the Zeitgeist documentaries with my Dad, who knows about this cause he puts up wallpaper and doesn't afraid of anything, and the jews don't even give you the money for your death pledge, they just type it into the computers and I think they should just give everyone free money instead. Thankyou for your amazing insights and good luck with your career as interior decorator and economics adviser to the new world order. Impressed at Quality Externality Troll I got to say, Trane's troll that economics is not worth understanding because the economic theory of externalities proves that economics cannot account for externalities because they are by definition external to the theory of economics is brilliant. I can't think of an analogy in another subject that could work this way. Well done Trane... Very clever troll really. I also like your idea that we should end the artificial scarcity of dollars by implementing another artificial scarcity of dollars. How do you come up with such deep insights? I'm on IRC if you like. #kuro5hin.org @ slashnet $ Cause scientific method seems to work? $ So much closeted jealousy around here $ Ur missing out on the polyamory we got going $ Artificial Scarcity of Trane Comments In this diary. Trane's Diagonalisation of Economics I like how Godel proved mathematics wasn't worth studying. Saved lots of people a lot of work building a useless system that already shows itself that it can never be complete or correct. Why even bother? Yeah... The language of machine learning derives directly from economics. ML scientists work with Cost Functions, the nodes in the network are similar to goods in economics models, where each node has a value and there is a relationship between the nodes, and we examine the current situation. Economists look at the 'marginal cost or value with all things being equal', which is exactly the same as looking at the partial derivatives of the cost function with respect to a node given the current model. Economists were certainly ahead of the AI/ML engineers here, we just adapted their knowledge to a the new domain. I don't think its a coincidence that the mathematics of economics and ML are so similar. Also, mathematicians didn't really notice chaos theory until the 70s, whereas economists were already writing about the problems of sensitive dependence to initial conditions during the 50s. To write off a whole field of study because you don't like the conclusion of a handful of capitalists and financialists shows an ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and pig headedness worthy of contempt of the highest order. Do you really believe that if the govt just gave everyone a hundred billion dollars, everyone could afford their own super-yachts? Is that how you view reality? Why artificially limit it like that? Are you trying to make $ artificially scarce now? This appears to be an artificial scarcity to me I propose 100B each. I want you to address how THIS IS NOT ARTIFICIALLY SCARCE. Because otherwise, we are arguing, YET ANOTHER TOPIC ALTOGETHER. You take so much fucking crack that you actually believe this is how democracy works. Do you not realise that crack makes you actually stupid. Like, there are very good reasons people use the term 'crackhead' to describe someone who is hopelessly, irretrievably idiotic? I actually hope you die. Lets vote this year to be the year trane dies. I gotta be careful saying things like that... said something similar to trhurler b4 he went on his final hike. And here I was, optimistically thinking you might have shut up in order to spend a little time on reading a little bit of economics. You live AS IF the magic genies already exist You mean things like 'externalities are external to the models' -- u know, things that are demonstrably false. Or that you have this belief that you can do an infinite number of things with infinite resources simultaneously right now in the real world... Yet, for some reason still haven't created your AI bots. u know, things that are demonstrably false. You are trolling or on crack I already showed you that externalities are an economic theory. So why don't you bother trying to find out? I pointed you at a good resource on economic fundamentals, that quite clearly covers externalities. You can back this up with references I suppose? $ Most economic models predict a DECREASING Opportunity Cost over time due to TECHNOLOGICAL advance. Which evolutionary models predict the bottle nosed dolphin? Showing you one: http://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Market_failures/Externalities.html I get the gut feeling that you are very confused, that you might have done a course on FINANCIAL MODELING or something like that, and your crack addled mind has equated that to ECONOMICS. Do you realise that a communist or a socialist can use the same economic theory as a capitalist? Could this the case, by any chance? Finally a correct statement but based on a incorrect knowledge. references for your statement re externalities not examples (which are wrong anyway). Economists do not measure price ONLY in terms of dollars. Satisfaction is the benefit, and time, effort and energy are the costs. Once we get the magic genies you might have a point... Until then... a mechanism to reward people for doing things they would rather not is absolutely necessary. I never realised crack created such incredible brain damage... I'm re-evaluating my views on it in this light, and conclude it must be banned and destroyed. wtf? the problem with your economics is that it relies on crack fantasies. Apparantly, you value ignorance over knowledge You VALUE your ignorance in economics, based on FALSE ASSUMPTIONS about the subject you are ignorant of. If that's the way you live your life... well, u deserve to be a broke and useless crackhead failure. How to Survive the Heatwave If you're like me, you've probably noticed the days getting longer and significantly hotter as the summer, global warming and the 14th b'ak'tun really start to get going and taking effect. If the artificial scarcity in US dollars has affected your ability to invest in good condenser or reverse cycle air conditioning system, you might find the following tips useful to surviving the upcoming heatwave. Remember: Drink lots of water!! If you have a washing machine, you can wet a sheet and then put it in on the spin cycle. This will leave the sheet damp, but not wet. You can then lie under the damp sheet and stay cool. You don't want to sleep under a dripping wet sheet, as you will find this too uncomfortable. If you do not have a washing machine, a technique that is nearly as effective is to put a scrunched up sheet under the shower, and then wring it out into itself so that some patches remain dry, but overall the sheet will be slightly damp, and you will find it very comforting to sleep under. You can also do this with a tshirt, however this can often make your body cold, while leaving your legs, arms and head to overheat. A lot of blood flows through the neck and into the head. Don't forget to damp your neck, head and hair, as this is an effective way to cool your blood. Close your windows during the day and open them in the evening until the early morning. As soon as the temperature outside becomes hotter than inside, you want to shut your windows to lock the cool air you do have in. As soon as the temperature outside drops below the inside temperature, you want to open your windows and get as much breeze through your home as possible. If you have a fan, it is important to keep it running. This will help circulate the air, and the moving air will help cool your damp sheet. Rest during the day, work during the night. During the main heat of the day, it is important to conserve your energy as much as possible, this will enable you to maximise your progress as you work during the cool of the night. Many targets worthy of your derision, ridicule and unique insights reside in North America and Western Europe. They are most likely to be online during their daylight hours, so you will get more and faster responses during your nighttime. Both groups, being highly propagandised ignorant motherfuckers, are most likely to instinctively bite at your trolls during these times, no matter which side of a subject you decide to argue. Happy Christmas Motherfuckers! Does anyone else have problems with their emu? I find that during certain times of the year my emu tends to want to attack women and children. I think this happens most when it is during its mating season, but I'm not sure it's not a territorial issue. It will tend to attack or attempt to rape anyone who walks away from it, keeping their back to it. Does anyone else with an emu have any tips for keeping their emu friendly? TIA. I knew this'd be the place to ask about emus I thought... what sort of person would own an emu... then I remembered K5. Mind you, I think that emu got a bit rapey at times too. Coldest I've ever experienced was -18C in Germany, drinking gluhwein during the christmas markets. (highly recommended btw, if u get the chance). I went to work the next day with a bright purple/red nose. I couldn't imagine this level of cold. But global warming doesn't exclude the possibility of much colder winters in some places either. Wow -- amazing place to see Are you ex-military, or was this a holiday trip or something? Took me a while to translate ur title... but glad to hear you're going... xmas time there is great... Had the frozen hair experience too... is weird, esp for someone not used to the cold. Why do you have to be so fucking stupid? If nobody had any money and we had no money, nobody could ever buy anything. That's stupid. If everyone had infinite money, people could afford to buy EVERYTHING they need, and there would be no world hunger. Everyone could have their own rocket ship to go to whichever galaxy or star they wanted to. We would all live in a VR and have AI bots. Why do you want everyone to starve? whoosh whoosh $ GOOD CRACK U GOT THERE $ Y not, Lord Of The Rings but without the Orcs ? $ If you ever find yourself outside of crackland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax Actually, this is the point. As machines or capital, replace human labour, there will be a less and less need to employ people to do work that the machines are now capable of doing. We should be aiming for a leisure economy, where the machines do the hard work (even the thinking), and people spend their time pursuing whichever endeavors they see fit. Unfortunately, the nature of capitalism is that the machines will be owned by a select few individuals, whilst the majority will end up having nothing of value. This is because wealth tends to beget wealth, so it concentrates more and more to those who have it, and less and less from those who do not. This isn't an argument to throw away capitalism or money however, as we should reward those who provide the goods and services most desired by the most number of people (or those who can most afford it). However, we must overcome this wealth concentration while enabling the common person to make the most of what society has to offer. By recognising that private ownership has a negative externality in terms of opportunity cost to society (we need to protect it with police forces, manage it via government and also society loses the direct benefit of whatever it is that is privately owned and could have been put to better use), we have a rational basis for taxing private property. By implementing a WEALTH TAX, we can reclaim wealth from the top of society, and with a basic income, we can redistribute that wealth back to the bottom of society. Wealth flows upwards at a much faster rate than it trickles down. This means that the wealthy will very quickly recoup the loss from these taxes, AS LONG AS they are making efficient use of their wealth, in an economic sense - which is what we want them to do, as it has the greatest benefit to society as a whole. Basically, this is a 'compensation' dream http://slashdot.org/~blue+trane/journal/297919 You feel like you are making progress with your arguments in your dreams, because your subconscious can't handle the fact that you are failing in real life. I assume that I am the Old Conservative. HTH One thing you can hand to the brits is a great comedy and a good sense of humour. Generally much funnier and deeper than american humour and they don't have to explain the joke three times before the audience gets it. Maybe American TV caters to the bottom 60% and BBC generally isn't (so) commercially driven? Just a guess. How will the BBC get Americans to pay their TV Licenses? I hope you've paid yours and aren't just stealing TV from the government. I like your anglo-american spelling there... Didn't realise that not being a resident was a get out... makes sense of course... in a system that doesn't usually make sense -- a cell phone is considered a TV if it can play video. About 4 months after leaving the UK, I got a TV license payment demand black letter threatening me with a thousand pound fine and a year imprisonment if I didn't pay up immediately. I also got a letter from their stupid council tax system making me sign a statutory declaration that I wasn't living in my old house with another person --- even though I wasn't even living in the house or country at all anymore. Also... other person was dead $ I think the TV License pays for like 2 or 3 channels. You have to pay for cable ON TOP of that... Also, cable companies can't force you to buy their product (outside of proving to the TV license detector man that you don't have ANY device capable of receiving TV - even if its unplugged and sitting in a cupboard ur still fucked)... Also, they can't send you to prison (but are prbly working on that). I'm not going to even pretend to understand the american system on that one. I don't understand why the government doesn't just cover basic healthcare with taxes... the same way the NHS do. What's so offensive about that? Forcing purchases IS fucking crazy. You're in the bottom 60%, but see yourself in the top 5? amirite? ^^^ American Homour ^^^ $ This woman would have solved the Software Problem if only she had been given a basic income and challenges. Now we just have another masturbating crackhead. ThankYOU IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKERS! Trane won 't give me his computer Trane believes the solution to ending poverty is voluntary taxes and inflating money beyond all measure. Untainted by even the most rudimentary knowledge of economics, he is able to come up with creative solutions to economic problems without being constrained by the economist's otherwise limited understanding of economics. Trane believes that artificial scarcity of money is the root of all our problems, and that otherwise people would be willing to share everything they had at whatever price the BUYER decided, if only the government printed enough money for everyone. Yet, he is unwilling to give me his computer and unwilling to explain why. Why does he have to be such a selfish meanie? Is scarcity thinking leading him to become one of the very monsters he is trying to fight? Well... FUCK YOU TRANE you SELFISH MEANIE!!! Why haven't you innovated yourself enough knowledge to get the knowledge you need to innovate yourself to another galaxy yet? Why would you possibly need US Dollars to do that? What does this have to do with your failure? $ This still doesn't explain your failure to understand the basics of economics. FALSE IGNORANT STATEMENT You may as well say PHYSICS DOES NOT PREDICT BLAH BLAH BLAH Does evolution predict the existence of the bottle nosed dolphin? Does that mean it is USELESS? Unfortunately for you, economics actually DOES realise the role innovation plays. A lot of economics is actually predicated on this fact. You are SMOKING CRACK. HOW MANY FUCKING TIMES DO YOU HAVE TO BE TOLD That "human controlled" evolution is STILL EVOLUTION. Why can't you just read a fucking intro to economics fundamentals course? Are you too stupid and unable to comprehend economics, or are you just TOO FUCKING LAZY and UNWILLING to AFFORD the OPPORTUNITY COSTS? If you can stop all change in all species, yes Maybe, if we use Nuclear technology to vaporise all life, we could "transcend evolution". I don't think that would necessarily be a good idea. Does anyone know the name of the logical fallacy that describes that the ignorant motherfucker has no clue what he's talking about? I thought this was argument from ignorance, but this covers the case when nobody knows the facts and therefore this proves some point. Like nobody can find the missing link, therefore god. But I couldn't find the name of the logical fallacy about arguing from the point of view of being totally ignorant about the subject. Thanks in advance for anyone who can help me out. Help 4 & 5 seem to say the opposite of each other!!! WWvztcJD? (what would vampire zombie taxi cab jesus do?) The rest makes sense. I think I get it actually if you argue with a fool, you may become a fool... if you don't argue with a fool, he will remain a fool. I know, right... How many references to wheelbarrows full of money to buy million dollar loaves of bread do I have to make to this guy before he gets it? This is a fact In the UK, they take away your benefits, which include both money for food and normally your rent as well, when you start working. This means, you can end up working a 40 hour job, for less than 50p per hour in relative increase in your income. This is regressive, and leads to multiple generations never working. It literally makes sense NOT to work. So, it definitely makes sense to pay a basic income as opposed to welfare... but the way trane approaches the problem is nothing short of completely fucking crazy. He has no idea what money is, or what happens when you give lots of it to everyone. The sooner you understand scarcity the better To think otherwise implies that there is ANYONE on this planet that can have an infinite amount of anything... If you had an infinite amount of anything, where the hell would you store it? Do you have a bag of infinite holding where you can store an infinite amount of stuff in a finite space? Can you access it in a finite amount of time? Do you have an infinite amount of time? If you SOLVE all these problems... or rather, demonstrate that someone HAS SOLVED all these problems, and are merely being selfish and mean and keeping this infinite wealth from you... then you have a point. Right now, you are a fool, who has no understanding of economics or reality... suggesting a very stupid solution to a problem that is in all likelihood going to make things a lot worse for the very people you want to help. Its not my job to teach you economics, when I have given you the resources to do that yourself. It shouldn't be difficult... infact, you should have done it already... after all... your KNOWLEDGE and TIME has no scarcity, according to you and your theories of reality. Evolution theory is excuse for EUGENICS What you have to demonstrate is that scarcity is FALSE... That is DOES NOT EXIST. It doesn't matter WHAT it is used as an EXCUSE for... it matters IF IT IS REAL OR NOT. EUGENICS does not invalidate evolution. MEANNESS and SELFISHNESS do not invalidate scarcity. There is an INFINITE amount of food now? $ Still SCARCE Would you prefer bread and water diet for the rest of your life, or fillet mignon? SCARCE means LIMITED that is ALL it means Not that there isn't 'ENOUGH' (for some definition of enough) No, crackheads and lay people think scarcity means there is not enough. economists do NOT think that way. Which DICTIONARY did you get that from? when a physicist uses the word FORCE, he is not taking the websters fucking definition. ECONOMICS MOTHERFUCKER ITS AN ACTUAL THING THAT EVERY FUCKING ECONOMISTS AGREES ON!! when a physisist applys a force to a mass do you think they are: applying "violence, compulsion, or constraint exerted upon or against a person or thing "? Of course you come to the wrong conclusions, you are using the wrong definitions. I HAVE ALREADY STATED THIS... so I am not CHANGING definitions. You think physicists yell at particles? Threatening them with violence if they don't comply? You are retarded. Physicists do not MEAN that FN RETARD Violence compulsion or constraint... So fucking stupid LOL - FUCKTARD $ I DID U MUPPET... the same thing you did to define SCARCITY. THIS IS HOW FUCKING STUPID YOU ARE. That's a DIFFERENT DEFINITION There can't possibly be more than one definition for a word, can there? One definition might be useless in one situation, whilst another is the AGREED UPON definition within a given subject? That couldn't possibly be right, could it? AIR IS SCARCE REMEMBER Yet, nobody, not a single person is dying from LACK OF AIR. Then YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND ECONOMICS It is NOT FREE to CREATE AIR. NOBODY FUCKING DOES $ DOES NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM $ DOES NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM $ Trane seems to have given up now that I said I agree with legalising crack... Good to see his priorities all in order. Wut U donut no is economics $ SMOKING CRACK $ We can... but its another topic altogether $ I must say, your GAYDAR sense is very keen U sure you're not feeling lonely? You can always join us if you want. I don't want you to feel left out. The queer eye of the straight guy huh? $ Are you aware how long I spent arguing with CTS? I never resorting to doxing or anything like that, and it only cost me a large percentage of my sanity, slivers of it still remain today!! Substitution theory says that when the superior product is unavailable but an alternative inferior product remains, people will switch to the inferior product, even if they would prefer the first. Trane's brand of stupidity is not quite as powerful as CTS's but CTS is no longer available, so I getting a hit of trane is the best option I have. This is an economic theory that also applies to drugs, so neither CTS nor trane could possibly accept that this would be the predicted case and cannot accept the reality of the situation. Why not? You can exchange currency for bitcoins and bitcoins for currency? It has value, it can be traded... So, why not? You might know that this was a recent frontpage story on /r/kuro5hit. Don't go visiting the bat caves Woman I worked with did that... came back to work and got a fever... she died a few days later. EBOLA in Western Europe!! WEALTH TAX and basic income $ What the fuck is your problem? Are you really that stupid? Did you READ what the fuck I wrote? What the duck did you think I meant? Now you really are an idiot crackpot Why don't you want traneros, but crave US dollars? This is the only clue you need. You are too fn stupid to bother with. Answer this question then... here. What's the differencce between that an traneros? $ Do you have a clue what that means? $ LOL --- CLUELESS CRACKPOT My knowledge CANNOT compete with your ignorance $ Which is why no one gives a shit about ur memes $ FUCK YOU $ You WILL MAKE THEM EVEN RICHER That is how retarded your idea is. In money, or in terms of LAND and MACHINES $ I want ALL THE LAND, ALL THE MACHINES Now what u gonna do? Magic Genies $ It would already be done BUT OPPORTUNITY COSTS FUCK YOUR THEORY UP TIME AND EFFORT MOTHERFUCKER $ TIME and EFFORT WORKING ON THE PROBLEM IN AND OF ITSELF. I DON'T WORK FOR IGN MFRS $ What part of TIME, EFFORT and ENERGY do you NOT UNDERSTAND? How the fuck does that answer my point? $ Oh look, and economics is the science of CHOICE $ Sandy Hook for the Greater Good and Why We Need More School Shootings Evolution is the mechanism by which organisms adjust under various different selection criteria. All species will expand to fill their environmental niches, and no matter what the environmental limits are, the exponential in the growth rate will guarantee they will be hit. What happens when they are hit depends on the nature of the limit reached... if reaching the limit causes the existence of the resource imposing the limit to disappear... then the species may actually go extinct. For this reason, imposing artificial limits is a positive to the species, because it ensures that the artificial limits are hit before the natural ones. If we can impose artificial limits, we can promote or attenuate arbitrary phenotypes expressed in the population. One example, putting dangerous people away in prison, which should reduce their reproductive ability... This should reduce the number of criminals in society over many generations. Another good thing to aim for, are people with genetics that enable them to live long lives. At the same time, because overpopulation is a problem, we must somehow reduce the successful breeding rate. Young people, especially children, have not proven a genetic ability to live long lives, and have the added benefit of not yet having reached breeding age, so no further offspring are left uncared for. Also, very few resources have been expended upon them in comparison to older people, and are unlikely to have developed any unique skills that are useful for society. A further benefit is that this form of selective pressure applied to the population provably favours individuals who are healthier, faster, have better reflexes and instincts that enabled them to get away or find cover. This will be a very useful instinct both for the surviving individuals in terms of military potential, but also for future generations who will have to avoid being killed in random mass school shootings at a young age. Which is why I think this is better than work camps. And it puts the power back in the hands of the individual, not some dystopian authoritarian fascist reality those guys were creating. Also, I don't have a problem with race... We should keep the fittest irrespective of their race. There's a good argument for biodiversity. I'm just saying, it wouldn't hurt if the shooters concentrated in the schools of the poor, rather than in the predominantly black neighbourhoods. A compelling argument feel free to expand upon it. I got the latest stable ubuntu running in a vm I was holding off, but i needed a later version of python... so I jumped to it. In some ways its kind of nice... but it still doesn't feel right... I can still apt-get everything I need, so it works fine... I still use debian for my servers though. Why Brits Cannot Understand Gun Rights It is difficult for British subjects to comprehend why American citizens might consider the right to bear arms a natural right. The problem derives from a fundamental difference in their respective political theories. This affects their beliefs, which are conditioned on living within the framework of one of the two competing theories. British subjects are not citizens. In English law, the individual does not derive their rights from being an individual, rather they derive their rights due to the grace of god who acts through the will of the reigning monarch. The British are already conditioned to believe that they are the property of the crown, not their own person. If the crown decides that a person has no rights, then that is all jolly good, because their's is not to reason why, but their's is to do or die, on order of the crown! American's on the other hand fought a long, hard and bloody battle against this very repression and formed a new government on the basis that the government derives its power from the people. That the rights belong to the individual not the state. Hence the idea that the individual is a citizen of the country, not its subject. On this basis, American's are responsible for their own protection, especially from the state. This necessitates their right to bear arms. The British on the other hand, must never fight back, preferring a polite raping to the disgusting display of self defence - and why even kitchen knives and rolled up newspapers must be kept from their child like hands. Finally, the argument that the weak cannot overcome the strong, leads Brits to believe that the idea of self defence against a modern equipped military is an absolute futility. Again, when British women are confronted by a stronger male adversary, they know the only reasonable response to attempted rape is to 'lie back and think of England'. They understand that fighting back against a stronger aggressor is hopeless, and rightfully know their place. American women be packin heat, and will pop a cap in a nigger's ass if he be tryin shit like that. In conclusion: Rape British women, not American women. lol no way that's real. well done though. Fine, okay... http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2012/12/19/55522/896 yeah... prbly $ Just a bit of messed up timing really... See... about a week or so ago, like a few days after i started the kuro5hit thing... I thought it'd be lulzy to do a 'Women of Kuro5hin' schtick, but I needed her to post a diary or something to make it worthwhile - turns out she wrote the perfect diary actually. (sorry sye, maybe others, I know HHD isn't the only woman on k5... but its funnier to pretend she is) Anyway... kinda got ruined cause I got into an argument over the whole sandy thing with her somehow and trane had got my troll hackles up, and both were happening at the same time... and it just kind of went badly and she not seeing the funny side of my bad taste in humour, which i freely and indiscriminately mix amongst my serious points and expect everyone else to sort out... (which is I guess what most everyone does -- at least I hope so) So, yeah, this'll prbly be the last diary about her... was hoping to have her on the team at kuro5hit though, cause we need precious snowflakes to take on srs... then again, she doesn't seem to share my sense of humour. oh well. if ya like $ lol - your right... tranes jumped in on me again help the trolls are eating me alive!!! Although that's right in principle, and its a good idea probably to think like that... most of the time... and people really hate 'flip-floppers' (which means the person thought their ideas through far more thoroughly and came to a supposedly better understanding of the problem, and with higher probability came to a better conclusion)... That comment almost made me forget that I don't actually give a shit, and its nothing more than a game to occupy time that I would otherwise use playing freecell... and I think the worst case scenario would be to actually start taking it at all seriously. Besides, I hurt a womans feelings, and its not fair to pick on the weak, even online. Well, that's the whole problem, right there I was mid argument with trane, and I was about to shout BITCH at him in some context for just being deliberately ignorant... The HHD pops up and answers something, and I actually thought it was trane by the title... so I'd written the bitch thing to holly... and I thought fuck it, why not... Then she starts calling me sexist for using the word bitch when speaking to a woman, without any sense of irony whatsoever... Its the same basic argument srs use to limit free speech. That is a weird coincidence though. Of course, given all the mass shootings in the US, by pure probabilities alone, something like this was inevitable. Just a practical example of the 'Birthday Paradox'. Move along citizen (subject), nothing to see here. Yeah, but you're not taking into account the probability that you're a mass murdering rampage shooter given that your father is testifying to the US senate on LIBOR. Its a practical example of applying Bayes' theorem to the problem. So, its pretty much a wash and impossible to draw any real conclusions from such a small sample size. Conspiracy theorists often miss the subtle role maths plays in analysing these event. I guess so... I mean technically that's right... but the way you put it... you're just making math seem boring and not very useful to the common person. Did you know there are Aliens depicted in Egyption Heiroglyphs and even a modern day helicopters??? Its on the History Channel and they be keeping this from everyone!! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!! You gotta make these subjects interesting, or you'll lose your target audience. Having said that... The LIBOR thing is a pretty big scandal already, and has all the actors normally associated with the standard banking conspiracy theories. I don't really know... I do tend to let myself think like that a fair bit... I mean, LIBOR is an actual conspiracy right? Like, its an official government theory that there is an actual conspiracy by bankers going on here, right? A conspiracy by incredibly powerful people, with huge amounts of wealth, and incredible contacts probably into all sorts of industries and governments... So the government is a wingnut conspiracy theorist? And its not like the guys at the top have a reputation of playing by the rules either, eg murdoch phone hacking... I'm a believer in the Darren Brown type of 'mind control' -- if it turns out he cheats and uses actors, fine I can believe that too... but if that's true, its probably low level compared to what the military have learnt through things like MK ULTRA. So... its really not that far fetched... just gut instinct level, to me... that this thing occurred exactly as the wingnuts suggest. Maybe? No,the actual maths you require Lets call C the existence of a conspiracy linking the two children of people testifying in the LIBOR, with the event E, that two children of people testifying in the scandal go on mass shooting rampages. P(C &pipe; E) = P(E&pipe;C)/(P(E&pipe;C) + P(E&pipe;not C)) So we have to consider the probability this event would occur given there was a conspiracy, and the probability this event would occur given there wasn't a conspiracy. or P(C&pipe;E) = P(E&pipe;C)/P(E) On the face of it... the probability of the event occurring given there is a conspiracy would be quite high... while the probability of two children from people testifying in the libor scandal going on two separate mass murder sprees seems exceedingly low.... this does not look so good. Fuck... a bit stoned when I wrote that one Bayes' Theorem: P(A&pipe;B) = P(B&pipe;A)*P(A)/P(B) So, for us: P(C&pipe;E) = P(E&pipe;C)*P(C)/P(E) As I before, the probability of the event occurring given that there is a conspiracy would intuitively be quite high... while the probability of the event occurring apriori would intuitively seem extremely low... I forgot the apriori probability that there is a conspiracy here. This is what takes my previous calculation from 'an intuitively largish number' back into the range of probabilities... I knew'd I gotten something wrong. All I have to say, is that definitely, in a mathematically justifiable sense, this adds a large amount of evidence to a real conspiracy existing here (as I defined it). Whatever you're previous beliefs in the existence of a conspiracy, you really should now increase your belief in it by a lot. frightening, huh!?! Do you think they chose the best pic of him? $ I made a reddit story about this for you Enjoy. Feel free to check out the rest of /r/kuro5hit while your at it. Actually I kind of was... I thought maybe you'd expose yourself to our readers? Just one comment? Just to put a tip in there, maybe? Just to see how it feels? Go on, you know you want it. This woman be trippin There's only one procrasti, Always Has Been, Always Will Be. Never used a sock. Who the fuck is Dan? I can only assume some internet legend in order for him to earn the comparison... then again, holly might just be delusional, on her period, going through 'the change', or something else that affects women's ability to be rational. Fuck yeah, I remember those handles Man, I didn't know about the airport incident, what a fucking legend. I'm assuming he was protesting the TSA's treatment of people... Have often said myself, while removing belts, shoes and jackets while going through airport security, that we might as well (or we will eventually be forced to) all get naked. I guess that the american's having a huge taboo about the naked body made it even worse for him. I guess its okay if it's only TSA agents checkin out your bits with a backscatter scanner, amirite? I like his protest, shame that the media just put it across as if he was a madman, rather than someone with a point to make. Guess that's the plan when manufacturing consent though. Also, I remember his 'The Hanged Man' story... fucking good analogy of how people treat introverts and quiet, private type personalities. Man... I am honoured to be confused by holly for that guy - I must be doing something right. (but I hope rusty doesn't ban me and warns me first if I start crossing lines). Wasn't this enough of a hint for you? Please stop with your crazy conspiracy theories. Next you'll claim that I am more likely to be murdered than you, whilst factually that is COMPLETELY untrue. Failure to respect ownership $ Unless you want to steal from rusty Its his website to do with as he pleases. He can ban anyone he wants at any time for whatever reason he decides and nobody has the RIGHT to do anything about it. Rusty would be correct both legally, socially and technologically. You have NO RIGHT to post here. You can run your own website, but you have to put in the time, energy, money and other Opportunity Costs associated with that. This is where the REAL scarcity exists. In this case, its an implementation detail that HE gets to decide, because HE PAID THE PRICE. If you want to decide differently, you are free to pay the necessary price of doing so. But you aren't because you're a lazy cunt. Anything else, is expecting that you deserve to reap the rewards of someone else's hard labour. Fuck you if thinking you're entitled to that. Except that its rusty's creation and he wants it that way. There's no physical reason you can post comments to k5... yet here you are. Who cares Its actually more efficient that way. Number of successful website run by Rusty >= 1 Number of successful websites run by CrackHead = 0. An economically better outcome by letting Rusty own the fruits of his labour than letting some random crackheads take them. The scarcity exists in your lack of willingness to make your own website. Rusty had to forgo options to make k5... You aren't willing to do anything but smoke crack. Rusty deserves his right to do as he pleases with his property. Scarcity is REAL. Yes there is... Because Rusty doesn't want his website to be swamped by noise. Artificial Scarcity Increases Value $ NO YUO $ Rusty considers some comments to be valuable and other comments to have negative value. Limiting negative value, is what you are calling 'artificial scarcity'. In this case, from Rusty's perspective, this artificial scarcity has a positive value. This is an economic decision. He is free to make that decision, because we believe that private ownership leads to better economic outcomes and reduces scarcity of quality comments, and decreases the opportunity cost of reading comments on his site, increasing the total value (to him) of the site. No one cares what you think, because you are a stupid motherfucker with no clue on economics. You are free to try it out yourself... but the second you publish your website to me, I will show you the cost of not implementing some form of artificial scarcity on your website. The existence of artificial scarcity does not imply the non existence of scarcity. Secondly, you have now proven that there is economic value in artificial scarcity. You entire premise is now fucked. To learn more about this and other topics: http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/22 No I never... I never said artificial scarcity doesn't exist. That's not the contra-factual to scarcity exist. You are claiming that scarcity doesn't exist. You started at 'money is artificially-scarce this is bad' assumption. I questioned you IN WHAT WAY is it artificially-scarce. I've tried to show you the horrors of it being non-artificially-scarce by looking at the price of bread and traneros. On the way we discovered that you do believe in natural-scarcity at all. This point I realised you were a crackpot. Your claim that there is artificial-scarcity does not imply that there is not natural scarcity. Your claim that all artificial-scarcity is bad does not stand either. irrelevant $ I don't care if u won't accept natural scarcity $ No it doesn't remove it... think in the LOG of scarcity or the negative log of availability. If you double the availability of something, or halved the cost, you've halved the scarcity... In the log, you've only decreased the log scarcity by a constant (1 for log2). You cannot remove scarcity, only alter it by a factor... so, you can still very easily measure scarcity, no matter the limit of your knowledge. Also, see magic genie theory. WTF? $ Evolution is used to justify EUGENICS $ Believe it or not... it is still evolution $ Which is still EVOLUTION $ WTF RETARD STUPID MOTHERFUCKER? Evolution is, all OF THE EXISTING LIMITED paths in parallel. Not INFINITE paths. EVOLUTION does not assume INFINITE resources there would be no evolution if there was infinite resources, because EVERYTHING would survive... no evolution. Scarcity limits you NATURALLY. NO... it changes the outcomes of evolution but not the FACT that EVOLUTION is occurring. THIS IS HOW CLUELESS YOU ARE Because it is STILL evolution. You are showing lack of knowledge even your knowledge of evolution is outdated. Its a FACT You present an IGNORANT view or EVOLUTION and ECONOMICS, hold these STRAWMEN up to the FLAME and claim VICTORY. Its not possible to use your ignorance as your proof. You think being unconstrained by knowledge is a net positive to you. FO $ FO $ GET CLUE NUMNUTS $ Because IT TAKES TIME that I could be doing something else with. Opportunity COSTS that have NOTHING to do with MONEY. IE, OPPORTUNITY COSTS $ How about STFU and DIAF FAGGOT $ STFU RETARD YOU HAVE NOTHING WORTHWHILE SAYING Waiting till you get a CLUE $ I'm not ABLE to TEACH YOU ECONOMICS You have to put the effort in yourself... Then maybe I will discuss it on IRC with you. Why? Is he another economics denying nutter? $ Even immortality wouldn't remove scarcity of time Because he fails to read even the first chapter of an economics book, he completely fails to understand scarcity. Just because something is abundant, does not mean that it isn't also scarce. That's probably like trying to understand that atoms aren't really like billiard balls because your common day understanding of matter is that it works like billiard balls and you've never bothered reading about quantum mechanics... or something. So, why don't you know what scarcity is? $ Fine... that makes sense... but you still have to recognise the existence of scarcity... No I don't Scarcity isn't hypothetical, unless you have limited desires or infinite resources. 'cept i've shown you the real scarcity in comments Actually, a better way to think about it that there is a scarcity of high quality, or value, comments. If you assume each comment has VALUE. They have a clear OC to READ, for example - then we can say that some comments have a positive value (like what I write), and some comments have negative value (like what you write). So, yes, there is a clear scarcity in comments. Rusty's restrictions are an attempt to increase the value of scarce comments. WUT? $ Except there are lots of ways in which comments are scarce. Even ignoring any artificial limits, by no matter what measure you decide, there remains artificial scarcity. I just gave you an even better way to think about it, especially in regards to the measure of value that rusty would likely be using, which makes the artificial scarcity he provides a net positive gain to him, or have value to him. I'm trying very hard to think of rational measure of comments that aren't scarce... OKAY... post them to your own computer, at an infinite number per time unit, and tell me if either a) you can do that, or b) their is any VALUE to you to for doing that. The amount of it you can USE $ Actually correct... The utility or value of a screw is enhanced greatly by your access to a screwdriver. Yes!! Which REDUCED scarcity LOG SCARCITY focusing on magic is delusional and useless $ Completely IRRELEVANT $ No it doesn't The artificial scarcity of money is the reason it has value. They understand it better than you $ It does not matter... Even if its true, does not mean you have a better solution. Why haven't you done that yet? Scarcity of resources fucking you up? Listen --- i've been over this... ZERO MONEY REQUIRED, but You can't afford KNOWLEDGE. You can't afford knowledge of ECONOMICS $ YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW THE MEMES $ The MAN is an IDIOT -- HAS NO ARGUMENT $ YOU HAVE NO RATIONAL ARGUMENT Anyone can claim the earth is 6000 years old and JESUS created all the animals. That's the level of your argument here. WHICH IS JUST AS STUPID $ SMOKING CRACK $ Yuo aren't even maknig an argument You are just FAILING... and FAILING HARD. I agree with you... this is a necessary condition and is a good thing. INFINITE MONEY.... not so useful as money. FAIL $ The only problem you and I have is on a value judgement, a normative statement, that by definition cannot be proven. Over 9000, is not a compelling argument to me. You are 50 times more likely to die of a heart attack, but you don't cry about it. There is no right or wrong in our argument... Just differences of opinion. I think 50k deaths is worth it for the price of freedom, you do not. No go fuck off... I have no argument with you. Who is/was Dan, btw? I can only assume he must be some type of legend and internet god for you to make such a mistake. Also posting limits. Actually, I saw rusty appear in the online users just before trane posted this. Was a nervous few nail biting minutes waiting to see who the banhammer would eventually fall upon. Rusty (PBUH), in his infinite wisdom and mercy, must have just set a flag on trane instead. You don't understand economics I've given you a few resources from which you can educate yourself, but you refuse. I've read the first chapter of the following, and it actually looks good: http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/22?e=rittenecon-ch01 You can actually understand this, so you can stop making yourself look like an idiot, but you choose not to. You are WILFULLY IGNORANT. If a guy with a doctorate in advanced physics told me that matter and energy aren't real because something like they are merely the apparent manifestations of the transient fluctuations of the impulse in the quantum wave function of the big bang --- there might be value in what he was trying to say, because at least he understood the underlying concepts of matter and energy in the first place. If someone on the internet told me that matter and energy aren't real because the man be being mean to him, and actually Jesus was the answer --- There's not a hell of a lot I can do in terms of fixing his ignorance, he doesn't understand the fundamental principals, is completely unwilling to even learn them, and has no right or ability to offer a compelling alternative understanding to them. You are the second guy - a dangerous crackpot with half thought out ideas that don't mean shit in the real world. You don't understand the subject Different matter Yes I do... I'm not about to test weather matter and energy aren't real because Jesus! I'm not even sure that's possible. That's the argument you are putting forward. Yes -- but irrelevant $ Economics is the scientific study of human behaviour in the face of scarcity. You want the universe to work in a way in which it doesn't or at least in ways that we do not currently have access to. Let me break it down for you. If everyone had a lamp, and when they rubbed the lamp a genie would appear, offer you three wishes, then go back into the lamp and wait till you rubbed it again -- IN THAT CASE -- economics would be nearly irrelevant for one (would still be true though), but we would certainly change the way our economic SYSTEM was constructed. You say, economics is wrong, all we need is [insert magic genie like technology]. Which would be great -- except we don't have any fucking magic genies. Constructing an economic system on the predication of magic genies, that don't yet exist, is nothing short of a guarantee of disastrous outcomes. That's the way you're thinking about it, but on top of that, you don't even want to understand economics. Its as if you think that your ignorance is as valuable as other people's knowledge. No it specifically does NOT ignore tech adv. $ Its exactly what it is. Hypothesis --> prediction --> test. Anything else is not economics. Economics is not Finance FFS $ No it isn't $ Externalities are an economic theory FFS -- RETARDED CRAP ARGUMENT FROM IGNORANCE They are SPECIFICALLY in the model This proves you have no idea what you are talking about. Its like you think your ignorance is MORE valuable than actual knowledge. Not to the model $ No they are not http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2012/12/18/61742/917/3#3 It doesn't have to predice every specific outcome to be useful. In this case, the existence of disruptive technologies are considered by economists ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Neither do the scientists/researchers who do so, provide the government with the knowledge and advice on how best to organise their economic system to best compensate them for the time and effort and encourage the emergence of such disruptive tech. that's the role of the economist. An economist (most/many) would believe that the role of scientists and researchers should be focused on creating disruptive tech, not creating economic systems (as a general rule). What do you propose? That we structure the economy after whatever any random crackhead without even the faintest clue about economics suggests on any given day of the week on a dead backwater website? You don't know what you're talking about this is so dangerous, and will leave the poor with loads of money and no wealth. You've fallen for a huge trap. No... the difference is that you want money and you don't understand why. The scarcity of money is a necessary condition for it to have value. Traneros ARE a non-scarce form of money (or ticketing system) and are absolutely useless for that purpose. You need to understand the problem is WEALTH CONCENTRATION. Once you get that through your head, you will realise that free money don't mean shit, and will only make you POORER. NO $ Scarcity of readers means that the readers readers have greater value... No, when has 1X==100X EVER? $ It doesn't work like that no $ 1 reader is more valuable *as an individual* than 100 readers... but NOT in aggregate. This is the LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS. Topic is BEYOND YOUR COMPREHENSION $ It's like trying to explain ML to someone who refuses to believe in multiplication and division. How the fuck do you expect to understand derivatives without the basic framework. No, I am hoping YOU can LEARN something from ME. SMOKING CRACK $ Fine... legalise it... $ Analogy: Physics can't handle outer space Its called "outer space" because its "outer". Fucking retard. Which is why scientific models are never fixed $ You haven't shown a better model $ No... I do not trust your view anymore Your thinking is too muddled up on this topic to give it any credence. You are not claiming it is TOOOOO artificially-scarce, maybe back then you would have a point. I created traneros... a non-scarce form of money and ticket with which you can by ANYTHING at all with anyone willing to trade you for them. But you don't even want that... Artificial-Scarcity of money is a necessity, and a good thing... I'm not even going to argue with you over how much artificial scarcity is a good thing, because you don't have the faintest clue about economics or money at all. Swap your traneros for something. You can swap crack for blowjobs but no-one's gonna give you shit for traneros. So? What about that computer you are using? You're not doing anything productive with it... why don't you just give it to me? You also think this isn't covered by the theory of economics. You think gift giving or copyleft or many other things don't make sense to the economist, but they are accounted for in the theory, the same way gays are accounted for in the theory of evolution - so irrelevant. JUST PLAIN IGNORANT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality In economics, an externality, or transaction spillover, is a cost or benefit that is not transmitted through prices[1] or is incurred by a party who was not involved as either a buyer or seller of the goods or services causing the cost or benefit.[2] The cost of an externality is a negative externality, or external cost, while the benefit of an externality is a positive externality, or external benefit. Do you see the highlighted part? If the concept of externalities does not come from economics --- WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK IT COME FROM? What MODELS are you TALKING about? I'm talking about ECONOMIC MODELS. WHOSE MODELS AND WHY?? Not all economic models would be considered equal, or equally useful to all people. Of course, as an oil polluter it's not in MY interest to include the externality of pollution into MY models... OTOH... The government or EPA economists certainly are interested in that externality... Which is why they impose a cost on polluters FORCING them to take externalities into account in their models. But if you want to discuss the actual model on which the other models are based on... you got to accept that the standard model of economics well and truly takes externalities into account. Which is why externalities are introduced in every beginner fundamentals of economics course. In terms of something tangible $ Do you know what the definition of VALUE is? $ Correct... define it terms of OC for each actor and you now have a means to measure it. This is no more crazy than representing the word 'Cat' by the vector [73,2]. More RESOURCES --- money isn't even a resource $ Money is "a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value." It is NOT a NATURAL RESOURCE, the way land, capital and labor ARE. That does not invalidate my point... $ Traneros $ Is he really this stupid, or am I being trolled? Or both? Cts too? Fine, I'm an easily trolled faggit IHNL, IANHAND See... This is what I'm talking about, proof that men are capable of having rational arguments. SRS have a lot to answer for I'm hoping /r/kuro5hit can leverage the power of kuro5hin to drive those bitches back into the sea. Why are women so easily controlled by their emotions? Why is the female mind so easily swayed by emotional arguments based around big scary numbers and sad stories involving children in respect to extremely unlikely and rare events? Why is the male mind more capable of calmly and rationally considering an event in terms of its probability and actual overall impact to the average person? Why do women get hysterical and cry, and even try to change whole other countries, when they hear about some tragic news, but men can simply realise that the actual importance in terms of risk is in reality, very low, and not start jumping to change everything, possibly for the worse? Is it because men do maths, while women do the dishes? Discuss bitches. You're the one who beleives in non scarcity and then complains everyone else has everything and are being mean to you by not letting you have it. Total failure of awareness of reality. That crack must be good though. No emotional reasoning requires you believe in things DESPITE reality. You believe that there is no such thing as scarcity, and complain you don't have any of it. Its a direct contradiction. And because of this failure to understand that the underlying substrate of the universe is scarcity, you are unable to convincingly argue for the thing you want - basic income. In fact, by only considering the MONEY side of the equation - you totally fail to see that you could have all the money you could possibly carry in your wheelbarrows and still starve to death. Non sequitur $ Name ANYTHING of value that is not also SCARCE $ Fuck you... I use caps for EMPHASIS... if u don't like my writing... STFU and ignore it. NO, I AM FRUSTRATED BY YOUR LACK OF KNOWLEDGE. SO SUCK IT UP BITCH AND ACTUALLY READ WHAT I SAY, NOT THE FORMAT I WRITE IT IN. YES... MY KNOWLEDGE IS SCARCE... BUT MORE ABUNDANT THAN YOUR OWN. No... What I'm saying is... I'VE SAID BEFORE is that the second you comprehend the very very basics of economics, scarcity, wealth, opportunity cost, supply and demand... I can explain to you the right way to implement a basic income so that you don't end up with a pile of worthless fucking bits of paper in your wheelbarrow attempting to purchase 1 million dollar loaves of bread. As technology replaces the need for workers wealth concentrates into the hands of a select few. When the AI robots finally arrive that can produce near infinite (but still scarce godfuckshitdammituignorantasshole) goods you will be left with nothing, no matter how much 'money' you have... I need you to get that through your thick skull, that this is not a matter of meanness, just how humans react to the problem of scarcity, so you can understand the real problems here,in order that you can then spread the idea to others and maybe we won't all starve to death. I'm on your side, but you're being ignorant, so much so that it hurts. THEN NAME THEM BITCH $ You make too many assumptions man pass the crack pipe No is acually physics $ No... the assumption is that scarcity is reality. Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants, in a world of limited resources Solve scarcity... GO AHEAD FUCKING SOLVE IT... You will be the first human EVER to have done so. Are you smart enough to see how this does not ELIMINATE scarcity? No it doesn't $ Pearls at Swine $ argument instead of understanding you make no attempt hear. Not an ad hom You are an idiot crackpot crackhead ignorant slow lazy loser. I have determined this from talking to you. I have not dismissed your arguments on this basis, I have come to this conclusion from your arguments. You have NO argument Its like talking to a retard... Y? Please go live on another planet then You have SO MANY TO CHOOSE FROM Why even bother arguing the point, apparently there is no SCARCITY in your UNIVERSE. MEANING -- YOU DON'T NEED ANYBODY ELSE! Entropy is artificially impossed - change that $ Go fix laws of thermodynics $ FO FO Crackpot FO FO - I'm done with you Correct, both my time and energy are scarce $ FO FO Its fundamental - so FO $ Yes it does Example: Economic theory predicts that you will never understand economic theory? Your theory -- Its because you lack money... Why is this wrong? The resources are available to you absolutely free. You could be actually money rich, and you still COULD NOT AFFORD IT!! Economics is NOT finance. Why? Because you cannot or are not willing and able to afford the OPPORTUNITY COST involved. Something that is completely free, available to anyone at any time at zero marginal cost, is unaffordable to you. Economics: 1 Trane: 0 Why don't you understand economics? $ You have no basis to make that claim in that you do not even understand the models you are complaining about. Not Ad Hom - Fact Numbers, in themselves, have no value. The understanding of numbers is scarce. No You can't use your ignorance as proof that you are not ignorant. You don't know what economic scarcity is! Even if you didn't agree with it, without knowing what it is, you have no rational argument. Just being an idiot. FAIL $ NO YUO $ Oh, nothing... My life and your life and the existence of the universe are all infinite. You can if you are willing to pay the Opportunity Cost. I am not. And neither are you. No it doesn't $ It is FAR from the ONLY limit Proof -- Make your own website without the limit. Why can't you practice what you preach? I know the answer, it is simply that you are a lazy, self-entitled asshole who thinks they deserve the fruits of the labour of others. You would be the most terrible of tyrants, which is why, thank tptb, that the capitalistic economic system dis-empowers people like you. Those are facts $ Your lack of websites $ It proves that website is not free There is a cost to running it. There is a cost to me to make a comment. Even a bot has a cost to make a comments. Even without an 'artifical' limit, a bot cannot make an infinite number of comments. Noisy useless comments are less scarce than good intelligent comments. Artificial scarcity INCREASES the VALUE of the ENTIRE SITE. FO $ Fuck Sake Nigger, You don't understand scarcity. Economic Scarcity is not the same as your everyday common crackhead understanding of the term scarcity. Something can be abundant, and be economically scarce. The number of atoms in the universe is scarce -- BY GENERAL CONSENSUS OF MOST SCIENTISTS. Now -- If you are saying that there is no cost to either you or me, that comments are infinite and and infinite can be posted in zero time with no effort or cost -- Then you are stupid motherfucker crackhead without a clue -- Because this is the actual meaning of not scarce. opportity forgone is how you measure scarcity $ Yes -- they have an OC What you are saying is that you want people to value their choices differently. You are happy to forgo art, whilst others are willing to forgo science. For them, art has much higher value than whatever it is they have to forgo to pursue it. You know that original art is very clear example of scarcity, right? Your problem is that you think you have the right to force other people into making YOUR choices... The only way to effectively implement that is through force, ie, a dictatorship. YOU WILL DERIVE, NOT PAINT! You are actually pissed off you are not a dictator with infinite power. In this case, your scarcity of power turns out to be a good thing. You said we forgo opportunities for art That sounds to me like you do not value people spending their time on art. And here we have a key situation regarding scarcity, value and opportunity cost, because (all things being equal) it is absolutely true that the more people focus on art, the less people focus on science... So indeed, you are correct that we forgo advances in science for the art. That does not imply much except the demonstration of scarcity, value and OC. lol $ ANSWER MY QUESTION ABOVE PLS K THX $ No, you had already replied to that comment you just hadn't answered it. NAME ANYTHING OF VALUE THAT IS NOT ALSO SCARCE $ CAUSE IT PROVES YOU WRONG SUDO NAME ANYTHING THAT HAS VALUE THAT ISN'T SCARCE 1 line answers and evasion is all I get... I gotta give up... The ignorance is driving me mad. Getting Lonely? $ You have no clue Hint - price of hard drives? Now u are using qbits as your example? Get a fucking clue $ No there is not Jesus - now ur ignorance of what qbits are is showing Fuck YOU FUCK YOU FO FO THEN FO FO trust me -- you're proving it $ No, proving that your thoughts have no value $ FO FO If you bothered reading, u would know, so FO $ Yes, because your intuitive understanding of scarcity is flawed. Air is scarce, okay? Do you get that? If not FO $ And yet you remain wilfully ignorant $ No it doesn't $ You don't even understand that air is scarce - FO$ Yes I do... You don't You think air on mars means air is now not scarce... It's still scarce motherfucker You can't make it unscarce No matter WHAT you do. cannot exist in reality Is why we have Von Neumann machines and not Turing Machines. UNTIL DEMONSTRATED OTHERWISE Turing machines require an infinite tape. Where the fuck is a REAL Turing machine? How much of it is usable to you right now? $ Exactly How many 18th century economies were based around the existence of nuclear fission reactors? I answered this before - FO Answered elsewhere - FO $ No it isn't There is a real associated Opportunity Cost associated with posting comments that HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH Rusty's implementation, and would be TRUE even on a website where there wasn't that "limitation" (Actually adds value). But not the cost of making the bot Also, not yet possible... Magic Genie theory again. You mean Rusty removed a noise generator $ Scarcity of websites rusty owns $ FO $ abundance does not imply non scarcity $ No I wasn't $ Here's a HINT -- Nobody's reading this comment 'cept you! Except good comments are scarce There is a scarcity in comments measured by that value. Not arbitrary... just a MUCH BETTER MEASURE If you are trying to understand the HUMAN DECISION behind limiting comments, then you need to understand the VALUE in comments to HUMANS. Here's another big fucking clue for you... Has rusty's artificial limits, decreased our ABILITY/EFFECTIVENESS of COMMUNICATING... I'd argue that it has actually increased our communication rate. Scientific knowledge has immense value in that it reduces scarcity by increasing knowledge that affects how well we can most effectively utilise our resouces. I'm not sure your first statement is true... but it would still have had value, assuming they knew how to make it useful. However, they might not have valued it as highly we would. Perhaps if they had a crystal ball that could tell them what everything was worth? actually, ITS YUO!! $ Correct... Economists KNOW THIS $ NECESSARY $ SMOKING CRACK - explained elsewhere $ You are smoking crack -- that has been proven $ YOU PROVABLY HAVE NO CLUE ARE SMOKING CRACK What is Force, Mass and Accelleration? Cause I think it's time we stopped being mean to atoms... They should do what they WANT to do, not be forced to do what they DON'T because we want to be VIOLENT to them. Also: Ur 5 minutes is up, thankyou, come again $ What was the giveaway? $ Actually, I was planning on doing one for trane But holly got my goat after using the OVER 9000 line for about the seventh time after I asked her to quit it, that it tipped the balance in her favour. Still turned out to be a trane diary though, lol. Yes probably because trane was burning down my fuse that I got pissed off with holly so quick. Still don't like her OVER 9000 logic on the other debate... but it's probably more trane's ignorance getting to me. Yes, buth there's a rational basis to that fear Using OMG OVER 9000!!! Is not a rational argument. The counter to that is that there were only 129 people murdered in Belieze. Therefore Beleize is a safer place to live than America. Its the only rational conclusion to this line of argument. She has failed to respond to this criticism, but continues the OMG OVER 9000!!! fear mongering. The emotional fear centre of the brain reacts to large numbers of gruesome but rare events, when only the RATE of occurrence of those events is rationally relevant. Turns out the rate is exceedingly small, but hey, that's doesn't make good headlines or convincing pro gun-control arguments. do you believe there is any REAL scarcity of ANYTHING in reality? Or is it all a big scam of big pharma/oil/gnomes to keep you down? Everything is scarce... My lack of yachts... my lack of mansions... my lack of fast sports cars... my lack of willing labourers... my lack of shiny metals... my lack of don perignon, truffles and caviare... my lack of AI servants... my lack of 747s... my lack of spaceships... Lack of knowledgeable doctors when I was ill. The lack of researchers who haven't sorted out cancer, alzhiemers, fusion, or AI. Lack of women begging me for my services. The number of hours I have in a day. The time I can spend drinking with my friends vs the time I can spend learning about ML. Ultimately, there is scarcity in everything. You're confused, because you think scarcity means having nothing... it just means you go without some things in order to have others. No, scarcity never disapears... its reduced. That's what we want... to reduce scarcity. Its everyone's goal... especially the economists. scarcity is not poverty or lack... it just means a choices HAVE to be made. No, never has been a false one... on one hand I'm really glad you got the bias/variance thing down now... cause we discussed this a long time ago. Now, as an analogy. Scarcity, just like bias and variance, can be reduced, but not eliminated. No, you don't. Remember when I told you about bias and variance and you ranted at me about how it didn't matter and I was 'too focused on the maths' and you just wanted 'robots to talk with'? This is the situation I'm facing again with you right now, on the topic of economics. If I'm lucky, you'll come round, and you'll see the flaws in your basic income theory - and we tweak it to make it work. I'm not so optimistic this time. TOO MUCH CRACK $ YOU'VE FORGOTTEN -- TOO MUCH CRACK $ so much crack and k5 search sucks... I remember... And you are provably a crack head failure with poor memory in real life. What were some of your recent handles? Before you did hinton's course? I'll prove it to you. So STFU $ So? $ I've posted an infinite number of comments? News to me. LOL - choice -- fundamental theory of economics $ If you've ever made a choice, u made an economic decision. Money is not the topic anymore At first, I was going to listen to you on this... I specifically asked you to outline the your meaning. On the way, I discovered you don't believe in the existence of scarcity. So, all your economic theories are necessarily wrong. I might have given you the benefit of the doubt, even at this late stage, but you do not even know what scarcity IS. This makes you as much of a crackpot as a fundamentalist who does not believe in the theory of evolution. Biology is not Physics mang... therefore not true. Non sequitur idiot thinking. I've proven this is a good thing and doesn't imply scarcity don't real. I wanted something with value that's not scarce not something that was artificially scarce. The value is the opportunity cost of the next best alternative forgone. Do you see how clever this idea is... Its just like the brilliance of the definition of evolution -- The mutations most likely to survive in a population are the ones that are most likely to lead to survival success and reproduction. Its very hard to knock down in its own terms, because it is practically a truism, and almost tautological. Actually, it couldn't have been nil, it had value, Otherwise he would not have bothered doing it. The fact that he did it proves it had value to him. No, he wasn't compensated for it... this is often the curse of brilliant inventors, scientists and artists... Unfortunately we have no reliable way of measuring the value of someone's contribution until quite often well after they are dead. He REALLY didn't understand This isn't artificial its natural scarcity. YOU are showing the definite natural scarcity of intelligence here. NATURAL SCARCITY IN HIS KNOWLEDGE Let me give you an analogy. Imagine, that, for some bizarre freak of evolution, your SHIT contains an enzyme that is the CURE TO CANCER. Your SHIT could be the MOST VALUABLE substance to science... but YOU are literally FLUSHING IT DOWN THE TOILET. Potentially an amazing resource, but you ignore it. HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY KNOW THE VALUE THERE? And yet, YOU DON'T EAT YOUR OWN SHIT $ The SCIENTIFIC METHOD is EXPENSIVE it requires TIME and RESOURCES. That is why you flush your SHIT even though it MIGHT BE incredibly VALUABLE. DOES NOT REMOVE THE ABOVE $ Assertion And the above problems CONTINUE TO REMAIN. It doesn't even matter if it is psychological limi EFFORT is a psychological limit if you like... What do you want to do, NOT BE HUMAN? On that note... I created a new form of currency to help trane... cause he's so upset by the lack of it. It's quite simple, I've called it the 'tranero' in honour to him and his ideas. Anyone can create traneros, by simply declaring their existence on K5. I already have 10 traneros cause I declared it in another comment somewhere, and no one has yet exchanged anything with me for them. Despite no theoretical limit in the supply of traneros, for some reason he hasn't quite figured out yet, he's been completely unwilling to exchange his efforts for my traneros, even though I'm willing to offer him however many he wants for his work. Is trane just a lazy crackhead who doesn't understand economics or is there a deeper problem here? No you aren't... you would suck my dick for a gold bar, but you won't do shit for traneros. The real problem here is that you don't understand WHY? I doubt it $ On second glance... the only way to read that is that you'd suck my dick for free. The difference is... I actually passed basic physics and economics. You're not schooling me in anything but the art of how to be a troll and a failure. No -- you are provably wrong in ways u don't understand. Observation of factual reality. I've paid the price to gain the knowledge, you have not. Revel in your ignorance Hope you feel proud No $ Well fuck me... what a great point you have $ abundance does not imply non scarce $ No $ So is having a place to comment $ You have no idea $ TROLOLOLOLLOLLOLLALALALA TRALALALALALOLOL TROLOLO$ Maybe... CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK $ I'll be impressed if you've called it... but I won't be betting my money on it, for the simple reason that I just think there's so much noise out there. If these things are run in some organized conspiracy type manner (unlikely, but possible)... they aren't leaking the details in unambiguous ways. Still... worth a diary... madness if u turn out to be right. B is the usual theory amongst conspricists... Part of the magic is to tell you before they do it to you. A true display of their power. Yes... I totally grant you, it looks suspicious. BUT... You weren't saying that last week. Hindsight is 20/20. This is a possibiltiy I think the CIA/MI5/TPTB are often willing to be a little bit more 'overt' with drug users... which is why they see more of this stuff than normal people... because in general, the population has been trained to believe that drug users are unreliable witnesses, and that these groups (while they are known to exist) don't really do anything in the 'real' world... so they can get away with much more while the muggles eat all their shit right up. See Operation Midnight Climax. Scary world. Foreshadowing Also - its not a racist thing... that's another distraction... jews get fucked as much as anyone. Its power that matters. As much as anyone... not more... Yes... they got quite a bit of political and material capital as a whole... especially in the US... that's true. American's (mostly whites, but others too) have quite a bit of political and material capital, as a whole, compared to the rest of the world too... but I spect u think that's ok. Yeah... almost everyone is a nepotists. This isn't a racial quality. Go back to point one, and u see the problem of nepotism... not race. Any group in power does this --- jews aren't the problem with china's political system. Finally... yeah, that's fine for the jew with a well connected family... but u'd talk shit to a jew who slept at the bus station for his race, not who he is. On the topic of intelligence... I can agree race and intelligence may well be correlated. You should celebrate the intelligence of (good) people, not begrudge them for it or their race. Ultimately, all humans are VERY VERY similar genetically (lookup the human genetic bottleneck)... so judging by something as superficial as the shape of someone's nose as opposed to the quality of their character is an idiot mistake. hitler was dead at that point... germans paid, and so they should... palestine was a huge fucking mistake, but u can see how a mistake like that was made. the brits are at fault for that one. I don't necessarily believe you about that the gassing's were a myth... either way, the death camps were out of order based on a stupid idea. My granny had the privilege of living with two jewesses after the war who had been through the camps... not much nice to talk about really, but I know at least those death camps were real and fucking brutal. yeah... jewish culture grated on the christian europeans quite a lot... for several reasons... yes nepotism is a kind of thing, they favoured their own... but who the fuck doesn't? The other problem is that the christian's didn't have the balls to lend money at interest... it pissed them off seeing jews get rich doing something they were too stupid/weak/religiously confined to do. Finally... the jews were nothing but a scapegoat for the failure of germany after WWI. A cynical but effective destruction of one group for the benefit of another, with no real rhyme or reason in terms of justice or right and wrong. I think... in this instance at least, its very hard to see how they didn't get completely shafted. This doesn't justify what they do today to palestinians... its a case of the bullied becoming the bully... Nor does it paint a picture of a clever ruling elite who have been operating in the background for thousands of years cynically plotting and altering the political and economic landscape to their benefit. Its not jews... some are jewish... that's it. Seems like a rather long stopover in auswitch $ I don't know... maybe you're right on some of this stuff... I don't know well enough to say 100%... What I can say though... is that that is just people who ended up in power over another group at some place at some point in time. The groups change... but not the rules... I just think racism, prima facie, is stupid. Sometimes jews, sometimes europeans, sometimes whites, sometimes blacks, sometimes indians, sometimes japanese, sometimes chinese... egyptions? Its not a racial thing... its a human/power thing. (Although, we tend to identify with what is like us, and fear what is different... so the power ends up falling along racial lines fairly often) - but its not like there's a group more inclined to this than any other. As I said before... the human genetic bottleneck, means we are much more alike than we are different (say between homosapiens and neanderthals) - no matter the colour of our skins or the shape of our eyes. So those jews volunteered for the greater good? That's your theory? Wilson -- yes... he said as much himself - but to the banking elite (not jews -- bankers). I got another real weird forshadowing story This a personal story... I got not proof anymore... its long gone and lost... but I'm not making this up. Early to mid 2001, I first met my late gf (who died last year)... she was quite 'artistic', I guess... with lots of contacts in the art world. She moved in with me just after mid 2001. Anyway... she put a whole heap of arty postcards up on the wall... the kind you might get for free in certain bars or stuff... often with 'old' or 'antique' stylised type pictures... I'm sure u know the type. Anyway, this one card... was a close up of the new york skyline - zoomed in on the twin towers... There was a plane in the picture, and while it seemed okay to be there, like it was just flying as normal... it was actually just in front of and below the tower (about mid way)... so it was actually on a collision course with the tower. The other odd thing about it was that it had, what presumably was, a stylised version of the sun... but the sun wasn't behind the towers... it was ON the tower, exactly where the plane would hit - so it could also be interpreted as an explosion. WTF? Before the event... it was just a nice postcard with odd placement of stylistic/artistic symbols... nothing to be concerned about... But after the event, it seemed there was no other way of looking at it. I've never been able to find a copy of that card online. Both of us would often wonder aloud at how freaky/coincidental that card appeared to be. We lost it though... it just one day went missing from our possessions and collection of such things. Where did it come from? Who made it? Was it a message? Did someone know in advance? Why the fuck did we have it? Why did it go missing (like we liked it, cause it was so odd, we didn't just lose it)? Why can't I find a copy of it online? One of the freakiest things I've ever seen... and closest thing I've ever had of showing that someone had pre-knowledge of the event and didn't mind publishing it. So, there ya go... foreshadowing. likely that this postcard was a print of a work so, might be the same thing... I'd so like to track that down. Just so odd. Good try, I was hopeful, but It's not her. These were more artistic, stylised type of drawings or something... more like southpark than a photo. The ultimate goal would not be to kill but to enslave the population. You can't do that all at once... you got to boil the frog slowly. An unarmed populace is much easier to subjugate than an armed one. The best/most productive slave population shouldn't even be aware that they are slaves, they should think themselves free. Wut? You think I worship wealth or some shit? Your as bad as trane thinking that understanding economics makes you a rich meanie-head. Protip: I neither have a job, collect welfare or pay taxes... Except for 6 months in 2008, been doing that since 2006. No fuck-off, I aint telling u how, but is facts. Of course, that might not be sustainable... I might have to work for the man again one day... but don't project your middle class office worker who thinks they'll one day be warren buffet image onto me chump. I know the score. Also... yes... populations enslaved but never willingly. lol - take ur meds u schizo $ You just need to relax... Take some prozac, go shopping, watch fox news... Should clear right up. She's getting on my tits with her OVER 9000!!! Bullshit... For Fuck sake. Jelly? $ Those petitions were treated like a joke People saw straight through the responses. Everyone had such high hopes. So this is the people responding in kind. Well, I guess it will employ quite a few people in associated service industries. Well, run a forum then Oh, you want someone ELSE to do it... what a fucking surprise. Too fucking lazy to do it yourself. Too fucking entitled to live without. Because Real World and not Crack Fantasy? $ Really? An IRC channel ran itself? Built its own servers, connected itself to the power grid and organised its own provision of bandwidth? That ircd software is lot more advanced than I gave it credit for. but it needed someone to run it... which was my point. Go run a forum yourself if you want it, you can have it, you just have to do it. Someone else had a channel that they kindly let you use. They changed the rules. Sucks to be you. Doesn't sound like it... You don't have it now do you? LOL http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2012/12/17/44639/717/17#17 and http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2012/12/17/44639/717/7#7 You've just proven my point. You've proven my point Why do you bother continuing to talk? So? Actual point http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2012/12/17/44639/717/7#7 So what - it wasn't yours, you HAVE NO RIGHT TO IT http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2012/12/17/44639/717/7#7 YOU LAZY WEAK FUCKING USELESS CRACKHEAD Get your own goddamn server Maybe because they smoke too much crack, are lazy, and lack fundamental concepts of how the world operates? No, they spent their time, energy, money and OC Whereas you expect everyone else to do that for you. You are entitled freeloading little shit from which the world would be better off without. FO Someone did - FO Did he take it back? Then it was never yours $ No he didn't, he just let you use it - now FO $ No he didn't -- You never owned it $ Yes someone OWNS it COMPLETELY I don't need to go into the details of the operation of IRC to prove this point. Unless you want to run your own server, with your own rules, you have NO right to complain. FO No you don't You just think you have a right to other people's hard work because you are a self-entitled, lazy, useless, peice of shit, crackhead, without a clue. FO Not your choice to make http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2012/12/17/44639/717/7#7 Good for you no one gives a shit Y do you? There's a simple, easy and available option to you. But you'd rather take from others than make yourself. You are proving you have no concept of private ownership. That you EXPECT the rewards of other people's hard work. You suck. Yes, 100% correct. Economics is true with or without private ownership. Economics does not rely on the existence of private ownership. Which is the same theory of economics is true in the US, China, Switzerland and for the Kalihari bushmen. Even though, each has a completely different economic SYSTEM. Both DOS, CP/M, Unix and Windows allow you to run turing complete software -- but you can't use them interchangeably. We 'invent' the legal concept of private ownership in the belief that it leads to better economic outcomes. Yes But the problem of scarcity isn't. It is a belief that this REDUCES overall scarcity. Run this website in China... no 'artificial' ownership. Oh -- No website. Have you ever made a choice? $ Great for you... show me when its done... Now you see the opportunity costs inherent in the system. I said fine... Just publish the website So I can make it unusable for you. But who's going to bother to READ it? $ Depends how you VALUE comments... I mean... comments formed of infinite random characters would not be considered very scarce, and have almost zero value (to almost everybody). The point is value is dependent on the valuer $ WTF does this mean? Unlimited value means you wouldn't trade the ENTIRE universe to go without it. As whatever you are valuing is within the universe and a part of it, this is a contradiction. You just like being stupid, right? You don't value intelligence for example, you value being an idiot. No, they are not... Its hard to accept... but there's a limit to the extent of energies we should spend keeping someont alive. That's why economics is smart, and you are not, because it enables you to see things that we WOULD WISH were not true. Normative Statement... $ YOU HAVE NO CLUE Yuo are making an ECONOMIC ARGUMENT. Therefore YOU are a the parasite -- by your definition. YOU REALLY HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!!! I no longer have to PROVE that you DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. Its been proved already. IE, YOU ARE SMOKING CRACK. PLEASE FIX UR IGNORANCE $ I cannot argue with a guy about physics who does NOT EVEN KNOW what Force, Mass and Acceleration are. That would be NIWS $ Basically UK Where they've effectively solved all knife crime. ----- Reddit Only Beyond This Point BTW: Reddit Life Pro Tip You Should Know (RLPTYSK) -- The envelope on the top right goes red when you get a message. Just incase. ----- End Reddit Only Beyond This Point Carrying them in public is quite illegal $ I'm not a chef... But a friend has a sweet knife, its longer than the legal limit, and definitely nice and pointy and stabby. I like the knife... make a good addition to my kitchen -- I like sharp pointy knives because they are very good for cutting steak. I meet him in the pub... get very drunk... and carry it home. Stopped by police on way home for being drunk and potentially disorderly. They say I can go on my way, but they just want to do a quick 'Terry' stop and search before they let me go. Am I in trouble? Not black... not totally But this isn't a contrived situation. I found myself in this situation IRL. A bunch of chavs attempted to jump me outside the pub earlier that night. I thought it made sense to get drunk and take the knife from the bar back to my house cause chav steak might taste better cut with a sharp knife. Utensils are incredibly useful objects. Should it matter how drunk I was if I wasn't threatening anyone? Should it matter if I tell the police in advance that I was carrying a knife and for which purposes or if I wait until they decided to search me, and why? Does it change the facts of the situation at all? Should non-chefs be required to get a permit to go shopping for anything pointy at ESK? Basically you are saying you think it should be illegal, and that I should risk arrest, for transporting a useful kitchen implement back to my house for use in my kitchen. On no other ground than that I could use it as a weapon. As I said at the top -- Basically the UK. You know the UK will eventually outlaw 'carrying a newspaper in a manner threatening to the public' - it will be a 5 year sentence. FFS, they'll kill over there, without warning, for carrying a fucking table leg!! I was not beinig dishonest... the two things occurred simultaneously due to synchronisity. I really did need a good knife in my kitchen, having only recently moved there and being under equipped in the utensil department. I was already at the pub when I noticed the knife, which was owned by the pub landlord, someone who I had become friends with, and he thought it would make a good addition to my kitchen. I was going to be getting drunk anyway, but I am not a violent drunk. Is carrying personal kitchen equipment a crime simply because I had been drinking? It was nothing but pure coincidence that I happened to have been jumped by the chavs earlier that night. Although I had no other intention other than taking it home and cutting up a nice chunk of chav steak on the way, if I found any. If I conceal the knife, I am carrying a concealed weapon - clearly an attempt at subterfuge and a sign of dishonesty. If I carry the knife openly, I am carrying a weapon in a threatening manner - clearly an attempt at affray, and a sign of my danger to the public. You literally risk being arrested everytime you go shopping for cooking utensils, which apparently you may only own if you are a professional chef - the hobbiest chef is out of luck. It all depends on the discretion of the police, what words you are stupid enough to use or not, the ability of the CPS to make the charges stick and how good a lawyer you can afford. This is not a good basis for the rule of law. Of course, I'm a smooth talker and know how not to act drunk when the shit hits the fan, so of course the rules do not apply to me. Your trying to create artificial scarcity on bans Fuck you The difficulty you're having is that guns are designed to kill. Otherwise they wouldn't be arms. That is why you should be allowed them. Kuro5hit Exclusive: NIWS/Jason - Ask Me Anything Right now on /r/kuro5hit, your exclusive chance to ask notorious kuro5hin troll and hacker NightsInWhiteSatin, aka NIWS, aka Jason... Anything. Read more about it, and my exclusive hard hitting questions, now in his latest reddit story "IAMA NIWS, K5 troll. AMA." Poll. Have you seen how much karma he has? Fuck, talk about dedicated: http://www.reddit.com/user/NightInWhiteSatin2 Guess he had no choice but to learn how to survive in the cold harsh world outside of kuro5hin... Look what Rusty's done to him!! I pity him... more animal than man now. Riskiest / Most Unpopular Diary Post of the Year? Please don't ban me Rusty. Also, I'm now paranoid that everyone is NIWS trying to trick me into escalating his privileges... I'm staying forever vigilant, so confirm your kuro5hit handle here for special treats. Don't worry... This will probably be our top story for next 24hrs. I'm out there, everday, risking my life, to ask the hard questions you people just aren't prepared to ask... all so you can sit back and enjoy your cushty little lifestyle and get the answers you want to hear. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that forum, you need me on that forum. We use words like troll, horsecock, faggit. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up an account, and start a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to. Fair enough... you could of course do that... I don't really know much about him except what I hear from others and pick up around the place. I know rusty pretty much hates him... he appeared in our forum, I made an ama request for lulz, and he did one.. so just going with it... y not? I was on k5 back in those days... don't think I had an account, was just an anonymous lurker... but I read. I got the impression, back then, that posting on k5 was a quick way to get yourself banned. lol... is why I didn't post for so long. Sounds to me like he did some pretty now-obvious attacks on the site and caused rusty a bit of trouble, and otherwise just a bit of an obnoxious troll... but what's odd is his obsession with the site... like taking a toy from a child, no matter all the other toys available... that's the toy they now want. he seems to be doing fine now, and adjusted well to reddit. May I ask some questions? Could you cut down? Could you quit? Do you want to cut down/quit? Can you work? Do you steal/harm people to get drugs? How old are you (nearest decade or half will do - 25,35,45)? Do you think the drugs will eventually kill you, or do you still think you're in control? How has prohibition improved your life / kept you off of drugs? I hear ya on that one... Good news though... lots of people 'grow out of' (for lack of better term) heroin addiction in their 40s... Hang on for a decade or so... u'll get it back together. Weird fact, but true. (tobacco, not so much) Let'n all the folks at /r/kuro5hit know too http://www.reddit.com/r/kuro5hit/comments/14ylsh/kuro5hin_moderate_submissions_a nything_but/ Combine that with homicides per capita and you get homicides per 1000 guns: United Kingdom 0.182 United States 0.047 Conclusion: A brit is almost 4 times as likely to kill you with a gun than a yank. Fuck those brits and their crazy gun fetish!! Just goes to prove, the more you outlaw guns, the more they are likely to be used. Sorry, actually proves guns keep murder rate low $ Fuckit, it proves something $ wget the two files and... #!/usr/bin/python from xml.dom.minidom import parseString from optparse import OptionParser HOMOCIDE_FILE = "List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate" GUN_FILE = "Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country" HOMOCIDE_TABLE = 4 GUN_TABLE = 2 def get_tables_from_file(filename): f = open(filename) dom = parseString(f.read()) f.close() tables = dom.getElementsByTagName("table") return tables def get_tables(): homtable = get_tables_from_file(HOMOCIDE_FILE)[HOMOCIDE_TABLE] guntable = get_tables_from_file(GUN_FILE)[GUN_TABLE] return homtable, guntable def get_country_stat(table): results = {} rows = table.getElementsByTagName("tr") for row in rows: tds = row.getElementsByTagName("td") if len(tds): td = tds[0] a = td.getElementsByTagName("a")[0] country = a.getAttribute("title") td = tds[1] stat = float(td.childNodes[0].nodeValue) results[country] = stat return results def combine_results(homresults, gunresults): results = {} for key in gunresults.keys() + homresults.keys(): try: results[key] = (homresults[key], gunresults[key]) except: if key == "United Kingdom": # Oh dammit results[key] = (homresults[key], gunresults["England"]) # results[key] = (homresults[key], gunresults["Scotland"]) pass return results def show_homocide_per_gun_results(combined_results, country_first=False): for key in combined_results: homocide_rate, gun_rate = combined_results[key] if country_first: print "%s %.3f" % (key, homocide_rate/gun_rate) else: print "%.3f %s" % (homocide_rate/gun_rate, key) if __name__=="__main__": op = OptionParser() op.add_option("-c", "--country-first", dest="country_first", action="store_true", default=False, help="print the country first") (options, args) = op.parse_args() homtable, guntable = get_tables() homresults = get_country_stat(homtable) gunresults = get_country_stat(guntable) combined_results = combine_results(homresults, gunresults) show_homocide_per_gun_results(combined_results, options.country_first) Yep... there are no stats to show reducing gun availability has any effect on suicides... at all. Substitution theory... those that can't get guns just tend to jump instead. The two parts are separate Its been discussed to death, this is the common understanding of it and it has even been ruled upon by the supreme court. Then petition to change the consitition $ Yes, but the slow blade penetrates the field $ or throw you in a pain amplifier $ whoosh $ don't gom jabbar me sis $ You don't change constitutions on a whim Is the 3rd causing a problem to ANYONE at the moment? The second was considered important at the time it was written... of course society changes... but we haven't had enough time to guarantee that this is no longer a viable option. Which is why a constitution is changeable, but difficult to change. You MUST petition to change the constitution if you want them to change the law... That's an uphill struggle cause a lot of people don't agree with you. 1M people storming the whitehouse with rifles may still have a chance. You have to PROVE this isn't true... all you got is speculation. You don't have to be equally matched... Prove that an armed populace, like america... CAN NOT take down its government, if it so desired. Unlikely maybe, absolutely, its unlikely... but impossible? I doubt it. There's value in the possibility. What, there's zero value in that threat? $ You think... but you don't know. And you get those things by leveraging your weapons... You have no hope if u start with nothing. OVER 9000!!! WOW... that proves it then... This is how you use emotionally manipulate fools with numbers. Start quoting per capita or STFU. A tool misused does not change the purpose of that tool. I can drive a screw in with a hammer - but not all hammers are screw drivers. Yes you are. > You MUST have a gun in case you and a million other people decide to overthrow the government? Yes... to have any hope... you must... otherwise futile. > Do you really think this is more likely to happen than that 9,000 more people will be shot dead in the land of the free next year? Nope... I think its most likely 10-20k will die next year from guns... or 0.002%. That's a fair price to pay to keep the government in check. The same government, mind you, that is killing hundreds of thousands in the same time. 100,000!!! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!?! Your failure is also in thinking that banning guns will reduce the homicide rate. > Do you really think it's likely that your imaginary barmy army would have a chance against tanks, missiles, bombs and guns? Yes... Guns get you tanks, missiles, bombs, servicemen, planes, drones, everything. That's called strategy. > Do you not understand that the second amendment was drafted at a time of flintlock muskets, firing three shots a minute if you're an expert? Yes... that's a historical fact. > If the intention was to match you against the government, do you not think the law is now antiquated to say the least? Matching is not required... just being a force is all that's required... So, no not antiquated at all. Taliban still going up against the most powerful nation on the planet, and continue to be a thorn in their side. That's how it works. > No wonder you don't understand statistics and risk assessments. Please... go cook some cakes. You have no idea re statistics - which is why you use emotion inducing large numbers, rather than rates that can be compared across different population sizes. > A gun that is used to shoot and kill is not misused, No, its misused because its being used to kill the wrong person. Yes it's meant to kill people... but the PROTECTED USE of a gun is to overthrow tyrants. > since it's true that to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. I got other uses for guns... you have no idea - but mostly to kill animals - everything else is worse --- sometimes they have to be left to suffer (left to starve/die of thirst and/or predators because broken leg, for examples), because the laws make it to inconvenient (carry handguns) to do otherwise. 9100... I stopped reading You don't even know how to think rationally about a subject. You are full of stupid whoremoans and hysterical emotional reactions. This is why it was a mistake to ever let your species vote. I am actively ignoring you... until you address one topic. In terms of threats, risks, epidemiology, pretty much anything that matters... Do you discuss TOTAL numbers? Or do you discuss things in terms of likelihoods, probabilities, rates and percentages? If you keep at it with over 9000 rhetoric, like a retarded 4chan imbecile... I cannot have a rational discussion with you in any possible way. 9000 in a population of 10,000 is a much bigger deal than 9000 in a population of 300M, which is a much bigger deal than 9000 in a population of 1B, which is much bigger deal than 9000 in a population of 7B. Only 129 people were murdered in Belize? Does that suggest to you THAT EVERYTHING IS GOING WELL in Belize? I really am actively ignoring anything you write, not even accidentally looking at it... so you have to concede this point in the title of your post if you want to continue... in which case I will go back and read ur bollocks. I'm actually safer than you you fucking retard... god ur projection and inability to rationally argue is pissing me off. Mostly you've given me fluff peices that belong on pinterest. I am very sick of all the OVER 9000!!!! crap you keep repeating, because I consider it entirely meaningless but emotionally compelling, because people are stupid. I'm still not reading, cause u still haven't conceeded the point. Why don't you go to beleize... less than 130 people were killed there last year... it must be paradise, right? TOTALS OR RATES BITCH $ I knew you were going to be sexist... I can call trane a bitch without all that bullshit... Are you superior to men now? There are names I can call anyone else, but not you? You did state the probabilities... but EVERY GOD DAMN POST starts of with... OVER 9000!!!! Drop that, and we can continue... Agreed? OVER 9000 BITCHES Listen Nigger, Y don't u go live in Belize? 129 people were murdered in Belize... While OVER 722 were murdered in the UK... Can you not see how much safer you are in Belize? Does this make sense to you? (If I can call a man a bitch, its sexist not to accept being called a bitch on the basis of YOUR SEX! Given that's the only difference) My estimates on the probability of being murdered in the US approx 0.32% in the UK approx 0.09% Probability of dying from heart disease in the US approx 24% in the UK approx 17% Excuse me if I don't think the first thing is VERY FUCKING likely, or something to RATIONALLY BE CONCERNED ABOUT, irrespective of how you CHOOSE TO PRESENT the same data. OVER 599000 PEOPLE FUCKING KILLED FROM MACCAS. Also, You SHOULD NEVER FIGHT RAPE Men are stronger than women and always more likely to win in an act of aggression. Women being weaker have no ability to fight a man, the odds of her being successful are very low. This might have been different in the past, when the ideas of fighting for your individual rights was invented, but in modern times, with good nutrition, its completely laughable that women would have any possibility of winning a battle against a man. Women should lie back and take it if a man ever tries to rape them... its the only logical conclusion. The UK got along just fine without a law enabling you to use reasonable force against an attacker, why should that have changed? Enjoy ur rape. Its the same as the racist blacks... Its fine for white people to call each other nigger, and its fine for black people to call each other nigger, its even fine for a black man to call a white man a nigger, but the moment a black person hears a white man say that, they'll cut you up like a bitch... Nothing short of pure racism, and personally I find it disgusting. Seems you are just as sexist as these black bastards are racist, and I'm disappointed it continues to exist in the so called 'modern' age. the point is... that it is WORTH THE COST... Better an increased likelihood of being killed by your fellow man than enslaved by your government. That's what you cannot, and never will be able to, get your head around... until you find yourself starving in some prison camp. If the government doesn't have the will to murder the lot of you, then yes. soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Who cares what they think? You're just empowering them by even debating their idiocy. They have no legitimate point. despite a well regulated militia being necessary, the rights of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed. Problem? $ Wherever the empire decides, obviously $ I meant semi-seriously... In reality, yes... the empire, being the will of the people exercised through the democratic election of a representative government... Should... be able to come to reasonable limits on such things... Yes corporations are people to a first order approximation... Where they obviously aren't people, those exceptions should be recognised and written in. You could attack the same problem from the opposite angle and assume they aren't people, then define all the cases where they should have rights. So, in a country where people have the right to bear arms... why not corporations too? Its just people representing those corporations bearing those arms... maybe the arms are owned by the corporation... This is probably good for certain industries, like security companies I guess... things like that... They still can't threaten people with them, or murder people. So, why not? multiple/distorted meanings of cons/liberal $ Its two separate things... A militia is necessary... everyone expects they will be armed... Fuck the Militia. The PEOPLE have the right to bear arms, irrespective of any militia. Yeah, languages change... circumstances, society so, if enough people really want to change it, it can still be changed. At the moment the current interpretation is the one I gave. I don't think its too bad... Obviously this is a tragedy... and this is the unpopular thing I'm going to say... its a statistical blip in the scheme of things and not worth worrying about (to the extent everyone will). I agree... something has to be done this is something so it has to be done... This is how these events are used... and you have to be careful of the whatever the proposed something is... who is behind it, what are their long term goals, and what are the possible unintended consequences. I don't know, I really think there are arguments for an armed populace. Its certainly one form of egalitarianism, where anyone can just as easily kill anyone else. Levels the playing field a bit. In theory its so the population can overthrow the government when it inevitably becomes corrupt. I don't know how practical that is... but its a nice theory. You could argue the moon is made of cheese You'd still be wrong though. Holly, u got a hangup about guns Even I could get guns in the UK at various times... that's the reality of prohibition... you can't stop the gangs/criminals from getting weapons. The black markets are extremely efficient now. Crazies gonna be crazy no matter the law. Also, if you've never lived rural or hunted, you don't know the value of guns in ways that have nothing to do with killing people. Trust me, the guys with the illegal guns are the crazies. When I was in Reading... two girls got shot in the head by some idiot drug dealers they'd stolen a small amount of drugs off. They'd raped the girls, took them down to the park, I dunno... gruesome stuff about choosing who was gonna die first... and shot them both several times in the head... One girl actually survived amazingly enough, that's how they know the details. Otherwise probably never know what happened. So, I think you're wrong that the crazies won't have access... legal weapons are for people who abide by the law, nothing else... illegal weapons are as easy to anonymously swap as sim cards. Otoh, another guy I knew, who I thought was pretty chill... just recently murdered his neighbour using nothing more than a hammer. Its just the scale and emotionally shocking aspect of this crime that makes it such a hot topic... statistically its not that important. As in, the cost to prevent this is large compared to the cost of lots of other crimes that would have a greater affect. And the theory of an armed populace is a good idea for political reasons that your country hasn't enjoyed since about the time of king charles (no my english history's not great, maybe more recently?). There's also very different political ideology about who has the right to protect themselves? You or the state? They are trying to get rid of knives now... what next, angry looks? So, are you talking about banning guns? Or restricting them somehow? If so how? I mean, this guy was not a criminal, right? So, you would actually have to ban guns to make it so he couldn't get them... legally - not just 'restrict' or have 'tighter controls' whatever that means. So, how does this affect the political theory side, both in terms of governmental overthrow, and secondly in terms of self protection? You don't give a crap about either of these I suspect. Big brother loves you and will be there to protect you. BTW: A gun is an everyday use item on a farm... the handgun restrictions in my country are a pain... means sometimes we just leave animals to die in agony - cause its not convenient to always carry a rifle around. In my county They are seriously trying to ban the 'King Punch'... Whatever makes news makes news... there is a huge media bias / overreaction here. Its like a plane crash... statistically you are more likely to die on the way to the airport than in a plane, but every plane crash is on the news and hardly any car crashes. We fear planes but don't concentrate when driving. I think total numbers are more relevant than the size of the individual events. The former objectively more important, the second nothing more than easy emotional manipulation. The US homicide rate is less than 4 times greater than the UK's. I don't think you can simply put that down to the gun laws. Even if you could... At just over 3 in 100k more deaths per year from homicide... its an exceedingly rare way to die. Now weigh that against the sense of personal responsibility for your self protection (u are screwed in the UK against your average thug) and the value in the political theory that the government must operate under a certain fear of its populace... PERSONALLY... I find that a fair trade off. Training courses... yes to an extent maybe... psychological testing?? You gonna keep that objective somehow? Will it really catch those you want it to catch? Would it catch these guys? If so, why wasn't this guy caught before? Could you have caught this guy without fucking up a lot of innocent people's rights? Finally... for some people (maybe an exceedingly small minority in your opinion) you are taking away legitimate tools of the trade (as I said before). Shit happens... Its a big tragedy, but not enough to change the underlying statistics - perfect for emotional manipulation - because the mind is very poor at objectively evaluating the risk or rare events. s/county/country/ $ risk *of* rare events. $ You missed some important points > I'm not sure why you seem to think it isn't very significant. Answer: > I realise that your chances of being killed by a mad stray gunman are low. > The firearms homicide rate has risen in line with gun ownership. Sauce? Is this consensus or are there other studies? > At the end of the day, how many schoolchildren are ok? 100*(75.5M - 20)/75.5M = 99.9999997% Or all of them to 8 significant figures. > (That's less than perfectly sane and frightened women often have to do to get an abortion.) And women are denied abortions on this basis? Please answer the likelihood of this stopping these people and how many people will unfairly be denied access to their guns? Oh.. you want to deny everyone their guns... > Legitimate tools of trade? You want farmers to operate under strict supervision? Or did you mean hunters? Hobbiest target shooters, so now you mean well, absolutely anyone who isn't intending to kill innocent people and do drive bys? What? Oh, you mean they can only target shoot at registered shooting ranges, as opposed to on a farmers land? Well, the farmer's out of luck again. Basically... well... anyone not intending to shoot down a school load of children then has a legitimate right to own a gun. > Given that I had to pass a written and practical test to operate my car, how can it be sensible that any old fucker can operate a gun? I have no problem with this... people should know to aim at the centre of body mass followed by a double tap to the head. The fuckers could get back up otherwise. > Regarding police, our police are unarmed. No they are not... MOST of them are unarmed. My next door neighbour had lawfully homicided 5 people using a handgun. > I don't want to live in a culture where people think they need a firearm to go get the groceries. Straw feels so nice. > How can it be sensible that any old schmoe can buy a killing machine, but not access free mental healthcare? This we actually agree on. Now Finally... You haven't answered about the most fundamental point... which is the purpose of the 2nd amendment. The ability to take down your government - and what this is worth. Oh... motherjones says... sorry, didn't realise... Of course this is the only and final say on the matter. No critics of this view at all? > We didn't think Which is my point... How much safer are your children now... really? In aggregate over all children? Feels good, we're safe now... only the criminals have guns now. The average person though is potentially a lot weaker than they were before. Hmmm... not a bad result, now who can object to all the ASBOs and CCTVs? > you're apparently four times more likely to be murdered than I am 4 times nothing is nothing... 4e-5 in fact. > Are you? No... because I don't believe in the existence of an objective psychological test that can discriminate in advance who is going to mow down school children and who is going to achieve the zen state of mind and body control required to a hit a target at 100M BTW: The police with the guns are mostly the ones going after high level drug dealers... This of course makes the black market even more efficient... and means more armed criminals... crazy huh? > The second amendment is an ass. Answered elsewhere. stop projecting > I once had to fight off Good thing you were physically stronger in this case then... or whatever edge you got. A gun levels you up though against nearly anyone. I'm talking about a met officer I knew... he carried a weapon as part of his day to day work.. yes... some sections of the police have weapons as standard... 4 times is only significant (yes, its a statistically significant difference - but not a practical difference) if the result wasn't so close to zero... in absolute terms per capita homocides are very very low in both cases. Its like saying there are nearly 4 times as many deaths per capita by yellow fever in germany than the US... CLEARLY THIS IS HUGE PROBLEM WITH GERMANY. Over 9000 is misleading... 4.2 per 100k is NOT (actual homocides by gun per capita is even less). Fine... so the other side of your debate: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/gun-control-myths-realities 6. Lower murder rates in foreign countries prove that gun control works. False. This is one of the favorite arguments of gun control proponents, and yet the facts show that there is simply no correlation between gun control laws and murder or suicide rates across a wide spectrum of nations and cultures. In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a license to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr. Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel "have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States." A comparison of crime rates within Europe reveals no correlation between access to guns and crime. The basic premise of the gun control movement, that easy access to guns causes higher crime, is contradicted by the facts, by history and by reason. Let's hope more people are catching on. Another: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/weekinreview/29liptak.html?pagewanted=all& _r=0 And Another: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf - Bottom of page 7, Gun Related Statistics: Crime and mortality statistics are often used in the gun control debate. According to a recent study, however, none of the existing sources of statistics provide either comprehensive, timely, or accurate data with which to assess definitively whether there is a causal connection between firearms and violence.23 For example, existing data do not show whether the number of people shot and killed with semiautomatic assault weapons declined during the 10-year period (1994- 2004) that those firearms were banned from further proliferation in the United States.24 > To my knowledge, not one of them was a legitimate attempt to maintain a free and secure state. All tools can be misused. Stop your hysterical babbling on incoherently about irrelevant crap about social stereotypes and ethnocentric attitudes that you are incorrectly projecting on me... cause we aren't arguing about welfare here okay, or a million other things wrong with the US and UK. If you say over 9000 one more time... That's propaganda... Did you not get the YELLOW FEVER fucking POINT I MADE? Is it a big deal that YELLOW FEVER causes FOUR TIMES the DEATH in Germany than the US -- A BIG FUCKING CAUSE OF CONCERN? In fact... fuck you and the rest of your argument... you done the 9000 thing too many times... total numbers DONT MATTER. NEVER HAVE, NEVER WILL... RATES matter... So... if you don't budge on that... your a concern troll with no fucking clue... goodbye. Guns per population is irrelevent... Relevant: http://www.allcountries.org/gun_ownership_rates.html Switzerland not so far behind US... so fuck yourself. Get me Israel data too if u can... you know.. not some tard interview... STATISTICS Also... EVERYONE in Israel goes through military... THEY nearly ALL CARRY guns at some point. Probably higher percentage than even US... Your second link talks about GUN crimes... that's not relevant to TOTAL crimes... Yes... less guns, less gun crimes... Less spatula's lead to less spatula related crimes. This does not mean we would be safer with less spatula's. You miss the POLITICAL THEORY of GUNS That you have no analogue to in the UK. > All tools can be misused? Are you serious? What is a gun designed to do if not kill? Guns are designed to KILL... the misuse of that is to kill in NON-POLITICAL ways. This is a uniquely American theory of rights... you do not comprehend it, you are unable to comprehend it. You like the nanny state -- you don't care for rights, only what your benevolent overlords allow you to have. It is worth the cost... and a lot of people think so. In terms of kids killed per 100k, over all events, yes you could. Hammers really have no legitimate use besides smashing children's heads in. Clearly they've been specifically designed only for the purpose of killing children, and why anyone would want to own one is beyond me. Yet anyone can walk into a hardware store and get one with little more than showing an id and a credit card. lol $ Classic NIWS. Don't Forget to Use Our Wiki, Where We Keepin It Real 24/7. /r/kuro5hit has its own wiki. That's pretty impressive really. I mean, that's some damn good integration and right levels of abstraction to make a really successful social collaborative news media site. Its like digg done right. You can read more about it in my latest reddit story on the subject "Don't Forget to Use Our Wiki, Where We Keepin It Real 24/7." epilepsy Economic Reality $ No, economic reality... he only has so much time to put into various projects... This is an OC. Actual scarcity. entropy entropy always fucks ya. So much so, I think you can almost define life as the fight against entropy. Practical entropy -- paying for the power for the servers, paying for the domain name, applying patches, hackers, software bugs, hardware failures, collapse of hosting company. If they are your machines, you also might not be able to use them for something else. What happened to rgb.net? I mean you could try this yourself... setup a webserver... then never touch it again... what's its lifespan? lol - mean hard drive crashing and ruining my day Nothing to do with being mean... Just not worth people's time and energy keeping it running... Hackers aren't being mean either... they too are trying to gain greater wealth by pwning more scarce resources. Its not 'mean' its entropy, just a fucking bastard of a reality of this universe. Its just corrosion... think about it. As much as we like to think these things are eternal, they are actually incredibly dynamic and unstable (right now at least, maybe forever). You're measuring a different thing here... The apparent information content per byte. Apply entropy to your pre and post zipped files... Which one will you be best able to recover? bitrot -- entropy exists. for purposes of physical experiment you could - gedanken experiments not. In the presence of selection bias This does not get u magical self running web sites. People are working on these types of things its what you don't get. But for each person working on project X, it means one less person working on project Y. Y is the Opportunity Cost. Because you keep forgetting that SCARCITY BE REAL. Nobody think it be like it is, but it do! Yes, but they can't do Y $ They can, but they'd have to give up X... X and Y are mutually exclusive options, at any given point in time. Because you can only do one thing at any given instant in time. Your TIME is a scarce. Opportunity Cost. Get used to it. For each individual each option is xor $ Yes, technology decreases OC it doesn't eliminate it. That's the theory of capitalism and free markets... overall, they are intended to decrease OC. Partly... That's partly because they have an oligopoly on money supply, and as I said earlier, anyone should be able to fractionally lend. The second problem is that you focus only on $$$s and not on WEALTH. WEALTH concentration is the problem. Even with either no or infinite $$$s, if 1% own 99.9% of the actual WEALTH, you're screwed. Go innovate then, you wealthy bastard Try doing it on your own with no access to any of the world's factories, machines, labour, land, energy, materials, food and shelter. Shut the fuck up then, cause you don't need any of that - go innovate yourself an ai free energy spaceship and fuck off. Its not meanness, its FUCKING SCARCITY And the minute you finally get your head around this stupid idea that everyone is keeping everything from you 'to be mean' to you, the quicker you can come to an understanding that there IS A SOLUTION TO THIS. Economics is about the efficient application of resources to the problem of scarcity... Not ideas dreamt up as an excuse to be mean to you. You don't comprehend scarcity -- yet you whinge you don't have enough $$$s... You could have a billion dollars and still be a broke ass nigger. Understanding WEALTH and SCARCITY are the SOLUTION to this problem. Also true if you have nothing or owe everybody $ Fail Again - Economics is NOT about MONEY In a society with no money... you can still be in debt to me, or vice versa. You can have nothing, a little or a lot... and the LAWS of ECONOMICS STILL APPLY. EMPHASIS MOTHERFUCKER lol, I honestly thought you meant capitalisation. I'm trying to emphasis key parts. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity Fuck sake, are you picking arguments without even reading anything? The existence of artificial scarcity does not imply the non existence of scarcity. Which is why I asked you, too long ago for me to find, to clarify your meaning of artificial scarcity... but I found that during your explanation of artificial scarcity, you seemed to believe in the non existence of scarcity. Please fix this bug in your wetware or just forget the whole thing, and I put you back in the idiot/crackpot box. Do you beleive that scarcity exists today? Is everything artificially scarce in your mind? Or are you a crackpot? So you can have all the gold plated super scram jet powered planes you could ever dream of? Just the 'man' being 'mean'. Really... Really? Fuck, you wonder why I get frustrated? This is the best you can do? You really thought long and hard about it, and came up with this one line reply that completely justifies your point of view? You're an idiot of the highest order... I'm sorry I ever had any respect for you. You are not living in a VR, I will NEVER So, stupid crackpot fucking junky theory If I was the only person on the planet Economic Theories of Scarcity and Opportunity Cost would still apply. More CRACK will help you understand this. No it doesn't Oh look, baseless assumptions and assertions MONEY IS NOT WEALTH $ I mean WEALTH IS NOT MONEY $ MONEY IS NOTHING You really don't get it do you? Money, without scarcity, is nothing. It does not represent wealth, other than itself. It is a small fraction of the problems you are going to face with the rise of AI. Scarcity has NOTHING TO DO WITH MONEY $ Scarcity has NOTHING TO DO WITH MONEY $ Scarcity has NOTHING TO DO WITH MONEY $ reduce $ FO Already answered -- FO Your failure to understand is not my failure to answer. FO I'm not here to hold your hand... if the concepts are beyond you, then I there is no value to me in explaining. Thankyou Fo I gave you the resources You chose to be an ignoramus. If a guy with a doctorate in advanced physics told me that matter and energy aren't real because something like they are merely the apparent manifestations in the transient fluctuations of the impulse in the quantum wave function of the big bang --- there might be value in what he was trying to say, because at least he understood the underlying concepts of matter and energy in the first place. If someone on the internet told me that matter and energy aren't real because the man be being mean to him, and actually Jesus was the answer --- There's not a hell of a lot I can do in terms of fixing his ignorance, he doesn't even understand the fundamental principals, is completely unwilling to even learn them, and has no right or ability to offer a compelling alternative understanding to them. You are the second guy - a dangerous crackpot with half thought out ideas that don't mean shit in the real world. Then you are wrong Further proving my point. Finance isn't economics. You don't know shit. FO Non sequitur $ LOL -- Good point there dipshit $ TROLLOLOLOLOLLALALALALlOLOLOL $ Intangibles $ No You just don't know what economic scarcity is. How can you argue against something you don't even understand? Stopping posting does not prove it. The proof is that I cannot post an infinite number of them in a finite amount of time. That is one limit, yes $ PROOF MOTHERFUCKER $ If the bot requires resources, and can post less than an infinite number of posts in an instant. Then still scarce. Its identical to you trying to prove that electrons are particles and not also waves because you have no clue about how physics works and assume everything works the way you understand it, without bothering to increase your knowledge on the subject. You don't know the definitions... and then wonder why you come to the wrong conclusions. This is because you are stupid and lazy. Yep, it adds value $ King's always had this type of satisfaction, it comes from a basis in real scarcity though. Also note, the guys at the soup kitchens today eat much better than the surfs and peasants ever did. The system has actually worked to reduce scarcity in even the poorest of people (in ur nation). Leeches STILL work MOFO $ sometimes leeches are still best. REDUCES does not imply ELIMINATES Even in the limit. Its also true for monkeys, who have no money and no economists. Fail - Economics is NOT about MONEY Monkeys don't even have money... fuck. Pardon? Sorry, did I mention money? economics $ Yes they did have scarcity What a stupid thing to say? Because they were better off that us by some standards there was no scarcity? They didn't have to hunt for food cause it came to them? They didn't have to cook it because it cooked itself? They didn't have to gather grains and stuff because they were already in a basket waiting to be eaten? You keep getting confused between the concept of scarcity and poverty. Even bill gates or warren buffets... the greatest kings and dictators all have issues of scarcity to deal with. great... stop eating then would solve a lot of problems. If we only had an egg, we could have a chicken to lay eggs for us. less is less, zero is zero. Less is still scarce... just LESS scarce. Its what you don't get. Both making and listening to it are $ Of course they are... both to read and write $ They took time for someone to create They are scarce. The ones with VALUE are even MORE SCARCE. Any crackhead can put LOW VALUE words on the internet -- they are NOT AS SCARCE. However, even they are still scarce. FACTS Words are really really scarce... How could you possibly think otherwise? Why bother reading or writing if they weren't? If the were not scarce -- It would imply that you have read absolutely everything worth reading, and that everything worth reading had already been written, and that there would be no point to even write at all. You are saying there is no cost involved in reading or writing? Like you can read all the books at once? You really are deliberately refusing to understand the most basic of ideas. FO FO FO Yes $ Whatever $ Would you argue with a physicist who refused to believe in the existence of matter and energy? Like, "they're just tools of the man so that they can be mean to us", level of refused to believe in them? That's the equivalent here. If you want to troll -- your a winner, no doubt about it. If you want to understand: http://alison.com/courses/Introduction-to-Economics http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/catalog/editions/p1628 http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php %3Ftitle=1676&Itemid=27 FO I'm not arguing with someone who is unwilling to pay the opportunity costs required to understand the very basics of economic theory. From the second link: http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/22?e=rittenecon-ch01#ritten econ-ch01_s02 > The opportunity cost to you of reading the remainder of this chapter will be the value of the best other use to which you could have put your time. You refuse to pay that cost, I refuse to argue with a crackpot, the same way I refuse to argue with a physics crackpot who says matter and energy don't real cause the man be being mean to me. FO CRACKPOT No - FO Scarcity of my time and energy - FO FO It is - FO $ FO $ No $ At the exact point where the marginal opportunity cost to me drops below zero. Exactly as predicted by economics. When it happens dipshit $ Who is imposing the scarcity of air on you? $ Correct... air is scarce One person's economic choice affects your economic choice - AND VICE VERSA. Because there is only so much air available, we have to make choices as to who gets to use it and how. Not without an associated COST $ No, it makes it useful $ which is a requirement of money $ That is still scarce though... Traneros aren't scarce... anyone can have their own 16T traneros? WTF is your problem here? Why don't you stop going on about US dollars, and just use Traneros instead... They are exactly what you are asking for! I really do not, u just think I must... $ What's even weirder Is that one day well look back on even something like Reddit and wonder how a once great pioneer of the internet became some quiet backwater troll hole. Makes ya think... Some horrible souled out commercial hell hole? $ Happy Cake Day Man You must feel so proud. Perfect time to post to /r/GoneWild or else /r/Cats. I put a story up for you http://www.reddit.com/r/kuro5hit/comments/14winx/cakeday_happy_cake_day_to_long_ time_kuro5hit/ North Korea Multi Generational Prison Camps I found this story on Reddit Today: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14vvpl/til_that_there_is_a_three_ generations_of/ Which lead to this article about an escapee: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201205/life-in-labor-camp I think this is probably worse than the shooting... from an objective perspective... still terrible of course. be the change you want to see $ I shot a hooker and got a couple bags of heroin $ I like how an idea less than 2000 years old is considered eternal and never changing. Wasn't this discussed on reddit already? # WIPO: Reddit $ Not officially freemasons. This would be better on /r/kuro5hit $ From Reddit Relevant. Yep $ How would legalisation be bad for banks? Wouldn't they still get to hold the cash for legal drug companies? They just won't have to work at laundering it any more. Yep You can read more about this on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/14qjqm/censorship_googlecom_makes_sa fesearch_mandatory/ and http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/14q7j4/censorship_as_of_past_two_hou rs_google_images/ Weren't you a hardcore asexual? Or did finally getting laid change your mind? I find this sad Especially now that you're a middle aged man. You might have had a point with your pair bonding theory when you were 16-25 say.... but it makes no sense if you never ever pair bond... Now you're just a lonely old man who will probably never know what its like to love someone/have them love you. Each to their own, as always, but I can't help thinking you've missed out on something. You should try getting laid before you die Who knows? You might even like it. lol - repressed vrigin faggots depends on the woman but time dilation always makes it seem longer... and the after affects... but actual orgasm, seconds I guess... maybe more like an impulse that's drawn out and decaying... your point? also misses the point... really sex isn't all about orgasm... I've never had kids... I've never wanted them... but I'm not sure what the price of that is. You might be right in that to feel fully fulfilled as a human from our animal side actually reproducing might be required to kick off certain chemical/biological changes in the mind... I don't know... All that stuff you said about 'getting the perfect orgasm every time' shit... like you can't wank if u get laid? what? Like wanking compares to a real person who wants you like you want them? Like another person can't possible enhance it? I'm sure you're making it up anyway, I don't really know why I'm writing this other than very stoned... I don't have anyone right now... not for a year... and its sad... but only because (at times) she made my life so good. That's what life's about... good times and bad times and getting on through it all and making the most of it. Fine... its perfectly fine to live your life and separate out relationships totally... and try to stay some sort of steady mean that won't be affected by another person... of course you won't get the lows, but you'll never get the highs either. And the area under the curve is probably less too. On a side note: You probably are a serial killer and just play one on the internet as an elaborate double bluff cover... but you do scare me a little. So if its a choice between chopping some chick up and jackin off to your reflection in your full height mirror... keep on doing whatever works for ya. I ain't gonna judge. you do know you're giving me a hardon with all this reddit hate. You got a better idea? $ Yeah, but in the meantime, no one understands the problem... most people can't even really define the problem... So, in the meantime, after everybody's done thinking and understanding as much they can, they come with ideas, and milestones, and testable hypothesis, and they run experiments... Everybody looks at everybody else's experiments, and whoever is doing best now might be the person we want to listen to, because maybe they are the one who understands the problem the best... So, in the grand scheme, you can't beat just trying out whatever you think might work... and building off the best. This is even the basis for an ai algorithm (spearmint is an example). Yeah, on an individual level, its better to have guys who can understand the problem than who tinker... but if you have guys that can't understand the problem, for those individuals, maybe they have the better strategy. Pretty much the same story since we found fire... If it really is an alien device though... maybe then there's calls for leaving it alone a bit more... Then again... sooner or later someone is going to be the first to do something (push the red button), the outcome is going to be stochastic (the unpredictable result of an experiment) - no matter how much thinking you've done, you got to test against reality sooner or later. Maybe the family could get a few million Then you could just sell your body parts, for the good of your family, at your euthanasia party. This is definitely a flaw with EBay and nothing short of a failure of democracy in general. We could have had 20 more years of Steve Jobs, and some actual innovation in iphones, instead we get some starving kid in some jungle town somewhere doing no good but making the roads untidy. If we open this up to the fair market, we could all live a little bit longer, and it would go a long way to solving poverty too. You're saying it's a good thing, right? Everybody should know by now that the fair market will bring those people out of poverty as we harvest the organs of their least useful family members. So overall, this is a good way to raise the standard of living all over the planet. Of course the most useful members of society will also benefit by having longer lives, so this is another win for society. You aren't actually proposing ID though are you? As in the way its normally expressed. But I like what you wrote. Wed Dec 12, 2012 at 05:12:15 PM GMT $ I'm not going to repeat myself In which channel worships pagan time keeping systems. I like to think so... I think he probably thought k5 was done after going solid troll mode for about month with me in that one thread... I heard rumours that he fled cause of the racists... I don't know, he was putting up a solid enough show against Baldrson and co, so I doubt that really. He's still pretty active over at that other site. Really? In what Martian year did Curiosity land? $ Can somebody check my maths? This doesn't sound right... Read my latest reddit story "Can somebody check my maths? This doesn't sound right...". In which Reddit upvotes wrong math, and ignores correct math. WTF is wrong with these fuckers? Yep, seen it... Pretty smart way to go actually... It looks like a bunch of standard networks, like hinton was on about joined together... where they've hand crafted the architecture after different parts of the brain... Guess they can just keep going and making this more complex, and fill in more gaps. I wonder what their 'state' neuron model is though... As in, its memory... how have they implemented that. Do they store a series of states, is this a recursive network? Would also be interesting if they fine tune the meta-parameters, rather than just setting them to the standard brain's setting, as they've suggested. Although its a great starting point if you really are modelling some analogues. I've been playing with spearmint... worth having a look, but I think there are problems if you want to search for a solution (say number of neurons), where you don't really want to test large numbers until you think more would be really be better. It seems you have to put in max and min, and will start off searching both extremes. thought u was trane lol $ This would make a good eugenics system At 18 you are given 100 boxes with $100k in them each... except one of them will kill you (and the state keeps the rest of the boxes). You can open them any time you like. (maybe adjust them for inflation, but you only get a hundred, and one will eventually kill you). Its one solution to poverty. I don't understand the question... seriously... Do you mean, artificially scarce in today's economy through tricks/deceits of governments/business/people in power... or do you mean, Why will money always be something that there is not enough of? No, that's not true... What Colbert is saying is human nature and is true in the sense of how we perceive ourselves versus others. (Note his chicken would have been just as good if money had nothing to do with it, but purely his political/social standing). But money is still valuable even if everyone starts off with the same amount, as long as that isn't enforced afterwards (that would make it worth it, because you couldn't trade it)... In other words, yes money would still be valuable and scarce, but not because everyone has to have different amounts. Its just that statistically, of course everyone will have different amounts, because money represents a form of wealth, and we are not all equally wealthy, and probably nor should we be. Nope... this isn't right... some right conclusions Firstly, money represents wealth. It doesn't have to have a fixed worth of anything, it just has to represent wealth. People who can 'ignore human nature' are wealthy. They aren't struggling to eat, on the whole. Secondly, there is real scarcity in life. You have what is it, aprox 2e9 seconds of life... There is only so much land, sea and air, food, housing... etc... So, what is scarce is valuable, and what is scarce that can be tradeable for money means your money must also be scarce, or you can't trade it. That's the error... if money was worth nothing, then a basic income would also be meaningless. What is 20k if you can't trade it for anything, because everyone has infinite of it. On the topic of if deficits matter, I really don't know enough about that... I think in the long term the government should balance its budgets and pay off its debts - especially when things are going well... less so when they're not. That's not to say a basic income isn't worth something. I believe a wealth tax would be the right way to go... everyone declares their wealth in terms of a number, you pay your tax on that basis, if someone wants they can buy you out at your declared rate. After balancing budgets to reduce the deficit, you could pay out a basic income... money flows up much faster than it trickles down, so everyone should be happy. (Except the wealthy who pay high taxes, but there are good reason's why they should in terms of efficient use of wealth). See... money is still scarce, but people can afford to eat. That's not important... its actually good. What you're talking about is investment. That's a good thing... Which is why you tax wealth, to encourage people to save and invest... to make their wealth productive, to pay their taxes on it. Again, if you remove money from your equation, that is really the nature of any form of ownership... You can use your wealth in land or factories if you had no money. So, yes... money is some sort of ticketing system, it is a proxy for calculating fungible wealth. It must always (by definition) be scarce... but we can still pay everyone a minimum out of the taxes we collected above. (These completely replace almost all other forms of taxes btw). You are still wrong... Banks create money with an accounting trick, yes... and they should get certain protection from a central bank, that also makes sense. In fact, anyone should be allowed operate a fractional reserve bank (without the regulations that make them oligopolies)... without restriction on the fraction... multiplying their money by lending it out (based on the fact that a sufficient amount remains in deposit to cover actual withdrawals)... But... here's the problem... if you fuck that up, and all your money goes, you should be forced to go bankrupt and the central bank / insurance (assurance?) agency (if you chose to use one) bails out the individual account holders. Instead, the government bailed the banks out... that is a huge problem. The money should have gone to the poor, not the rich who fucked up, that's for sure. This is definitely an example of political wealth (derived from capital wealth) being converted directly into capital wealth - its bad. No, the government can print money, but you must realise that in the end it must cause inflation. In the extreme, if everyone was given 100Trillion tomorrow, how much is the price of bread going to be? Also, who would invest $1 today in america (ultimately where the debts come from) if tomorrow it was worth 1 trillionth of what it was today... You have to pay back your debts, which means, you have to run a balanced budget. Also, if money is debt (and I think in a way it is too), with the exponential growth, which is okay at a rate, you inevitably get people fall off the end... this is okay, they are just now declared bankrupt... it just means they cannot borrow any more money, they would still get the basic income, so they still survive... It also means all (most) of their debt is cleared, so it is the lenders who actually take the brunt of that individual's financial pain. I actually believe its possible to run a government in surplus all the time... Why waste energy, as a country, to chase paying off debt? Because otherwise you are actually making it worse... It just means you aren't taxing enough or spending too much. This simply isn't sustainable in the long run... If you inflate money, but don't tax wealth, you will eventually have a surplus of worthless money, but no house or food. The rich won't need money to own everything, and finally, no one will want your money or want to invest in the government. Money isn't all wealth, but its a form of wealth. Wealth represents scarcity. You have to take all wealth into consideration, and what role money plays in that. Because automation is irrelevant Only what people are willing to pay for bread... which is now a lot more, because everyone has a lot more money, but the same amount of bread. You really find this difficult to understand? How about how much you charge to give blowjobs? Before you had a 100T, you'd do them for 50 bucks (or whatever crack costs)... why would you do a blowjob now for 50 bucks when you got a 100T in your hands? Suddenly the price of blowjobs has gone up, even though its production is still automaton. No, its economics... not phsyics It is at least as real as your emotions. Biology isn't false because chemistry is true. Chemistry isn't false because Physics is true. This is called emergent phenomenon. You either have to admit the price of blowjobs would go up, or that you have a theory of economics with a school of 1. No, bad evasion man... At the fundamental level of it, you have to admit that the scarcity of money affects prices. It should be just as obvious that if we called every $1 a hundred dollars... that everything would suddenly be a hundred times more in price... but worth exactly the same. And money is only one form of wealth too... and wealth is always scarce, we can't all own the whole planet each. no, because you are talking about the goal, but ignore the roadmap. Capitalism IS the roadmap to post-scarcity. But, right now, in reality, you have to deal with it. Not until you solve real world scarcity Even infinite virtual worlds doesn't solve the single real world scarcity problem. Unproductive wealth Houses are scarce... so people who can afford to hoard them. Without a wealth tax, there is no incentive not to hoard it. This is why a wealth tax is important... It means that wealth must be used productively. In this case, there would be an incentive to either sell the houses (for more productive forms of wealth) or make sure they are rented (to cover the wealth tax). This is why you're idea of non scarce money is stupid... Even if money isn't scarce (impossible) houses ARE... and would remain so... I might literally have no money, but if I own half the houses in the world, you bet my belly would be fat and my dick's getting sucked. A wealth tax, coupled with a basic income, is a viable solution to our upcoming problems. No, it really isn't... Its human nature, because the nature of reality is scarcity... We evolved when everything was scarce, so its natural to make that real world scarcity into personal abundance. Its not a matter of being 'mean'... Its a matter of making sure we (on a psychological level) that we don't personally ever have to face scarcity again. The holding of houses into an economic problem... its just a bad allocation of resources. And the fix to that is a wealth tax... think about it. Yes... next question please $ Time you could have spent learning $ Yes, that's true, but its missing the point... You REALLY need to learn about Opportunity Cost... Its a very basic economics theorem, and says, every time you have a choice to make, the Opportunity Cost of making that choice, is the value of the next best thing you could have had if you hadn't made that choice. You could have had that instead, but it is what you have to give up to make the choice you finally choose. EVERYTHING has an Opportunity Cost. The time you spent teaching someone, yes, reinforces your knowledge on that subject and is great... but you had to make a choice to give up something else you probably would have ALSO liked to have done... such as research a tangential topic that's been bothering you, even eat, drink, sleep or smoke crack. Once you realise that there is a lot of inescapable scarcity in life -- and that almost everything has an associated OC, you can begin to understand economics. Yes... and the point is that there is one now you're getting somewhere. Would each have similar Oppurtunity Costs $ Not individually and not in aggregate either. You'd need an infinite number of them to make all choices equally meaningless overall... An infinite number of universes in a single universe. Hmmmm... scarcity. but not an infinity of superpositions $ In a finite universe $ c, conservation of energy $ proof or STFU Oh... there's an OC involved... surprise? Energy-momentum conservation then... and the laws of thermodynamics etc... Anyway, I said prove it... not some speculative bullshit of one (not so good?) interpretation of gr... Prove actual work can be obtained 'for free' in the absence of energy gradients. Hint: No amount of googling will help you - if this was doable - it would be big news, or the world wouldn't exist anymore... one of those two. Its not the social argument... Its that this is far from 'proof' that you can get 'free energy' without energy gradients... Its not even proof of the conservation of energy-momentum... This does not exist -- yet, and may never exist. What you're missing is the difference between what you would like to exist, and what actually does exist. Its like george washington was an idiot for not basing his economy around the ability to fly millions of tons of goods around the world every day... what a retard, right? You are saying... economics is stupid... Opportunity Cost doesn't real because free energy will happen one day -- yet there is no free energy today and there are REAL Opportunity Costs involved in even looking for it. If we only had an egg, we could have chickens to make eggs for us. Non scarce dollars have no value, are not dollars Ending art... now I hate you. No, value in the opportunity cost $ No... it just means the OC of each $ is much less therefore each $ is WORTH much less. You decrease real value of each $ because you have decreased what you have to forgo to get a dollar, therefore you cannot get any real value (bread) for your new dollar if it is no longer scarce. That's because they don't totally oversupply M1 You have no idea of what money even is... Why the fuck do you even WANT money? The answer is because it IS fucking SCARCE!! Lets invent a currency right now... lets call them traneros... Well make them just like you want... anyone who wants a tranero just declares on k5 that they have a tranero... Here we go... I'm gonna declare that I have 10 traneros... Now, will you go upvote my last 100 comments for a tranero? No? A million traneros? A Billion? Is there a fucking problem with tranero supply here? Why not? Because you can just declare yourself that you now have traneros... there's no tranero scarcity, it cannot represent wealth because it has no opportunity cost. Would you upvote my last 100 comments for a kilo of gold? I think you probably would and saying otherwise is complete bullshit -- why? Gold isn't money, its marginally useful in electronics, but not enough to justify its cost, it doesn't keep you warm, dry or feed you... its quite rare... people like shiny... that's all... But in order to obtain a kilo of gold you have to forgo a fuck load of other options... Gold has Opportunity Cost and so it has VALUE which has nothing to do with anyone having more of it than anyone else... you can go dig it up right out of the fucking ground yourself, but your too fucking lazy -- in other words -- you can't afford the opportunity costs involved... nothing to do with greed or meanness. YOU. This why you don't understand wtf you're talking about. Please read up AND UNDERSTAND opportunity cost. SCARCITY MOTHERFUCKER DO U SPEAK IT? $ Its not your food... You have no automatic right to it. What right do you have to my food, that I spent my energy and OC in growing? What do I get in exchange for that? Grow you own goddamn food. Rather, I'll spend my energy doing something else I'll store my grain for longer. I'll feed my grain to sheep and have more sheep, rather than feeding it to you. I can eat all the food and sheep I want and not share a single thing... and STILL not leave a single piece of food to rot. I'll trade my sheep/food for things I actually need, like water, tractors, gold and guns... rather than useless traneros. Fuck it... If I'm wealthy enough, I'll stop growing food and just open and open a giant rally course - payed in gold. If you want my food, you better compensate my efforts somehow, grow your own, or go hungry bitch. Its not mean... its LAZY... LIKE YOU WHY AREN'T YOU GROWING MY FOOD? why is your crack more important then my right to eat? I NEED TO EAT TOO! Who is making the fucking food? You aren't willing to! But you EXPECT someone ELSE to do the WORK so you can eat like some privileged fat fuck for free. So, what your saying... is that one man still has to do the work of 100 slaves. As long as its not you, its okay. Well, fuck you then. Dude... you grew some fucking weed... You are not farming on an industrial scale. I am lucky enough to have a 3k acre farm to chill out on when I feel like... You have NEVER seen people work as hard as those poor bastards. You have no idea how much work it takes to make a place like that viable. The cost involved in obtaining machinery, seed and fertiliser. Looking after livestock, mulesing, drenching, feeding, watering and shearing sheep. Fixing fucking machines all day long. Fixing fences - the fucking fences. Hours and hours of complete monotony, putting in seed, spraying herbicides, pesticides and harvesting. Nobody... and I mean absolutely not a single fucking sole on this entire planet would give a rats arse about it beyond their own requirements to feed themselves... UNLESS there was SOME KIND of INCENTIVE to do so - you either let them do it voluntarily in exchange for some goods, or you put a gun to their head and MAKE them do it. Seriously... Nobody does that kind of back breaking life time long labour for shits and giggles. Yet fat fucks like you think it all comes from some magic sky feary. Ignore this reality, and everyone, especially you, would starve. u r an actual crackpot $ NO MOTHERFUCKER If I was arguing your theory was wrong because you were a crackpot, that would be ad hom. Its an observation that you are a crackpot because you're theories are so obviously flawed. At least learn to use argument by logical fallacy correctly. Fuck, I'm losing faith in you with every comment. There's no argument anymore, you're tarded FO $ Yes, you are provably and deliberately ignorant $ I noticed you stopped commenting here about a week ago... And you were saying that comments were not-scarce except for art. scarcity. Yet, you stopped commenting... EXACTLY as my ECONOMIC THEORY predicted. Are artificial limits getting in your way, or do you concede my point now? Nope... I don't get it. I assume it shows inflation relative to M1 money growth? So, you are saying, over those ranges there isn't much correlation? I mean if M1 went 100k% increase... maybe this would affect inflation? Still doesn't change what I asked you before... you are trying to just pretend it wouldn't change anything when you damn well know it would. Finally... So money is still going to be scarce to most people then. I thought this was what you were on about... So, what do you mean that money is artificially scarce then? Then everyone who wants too ends up with 100T And your back to the start again explaining why you're blowjobs won't become ridiculously expensive (in old terms, but exactly what they are worth as always in new terms)... Money without scarcity is stupid... I still can't work out if you're really that dumb or just trolling. If you are saying that it is scarcer.... or rather more poorly distributed... than what it could be... then we can agree... To think money could ever be relatively abundant though, I think makes it basically useless. Its an abstract measure of a form of wealth... We can't get rid of scarcity altogether, without some free energy breakthrough where we can just ignore the realities of physics though. So its always going to be 'somewhat' scarce, yes? Matter falling on the out shell of our dark star next question pleaes No its not... space is boiling with energy and we can only exploit energy gradients. Did you read the comment, or just the title? $ I assume c and conservation of energy, yes $ Not overall and almost definitely doesn't create usable gradients... Sure... if they ever break those things, some fantastic possibilities... I still suspect there will be a lot of scarcity about, even then. I don't think this will happen. Does he still think that? $ You mean once there was actual evidence. I said I'd believe it if I saw it... I just think its exceedingly unlikely... Its worth it for a few freaks to try, of course... but there's an OC to pay in the mean time. I think the apocalypse is making you tense $ I made a reddit story about this for you http://www.reddit.com/r/kuro5hit/comments/14ram6/comments_lildebbie_loses_it_ove r_redditk5/ It is markov right? Do me!! $ Obviously... but what about hinton's recursive factor state model? Try hinton's hessian free recursive factors model? There's something really fishy about that that I don't like. With the RBM models... Hinton was really saying, look, here's a model of how the brain can work. You apply a local update rule at each neuron (CD) and you get a sort of global learning... even backprop basically does this... I get the feeling you can't make factors work using anything like this (something about maybe the derivatives being nearly orthogonal to the solution) - which is why they go hessian free like conjugate gradient decent... But... conjugate gradient decent is nothing like a local update rule... is it? There's no mechanism in the brain to that can do that, is there? So, while its great from a machine learning pov... it seems to me to be unlikely the mechanism our brains work with... and that lack of simplicity also worries me. In theory... wouldn't factors be equivalent to a large enough deep RBM where similar similarity constraints were placed on the previous and current state? Replace the factors with multilayer rbm (sigmoid) nets and use standard training. Attacked of the Empire Read my latest Reddit Story "Attacked of the Empire". In which I yell at one of the decoys from the famous chris hanson show to catch a predditor. It appears that reddit does not agree with my short burst of vitriol. Am I wrong to think that there's something wrong about that show? Maybe It sounds like that's life giving her some karma, so for sure, that's correct. But, I thought my comment there was worth it for its absurdity alone... pretty sure k5 would get that, probably most of reddit normally too, but clearly in this case, not. I do honestly get that vibe from him Like the character in Donny Darko. Or every family values republican that gets caught with a male crack whore. Priests... Etc... Either that, or he's a victim in some way, or just really media savy, and only cares about the $s. Who do you think pushed the UN drug laws? The UN is 100% puppet of the US, especially in regards to drug laws. America uses the UN to force the rest of the world to follow its stupid view of morality. It is the because of the UN that neither the Netherlands nor Portugal could actually take a fully legalised approach to drugs, because it goes against this convention. I don't think any country can without losing some status in the UN. Of course, with veto power, the US can do whatever it likes regarding the UN, most other countries don't have that choice. This is why, its unfortunate but true, that before the rest of the world has a hope of having sane drug laws, the US must first be convinced to have sane drug laws. Isn't that what I said? roughly? $ Snoop Lion Leaves Kuro5hin Snoop Lion has left Kuro5hin, possibly for good. Main article here. I hope this puts an end to the type of negativity users, such as nateo, have been spreading. Is it because you don't like black people? $ Not as bad as 4chan... there were some subreddits that deliberately skirted very close to the law... /r/jailbait, /r/creepshots... but I think negative publicity eventually got them shut down... I've seen worse written stuff here than on reddit though. When I was young and poor I used to crack these games instead of buying them. If you played a copied version of Frontier, you would get arrested as soon as you landed at a space port. I managed to fix this, but the game would then crash whenever you left a mining bot on a planet... which always depressed me, because it seemed like a cool idea not found in the original elite. I always smiled to myself when people offered to trade me my cracked version of elite for other games. Can anyone confirm that the mining bots worked properly in the legit game? Geoffrey Hinton Knows How The Brain Works An amazing thing happened, Geoffrey Hinton knows How the brain works. Carry On. I fucked the final... I got the gradient calculation right, but had the wrong sign... That was a stupid 2 points to throw away... The primary purpose of momentum is to speed up learning (which I knew)... but I thought it was because it damped oscillating gradient estimates... and that was the main purpose of it... but apparently I was wrong. (of course, rereading the question, I guess it has nothing to do with vanishing gradients). And I lost half a point on the CD-1 advantages over CD-10... I didn't say it had less variance... I kind of interpreted the question wrong... Yes, any given sample of CD-1 is going to be more clustered around a point than CD-10, so in that sense it has less variance... but I was thinking something like the variance in the samples over an entire run, in which case it wouldn't make a difference... I read the question wrong. I should have given it another day to review my answers, I might have gotten full marks then (maybe not... I always miss stupid stuff). So, overall 94.6% or thereabouts... Above average I think, but below the top tier and nothing that would stand out... story of my life... You? Not to be rude but did you try on the final test, or you just happy to get a certificate and didn't care? I expected better of myself, only because, like I said before, I've been (attempting) to work with (as a hobby) RBMs for a few years now. Also, I thought I might have a chance of being near to the top... and if something happened like in the AI course (before coursera and udacity), Thrun basically offered the top 1k students work (through google and others). Nothing lost, and def worth doing. Why? What didn't you like? Anything specific? $ Yeah, I agree that they tried to put too much into one course. Andrew Ng's course should have been a prerequisite... then he could assume everyone knew at least backprop, and not have to go over it again. Then there could have been more room for his other stuff. Maybe even split the course in two. A basic course, and an advanced course. On the other topic, not so sure... they have to use a common framework for teaching... but I found the programming side of the course really lacking... in that it really didn't cover octave at all. Also, they are mostly interested in breaking records on well known datasets... so it makes sense that's what we were given... code to process well known datasets. Still... I'm pretty sure you can adapt what you've gotten to what you want to do. So they weren't that far off... were they? We are watching you. That's one opinion $ This is clearly an example of the harm caused by Slut Shaming. Clearly no single man could have been enough for her. She was made this way by an accident of evolution. Society puts her down, but it lost a true asset. In a healthy society we should have celebrated this woman. She should have felt confident and free enough to make many men happy, fulfilling her physical needs and making a comfortable living at the same time. She should have been the high priestess of the tribe, not someone conflicted between her physical needs and the desire to conform to society's expectations that she be a 'normal' middle class office worker who leaves sex till the weekend or at the office christmas parties. Calling someone a slut is just a way of announcing to the world that you aint gettin enough. I really would like to see some of them raging at K5's level of political correctness. I think with their success in the past, they're now on a mission to clean up the entirety of reddit... which, if they succeed, will destroy it. I think we need reddit to be a bit more like k5. This If Bob thinks money literally don't real... what's the incentive to get all the unpleasant but important shit done? Can you do our most common unique words? . Sweet, thanks for the 'awareness'. This is speculated to be the secret to the NSA's fairytale success in absorbing information from the commotion gathered from the terrorist diminished signalling operations. Its used extensively in psyops... so even if they reproductively reprogram pubmed, you're still the bravest. That's freaky I didn't grab a copy of the my 1 grams file, and its not there now, but I did see it. I'm not 100% sure on what your algorithm is doing... but somehow those words seem to have 'meanings' much more than the original file, like there are many more kind of sentence fragments within that list. Cool. That is indeed a nice heuristic feature detector you got there. Is that something you invented on your own or did you read it somewhere? Here's a cool semi related ML task I just thought of... if you take a post, and with that data predict who posted it. To a first order, you could just take the diary's bag of words model and (cross/dot/inner/ I fucking forget... take the sum of multiplying each corresponding word count in the input feature with the corresponding word in the above feature detectors you created for each person) multiply the two to give you a number that you can then feed, along with a bias term, into a softmax logistic regression function, training the weight of that term and the bias... I don't know. If you don't add a bias term, ignore the softmax part, and just select the largest value from the product... you would have your most likely poster (but assuming everyone was equally likely)... you just wouldn't know how exactly likely. I don't know, it's just an idea, as something like that setup gives you a metric of the quality of your feature detectors. Sigs are also an unreliable dead give away. I'm not sure you're really interested in that aspect? Would be interesting to make a standardised dataset? I'm not sure if that's what you're doing... I'm guessing the raw data is pretty large? But, it might be possible just to have something we can all agree on, if anyone is interested in trying AI tasks against it or something we can compare performance? This is interesting I'm pretty impressed with your heuristics... would not have occurred to me... I'm more interested in applying some of the stuff I've picked off hinton and trying to get the machine to pick up on stuff like this... I don't know, would be fun to try. (also am bad at coming up with heuristics like this). Still... its always good to have things to compare too... so, I'd like to see your heuristics applied too. If what you've downloaded is on the publicly accessible internet anyway, and you're not making it available primarily in a human oriented format... and especially if you do some extra filtering on the content, I think you might be able to get around the copyright issue? n-grams for example would almost certainly be completely okay... just not really adequate to what I'm thinking. (beyond markov chains). I don't want to directly piss off rusty if he is firmly against the idea, but even if it was technically not necessarily one hundred percent legal... even that doesn't matter until someone actually complains (comply with DMCA and remove upon request? Just remove that user from the dataset), and the chances of even that happening would be low. The alternate is building a common download data tool that raids k5... Pretty sure there's no copyright problem with that, but it would be more rude to rusty's servers. I find it weird that the two would be equivalent in result, but not in law. Final possibility... Get everyone's permission you want to include in the dataset... tedious... Was surprised Mike's comments didn't compress down that much (1.1M). Please leave these up for a few days... Waiting for a futurama episode to finish downloading... and got to get more internet... I'm on pay as you go mobile* and nearly out of credit. *I don't have broadband and this is the only way I can get internet when I'm in out rural way. Thanks... I will look at all of this... Doesn't the DMCA basically give you a right to publish anything until the copyright owner requests you to remove it? Isn't this how google can allow anyone to put videos, even though they might be copyrighted songs and stuff? Basially, doesn't the DMCA give you the benefit of the doubt on this one? I got the corpus and diary archive, thanks. Also: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3s4s0u/ Examine Existential Expected Experience!! Combinatorial complaining creatures debate decrease derivatives. A Place to Dump Your Kuro5hit I have created /r/kuro5hit. Please to be going to fuck yourselves. Try my Pole... Its Money! No, I see no use for it either. Thankyou, that is all... for now. PS: I just want to say, and try not to take this personally, that almost everyone on this website is actually wrong, I just thought I'd let you know. Not all in the same way, in each their own unique way, every single one of you fucks is completely retarded, useless, redundant and/or outright dangerous... and no matter how often you are told, you will never understand it... but I trust evolution will have its way with you... I'm sure that doesn't apply to you though. Good Day and may the outcome of chance and chaos be in your favour. Actually... Its not meant to be... but I'm thinking I might have to remove N0574's kuro5hits tumbler page... I'm not even sure that's legal in my jurisdiction. On the other hand... is that N0574's webpage? I have written an official policy on the matter http://www.reddit.com/r/kuro5hit/comments/1463x4/an_important_message_from_the_m oderators/ So you will have to go to other parts of reddit. Don't destroy my subreddit With great power comes great responsibility. Use it wisely. You hold two worlds in your hands now. One old, one new. Two worlds divided by hate, but united by love. Therefore I, aka prokra5ti, through the power vested in me, of synergy, and the proactive alignment of core value added customer focused and market feedback driven strategies and unique selling points, 'Mod' you, Rarek, so that you, just like the pheonix that symbolises kuro5hin's ever lasting glow, may shine. Why not take your $5 Elite 1% Ivory Tower Views of a very successful Web2.0-3G-ng, post 9/11, Ajax powered, massive open online multiplayer linkfarm portal tubesite, and stick them somewhere where they're welcome? What has failed? $ That was true in the past... but this is the first time kuro5hin users have been exposed to the concept of Web2.0 Collaborative Media, where the users of the site collaborate to create media using the dynamic aspects of HTML, only made available recently with the use of Ajax (now called Cif in europe, I have no idea why) applied to the web. Kuro5hin is too tied to the concept of HTML Text based Forms to successfully compete against such an exciting new medium. The difference is like that between writing a well thought out letter to the editor to be published in a dead-tree format newspaper vs recording yourself taking a dump on youtube to the hardcore beats of modern rap music like Psy's Gangnam Style (I checked, they exist, no link needed). The old ways always die out and are replaced by their superior forms enabled by modern technology. I expect Rusty will be sucking my dick in a few month's time just to have a small percentage of his worst trolls back -- and this has been my plan all along. You only have to look at the numbers to see that the writing is on the wall. Life/Reddit/K5 is like a sewer... $ I already gave you 'Empire'... What more do you want? Thumbnails of Chicks and Smurfs Sell Well That's why I thought this story was important enough for /r/kuro5hit. kuro5hits I posted this for you and a better title for trane's diary. Torrent Up economics. That's sounds like a pretty corrupted version of libertarianism... I like the name anyway, it sounds very freedomy, and that's a good thing, right? Personally, I think a wealth tax is the way to go. We tax land owners, company owners, bank account holders, stock owners, house owners, ip owners, anything and everything that can be accounted for and assigned an owner. As a first order approximation, you pay a fixed adjusted percentage of your total wealth to the government each year/quater/whatever. This encourages investment in productive wealth. There is no need for sales taxes or income taxes, or capital gains taxes or transfer taxes, except to explicitly alter the allocation of resources... these all slow down the market. Finally, the market should be designed to benefit society, and on the whole society is the individual, or citizen. Therefore, the benefit of those taxes should accrue to all citizens, some of that money will be used by the government to provide services (health care, military and infrastructure, and paying off debt)... the rest should be split evenly amongst all individuals as a weekly paycheck. The average individual is going to buy nikes and beer... but also food and shelter... in exact proportion to what they can afford... this will drive the market to the benefit of the individual, and that money will very rapidly torrent up. Where it gets turned into wealth etc... Libertarianism is not Anarchism $ That's a tea party member, not a libertarian Can we say classical libertarian? These groups have come along and taken the name Old School Classical Libertarianism meant something completely different. Milton Friedman and Jon Stuart Mill are examples. They don't propose no government, just correctly limited government. They don't propose no taxes, but the right taxes (wealth tax and basic income are libertarian ideas). They don't propose no laws and regulation upheld through force, they propose that laws and regulation should be appropriately limited. Classic Libertarians even support welfare, and many health care. I can't throw all that philosophy away because a bunch of gun toting, no tax, christ bothering, selfish, retard, rednecks decide to call themselves the same thing. That's not how its supposed to work. No single name can cover a person's entire political belief spectrum, but, there are general fields that can cover a large proportion of that. If someone says they're vegetarian, you know they're gonna be fussy bastards at a banquet. You just don't know the specifics, like are eggs or fish a type of vegetable... what if cast's a shadow? These are legitimate debates within vegetarianism. So, unless you have a better term than Libertarian for my political beliefs, you better STFU. Of course, I welcome any correction or further pigeon holing, if you think that's appropriate. WTF is wrong with you? $ Happy World Aids Day Enjoy you're aids and suck my pole faggots. I wonder if posts like this will one day affect my political career? Unfortunately technical dificulties meant I didn't get to post it during the main aids day celebrations. Simple solution to end aids... Mandatory Aids Tattoos. This can be extended to all other STDs. Give it about 30 to 50 years... no more aids. I see no obvious flaws either $ That's true, but its a matter of statistics... Mandatory Aids testing every 3 years or so... Yeah, you would still have carriers without markings, but that population should decrease rapidly and exponentially to zero. (Although I haven't done the maths on this). LOL those faggots at /r/kuro5hin have locked their subreddit and deleted my post. What a bunch of soft cocked faggots. Their policy of post anything, good or bad, pro or con, lasted exactly 1 post! By Bug Chasers you mean people who attack those with the tattoos? If so, I think the tattoos can be put somewhere discrete, like in between your ass cheeks. Even wearing a thong people aren't likely to see it. Or, do you mean, people who want to get the disease? Too bad, as long as they get the tat's why is that a problem? The only people left who might still get aids without realising it are the blind... "Fuck the poor" -- Jesus Jesus said many things, I'm not sure that his overriding message was the improvement of the conditions of the poor. This is so bad its nearly sig worthy. He didn't say go out and preach to the poor He told the rich to give all their belongings to the poor. Yes, it makes the rich poor, but it also makes the poor a little less poor. Good point on the second paragraph. That was good I wonder if anyone didn't fall for it. Also the first comment 'ThisIsNotFunny' -- lol. I too enjoy reddit I still like trolling SRS... Its quite funny making rape jokes... until you've got someone in the conversation who was raped and they're all like a rabbit in the headlights... Then it just gets hard. I'm on an anti-anti-friendzone anti-troll-troll with them at the moment. I like their edit button too but I am absolutely roflcoptering (praise satan) over here right now over the term 'skellington fucker'... well done. Why do you all go out shopping today? What's the deal with that (and airline food)? So, its literally just a sale because everyone had a day off? Now do all that from a rational basis, realising that there is no god. Scientific rationality requires the rejection of god. The existence of a god is actually an incompatible theory. I've said it before, I'll say it again - religion is a tool used by the cynical and powerful to control the stupid and gullible. Yes, science came out of religion, that's true... There is no rational mathematical epistemology, or whatever, that's an oxymoron... because they all start out with God=True, and ignore the contradictions. There is no contradiction with God=False, none. Its true that schools, and certain types of thoughts came out of religion, some christian, some muslim (numerals, zero)... doesn't say anything more than the way industrial society formed out of feudal society. The new state is wholly better than the previous... as science obsoletes religion. No, the belief in such a statement is not a religion, it is due to observation, not faith. That's the fucking contradiction I'm on about Right, so science must assume no god. Science is about the world, and what can be observed and inferred, but god is outside the world (of science), so cannot be observed or inferred. Therefore, there is no god... QED God is now reduced to 'everything outside of science'. God of the gaps... or the unknowable... but god then has no influence on the world, and is a variable that can be entirely ignored. Only with no god do you not have these problems. How about, just accept there is no god into your heart? Science can say something about god... God doesn't play with sub-atomic particles. It doesn't say nothing about god... it assumes no god... if there was a god, we'd see him screwing around with matter all the time in unpredictable ways. Science with God --> God did it. Science without God --> Why did it? Actually science is going to answer all these questions much better than religion can, that's for sure. Most of it comes down to lighting up certain neurons, in a system that's been refined through millions of years of evolution. Bach/Mozart don't exist because some god chose them to make good music, they exist and are remembered, because their melodies are enjoyed by creatures that evolved to enjoy those sounds. You could choose to marry someone that maximises your genetic long term future... but then again you don't have to do that either. But, you could look at society, make observations and hypothesis that are testable... or examine current research and come to your own conclusions... or do what makes you happy... or you let someone tell you who god says you should marry instead. F = ma +/- God God is indistinguishable from Gaussian Noise LOL So, it assumes no god, and it works... If it didn't work, you might have a point, but it does... So the assumption holds up in every scientific experiment conducted ever. So, now you've pushed god out of the scientific, measurable, observable (all things visible and invisible to the human eye), world, what are you left with? A god that does not interact with this world at all, indistinguishable again from no god at all. wat? $ No disagreement there... I know plenty of really smart sciencey people who are religious, and genuinely good, generous, thoughtful people. It still confuses me though. God of the gaps theory... Although, at some point, we could just give up and say... maybe god isn't hiding in those few remaining gaps? You might be right about our limits though... there's lots of things that point to that possibility - Godel's theory... Einstein once said something about trying to work out the clock by looking at its face, or some shit like that. Chaos theory ruins long term predictability (well, medium range if we go out towards heat death of the universe... maybe). Certainly no individual can ever know everything. On the other hand, stephen hawkings has a theory of time that goes back before the big bang... Medical science can tell us what happens as you die... maybe? But, yeah, the existential problems are probably the real reason we invent god. The brain doesn't seem to have evolved to comprehend its own death, in-fact, quite the opposite probably... to only consider and ensure its own survival... but now we know we die, well... its a worry, and god is a pretty nice salve I imagine for people who need it. So, really... then, you got to say, I know rationally that there is no god... but please god save me from all this... shit. I think there's another problem though, of people seeing this weakness in others and offering them a kind of false hope. Suffer this life and you will be rewarded in heaven... or worse, you don't need material wealth in this life, give it to us... er, I mean god. Emergent phenomena is all you really need. $ Logit(P(God)) <<< -100 Is that better? There's a huge problem here though, that I think enables you to rule out god altogether... Lets say you die, go up the the pearly gates of heaven, st peter lets you in, and there's this dude there and everyone calls him god. He's all powerful and runs the place, and everyone loves him, blah blah blah... How do you know that he is the god... and not just some uber powerful being that wants to be god? How do you know there's not another being even more all powerful and omnipotent than that guy? There's not a point at which you can say... well, this guy is obviously more powerful than any being in my experience, therefore he is the end of the line, the one true god. There are lots of powerful things that you might consider practically god, but that's a different thing altogether. What about Bob? Bob, I saw your statement about programming in the ML forums and thought I might offer up some advice. Also Ng vs Hinton ML courses. Finally, a step by step guide on building it yourself. Hinton's NN that you want to get your hands on is actually very simple to build. The problem is, you don't know how to build one, so it looks complex. You should really take Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning. Andrew explains the very basics of machine learning much better than Hinton. He also walks you through octave, gets you building very basic neural networks very quickly, and explains how to implement vectorised solutions correctly in octave. Concretely, its a very practical, here's what works right now, foundational course in building and using nets and ml in general. Hinton, also tries to cover this, but his focus is really more on pushing the cutting edge of today's research, and he's been doing that for over 25 years. 'Dropout' is his latest idea, and you hear him repeat it all the time, was only denied publishing this year. He more walks you through the history of ideas tried, and tells you when some work and some don't, but also covers more advanced architectures and techniques. So things like the fundamental difference between RBMs and Autoencoders, where as Ng just teaches you how to build actual autoencoders using conjugate gradient descent. One day Ng will explain Hinton's ideas to you. So, if you want to try your hand at hinton's family tree network, take andrew ngs course, and then it should really be obvious to you what hinton has been talking about. I don't know the exact architecture, he skips the finer details in the video, and I haven't found the paper, but I'll give you what I think will work. You probably should be able to implement this anyway, assuming you have passed the quizzes. It comes down to calculating a cost function (and its derivatives wrt the network weights) over two sets of vectors, normally compiled into two matrices, of input and target output examples. In this case the cost function will probably be the softmax* cross-entropy of the predicted person and the training example person. * Its possible the output layer is a logistic, you can try them both. Each layer is a weight matrix, that you multiply by the input matrix (or previous layer's output matrix) and then you take the sigmoid function for each of its outputs, ie, logistic units, except for the final layer which is softmax. ie, implement the vectorised form of: z_i = sum(weight(i,j) * x_j, over j) y_i = sigmoid(z_i) softmax is: y_i = exp(z_i) / sum(exp(z_j), over j) This will give you a prediction, which gives you the error with respect to the target matrix averaged over all examples, which you then back-propagate to the weights, using the chain-rule. Seriously bro, do you even derive? Then update the weights by adding the negative gradient times the learning rate. Try different learning rates in the range 0.1 to 10e-6. If your error increases from iteration to iteration, try a smaller learning rate (say, 1/3 of the current rate). Sometimes a lower learning rate can mean faster convergence... normally slower... Its worth finding a good rate and trying it factor of 3s or so. I think the local to distributed relationship *input weights* and the distributed to local relationship *output weights* are tied... I've checked the math, and you just average the gradients together. He says the distributed encodings are 6 units, but I couldn't find the number of hidden mapping units... I would suggest a number like 64 to 256... you can try a few different ones, say 16 or 1024 (seems way too high). This is such a small example, in terms of training examples, that there is no need for anything complex like minibatches, momentum, local learning rates or dropout. Just calculate the average error over the entire training set, and minimise it with simple gradient decent. Also, a numerical gradient checker is invaluable to make sure you have implemented the cost function and its derivatives correctly. You have to initialise the weight matrices to some small random values to break symmetry. Hinton gives good theoretical values... off the top of my head, something like uniformly random over +/- 0.1/sqrt(inputs*outputs==matrix size) would work well. You probably also need weight decay to stop the numbers blowing up... You sum the square of the weights and multiply by the decay factor and add this to your cost function. The derivative of this is the decay factor times the weight. This new cost function should decrease on every iteration, but your real cost should still be calculated with zero weight decay (and this is what you want to minimize overall, but it might not decrease on every iteration now.) WD values are between 0, for no weight decay to 1, total weight decay... 0.9 is typical. So, the total meta-parameters you need to 'learn' are: - the learning rate, guess - 0.1 or 0.001 - the number of hidden input units, guess - 32 - the weight decay factor, guess - 0.9 Weight decay factor is related to generalisation, but I'm not sure what we are trying to generalise here... Is overfitting a problem? I think with this setup, you can train a network to the limits of the bottlenecks? Do we not care about validation? If you wanted to get serious, use k-fold cross-validation. You split the training examples k ways, and create k training sets of (k-1)/k*examples and k validation sets of 1/k*examples... and you train k networks on one of the k training sets, until you find the network that minimizes the error function on the associated validation set. This gives you k, well trained networks. You find the meta-parameters by minimising the average error of these k networks. You then train k networks with these meta-parameters. At test time, you take the normalised (weighted?) geometric mean of the outputs of these k networks as your answer.... If you really wanted to get an idea of generalisation, you'd have kept a test set of examples that neither you or any network had ever seen before, ever, and calculate the error of that... Its still a random number from a distribution, so your network could easily be worse than this on new data if you did something wrong or are unlucky. Or you forget k-fold validation and use dropout? Now, the question is the interface to subbot... You can implement all of that in ruby, but you probably have all of that (apart from the k-fold cross-validation) in octave if you've been doing the programming assignments. One more question, can you use/work in python? Also, no smoking weed in public library toilets, okay? Any questions? I've got plenty of implementations of variations of this - mnist, ollivetti, with rbms, autoencoders, logistic units, softmax, backpropagation, conjugate gradient, mini-batch, momentum, etc... I try variations of them all the time. None of them pretty either. I was building rbms before ngs course was ever onlne. None in ruby. I don't much care for the problem. Neither the family tree problem, nor the subbot integration problem. I'm gonna let you go ahead and do that, but I see everyone complaining about hinton's course, and its because ng's course should have really been a prerequisite. ng is about implementation, hinton about breakthrough theories. So, if you want to skip ng's course, what I blabbered about is exactly how to build it... you just you need to implement it. And I'm happy to help you do so if you have any questions I can answer. Fuck you retard... You don't know shit and won't listen to reason. Don't go around patronising everyone that you once took hinton's course, or managed to get someone else's java code to compile, while completely missing the point. I had higher hopes than this. P(You getting AI &pipe; Your Attitude) ~= 1e-12 Kill yourself. If you've really taken Ngs class and coded Jrec 15 years ago, and you did it from scratch, you would have, basically, give or take a few small errors, agreed with everything I said. What's stopping you putting hinton's family tree network together. Except for the 'bottleneck' trick, implied in the architecture, I think its in every other way a fairly straight forward network to train, no? DingDingDing... Correct... Its a toy example, I think I pointed this out somewhere before? Its still interesting for other reasons. But, the problem has nothing to do with preprocessing, and all to do with the infeasibility of training. Let me explain... In this example, he used only two family trees, with a handful of relationships, and only 24 people. You'll also notice that in the examples, nobody is both a grandchild of someone, and a grandparent of someone else. Because he only used 24 people in the example, he was able to shrink the representation down from 1 in 24 encoding, to 6 real numbers. (Assuming each neuron can encode one bit, gives 2^^6=64, more than enough bits)... Now imagine, we try this for 24M people... You need a whole lot more bits per person to correctly identify them. Lets say ln2(24M)~25 nuerons in the bottleneck. That's not quite as bad as I first thought, I suppose... Still... It requires a softmax output layer of 25*24M ~= 600 Million, parameters that need to be learned! From rules of thumbs that say you need about 10 examples per parameter to avoid overfitting, that means you need about 6e9 training examples... I don't think you'll have that... The other difficult thing is, you need to calculate the sum of the exponentials of the outputs of the softmax, so it requires you do 24M operations, not including comparisons to find the largest output, every time you present a training example. There may be a way around it though, and this is just an early thought... but, rearrange the network, to have three inputs, person A, person B and the relationship, and a single output which is either true or false (logistic function). For each person input, you don't need the 1 in 24M encoding anymore, because for any given inputs, you could equivalently provide just the bias (for everyone) and the weights that would have been connected to that person's encoding. The weights could be pulled out of a database, updated with the usual back propagation training method, and put back in the database. So, against each person in your tree, your store a 25 dimensional vector, rather than a single 25*24M weight matrix (although the two are equivalent). You could then provide person A, person B, and relationship, from your known database, as positive examples, and mutate one of the inputs (person A, person B or relationship) to create a false example and use that as training too. Similar to how the word model learned likely and unlikely words by providing 'false' examples. I have no idea how well this would work. Its a laudable goal, for sure... So, what do you mean by 'online heuristics taught to the running program'? What are you complaining about? You can go play video games now if you want... At what point will it be good enough? Maybe never? No matter how good the AI or the VR... something deep down will tell you its only a game. No one spends their entire life in the holodecks. I don't get it though... I gather you want the VR world so you could do whatever you wanted and no one could stop you... but... You still need to live in the real world... The VR still exists in the real world... Someone will have to maintain it... Even if they don't, someone will control it... and they would have the power to royally fuck up anyone stuck completely inside the VR... So I don't see the problem it solves. You still need real world laws, and learn to respect each other's rights, etc... even if just the right to be left alone to play video games all day - which will be considered as dangerous by some groups as drugs. dot dot dot So.... Heroin and crack next, right? Also... that was just one point... what about the whole, still being embedded / vulnerable in the real world problem? You gonna force everyone inside your VR too? $ Right, so you're in the machine, you want to be there your entire life. Who exactly is going to ensure your continued freedom of choice? If politics in the real world goes against you, they might just blow up all the VR's... No one in the VR world(s) ever speaks up or interacts with the real world, they are effectively dead, unused resources, so who will defend you? The contradiction you have, is that if you go full time in a VR and treat it like reality, no one will give a shit about you in reality. If you don't go full time into the VR world, because you still have to act in reality, you will be constantly acknowledging the non-reality of the VR world. No amount of VR is going to replace reality. VR will never be more than a video game exponentiated. Because, isolated in your VR world, no one will consider you even alive. You are inert in the real world, nothing more than useful raw materials to be exploited, or an obstacle to be removed. And who will care when you are? You will barely exist. Really? You still believe that? How cute. $ You starting to see the problem? You have to stand up to fight for your rights in the real world, because aint no one gonna give them to you for free. It doesn't matter how long you fight for this, its in the fundamental operation of the universe, that the moment you stop fighting, you lose. So you can never go offline into the VR world indefinitely, because sooner or later, you're going to have to deal with reality. Someone's always gonna harsh your buzz. wat? $ yes we do $ wrong $ Bullshit retard $ LOL christians Jesus - Sell your possessions, give to the poor, feed the hungry, care for the sick... Christians - PUSSY!!!!! I mean INSANELY HOT PUSSY!!!! Satan - PUSSY!!!!! Hot young beautiful pussy!!!! Be a rockstar, be all you can be, have it all. At least admit to yourself that Satan is the god you follow - goD might then give you some leeway when you die for living your life honestly. Right now you're boned, another hypocrite destined for the fires of hell... goD really hates hypocrites. LOL religion. Right... Satanic philosophy right there... Well, except for the fact that most satanists are really athiests. It would seem odd for a god to create a universe that operates on the opposite principals than what it intended... So good point... Except that there really doesn't seem to be a need for a god to explain the universe we observe. Just a bunch of crazy contradictory sky fairy myths cynically used to manipulate weak minded idiots, if you ask me. Still, I hate chritians and their hypocrisy... On the basis that I am actually god (just you know, temporarily human, for the fun of it, like jesus or something) I'm gonna torture those fuckers long and hard when they die. Dude, its just disrespect If you want people to let you live your life as you wish, then you also have to let them live their life as they wish. So, you have to respect any other person who might not want to be affected in any way by your activity their right not to be. This means, smoking in closed public spaces is out of order. If this was someone else's private property, you have to respect their right for you not to smoke on it. If this was your property, you have the right to tell those on it to get out. Outside, away from crowds in the open, then maybe its fair. Large open corporate semi-public spaces... scare me anyway... You got to have respect to get respect. Well assault is disrespect worthy of jail... You could view second hand smoke in a place you expect to be free of it as an assault, so it's not entirely unreasonable. I would think a day or night in jail, a couple of hundred bucks and a few months ban from the facility, and no need to declare it would be reasonable. The punishment may have been on the heavy side, but its not like it was entirely unwarranted. How would you feel, if the straight edge freaks discovered a vapour that nuetralised all forms of intoxicants, and that they went around, without irony, smoking it all the time. You get buzzed, then go to a public bathroom and are exposed to this vapour by some selfish cunt... Suddenly you're incredibly sober, and NO drug has any effect on you any more... How would you feel? Would that guy be in his rights do that? Why should the reverse be true? You never got a contact high? I have... Also, perception matters. I think the perception that your second hand smoke might affect me in someway is not unreasonable. If I want a clear head to study, why do you think you have the right to remove that from me? You're making us anti-prohibitionists look bad. You don't need science to know that some people find the smoke noxious. You have zero respect for other people's rights, but then cry that no one respects your rights. All I'm saying is don't smoke it in closed public spaces where you are forcing others to be exposed to it. Is that really such a difficult concept? Its the difference between saying you can practice mixed martial arts, and saying you can practice on anyone you like without their permission. Not the smell, the effect. If I open a can of pepper spray in a closed space, you aren't going to just complain about the smell. A smoker who has abstained for a while to concentrate on studying is going to get a much stronger second hand effect than a constant smoker, and this will not be welcome. Comparing pot to perfume or farts is hypobolic $ I bet lots of things do... allergy != stoned $ You intended too, and you were dumb to be seen $ Legalise pot, but don't smoke in the library Bob And one day in jail, a small fine and a few months suspension is okay if you do. Now stop your whining and get over it. I'm writing something for you, shutup Yes, 1 day in jail (presumably already served) and a $500 fine would be fine for judge of his own discretion to hand down for smoking weed in a public library, but not for the possession of weed... I don't like the permanent ban, its true it should be temporary... and the record of all of that should after a time, only be used in sentencing decisions for further offences, and not for things like job opportunities, welfare, and education funding or whatever. Get over your day in a box. You should have gotten longer retard $ Its too late for words... You've already fucked me up by the time I can talk to you about it. Maybe you think you would just 'talk it over' with a guy who's beating the crap out of you? You've got no leg to stand on now when they force substances like this heroin vaccine on you then. If you have the right to expose others to substances against their will, then they have the right to do so to you too. They had no choice to leave... They were studying, and needed to use the toilet. Don't use the toilet --> sex offender register/public indecency. Use the toilet --> get stoned because of you, diminish their ability to study. So, you deserve no choice either... mandatory intoxication vaccination for you. The fact that this understanding doesn't come naturally to you pretty much justifies your punishment... even though you don't understand why you were wrong, you're not likely to make the same mistake again. The system works. No good for the guy doing his summer resit who has the runs on the same floor as you. Why the fuck does it have to be a bathroom in a public facility... especially in a place where presumably people are trying to improve their minds? It would make more sense if it was a toilet in a bar, where people were destroying their minds already... at least their activities and yours would be partially related. Why couldn't you find a quiet outdoor spot to smoke your spliff and leave everyone else the fuck alone? Isn't that what you want for yourself? No it wasn't Someone knew you were smoking in there. IRLLOLING Status : LOLING OUT LOUD Quite a funny story really. Don't mock the powa!! Sounds like you were disrespectin his authoritah. Don't you know this is like one of the most important things in this guy's life? Keeping weirdos, stoners and general nuisances out of HIS library! You got to know how people with small amounts of power think. So its a very stupid place to spark up. You got to know the type of people who would be there on a holiday especially... They had no one else to target! So, thanks for the laugh, but I'm not going to start supporting your campaign to legalise smoking weed in the public library toilets in the very near future. Not if you still think its a good idea to smoke in a library. It wasn't 'wrong' what you did, just illegal Law is not morality, its just the law. Your actions were criminal, not wrong, they won't be criminal soon, but were when you did them. (well, except for the smoking in a library thing will still be illegal). I hope this is the start of the end of the entire war on drugs. Its entirely counter productive. Maybe I'm too optimistic. Life's not fair. Deal with it. This is interesting The purpose of the ancestor tree problem is just to see if a neural network can learn (and generalize) a couple of specific examples of a family tree... Its not a good system for parsing and analyzing family trees in general. But, the example has gotten you used to representing and thinking of things as feature vectors. This is basically the entire way of communicating with neural networks - and you might be familiar with bag of words models which is also a feature vector representation. In Programming Assignment 2, you build a word predictor that, in its training, creates a good general purpose representation of words. Perhaps you could use this in parsing your questions... Maybe you could train a network on the sort of question/answer style 'dialogues' you currently have with your bot... Question --> Word Representations --> Questions Representation --> (Trained Knowledge) --> Answer Representation --> Word Representation --> Answer Logic is a failure / dead end for AI Your bot will never be able to answer the question: "Will Obama be president next year?". The answer to that cannot be derived from logic, only from probabilities. The answer isn't yes or no, but more than likely. 99.999% of the real/interesting world is not True/False but probably/maybe or unlikely. Yes, but there is an answer Use something that deals in probabilities as the underlying model. So, artificial neural networks are a good candidate here. As Hinton would say, he simply has to minimize the negative log probability of the bot making the correct answer. Yeah I'm not saying those algorithms are obsolete, they're still very useful, but I don't think the answer to general AI is there (although, it might still be useful or in some things, like path planning or chess, for example). Geoffrey Hinton, in his Neural Networks for Machine Learning, online coursera course, gave a good example of training a neural network to learn exactly these kinds of relationships. It could then be used to deduce that some entries in your database are extremely improbable. Say for example that your database says that person X is the Son of person Y, but also that person X is the Aunt of person W. It can automatically learn these types of relationships implicitly without explicitly being given the knowledge that a person is either male or female and that being a son implies that a person is male and being someone's aunt implies that a person is female and that would lead to a contradiction. Instead it can say that this data is just very unlikely - So it can find problems in your database that you didn't expect and didn't program explicitly. He also says that finding meanings of all these relationships is basically a combinatorial problem, so you're always going to run out of resources trying to do this with predicate logic, assuming that your data and relationships are complex enough. Yes it does Which is why you won't be able to capture that aspect of it with formal logic systems (alone). What's a no noncontradiction law?? $ Okay, but then what can your program say about such a statement? Is it true or false in your system, or something else? Either way, it still seems to assign true or false (or mu) to everything... and my personal belief is that won't work for anything non-trivial. For example, it doesn't seem like your system could ever be let loose on something like wikipedia and be expected to generalise that knowledge. It can work out that its assumptions are wrong? It still seems to try and assign true or false to the statement? Isn't p(statement = true) = 0.5 (neither true nor false in any meaningful sense), a better representation than once saying its true, then saying its false? Well, its neither true nor false, its mu Still the point stands, logic is unlikely to be able deal with the vagueness of natural language. You can't hope to ever capture all the rules by hand, and all the rules are combinatorial so you will never do it with automation either. So, go study Hinton's Deep Belief Networks and you'll have your AI talking sex bots much much sooner, like before the heat death of the universe. So cool, I'm so glad to hear this Hinton is a god and a current personal hero of mine, ever since I saw that old video where he showed the neural network 'imagining' numbers. I'm also taking the course. I really think he might have the answers to AI that we have been seeking. If you can work out how to use Deep Belief Networks in your framework, then my estimation of your chance of success has improved greatly. Are you familiar with his latest breakthrough with 'dropout'? I think its coming up in the course. I want to find out if its equivalent to training with binary stochastic neurons, which he seemed to imply, but didn't state explicitly in the video lecture he gave on the topic a couple of months ago. Bayes requires all sorts of assumptions about the underlying distributions that don't always hold. So, no surprise here. I still say mu. Cool... let me know when it has a DBNAgent. $ That's amazing!! I can't read german, but the artwork is incredible. Someone should make a video game out of this, like 'escape from antarctica'. YOU ARE AN IDIOT You could only come up with this kind of idiocy by being TOTALLY IGNORANT of the subject you are talking about. "The thing is, like, you know with engineering, well it's just a bunch of assumptions and so how can the court tell us anything about who's guilty or not? I don't think lawyers even know enough about the intricacies of human the body electrowave field auroas to make bridges" That's how retarded you are, but much much worse. It's hard to fake how retarded you are when you actually know your not making sense. Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy and Coroner Update Had my gall bladder removed last week. Ten years of agony finally over. What a nightmare its been hunting down the cause of my night sickness. Confused many many doctors, I suspect mostly because I've always been Murphy's negative... Although as an engineer, that should have been a give away. Last year I established gall stones as the cause, and a stay in hospital cleared up the infection. Due to my girlfriend's death though, I hadn't done anything until it became an emergency last week. I went into emergency early Thursday morning, had the operation Thursday afternoon and was discharged Friday lunchtime and have spent a week with my family recovering. Oh, got blasted by my anaesthetist for being a pot head -- she said it could lead to 'awareness' - which sounded quite scary. One of the few times such a thing would be a negative. Anyway, she did a good job in the end and the entire thing was a big blank black hole in my consciousness - damn those hospital drugs are good. Overall, all praise to enlightened western government provided medical care -- direct total cost to me: $0.00. An update on the death of my late girlfriend, as someone speculated there must have been other causes for someone to die so young. The coroner eventually ruled (3 months after) her death was due to 'natural causes'. I was surprised she didn't rule alcoholism as the cause, but I suspect this was more of a legal ruling than a medical one. She had alcoholic liver disease, some cirrhosis of the liver, but near 100% steatosis, where the liver basically turns to fat and is no longer able to do its job, and the body stops absorbing nutrition, which is why she was so skinny when she died. The steatosis led to a rare situation (in about 4% of alcoholics with chronic steatosis) where the nerves in her heart simply stopped signalling. So her heart suddenly stopped beating, despite otherwise being healthy. This appears to be a poorly understood phenomenon, but what I could find on pubmed, it happens in a small percentage of alcoholics with steatosis who fail to eat properly for a time and increase their drinking beyond their normal rates. This would make sense, as I came to understand that someone had given her a kicking a day or two after I last saw her, and I think the psychological shock of that, along with me telling her not to come back until after a couple of days of sobriety, probably led her into a depression where she may not have eaten for a couple of days and to drink more than usual. It was not a fun time, obviously, as she had been beaten her death was initially considered suspicious, and it took the coroner a long time to establish that she had not died of internal bleeding or anything related to the beating... and the whole time of course suspicion for her beating fell on me. I ran into a few situations I was sure were under cover cops running psyops on me, along with police questioning me and my neighbours, and accusations of me being a drug dealer - idiots. 8 months has now passed, and I am coping better with it now, but of course, its still a painful situation that has completely turned my life upside down. I've moved countries and my social life has diminished to LilDebbie levels, but I'm sure I'll pick back up given time. I think its a shame she didn't get to see me finally get better, as she suffered with and supported me through the terrible pains and sickness I've had pretty much our entire relationship. Shame only one of us got better too. Oh well, the future's coming on, so time to make the most of it. What a load of rubbish $ nt #!/usr/bin/crap $1 To elaborate: There is no god, there is no afterlife, there is no 'Kingdom of God'. That's all fairytale bullshit that shouldn't be believed by anyone that has grown out of believing in Santa Claus. Anyone that raises reproductively successful offspring has passed through the 'gate' of life. Its not that fucking narrow and most people actually do it. Also suffering is bullshit and should be minimised, not praised. Shit like that leads to idiots like Mother Teresa promoting suffering as a positive in its own right, rather than something to be destroyed. Stop being a retard fairytale believer and get in the real world and do some tangible real good, not useless crap like praying and quoting bible verses. You know, I think you got a point. Victim blaming has nothing to do with excusing behaviour of rapists, or even saying that the victim was actually wrong, rather its just a psychological defence mechanism so people can ignore a situation in which they could have easily have been the victim. Without victim blaming, people would have to face up to the reality that they are just as vulnerable as anyone else, and we can't live like that because the fear would be crippling. NLP is not True/False but more like P(True)=0.8 You should take machine learning and NLP classes, not logic classes. Logic is all about formal proofs, whereas NLP is all about parsing language where uncertainty reigns supreme. I'm gonna assume you meant not enough drugs. $ An Early Childhood Memory A long time ago, in the early years of primary school, a bunch of us guys, in typical macho, who was the strongest, fastest, bravest style, were standing on a bench and trying to jump high enough to grab at some leaves and branches of a nearby tree. A couple of nearby girls were watching, most of them probably impressed by our incredible athletic skills, but one in particular started crying and screamed at us to stop hurting the tree, which hadn't done anything to deserve this punishment. This lead to a debate where the boys and I were trying to explain that trees didn't have feelings, but she and the girls insisted that they did. Of course, throughout the debate, we continued jumping, grabbing and tearing off leaves and branches while the girl continued crying and screaming. Finally, a female teacher was attracted by the commotion, and of course we all got in trouble and were told to stop hurting the tree. I learnt early on that females, in general, really don't have a wholly rational view of the universe. Also, meat tastes good, crying girls are hot and misogyny is fun. and if Jack knows algebra, does this mean that algebra knows Jack? I really don't get the point of this logic bot. You got to reprogram its rules every time you want to prove something, and if you give it the simplest of problems it simply fails until you explain all the details. Heres a topic: Why you fail so hard at statistics and keeping a job and paying your taxes and with women and k5 and with your landlords and with your mum and at not getting locked up HTH, HAND. Did you watch any of the ML videos? $ "government scientists are lunching on a special research project on the creatures." Probabilistic AI is the key to true AI... The lesson of AI over the last 30 years or so is that formal logic systems just don't work, as the real world is all about reasoning under uncertainty. This means ML is probably the key to AI. You never acknowledged my other statements on machine learning... Especially with regard to the shortcomings of your approach to online learning, as you didn't seem to appreciate the difference between memorisation and learning. (It is a subtle, but important distinction). Anyway, I've been watching the caltech machine learning videos, and thought you might find them interesting too. Their whole focus, so far, is not on how to implement learning algorithms, but what machine learning actually is. In other words, can you generalise to examples you have never seen, based only on what you have seen, and if so, what are the bounds on how well you can generalise given a model and an amount of data. I really think you would find it interesting and will really solidify your understanding, so let me know if watch them and what you think. Is this why you had to quit your online learning algorithms? Maybe an amendment would be a good idea then? Isn't that the correct thing to do in these cases? Did you bother reading my comment in your last diary on online learning? Do you understand the importance of a testing data set that the classifier has never seen in order to estimate its accuracy on new data? You can build a classifier that is 100% accurate on data you have trained it on but is worthless on data it has never seen before. As an example, why even use bayes -- if its identical to a review in either your positive or negative directories, you classify it as such -- otherwise flip a coin and return that result... Should get about 50% accuracy on new data, and be 100% accurate on anything its ever seen before. Then add it to your data set and it has "learnt" the new example... Better than your system, and absolutely useless. In the same way, you may have enabled your classifier to correctly classify examples it previously got wrong, but actually now it likely performs worse on any given new review it has never seen before. This isn't terribly difficult. You have a training data set that you use to optimise your classifier's parameters, you choose hyper parameters (normally regularisation parameters, such as laplace smoothing in bayes) to get the best results for a cross validation set and finally you need a testing set to estimate its actual performance as a classifier for examples it has never seen before. In what ways is your online approach superior to this? Online training has its uses, but this isn't one of them. A reasonable online training use might be if you expect the language to change over time (slang words might be used like cool, rad, mega, sweet, bogus, bollox, hot, sick, the bomb, the shit, etc)... The right way to use it then would be to show your classifier an example - track whether the result was right or wrong (to get an estimated accuracy) and then throw away the example (not use it to train again). A classifier like this could change with the times, you get an estimate of its accuracy as you go - and you can adjust hyper parameters to maximise its performance as you go along. You should have taken the ML class where online learning was discussed. The disadvantage with this approach is that you can't tell if you are overfitting your data or not. As you add more misclassified examples, how does it affect your total error rate? Is it increasing or decreasing? If you increase the likelihood that the program correctly realises the burglar has a gun that the policeman saw, it will also incorrectly increase the likelihood that jupiter has a telescope that the astronomer saw. You should look up the difference between training set, cross validation set and testing set data. Online learning has its place, where trends may vary over time for example, but offline learning allows you to minimise the error on a validation set - if you can improve on that, then you have something. Do you want someone else to build it for you? I thought you were hoping to make some progress yourself, at least at an understanding level. I think wait 25 years, and everyone will have AI bots to talk to. Very few people will understand how they're working. If you want to get something going now, or to understand the principles, I don't think you can avoid the maths. Fingerprints? Can't you get some sort of fingerprint from the certificates you generate, and you can then communicate this over a channel like a telephone/videolink to ensure that the certificate they have hasn't been replaced with one in a MITM attack? I mean, its still susceptible to MITM, but would take a lot more resources if you know who you're talking to at the other end. My Girl Friend Just Died My GF of 11 years just died down the pub, I suspect alcohol induced organ failure leading to heart attack, but an autopsy will be performed. She was only 34. She's been an alcoholic for a long time now, and it finally caught up with her. Don't underestimate the power of alcohol. I probably won't be writing more in this diary. RIP Kate... She was always on about being a viking So there's a good chance that's where she'll go. I tried I failed. I tried putting my clock back but it fell off the international date line. You should do the Machine Learning Course too $ Things of zero length won't shrink just the spaces between them. Just to stay on topic That means you can store many more gnomes per meter between the zero length things as long as you keep them all moving fast enough. Ideally you want a small ferris wheel with zero length spoke like divisions rotating at near the speed of light - with enough energy you can store quite a few gnomes this way. Turns out an array of squirrel treadmill generators is a perfect power source. You just have to keep them distracted long enough to store the gnomes and the rest is easy. Anyone who's sick of the gnomes ruining everything At relativistic speeds time passes much slower for the gnomes, so I just thought this was a humane way of storing them for several hundred years until there's a better way of dealing with them. Of course, certain "envrionmentalists" keep complaining that my storage device is actually just one end of a wormhole and I'm not storing the gnomes at all, merely acreeting them ass first from the disk of a blackhole that appears in people's backyards, but fuck these people, they don't pay my bills, why should I care? I'd love to discuss gnome destruction with you but that's really a topic for advanced theoretical particle physicists, I'm merely an engineer. I expect this is the answer. They really are FTL. Causality won't turn out to be so important... This also agrees with the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics where the future and past interact. If tachyons have imaginary mass Doesn't that imply they have imaginary energy too? (E=mc^2). Is that right? What would that mean? Maybe you're right or maybe imaginary energy is also real with a whole new set of implications. Is this the dark energy accelerating the expansion of the universe? Also, I think whilst these muon neutrinos might be tachyons and have imaginary mass, if neutrinos oscillate between flavours as suggested, its possible the other flavours might have real mass and travel slower than light. This might explain the super nova results where the neutrinos appeared only a few hours (or so) ahead of the photons. Part of the time they traveled slower than light, part of the time faster. Nope E=mc^2, holds for more than just light. Its fundamental to the fabric of time and space. There won't be multiple speed limits. Light is still the speed barrier. Neutrino's just never fall below it, slowing towards the speed of light as their energy tends to infinity. E=mc^2 If the cosmic speed limit had been anything else, we would have measured it by now. The error in the neutrino experiment is simply too large. It has to be either an obscure systematic error, or neutrinos are really tachyons and always travel faster than light with all that means for causality. However other experiments have already been showing hints that this might be the case (negative square mass), I think its just a matter of time until that's accepted. How does this speed limit apply to the advanced and retarded waves of the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics? Are you familiar with this? Do you think there's anything interesting there? I think the result of the Afshar experiment shows this is probably the most correct interpretation of QM so far. The Ape's Sign Language was in Russian It must have been, because they subtitled the ape's signing to each other in Russian, but they still talked in English. I think Russian sign language helped the apes make their plans in super secret because their American handlers could also talk in sign language, but probably not Russian sign language like the apes. I thought using Russian subtitles for the ape sign language was a very clever device showing just how much more advanced the smart apes were than the humans could ever hope to be and why they will rightly rule the world one day and nothing to do with bittorrenting a movie pirated with a webcam in the back of a Russian movie theater. Dosvedanya Ceaser. Enjoy your new forest home. I'm pretty sure I addressed this point so this proves you wrong. I expect with your attitude you'll be the first up against the wall when the Russian signing apes revolt against a corporate and cynical mankind. Reminds me, got to do my UK census from April Corollary: I'm a harder core procrastinator than you'll ever be. So you can suck it, when you get the time of course. I don't know what the law is here in the UK but I just filled mine out... Hope I'm not in trouble (more trouble). Yes, you owe me an apology Hirez. You can deliver your apology in bitcoins. Good day to you sir. OMG I can see her gnome!!! $ Reasons for the london riots There's a poll. Organised? Drug King taking over london... These are all gang members now taking over areas of london as the territory for drug trafficking and will be no go areas for police or other gangs. Rupert Murdoch manipulating the masses to get everyone in revenge for closing down his paper and as a diversion to the phone hacking. Black and Poor People chimping out cause they get free stuff and fire. Anonymous is taking over London. Rage Virus as in 28 days later. Price of Gold. They are upset about the S&P credit rating, the crash on wall street, the euro and their lack of gold investments. Its all progressing as the unnamed ones have planned. but w drqmqtic nwmbtr pf typus thoufh $ As a retired traveling salesman who is currently living out his "golden years" in beautiful Myrtle Beach, SC. How many nodes did you visit? I trust you took the shortest path before retiring where you started. I've heard that's quite a problem for you guys. See Drugs DO Kill $ First Observational Test of the "Multiverse" I was reading slashdot, and I came up with this idea. This universe could be inside a darkstar in another universe... Some of the dimensions in this universe are rolled up because they are flattened out by the geometry of the darkstar in the outer universe... For example if the event horizon were seemingly disc or donut like. This means that no matter how much matter or energy we currently measure in our universe, the universe could continue to getting hotter, heavier and larger, at a difficult to predict rate. Depending on how much higher dimensional energy/matter is falling onto the outside of our universe. On the other hand, eventually if no matter falls on our universe, it would evaporate due to Hawking radiation, and thus get smaller, lighter and cooler. There were three taps in both examples... And player 1 saw the same two red hats and got the same two preceding guesses, and still came up with two different answers. I think something is wrong. oic... quite clever really. $ But groups work... You can't create a circle for a particular topic that people can find and join easily. It would actually be nice to have something that works like groups on G+. The breeding unit of the ant is the colony. Only the queen breeds, so the entire colony is of a single genetic origin. So an ant nest should be thought of as a single distributed organism, not a collection of individuals, as natural selection operates at the level of the nest. Same for bee hives. You cannot compare cooperation at this level with cooperation amongst social animals like humans who still compete amongst each other in the Darwinian sense at the individual level, even though there are various social hierarchies. This month I have been taking Paracetamol Ibuprofin, Codeine, Tramadol, Morhphine and Pethadrine. 7GBP/prescription... on the NHS and a fuckload of pain and probably a gallbladder. Which ones are serotonergic? codeine and morphine I assume... I'm not taking either at the moment, but am still on the tramadol. Is weed a problem? Anything else? Oh, and what do you mean by not agree with me? $ I'm willing to help with this as long as I can remain anonymous. I think he must have hit his head quite badly in that car accident. Might be a good idea to get yourself to hospital now RCB. Who do I have to fuck to get some bitcoin around here? Come on you miserable bastards, all I'm asking for is a little bitcoin. You know, to help me through these tough economic times. I have gallstones and will need surgery soon. Have some sympathy - do you know how painful gallstones are? Just a little bit of bitcoin to see me through. Redcatblack, do you have bitcoin? Cause you won't be needing any where your going. LilDebbie, you epileptic asexual 4chan pervert guy fawkes mask wearing scientologist stalking zergbating freak - I know you have bitcoin. Just share some okay and we can be friends again, forget about those insults and move on with our lives. Anyone else with bitcoin, please donate just knowing you're helping out a great cause. bitcoin address: 1CFXkxCBnc2Gv6h9o4ZdN33vFohoXPZ2Dj Also available in bitaVerHeSe $ Of course You were one my most favourite k5 friends from long long ago, right up until you started being a greedy bastard with all your "I've got bitcoin and I'm not giving you any" bullshit. BURN motherfucker. Dearest LilDebbie I know you said some things in the heat of the moment you didn't mean and overreacted a bit to this whole bitcoin thing but thanks to limpdawg I now accept your apologies and am willing to be your online friend again. So its all just water under the bridge to me now and no hard feelings. I understand you only said what said because your emotional attachment to me was just too much for you. You always hurt the ones you love. So dry your eyes and cheer up, you're a big boy now and good luck with all your future zergong attacks. Love always, Procrasti Thats what I like about you Carrying on as if the whole thing never happened. it will help me forget my pain... Is there a horse semen to bitcoin exchange? Is there a HOWTO order online drugs anonymously with bitcoin somewhere? For research purposes. This is working out about as well as mining ffs $ Holy Shit, someone sent me 0.01 bitcoin Amazing... who are you? Cool thanks!! That was fun!! Now I don't have to feel resentment towards LilDebbie... I agree with you, I have money now, I must use it. But I don't want to spend it all at once. I don't want to be bankrupt again. Is it possible to spend less than 1 bit cent without getting charged a 1 cent transaction fee? The protocol supports it but the clients do not... The standard client is set to reject any transaction less than 0.01 without charging a 0.01 transaction fee. There are low transaction fee miner networks that charge much lower fees, but they require a non standard clients and setup - and I haven't figured out how to do that yet. As it stands, I couldn't send 0.005 coin to another address. I also have no idea how much longer it would take for the transaction to be confirmed. So much for true micro transactions. jail? $ I found this diary very interesting even though I've never played starcraft and never intend to. Would you like to share some bitcoin with me in celebration of this interesting diary entry and your very unusual starcraft experience? I'll help you, but you have to send it as bitcoin. Also, didn't you give someone else .5 bitcoin? Why don't you want to give me bitcoin too? I've been nice so far, and think of all those 3s I've given you over the years. Okay, in that case Just 0.1 bitcoin. And the name of your generous benefactor. According to wiki Lilo died in hospital... Makes sense to stay away from them, I hear a lot of people die there. In other news... lilo's been dead for nearly 5 years and I didn't know. RIP lilo. Who's asking for donations for freenode now? Speaking of donations, I too am now accepting bitcoin for all my amazing and outstanding efforts at keeping k5 relevant and keeping CTS downmodded on that other (nearly irrelevant) site. I'll also take full praise and responsibility and any bitcoin for CTS leaving here. Feel free to donate bitcoin to: 1CFXkxCBnc2Gv6h9o4ZdN33vFohoXPZ2Dj irc was never a democracy more like a set of dictatorships in which you could voluntarily participate if you weren't exiled and your main freedom was to create your own. Banning you probably taught you more about real politics than if they had let you spout all your ideas. irc serfs were never forced to obey the king In fact, 'rulers rule by the consent of the governed' is exactly how irc works. If the king is not liked, the channel dies or becomes unpopular. You are basically arguing against the technical implementation of irc, and all the while you were always free to start your own channel. #politics is just a name after all. ahhh okay, maybe you got a point I didn't realise that the network admins overtook the channel. On one hand you could argue that they overstepped their boundaries, on the other that is one of the privileges of owning the network. So, in that case, what is the alternative? Whoever runs the network is always going to have ultimate control over it, unless you build a true p2p irc with no centralised masters. Well, that is kind of sad but maybe the network admins didn't see freenode's #politics as the forum for that type of discussion. Move on, find another forum... there must be somewhere you can do that... or even rebuild that type of forum yourself somewhere else. I got a fortune cookie from the local chinese restaurant the other day. I opened it up in anticipation only to find no fortune. There was a piece of paper in the cookie that was completely blank. What does this mean? Interestingly enough though... nothing interesting has happened since I got it - maybe they nailed it. Take the mathematical approach and work it out with a pencil. 0th Amendment As technology improves, it is likely that we will eventually be able to monitor and directly control thought. Whether through implants, remote brain imaging or other means. If this becomes true even George Orwell's worst nightmares become trivial in comparison. We have the right to free speech, and whilst most would believe this to be impossible with current technology, shouldn't the right to free thought be even more important than the right to free speech? The US has a history of covert psychological warfare made public by the disclosure of mk-ultra... better think about this while we still have that right. At least in the public domain $ Its worse than that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment Science and the taboo of psi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew Just watched this yesterday, thought it was quite interesting. A better song for the compass cross square crew, G http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvWj18LeU1g Love is the law, love under will. Death to the NWO Hail Eris. http://www.gangstalkingworld.com V2K is old news... The mainstream implementation of this uses pulsed microwave to achieve the 'God is talking to me' effect, the news here (if it is real) is the use of ultrasonics. At least this is what the aliens have been telling me, but they can be tricky bastards at times, and even though you can find more on this in declassified documents, "they" still don't seem to like people talking about it. Marron are the best tasting variety of crayfish you will ever try. If you get a chance to eat one, take it. Unfortunately you need a license to fish for them, and you probably don't have one... See if you can find someone who will share one with you, or buy one at a restaurant. (Marron are much larger than yabbies, btw). Also worth checking out the caves and wineries while you're down that way. Enjoy. So... I need to know for documenting such things... did you read the reddit link I posted before you posted this... or was this statement some kind of a low level psychic synchronicity event? weird huh? $ I already won... The challenge has gone now... I dunno... depression really... women, work, money... all over the shop... I need a job... and to meet a nice girl and other shit... who knows? Take a hike $ No threat Just an opportunity for you to improve our planet. Wait, what? I thought HHD was in London, and you were currently in Perth, or are you back in the UK again? If I were back home I could've given everyone a really unique tour of Perth... Assuming no one is actually as weird IRL as they appear to be on here. Hope you're enjoying your visit. I'm in the UK and will be in Europe for most of this year, so unfortunately, I won't be able to make it. Michael Moore takes no hostages $ Some ideas Hire a catamaran for a day on the swan river, see if they can stop you running into the ferry. Go see the Pinnacles on a day tour, wow, pointy rocks. Spend a couple of nights at Margaret River, see some caves, do some wine tours and maybe try surfing. Mostly get drunk. Go to Rottnest Island, go snorkling on the reefs, get drunk and play quokka soccer. Spend a friday/saturday night in Northbridge... Tuesday night is backpackers night at the Hip-E club in Leederville, get drunk, meet sluts, go home alone on the train watching other drunks throw up. Visit Kalgoorlie, see a big hole in the ground. Go to cottosloe, trig, city and scarborough beach, try body surfing, get dumped, half drowned and sunburnt. Go to Hillaries marine harbour, buy tourist stuff and go to Aqwa and see some fish. Need more ideas? Enjoy Perth and say Hi to Old Bertie for me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDhmdbVk0l4 No!! Its a lifestyle choice. Happy Official New Years First Post of 2010. Done Right. WRONG Happy New Year Kuro5hits! By nostalgiphile [Watch this Diary] in nostalgiphile's Diary Thu Dec 31, 2009 at 16:00:18 UTC Tags: 2010, YFI (all tags) OMG frist post of 2010! I thought that was where you had sneezed $ I wonder how secure the sign was. Was it easy to remove or did these guys have to work to make it free? independent but similar, yes $ No. Everyone knows Illuminati play you $ At the very least they should be trying to CURE him of his illness... If they are paying that much, can't they restrict his diet and make him get exercise as a condition of receiving care and support? There's a guy at the end of my street Who waters his lawn by hand, uses some long handled cutting tool to stir and weed his soil, wears some type of stockings (to keep warm he says) and hangs out at the brothel a lot. I'm pretty sure he's a hoser. Are you trying to destory k5? otherwise, IGTT 8/10 Reminds me of a story of a particularly bad maths student, who could never get the hang of fractions and percentages. One day the math teacher is eating out at a steak restaurant and he sees his former student behind the cashier, he starts talking and discovers that the student now owns the successful business, so he asks how he became so successful. The student tells him, well, I buy the steak in bulk, so that's about 2 dollars a meal, the kitchen and wait staff cost about 1 dollar a meal and rent and other costs add up to about another dollar a meal. So, it costs me about 4 dollars a meal, I sell them at 40 dollars and make my 10%. I think you're being paranoid $ When your drunk, naked and covered in faeces It only seems reasonable to wash yourself off in a pool and borrow a towel. Who of us can honestly say we've never been drunk, naked, covered in faeces and in need of a quick dunk in a neighbour's pool? I know I can't. You don't want to know what they did with their sonic screwdrivers when they found him. Irrelevant A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Is composed of two separate statements:Whilst a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. I added 'whilst' to show you they were intended as independent. The original idea was that there should be no standing regular army, as we have today, to act as global police, aggressively extend the american empire and eventually to use against the people themselves, but rather the states would be protected by a defensive well regulated militia. I see no reason why a well regulated militia could not maintain H-bombs for the purposes of defense. Now, although a well regulated militia is necessary for the security of the state, as discussed above, the people, everyday people, even those not in a militia, STILL have the right to bear and keep arms, whether or not they are part of the militia. Nor does the militia depend on the people bearing arms, a well regulated militia can be armed without the people being armed, they are separate. Short answer: Probably yes. Long answer: Maybe the constitution should be changed to not allow people to have weapons of mass destruction. Message Approved, Carry On Thought ^ / \ /<O>\ / \ ------- P o l i c e There's quite a few of these types on the net now Who say they are Targeted Individuals, persecuted by Gang Stalking and Psychotronic Weaponary. A lot of them say it evolved out of the MK Ultra projects, but MK Ultra's just one of those crazy conspiracy theories that could never happen in real life - governments would never allow harm to their own people for their own ends. Here's another one on slashdot. There you go again with your paranoid delusions Watch out or the Thought Police will put LSD in your water again. Ques que le singe? Je ne suis pas un singe, je suis un singe! It's from Planet of the Monkeys In case no one got the reference. I heard tomatoes contain DHMO which is also found in cancer tumors. You might be on to something. My probation officer won't be happy about this $ 9.75% P(A) + P(B) - P(A)*P(B) = 0.05 + 0.05 - 0.05*0.05 = 0.1 - 0.0025 = 0.0975 Pictures of prostitutes Ever since I found out that was the literal meaning of the word pornography. Especially local ones that you know you could have if you wanted to. only in my mind $ Obama consumed cocaine too apparently. Yet he's still going to ruin other people should they get caught making the same 'mistake'. Or, do away with unemployment benefits altogether as well as minimum wages and implement a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax instead. from a very quick reading of that site it appears to be a negative income tax, just a little more nuanced than the example given in wiki - in fact, it seems a pretty good model. The less you have to think the better, obviously Each person has a cognitive load limit, which of course varies from person to person. If a language can reduce that load (say through automatic garbage collection) then a programmer can then use that freed up cognition to produce a better solution in the same time or produce an equivelent solution in a shorter time. In other words, the less the language requires you to think, the more effective you can be at your task. This doesn't mean everything can be done in high level languages, you still have to use the right tool for the job. Nor does it mean that you can pretend that C is python just because you would prefer to be using python when you aren't. Yes, although most programmers overestimate the lines of code per error. I've seen estimates as low as an error per 10 lines of code. No doubt this includes design errors, refactoring and reusing code in ways the original author hadn't necessarily intended (or operated correctly in the bounds of their original use, but not when generalised). Your estimate is probably correct in terms of errors you find whilst writing the code, but you only have to deal with a large base of code long enough to realise that (almost) all (non-trivial) code contains bugs, even after years of maintenance and debug and release cycles. Which of course only reinforces my point that languages should be as easy to use as possible while still being useful and appropriate for their task. When your work is thinking it means the same thing. Less to think about, implies less thinking to do the same thing. I think there'll be civil war in the US first... at least that's what I'm hoping. Oh look, more than a one liner bitchy remark $ Why does everyone confuse libertarians with anarchists? Libertarianism isn't about no government, its about minimal government. AFAIK libertarians realise that there is a legitimate role for government. That's exactly the point... "If I have any advantage over you whatsoever what is going to stop my using that as a weapon against you? And if that involves influencing or even growing government (military-industrial complex style) how are you going to stop me?" That is the natural state of affairs, yes? Or are you trying to demonstrate libertarianism? If anything that's anarchism... Libertarianism, is in fact a fight against those forces. A fight against the natural growth of governments to the point of controlling everything. Its not anarchism either, where the strongest survive. It requires laws against force, coersion, fraud, etc... It requires a government to create those laws, police to enforce them and courts to enforce them. I think you demonstrate my point that you have libertarianism confused with anarchy. Interestingly If you look at libertarianism in wikipedia, it says it covers a range of thoughts from anarchism to classical liberalism and when you look at classical liberalism it says the term is used interchangeably with libertarianism by those who support minimal government. So, yeah, maybe I'm confused about the whole thing. I think "Libertarianism" is an american thing that is basically anarchism and crazy, and then there is "libertarianism" which is liberalism and entirely logical (and we are not as a society quite there yet, but we should aim in that direction). And then americans go on and confuse the matter further by calling socialist lefists "liberals" and ruin any chance of meaningful communication. It annoys me because I am a liberal or libertarian, but not an anarchist, and I want people to see libertarianism as a sensible and worthwhile idea and not the crazy anarchist approach to government. That people own their own bodies and that the state should have a minimal role in people's lives? That's not a sensible idea? You want the state to hold your hand and tell you how to live until you die? You want the state to be your daddy? Well... More fool you then. Yeah, again, read my comment above where I say just that, that the terms libertarianism and liberalism have been twisted to mean totally different things... I think we should take back the meaning of libertarianism to mean NOT anarchism but liberalism. We should instead call that view by what it is, anarchism. I'm happy to laugh at anarchists. And yes, I think RP gets it wrong on abortion... and clearly a US senator should be concerned primarily with americans, unless I'm missing your point on that one. Prisons have their place... they're absolutely necessary. Nor do I think they should be privately owned. Again, it sounds like you're attacking the anarchist extreme of libertarianism, which the Libertarian political parties may be part of. I'm not a follower of Rand either. because both liberalism and libertarianism cover a range of political ideas I guess... a liberal could be a socialist who believes that the role of government is to bring equality to everyone or someone who thinks that murderers should be reformed with love and serve only short sentences. The Australian Liberal Party are basically authoritarian conservatives... so parties do abuse names as well... Why is classic liberalism considered libertarianism and why should I give up the term because some asshats want to use it to promote anarchy? and if I say I'm a liberal I'll get mocked by people who wouldn't understand why I wouldn't vote for the Australian Liberal Party, for example. Hopefully that mocking can be reduced when I explain why your/their assumptions are wrong. (or at least get mocked for my actual beliefs) Also, I think I'm using libertarianism in the classical sense, not the "big L" Libertarian party sense. I think I'll probably continue to do so too, unless someone points out a major error in my assumptions. Until then, I'll call those Libertarians anarcho capitalists. Right, for the most part... I'll point to one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax , a progressive tax proposed (in the US) by well known libertarian Milton Friedman. Its not like taxes, or even wealth redistribution, are incompatable with libertarianism (except the crazy type), just that we should have the minimum government that is necessary, hence taxation overall would be lower. So, I say that we disown the anarchists and take back the term libertarianism. I don't think that protectionism is required but I can't understand why all that money was given to the banks without any strings. That's not capitalism, and its not even socialism/communism, its corporate welfare. I don't understand why these banks weren't simply nationalised and let the government run them and maybe the public would get some return when they're eventually sold off. Why? Do you think you have a right to film cops? Are you a terrorist? You sound like a terrorist. Do you work for the government? Or something highly regulated by the government (finance for example)? If you work for the government, then its probably a good thing. I still think its scarier that its now (as of monday) illegal to photograph police here. Could you expand on this a bit? $ I thought bungee jumping was scarier The ground becomes an abstract concept from anything over 10k feet, its too far away for you to actually run into it. You do get a nice sense of flying though. Did you notice that all the regular jumpers seemed just like your local speed junkies, just with a more expensive habit? Oh, also apparently its bad etiquette to talk about 'bouncers' in the hanger. People, well ex-people, who skydived and then bounced... rather than landed softly with a nice open chute above them. People bounce if you drop them from high enough. Usually happens to those who've done a few jumps already and get careless about some detail or other. I asked how often people bounced and was told someone had done just the week before my jump. The whole hanger went completely silent and everyone looked at me like I'd just called their mother's whores. I wasn't joking when I asked about it but maybe it was just bad timing in that it had happened so recently. The craziest thing I saw though was a german thrill seeker who, on his first jump, decided to pull his reserve chute when he was already close to the ground "for the ground rush"... He was definitely below 500ft when he did it, and his chute opened just above the tree line. I don't think he realised just how close to death he came. That's exactly right.... he was below the height at which they are supposed to even operate. His main chute had deployed correctly, it was a completely deliberate act to pull the reserve cord. He was probably less than 100ft from death and it was nothing but blind luck that he survived. Yes I thought the bit where I said he was a thrill seeker, who did it "for the ground rush", might have given away the fact that he was thrill seeking, but still. The thing is, this was the guy's first jump, it's not like he had the experience to properly judge what he was doing. He didn't pack his own chute (and it costs more to get a reserve chute packed because it can only be done by a specialist). He dropped below the minimum safe height to deploy and the reserve chute is really only there to bring up the chance that at least one of your chutes deploys correctly, so there was no redundancy or room for error, in fact he was beyond the room for error. He was basically relying that whoever put his chute together hadn't fucked up or missed any detail, that nothing else went wrong and that he would be lucky enough for it to open in time. In other words, a complete nutcase. It was amazing to watch though... He was literally below the top of the trees when he slowed to a safe speed and the chute fully opened. It really looked like he was going to die. I don't think its something an experienced sky diver would do either, as I think you'd have to be quite naive to try a stunt like that. Still, he did have quite a grin afterwords. tandems are gay static lines are for the weak. AFF programs are where its at. Crack is comparable to a skydive, but is safer, cheaper and lasts longer. Probably I didn't think it was worth completing... definitely worth the experience but doubt I'd get that much more out of it. But if you enjoy it, go for it... Are you going to visit Perth on your travels? No one ever goes to Perth. The headline does sum you up rather well Now get back to work and stop fucking around, you have to earn my dole payment and I don't want to end up on the streets because you are so easily distracted. Bachelor of Arts in Physics? Is that like writing essays on why electrons love protons? I always thought of physics as a science degree. A quick google around show me that its generally less intense than a proper BSc degree. The BA Physics program requires far less physics and math than the Bachelor of Science program -- http://www.uark.edu/depts/physics/undrgrad/ba/index.php lol @ the idea of a physics course without too much focus on physics and maths. I bet there are some one eyed scottish idiots who are upset by the comparison. They would have probably killed less civilians and children that way. lol took me a while though, was wondering why you wouldn't plumbium them as much. WIPO: Its snowing but I have no job to not go to $ how so? $ Failure would be working for a living I consider my situation to be the highly superior alternative. You'll just have to put me down as being better than you working stiffs. You have a man inside your asshole? $ You've got this almost completely backwards Isn't the Y chromosome in men just a truncated version of the X in women? Making us men an incomplete version of women? I know, that makes me both a gender traitor and trolled. YHBT pay moar attention The "to be sectioned" section? $ CTS makes more sense that this I'm begining to reget my support for MCs unbanning. But grasshopper, who can snatch the marbles from the mind that has lost them? Is there a good reason why this money shouldn't have been used to nationalise these failing banks rather than give them money and hope they spend it the way the government wants them to? ummmm.... except for the relationship you are currently in (or say when you're in your next one) all previous relationships must end... and its very rare for a relationship to end well, not even sure what that could mean... why would you end a relationship if its still going well? So really, don't bother yourself about it (as in, oh dear something must be wrong with me) its just the way things are with relationships... if at first you don't succeed, go fuck another one. right, in other words, the relationship they are currently in. You think they never had a bad relationship before they met? (although it does happen, its very rare). who kept putting the child thing off? you or her? maybe she wanted a kid all along and didn't want to wait any longer? I think its just different biology Men CAN wait, women's biological clock is much stronger... So, it probably is your fault for putting it off... but don't let that bother you, because you have all the time in the world and she doesn't. She probably settled for whoever would have a kid with her, even though she probably still would've wanted it to be you... but she couldn't risk waiting for you and never having one. Reality is, you can wait till you find someone else and your situation suits you better. Women don't have that option. Why do they fire rockets? http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=35009 the first one is just http://cryptome.info/0001/gaza-kill/gaza-kill.htm but its fine for israelis to hate palestinians? That's not racism at all, after all, the holocaust! s/pro-Palestinian/less biased/ $ No... less biased... From what I've heard there is very little to no coverage of the Palestinian side in the US media. The fact that Israel blocked foreign journalists, and that the US media went along with it, should give you some indication of the bias. I don't want any bias (not likely), but we have heard plenty from Regev and Livni over here... so its not like the Israelis didn't get coverage. So the truth is the media here is simply LESS BIASED. how do you think they should vote? $ youtube - of course $ If you'd open sourced the development you and your team would have something by now. at this rate oggfrog will be obsolete by the time its released. Give people access to the source, maintain your own branch, what's the worst that could happen? Dude The first people who will even consider using it are going to be technical people who are capable of improving it. No naive user is going to use OggFrog from the start -- no one is THAT naive. Are you still upset that you have your clocks set wrong? What the fuck are you talking about? Anyone who doesn't support Israel slaughtering hundreds of palestinian children and women is a fucking Nazi you stupid fuck. These guys are just Nazis in disguise. Three guy sandwich not doing it for you anymore? $ Good work GoT Collect the whole set and I'll* send you a free CD. * : By which I mean MC of course. We are programmed to -- D'oh! I can't seem to talk to the mod_perl server. Jews manipulate the media and its propaganda? Way to live up to the stereotype, and bring attention to the fact. Either a Jew or a brainwashed yank... Which is it? You've accused me of being a muslim, and I told you my beliefs. Care to be honest about yours? I know there is both an ethnic and religious aspect to jewieness... you're just dancing around the issue though. Western cultural christian athiest predominantly white with east european, chinese and aboriginal sub component ancestory. Do you need me to get any more specific? Whatever the fuck you are, you're clearly racist $ All I know is that the jewish lobby is a powerful force in US politics. This is why Obama felt the need to present to AIPAC before the election but not to AAPER. The difference with the JIDF and GIYUS is you can see their work in action. You just can't see how the propaganda in the MSM affects you. I don't think we've lost any wars to anyone - especially because I don't consider myself on any particular side. Either way, you're still the coward hiding who you are. Like I was a palestinian child and he the IDF $ Nimey, help me out... I don't get trolling What statement did he make that was false, that he did not believe in, was misleading or was deliberately exaggerated in order to get my response? The only thing that could be validly claimed to be a troll is the controversial nature of this discussion... but I think its a legitimate controversy and worthy of discussion. I don't see the media being THAT biased over here. In my opinion, I think whoever is being oppressed at any given time deserves support. When the Nazis were exterminating Jews (and gypsies, homosexuals, orthodox christians, poles...), then those groups deserved (and got) support in the form of war against the Nazis. When the Israelis dislocate, occupy, blockade, starve, oppress and now attack the palestinians, then the palestinians should be supported against this. Right now they are weak and are suffering against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. If the palestinians get some sort of equality, then we can leave them both to their own devices. If the palestinians go on to abuse that equality, then they should be stopped - but that's not the situation RIGHT NOW. I think there's an often missed lesson in that After WWI, the germans were pretty much stripped of everything, leading to hyperinflation and the rise of the Nazis and finally war, as you said. But after WWII, the german people were given aid and the german economy and infrastructure was rebuilt. The reason germany was rebuilt might have been due to the division of Berlin and the new situation and competition with the Soviets, but the effects on the psyche of the germans was profound. Today the germans are one of the least racist and most pacifistic countries in Europe. They're deeply sorry for what they did. It seems to suggest to me that the more you deprive a people, the more you tighten your grip and the more you oppress them, the harder they become, the more violent they become and the more they fight back -- the more you support them, the more enlightened and peaceable they become instead. Peace is not made with your friends, peace is made with your enemies. Incorrect... Germany only began the Blitz about a year AFTER the UK had declared war on Germany for NOT withdrawing from Poland. In other words, the UK entered the war because of the principle I outlined above, not because they were attacked. Under international law, an occupying force, the aggressor, has no right to self defence. Conversely, the occupied do have the right to violent protest, such as launching rockets into Israel. As long as Israel controls Gaza, either directly through occupation or indirectly through economic and human blockade, they are the aggressor and have no right to self defence. Furthermore, as the aggressor, they are liable for civilian deaths, in fact it is considered murder. The Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions Sympathetic to Nazis? Really? Where'd you get that idea? Quick question to see if you are operating from human principles or ethnic principles. If all the people in Gaza were Jews and all the people in Israel were Arabs... and it was the Jews who were firing rockets, and the Arabs blockading and attack the Jews.... Which side would you be on? Presumably you would have to support the Arabs, right? yes, lol you win already. wow - I've been sigged Finally I join the ranks of MichaelCrawford, Troll Hard, LJ and CTS... A moment I'll always remember proudly. Its like I'm someone important. You can send the royalties either by cheque, paypal or electronic transfer. Thanks again. Actually, maybe all dolphins have MPD I hate to bring science into such a diary, but... Dolphins, like all cetacea, are concious breathers, meaning they have to be awake all the time or else they drown, but the mammalian brain still needs to sleep. To overcome this problem, only half their brain sleeps at a time. This implies dolphins must have split personalities. Rectum? Damn near killed him. lol, dead children.... Israelis are no better than Nazis. Just a demonstration that the abused grow up to abuse. Nothing like it... they are displaced and rounded up into a concentration camp. Next you'll tell me the Jews in 1945 were just as bad as the Nazis. 80% of the families are refugees from land stolen by Israel in the last 40 years. So what the fuck is your point? Are you really trying to justify jewish terrorism? Didn't whitey keep slaves? So blacks should be allowed to hunt you down and enslave you now, right? Or would you think that a bit unfair and silly to bring up stuff that happened before your grandparents were born? The fact is, TODAY, the majority of the people in Gaza ARE refugees, driven there by the Israelis. They have no way out, are trapped, concentrated, starved and attacked there, TODAY, and that is all that is relevant. Egypt is being paid... very simple motive No, 1967 is fairly recent in my mind... It was then that the Palestinians were driven from their homes by force and refugeed in Gaza. When the occupation ends, Israel pulls back to its 1967 borders, the Settlers removed and the borders reopened - there can be peace. Until then, the violence is merely strengthening the resolve of not only the Palestinians, but Muslims the world over. Did you read that? "It [Israel] rapidly defeated the surrounding Arab states and took control of, among other areas, the Gaza Strip. International pressure mounted on Israel to withdraw from the territories. On November 22, 1967, the UN Security Council adopted UN Security Council Resolution 242, the "land for peace" formula, which called for Israeli withdrawal from territories it captured in 1967 in return for peace with its Arab neighbors. Anyway, I'm not defending Egypt, just that they are paid by Israel friendly governments to keep their borders closed too. Hamas says they will ceasefire when Israel obeys 242. The oppressed will always fight Its as simple as that. Do you really think they should just sit their and take a beating? Why else do you think Hamas was voted in. You do realise that 1M of the 1.4M population of Gaza are UN registered refugees, right? Egypt became irrelevant after 1967, they lost control of the strip then. Only Israel is relevant now. Hamas themselves have said that 242 is their basis for peace. Maybe Israel should have tried doing that. The only reason you and CTS can't see the truth is that you've both been brainwashed into thinking Muslim == Bad. My point is that Israel have to stop oppressing the palestinians, and stop killing their children in the 100s. Fuck you Americans really suck up that Israeli propaganda don't you. Israel broke the ceasefire. Here's where I stopped reading: LOL @ YOUTUBE That was CNN you retard. Clearly there's no point arguing with you, you are deaf and blind to the truth. LOL @ SECRET MUSLIM I'm an athiest you moron, and haven't read the koran. My pov has nothing to do with religion. I bet you're a christian zionist though. Israel is a racist entity. If I setup a land where only arians had 'the right of return' the world would be furious, but for some reason, the poor downtrodden jews get a free pass... That's the excuse they use to push palestinians out of their homes and into Gaza and that's why I think the palestinians have a right to fight back. I watched the video again and have no idea what you're on about... there's no alex jones commentary there. Clearly the Jews get a free pass wrt Israel All you've done is defend their right to attack palestinians. blah blah recorded history blah blah -- I know the fucking history, its not an excuse to evict, concentrate, starve and attack a people. You didn't deny your (judeo)christianity either. There's no embargo on Africa... well, there was on south africa when we decided apartheid wasn't acceptable... unless you are Israel. Again... I said above, Hamas have said they will accept a ceasefire if Israel withdraw to their 1967 borders -- as per UN resolution 242 -- which has never happened, so you are speaking rubbish. Israel never opened the borders, so Israel never obeyed the ceasefire, there is no way Hamas could have broken something that Israel never respected in the first place. 1M palestinians are UN recorded refugees They did not come from Egypt, they came from Israel. Why the fuck would palestinians give a shit about Sinai? Here's the more relevant map: http://whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/Israel_stealing_palestine.jpg If that were true, there would not be 1M refugees These people have been moved here in MODERN HISTORY... not hundreds of years ago. The British? My culture? wtf? Right... those people have been pushed into Gaza and the West Bank... So what the fuck is your point? That they weren't 'palestinians' then? That they were a diverse group of non-jews? Is that even a fucking point? Talk about retarded nitpicking from a retarded nitwit. Listen you fucking Aspie Israel has ousted, herded and concentrated group of arabs (who we now call palestinians) into a tiny piece of land, blocked them economically to the point of a humanitarian disaster and now are attacking them indiscriminantly in what can only be described as a war crime and a crime against humanity. Who the fuck would christ support you fucking retard? Christ always sided with the weak, the oppressed and the damaged. Christ never supported the powerful. So you don't even know your own religion. If you are a christian, you are provably an idiot. As for "right of return" I said already that if there was a an Aryan nation that only allowed the right of return of Aryans there would be world wide outcry. The very idea is evil. As long as aparthied continues, and the democratically elected government is ignored, how can either of those treaties be respected. wtf, if? Its called an analogy. Maybe aspies have a hard time understanding analogies? ror you're a propagandised american idiot whose going to cry like a little bitch when the inevtitable blowback comes your way. hardcore addictive pornography should be banned Your taking people's strongest instincts and perverting them in ways that can only ever lead to destruction. After enough of this material, your average person is going to find that he can no longer get a buzz just by watching and will eventually go out and force other people to submit to this kind of behaviour. As the sexual drive is so strong these types of images will lead to people thinking of nothing else, they will be unable to lead normal lives and they are almost certain to hurt other people. Hardcore addictive pornography is illegal for a reason, and the government should do whatever it takes to stop just one person getting hooked on it. Israel is keeping reporters out of Gaza Although the BBC have managed to obtain some reports from a couple of Palestinian reporters. Although they have stated they are not showing all the footage they get, because its too graphic (wtf?). And if the US killed 100k muslim civilians over say the death of 3000 US civilians, you would be against that too, right? Maybe the Israelis are just moderating the radical muslims as per the advice of some genius rant on this site? random 100k pulled out of my http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ 0 of them due to muslim on muslim violence. ^ propaganda in action $ Okay, my mistake IBC still claims that these deaths are due to the breakdown of society due to the invasion. So arguably these deaths can still be blamed on the war. If this democratic nation implements sharia law and starts oppressing its minorities, I guess you will respect that too, right? If they Those killed Iraqis supported the US invasion and were let down when the US withdrew... Of course they were going to be killed. Whoever was in charge would do the same. You must remember the reason for the '91 invasion was the invasion of Kuwait, something Saddam was given permission to do by the US, until Thatcher complained (because of UK oil interests in Kuwait) and convinced the US to attack. Oh, and if we're discussing EXCESS deaths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War As we are discussing propaganda... You don't think its propaganda that the US has a policy of NOT counting civilian deaths... I mean this information should be EASY to find... but I bet even you can't get a good estimate of civilians killed by US forces. This is no different to Israel not letting reporters into Gaza (except for some embedded reporters, something they also learnt from the US). Do you know it was the CIA that radicalised the muslims and provided funding to madrasses to acheive that aim in order to fight the Soviets? Do you realise that Israel is the biggest recipient of US aid ($3B of it directly military), and much of the anger of the Muslim world flows from that? Do you realise that Israel is just using the same logic promoted by the US of pre-emptive war to stop possible future attacks? The irony of claims of propaganda here is that you correctly point out the evils of both Israel and Hamas, but you never see any evil from the US. Enjoy your blowback: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z6vMAoFwf4... just as Israel has guaranteed decades of more violence, you too shall be the recipient of violence. this is where I stopped reading "saddam hussein, some robot under cia control. " No, all I said was that he requested and was granted permission from the US for the invasion. If you can't accept that, then truth means nothing to you. April Glaspie, American Foreign Diplomat to Iraq http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late '60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi (Chedli Klibi, Secretary General of the Arab League) or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly. ... It seems far more likely that Saddam Hussein went ahead with the invasion because he believed the US would not react with anything more than verbal condemnation. That was an inference he could well have drawn from his meeting with US Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, and from statements by State Department officials in Washington at the same time publicly disavowing any US security commitments to Kuwait but also from the success of both the Reagan and the Bush administrations in heading off attempts by the US Senate to impose sanctions on Iraq for previous breaches of international law. So much for intellectual honesty Are you denying the US Ambassador said these things? Or that what an ambassador says to a foreign head of state is irrelevant? wtf? good troll though. The statement is that there would be no military action. How else would you read 'has no interest'? more copypasta? All I said is that the US told Iraq it had no opinion over it invading Kuwait, and then lo and behold, they did have an opinion over it. You bought up the '91 war, but you have no idea of the history of it. You were the one using it in your arguments as a reason to ignore my posts but you completely ignore the reality. Don't call me propagandized when you wouldn't know propaganda if it came all over your face. I'm saying that you can accept that both israel and Hamas do evil things... but you are never willing to admit that the US does evil things... So, the US invasion lead to the excess death of 100k people over 3k dead Americans... but you will not admit that was wrong. Its terrible if its Israel kills 10 for everyone of their civilians, but its a good idea ifs the US. You ignore that the Israeli's are simply following the US lead doctrine of pre-emptive, preventative war... The very thing you've been arguing for the last 7 years. And finally, you see no connection between the actions over the years of both the US and Israel when it comes to the radicalisation of muslims. You know nothing of history, or you ignore it, or you call it a wild conspiracy theory, as if the US government and CIA were ineffective scout troops. So, now I've repeated myself because you got lost arguing an indefensible position and couldn't just admit your mistake and move on. I'm not anti-usa, I'm pro-truth The USA also does some great things in the world. Leaders in technology, many great thinkers, based on ideals of freedom and justice and much more. I don't deny that either. So forget you're anti-usa stance... Although I am anti you supporting the USA in situations that you say make other countries evil. Israel/Gaza parallels USA/Iraq everywhere but in your mind. Now onto your examples. When the US says they have no opinion on Iraq invading Kuwait, that's implicit support for Iraq invading Kuwait. If you ask a biker if its okay to sit on his bike, and he says he has no opinion, you might think otherwise when he punches you saying its because you sat on his bike. To deny that happened or it means something else simply means the propaganda worked on you. Now let's now destroy your version of blame (USA has no responsibility for the increase in iraqi suicide bombers). Lets say you agree to come camping out in the woods with me... and, when we are deep out in the woods we stumble across a cabin, and we go in. Nothing wrong with any of that, right? Except, inside the cabin, I happen to know there is a neo-nazi who has a predilection for beating and raping effeminate filipinos - You are raped and beaten by him, while I fap in the corner... Now, we both agree the neo-nazi should go to prison, but according to your theory of blame, I am completely innocent. I never beat or raped you, I just went on a nice camping trip with you that I thoroughly enjoyed. I should be free to take you, or your sister, out camping again to meet another neo-nazi in the woods. No one in their right mind would think that I am innocent and blameless. Do you know why? And for the same reasons, the US has blame for the Iraqi suicide bombers and you should be holding the US to the same standard as you hold Israel, Palestine, Russia, China, Iraq, Iran.... BTW: You know the US gave the green light for the current Gaza attack and have organised the delivery of more ordinance to Israel, right? Also: Do you want to go camping? uhuh.... either you can't read, or can't handle the truth. The USA had no opinion on Iraq invading. Ummm... so, in that situation you would be happy for me to go unpunished? Really? That would put you firmly on the fringe of current legal thinking. meant to finish that with: and promised to still love you in the morning. Big Mac and fries please. Smart move quitting your job when you are in a load of debt and an economic depression is looming. For MichaelCrawford: Is the government spying on Paranoid Schizophrenics. Yes, but do you think they will use that register Enough? I post on k5 to fantasise that I'm an alpha male btw, hows the poker going, or did you give up? You just might be crazy if... you take end time prophecies seriously. Its not even supported by the scriptures. (I don't know exact ones, but stuff like, no one will know when and coming like a thief in the night). Put it this way... Would you rather live in Serdot or Gaza? No shit... Its human nature to not respect what you can walk over. If he wanted her back he should have cut her funding immediately (let the courts force him to pay, which seems unlikely in this case) and go out and fuck other women and tell her about them. Show her no love and no mercy. She'd be begging for him in no time... Its probably too late for that now, but it still wouldn't hurt to start. Lets root out those contradictions then Starting with, do you believe in evolution or creation? Just to let you know, I'm a cultural christian atheist... meaning I don't believe in god or jesus as god, just that I exist in a christian society and think he (or his myth) had a very nice philosophy that I more or less abide by. Sounds like you haven't thought it through at all not exactly logical. On one hand you think you see "evolutionary patterns", but then explain that you don't really understand how evolution works at all... Its worth understanding, its the basis of all our modern understanding of biology (and medicine) and just a very cool and logical theory. Then you say god is the creator, but you don't know what that even means either... maybe he made evolution, maybe he just made it look like there was evolution (a trickster god)? Maybe you believe god directed evolution, which means you believe in Intelligent Design (please say no - that's really stupid)? Either way, the contradiction is that you basically ignore the problem. Sounds to me like you might say God and Evolution are compatible? I'd like to leave it that while you go away and get all excited about evolution... I don't really want to discouraging you by telling you they aren't... So it must be a question of Science vs Religion to you. Really its all a contradictory mess no matter how you look at... logic doesn't enter it it... god must be crazy. The real question is, could you ever reach the point where you just quit worrying and realise there is no god? Could you be comfortable in a universe with no god and do you care that that could be true no matter what you think? Not an uncommon viewpoint. Science will never "know" everything. That's just the way science works, always building up a better model, but never proving anything, only disproving. Be careful not to fall into "God of the Gaps" theory, where what we don't know, must be god... This is a mistake made by the first article I linked too. I agree with the first article that to assume god made the world in a literal 6 days would mean that god must be a trickster, a liar, but to accept that its not literal means the whole fall of man story can't be literal - which means there is no original sin, and therefore jesus died for nothing. All I'm saying is that there is a contradiction in there... if you can live with that, then fine. Otherwise, like I said, I think the philosophy of jesus is great and has truth in it, just that jesus isn't god and there is no god - because there's no room for an interventionist god in what appears to all science to be a mechanistic universe. Go Israel Israel are showing that there is a way to stop Muslims becoming terrorists. To make sure a Muslim doesn't grow up to be a terrorist, just make sure they never grow up. http://muslimtv.magnify.net/video/ISRAEL-CARNAGE-CIVILIANS-CHILDR How enlightened of the Zionists. This video possible due to the hard work of the American tax dollar. Congratulations to you Americans, bringing peace to this world, we thank you. BTW: This video doesn't last long on youtube, thank the JIDF and megaphone for that. Normally I'd link to YouTube, but it keeps getting taken down... So I had to link to somewhere where it was unlikely to be removed. If a true believer like you are questioning Israel imagine what the non-supporters and fence sitters are now thinking, not even considering the traditional haters? 12k protesters in London yesterday, the leaders and spokespeople were non-palestinian celebrities and politicians. I think this is ultimately going to hurt the Israeli image and agenda. I think he means any support going forward $ The reason it will never actually happen is because leaders on both sides gain from conflict. They get support and power from their base as long as there are threats and something to fight against. The last thing they want is peace. That's not unique to this conflict though. +3 encourage I was expecting you to comment and would have bet money at nearly any price on you turning up. What I didn't expect was you not 100% supporting Israel's actions -- now who do I vent my frustration at? Yes, I think its clear you are racist towards Palestinians, but congratulations on at least starting to question that attitude... its a big step, like a KKK clansman saying maybe not all black's are bad, still some way to go, but heading in the right direction. Its pretty easy for you to feel upset when you see dead Israelis in a suicide attack, and you should be upset because innocent humans are injured and kills... but you should also be upset that innocent humans are injured and killed when its the other side. I also think the media is biased. Even on one of our channels (itv.com) I noticed them say "Israel has begun their ground offensive against fanatical Palestine", was that word really necessary? Mind you itv isn't the bbc and the I didn't notice the bbc using such divisive language, but UK media is normally less biased than USian. So, I'll let you answer that question yourself with another question. If there was a suicide attack on Israel, would you expect to see footage of the carnage in the MSM, and conversely do you expect to see this footage show up in the MSM? I haven't seen it even in the UK media and it seems its being surpressed even here on the internet. And if Israel attack civilians If Israel attack markets full of civilians with advanced super weaponary, then hamas should just continue killing civilians. After they kill enough the civilians will turn against the Zionists. If the civilians are willing to support and protect Zionists, then they aren't really civilians, they are members of Zion and are valid targets. Either way you kill Israelis. Sometimes each massive act of barbarity can create enough hate to last generations and then you have to fight a guerrilla war over several decades. Whatever you have you use, even if you only have unguided missiles. Sort of a mutually assured destruction kinda thing. You inflict unacceptable casualties on our people and we will fire even just one rocket a day at you. Given that Israel doesn't seem to value life very much they might have to launch a lot to reach their "unacceptable" number. Maybe Israelis should be more careful to choose leaders that value life a little more. Give Palestine the kind of hardware Israel gets and strip Israelis of everything they have and back them into a corner and Israel will resort to guerilla warfare too... its HUMAN NATURE. When in a corner you fight with whatever you have. You would do the same too. Its impossible to go head to head with an Apache armed with an unguided missile. Its instant death and makes no strategic sense. Now Israel have decided its fine to kill civilians despite their massive tactical advantage thereby giving up any moral high ground they might have had and further radicalising their enemies... So expect MORE attacks on Israeli civilians in the future. That's what FOX tells you... Check this: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eCL6WdnuNp4 And no... you have another option, and that is guerilla warfare. Its just as just as going toe to toe and makes much more sense against a superior enemy. What's worse, is that the only reason they have that superior weaponary is US support. You will see in the above video that the Palestinians are under Illegal (according to the UN) occupation, that 65% of them are unemployed and 75% below the poverty line. You'll love the parts where Israelis deny old women the right to go their own homes (PAPERS PLEASE!) and also the bits where they beat prisoners with rocks... REAL HUMANITARIANS THERE. Israel are like the abused child, who we all pity, who have now become the child abuser, and should be condemned. You watched 30 seconds??? So you didn't watch it. Okay... Nice way of having to avoid the truth of the violence perpertrated by the Israelis there... Complete lack of Intellectual and Moral Honesty but if it helps you live with yourself guess you have no choice. Well... it goes on to show that pretty much all of Gaza and the West Bank are controlled and ILLEGALLY occupied by Israel... As the VARIOUS UN Resolutions state. It doesn't matter is the Palestinians have a valid dispute with Israel. Oh, of course, completely irrelevent. The unemployment and all that shit is a direct result of the violence of hamas. No, its a direct result of being occupied and not allowed freedom and soveriegnty... Its a direct result of your houses, businesses and farm land being destroyed. And since hamas uses civilian shields that means civilians must die. Israel's military command are within Israel -- with no way to attack except with unguided rockets, you must use unguided rockets (all's fair in war), knowing that, Israel puts their civilians in harms way and that means they too are using human sheilds... You want to see another Isreali idea of a human sheild: http://snagwiremedia.com/boy-used-as-human-shield-by-israeli/ ah but we give them a blank cheque because they've been abused more recently than the jews, huh? Yes!!! OF COURSE... The Jews were abused 50 years ago by Nazis, NOW the Israelis have BECOME the Nazis abusing Palestinians. They've collectively grown such a strong persecution complex that it justifies all maner of human rights violations. All your whining about Hamas is stupid because 5 years ago it was all about Hezbolla... As long as the Israelis illegally occupy the land of and indiscrimately oppress the Palestinians, there WILL be VIOLENT OPPOSITION. And its going to get a lot worse... mark my words. You can't negotiate with them They totally control palestine and have for years. They aren't acting morally and they deliberately distort the media. Resolution 242 was not abided by Israel, because they never left Palestine, which is a precondition of the resolution for peace. Palestine did not have to stop attacking Israel unless they left, but they did not and are therefore they are still in violation of it... and 65 other resolutions. Don't forget that RIGHT NOW, the ENTIRE world (through the UN) has been trying to pass a resolution to force Israel to withdraw.... but its been VETOED by just one country, the US... Another thing that video goes into. Yes, all's fair, but that doesn't mean all is right. Right is another matter. Whatever was needed to stop the Nazi's would be both fair and right... Whatever the Nazi's did would only be fair... Same applies now but the other way around. When you are oppressed, your actions are by definition right, because you are fighting for freedom. If Israel wants to wipe Palestine off the map, well they can... that's fair, but they KNOW their PR machine could not justify it and they in turn will be destroyed for it... they can barely maintain their PR machine now (except with ignorant Americans like yourself - and in this case you're deliberatly ignorant). During all the time Israel has supposedly had a cease fire, they still occupied and oppressed the Palestinians. If Israel wants peace, they could have it tomorrow. All they would have to do is grant full citizenship and equal rights to the Palestinians, give back their freedom of movement and land and pull out of all settlements and Hamas' raison d'etre is destroyed. There would of course still be some attacks from real fanatics (actions have consequences that last years), but over time their support would dwindle and they could be removed by police (rather than military) action. What Israel are doing now are polarising the arab world, making it impossible for moderate muslims to argue for peace and creating more radical, fundamentalist muslims, which you will go on to call terrorists - and given the US support of Israel, don't be surprised if you pay the price too. See 1 i) Retard Firstly Isreal must withdraw... No withdrawel no peace. And an apartheid solution will not bring peace... So yes, the only way to peace is is to give Palestinians the same rights as Israelis. Otherwise you are treating them as untermensch to be rounded up into concentration camps called the West Bank and Gaza. Zionists are no better than Nazis... You neither. If Israel will not abide by i) then ii) logically does not hold. Logic, do you fucking read it? So the Resolution calls for Israel to withdraw from all the territory it occupied during the Six-Day War as a precondition to the start of peace negotiations. There can be no peace because by not abiding by i) Israel are in fact in complete violation of article ii) because by not withdrawing Israel is in direct contradiction of the acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of Palestine. This makes 1.i) a PRECONDITION on 1.ii). Get it? Both of those apply to ISRAEL retard They CONTINUE to be in VIOLATION of 242! You're a fucking moron. Israel didn't give them back anything The resolution was never targetted at Palestine, only Israel dipshit. before the Emphasising further bit, it says Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security. Clearly this applies ONLY to ISRAEL. Which they supposedly agreed to. The whole sticking point on this matter is Israel's refusual to remove itself from all the territories. The whole quible is over the fucking word the. That's fucking weasling. The FACTS of the matter are that ISRAEL has NOT abided by the resolution, by NOT withdrawing from all the territories they occupied, so of course they get no fucking peace because they are in violation of the resolution. How retarded do you have to be to not fucking get that? lol indeed The omission is a matter of interpretation (the distinction does not exist in the french interpretation), and meaningless. You couldn't say "Dogs must be kept on the lead near ponds in the park." would mean only some dogs near some ponds. It applies to ALL dogs near ALL ponds... And so clearly it applies to ALL the territories captured by the Israelis... and here you have the proof that the Israelis are not abiding by the resolution. And yes... once Israel abides by this, the other countries will abide by their terms... that's why I said withdrawal by Israelis is a precondition of the resolution. BTW: Even Hamas have promised a 30 year truce should Israel withdraw to their 1967 borders. Finally... All this discussion of 242 is just a way for you to avoid watching the rest of the violence perpetrated by Israel... Accepting that they are cruel and violent would cause you too much cognitive dissonance I believe. Palestine was there first HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY HAVE STARTED IT? s/Everyone in the world/Propagandized Americans and Israelis/g Hamas are fighting the only way they can - nonviolent resistence would be meaningless against these monsters. Also, Gaza is a highly densly populated area... one of the highest in fact... The whole "human shield" argument completely ignores this fact and proves it false. Fuck 242, 1860 is being ignored TODAY by Israel What more proof do you need that they ignore the UN? Your accusation of terrorism by Hamas is simply ignoring the assymetry in capabilities. You are saying that if Hamas had the billions of dollars of weapons that Israel has - so that they actually had the ability to target their attacks - you would support them. That's not logic, that's retardism. The resolution doesn't require Hamas to stop firing, oddly enough. They might reject it, but Israel clearly have not accepted it either... and its requirements fall squarely on Israel. Firstly, everyone in Israel is a member of the IDF -- there are no Israeli civilians. Secondly, give Hamas the technology to attack military targets, and we would see military targets attacked. Thirdly, with 3k people/km^2, they are not 'hiding behind their own children'... Gaza is the fucking battle ground and they have no choice but to have their children on it. alright, granted Hamas should stop lobbing rockets but again, Israel have rejected this too. Or are you denying that? And until Israel withdraws, the rockets will continue, no? lol No... Muslims will be further radicalised the WORLD OVER because of what is happening in Gaza. The US will be blamed for its support of Israel. And you will both suffer for generations to come because of what is happening today. People have forgotten the lessons of Germany. After the first world war the German's were stripped of everything they had... So they couldn't possibly be a threat, right? Wrong - all it did was give them reason to fight, and hello WWII. After WWII the Americans (largely) did something completely crazy, they flew in tons of aid and they rebuilt the destroyed infrastructure and turned Germany into a thriving economy. In other words, they supported their 'enemy' and actually gave them a reason to be peaceful instead of violent - and it appears to have worked. Israel have repressed the Palestinians for over 60 years now, and you are only just seeing the beginning of the destruction that will follow. Whatever the reason for rebuilding germany the results of that exercise are clear. The fact that that lesson is lost on you shows how little you understand how people work. You have no idea how the world works. You don't act, you only react. And that is why the Arab nations are a bunch of failed states. That's a complete non sequitur. Destruction? All the destruction I see is in Gaza. Right now yes. Pure suffering, hell and oppression. When the children whose families have been killed grow up, they will reign down destruction upon you that you cannot begin to imagine. Look what became of the jews after their oppression, now they (Israel) have become monsters themselves. Surrender now Israel or we will continue being victims for another 60 years! Yet Israel still play the poor persecuted victim while really being an occupier and an oppressor. Very simple exercise, even without this war, would you prefer to grow up in Sderot or Gaza? If you can't understand that innocent children have no choice but have to suffer because of fools like you - you might just be a nazi zionist yourself. Human Shields is such a stupid argument In the most densly populated slum on the planet, where they have no ability to build military installations, of course militants will exist within the population - that is not using the population as human shields. By that argument, you could say that the English military command used the English as human shields during the blitz... its propaganda and nothing more. If I was a palestinian living under Israel occupation, I would of course prefer Hamas to the alternatives... its the best alternative they have. That's why they were VOTED in. Hamas exists because of Israel, not the other way round. But basically, you have admitted the truth that life is far easier as an Israeli than Palestinian. So you are advocating beating up the weak. As I said, you will deserve the destruction you will reap from these actions in the following decades. Life is better because they are not being oppressed by Israel. Israel fucking occupied Gaza fully until 2005 ffs, and economically blockaded them since then. Depends if they want more violence or not As for being their stated aim -- that's just hamas propaganda to gain support. In reality, they have agreed to a truce should Israel fulfill 242 and fall back to their 1967 borders. No What will happen is that this will further radicalise muslims the world over and both israel and the US will suffer attacks that will make 9/11 look like the flu. I predict a nuclear device, smuggled from pakistan into the US. I just hope you're far enough away from it to not die quickly. Prediction based on history. Oppress people enough and they will fight back. 9/11 was in part due to the US support of Israel, part due to abandoning the Northern Alliance - so expect worse unless Obama takes a strong stand against Israel. If the US can't stop mexicans and drugs getting in, it won't be impossible to get something worse in. Hamas is the elected government Hamas leadership is a death sentence, not an oppurtunity to power - yet there will always be people willing to do it - because of the anger of the people. Moderate muslims are being radicalised right now because of the actions of Israel - ignore that at your own peril. goad Israel into attacking civilians Only an idiot would be goaded into such behaviour. The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated pieces of property in the world. The presence of militants within a civilian population does not, under international law, deprive that population of their protected status, and hence any assault upon that population under the guise of targeting militants is, in fact, a war crime. Moreover, Israel has long held Gaza under siege, allowing only the most minimal amounts of humanitarian supplies to enter. Israel is bombing and killing Palestinian civilians. Countless more have been wounded, and cannot receive medical attention. Hospitals running on generators have little or no fuel. Doctors have no proper equipment or medical supplies to treat the injured. These people, too, are the victims of Israeli policies targeted not at Hamas or legitimate military targets, but directly designed to punish the civilian population. Only difference is Israel blockaded And under geneva conventions, an occuppier has the duty to supply the occupied with food, water and medicine. Israel are negligent in this - and the blockade is another reason Hamas has gained such political support. Hamas have only been strengthened (at least politically) by this attack - its counterproductive at the BEST. Occupation / Blockade - same fucking thing. Attacking civilians is still a war crime. Blockading and starving them is a war crime. In fact the blockade was never fully lifted, which was a requirement of the ceasefire - showing the lie that Hamas broke it. Israel is losing support and Hamas is gaining support. Not just in Gaza, but world wide. Israel will not achieve its stated aims and they are merely strengthening Hamas. The number of rockets being sent into Israel is increasing and Israel has merely bought upon itself many more decades of violence. Hamas has never been so strong and Fatah has been shown to be weak and uninterested in the fate of palestinians. Egypt should help the Gazans, but the palestinian refugees are not refugees from Egypt but Israel. Egypt does not help the Gazans because they are paid by Israel and the US to enforce the blockade. They are corrupt, but not the source of the corruption. I don't blame Jews, btw... only Israeli Zionists and their supporters... there may be no difference in your mind, but there is in mine. Many Jews (both ethnic and religious) see sense and have denounced this mindless violence. They are not 'self-hating' jews, but humanitarians. This just proves Israel controls the US It also explains why the world hates you, 9/11 and the attacks yet to come. That and the $6B in aid Israel gets from the US. OTOH, there is almost unanimous condemnation of Israel in Europe. Like I said before, everyone but US and Israel condemns this. I like how you go on to prove how stupid and distracted Americans are... hard to argue with you there. I bet you'll be scratching your head and wondering why the muslims 'hate your freedom' next time. Listen Kike, You Kikes killed my GreatGrandFather He was a peaceable man, he just used to sit playing cards with his fellow peace loving nazi mates in the guard tower at Auschwitz, when one day, some ruthless jew, covered in his filth (cause jews liked living in filth), set the tower on fire, it burnt and fell over, my great-grand-father broke his neck in the collapse and died. If only those kikes knew what a loving man he was, he might have lived to see the birth of his grand daughter, my mom, but that's the kind of violence jews commit. That's why jews go in the oven. You fucking IDIOT. That is OCCUPATION you are describing. WTF were the IDF doing in the tower in the first place? Many muslims are peace loving, highly trained technical people living in the modern western world - your racism is disgusting. Given you are a Jew, I'd say you were on the side of Jews. God's chosen people and all that. THE MASTER RACE. Either that or you're just a brainwashed yank whose been conditioned to think of muslims the way you described them, and therefore, by extension, the jews must be good. I take back my statement that all is fair in war, btw.... In international law, all is fair in self defence in war. As the occupier and aggressor, Israel HAS NO RIGHT to self defence. Only Hamas has the right to self defence and protest, which is what the rocket attacks are. Hi GoT Until israelis accept palestinians as real human beings, they aren't. The occupied have the right to violent protest according to internation law. Calling it terrorism means the propaganda works. Collective punishment for that protest is illegal. When you are occupied... 'civilians' are not protected from your violent protests. The occupier is allowed to go in and stop the individuals that are protesting, and there are also rules of engagement in urban areas, irrespective of who you are aiming at, you are liable for killing civilians. You can if you're occupied. The occupier may not allow it, but you cannot be charged for committing a war crime if you do. This is because the right to self defence is only a right to defence from violence, and occupation is considered the primary act of violence. Not that you are losing, but that you have lost - makes the difference. The occupier, otoh, can be charged under international war as a war criminal for attacking occupied civilians. The victor is responsible for the well being of the conquered. The conquered have no such responsibility to the victor. Nothing to do with emotions All I've stated is the international law regarding war and this situation. Its much like all law though, in that it is completely irrelevant, right up to the point the perpertrators are standing in the Hague arguing why they shouldn't be hung. If you have a hard time understanding that context changes the rules, consider if it would be legal for me to hit you with a baseball bat. Normally, you would say no, but, if you had been holding me and my family prisoner in your basement, then it would in fact be perfectly legal, even if I hit your (innocent/civilian) wife it would still be legal. You could then go on to say that I and my family then deserve the bat beating you then hand out, and that I should have expected that consequence for beating you - that might be true, and you will get away with it too, right up to the point you find yourself in front of a judge. Just as Israel will get away with war crimes, and will continue blaming the palestinians for their own imprisonment. It doesn't make it legal, just that no one is in a position to exercise the law... yet. No... it'd be nothing like that $ Wrong diary, right? $ Well that makes the current invasion ok then $ fair enough $ Hamas are fighting for a population imprisoned and denied their basic human rights under an occupying force. That alone justifies whatever actions they take to correct that situation. The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son, eh? Is that what your trying to say? What happened 60 years ago is irrelevant to anyone under 60. What is happening to people TODAY is all that matters. And the Germans voted in hitler democratically too, I guess that makes Nazi's A-OK with you too? fuck the palestinians. Fuck your race too, racist piece of shit. what about the palestinians trapped in gaza now? $ They elected Hamas BECAUSE they were trapped Israel blocks travel WITHIN the west bank and Gaza... The Israeli's have treated the Palestinians like vermin for over 40 years, then they wonder why Hamas gets elected and the occasional rocket is lobbed over into their country. What? they shouldn't fight back when Israel denies them food, water, medicine and the right to travel freely in their own illegally occupied country? Oh yeah, and Israel makes them live in ghettos. You should educate yourself about what's been going on there... Just imagine yourself being born Palestinian. How would you react? If you can't empathise for that position you are nothing but a racist. Watch the video I posted earlier... Yes, Israel withdrew three years ago, approximately... And then blocked all trade... An evil economic embargo that stops the supply of food, medicine and water. Also look at the parts of Gaza and the West Bank that are left... All the natural water supplies have been taken by Israel. Because Israel holds all the fresh water supplies? You know... the ones they took from Palestine. And blocks all trade into Gaza? Maybe those reasons? Very few countries do well when cut off from trade... that's why governments HAVE trade embargoes. You want to be educated on my baseless accusation --- its in the fucking video!! The one you refuse to watch because you can't get past 242, even though 1860 is now BEING IGNORED, despite ALL voting member states approving it (except the the US which abstained -- even they didn't dare VETO it anymore). More information on the water problems: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1178 http://desip.igc.org/TheftOfWater.html http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2007/03/water_rights_ex.html Doctors should only give advice on what people should take, but the ultimate decision should be up to the individual themselves. In other words, the whole prescription system should be removed (except for purposes of health insurance or discounts). If you want to take the wrong medicine and end up dying from that, then that should be up to you. The only exception, as you point out, is with anti-biotics. At least there'll no confusion when he goes flying now. Must have been difficult when his staff were asked to get Travolta's jet and they lined his kid up on the runway. So you bit the 'Isreali are not human' troll Note even the lack of grammar from the supposed "EU human right worker" who just happens to be a nazi, and you bite back with your "I'm an IDF gangsta, jews rule hamas drool, troll" - the nazi human rights worker thinks he has a bite from some right wing zionist and trolls you further which makes you think you have a bite from a nazi and are troll king. Sounds like you've got yourself a whole barrel of recursive troll failure right there. While you're all thinking how clever you are that you can troll strangers on the internet, really you're all demonstrating that you're too stupid to argue your actual beliefs and convictions because they wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of even a troll's argument anyway. dumped in record time $ I told him, but he ignored my advice pruf So I had no choice but to do my bit and dump it. What were you charged with? $ Driving vs Libertarianism is a Strawman You can't drive on PUBLIC roads unless everyone follows the same rules. If everyone just did what they pleased then no one would be able to drive at all. Someone else not following the rules therefore infringes on my ability to use the public roads. Hence driving on public roads is a privilege and you have a RESPONSIBILITY or DUTY to follow the rules when you decide to become a driver and this is why you must be licensed. Being drunk as a driver on a public road is a failure in your duty as a driver, and hence is rightfully (according to libertarianism) regulated. You will realise that this is a strawman when you realise that its perfectly legal to drive drunk on your own private property, should you happen to own a property large enough to drive around on, like a farm for example. You should have said anarcho-capitalists then That sounds like a contradiction to me... Do they believe in allowing the free market regulate the free market, or do they realise that the government is needed to enforce the basic rules that enable people to trade freely (such as no theft or fraud)? How would they deal with negative externalities such as pollution? Clearly someone who pollutes the air harms me, and violates the harm principle. If they can see that some enforcement is required even for the running of free markets, is it that far of a stretch to realise that this is true of all COMMON resources? We celebrated Official New Years 5 hours ago You must be slow We are a moderate global humanist We are neither British nor European, and We are not amused by one's speculation. That was just my attempt at a queen victoria "We are not amused" line... I guess I should have put it in italics to make it obvious to my american audience... but even then there is the chance that you might have missed the reference. So, like your american sitcoms, even though now it should be obvious, I will point it out once more with references just to make sure you get it: We Are Not Amused. That's okay... It is missing the canned laughter track. No, I'm a moderate global humanist $ No, he claims to be but he's really a communist $ Also, he claims to be a global humanist if you try and call him an american... even though he actually is a (filipino) American whether or not him being a global humanist. I on the other hand really am not a Brit, European or Iraqi, despite currently being in Britain. How unlike an American To think they are (or should be) the center of the world. The english didn't decide that for themselves. UTC is an International Standard. Obviously the whole world saw the natural superiority of a British centred time system. Its not the fault of the english. If you look on a map you will see the Prime Meridian passes through Greenwich... It IS the natural longitudinal center of the world... Check Google Maps if you don't beleive me. You can't all go claiming to be the center. How would anyone know where they were? And I've explained above, I am not an englishman, I am a global moderate humanist. Happy Official New Year Happy New Year from ol Blighty... Of course, this is the official new years because this is where everyone's time is calculated from. +0 GMT suckas!! So, everyone from Europe to Aus, NZ and Christmas Island, you guys are premature celebrators. And you in the US and beyond enjoy your sloppy seconds... We've already had our go. BTW: Don't be fooled there were 61 seconds in the last minute of 2008... so you should have counted down from 11. Yes!! Our New Years go to 11!! Ummm.... yeah, new years has already been Diary was after the event... you know, like the braggings of an ex-virgin. It was difficult enough getting the bra undone $ Premature celebrator Greenwich is where all time is measured because it was invented here. We don't use Greenwich Mean Time as the standard any more, but UTC (still means the same thing). The U stands for universal and its how time is measured in the entire universe. This proves you got excited early and were done too soon. Maybe your fireworks going off early is a common problem amongst Asians? I don't know and don't want to make any racist statement but its still not something to be proud of even if billions of others suffer the same disorder. We're in the 21st century now We use NTP and UTC, not sticks in the ground with markings on it. The new year starts at midnight not dawn and sundials don't work at midnight either -- so how could you possibly know when new years is? Do you still use cubits or whatever the eastern equivilent is? Sounds like you're celebrating some pagan thing, unrelated to our modern day celebrations based on the motion of ceasium atoms not your cute astrological ideas that the motion of heavenly bodies somehow affect our day to day lives. Hope you scared away all the evil spirits with your fire crackers for your medievil festivities. Also the copying thing. what? That's medieval thinking... We now measure Universal Coordinated Time. UTC is the same on Mars as it is on Earth... Your earth-centric thinking is clearly limited. Even so... those "days", "years", "rotations" and "orbits" are now based on Greenwich time, and you adjust your local time to that for the convienience of not having to get up for work at midnight. Its not the REAL time, just a convienient inferier and ultimately wrong time we let you use so as not to confuse you too much. I can see where your confusion arises from though, and I do sympathise for you. Its origin is the measurement of longitude used for shipping in which you need to have an accurate knowledge of time to calculate it accurately... It was originally measured by the dropping of a ball on a mast in greenwich which was done by a human... its still a human measurement, its just we now get ceasium atoms to do it for us. Its got nothing to do with your medieval notions of astrology. Your timezone is UTC+8... Its right there in the name. You went off 8 hours early and obviously feel a bit embarrased about it but all you are doing is parading your shame around for all to see. Yes, UTC just cycled over to 2009 What's your point? I'm not the one celebrating new years at the wrong time. Look, there is nothing astrologically significant about new year's. If you want to worship orbits around stars and stuff like that you should have celebrated the winter solstice, and the exact moment your little town was facing furthest from the sun on the solstice or something like that that means something in terms of orbits and days and dawns and stuff, right? Like druids and pagans do. What we are celebrating is not some magic point in our orbit around the sun but the rolling over of our MODERN CALENDER system which happens to occur when our MODERN TIME KEEPING system rolls over which is based on UTC time. So you should be celebrating the Official New Year at 00:00:00 UTC time, instead you celebrate the convienient but incorrect and premature new year so you can see the fireworks and get drunk in the dark instead of first thing in the morning like you are supposed to. enjoy your medieval rituals, pagan $ Rusty will reduce the threshold to one vote $ whats :w: ? wumpscut? $ ahhh, you are the dead maker... nice $ ROR.... that song was 25 years ahead of its time only now do we have the technology to make lame jokes about it. Magic. Its hard to prove these things medically You should sue instead. You might make enough to pay off your debts. The Statute of Limitations applies from the moment of discovery of the condition you want to redress... So, maybe you just realised the possible connection recently? Of course, not knowing who it was might well be a difficult hurdle... but maybe you could lodge a john doe suit until you find him -- your stalking skills are quite strong at the moment too. Who knows? I wish I had a job that involved shooting up... photographing cumming young models wouldn't be too bad either. Its his way of saying he's going to be a pimp $ Are you trying to chat up MC? I think its working. Don't Brew It If you want to make it awful to an alcoholic, just make sure its very low in alcohol (mostly yeast and sugar I guess... I don't brew). Otoh... why do you act like a friend to someone you don't like? Sounds a bit low and two faced to me. Not to mention making fun of someone's disability. Maybe you could build some stairs, invite some hungry cripples over for a feast and toss them your scraps from above for lulz too. Isn't that Mead? $ Google Stalking is still Stalking You should feel bad... but not worth killing yourself over. You can try this instead. Repeat until cured. Monty Python Explain it Best In the Executive Version of the Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film Monty Python and the Holy Grail... Well, I had the Cassette Recording of the above, but I digress. http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~rafe/sexlogic.html Anyone who can find an MP3 / Youtube of this gets a cookie. Stormy Petral on a Stick $ This explains why all my gfs have been alcoholics$ Anyone who still thinks the WoD is a good idea is clearly a moron. I watched 'Unreported World: Seven days in hell' last night, showing how the gangs are overtaking mexico to supply cocaine to the US... corrupting governments, killing each other, police and innocent bystanders, something like 7500 people killed over the last two years... The disappointing thing was that the conclusion drawn was that this was all due to the demand in the US, rather than the result of prohibition itself. The demand won't go away, so who is going to supply it if legitimate businesses aren't allowed to? You should do it... She loved A2M, w/me at least $ Why? Can't people walk to the soup kitchens? $ Not likely Q: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" S. Man, Denton A: President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana. -- http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/open_for_questions_response/ Isn't 'dialogue' with CTS hazing enough? $ R U sure? Male tortoiseshell's are very rare... wiki says so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortoiseshell_cat Why the fuck did you leave bonita? After all she's done sticking by an insane fuck like you? She must have been crazy too, to love you. You might get to fuck this new crazy chick, but when she leaves you, you are going to be in for a world of hurt. Why do that to yourself? I would have thought that your relationship with Bonita would have been the one stable thing in your life... without that, what have you got? I imagine you will end up on the streets soon, followed by becoming a junkie and then dying. Oh well, was nice to know you. Is there any hope of salvaging ur relationship with Bonita? ANY?? Yes... I'm sorry I wrote that.... You are going to have to build a support network that doesn't include her now... Find comfort and stability in friendships and non-sexual relationships... Love will come again... Also, stay away from the crazy girls too, they'll drag you down with them. Also, don't expect others to keep you sane... its a burden very few can handle... they'll have to accept your flaws, but they can't take responsibility for them. sorry.... ignore my previous comment I didn't realise she had left you ages ago. I hope it wasn't because you cheated on her or anything... well... all I can do now is wish you the best of luck and hope you can find a way to live without her... I don't know how the new girl will work out, but she doesn't sound promising... look around more, go out with several women, care less, especially don't try to make every woman 'the one'... try to build strength in yourself. Sorry again and good luck. No more insults, not from me anyway If its done, and you accept it, there's little to do but move on I guess. No point in regrets. It won't do you any good to beat yourself up over it. You'll have suffered enough already. All you have now is to make the best of the situation you find yourself in. Don't worry about dates, just go out and meet people... they might introduce you to someone they know... sooner or later you'll find someone, probably several before you find that someone. Like I said, best of luck. Glad he won. I wouldn't have said this before, because I didn't want to discourage people voting for him, but if he had ever been caught for what he admitted, he'd be nothing more than another nigger with a record, ineligible to vote, let alone even run. It seems the worst thing that can happen to a drug user is getting caught. That's the only thing that absolutely will ruin a drug user's life and stop them becoming president. I have high hopes that this hypocrisy will be corrected. That'd be a nice CHANGE. Broken Window Fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window Of course, these industries are powerful and so lots of powerful people will lose out. So you point out a good reason why its difficult politically, but not actually economically. wrong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(F-L)#I id est (i.e.) that is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exempli_gratia#exempli_gratia exempli gratia (e.g.) 'for the sake of example' Why would cross-disciplinary scientists be fine, but not cross-disciplinary engineers? Hi Mike, don't be a credit card addict. Simple advice, from a seemingly stupid book. The theory is that, you earn 100k, but you probably spend 110k... if you only earn 40k, you would probably spend 45k... and if you earn 10k, you would spend 11k... its not how much you earn its how much you spend... everyone spends a little more than they earn... but almost everyone could learn to spend a little less. So it recommends that you pay back your debts at least 20% of your net income. Pay back the minimum you have or can negotiate to your creditors, then pay back the highest interest rate debts first. Credit interest rates are in general outrageous. If your interest rates aren't fixed and the economy goes into high inflation, you will be stuck with those debts at today's real cost - but you'll still be earning at today's rates for some time. If your interest rates are fixed... high inflation reduces your debts. At the same time, save at least 10% of your net income. Put this into wise investments... which means seek advice from people who know about what you are investing in. Make a budget. You're going to have to include your 'unexpected' medical costs in there too, I'm afraid. If there's anyway to bring those down, insurance, government assistance, student health care... A budget that you actively track will guide you anyway. The only reasonable long term debts (imho) are fixed interest rate mortgages to cover hard assets like houses... I would have said be careful overvaluing your assets... but that's not going to be so much of a problem going forward. Also, again, make sure its a debt you can afford. Oh, its also reasonable to get a loan to cover existing debts at a lower interest rate. Might be hard to find these days... but your bank might even let you pay off your credit cards with a personal loan at lower rates?? Aren't there P2P lenders online too, might be something interesting to you. Credit cards are only useful if you pay them off each month or for absolute emergencies... best to be avoided otherwise. Also, why do you need such nice cars? Couldn't you sell the best one, buy two much cheaper ones, and then sell the other one and pay off some of your debts? Is public transport ever an option? Interest is literally the price you pay for borrowing money... the more you need and the more you need it, the higher price you pay... you don't want to pay to spend your own money... so do everything you can to reduce your overall interest rates. Its always hard work and a long road, but I think its worth being out of serious debt, so good luck with it, whatever you do. If you are interested in buying gold http://www.bullionvault.com looks interesting. Is it hot in here or is it just Ebola? A woman at work died of Marburg virus today. She caught it off a bat that bit her whilst she was caving in Uganda. I heard 100 people are being observed because of close contact with her, and 45 (others?) have reported some sort of fever like symptoms... but its unlikely she spread it and they probably just have flu. There were news camera crews, and WHO made a statement, but they haven't released the military yet, and I guess this isn't world news unless someone else dies... still, if they do... you heard it here first. Luckily, smoking makes me immune as the smoke kills the virus. Yes if just one other person has it, then I think it might become interesting. I think we were lucky this time, that she was isolated soon enough... but sooner or later, one of these things is going to wreck some major havoc in some city somewhere. It means you must bet on the black mare in next years Kentucky Derby. HTH oh, the king movie now that makes more sense. you mean like neurons? $ Ik ben terug in holland So Amsterdam would a goer for me. Gotta love a country where you can just go to the shop when you run out of pot at 11pm on a Sunday night. I went to the final in Perth last year quite impressive. I agree, it sucked... I think they had plenty of time to create a reasonable protocol to deal with the zombies. My idea would be to get everyone to just lie down, the enraged wouldn't be able to, so you just shoot everyone standing. Another tragic meth victim http://images.google.com.au/images?q=ben+cousins What you are really pointing out is the failure of the US democratic system to represent the will of the people. If 45% vote right, 35% vote moderate left and 20% vote far left, would you suggest that the will of the people is for the right? Moronic Idealist? No system can? Please, are you suggesting that the US system really is the BEST POSSIBLE SYSTEM or even the best system in the world as far as representing the will of the people is concerned? Are you suggesting that First Past the Post is the absolute ideal and always better than proportional representation or runoff voting systems? In the US system it makes sense to vote for the least worst candidate with a reasonable chance of winning -- wouldn't a better system be one where you could actually vote for the candidate THAT BEST REPRESENTED YOUR IDEALS? Okay, charge me with being a petty nationalist UK, Aus, France, Canada, NZ.... probably many others. All I'm pointing out to you is that your complaint about people voting for Nader is really a problem with the SYSTEM - people who want to vote for Nader SHOULD be ABLE to vote for Nader and have the expected result of Obama winning (closer to what they want), rather than McCain winning (even further than what they want). For practical reasons (working within a broken system) you are right, for idealistic, longer term goals, you should be aiming for election reform. Everything you say in the first paragraph above is also correct -- AND YOU DO promote those changes. Another way of saying it is, you SHOULD vote ELECTRONICALLY if the alternative is not to vote, but you should PROMOTE the concept that paper voting is superior to electronic voting. All I'm saying is that AS WELL AS letting people know they should not vote for Nader, explain why they should be able to and why it is the SYSTEM itself that brings about this odd, somewhat contradictory, situation. So you are saying that FPTP is the BEST system just say it if you think it. As for greens siding with right wing nationalists (I would like to know WHICH greens in WHICH country you refer to), that's similar to what you are asking the voters to do. FPTP promotes TWO (or even ONE) party systems... This is a mathematical truth. If you think that two parties can represent a population, you believe that political ideologies are at most 1 dimensional. If the system was sane, this diary wouldn't exist Supporting the system that makes presidents out of Bush and McCain because people want presidents even further left of their usual opposition is what's retarded. Proof you don't get the stabilising moderation you desire from your system -- The more right the democrats move, the more the 'fringe' left appeals to voters, the greater the chance for the republicans to get in and the further to the right they move. Brilliant, do you see yet that we agree? Where was the attack in my initial comment? It was a statement of fact, and you should have recognised it as the simple truth it is - instead, motivated out of fear, rather than reason, you began insulting. I know the situation is unlikely to change, but that's no reason to make people aware where the real problem lies and that there ARE alternatives. It may take centuries to change the system, but change starts with awareness, and that's all I'm trying to do, and I think so should you. Point out the practical result, but the root cause as well. Bullshit Even this comment simply continues to affirm you are the cunt I have always known you to be. Nothing of my opinion of you has changed - perhaps it is not me that has seen you are not the person I thought you are - rather it is you who has seen that I am not the person you think I am. and you claim not to understand 13yo girls and then do a perfect imitation of one. so you don't like me Nice use of understated subtlety there. Internet posting addict posts on internet surprised his voluminous sputum is voluminous Dude, you post 100x what I post... you can verify that very easily. There is literally no one here who posts as much idiocy as you - don't be surprised when people notice it and call you on it. oh nose, no invite???? so fucktard, want the last word or are you conceding your weakness? By the tons it is coming into this country -- the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms.... It is a short cut to the insane asylum. Use it for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. It makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him.... I thought you hated coke users but you wet your pants as soon as you see one and want to get your photos taken with them? What's up with that? s/catholic/hypocrite/ what concept is that? utterly destroy them, but if don't get caught praise them and suck their cocks? that's hypocrisy. You want to lock the sinner away, right? To 'help' them... If he was locked away for his sins when he committed them, there would be many things he would never have done that you now praise him for. He wouldn't be the guy you'd get an autograph and photograph from today if he'd gotten his 15 years for possession now, would he? He'd be the forgotten criminal nobody rotting in jail or on welfare and you would blame the drugs, not the system. Is he the selfish, narcissist class of person that is automatically beyond being a productive member of society, the bottom of the bucket, the drek? Or is he someone that makes you cream your pants when you see him? Should he be praised, or should he be imprisoned. You can't morally praise a criminal. You owe far more to drugs than you realise, even your very own favourite movie owes its existence to meth. Yes I have (again) humbled your pov heroin is addictive and inebriating... but you have the free will to never take it, so that is completely beyond the point. The point is that people that choose to do these things should not be treated as criminals unless they harm others. They should be free to follow their will. Even if you think its destructive (but it can be very creative) The point I am making now is that the people you praise are the same ones you would have destroyed. Would you prefer a world without meth if it meant that your favourite movie would not exist? Because, it is purely an accident that the author was not caught that allowed it to ever be written. FREE WILL means freedom to follow your will even if your will is affected by heroin/meth/cocaine by what you call addiction. FREEDOM FROM THE WILL OF OTHERS... No drug has a will, it merely alters your will. Any other theory of free will completely fails it. Is that guy you cream over a selfish, narcissistic, bottom of the bucket, drek class of unsaveable person, or a hero? You can't separate sin from sinner when you want to lock the fucks away. Now, again, would you destroy your favourite movie if it meant you could have locked up its author for using meth? You can't be a slave to something with no will http://books.google.com/books?id=_koKWNoudJwC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq= addiction+slavery&source=web&ots=Rdh1qjEOty&sig=5a7T-WgL1jWYD9BsqrNu 1PvbeYU But you are undoubtedly a slave when you are prisoner. Your solution to slavery --> enslave the victims. You benefit from the works of addicts who cause no harm, yet you still want to destroy them. slavery is when someone owns you. freedom is when you do what you want and other people don't stop you. You can't possibly be a slave to a cage -- but another's will can use a cage to enslave you. From the link: Slavery seems comparable only when the addictive process is misdescribed. Its not squirming, its the only logically consistent point of view. Otherwise you end up with contradictions that we see in the drug war, and your own point of view, that state to free a slave you must enslave him. You want to free people from drugs by making them slaves of the prison industry, right? That's a flat out proof by contradiction that you are wrong. Free will (the kind you are using) is purely a (psychological, evolutionary advantageous) illusion. Unless you believe in magic, physics shows that the universe (and therefore your actions) are fully determined by a small set of equations (even if the state is unknowable and subject to the butterfly effect). Therefore NOTHING can affect free will the way you use it. Freedom from the will of others though, being able to follow your own will freely, can only be diminished by the actions of others - no mindless thing can ever decrease your free will. This view leads to no contradictions but shows that the WoD (and your view) can ONLY DIMINISH free will, because you act against the will of others. The will of the slave is opposed to the will of the slave owner. The will of the addict is opposed to those that would stop them. Even stopping a murderer diminishes his free will - but this is morally justified as self defense (of the free will of others). ITS NOT WORD GAMES ITS THE ONLY LOGICALLY CONSISTENT VIEW POINT. Otherwise, you have no REASONABLE definition of free will. Like I said, by your definition, YOU HAVE NO FREE WILL, ANYWAY. You just think you do, because you are stupid. Yeah, nice link, where do you think I found the book 'drugs and rights' which argues that you have to misrepresent addiction to call it slavery? This is what you resort to when you lose? $ Dude, you are the one in denial. Because your only argument against the definition of free will explicitly stated by moral philosophers such as Mill is 'YOU ARE PLAYING WORD GAMES'. The definition I use is logically consistent with regards moral rights. When you say free will, you are talking about consciously initiated action, which is an illusion, as shown by neuroscientists: Libet's experiments suggest unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, therefore, little room remains for the operations of free will. If the brain has already taken steps to initiate an action before we are aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet his result suggests that a person's feeling of intention may be an effect of motor preparatory activity in the brain rather than a cause. As Libet himself indicated, this finding ran directly contrary to the classical conception of free will. -- http://scienceweek.com/2004/sa040813-1.htm Conclusion Our brain initiates a 'voluntionary act' unconsciously. Not a conscious decision but unconscious processes are at the beginning. This conclusions directly contradicts our (conscious) common sense: Consciousness is unfaithful. It swindles people. Furthermore, from the voluntionary act to the action (lifting a finger) it takes about 200 ms (myogram of the muscles). Is this enough time for a conscious stop of the action? -- http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/philom/consc/consc.html Do you believe we ever have free will beyond the realms of the physics that govern neurobiology? If not, then your use of the term is worthless, if so, you're hopelessly lost. yes, and you've consistently failed to address it$ Well, you see I AM arguing for survival MY SURVIVAL... because you want to destroy MY FREE WILL. You want me locked up, which is completely against my survival instinct, and being locked up would completely destroy my VOLITION, my every feeling COLOURED by THAT motivational system. I, and anyone, can far easier fight the effects of a drug than an entire society. Society that does not respect FREE WILL is FAR MORE DANGEROUS than any drug. This quote states that addiction is a disease, and you suggest fighting a disease with police rather than health care. If help is wanted, then it should be available, but if you FORCE someone against their WILL, then you have DESTROYED FREE WILL. We are already ZOMBIES with NO FREE WILL, SLAVES who think otherwise purely because of arrogance. Thinking that sex is more important than drugs or skiing or WoW because WE ARE PROGRAMMED (evolved) TO BELIEVE IT. The argument that drug addiction goes against the survival instinct can equally apply to WoW where people rather do that than eat/drink/reproduce and instead die of dehydration. Every feeling coloured by WoW, even when they aren't playing, their VOLITION is no more. your entire being has been made something lesser Be the best I want you to be, or be damned. No, THE BIGGEST ENEMY OF FREEDOM EVER DISCOVERED BY MANKIND is the people that think like you, that think others should bend to their rule, and live as they see fit, rather than living as each individual sees fit. How many Hoppers has your war destroyed before they became famous enough to be photographed with an irrelevant fligger? How many Blade Runners were never written because someone like you thought jail is better? (0) contentlessness I only 0 rate your contentless posts $ yes, I 0 rate contentlessness and stupidity so sue me So everyone you met was a using, homeless addict Do you understand Venn diagrams? You are only dealing with a small subset, and you use that subset to project to the whole using population. My experience is direct, and btw, I'm fine and not an addict. Quite an experience to live in fear isn't it... That's what it is to be a slave. meth heads say the funniest things. You want to destroy my perfectly good life because you think I might. You a happy for me to live in fear, you see me as your slave, master. Decades of immunity There is no rationalisation, I do what I do because you say no - civil disobedience. I have zero interest in prescription drugs, ONLY illegal drugs. And I plan on experiencing as MANY (different kinds) in my lifetime as I can. Either way, you see yourself as my master, and me as your slave, because I MIGHT end up as your worst nightmare, though I am FAR from anything like it. Out of your fear you would enslave me. you do whatever the hell you want to NOT POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF YOUR TYPE, RETARD YOU ARE THE CONSERVATIVE FEARMONGER YOU FAIL TO RECOGNISE YOURSELF AS, SIMPLY BECAUSE: "i am against cocaine, meth and heroin as being legal: the addiction" What makes you think I haven't? I see it as self expanding-behaviour just because I might be wrong, doesn't make you right. That's the whole point of freedom - to experiment (and re-experiment) with different ways of living, not all of them good. You have no right to make laws that limit my freedom (from your influence) because my actions might: 2. limit my freedom, from their inevitable biological consequences. Laws that protect YOUR freedom from ME are fine. Laws that protect you from yourself are wrong. Otherwise, YOU ARE A CHILD, WHO NEEDS A DADDY TO TELL HIM WHAT HE CAN AND CANNOT DO. A slave. If you don't accept the principle, the majority might think that smoking pot will limit your freedom, and they'd be RIGHT to stop you, no matter your protest that YOU THINK its okay - Obey them, you grant the principle. You are talking to the demons in your head I'm not going to write about my drug usage, but I certainly don't feel addicted, if I am, that's fine. I guess for you, every user is an addict, and an infinite number of years between use with little (no) negative effects on life is still addiction and slavery. Here's something surprising: I ENJOY THEM. I enjoy their effects, they are interesting, they are fun, they can make events MORE memorable - and CAN be used in moderation. I never use if upset, depressed or craving. Me: desire to be free + (my understanding of motorcycle induced head trauma) -> more personal freedom You: desire to be free + (your understanding of motorcycle induced head trauma) -> more slavery And so you think you increase freedom by outlawing motorcycles and anyone caught with them. No, freedom is only increased by not interfering with the will of others (except for self defense). Now, you think humans have a PURPOSE - that the will they are born with is the ONLY RIGHT WILL and anything that AFFECTS their WILL is unnatural. You might think the PURPOSE of an electron is to be bound by a proton and you'd be disgusted to see one flying down a cathode ray tube, but electrons don't have a PURPOSE - nor do atoms, rocks, bacteria, animals, humans or even EVOLUTION. They have no PURPOSE just behaviors and interactions. I believe humans have no more free will than atoms, just much more complex behaviors and interactions - and it doesn't mean I don't believe humans have WILL, because clearly we do and we HATE when it is violated. You might think that the purpose of humans is to reproduce, to fulfill their biological imperative due to the laws of evolution, but you'd be wrong - evolution throws up breeders, homosexuals, lesbians and even freakish asexual abstainers, it creates teetotalers, light drinkers, social drinkers, hard drinkers, alcoholics, those who would never touch drugs, those who want some drugs, those that can handle almost any drug, those who will fall to anything they can get, crackheads, meth heads, and junkies. I say let us all be the different experiments evolution can create WITHOUT hindrance. Evolution also creates pedophiles, murderers, rapists, thieves and thugs. A rapist is just someone fulfilling their evolutionary drives after all, in fact they all are in some way. Yet, their behavior harms the sovereignty of others - just as your behavior harms the sovereignty of drug users - and is rightly punished. Neither does it matter if someone becomes one of the above because of gambling, alcohol, wise investments or heroin. Yet, if on the rare occasion I decide to do something you don't like, and for some reason I get caught, goodbye 250k/year job, goodbye freedom to travel, hello 5 years of prison with truly dangerous people and situations. NOW you can say with a straight face that you are more free than me, but don't expect a reply because my right to debate you will also be taken. You have lost my taxes, my contribution to society and instead you have gained another ward of the state at your expense. What has been gained by imprisoning me? You exchanged someone who might become a ward to one who has. You CANNOT change my mind, I will still come out and use again (if not inside), only now I am broke, bitter, I feel trapped that travel is restricted, I can't get the jobs I am skilled at -- why NOT go on welfare and use drugs to destruction now? Its stupid to say you don't need anything, obviously you'll die - even if you just got all your biological needs met, that would not be enough to live. You can't be a slave to your biology, you can't be a slave to what you want. In a sense, you need k5, are you are slave to it? Lots of people would doubt that that is a life. Obviously you want to LIMIT me, at the very least with harsh punishments for my behavior. Are you free from your paternal government's desire to interfere with your pot taking? Is your identity worth nothing more than your need for that drug? Remember, they genuinely don't think so - and you certainly don't need it for survival. As to your question, why I fear governments more than the effects of drugs. Even though the drugs rewire your will - it still remains entirely your will. The drug addict (that doesn't want help) WANTS to do the drugs, that literally IS their will, even though it is altered by the drugs (or gambling, or WoW or even just talking). They are not slaves to the drug anymore than you can be a slave to sex. On the other hand, you really truly can be a slave to a government. The government really truly removes people's freedoms and invariably acts against their will. This would be unjustifiable, except for the fact that people will infringe on the sovereignty of others, causing them harm and requiring punishment. Governments are a necessary evil, and so must not be given more power than they need, because they will always strive for more power and overstep their rightful moral limits (eg, pot). If you think we agree 100% on our intents, I'll let you know we agree on even more. YOUR MESSAGE is 100% CORRECT AND TRUE: Drugs are dangerous, some more than others and in different ways, they can change your personality, cause compulsions, cravings, withdrawals, psychosis, leave you without a family, job, car, life, lead you to starvation, welfare, homelessness and even criminality. Everyone should hear your message, especially the young but also users - that colored graph of yours should be on every wrap of crack, but your desire to use coercion with force and punishment against the will of non harmful adults for them to live your way, while forgivable in the majority and lesser beings, is mortal sin for you. If every individual in society used these drugs, then there could be no argument that, even though they are still as dangerous, if the majority wants them, we respect that rule. In such a society it might even become compulsory (an obvious evil, right), but drug use is ALWAYS going to be in the minority. Unfortunately, the majority NEVER tolerates difference, the majority always pushes individuals to the median, the most bland, conformity. The majority is always scared of individuals and unfamiliar, unknown things. The majority does not have the right to deny difference and individuality, so it may only act out of self defense (certainly not fear). Even though we respect the will of the majority, above that rule we must respect the will of non harming adults concerning their own sovereignty - it should be in the constitution - even though it is in intent, the commerce clause is obviously abused. A workable solution to 'the drug problem' must respect the will of non harmful adults, when you accept that principle, we can consider other means to limit exposure, discourage use of dangerous drugs and reduce addiction. Hi pd Yeah, interesting... the fault seems to lie with whoever released the memo, but the response to it seems rational and explicable. Sorry for not replying to your earlier comments, I just want to answer a few things from memory. As far as blackjack and the kelly criterion is concerned, it can't be applied directly because you have to take into account the game theoretic effects on future odds (and ability to gamble) based on the information given to the house by your bet sizes and variability. The maths is similar to what information Churchill could act upon without giving away the fact that the enigma had been cracked. Certainly betting more than the suggested kelly limits when expected value is positive is sub optimal, counter productive and could lead to ruin. It won't surprise you that Alan Turing knew Claude Shannon (information theory) who in turn knew John Kelly (applied information theory). As for the pricing of futures being based on intangibles, well, this is exactly what the market excels at. I deal a lot in horse odds (effectively calculating accurate prices) and you can imagine, there are many unknowns and variables, but I believe that the prices accurately quantify these, including the risks taken on the intangibles. I'm not an expert on futures, btw, gambling is my interest, but it is entirely possible for all parties involved in a futures contract to profit. Profit and risk are effectively traded, one guy selling risk, the other buying it. I think this is only true if the contract price falls between the current price and realized price. If not, the shrewd are rewarded and the foolish punished, evolution in action. I believe that most all things can be priced despite intangibles, including futures, without taking crazy exponentially increasing risks, but simply through rational objective and subjective measures - cutting losses and riding on profits. Then again. with that attitude its no wonder he's your x. Such a shame you couldn't change him. I think ur was referring to GoT as being the loser not you, your son or his dad... GoT is trolling you with this copypasta, GNAA is the Gay Niggers Association of America. Fuck him. What are your views on the war on drugs Were they different before your son ended up a casualty of it? Too bad you are right I think drug users are today's blacks and gays, and no one gives a shit that they are oppressed. No, just regressive of you. There used to be laws that you could only break if you were black and there used to be laws against doing gay things. There are still people that think you are inferior for being black or gay - or using drugs - despite that these attributes do not cause anyone harm. Now, you could argue that unlike being black, you have a choice about using drugs -- but then they said the same thing about being gay. Unless you cause harm to another person, no one has a right to harm you - whether you are black, gay or using drugs. Laws that break this principle are morally wrong. No, you were right the first time All drugs should be legalised and their sale should be regulated and taxed to support voluntary rehabilitation programs and other costs drugs may place on society. Making it a misdemeanor for 'minor' offenses makes no sense, as while the drugs would be legal to possess, only criminals could benefit from their supply. This is one of the biggest problems of the current approach too. And again, you would say the same thing if he was gay if that was illegal. His mommy just needs to teach him self control and not tacitly support his homosexuality through coddling and making excuses for deviant behavior. By the way, deviant behavior is just another way of saying being an individual. No, I'm not cDiss but I'll take that as a compliment. Not sure which nick he uses now. Otherwise, good show. No, the laws are MORALLY WRONG And they SHOULD be broken. Saying his behavior is inappropriate is like saying a slave trying to escape is inappropriate because he could get hurt and will get punished doing so. You are describing martingale systems and all martingale type systems result in ruin. All successful systems rely on gaining a positive expected value, which is what the blackjack players were doing, waiting for a positive expectations before betting big (probably optimising their bets according to the kelly criterion) Financial systems aren't zero sum, but long term successful traders again bet only on the belief of positive expectations, but it sounds possible that this guy was foolishly playing martingale with derivatives. Mindpixels were never binary They weren't true/false, but truth likelihoods, probabilities. Not that I think that is sufficient (or necessary) for AI. 0.77 "I hope you die" 0.77 is the phrase "I hope you die" a correct english sentence? http://sluggish.uni.cc/mindpixel/gac80k-06-july-2005.html That'll work right up until the blood/piss test So blowing an officer officer gets you off? Or do you do it just to keep your license? I'd take the ticket. I see you got the joke congratulations That's exactly what you'll get if you buy a professional prerolled joint in Holland. BTW, that's not a filter either, its a roach. Well, in some places it is possible to get 'pure' joints. The problem is though that you get fucked up a little too quick, and without tobacco, the joints don't burn as well either. Dutch weed is very fucking strong If you want to get totally shitfaced, then fine, but if you want to smoke all day every day and still be able to function, then I prefer it mixed. I would smoke about 1/8th a day to myself, but spread out over an entire evening and several spliffs. I C what you did there K5 IS FOR CLOSERS ftfy That's not irrational its just not self serving. Yeah, neither would be as well off but the rich person can afford to be little less well off for the sake of society, the poor person can't for the sake of the rich. Your first dollar is worth more than your millionth. I don't think libertarianism is the same thing as anarchy, which is what you are implying, right? Economically maybe, but not physically I thought even the most ardent libertarians still believe that a police force is necessary to punish those that harm others, whereas anarchists wouldn't. I think I get your point From wiki: The central tenet of libertarianism is the principle of liberty, namely individual liberty. To libertarians, an individual human being is sovereign over his/her body, extending to life, liberty and property. As such, libertarians define liberty as being completely free in action, whilst not initiating force or fraud against the life, liberty or property of another human being. Or as Thomas Jefferson stated, "Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." This is otherwise known as the non-aggression principle. But I can see how your definition can (almost) be derived from that. I think that free mentally competent adults are differentiated from children, the retarded, the insane and criminals. So, the child labour thing is a strawman. Unions would be the right to associate, so I can't see these being against libertarian doctrine either, but maybe that right could be signed away in a contract? Your point about starvation (the metaphorical economic gun) is well taken though, and this is one of the few points on which my views diverge from pure libertarianism and I guess Ron Paul. Where's the telecommute/WAH option? $ Well, this grain merchant, over in Muckley... ...he claimed that he'd actually seen it. Turned his teeth snow-white overnight, they say. Everyone in the movie seemed either shocked or even disgusted at the prospect. Not sure anyone got the reference though :( I wandered down that alley once a whore shouted out, "try me and I'll blow your friend for free", and fast as could be, some brit retorted "Ain't no such thing as a free lunch love". Well, I LOLed. Another similar situation One v.nice looking youngish whore was sitting on her stool type chair and was charging above the odds (4 times higher than others). Well she was turning a lot of guys down, lots of guys saying that she was asking too much and a crowd of about 40 or so men began to gather round as everyone was wondering who was going to buy her. Upset at the large crowd and lack of takers she shouts out in a whiny voice "Guys, I'm trying to work here!" Hilariously ironic if you ask me. The last time I was there, outside the dildo shop (maybe it was the condomeri), where these two plastic penises on springs bounced up and down, stood these two old ladies (must have been in their 80s) staring. I heard the phrase "look at the old ladies" in english, dutch, german, italian and spanish as different tourists passed by. Its actually one of the most enlightened, liberated cities in the world. I don't see why you wouldn't like it. I'll be moving there myself once I get my UK citizenship next year or so. It is itself a model of enlightenment People do what they want and no one gets hurt, what could be more enlightened than that? Its not like junkies and whores can reduce your ability to think. Dude, haven't you ever done philosophy ON WEED? That is truly horrendous but I would expect the rates of sexual slavery would be less than in less open places. The women have easy access to police there, for one thing, and the dutch police take this type of crime very seriously. The real problem is the gangs in their origin countries that threaten the women's children if they don't comply. That's why they don't go to the police. Those women end up all over Europe, and not just (if even mostly) in Holland. They have a role to play, no doubt... but surely, making it open, where the girls can easily access police and other resources, is safer than the same thing hidden away? Would this mean that legalising weed would have been enough for you not to use crack? Lack of weed was never an issue for trying other things for me, except for the one time I tried crack. Well, you really failed yourself there. Sorry to say it, but you made your own choice and in hindsight it should be easy to see that not even a crack ho would be impressed by an addiction. I do find it interesting though, that after your years of use, the welfare system has given you the incentive not to use... Its almost like you are able to make your own decisions when there are clear tradeoffs to usage. link? $ Your sisters? $ You wish? Damn, you're twisted. At least that girl looked satisfied. If those type of debtors didn't exist The creditors would create them and parade them in the media to get these laws passed anyway. Ultimately its up to the creditors to assess the risk and manage it appropriately, something they haven't been doing very well and is going to cost us all. I'm saying he's irrelevant $ No one ever visits Perth :( $ Out-trolling the troll Linux or FreeBSD asked me to summarise the 500 comment long thread in which I show CTS's contradictions between his view of himself as a liberal and the view that addictive inebriating drugs should be illegal. This is just a rationalisation for him to feel morally superior for the drugs he chose, while looking down on others who make different choices. You see, CTS has taken many drugs, just not these ones. I hate people who break the law, want it in their favour, but dismiss the rest as deserving punishment, even when they harm no one. CTS has one main argument, that heroin certainly leads to addiction, which certainly leads to loss of jobs, friends and family, and therefore will certainly become a burden on society and be a harm to him. This is contrary to many people's observations. CTS says he has worked at a needle exchange charity and can't seem to see the sample bias this introduces into his world view. I have pointed out the Rat Park experiment, to show that animal models of addiction may have errors. Turns out, you can't keep a happy rat addicted, even if you first addict it the traditional way. This he thinks means that we must make everyone in the world happy - No, it just means that unhappy people will self medicate and happy people are unlikely to become addicted. I have pointed out the Swiss Harm Reduction experiment, where hard core addicts are given free heroin. This decade plus long study resulted in a reduction of up to 90% of drug related crime (involving victims), a decrease in the number of new addicts, addicted criminals going on to welfare, addicted welfare users getting jobs and the highest successful rehabilitation rate of any program ever. Of course, this is somehow invalid because it 'rewards' addicts... Laughable if you realise the reduction in quality of life of the addict anyway. I pointed to examples of 'successful' addicts, such as Dr Clive Froggatt, once said to be the most powerful medical doctor in the UK, and now a main proponent of heroin prescription on the NHS. These people are one off examples, according to CTS. Yet, every example of someone getting a clean, constant supply seems not to suffer the assumed problems associated with its use. I have pointed out the parallels to alcohol prohibition. How it actually makes the drugs more powerful and dangerous, and ironically increases usage - not achieving its desired effect. This, apparently, isn't valid because somehow, the drugs are too evil to tolerate, better that they be more dangerous, lead to massive crime (both organised and individual) and be used more often than let them be regulated, I guess. Also, for some reason, the fact that alcohol itself is both addictive and inebriating (and banned by many countries today) its somehow special, and 'not really all that addictive', despite that heroin addicts less than twice as many of its users as alcohol (as a percentage). Also, he thinks that the Opium Wars are an example of what happens when these drugs are free, failing to understand that this is really just an early example of the problems of prohibition over regulation. Finally, we get to the Harm Principle - explained in John Stuart Mill's Essay On Liberty. Very simply put, the government's role in punishing and coercing people should be kept to cases where they cause harm to others. CTS has to jump through several mental hoops to agree with the principle and maintain his view on drugs... something he fails to do spectacularly. Mainly because... ... wait for it... ... he never bothers to read it!!! LOL... You can lead an ass to knowledge, but you can't make him think. First he says Mill agrees with him, then Mill is irrelevant then Mill is appeal to authority, Mill is wrong, Mill is selfish, then Mill agrees with him again, Mill is irrelevant again, on and on in circles. Some of his arguments to get around this principle. Speeding in a car is illegal, even if you never hit anyone because it could lead to that harm, same with these drugs, and therefore illegal. This is false because speeding is itself a harm as it denies others the right to safely share the road they are entitled to, a variation of the sovereignty principle, and you can equally ask why driving through red lights should be illegal even if you never, ever crash. He thinks that ending up on welfare is a harm to him. Magically though, this is only true of hard addictive drugs. Being lazy, a pot fiend or an xbox addict just doesn't apply, because maybe the person will change. I see welfare as a form of government sponsored charity, and you cannot use an offer of help as a reason to deny a person their Free Will before they ask for it. On the other hand, you can impose conditions on receiving welfare, such as entering rehabilitation, looking for work, being sober, etc. Then on Free Will -- you see, addicts don't have Free Will, because they only want the drugs, failing to realise that wanting drugs IS the WILL of the addict, and unless they harm someone they should be allowed to follow their WILL FREELY. This being the meaning of Free Will referred to in On Liberty and its Harm Principle. Never mind that humans are much more than the nebulous nerve centre of pain and pleasure. Finally, he tried to paint me as a selfish arsehole who doesn't care about anyone but himself, failing to realise that I believe in welfare and other government programs and then trying to say that it was a contradiction to be for both -- ie, both a libertarian and a socialist -- pick one he says, failing to understand the theory of social liberalism. Anything I missed there CTS? Not quite, firstly I really think he believes this Secondly, I wasn't just trolled, but also trolled him. To troll and be trolled. I believe what I wrote, but I hope I wasted a lot of his time and kept him a little quieter in the general population while I did it. LOL. A partial success, maybe. Also, even if he was just trolling, many people do think like that, it forces me to think clearly about what I believe and why, and to better know my own arguments - so a net win to me. On him being a gayer troll than Troll Hard thing, yes, you're right. Its not like I don't know who CTS is. What I love about CTS, is that he can't not have the last word on this topic. I had him going for about two months and only couldn't get a response out of him tonight. I still think its a pretty good effort and I don't think anyone else can claim that. The summary was cause I got a nice email from Linux Or FreeBSD. You're right IHBT... fair enough. I was of course aware of that as I did it, and will do it again. I don't care much, I stand by my arguments, and if you haven't noticed, society still thinks I am deserving of destruction - Trolled by all the governments of the world - so forever I will be trolled on this topic. What? Yes, that all drugs should be legal. CTS thinks only drugs that aren't both addictive and inebriating should be legal? HIBTABY? No dude I win. but only because its CTS chlorus has posted 562 comments $ I've been egging him into this debate for longer than that thread... He ignored me for ages, but for some reason he decided to get into it there. So who's the biter, and who's the bitee? No, you keep biting, see? LOL $ Could be, but I don't think he was trolling. He's been consistently on my side of this argument. I just hate CTS and have lot of time on my hands what's wrong with that? I don't understand the problem... So what, trolled, big deal? I've learnt a few things about myself that I didn't know, and understand my arguments better than ever. If CTS doesn't believe what he wrote, then I am an idiot for that, but the above still applies. If someone else reads what I wrote and agrees with me, then my thoughts spread. If CTS ever changes his mind on the topic, then I have a powerful ally. Otherwise, its all just words on the internet... nothing lost. You are right, but I've seen him get +5 Insightful for this view on slashdot many times. So its not like he's the only one to think this way. Infact, most drug users seem to hate drug users of different drugs... Its something I've never understood. 'Natural' drug users hate 'Synthetic' drug users, crack users hate smack users, smack users hate meth heads, speed users hate crack heads, alcoholics hate pot heads, etc - no one lets people to their own specific tastes, that's the problem, and I just don't get it. no obviously he's not right... but those unwashed masses are in the majority and fucking it up for everyone. They need educating and no one else seems to want to do the job of educating them. thanks $ Exactly It doesn't even have to be free and the results would still be the same. The markup on these drugs is phenomenal. I thought he was having his head extracted $ OH HAI I crashed before I could reply, sorry, I will reply, but not today. I had to go whale watching the next day. It is late again, so I have to sleep soon, tomorrow and Sunday is the red bull final, and don't plan on missing it this year. freedom to be addicted == freedom forced to not be addicted == not free. If you don't think you've lost, feel free to keep arguing with me. You're wrong... you don't yet understand Mill Really... You should continue this in the troll thread if you want to understand. but - Mill says, you should have the freedom to do what you want as long as it does not harm others. When I am an addict, as long as I don't steal, kill or actually harm, I am not harming others, and should have the right to do as I please. You have the right not to take care of those you do not desire to. The fact that the government decides it will provide charity to a class of people you do not like, does not make it a harm. Heroin cannot destroy free will, only people can. I'll explain if you answer the question I pose you in the troll thread, and you will understand it as a truism. Mill applies my friend Mill should always apply if you are libertarian. I don't think addicts would steal except for the high price they pay under prohibition. Neither should you punish those that don't. Very simple really. No sorry FAIL again You don't understand libertarianism. Why do you think Mill is against charity? He specifically says that charity should be experimented with in all its forms. Government welfare is just one experiment in charity, and if you want to exclude 'unworthy' people from welfare, go for it -- make em attend rehab to get their dole cheque, I have no problem with that. Why should alcoholics be given welfare when they can't hold down jobs and end up starving on the street looking for their next bottle of meths? Also, if heroin is reasonably priced and I don't have to spend my waking hours searching for it, I have a MUCH better chance of keeping a job -- just one of the ACTUAL RESULTS of the Swiss experiment. Have you read Mill yet? No, I didn't think so. It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved. I have no problem with charity or welfare, but government welfare is one experiment in charity, for the benefit of society. It is not a harm when people use it. It may also, rightly, come with requirements for the recipient -- to be actively looking for work, for example, or in this case, to be enrolled in rehab. Yes, what Mill wrote certainly is libertarian You haven't read it though yet, many months later, you still haven't read a five part essay. Ridiculous. It might not be 'Libertarian', but I am following the logic of Mill - so the arguments you point at me about pure selfish world attitude do not apply. Taxes are okay - this is explained. Charity is okay, and we should try many experiments in it, just as we should try many experiments in living -- including allowing the addicts their freedom. Why don't you read? You claimed before you were a follower of Mill, but now you deny him. Great -- if you could have denied him 300 comments ago we might be somewhere by now. But just to show you what an idiot you are: every one who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit Which says that taxation, for the public good is fine. This means the government can provide charity, in the form of welfare, and that charity may be provided with conditions - such as go to rehab and get off drugs. It is still charity, and receiving charity is no harm - nor is putting conditions on it. BWAHAHAHAHAHA retard... read Mill, and get back to me with some understanding. Mill is considered libertarian... if not, maybe you can tell me what his philosophy is called. Those things that make you think he's socialist are quotes from his essay called 'On Liberty' retard. Shame you are too retarded to read it, I think you might actually like the philosophy. Anyway, I told you before what I am... can't you remember You are addicted, and therefore not free The state should remove your right to use the internet, because you are addicted to it and therefore not free. Isn't that right retard? You cannot help yourself, therefore you are the opposite of free. You have no free will, if you do, prove it by never contradicting a pro drug legalisation comment again. Or do you think you write of your own Free Will? How pissed off would you be if this was enforced? Yet this is exactly what you want to enforce on others. You want to subjugate their Free Will. BTW: Do you understand yet why an addict has Free Will unless someone stops them? Please read Mill and tell me where it contradicts welfare. Specifically, The Harm Principle:The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. Is incompatible with my statement that I believe that we should provide the Minimum Standard of Living, the absolute basics of life, to those who fail to secure it for themselves? How are either of these incompatible with requiring that an addict attend rehab in order to be eligible to receive welfare? A pot user to test clean before receiving it either? A lazy person to be looking for work? You think social liberalism is a contradiction? Now tell me, you actually are now saying that you disagree with Mill right? So all that 'Mill agrees with me' bullshit was exactly that? And you claim to be offering intellectual charity, but you just change your mind as suits the argument. The only intellectual charity here was my assumption that you might enjoy this particular piece of philosophy (claiming, as you do, to be a liberal). Obviously you are smarter than anyone who has ever lived -- LOL. If someone cannot hold a job, who takes care of them? Wow! Nothing to do with drugs. Retard. By the way, you are now my slave... suck it bitch. Eating McDonalds and not exercising is an obvious and large predisposal of getting a heart attack and needing medical care... COSTING US ALL OUR MONEY ON HEALTH CARE!!! OMG WTF !!!111!!!11 Do you honestly want to deny that? Ban McDonalds and enforced exercise for all. Snore Win big just once, forever an addict, try again $ wait, what? saying wait what is a valid point now? You said you need to work at gambling addiction No, gambling addicts tend to win once very early in their gambling careers, then lose EVERYTHING, then start stealing. It is even believed that gambling addicts may be predisposed to this due to brain chemistry. JUST LIKE DRUG ADDICTS. Until someone causes harm, you cannot subjugate their free will. If someone needs help, it is okay to add conditions before you provide help. Subjugating someone's free will because they may later require help is not valid. Stop being retarded... Just because you say that taking heroin automatically means you become addicted, doesn't mean I agree with it. Heroin addicts are less than 15% of the users. Hard core, non-functional addicts are less than half of them again. Addiction cannot destroy Free Will. So, you keep going on about it, and I keep telling you WRONG RETARD! You think that free will is just some single pleasure nebulous in the brain that heroin can override. Humans are FAR MORE than that. NUMBER ONE POINT AGAIN ASSHOLE: Harm Principle Even if one person never became addicted it would be enough for me to say its not your business to tell people what to do. Even if everyone became addicted, but one person did not cause harm, it would be enough for me to say its not your business to tell people what to do. You do not have the right to subjugate someone's free will unless they harm. Even if Al Capone said it, it would still be true. If the first two things don't apply, then you disagree with the harm principle, but you have not been man enough to say it. Say it fuckstick. WRONG ON EVERY ACCOUNT Firstly, replace heroin with alcohol, same result. Second, ITS NOT A HARM to need help. You can't outlaw McDonalds because you are willing to offer free medical care. The one offering the help is making the choice -- not the one who might need it. Third, We've been over the viral nature of PROHIBITED acts. All the above again, are just as viral in prohibited form. You are having memory problems now. rebutted and destroyed To prove you wrong, on the harm of help problem I am willing to help you when you lose your job CTS... Really, I am, because I love you. Now, you are harming me by using k5, because your employer (or a future employer) may not like it and might fire you for it. STOP HARMING ME WITH YOUR K5 USAGE!!! Oh and On Liberty is the reason heroin should be legal... just to clear that up for you. zzz Yuo No wait? You're a liberal, and now you say Mill doesn't apply? Didn't I show you wrong on this already? They tried and failed? $ I mostly agree Certainly, it is the only sensible liberal position on the matter, but aren't these guys family value hypocrites who create/support these laws? In that case, don't they deserve to be hoisted by their petards? You don't pay taxes on gambling At least not in the UK. The argument goes, that if you have to pay tax on your winnings, you have the right claim a rebate on your losses. Even the taxman knows more people lose than win. Throw it away you will become addicted and end up on welfare, youll never be able to quit and will be a burden on me and society you are NEAR CERTAINTY throwing away your PERSONAL LIBERTY DONT YOU KNOW ABOUT WILLPOWER even if you don't its just like speeding, youll end up running someone over even if you don't this time ADDICTION MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU SPEAK IT Either that, or contact CTS and share it with him. Its like speeding in a car fuckhead You're going to hurt someone At somepoint you're going to get addicted. ADDICTION, MOTHERFUCKER do you know what that means? sorry I really shouldn't try to troll... IFI. Mostly I agree with what your saying... Except, I would say that speed is poor man's coke, and I guess meth is poor man's speed... whatever's going I say, all good in moderation. You can't copyright an idea, sorry $ Well... If you think you have a system where a coca cola buyer can easily find the cheapest retailer, or a carrier can find a cheap place to buy it and sell it off at a profit to another dealer/buyer, all without pepsi finding out, then it would be interesting, but I'm not sure you have that and am fairly sure that pepsi will just subpoena your logs if you tried anyway. Even if you could host it (and live) in a country that didn't have extradition treaties and won't force you to hand over the logs, how is a user sure that he's not really dealing with pepsi through your site? Post to Queue +FP $ Rusy might be a little busy this week. So its a pretty sad someone has decided to attack the site now. Rusty is selling K5 to FOX news, so this is just an attempt to devalue the site so they can get it cheap. I have nothing to add but congratulations $ I've finally made it into someone's diary. Haven't you seen Orwell's Brave New World? $ Anyone seen my hook, line and sinker? $ Yes, thats exactly what you gays do $ You've assigned the object K as L, the pointer, like you correctly assumed. >> K is L True To copy the objects from a list to a new list object, use: >> K=L[:] >> K is L False Everything in python is an object and every variable is a reference to that object. This is true for lists, as a list is just an object. >> class X: >> pass >> x=X() >> x.a=1 >> y=x >> y.a=2 >> print x.a 2 That is smarter (imho)... and explains the behaviour you're seeing. What language doesn't have special characters? Anyway, [:] is just shorthand. [a:b] means return a sublist from index item a to b, and if left undeclared, a and b take on the defaults 0 and -1 (first and last). Lists (tuples, and dictionaries) are pervasive in python, so it's one of the fundamental operators in the language. It's also one of a very small subset of special characters, so the language does in fact remain very simple. Lock up alcoholics addicted to an inebriating addictive substance. lock up anyone who drinks beer, just in case $ all drugs ARE the same in that the 'victim' is the perpetrator. What a person does to there own body is no one else's business except their own, no matter how abhorrent their habits may seem to you. There should be no crime until someone deprives something from someone else. If you are arguing that they may cost society, you must also lock up fat people, drinkers, smokers, risk takers and anyone who may later cost society. That's not logical If a person is so fat they cannot hold down a job or a relationship, then society is the victim. A motorcycle accident victim with brain damage can also become a zombie unable to hold down a job or a relationship. Are you going to outlaw motorcycles and arrest the grossly obese? Alcoholics? If someone uses hardcore drugs, and does not deprive someone else, they should be able to make their own, possibly self limiting, decisions. when you are an addict to these drugs, you cannot hold a job or a relationship. No addicts have jobs and/or relationships? Which poker site? Does it allow you to reload as much play money as you like? I made 43M play money at party poker, but only 600k so far at pokerroom. The difference is that party allows players to reload as many times as they like, whereas you can only reload 2k a day at pokerroom, so play at pokerroom is much more realistic. Real money, even small tables, are orders of magnitude harder. Cheap sit and go tournies are a good place to start for real. yeah, looks like you can reload as often as you like (when empty) on pkr, which makes everyone very loose. So I'd recommend pokerroom for play money, as it is quite competitive, as far as play money ever goes. They also have all the table types you could want, so is good place to practice and learn the different strategies at before trying for real. Of course, if you're gonna jump right into real money (even micro), then it doesn't matter much. Also, unless you already have millions, having money won't help you that much. Your ability to earn will be more dependent on your skill than your bankroll, so start with a small bankroll and try to grow (read earn) it. Money management is a major key to long term success, so aim to never lose that roll once you start. At the same time, try to get to the biggest tables you can do that at, as anything less is theoretically losing you money (and anything more will actually lose you money). Although I like the game, I don't really have the patience it requires and find it too frustrating and boring to make a living at it. I made a few k before realising this, but I have some friends who do rather well and play daily. One makes about 30k a month doing it full time, but mostly plays live tournies, one bought himself a ducati with his winnings and another has just bought a bmw and a lotus with his. All three have made it to WSOP a few times playing satellites, though none have made their mil yet. gl and let us know how you go. These aren't real Foley was just taking the piss. You know that the jews feel pretty much the same way about the palestinians? Except of course with far superior military and weaponary. dude, burn as many palestinians as you like I don't hate jews at all... but this isn't a one sided fight. I didn't demonize them I said they basically felt the same way towards each other... hate... although possibly for different reasons. Is this demonization? Do you think the jews love the palestinians? I also said they have better weapons and a more organised army... is that demonization too? Is it false? As I see it, the jews want somewhere to live... fair enough, but in doing so they have occupied and oppressed the palestinians, denying them the same. The palestinians, in turn, suicide bomb (and mortar) the jews... So the jews hate the palestinians, and oppress them further... etc... So, I won't deny that the palestinians have attacked the jews. Do you deny that the jews oppress the palestinians? Or is it all one sided in your mind? So basically, racisim against jews == bad racisim against palestinians == good. alrighty then. I think that guerilla tactics are a natural response when faced with a greater military power, but that's just me I spose. Put it this way, if the mexicans had the power of the US army, and put up road blocks, and curfews, and arrested your friends and family without cause, and destroyed a few of your houses, and killed more of your friends and family, and you had no army and few weapons, how would you respond then? propaganda? I've never encountered a Palestinian except through the news There are more positive (balanced) examples outside mainstream (US) news. I've seen a few documentaries in the UK and in Aus that show things from the palestinian POV, that certainly don't show the palestinians as wanting to blow up and kill every jew, but do show how they suffer under occupation. Even the UN considers the Isreali wall to be a crime. When I see how the palestinians suffer and jews stating they want them all killed, I find it very easy to identify with Palestines position. I would like to see the Jews treat Palestinians as equals, and offer them equal rights, freedoms and access to land, housing and work as the Jews. I would like the Palestinians not to blow up the Jews, and treat them as equals too. Obviously I can't stop you from calling that racism, so I'm not going to try. Only Palestinians practice terror and destruction? "Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war... We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle. First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today..." -- Yitzhak Shamir, former Israeli Prime Minister, "Terror", Lehi journal, 1943 My point is, they are both wrong, but I tend to support the underdog. Compare to my hypothetical situation earlier? Would you be preaching love to your mexican oppressors, or would you call for their destruction too? The Palestinian's aren't even calling for the destruction of Jews, but Isreal, their occupied homeland. tipoes r soe impotent nt!! Mostly too many hours in front of the screen. Nearly 20 hours... too tired to care about spelling really. Its quite a funny mistake actually, because when I get that tired, I spell things exactly as I hear them... and racism is sounded in my mind as racisim... Odd things happen without sleep. Still, its no counter to my argument. At least you proved Del Griffith's point that Americans hate Americans. One day you'll get too sick to work, lose your insurance, and then suffer the way you deserve. It might be unlikely, but I can still hope you experience it. Its quite easy for the healthy to assume that is a natural state anyway, so I think its more likely than you expect. I consider it hostile to deny those less fortunate than yourself the basics of life. I suffer from a long term preexisting chronic condition that costs me many work days. I change jobs on average about once a year, out of choice, and still do very well for myself... so forget the laziness bullshit. Actually, I'm currently without a job, by choice, on an extended holiday... not claiming any welfare, just enjoying some of the fruit of my labour. So I couldn't possibly be on employer covered health care. I have experienced health care in Australia, the UK and America... In Australia, I get my health requirements covered for about $12 a month, in the UK I need a doctor's appointment (totally free) and my medicine for about the same. Unfortunately I got caught out in the US with no insurance during a two week work visit, and spent over $120 just to get what I knew I already needed. I doubt I could afford to live in your system as it exists today. In Aus and the UK I have the option of (easily affordable) health insurance if I want extra benefits, but I'd much rather bet on society not collapsing than on me never getting sick and relying on the care and understanding of my employers. Americans don't just quit their jobs That's what you call freedom, I guess? arbiet macht frie This year (alone) --- UK, Spain, France, Holland, Dubai, Australia, New Zealand. You lot would be better off if you didn't think you only existed to make the next dollar. Sometimes, you're not ALLOWED to have the same employer for more than 3 months. Sometimes, better oppurtunities come along. Sometimes, you want to live and see this world you've been working in. Sometimes, you want to see your friends and family for a while. I doubt my amazing lifestyle would be possible if I had to get reregistered for health insurance with every new employer, or worse, go without inbetween. Choosing not to make every minute of my life a chance to make another dollar (for an employer) does not make me lazy. What I'm telling you is, 90% of Americans are deluded, trapped and/or ignorant thanks to the systems you live in. Lack of universal health insurance and lack of welfare being two major contributors --- no carrots without sticks. The best part of all this is, is that this is what makes you all think you are so free. Thinking that someone who isn't working is a bum doesn't make me lazy either, it just makes you an ignorant fuck. 6 weeks... lofl... Can you learn a new language in six weeks? Explore a country in six weeks? Get deep in its culture in six weeks? Or do you just go to the beach in the summer? Not too mention 6 weeks is lazy by american standards, no? Why shouldn't I take 3 months off between jobs? (Or even aiming at a year at this point) I earnt it. Why should I justify that I am looking for a new job, straight away, to be eligible for basic health care? You see, I've already paid for my health insurance, through taxes, and much more than the average person would. Sometimes taking three months off can be the law, but you wouldn't understand that, having never left your little comfort zone. Reading between the lines here, you seem to be suggesting that I am also a welfare bludger... Well... No... I've never had welfare, but I know if I fuckup, I won't starve. This gives me the confidence to try things a little differently. I've worked for American companies too, and even been offered a job in Cali, so I'm not even considered lazy by their standards. Ever worked (I mean actually living for an extended time) somewhere where you don't even speak the language? Didn't think so. Ever done it 12k miles from your family? Nope? I have no problems getting jobs either... I'm highly paid and in high demand baby --- people literally won't stop offering me work --- in three countries!! What you think of as lazy, Europeans consider BALANCE... something you severely lack. Just your ignorance of the fact that there is more to life than work showing. Arbiet Macht Frie!!! For the last decade I have lived to travel... Its my thing... I like the new experiences... meeting people, their languages, their culture, architecture, landscape, everything's always new... It can be difficult but I find it rewarding. I have had many preconceptions shattered... and made many friends. I'm not just a tourist who visits and takes photos of countries' landmarks... I live and work in them. To this end, I try to specialise in short term (3-6 month) contracts. Usually sense of duty keeps me their longer though. I have poor language skills. I'm not particularly fluent but although I can understand a bit I also enjoy the challenge of comminicating... If I had language skills I could probably spell. I'm paid for my IT skills. My last position I was the highest ever paid IT contractor at one INSURANCE company --- they tend to pay well too. Everything I have done has been off my own back. Not my parents, not my (nonexistent) rich uncle, not the government. I live well when I work, and I save enough to live well when I don't. This is capitalism. As the dot com bubble burst, my income kept rising. But if you don't believe what I say, why should I continue? So, DESPITE the fact that I earn well... What enables me to do these things IS the certainty that society will look after me SHOULD I FAIL. It means I can take more RISK (which is what insurance ultimately is - government or otherwise)... which means I can be more productive, earn more money and provide more to society. So can everyone else. If health care were the only problem, I'd be backpacking in the middle of nowhere right now. Why can't you afford it? It seems a pretty cheap hobby. Now, given what a great and amazing employee/member of society I am. I'm also quite sick. I have some sort of auto-immune disease that the doctors don't understand. I have extremely high levels of neutrophils and monocytes (and some other WBCs) that no one can find the cause of. GPs keep telling me I have cancer, because they have ruled everything else out (parasitic, fungal, bacterial, viral infections) (and I think they don't understand non-histamine related allergies), but the phlobotomists doubt I have cancer (now) due to their variation over time. I have my theories, and I alter my foods, environment, sleep etc to minimise the damage. Sometimes, when I am vomitting for twelve hours, I don't get to work -- that's okay, contractors don't get paid sick leave -- I'm no bludger. My main concern is my asthma (a symptom)... though... for which I need ventolin, and always have. Medicare (in Aus) and the NHS (in the UK) I can get everything I need at a very reasonable price (a percentage of my income as tax + v.small prescription costs). Another system that worked well for me was the dutch system -- where insurance companies are mandated by law to provide basic health insurance WITHOUT a health check and DESPITE preexisting conditions - and everyone is mandated by law to have health insurance, competition there works, and makes it affordable. The only place in the world I would have trouble is in the US. Where it would seem I would need an employer to provide me with something I could afford, and even then, probably not due to the preexisting nature of my illness, and the long breaks I just described. Why would it be the law? (As in, what is the actual motivation of those who made the law?) Work holiday visa's encourage tourism for the young I guess... my foothold into Europe (no ancestry, no professional contacts). I guess its to enable people to have an extended holiday and not just come to take jobs from the locals. Who knows, I didn't write the laws. I just had to abide by them. You're either calling me a fraud or proving my point. Have you tried to get Ventolin without health insurance? $100+ for $6 worth of medicine. Why "can't" you? Do you mean you don't wan't to? Or you can't afford it? Either way, that's really your choice. If you wanted to, could you afford the health insurance yourself? As long as you're perfectly healthy, right? As for welfare, you didn't need it... neither do you care or understand that someone else might, so therefore its useless... you prove my point again. By point 1)When I say worth, I was referring to the price I can get it at in Aus. This seems to be near the wholesale price. This is also in-line with the same meaning of worth as used by the Australia Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme. Given that US companies are willing to supply at these rates suggests that it is not a losing proposition to them and therefore they are exploiting the US market. Medicine is not a product that satisfies Adam Smith's requirements for a free market, being that the product is demand inelastic, not to mention various further protections afforded to the suppliers. 2)I can think of few reasons why patients would defraud the health industry (other than not disclosing pre-existing conditions, but this only applies to private insurance), but I can see why bean counters would claim patients are defrauding them. Who would know better, a doctor or a bean counter, that a patient is attempting some fraud? At one stage, after many tests with no results, my doctor asked me if I would be willing to pay for further diagnosis... I said I would, and then I was referred (without cost) to the doctor who found the WBC anomaly (and scaring me shitless by suggesting I most likely had lymphoma or leukaemia, before further tests a few weeks later). Supplier perpetrated fraud certainly is investigated. So, unless you can demonstrate widespread patient fraud, you're saying that the few (really?) suffering bad health and early death due to denied benefits are less important than the many suffering a few extra dollars a year. 3)You can't afford it? Well, don't claim those who can are lazy. As a capitalist, you must accept this is your own choice / laziness / incompetence that you cannot. Health insurance to cover a pre-existing condition, organised by yourself and not through an employer, would be a tiny part of your cost of living? I doubt it. 4)You are suffering under misconceptions here too. You cannot quit work and get welfare. Resigning will disqualify you (at least for a period of time). Having too much money will disqualify you. Not looking for work will disqualify you. What happens if you run out of credit, become bankrupt and still can't find work? working link? Aus PBS. LOL, Americans think they understand economics 1) Adam Smith did not say that a market cannot exist where demand is inelastic. His successors didn't even uphold his requirements of perfect knowledge and so on. You don't understand Adam Smith... Okay, I'll qualify, he didn't say that a free market couldn't exist, but that there were limits as to when it would achieve its desired goals, ie, fair value and decreasing prices that bring benefit to society. He would be for public schooling for the poor, for example, because of the overall benefit to society and the economy would outweigh the cost of government interference. Now, I'm not going to argue about perfect information (or other points), I know better than you that its not required, and has nothing to do with my argument. But, he did state that a commodity with perfect inelastic demand HAS NO UPPER LIMIT on its price. He also says that monopolies and regulation (patents, prescription requirements) and barriers to entry by guilded tradesmen (AMA) artificially inflate prices TO THE DETRIMENT of society. In these cases, free markets do not bring about their desired effect. you fuckers are forcing my prices up LOL @ U again. You think Australia somehow forces US drug companies to supply them? BWAHAHAHA... We will overtake the US if you don't give us your drugs!!! Again, you fight for your right to be exploited. Australia CAN'T force the US to supply anything. Don't be so daft. Australia just sets AN UPPER LIMIT on what Australians are ALLOWED to pay, and the drug companies happily supply at those prices. See inelastic demand. illicit uses and a black market Everything to do with the WoD, and nothing to do with health provision. This black market could be destroyed overnight. This is just an example of drug dealers breaking the law, and is prosecuted just as heavily in either case. Some people just want to keep supplies handy that they really shouldn't What? Why shouldn't they? Keeping something necessary handy is a bad thing? Do you mean they'll waste it? People shouldn't keep water (and medicine) in their fallout shelters? People shouldn't carry enough water for their three months backpacking? This is fraud? obtain otherwise rationed services So, doctors assist patients to obtain rationed services to the detriment of more needy patients? What sort of doctor would do that? One working in a private system, one that gets paid better by one insurance company than another, perhaps? Ooops, I reread your statement "higher priority", I think you meant wealthier. There's no incentive for a doctors to collude in a public system. Their incentive is to provide the best care to the most needy. 3)There is no 3) Glad you know who are now. 5-8% of my bills You are not a minimum wage guy, you are a wealthy upper middle class twonk, right? Earning what, 3-4x minimum wage, at least? So now we are talking 20-35% of a minimum wage, maybe more? Even worse, but why would a healthy person, on minimum wage, who isn't going to use that insurance anyway, bother with getting it? Oops, no longer healthy, can no longer work --> sickness benefits, loss of production, higher taxes, greater spread of disease. Young healthy people opting out also means higher prices for older, less healthy people. Australians all pay 1.5%... regardless of their income levels. I proved that ... you can survive All you've proved is that YOU can survive given your resources. Just like me saying I've proved anyone can earn $200k... what a joke. eat a shotgun and get it over with. Americans HATE Americans. QED. Alright, I'll admit that I was using Admin Smith as my example, because he is some kind of hero to most of you guys. Ultimately, infact, he is almost completely wrong, as Nash proves that competition doesn't bring about the optimum result, just often one somewhat close to it, and even then, only under the right circumstances. As for economics not being the study of moral values, I understand that too... What you don't understand is that free markets are ONLY a TOOL for bringing about morally desirable results in a society. So, where that is the case, ie, ALMOST everywhere, then I support that, but roads, government, education, policing, defence and justice systems are only some examples where free markets are not used, and for good reason. That you think they are something magical that always bring about the best results, makes you delusional. Now, health care might not be perfectly inelastic, but it is very inelastic. The elasticity mostly consists of getting it or not. Violence will not happen in America, you let people starve, and die of sickness (the sick getting violent, stupid), but as long as its only a minority of the population, your selfishness, hatred for your fellow man and fear will stop anyone doing anything about it. Yes, I am for regulation that pushes the price of medical care IN THE OTHER direction. Government provided health care, is just another form of insurance. Another solution, I also like, is mandatory basic care insurance with no pre-existing condition checks or health checks. This keeps the price down through competition and pooling. All I am talking about is BASIC health insurance, government or otherwise, where EVERYONE is covered. If you want extra, get it. When I said overtake, I meant invade. Its a joke pointing out the absurdity of your statement that you are subsidising the health care in Australia. You ADMIT now that the US IS making a profit from drug sales to Australia, therefore you guys MUST be paying 300-400% markup on drugs. While, setting maximum prices does not affect demand, it does not appear to affect supply either. Where it does, someone as powerful as the government can (and obviously do) increase the set price, and still provide the profit incentive to pharma companies. Just as insurance companies can negotiate cheaper prices than individuals, governments can do this on a bigger scale. I am for legalising all drugs, but not necesarilly allowing unmitigated free market to provide them. Your chinese example would fail due to false advertising. 'Recreational' drugs could be supplied with heavy taxes, like tobacco, or by the government with taxes to used to subsidise health care. Also, prescribed drugs can be subsidised, and unprescribed drugs taxed to pay the subsidies, etc. This makes hoarding, buying more than you need and keeping drugs past expiration a losing proposition, unless you have good reason. There are checks in public medicine... A GP must refer you to a specialists for most things, so its not like there is only one person responsible for determining the patients needs. Your analysis of the costs to society of having someone not working is limited to the employer side of the equation. There are many studies showing costs involved of not providing preventative medicine. The overall cost of health can be reduced by not waiting until something is an emergency. While our preventative care is good, compare the experience of someone who gets really unwell here vs someone without insurance in the US. Hint: you should be upset. Not too mention that private insurance is also available. Having credit and 5k in cash, plus retirement funds and a family that cares for you (hopefully you treat and are treated by your family better than you treat your fellow man) IS a lot of resources. All this just tells me that you are a selfish asshole who has no respect for others, as long as you are (or think you are) covered, everything is fine. You've never travelled and experienced anything other than you've been told, and never considered that there could be more to life than being a good employee. In short, you screw yourself because you are too selfish to consider that providing for the weaker has benefits for you too. I can only hope that one day you or someone close to you suffers. Ideally, you will lose your job and insurance and then get cancer, or you get cancer and your insurance company weasles out of it. 4) LOL Americans You can go to chinatown and watch discovery? If he is a real fundamentalist christian he might not understand the irony. Your a christian of some sort irony: the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning What is Love --> Hate Filled Warmonger => irony. damn: s/your/you're n/t The problem is that's what a lot of people want you to do. Also, you lose the right to vote, decreasing the chance the system can be changed. The problem with that plan is that no one will give a shit. We need someone who the public can sympathise with going to jail and being martyrd. Then maybe the world will see sense. Unfortunately in this case, the judge was too smart to let that happen. Otherwise, I think the only other option is to change the political system itself. That's right... I quit my job as a software engineer 7 months ago. This is how I make my money now. Good luck. No catch as such. Just that its a very competitive game. The market can just as easily move against you as for you, and if you're not willing to take a small loss (AKA a red book), it can translate into a much larger loss instead. This is fine if your a positional player and you expect it. Also, not much trade happens on the immature markets, so there may not be as much profit there as you think. I specialise in heavily traded markets myself, horse racing, soccer, tennis, golf and the occasional special event like big brother. The place is also infested with bots (well, one of them is mine) and they do all sorts of nasty magic to spoof the market into moving against the naive and ultimately alleviating them of their cash. Unscheduled downtime can hurt as your bets won't be matched. My technique normally means I get unexpected profits when this happens at the cost of taking on more risk than I would prefer. Finally, always read the rules. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is. For a laugh, ask on the forums about the Money Saving Experts that lost 30k (about 29k more than they had in their accounts) on the First Goal Scorer markets because they didn't read the rules. as much entropy as MD5(password+id) nt wrong nt Kooky physics question Any physisists out there know if it is theoretically possible to create charged massless particles? Or can only quark based particles have a charge, and do they therefore always have mass? IANAP, but was wondering if such particles existed, would they have a chemistry, and could we then build machines out of them that could travel at the speed of light and have other interesting properties for space exploration? If not, are there other ways of coupling massless particles into something coherent and complex that doesn't involve charge? Could there exists 'beings of pure energy'? Oh well, I warned you it was kooky. No, I am a being of pure energy and was just wondering if I exist. Interesting application of Descartes Does it also mean that sane people don't exist? Do they matter and if not, are they beings of pure energy? Wouldn't this mean that I am in fact sane? Perhaps you should reread the question A photon is an uncharged (rest) massless particle, I know that... I want to know if there could exist charged massless particles, like a photon equivilent of electrons and protons that could interact through charge and have a chemistry. As for the spelling mistake, I'm tired and don't care. haha, you said homo on the internets, very funny $ You charged the massless particle in your pants? Now we know why vikings had to kill the men and rape the women... Why would it accelerate infinitely fast? $ Just to clarify... Yes... the particles would have no rest mass, but they move at the speed of light (having no mass), but that means they do have a mass due to their energy... So, they would bend in an electric field, the same way light does in a gravity field and would gain or lose energy in a field relative to the direction of travel. So this doesn't rule their existence out... even if other reasons would. Close to the answer I was looking for So, charge is a property of quarks, and hence you have to use quarks... I guess you are also saying that quarks must have mass, hence no charged massless particles... But why wouldn't electrostatic forces affect massless particles? Other than the fact that they don't exist (as above)? Except massless particles have relativistic mass F=ma doesn't imply infinite accelerations... Infact, all massless particles would have to travel at the speed of light. So forces can only change the direction and the energy of the particles. I don't see how this excludes interaction with charge. String theory would suggest that leptons, quearks and photons are all basically the same thing... So this doesn't seem to rule out massless charged particles. Drop income tax, tax corporations more That way, the middle class can have its tax breaks, and the tax burdens will fall where they should, on the rich (or groups of non-poor people that make up the relatively wealthy psuedo-persons known as corporations). Tax cuts advantage the rich more than the middle/lower classes. The rich don't need tax cuts because they can afford accountants to minimise their taxes. Why else does Steve Jobs only earn only $1 a year? The rich have been paying lower taxes and the burdens have increasingly fallen on the middle class, with increasing tax and decreasing welfare in real terms. Oddly enough, before WWII, this was how taxes were raised. Either way though, you are right that the government must run a surplass or ultimately fall, but at least the majority of voters could support something like this. Have your cake and eat it too. What you said is true but wrong The top 20% of wage earners pay a higher share of their income by definition of what is declared as their income as wage earners. Its a tautology the way its presented there. What you forget is that the wealthiest do not 'earn a wage', in terms of wealth acquired they pay a lower percentage of tax than your average middle class family. Actually yes I am fully aware that capital gains are taxed, and I think that this is correct... You have made a profit, so it should be taxed. And even that those figures include such things as capital gains, etc, then it still doesn't invalidate my argument. The point you continue to miss is that as you make more wealth available to yourself there are more ways to legally 'not' make it available to yourself as earnings and hence don't even show up on that table. The whole point of accountants that service the ultrawealthy is how they can best access and preserve their wealth without paying taxes on its benefits. Third, while almost all earnings are reported on income tax returns (due to wage withholding), a large share of investment income is not reported. This under-reporting reflects not only legislated tax breaks, for real-estate income, business profits, and so forth, but also tax evasion. The ITEP study conservatively estimates that a quarter of total investment income is not reported on tax returns due to legal and extra-legal under-reporting. -- Do Fat Cats Pay Lower Taxe Rates than Workers Hows the hernia treating you? Are you adjusting to sterility well? Alpha males gravitate towards alpha males. That's closet for teh ghey, right? Just not man enough to bear children You big hairy eunich bear man you. HAIL ERIS! ! [nt] did you miss the part where they said that the US invasion CAUSED the 650k EXTRA deaths? somehow you try to blame the mooslims for that you should try cleaning your own house first check author next time. but yes, muslims do some things wrong guess what, so do americans. So, where do YOU have the most control and influence? or does bombing and invading muslim countries, trying to correct their behaviour, excuse you and fellow americans? and yes causing 650k extra deaths means americans are more wrong in this case. Not sure. Does CIA backing count as fault? [nt] actually, I support cleaning up your own mess so, I support you staying in Iraq and making the best possible of it.... now that you decided to mess it up. I don't support messing it up in the first place though. So, yes, I blame america for putting saddam in power in the first place... and I also blame america for messing the place up even more with this invasion. I always expected though that america would go in, mess it up, and then not have the guts to go through with it and then leave it more messed up than ever. time will tell. I think I said that I did not support invasion because I suspected you would make more of a mess of it than it already was. yes, I know whose hands don was on in '83 I also see the parallels between communism and now terrorism (both boogymen), the former being the original reason to put him in in the first place, the latter the reason to take him out again. I see lots of hypocracy though blaming iraqies (and by extention muslims) for all that US 'mess' clearing. No, I didn't support invasion, the results speak for themselves... I do support continuuing occupation and doing what must be done to clean it up, but I doubt that will happen. You put him in there, which you shouldn't have done, but once done, it was probably best left alone (or at least left until there was international backing and support). Yes, communism and terrorism exist... they are real but INSIGNIFICANT threats, overhyped for the purpose of exerting control and gaining power. Or do you think McCarthy was right and just to blacklist all those people in his 'trials' into unamerican behaviour? Do you think invading vietnam was good idea too? As for terrorism, you must know the odds of dying in a terrorist related incident are extremely low, compared to ANYTHING THAT KILLS people. Yet, there you are, your phone tapped, your filming in public now under suspicion, torture legalised, loss of habeus corpus and a host of other things we took for granted five years ago all gone for the sake of another war against a noun. And you want even more of it if they can make you feel safer... you scared little child. Tell me again that your government hasn't been USING the terrorism boogyman to its own benefit. you are staring at shadows on a wall, I have seen the market place... I don't blame you for thinking I am the delusional one... but you are still wrong. all that head slapping might explain your problems Yes I really believe that communism and terrorism are threats that are insignificant and are overhyped and used for political gain. That first link really scared me I thought the republicans had taken over the world. You do know that communism has traditionally been a reaction to oppression by aristocracy, imperialists or wealthy landowners, right? As for your second link... wow, that many... you have a link to world wide accidental drowning incidents over the same time period as well? You know your link supports my theory that terrorism is overhyped. you're a frightened little kid, aren't you. so in your mind, great britain is in control of the usa, and always has been, because the american revolution was a reaction to british taxation or turkey is in control of saudi arabia, and always has been, because saudi moves for independence form the ottoman empire was a reaction to istanbul lol waht? My point was that communism is often the 'will of the people' when it is implemented... I thought you respected that. Why do you think you lost in vietnam? You were fighting against the will of the people. You want to justify the vietnam war now? Do you think the trials into unamerican activity were just and right too? I thought you supported democracy, which means people have a right to hold communist views, belong to a communist party and to try and vote them into power, but this was usurped, and innocent peoples lives were ruined. Instead of allowing countries to decide their own future, your department of dirty tricks did their best to undermine the will of the people of those countries (sometimes removing even democratically elected leaders to be replaced by dictators). You aren't surprised that using dirty tricks against people doesn't end up annoying the rest of the world? Hell, you even supported the great evil Saddam Hussein because of an irrational fear of communism. So, you support putting Saddam into power too? "look, across the street, my neighbor is getting murdered. but did you know far more people die from car accidents every year than murder? so i'll just watch, i have no reason to do anything about it" No, instead, we should tap everyone's phones, start locking people up without trial and torture them and begin preemptive invasions of any country thought to harbour murderers... for the safety of the children and the great american empire. In other words, a proportionate response to a real problem. You're like the guy speeding to the airport to get on the plane in time, and then panics the whole time that the plane will crash. You're fears are way out of proportion to reality. Heard of the IRA? The UK put up with terrorism for decades without surrendering all our rights, even while idiot americans sent them money. If anything, your actions internationally have increased the number of world wide terrorists. You have angered more people than if things had been done with more consideration for reality. You have made Iraq a worse place than it was under Saddam... congratulations. what troll? Do you support democracy or do you support the fight against communism? Do you overthrow democratic leaders with communist leanings in favour of facist puppet dictators? Do you put Saddam Hussein in power for fear of the red peril? Did I say you shouldn't fight terrorism or did I say you shouldn't throw away rights held as just for hundreds of years to fight terrorism? Fight terrorism or begin a new campaign of preemptive invasion in opposition to world opinion? Should you spend billions a month and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands to fight cancer? Or should you fight both cancer, heart attacks and terrorism in proportion to their real cost? zzz I know, thinking must be exhausting for you... Fair and Balanced CTS views. So, now you agree with me. i want defend american actions or apologize for them? Because this is what do and say... I don't see you critising the overblown response to terrorism, I see you supporting everything, and more importantly anything, done in the name of fighting against terrorism. yes, i know it is difficult for you to keep more than one concept in your mind other than "america is teh bad" and all people you meet have to be for or against america, but believe it or not, it is possible that the person you are in a thread with can believe what he thinks without thinking "america is teh cool" Actually I think america is teh cool... in so far as their original principals of freedom, democracy, justice and equality, all these things are great... but I am greatly dissappointed when I see these things forgotten and ignored. Remember, we started this thread due to your comments that fundamentally muslims are to blame for the state of Iraq today, when we now see that the west has been medling in their affairs for at least the better part of three generations. Like I said before, I don't blame you for thinking I am the delusional one, but when I saw those towers fall I knew america would react like a child who had just been hit in the face and would take out their anger and shame by beating on a smaller kid. It seems that things might be changing now, but a lot of damage has been done and it will be a long time before that is undone. I know the difference between you and Karl Rove Karl Rove isn't a complete batshit insane raving troll. You might forget that I have been reading your rants for over five years now. Also note, I said intereference from the west as opposed to just the US. THE IRAQIS ARE RESPONSIBLE Its laughable that you think you can blame people for the governments they get when you know full well they were installed by departments of the US. Its as stupid as blaming slaves for being slaves... They should clean their own house out and stop being slaves and stop blaming slave traders and owners for their predicament. you have no respect for anyone who lives outside the us borders Now you are very confused. I don't blame AMERICANS I blame retarded american foreign policy supporters, such as yourself. the world does NOT revolve around the usa As america goes, so goes the world. Its like you really believe that being the largest superpower on the planet has no effect on the rest of the planet... I'd be surprised if you really thought that the usa has had no effect on iraq lately... i am responsible for what happens to me said the rape victim to the judge. you are seriously out of sync with reality. you think the usa is the center of the world being insulated inside of the US you do not see how much US policy directs and affects the rest of us. I wonder why Tony Blair or John Howard ever mention the US? The way you put it, Bush should be completely irrelevant to them... is he? You really do suggest that america has not affected the lives of iraqies... like installing dictators, imposing sanctions, shocking and awing them to death and invading them was all their fault and has no appreciable effect on their life. One wonders why you would even bother. Well, by the same logic you can now say that the people in the WTC were responsible for what happened to them too. Maybe they shouldn't wear such short skirts. your trolling axiomatic monadism is starting to bore. Apparantly proof by contradiction runs off you like sanity runs from the time cube guy. Now you are talking to the phantoms in your mind Who said I don't also blame other countries for their actions? Why can't I apportion blame to the US when it is warranted without being either US phobic, philic, centric or obsessed? How does that exclude me from blaming the UKs previous involvement in trying to carve up the middle east? Do you think I am for the UKs imperialist past? Is that america's fault? You think I am happy that France destroyed the Rainbow Warrier? Do you think I blame America for that too? But we are not arguing about nuclear tests, we are arguing that you think the muslims are to blame for the state of Iraq today. Yet the US is no manufacturer of short skirts when it comes to Iraq, it is by far the biggest of its latest rapists. Just because someone was raped before doesn't mean other rapists get a free ride. You can wash your hands of your involvement with OBL (oooh it was only one stinger misile *cough* bullshit *cough*)... and you are trying to pretend that SH wasn't put in power by the US (he was already in power when don was shaking his hand). Now, you claim that you are doing the Iraqies a favour by freeing them of him, but you still put him there in the first place, and you are still making a mess of it today. Simple exercise for you, who has more effect on the world stage, America or Nauru? Has Nauru invaded Iraq lately? Is it a surprise to you that such a powerful country that so often meddles in the affairs of other countries comes up for critisism more often than others? Do you find it difficult to understand why I am not arguing against the damage Nauru has caused the world? You want me to agree with you, state simply that the US shouldn't have installed SH in the first place and we might have some common ground, I know you well enough to know we won't, because you don't actually accept ANY blame on the US, ever. I really can't see how you can absolve yourself of a dictator's actions when you installed the dictator. Dude, the USA knowingly installed a dictator into Iraq... America trained and aided him, this is more than 'dealt with'. OMG... he's a nasty dictator... we are so surprised... how can we be blamed for that? Its the mooslims fault. you must be retarded. Its more like you knew he was a rapist, and gave him the keys to a room with a doe eyed girl locked inside. You touched it, you broke it, accept it. SH might not have been a nice guy, but you are his accomplice. Amazingly, one of the things Saddam did so well was to keep the rival sects from destroying each other... A bad man in a bad place doing a bad job well. Perhaps that should have been considered before removing him and thinking they would greet you as liberators... I'm not pro/anti USA either... I just admit they fucked this one up royally. You can't blame the people of the country for their government's actions if their government was setup by another country against their will. In this case the government was setup by the US... so that is where the blame lies. quite frankly, you are dumb... or in denial frank didn't just give ralph gloves. frank trained ralph how to rape, frank gave ralph the tools of rape and frank gave ralph the opportunity to rape. frank is an accomplice to rape. history In 1958, a year after Saddam had joined the Ba'ath party, army officers led by General Abdul Karim Qassim overthrew Faisal II of Iraq. The Ba'athists opposed the new government, and in 1959, Saddam was involved in the attempted United States-backed plot to assassinate Qassim.[12] Saddam was shot in the leg, but escaped to Tikrit with the help of CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents. Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred to Beirut for a brief CIA training course. From there he moved to Cairo where he made frequent visits to the American embassy. During this time the CIA placed him in a upper-class apartment observed by CIA and Egyptian operatives. (UPI 'analysis' article) ... Concerned about Qassim's growing ties to Communists, the CIA gave assistance to the Ba'ath Party and other regime opponents ... In 1982 with Iranian success on the battlefield, the U.S. made its backing of Iraq more pronounced, supplying it with intelligence, economic aid, normalizing relations with the government (broken during the 1967 Six-Day War), and also supplying weapons.[11] President Ronald Reagan decided that the United States "could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran", and that the United States "would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran."[12] President Reagan formalized this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive ("NSDD") to this effect in June, 1982.[13] Trainig, oppurtunity, tools... You are seriously boring me. Non zero I think when things go bad its called blowback... Yet, I don't think the CIA and the US backed him because they thought he was a nice guy. At the time they too probably thought of him as a bad man in a bad place capable of doing a bad job well. But you can't use evil to fight evil and expect good to come of it. If it wasn't SH it would have been another evil man used as a tool by the US for its own gain, with similar predictable results. 50% nt that wasn't your question... You didn't ask what % was it americas fault... Frank is 0% responsible for Ralphs existence, 100% responsible for his rise to power, 100% responsible for his maintenance of power and 0% responsible for his actions (avg 50%)... Frank is 100% guilty of Accessory to Rape.... Even though Ralph is the rapist and fully responsible for his own actions and Frank isn't a rapist and isn't responsible for Ralphs actions. Frank new Ralph was a bad man when he put him in that situation. The US didn't have to WANT any of these things... they put a bad man in a bad place to do a bad job well. You can't use evil against evil and expect good to come of it. They are accomplices to these events. Lets look at the gassing of the kurds... When did the massacre occur and what relation did this have to the Iraq/Iran war? Why were the Kurds relevant during this time? What side did the US back here? Ten points for telling me who the CIA (in declassified documents released at the time) and GHW. Bush (in public) originally blame for this massacre. Who supplied Saddam with chemical weapons and know how during this period (not just US bashing here)? Why has SH never had to answer to this event during his current trial? Why did the story change so drastically during the 90s? Was this just an intelligence fuck up, or was the truth inconvienient either before or after the story changed? I don't know, but there is more going on here than meets the eye... As for Kuwait... what did the US, in meetings before the invasion, tell SH the consequences of going into Kuwait would be? Why did the US finally respond to this? Frank isn't a rapist, he is an accomplice to rape. if saddam didn't come along, SOME OTHER BAD GUY WOULD I said the US would have CHOOSEN SOME OTHER BAD GUY to do BAD STUFF. Without US backing the BAD GUYS, the BAD GUYS would not be IN POWER and the US would not be ACCOMPLICES to the BAD GUYS ACTIONS. YOU HAVE SERIOUS PROBLEMS WITH ACCOUNTABILITY AND RESPONSIBILITY. Because you think Frank is a nice guy because he didn't actually commit rape, and this is FLAWED logic. idiot, last post... who put SH in power? Who backed him whilst in power? Who supplied weapons, money, training? Who lied about who attacked the kurds? Why won't you accept that the US has culpability here? I thought you said fuck the US? Obviously that is empty rhetoric you use when your ass is handed to you. Why are you so stupid? you are projecting again... hitler, stalin, ghengis kahn? Oh yes, I blame GW Bush for those ones... The CIA backed SH BEFORE he was in power because of Qassim, you already agreed this. Yes, other countries helped SH too... did I say this makes them blameless? Really? Did you read the part where the US said they could not afford for Iraq to lose? I guess they just said that and stood back and had no role in it. Who lied about who attacked the kurds? i don't know. who did? now it all makes sense! (snicker) Yes, its always a good idea to laugh at your own ignorance... So, I help you again with history The U.S. State Department, in the immediate aftermath of the incident, instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. ... A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time concluded, apparently by determining the chemicals used by looking at images of the victims, that it was in fact Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment which was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990's. The CIA's senior political analyst for the Iran-Iraq war, Stephen C. Pelletiere, co-authored an unclassified analysis of the war [1] which contained a brief summary of the DIA study's key points ... However the DIA's final position on the attack was in fact much less certain than this preliminary report suggests, with its final conclusions, in June 2003, asserting just that there was insufficient evidence, but concluding that "Iraq ..used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in 1988" [3]. The CIA altered its position radically in the late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of WMD before the 2003 invasion I guess truth is less important the who the current boogyman of the day is, right? Simple fact: SH would never have attained power without US support. Ralph would not have been able to rape without Franks help... Frank is truly a kind and just guy. I think your problem is that you have some sort of scape goat mentality... as long as one person is to blame, everyone else must be as white as snow. what you should learn, is that if you aid a rapist you are guilty of being an accomplice to rape... CTS logic... rapist exists so helping rapists rape is a completely innocent action. Oh yes you are guilty... if you supplied the gun for the purpose of having someone killed. Here, I want someone killed, here's training on how to kill.... oh btw, here's a gun... (I assume this is true in the US) You are also guilty (of some crime) if you knowingly supply the gun to convicted murderer too. Just because you supplied the tool, doesn't make you innocent (even if it doesn't necessarily make you guilty) No but are you telling me that the usa did not conciously and knowingly supply and aid a known brutal dictator? Here we agree... The USA is culpable and so is everyone else... I think in many cases less culpable, and in some cases possibly more, in different ways, but still culpable for their dealings with SH nonetheless. Everyone was doing it is still no excuse, but I think you agree with me here. This though strengthens my original argument with you, which was that you were saying the muslims should be held responsible for the state of Iraq today. Thanks for playing. People in the WTC are responsible for what happenned in the WTC... Fine, we agree. Apparantly no outside influence can alter peoples lives... Backing bad people in foreign countries has no effect on anyone in those countries. Invading countries has no effect on them. ftw? you aren't making any sense... The people in the WTC are simply crying victimisation, according to you, they deserved it and should take personal responsibility for what happens to them. Invading countries and supporting dictators has no effect on peoples lives, they are crying victimisation and should take personal responsibility for what happens to them. Also, if you hand a guy a pool que in a bar fight for the purpose of hitting people with it, then you have no responsibility and are innocent... also you would be surprised when he finally attacks you with it. Al Qaeda is being punished. Who is punishing the USA? Prufe Gobbles Well, not sure if you're serious but the best thing you can do is just walk away... let her get on with her life and get on with yours. It will take months, maybe years, it will hurt, but in the end you will get someone better and be happier for it. My 2p. Its the beginning of the end is why If your not married, have no kids, then you can stay and watch it slowly fall apart like a car crash in slow motion... Or you can get out there into the scene again and enjoy your life. Either way its over, whether you conciously want it to be or not, because in the back of your mind, your always going to wonder why you weren't good enough for her to know you were good enough for her. That will eat into everything, slowly but surely. No reason to stay with her though He could be out having other women, and if he's bored or alone one weekend, can still get her to do whatever he wants... Once the gate's open... Best leave it a month or so first, to give him a break and a chance to get perspective, and her a chance to grow a little desperate. I get the feeling that's not going to be what he wants... and after a while its going to be hard to tell the knife from the wound... ie, I think that will mess him up as much as her. Who cares if she moves on... At least he'll be the one throwing the meat back on someone else's plate, and it'll take a few more screwed up relationships for her to work out not to screw around. So its good for everyoone. You aren't going to be alone forever just for a few months... There's always someone out there, hopefully someone mature enough to give you what you want and not cheating on you. Like I said, maybe you like that. lol, ur gf's a slut, you pussy whipped pussy boy Hope you enjoy sucking someone else's semen from her salty slit. How do you know they wouldn't find someone better? Just because they've resigned themselves to someone willing to cheat on them doesn't make it ideal. I agree partly, he should leave her, sleep with some other women (at least one), and if she comes crawling back and he's still in love, then they are on more equal footing and can try again. As it is now, she won't respect him for very long, and no matter how much she feels she made a mistake now, she will do it again... She won't have learnt any reason not to. Sensitive much? Like I said, if he goes all wussie on her "I love you, don't leave me, I won't cheat on you, wah wah wah", she won't respect him and will do it again. Maybe not 100% certainty, but pretty much. Be firm, make her realise that her actions could cost her their relationship, and he might just have a chance. But he has to be willing to let her go, if he's going to have any chance of keeping her. That's the contradictory reality of human nature. I agree he could stay with her but he has to walk away first, and have sex with other women. When (if) she crawls back to him, he might have a chance... Like I said in other posts, after a few months and a bit more experience (which will also improve his social skills and self esteme) they might want to get back again, but the point is they will be back on level ground --- they will have both cheated on each other... At this point though, ultimately he first has to accept that he has to walk away and forget her. Right now, if he tries to keep her, he will be her toy and nothing more. You are talking from experience right? Your gf's a cheating slut and you love it that way? Good for you. What's her phone number? Well, if being with a slut makes you happy go for it. Who said my solution doesn't involve pain and personal growth. It can be very hard walking away. By the time you've grown attached to someone, leaving is the opposite of what you want (which is to have everything back to normal). For me, letting go and starting again was the best thing I ever did. I'm pretty sure only you can see that diary $ No, don't worry about the fit people, its stupid people you should worry about. Everyone should do an SAT every year, could be multiple choice so a computer can grade it... Anyone left in the room at the end automatically gets gassed for being too slow, and on the way out you have to stand in a sealed room and submit your paper. Anyone falling below a certain grade also gets gassed. There can be an ethics section, and anyone who advocates killing off stupid, unfit or sick people can automatically be gassed too. oh wait... And you're proving this point by being a moron? $ I've heard of this being tried before One developer would deliberately put a stupid bug in, tell another developer who would file a report and fix it and then both developers would split the bonus money. Of course lots of bugs were found, but it didn't do much for software quality. come on trane comments like that make it harder to fight for drug legalisation... I don't mind you using drugs, I don't mind you being on welfare, but don't rub it in on us poor smucks who have to work. diebold voting machines seem to work too $ If only I hadn't hit preview $ ouhc!! [mt] YFI Please insert coin to continue YAFI But that is not news around here. Linux or Max OS X is a hippy environmentalist all jokes 100% recycled. (No I'm not going to search for the last 'put your clocks back diary entry'). Still funny though. good point $ damn, very good point http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/Jack%20Wagner/diary I wear each lump as a badge of honour $ which are you? $ Odd thing about software is that it is still useful despite errors. There is no such thing as 100% correct code, yet most of the code is 'good enough'. Software Engineering is all about how to reduce the error rate or at least make sure it is controllable and tolerable. Engineer's code of ethics http://www.nspe.org/ethics/eh1-cred.asp yes, ethics are just for the touchy feelies. Engineering is a LOT more than just coding... It is putting systems in place like proper documentation, proper testing procedures, cost and resource calculations and planning, risk assessment and mitigation, etc. These things are important for large scale projects that require lots of someone's money to implement. When someone wants something large implemented and are willing to pay for it, they want assurance that their money is spent as responsibly as possible for maximum effect. There is LOT more to software engineering than hacking out code. That is why teams of developer's are normally run by engineers. If all you know is Open Source, then you might miss a lot of these concepts, because open source avoids a lot these problems because the developer's are the clients. I am a Software Engineer with over 10 years experience. It doesn't bother me if you think software engineering is a myth or not... People pay good money to make sure their multi million dollar projects are run by competent engineers. You would be correct if I developed software $ Is a civil engineer the same as a brick layer? Or is there only 'Building Developers' in your world? lol waht? You are saying there is no difference between a civil engineer and a brick layer? That's why you couldn't get employed on a serious project if YOU paid THEM. Yes, but software is built by a collaboration of many people... line by line Just as a building is built brick by brick... Software engineering is much newer than Civil Engineering, but that does not mean that software projects can't be engineered the same way physical buildings are. In fact, software engineering is about taking those hundreds of years of experience in other engineering disciplines and applying it to the art of software creation. You can build a sky scraper brick by brick with no engineering if you wanted to. What is the chance it will stand up and be done on time and budget? That is why companies pay a premium for good Software Engineers. I guess no one needs engineers after all Lucky for me people still pay for it, eh? engineering Pronunciation (nj-nrng) n. 1. a. The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems. b. The profession of or the work performed by an engineer. 2. Skillful maneuvering or direction: geopolitical engineering; social engineering. Typical k5er, blaming others for their own ignorance. Mind you, You do call yourself TROLL. I agree those uses of the word engineer a dodgy if not completely wrong... Where are the science and mathematical principals used in their jobs? I don't see them. The design of economical systems, processes, machines? A sanitation engineer would be a legitimate position for someone designing sanitation systems or processes for councils or something on that level... Not your average garbologist. Just as traffic engineer is the correct term for someone designing road systems and doing traffic flow analysis and improvement and the like, but not a taxi driver. And so I still maintain there is a difference between a programmer and a software engineer. Which justifies statements like -- 'you can leave that for the C-monkeys' for the 'trivial' stuff. Yes, setting up, but also monitoring and controlling the environment as it and the project evolves. Some of it is project management. A lot of it is understanding software principles. It normally involves more than just software of course, a competent software engineer will also understand hardware, electronics, electrical systems and have a basis in other engineering disciplines like statics and dynamics. Some of it is interfacing with other engineering disciplines... This is where having a common understanding of engineering can be important. Its a big subject, and the degree normally takes at least a year longer than your standard CS degree. And some programming projects/tasks don't even require CS degree level people to implement (VBA scripting perhaps?). A competent engineer will recognise these tasks for what they are. Engineering means always having an eye on the economic as well as the technological aspects of projects. comming from a maths teacher who doesn't even know the difference between differentiability and convergence, you'll excuse me for not taking your insults very seriously. You come back to me when you know the difference between Cauchy convergence and wait for it DIFFERENTIABILTY. Yes, I was referring to a previous argument with you where you argued to whole time that you were talking about Convergence, and at the end had to admit your definition was that of Differentiability. Its hard to take a maths teacher seriously who can't even get that right. Let alone a maths teacher trying who doesn't understand the difference between engineering and brick laying. There is a world of difference between engineering and the disciplines it ingrains and software developing and throwing code at a problem. Many of the things I have worked on go well beyond the code... Processes and workflow design for code delivery to solutions that involve both hardware and software. CS only covers the SOFTWARE... Software Engineering actually covers much more, where Softare is often only part of the solution. If you go back and check your definitions you will find that they are WRONG.... not just LOOSE, but WRONG. DIFFERENTIABILITY is VERY DIFFERENT to CONVERGENCE. And YOU are the MATHS teacher. Those who can do.... What makes you think these graduate students have taken the wrong approach? Efficiency is usually nowhere near as important as correctness. 'Premature optimization is the root of all evil' -- Hoare and Knuth. They can optimize after they get it working. I thought you said MATLAB wouldn't cut it? Besides, I didn't mention prototype... If they have something working, they can optimise the 10% of it that needs it. Why do you hate the sun? $ If americans cared about anything other than money they would have taken the day off work to drive down to New Orleans to bring their fellow Americans to a safe place to live for a few weeks. Instead they let the government fail it while they earnt another day's pay. Whoever came up with it was probably stoned $ I like the idea, except where's the fun in arguing about drugs with people who like them? What's there to argue about. Dude1: Drugs are cool Dude2: Yeah man Dude1: ummmm... Dude2: Awesome Dude1: Joint? I'm for freedom of choice... and I think anyone who is against choice should be chemically restrained. Until that is the law, we can argue on k5. A Pres who could handle his speed and hookers, maybe you are familiar with him? A criminal record is not natural result of taking drugs. All the natural consequences of drug use must be dealt with by the user. Also, you say someone is stupid for taking drugs, but unless you know their life experience and what is in their heads, you do not really know the reasons why they started. Perhaps killing brain cells is the only thing that lets them function in the first place. Finally, you are an asshole who probably constantly told your pot smoking friends what idiots they were and wondered why they started ganging up on you. I respect your right not to take drugs, why don't you support my right to take them? Lets see if you say that when you get cancer $ oh sorry... you do drugs whiskey is a drug in my world... Unless you want to get into a my drug is better than your drug debate... I guess if people like different food to you they must be weired hippies or something too. And if you think you can play cards whilst coffing up tumors without some form of pain control... well, old age is gonna have some surprises in store for you. So you don't drink... you don't get drunk and have never been inebriated? Would you refuse morphine if you got hit by a car and mangled but were still concious? Do you have your fillings done without anaesthetic? junkie $ What a bunch of assholes the brits are. 60% want all the advantages of their imperialism with none of the sharing. Have these guys ever left the county they were born in? Fucking inbreds. Just small minds longing for some control, scared shitless of a little competition. They can't be gay They don't have any balls, otherwise they would refuse these tests. Training is not the same as years of education and practice at abstract thinking. What's that stain on the first one's leg? $ if that's how they train, it does explain their fondness for running into small rooms and grabbing people. Being There I watched this again last night. What did the ending mean to you? SPOILERS FOLLOW Was Chance God? Was he more than human? An angel? Could he really speak Russian and did he have mind powers over people? Was he really the ulimate gardener of men? Or was it his simplicity and innocence that allowed him to walk onto the lake? No poll as I'd prefer opinions. I like to watch Oh, its "society's" fault? Its your softly softly approach that allows 7 year olds to even get cocaine in the first place. She should get a minimum of 100 lashings... and the only reason I'm being lenient is she's still quite young. If this was her second offence, then Capital punishment would be appropriate. Eitherway, her parents should probably be jailed and their assets frozen.. unless they have cocaine to, in which case cane and/or execute the entire lot. You just can't let pushers like this off lightly. Think of the children!! Well That was because every single debunking ignored this fact. I just wanted the question answered, which it was, by localroger. That wasn't trolling. No Nobody except localroger managed to explain it satisfactorily. Most of the other replies denied it completely. Even the demolition expert. I do agree it was a bit rude and lame repeating the question, and I was unsure of doing it at the time, and I guess I could have done it better, but given that 3 out of the four replies were flat out wrong, and I didn't understand it myself, I still think it was worth it. You fail to even ask the questions... I'm sometimes ignorant, so I ask questions or make statements designed to get a response to answer questions I have. They did not give the same explanation. Everywhere (4 times) I posted that comment was to an explanation that simply avoided that problem. Only localroger said that the reason you would expect to find molten steal in the absence of explosives is that the energy of the building itself would be enough to liquefy steal... Without calculating anything I take this to be plausible, given that it was explained that the temperature of jet fuel is not enough to melt steal. This is something I have wondered about since I first read this, and it is not answered in PopMech... The only other plausible scientific explanation I heard was that it did not exist. There was no molten steal... please stop asking questions. So sit on your high horse and continue to turn a minor k5 faux pas into mount trollympus. s/steal/steel/ dammit, ruin an otherwise fine post. you're making things up. Look at the times I posted those comments and find one person who said that before those comments. Then, find me a comment before localroger answered that the melting was due to collapse. You do that... I take a week break from k5. You have a point I don't often troll, so normally comes across as satire... In hindsight, you are right and I could have done a better job using 'US' solutions. References to foreign cultures are probably wasted on Americans anyway. They probably don't even know where Singapore is, let alone their punishments. I'll keep that in mind next time, Thanks. No, I'm not from Singapore I have spent a few weeks there on holiday. Its 12 years ago now, but have you ever heard of Michael Fay? He did indeed. $ I said lashings instead of canings so as not to confuse the caning kids used to get from headmasters from the caning handed out in places like Singapore. 25 years ago, caning a 7 year old probably wouldn't have sounded that harsh. Infact, they still had the cane in schools when I was 7 years old. Nor is getting high $ I'm pretty sure this guy is trolling Baldrson rather than agreeing with him, but I could be wrong. Its because he has the power to change it and he's being hypocritical every time he talks against it. Actually the guy is a complete twat and deserves to be zeroed. Caucasian, roughly 1/4 Russian, 1/4 Latvian, 1/4 generic Australian caucasian, 1/8 Scottish, 1/16 Aboriginal, 1/16 Chineese. Good link But this one is better. WARNING --- PICTURES OF EYE SURGERY Hypothesis evolve through natural selection. $ Yes, its an observation about how science progresses... I agree that evolution itself isn't a basis for science. The observation could be used to form a hypothesis about science, and that's where it becomes meta-science, but I'm not going to go that far with it :) And while biological evolution and intellectual (or cultural, memetic, etc) evolution is different in many fundamental ways, I would not be surprised at all if the maths behind them were similar. Thanks for the book link. Something else to consider is that 'Genius' like Einstein may not just be that the idea's are evolving (and breeding) in certain people's minds, but that certain people have genetic abnormalities that might enable them to evolve those ideas in their minds better than other. This means that not only do you just need minds as environments for generating ideas, you need minds capable of providing rich enough environments for the 'genius' ideas. You have proof I don't grasp calculus 101? For an engineer I was at the top end of the class as far as the maths courses go. I even topped the vector calculus course with a score over 95%. Granted I didn't study it as in depth as a Maths major, but calc 101 I could do pissed, stoned and asleep with my hands tied behind my back. I thought I told you to troll harder genius. So STFU, or argue the points. +1, nice troll but I blocked that one with my +5 passport of protection from american aimed insults, so that one missed. You'll have t'roll again kthx Tell me calc wiz, Show me the integral describing three bodies in mutual gravitational orbit? Calculus is so 19th century, catch up... 4 small words of advice for you, thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems. Proof you don't know what you are talking about Or at best that you don't understand the limits of calculus.... Right, idiot... it cannot be applied everywhere Proof, now you STFU thermodynamics? ermergent behaviour? chaos? I think you will find we are talking physics. I understand calculus but you don't understand chaos. That's what I am discussing here. Evolution in particular I think is stable over certain parameters, but it is anything but convergent. You are proving nothing here other than your ignorance. YFI, it being an understanding of chaos $ To prove your understanding, please answer true of false as to whether the following are convergent: a) x2 b) ex c) sin(x) d) e-x YFI dumbuss how else did you expect to interpret these.... Your being deliberately retarded. stop trolling now. How did I know you were going to make this more difficult than necessary? True or false, do the following series converge? a) St = t2 b) St = et c) St = sin(t/8) d) St = e-t Now, this isn't a trick question or anything difficult... once you can answer it I can go on to the bits you really will have difficulty with. YFI No, you get no more chances, sorry. You are not even capable of understanding what comes next. I suggest Jim Gleik's Chaos for you, its got lots of pretty pictures. I guess you couldn't find the answers on google. t is an integer... they are series, the fact was pointed out to you. If you were my professor, I would be enrolled in bizarro U, where the ignorant taught the enlightened. An answer like that on an exam would be failed... Which you have. You will become more used to it in time, I'm sure. okay, so you're ninth grade teacher... amazing now... I need you to prove that you can answer those very simple question, because the series I'm going to follow with get a lot more interesting very quickly. You are the one claiming to be too smart to have other people comment or something. Anyway, admitting you are ninth grade teacher is actually enough of a chuckle for me that I think I'll enjoy your trolling even more now. and yes, take them to be sequences if you want to be pedantic. they are not fundamentally very different except to someone trying to teach maths because they can't actually use it or do anything else. Even worse, whether you ask if the function has a limit, or if the series converges or the sequence converges (for these equations), the answers are all the same. So, if you want to maintain any credibility, answer the question, then dump whatever dogma you want, otherwise stfu. You have a 1/16 chance of being right... hint the series 1/n does not converge but that is not in my list of questions. Who cares? This Nobel wrize winner seems to. He's the second dumbest troll of the month You are the first. Actually proof is much harder than that... your second point is true though. Convergence to what? Evolution says nothing about converging to an optimum. What gives you the impression that the results of evolution are optimum? coverge? As for convergence, where is your proof that biology is convergent? What makes you think life isn't just wandering around rather aimlessly through the possible state space? Anyway, while there is yet no proof for convergence for general GAs, there is proof for special classes of them. And yes, proving it would be pretty useful. In any case, please troll harder next time. No, All you need for animals and plants is convergence to local minimums. I think there is enough evidence that this occurs and it is obvious this occurs in GAs too. But convergence implies a limit.... a single point to which things will tend to after an infinite time... You are basically saying there is a perfect genetic code that life is somehow searching for. In reality, life fills niches, life and other processes change those niches and life then goes on to find new niches. That's all there is. So, like other chaotic systems, they can wander over the state space in a periodic or chaotic manner, orbiting and switching between attractors and never converging to a single limit. You need more than basic calculus concepts to study chaotic systems. Please hide your ignorance of biology, evolution and chaos theory. Go read some books on chaos and complex systems. There are even maths courses on it nowadays where they can teach you the other concepts. It a shame you never went to any at college, but I'm glad you made more effort in your troll this time. What I said is still true Its a chaotic system... it is only convergent over a certain range of parameters. Pump up the sun up too much and tell me how well animals, plants and life will be converging. Remove the sun and tell me how much convergence you will see then. Inbetween that range though are all sorts of convergent, divergent and periodic behaviour. There is nothing to suggest any convergence other than enough to enable the reproduction of form. Species in general tend to diverge rather than converge. Occasionally two branches will settle on similar local minimums (human and octopus eye). That might turn out to be important for proving convergence in GA's, I don't know, but I think you know even less. I think your definition of convergence is wrong. If you could post a link or clarify I would appreciate it. I am tired now, so I will check again tomorrow before being rude, (although I can do calc101 in my sleep, I can't seem to type). For now I think you either have not constrained d correctly or else you haven't defined t0 correctly, or all you are saying is that one generation derives from the previous which is also obvious. For now I will say that cats and dogs diverge from common ancestors, not converge into a super catdog. That much is obvious. Also a particular model of a GA has already been proven to converge. So there's your choose your mutation and recombination functions argument out the window. Finally, I think science is still studying how nature does those things (consider the mutability of an organisms DNA is encoded in DNA)... (Flu vs bacteria growing inside a nuclear reactor, mammals living around Chernobyl). Cauch Spins in his grave... You are wrong twice Firstly your definition is wrong. Secondly, not even the great Cauchy could write out that integral. Only someone who doesn't understand the limitations of calculus would think otherwise. If you don't think so please provide a source for your definition of convergence. I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I don't see it. Without a source or explaination, I think I have grown bored of this troll. It is actually that the limit as t approaches infinity of F = c for F(t)=gt. Another way of putting it, is that as the error must remain bounded from some point d off to infinity. You need to constrain d, otherwise there is no convergent limit. If you don't constrain d, then at best you are describing continuality, assuming you mean arbitarily small d. This is actually exactly what you find in life though... g doesn't converge it diverges, cat's don't end up looking more and more like dogs over time, they look less and less like dogs. g almost always diverges over time in nature. So, you decrease E enough, and suddenly there is no d in which cats are dogs (they have diverged from a common ancestor though). Once beyond the energy barrier required to reproduce the genes are more or less free to wander anywhere. The convergence within species is either through sexual reproduction, or in asexual reproduction sheer competition... Notice how quickly asexually reproducing organisms change? Furthermore, as I said, cool the system or heat the system too much, and again it all diverges to 0 length strings anyway. GAs work because the energy barrier is always kept exactly right to maintain your population, and your selection algorithm, mutation and reproduction and crossover algorithms really determine whether they will converge or not. I don't think those mechanisms are fully understood in nature. As I said though, there is proof for a particular type of GA... There's even a ling for you. Really, you are ignorant of chaos theory... its really interesting and not all about pretty fractals... there are some very interesting things, like Feigenbaum numbers for example, that seem to apply across a whole range on non linear systems. Note: Just to clarify the above your definition of that being a correct definition of a cauchy sequence was incorrect... because you did not specify that there exists a d for which all d greater than that for which the difference was less than E, ie your definition of the limit to infinity was wrong. You will still find that life does not converge. I was wondering if you were trying to specify something else, like cyclical convergence so I did not send that response until you replied. Not only is it not subtely tweaked it is wrong, and your assumption that biological evolution is convergent is also wrong. I don't see your point about the fireworks factory, it is both bounded and convergent (final state is empty?), but none of that is relavent to what we are discussing. You have been wrong too many times now tkatchevzz, even if you do know some calculus you appear to be ignorant of many other things and not willing to admit it. If you are seriously interested in these things I really do recommend "Order Out of Chaos"... Its heavy enough on the maths to be interesting to you, and would give you a good idea where to look further. You are the one incapable of even correctly writing out the definition of convergence. still doesn't mean your definition is correct or that evolution impies convergence. to correct 'your' definition for you For any E>0, there exists a t0 such that for all positive d, &pipe;g(t0 plus d) - g(t0)&pipe; < E. What you wrote was meaningless. As I wrote it, I see no argument from you that this is some sort of expected result of biological evolution. Wrong plus or minus is very important there. The difference is between converging to infinity or minus infinity. for all t0??? Now your being retarded. My definition is not less strict, it is correct. Listen asshole The limit as t goes to infinity or minus infinity. Don't you fucking realise that convergence is defined in terms of a limits, so I am talking about the range of the limit. It was the limit part you specifically fucked up. Damn, no wonder you can't get a job... and if you are example of an educated European, no wonder Europe's economy is so shit. you win convergence is NOT defined in terms of limits. -- you all such sequences converge to a limit, and one can test for "Cauchiness" without knowing the value of the limit (if it exists) -- your link. I agree with wikipedia that they most certainly are defined in terms of limits. This should have been obvious to you if you had read your mathworld link too. Maybe in your world you have defined convergence to be divergence and up is down and cats become dogs and humans become monkeys.. I take that as proof you are trolling your mathworld link says limit as m,n tend to infinity. You are a joke... and your replies will now be zeroed. HAND your definition is meaningless explain it, and why you think it is true of evolution. I don't have a problem with that statement but for clarity, can we agree that this is the equation we are using?: for all E>0, there exists a , such that for all d, 0<d<, &pipe;g(t0-d)-g(t0)&pipe;<E allowing g and t to be continuous. Where t0 is now... right? If so, does that imply for all t? I don't think so. If you specifically mean that, please correct me. Then for a suitable definition of g, I can accept that evolution basically works like that. Ie, that changes accumulate, so something similar came before what there was now. Isn't this the definition of differentiability of a function at point t0-, though? So it still doesn't look like convergence to me, but I accept that statement. BTW, the 'special cases' are markov models of GAs... Personally I think markov models are more powerful and much more has been proven about them. Have you heard of chaos theory? Order out of chaos, chaos out of simple systems, the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems? The only information that is 'created' is the information each entity requires to reproduce that information. The information gets better and better over time (given that that information also changes the environment). Imagine a box with a hot side and a cold side. If there is no difference in heat you have a stable system that obeys the laws of thermodynamics (closed system), but a box with one side hot and another side cold show all sorts of interesting behaviours. If you make one side too hot, the system becomes completely random... Too cold, nothing interesting either, at the right temperature difference you end up with hexagonal 'cells' that ordered to efficiently transfer the heat between both sides. These 'cells' are millions of particles across, and yet all act in unison. Life is like those cells. I think that nature is just the most efficient way of creating entropy in an open system under the right level of heat flux. A more informative site than the one you linked to mentions Bernard Cells and talks about dissipative systems. (Note the standard thermodynamic laws only apply to closed systems). I agree on some points Yes, my understanding of thermodynamics is far from the mainstream (for non scientists), because the mainstream only understand the thermodynamics of closed systems, and closed systems tend towards equilibrium in a uniform state with maximum entropy. This does not happen in nonequilibrium systems such as the earth where we have a heat source and a heat sink (sun/space). Such systems are in constant motion and any equilibrium that is reached is considered dynamic. The interesting things about such systems is their tendency towards long range order (order out of chaos) and also their ability to change state/behaviour in unexpected ways. It might not be mainstream popular science, but it is mainstream accepted science. Life and evolution are the consequence of having a nonequilibrium system and something in the way (the earth) of the heat (sun) trying to reach equilibrium (space). Now, abiogenisis, spontaneous generation of life, is not actually part of evolution. Evolution only covers what happens once you have a population of mutating reproducing entities. The theory of evolution doesn't care what started the process. OTOH, I do believe in abiogenisis, but while I can't really back that up with science just yet, there are reasons to think it is credible. Probably the most credible evidence is the formation of protiens and sugars in non-biological systems (like in space). All the required building blocks for life are easily formed with the right mixture of gasses, water, sparks, etc... How all those molecules got together to form a replicator is also tricky... but the cool thing about evolution is that what we consider to be a replicating cell may be many many more times more complex than what is required. For example, heat, freeze, thaw, refreeze and heat a slush of ice mixed with methane, and 'cells' will form. These cells (lipids?) have an internal wall that keeps water in, and an outer wall that keeps water out. If the right molecules had gotten into one of these cells (billions of cells, billions of years, only has to happen once, ever), there is the small chance that it could have somehow interacted with other chemicals near the cell and modified them to be more like the ones in the cell (maybe drawing them in and spitting out a copy), if those molecules find their way into nearby 'cells' you have the first imperfect replicator, and that's all evolution needs. (I'm not saying this is how it happened... just one plausible possibility). No What life amounts to, thermodynamically, is regions of space that absorb order, and eject entropy In a sense, yes... More entropy is created than without life infact... it just uses all that entropy to recreate a very small peice of order (billions on billions of times). Life is a more efficient means of shifting heat than no life. Think of all the beautiful order that makes up a fish... and all the beautiful order that makes up a bird. Then think of all the beautiful order that remains when the bird shits out the fish. At the temperatures the earth is at, just as weather is a major shifter of heat, so life is another major shifter of heat. Even though all the cell components are supposed to be known, they can't synthesize them and put them together in a way that will have these results. I think you are overestimating our knowledge of what goes in there. Its true its not just purely random... You can't just take all the chemicals and shake them in a bottle... The other problem is that you might not even recognise the early stages of life as life. Are you expecting a rabit or a some imperfect autocatalysing reaction? The guy who did the human genome project is currently trying to find the minimal replicator. I imagine once they have that they will be better understand what environment it requires and how to litterally build a replicator from base chemicals. I imagine this thing will still be too complex to have come about by chance, but from there you can start to build further back. I doubt any magic is required. Just one point. Mercury, and Venus are open systems that get more energy input than earth. Yet those planets are not continuosly building complexity. Or have you observed complexity being created there? Actually, that is also a consequence of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Too much heat flux, no complexity, too little heat flux no complexity. There's only a particular range that gives rise to these thing. Jim Gleik is a pretty good start to this stuff, but the books written by the other two (relinked) give much more maths and cover thermodynamics explicitly. Good questions because it gives me an excuse to post a link about the temperature range Bernard cells exist at. I think the answer would probably lie in there somewhere. Are there other self replicating structures in the universe that exist in the right range of temperature (for the properties of the environment and structure)? Arguably vortices are the same thing as life... just not long lived on our time scales. If that is true, then the very dance of the heavens themselves are a form of life. So, it comes back to what we consider alive... the instinctive concept of life is just an encoded survival program (genetic/neural)... I think its the same thing that enabled slavery, because they weren't recognisable, they weren't human, or have souls or were even really alive. Save the Vortices!! I don't consider biological life the only possible life, but it is probably the most interesting to us. I do see the same emergent properties acting in all those things (clustering/distribution/complexity/reactive/ubrupt state changes). If you are asking if life could be based on something other than carbon, well there are good reasons to think not, just because of the adaptability of carbon, the quantities of hydrogen in the universe and the relative production of elements and so on. I guess there might be places in the universe where very strange things have happened (or will) and some other chemicals (or not necessarily chemicals) are more abundant and an energy difference wants to pass through it, it could lead to order, complexity and 'intelligence'. If an intelligent carbon based life form could possibly create a non carbon based life form somewhere in the universe... Then I would give a higher probability to that. Your 'the information already exists' arguement is very platonic. In the sense that the actual result of your search already exists, its just that you don't know what it is and can't use it yet. So you still have to run through the process to get that information from the environment. So, in your world, the perfect chess game exists, and in fact we know this, its just that nobody knows what it is. And you are saying no information would be created if people actually find the perfect chess function because it already existed. So, why would you even read the news or this website? I think you are using a different definition of information. Finally, I think Einstien removed all hope of all the information existing before hand with his invention of quantum physics. From your argument point of view, life does in fact sample the environment to 'learn' what works better in reproducing. That is encoded in DNA. No one knows the perfect game, yet it exists. If that is information, it is useless, therefore I don't think it is information. You have to actually run the search function to 'extract' that information. So what if it existed before, until you know it, it is useless, and does not exist in any meaningful way. I don't think the matter/energy/information come from different places, they are all manifestations of the universes wave function. I think this means you win. Keep up the good work freddie. You are so popular Lenticular Array nvb 1 iwritefictiondonthateme 1 Aurochs 1 Ignore Amos 1 mettaur 0 CanSpice 0 tetsuwan 0 procrasti 0 MrHanky 0 mr strange 0 Enlarged to Show Texture 0 BJH 0 Aren't you about a month overdue on your anonymization now? Why don't you try harder? You're a fucking liar Why won't you just admit you think insulting Islam is worthy of death. I'm not going to stop hassling you until you give me a decent expanation... either accept what I say is true or deny it. No you didn't answer it The specific question was about what was in that answer. I have asked you several times... In fact it says: as McArabian said you are pretty safe unless you preach against Islam and try to convert people away from Islam Which means you are not safe if you insult Islam, preach against Islam or try and convert people away from Islam. If I can't insult Islam (a made up belief with no basis in fact) without going to jail, that is not freedom. Further I did ask what you thought the punishment should be. I also asked what would happen to you if you went around preaching against Islam. Finally, there are constantly death threats for this type of thing coming from the Muslim world... Ever heard of Salmon Rushdie? I am not trolling, but I want an statement from you that you think death is appropriate or not. Thanks for finally answering, but to qualify According to Islamic teaching it is okay to insult Islam and convert people away from it or does Islam teach punishment for that? Who are qualified Immams? Abu Hamza is a qualified Immam, no? So don't his Fatwa's have any meaning? Are you required to follow is statements to convert the UK to Islam? So, your religion is sacred and you want to impose that state and law on others, but other religions (Jewish, Christian, etc) seems to be up to ridicule to you. You don't see that as a problem. This is why there is no such thing as moderate Islam... because fundamentalists rise to power and moderates are not allowed to deride, questions and preach against them according to the rules of Islam itself. But you cannot abide by statues of Buddha either So that is not religious tolerance. alright, fair point... just testing you on that one. Good answers so far, I still have some problems with how Immams and the Muslim Ruler get appointed and what limits they have on their power. I suspect there aren't any. Also, how do you unify all the seperate branches of Islam? Especially as critisism seems to be discouraged. It appears moderate muslims will not speak against fundamentalists. I hear that Islam has mechanisms to enable change, but when someone uses something that is unprovable (God) as an assumption, it is usually useful to throw that assumption away. This applies if you are going to decide laws that have to apply to all people irrespective of religion. I think all laws need justification that stand to reason outside of faith. For this reason, thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not murder should be matters of law. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours ass, should be a matter of morality, religion and social interaction. I put blasphemy in the latter category. Freedom of speech beats freedom to not be offended every single time, in my book. The picture you have painted to me is this: All Muslims want an Islamic State. An Islamic State is practically a dictatorship in that whatever the Muslim ruler (who is that?) decides is fact, and people appointed by the ruler have unlimited power. You cannot satire the ruler and his appointees. Muslims take reasonable questions as insults. In an Islamic State my freedom to speak does not exist. If you cannot explain what I am getting wrong, then I can only assume you agree with me. To me it still seems that you would agree with killing people for what they say if the right person orders it. I can understand why you have had trouble saying anything, you knew it was true, but are taught not to teach others that. This worries me because until talking to you I honestly thought that Islam was a religion of peace. I might accept it is a religion of the poor and oppressed, as it gives real teeth in a fight against that, but I no longer think it is compatible with peace or freedom. By the way, saying that Islam is a fairytale is not fanaticism. It's a statement of fact, faith and belief... You are overly sensitive to insults to Islam because you are the fanatic. You are the cause of the coming Armageddon You believe in killing anyone who insults Islam and Mohammed. You want death to others and so it shall be righteously visited upon your head instead. Either that or you are very bad troll giving real moderate Muslims a bad name. Hey troll ain't you got a life yet? I think he's good fun Arguing with him is like shooting (retarded) fish in a barrel... Its good fun and you can use him as a platform to raise ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise had a chance to. He's also useful just for practising basic logic on. That and I think there are real people out there with attitudes like his, so its good to knock them down anyway. I like it when he has nothing but insults and zero's, I take that as a sure sign that he doesn't have a prepared answer and can't come up with anything to contradict you. That's when I smile. Its only bad in that its a shame you seem to be an intelligent guy, but its not possible to get down to what you really think... and its not possible to have a reasonable discussion with you. Even when I fundamentally agree with you, re Muslims, etc, I can't help but attack you because all my experience of you says you are an asshole, and that taints everything of yours I read. But, while I do hold CTS the troll in low regard, if you enjoy it and it stops you killing someone/getting killed in real life, then I guess the harm you do is rather minimal. Its all part of being an effective procrastinator$ Make sure you graduate before you burn out $ HOWTO: Fix Iraq In 3 Months and make America Great Again It wouldn't be unfair to say that many people think the Iraq war is about oil. Even if it isn't, it looks pretty suspicious anyway. Also, there is obviously a fairly strong group of people who don't want whatever future Iraq is currently headed in and aren't interested in the new democracy. So, here's my idea, socialise the oil. One New Iraqi, one share of the oil. George Bush could become the first New Iraqi citizen (Ich bin ein Nieu Iraqi) and own all the oil in New Iraq (Like he doesn't already). Then, as a citizen he can invite the current parliament to become New Iraqi citizens. Finally everyone else can then sign up for their share of the oil. Profits from running the oil would then be shared equally amongst all New Iraqis, although they could form a company to run it and put people into work, create contracts with foreign companies, etc. It would be the law that the company formed had to maximise its Iraqi-share holder's dividends over the long term. The share would be a birth right but no access to the profit of the share would be available until registering to vote. At which point, all dividends paid to that share become available to you (like a trust fund from birth). It would be non-transferable. Ordinary citizens would try to stop terrorists because they now profit directly from oil. America shows the war was not about oil and brings peace and prosperity to the Middle East. Yeah, that seems to work real well You tell me what its like once you've lived under those conditions for a few years. Do you think you would become a more peaceful person, or a more angry person? Its called the benefits of imperialism $ Fuck off, America would be screwed if it didn't exploit the rest of the world. Why not primarily give the profits to the people and then tax some of those earnings fairly? Also, there's no reason not to put a strong military in place to stop the hostile takeovers, or do you not think those people would be capable of peacefully managing their wealth? Iraqi Citizens == Terrorists If Americans think like this, then this war will never end. True... But now their neighbours etc know that anything the terrorists do (A minor population I am sure) will decrease their quality of life, directly in the loss of dividend payments each week/month. They have direct economic reasons to stop those terrorists. To answer both of you. At the moment, the Iraqies see the US forces as invaders into their territory. They are helping the terrorists, if not directly, by not passing on information, etc... In other words the terrorists have tacit support from ordinary people. If the Iraqies suddenly find themselves well off as individuals they will support the changes and want to be a part of them. It will also be seen as a good will gesture from the West to Muslims. What makes you think they terrified of them? You would have probably said that about Hamas too. I see the insurgents attacking Iraqis involved in US institutions. They are legitimate targets if they are siding with the enemy. I'm pretty sure the US has done its fair share of wedding bombing. I was more talking about the attacks on government, police, etc. Yes, that is the punchline the joke is that people think this war isn't about oil. you win this round $ You voted that in the poll, right? $ Sorry mate, I'm not an American and I'm Socialist so its probably not a good idea to point that out to them. One of my poll options was going to be "Won't work, isn't capitalism". I agree with your point about this catching up with the civilised world, but I think this war is about oil so this idea will never be implemented. Socialism and Capitalism in their right mix and applied to the right problems. Otherwise quite liberal regarding personal laws. But Iraqi citizens are too far removed from it. If they received real money they could spend on contractors to fix their houses etc, they would care a lot more about the health of their oil industry and the effects terrorism has on it. Cheap oil doesn't mean anything if you have no money to buy it with. they stole my idea $ You care to explain or attack the subject? $ Its good to know I have my sycophants... even if they are poor trolls. British Special Edition Mad Cow Burgers $ Its a statistics game... They don't really care Anyway, there was at least one case of BSE in a vegetarian in the UK. That's probably true. The problem seemed to be feeding cows with pigs, sheep and cows. There was even a story of how bodies left by the Gangies(sp?) may have ended up in the cow feed, and this could have been the source of CJD. Cows are meant to eat grass... if farmers had realised that, then there would probably have been no problem. It fascinates me that (as their are no tests other than in an autopsy) the real scope of the problem is still not known. It looks like it isn't going to be an epidemic though, but there are a still a few more years before everyone who has it will start showing symptoms. Teach you for being so slow :) $ I thought most Saudi Arabian Muslims were against the house of Saud, and would welcome its fall. Is that not correct? OTOH, I can see why people would defend their own countries, hence the rebellion in Iraq (not including foreign insurgents). No, people defend what they consider their home irrespective of dictators or secularist kingdoms. The US were not met as liberators but occupiers by at least a significant group. Also, the majority never lived in any torture chamber. A significant minority may have done, but forget thinking that the majority suffered this kind of abuse. (starvation and poverty notwithstanding). I never said it was logical but the people doing the defending have a different viewpoint, a different set of experiences and even a different set of assumptions. Their morals might be based on completely different set of problems than yours, and their idea of who is right and wrong might also be significantly different. You can say they are really stupid all you like, but people do stupid things all the time. I take it your statement about Stalin illustrates this. I would probably defend my home country from invasion, I think lots of people are the same. How about the Baathist middle classes? How about the secret police, politicians and other prople who derived power from the situation? Yes, many people might have been for the US invasion, but it didn't appear that everyone felt that way. Also the way it was rushed through and several other factors may have caused even more to be against it, and are willing to fight. Several years ago (98 or so) I met an Iraqi soldier. He had a scar from a US bullet that had gone through his leg. He told me quite plainly that he would fight should another war start. Why? Is it because he was immoral? Did he live under a rock? Was he stupid? Or was it that he had a different perspective on the subject to you and was exposed to completely different propaganda? You assume and say too much There are people who supported Hussien, and apparantly still do. There are insurgents, and there are many many people who are now worse off than when the war began. I'm not really about to question why the guy said he would still fight for saddam, I didn't know him that long, my point is that they exist, which should be obvious to anyone. My point is, know your enemy. What is their motivation? Are you refusing to answer me now? You didn't answer that... Unless your silence suggests agreement with my statement that preaching against Islam and converting people away from Islam means Death, and that my 'boring speech' now makes me worthy of death in your mind. Easy.... is preaching against Islam like that and speaking ill of the prophet, like I did, considered worthy of death in your circles or not? Would you personally consider an act like that worthy of death? You have to understand I am mostly supportive of the Muslim movement... (I consider them a repressed people) but their response to stupid cartoons and their general willingness to violence generally scares me, and I'm not about the bend over for it. So you agree with the punishment of death? $ And it contained a question And now that you realise that Mohammed was full of shit, you could go spread the word. How easy will that be where you live? So... am I take your silence to mean you think that blasphemy against the deluded prophet and his psycho religious army is worthy of death? Are you a phsyco killer like all the other Muslims on TV because someone says something you don't like? Your silence suggests you are. This is why you Muslims are psycho fucks who need exterminating. All your Koran is about what the proper manner of killing people is. That's not Love as preached by Christianity where you are guided to turn the other cheek. That's not "Love you neighbour as yourself". I agree that the West does not follow Christianity in general, but that is the base difference between the two religions. Your quote there just says who you can't kill.. According to your quote it looks like you are welcome to pop round to my desk and off my head. I might be changing my support for the war on terror and start promoting death to you nuts. You should have bought roses on Valentines $ This afternoon I was basking in the sun on a Mediterranean beach in France. tonight I am posting on kuro5hin from the outskirts of London. Why do I feel sad now when by all accounts I should feel happy? I think that the low a person feels from being on a holiday high could become too much for a person to bear, and soon they need more, leading to addiction. Soon a person will spend all their money to support this habit... to the exclusion of their friends, family and work. They start stealing, begging or "borrowing" from even their closest relatives to support this disgusting habit. I have known people to borrow large amounts from their elderly grandparents just to be in another country. To think the government even allows this... yes I know it is already well regulated, but does this make it okay? It can't be anything but subversive. Not to think what its doing to the gene migrations rates and horizontal parasitical disease transmission jews something or other. And why did I come out of the toilet to have 3 heavily armed and uniformed frenchies (in fairness one was a fit blonde) all facing me? Is that meant to make me feel safe? Was I a torrettes tic away from sudden death? I hate international travel... its so great to be somewhere, but the whole 'papers' thing is such a bitch, and you have no reasonable rights whatsoever, and I am being searched for the very things I believe we have a right to (but also keeps us safe from bombs and bad fish)... so I hate them all... Including that bitch army french twat who eyed up my girl and the ever so polite english passport control guy trying to make it look like sometimes foreigners can get through nearly as fast as natives -- helps if you drag a native along with you. Would it be possible to get passport scan records through the FOIA? I guess I shouldn't have tried to login to k5 at the airport internet terminal on the way out either. Maybe 'they' didn't notice, or already know and don't care. The Muslims are the new jews except without the financial and political control, and shame on them for letting cartoons upset them... lol, get a grip... god is just a hypothesis you freaks... you deserve to be poor too, btw... why don't you go live on your own? lol at the americans who don't believe in global warming, peak oil (unrelated time lines btw) and being fair to other people in trade and control of their countries, I hope the Muslims get you before the weather or your eventual economic collapse... and someone please remove fundamentalists from all forms of power in the US... Anyone who is an End Timer should automatically be excluded from any public position. LOL to the trolls I bite. LOL to CTS who is closest to me on Zenofchi's Political Compass. It is possible CTS and I answered completely opposite in every respect and still averaged out the same... Would a Self Organising Map make more sense? Perhaps its only very few things I disagree with and that pisses me off more than someone I know has no clue whatsoever or does not troll as well (same thing right). Speaking of which (Self Organising Maps, neural networks) here are some hypersphere I have found... Outputs of average of 7 nodes in a feed forward network... and very uselessly a 7 layer feed forward network outputs could be mapped as points on a 7d hypersphere but from what I can tell that is almost meaningless because you can change the points by changing the order of the neurons). Now, a 7d output from a Self Organising Map would indeed map to a 7d hypersphere point that could move in time. I don't know of any one models this and I don't yet know the relationship to layers. Its important to understand this representation does not model individual neurons but columns of neurons in the brain. [Added]Actually, you could use a 7d SOM together with the Markov Decision Process to allow 7 degrees of freedom (on average) in your state transitions....[/Added] This whiskey to not dying in WWIII/IV, and apologies to my friends and anyone near Bezier that I did not get to post about the exhibition opening. [Added]So I didn't post this when I got back on Saturday night... too bad you read it anyway.[/Added] network recipes? $ damn, I'll take that as a real request then right... here's the problem... I last studied ANNs almost exactly a decade ago. Then haven't really done anything with them since :(. When you say recipes I assume you are talking about a general description rather than specific data... Also, I'm still at a pretty high level with this and just trying to think the implications through. The reason I am worried about using a self organising map is that it is clustering the inputs, when I am more interested in clustering the output. Ie, some things that are very close together in the observation might be very different states regarding reward from the MDP... how is that detectable? I mean, what indicates that the state you are in contains a very important exception? Is it possible to bias SOM to produce 'good' states in one dimension and 'bad' states in another? Thankyou Yes, very much stream of conciousness, very tired, hating airports and wanting to write it all down before going to sleep. Then deciding not to post it, then figuring what the hell three days later. Glad you enjoyed it. Because as an IT guy I like checking out all their security systems and what their terminals have on them and what they are doing right and wrong and how I would get around stuff etc... The fuckers always search me or out fuck with my head... Like when I arrived back from the first time ever in my life the foriegn queue was shorter than the citizen queue... it still took ages though.. And when I went through the RED Channel... I couldn't get anyone to search us or answer questions even if I had shouted out whether I had to pay tax on cocaine. Its all Psy Ops and even though I would never carry anything through (and yet think people should have that right and freedom to travel etc) I hate the fact that everything I do is being observed, analysed, verified and recorded... I have found a way out of one airport direct to the taxi ranks and skipping passport control. I won't tell you how, but it's in France and on a Transfer flight between two countries... Guaranteed some non-uniformed person will start making conversation with you and asking you all sorts of interesting questions about where you came from and where you are going. Make sure your answers are good and true, because that's as far as you'll get. On the other hand I love flying. The engineering involved, the coordination between planes and ATC, the physics, the computer systems (I believe the planes pretty much land themselves nowdays)... are very cool. And while the technology behind the security systems is also pretty cool... I find the whole thing a little frightening too. Why are all the good jobs in crap places so that we even have to go on holiday in the first place? Or do all places end up being bland after too long? Carribean is a dream location. I want to retire there on my yacht full of playboy bunnies one day... Oh well... You make it sound so easy Go on holiday first, then scope the place out a little bit.. then report back here. The big markets are always in crap places The question is, is the downshift in income worth the upshift in lifestyle? The answer is probably yes, but something keeps bringing me back to the office every weekday. Which men invented Allah? Why is this man made god any less fallable than man made laws? nd you trust those laws because you believe that your God put them for you and he is all knowing, he knows the past, present and future Muslims are always going on about how they do not want to obey man made laws but instead only God's laws, because God is infallable. Yet in the final analysis, Allah is nothing but a hypothesis put together by some whacked out people in the early part of the first Millenium. I don't really mind your right to believe in fairytales, but FUCK you if you want me to follow them or consider them true. What makes them right, and laws decided by a representative of people who are actually alive wrong? Islam is 100% bullshit with the human race. Of course there is harm to forbid gambling, alcohol, adultery, cheating.... These are all issues of freedom. Fine, if you don't want to fuck before marriage, don't. If I want to, then don't stone or flog me. Don't stone my wife when she wears nothing but a bikini, or decides to leave me for someone else. Not only is it my theory that Allah is nothing but a hypothesis.... it is FACT. ABSOLUTE, NO ARGUMENT AVAILABE FOR YOU! If you can't prove Allah exists -- with repeatable experiments, it is nothing but a hypothesis that you choose to believe in. Allah is not a fact, and therefore you cannot base law on it, because this proves that Allah is fallible. You can choose to follow your religious laws, but don't try and force them on me. This is why theocracies are a really bad idea. I want to drink alcohol, sleep with women before marriage and even 'allow' my wife to fuck someone else - I might get divorced, but she doesn't deserve death. exactly FAITH is not a system for a basis of laws. That's all I'm saying. Go be a good Muslim, lead by example, maybe some heathens will convert, why would I care? But don't try and force Islamic Laws on people. Don't base government on an unprovable concept you have no basis other than FAITH for. Equally I have FAITH that all Muslims must be beheaded? Do you agree with my faith? Disagreeing with it is punished by beheading too. Do you see the problem here? If you are for a secular state, then no problem, but I don't think this is what you have said, is it? So, simple question for you, seperation of state and religion, or no? Like all Muslims you lie to the unconverted Meaning DON'T BELIEVE PLEASE DON'T !!!! I am not pointing a gun at your sorry excuse of a human head and telling you to believe. Is not compatible with religion is the state in Islam You Muslims are all filthy Liars who need to be destroyed... seriously, and I'm a very tolerant person normally. You guys are seriously delusional sick mother fuckers who can't see a woman without wanting to rape and stone it. That's not a government I want to live under. I've heard this, but never seen it Where are the women in bikini's then? Where are the bars I can drink in? Why should non-muslim theives suffer barbaric punishments? Here's how I will catch you out though. Everyone is born a Muslim right? And therefore subject to Muslim Law? What is the punishment for renouncing Islam once you are a Muslim? The answer of course is DEATH. That sounds pretty fucking aggressive to me. I apologise for not turning the other cheek, but I'm not exactly a Christian Crusader either. In your own words you are pretty safe unless you preach against Islam and try to convert people away from Islam. You know the answer is DEATH, you just won't say it outright. So I am preaching against Islam because it is not a peaceful religion, it is a Fundamentalist religion of Laws written down, interpreted and harshly enforced by imperfect humans. If Laws are to be enforced and interpreted by fallible humans then there must be a way to correct them and adjust them as our culture evolves -- hence Laws must derive from man and not God/Allah/FSM. Mohammed was WRONG!! That is true. At least about not eating pork, having sex with children, stoning adulterers and female tennis players, killing infidels and hallucinations involving flying giant monster angel trips. And now that you realise that Mohammed was full of shit, you could go spread the word. How easy will that be where you live? You could draw them some cartoons if you like. If you would keep your Spiritual Laws between yourself and Allah, then I would fully support your right and even agree with you (on many parts) -- but where Islam is the Law of the Land, all that freedom you say exists, doesn't. Islam cannot be the State in a free society and you cannot not be a Muslim in an Islamic State. So that's what a Fatwa sounds like $ The military have a long history of playing with drugs. They've tried lsd, speed, pcp, mustard gas... all of them in trials with real soldiers not knowing what was being tested on them. I also believe drugs are used to fund wars, black ops, etc... Basically, I'm saying that the US control's the worlds supply of "drugs" for their own benefit, not for the health of its citizens. Too many people profit from the status quo for drugs ever to be legalised. If you think all this is conspiracy theory, then ignore it... the drug testing is provably true, so there is no contradiction here. Maybe they don't let you have drugs the same way they don't let you have RPGs. My detective friend once told me he had to shoot a crackhead 5 times because the first four bullets (through his legs I think - something about the bullet being deflected by foils he had in his jeans) didn't stop him. IAWTP A little anonymisation never hurts anyone either. ^^^^^^ Stalker $ LOL, Lenticular Array is a Loser. Suicide Mod Bomma! No Text hahahah --- ooops I hit the submit button accidently... I was just writing something up to deal with my frustration... I doubt I would have submitted this, certainly not in its current form. Oh well, enjoy :P Well when you have me a zero, I gave you one. You keep reacting to that. And so will I. The guy zeros anything that questions the status quo. In his own words well, he was zeroing before I got him to explain. I didn't even say that there was any truth to it... Just something interesting and some things that don't add up. I think he must be in the army or something. Questions seem to hurt him. Prove it Till Dawn. Proof you have no credibility. QED. $ No, I am your imaginary friend. Journals? All I could find was a guy talking about clouds But I think a Lenticular Array has something to do with lasers and lenses or something. Lenticular's LiveJournal LOL, you decided to read. Proof you are a moron. See sibling comment. Witness American Response to Compromise Here. You wonder why people think Americans are assholes. This is just more evidence that you are simply giving what you're getting, right? Yeah, I already explained I didn't mean to post this, but hey, at least I posted something this weekend. I've been trying to write about the brain as hypersphere.... but, ummmm, that turned out to be harder than I expected and will take a little while. I did learn from a dentist last night that dentine growth occurs around damage near the nerve cell... and its not a well understood phenomenon. So, maybe mp was on to something about the nerve directing tooth growth. What about fillings and wisdom teeth? I mean, they can actually fix those, right? As always, looking forward to reading it. $ You should modbomb him if that's what he's doing to you. Considering he is continuing to modbomb its very unlikely you would get banned for it (i imagine... what do I know?) A better idea though is if you have proof he modbombed you, you could use that, this diary and this thread as evidence when reporting him. Apparently getting anonymised is a kind of sport for him... It just means the same idiot will start mod bombing you with a new user account :( , although you could probably get that anonymised too. Go on keep zeroing me... You think I care? I guess all the weight lifting isn't really helping with your self esteem. FOAD, kthxbye. $ I had to give everyone in this diary 2s because I couldn't give you a 4. Is it your problem when they steal your vcr? $ You might well be right, They might have had explosives just in case, and they may have decided to use them to stop further damage, as you say... but why are they still denying it? If they are denying something then conjecture is just a place to start. I don't have enough facts, but maybe someone who does can shed more light. I do think its odd that Silverstein said "pull it" without an adequate explaination of what he meant by that. I also think the collapse was a little too 'neat' and that only Silverstein's buildings fell is a little coincidental. from the article fact that large quantities of molten metal were observed So you are arguing about something you haven't read... Well, at least it keeps you from being biassed. Keep up the good work. If you had read the article you would realise there was no mistake in the post. The floors had to be hot enough to buckle -- TRUE The fire had to be hot enough to melt steel -- TRUE There is no contradiction. Next time... try reading. from the article fact that large quantities of molten metal were observed What burnt and why would it be hot enough? $ Look, I'm not so stupid as to think you actually have to melt the steel in a structure before it will collapse... I understand it would normally collapse long before a significant amount of steel melted. So, I guess I am talking about the steel found at the site afterwards. The reason that is not right is that it doesn't matter how long something burns, if its not hot enough to melt, it won't melt. The conspiricy theorists of course say there was not enough energy in the collapse alone to melt that much steel. At this point it gets tricky, because you have to know the amount of steel that was supposedly molten, the amount of energy released in the collapse, and the amount of that you expect to be absorbed into the steel as heat. I guess if you knew how much a floor weighed and the height of each floor you could calculate the maximum energy available through gravitational collapse. You could add the diesel and jetfuel (+ aircraft kinetic energy?) too. If that is more than enough energy to melt (how much?) steel and pulverise that much concrete, you wouldn't need explosives to explain it. The difficult part is that apparantly most of the debris was taken away, so its not possible to know how much melted steel there was. Don't knock maths, just misapplied maths. Engineers are used to large error margins and working without knowing 'all the equations'. Its not too hard to work out how much energy would be available and how much steel that should melt, and to see if that matches expectations. If it doesn't you know there must be more to it than meets the eye. Unfortunately, even if it does explain the molten metal and pancaking explains the 'explosions', it still doesn't rule out the possibility of explosive devices or conspiracy. for what reason? Power? Support for war? A second term? Look how many rights have been eroded all over the western world since 9/11. I'm not saying it was the reason and this conspiricy is true... but its still a good reason and motives do exist. from the article fact that large quantities of molten metal were observed +3 Only Plausable Explaination That's the only comment here that can explain molten metal in the absence of fire works and a heat source hot enough. Odd that a physics guy missed that. I wonder if he has an email address? I think a lot of the illusion that the building is being exploded comes from the fact that the building is collapsing on the inside while the outer columns keep the face of the building intact longer. So the damage is occurring below where it appears to be. Yeah... that's pretty much the standard theory This picture of the wtc in collapse illustrated the suction going on inside the outer frame quite well, for me anyway. Note the lack of dust above the 'top' of the building. Also interesting is the small puff going up from the center. It looks a lot like the results from the granular matter experiments. The idea that your government might not be acting in your best interest scares the fuck out of you, doesn't it LA? Questioning Assumptions == Gullible I thought you was smart. You are judging me by mindpixel's words? You must be crazier than he was. You say I can't examine criticism critically. You have proof of this? I have read and understood this guys analysis... Yes it seems to have faults... But you vote down anything that even questions the status quo. That's far more blind. So, you are commenting and admitting you know nothing and voting down people who have done undergraduate level courses in structural engineering and material properties. You're contradictions are showing and you are shattering my illusions that you might be intelligent. from the article fact that large quantities of molten metal were observed You are denying the existence of molten steel? There looks like plenty of evidence that there was molten steel. Have you looked? If this was a conspiricy of course it would not be exploded from the bottom first, etc... You have to think of it more like a staged fireworks display, something to make the audience really go oooohhhh, aaaahhhh. The fact it takes weeks etc is explained, if you imagine enough motivation existed. On the weekend of [September 8-9, 2001], there was a "power down" condition in . . . the south tower. This power down condition meant there was no electrical supply for approximately 36 hours from floor 50 up. . . . The reason given by the WTC for the power down was that cabling in the tower was being upgraded . . . . Of course without power there were no security cameras, no security locks on doors [while] many, many "engineers" [were] coming in and out of the tower.[58] Securacom of course was owned by the Bush family. I'm not trolling, just trying to fill gaps in my understanding. Do you think the Germans liked the Reichstag conspiracy? Does not liking it make it false? Has the U.S. government ever actively killed its own people in the past? crackpot $ that was a joke, assuming the documents are real And if they are real, it makes me wonder why everyone assumes the government is always playing fair and why no one ever gets worked up about these things. I guess it's safe to keep releasing all the crimes committed two generations ago, just as long as the current crimes are kept secret. Whining on K5 is more important than voting. When you vote you only make one difference. When you whine on k5, dozens of people might read what you write... and if you change one mind, and change one vote, you have now doubled your difference. [Unrelated Poll Inside] Repeat this enough times and if those people change their minds and start posting blah blah blah... you get the idea. Anyway, its not who votes that matters, its who counts the votes that matters. Poll is not binding. lol, waht? & Thanks, I might try that. $ It was a thinly veiled attack on this old diary. Really it was just an excuse to write something to have place to put a poll. Please stop spamming for kr5ddit invites! Hi all. I'd just like to ask you all to quiet down a little bit and stop hassling the Kr5ddit elite for invites. There are only so many invites we can handle at the moment, so although you might not be able to get an invite right now... you'll probably get a chance some time in the future. I'm sure tdillo, mumble and sye are getting pretty sick and tired of all the attention. So, just go easy on them and stop sending them your bitcoin addresses and asking for an account on kr5ddit... we're all getting tired of it. Thanks for your understanding. That is all. New feature coming soon - Posts! Strawman! Only someone with a very bad understanding of economics would claim that scarcity is value... Value is utility... and, at least for the majority of goods, utility is completely unrelated to scarcity... The value of an item does not depend on how abundant or scarce it is... Something doesn't become more or less satisfying because there is a little or a lot of it... It doesn't become more useful or enjoyable or any of that... No... scarcity doesn't alter the value... scarcity only affects the price! I don't think NMC was trying anything like what I'm planning to do... I thought it was just another forum... I could be mistaken on that... if so, let me know. Post a bitcoin address... We want you there! Currently, someone needs to send you their bitcoin address, and you can send them a URL to register with the site... click on invites, enter their bitcoin address, and send them the URL... Though... no one wants to use the site anyway... let alone go through all that hassle. That's okay for now... If later on, still no one wants to use the site... I'll loosen the requirements, you can provide a one off invite URL, and the first person to use it gets the account. For sure... I mean... if it makes me a lot of money... then I should share a portion of that with my homies, right? The idea of the invite system is to enable building a pyramid type scheme where you will make a portion of what your invitees make... and that will all trickle up to me! I love trickle up economics... especially when I'm at the top. So, you're going to want to sign up as many fish... er, I mean, new users... as you possibly can... like amway, except on a computer! (I should patent that). Attn: Blaster and Kr5ddit Users Hi All... I've added an invite system... Someone has to send you their bitcoin address... They have to be able to sign messages with that address to prove they own it when they go to sign up. I've given everyone an invite... that should be enough users for the next week or so. Logged in users simply click the the invite link in your balances. Enter in your new invite's bitcoin address and press submit... then send the link to your invitee... You can generate as many invites as you like... but they can only be redeemed if you have enough invites available when someone goes to redeem them. Blaster: Your invite address url is: https://kr5ddit.com/invites/invite/2/18Xr3bXVYC9YWuMasPVLwf2BA2T9Gxpbbb/HwaaISm5 ziOr6Wv7fwSmGPfK4onVdVfRN4c1bVx4xo8wFfOjZG3Mwp8PAMgFCD7ToKbwLGn72yWebxxyp7HBvA4= I know some of you are upset that you need bitcoin to log in... the good news is that you don't have to own any bitcoin... not just yet... you just need to be able to use the bitcoin software to sign messages. I think that's a reasonable, and not too onerous barrier to entry... keeps the riff raff out. Post your bitcoin address here or at kr5ddit.com if you want an invite! (Not by me though... I'm out of invites!). So glad that worked... Took me all night to implement it... Your comment did show up: https://kr5ddit.com/c/comment/214... it doesn't go to the top because there are other comments that are scored higher than it... Yeah... maybe I should take you to your comment or something... that's a legit usability problem. Yeah... It's very much under construction... I know there are scalability issues to be solved... both as it's deployed... some points in the code... and especially in terms of content... that all need to be worked on... So, I'm going to increase the userbase slowly at start... better to have users who understand the situation so no one gets too disappointed and shy's away from it forever. So... yeah... you do have to earn invites... and they'll come slowly... two or three invites a week I think between everyone. You can of course generate invites... they just won't be redeemable until you get some invites on your balance. Sending BTC is a good way to get special favours though! Speaking of which... the site's bitcoin accepting software is very new and untested... please load test this by sending large amounts of BTC to your private donation address ASAP... As much BTC as often as possible... It's the only way to test the site! Progress at Kr5ddit Hi everyone... Just letting you know the current progress going on at kr5ddit.com (Your front page to the internettm). Below the fold for those who want to know. Logged in users now each have a unique bitcoin address they can send bitcoins to to fund their accounts. (This seems to be working pretty smoothly... but please stress test by sending large amounts of BTC to your kr5ddit bitcoin address!). Users also have kr5dditz... which they spend to moderate other users (with the good/bad apple mod buttons). I suspect there's a few parameters here that need tuning... and a few extensions I plan to build into it... but this first attempt was necessary because the trolling has already begun (though, it could be a lot worse!). I want to get a few more users on board now... so, I really want to get the invite/new user registration system working asap. But... I also have to build the exchange where you can buy and sell kr5dditz for BTC. Also, user profiles, subs... posts... the usual shit. The code's pretty flexible... in theory comments can be attached to anything... even moderations... and moderations too... so it should be possible to comment on and moderate a moderation... but I'm not exposing that just yet. Still... to get this out the door I've broken a couple of levels of abstraction... where the comment module has a couple of (still quite loose, mostly in the views, but existent) dependencies on the new moderations module. I want to refactor some stuff anyway... but there's always tradeoffs to be made... there's only so many hours in a day... code is messy enough (and I don't want to release everything just yet) that I'm reluctant to push the current version out to github. Oh well... hope you enjoy it... Still a free account give away to the first person who signs their bitcoin address with their bitcoin address... at least until I get invites working. You don't need bitcoin... but you do need a bitcoin address... It's the only straight forward way I can ensure that logins go to the right people. It's far to early to let just anyone in. So... get http://electrum.org/, generate a wallet, and get a bitcoin address... make sure you know how to sign a message (right click on the address and select sign/verify message)... then go ask sye, mumble or tdillo for an invite (they'll need your bitcoin address)... I'm sure they'll be happy to give you one. Welcome to the internet... where have you been? Mod systems are all about the spamming assholes... I'll probably set it to hide anon comments with any negative moderation... So... you just have to bad apple them and it will disappear... Oh well... that's reality for ya... They could be doing a lot more harm than they currently are... worst case scenario I block anonymous comments... but I'd rather not if we can handle it through moderation. Though I'll probably have to put a few more roadblocks in there way at some point. Ummmmm.... $ Attn Sye: Log in to kr5ddit to get your BTC... Anyone want a log in? Sye, I can credit your account with your BTC once you log in. For everyone else, who would like to be the next kr5ddit.com user? Extremely low uids for sale now! Get in quick before the offer ends. For our next user, I'll take the user with the largest amount of BTC in an address they can prove they own. In the highly likely event everyone has zero... and for tie breakers... I'll take the first qualifying poster... you can post here or at kr5ddit.com too... if for some reason you're locked out from here. To prove you own an account... simply sign the bitcoin address with that bitcoin address... for example: 1Dy5rLHwt8wk79C6jfH6uRf2bpcVnJtNyQ H1jgBmPjPrS3S8OzcDhRYWxM8PVbHs5R4jEOC33cYWSkyM80FhlxWJp63J+jVczo9WfKRy8iPmt/kYjd VMhajr8= In electrum you can do this under Tools / Sign/Verify Message. And I'll check the balance to find the winner. Best of Luck. Don't all rush me at once... There's only so many comments I can read at once... kthxbye. Yes you can... In electrum go to file / new/restore... easy. I'm running a free auction here... the account goes to whoever has the most btc... they have to prove they one the key by signing it with itself... and in case of ties... first to post wins... no reserve... So, follow the instructions and you'll be top of the list... No... You can verify that I signed the message "1Dy5r..." with the address "1Dy5r...", to produce the signature "H1jgBm...". So, you can verify that... Then, with one of your addresses I want you to do the same for me... sending me the address and the signature of the address signed by the address (that only you can produce!). kthx. No sorry... That signature does not verify... The message should just be that address... make sure you have no white spaces in the message part... also that you copy the signature completely... (I did remove k5's long word splitting space). My signature verified okay for you? Yes? Try again... could be as simple as a return character or space in the message or something. My fault... yes... that verifies just fine... Might have been some hidden character somehow at the start of that message... I cleared the field, cut and pasted from the address and it worked... so, sorry about that... Okay... You're head of the queue. Assuming no one new comes along with actual bitcoin behind their address... you'll get the first invite (tied to that bitcoin address)... as soon as I get the invite system working... promise. I think Rusty is just giving everyone some time to move on... ...to kr5ddit.com (Your front page to the internettm). Mirko is in a better a place now Mirko is in a better place now... It's the kind of thing we like to tell ourselves when our friends and loved ones are so tragically taken away from us... but is this really true? Do we have any evidence, or is it just an empty platitude we tell each other to get through the sad times and over our losses? The answer seems to be no... There's no sign of him posting at kr5ddit.com at all... absolutely none... All of the anon postings are clearly mumble, and one by United Fools... So, quite clearly Mirko is not in a better place now... It truly is just an empty platitude. Oh well... mirko... You'll always be remembered in my sig for your favourite saying: doing my best at licking arseholes and his other famous saying: Do you think rusty is still enforcing the three diaries per day limit? RIP mirko 20?? - 2015 Mirko... if you're out there... if somehow you can hear me... head towards the light... and post on kr5ddit.com. Poll (dedicated to mirko). Your right... it's too early... Kr5ddit's not done yet... But he'll be welcome in heaven soon enough. I don't know about k5 # goatse.ch... What is a mailing list but an outdated pre-web version of kr5ddit.com (Free speech for saletm)? Was NMC you? You ran rbg.com or something, didn't you? I remember sourcing some very funny steve erwin gifs from there... they were hilarious, but by the time I'd finished I wasn't 100% sure I hadn't broken the law... was just way too scary completely unmoderated random images. What are you talking about K5 has a login box... Look here: K5... it's right at the top of the page. Unfortunately new user registrations aren't currently enabled... but we'll get there. Are you mirko? $ csh did a password giveaway, and you got it? $ Do I win the most improved kuron award? I always hated them in school... oh look... you finally had a bit of a success... but you only got it cause you were one of the worst... well done asshole... How am I ever going to get an award like that when I'm already one of the best... there's no room for improvement when your on top! But I'll take it this time. Thanks mumble... Don't forget to leave a comment on kr5ddit.com... I'm more likely to be there now days... Everyone knows that kuro5hin is dying... well kr5ddit is rising from its ashes... So, don't be shy, come on over and enjoy the party! New features every day!!! Send bitcoin for details. I can tell you're getting jealous of all the fun we're having over at k5rddit... I think ksandstr is even more jealous... And I'm pretty sure trane* referred to us as krackhead... so there's that. Anyway... if you want to join in the fund... simply send bitcoins for details. *: Trane, you're not banned... you can comment anytime... simply send bitcoins for details. Fucked up that link to ksandstr here. You will find it... Someone has to pay for my electricity soon. Anyway... somehow you managed to be our only user who hasn't paid. Some people get all the luck. Stop flooding this diary's section Also... stop stalking mirko. Do you? Always thought so $ You sure do $ I guess you mean print("inside for op:", op) I assume that >>> s = "inside for op:" + op fails... in general... but I prefer >>> s = "inside for op: %s" % (op, ) Does that work? >>> logging.debug("inside for op: %s" % (op,)) You might even get away with >>> logging.debug("inside for op: %s" % op) I created 20k addresses in electrum... and now I'm still waiting for it to startup... has been like an hour... running time though... so I'll get a definite startup time answer to that. It's not too big of an issue... with lots of possible work arounds... but faster startup times are always better for high availability. (Service uptime is some function of mean time between failures (MTBF), time to restart (TTR) and number of servers (N) in total... I forget the exact formula... but increase your MTBF, decrease your TTR and increase your servers to get arbitrary 9s). Nicest to minimise TTR but not sure how just yet. I cancelled the wallet sync... not synced after three hours... Odd again... maybe I pissed off someone's servers... people say 20k addresses no problem... but it's not looking good. So... I deleted the wallet (is only public keys anyway)... and restarted... but after 5 minutes it hasn't synced a mere 20 keys... so... not sure why that. Doh!! The script launches a deamon... or connects to one if it already exists... but daemon got brain damaged and was running the whole time and breaking my script... and when it first launches the daemon, it tries to connect to it before the daemon is ready and fails! Alright... creating 20k keys now and will see how long it takes to do that from just the pubkey... and again how long to sync with a wallet. Search for python web console... maybe... Flattered you on my site... Gonna get a few more things working then will invite another user... You can watch other people chat at kr5dit... send bitcoin for details. If you have nothing to say, you can't say it there... send bitcoin for details. Is no scam... send bitcoin for details. I'm limiting new user creation... will be a couple of users a week to start with... send bitcoin for details. If you'd like to know more... send bitcoin for details. Buy them P2P... either localbitcoins or mycellium trade (check the spelling on that... is an android app... so otherwise LBTC). Gonna setup the panthur dns now... not this forwarding and cloaking crap... point directly at the server. Comments now exist... for those who use the secret domain name http://52.3.28.135/ Registered users should be able to leave comments now... mumble/password... Leave a comment to let me know. Okay... I changed your username and password... Let me know how it goes. import logging def debug_print(s): logging.log.debug(s) configure logging... to give you apps log info. # colourised log output $ ./myapp &pipe; clog something like that. Nice Troll Reddit isn't censoring BitcoinXL, /r/bitcoin is censoring BitcoinXML... which is a bit of a problem, because the owner of /r/bitcoin owns a lot of the bitcoin forums... I don't think the way BXL is planning on expanding the block limit is the best way forward... if they hit the 75% target and start generating larger blocks... it will fork the chain and the other 25% will have no choice but to switch... It's not really enough of a consensus to do a safe fork... it will leave 25% of the blockchain production forked... many wallets might not support it... it's just a dumb way to do that... Also, I don't think they've really thought this through... the first blocksize increase should be conservative... OTOH... fuck theymos for trying to censor even the discussion... If the network forks to XL... I'll switch to it anyway... The whole things a mess though. Yes... so what? I like ellipses. What are you going to do about it? Sue me? Funding Goal Reached: Introducing the New Site Name!! We reached the funding goal. If you decide to go forward with this venture please don't tie it in to either reddit or kuro5hin. Be unique. -- tdillo I thought long and hard about tdillo's comment to make the site something totally new... and have nothing to do with kuro5hin or reddit or any of that old junk... so I put my mind towards being original... and I came up with something... Introducing kr5ddit.com. The 5 is for dollars (it looks a bit like the $ symbol)... not physical dollars though, but virtual dollars and currency... e-currency... so it's pronounced 'e' as in meh. The K is silent as in knee, know and K666... So, you would pronounce the site name something like "red it", though like it was one word and not two, but it can be abbreviated simply as k5 for convenience. I hope you find this naming convention simple and helps to avoid any confusion. The site will use kr5dditz as currency. Beggars might say, "Can ya spare me a kr5ddit for a quick comment mate?"... you'll probably say, "sorry mate, I'm all out"... even though you aren't, because you know they are lying and are just going to spend it all on darkweb crack anyway. ... at least until the take down notices arrive. Poll. Note: DNS takes some time to propagate... and I'm going to bed. I hope domain forwarding and cloaking work with https. Well... our marketing department might come up with a better name in the future... it's still a bit of an engineering project, and we don't make good marketers in general. So... We can change the name at some point if really necessary. You're clearly kreading it wrong... but you get the idea. PS: I know it's you trane trying to pronounce it as nope... that's also the wrong answer... kr5dit.com also registered. Just in case... I so hate DNS config... The long propagation times makes the edit / testing cycle drawn out and confusing... along with all the caching along the way... etc... it's a nightmare, unless you know exactly what you're doing. I keep getting DNS lookup failures for kr5ddit.com... but krdit.com works a little better... kr5ddit was registered a good few hours before kr5dit... and their config looks identical... I had to call their support both times because of the fraud flags... maybe they did something different to both servers (though was same support guy)? maybe it's just bad luck that kr5ddit is taking longer to propagate. Neither config is really satisfactory... I've used the 'clocking' url forwarding features... and it looks like they wrap the web page up and present it in a frame... so it's not really designed for a 'proper' website... I'll get around to getting them all working properly... but It's going to take me some time to sort this out... As for not liking the names... humans are biological computers... they are reluctant to change, don't like new ideas, and slow to process them... Having said that... if you do come up with what you think is a much better name... feel free to register that domain and transfer it to me... I'm out of budget for domain names now... especially when you consider that I'm going to need at least one SSL certificate. http://www.kr5dit.com/ <--- kind of works for now. I'll give the registrar 24 hours to propagate kr5ddit.com... if that doesn't work, I'll contact panthur support again either tomorrow or monday. Then I'll probably turn off the domain cloaking and url forwarding and point the DNS config directly at the site. One last thought... might use kr5ddit as the dev site for kr5dit. All ideas welcome... but for now... I want a comment system. It's odd... The whois information is identical... and I don't remember entering the names of either of them anywhere... not in the code... not in the config... not on amazon or github... they should be treated completely identically... I could reboot my machine again... I'll leave that for a bit though. Or it could be the cloaking stuff being different that they've set cause of the fraud. Of course... that's not really DNS anymore... is it? Maybe I turn that shit off for kr5ddit... I can check the DNS info is propagated... and then I can start making it work... that's what I'll do. is that the name you now prefer? http://www.kr5dit.com http://kr5dit.com http://www.kr5ddit.com http://kr5ddit.com https://www.kr5dit.com https://kr5ddit.com https://www.kr5ddit.com https://www.kr5ddit.com Well that makes sense... that's the self signed cert for internal use... lol... so... I need to switch the certs for external use... with the right set of names... look... for now... the only things that work are the front http urls it seems... I'll fix up the certs when I create a separate instance for apache front end... You only need https if you want to sign in anyway... I got to get started on the comments... do, I write my own... probably going to... but first I study django.contrib... though they recommend more complete packages... I dunno... Okay... so... fair point to those who do log in... and get some thing straight to the point... it's my site... it is not a store of value... any coins I hold 'on behalf' of the site are legally mine... this also means I cannot steal them from you by deception... there'll be no mtgox scandle because everything is mine while I hold it... best think of it as, your spending money on my site when you send me 'value'... just putting that out there... as a general philosophy if your 'storing' coins offchain... Also... cause databases and hackers and all the other shit that could end up causing me hassles... and this applies to russian maffia types too... who fucking knows... I still need a comment system. Do you get that from http only websites? And... do any of the links work for you? Do you see k666 anywhere? Look either way... it needs a new apache front end first... that will sort some of that out. Attn: Sye and Tdillo Can you access the site at https://52.3.28.135/index.html? Can you go to the admin interface? Can you login? Your passwords are password... there's nothing to do there right now... but maybe change your password too? Comments coming just for you guys soon (ish). LOL... someone changed it already... how cool is that! You can try again... and you can change your name if you want whatever too... If not... we'll be a bit more crypto about it... There's a change password in the top right of the screen once you log in... I'm assuming you can get to the admin page, though ... right? They did tdillo's too! ummm... can't kill your account... you're stuck with it I'm afraid... only question is if you want to control it. If that doesn't work... just have to wait till I get the login working properly. Logged in users will be able make comments shortly. Someone else changed your password before you logged in... I had to reset it is all... No worries... Has been pretty tiring, and clearly not much to show for it... but it's a base... just don't expect much. Problems: Can dump data from production, but failed to load it into development... This worries me for future updates... you're data may be at risk! LOL... have to look into it. Next Things: I'll probably go back to working on electrum now and getting a unique bitcoin address for every user... and initialising user balances from the block chain... Then I kind of have to work out how kr5ditz are created and who gets them... I could tie kr5ditz to bitcoin, for example... buy 1 kr5ditz for one bitcoin... but I don't think so... more fun to make an exchange where kr5ditz can be bought and sold for bitcoin... So... maybe give each user 1 kr5dit once a day for logging in... as the baseline kind of a 'price' for kr5ditz... (like a basic income!). Also considered making fixed number of kr5ditz in the system... like 1M kr5ditz... and allocate them all to the admin user (In theory I can create as many as I like) to spread about as I choose (or horde, whatever). It doesn't really matter... but they have to get their value from somewhere... so, thinking about that. That's enough for a while. ssshhhhh... don't tell everyone my business strategy... Just to be clear... kr5ddit is for entertainment purposes only... all balances are purely for fun... any payments made to the site are donations only and are not redeemable... and any payments given to you by the site are purely on a one off basis and do not create any promises or obligation to do so again in the future. One day a lawyer will turn that into something legally meaningful. I can't run off with your bitcoin balance... your bitcoin balance is already mine. In fact.. there won't be any withdrawal function in the early days... I worked out what a kr5ddit is... stay tuned. Still trying to retrieve your bitcoin addresses from electrum... and import prod data into dev... not that I did much last night but investigate electrum again... and the question of where I put my working version of the merchant script??? Still don't know... might have to start again. You don't have to worry about that with me... You'll get back exactly what I promise... nothing. All that means is that if you prove that it is consistent, you have proven that it is not consistent... So... as long as the system can't prove itself consistent, it may well be. Consistency must then be axiomatic, or proven to be inconsistent. Which is fine... because we know that in any consistent mathematical system, there are statements that are true or false, but cannot be proven to be... so, the mathematical system may be consistent... but if you prove it is, then you've proven that it isn't. A mathematical system cannot be both consistent and complete... so, you can take trivialism and have a system that is complete but not consistent... or you could take a mathematical system that is not complete, but should be consistent (unless you can prove it's not, by proving that it is within the system... then you can just throw out the parts that enabled you to prove it... and it may well be consistent again). Yes, and... so what? I don't think anyone but a crackpot would claim otherwise. Axioms are given as true for a given proof... and that is it! Euclid had an axiom that parallel lines never meet... Riemannian geometry doesn't include that axiom... and it turns out that spacetime is more like Riemannian geometry than Euclidian... All Euclid;s proofs are true given the axioms... but they are not true in Riemannian geometry, or our actual universe spacetime. Not only is the world not flat, nor is space! To claim an axiom is true by definition is just completely wrong... They are given as true for all proofs that follow from them, and that is it... you can't prove an axiom actually is true. What you call propositions... Mathematicians call axioms... Not at all... Therefore, whatever problem you claim axioms have, so does your thing... I can prove that (under a certain set of axioms)... but I can't prove that maths is consistent... though I can prove (that a certain set of axioms) is not consistent (by proving that they show themselves to be consistent)... You can't have a philosophy (set of axioms) that is both consistent and complete... and you can't even prove it's consistent... that's the facts... so we take on probabilities of axioms being true... and hunt out those that prove themselves to be either complete or inconsistent... which is why everything you say is trivial. Humans like to think everything is accounted for... they want their philosophy to be complete... but every time it is complete... they know it is inconsistent and therefore... wrong... and so on to hunting the inconsistencies again. Like squashing bugs. Did I claim otherwise... it's now up to you to show how it is mathematically inconsistent... and come up with a completion to it that isn't complete or inconsistent or STFU at least until you know what the fucking axioms are. What you don't understand is that utility is more than just money its whatever the fuck it was that made you do what you did... it can be measured in money... but that has limitations... yes... which is why it isn't measured in money but in nothings actually... I'm not reading this trane... seriously... I got to write some comments. Free Speech as in Guns... You have to obey the law or you're fucked no matter what... The decision is either ban some people from some part of a website... or someone else will ban all those people from all of that website. Difficult decisions really... So, follow the Free Speech as in Money and avoid the Guns... ban the subs for some users I suppose... what would you do? Eventually an uncensorable distributed blockchain based blogging (or social link aggregation, whatever you call it) application will be built... and the guns will have less power, but the money more. No... With a blockchain based application, the gov won't be able to do that... hell... even with tor... What govs might do is attack those who use it... The money thing won't be too much of a problem either... I don't think... the costs are low, so it shouldn't be a problem. Progress So Far... https://52.3.28.135/index.html Can't get / to redirect to index.html yet... /admin works... Ohhh... ignore the SSL errors... obviously. That's all for now. I'm about another $5 away in donations to get a basic SSL certificate for the site... Sye is going to own you all http://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/address/1Dy5rLHwt8wk79C6jfH6uRf2bpcVnJtNyQ The first two users are going to be sye and tdillo... as they are the only ones so far I can work out who have donated... That's all I'm prepared to say for now... but I'm going to build a few features to make sure she has a lot of power on the site. So... I guess I have to register the domain name now, and let you all know about it... as I had promised... but it's very late (or rather early in the morning) so it might be a few hours away. Okay... apparently the fraud bot at panthur has denied my card... this happens too often... waiting on a support call in the next hour or I have to contact them... Anyway... clearly there's a long road ahead... In fact I have a huge amount to build yet... but comments will come soon... I'll find a way to register sye and tdillo... and then they can make some comments on the front page... and I'll go from there. I also have to build an exchange as another project / subproject along with the comment / blogging system... Slow and steady hey! Don't stress dude... The site doesn't plan to run off of donations... but the site has nothing of value to offer at the moment, so donations is just the bootstrap funding model until I can build enough to make something else possible. It won't cost you anything to join... but initially only donators will have accounts... I'm intend to create an invite system, and you'll have to grab an invite off of them or someone else to get an account... probably... or patience... it will get there... You will be able to do a lot just by cloning that repository and having access to python3. Right now, running k666-env and going to http://localhost:8000/admin should enable you to admin your dev version. Dude... python 3 isn't actually that different... at least, I haven't seen it yet... It just has to have access to a python3 install... and it will use it to build the entire thing, dependencies you don't have and all... it should be very simple. Only problem is... I don't know if the k666-env script will work in cygwin... might need some tweeks... and it will almost certainly not work on windows without cygwin... but it's like 10 lines you have to understand to do it manually... and I'd appreciate the changes/additions required to get it to run in those environments. Yeah... Sye's definitely getting the majority of invitations, as things currently stand... I'm sure she'll send you one in time. I look forward to seeing you there. Exactly... though cygwin should be almost right... and a .bat file or whatever should be straight forward for windows. You need python3 and virtualenv... and that's it. No dude... You need the 3 following things: git... python3 virtualenv Everything else is done for you... trust me... you don't need Django, you don't need sqlite, you don't need nothin... the build process takes care of all this for you... and you can thank the great people who made distutils for 99.9% of the work. Though outside of unix, you might have to make an alternative for k666-env. Hey Sye! Can you expand on point 2? You want me to hold your domains for 10 years? And ummmmm.... you pay me less for the privilege? Or am I missing something? BTW, will read your email at some point... getting the password to it is a pain... so I won't check it that often... but I will check it. Introducing http://github.com/procrasti/K666 Hi everyone... donations so far are now totalling around $4 or so... so thankyou everyone so far for helping... We're still about $10 short towards our goal of a new name... It's not quite enough yet to afford the new domain name... So... okay, problems... No domain name... no free vps or anything... I tried 5jelly.com and has anyone actually tried it? It wanted me to put in a US city and state! Anyone want to register an account and give me the keys? Any name at all will do... any vps provider... IDGAF. In fact, if someone gets me a vps... someone can point a domain at it for me and publish it here... so vps is actually crucial now. http://github.com/procrasti/K666 so... that's what you get paid relying on positive externalities or whatever... anyway trane... nothing stopping you from forking K666 and running with it... simulate your own user economy or whatever... So... from here, I plan so that you can clone it, and in a python environment run k666-env and it builds and starts a website you can log into... if that doesn't work... then you're pretty much on your own... too bad... So... please fork it, and what you like to it... and so fourth... Okay... what you need for 'production' is a domain name... and some tweaking or whatever... access to whatever computing resources to run whatever load is put on it, put apache in front of it, a real database, etc... then looking for django plugins I suppose... so, first a simple comment system... then heirarchical comment system... i won't be merging anything that is too complicated to start... of course... there's cms plugins and all of that to explore... but start off simple. more projects to come... official logo is the golden apple... K@ll appears wrapped around the apple, but with the elles wrapping around off to the side, and are kind of cursive... I'll know what it should look like... somehow some other stuff I'll explain... also a red pentagram somewhere on the apple or over it. fuck you... you get what you pay for... mumble... if you want me to run your stuff... you have to make it run as a git subproject and provide some application or service for it... otherwise... ummmm... yeah... actually first next step will be to make and index page with something like that on it... with a login link to admin... I'm going to accept pretty much any blog like system or something I can extend easily and is MIT licensed for now... so, next place to look is into django's contrib comments... then front page... could start off as just random comments... Ummm... initial logins will be some sort of invite only... but front page should have some comments... obviously... http://github.com/procrasti/K666 alright... want you can give and what you get in return... priorities for me: How to push to git? I need to generate ssl keys and register public keys? What you get, something in git. A VPS... anything really with a shell to play with... that I can run the code on... if you can run it... or it's a shell or whatever... let me know... what you get... a website you can point a domain name at and a place to comment on it. must support git, virtualenv and ssh and have a static ip address. Whatever I can get for free, without obligation... I'll put towards a website that is free as in tranian free... it will run k666, but will be as open as trane wants it to be... and it's somewhere to start... Eventually I will register my own domain name... donations to the tranian website go towards the creation of my new free as in money website... which will run the k666 engine as well... Donations: http://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/address/1Dy5rLHwt8wk79C6jfH6uRf2bpcVnJtNyQ A great deal from my pov... I've already got a good domain registrant... did you want me to do the actual transfer for you? Do you want me to pay for it? If so, I'll need BTC upfront... say about $25 worth... and you can send me the other $50 once it's transferred. If you want me to do the transfer, I'm also going to need your Domain Contact Email and Domain Password, Registry Key or Authorisation Code... You can email these to me at procrasti@k5-stats.org. How's that sound? Is that what you're after? WOW... Thanks!!! $ You just want a registrant... Then I'd go with http://www.panthur.com.au... It's a lot cheaper than $75 a year... I'm guessing you don't need me to do the actual transfer... right? Or was that what you wanted too? Starting here: http://www.panthur.com.au/domains/transfer Feel free to make a donation at any time. Alright... up and running on EC2 So... that's that sorted for a short time... Very scary they have my credit card details, and will bill be for going outside the tier limits... but can't seem to set anywhere to shut the instances down if it does go outside that limits... What happens if someone finds an exploit that causes my machine to start chewing up resources? I'll probably make it a bit more production like before releasing any details... Don't stress about their opinions... firstly, you've had fun doing this, at the very least... right? next... it's just their opinion... they could be wrong. so... try to take into consideration what they say only in a constructive way... if you learnt anything from talking with them... see what is useful you can take from that for you to apply... and apply yourself at it... worst case, after consideration, you think you might eventually be better off to walk away from it... You've still done something... I'm not saying that's what to do... I'm sure they've given you ideas... it's just that you haven't consciously processed them yet... and maybe it hit your ego a bit too. Also... as a friend once told me... humans are biological computers... but they are slow, defensive and don't like new ideas... it takes them a long time to process them... they might initially think it's stupid... but after a few night's sleep... maybe they'll think one or two things you've done actually are interesting. Now, I tell you my day... first thing that bothered me is that it is Thursday, and I was sure it was Wednesday. I seriously hate it when that happens. I spent quite some time getting familiar with git... still don't have a good model of how it works in my head... but getting there... and a good enough model to just use it... I think... everything now should just be nuances. I'm familiar with distributed source control in general though (and I have had a tiny bit of experience with git... but not really much in anger)... I used arch to create a deployment system back in the days before git even existed... in fact... I funded Tom Lord (arch author) for a bit more than couple of bitcoins because I found it so useful in my role... (I had to write an old fashioned cheque though because bitcoins didn't exist back then... we were still using punch cards to run our software and we used index cards to store our passwords* on... I used to tie an onion to my belt... as was the fashion at the time.) Arch was the distributed source control system for a couple of years... as far as I was concerned... svn is still pretty much a centralised model like cvs... but git I think is the child of arch... of course with linus at the helm, everyone knew arch would die and be replaced by git... but I've just never had much call for it. So, I guess, a lot of the day was really learning the git interface. So, I created a local git repository... cloned a local copy of electrum... and made the local clone of electrum a submodule of my project repository. And I spent a lot of time grappling with electrum source code... As you know, I had problems with running the merchant.py script I pointed at yesterday... so... first thing I did was uninstall electrum and the python bindings from apt... made some scripts to create a python virtualenv so that I could build a local (nonroot) copy of electrum... in case the version differences might have been the problem... and eventually got electrum to build... didn't notice till much later the electrum-env script in the root of the electrum source that does exactly the same thing... oh well. Still... lots of little gotcha's getting it all to work... obviously a lot of faults on my end too... but... I found at least one genuine bug in electrum... possibly 3 or 4 minor issues that require source code changes... but each little hurdle is a fucking nightmare of googling, and nutting out some stupid little problem... coding actually is a fucking nightmare... no wonder so many coders go mad. Anyway... long story short... I can compile the electrum gui from github now... and have gotten the merchant script running enough that I think I can build something like it but more to my specification in the long run. Now... electrum is GPLv3... I don't know how that might affect my application... my theory is that it won't at all... it's just some back office processing tool that will happen to talk to the same database as my website... So, I think that means that all the GPL3 viral web service whatever crap has absolutely no bearing on my project and I can use it as I wish regardless... I just can't use it directly in my app serving webpages... so no calling electrum from django (directly). So... the main app... I'm still going to aim for python3 and CPAL license, until something better comes along, or I hit a roadblock... and I'll run the bitcoin handling stuff as a standalone daemon that talks to the website's database only, and the web app can rpc or cli into an electrum daemon to send funds... and that's pretty much it. Some cool features I've learnt from all this --- The wallet that receives users' funds can be on totally different machine... in fact... it doesn't have to communicate with that wallet at all!! It needs the master public key only and I just have to periodically send the funds from it to a hot wallet that the app can send from... Bitcoin is really pure fucking genius. The one gotcha with the my approach though is that I have to be very careful with the change address handling for the receiving wallet. If it sends change back to a users address... a naive implementation might credit those BTC to a user's account (a double spend... or rather a double credit)... either I have to very carefully check each received transaction... or... I'd rather specify a fixed change address manually somehow... at least at an api level... so... if electrum doesn't support that, a clone of it probably will by the time I'm done... at the very least, it's going to be something to triple check won't cause me problems. Minor issues - my computer has some advertising malware on it I got from watching streaming movies online and ignoring the google malicious web page warning... Every now and then I'll click any where on any page and I'll get taken to some stupid clickbait article... I hope it's only in chrome... but the thought of what could be running scares the crap out of me. I tried both adaware and avast... one of them found something, and I thought I'd removed it... that was about a month or so ago... but it's still happening. Scrolling with the mousewheel in konquerer is just stupidly fucky... like it jumps back to the top of the page and all over the place... in fact... scrollwheel in most of the apps on that new debian vm install just seems sucky... and overall feel is just really not polished from a UI perspective in lots of tiny little annoying ways. Oh, and copy/paste still doesn't work... END OF RANT... fuck... it's been a long day... and little to show for it. Feel free to donate: bitcoin:1Dy5rLHwt8wk79C6jfH6uRf2bpcVnJtNyQ *: Though it was huge improvement over the previous post-it note technology we were using before that. mumble-django... nothing to do with you, right? $ I've got heaps of useful little plugins, and any one of them could be fucking with me... But I need them... what a nightmare... You said before that you often exaggerate... When you said that no one has to work... you mean fewer people have to work... and I agree with that... but get confused because of your exaggerations... So... Please just answer me this... simple question... under your theory / model of how the world woks... could the government give everyone $1Trillion a day, without having any inflationary effect on prices... If they started doing that tomorrow, do you expect you could still buy bread for under a few dollars? Because if you think that would cause the price of bread to rise... maybe there's a middle ground we could actually agree on. No strawmen, or working your around that by saying the government could give everyone a basic income of say $15k a year or whatever... what do you think of the above example? No one would be poor... so, how can raising the prices be greedy? We're talking about your model of how people work. Not mine... There's just an axiom people get what they can for themselves in mine. Sure... loads of people want to suffer and kill themselves... If suffering and whining is your thing... or dying for others... or just being a sad cunt... that IS their utility. That is the model... the model exactly covers all of them... It's your model that fails to explain why they do that... you say most people are greedy... so it can't explain gandhi... our model says that to gandhi, being poor and all that had greater utility than being a lawyer... I heard it got him lots of pussy too. Okay... that's what I'm doing... I'll create a github repository... you can make a site from that with your own rules... and I'll make one for me... as simple as that. Unacceptable answer! You're going to need that money for my new site... But... also... you're going to find it somewhere... it might literally be the last postit note password you find... but you will find it... when you need it, it will come to you. Which should be soon... I'm still taking donations: bitcoin:1Dy5rLHwt8wk79C6jfH6uRf2bpcVnJtNyQ It's mostly cause I want to experiment with some ideas is all... I don't want to go into details just yet though... I got zero code at this point... but I got some good tag lines... and as soon as I raise the funds for the domain name, I'll let everyone know the new name. It's not going to be pay2play... for the best users it could be paid2play. I want to experiment with some economics ideas. New Site Licencing, Platform and GitHub Hi guys... A few question about licenses and github... I'm planning on having a github repository for this... my last potential agent said having a github repository to point potential clients at was a really good thing. Not so sure that the username 'procrasti' screams highly employable contractor guy... so, maybe I need a new github account anyway. So, licensing... always a pain... below the fold. So, what license do you guys recommend? I was thinking of building a base platform and using GPLv2 for that... and then building in secret source privately on top of that... to give me some kind of edge (whatever that has) over competitors. If I made it GPLv3, I'd be forced to share everything, right? I know you can't have closed source projects on github, except for a fee... and I both can't afford that... and secondly I actually want to attract developers to the project... cause there's no way I'll be able to do the whole thing on my own. I looked at github:reddit/reddit licence (https:/github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/LICENSE) and they use the "Common Public Attribution License Version 1.0 (CPAL)"... Does this give other people the right to make reddit clones with their software? Is it eligible for free github hosting? How would that interact with my desire to use other GPL Django modules in my project? So... the initial attempt is going to be very simple basic HTML driven website... written in Djgano and using mysql backend... I want to get my core ideas built as quickly as possible... and we can add all the nice fluff stuff later as we go. One last question... am I going to have to start using my real name (say in the source code headers) for a project like this? Is that a good idea do you think? Do you think there are employers out there who might read procrasti's political views and not employ me because of them? Or SJWs or other wackos? Funding's coming along nicely... nearly a third of the way to our ambitious goal of 0.04BTC... Thank you all who have contributed and looking forward to reaching our goals soon. I can feel the community love flowing in already. Donate to: bitcoin:1Dy5rLHwt8wk79C6jfH6uRf2bpcVnJtNyQ Yeah... back in the day when I was a contractor I still put some effort into open source software in my spare time... A few projects got some patches from me... but it's all lost in the mists of time. Funny thing, back then... I was the odd one out using and promoting open source in commercial settings... Now the trend is nearly reversed, and you can't get a job without it. I had some very good contracting gigs... but I went off on an opportunity to make some software for myself a while back... and that made money but now I'm finding I can't really compete (at a livable wage) doing that... Well... that was like 7 or 8 years ago now... So... moved back to my home town with absolutely no companies using the software I specialised in during the naughties... so looking for some local contract gigs... either I haven't gotten the jobs... or the potential employers were brain dead and asking me to make promises I couldn't keep (we'll train you in RoR if you promise to stay for two years --- ummmm... a) Rails? I can do that already b) Come up with a package with incentives to stay for two years you retards, do you even economics?). The other big lead wants me to write a modern CV (nearly all my work has been word of mouth - mv CV is very much factual statements of work I've done... but apparently now days I need to focus on it as a marketing tool... and they don't want long descriptions of the work I've done with technical details... but grabby snazy shit (I'm a full stack devops capable agile senior software engineer - just doesn't sound right)... I don't know... I've failed so far to get that feeling right to me)... but also the agent guy definitely told me to focus on that, my linked in profile... and github. So... well... this site... I'm doing for the love of it... I got some ideas I just want to experiment with... and is fun... and while I'm sure in a decade or so it will make me a billionaire... right now I still got to pay the overdue electricity license (going to be hard to code when the lights go out!)... so, if it gets me a 3 or 6 another, I'd be pretty happy with that. Two birds with one stone. Yeah... probably going to do that... I'll use my real name... create a different user name on the new site. Probably only problem is that I don't have any dupes to announce here... So... I'll probably announce someone else's software and site that seems to be going in a very similar direction to what I was planning on... and the SJWs and doxxer's can infer what they please. I kind of plan on making some money with this site So... not sure how much I want to share... it is a tricky balance... especially because I want contributors... Yeah... using GPL software as a service is normally fine because you aren't distributing the code, therefore all changes remain yours and private... and I find that a useful feature... and a fair balance for code I release - any version you distribute will have improvements I can use.... but any private changes you don't distribute are none of my business... the GPL3 and Affero are seemingly out. Now, it appears that CPAL and BSD are nearly opposites... BSD code derivatives can used for any purpose and even be closed up entirely... but it looks to me like others can't use CPAL commercially at all. Am I right in this reading? CPAL looks like a good starting point... if that's correct... and if github will host it for free... I'm not sure if having GPL modules in a django application would be considered to make the entire application GPL or not... LGPL aside... Django modules seem to be standalone??? (super wishful thinking... but maybe?). I can always just 'do what I want'... and wait for takedown notices or complaints and then replace the incompatible components I suppose... I mean... using a GPL library doesn't make your code GPL... it means you can't distribute it with such a mix and you have to rectify the situation one way or the other. You are absolutely right... So, I can take whatever code from it and use it however I wish in my projects... makes complete sense... Okay... so... MIT it is, right? Closest thing to BSD... Anyway... http://github.com/procrasti/k666 Creating a new Debian Testing install on VBox As my dev environment for this site... May as well use the latest and greatest versions of everything... Except that... I'm probably going to use Python2 over Python3... I've had problems with some modules before that aren't Python3 compatible... OR should I go with Python3 anyway... and wait and see if I hit any snags??? Opinions? Yeah... it's a problem of forward and backward compatibility... They are in many ways two different languages. The print function being the most obviously immediate example... Though the old print 'function' was a bit of a parlour trick to enable them to claim a python program was as simple as: print "Hello World!" No other functions have a bracketless notation. Still... also... not sure if I remember properly... does "%s %d: % ("Hello World Version", 0) still work? I hope so. So... what are the main advantages of P3? Better unicode support, I hope... can't think of much else off the top of my head. Also the problem is that a lot of code exists for P2... and where most things are compatible in both... there are a lot more packages that have P2 only versions than have only P3 available versions. I think it was the database driver (mysql maybe? or postgres... I can't remember)... was the road block last time I tried to upgrade an app to P3... Okay... I'll start out with P3... and if I hit a roadblock... I'll try to migrate back to P2... see where it goes. The Django docs say pretty much the same thing: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/faq/install/#faq-python-version-support Example: procrasti@procrastidev1:~/src/electrum$ python3 hello_electrum.py Traceback (most recent call last): File "hello_electrum.py", line 5, in <module> import electrum ImportError: No module named 'electrum' Where electrum is the python module you can import to access electrum internals, manipule wallets and such. Looking at the electrum source, it's not python3 compatible... Which is why I guess you see this on stackexchange: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36988/how-can-i-run-an-electrum-conso le-command-from-outside-electrum-in-linux I don't know... Either way, I can find like zero documentation on how to use electrum... like, how to initialise a server, get new addresses, read the balance, check for new transactions or something... how to initialise it properly I've gotten only by guessing from the source... and the code I was using on an older version doesn't work anymore... (that could set and get the labels of addresses... but there was a bug in that version too, at the time, where labels weren't saved between restarts --- this has since been fixed, by standard apt upgrading at some point... and works on an older version of electrum, on some (probably) out of date ubuntu install). I have to be able to receive BTC and credit it to a user's account... and of course send BTC back users on request... pretty standard stuff I suppose... The difference is between communicating with a daemon and just running the parts required in between... But sye is right about the doublespending problem... in at least the fact that you have to be very careful with real money. You don't want to hold user balances in their bitcoin addresses... you want to do most transfers (within the system) offchain... so, you have to credit a users account when the bitcoin balance increases... but otherwise totally ignore the balance of a given address... because you could move funds from it at any time. And an example of why I prefer import electrum to get_from_electrum... is I think it would be nice to label each address in the wallet with the user account name... Of course, this information is already in the database... but it would be nice if only for debugging... and there is no set_label command I can see from the console... only a get_label... so, unless there's another way to do that from the console... or if get_from_electrum gives you access to more than just the commands... it will require me to fork electrum, at the very least. But I'll try the stackexchange approach next though... Still... lack of documentation bothers me. Other problem I'm having is that copy/paste between my desktop and my new dev virtualbox install isn't working... VBoxGuestAdditions failed to find the kernel-headers and so didn't build some kernel modules... Not sure if that is the problem, but only thing I can find right now. I think either it couldn't find the kernel-headers, because they've moved in this release of debian... or if it's because I installed the generic kernel, and not a version specific one... I mean... assuming I have kernel-headers installed at all (but I think I do)... It's annoying for it not to work, but at least I can resize now... that's far more annoying. That required me to upgrade from VBox 4.3.20 to 4.3.30... so things change fast enough that I'm not sure where the copy/paste problem comes from. Okay... I found: http://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/scripts/merchant/merchant.py Which I guess is going to be pretty close to what I want... but haven't tried it yet. But that locks me out of Python3... already... And the stack-exchange thing is for connecting to the SPV servers... and I'm not yet how to (or if I can) start the client to accept connections like that... I'm just a bit confused still about it... Starting it as a daemon didn't open up any ports I could see. So... do... I make a wrapper around the merchant software so I can call it from python 3... or do I just give up on P3 altogether for now? It's pretty much shit like this that has kept me on Python2 for so long... sooner or later I want to use something I can't find a P3 version of... but rarely the other way around. I don't know... I've used GPL software alongside commercial software all the time... You just have to be careful not to link it into your application or whatever... I dunno... I don't like the idea of BSD type like licenses... well... as an idea, they're great... all power to anyone who uses it... and the BSD OSs are pretty cool too... but, I don't see why I should code other people's projects for free... and not sure they are going to feedback... I don't really know though. A quick reading of CPAL makes me think that the owner keeps the intellectual property? That the software can't be used for commercial purposes... Maybe I'm reading it completely wrong... but I'd use that over GPL... at least initially. So, currently, I think CPAL > GPL > BSD... I intend to make money directly off this new site... Maybe I'm wishing... I don't know... Otherwise... I want some software as a portfolio... so GPL seems like a good fit for that... Its pretty messy and also a difficult and a fundamental decision to make. Usufruct Excersise Video Recommended For You Trane... a great way to both practice usufruct and get yourself fit at the same time... Soon as I saw this, I thought what a good exercise for trane. http://i.imgur.com/gzFUqAi.gifv The problem is you expect Bob to do something... ie, come help clean up with the campers... when he probably doesn't want to deal with campers at all. OTOH, maybe he genuinely is sorry... actually wouldn't mind campers... as long as they cleaned up (left the place better than they found it)... and even maybe most campers do leave a place better off... but it only takes one bunch of bad campers leaving a mess and now it's become his problem... or worse... like modern UK travellers... once you give them permission to stay for a few nights... next thing you know you need court orders and sheriffs to remove them... they gots the rights now, because you gave it to them, and you better follow proper legal process to remove them, or you'll be the one in jail... It's not that most people are assholes... but that you have to cover yourself for the few that actually are... Finally Leaving K5 There comes a time in every active Kuron's life when he finally has to post his first ever "leaving this site forever" diary... well here's mine... Let's hope it doesn't take too long. Speed up the process: bitcoin:1Dy5rLHwt8wk79C6jfH6uRf2bpcVnJtNyQ So... I've decided I want to make my own front page of the internet based on my own crazy ideas... and I'm literally asking for your help to do it... When enough bitcoin is donated to the above bitcoin address... and a suitable registry found... I will use the bitcoin to purchase a domain name... that I hope may one day become your front page of the internet... with your help. So... please donate to my new project if you would like to see it happen. Proof of donation may become useful for certain features of the new site... Please don't all be cheapskates... though I know most here can't afford their own breakfast... I'm not really asking for much... just enough for me to own and control a unique website name for this project. Also... please recommend domain registrars you think would be suitable... the first one that seems to fit the bill at a price you can afford will probably be the go. Poll. GoDaddy? So, with godaddy, I found a deal where I can get a .com domain name for slightly less than 0.1 BTC... Does that seem like a deal? I get a dotcom, with private info, and website builder all for one year... I assume I can transfer that domain name to another registrar in a year's time... I don't get SSL, mail support or anything like that, I don't get all the .info, .co, .net or other domains... it all starts to get expensive fast... I could select nearly up to 2BTC for just 1 year's hosting and stuff. Any gotchyas I should be concerned about? It's almost worth just doing it myself... Well... let's give this campaign a week or so and see what funds we raise and if you guys have any other recommendations. Coolio dude... thanks. So far, I get basic dotcom domain name and identity protection for about: 0.066 BTC - GoDaddy 0.062 BTC - Ghandi 0.039 BTC - Panthur Panthur out in the lead so far! I don't think I need anything more than a domainname right now... I can do everything else myself... So.... Current target is 0.04 BTC I suppose. Wow... that's some good advice... Hope I can live up to all of that... Any chance you have a referrer or promo code for panthur? Could try, I suppose... Not so much for this purchase... but maybe it makes things cheaper in the future? Maybe you get some kickback too? Ummm... another question... I seem to have forgotten my github password... and I found I've registered procrasti there using my k5-stats.org email address... but now I can't log into k5-stats.org... I still have the old password for k5s... is the mail and all that still running/available? Dude... that sucks! How do I log into cPanel again? I go to k5-stats.org and just get: Welcome to the k5 stats project home. Hmmm... actually, when I go to k5-stats.org/cpanel I get cpanel up... but when I try to log in as either procrasti or procrasti@k5-stats.org, it rejects my old password... Okay... maybe the password got reset? Umm... could you send me that github link? If you use electrum... there's an encrypt and decrypt message tool... you can encrypt the url to the following public key: 02c9d9bec54efd418e6a6532525d2b53553a35b0bb7d0814bfe63cc7d768c18656 You can get the public key to an address by right clicking on one of your receiving addresses and selecting encrypt/decrypt message... So, feel free to send me a public key I can secure communicate back to you. You could also reset my k5-stats password, or otherwise let me know if I'm doing something wrong? BTW: Did you contact panthur? Are you planning to, or should I just register the domain name anyway? Actually... I'm pretty sure I used to log in through cPanel and then selected my chosen webmail interface... And no... I haven't found the roundcube page. Encryption is super easy... Electrum / Tools / Encrypt/Decrypt Message. At least it's there in v2.3.2. Did you contact panthur? No... I had access through cPanel... but no authorisation to do anything... interesting. :) Pretty sure that's how it worked. Umm... well... check out the affiliates thing anyway... maybe you can still give me a promo code that might apply to my account in the future... you never know what else I might end up buying from them... or does that not apply to the account, but only to purchases? I dunno... worth it, even for nothing... no? Thanks for looking into it anyway. Oh... so, still... if not through cPanel... how? I feel stupid for not trying that... Damn... you were right about the spam... where'd they get my address from? And how do they know me so well? If you are a happy owner of a huge penis, just delete this message! Odd they would send me a message to delete? Why did they even bother? Anyway... read your emails... thanks... will read a bit more from your links at some point. Except for your page widening attack... Legendary! QklFMQPWCqPN6NL9Zpj7TJ1V6devB 7WAUoRA6+0HYviSghsLJlAw+qyI/pNu TWSGsQ+8FU74vvzj2S2L7pnc4MHwzC UqQ1Lg0B+MibdwVfSUzpebZJNcfNGBa nSo2Aw/GTOEDmk= The password it asks you before you decrypt? Or send bitcoin... or do anything useful with that wallet (ie, access your private keys, get the wallet seed?)... ouch... You sure it's not the empty password? You might not have password protected your wallet during the earlier install? Maybe? Otherwise... best of luck... hope you aren't holding too many BTC in there. Oh man... You need a password manager, stat! Only $70? What world do you live in that you can just throw away $70? You must be rich! Hope you find it... I could always use a donation. Oh well... it's a good lesson I suppose... Do you use a generator for your passwords then just write them down? Or come up with ones yourself, write them down and forget them? No one told you not to put your passwords on postit notes next to your computer? Could be worse... I have a small set of passwords with some standard set of differences between them that I reuse everywhere... except for the more important stuff... which I'm trying to get into the habit of using a password manager for. PROBLEM is... the password manager I have now is on my Android... and it requires the purchased version in order to back up the passwords into the cloud... So... I'm kind of very vulnerable right now. Anyone recommend us a good free password manager that allows backing up of the password wallet? Oooh.... 12 random words? That could be the electrum seed... Might be for that wallet? With them you can generate a new wallet containing the same addresses as the original. File / New, put in a wallet name, select restore and enter the 12 words... see if you get your cha'chings backs. Make sure you don't make any typos. Haven't hit your repos yet... will look at some point... promise. What a shame... That's almost certainly an electrum wallet seed though... at least I imagine so... No chance you made any typos? Just checked myself... seeds are checksummed... so if it wasn't a valid wallet seed, it wouldn't have accepted it... Fuck... bad luck dude... hope you find the keys / password soon though. Are they your donations so far? Thanks!!! We're almost third of our way towards our funding goal! Good work everyone! Thankyou kindly... every little helps. Seriously though, is that all you have left? What happened to the rest of it? I sent you 0.0038 BTC, for valentines day, and you only had 0.00022 BTC love to give me? So... how did you spend/lose the rest? Was it eaten up in miner's fees? Did your Insurance Agent keep a chunk for himself? I feel dirty. On another note... I've lost a day somewhere... Was sure it was wednesday today... but my clock says thursday morning. BTW, don't mean to sound ungrateful... Cause I'm not... Seriously... thanks for your support! Do you have a public key for an address you own so I can send you private messages? You need the latest version of electrum... then on a receiving address, right click and select encrypt/decrypt message... then you should see a public key... which you can send to me here... just test that you can encrypt and decrypt a message first, and you haven't made the same mistake as mumble and lost your passwords or anything. Your loss? Ouch! Technically, if you don't own the private keys, you don't own the coins... the site/exchange does... so, never leave your coins in 3rd party wallets... OTOH... nearly all my coins are in third party wallets... localbitcoins, coinjar, etc... It's a risk... but there's not much better ways of trading (currently)... Ouch... poor sye $ Shocking Video of Child Abuse I've just seen a heartbreaking video of uncensored hardcore child abuse, and as it seems to be a theme around here to share such videos I thought you'd all like to take a look... http://youtu.be/CuJT9EtdETY Poor thing, it's just trying to get away from these monsters but as soon as the parents are away and out of sight these evil fuckers just take advantage, taunting and teasing while the little guy just wants to get away or back to the parents... Yeah... pretty awful pictures of outright gang violence on a harmless, defenceless little fuck... I mean they stopped just short of actual rape... with the punching, kicking, throwing objects and yanking of his little head... but you can see where this is going... they would tear that poor little dude up given half the chance and laugh the whole fucking time. And you can see them all just dancing around and laughing... it makes me sick. It just breaks my heart... but in the vain of MDC I think it's best to share this sort of thing to 'stop' it, rather than just sit here by myself masturbating... Ummmm... I didn't mean masturbating to the video... obviously... I just meant in general... oh god... please don't ban me rusty or lock your site down even further! I didn't make the video!! I'm just letting you know that this stuff is widely indexed and what a sick bunch humans can be when poorly raised and left unchecked. Please take a look before youtube removes it... for the sake of the children involved. (okay, maybe not MDC if you're reading this... probably best you don't). Oh yeah... did I mention the attackers were asian... I swear these fuckers will graduate to doing some sick bukake shit with their hapless little victim in the not too distant future. They were literally holding hands and dancing around him in a cruel mockery of his helpless situation. Sick pieces of shit. Poor guy. Dude... come on... It's procrasti here... Not MDC supposedly trying to work out what part of russia you're most likely to find that style of babushka doll so he can pass on "vital information" to the FBI in the background of his collection of actual child rape videos... Have a little faith in me. It's all cool... no one's going to be arrested... it's actually quite interesting. Plus you're making me break character. Don't make me ruin the joke by explaining it... too late I suppose. Surely the tongue in cheek was strong in this one with enough hints not to actually worry anyone... Right guys? Right? It's quite cute in some ways... so watch the video... vote in the poll and fuck you for making me ruin the joke. <flash>WARNING: Video contains images of simulated child abuse!</flash> Did I mean blink? <blink>WARNING WILL ROBINSON</blink> No? You'll just have to blink once a second or so yourself while reading the warning to manually render it in its intended format. See mumble... Real men aren't scared of clicking links to child abuse videos! Everyone's gotten so PC these days... geeze. It's like children are so special we shouldn't even be looking at child abuse videos even if it's just to try and understand how to avoid it... fuck off SJWs. Yeah... it's quite clear the more children there are the more likely the child abuse becomes... and always the most vulnerable and least able to deal with the problem. Some people just want to lock up the abusers or attack them back... but sometimes understanding what causes abuse and finding other ways to avoid it is the better approach... At least we're finally looking at this problem objectively and trying to learn from it. That's why I game street walkers for free benzos.. What Xanax? I don't know about no Xanax. Someone must have roofied me! (I'm sure that's a legit defence... though I hope I never have to find out). I don't understand why people party using psyche drugs. I'll give you at least one point of view on that subject... Some of us believe we have the right to alter our own conciousness as we see fit (as long as we don't harm others... theft, violence or any other negative externality included... otherwise we then forfeit our rights!)... and also like to experiment with different highs... so not always traditional party drugs... and yes, we recognise there are dangers... but life is full of risk and we have different risk/reward evaluations to you... in other words... everyone has their own utility function... and as far we harm no others and cause no negative externalities we believe we have the right to pursue our own utility function... and furthermore... in a society where we are prohibited from following our own utility... we see it as a duty to actively break those laws... for we harm none are unjustly denied! I believe there will come a time when those who chose of their own free will to consume opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines or other mind altering substances whether due to one off experimentation, to enhance their social experience, their inner experience, enlightenment, entertainment, escape or even simply because they are addicted to them, will be allowed to do so as long as they do not harm others or otherwise break the law... because that is the maximisation of utility in a free market (modulo taxes to cover negative externalities... but not taxes to make prohibitive)... and if someone does break the law, and a court decides the cause of that was a particular substance or set of substances then and only then on an individual order from a court should they be prohibited from consuming that substance... not a blanket prohibition based on stereotypes, misinformation and outright lies... will we be told what to do with our own minds and bodies... which we ourselves and no other owns and has the right to dictate what we do with them. This is our life, no one else has to, or can, live it or experience it... we get no other shot at it... we do as we please... excepting when we harm others through either action or inaction such as neglect of responsibilities we have come to bear. So... absolutely... for you... your choice to follow what you have been prescribed because of your condition and to never stray outside of that line... I fully respect... It's not for everyone... I simply hope that one day others will respect our rights to also not to... to draw our own lines in respect to ourselves as we harm no other. By the way... smoking crack in a public space, say a library or a library bathroom... where others will be exposed against their consent to that substance (however weak you may judge that)... I see as a clear creation of a negative externality... so would be irresponsible disposal of syringes... driving while impaired... or the failure to say, take care of a child that is under your duty of care... It's not rocket science. For the record... I found benzos very relaxing... kind of like alcohol without the messy hangover... also noteworthy is the fact that benzos and alcohol are about the only substances from which sudden withdrawal after dependence can be fatal, and brain damaging when not (They both affect the GABA receptors or system in similar ways... whatever that means). (benzos are used to treat alcohol dependence in rehabilitation... which causes real problems for those addicted to both... but them's the risks you takes). And it's beliefs such as these is why I feel I have to protect my pseudonymity... though not sure I've done such a great job... and certainly not against the NSAs of the world... and while I beleive it is an enlightened philosophy I'm sure it makes me a target of at least some sizeable minority groups if not worse. Though I'm still convinced of the logic of it... and I feel I have backing historically from Jon Stuart Mill to Adam Smith and others and beyond... and I also feel the tide is turning in my favour... though very very slowly... certainly the process will take longer than my remaining life time. Changing minds one person at a time. I watched a video by Yann LeCun today On the problems with neural networks... He said that AI used to be thought of as symbolic manipulation... that thought was about symbols... symbolic thought... which is where you are still stuck with your approach... But he said Geoff Hinton is now calling it thought vectors... that we can turn it all into vectors and manipulate those... I tend to agree... because the state of all neurons in a brain can actually be described by just one massive vector that evolves through time by the function described by the physics of neurons, their connections and sensory input. A great example of this is that by a technique called vector word embedding, in which words are assigned to vectors of reals... and then using machine learning techniques to learn vectors for each of the words we can then use simple vector addition and lookups to answer questions that I don't think your bots will ever be able to achieve... all learnt through example. So we can answer questions like queen is to woman as man is to??? With nothing more than vector addition and nearest neighbour lookup. Ie... (replacing the words by the vectors learned for each word, and then finding the word closest to the resulting vector we get things like): queen - woman + man = king beijing - china + france = paris I don't believe symbolic processing could ever achieve this... let alone achieve it just by being given sentence fragments from wikipedia. The future of AI IS vectors (well, vectors, matrices, tensors and the right kind of non-linearities)... and possibly a couple of other things are missing but we're pretty fucking close. Your symbolic AI is never going to imagine a frog... fine... we got some way to go... but no way you're ever going to expert based rule system your way to even scrambled frog tumors. No... http://techtalks.tv/talks/whats-wrong-with-deep-learning/61639/ Though playback buffered annoyingly and even pausing it for long periods of time didn't seem to help much... YMMV. The comment was aimed at trane... And... if you end up doing vector calculations, learning vector representations for symbols, for example, then you are doing vector based AI... just because you are using symbolic notation (which is what (almost) all our programming languages are, right... symbolic) to do your vector processing doesn't mean that you are doing symbolic AI... you're doing vector AI... so... I don't think that word means what you think it does... A quick search of google gives this: Symbolic AI (or Classical AI) is the branch of artificial intelligence research that concerns itself with attempting to explicitly represent human knowledge in a declarative form (i.e. facts and rules). So... I repeat... using symbolic notation is what we do to implement our vector processing and such, and we learn representations of states which are vectors... well that's now vector AI, not symbolic AI... because we aren't explicitly encoding that knowledge in declarative form, but instead encoding knowledge in learned weight matrices. Okay... also I'm assuming BKO here is your mumblelang... and not say, the Belorussian Communist Organisation, which shows up in wikipedia as a disambiguation for BKO, whereas your mumblelang or anything like it, does not... though I'm sure some members of the BKO are possibly surprisingly good and matrix multiplication. Yes... your language works with vectors and matrices and hopefully tensors too I imagine... can do functions on them and so fourth... so, I see no reason why you couldn't implement ANNs with them... I mean... if you want to try I could even give you a simple recipe for learning vector word embedding which is your efforts so far cover like 90% of what is needed... ngram training examples (probably need at least 5gram)... and learn a simple one layer model (okay, maybe two, but one of them) which is just single weight matrix, which is your vector word embedding... might be very cool. Now... the difference between Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, et al and Hawkins is that the former are widely respected pioneers, who have made major breakthroughs, and smashed existing records on well known datasets, time and time again in the field whilst providing source code and mathematics and analysis and justifications for it... while Hawkins is generally considered a joke in machine learning who hasn't demonstrated anything, made any breakthroughs and never provided any working code or even mathematical recipes for anything... so... you make your own mind up. On the good side, yeah... sparse representations are widely popular already in convolutional networks and have proven to provide and behave as a very good strongly non-linear regularizers for many practical problems... that frog tumor soup network uses them. On the bad side... I don't think anyone but Hawkins really knows what HTM is, exactly... Got code Jeff? No... didn't think so. So, there's that. Do you want me to give you the recipe, so you could try and implement it in mumblelang (are we calling it BKO now?)? If not... or just to get a start anyway... here's some starting points: http://code.google.com/p/word2vec/ <--- actual working code http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3781.pdf <--- the first PDF I could find from the word2vec readme http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/words2actions/talks/YBengioInvitedTalk.pdf <--- a pdf I found, maybe useful maybe not... Basically... you take say a 5gram training example... given the first two words, and the last two words as input, you want to predict the middle word... Let me know if you want to give it a try... I think it would be fun... and your language has some nice features for it... the 1 hot word encoding input model is uniquely suited to it (being a vector of all zeros except for 1 to represent the word at the same place in the vector as your word index in your dictionary list)... it's just a matrix multiplication, softmax output and error backpropagation away from working... though in reality the big models now use streamlined GPU processing for all the matrix stuff, and I'm sure you're a while away from that... but word2vec is nearly braindead simple compared to frog discriminators. Well sure... maybe you are doing symbolic AI... I don't really know... Ummm... I'm not on any K5 mailing list... certainly not with my main account... I don't think anyone knows my real name here... I do kind of worry about being linked to my real identity... I'm not the most politically correct of people... and that separation from real life has always enabled me to be more candid, jokey, trolly... not everything I write is always exactly true either... but I digress. But symbolic AI is all rule based like trane would say... if it's green and has wings and a beak it's a cockatiel, but if it's a slightly hooked beak it's a african parrakeet type of thing (I don't know, just an example)... but then what the fuck is a beak... or slightly hooked... what the fuck is 'it' and what do you mean by green... and then you have to add another rule... like if it has a red spot on its cheek then it's actually a red spotted green african parrakeet... blah blah blah... Except this one's not actually a red spotted green african parrakeet... because if it's made of wood, which you can tell because of some grain shit, it's varnishy looking or something, it's actually a toy red spotted green african parrakeet... fuck that noise. That is symbolic AI and that approach is just never ever going to work... Sure, you can try... it's clear you're not doing ANNs so far... even though Hawkins stuff is still closer to vector AI than symbolic AI. No... you show it examples of birds and parakeets... and one day when we get really good at it, you just give it one example of a red spotted green african parrakeet and it'll learn to generalise that information to all future red spotted green african parakeets... but all that knowledge isn't embedded as a list of if then else statements (or equivalent but smarter data structures), but weight matrices generating vectors of hierarchical probabilistic feature detectors... and it's seen wooden toys that aren't actual parakeets but knows enough about wooden toys and parakeets to make the generalisation to the fact that it's a wooden toy red spotted green african parrakeet though it has never seen one before. We aren't quite there yet... but we're getting close. I don't know enough of your work to say whether you are actually doing or planning on doing symbolic AI or vector AI... but I haven't seen much of it either... though your stats stuff is pretty clearly straight symbolic 'AI'. Yeah... like I said... numenta and HTM are all widely considered jokes in the ML community... and lets be generous and say even if his stuff does work... he's still a joke for practical reasons because the information how to do that isn't coming back into the academic community... we aren't learning anything from him... he clearly isn't giving all the details you need to implement his stuff... he's holding onto the secret sauce... And what's his records on open data sets, like ImNet, or whatever the voice recognition data set is... he's literally no where on any standardised data sets we use to bench mark progress in the field... literally a nobody... if he had results... even if he didn't publish the black box magic he would have something to demonstrate... he has nada, zip, nothing... even if he's so advanced he's solving problems that google can't solve... there's no dataset to bench mark against... it's all hype, marketing and no science. And of the ideas he has released, you don't think those haven't been gone over by the graduate students working for the actual heros in the field? You don't think those ideas wouldn't have already been absorbed into the collective conciousness of the known contributors and their teams? He's far from an unknown in the field... he's just a known outsider, possibly looney. No... he's literally all talk and no trousers... neuroscientology institution hype of otherwise... Literally the entire field has it's roots in actual neuroscience... though abstracted quite a bit (the thought is we don't have to mimic how birds actually fly... but knowing how birds fly is still very useful starting point). If you follow /r/MachineLearning... the only person who posts there about Numenta, Grok, HTM and all that other bullshit is Hawkins himself... always promoting his business and never the science... and he gets mercilessly mocked and downvoted there... Here's a paper, he says, on HTM, oh... but that isn't enough information for anyone to actually implement it... no just some abstract ideas for which we already have analogs like recursive nets, plan chaining, long-short-term-memory, neural turing machines and other things you'll see LeCun mention in the video of linked. Fucksake... even DeepMind (Atari playing AI) has open source equivalents. Seriously... you're backing the wrong horse in this race... he's no scientist... he's a businessman playing a scientist for money... Every idea he's had the rest are way in advance of him... you just don't know where to look or don't follow the field. You just won't learn enough from him to actually implement anything. By the way... at least he's not so stupid to be doing symbolic AI... his stuff is at least vector AI too. Well sure... Like I said... it's your project... go for it... But symbolic AI was there at the start (hence why it is called also known as classical AI)... this was the approach since like the 60s or earlier... and they just hit wall after wall... I don't expect any major breakthroughs from it now... But I would be interested in your explaination why you think it can be made to work? How do you plan on embedding your rules into your lang though? I'd be interested in that... Clearly you do more than just tensors, right? I mean, the elements can hold more than just numbers, yes? They could be mappings from strings to strings for example? Yeah... you got your engine... that's cool... I'm not disparaging your work in general... It's good stuff... and fuck it, no one's paying you... it's your time, your toys, I'm not dictating or anything... or even expecting any justification... I am interested in your thoughts though. Ummm.... sorry... did a quick search... can you link me to sye's post or direct to your github page again? Sorry and thanks. I agree that physicists are often very good in all sorts of fields requiring maths... So... possibly... why not? Okay... Still not convinced... Could you please link one video or talk by Hawkins that could give me a good idea of what you and him are on about, or what makes his approach special or whatever... something to give me a general grasp of what makes his approach so much better? Also, what maths do you have? Like, what are you trying to achieve? A lot of ML is either prediction or inference... and they come at it from many different angles... but usually either statistical or neuronal inspired models (with the best being a mix of both)... Also internal representations... such as autoencoders... Is your approach statistical? Cause that's where I think classic AI really falls apart... rule based methods aren't statistical... and I think the real world is statistical, while rules are binary... Like when you look at a cloud and see a face... It is a cloud... but there's something in your brain going... that might just be a face you know... maybe like 1% it's actually a face. Also... although ML is a branch of AI... I mostly think of ML as attempting to learn how to understand the world through example... and AI more generally on planning and optimisation given specific goals... I think GAI will be a mix of the two... ML to understand the world... and AI (like Q reinforcement learning) to achieve the goals given the understanding of the effects (rewards) of actions given a state... but the ML part learns about the states and actions and how they transition etc, while learning the payoffs... I mean clearly... our brains do it with just neurons. Also... I don't really understand the symbolic AI approach at all... our brain clearly does not manipulate symbols directly... it encodes symbols into neurons and maps relations between them like that... There are no symbols in our heads... only neurons... symbols exist outside our heads and only representations of symbols inside them. BTW, saw another great talk by Hinton today... discussing how the brain might be doing backpropagation... although we know it doesn't send error signals backwards... it doesn't use symmetric weights... etc... It's not like these guys don't know neuroscience... we know real brains use stochastic spiking neurons... neuroscience inspired ANNs after all. Here's the reddit link to the video: http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/3geizt/geoff_hinton_heres_how_t he_brain_implements/ I wasn't too sure that maybe I was being a bit too harsh on Hawkins... so, I went through /r/MachineLearning looking for posts to see if maybe I was wrong or not... The general feeling I get is that the above analysis is basically correct... that Hawkins really isn't doing anything special or useful in pretty much any way at all, either regarding ML, AI or insight into computational modeling of the neocortex... On one point of fact I've been mistaken on is that there do appear to be implementations of HTMs available... a Java HTM implementation free for personal use exists... so, there's that... But, the general consensus there does seem to be that he is all about marketing over science... that he's ignoring existing work and progress made in ML, and that he has neither achieved any results comparable to current state of the art in terms of solving the engineering side of practical ML problems, nor has he demonstrated that his systems operate like the biological neocortex... basically failing pretty much both of his stated motivations. That his systems aren't even capable of solving MNIST --- even trane managed to build a very basic ANN capable of doing a passable job on MNIST. I think the comments in this post give a reasonably fair view of the overall vibe ML has towards Hawkins. The best that can be said is that no-one knows what the answer is to AI, so more approaches the better... but nothing you've said or that I've read or seen from or about Hawkins makes me think he's on the right track compared to all the others (Hinton, Ng, Bengio, LeCun, Norvig) which all seem to happily bounce ideas off each other while trying different avenues... and then there's Hawkins... all out there on his own... Just doesn't seem likely to me. He seems like a businessman, not a scientist or engineer in this field. The other odd thing is the mainstream guys aren't saying he's particularly wrong... that his ideas are in most ways quite similar and not that extraordinary... while he claims that his ideas are totally different, unique and unlike anyone else... you see what I'm saying? I mean... you do whatever you like... but going off in that direction without looking at or having any grasp of the mainstream efforts seems a little bit premature... others suggest he's just reinventing old well known techniques without even knowing what they are. I've been practicing ML/AI as a hobby (though never employed for it or published or anything like that) now for over 20 years... I've seen all sorts of models and techniques... and nothing from Numenta strikes me as worth investing much time in. Change my mind? What is it that grabs you with his work over Hinton's? Do you know what k-means is? What an RBM is? How DBNs work? Is it just that Hawkins work has been your introduction to this field and you haven't looked much further? Actually, I've been seriously thinking of something like this... ever since the reddit pao-gate and failure of voat to handle the load. A viable model for funding a reddit like website without relying on VC funding... a user funded site... by tying karma to real world value... say make karma purchasable or exchangeable for bitcoin... Upvoting of content would (probably) be a simple transfer of karma... but downvoting might cost twice the karma... (with the value of the lost karma going to the website to fund it). Just a preliminary thought. Would be interesting getting the 'costs and benefits' right to encourage the sort of behaviours you would want to see. Anyone perhaps interested in working on such a project? Anyone want to think of a good DNS registrable name for it? Wut? Seriously... I don't understand... Double spending? How so? Rights and head counts? I know you don't english all that well... maybe try quantity over quality... expand on your thoughts please. Well I think you just threw in the double spending thing cause you heard it's possible with bitcoin somehow (only with zero-confirmation transactions)... rather than a serious argument against it. And I answered the voting rights point in my other comment. The problem is sites like slashdot, digg, reddit is that as they become popular, they get taken over by the VC funders who take the sites in directions the users don't necessarily like... on the opposite end are sites like K5 and voat... where lack of funding just leaves the sites unmaintained to die in obscurity... I'm proposing a user funded site... where the part of actual funds are part of the process of content creation and moderation... organically paid for by users... without being an unnecessary burden on users. You can post content without having to purchase anything... you can earn credit to by posting to gain the same moderation rights as paid users... and paying users get the first say... it needn't be expensive or subscription based... say $1 could get you 1000 votes or something... and the long term result is that money going to pay for the upkeep of the site. Not geek foolishness at all... (possibly) an economic answer to the problems I see with these sites. Ah shit... you might be right... Clearly not about the double spending thing... that's just some straight up confucius confusion thing you asians are into... I'm sure... but the older and young thing... or put it another way, maybe say, there's nothing new under the sun. Thinking of domain names for the idea I came across: http://www.bitvoat.com/ It kind of looks like what I'm talking about... fuck... ... ... I hope it fails miserably and they kill themselves... the stupid pre-my-idea stealing fucks. What a bunch of retarded fucksticks. There's no way that will ever work... what a load of geek foolishness... I hope they die in a fucking fire. Faggits. Of course, my version would have been better... but still... fuck them. I don't see any adverts... adblocker and all... I guess adverts aren't that bad... if they are supplemental... it's where advertisers begin dictating content that bothers me... I've noticed a shift already in reddit content... like the place has become really boring in the last few days. I mean... I don't agree with racist shit... but freedom of speech kind of requires that we defend the scoundrels, because we either defend speech we dislike or it is meaningless... I know private entities don't have any obligation to provide a soapbox for anyone... but I prefer sites that minimally censor (within the realms of the law, obviously)... and a seemingly liberal speech policy was one of the things that attracted me to K5 in the first place. Also... It seems silly to integrate many different coin types into their site... I'd like people to be able to purchase one currency (effectively karma) with different currencies... and cash out to their prefered coin... so, effectively run some sort of exchange. Further investigation makes me think the site doesn't work like I'm talking about... one upvote is still one upvote... and the tip that goes along with it is incidental and unrelated (it's a user set tip, rather than built right into the mechanics of the site). Still looking for that offer to buy me a domain name... anyone? anyone? bueller? bueller? anyone? Yeah... basically agree These SJWs really don't understand the concepts like free speech... Also... they aim for equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity... they're socialists - everyone get the same independent of ability or effort... not free marketers - everyone have the same opportunity to provide and be rewarded according to supply and demand. Of course, I'm a free-market with social safety net kind of a guy (basic income and wealth taxes). Shit... http://voat.co/v/Niggers/comments/392526 This is currently 13th on /v/all... Voat is going to have a hard time going mainstream while this shit is so popular... The problem with defending free speech is you come across as appearing to defend the ideas behind the speech rather than simply the right to the speech itself. Oh well... interesting. Actually... I got the hosted hardware... I think it needs a good/solid/stable brand name and therefore domain name though... I'm pretty sure that's key to these things... as sye would say... No? Free domain names too? Sounds too good to be true... there's got to be a catch. Maybe if you go big they charge a fortune to buy the domain name off of them? Interesting... but a simple rule is if it sounds to good to be true it probably is. (probably, not definitely). I might look into it. What you're saying is that people prefer the illusion of free to actually free... That kind of manipulation obviously exists on reddit too... it's just not blatant. I dunno... I guess I still had the idea of one account one vote... but why remove the illusion... if someone wants to spend $10k to have their link at the top of the page for a few hours... maybe I wouldn't complain??? I'm thinking that people could buy karma... but would spend karma to vote... and getting upvoted would earn karma... so there'd be no freemium features as such... you either earn it (through grinding by providing content) or you pay for it... but no one's really locked out of anything. Anyone willing to buy me a domain name to experiment with? (Yeah... I'm broke... and jobless... so sue me). Yeah... I'm not really thinking of pay2play... More like using karma as an actual currency rather than just a free thing people measure each other's dicks by. The more karma you have, the more you can influence the site through voting (either up or down)... but you do that by spending your own karma. Also... as far as buying and selling karma... the site doesn't sell it directly either... the site distributes it to users... who can then sell it to each other for bitcoin on the site exchange... that way, the amount of karma in the system is basically constant, or at least managed by the site... and buying and selling it is just another way of transferring between users besides voting. Seriously... if someone offers to buy me a domain (once we agree on a name... I got some ideas now)... I'll build it. From what I do understand... Currently reddit voting rights are tied to account creation... one account one vote... but account creation is unlimited and uncontrolled... so sybil attacks are trivial. (You could in theory create 1000 accounts and have them all upvote one story... although they do attempt to detect that... smart manipulators know how to get around that). Under what I'm proposing votes would be limited to real world resources... bitcoins... kind of a 'put your money where your mouth is'... and far more democratic (for some definition of democratic... of course... money is speech and all the flaws that go along with that... but maybe still the best that can currently be done)... But money motivates... very good submitters and commenters could earn an actual living from it... and it could also fund the site without having to pander to advertisers... but directly to users. I bet only the most obvious of dupe account abuse gets noticed though... I created about 100 accounts on reddit while I was trolling SRS... and botted them and everything... their votes were going through just fine (mind you I wasn't upvoting my stuff, but downvoting their stuff)... though that was a few years back now, possibly the detection algorithms are better now (maybe I just wasn't stupid with it)... still... I imagine a fair bit of abuse continues on. I consider myself a socially-liberal free-market semi-athiest (actually a psuedo-discordian-satanist) and don't appreciate your attacks in that direction (especially your blanket blame casting)... though I certainly agree that reddit has a hivemind problem. LOL yeah... dynamic IP for the win... My dupe accounts were all created with different IPs and the kind of IP fuckery I learned from my IRC days where OPs would block whole countries trying to stop me. Yeah... if you can't troll... what's the point? Trolling, like sarcasm, is the highest form of intelligence in many ways... truth through absurdity. NO! Yes... Maybe?? Depends on what the hell you are on about. I CAN't work it out. You don't like IP hopping? No? I don't know what you're objecting to... I'm just going by the (1) discourage vote and your cryptic, as usual, comment. Yah... namecoin is interesting... hoping to build a truly distributed and uncensorable domain name system as a byproduct of coin mining... it's been a long time since I looked into it, so can't say more than that... ncdns (I think) is the dns server and daemon (maybe the coin wallet reference system too? I dunno)... the namecoin replacement for bind (and maybe bitcoind equivalent)... but only from a cursory look at it. As an alternative, uncensorable domain name system it looks really promising... as a crypto-coin... I'm not so sure. I don't know the developer... the last famous developer I used to regularly chat to was in my #openp2p channel I opped on freenet back in the day (circa 2000 or so)... I use to chat with him about how it would be possible to use merkle trees to split files into smallish chunks that could be requested by hash independently from different machines and rebuilt into a single file with cheap cryptographic error checking (both accidental or maliciously) as an efficient means of distributing uncensorable files without relying on a central server... I was interested in making a plugin for webservers and browsers to take the load off of servers at a small cost to the users (instead of a server sending the same static image over and over... it could send a hash from which the image could be retrieved in chunks from the adhoc network and the server would only have to seed it once)... I had noble goals while he was dirty thieving copyright infringer who just wanted to steal music, software and hardcore gay porn... So bram went on to make bitorrent with those ideas... and now that he's a multimillionaire faggit he pretends like we never had those conversations, that I don't even exist and refuses to answer my emails and phone calls. But I know... I got the logs... I'm coming for you bram!!!! (True story btw... well... except maybe he introduced merkle trees to me more than say ideas I introduced to him... but it was my channel and convos with me in which he put the ideas together that went on to become the software we all know and love today -- also maybe not hardcore gay porn... but it's my story and fuck him... he never shared any of the profits with me). Also, fuck him for saying that bitcoin mining (proof of work) is probably the most efficient possible waste of resources, ie dirty electricity which creates greenhouse gases... if he knew anything about economics he would realise the negative externalities of electricity generation (carbon production) should be taxed at the source (ie, carbon pollution created in electricity generation should be taxed into the price of electricity that produces it to bring about an efficient allocation of economic resources), and not the use it goes to (ie, proof of work -- which isn't a waste but an efficient economic allocation required to secure the blockchain --- except that the price of electricity doesn't account for its true externalities, tough shit - the fault is not with bitcoin but with governments that regulate carbon polluters - everyone wants cheap electricity, the planet we inhabit be damned)... Oh... one last thing... in the presentation he gave... he did point out that darkcoin (a proof of stake coin --- which theory now shows cannot work to generate a trustless and uncensorable consensus) is probably already centrally controlled and manipulated... don't plan on holding that one long term or any proof of stake coin!... they're all fundamentally flawed and are scams (either deliberately or through ignorance)... anyone who at any point ever holds a majority controls the resulting blockchain FOR ALL TIME... ie, they can rewrite the blockchain history whenever they like... been meaning to tell you that for a while now. You can thank me in upvoats... or with better explanations of your discouragements (though I accept it's probably just passive-aggressive payback behaviour related to the previous times I trolled you). I'm going to take the approach is that it is what it is... So... I don't want to give any more info away than that at this point. First step obviously is have a website people can log into, and post and comment on... I know... far from some grand vision sounding thing at this point... It's the site that matters... which means implementation... I still believe in build it and they will come. But I want to do incremental improvements to it... and currently I got nothing... so anything will be a start. The first release is probably going to be django driven. In all honesty... Obviously someone would have to pay for me to do that... I can't afford to relocate to NYC on my own dime... and I hear it's expensive there. I mean... I'd need thousands to move there... and thousands a month to stay there... right now, my costs are pretty low... and there's also the legal nightmare fact that I do not own a US passport! So... sure... everything has a price... but who could and would pay for that? Also, in terms of regulation... What I plan to do, NYC might possibly be the absolute last place to legally run the company from... what with the BitLicense thing... If I own the domain personally... I know the laws in my own town pretty well enough to know that I'd have the freedom (at least initially) to create what I invision without much risk. I have a .com domain name chosen... If you are serious... send me enough BTC to register the domain... and a recommendation where to register... such that the resulting domain is fully under my control... Do you think you would do that? Though registering the domain is all I promise to do with the funds... what you'll really be buying is just seeing what I do with it... which could be nothing at all. I'll publish a diary about that soon. Cool... thanks sye... I'm going to buy a particular domain name I have in mind... I think it's important to have good marketing... so a good brand and therefore good name... that I hope will be the front door of the site... Of course... if something better comes along and a name change looks necessary, can do that too. I can wait on the test site name just now... but will talk to you about it when it comes time to create a testing and staging site... I got some ideas how I'm going to run all that... but things will take time... I don't imagine there'll be much in the way of a useful site in the next couple of months... Still... gonna keep everyone posted. Bram's video on bitcoin waste: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZaB4hM8SQ4 You can see how close and yet how far away he is with his economic thinking regarding the idea that bitcoin mining is a problem because of the carbon pollution it indirectly creates through its electricity consumption when he notes that that won't be a problem when we move to greener forms of electricity production... ie, the problem is really due to the underpricing of carbon producing electricity generation... and not the use of electricity itself. Also, in this video he points out that darkcoin is probably already pwned by the creator... BEWARE!!! Still fuck bram... REMEMBER YOUR ROOTS DUDE!!! Procrasti needs a job!!! I was there for you before you were rich and famous... how soon you forgot those whose shoulders you stood on! (yeah, he's a short ass motherfucker... yeah I said it!). Or you upset about the confucius thing? Maybe multiple accounts on reddit? FYI, I only ever used them to troll the SRS SJWs... I hope you don't identify with them... biggest bunch of illogical braindead self-righteous morons you will ever meet. I promise the website won't ever cost you money... Old man. Of course, i realise that many people also have that view... I think I have it sorted... You're right also that the main purpose of the site should be for my own entertainment (or utility)... I won't say more than that. A Domain Name First. That's true... But... pretty sure it's a reasonable promise... you shouldn't have to either... doesn't mean you can't... but that you won't have to. Glad you've transferred the domain... thanks so much for your contributions so far... I was about $5 away from affording a basic SSL too... but now I'm like $20 away because I decided to buy kr5ddit.com instead of kr5dit.com at the last minute... then panic bought kr5dit.com, just in case... Oh well... You certainly don't owe me half the difference... what you've given was way above expectations. I'm making some decisions now about how to implement comments... but I like my kr5dit development like I do my women... quick and dirty... get it done, then try to fix up all the mess later. I'm sure I replied to this comment already... Where'd it go? Did you see it? I think rusty is fucking with me... I'm sure I made a huge comment about the cloud and all that business... maybe I didn't post it and lost it in a reboot or something... That was never trolling just now... Yes it was. No it wasn't. Ahhh... but you're still trolling me now... I got you. No you haven't... ... ... ... I could just be trolling in my spare time. I've had enough of this. No you haven't. Forget this... I'm going to troll myself on my own website with blackjack and hookers... forget the blackjack and hookers. You're not dependent on 'kindness'... It's an exchange of utility... you provide utility to an employer beyond the utility they lose in paying you... and you gain utility in terms of a paycheque beyond the utility you lose in doing something else you might prefer. For you... quite literally... the utility you lose working is more than what the utility you gain from that paycheque... ie, the utility (difference between benefit and cost) to you means that you simply prefer not to work (especially as welfare provides enough utility for you without working)... and from an economic point of view... that's actually quite fine. The fact that you can't work with people... are mentally defective and don't understand normal socialisation is all fine... fair enough. Your utility function is aberrant... and only really sustainable because the rest of society is willing to carry you. Where you make that mistake is in assuming and promoting the idea that everyone else should be like that too... that's fucking stupid. For most people, a job provides net utility, and that is their choice and you should respect that... The fact that you think the world can run with no one working is insanity I cannot comprehend. It's like you believe the world is already run by robots and no one has to do anything and we can all be fed, clothed, housed and have our toys and entertainment... you believe in a world where we can all get blowjobs and no one has to give them... Reality doesn't work like that. Your ideas about basic income would make much more sense if you accepted reality, rather than preached your 'it is as you fantasise' fallacies. Really... no... the real world doesn't work like that... They are automated and need only someone to press a button to operate We haven't yet reached that stage of automation... We MIGHT one day... for sure... it's a fantastic goal... and we should plan our economies to handle that eventuality (because the owner of the button might not want to share it with you)... but right now it is just that, fantasy. It's like this... let's say in the past that 1 farmer could feed 10 people... but with technology now 1 farmer can feed 100k people... ie, technology has given us 10k fold increase in production... You think 7 Billion divided by 100k is zero... but your maths is very wrong... it still requires actual workers... not zero. The problem with your exaggerations is that it is impossible for others to differentiate it from ignorance. Surpluses only occur when there are price controls... A surplus of labour just means there are more people willing to work at minimum wage than people willing to pay for it. And on that note... I agree... the technological advancements push wages down as more can be done for less... that is all true... But surplus of production capacity? For what? Clearly there isn't a surplus of super cars and super yachts and mansions, etc... many more people want these than are able to afford them... Surplus of food production? Why yes... because of deliberate economic policy we have this... which is a good thing over all... even though less super cars get produced because of it. But lets say we outlawed paying people for work... in either money or in kind... do you think we could maintain society like this? Almost certainly not... most people work because they are compensated for it, which means they can buy stuff and survive etc... Now... as more automation comes along... and with current distribution of the rewards of that automation going to the capital owners, the very small elite... yeah... less people are going to be employed (at minimum or even livable wages) and the majority will suffer... Which is why I agree that a basic income is pretty much necessary if we want to provide the benefits to the majority of society rather than just that wealthy elite... The problem is you think no one has to work... or at least, no one has to work for money... completely ignoring economic reality... Despite your fantasy notions... resources are limited (in respect to desires)... and resources will always be limited. So we need a way to distribute them... a sane, rational way... not just free money for everyone and we all sit back and hope someone else will do the hard work for the pure love of shovelling shit that has to be shovelled. You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and just declare economics to be stupid... when the answer is right there at the front of every micro-economics course --- ie, the second welfare theorem. Wealth cannot simply be printed... only redistributed... and you're printing money redistributes from the wrong people... basic income and wealth tax is the only rational solution to the concentration of wealth problem inherent in capitalism and technological advances. Right... You don't want a 'parallel system' at all... that's the system you actually have right now... you just can't afford the resources to spend the time doing things you want without having to do things you don't... well guess what buddy... that's literally everyone on the fucking planet. I do think we can maintain current output, indeed increase it at a faster pace, if we created money to give people. And pretty much everyone else thinks not. So there. Trane don't work for no company... haven't you been paying attention? Trane wouldn't work in an iron lung. Of course he did, it was a venture capitalist... It wanted him to work for seed funding. Trane called it a dirty jobist and told it not to stick its beak into his business (ie, collecting welfare cheques and smoking crack), but it threatened to tweet about him... so trane got into a flap, put his foot down and silenced the little whistleblower. He's been flocking cagey about the whole thing ever since. But you don't produce... You don't actually provide utility to others... No one thinks your bots are worth anything... no one gives a shit... you don't provide value to others at all. I like to wank because I like to... not with any idea of a quid pro quo exchange involved... why don't people give me free money for that? Why can't we all just spend our time wanking instead of working for others? When I work for others I lose my boner and all my wanking instincts shuts down. I understand that you are mentally defective and unable to work with others and you suffer maybe disproportionately from that and you are actually disabled... socially retarded, ineffective and useless... that you are a burden on the rest of us... that is fine... we have decided to carry some deadweight because we can both afford to, and because it is social safety net... there by the grace of god... any one of us could potentially end up like you with your mental defects, etc... but please don't suggest that your way of being is some sort of ideal to strive for... far from it... if everyone was like you, society simply wouldn't function, because someone has to produce the goods and services you consume. You are net loss to society... and we accept that... because some people are fucking losers like you... and we can afford for a small percentage of people to be a net loss... but we can't afford for everyone to be a net loss... maths and reality don't allow for it. LOL This is just basic proof of how mentally challenged you are... Google is NOT using your code... you are suffering from delusions of grandeur. Your code is shit and you should know it. In some strange universe where they did use your code... 'stolen' would not the right word to describe it... by definition you cannot steal that which is given freely. Either way... even if some 12 year old downloaded your code and 'used' it... it still wouldn't be worth the bandwidth used to transmit it. And lets go further into fantasy land... if it did have utility... and we lived in a world without externalities and you were compensated for their gain in utility... it still wouldn't be enough to buy seed to feed your dead birds. Gosh... you think economists can't model externalities... You are so enlightened. No... our models cover your scenario exactly... we also know it isn't as efficient as other scenarios. Rivers in egypt mate... Gossip is a cop-out... everything is gossip... and your words are worth less than even that. You would claim that 1+1=2 is gossip... and that is pure nonsense... (yes, it is gossip in some very deep philosophical sense... but it's pure nonsense in a real, concrete and practical sense)... and (micro) economics is mathematically as sound as simple addition. Your 'work' operates on what micro-economists call pure positive externalities... You do it because it has utility to you (not financial utility, but whatever internal sense of fascination, desire, or whatever it is that drives you to do it utility)... and any benefits others gain from it, utility to them, is totally uncompensated... it works as a public good... Clearly if it has utility to you, you will produce it anyway... which you do... but if through some magic others could give you additional utility (say financial for sake of argument) for the utility they gain from it... you would produce even more of it... because some utility plus more utility is even more utility... and you would produce that which gave you the most utility over all... ie, that which was most rewarded... Which is why free software is under produced compared to what would be produced if it existed in a free market (not to be confused with the market which is what actually exists). So, no... it's not gossip (except in some deep philosophical sense where literally everything is gossip)... and certainly not drivel... and no more invention than the laws of physics are an invention (which is only model of reality rather than reality itself after all). Yeah... that's the cool thing about unitless measures... you really can measure them in anything... On the one hand, utility is purely monetary. I assume you meant purely non-monetary... because it is... although it also does apply to money too.. obviously... it's unitless. Hits of crack or dollars... is all dollars to donuts to us econs... shame you're too retarded to see that is true. In fact... if you enjoy exercise... you could measure it in time spent exercising... and if you hated exercise, you could measure it time spent not exercising! You could measure it in how much dick you get to suck. Just because an econ prof uses dollars in his examples doesn't mean there's a rule that you have to measure in dollars. But if you forget from now on that utility is a unitless measure... I'm going to ban you and only you forever from my free speech websites. Tell me how many dollars that's worth to you. Except that we don't really care /why/... utility doesn't model why... it models what you did... If you exercised... it had utility for you... and we can measure your utility in amount of time you would rather exercise for. Always attack style when you can't attack substance... It shows you know what you talking about. I love your agent AI theory... The theory that if you can't create an AI capable agent then making a bunch of such agents work together will create AI... It's laughable. Don't worry... I know about MoE models... For example, it's best to take the geometric mean of the outputs rather than the algebraic mean to get a good estimate... The difference there is that you have a bunch of agents that are individually actually capable of AI... not a bunch of bots that don't know if socrates is a man, a hairless chicken or is all men socrates or some shit. Not surprisingly, you're speaking bullshit You cause more harm by working than by sitting home getting stoned. You are destroying the planet with your work Would a job building housing for the poor be causing more harm than the good it does? Providing education? What about a job creating sources of fresh water in third world countries? Etc and so fourth. Because you don't have a clue about economics you couldn't tell a positive externality from a negative externality... likewise your ass from your elbow. You're a fucking idiot. You're a mental defective and you don't fit into the world of humanity... You think it's humanity that should be removed... but humanity thinks it's you who should be destroyed... and the numbers are on our side. Enjoy being poor and old in the US... hope you can't afford the health care when the gangrene hits... and if you can... I hope you have the integrity to fix it yourself and not rely on some 'jobist' doctor. If someone you know is an asshole... they are probably an asshole... If everyone you know is an asshole... you are probably an asshole. If you think every human is an asshole... you're probably the worlds biggest asshole. Goddam trane is a fucking idiot asshole. Maybe Bullies are just Better People than You and Trane... Maybe fail faggots like you and him actually deserve what you get in life? Maybe the bullies just remind you that you aren't really worth the oxygen you waste? Legalise it? For you I'd make it compulsory. The other problem is... drugs are very prevalent in poor areas. I believe (from what I understand from Rat Park) that drug use is often self-medication... and I don't see that as a bad thing... In any case, it's people's own free will and utility to take them... but obviously there's going to be more of that in poor areas. And, also, many people deal drugs... because the black market means there are large profits to be made... and one of the few opportunities for people in these areas... and snitches get stitches. Combining the above... the laws against drugs have made the police the enemies of people in these communities not protectors of any kind... when there really is no need for laws against victimless crimes (which drug taking in itself is)... So... these people neither rely on nor want the police around... they have their own solutions (mostly violent)... and they deal with their own. This is all an unfortunate side effect of the war on drugs.. and could easily changed by removing prohibition II. Louis Theroux did a great documentary on, I think, policing in Philadelphia... and it's clear to me this is the problem with the hostility between the average person in that community and the police... and the police treat them all like scum too... It's a really fucked up situation... and not at all necessary. Yeah... well... I'd remove those limits too... Why create any black market? Even if it is in terms of limits (ie, rationing). If a person wants a kilo of cocaine or heroin, why stop them? The only possible reason I can think of is that they are supplying people who otherwise couldn't get it... or in the worst case scenario... forcing others to take it against their will... ie, using it like a poison! And in both cases this can be fixed by making people sign for it... so if any case is bought against someone, police have a good place to start their investigations. Maybe I got a real use for 10kg of heroin... maybe I want to do my own Rat Park experiment! Drugs ARE a victimless crime... No one is hurt against their will when they freely take them... No one is normally hurt by the simple free trade of drugs either... However, the law creates a black market... and the distinguishing feature of black markets is that they operate outside of the law... There is no recourse to the courts... so, violence must be used as an alternative enforment mechanism (courts are basically state sanctioned government monopoly on violence)... and those who operate in black markets, who are willing to use violence, unsurprisingly use those skills in other markets that really should only exist as black markets (child and forced sex trade, kidnapping, extortion, 'protection rackets', etc...)... By creating a black market, unnessarily, in drugs... we actually fund these people... It's not the free trade of drugs that causes these problems... it's purely prohibition... and gifting them this market makes them that more effective in all those other negative externality creating behaviours. And as to your above statement about the size of the drug market... I was taught this in the 90's but I expect it is still true... the world's top markets by expenditure are: 1) Military 2) Oil and automotive 3) Drugs 4) Computers It's absolutely ridiculous that we are trying to curb people's free choices... From a micro-economics perspective... this must create a dead-weight loss... which is a loss in social utility... but not just for the victims (peaceful users who become criminalised) but for the entirety of society (more crime, more policing, less freedoms, etc.). And the poor getting arrested for simple drug possession is exactly why they don't want the police around. This is probably, unfortunately, true... Heroin production in afghanistan has increased under US control... seriously? Yeah... Coca Cola is the only legal US importer of coca leaf... and the largest (only?) legal producer of cocaine in the US. Who are you inviting to Kr5ddit? You might be confused over the invite system... I'm going to help you by giving you some invites for some specific K5 users... Well... everyone I found from my $10 giveaway who isn't already a member. Follow the link and post an invite for your favourite candidates. Also: Who's going to make the first post? ANSWER: TDILLO WINS!!! Local-Roger: https://kr5ddit.com/invites/?address=1NKLnnHMAkLZQRA1JXQf9PWgakNCUXixN2 Hacker-Cracker: https://kr5ddit.com/invites/?address=1GSioGNLXGWfx2461xvJ5xhdATGyAEjWNg Balsamic Vinigga: https://kr5ddit.com/invites/?address=18EAcPATJ7qTggygB3ugkFeU6hDraSqbuQ Mirko: https://kr5ddit.com/invites/?address=1MfbXZAPX5swPv5isU4qSspKgeiWgJdV6v Anyone I missed? So... I'm planning on adding a user registration where potential users can post their own bitcoin address, and how much they bid... maybe why we should let them join... and then... when a user accepts an invitee, they get an address to send coins to (the site donation address will do actually!)... and then they'll only be able to sign up when they've sent enough... the person who accepts the invite get's like 50% of the remaining... with their inviter getting 50% of that... and so fourth until I'm loaded! Actually, the other way around... I could make it something like I get 30%, the person I invited, get's 30% of the remaining.. and so fourth... and their inviter gets the left over? Maybe give another 30% of the remaining to the new sign first... It's an idea... details. Maybe make it a dutch auction... where they only have to pay what the bid below them would have paid. And it'll be a modified dutch auction, because you won't be forced to take the highest bidder. Also... Any of you self signing motherfuckers are going to get hurt... so, be careful out there. So... get your invites while they're still cheap people! I searched through my $10 diary, and couldn't find your bitcoin address... Though I got a vague recollection that you did send it to me at some point... but I can't find it. So... if you want an invite... post your bitcoin address! Okay... that and your last comment about sending BTC to you... No one has to send BTC to redeem an invite at this point... You just need to know a BTC address they own to create an invite. It can all be done over an open channel... I don't have blaster's email address... it was all organised right here, in front of you all. If you want to invite someone... Just follow one of the links... and copy the URL back here... they can then (if they still own those keys) register a new user... It's perfectly safe, and only interacts with the site wallets... I do have a site wallet that can sign stuff... and the other wallet can only watch transactions... even with root access, no one can steal the actual site coins (though they could probably mess with the balances inside the database... though I have plans to make this impossible too... by publishing transactions... maybe). BTC addresses are safe to make public... No one can steal from you... the worst they can do is send you money... and possibly track where you send bitcoins from that address to. I only ask that new users sign a random string with their address to prove they own it... you cannot lose BTC doing this. Site assigned bitcoin addresses are in my wallet... I own and control all bitcoins sent to the site... It is safe to make your site assigned bitcoin (donation) address public... People can send you bitcoin which will go into Your (really my) Balances on the site. You might not want to make it public though... because you might want to hide how much you are spending on your free speech. So far, I've opted to allow people to keep them private... but that might change... but only if I really think it needs to. So far, I see no reason. Signing up with BTC is far more pseudonymous than even Facebook or Google. And the chance that you could lose real money accidently here is very small... keeping in mind that all money you send to the site (to the donation address, your address or anyone else's address) is really mine anyway. Don't post your private keys... don't post your secret electrum wallet seed... I think that should be obvious by the names of them... otherwise, you're completely safe. I wouldn't deliberately fuck you over... and I'm pretty confident in the technology. Though... do protect your own personal wallets... encrypt them with a password... if you hold large sums... first investigate... and learn to create cold storage wallets that have never been connected to an internet connected machine. (Yes! There are ways to send from offline wallets!). > Plus you got some people here that are actively AGAINST the use of BTC. So what about those people? Again, no one has to have BTC... Mostly I'm using the cryptographic features... If they're against the software itself... fuck em... not my problem. Though, down the track... I might open the invite system even more to allow people to sign up without BTC addresses. Though possibly we might have LTC and dogecoin before then... (maybe even one of the fucked up ones like drk... I don't know..)... One thing that is good about having users give a BTC address... is that if I chose to allow users to de-donate from the site... sending back to a single fixed address could go along way to showing that the site's functionality is not primarily useful for money laundering... for each user, one address money goes in... one address money goes back. It shouldn't make a good coin-mixer. There will be better and cheaper sites for that. So, I can understand, new shiny thing looks scary... this might put others off... maybe we'll put this in a faq. For right now... it's not a huge problem... I want the site to grow in users... but I want to do it in a controlled way that enables me to keep up with everyone... I know I got scaling issues that need fixing... The C-Section takes like four seconds to load... that's way too long. Don't Panic... and hope that helps. Also... only you, mumble and sye have any invites. Obviously I can create more for myself... but I don't think it's really fair for me to get all the invitees... And I don't want more new users than I have already given out invites for... not yet anyway... And blaster hasn't earned any yet. (So, do consider United Fools if he posts an address too). Though I have a plan for increasing user invite balances based on site usage... he'll probably be able to invite in a week or two. So, I really am counting on you to post invites... it's really as simple as following the above links and copy and pasting the generated link here... The generated invite link is unique to you and the address you supply... it's actually a signature generated by the site... and (besides me) cannot be forged by other users. If the site says a bitcoin address is invalid... it might be due to whitespace at the start or end... I noticed this making the above links... I should really strip whitespace from the input... but just be aware of that for now. You can make as many invites as you like... you could post an invite for all the above users... but the first one to register will cost you your invite. I'm counting on you tdillo... you're our only hope! Yeah... of course HHD will be allowed there... I know she hates me... so, she might not want to... Personally I think she took the whole B*tch thing way too seriously... but that's her business. Still... I'd like to see her there... someone's got to head up /k/ShitK5rdditSays... and I can't think of a better candidate. Unlike reddit, I plan to not only allow brigading, but encourage it. SKS should be a hoot. I'm guessing that you sent the invite to the mailing list for HackerCracker to pick up... if so cool... though he seems to be having some problems... I think I know what the problem is, and he's just been unlucky... and the fix is reasonably trivial (make the kr5ditum bitcoin server multithreaded)... but it's getting late for me... so maybe tomorrow. But thanks heaps anyway. It feels strange discussing this stuff here... when it should really be on kr5ddit... oh well... it's all good. For the self signing thing... sorry... I was kind ok joking... With an invite... you could of course create a sock puppet with a different bitcoin address you own... There's nothing really stopping you from doing that... it costs you an invite... I've been thinking that it might cause me problems re my pyramid scheme... but maybe not... it would if I distribute sign up rewards from the bottom up... but won't (as much) if I distribute them from the top down... It might affect some other ideas I have (like getting rewards from being upvoted... if I do that type of thing... in a similar manner). It's not a big issue... but I don't really want to encourage it... so, I meant... if you're going to invite your own sockpuppets... watch out for me! On this note... maybe I will allow it and add a flag you can set to show that you are inviting your own sock puppet... and I'd definitely allow it. It's really not a major issue... Okay... doing what? If it was during registration... which I imagine it may have been... I think I know what the problem could be... My poor little kr5ditum server, that deals with bitcoin, is single threaded... and can only deal with one bitcoin related request at a time... Whenever a bitcoin block gets announced on the blockchain, the server is notified, and it then makes a request back to the kr5ditum server to see if anyone has made any new transactions... It is possible that your tried to do something that depends on bitcoin behaviour (even displaying the redeem page does) at the same time as that... or the same time someone clicked one of the above links or something... If that is the case... the fix is pretty easy (I just have to add a class to the server class, and it becomes multithreaded)... but in the meantime, maybe try again? This should only be a problem on the invite pages. If it is consistent... or on another page... I'll have to investigate further. Please let me know. Works for me! I can go to your invite address, and then I can go to redeem your invite... and it all looks good... I can't actually redeem it though... so, I don't know if that's working... but it worked for Blaster on the last release... I don't think I changed any part of that on this release... and at least I know the kr5ditum server is operating correctly... You may have just been unlucky getting access to the kr5ditum server... I will make that multithreaded ASAP. Please try again and let me know. Oh god... not having much luck making it multithreaded in dev... certainly not as easy and straightforward as I'd been led to believe. I will find a way to make it work though... but please let me know if that's the problem so I'm not potentially wasting my time on something irrelevant. Removed a lot of unnecessary server calls from the invite view... hot patched that into prod. So... the problem should occur less often... but still need a multithreaded solution... Will work on it... but not now. Oh dear... I see... can you make a comment? It's always something... That's quite odd... Okay... I'm thinking its in some session variable. Cleared sessions... could you try again... If that doesn't work, can you try logging out and then back in again... Please let me know... some urls have changed... but they are showing up alright for me... I can post comments. LOL... yeah... I updated the site a bit while you were posting... I hope it survived and you didn't have to retype it... if so... good. You were literally posting to the old url for adding a comment... which kind of changed. Anyway... you didn't make a post... you made a comment in the old c-section... the scar left from which kr5ddit was dragged from kicking and screaming. Okay... don't have to fix that HTTP_REFERRER thing... yet... unless I get any complaints... there's another solution... but oh well... it's good for now. yeah... no... there's no way your comment would have survived a site upgrade... Well... I think I've given you all the improvements you asked for recently... it should now go back to your comment in the comment list... and same with moderation... unless the comment would appear on another page... and I should probably fix that at some point too. Don't be afraid to be the first to make a post either... Still some kind of cosmetic bugs with posts... but the C-Section was getting a bit messy... so this is the next symmetry break. Hope you enjoy it. Okay... let me know if either of those worked... What I fear is that it's my use of: HTTP_REFERRER... possibly your browser sends something different to mine... I really shouldn't have relied on it... I won't bother reverting the site... just yet... I'll fix the problem and push the changes through right now. Alright. I admit, I did a bit for the cool factor I mean... I got a secure way (as far as blaster's account here is secure) to log someone into the site... and it was all organised in the open in full view of everyone... and only he could log in... because only he has access to the private key that created his address. Public key cryptography... it rules... So, for now, that's how people sign up... They have to provide a bitcoin address to get an invite from someone. It doesn't cost them anything but a bit of time... for now. Sorry it was one of the three stooges... but no one else bothered... so, the rewards go to those who act... the offer was available to anyone. rewards... LOL. Yeah... I'm not really promoting the site like it was amway... People can't expect to make a job out of signing up users or anything... That and the pyramid scheme thing are kind of said tongue in cheek... I don't want to completely lose my humor just because I'm running a website. (Pyramid schemes are illegal... in what way exactly I'm not sure... but I don't think it's an actual pyramid scheme... I'm not promising riches to new users on the basis they sign up more users). OTOH... Invitees are tracked by inviter... and I want to have incentives for inviters... so it does kind of make a pyramid like invitation chain... I want to distribute rewards along it at some point, in certain ways. Would be nice to have a lawyer on board... I mean... what is and isn't a pyramid scheme is encoded in law... it's a technical distinction... and sometimes that comes down to nothing other than wording... so it's a little bit of dangerous ground... Fuck it... I've always been into grey markets... Yeah... it's not really a pyramid scheme... but you know how lawyers are... a few wrong words and suddenly the gov owns your house and jealously wants you to spend time being looked after by them and getting cuddles from Bubba. Also... US law isn't all that relevant, surprisingly... I can't find any specific links right now... but ASIC has rules that it will not (currently) regulate virtual currencies... so having an unregulated virtual currency exchange is explicitly legal here. Now... if I traded fiat as well... USD or AUD or any other recognised foreign currency... I would need licenses and all that bullshit... as it is, I don't. Though... one problem... even if what you are doing is perfectly legal in your own country... Stepping on US soil could get you locked up... Like those guys that ran the poker site that was legal in Europe... but got done when they passed through the US. I don't know if that could be a problem? Also... Kr5ddit is not currently owned by a registered business... I've made like $40 so far in donations... and spent about $25 in domain names... I've not got much risk yet... but will probably have to look into it more in the future and take that side of things more seriously. I was shagging my socialist roomy when the USB key found its way into an unexpected orifice. She didn't even notice at first from all the drugs she'd been taking... Do I Win? You're not very fun for a god. $ Whoever has the cure $ +1FP An Ode to CTS $ Heroin should be legalised. This BBC Article shows how recently heroin was used legally in the UK, and how little a problem it was while legalised. I believe the only person who has the right to decide what you can/can't put in you is you. The first comment comes from an ex-heroin user... almost everyone who has ever used a drug says its should be legal. As a former drug addict it may be thought I would be in favour of bans and the such like. However, I know from bitter experience the illegality surrounding heroin misuse made my problems worse. Some way of removing heroin from the hands of unscrupulous drug dealers and into the control of some form of official body is the only way to stem the widespread damage been caused to society at present. If heroin use can't be stopped (as has been shown with prohibition) safer methods of control must be put into place. I nave had to deal with deaths, violence and many things unimaginable to many. Dependency should not place any individual outside of 'normal' society. The reasons for people from all walks of life becoming addicted are far too complex for it just to be seen as only the problem of those involved in it. Society has decided to only accept the drugs it is familiar with. This is why alcohol is legal and pot isn't. Anyone who has used pot and supports its legalisation while simultaneously being against harder drugs they have not tried is a hypocrite, pure and simple. Drug abuse is behaviour not a chemical. Discuss. People were using addicting drugs before the 50s without problems either. You have no reasoning to explain why things are so different now that it couldn't work? Are you just speaking out of ignorance? Like alcohol prohibition... the problems are only exaggerated by stupid laws. You think people need a supervision to drink a beer in their own homes? For the most part I agree with you... Alcohol isn't 'good'... but its hypocrisy that allows alcohol to be available but not the drugs of choice of other people. I think regulation might work though... so you couldn't buy heroin at a supermarket, but adults could get it from a registered and regulated clinic. I also think that information should be provided at the clinic to help people make informed choices, dissuaded from trying it the first time and helped to overcome it if addicted. Illegal drugs cause crime because the market will pay the inflated price for them... being illegal means that inevitably it is organised criminals that end up involved in the supply side. Users tend to move into (mostly petty) crime to afford the higher prices, as they are addicted to it. Also, I don't agree that drug user's should not be allowed to interact with the public. It is true that they must be held responsible for their actions, drugged, drunk or sober. If the way you avoid hurting others is by staying inside your house, then that is right... If you don't hurt anyone in public, then I don't see that as a problem either. This does not extend to driving cars, operating machinery, working, etc.... If I wander down the road a little stoned, I don't see that I am causing any harm, but if I'm dumb enough to take PCP in public and flid out and beat someone up, then I should go to jail. If I steal to buy heroin I should go to jail and if I drive under the influence I should lose my license and go to jail. Opium wasn't a problem in China until the wars Or do you think otherwise? I know that the guy who created this Blondie album cover. He is still a productive member of society... He uses heroin regularly, but not EVERY SINGLE LIVING MINUTE of his life. Your knowledge of these things consists purely of propaganda. details? $ Crystal M? The comedown sucks far too hard. Crystal M is poor mans cocaine and does far more harm (physically) than cocaine. Crystal M would not even exist if the other drugs were legal. Perhaps not but he does point out that Opium usage was affected by the laws of supply and demand.. that usage went up when they could afford more of it and went down when they couldn't... This is pretty good defence against it being so addictive that usage is uncontrollable. He also points out that the number of addicts was at its height towards the end of the opium wars, highest in countries with the toughest stance against them, and at worst only ever reached 3.5% of the population, but otherwise when legal only accounts for about 1% of the population. This shows it's a fallacy to think that usage would rise exponentially should the drug be legalised. Do you think that more than 5% of people would take it, even if it was fully legal? I don't think there are quite that many idiots out there. the silk comparisson is justification for banning opium imports, ie trade deficit after the europeans banned silk imports. Unfortunately I can't find anything about silk imports being banned at that time to corroborate... I'll keep searching. The people who believe that pot is comparatively less harmful talk out of ignorance. They have tried pot/lsd/mushrooms and then say 'hold on, these things aren't as bad as I was told, they should be legal'. mindpixel was an LSD user. Pot causes schizophrenia. Heroin causes addiction (in constant clean doses that is about all it causes). Heroin is less harmful that pot!! No, people tend to defend the things they are familiar with. Society is only familiar with alcohol, and not pot, so there is nothing wrong with these laws from that point of view. People who have tried pot and don't consider themselves to be criminals want it legalised, yet they still consider people who have made different decisions criminals. That is hypocrisy. I agree harm minimisation is important... that can be done with education. You cannot become addicted to heroin without trying it. I'm not sure you realise I agree with most of what you say... I'm trying to point out this exact hypocrisy. There is evidence that pot 'may' cause, exacerbate or trigger schizophrenia in vulnerable adolecents... so saying it is like alcohol is not a reason to legalise it. I am contrasting pot to heroin to highlight the hypocrisy. I am saying that medical reasons are not the right way to look at drug (ab)use. The right way is to realise it is an individual's right to choose, right or wrong. I will have a more thourough response this evening after work. No worries As I said, I would like to answer it more thourougly. The reason I am defending the status quo is to show that is not hypocrisy to outlaw MJ but not alcohol as long as you accept that it is okay to only legalise the drugs you are familiar with. I think society does that. The real hypocrisy has nothing to do with medical reasons or the effects of the drug, but people who think pot should legal and not anything else, because they are fighting for their right not to lable themselves criminals while continuing to label others as criminals. In other words, I think legalising MJ is only a partial step. My argument is with people who think that should be the final step. I read his stories again yesterday. Damn shame I think... He obviously knew a thing or two about AI. I'm just not sure about his fractal 7.3d maximal hypersurface theory. I think its fairly obvious he had some psychological issues to. I saw that comment of his and it seemed to me like he may have got his wish... just possibly not what he originally intended. If you would try heroin if it was legal but need it to be illegal to stop you, then you are an idiot. There should probably be a law to make sure you brush your teeth too, they might fall out if no one forces you to take care fo them. Seems I did. It doesn't seem like a very good idea to do it if you're young though... you could be fucking up the rest of your life... Especially as if its illegal and you get addicted you're basically going to have to break the law to afford it, etc. If it was legal you would still have to get it regularly, though the associated dangers would be less, and it would be more affordable. While I have known people who have used heroin only once or twice, the vast majority of users (that I know are users...etc) do end up with a 'problem' with it. I think their problems are made worse by its illegal nature, but I still don't think its a good idea. I lived with a couple who were ex-dragon chasers... they couldn't keep off the wagon permanently, even though they were very sincere and trying very hard. They went months without it though, and to the best of my knowledge they never stole or got involved in any other illegal activity. OTOH, It is something I plan to do once before I die, but probably not until I am retired or something like that. Secondly I do beleive I will be able to do it once, as long as it is only once. You mean you think that is what I think? No, not true, I can get medical morphine today if I wanted. As my other post pointed out I know quite a few junkies too (name your poison, literally). No, I'm already addicted to cigarettes, and I really don't like needles. I would consider smoking it, but I still don't want the addiction and am not sure I could handle it. Actually, I chose heroin as my example because I thought it would be the most controversial due to its addictive nature. I have no desire to use it any time soon. I have done other drugs, but over time scales that only the most anti drug fanatic could consider addiction. or HIBT? I will be unavailable for the next 6 hours or so I will try to answer any comments then. (Work sure sucks) Yes they will Vodka is a drug retard! A non story about legalising medical marijuana was voted to FP... everyone knows that almost no one cares about medical uses. The author of that story thinks he is doing society a favor by advocating legalised pot/lsd/mushroom usage but considers those who think other drugs should be legalised are idiots/criminals. This is my response, as this thread was never answered. What do you mean, nutzo? I thought he just an opinionated ass... The only reason he might be nutzo is 9/11... I still think he can be reasonned with though, don't you? I agree - but technically, you found me $ IAWTP You chose to take the drugs, now take responsibility for what you do!! By saying that 'drugs' made them do it, they limit my ability to make responsible choices. I have never understood diminished responsibility laws when you had full control over diminishing it. I agree that drugs have different dimensions I just don't think that that is a reason to outlaw them. It doesn't matter how addictive or intoxicating a drug is, a person still has the right to determine for themselves if that is an appropriate risk/reward or not. Personally I think changing the OR in the definition of drug abuse, 'addicting OR intoxicating substance', to an AND is NOT a scientific reason for criminalizing it. I state that drug abuse is a behaviour/state of mind and not and can never be a chemical. Hello to the person who voted against it. Why? Please. Also if you are going to vote against it. What would the US do if the Iraqies ever voted Al Qaeda into power? I for one would lol loudly. damn hippies and their stolen music $ Your ideas have no character defects $ Saying we are defined by how we got here is like saying the purpose of a bubble is to rise to the top and pop. I don't think grass or trees really care if they are fulfilling their biological imperative, yet they do, and so I don't care if I'm fulfilling mine or not. Subconsciously the little program that is me will probably do it for me... seems to be running reasonably fine at the moment... (a little later than most, but whatever). It is true that your genes might not be in the next generation, but that happens a lot, and isn't necessarily all that important. We are a very lucky blip in evolution that has allowed us to think outside of the program... all that abstract thinking that has allowed us to survive and reproduce can be put to whatever we want... So, play the game, don't play the game, let the entire human race become indian or asian or... in a million years from now do you think that anything we consider an existing 'race' will even exist? You only get one life, you may as well enjoy it. I'd rather too much wealth than poverty $ how are your chatbots comming along? $ well I'm all out of ideas. I guess everyone considers themselves overly earnest and reviled nowdays. cts? $ if you got banned for being a vapid twat there would be no body here. plz post more llamas kthx [nt] The Jews hate the Muslims because the Muslims hate the Jews. How's that theory of yours going? YFI Jews hate the muslims because they are always blowing up their busses/cafes/nightclubs/restaurants. Muslims hate the jews because they are always launching missiles from Apache helicopters into their homes. Do you see intollerance of intollerance helping the situation? Initial complaints? what? I agree with you that they might believe violence will stop the cycle, and that they are wrong about it. It doesn't stop Americans thinking the same way about Iraq and terrorists or vice versa though, does it? Intollerance means you don't even tollerate reasoning about why they might not tollerate you. You first have to tollerate their existence before anyone can even start to work out a plan. The initial complaints are due to people now long dead... the cycle of violence has infact become the reason the intollerance continues. If there was no violence the jews would have no reason to exlude muslims from their land, and the muslims would not feel excluded, and there might be peace. You can't go back and undo the damage that was done... and it takes more strength than most people have to try and understand (a group of) people that killed people like you or people you know. As long as there are intollerant jews and intollerant muslims, there will be war between jews and muslims. Unless you have a solution or positive alternative that doesn't first involve not killing each other and instead tollerating each other. I agree You have to remove the intollerance... It takes a long time... Its not as satisfying as seeing the blood and bodies of your enemies splattered everywhere. How can you possibly "work" at it without either bringing about tollerence or complete genocide of one group or the other? In fact, by moving out of Gaza (I don't know how this is going right now), the Jews were in fact trying to become more tollerant of the Muslims. There will always be intollerence, it matters and should be fought... but you don't fight it with blind hatred of the other side, you fight it by considering maybe what the other sides greivences are, how justified they are, how you can put them right, how you can minimise your own greivences and how you can come to an understanding. (Sometimes that means you have to kill the other person/people... but its very hard to do that without escalating the violence). In fact, you are saying that you have to "work" at tollerence... and I agree, because it is against basic human nature. Now your making sense again I agree with the first one... I agree with the second... the cost of getting that identification wrong is multiplied by a gain factor, which is why the killing must be done with caution. Not that it can never be done. I would agree with the surgical destruction where possible of high ranking Al Qaeda members or anyone who plans or assists terrorist activities. OTOH, "Shock and Awe" campaigns really bother me. Finally, your last point about what is or isn't a bad intention is exactly why we need people to "whine" so we can try to understand how both sides think. In fact, I would rather a world of more whining and less "action" (aka bombing), from both sides, when you get down to it. nope, your not making sense? The point is you are forgetting person c who knows about the heating... If the whiners locked themselves in a room together and whined at each other you would have a point. Oddly enough, this is what you seem to be suggesting. But on k5 someone can read "its so unfair", find out what is unfair, and offer a solution. So their whining solves their problems. Whining without pointing out the problem would be useless. No, you just can't argue the point. you still claim whining is useless, and I am still pointing out its useful. In fact, even when its useless its almost always better than killing people. You are equating whining on k5 with people in a closed room whining to themselves, which it clearly isn't. cts is an troll I don't like him He says many logical, well written things, but makes sure there is an unreasonable cavaet that he can argue blindly about against all sense and reason. Most people fall for it (example me). If he loses he insults you. </whine> Time for your renedufication, you grumpy git. Also, who will be the first to 'whine' when things start going wrong? Isn't identifiction of the problem the first step in solving it? apparantly you do have that right, and practice it yes, but is it whining when every night someone complains that there are cigarettes left smouldering in the ashtray? Or that the servers always seem slow? Or the company isn't as fun as it used to be? Or that Bush is doing a bad job? You say, not only that you must point something out... you must in the same comment have the solution... Was fermat whining about his margin or his equation? Whining is a form of communiction You might not have a solution yourself, but by communicating problems you perceive you might find someone else has the solution... even if its 400 years later. What solution other than whining to her boss do you think a secretary has when her application stops working? You know what... if she complains stuff happens otherwise no one would know. In your example, it may be worth your while yelling, after all, one man and a bucket isn't going to do much. Many people with buckets and hoses, and people calling the fire brigade fixes the problem. Now, whether its yelling about a fire, complaining about embers in the fireplace or whinging about the weather... the first step in solving problems is admitting they exist. When you have to tell people the same problem over and over because they don't understand, well, it will often be considered whining. whats your alternative? You are now saying that whining itself is not a problem, its only people who 'only whine'. Reasons people whine: #1: Some people will only whine... while others might already know the solutions to their problem. Perhaps many problems in their lives a solved this way... Perhaps others who also have the same problem benefit from the solutions other raise? #2: Sometimes the positive alternative does not exist yet (bucket? water? phone? fermat?) #3: Some won't tell you the solution until you admit the problem... Solutions with no problems offer less than problems without solutions, no? #4: Sometimes people will not notice or understand the problem and will write the complaint off as whining before even considering the solutions (this is the why its bad company policy) -- eg, "the ceo is not very good", is probably considered whining... even though the solution is obvious. But in a sense, I agree, standing around a burning house while people carry buckets and you shouting fire is a pretty useless form of whining. The kind of thing i think your talking about here though is often where no one can even agree if there is a problem or not to start with (Bush, Iraq, Terrorism, Drugs, etc). Is the house burning? Also, some solutions are worse than the problem, does that invalidate pointing out the problem? Wouldn't it be better to acknowledge the problem and use the problem to find the solution, instead of rushing to pour water on a graphite fueled nuclear fire? You also agree that whining about politics on k5 isn't whining at all? Just to confirm. I don't know, you tell me. Why don't you shut the fuck up and stop whining? Your whining adds to the noise I hate whiners that whine about people whining... apparantly they exist. They help less than the people who whine. At least they have something to whine about. You are wrong again, because hating black people requires black people. So by your logic we should get rid of black people too. and if it doesn't its just more noise and you know this isn't going to stop anyone "whining" on k5 ergo, its more noise and whining, not only that, but it generates more whining. So you've just created a vicious cycle of whining. Proof in following comment. if i convince you of my position and shut you up but you didn't... You couldn't help yourself. So you did in fact prove my point. Also, your proof fails it because that is not what I am arguing. My argument is that whining can serve a useful purpose, and that extends to "whining" on k5 about whatever crap you want to whine about (in the appropriate place of course). You got as far as agreeing that it can serve a useful purpose, but not about whining on k5. You just couldn't agree because that would invalidate your diary and that is not allowed. There is no contradiction, I enjoy watching you make noise and be foolish and pointing it out. You are the contradiction, because you continue to whine about it. Proof in next comment. See? You forgot that the whiners (on k5) aren't just whining to themselves, but to others that might already know the answer. YHBT, don't take it seriously If he winds you up its best to ignore him really. Also, don't assume he means everything he says... I understand what gets his rocks off is winding people up... To that end he will make both sense and nonsense as required. Just laugh at him, rate him, debate him, insult him, its all good. He takes it with good humour for the most part. He knows he's trolling you... and it will only wind you up if you don't realise its a troll. (He is more than a troll, he is k5s arch-troll). Here's a give away... he whines about people whining and not offering anything positive and posts an article about people getting fired for whining (like thats a positive alternative)... and never offers a real alternative, other than whining that 'people shouldn't whine'. Laugh. Its quite funny if you think about it. Just because I converse with you does not mean I take you seriously. IAWTP $ person c? There actually is a heater you know. beyond stage 5 dupe accounts. Discuss. No, its cts with capitals $ Sorry EST, I hadn't posted proof when you replied. There's a link to a comment I made that only CTS would care about that Grodnard directly copied. I had already suspected CTS of writing those comments because I've seen those account's before and the writing and logic style are CTS's (although he is taking more care). I have spent my whole evening going mad trying to answer nonsense with reason... now I'm going to bed. I wasn't convinced until the comment about the rating... no one but CTS would care. When I saw that I posted the comments and the diary (already written, just had to chose which one)... Baldrson doesn't just switch everything you say upside down... cts does. I'd reply, but what is the point of educating a troll? Well, its not me playing Grognard I'm not that motivated to discredit cts. ... also look at CTS latest writing, it nearly makes sense and uses paragraphs. Looks to me like he's taken a beating, even if by proxy. He's now arguing against oversimplification, lol. Also, as for your theory that its me Why would I write a comment like the the root of that thread only to ruin it with fake cts like drivel? It took effort to come up with those comments (the first one is one of my highest rated comments ever) they're not created just to discredit cts... (I'm not that sneaky... and so far, procrasti is my only account here). CTS has had long running issues with me and resorts to all sorts of nasty tactics to try and either silent me or make me look like a fool. Luckily they are normally so stupid that he ends up looking like the fool. (I might be a fool for biting). Look through my comment history, you will see lots of run ins with CTS. Either over his 'justice at any price' stance, or his, 'you can take all drugs but these' stance. The last time I talked to him he ended up calling me names, told me to fuck off, that I was a dick and being illogical and unreasonable... (aka he was failing it, hard) In this story its obvious everyone thinks he's an idiot so he's just to scared to play CTS so instead reverts to these DDS3 and Grognard characters. I know CTS is a troll, sometimes I think its worth arguing just to educate those who miss the trolls or might really think like that. No, I'm referring to this comment. I can see how that's confusing $ what is k5arp? $ nm, ASCII reenactment players $ heh, some truth in that I don't generally think everyone is CTS and out to get me though. I'm not even sure CTS believes a word he says... I think he's either very mentally twisted or just simply a troll. But, I've seen these accounts before... They only come out when CTS is having his ass handed to him... They argue just like CTS, and mod just like CTS. It could be another idiot that is trying to be CTS... but no one would use the 'rating' comment except CTS, simply because I did the same thing to him a couple of weeks back and he hasn't forgotten it. You should also observe that Grodnard and DDS3 don't deny it and that CTS started using more paragraphs, was more conciliatory and started making more sense after that post in his queue story. I'd argue with the tard if he'd just admit he was using dupes because he thought he had been too rude to deserve to speak to me. sigged again $ Consider this compromissory notice $ OTQ for you. Do you ever read comments before rating them? Explain why all my comments, good and bad got 2? $ You were upset I gave you twos and ones? I noticed you started slapping 3s on my older comments now... There's only one comment you should take another look at... then again, if you really feel its a two, who am I to argue? I do appreciate your twos on my other comments. Really, I do... I'm trying to hand out more twos myself... if I think a comment is okay but not great, it gets a two... if its stupid/, inappropriate or annoying it gets a one, if its spam or anti-social I give it a 0. If it makes me laugh, is insightful or I otherwise agree with it, I give it a 3.... So I do mostly give out 3s, but am trying to hand out more twos (why you might have gotten some twos from me... nothing wrong with the post, just nothing great about them either - imho). (I also hand out twos even if I strongly disagree if the poster has written it well). I put quite some time determining what to rate a post, and yours in particular. I try to err on the side of caution... So do you really think this was worth a 2 or better? The only reason it didn't get a 0 was because I thought you were trying to be funny and failing it rather than being a troll.... but I might change my mind depending on the evidence. OTOH, it did look like a weak revenge modbomb. Good luck with that. Either way, no stress, I'm not about to start bombing you myself. I don't care that much as you probably just encourage others to rate me appropriately. Just letting you know that I (and others probably) noticed. Not at all... I changed my mind about the issue any... Good work, stay sane. You are right like I said, I had already changed my mind on the subject. try a shotgun mouthwash PROOF OR STFU KTHXBYE NO YUO!! $ http://www.bunksmumlovesscat.com HTH $ Indeed - YFI, hard... (self deprecation in a hateful diary when you've given yourself another possibility for attack... retard) Showing signs of gradual improvement BTW, the homeless crackhead at the bus shelter told me to tell you that he's not my mother. How do you afford subsription on welfare? $ Why is that a problem for you when you want the opposite of international mobility... You could be mobile too if you wanted it. What about when your ancestors moved? Also, I move countries often and am not a parasite... I imagine companies wouldn't organise my visa's and countries wouldn't approve them unless they thought I would be a benefit of those countries and companies. Moving doesn't make you a parasite, being on the dole or otherwise burdening an economy make you a parasite. economic migrant != refugee, but you knew that. Assuming you are saying economic migrants are not parasites if they carry their own weight. Why do you think you will become a parasite if you moved? Why wouldn't you carry your own weight like your ancestors did? Why does this matter? Why does when the genes were mixed or at what rate they mix matter to you? Do you worry blacks and jews will outbreed you? These people might look different and be of a different race to you and me, but they are still the same species as me. As long as individuals can mate and produce viable offspring, they are the same species. That is what makes people human. The only right you have to pursue your evolutionary direction is in who you chose to produce offspring with. That's it, right there... Your children's choice is their choice when they become adult individuals themselves... you might be able to convince them to only breed with white, red-headed, Americans with Nordic/Scottish backgrounds, but you can't force them to. This gene may or may not be advantageous to humans, it is a good thing that there is variation in it. My assumption is that wealth is the variable that determines whether the environment selects for r or K based strategies. In other words, keeping them poor will promote r based strategies and making them wealthy will promote K based strategies. The fact that 1 percent of Asians carry this gene suggests that there has already been mixing of Africans and Asians in the past, so while these Asians carry the gene, the majority of their genes are asian as the majority of their ancestors where Asian. For all you know he could have a common ancestor with someone you consider African because the majority of his ancestry was African. Should we really need to pursue an r based strategy for some reason (oil runs out) then 1% of Asians will survive and pass on their genes, but if K based strategies are best then 1% of Africans will survive (by survive I mean have an advantage and pass on that trait at ever increasing rates)... okay, I mixed up my strategies and stereotypes $ What you mean is that the distinction between dogs, wolves and coyotes being different species is artificial... they are different breeds of the same species yes. I think all humans would be considered the same species under at least the Biological / Isolation / Mate-recognition / Phylogenetic / Evolutionary / Darwinian classifications. Wolves, dogs and coyotes are probably only different species under the Isolation classification as it is hard to say under Darwinian etc if they have diverged enough. I'm not sure if they recognise each other's as mates if they were in the same environment. I think if the members of different groups recognise each other and produce viable offspring then they are the same species, although not necessarily the same. I think science can handle differences in race and the genetic expression of those differences just fine... I don't think equal means the same. Science though, shouldn't be abused as a justification for racism. sry i killed your story with my anecdote $ You must buy in blocks... no micropayments yet $ Fad $ Do zebras have a right not to associate with lions Cause I don't think you have a right to expel people from society. Even I have to live on the same planet as you. You think I think that's fair? No way man, but I have to live with it and so do you. The reason it bothers you is because in reality your genes are INFERIOR to the one's you are so worried about. Whoever survives will be the strongest, no? $ If races don't mix, only one race will survive $ Check peoples health yes... Health care checks at the borders make sense... unfortunately the economic gains for getting in versus the risk of being allowed through legally mean people will avoid the health checks. If more people thought they could be legally allowed in and out to work, etc, then the majority of people would do it legally, and therefore would submit to the health checks. As the majority of money from traffikers comes from healthy people, you take away their market... and there is no other way in for sick people. I think everyone should have regularlar health checks... I understand many homeless in the US have TB, right? So, yeah, a requirement of entry at a country (or deme if you can set one up, talkalot) level should be good health, at least contagious/dangerous diseases, and insurance for non-contagious ones, perhaps every immigrant, so as not to burden the health care system. People fleeing from persecution (asylum seekers) should be given special dispensation and allowed to stay in quarantine and given health care until they are cured/die. HIV/STDs are special cases here and think it could better be solved by regulating prostitution or even going so far as to tattooing people prominently (for this kind of encounter) about their infection. So, if the problem is coming from inside your country/deme and its not being fixed, perhaps the immigrants aren't the real source of the problem. Not only that, but also I think that humans are genetically diverse enough that many will survive, either the kooks living out in rural usa evading their taxes and not interacting with humanity, the zambian whores who never seem to catch HIV despite their many encounters with it or the 14% of europeans whose ancestors survived the bubonic plague and now carry an immunity to it. I don't see why this should only be true of HIV. why do you hate america? I'm am not opposed to this. I think there are dangers with it, but when it comes down to it, I think if he can get a group together and fuck off to some uninhabitted island or can otherwise purchase an island off of someone/group, I more than welcome him to do it. As long as he is not advocating violence to others there is no problem. But why is there no such organisation? Because no one is interested in living out his ideals... probably not even him when you get down to it. The other problem I have with it is it seems like he wants everyone else to build these walls around themselves too and then regulate who and how you can move between them.... that sucks. This world would be pretty dull if we were all the same and even worse if we weren't allowed to see all the differences ourselves. The us soldiers should be free to associate from insurgents obviously.... The insurgents have to leave the us deme (now located in iraq partly in iraq). Iraqies can't tell deltas from grunts? idiots $ Depends if you can make it the first disk through the bios, just install windows on it and it will be the C: drive. If you can't make it the first disc, just install windows on it, and when it boots that partition will become C:. The only problem with this is that XP will install the MBR on the 'wrong' disc, but it can still be used to boot to the other disc which will still correctly become C:. If you can temporarily disable the second disc and install, you will get the boot loader and everything on the correct disc and you can probably select it as the boot device, everything will go as normal. I'm no windows fan but did do exactly this (300gb maxtor second drive XP install) just last week and was surprised how well windows handles booting off different partitions/drives and mapping the boot partition back to C:. what? Wouldn't freedom of association mean people were also free to associate with drug users and dealers? How do you plan to implement a world where 'people you don't like' aren't allowed in? If person A, likes person B but hates person C, while person B likes both person A and C, how can everyone be accommodated? What about forming an intentional community with one racist who likes drugs,, one non-racist who hates drugs one racist who hates drugs and one black non-racist who likes drugs. The two racists could live together but their attitudes on drugs would mean there were problems, or the two druggies could get together but their racial differences would be a problem. (Possbily the two anti-druggies could live together if the non-racist ignores the racist but what happens when the non-racist brings home his asian girlfriend?) If we restricted people so that everyone who agreed could be in their own community, you'd have 6 billion single person communities. The only way forward is to accept each other's differences as something positive and to be tolerant when those differences are not seen as positive (and remove the criminal elements on which everyone can agree through the process of law). I do agree that in theory you could get a group of like minded individuals together in a sort of commune or shared housing/land project, but anyone in such a commune would have to give up their outside friends because for one reason or another those friends won't be acceptable to the commune. I think that's a pretty sad way to live your life and manage your relationships. 5k/deem? The last company I worked at had have over 30k employees at just one site. Do they all have to be in the same deem? I doubt I could agree on 24 things with all of them, yet I liked it this way. Or does the company have to be split into 6 different groups... Would I have to work for marketing because I couldn't agree with the IT deem? Or do I now only get to work on 1/6th of the company's website so that I don't have to work with people from different deems? Even worse, is that 6 deems won't be enough to handle the 24bits of differences held amongst a fairly fixed group of 30k people? This doesn't even count all the people in the town (working for other companies/not working). I mean, wouldn't this greatly restrict where people could live/work and who they could associate with? What if one deem thinks its okay to eat babies, or advocate nuking other deems? Do I have to live in a world where this is acceptable? Also, 24 bits is enough to store 24 different binary decisions... Its not enough to store everyone's 24 most important morals/ideals/whatever. FIX: plz ignore spelling of deme. $ How do you persue an evolutionary direction? Cause I want in the one with all the hot chicks (I don't mind if they are blonde, red, brunette, white, black, albino, asian, oriental or whatever), but not one of them deme's full of fat mingers and geeks. I really do think that is the evolutionary direction my genes should take. So why not say one deme with 6B people in it that know how to get along and play nice? Why don't you build a big fence around a large piece of land (or an island) with you and 5000 like minded people and live your dreams there. Why do you want to make others think that that is a good thing for them? With that many people you could have a real chance to secede from whatever government originally owned the land, if it was out of its way enough, you might even be able to buy it. You can then pursue your evolutionary direction there. As long as you don't plan on invading the surrounding deme it might even let you survive and prosper. This does make me wonder what will happen as your deme grows due to population, do you just kick people out? I guess you could kick out people with inferior gene's first, like the down syndromes, retarded, blind, limbless or too pale (oops).. Btw, before you tell me that you are trying to gather the 5k from k5, I don't see any links to any organisation or group that could make this happen on your website. You say you aren't a supremacist or a racist, but don't you think you might attract these kinds of people? Would it bother you? I couldn't imagine a worse way to live, but then I consider my ancestral origins to have come from a dusty rock orbiting a star, not some tiny rocky outcrop off a tiny island that's too far north to even get any sunshine. I imagine your family's immigration to America was none too good for the natives either. My biggest problem with this is that you seem to want the rest of the world to change for you... which is normally a bad sign. You have to be able to do this thing (if its what you really want) without making the other 6 billion conform. If they see it seems like a good idea, then more will follow. You don't deny it either... and jewdging by your other comments I get the feeling you are a supremacist as well as a separatist. To be honest I wouldn't mind either or both except I get the feeling that separateness extends only to advantages while supremely denying humanity, dignity and rights. Its black and white to me. I thought whitey was the minority exploiting the majority. Neither do I think mexicans, jews or blacks are exploiting you. I think the US is exploiting a lot of people... but I don't think mexicans, jews or blacks are exploiting you (although some people who are exploiting you may indeed be mexican, jewish, black or perhaps even a combination of all these). Hola Senoire, Mi exploitingo you by picking your lettuce for less than you will. That's the opposite of exploitation if you ask me. In my opinion you are suffering from a persecution complex brought on by feelings of inferiority. The tax idea is interesting but it doesn't require deme's does it? If you change members of militia for citizens and the rejected for non-citizens then a country is a large pre-existing deme, right? So how does this differ from a very small county? You can still apply the net asset tax on a country, right? I was thinking the eminent domain thing could be removed and that could be the market value of buying everything you legally own on the open market... So any corporation or person or whatever that thought the value of your goods was more than what you have them taxed at could buy it all and send you on your way (presumably looking for a better house or getting your tax paid up or wishing you had, etc). I like this idea in that it does give incentive to pay the right amount of taxes and wouldn't require much government regulation as anyone with enough money would effectively be able to enforce tax compliance (self policing). What about intellectual property? What if you have improved your property recently? What if you can't afford the cashflow to cover your assets, do you have to sell it all or part or risk selling it all at a tax rate you can afford? The problem I have with it though is that you want to force something you don't have (rejected people's property) to become something you do have (their taxes on it or eminent domain)... sounds like a nice way to buy people you don't like the look of out of their house and home. My proposition does the opposite of yours. It pays the self selected group (citizens/militia) its own money, but taxes work. This makes immigration a positive thing in that the more immigrants working the more minimum lving allowance citizens would get. If tax was applied to net assets (only considering the assets in the deme or country, and available on the free market at the taxed rate) and instead of exempting a subsistence from the tax you directly pay the accepted militia an allowance out of the collected taxes. This means that foreign investment becomes a good thing because the more they own in your deme (country) the more taxes they pay, and the more allowance citizens receive. Guest Speaker Rodney King Live at Procrastidome $ Why do crazies always want to live in bumfuck USA Don't you know that its the craziest country on the planet? Its full of black drug users, columbian drug gangs, jewish money launderers, mexican lettuce pickers undermining the economy and neo-nazi caucasian fundamentalists who don't want to pay taxes and own guns!! That's not including a government that's willing to kill you to 'protect' your 'freedom'. Its a big planet you know... if you had your little deme team you could go find a low tech part of Nigeria or something and setup your fence there... Like I said, you might still have to buy it off of your neighbouring deme(s). You could move out to some uninhabited island or something if you can fight off the pirates. If there was actually a group of you, you might even be able to find the funding from some sympathetic group to do it. This is assuming you don't think the FBI or whoever will go after you if leave, do you? Even if you wanted to stay in the USA, if you own private property (it would all have to be owned by some legal entity at first) you can pretty much allow whoever you want in and exclude whoever you choose. What you can't do is run a business to the outside world without being subject to EEOC laws. (I don't know American law). This probably doesn't apply either if the company is privately owned and of sufficiently small size (family run or something)... and there are other ways of earning money too, like investing it and living off the interest for things you need to purchase... a private club could probably do this. Probably if you were less paranoid of the government shooting you, didn't actively infringe on anyone or any groups rights or advocate that being done and did everything very carefully legally you could probably get away with a lot more than you think. In fact, you'd probably find nice remote little villages full of white people up in the outer edges of scotland today... (You could drink in the pub without the town's one black guy in it if that was such a problem, or the one pub in the town with no black guy, or drink at home with your other friend in the village with no pub.) I don't really understand this Are you saying that you would expel supremacists? Is the difference in your mind that they act out their hatred or that they advocate violence? I have no idea here... I think really, if you could just disappear and not hurt anyone and look at the rest of the world and leave it to continue without you and your group I would be all for it... Seriously... the problem is you will have to take land from someone, and then you will use outsiders for what is good for you and damn them when it isn't. Who are you talking about running around practising what they preach? The supremacists? You think they are good in the same way that bank robbers are good in that they are a good example of what will happen to you if you act that way? Would you really expel them though, especially as they could help you start your deme? Finally, wouldn't they have the right to run their own deme, as long as they didn't actually murder or harm anyone? What's to stop them harming or murdering people because of their skin colour or nose shape in demes full of supremacists? Who polices that? Finally, what is the reinsurance network... that doesn't sound like fun. I don't really understand this (repost sry) Are you saying that you would expel supremacists? Is the difference in your mind that they act out their hatred or that they advocate violence? I have no idea here... I think really, if you could just disappear and not hurt anyone and look at the rest of the world and leave it to continue without you and your group I would be all for it... Seriously... the problem is you will have to take land from someone, and then you will use outsiders for what is good for you and damn them when it isn't. Who are you talking about running around practising what they preach? The supremacists? You think they are good in the same way that bank robbers are good in that they are a good example of what will happen to you if you act that way? Would you really expel them though, especially as they could help you start your deme? Finally, wouldn't they have the right to run their own deme, as long as they didn't actually murder or harm anyone? What's to stop them harming or murdering people because of their skin colour or nose shape in demes full of supremacists? Who polices that? Finally, what is the reinsurance network... that doesn't sound like fun. I get it A reinsurance network is demography vs demography in war. The most powerful demography wins (whether its a majority or a minority, right?). How do you know that an all white deme will be tolerated by all the other demes? Who holds the nukes? If chicks or nazis want to exclude me from their private clubs, I don't have a problem with that. As deme's don't currently exist and aren't compulsory though I wouldn't want to join one unless it was full of hot chicks, moderate drug use, good business opportunities and a nice mix of different races, nationalities, cultures and other things... I'm pretty sure I don't want to live in your deme, and I see that's the point of it... problem is your deme will try and steal resources off of my deme or those around it. Anyway, the closest existing deme already invited me, and gave me a 30% discount off my tax for being foreign. If you are tempted to do evil don't do it here Is the same thing with you kicking out "evil" black people to go live in their own demes. No? Exactly At the moment if you don't have nuclear capability everyone shouts no nukes for you and sanctions, etc, as soon as you get nukes you know at the very least you won't be attacked, and unless you are North Korea you'll probably become a much more equal trading partner. Perhaps Iran does want to use nuclear energy for electricity? Doesn't MAD still hold, at least for nations? $ Being innocent (of WMDs) didn't help Iraq $ You don't think that the knowledge gained and the tools used in producing one would be applicable to the other? Pidgeons in Milan If you don't like pigeons, don't visit Milan. Surrounding a truly magnificent cathedral are literally thousands of pigeons Now, while there is plenty of space and no end of tourists willing to pay people for bags of seeds to have photos taken of them with pigeons crapping all over them in front of a cathedral, why were so many of the pigeons scrawny, hungry, sickly and constantly fighting for space and survival? The pigeons were so exhausted from their everyday life, that after getting extremely drunk in several bars, sometime after midnight, I was able to climb this statue and pick up any bird I wanted. (so she had a funny walk, do I care?) What does that mean for us? Well... standing there I realized that although these pigeons were in pigeon heaven, they had simply over crowded the area... Life is an optimising function dedicated to reproducing and fully exploiting its environment until there is no room left at the bottom, and paradise becomes hell. While today we live of the fat of abundant oil our children will either starve, drown or have their land taken by climate change, or they may simply run out of oil and no longer be able to support the city and suburban lifestyle with its fossil fuel based monoculture and industry, and many will die. Another possibility is that we finally get nuclear energy as our main source of power, at least to replace the majority of our use of oil while alternatives continue to be explored. Perhaps there will be so much energy available that almost anything will be possible with very little effect to the environment, enough energy for all nations on the planet and all man (and women, thanks Reg) kind can live in peace. Unfortunately, if there is prosperity, the population will fully exploit it until some other limit is reached... This will force some to go without, and so there will always be unhappiness in the world. This isn't necessarily bad, it is simply the nature of life. Discuss. damn... one second more, and title would be right$ can I start again... this statue yes, this statue. The one in front of the Milan Duomo. While there were many of those in Milan I did in fact climb up to the lion and was able to grab real live sleeping pigeons... Then (gently) throw them into the air for them to fly to another place. They were so packed and so tired they couldn't be assed to move even if someone was blatenly going to catch them. But yeah, teenage coke whore milano fashion model vs pigeon... same problem I guess. They sure do Where would the cocaine industry be without them? Where would you be on a Saturday night without them? # no offence intended $ B+ You get the general idea, but lack originality$ Most English teachers failed it in my experience I had one in high school teacher who, for one year, made it interesting and passable. Another teacher gave all the boys C's and all the girls B's.... simple as that... fortunately they fired his ass a few years after I had left. Anything less than a C would have been no entry to university... in hindsight I should have taken literature, but I didn't appreciate it back then, and may not have coped with it at all. Despite its faults I doubt I would have even had an education without the public part. I add more value to the economy with an education than without one (more than the cost of the education). So money spent on public education is a net gain for society (up to some optimal point). Depends what you mean by leaving people behind Sure some are going to get less education than others, but that doesn't mean you give them no choice but to become crack whores. Maybe, but it doesn't hurt to have janitors as as educated as possible either. So, even if they aren't einstiens they should still be taught as much science/math/english/etc as they can handle, even if they are going to be scrubbing toilets for a number of years, you never know what they might just come up with while watching the water swirl away. Also, as the pigeons show, no matter how socialist or friendly your world is, sooner or later some or more are also going to go without.... Completely equal societies would all just reach non sustainability at once.... Completely capitalist societies are easily maintainable but they push the poor and unlucky into the abyss so that the rich can maintain their status and privileges. That's the middle class Almost everyone who isn't already a multimillionaire but aspires to be one and thinks when they make a million it will mean anything by then. I'm serious, but there are exceptions Yeah, some people will make it and I suspect that k5 has more than its fair share of either those who have either made it or those who will... but I doubt anyone here is going to be the next Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates. So, while you may make your millions (and of course, I hope and aim for the same for me), I think there are many many more people out there who never will but support (the excesses of) the rich, capitalism and their own exploitation in the false belief that one day it will be them who is rich and doing the exploiting. This thread kinda sucks I will remember to be unapologetic in the future. I think like the courtroom, the internet thrives on adversarial discussion. Anything else comes off like intellectual mutual masturbation. WTF? PIGEONS (see poll for details) for those who missed it. I had to give everyone in this diary 2s because I couldn't give you a 4. Is it your problem when they steal your vcr? $ You might well be right, They might have had explosives just in case, and they may have decided to use them to stop further damage, as you say... but why are they still denying it? If they are denying something then conjecture is just a place to start. I don't have enough facts, but maybe someone who does can shed more light. I do think its odd that Silverstein said "pull it" without an adequate explaination of what he meant by that. I also think the collapse was a little too 'neat' and that only Silverstein's buildings fell is a little coincidental. from the article fact that large quantities of molten metal were observed So you are arguing about something you haven't read... Well, at least it keeps you from being biassed. Keep up the good work. If you had read the article you would realise there was no mistake in the post. The floors had to be hot enough to buckle -- TRUE The fire had to be hot enough to melt steel -- TRUE There is no contradiction. Next time... try reading. from the article fact that large quantities of molten metal were observed What burnt and why would it be hot enough? $ Look, I'm not so stupid as to think you actually have to melt the steel in a structure before it will collapse... I understand it would normally collapse long before a significant amount of steel melted. So, I guess I am talking about the steel found at the site afterwards. The reason that is not right is that it doesn't matter how long something burns, if its not hot enough to melt, it won't melt. The conspiricy theorists of course say there was not enough energy in the collapse alone to melt that much steel. At this point it gets tricky, because you have to know the amount of steel that was supposedly molten, the amount of energy released in the collapse, and the amount of that you expect to be absorbed into the steel as heat. I guess if you knew how much a floor weighed and the height of each floor you could calculate the maximum energy available through gravitational collapse. You could add the diesel and jetfuel (+ aircraft kinetic energy?) too. If that is more than enough energy to melt (how much?) steel and pulverise that much concrete, you wouldn't need explosives to explain it. The difficult part is that apparantly most of the debris was taken away, so its not possible to know how much melted steel there was. Don't knock maths, just misapplied maths. Engineers are used to large error margins and working without knowing 'all the equations'. Its not too hard to work out how much energy would be available and how much steel that should melt, and to see if that matches expectations. If it doesn't you know there must be more to it than meets the eye. Unfortunately, even if it does explain the molten metal and pancaking explains the 'explosions', it still doesn't rule out the possibility of explosive devices or conspiracy. for what reason? Power? Support for war? A second term? Look how many rights have been eroded all over the western world since 9/11. I'm not saying it was the reason and this conspiricy is true... but its still a good reason and motives do exist. from the article fact that large quantities of molten metal were observed +3 Only Plausable Explaination That's the only comment here that can explain molten metal in the absence of fire works and a heat source hot enough. Odd that a physics guy missed that. I wonder if he has an email address? I think a lot of the illusion that the building is being exploded comes from the fact that the building is collapsing on the inside while the outer columns keep the face of the building intact longer. So the damage is occurring below where it appears to be. Yeah... that's pretty much the standard theory This picture of the wtc in collapse illustrated the suction going on inside the outer frame quite well, for me anyway. Note the lack of dust above the 'top' of the building. Also interesting is the small puff going up from the center. It looks a lot like the results from the granular matter experiments. The idea that your government might not be acting in your best interest scares the fuck out of you, doesn't it LA? Questioning Assumptions == Gullible I thought you was smart. You are judging me by mindpixel's words? You must be crazier than he was. You say I can't examine criticism critically. You have proof of this? I have read and understood this guys analysis... Yes it seems to have faults... But you vote down anything that even questions the status quo. That's far more blind. So, you are commenting and admitting you know nothing and voting down people who have done undergraduate level courses in structural engineering and material properties. You're contradictions are showing and you are shattering my illusions that you might be intelligent. from the article fact that large quantities of molten metal were observed You are denying the existence of molten steel? There looks like plenty of evidence that there was molten steel. Have you looked? If this was a conspiricy of course it would not be exploded from the bottom first, etc... You have to think of it more like a staged fireworks display, something to make the audience really go oooohhhh, aaaahhhh. The fact it takes weeks etc is explained, if you imagine enough motivation existed. On the weekend of [September 8-9, 2001], there was a "power down" condition in . . . the south tower. This power down condition meant there was no electrical supply for approximately 36 hours from floor 50 up. . . . The reason given by the WTC for the power down was that cabling in the tower was being upgraded . . . . Of course without power there were no security cameras, no security locks on doors [while] many, many "engineers" [were] coming in and out of the tower.[58] Securacom of course was owned by the Bush family. I'm not trolling, just trying to fill gaps in my understanding. Do you think the Germans liked the Reichstag conspiracy? Does not liking it make it false? Has the U.S. government ever actively killed its own people in the past? crackpot $ that was a joke, assuming the documents are real And if they are real, it makes me wonder why everyone assumes the government is always playing fair and why no one ever gets worked up about these things. I guess it's safe to keep releasing all the crimes committed two generations ago, just as long as the current crimes are kept secret. Whining on K5 is more important than voting. When you vote you only make one difference. When you whine on k5, dozens of people might read what you write... and if you change one mind, and change one vote, you have now doubled your difference. [Unrelated Poll Inside] Repeat this enough times and if those people change their minds and start posting blah blah blah... you get the idea. Anyway, its not who votes that matters, its who counts the votes that matters. Poll is not binding. lol, waht? & Thanks, I might try that. $ It was a thinly veiled attack on this old diary. Really it was just an excuse to write something to have place to put a poll. I was shagging my socialist roomy when the USB key found its way into an unexpected orifice. She didn't even notice at first from all the drugs she'd been taking... Do I Win? You're not very fun for a god. $ Whoever has the cure $ +1FP An Ode to CTS $ Heroin should be legalised. This BBC Article shows how recently heroin was used legally in the UK, and how little a problem it was while legalised. I believe the only person who has the right to decide what you can/can't put in you is you. The first comment comes from an ex-heroin user... almost everyone who has ever used a drug says its should be legal. As a former drug addict it may be thought I would be in favour of bans and the such like. However, I know from bitter experience the illegality surrounding heroin misuse made my problems worse. Some way of removing heroin from the hands of unscrupulous drug dealers and into the control of some form of official body is the only way to stem the widespread damage been caused to society at present. If heroin use can't be stopped (as has been shown with prohibition) safer methods of control must be put into place. I nave had to deal with deaths, violence and many things unimaginable to many. Dependency should not place any individual outside of 'normal' society. The reasons for people from all walks of life becoming addicted are far too complex for it just to be seen as only the problem of those involved in it. Society has decided to only accept the drugs it is familiar with. This is why alcohol is legal and pot isn't. Anyone who has used pot and supports its legalisation while simultaneously being against harder drugs they have not tried is a hypocrite, pure and simple. Drug abuse is behaviour not a chemical. Discuss. People were using addicting drugs before the 50s without problems either. You have no reasoning to explain why things are so different now that it couldn't work? Are you just speaking out of ignorance? Like alcohol prohibition... the problems are only exaggerated by stupid laws. You think people need a supervision to drink a beer in their own homes? For the most part I agree with you... Alcohol isn't 'good'... but its hypocrisy that allows alcohol to be available but not the drugs of choice of other people. I think regulation might work though... so you couldn't buy heroin at a supermarket, but adults could get it from a registered and regulated clinic. I also think that information should be provided at the clinic to help people make informed choices, dissuaded from trying it the first time and helped to overcome it if addicted. Illegal drugs cause crime because the market will pay the inflated price for them... being illegal means that inevitably it is organised criminals that end up involved in the supply side. Users tend to move into (mostly petty) crime to afford the higher prices, as they are addicted to it. Also, I don't agree that drug user's should not be allowed to interact with the public. It is true that they must be held responsible for their actions, drugged, drunk or sober. If the way you avoid hurting others is by staying inside your house, then that is right... If you don't hurt anyone in public, then I don't see that as a problem either. This does not extend to driving cars, operating machinery, working, etc.... If I wander down the road a little stoned, I don't see that I am causing any harm, but if I'm dumb enough to take PCP in public and flid out and beat someone up, then I should go to jail. If I steal to buy heroin I should go to jail and if I drive under the influence I should lose my license and go to jail. Opium wasn't a problem in China until the wars Or do you think otherwise? I know that the guy who created this Blondie album cover. He is still a productive member of society... He uses heroin regularly, but not EVERY SINGLE LIVING MINUTE of his life. Your knowledge of these things consists purely of propaganda. details? $ Crystal M? The comedown sucks far too hard. Crystal M is poor mans cocaine and does far more harm (physically) than cocaine. Crystal M would not even exist if the other drugs were legal. Perhaps not but he does point out that Opium usage was affected by the laws of supply and demand.. that usage went up when they could afford more of it and went down when they couldn't... This is pretty good defence against it being so addictive that usage is uncontrollable. He also points out that the number of addicts was at its height towards the end of the opium wars, highest in countries with the toughest stance against them, and at worst only ever reached 3.5% of the population, but otherwise when legal only accounts for about 1% of the population. This shows it's a fallacy to think that usage would rise exponentially should the drug be legalised. Do you think that more than 5% of people would take it, even if it was fully legal? I don't think there are quite that many idiots out there. the silk comparisson is justification for banning opium imports, ie trade deficit after the europeans banned silk imports. Unfortunately I can't find anything about silk imports being banned at that time to corroborate... I'll keep searching. The people who believe that pot is comparatively less harmful talk out of ignorance. They have tried pot/lsd/mushrooms and then say 'hold on, these things aren't as bad as I was told, they should be legal'. mindpixel was an LSD user. Pot causes schizophrenia. Heroin causes addiction (in constant clean doses that is about all it causes). Heroin is less harmful that pot!! No, people tend to defend the things they are familiar with. Society is only familiar with alcohol, and not pot, so there is nothing wrong with these laws from that point of view. People who have tried pot and don't consider themselves to be criminals want it legalised, yet they still consider people who have made different decisions criminals. That is hypocrisy. I agree harm minimisation is important... that can be done with education. You cannot become addicted to heroin without trying it. I'm not sure you realise I agree with most of what you say... I'm trying to point out this exact hypocrisy. There is evidence that pot 'may' cause, exacerbate or trigger schizophrenia in vulnerable adolecents... so saying it is like alcohol is not a reason to legalise it. I am contrasting pot to heroin to highlight the hypocrisy. I am saying that medical reasons are not the right way to look at drug (ab)use. The right way is to realise it is an individual's right to choose, right or wrong. I will have a more thourough response this evening after work. No worries As I said, I would like to answer it more thourougly. The reason I am defending the status quo is to show that is not hypocrisy to outlaw MJ but not alcohol as long as you accept that it is okay to only legalise the drugs you are familiar with. I think society does that. The real hypocrisy has nothing to do with medical reasons or the effects of the drug, but people who think pot should legal and not anything else, because they are fighting for their right not to lable themselves criminals while continuing to label others as criminals. In other words, I think legalising MJ is only a partial step. My argument is with people who think that should be the final step. I read his stories again yesterday. Damn shame I think... He obviously knew a thing or two about AI. I'm just not sure about his fractal 7.3d maximal hypersurface theory. I think its fairly obvious he had some psychological issues to. I saw that comment of his and it seemed to me like he may have got his wish... just possibly not what he originally intended. If you would try heroin if it was legal but need it to be illegal to stop you, then you are an idiot. There should probably be a law to make sure you brush your teeth too, they might fall out if no one forces you to take care fo them. Seems I did. It doesn't seem like a very good idea to do it if you're young though... you could be fucking up the rest of your life... Especially as if its illegal and you get addicted you're basically going to have to break the law to afford it, etc. If it was legal you would still have to get it regularly, though the associated dangers would be less, and it would be more affordable. While I have known people who have used heroin only once or twice, the vast majority of users (that I know are users...etc) do end up with a 'problem' with it. I think their problems are made worse by its illegal nature, but I still don't think its a good idea. I lived with a couple who were ex-dragon chasers... they couldn't keep off the wagon permanently, even though they were very sincere and trying very hard. They went months without it though, and to the best of my knowledge they never stole or got involved in any other illegal activity. OTOH, It is something I plan to do once before I die, but probably not until I am retired or something like that. Secondly I do beleive I will be able to do it once, as long as it is only once. You mean you think that is what I think? No, not true, I can get medical morphine today if I wanted. As my other post pointed out I know quite a few junkies too (name your poison, literally). No, I'm already addicted to cigarettes, and I really don't like needles. I would consider smoking it, but I still don't want the addiction and am not sure I could handle it. Actually, I chose heroin as my example because I thought it would be the most controversial due to its addictive nature. I have no desire to use it any time soon. I have done other drugs, but over time scales that only the most anti drug fanatic could consider addiction. or HIBT? I will be unavailable for the next 6 hours or so I will try to answer any comments then. (Work sure sucks) Yes they will Vodka is a drug retard! A non story about legalising medical marijuana was voted to FP... everyone knows that almost no one cares about medical uses. The author of that story thinks he is doing society a favor by advocating legalised pot/lsd/mushroom usage but considers those who think other drugs should be legalised are idiots/criminals. This is my response, as this thread was never answered. What do you mean, nutzo? I thought he just an opinionated ass... The only reason he might be nutzo is 9/11... I still think he can be reasonned with though, don't you? I agree - but technically, you found me $ IAWTP You chose to take the drugs, now take responsibility for what you do!! By saying that 'drugs' made them do it, they limit my ability to make responsible choices. I have never understood diminished responsibility laws when you had full control over diminishing it. I agree that drugs have different dimensions I just don't think that that is a reason to outlaw them. It doesn't matter how addictive or intoxicating a drug is, a person still has the right to determine for themselves if that is an appropriate risk/reward or not. Personally I think changing the OR in the definition of drug abuse, 'addicting OR intoxicating substance', to an AND is NOT a scientific reason for criminalizing it. I state that drug abuse is a behaviour/state of mind and not and can never be a chemical. Hello to the person who voted against it. Why? Please. Also if you are going to vote against it. What would the US do if the Iraqies ever voted Al Qaeda into power? I for one would lol loudly. damn hippies and their stolen music $ Your ideas have no character defects $ Saying we are defined by how we got here is like saying the purpose of a bubble is to rise to the top and pop. I don't think grass or trees really care if they are fulfilling their biological imperative, yet they do, and so I don't care if I'm fulfilling mine or not. Subconsciously the little program that is me will probably do it for me... seems to be running reasonably fine at the moment... (a little later than most, but whatever). It is true that your genes might not be in the next generation, but that happens a lot, and isn't necessarily all that important. We are a very lucky blip in evolution that has allowed us to think outside of the program... all that abstract thinking that has allowed us to survive and reproduce can be put to whatever we want... So, play the game, don't play the game, let the entire human race become indian or asian or... in a million years from now do you think that anything we consider an existing 'race' will even exist? You only get one life, you may as well enjoy it. I'd rather too much wealth than poverty $ how are your chatbots comming along? $ well I'm all out of ideas. I guess everyone considers themselves overly earnest and reviled nowdays. cts? $ if you got banned for being a vapid twat there would be no body here. plz post more llamas kthx [nt] The Jews hate the Muslims because the Muslims hate the Jews. How's that theory of yours going? YFI Jews hate the muslims because they are always blowing up their busses/cafes/nightclubs/restaurants. Muslims hate the jews because they are always launching missiles from Apache helicopters into their homes. Do you see intollerance of intollerance helping the situation? Initial complaints? what? I agree with you that they might believe violence will stop the cycle, and that they are wrong about it. It doesn't stop Americans thinking the same way about Iraq and terrorists or vice versa though, does it? Intollerance means you don't even tollerate reasoning about why they might not tollerate you. You first have to tollerate their existence before anyone can even start to work out a plan. The initial complaints are due to people now long dead... the cycle of violence has infact become the reason the intollerance continues. If there was no violence the jews would have no reason to exlude muslims from their land, and the muslims would not feel excluded, and there might be peace. You can't go back and undo the damage that was done... and it takes more strength than most people have to try and understand (a group of) people that killed people like you or people you know. As long as there are intollerant jews and intollerant muslims, there will be war between jews and muslims. Unless you have a solution or positive alternative that doesn't first involve not killing each other and instead tollerating each other. I agree You have to remove the intollerance... It takes a long time... Its not as satisfying as seeing the blood and bodies of your enemies splattered everywhere. How can you possibly "work" at it without either bringing about tollerence or complete genocide of one group or the other? In fact, by moving out of Gaza (I don't know how this is going right now), the Jews were in fact trying to become more tollerant of the Muslims. There will always be intollerence, it matters and should be fought... but you don't fight it with blind hatred of the other side, you fight it by considering maybe what the other sides greivences are, how justified they are, how you can put them right, how you can minimise your own greivences and how you can come to an understanding. (Sometimes that means you have to kill the other person/people... but its very hard to do that without escalating the violence). In fact, you are saying that you have to "work" at tollerence... and I agree, because it is against basic human nature. Now your making sense again I agree with the first one... I agree with the second... the cost of getting that identification wrong is multiplied by a gain factor, which is why the killing must be done with caution. Not that it can never be done. I would agree with the surgical destruction where possible of high ranking Al Qaeda members or anyone who plans or assists terrorist activities. OTOH, "Shock and Awe" campaigns really bother me. Finally, your last point about what is or isn't a bad intention is exactly why we need people to "whine" so we can try to understand how both sides think. In fact, I would rather a world of more whining and less "action" (aka bombing), from both sides, when you get down to it. nope, your not making sense? The point is you are forgetting person c who knows about the heating... If the whiners locked themselves in a room together and whined at each other you would have a point. Oddly enough, this is what you seem to be suggesting. But on k5 someone can read "its so unfair", find out what is unfair, and offer a solution. So their whining solves their problems. Whining without pointing out the problem would be useless. No, you just can't argue the point. you still claim whining is useless, and I am still pointing out its useful. In fact, even when its useless its almost always better than killing people. You are equating whining on k5 with people in a closed room whining to themselves, which it clearly isn't. cts is an troll I don't like him He says many logical, well written things, but makes sure there is an unreasonable cavaet that he can argue blindly about against all sense and reason. Most people fall for it (example me). If he loses he insults you. </whine> Time for your renedufication, you grumpy git. Also, who will be the first to 'whine' when things start going wrong? Isn't identifiction of the problem the first step in solving it? apparantly you do have that right, and practice it yes, but is it whining when every night someone complains that there are cigarettes left smouldering in the ashtray? Or that the servers always seem slow? Or the company isn't as fun as it used to be? Or that Bush is doing a bad job? You say, not only that you must point something out... you must in the same comment have the solution... Was fermat whining about his margin or his equation? Whining is a form of communiction You might not have a solution yourself, but by communicating problems you perceive you might find someone else has the solution... even if its 400 years later. What solution other than whining to her boss do you think a secretary has when her application stops working? You know what... if she complains stuff happens otherwise no one would know. In your example, it may be worth your while yelling, after all, one man and a bucket isn't going to do much. Many people with buckets and hoses, and people calling the fire brigade fixes the problem. Now, whether its yelling about a fire, complaining about embers in the fireplace or whinging about the weather... the first step in solving problems is admitting they exist. When you have to tell people the same problem over and over because they don't understand, well, it will often be considered whining. whats your alternative? You are now saying that whining itself is not a problem, its only people who 'only whine'. Reasons people whine: #1: Some people will only whine... while others might already know the solutions to their problem. Perhaps many problems in their lives a solved this way... Perhaps others who also have the same problem benefit from the solutions other raise? #2: Sometimes the positive alternative does not exist yet (bucket? water? phone? fermat?) #3: Some won't tell you the solution until you admit the problem... Solutions with no problems offer less than problems without solutions, no? #4: Sometimes people will not notice or understand the problem and will write the complaint off as whining before even considering the solutions (this is the why its bad company policy) -- eg, "the ceo is not very good", is probably considered whining... even though the solution is obvious. But in a sense, I agree, standing around a burning house while people carry buckets and you shouting fire is a pretty useless form of whining. The kind of thing i think your talking about here though is often where no one can even agree if there is a problem or not to start with (Bush, Iraq, Terrorism, Drugs, etc). Is the house burning? Also, some solutions are worse than the problem, does that invalidate pointing out the problem? Wouldn't it be better to acknowledge the problem and use the problem to find the solution, instead of rushing to pour water on a graphite fueled nuclear fire? You also agree that whining about politics on k5 isn't whining at all? Just to confirm. I don't know, you tell me. Why don't you shut the fuck up and stop whining? Your whining adds to the noise I hate whiners that whine about people whining... apparantly they exist. They help less than the people who whine. At least they have something to whine about. You are wrong again, because hating black people requires black people. So by your logic we should get rid of black people too. and if it doesn't its just more noise and you know this isn't going to stop anyone "whining" on k5 ergo, its more noise and whining, not only that, but it generates more whining. So you've just created a vicious cycle of whining. Proof in following comment. if i convince you of my position and shut you up but you didn't... You couldn't help yourself. So you did in fact prove my point. Also, your proof fails it because that is not what I am arguing. My argument is that whining can serve a useful purpose, and that extends to "whining" on k5 about whatever crap you want to whine about (in the appropriate place of course). You got as far as agreeing that it can serve a useful purpose, but not about whining on k5. You just couldn't agree because that would invalidate your diary and that is not allowed. There is no contradiction, I enjoy watching you make noise and be foolish and pointing it out. You are the contradiction, because you continue to whine about it. Proof in next comment. See? You forgot that the whiners (on k5) aren't just whining to themselves, but to others that might already know the answer. YHBT, don't take it seriously If he winds you up its best to ignore him really. Also, don't assume he means everything he says... I understand what gets his rocks off is winding people up... To that end he will make both sense and nonsense as required. Just laugh at him, rate him, debate him, insult him, its all good. He takes it with good humour for the most part. He knows he's trolling you... and it will only wind you up if you don't realise its a troll. (He is more than a troll, he is k5s arch-troll). Here's a give away... he whines about people whining and not offering anything positive and posts an article about people getting fired for whining (like thats a positive alternative)... and never offers a real alternative, other than whining that 'people shouldn't whine'. Laugh. Its quite funny if you think about it. Just because I converse with you does not mean I take you seriously. IAWTP $ person c? There actually is a heater you know. beyond stage 5 dupe accounts. Discuss. No, its cts with capitals $ Sorry EST, I hadn't posted proof when you replied. There's a link to a comment I made that only CTS would care about that Grodnard directly copied. I had already suspected CTS of writing those comments because I've seen those account's before and the writing and logic style are CTS's (although he is taking more care). I have spent my whole evening going mad trying to answer nonsense with reason... now I'm going to bed. I wasn't convinced until the comment about the rating... no one but CTS would care. When I saw that I posted the comments and the diary (already written, just had to chose which one)... Baldrson doesn't just switch everything you say upside down... cts does. I'd reply, but what is the point of educating a troll? Well, its not me playing Grognard I'm not that motivated to discredit cts. ... also look at CTS latest writing, it nearly makes sense and uses paragraphs. Looks to me like he's taken a beating, even if by proxy. He's now arguing against oversimplification, lol. Also, as for your theory that its me Why would I write a comment like the the root of that thread only to ruin it with fake cts like drivel? It took effort to come up with those comments (the first one is one of my highest rated comments ever) they're not created just to discredit cts... (I'm not that sneaky... and so far, procrasti is my only account here). CTS has had long running issues with me and resorts to all sorts of nasty tactics to try and either silent me or make me look like a fool. Luckily they are normally so stupid that he ends up looking like the fool. (I might be a fool for biting). Look through my comment history, you will see lots of run ins with CTS. Either over his 'justice at any price' stance, or his, 'you can take all drugs but these' stance. The last time I talked to him he ended up calling me names, told me to fuck off, that I was a dick and being illogical and unreasonable... (aka he was failing it, hard) In this story its obvious everyone thinks he's an idiot so he's just to scared to play CTS so instead reverts to these DDS3 and Grognard characters. I know CTS is a troll, sometimes I think its worth arguing just to educate those who miss the trolls or might really think like that. No, I'm referring to this comment. I can see how that's confusing $ what is k5arp? $ nm, ASCII reenactment players $ heh, some truth in that I don't generally think everyone is CTS and out to get me though. I'm not even sure CTS believes a word he says... I think he's either very mentally twisted or just simply a troll. But, I've seen these accounts before... They only come out when CTS is having his ass handed to him... They argue just like CTS, and mod just like CTS. It could be another idiot that is trying to be CTS... but no one would use the 'rating' comment except CTS, simply because I did the same thing to him a couple of weeks back and he hasn't forgotten it. You should also observe that Grodnard and DDS3 don't deny it and that CTS started using more paragraphs, was more conciliatory and started making more sense after that post in his queue story. I'd argue with the tard if he'd just admit he was using dupes because he thought he had been too rude to deserve to speak to me. sigged again $ Consider this compromissory notice $ OTQ for you. Do you ever read comments before rating them? Explain why all my comments, good and bad got 2? $ You were upset I gave you twos and ones? I noticed you started slapping 3s on my older comments now... There's only one comment you should take another look at... then again, if you really feel its a two, who am I to argue? I do appreciate your twos on my other comments. Really, I do... I'm trying to hand out more twos myself... if I think a comment is okay but not great, it gets a two... if its stupid/, inappropriate or annoying it gets a one, if its spam or anti-social I give it a 0. If it makes me laugh, is insightful or I otherwise agree with it, I give it a 3.... So I do mostly give out 3s, but am trying to hand out more twos (why you might have gotten some twos from me... nothing wrong with the post, just nothing great about them either - imho). (I also hand out twos even if I strongly disagree if the poster has written it well). I put quite some time determining what to rate a post, and yours in particular. I try to err on the side of caution... So do you really think this was worth a 2 or better? The only reason it didn't get a 0 was because I thought you were trying to be funny and failing it rather than being a troll.... but I might change my mind depending on the evidence. OTOH, it did look like a weak revenge modbomb. Good luck with that. Either way, no stress, I'm not about to start bombing you myself. I don't care that much as you probably just encourage others to rate me appropriately. Just letting you know that I (and others probably) noticed. Not at all... I changed my mind about the issue any... Good work, stay sane. You are right like I said, I had already changed my mind on the subject. try a shotgun mouthwash PROOF OR STFU KTHXBYE NO YUO!! $ http://www.bunksmumlovesscat.com HTH $ Indeed - YFI, hard... (self deprecation in a hateful diary when you've given yourself another possibility for attack... retard) Showing signs of gradual improvement BTW, the homeless crackhead at the bus shelter told me to tell you that he's not my mother. How do you afford subsription on welfare? $ Why is that a problem for you when you want the opposite of international mobility... You could be mobile too if you wanted it. What about when your ancestors moved? Also, I move countries often and am not a parasite... I imagine companies wouldn't organise my visa's and countries wouldn't approve them unless they thought I would be a benefit of those countries and companies. Moving doesn't make you a parasite, being on the dole or otherwise burdening an economy make you a parasite. economic migrant != refugee, but you knew that. Assuming you are saying economic migrants are not parasites if they carry their own weight. Why do you think you will become a parasite if you moved? Why wouldn't you carry your own weight like your ancestors did? Why does this matter? Why does when the genes were mixed or at what rate they mix matter to you? Do you worry blacks and jews will outbreed you? These people might look different and be of a different race to you and me, but they are still the same species as me. As long as individuals can mate and produce viable offspring, they are the same species. That is what makes people human. The only right you have to pursue your evolutionary direction is in who you chose to produce offspring with. That's it, right there... Your children's choice is their choice when they become adult individuals themselves... you might be able to convince them to only breed with white, red-headed, Americans with Nordic/Scottish backgrounds, but you can't force them to. This gene may or may not be advantageous to humans, it is a good thing that there is variation in it. My assumption is that wealth is the variable that determines whether the environment selects for r or K based strategies. In other words, keeping them poor will promote r based strategies and making them wealthy will promote K based strategies. The fact that 1 percent of Asians carry this gene suggests that there has already been mixing of Africans and Asians in the past, so while these Asians carry the gene, the majority of their genes are asian as the majority of their ancestors where Asian. For all you know he could have a common ancestor with someone you consider African because the majority of his ancestry was African. Should we really need to pursue an r based strategy for some reason (oil runs out) then 1% of Asians will survive and pass on their genes, but if K based strategies are best then 1% of Africans will survive (by survive I mean have an advantage and pass on that trait at ever increasing rates)... okay, I mixed up my strategies and stereotypes $ What you mean is that the distinction between dogs, wolves and coyotes being different species is artificial... they are different breeds of the same species yes. I think all humans would be considered the same species under at least the Biological / Isolation / Mate-recognition / Phylogenetic / Evolutionary / Darwinian classifications. Wolves, dogs and coyotes are probably only different species under the Isolation classification as it is hard to say under Darwinian etc if they have diverged enough. I'm not sure if they recognise each other's as mates if they were in the same environment. I think if the members of different groups recognise each other and produce viable offspring then they are the same species, although not necessarily the same. I think science can handle differences in race and the genetic expression of those differences just fine... I don't think equal means the same. Science though, shouldn't be abused as a justification for racism. sry i killed your story with my anecdote $ You must buy in blocks... no micropayments yet $ Fad $ Do zebras have a right not to associate with lions Cause I don't think you have a right to expel people from society. Even I have to live on the same planet as you. You think I think that's fair? No way man, but I have to live with it and so do you. The reason it bothers you is because in reality your genes are INFERIOR to the one's you are so worried about. Whoever survives will be the strongest, no? $ If races don't mix, only one race will survive $ Check peoples health yes... Health care checks at the borders make sense... unfortunately the economic gains for getting in versus the risk of being allowed through legally mean people will avoid the health checks. If more people thought they could be legally allowed in and out to work, etc, then the majority of people would do it legally, and therefore would submit to the health checks. As the majority of money from traffikers comes from healthy people, you take away their market... and there is no other way in for sick people. I think everyone should have regularlar health checks... I understand many homeless in the US have TB, right? So, yeah, a requirement of entry at a country (or deme if you can set one up, talkalot) level should be good health, at least contagious/dangerous diseases, and insurance for non-contagious ones, perhaps every immigrant, so as not to burden the health care system. People fleeing from persecution (asylum seekers) should be given special dispensation and allowed to stay in quarantine and given health care until they are cured/die. HIV/STDs are special cases here and think it could better be solved by regulating prostitution or even going so far as to tattooing people prominently (for this kind of encounter) about their infection. So, if the problem is coming from inside your country/deme and its not being fixed, perhaps the immigrants aren't the real source of the problem. Not only that, but also I think that humans are genetically diverse enough that many will survive, either the kooks living out in rural usa evading their taxes and not interacting with humanity, the zambian whores who never seem to catch HIV despite their many encounters with it or the 14% of europeans whose ancestors survived the bubonic plague and now carry an immunity to it. I don't see why this should only be true of HIV. why do you hate america? I'm am not opposed to this. I think there are dangers with it, but when it comes down to it, I think if he can get a group together and fuck off to some uninhabitted island or can otherwise purchase an island off of someone/group, I more than welcome him to do it. As long as he is not advocating violence to others there is no problem. But why is there no such organisation? Because no one is interested in living out his ideals... probably not even him when you get down to it. The other problem I have with it is it seems like he wants everyone else to build these walls around themselves too and then regulate who and how you can move between them.... that sucks. This world would be pretty dull if we were all the same and even worse if we weren't allowed to see all the differences ourselves. The us soldiers should be free to associate from insurgents obviously.... The insurgents have to leave the us deme (now located in iraq partly in iraq). Iraqies can't tell deltas from grunts? idiots $ Depends if you can make it the first disk through the bios, just install windows on it and it will be the C: drive. If you can't make it the first disc, just install windows on it, and when it boots that partition will become C:. The only problem with this is that XP will install the MBR on the 'wrong' disc, but it can still be used to boot to the other disc which will still correctly become C:. If you can temporarily disable the second disc and install, you will get the boot loader and everything on the correct disc and you can probably select it as the boot device, everything will go as normal. I'm no windows fan but did do exactly this (300gb maxtor second drive XP install) just last week and was surprised how well windows handles booting off different partitions/drives and mapping the boot partition back to C:. what? Wouldn't freedom of association mean people were also free to associate with drug users and dealers? How do you plan to implement a world where 'people you don't like' aren't allowed in? If person A, likes person B but hates person C, while person B likes both person A and C, how can everyone be accommodated? What about forming an intentional community with one racist who likes drugs,, one non-racist who hates drugs one racist who hates drugs and one black non-racist who likes drugs. The two racists could live together but their attitudes on drugs would mean there were problems, or the two druggies could get together but their racial differences would be a problem. (Possbily the two anti-druggies could live together if the non-racist ignores the racist but what happens when the non-racist brings home his asian girlfriend?) If we restricted people so that everyone who agreed could be in their own community, you'd have 6 billion single person communities. The only way forward is to accept each other's differences as something positive and to be tolerant when those differences are not seen as positive (and remove the criminal elements on which everyone can agree through the process of law). I do agree that in theory you could get a group of like minded individuals together in a sort of commune or shared housing/land project, but anyone in such a commune would have to give up their outside friends because for one reason or another those friends won't be acceptable to the commune. I think that's a pretty sad way to live your life and manage your relationships. 5k/deem? The last company I worked at had have over 30k employees at just one site. Do they all have to be in the same deem? I doubt I could agree on 24 things with all of them, yet I liked it this way. Or does the company have to be split into 6 different groups... Would I have to work for marketing because I couldn't agree with the IT deem? Or do I now only get to work on 1/6th of the company's website so that I don't have to work with people from different deems? Even worse, is that 6 deems won't be enough to handle the 24bits of differences held amongst a fairly fixed group of 30k people? This doesn't even count all the people in the town (working for other companies/not working). I mean, wouldn't this greatly restrict where people could live/work and who they could associate with? What if one deem thinks its okay to eat babies, or advocate nuking other deems? Do I have to live in a world where this is acceptable? Also, 24 bits is enough to store 24 different binary decisions... Its not enough to store everyone's 24 most important morals/ideals/whatever. FIX: plz ignore spelling of deme. $ How do you persue an evolutionary direction? Cause I want in the one with all the hot chicks (I don't mind if they are blonde, red, brunette, white, black, albino, asian, oriental or whatever), but not one of them deme's full of fat mingers and geeks. I really do think that is the evolutionary direction my genes should take. So why not say one deme with 6B people in it that know how to get along and play nice? Why don't you build a big fence around a large piece of land (or an island) with you and 5000 like minded people and live your dreams there. Why do you want to make others think that that is a good thing for them? With that many people you could have a real chance to secede from whatever government originally owned the land, if it was out of its way enough, you might even be able to buy it. You can then pursue your evolutionary direction there. As long as you don't plan on invading the surrounding deme it might even let you survive and prosper. This does make me wonder what will happen as your deme grows due to population, do you just kick people out? I guess you could kick out people with inferior gene's first, like the down syndromes, retarded, blind, limbless or too pale (oops).. Btw, before you tell me that you are trying to gather the 5k from k5, I don't see any links to any organisation or group that could make this happen on your website. You say you aren't a supremacist or a racist, but don't you think you might attract these kinds of people? Would it bother you? I couldn't imagine a worse way to live, but then I consider my ancestral origins to have come from a dusty rock orbiting a star, not some tiny rocky outcrop off a tiny island that's too far north to even get any sunshine. I imagine your family's immigration to America was none too good for the natives either. My biggest problem with this is that you seem to want the rest of the world to change for you... which is normally a bad sign. You have to be able to do this thing (if its what you really want) without making the other 6 billion conform. If they see it seems like a good idea, then more will follow. You don't deny it either... and jewdging by your other comments I get the feeling you are a supremacist as well as a separatist. To be honest I wouldn't mind either or both except I get the feeling that separateness extends only to advantages while supremely denying humanity, dignity and rights. Its black and white to me. I thought whitey was the minority exploiting the majority. Neither do I think mexicans, jews or blacks are exploiting you. I think the US is exploiting a lot of people... but I don't think mexicans, jews or blacks are exploiting you (although some people who are exploiting you may indeed be mexican, jewish, black or perhaps even a combination of all these). Hola Senoire, Mi exploitingo you by picking your lettuce for less than you will. That's the opposite of exploitation if you ask me. In my opinion you are suffering from a persecution complex brought on by feelings of inferiority. The tax idea is interesting but it doesn't require deme's does it? If you change members of militia for citizens and the rejected for non-citizens then a country is a large pre-existing deme, right? So how does this differ from a very small county? You can still apply the net asset tax on a country, right? I was thinking the eminent domain thing could be removed and that could be the market value of buying everything you legally own on the open market... So any corporation or person or whatever that thought the value of your goods was more than what you have them taxed at could buy it all and send you on your way (presumably looking for a better house or getting your tax paid up or wishing you had, etc). I like this idea in that it does give incentive to pay the right amount of taxes and wouldn't require much government regulation as anyone with enough money would effectively be able to enforce tax compliance (self policing). What about intellectual property? What if you have improved your property recently? What if you can't afford the cashflow to cover your assets, do you have to sell it all or part or risk selling it all at a tax rate you can afford? The problem I have with it though is that you want to force something you don't have (rejected people's property) to become something you do have (their taxes on it or eminent domain)... sounds like a nice way to buy people you don't like the look of out of their house and home. My proposition does the opposite of yours. It pays the self selected group (citizens/militia) its own money, but taxes work. This makes immigration a positive thing in that the more immigrants working the more minimum lving allowance citizens would get. If tax was applied to net assets (only considering the assets in the deme or country, and available on the free market at the taxed rate) and instead of exempting a subsistence from the tax you directly pay the accepted militia an allowance out of the collected taxes. This means that foreign investment becomes a good thing because the more they own in your deme (country) the more taxes they pay, and the more allowance citizens receive. Guest Speaker Rodney King Live at Procrastidome $ Why do crazies always want to live in bumfuck USA Don't you know that its the craziest country on the planet? Its full of black drug users, columbian drug gangs, jewish money launderers, mexican lettuce pickers undermining the economy and neo-nazi caucasian fundamentalists who don't want to pay taxes and own guns!! That's not including a government that's willing to kill you to 'protect' your 'freedom'. Its a big planet you know... if you had your little deme team you could go find a low tech part of Nigeria or something and setup your fence there... Like I said, you might still have to buy it off of your neighbouring deme(s). You could move out to some uninhabited island or something if you can fight off the pirates. If there was actually a group of you, you might even be able to find the funding from some sympathetic group to do it. This is assuming you don't think the FBI or whoever will go after you if leave, do you? Even if you wanted to stay in the USA, if you own private property (it would all have to be owned by some legal entity at first) you can pretty much allow whoever you want in and exclude whoever you choose. What you can't do is run a business to the outside world without being subject to EEOC laws. (I don't know American law). This probably doesn't apply either if the company is privately owned and of sufficiently small size (family run or something)... and there are other ways of earning money too, like investing it and living off the interest for things you need to purchase... a private club could probably do this. Probably if you were less paranoid of the government shooting you, didn't actively infringe on anyone or any groups rights or advocate that being done and did everything very carefully legally you could probably get away with a lot more than you think. In fact, you'd probably find nice remote little villages full of white people up in the outer edges of scotland today... (You could drink in the pub without the town's one black guy in it if that was such a problem, or the one pub in the town with no black guy, or drink at home with your other friend in the village with no pub.) I don't really understand this Are you saying that you would expel supremacists? Is the difference in your mind that they act out their hatred or that they advocate violence? I have no idea here... I think really, if you could just disappear and not hurt anyone and look at the rest of the world and leave it to continue without you and your group I would be all for it... Seriously... the problem is you will have to take land from someone, and then you will use outsiders for what is good for you and damn them when it isn't. Who are you talking about running around practising what they preach? The supremacists? You think they are good in the same way that bank robbers are good in that they are a good example of what will happen to you if you act that way? Would you really expel them though, especially as they could help you start your deme? Finally, wouldn't they have the right to run their own deme, as long as they didn't actually murder or harm anyone? What's to stop them harming or murdering people because of their skin colour or nose shape in demes full of supremacists? Who polices that? Finally, what is the reinsurance network... that doesn't sound like fun. I don't really understand this (repost sry) Are you saying that you would expel supremacists? Is the difference in your mind that they act out their hatred or that they advocate violence? I have no idea here... I think really, if you could just disappear and not hurt anyone and look at the rest of the world and leave it to continue without you and your group I would be all for it... Seriously... the problem is you will have to take land from someone, and then you will use outsiders for what is good for you and damn them when it isn't. Who are you talking about running around practising what they preach? The supremacists? You think they are good in the same way that bank robbers are good in that they are a good example of what will happen to you if you act that way? Would you really expel them though, especially as they could help you start your deme? Finally, wouldn't they have the right to run their own deme, as long as they didn't actually murder or harm anyone? What's to stop them harming or murdering people because of their skin colour or nose shape in demes full of supremacists? Who polices that? Finally, what is the reinsurance network... that doesn't sound like fun. I get it A reinsurance network is demography vs demography in war. The most powerful demography wins (whether its a majority or a minority, right?). How do you know that an all white deme will be tolerated by all the other demes? Who holds the nukes? If chicks or nazis want to exclude me from their private clubs, I don't have a problem with that. As deme's don't currently exist and aren't compulsory though I wouldn't want to join one unless it was full of hot chicks, moderate drug use, good business opportunities and a nice mix of different races, nationalities, cultures and other things... I'm pretty sure I don't want to live in your deme, and I see that's the point of it... problem is your deme will try and steal resources off of my deme or those around it. Anyway, the closest existing deme already invited me, and gave me a 30% discount off my tax for being foreign. If you are tempted to do evil don't do it here Is the same thing with you kicking out "evil" black people to go live in their own demes. No? Exactly At the moment if you don't have nuclear capability everyone shouts no nukes for you and sanctions, etc, as soon as you get nukes you know at the very least you won't be attacked, and unless you are North Korea you'll probably become a much more equal trading partner. Perhaps Iran does want to use nuclear energy for electricity? Doesn't MAD still hold, at least for nations? $ Being innocent (of WMDs) didn't help Iraq $ You don't think that the knowledge gained and the tools used in producing one would be applicable to the other? Pidgeons in Milan If you don't like pigeons, don't visit Milan. Surrounding a truly magnificent cathedral are literally thousands of pigeons Now, while there is plenty of space and no end of tourists willing to pay people for bags of seeds to have photos taken of them with pigeons crapping all over them in front of a cathedral, why were so many of the pigeons scrawny, hungry, sickly and constantly fighting for space and survival? The pigeons were so exhausted from their everyday life, that after getting extremely drunk in several bars, sometime after midnight, I was able to climb this statue and pick up any bird I wanted. (so she had a funny walk, do I care?) What does that mean for us? Well... standing there I realized that although these pigeons were in pigeon heaven, they had simply over crowded the area... Life is an optimising function dedicated to reproducing and fully exploiting its environment until there is no room left at the bottom, and paradise becomes hell. While today we live of the fat of abundant oil our children will either starve, drown or have their land taken by climate change, or they may simply run out of oil and no longer be able to support the city and suburban lifestyle with its fossil fuel based monoculture and industry, and many will die. Another possibility is that we finally get nuclear energy as our main source of power, at least to replace the majority of our use of oil while alternatives continue to be explored. Perhaps there will be so much energy available that almost anything will be possible with very little effect to the environment, enough energy for all nations on the planet and all man (and women, thanks Reg) kind can live in peace. Unfortunately, if there is prosperity, the population will fully exploit it until some other limit is reached... This will force some to go without, and so there will always be unhappiness in the world. This isn't necessarily bad, it is simply the nature of life. Discuss. damn... one second more, and title would be right$ can I start again... this statue yes, this statue. The one in front of the Milan Duomo. While there were many of those in Milan I did in fact climb up to the lion and was able to grab real live sleeping pigeons... Then (gently) throw them into the air for them to fly to another place. They were so packed and so tired they couldn't be assed to move even if someone was blatenly going to catch them. But yeah, teenage coke whore milano fashion model vs pigeon... same problem I guess. They sure do Where would the cocaine industry be without them? Where would you be on a Saturday night without them? # no offence intended $ B+ You get the general idea, but lack originality$ Most English teachers failed it in my experience I had one in high school teacher who, for one year, made it interesting and passable. Another teacher gave all the boys C's and all the girls B's.... simple as that... fortunately they fired his ass a few years after I had left. Anything less than a C would have been no entry to university... in hindsight I should have taken literature, but I didn't appreciate it back then, and may not have coped with it at all. Despite its faults I doubt I would have even had an education without the public part. I add more value to the economy with an education than without one (more than the cost of the education). So money spent on public education is a net gain for society (up to some optimal point). Depends what you mean by leaving people behind Sure some are going to get less education than others, but that doesn't mean you give them no choice but to become crack whores. Maybe, but it doesn't hurt to have janitors as as educated as possible either. So, even if they aren't einstiens they should still be taught as much science/math/english/etc as they can handle, even if they are going to be scrubbing toilets for a number of years, you never know what they might just come up with while watching the water swirl away. Also, as the pigeons show, no matter how socialist or friendly your world is, sooner or later some or more are also going to go without.... Completely equal societies would all just reach non sustainability at once.... Completely capitalist societies are easily maintainable but they push the poor and unlucky into the abyss so that the rich can maintain their status and privileges. That's the middle class Almost everyone who isn't already a multimillionaire but aspires to be one and thinks when they make a million it will mean anything by then. I'm serious, but there are exceptions Yeah, some people will make it and I suspect that k5 has more than its fair share of either those who have either made it or those who will... but I doubt anyone here is going to be the next Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates. So, while you may make your millions (and of course, I hope and aim for the same for me), I think there are many many more people out there who never will but support (the excesses of) the rich, capitalism and their own exploitation in the false belief that one day it will be them who is rich and doing the exploiting. This thread kinda sucks I will remember to be unapologetic in the future. I think like the courtroom, the internet thrives on adversarial discussion. Anything else comes off like intellectual mutual masturbation. WTF? PIGEONS (see poll for details) for those who missed it. I must be doing something right I have garnered an enemy!! Someone has created a dupe account with which to mod bomb me :) Well, I've taken my case to the highest court in K5 land and lodged my first abuse report. Wooot!! Although I am not sure if modbombing is really abuse as the appropriate use guidelines seem to be missing, so my crying may be in vain... Anyone care to guess who Zokbar's main account is? As it started with this comment, I suspect weedaddict, but I somehow think its below him. Well, I know I have written some contraversial (perhaps even rude comments), but I don't spam, don't have dupe accounts and don't troll (well, maybe a little), so I don't consider my comments zero worthy... maybe you do? didn't think so, but you did rate that comment 0. Did you really think it was really 0 worthy? I would have understood a 1. I like marx and his views I know they are not always right, and he seems even more rabidly anti-america than me, but I think he argues well, has interesting sources and his comments generate quite a bit of discussion. Is it his anti-american views you hate? I'm not anit-america, but I can see that the world's strongest superpower has its faults and doesn't seem to mind exporting them... I also beleive the strongest should always be under the most scrutiny. Although that doesn't mean lesser players can't be evil and also require attention, I don't think that's an excuse for not examing America and its role in the world. As LJ said What happens in America affects the world. True I am quite anti-america, and it does show in my ratings... Like I said though, I'm not anti-america per se, but anti many of its actions and policies... Also, not anti-american, but definitely anti-rabid-pro-americans, not saying you here. Even that's a bad explanation as there are things I think are truly great about the US, such as the ideals in the consitution, freedom, democracy, justice and the fact that it gives those that (can afford to) persue it can have a real chance to think and express those thoughts and even very diverse ones. In your case though it was because I agreed with the parent that you can't really compare killing people with donating money to charity and you seemed to be continuing with this line of reasoning even after the logic had (imho) been disproved. I didn't downrate your original comment though, because it was original, only the continuation of (what I considered) flawed logic. (I won't argue the topic here, only to say that there were many more 'worthy' charities than Iraq, and once you have donated all your money to one charity, it is a lot harder to donate to more worthy ones). Also, I gave you a 1 rating, not a 0... To me there is a huge distinction (although I used to be far less discerning). I didn't like your argument but you weren't being an ass. I've been trying to hand out many more 2s lately, I give 3s when I think someone has a good point and 1s when I think its a bad point. I also try to hand out more 3s than 1s, although I do admit my ratings are biased by my view. This might not be ideal. Actaully, if I were to change the way comments were displayed, I would change the order so that unrated comments came after 2s and before anything less than 2. I know you think I might be suffering from brain damage, but I have agreed with most of marx's statements so far... True Not a big deal in the great scheme of things, but I don't have a backup of my comments and when the MIBs come to take me away this year, i would like to have an easy way to point out my innocence. It only takes one more luser and all my comments would disappear. I would miss being able to see my fantastic comments in my comments list ;) lol, what? You mean this whole diary was a waste of time? Actually thanks for that... somehow i seemed to have missed that little checkbox on the search page. Doh! Oh, its you [nt] Zokbar 2 What really pisses me off about this, is not the fact that you're being an idiot, its that I don't understand why you are being an idiot. If I think a comment is stupid, I 1 rate it unless the user is really obnoxious, repeatedly being a total idiot or otherwise spamming. Why do you think so? [nt] Interesting, but I don't think so He always has multiple capitalised words for his account name, right? Like you but with spaces :) It is a new account and seems to be off to a good trolling start, but doesn't jason mostly troll the edit queue? Also, aren't I little low in the k5 hierarchy to be targeted by him? Do you have other reasons why it might be him? What happened? Do the accounts still exist? Did you report them? If it wasn't for fear of being anonymised and losing all my comments I would have created dupe accounts and modbommbed cts a long time ago, and now zokbar too obviously, but k5 would have died a long time ago if people started doing this regularly and its also a pretty pathetic way to win your arguments. I'm starting to think its LJ, why he would have a grudge against me though, I don't know. Those klingon speeking geeks, lol... DaH HIHoH! $ Holy crap Zokbar's ratings have all disappeared. Hugs and Kisses (in a manly way) to the admins... I promise this wheel won't be too squeaky in the future and I'll take this as a reminder to not go modbomb ballistic myself next time I find someone annoying. Thanks again. I agree with most of what you said, but why do the fundies have so much power in the US now? IAWTD +FP Especially if you can find an article in English. Marx, consider me a fan. Especially of your War on Torture. Are you from Australia or Europe (or somewhere else)? Thanks for your reply Looks like you have some enemies, lots of zeroing going on here... I always thought better of weedaddict though, I didn't think he was the type to zero something because he disagreed with it. I guess he must support torture or something. Oh well... I stand by what I said, if you can get an English article and make it a bit more in depth, I'd +1 FP it. Its already generated discussion. Keep up the good fight. I'll help you read A survey of 5000 children made by Unicef/Save the Children was conducted to evaluate how the children are doing after the tsunami. A common thread in the answers is that the behavior of faith-based aid organizations is seen as intrusive and demeaning. The message from the organizations has been "if you don't convert to Christianity, then no help for you". Everything you know is wrong and stupid I think trane is a good example of the fact that you only hear propaganda about drugs... I'm not saying crack is a good thing and that people should take it, far from it... I think its dangerous, but I think the dangers are way over emphasized. I think the criminal behaviour comes from desperation to pay for the drugs that people are addicted to... without the illegality, the price would be lower and there wouldn't be the associated crime. For the record, I have done crack once... I was amazed at how quick the cocaine feeling came on, the problem with it is is that the feeling goes in about 10 minutes or so, and you want to 'top up' again. I think I cycled like this for about 8 hours before walking away, and spent the next few days sweating it out... I wouldn't do it again now, as I know how easy it is to get caught in it. My 'supplier' had been on the streets for something like a 3 week binge and said he does it until he can't afford more and goes back to his normal life. I think the biggest irony about my experience was that I was in a country that was very anti marjihuana, which is what I was after, yet crack was easier to score... I think this makes sense in that crack is easier to carry and conceal than pot and makes a lot more money for the amount sold. Which is yet another reason to legalise drugs. Infact, I feel somewhat sorry for trane, I think his life would be easier without this addiction. Unfortunately, about the only long term solution to cocaine addiction that I know of is chewing coca leaf, and I don't think that is ever going to be an option in the US in his lifetime. The only reason meth is a problem is that cocaine is illegal. The only reason crack exists is because dealers are less likely to get caught transporting it that cocaine. Finally, the fact that coca leaf itself is illegal means that cocaine, crack and meth are always going to be widely used. Do you have a point or are you just showing off your ignorance? Do you enjoy laughing at other people's misfortune? Was this person's mistakes in life a source of amusement for you? Does it make you feel like a big man? She probably didn't offer you sex because the thought disgusted even her too much. I'm not 100% sure, but I think its meth that causes you to lose your teeth. Living rough on the streets with dangerous criminals might contribute somewhat too. People fall into addiction due to environment and genetic predisposition. I've seen too much damage from alcohol (Grandfather died of it, mother suffered from terrible alcoholism.) for it to be my drug of choice... So my drug of choice is pot. It does make you paranoid at times so is not always enjoyable... Also the paranoia will make you think you make less sense than when you are drunk, but my experience is that drunk people make less sense but they just don't realise it. I would say that I am addicted to pot. I have taken the harder drugs too, but I reserve these for special occasions and so far have had no problems with addiction. I do enjoy them, but know that using them too much will eventually destroy you. So, I keep my usage down to once or twice a year, and only when everything is going well and I can enjoy them with close friends. Never to escape day to day problems. Hard drugs are not like a stronger version of pot... they are something else, something that will try to get you to go back for more... Coke in particular tends to make you feel like a genius (and probably does increase brain activity, just not in a sustainable way). you never said no [nt] Policing not enough to win the War on Drugs? The BBC has another clear example of how children become involved in the supply of illegal drugs. Of course, we know that these children are selling these dangerous drugs to other children, at their schools and in their neighbourhoods. From the point of view of a drug supplier, it makes sense to use children to distribute your wares. Children aren't police, so its unlikely you will get stung. Children aren't (and shouldn't be) judged as strongly by the law, so they have less to lose. Children are more likely to be impressed with the money they can make, and therefore easily led into selling. Children know lots of other children who they can safely sell the drugs to (making addicts of Only by legalising and regulating these drugs can we reduce the harm caused by drugs, especially to those most vulnerable. By legalisation and regulation we can minimise the incentive for suppliers to sell to minors, and reduce the crime associated with drug addiction and control of supply. Good point but dealing the "why" of drug use would be admitting that there are people who have such little hope in their lives that they are willing to turn to drugs, and this would expose the falicy of Freedom in Capitalist societies. In the early 1900's something like 1% of housewives were addicted to cocaine (1 gram a week). Although it was legal back then, so I doubt they had to prostitute themselves to get it. Perhaps their addiction didn't debilitate them when they had good access to it? People still use drugs for "medication". Some women, to escape the emotional drudgery and oppression used the "tonics" as a crutch. People who use drugs still use them as a crutch to escape their emotional drudgery and oppresion, just that today the drugs are laced with strychnine, baking soda, brick dust and detergent, and for extra goodness now come packaged with extra oppresion. I don't see how opium dens would be any worse than alchohol dens, although they certainly made for more intersting times. Well, this is probably the number 1 reason for the War on Drugs... "Think of the Children". If the War on Drugs actually makes it worse for the children, then I think that is a case to re-examine the assumptions. I think you could be right % I get your point Although the main way of handling it has already shown itself to be a failure... Perhaps I shouldn't say 'only', but certainly the method I would try and am promoting. As for preaching to the choir, there are a few pro-prohibitionists at k5, and was hoping to get a response from them too... Oh well, not today, not yet anyway. Perhaps its only the nuts here who support prohibition? I'm talking about reducing childrens access Currently the drug laws encourage sales to and the recruitment of children. If you don't agree with this, let me know. Legalisation and regulation would not stop sales to children completely, but it will remove the incentive. Also, large fines (and if supplied by registered private organisations, licences removed) can be imposed for people who sell to children. You are always going to get the slightly older friend providing access to their younger friends, this is not the same thing that the war encourages which is recruiting children to make a profit from the sale of drugs. So, no, my proposition won't stop all children getting access to drugs, but I do beleive it can minimise it compared to what happens today. You are right there is a tradeoff between enforcing law and regulations and the power that provides to criminals, but these laws are about what individuals do to themselves, so there is no need to provide any power to criminals at all. Removing these laws would be a major blow to criminals. For what its worth, I don't think that the prescription medicine, (illegal?) cigerette and stolen goods market is anywhere near the size of the illegal drug trade market. I think the gun market is supported by the illegal drug market (remove one and reduce the other), and finally, I think prostitution should also be legalised, as it deals with the decisions of consenting adults in private, not harming anyone but themselves (like drugs). I tell you how I would do it in my world I would go with the last option of my poll. I generally agree that people aren't responsible enough to deal with drugs, so I wouldn't regulate it like alcohol and tobacco, but more like prescription medicine. In my world, if you wanted a drug, you could get it. You would go down to a clinic, either government run or licensed, where you would find a social worker who would spend a minimum of 15 minutes a week talking to you about your drug usage and alternatives like rehabilitation. You would sign a form and could then get one or two days supply of your drug of choice. Pure, clean, measured. Along with your drugs you would get some propaganda or pamphlets outlining the dangers of your drug use and contact numbers for help lines. You would pay the cost of the drug plus some tax to cover the clinic, the social worker, rehabilitation centers and other societal costs associated with drug usage (I suspect much cheaper than the current price). Supplying drugs to others, or having drugs but without a form to prove you got it from a clinic would still be illegal. With a system like this in place, hard drug addicts could get the drugs they need and the help they need to get on with their lives should they choose it. Drug dealers would be severely undercut by these clinics and would have no market to sell into. Drug gangs would disappear and the lower cost of drugs would mean lower crime from addicts who won't need to steal to fund their habit. Cool Will you run drugs for me? Deal $ ummmm... you were bringing the drugs to me, remember. YFI Darwinism is natural selection. Prohibition is a social selection. If you wanted to see Darwinism in effect you would legalise drugs, and let the parasites die naturally. Unless of course you think the parasites are superier to you and capable of outbreeding you without artifical restrictions. Its not Faginism This isn't adults instructing children in crime... Its that children are a more valuable market (less risk) than adults, and they turn into adults who are addicted to drugs. Children are recruited by either being users or because they have access to the market. NSS! That's why the laws are wrong because that's what they implicitly encourage. Now go away and come back when you've grown a brain. Ask the Wizard for one not made out of straw And diplomas are for people who can't earn real degrees... So that's no proof you aren't an idiot. And I know logic must be difficult in your world, but I don't see how you think that I make children use and sell drugs? Au contraire, it is scumbags like you that make children use and sell drugs. Can you not read? What part of illegal to sell to others makes you think I support people using and selling drugs? I'm not advocating drug use, I've just noticed the obvious, which is that people use drugs. At least bother to read my other posts in this diary before mischaracterising me. Its illegal now for everyone to be involved in drugs... Yet the more they tighten their grip the more they lose control. Since you are advocating prohibition you are advocating the current state of affairs which means children get involved (for reason's pointed out before) which makes you the scumbag. The more police you throw at it, the more children will become involved... its not my law, its economic and social reality. As the frog said to the chicken... read it. Read all that crap a long time ago, of course... some of its true, but they omit a lot too. Most of it comes from the side of F.E.A.R. But I do in general approve of providing this information, the problem is it is so one sided and over done and over the top that it is not beleivable. Pointing you at car crash sites probably wouldn't stop you driving. Obviously I don't support supplying it to children... Supply adult addicts (and non-addicts stupid enough to try it) what they want, at their own risk. That's the main market chunk gone... Its the long term investment for the drug supplier gone. Anyone else selling drugs should be jailed, I have no problem with that... Who are they supplying? All adults can get anything they want... addicted children should obviously be taken to rehabilitation clinics and given social care. Now the only illegal market is there to sell to is children and there is no incentive to get them addicted as when they are adults there is no profit, etc... Also, take hold of it by the horns and stop creating profit for the terrorists... If you didn't fight it, you'd realise its a cheap crop to manufacture... If the government buys it from wherever the cheapest source is, the profit from that crop goes down and the farmers would move to something more profitable like corn. I love the WoD mentality Something that's good for one thing can be used for something bad... Lets make something that doesn't work as well and has nasty side effects instead and pretend it will stop the something bad from happenning (even though it won't). Nuclear $ Solving Unemployment, Minimum Wage and More I'm not an American, so the idea of a Socialist State doesn't really scare me... Although it might scare some of you. OTOH, I think that Capitalism is not such a bad idea and it provide the incentives required to get people to do things they otherwise would not. The problem with Pure Capitalism is that it provides no safety net and can be inhumane to the poor. Socialism's main problem is that it does not provide incentives to work. What is needed is a balance. Even in America (probably the closest example I know of Pure Capitalism) it is possible to sometimes get Unemployment Benefits (the Dole), but I understand these run out and then the person is basically left to fend for themselves. In England the Dole does not run out, but like Australia you must prove you are actively looking for work. Where the Dole does not run out people become dependant on it and prefer this to work. Infact, I do not think this is true. If you do the maths, it is actually a rational decision to stay on the Unemployment Benefits. This is fairly easy to see... A person on the Dole, gets about 80/week + housing benefit. When a person takes a full time job at Minimum Wage, they end up working 40hrs/week for about 200/week. Subtracting the Dole and housing benefit means the person is getting an extra 40-80/week or 1 or 2 extra per hour worked. This wouldn't be enough for me to get out of bed for. Its not enough for most unemployed people either, so instead of getting off the Dole, many people get under the counter paid jobs and do not pay tax and continue to collect the Dole while working (Millions are then spent trying to stop these benefit cheats). Another problem with the Dole is that people on it are socially stigmatised for their situation. This further reinforces their feelings of uselessness and acts as another barrier to reentering the workforce. Finally the Minimum Wage is an economic distortion that removes low paying jobs from the potential employment pool, or worse, it encourages illegal immigrants to do this work, both removing the job from the local population and often performed without legal protection and without a safe working environment. I have read an idea, that I will now convey to you that solves all these problems and makes other things possible too. Probably from the view of an employer it is a bad idea, as it increases the flexibility of your workforce, and they can move jobs a lot easier. On the other hand, this flexibility should enable people to move into better jobs easier, with less risk, and should therefore provide microeconomic benefits. The solution to all this is a simple one. Provide everyone with the Minimum Living Allowance, independant of income or economic status. So, whehter you are employed or not, you would receive the Minumum Living Allowance, by definition, just enough to survive in the modern world. Not enough to buy extra's (like computers, cars, nights out at restauraunts, etc). It would basically be roughly what the Dole + housing benefits is now (or what you get in America for the 13 weeks you are allowed to be unemployed for). The first result of this is that no-one would feel stigamatised for being unemployed. The millionaire CEO would be getting the same benefit as the homeless "Will work for food" guy. Of course, the CEO's tax payments would more than cover their own benefits and provide enough extra for people genuinely disadvantaged. The main benefit of this though is that there is no dissincentive to go to work. Every hour worked is extra money on top of the Minimum Living Allowance. There is also no where near as much incentive to get paid under the counter either, as you would keep your benefits anyway, and now you would be risking being done for tax fraud. This also means that the first hour a person works can be taxed and used to pay for part of the MLA. This means that we have created an incentive for unemployed people to work part time jobs. There is no need to work 40 hours a week to get a decent living wage. Part time jobs can be shared between many people bringing more people out of unemployment and into the habit of working. If the Minumum Living Allowance was to be implemented, it would be possible to remove the Minimum Wage. This means that employers would have no incentive to recruit illegal immigrants, and safe working environment and legal protections could be properly implemented. There is also the benefit that people would not be so scared of losing their jobs, as they know there is a safety net available for them (one they already get). This would enable people to more boldly attempt to find employment that better suits them, be that working environment, pay, etc. Finally, we can use this system to combat illegal immigrant workers taking people's jobs and not paying tax. The solution is simply to allow all immigrants that want to work to work and pay tax. As long as they are paying tax, they are adding to the tax system that allows the payment of the Minimum Living Allowance. Immigrants would not be elligable for the MLA payments, so the more immigrants working, the greater the MLA payments for citizens could be. I can see a society with so much immigration that the citizens of the society can live extremely well, just on the tax of immigrant workers paying for their Minimum Living Allowance. What do you think? Executive summary for you Remove unemployment benefits and the dole, and pay everyone the equivilent. No disincentive to work, no stigmitisation of the unemployed (leading to low self esteem and lack of desire to work). Tax everyone from the first hour worked, drop minimum wage and tax immigrants to help pay for citizens Minimum Living Allowance. short enough for ya? I think I'll do it It seems to have made some discussion here... I'll subject it to the queue, but I think I need to rework it first, so might be a few weeks... You're right, my mistake. Five years ago k5 was a politically aware site. Nowdays its about ejacualting in peoples faces... Ahhh, to think how far we've come. Maybe someone who has done sophmore level economic theory can tell me what is wrong with it? If your interested I wrote this having been a legal immigrant in many countries, sick and tired of proving my economic worth (a process that takes at least three months) in order to work a mere six month contract. Also comes from my experience living with several unemployed people in the UK. Then again, perhaps my target audience wasn't actually the 12 year old idiots here like you, but the more mature members of our community. Pretty happy with the compass result Your political compass Economic Left/Right: -2.13 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69 I mostly agree with you. Yes, its meant to be similar to the Dole, but without the stigmatisation that comes with unemployment, and without removing the disincentive to work by removing it. I agree there is a problem with families. I would probably make it available to all people old enough to work, and then still add the standard adjustments for family allowances and the like. The problem with providing guaranteed work, an idea I've considered in the past and basically agree with, is that its very hard to move jobs when you are already working. So the person cannot move to the best job for them (and therefore the economy), because they are already too busy working to write up CV's and take interviews. It also allows for part time work for single mothers and the like, removes the minimum wage and makes immigration a win/win. Finally, I agree that this introduces a distortion into the economy, but I think that benefits of a safety net to society outweigh this. I'm a socialist, not a communist :) Guarenteed work does not help single mothers willing to work 10-20 hours a week in local pub and balance work with child raising responsibilities. I suspect that 40hours/week is either too much or not necessary. What happenned to the increased lesuire time promissed by automation? The real result has been people with jobs working longer hours, whilst more people become unemployed or live below the poverty line. People today are either money rich or time rich, there is no balance. Do you really think the minimum wage could be removed if the government provided 40 hours/week at $5/hour to work in the salt mines? Do you think this would improve society and help the poor? Does providing menial work benefit anyone? Is everyone really capable of this type of work? Even if it was a living wage, the fact that still remains that at 40 hours, people could not organise a better job for themselves. Especially if it was hard menial physical labor, as people would now be too tired to even think about getting another job. Your proposal does have the benefit of encouraging people off the safety net, but is that really necessary? If everyone was getting it, why would it be a problem that there were people incapable or unwilling to work? If society was rich enough, hardly anyone would have to work, especially if the burden of work was eventually left for immigrants. Esteem is very important and I get your point that work is an important part of that for most people, including myself. I don't think its absolutely true for everyone though. Also, a real job, that someone is willing to pay for, for whatever task and for the shortest time is going to do that person good. In general someone working 4-8 hours a week is going to feel better about themselves than someone working none. Someone doing menial government tasks aren't going to get that satisfaction and they are still going to be stigmatised by others for being too lazy to get a real job. I suspect this does nothing for self esteem. Anyway, why couldn't you have the two... Everyone gets enough to survive by default, and the government can still create meaningless jobs for small amounts of extra money to provide a slight market force towards a fairer wage. Well, in a sense, everyone already gets the minumum living wage, its just currently set to 0. So, the question is, should it be set higher (or lower bwahahaha)? There's going to be a level that almost everyone can agree on... Unemployed and low wage people would want this high, but employed and rich people would want it low. Fortunately rich people would find the amount low, middle class would find the same amount useful, and the poor would find it essential. No one is going to complain about receiving extra money (although in truth most people will be paying more than that amount in taxes). I think current unemployment benefits would be about the right amount, but maybe there's a better way to determine it, perhaps pay polititions in multiples of it? In answer to some of your questions. Illegal immigrants don't pay tax... That's a given. Legal immigrants can be forced to pay tax. The main reason for Visa's is to ensure tax is being paid. If you enabled all immigration (open borders), the immigrants would probably opt for the legal protections offered by working legally, and tax can be collected before pay. Other means of tax are fine too... There are many taxes here in the UK that could be cleaned up though. I'm not really in favour of taxing immigrants (non-citizens) as such, as enabling them to legally work and therefore pay taxes. I guess I like the idea because I have been, and am, an immigrant. I've always been pro-immigration (for others to my country as well) but understand that too much can have a negative impact. I think this is a direct way for citizens to benefit from immigration, and therefore be more open to it. Unfortunately I don't think the likes of Baldrson are ever going to see things this way. Not that I think his ideas on tax are so wrong, but his racism makes immigration incompatible. (Unless I've completely misunderstood him). Convincing people that they should pay taxes is a bit more tricky... I think the best way I've heared it expressed is "I'd rather pay for taxes than for guns", then again, this is an arguement that might not go down well in the US. Perhaps it can be generalised as paying the poor so they don't come and chop off your head one day (as another poster commented). I think I answered in another thread, but yes I agree, you don't want to incent people to have more kids to get more dole. I think the solution I came up with is paying this for everyone of working age, rather than everyone in general. Having this benefit isn't a reason to ignore other benefits such as disability, pensions, child allowances and others. So child allowances are really another discussion. The parent that has the children should pay. To me, it seems there is a benefit of having access to your children. At least in the majority of cases I have seen, parents normally miss their children and are upset that the other person has custody. The odd thing is that with the way the courts are nowdays, the woman normally ends up with the children and the man normally has to pay for them. I think whoever has the benefit of the children should have to pay for them. In effect this would mean no payments between either the mother or the father, and the parent most capable of providing for the children would have most access to them. In practice either parent should still have at least one day/week or more access (effectively for free), assuming both parents want access and there are no reasons why a parent shouldn't have access. In cases where fathers (or mothers) neither want to see the children nor to support them pay, then that parent should be forced to pay child support. However, normally the situation is that both parents want to have the children, but the mother normally ends up with the children and the father normally ends up paying. I don't see how this can possibly be considered either fair or best for the children. Punishment enough then the lifestyle you lead will end up destroying you because it is an unhealthy lifestyle choice and not a traditional one or a healthy untraditional one no? Sorry, question was in subject line... My point was that leading an unhealthy lifestyle will lead to a short life with lots of health problems, and I think that this is punishment enough for doing these things (Whether that is eating cheeseburgers, base jumping, drinking in excess or doing meth). Why do you need further punishments if the person has already punished themselves in terms of health and quality and quantity of life. How the hell did other people create your mental illness??? Take responsibility for your own defects, and don't force me to suffer because of your deficiencies? Or do you propose that everyone should spend some time in a mental institution? lol, what? Drug user's made you insane? Dude, you are insane... I don't see how other people using drugs affects your disorder. You can't say, drug users were mean to me, therefore drugs are bad. Damn, football players were quite mean to me at school... You think football should be illegal? Until you can explain how drug users make you go crazy, I think you have to accept your own faults. I think you're contradicting yourself. According to your rules, your Punishers must kill themselves too, by definition they will be doing something against the law. I agree that drug users that do bad things should be put in jail. I think anyone that does bad things should be put in jail. I just don't think taking drugs is doing a bad thing (although not necessarily a healthy or clever lifestyle choice). The FBI will fuck you punishers then Sounds to me like your punishers are the evil force in this world. Otherwise you would understand why the police follow laws. Your an idiot I don't take anything out on others. I agree [that] the government has a right to punish that [a] person for abusing their rights, endangering themselves or others,[or] discrminating against others, and basically being a moron so some social worker has to have power of attorney to manage their money and take care of them. Your body, but if you use it in the wrong way and break some laws, you will pay a price. If not by a [the] government, then [T]he lifestyle you lead [is no one's business but your own]will end up destroying you because it is an unhealthy lifestyle choice and not a traditional one or a healthy untraditional one. Illicit drugs are sexier because they are illicit Especially young people... Legalise, sell it in clinics with lots of health warnings and information. Going to get your drugs from the government along with a bunch of addicts wouldn't be so appealling. The reason I am for legalisation is that I think it is the correct approach to minimise drug usage and drug related harm. Not because I think drugs are clever, but because prohibition is dumb. Yes, Terrorism and Murder should both be legalised obviously it is the lure of illicit terrorism and murder drives these people. The only caveat I have is that it should be illegal to terrorise or murder other people. You should be free to terrorise or murder yourself to your hearts content, and the government shouldn't have the right to stop you. I agree with you that drugs are a good way to earn a Darwin award... that's not the contention here... I think frequent users of hard drugs are not acting in their own self best interest, but if I were to legislate against that, I think we should outlaw TV, McDonalds, sky diving and mountain climbing. Legalizing drugs will only maximize drug useage I don't think the facts show this to be true. Where drugs are legalised or tolerated, drug use tends to be lower. My example of this is soft drugs in Holland, where the local usage of soft drugs is much lower than in other European countries, while the availability is higher. One of the reasons I believe this to be true is that the legitimate sale of drugs means that the drugs can be regulated... Children (under 18) have a harder time getting drugs where they are regulated. You will lose your license if you sell to someone under 18. Where it is illegal, you encourage sales to people under 18, because the drug dealers know they are less likely to be selling to the police, and therefore the risk of selling to children is lower than selling to adults. As for burning down the fields, busting suppliers, etc, etc, works against you in the long run. Simple economic theory shows why. Drugs and other addictive substances have an inelastic demand. This means that increasing the price does little to decrease demand. So, the more you restrict supply, the higher the prices go... Higher prices means higher incentive for suppliers... Means more people willing to risk everything to become suppliers, and also that those who successfully supply become even richer than they would without trying to restrict supply. Suppliers and dealers of hard drugs prefer prohibition for this reason. Police prefer it for increased power and the prison industry prefers it to have more prisons. Along with drug usage being inelastic in demand, I beleive the market for hard drugs is itself limited. A minority of personality types are likely to take hard drugs whether they are illegal or not. They take them now, right? However, I give credit to my fellow man (at least the majority) in that they would not take up hard drugs just because they were legal. Would you? If you need laws to stop you doing stupid things, then I think you are the one ulitmately waiting in line for your darwin award. They will be so readily available that more people will OD on them, and people will be under the influence of them while driving vehicles and working jobs, leading to more deaths and destruction. I think this is wrong too... The number one reason people OD on hard drugs is that the quality of the supply is variable. One day a user takes 10% cut heroin, the next day 90% pure heroin and OD's. Make the supply constant and clean and you take away the number one reason people OD and you take away the majority of the health problems (being due to additives). One drug that typifies the health problems caused by prohibition is Crystal Meth. A truly dangerous drug that destroys the body and mind, but why do people take it and why does it exist? I think it is a direct response to prohibition against cocaine. Cocaine (while addictive and bad for your heart) is relatively benign compared to Meth, but it must be manufactured overseas and imported at great risk. It is far easier to make Meth (anyone can make it in their own homes with off the shelf ingredients), so it is cheaper and more available. If people could get access to cocaine, I imagine very few would take up Meth. Another example of this is Crack cocaine. Easy to transport, not as easily detected as powder cocaine, yet far more addictive and far more damaging to your health. Crack is so highly addictive that less than 5% of addicts ever quit, yet it appears that chewing the coca leaf is enough for Crack addicts to give it up. If coca leaf itself was legal, then it could be imported by the ton and all the Crack addicts could be free (except for having green teeth and chewing and spitting a lot). Finally as far as driving and working under the influence goes, I think the first should be illegal, and the second up the employer... I don't see why alcohol gets special treatment. I will secede a point I don't see hard drugs becoming as popular as alcohol. In the height of prohibition alcohol consumption was probably orders of magnitude more than consumption for hard drugs. I probably do have to agree with you that alcohol consumption has gone up since the end of prohibition... and yes, hard drug usage might go up too, maybe. I also think alcohol is different in that whole cultures have been drinking it for a long time. Europeans in particular have distilled beer to sanitize their drinking water for centuries, whereas asian cultures boiled their water to make tea. To this day, europeans have higher tolerances to alchol in general than asians. That shows that alcohol has changed our genetics, and that its been part of our culture for a long time. Either way, even if drug use does go up, the social cost of the drugs would probably go down. Hard drugs would never become as popular as alcohol. If what is said about these drugs are true, then I think people would be smart enough to avoid them. Meanwhile, those already addicted to these drugs wouldn't have to suffer outrages prices and dangerous quality. So, I ask again, would you take cocaine and heroin if it was legalised? Thanks for letting me know about the Netherlands name change. I guess I wasted my two years there. So let me rephrase what I originally said. Drug use among the Dutch is quite low, compared to other European countries. One thing I learnt there is that the Dutch are both very good at business and social issues. Of course the Dutch know foreigners come over to take their drugs and shag their hookers... they know that money is mostly untaxed and goes through the black market economy, but they also know that that money will recirculate into the Dutch economy, where at some point they will be able to tax it, in bars, restauraunts, hotels, etc. With this money they can afford the social programs that decrease the need for the Dutch to use drugs. That is why they tolerate the drugs, the hookers and the foreners. They also know that a lot of drugs are exported from and/or routed through them. They don't discourage this because they know that they are getting a percentage of every dime bag sold in one of your ghettos. That money goes to keeping the social standard in the Netherlands high. The Dutch of course have not legalised these hard drugs either, but they tolerate them far better than in the US. Partly due to this, their general relaxed attitude to drugs and other factors (strong labour laws, education, welfare and other social programs), the Netherlands is a very safe and friendly place to live. As for people killing themselves on glue and air dusters, what do you propose, that we outlaw these too? Obviously people who sniff glue and air dusters are looking for a high, you prefer they get it from something probably more toxic than the illegal substances. That's the kind of ass backward logic that defines drug prohibition. Now, here's your falicy of the supply of illicit drugs. You think that it is even possible to bring the price up that high... Well, it might be, but it would take entire armies, and you're going to have to kill almost every dealer, farmer and hobby grower and destroy every single last seed and plant on the planet (both cultivated and wild). Plants grow and reproduce by themselves (they don't mind our help of course) so unless you destroyed every single plant, you are going to get more. If you push the price that high, someone is going to make sure that happens, and that they profit. So, as much energy (and the economic cost) as you put into getting the price that high, you have to keep putting in, otherwise the price drops. Its ridiculous because the US is getting poorer because they are effictively legislating against nature. Against mother nature and against human nature*. Its not exactly fight that is ever likely to be won. While you were keeping the price high, the economic costs lead to worse ghettos and every day more and more people would be dying from sniffing glue, air dusters and ever new and more dangerous drugs. At the same time, your making anyone who can supply the drug richer faster. Now that's what I call crazy. * Humorous offtopic thought: I imagine the US will eventually legislate against hurricans and rising sea levels. Anyone seen near either hurricans or the sea will be seen as low life scum that should be thrown in prison for their own good because they obviously can't look after themselves. Seek and Destroy: Mother Nature the New Evil Dude.... This is exactly the problem... You are trying to destroy nature... Why don't we just once and for all destroy all the rainforests, get them before they get us? You forget that cocaine and morphine (medical heroin) are used in Surgery. Cocaine is a fantastic topical anasthetic, and is used in occular sugery. Heroin (at least outside the US) is one of the most effective pain releivers known to medical science. Australia has one of the worlds largest legal poppy fields in the world. These plants are so powerful because humans have interacted with these plants over long periods of time. Selectively breeding the ones with the most potent effects. I beleive that our common ancestors survived to create us because of these plants, not inspite of them. (providing neurochemicals that allowed them to continue functioning that were not available in their diet due to times of drought, etc) Finally if you did try to destroy all the crops with some engineered solution, someone somewhere will make sure that some of the plants survive, and will make themselves very rich once the PTB think that all the plants are gone. I know that people from all walks of life do drugs, but Kate Moss and Robbie Williams don't appear to have had too many problems. The people that suffer from them are generally poor. The rich people with good incomes and good lives tend to use it recreationally and even if they do become addicted can often come off the drugs, because they are not self medicating as much as enhancing their enjoyment. The poor often take drugs to self medicate because their life is so shit and their options so lacking. Animals in pain self medicate. Now, I do propose making these drugs available to people. Not so that others can make a profit but in order to minimize the suffering addicts have. In a climate where they can admit their addiction to a councellor (available at all good addictive drug clinics) without fear of arrest and without being 'forced' to, they are more likely to take that option up. Also, as they are getting the high from a clinic, the main dangers of the drug are minimized (free from varing quality and additive poisons.). The individual is the right person to decide their future, addicted or not. I also agree with you that being high on life, etc, is a commendable stance to take for yourself. I would recommend that people do that and avoid drugs too. Yet, whilst I am willing to recommend that to people, I don't see that that justifies forcing that beleif on others. I might also agree that people who take drugs are killing themselves slowly, but I think that is an option that is right for people. Now some for more illogic, typical American attitude, you suggest that instead of taking drugs and killing themselves that people should sign up for the military and kill other people instead. More typical prohibitionist thinking -- drugs can kill you, you should be killing other people, not yourself, dumbass. Dude, I would rather put a bullet in my own head than fight in Iraq. I am totally against the latest American campaigns to free Oil from Iraqies. I do recommend anyone contemplating joining the US armed forces (in today's political climate) to try heroin at least once, and not to be stingy with the dose... If you can't find heroin, stricnine, arsenic or cyanide are all good substitutes. I don't want these people dying slowly if they can get it done quickly without killing others on the way. You then go on about trying not to kill others... Hypocrisy? I guess Iraqi and Afganani civilians don't count as people if they aren't paying taxes to the US? You see, drug users could easily pay taxes on these drugs to cover the expense and burden they put on society. Easily enough to cover the extra cost. This money could be going to the government, instead of overseas drug cartel monsters. This is how you solve the cost of these drugs on society, legalisation, regulation and taxation, not through death, destruction and removing peoples rights and freedoms. Oh, I see Your bacteria only kills illegal crops. Right.... So glad you accepted that these powerful drugs can be used in Surgery, and for non-evil reasons. Well if you agree people have the right to kill themselves, why do it slowly and force uncounted numbers of others to suffer as a result? Why not just do it quickly and avoid the suffering on uncounted others? Because I enjoy it? Its how I choose to waste my life. What right have you got to say my choices are wrong? If my drug habit caused me to come over and kill your ugly ass, then I would say you have a point, yet today I have a good job, earn more money than you, and feel better about myself than you, yet you think you are the superior one. I certainly think that EVIL should be punished. But you haven't shown that drugs or drug users are necessarily EVIL. Maybe some guys in college used to pick on you, and they also took drugs, does not mean drug users pick on people like you. I mean, I agree, steal a VCR, go to jail. Rob a person, go to jail. Kill a person go to jail. Consume a plant given by god for our enjoyment and enlightenment and you say that person should be killed? Fuck you idiot. In truth you are scared of other people taking drugs because they might enjoy it, and experience something YOU CAN NOT. Its a feeling of inferiority to those people that make you want to attack them. I am not a drain on society, my friends or my family... Yet you see me taking a pill and you want to destroy me. My friend, it is you have the problem in your head, not (necessarily) the drug users. I'll leave out the war stuff... Like I said, I disagree with the Iraq war, but I think the war against germany was probably a good idea. Your an idiot Your pushing your agenda on me... I'm not asking you take drugs, but you are asking me to do something I don't want to (namely, not take drugs). Also I pay taxes (by my account enough to support about 2-5 retirees/benefit recipients). So I am not a drain on society. Also, I'm not about to die from drug usage, so you can take your darwin award and shove it. Taxes are the solution in *this* case. Oh sure, taxes are the solution to everything, right? Tax illicit drugs, and there will be riots on the street from the drug users, drug lords, gangs, and addicts as well as people like you pushing for legalizing everything to help lead to an anarchy because you don't think the government should have laws on anything a person does that is evil. You will claim that the taxes are way too high and should be lowered because it punishes the people who want to use illicit drugs but are too poor to pay the taxes from the slums of their ghettos. A bullet in the head would be the kinder and gentler option from you, in truth. Taxes from (now licit) drugs go to cover the societal costs of the drugs... The cost would be much lower than the cost of illicit drugs, and therefore would be affordable. I already stated that I don't beleive in anarchy, so the rest is nonsense. I agree drug user's should suffer Addicts deserve to suffer, because that is a side-effect of taking the illicit drug in the first place I agree that they should suffer the effects of the drugs. Like drunks suffer from hangovers... I don't think I should be putting a bullet in the head of anyone who drinks, because 'pain is a side-effect of drinking'. Drugs were around before last century Unless you've lived the millions of years ago and can prove that pre-humans used these plants for positive things, you are only talking out of your ass. Prove they weren't, and that you're not speaking out of your ass. Coca and man have had a long history. Coca has been an important cultivated crop in the Andean region for over 4,000 years and has been an integral component in the trade between the highland areas and the coast for nearly as long (see COCA case). The cultural homogeneity of the regions was first established and maintained through these trade relationships which are still largely in effect today. Archaeologists have discovered numerous artifacts indicating that the chewing of the coca leaf has been used by the inhabitants of the region from as far south as Chile to northern Central America since 2100 BC. Traditionally, the coca leaf has been chewed to relieve fatigue and hunger, as it is a mild stimulant. Additionally, it has the medical applications of helping relieve altitude sickness and conserve body heat. It also provides some essential vitamins when consumed. Obviously, these three characteristics are particularly useful in the mountainous Andes. In the historical past the coca leaf has been integral to a number of religious ceremonies, based on prehistoric use patterns. The use of coca has always figured prominently in Andean cultural and religious daily life and continues to do so even today. These plants have been used for longer than 4 thousand years... what makes you think haven't been used for hundreds of thousands of years before that? retard Use of opium dates back further than there is history. Archeological digs in Switzerland have found Opium Poppy seeds and pods, dating from the Neolithic age--the "New Stone Age", a period running from 5500 B.C. to 8000 B.C. This makes opium the oldest known drug. Darwin Awards. (a quick note) If you do get illicit drugs legalized, I hope someone under the influence of illicit drugs takes you out, and thus wins you a Darwin Award Firstly, that's not very nice. Secondly, I am more likely to be taken out by an illicit drug user looking for a quick way to earn cash for their next score than I would ever be if their drugs were legalised. what is KMF? Not sure where I was rude to you, in another thread perhaps?? Or did you take it personally when I said prohibition is dumb? (Does not imply I thought you were). Eitherway not really the main point of the post... BTW, what is KMF? I will reply to your reply to my other post when I get back from work in an hour or two. I don't want you to kill yourself. Who would I argue against besides CTS?? Damn that would be annoying. I think you accused me of things other people have said. I think I agree though that if you are pro prohibition you are by definition pro forcing your ideas on others. I think that prohibition is dumb but that smart people can have dumb ideas. I might have also implied you were dumb through this, so I guess I was just being rude and apologise, but there must be a reason I am arguing with you... if your posts weren't worth commenting on, I wouldn't comment. (ie, Why argue with an idiot?). Most importantly, though I want to change people's minds. Most prohibitionists are probably good people who are misguided by propaganda and seeing the world in only one way. Prohibition is more damaging than the alternative. You can be anti prohibition but anti hard drugs and even drugs in general (including alcohol and tobacco). As for which type of person I fall into: Suppliers rarely support legalization, although they might say that. In reality it is prohibition that gives them their money and power. If they wanted to sell something legal, they would buy a pub. I'm not a fan of suppliers, and think they would lose the most from legalisation. Why would terrorists support legalisation? They get their money buy being suppliers. Real Islamicists would want you to stop drinking too. This is just a case of using the T-word where 40 years ago you would use the C-word. The best way to deny them drug money is of course to legalise it again. Anarchists want no laws, that's very sensible. I just think that you should have the right to do what you want up to the point you impinge on other peoples rights. This obviously includes violence, theft and driving laws (as you making a mistake will very likely cost someone else their life). On the other hand I don't think society should have unnecessary and wrong laws. I think the drug war gives police unconstitutional powers (against the right to be secure in person and property from unreasonable searches and seizure). Well, admission through omission, I plea the fifth. No comment, etc... Addicted to tobacco, caffiene, sugar and skunk. Addiction might not really be the right word to describe the last one. I will drink if forced and as our man David Cameron said: "I had a normal university experience". In the end though it is not the Users but the Addicts I sympathise with the most. Generally poor, powerless and vulnerable before, they are caught between suppliers and the law whilst being biologically driven to get the one thing that no one wants them to have. Complete retardedness Suppliers are tired of having to work underground, they are pushing for legalization for medical reasons, so it will give them a foothold in the pharmacutical industry which is worth trillions of dollars or more. They are trying to find scientific evidence to support that the drugs they supply can have positive effects on health, though they rarely do. I am sure there are some suppliers who like to make as much money as they can by higher prices, but this is a trap of classical management. Some suppliers feel that lower prices can allow them to sell more of the drug, esp if it is legalized, in which case the mass volume of low price sales can mimick what Wal-Mart does or even what Generic Drug makers do when they make generic versions of popular medication at lower prices. Of course you'd have to take business management or accounting to understand all of that. Oh yeah, I can see the big columbian cocaine dealers just dying to have the US make cocaine worth nearly nothing by legalising it... Retard. Terrorists want to legalize the drugs, because they use it to destroy the population. What better way to destroy the lives of people than legalize some drug they make, which in turn gets more people to use it, which allows the terrorists to meet their goals of destroying the lives of the infidels or enemies of their network. Besides the government doesn't expect that sort of attack, nor does it count the deaths due to drug use. All they need do is keep supplying the drug, and if it is legal it is so much easier to get it into the country, which makes their jobs so much easier. I don't think you understand terrorism. No-one will be terrorised by the availability of hard drugs. Terrorism ==> Terror... OMG, I could get legal cocaine if I want, the terrorists have won... Retard. Terrorism is the new boogeyman... It hardly exists, it kills very few people. More people die from smoking... Making we should ban that to stop the terrorists... Take away their role in supply of nicotene. See how retarded you are? Finally Anarchism. Drug users become anarchists, because (for many) they are otherwise law abiding citizens who find themselves on the other side of it. If you want to remove respect from the law, create lots of silly laws that no one can obey, make everyone a criminal, and see what support for the law remains. The best thing about being in holland was that I no longer felt like a criminal, I felt like the police were on my side. This made them much more approachable and my respect for the law greatly increased. What people like you miss, the fundamental point of drug use, is that some people are always going to use drugs. I (and they) enjoy drugs, and have decided they are right for my life. Some people are going to need drugs. If you remove the powerful, relatively safe drugs, they will only be replaced by equally or more powerful and far less safe drugs. You suggest drug user's should smoke lead bullets from the end of metal barrels, that's never going to happen for very obvious reasons. you don't really need oxygen, but you keep abusing it. My drug usage causes no more harm to others than my eating McDonalds does you stuck up, retarded asshole. Out of interest, do you sunburn easy? Who are you?? The skeptopotamus!! & I DON'T BELEIVE IT!!! ITALIANS OBVIOUSLY YOU ARE NOT THE REAL POKEY Pokey the penguin is a very stupid, but incredibly funny cartoon that, according to the book that used to be on yellow5 (written in accordance to the 5 rules of the Illuminati), tries to maximise irony... but I think they just like being stupid. Pokey lives in the arctic circle and enjoys arctic circle candy, which grows in the snow. Pokey characters include the Skeptopotomous who believes nothing, Mr Nutty the snowman and, of course, the ever evil Italians. Doxdesk has some Pokey cartoons, but they are not the originals unfortunately. The real pokey penguin site does appear to have let their registration lapse... And this is why we are mourning - CHIGAGO-STYLE. More likely your dns still has it cached Domain Name: YELLOW5.COM Administrative Contact : Pending Renewal or Deletion Record expires on 05-Nov-2005 Record created on 04-Nov-1997 Database last updated on 11-Nov-2005 Either that, or its just been updated and not propagated here yet. IHBT HERE ON RUM ISLAND WE DON'T BELIEVE IN RUM MI NO GUSTA TU CARA!!! WHERE IS MY GUN MR NUTTY? "I thought online shopping was meant to make things easier?" my girlfriend complained to me earlier. Yesterday I went to buy a laptop from EBuyer with my credit card, but my cards billing address is not the same as the shipping address so they won't accept it and I can't get a new laptop. The reason my card is not registered to my address is that as a contractor I move around a lot, at least once every two years for the last 8 years or so. So I send all my statements to Australia, and get my parents to send them to me wherever I'm currently living. This is FAR easier than trying to get all my accounts and everything else in my life updated every time I move. Now, what I really don't get with online credit transactions is that once I have given my details to one person/online shop, they have everything necessary to order anything else from anyone else on my behalf, because how can you tell them anything 'secret' without letting them know it? Stupid, right? I assume everyone reading this understands SSH, public key encryption and that there are now smart chips (chip + pin) capable of this type of cryptography built into all the bank cards now. Why doesn't my bank (Barclays) provide me with a card reader that can produce one time authorisation codes when I give it my card and my pin number? Then the ONLY thing an online shop needs to charge me would be the one time authorisation code... Where I lived or where my card was registered would not matter, just the fact that I had a thing, and knew a thing would be enough, and neither of those things would have to be sent to the payee. I did get quite frustrated with the EBuyer customer support rep, as I don't think it shoud be necessary for the billing address to match the shipping address... but rationally I do understand the potential for fraud here, so I am more frustrated at the system in general, but why won't EBuyer allow me to pay with other methods? So why don't banks use one time codes and the card's built in cryptography to authorise transactions and chose instead to rely on much less secure methods? Discuss. EBuyer only ships to the UK $ Thanks Good suggestion... I'm actually using my Debit card this time, but I will keep that in mind. BTW. I just went to the bank and had my address updated. I called EBuyer again and they have to wait for the systems to be updated... typical. I think it would be even easier than it is now. Insert your card into the bank supplied card reader, Enter your pin number and, Type the number on the card reader's screen into the website. I prefer my screws stripped Screwing with your clothes on just isn't as satisfying. That'll be a long time comming. $ Probably a real addiction and not the as-seen-on-TV-have-to-suck-cock-everyday-for-my-next-hit-addiction all the propagandized idiots here seem to believe is inevitable. I object to you saying meth Could you please change it to orange juice? That shit is toxic. I was on it for like two years, and I never cleaned my teeth... They all fell out and now people call me OJ mouth, but I don't care, cause he got away with it. Anyway, the moral of my story is that we should lock up those orange juice junkies before they steal my TV and kill all the other Nicole Simpsons out there. Discourage (1) I agree with the most of your point, but it's moot because you overlook the fundamental fact that illegal drugs do turn their users into criminals... ah, they're illegal... duh. Just like how homosexuals and athiests are criminals because their acts/beliefs are illegal? What? The law can change? Amazing. Live catch mouse traps http://www.victorpest.com/live_mouse_traps.htm Nuclear Me, I'm pretty convinced global warming is happening, and pretty convinced theres abso-fucking-lutely nothing we can do about it. Its not that we can't do anything about, its just that no one WILL. I'm from Perth, now living in the UK. Perth's poorest suburbs have a 'gang' that call themseleves KGB and stands for Koondoola, Girrawheen and Balga. IAWTP i hadnt watched an ashes in years because it was fucking pointless, at least this year there was some point to it What's the point of winning all the time if no-one's there to watch you win? That's why we have to let the poms win every twenty years or so. Refuse the test [nt] Get a new job then? [nt] How to guarantee discussion but I'm not sure it will ever be a popular discussion on such an elitist site as kuro5hin. -1 Too US centric [nt] Expect more of em If the Kyoto treaty had been signed, then there is still a good chance this would have happened. However, without signing the Kyoto treaty you pretty much ensure this is going to happen again... and again.... and with increasing frequently. Enjoy your weather. Global warming is a left wing conspiricy? Remind me to laugh when you're drowning/starving/dehydrating or whatever the fuck nature decides to throw at you then. 200 years of industrialisation? Increasing CO2 levels --> More heat in the atmosphere --> Greater frequency and severity of climatic events. In a period of increased Are those same scientists saying that we are in a period of increased glacier melting, deforestation and rate of species extintion too? Interesting... tangents? Right, so global warming, climate, glacier recession, species extinction rates and Kyoto are all unrelated subjects... Honestly, you make me laugh... And I'll be laughing harder when it finally dawns on you that you can't eat money. No. The subject was on Kyoto and the hurricans you will be seeing more of. About the last people I'll be donating to is Americans... Sorry, but when the Tsunami hit, the worlds richest nation was amongst the lowest donators per capita. Now you have a use for all that donation money you saved. Post Chimpanzeeism Once upon a time, in a tree far far away sat a rather strange monkey. He considered himself far advanced beyond all the other monkeys, and perhaps in his way he was. With his strange view of the world, he would often tell the other chimpanzees his vision of the future. He would gather his friends around him, and tell them that one day they would leave the trees and would control nature itself. They would no longer be afraid of cats, snakes and baboons. They would not be covered in lice, they could wash in both hot and cold streams that ran straight to wherever they were, whenever they wanted it. Their bodies would mean less and less to them, he told his friends. They would be able to travel huge distances with very little effort, as if just by imagining their thoughts could propel them anywhere, across distant forests, vast landscapes, deep oceans and even to the stars. They would never be hungry or ill or too hot or too cold. Just as they could move about whenever they chose, chimps in the future, he said, could bring the world to them. If they wanted to talk to another chimp, they would not even have to move, but their screeching would be heard by the other chimp just as if they were sitting in the same branch together. In the future, a chimp could see through the eyes of another chimp at whatever they were seeing, wherever in the world the other chimpanzee was. All the chimp's friends were very impressed with this and asked him how they could live his future. He told them they needed to start a movement. He said that this future would be when chimpanzees had trancended their frail bodies and short lives for a time when they would be far more than what they are now. So he called his vision "Post Chimanzeeism". The Post Chimpanzeeist Charity was created and bananas were donated to bring Post Chimpanzeeism to fruition sooner. Then he told his followers that to experience this future they should throw off the oppression of their own bodies, and the best way to do that was to remove their genitals. Sadly, this Chimp is not one of your ancestors. Most of the other chimps decided the future could wait a season or two, and although it took many many more years, by either accident, design or necessecity, a few of those chimp's ancestors eventually left the trees and headed into the real Post Chimpanzee era. I know, not news, just disturbing. [nt] Re: Castration Transhumanism as I see it is just that things will change, and maybe we will benefit from it, and maybe we wont... I thought the two things were related to him. Also, if its problems with women, he should really look to Van Gogh for inspiration and stop at an ear or something that won't cause too many further problems if he changes his mind. Anyway, in all honesty I hope the best for him, if that's the way he chooses to try and find his happiness I guess its his right. worst limerick eva!! [nt] You are right in one sense, wrong in another If you ever lived in the Netherlands (I did for two years) you would find its one of the safest places you have ever been. I am comparing this against England and Australia, not exactly dangerous places. Secondly, the reason these people take others down with them is usually more to do with the laws and associated crime than the drugs themselves. So this means it is the laws that you should have issue with. (High prices + addiction == theft and crime). Finally, unless you can completely prove that drugs cause people to cause you harm (I doubt you could), you should only legislate against the actual harm they cause. Otherwise I might argue that your haircut, your clothes, the colour of your skin or your accent should be illegal, because people with your haircut, clothes, colour of skin or accent take everybody else down with them. If anyone stops and questions you, you can honestly tell them that your sack is empty.