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Comment Um. Who exactly is attacking? (Score 1) 29

We can't pay poor people a few bucks to eat, but we've infinite cash for surveillance and war. Who the hell is threatening us with chemicals? The US had THE stockpiles of nerve toxins on this planet. We still haven't gotten rid of it all. And for what did we make enough poison to wipe out all life on earth a million times? We seem to be the biggest threat on the planet, by far.

Comment Re:benevolent dictator. (Score 1) 319

Or don't pay your condo association fees for a month. Or homeowners association fees. They can confiscate.

There's no place in the world you can live where a bastard can't figure out a legal way to steal your home. Never was. Government or private. Remember the hundreds of thousands of faked refinance agreements that banks and capital groups used to steal people's homes in the last ten years? Got clean away with it. Kept the houses, too. We can't touch them anymore. Red handed, and they walked away with tiny fines.

The only defense against thieves? Live somewhere they don't want to live, or where they can't figure a way to rent your property for a good price. This is the new Gilded Age, and the bastards are just getting warmed up. We're gonna see what supercapital trillionaires are capable of in our lifetimes.

Comment Re:Read your lease... (Score 2) 319

Nope. They won't. Renters are peons. No leverage. The leverage is money. Too many rich people, too many trust funds. Better for the landlords (capital funds will buy up the good units very soon now) to evict and replace with more affluent renters - or even better, write some new laws so the landlords can rent the units out at AirBnB prices themselves. Why not?

Comment San Francisco is no longer an option for we peons (Score 1, Interesting) 319

Really. Can't rent an apartment there, can't rent a hotel room there, can't breath the air there without a trust fund. Godz forbid we should find a way not to pay the rapacious owners of San Francisco even more money. No, this is not the way the free market goes, Rand Fans. This market will never be "free". It's monopoly of space. Space is limited. There's too much money in the city. Prices go up. Eventually the place is full of empty apartments owned by capital funds and by Saudi and Colombian investors, as London has shown us. Free for whom? No the people who live there, damn it. They're peons now.

Capital funds are now rolling up the apartments into securities now, and selling them on Wall Street as investments. Of course, surrounded by derivative bets. No chance of a crash there, eventually. And the complaints of a reduction if not elimination of maintenance are of course rolling in, 'cause that's what an unfree market does: charge you more for less and less.

Don't care about the laws. Laws are bought by the owners of the city, and we duck around them as best we can. If you are rich enough, you ignore the laws and pay the fines if they catch you. Or just buy a new law, just for you. The law is a joke. Contracts are a joke. We have no power to negotiate a better deal, so the hell with it.

Don't see an end to the hoovering up of the peon army's piggy banks any time soon. Students now owe a trillion dollars in student loans that most can never repay in their lifetimes, and additionally they'll have to live in cars or trucks when the rentiers start enforcing the limits on the number of people living in a single unit. Don't want those poor people in your neighborhood. And "poor" is a relative term. The middle class are starting to understand that they are the new "poor" now, in some places.

Where the hell are people gonna live? This is amusing. SF might become a true Randian paradise. A lost cause for 95+ per cent of the population. New York used to have rent control, and that might have saved SF from the upcoming years of rage; but "free" markets are the rule now. Let's see what happens. Vomit on the buses? That's the beginning. We're replaying the 1930's. Gonna have to start getting those private security forces, rich people. (Odd thing: if you've money, you tell your private police what to do. If you don't have capital, public police tell *you* what to do)

End result, less money from tourists, visitors and job seekers looking for a place to crash while finding their bearings. The rentiers don't care; they're rich anyway. Also, the people paying 4000 - FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH for their two bedroom can't make a little cash back. They can't buy the appropriate laws. Shrug. Lost cause here.

Math

P vs. NP Problem Linked To the Quantum Nature of the Universe 199

KentuckyFC writes: "One of the greatest mysteries in science is why we don't see quantum effects on the macroscopic scale; why Schrodinger's famous cat cannot be both alive and dead at the same time. Now one theorist says the answer is because P is NOT equal to NP. Here's the thinking: The equation that describes the state of any quantum object is called Schrodinger's equation. Physicists have always thought it can be used to describe everything in the universe, even large objects, and perhaps the universe itself. But the new idea is that this requires an additional assumption — that an efficient algorithm exists to solve the equation for complex macroscopic systems. But is this true? The new approach involves showing that the problem of solving Schrodinger's equation is NP-hard. So if macroscopic superpositions exist, there must be an algorithm that can solve this NP-hard problem quickly and efficiently. And because all NP-hard problems are mathematically equivalent, this algorithm must also be capable of solving all other NP-hard problems too, such as the traveling salesman problem. In other words, NP-hard problems are equivalent to the class of much easier problems called P. Or P=NP. But here's the thing: computational complexity theorists have good reason to think that P is not equal to NP (although they haven't yet proven it). If they're right, then macroscopic superpositions cannot exist, which explains why we do not (and cannot) observe them in the real world. Voila!"

Comment Another piece of failing equipment (Score 2) 518

Keep it simple stupid - an engineering principle that has been tossed out forever.

Another damned piece of electronics that will fail in less than seven years. Another piece of electronic junk with a thousand dollar replacement or repair price tag (dealer cost to you). More damned code that can fail. More maintenance costs. More power consumption. More holes in the shell to let rust in. Tech lust as engineering.

Geeze, let's not use a MIRROR. My side view mirror was just torn off by a speed-crazed yuppie - it cost me 23 bucks to replace it, good as new, from an eBay vendor. Shipping included.

the idea is to make damned sure that no new car will have a lifetime greater than seven to ten years. New cars, new debt without end. Cars as smart phones - unrepairable. Toss 'em out and get a new one will be the only option. The used car market will slowly shrivel and finally die when the last repairable car gets totaled.

Comment Re:The Founding Fathers are crying.. (Score 1) 284

Thus, in libertarian heaven, all search engines are indeed private, so... everything you read and see and hear is subject to whatever the company owners collectively think you should. Tyranny, same as if they owned the roads you travel on.

"Sorry, My. Grumpy, but our manager informs that you are not welcome on Roads Numbers 456-780. Please remove your vehicle from our private property or we'll notify our private police force, which you'll notice have a laser battery pointed at you up above. And oh, yes, it seems you are banned on all competing roads in the area, just to give you a heads up. You must have got someone important angry over at corporate, ha ha. You know, watch what you say, watch what you do. Words to live by, indeed. We hope for your future patronage on the Richard Cheney Memorial Highway System, Incorporated. Have a nice day. Get out or get shot."

Comment So? (Score 1) 284

God handed the constitution to Jefferson on a mountain in the 1780's? The founders did not envision a private (government-controlled, for fuck's sake!) company controlling access to the world. They didn't have to. They didn't want to. They expected us to evolve and add more rights. They did not see the document as holy writ. They gave us the 9th amendment to slap us in the face with that fact. Rights exist whether or not the holy book explicitly enumerates those rights. So, fuck the constitution, as I am sure Jefferson would say. Fuck private company takeover of the world. Corporations are legal government-created fictions. They are OUR dogs. We are not theirs. HEEL, bitches.

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