Interesting Links for 10-03-2016

[andrewducker]

Nobody Knows the Identity of the 150 People Killed by U.S. in Somalia, but Most Are Certain They Deserved It (tags: usa terrorism death military drone OhForFucksSake somalia ) Global weather map (tags: weather map ) Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history) (tags: typography design history facts )

Comments

[andrewducker]

As Andrew Hickey reminded me: ADHD is both under and over diagnosed.

[gonzo21]

Obama's expansion of drone warfare is shameful. Arguably one of the worst things he's done as President. They're now slaughtering civilians based on 'statistical probabilities'.

Still, that's a neat trick to avoid killing civilians, simply pass a rule that all adults in a target zone are by default 'militants'.

Not sure bitcoin will be allowed to grow. As I understand it, bitcoin ultimately theoretically makes almost every banker irrelevant and unemployed.

[bart_calendar]

Also a completely traceable currency is something governments, organized crime and intelligence agencies can't afford.

When a CIA chief of station wants to hire a mob hit man to take out a given politician because he's a threat to our government interests they really don't want an electronic trail of that transaction that can never be deleted.

[andrewducker]

Well, they're only traceable in some ways. If you get the money into the system in a private way then that's safer. And you can always use mixing sites to re-anonymise the money later. It's not as untraceable as a suitcase full of cash, but less traceable than credit cards.

[bart_calendar]

Traceable at all is bad.

[bart_calendar]

Bitcoins are such a weird combination of Dutch Tulips and stamp coupons.

It fascinates me.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. They're "money", if money was issued privately. Which makes very little sense, in some ways, but works perfectly in others.

I still can't tell if they're going to be massive or vanish.

[anton_p_nym]

Bet on "vanish". Bitcoin is designed to be easy to create at first but harder and harder to create as each new coin is "minted". That means it's tough to increase supply when required if it's ever widely adopted, which means people holding it now will have increasingly strong incentives to hold onto it because demand could easily outstrip supply and make it more valuable. It'll choke itself out eventually; the question is will it do so before it grows to a point that choking out will damage people in the real world.

-- Steve can't help but see it as a Ponzi scheme, albeit one using technologies that might prove useful elsewhere.

[cartesiandaemon]

I think collapsing in some way is likely, but why does "no more supply" mean that happens? Doesn't the same argument apply to gold?

[fiddlingfrog]

I do appreciate that the article on typesetting took the effort to maintain double-spaces after the periods within the article itself.  I've often done the same thing when having similar arguments on the internet, just to difficult.

On solar power, I'm fascinated by the tone deafness often present in typically liberal proponents of solar power.  There's lots of advocacy for people being able to disconnect from the grid, to go it alone based purely on solar and other renewables, presumably because the energy companies are "Big Evil Polluting Corporations" and deserve whatever they get.  This is completely opposite to the "nobody does it alone, we've all benefited from public infrastructure" argument thrown at people/corporations that want to stop paying for some particular public service.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. Clearly the best answer, all round, is for power generation utilities to use renewables, and use the grid for balancing.

[fiddlingfrog]

I'm all for local generation of power (solar, geo-thermal, hydro, whatever...) but I think people (& businesses) need to realize that as soon as they start generating power they are no longer just consumers and have different needs and obligations.  It wasn't mentioned in the article, but from what was said I assume that the casinos are trying to stop purchasing power from the big state power company rather than cutting all connections to the grid entirely.  Where it gets muddled is that the PowerCo is both a supplier and the owner of the infrastructure used to deliver whatever electricity the casino can't generate for itself.  I think going forward the old power companies, the ones that built and maintain the grid, will need to figure out how to charge separately for supply and grid maintenance.

[danieldwilliam]

Separating the cost of the network and the energy is fairly straightforward. I used to be an energy policy wonk in the UK. For industrial sized producers and consumers of energy like power stations or large factories, the system for operating back then had three layers to it

[danieldwilliam]

I think bitcoin is either a Ponzi scheme or it's operators have fundamentally missed one of the important tennents of operating in the real world; that the organisation most able and willing to dole out targeted violence controls the system.

[andrewducker]

I think that Bitcoin is an attempt to put money beyond the control of people who want to control the system.

Which may well mean that it's doomed to failure, of course. But I'm not convinced of that yet.

[danieldwilliam]

You might be right, in that it might be a good faith attempt to do that. (Or it might be that it is a Ponzi scheme by design, or by accident - which I think is the failure mode of a good faith attempt.)

I'm not sure you can put the system beyond the control of people who are basically willing and able to come round to your house and kill you. It's why nationalism exists.