Nashhhh

In the Q&A part he addresses this. I think they showed passengers first for the video just for stylistic purposes. He said he thinks you'd probably be launching spaceships and begin fueling between trips (26 months), keeping them parked in orbit, and then passengers would go up last before the trip and board fully fuled ships. I think it's a detail that's not determined yet. Watch the video.

The key difference being that in the case of Uber, those VCs and investors gave their money voluntarily.

Perhaps this is relevant: meat in Argentina isn't aged. You never see it in marketing either... it would seem weird here. Cattle is trucked in to the city (a third of the country is in Buenos Aires), butchered here and sent out to carnicerias (butcher shops) that day. It's a common sight to see refrigerated boxtrucks with cow carcasses hanging in the back double parked outside markets/butchers/etc.

Probably either Bio (vegan) or Artemesia (not-so-strict-vegetarian). Or green bamboo.

But the reason you found lots of vegeterian restaurants is not surprising: you were a tourist in a touristy area, and it's mainly tourists that look for vegetarian restaurants in Argentina!

Source: I'm Argentine, and I live here. Also, I eat at those restaurants.

You're right.

Exactly! When I saw the headline, that is what I thought it would be about: how apple has been playing defense and is destroying itself. They have been innovation free since the iphone 4 and it shows. Unfortunately, they made the wrong call on screen size and it's taken them 4 years to catch up. They also really need to drop this one-model-per-year schedule. Competition is too strong now. They need to release their BS "s" models midyear.

It's true (apple fanboy here, I remember it well). He was adamantly against them. If you look around, he did a whole keynote where he tried to present web apps as just as good as native apps-- it was ridiculous.

He'd been dead wrong before as well: just a few years before the iphone, when people wanted to see an ipod with video capability, he said nobody would ever want to watch video on a mobile device.

It really bugs me that apple makes these "nobody would ever want" proclamations and then reverses itself without saying, "we goofed". The next one coming is 5+ inch screens for the iphone. They'll make no mention of the fact that they criticized large screen phones before ("look, my thumb goes from corner to corner!"). Oh well.

Exactly

Saying it's been used since the mid 80s doesn't actually serve to convince me I'm wrong. In fact it does the opposite; I'd have thought it was in use longer.

Yeah stolen! I had a copy of Ghostbusters at home on my shelf and it disappeared yesterday. I suspect a criminal using popcorntime must be responsible.

Your examples are not examples of the problem with gold standards, but the rather the problem with fractional reserve banking, which is virtually non-existent with BTC (I disagree with Bitcoin proponents that say FRB isn't possible with BTC-- it'll simply be market based and potentially auditable through the blockchain). My point with 2008 is that it was a problem created by banks/government, which, whether corrupt or whatever, is essentially centrally planned. So I meant to say that while the current system was "saved" by the central planning, you must couple it with the fact it was caused by it, too (or, caused by a failure of it, if you'd prefer).

This is true, but the end of your post implies that recessions have become rarer and less pronounced in a fiat system. They haven't. In other words, sure, central banks "flooded the markets with capital and blunted the impact of the crisis and avoided panic", but what system was in place that allowed the manic colossal 1995-2008 housing bubble to take place? Did it not have anything to do with central banking policies, say, I dunno, incredibly low interest rates for a decade?

The interesting part about your post is that it is in response to OP asking if people would be willing to buy BTC at any price (to which you responded no). But you gave the perfect example of mass psychology encouraging people to hoard an asset they believe to be safe: in this case, in 2008, it was the USD. Despite 'printing' (yes, I get it, it's not literally printing) massive amounts of USD, the world ate it up because the USD it the world's reserve currency and they (correctly) assumed that if the US is in trouble, every one else's currencies were in waaaaay worse shape. Thus the insatiable demand for something that was becoming 5x less scarce.

Now, if Bitcoin ever reaches that level of belief in its capacity as a store of value (for example, based on the fact that for the first time ever you have a currency/scrip/asset/commodity whose entire supply is predetermined, fixed and immutable politically, could you not conceive that it might to have buyers flock to it? (not asking if it's probable, only if it's possible; I'd agree that at this stage this isn't the case)

"Fiat currency is sustained by our obligation to pay taxes in it..."

I often see this argument, but it neatly ignores, for example, the Argentine Peso, which is losing 46% of its purchasing power (last few months, annualized) vs. US Dollars (or tomatoes, or cars, or whatever you want, on average), yet taxes are just as high as they ever been (higher, in fact: 35% tax just implemented on all cars above a certain threshold, for example). So where is that value-sustaining-tax effect I hear so much about?

Come to think of it, in 1989 when the Argentine Austral's value went to essentially zero (1-1 with the USD to 1-10,000 in a little over a year), taxes weren't low... so what happened? In fact, you could still pay taxes just fine with all that worthless paper with a bunch of zeros on it. Why didn't taxes and legal tender give it value?

Instantly. Zero exchange risk for the merchant (Bitpay considers their hedging strategies as part of their core-competence-- they don't always convert to USD/Euro/GBP [1], they sometimes stay long bitcoin). All payments for the day are aggregated (in USD/Euro/GBP [1]) and sent to the merchant (as long as it's more than $20, I believe. So it's much quicker than credit cards (and don't forget money from credit cards can be automatically pulled from the merchant account up to 120 later, whereas these ones are irreversible.) [1]Note: This is why it's easier to say "fiat" when referring to national currencies. :)