In my experience Americans sort of take for granted the breadth and depth of consumer protection you enjoy. I'd wager that in an insignificant portion of countries Apple expanded to, they have had to significantly cut back on refunds/warrantees they offer to combat fraud and abuse.
I'm not sure what threat model this supposed "Easy Fix" is intended to address. Struggling families already keep food past supposed expiration date. If manufacturers want people to throw away food, changing the way the label is worded won't fix that. And most people are discarding food because they don't plan and/or buy too many.
> Most Americans’ daily routines depend on single-use items and throwaway plastic packaging, much of it flowing into streams and oceans, polluting our ecosystems.
This is unsubstantiated sensational bs. Plastics do end up in landfill or incinerator, but the US does not have waterway pollution problem.
It's not as much time lost as extra effort spent handling the denominations and counting changes. When I take a taxi in Bangkok, I need to pay cash to the toll booths. Uber just bills them directly to my card.
This is so appalling. If your wife is in labor and needs to rush to the hospital, the cab driver ought to charge you outrageously because you're richer than him?
I will not comment on how much value this kind of snark is not adding to the conversation, but note that fairer forms of tax e.g. property taxes exist and don't require state to track financial transactions.
Then it's even more important that we read this blog post in the knowledge that it's the one that made it past NSA screening. We'll never know how many didn't.
I for one welcome our new autonomous corporation overlord, which would hire people via TaskRabbit to become its shareholders, and hire lawyers via emails to protect its interests. It would commission new servers on various cloud providers on the fly to avoid being shut down. It would generate revenue by running a SilkRoad that cannot be stopped. It would employ security guards and hitmen to stop people going after it. It would commission black hat hackers to help it infiltrate various intelligence networks, and rely on Mechanical Turk to translate human language into something that makes semantic sense for it to act upon.
Yes, but practically, does it matter as long as the autonomous systems continue to provide sufficiently lucrative reasons for real people to sustain its operation, e.g. by continuing to mine or maintain the network under the governments' radar?
Maybe startups find it more difficult to fire okay-but-not-great employees just because they don't have that much resource to focus on hiring in this super competitive job market.
This paper highlights the only real concern I have with BitCoin over the long term: that it's possible to engage in class warfare.
If you believe the socioeconomic pyramid to hold true, the middle and lower classes will always outnumber the top 1%. And by achieving this power of economic majority, they can gang up on the "elites" by means described in this paper. I'm not going to get into the messy debate of whether it's justifiable; just that the capability exists. Maybe this paper won't do it. Maybe one that comes out in 30 years will, under the correct economic and political climate, finally incite people to make this happen.
Or you could argue that the top 1% would have been prepared by using some of their wealth to gain control of the means of production (mining machines) and secure an economic majority. What's to guarantee they won't rig up some positively reinforcing rules to ensure their prosperity at the expense of the general public?
Currencies run on immutable rules. BitCoin has had a good run so far, but its kill switch is already in the collective hands of three people: the leaders of ASICMiners, Slush, and BTC Guild.