duckingtest

There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government

You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman where 'capitalism' can have any property you want, which then allows you to misrepresent an attack on a $random_negative_thing as an attack on 'capitalism'.

A system with state intervening in the market is called a mixed economy.

It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.

The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.

If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.

American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist. It's illegal to offer services without explicit permission of the medical guild. It has the exact same effect all historical guild systems had: price gouging and reduced supply. Taxi licenses are another good example.

Capitalist medical system would mean the value of a particular medical certification would be set by the market, ie. everyone would be able to sell medical services. Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.

1. Jacek Dukaj [0] - virtually unknown due to refusal to write directly in English :( "Perfect Imperfection" is imo the best sf book about trans/posthumanism there is.

"Dukaj has interesting take on post-humanism, both as a state of being and as a process. If you recall Accellerando, even though Manfred Macx was a futurist and trans-humanist he was hesitant to augment himself past certain limits. Stross pretty much drew a line in sand and said: up to here, you are human and if you rewire yourself further you will become something both incomprehensible, inhuman and frightening. Dukaj is very aware of this problem, but in his universe there is no line – there is a blurred spectrum of humanity. Yes, if you continue augmenting yourself for pure performance you may eventually lose track of your humanity." [1]

2. Hannu Rajaniemi

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection

[1] http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2011/07/08/perfect...

It's only possible for everyone to win if basic resources are infinite. Tribalism is the only pareto optimal strategy for finite resources, especially land on Earth.

Allowing for coordinated protocol changes, the optimal length of pre-cooperative identification code should depend on the probability of error (defector). Which after a long enough time of winning (ie. close to zero defectors) would lead to jumping into cooperation immediately. Which would make defense against defectors impossible and lead to a total collapse as they exploit the hapless cooperators.

Interesting parallels.

What these simulations show is that tribalism is a winning strategy. Which means not following it leads to death.

We should move beyond tribalism because of it's inherence of prejudice.

Considering an inherent property of a winning strategy evil means your code is non-optimal and is inevitably going to disappear.

POW can't work at these scales. At $250k/btc mining would burn something close to the equivalent of New Zealand's GDP. As this would be purely electrical energy, energy use alone would be equivalent to that of Spain or similarly sized country.

That's only partly true. There are countries where average wage is $300/month. They are NOT going to buy legal software and media for $40/thing no matter how easy it is.

You can only say this if you're too ignorant to be worth a damn on the subject, or are insane enough to think that the people who have developed the protocol for the last 8 years are all misguided

Argument from authority

where the decentralization of miners is threatened even by a 2 MB block size

proof by assertion

is too capable of assumptions to be let near engineering.

ie 'u dumb'

I'm sure you convinced many people with your thoughtful comment. :)

That's complete FUD on several levels. On a most general level, mining itself only needs the header. Chinese miners can verify blocks and transactions elsewhere and only send headers to the actual mining sites. A dial-up should be enough.

Regardless, from what I heard it's not a problem anymore. Even if it was, allowing 'fast passage' for bitcoin blocks seems like a obvious course of action for the Chinese government, it's just another export industry at this point.

Calling it 'weak' is giving it too much consideration. The only sensible argument against larger blocks is that they boost mining centralization because larger blocks may take more time to propagate. Which may be true but it requires 1GB+ blocks. 10Gbps connection isn't a noticeable cost item for a serious mining operation, which means latency for a 1MB block and a 1GB one should be almost identical.

That's it. Remember that decentralization in bitcoin concerns miners, and miners only. 'Nodes' in the whitepaper are synonymous with miners.

Non-mining wallets need to have enough bandwidth to download blocks from miners as they appear. For 1GB blocks 20Mbps is enough. Which means a full verifying wallet for 1GB blocks is practical on a LTE connection.

Storage is also a non-problem with utxo commitments.

It turned out to be a misconception because computers are astronomically easier to use now. If you had to ever configure a config.sys entry for a specific game you know what I mean.

You should ask the question about Core developers' incentives: what do they personally gain from scaling bitcoin? Nothing, at best increase in value of their holdings which they share with lots of free-riders, and only until they sell. They only gain continuously if scaling is prevented as that opens space for their second-layer solutions - presumably to be enabled by planned 'improvements' to bitcoin. Ie. their only incentive is to capture bitcoin for rent extraction.

Miners are the only entities that have a continued incentive to improve bitcoin directly.

THAT'S the real conflict, everything else is BS.

There's an old idea that solves the storage issue completely - utxo commitments.

Literally the only real throughput limit is end user's download bandwidth, which means 500MB blocks or so for 10Mbps download. Spv clients are fine for those unfortunate to have monthly limits.

making it even more profitable to mine for big investors, than smaller fish.

Both storage and bandwidth are utterly insignificant cost items in a mining operation.

There's no free market in healthcare. Healthcare in the US is a guild with state-enforced monopoly. Reasonable prices would defeat the whole point of this.

Naturally, it's sold to the public as 'safety' or other BS.

Sweden has a population of 9.8 million yet it has produced Skype

Skype is Estonian.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/stories/skype/skype-chapter-...

In my case I was searching for something niche very hard and nearly couldn't find it. It turned out it exists, but was marketed to a drastically different market and I was using 'alien' terms, so to speak. I think I noticed a small 'affiliates' link in the footer and got the idea to market to people starting from my starting point. Wasn't sure if there was even one, turned out there are thousands.

I don't think you can specifically look for a niche. That's how you end up doing the exact same thing thousands different marketers are doing. Just be able to recognize the opportunity when it randomly presents itself.

About three years.

understand that all your years of work can be destroyed by one diagnosis. And plan accordingly.

Outside of emergency, you can travel to cheaper countries for treatment.

Affiliate marketing.

I'm making about $10k/month from several sites I don't really update. The trick is to install yourself in some customer acquisition path no one else figured out. When I started my first attempt I didn't even expect to make the domain registration fee back over a year, I did it mostly out of boredom.

Don't look out for affiliate solutions specifically, but keep an eye out for them. Especially when you found some product/service that's hard to find, but very valuable - do they have an affiliate program? Great, that's your chance - especially because, being a customer, you probably know better than them what's their main selling point!

No more details than that, sorry. I'm not trying to sell you anything. In affiliate marketing be super wary of those that try, most likely that's their real income source.

It's mostly a parasitic income but sadly that's how current economy is, honest productive work pays the least relative to what it brings. Mostly thanks to central banks that artificially prevented a giant systemic reset.

I think the real difference is much more pronounced than what your analysis suggests. A significant fraction of people without college-level education aren't able to pass the non-financial admission requirements, or drop out. Which almost certainly means that earnings of those who could easily finish but decide not to are going to be much higher, making the decision to not go even better.

Sadly, I don't think any relevant statistics exist.

The idea of completely stopping cheating in systems like these harms meritocracy. I know this sounds outrageous.

The problem is systemic - in European post-socialist countries, education is based mostly on rote learning which becomes more and more pointless in a modern world. Example on the bottom.

Students cope with that by cheating, which allows them to concentrate their time on actually useful aspects. Most teachers, except the dullest ones, tolerate that. In other words, the whole system sort-of works only because of cheating! As it's so accepted rote learning is irritating, but mostly harmless.

There's a fine boundary where cheating stops being beneficial - crib notes are great, making someone else solve problems for you, or having pre-made answers is not. That actually should be punished.

Punishing all forms of cheating is going to be incredibly damaging, because it means the best scoring students are going to be those best at memorization.

Wouldn't it be better to remove rote learning instead? Obviously, but I'm afraid that's not realistic. Harshly punishing cheating now is going to achieve the opposite: today's top rote learners become tomorrow's professors and teachers. Not only did they get great scores, but they presumably feel good in a rote-learning system.

---

What do I mean by rote learning? Memorize these numbers [0] to the third decimal place. Not a joke - it's a real example, albeit exceptional in its absurdity.

[0] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lsq2xglw1e4/maxresdefault.jpg

http://www.wicab.com/

It directly is, otherwise exploitation via voluntary transactions becomes logically impossible.

is not central to socialism

The whole point is that workers get their 'surplus labor' stolen. The concept doesn't exist without labor theory of value. Socialism without labor theory of value becomes a naked call to plunder without any pretense of justice.

I have amblyopia in one eye too, try doing LSD or one of its semi-legal analogues. While on 300µg I was able to read with the lazy eye and got 3d vision. I was looking at a tree with lots of branches and suddenly it clicked. I retained 3d vision for about 2 weeks afterwards, progressively weaker.

Interesting experience. 3d vision really means depth is directly perceived in the same manner as width and height. Now I understand why so many people are afraid of heights.

The core but unspoken idea of socialism is a zero-sum world. Everything stems from that. Marx's labor theory of value is an attempt to explain how economy works given that premise. In a zero-sum world every profit indeed means loss for the other party; so employers' profits must come from workers exploitation.

There's no room for any improvement in this mindset. In a zero-sum world being more efficient at something and hence more profitable means you're stealing, either from customers or from less-efficient producers. Which really means any attempt at making things better is evil.

After a generation or two people start to internalize it, and you get a 'homo sovieticus' society which interprets any ambition as aggression - wanting a better life becomes synonymous with wanting to steal.

Villains in Atlas Shrugged may appear ridiculously one-dimensional and simplified, but then one look at Venezuela today should convince anyone they are indeed realistic.

That's not accidental - after all she lived in the early USSR and seen it all with her own eyes. That's how life under socialism really is - envy and brutality combined with breathtaking incompetence.

What you described is a life of a house cat, happy that the food's always there and that there's lots of time to sleep. A bleak life devoid of any ambition and goals.

I can't imagine the brainwashing required to make people accept that.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2016/jun/02/high-ef...

That's pretty pointless... it has absolutely nothing to do with basic income. It's a limited time stipend. The recipients' behavior would only be identical if they were so dumb as to not plan more than a month ahead.