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Comment Re: please /. stop advertising blockchain-as-curr (Score 1) 181

The comparison was the currency itself.

Even if today's orange is closer to 1982's orange than comparable Apples -- it's still roughly an orange and an Apple. If you stuffed $2,500 into a mattress in 1984 instead of buying an Apple, waited 40 years, pulled it out and went to the Apple store, it would still buy you an average Apple. You'd be a bit worse off in oranges, since they would be pretty much the same oranges, and fewer of them, but not catastrophically.

With Bitcoin, and its reverse-Argentinian levels of speculation, a pizza party today comes at the potential opportunity cost of a Porsche in ten years... or very possibly the reverse. Tempting gamble for some, surely, maybe even a profitable investment of debatable wisdom, but unquestionably a terrible currency.

Comment Re: Short answer: (Score 1) 153

Itâ(TM)s not the duration, itâ(TM)s the distance. Thereâ(TM)s just a different scale of existential terror going on. The ISS folks frequently look out a window and can pretty literally say âoeI can see my house from here!â Even going to the moon you can still recognize the planet.

Going to Mars... youâ(TM)re just in the void. That could seriously mess with people in ways ground testing isnâ(TM)t going to reveal.

Comment Re: Short answer: (Score 1) 153

That was rather the point. We can make educated guesses about the mechanics of how things will work out, but since our observational N=0, we can't say anything whatsoever in the form "dozens of ships were lost with all hands, many others regularly returned with 30%+ of their crews dead." Maybe that sort of spaceflight invariably turns into some Lovecraftian descent into madness and they all cannibalize each other before they even arrive. Maybe including peanuts snacks and a smoking section mitigates the cannibalism to a greater degree than the choking hazard and probable death in an oxygen fire. We just don't know.

Comment Re: How did they calculate this? (Score 1) 170

No, the problem is stupid people rather persistently ignore context and are frustratingly biased to preconceptions. Like, for instance âoeyour long term health outcomes are better off with less than two drinks dailyâ is a vastly different assertion than âoeyour short term freedom outcomes are better off if you donâ(TM)t drink and drive, moron,â but a drunk will only consider the latter to be of any importance and will misinterpret the former to be uselessly imprecise.

Comment Re: How did they calculate this? (Score 2, Interesting) 170

Itâ(TM)s a heuristic for approximating around a mean. This is often done to communicate complex information to a wide audience that may better understand an imprecise but readily accessible quantity than a scientifically precise one that will satisfy pedantic aspie nerds with raging cases OCD, but completely alienate 90% of the population.

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