The correct comparison is with the transaction and storage costs, in electricity, of storing gold in fort knox and moving it once a century in a boat across the ocean. Tesla's 1.5 billion USD in bitcoin probably won't move in your lifetime.
It’s been years, so I know I’ll get the details wrong, but I vaguely remember a dating website that had an entry survey to help match people to whoever had the best compatibility score. But, for whatever reason, they got far more women applicants than men, and started turning particular women away. And some other dating site tried to advertise to those women (not good enough for ___? Try us instead!).
Its really amazing that you would try to defend free press in a discussion about Assange. Locking up Assange is an attack on free press. Trump calling CNN liars actually isn't. Obama calling Fox liars wouldn't be either.
What is the extent of the Russian interference really though? Studies show it didn't change the outcome. We still don't really know who hacked the DNC, whether it was Russia as a hand selected group of people from intelligence agencies included was likely, or whether it was an insider as implied by Assange and security experts who looked at how fast the information was downloaded. We know Russia did take both sides on issues like black lives matter to "cause division" We know they created a "Buff Bernie" meme, but it really feels like a massive excuse by the Democrats for an embarrassing failure. The whole thing at this point has come to feel comical. Am I missing something or is this still all a bunch of nonsense strewn around for clicks and ratings?
I haven't been able to find the comedy in the situation myself, conspiracy theories aren't much fun when people start acting on them.
But it is profoundly worrying in a next-two-decades-of-politics sort of way. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seem to see negotiation as a viable way achieving good outcomes, and it is difficult to see how that will end well.
If the Dems had launched this conspiracy that the Russians are scheming to do ... something ... completely out of the blue it would be good for a generation of lampooning, but it conceptually fits in with older Tea Party attempts to shut the government down, or the partisanship towards the end of the Obama presidency on issues like Supreme Court nominations. There isn't a loud force in American politics that is talking about compromise or finding common ground.
Nothing credible says that, or could say that. Counterfactuals of that nature are very hard and in an election that was decided by 70,000 total votes out of over 130,000,000 it's nearly impossible to assign causation.
> We still don't really know who hacked the DNC, whether it was Russia as a hand selected group of people from intelligence agencies included was likely, or whether it was an insider as implied by Assange and security experts who looked at how fast the information was downloaded.
Nah, we know it was Russia. The CIA said so from the beginning (learned via signals intelligence), independent security firms all said the same (by attributing the C&C servers and link shorteners to other attacks known to be from Russia), and the DOJ laid out the full detail in the indictments. We even know who specifically was sitting at the keyboard (presumably via Dutch intel who had literal real-time video access). The Bill Binney nonsense about download speeds was immediately discredited -- and further discredited once it turned out that the Russians were using US-based proxy servers.
> We know Russia did take both sides on issues like black lives matter to "cause division" We know they created a "Buff Bernie" meme, but it really feels like a massive excuse by the Democrats for an embarrassing failure.
They repeatedly expressed preferences for Trump, the divisions they were trying to cause were all for his benefit. They started targeting Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and then eventually moved on to anything that would harm HRC, such as propping up Bernie. The democrats obviously failed to win what should have been a very winnable election but to deny Russian influence at this point is to be deliberately obtuse.
An indictment isn't proof. You aren't 100% certain of anything. Assange has never lied to us. The intelligence agencies have. Assange says it wasn't Russia. Its amazing how the left has turned on him.
Yes, Russia wanted Trump that was why the Buff Bernie meme was out there. My point is its probably a trivial impact. People who have the slightest ability to be open-minded about this issue generally can see that. $100,000 for facebook memes compared to Hillary getting questions in advance from U.S. media? https://www.cnet.com/news/russian-trolls-targeted-teens-on-f...
None of this stuff is certain and it really is amazing how blown out of proportion it is in people's minds.
Your first post said Russia didn't change the outcome -- yet in this one you said that the effect was "small", "modest", and "a trivial impact". Once again, Trump won by 0.05%! --- A small/trivial/modest impact could have absolutely swung the election!
Assange lies all the time, I doubt there's anything that I could do to change your mind on that point but just look at the comments his former coworkers made after they were chased away from WL, his backtracking about talking to Trump Jr during the election, his withholding of documents that would be damaging to Putin, his deceitfulness in the DMs that were exposed by Emma Best last summer..
Intel agencies have Russia dead to rights on interfering in the 2016 election. Please explain how Guccifer2 accidentally logged into Twitter from the GRU headquarters otherwise... or if you're a Seth Rich truther, how a DNC worker had access to Podesta's personal gmail? It's not just intel agencies, several private security companies came to the same conclusion.
Outside the now, well supported evidence of Russia's involvement in the hacking of the DNC emails we have massive donations to groups like the NRA, political campaigns and hiring people like Maria Butina to influence politicians. We've seen them try to meet with Trump's family in order to provide them with damaging information on Hillary clinton in exchange for dropping sanctions. We've also already had indictments of people within the Russian government that were apparently involved with the disinformation campaigns. With lots of information about their groups and US based organizations they used.
You have to ignore the information available to you to claim the extent of their interference wasn't broad.
The claims aren't just repeated the evidence for it has expanded over time. Like I said you really have to try at this point to ignore everything that has come out.
The thing about statins is if you believe the hype, and don't believe the fear mongering they still barely work, according to the pharmaceutical funded studies. Just enough to claim its got a benefit but how big is this benefit?
The evidence on statins is so strong that DeBakey put himself on one when they first came out. He lived to 99 and was sharp to the end. More than a few have opined we should add one to water supply.
Things like this make me ask ... would he have been sharper without them?
That’s what I run into with my doc. “You seem sharp to me”. Yeah, I’m a resonably smart guy, but could I be better if I skip these? Slowdown may not be apparent to others, but it is to me.
Not a doctor... observed some interesting side effects with my parents on these, and would personally err on the side of caution with them. If you do come off though, do it gradually - also there are different types, so it may be worth looking into that.
Since he kept working for another 19 years, including supervising heart surgery on Boris Yeltsin, he probably didn't suffer much of a decrease in sharpness on statins, if any.
Two well-done meta-analyses of statins for primary prevention showed no mortality benefit. After the exclusion of four trials with serious risks of bias, the relative risk of cardiovascular events associated with statins was 0.99 (95% confidence interval, 0.90 to 1.08).2,3
Now, as for mental health, the FDA has added no warnings despite decades of use, and the mechanism of action strongly suggests statins would be protective if anything (by directly and significantly reducing vascular dementia). Here's a package insert from the FDA's website: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2012/02...
Also, I'm not raging statin advocate, the real answer is diet and exercise. The American lifestyle is a catastrophe.
If this were the first of its kind yes, but given that there are numerous studies suggesting that exercise is good for the brain its reasonable hypothesis. Rather than a non-story I'd say it adds to a body of evidence for a strong hypothesis.
However, this studies falls short of demonstrating that "strongly", or the claim than sitting makes some part of your brain thinner.
When looking at the data, age is the most important contributing factor, but the authors do not perform any multivariate measurement of age vs physical activities vs sitting time. Maybe it's because they don't feel the need to since, and they state it:"As with total MTL thickness, physical activity was not associated with any of the subregional thicknesses."
By redoing this study, including a many more participants, across the country, actually measuring physical health parameters instead of simply doing a survey. I also think they should have used non-parametric tests. I don't believe, and they don't show any indication otherwise, that their sampled population had a normal distribution, was in sufficient numbers, and the some of the metrics were independent from each others.
Since their data set is available and rather simple, one can readily redo the tests and find out that the strongest relation is Age vs MTL, that Age vs Physical activities also correlates strongly, as does Age vs Sitting. Contrary to what the authors reported, sitting and activities also correlates... So yeah that's a bust!
Are you referring specifically to certain Chinese exchanges where this could be done without a commission? Have there ever been any accusations that U.S. exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini engaged in wash trading?
I think "not entirely true" is an understatement. Bitcoin has a 115 Billion dollar market cap and is traded all around the world in arms length transactions for local currencies and is treated as fungible. Like to gold market people loudly insist that its manipulated but I don't understand how it could be to any large degree when I can go to a pawn shop and buy or sell it anywhere in the world. I'm not sure what central regulatory body would give any greater confidence than that fact.
What's the point of market cap here? It's just (current price)*(number of bitcoins), so if some speculators drive the price up, even if there are low volumes on the exchanges, the market cap will rise by a corresponding percentage.
Hypothetical example: If there is a single trade at say twice the current price, the market cap will double.
It absolutely does not represent how much adoption Bitcoin has.
I would like to see how much "actual" usage there is to Bitcoin as a currency (i.e., sending bitcoin to another person in exchange for goods or services). You seem to believe it's a lot; I don't believe that.
My point only is that the total value is relatively very high and its price would be as difficult for one individual to move around as a large cap stock.
Your hypothetical 1 trade a day isn't reality. Click this link and look at the depth chart. You would need millions of dollars to move the price from 6925 to 6950.
https://www.gdax.com/trade/BTC-USD
I don't think its used a lot as a currency now. I think there is a lot of investment in it based on the belief that it will be used as a currency in the future or that it can act as a store of wealth.
You would need millions of dollars to move the price from 6925 to 6950.
That's not entirely true, the operators of Bitfinex, tether, or any of the early adopters who control a major percentage of BTC could push the market with the amount of influence on the ecosystem they control.
Traders and bots will attempt to arbitrage other exchanges which have unverifiable volume and possibly large amounts of counterfeit capital.
That's not how it works. Most of that liquidity it's anchored at a specific distance away from the price. When the price moves up/down, that liquidity will move with it.
Thus you need much less to move the market, because the liquidity will get out of your way.
You make a good point that the value of regulations for Uber is negligible. Regulatory capture is an understandable motivation by industry but its weird to see the public embrace it. I see a lot of people in this thread complaining about how Uber, AirBNB, and Turo aren't fair to industry. The point of regulation is to protect the public. If they aren't needed for that purpose they should be repealed for existing players. Taxi Medallions artificially constraining the supply of taxis were always a stupid idea regardless of whether Uber and Lyft were created.
Give someone a ride, let them borrow your car, let them stay over at your house while they're on vacatin, have a one night stand with them. Nobody thinks we need government regulations for this stuff. What is it about commerce that scares us so much?
"Give someone a ride, let them borrow your car, let them stay over at your house while they're on vacatin, have a one night stand with them. Nobody thinks we need government regulations for this stuff. What is it about commerce that scares us so much?"
The things you described are usually just one off things, that a friend will occasionally do for another friend. Once you commercialize it, then it starts getting abused. Take AirBnB: You now have a lot of buildings becoming unofficial hotels. Not only are they driving out regular, long term tenants, but the people who are there did not sign up to live near a hotel.
I think what you're describing is a subset of the character of your neighborhood changing in a way you don't like. For example, your neighborhood becomes expensive, or gentrified, or crime filled or you don't like the noisy guy who moves in upstairs from the apartment you're living in. Or the deli you like downstairs closes and is replaced by a hair salon and you didn't sign up for that. These are problems that are part of life, you can't control everything outside of what you own. I wouldn't personally expect to legislate it any more than if my gf broke up with me because of Tinder or FB or something its just life.
