But is it really overvalued? Debt is only part of the equation. When the statement "the dollar is backed by the US Government", that means the whole thing; Executive (including the Federal Reserve, military, and so forth), the courts, and of course Congress, not to mention the collective will of the citizens of the United States. When you look at the greenback in that light, it's hard to imagine a currency in modern times as well backed.

Indeed. I fail to see what the difference between $1 electronically stored in a bank account or being transferred between two banks is measurably any better than a one dollar bill.

A unit of currency, whether digital or physical, is issued by a country's central bank and backed by the country's government. If Argentina burned all its physical currency tomorrow, everything would still be denominated in Argentinian pesos, whose value, by and large, would still be determined by the same mechanisms. I suppose certain aspects of physical currency, like counterfeiting and hoarding, might be eliminated, but it certainly wouldn't prevent monetary crises.

This article seems to have a rather odd view of what modern currencies are.

This, absolutely this. In order to force someone to turn over information, I have to have a valid subpoena issued by a court with jurisdiction. The fact that they just punted this to "you figure it out" means Google is given arbitrary discretion on how they can fulfil this, and the recourse to disagreeing is to take them to court and sue them again.

If you're going to give someone a right enforced by the government, then you should provide the necessary process to issue a "strike-records decree"...

BTW, Google still tells employees not to talk about this stuff in public, because Google has to so carefully watch its steps. (Disclaimer, I used to be a Google employee this year)

The problem is also the consent decree that says "anything that Google says, it has to actually be doing"... which can end up really nitpicky if lawyers want to be... and "my various governments" are all looking to catch Google for something, anything... so, they are being a bit nitpicky...

Seeing two researchers explaining an experiment, and the first thing you care to say about it is some variation of "nice tits" suggests a misogynist.

And when your special antivaxxer school suffers a measles or whooping cough outbreak, you can shout "YAY FOR FREEDOM!!!"

My impression is that Apple's industrial design people believe cables, physical buttons, and anything that requires a hole in the shell of the product to be intrinsically filthy and sinful.

The mac mini, which has among the fewest integrated peripherals of any current Apple product, wantonly incites users to plug their filthy cables into the various ports cut into the perfection of the aluminium body. The iMac, by contrast, can be used in relative purity(with bluetooth peripherals) marred only by a power cable that is discretely hidden as such a shame should be.

I strongly suspect that you are right, your reasoning is certainly sound; but I'd assume that if they have a percentage for NSI phones, they should have percentages for other categories, and it's only fair to take action based on actual data, when you can.

That's what I meant about 'barely concealed desire to kill the mac mini'. Time was when Apple considered the mini to be a strategically valuable product, both for replacing the emac as a school computer lab staple and for converting former PC user households. Not coincidentally, that's the time when they were actually pretty aggressively priced, unless you counted best-buy shelf crap that managed to be massively larger and still noisier.

Now, they'd really prefer that schools sling ipads and households either buy imacs(or, in either case, just go with laptops). Their tepid updates, uncompetitive pricing, and frankly painful lower end configurations reflect this. They haven't yet gotten to the point where they can kill them off; but they sure don't care much.

So, for NSI phones, the figures are reportedly 70% fraudulent, 30% legit.

But what am I supposed to compare that to? What are the numbers for wired phones? Cellphones on contracts? Prepaid cell phones?

This seems like pretty important information if one hopes to make a decision. Nobody wants bogus 911 calls cluttering up the system; but is 70% fraud similar? Modestly worse? Terrible?

Also, if we deem 911 access to be a social good(which is why NSI 911 calls work at all, and seems pretty reasonable), why not split the difference and allow someone to 'register' an NSI phone(having their particulars on file with 911 dispatch is likely to discourage spurious use and potentially be useful for locating them in an emergency if they are unable to provide clarification themselves thanks to injury or exigent circumstance) without signing up for a paid calling plan? So long as it is 911 only, it's still no competition for actual calling plans; but it's less draconian than just killing NSI 911 entirely.

Intel is lucky that Apple appears to have a barely concealed desire to kill the mac mini, and bootcamp. Otherwise it'd be tricky to imagine many NUCs moving at all.

Given the NFL's more or less uniformly dishonorable record on football related traumatic brain injury (roughly the same honesty, and similar stalling tactics, as tobacco producers); it wouldn't entirely surprise me if they are worried about this guy because he's a football player with an easily demonstrable history of high intellectual capability.

If he ends up a pitiful sad-sack, markedly damaged, the story pretty much writes itself: "From published mathematician with lots of papers you don't even understand the title of, to broken man, thanks to football!". In players without any baseline, or where the baseline is roughly 'normal to sub-normal intelligence, no non-football skills of significant note', there may still end up being a sad story of cognitive effects(it doesn't just knock off IQ points, depression, emotional disregulation, and other quality-of-life ruiners are pretty typical); but the story won't be nice and clear cut in the same way.

There are sociopaths that do overt violence; but most of them don't last so long in the wild. Either somebody kills them, or they kill somebody stupidly and impulsively and the criminal justice system gets them. (Though much of our more rigorous research on sociopathy is built on them; because people doing very long sentences in high security prisons are comparatively easy to sign up for studies, it breaks the tedium if nothing else, while getting high-functioning sociopaths with busy schedules who aren't in prison to cooperate can be tricky).

That aside, mistaking voluntary physical aggression for mutual entertainment for 'violence', because the mechanics look fairly similar, seems to be a mistake similar to mistaking consensual sexual behavior for 'rape', because the mechanics look fairly similar. It is pretty weird what our more atavistic tendencies have led us to think is fun; but so long as everyone involved is an informed and willing participant, so what?

I think that the 'surprise' here is related to the (quite numerous, now that the NFL has pretty much lost the battle to keep CTE under wraps) stories about how the head trauma you experience in football has a nasty habit of wrecking your brain in a variety of unpleasant ways.

The fact that not all math professors are wholly sedentary, feeble, and bookish isn't a huge surprise; but seeing one doing something well known to have a high risk of chewing up his brain and spitting it out, that is somewhat curious. I would have expected him to choose something with more below-the-neck contact. Soft tissue damage and broken bones are something that humans cope with fairly well, and Team Medicine knows a lot about dealing with, if natural recuperation isn't cutting it; but brains are touchier; and there is a lot less we can do for you if yours isn't working so well.

Thank you for proving my point. How many night lights did you have as a child?

It sounds like somebody is justifying have their head in the sand by commissioning a fancy study on mineralogy.

People fucking hate call centers because they have to traverse some hellish phone tree, wait too long to talk to a representative who is generally underinformed and insufficiently empowered to actually do anything about the problem. In some cases the rep is even required by company policy to be actively unhelpful, attempt upsells, and the like. Plus, of course, nobody calls phone support when things are working properly, so you start out with a somewhat skewed sample of people who are having issues of one kind or another; not so much happy people just looking to transact.

What do they want? The magic fancy AI to tell them how to keep customers from being pissed off because of bad service without actually making service better? The one weird trick to making someone feel calm about being told that the problem cannot be fixed? A deeper understanding of why listening to hold music and inane recordings about how much we care about your call for half an hour is obnoxious?