It was, but it was also about the evolution of financial systems. (Most of the stuff with Eliza was about the advent of the stock market, investing systems, and banks' roles in this.) It was also about religion. And pirates. And politics. The Baroque cycle was five or six stories, each with their own themes, all weaved into one universe.

It was, and, if you read the interview, Stephenson says, "No, I was wrong. WoW is where it's at." The problem with Second Life is, once you get over the novelty of having an avatar, it's really just a huge, elaborate chatroom. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, has all of the important social aspects: communities, chat, emotes, avatars and it gives you a reason for being there: playing the game. It being a game is really a critical distinction. It pulls all sorts of people in, not just those exclusively interested in forming some sort of online community. It justifies a payment mechanism, and funds servers, development, and advertising. It gives people a common goal that they can complete exclusively in the context of the metaverse.

Stephenson got the "online alternate reality" aspect of it right way before it actually happened; he just didn't see the correlation between "expensive 3D rendering engine" and "games," because, with the state of hardware, it was way, way too expensive to even consider doing at the time.

COROT-2b is much, much larger than earth. It has a mass of approximately 3.31 times that of Jupiter, which itself is 317.83 times that of earth. (COROT-2b) Your estimate is off by about three orders of magnitude, assuming a constant rate of decay.

I imagine that the control would, in fact, be doing nothing for approximately the same amount of time that the other group played Bejeweled. You might want to throw in some other games or cognative activities (DOOM, crossword puzzles, Solitare, etc.) to see if the "action-puzzle" nature of Bejeweled is what causes the feelings of "sharpness," as well.

I see no reason why these things wouldn't cause visible discomfort in your face, as opposed to whatever (skin conductivity/heart rate?) a traditional lie detector measures. The whole point is to mask truths and lies alike, so there is no way to tell them apart.

Stand really close to someone else. The odds that falling satellite debris will hit two people are absolutely dismal.

Yep. TFA puts it at 1:3200, actually.

Yep. TFA puts the odds at about 1:3200, actually.

You assert that HFT does not help the market in any way. I'd be inclined to agree, but that's really just my gut feeling. Can anyone provide any kind of source, one way or the other, saying that HFT is necessary, or good, or terribly evil? I'd like to hear what actual economists think of it, rather than just laymen.

Spending money is literally what drives the economy. Saving money in a bank does make it available for other people to borrow so that they may spend it. The "redistribution of wealth" is the benefit here, though, not the saving itself.

Relative to the purchasing power of the dollar a few years ago. A Big Mac, or a loaf of bread, or a new car costs about as many USD today as it did a few years ago. The dollar is stable. A Big Mac costs a wildly different number of BitCoins today than it did a month ago. The BitCoin is unstable.

Good for those who hold Bitcoins without spending them. Bad for those who spent them. Pretty soon, people will realize that it makes more sense to hold onto Bitcoins than spend them, so no one will spend Bitcoins - they'll hoard them, and spend, say, Dollars instead. This weakens the Bitcoin economy, because no one is spending Bitcoins.

Absolutely. He wants you to have to pay $15 per gallon in 50 years. He also wants minimum wage to be $45 in 50 years. He wants inflation - the purchasing power of $1 to decrease - and for people to have more dollars. This is good for the economy, because it means that spending money is more sensible than hoarding it. This means that people have to keep on working to get more money, and more economic product is produced.

Going broke doesn't make dumb people smarter. Especially with the app that was developed by a Dermatologist: these people are being told by individuals who represent themselves as experts that the product works. If they do a quick google search for "color light kill acne", they get pages and pages of legitimate-looking results. In the United States, we regulate medical claims specifically because it is unreasonable to expect everyone to hold the level of expertise that would allow them to determine the validity of such claims.

Allowing fraud wouldn't necessarily result in a smarter population, but it would provide a financial reward for being a more clever fraudster.

In this case, you need to raise the tax rate even higher, to make up for lost revenues from "poor-people purchases," which, in turn, is going to end up reaming the dwindling middle class. The problem is, the wealthiest, are still going to come off way ahead with sales tax, no matter how you slice it. Those who can afford to give the highest percentage of their income as taxes are the same people who feel compelled to spend the lowest percentage of their income on taxable goods.

I've never understood why people seem to think it makes the most sense to simplify the tax system to only apply to sales tax. Why wouldn't it be simpler,fairer, to simplify it to apply only to income? Only to net-worth? I simply cannot understand why the self-styled "populist" movement is proposing tax systems which will benefit the top tenth-of-a-percent of the population, to the severe detriment of the lower 95%.

The problem is, if the purchase takes place over the internet, where can it be physically said to take place? The home of the purchaser? The place of business of the seller? The physical location of the server hosting the website, or hosting the credit-card-processing service?

Congress has said that taxes can be collected if the business has a physical presence in the state where the purchase takes place. Amazon tried to get around this by calling all of their places of business in California "subsidies." California is merely closing this loophole.

A sales tax has officially and legally been levied against Amazon. If they try to change the law to make that tax no longer apply, I'd call that an attempt to "dodge" the tax.