I kind of wonder if a group of companies could create a kind of private currency that would be represented as a store credit, say Amazon, Google Play and maybe Alibaba (to pick 3).

They could denominate it in dollars and provide incentives to customers and vendors to accept some of their income or refunds at a dollar premium in private currency as well as making it transferrable to other people (using a cryptocurrency model, maybe) as well as being portable to other core vendors. They could even offer to process transactions for other web site that wanted to be able to accept it.

They might even save operating expenses if it became widespread enough that it allowed them to reduce currency exchange issues. A combination of Amazon, Google and whoever would also probably be deep-pocketed enough that there wouldn't be much risk of the credits being defaulted on.

I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Even figuring out how the company "works" and how to work within its systems can be time consuming and lead to a lot of inefficiency for employees. This is obvious in large companies with many systems, departments, people and sometimes even space.

It's less obvious in small companies like the one I work in, but as a small company with only 10 years history we are terrible about processes and our own domain knowledge. New employees are often in the dark about a lot of things and aren't effective until they have figured out a lot of information on their own, the hard way.

It's not a complete solution, but it should be possible to ameliorate this sort of problem by making assimilation a more attractive option for immigrants, or segregation a less attractive option.

The left's embrace of multiculturalism has made such a solution politically impossible.

But we have our own internal issues that make a lot of this difficult. We could be much more strict about enforcing secularism in public education, barring the display of religious symbols and restrictive dress and refuse to allow prayer in our schools. Trouble is, our own religionists in the US are so busy trying to put religion back in school they would never support this.

We also have a fair body of case law that prohibits religious discrimination at workplaces and generally forces employers to allow religious clothing and some types of religious activity at work.

I also think that enforcing an official language would help, too. If you can't take your religion to school or work and the only way you can interact with the government is in English you have a lot of motivation to assimilate. If you don't at that point, I guess you're everything I want in a fellow citizen -- someone who supports themselves, stays out of government and keeps their religion to themselves.

"seem to". Christianity is a whole lot less homogenized than Islam, which itself does have distinctions.

The funny thing with Islam is that it is, AFAIK, less centralized than Christianity, whose primary denominations (at least by membership) tend to belong to larger governing bodies who control doctrine, ordination, such as the Catholic church, the Lutheran synods, the Anglican Communion, and the branches of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Despite it's apparent schismatic nature, Christianity has a lot of central authority even if it is weak authority.

Islam as a religion doesn't have any central structure like this, excepting within Islamic states where it is controlled by the government or organized within a given nation. There's no central authority that ordains Imams or is able to establish an orthodoxy, This has been one of the major problems with Islamic Fundamentalism -- you can't go to the Islamic pope and say tone it down. Anybody can grow a beard, grab a Koran, claim to be an Imam and try to be more conservative than the guy next door who he labels an infidel.

  Most so-called Christians aren't particularly religious,

And this is largely what makes Christianity in many ways more compatible with secular modernism -- the dominant flavors available don't lay outright claim to civil governance. Unlike Islamic upheavals, the 30 Years' War was settled with the Peace of Westphalia which established an idea of non-interference in other states' internal affairs, putting an end to the imposition of pan-state Catholic meddling in national affairs and in effect greatly curtailing theocratric governance in the Christian world.

Christian belief tends to be more personal and its edicts begin -- and end -- with its members, and they don't really have explicit civil authority. The Islamic world still is invested in notions of theocratic governance -- there isn't civil law and religious law, there is only one body of law, Sharia. I think one thing that frustrates Muslims is this lack of enshrinement of their religious beliefs in civil law.

Which is why I said "sense of powerlessness" -- I don't know that anyone is ever totally powerless, outside of maybe some kind of prison inmate in a 24-hour solitary confnement situation.

Obviously a member of a more or less free society can project physical power through some kind of violence (guns, bombs, going batshit nuts with a knife in a crowd, even).

But the belief that one lacks the kind of conceptual power to shape their future or influence their larger environment is what I was getting at. And usually the greater the perceived sense of powerlessness, the more over the top the physical response usually is.

The problem with talking about the actual power of "the Muslims" (a fraught concept in and of itself) is that in most ways of looking at it, relative to the West, the Muslims power seems pretty small, politically, militarily, and perhaps even culturally and ideologically.

It strikes me that most flavors of Islam are ideologically and culturally non-competitive with secularized cultures through their rejection of forms of social organization and interaction that limit their ability to adapt or innovate. As one example, suppressing women seems to cut off half your source of economic power, intellectual innovation and inhibits social values that even traditionally patriarchical cultures like Christianity seem to have embraced.

What if one of the "core issues" is a substantial difference in cultural values?

Immigrants show up with cultural values completely at odds with the dominant culture and move into self-isolated communities. The dominant culture rejects the immigrants' value system, which combined with the isolation of a separate community, seems to contribute to the sense of alienation and powerlessness. Some, rather than choosing assimilation, instead choose a kind of victim mindset, seeing the rejection of their values as a kind of active oppression and become ripe for radicalization.

None of this is to say that the dominant culture may have in fact engaged in some actual good old-fashioned discrimination, but labeling all of the dominant cultures rejection of the immigrant's culture seems wrong when things like separation of religion and state, women's equality or concepts like blasphemy are in play.

I just don't know how you "fix" conflicts like this.

After a lot of widespread adoption, is bitcoin considered more or less perfect, or are there weaknesses or problems that should be changed/rethought? Not just software wise, but maybe in terms of assumptions like the maximum number of coins that can be minted or the nature of the blockchain network, etc.

I always wonder how you "improved" a cryptocurrency once it gained some widespread adoption? It seems like network effects and investment would make it kind of easy for an alternate currency that appears "good enough" for initial investors to get somewhat established would be impossible to fix or migrate off of, short of a panic situation where some serious flaw causes holders to be forced to dump it for something else.

Most new cryptocurrencies seem to be either just clones of bitcoin or pump and dump schemes where it's pre-mined for get-rick-quick promoters (or at least they get labeled as such). But those invested in an established one like bitcoin could also be seen as working their own vested interests, be they financial or otherwise, and either ignoring weaknesses or badmouthing potential competitors because they are invested in it.

I'm sure the former is more true than the latter, which is why I'm curious if bitcoin is as good as it can get or if after a period of adoption if there are things that could/should have been done differently.

You forgot cheapest! More proof that nuclear power is the cheapest low-carbon power source, not a tech more popular on K street than Wall Street that gets by via being absolved of all potential liability for major accidents, getting huge loan guarantees, and being allowed to pass off cost overruns to consumers at-will and even still has trouble finding investors. Nuclear power has always been more popular on K-Street than Wall Street.

How did that "nuclear renaissance" work out for you all? Yeah, that sure bombed out fast. Gotta love an industry with a negative learning curve, where costs continually rise with time and scale rather than dropping (aka, learning of new potential problems and risks faster than refining the technology to lower costs).

Nuclear scares the public a lot more than it actually poses a risk to their health or life. But you know who it scares even more? Investors. Given the race out the door today, can you imagine what it'd be like if the industry wasn't let off the hook for potential damages over a maximum in the event of a major accident? No insurance company would touch the industry with a 10 foot pole. Nuclear accidents may not be good at killing people, but there's one thing that they're damned good at and that's costing a bloody fortune to remedy.

It's not just commissions. If you can automate away the process you can eliminate a shit ton of people, too, and that's where the costs are. I'll bet a lot of those commissions are in commercial insurance policies and those kinds of policies will still probably be sold by sales people who earn a commission.

Part of me is like, yay, insurance is expensive and it would be nice to pay less for it, and why shouldn't you in theory be able to just find policies via the web?

But part of me is like, ugh, every time some genius decides an industry is ripe for disruption what they end up meaning is they want to shitcan a bunch of employees and pocket the money that was otherwise filtering through the economy and keeping at least SOME people middle class.

It doesn't seem like anyone actually wants to change the business model of insurance -- ie, I pay money in case something bad were to happen and in theory the policy covers my liabilities. I don't know how you "disrupt" the basic structure of that business.

It's just the race to the bottom all over again.

It will be just an other obscure mobile OS - But If Samsung actually start to manufacture Tizen devices over Android. They will loose the market just like NOKIA did a few years before.

Ahem.

Organized human civilization has been around, what, 10,000 years? How do you suppose bands of humans dealt with some new group that showed up and wanted their fishing spot or their hunting spot or women? Pretty much everyone had some stake in the outcome and hiring a "conflict resolution facilitator" wasn't really an option.

Even a lot of Roman military activity up to about the Marian era wasn't necessarily expansionist but considered defensive against various Gallic and Germanic tribes who made incursions into Roman areas. The Romans were seriously concerned about the risk to Rome itself from these tribes it was several serious defeats that led to changes in the organization and makeup of the Roman legions known as the Marian Reforms. Prior to those reforms, poor citizens couldn't even join the army.

Plus I'd argue that most of your arguments really boil down to economics or economic pressure on existing civilizations even if some of the rationale seems explainable by religious or ideological motivations. It seems unlikely that pure political ideology was any kind of motivating factor until late in the 19th century.

There's a little unspoken benefit about what a true, affordable, universal-coverage broadband system could provide for: drones. Envision drones that can provide high quality real-time streaming (commands to the drone, imagery back) without requiring line of sight or effective cellular service.

Individuals and companies could get the sort of drone communication that today only exists for militaries. Buoyant drones (hydrogen, helium) could stay aloft for long periods and go anywhere. Conceivably a hydrogen-powered drone could stay aloft until its electronics failed, via condensing atmospheric moisture via a hygroscopic material and electrolysing it to replace the slow rate of leakage (using solar power). So picture a world where, say, anyone could buy a mass-produced mini spy drone and send anywhere, even a war zone with no infrastructure, and have it fly at a height where it would be almost impossible to spot. It would in most cases cost significantly more to take down than it costs to build (barring "drone killer" drones, but then you get to needing to maintain a large distributed inventory of them and a sensitive nationwide detection system that works at all altitudes, and you're just inviting people to come up with countermeasures). It would make it increasingly difficult to lie about human rights abuses, war crimes, armed incursions, etc.

I once looked into what it would take to make such a drone previously but quickly realized that the bandwidth costs alone via today's satellite internet services would get pretty astronomical quite fast, turning a "cheap drone" into a prohibitively expensive one. But this could change the picture. If satellite internet is cheap and widespread, not only will your bandwidth be cheap, but it also means that your connectivity hardware will also be widespread and cheap.

On the home front, one of the big concerns by regulatory bodies for all of these drone-based services companies are eager to launch is of course loss of connectivity - which is one reason why, for example, the FAA has been resisting them in the US. But if satellite service to a drone is much less likely to suffer from the reception irregularty that plagues cell phone towers. And you always have cell phone connectivity as a backup. You're greatly improving the overall reliability of your drone communications, which should make it easier to start getting commercial drone services approved by regulators.

Because this one system is just soooo cool, and there are no others out there like it.

Well, you could say that about the Middle East vs. the Gobi Desert -- because that ONE patch of sand has something and no others out there are like it.

As it turns out, some patches of sand in the Middle East turn out to actually have something no others out there like it have and that something (oil) turns out to be hugely important for managing and maintaining your inter(steller)national empire.

Who's to say the same wouldn't apply to outer space? Maybe there's some unobtainium material out there that just turns out to be very rare AND very useful either to interstellar space travel or use on some home planet. It's not like it's not a recurring theme in tons of scifi books, from the "spice" in Dune to dilithium in Star Trek.

It might be a fair argument to make that interstellar travel presupposes the ability to produce useful energy in unlimited quantities and mastery of such energy production also presupposes the ability to create materials and refine raw materials on a virtually limitless basis.

OK, but we really don't yet know what kind of materials make this energy harnessing possible and maybe those materials don't exist with some uniform distribution or in the quantities necessary for interstellar travel, making acquiring such materials or elements critical for maintaining an interstellar civilization and hence making it necessary to use military force to maintain supplies.

I'm not sure anything's a fair comparison with an HBO series, mini or otherwise. HBO programming has a staggering production quality whose peers really are only big-budget Hollywood movies.

Most TV series (other than HBO) have simpler production values all around, from costumes to sets to location shooting and generally even to cast sizes and extras. This makes them cheaper but I would also guess makes them faster to shoot, since as the AD is fond of yelling, "Time is money people!"

I suppose Amazon and Netflix are consciously trying to conflate their unique programs with HBO's, but other than what seems like extensive location shooting in House of Cards, most seem fairly conventional in terms of production standards.

Maybe the earnings call will go something like this:

ANALYST: How much loss do you attribute to the totally failing Fire Phone?

AMAZON: WOW! We're going to produce a dozen movies! It'll be awesome!