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Comment Re:Pointing out institutionalized racism (Score 1) 292

I'd suggest you take more care with your wording.
"Institutionalized" means there is something codified within an institution, For example, if there were a police procedure document that states "Always pull your gun on black men during traffic stops". There is no such thing. In fact, our institutions attempt to suppress racist tendencies with their official procedures. The problem is that cops are still human and, without sufficient training, they remain the unwitting racists all of us were born to be.
There has been much research over the last few decades that makes clear that humans are associative machines. We make assumptions, biases and generalizations at a sub-conscious level and react to those biases before we even have a chance for our higher-level reasoning abilities to tell us "Calm down, this black man means you no harm".
All of us could use better training to counter our natural racist instincts.

Comment Re:Against stupidity (Score 1) 281

But it was not one Dane who set an example, it was all (or most) of them. The larger group is the entity with real power.
I could not even rely on my own family to set the proper example on some issues, unfortunately.
For that matter, I'm not sure I've changed any of their minds either. I've no experience as a salesman.

Comment Re:Could be big in Fintech (Score 1) 42

IBM CEO Ginny Rometty gives speeches at Fintech conferences all the time. They are available on YouTube. One oft-repeated phrase:
"Blockchain will do for transactions what the internet did for information".
BitCoin had no buy-in from large multinationals or any governments, yet, it was successful. These new business-friendly blockchain implementations absolutely DO.

Comment Re: DAB is useless nowadays, ever heard of streami (Score 2) 303

Workers in 3rd world countries have few wage earning opportunities. This depresses wages and also makes it possible for companies to find workers to disassemble obsolete electronics at a (very) small profit and recycle any parts that have value.
Personally, I think this work should be done in the 1st world countries where the obsolete products are disassembled by robots and in adherence with the strict environmental standards of those countries.
Part of the attractiveness of sending those electronics to poor countries, in addition to low wages, are the lack of environmental protections.

Comment Re:I'm going to make my vote count (Score 1) 857

Well, economics has been called "the dismal science". Human economic activity is an emergent system and so, very hard to apply it's teachings to predict economic behavior (other sciences do this with much more success). Nevertheless, I did say the GOP was actively damaging the economic environment. Many economists have come to this same conclusion. For example, Thomas Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century.

The GOP is de-regulatory in a broad sense. And that sounds nice, especially to American, freedom-lovin' ears.
But, capital attracts more capital. So the rich get richer and the gulf widens. I would argue this is, qualitatively, a bad thing for the majority of people.
Government is the only estate that can regulate that. I mean, regulation is the governments raison d'etre.

Comment Encryption needed (Score 1) 40

This nice thing about the old 72mhz and newer DSM-based RC control schemes is that they have really, really low latency. There was no need for encryption in the good old days. But now, we have high-speed, low power chips that could handle encryption on both ends of the data stream without too much extra latency. There is not a great deal of data that needs to be moved so, the load on the encrypt-er and the fattening of the data pipe should be modest.

Comment Re:Read "The War on Cash" article... (Score 1) 394

I modded you insightful for the article reference and this reply will remove that. Sorry, but the article was exceptionally long. Dude must be getting paid by the word!
Also, it neglected to make any mention of bitcoin, distributed ledger or blockchain technology.

Apple and other financial industry players wanting to supplant cash is a DEFENSIVE movement against the rise of open-source digital currencies like bitcoin.
https://www.hyperledger.org/

Government-backed pieces of paper will no longer be needed for "the people" to be able to transfer value between each other, in private.
"blockchain will do for money what the internet did for information".
Governments and financial institutions are quite worried that they will lose control and will no longer benefit from acting as the middle man in all these transactions.
Personally, that is a little scary to me because I believe governments provide much needed regulation. I wonder if the modern Mafia uses blockchain... this should be a terrifying prospect. The lack of trust relationships between parties engaged in criminal enterprises is a big advantage from the perspective of law-abiding citizens and law enforcement. Distributed ledgers like bitcoin could help them with that trust relationship.

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