How about on first boot on a new motherboard, Linux tries to set PCIE on, then runs tests that are going to result in the locking you mentioned if PCIE isn't actually available. Is that possible?

Then we all have to work anyway to afford our now much more expensive plumbing.

They could just get some crackheads to do it for them. They need the money now and don't care about the future. Even if the police come by, buying IP addresses isn't illegal and the crackhead in question probably has no notion what nefarious purposes an IP address can be used for.

I think it depends on what you mean by a decent standard of living. In the Nordic countries, you will be consistently living very well without a job compared to most places in the world. No one there fears starvation or homelessness due to losing a job, as long as they are mentally capable of understanding what a budget is so that they understand that unemployment means a reduction in their standard of living. Yet obviously living off well fare like that isn't all that comfortable where going to a cinema is an investment you have to budget around. If that's what you are talking about, I'm all for it. If you are talking about a situation where not working gives as much respect as working, and the people who don't work live in a style similar to those that do work, I think you'll see some necessary but unpleasant jobs unfilled. For example, I don't really think that the paper shufflers really enjoy making sure that tax form 53-5C is filled out in the correct way, and if we didn't have such people, how would taxes get paid to pay for all the people not working? I also doubt that you are producing enough food that you could sustain yourself off of that alone all year - and if you do, then consider how much more time you have to spend doing that compared to a farm worker using specialized equipment and who benefits from large scale production. Moving food production from centralized agriculture to dispersed personal gardens is great as a hobby, but it is not a good way to feed the world.

Let's take you up on your suggestion and extrapolate into the future. You won't need an education unless you think it's interesting enough to do for its own sake. For example I am guessing that not many people will choose to get a plumber's education just for the joy of making shit flow. Who's going to fix your toilet if no one needs to work and it requires a skilled plumber to fix it? Who's going to build new buildings? Grow food? I think you suggestion requires robots to be able to do all the jobs for us, and we aren't at that point yet.

E=MC^2, M is mass and C is the speed of light, E is energy. Light is very fast, so that is a WHOLE LOT of energy in just 1g of nickel. The reason we don't normally think of 1 gram of mass as having all that much energy is that we don't know a good way to extract all of it. I don't know what the exact right number is for the energy equivalent of 1 gram of mass, but 517 tons of oil (if burned regularly) doesn't sound unrealistic to me. Of course, the interesting part is if he can actually convert that 1g of nickel into energy, which isn't likely.

It took 50 years of wasted effort to build the pyramids. The pyramids do exactly nothing useful, except now people can go look at them and say "cool". I'm with you about the point you are making, but the pyramids are a terrible example. The Great Wall of China took a lot of effort too, and it actually did something useful, so that might be a better example.

That does make sense, it's just obtusely written. Completely clean combustion creates CO2 and H20, so you are moving around hydrogen, even if you never had pure hydrogen in the from of H2 stored anywhere. There's a reason it's called *hydro*-carbons. To be more precise, he could have said something like "burning only the energy-carrying molecules that have hydrogen on them to create CO2 and water". He's probably expressing himself in this confusing manner to make people associate pure hydrogen and coal, but he's being crafty enough about it that what he's saying isn't false, just misleading.

You are confused about what makes "scientific sense". Science is about facts, not about decisions. Science doesn't tell you what you should do. Science only tells you what the facts are. So Science might tell you that group X of people are not productive. Science could never tell you what you should be doing about that, if anything. Science doesn't tell you what you should do about global warming either, Science just tells you that there will be global warming if we keep releasing CO2 and it tells you what some of the consequences of that are. What you do about that is up to you.

Democracy is not based on the assumption that most people will be very intelligent and have everything figured out. That's never going to happen. The value in democracy is first of all that it gives a non-violent outlet for what would otherwise become revolutions. For a revolution to work out well for you, you need lots of people on your side, but if you have that many people on your side, they can all just vote for you, so violence becomes illegitimate and in its place there is an orderly and non-violent coup every so many years based on the election. That's a huge improvement right there and in itself already makes democracy the superior form of rule. The second benefit of democracy is that power corrupts, and people in power are always the target of influence mongers, yet officials in a democracy must at least pretend to be accountable to the voters and even so, the people in power get changed out every once in a while. So the benefits of democracy is less violence and a stronger resistance to corruption and tyranny. Making very good decisions is not a benefit of democracy, though I will say that I wouldn't expect a tyrant to make decisions that were good for the whole either.

It's not about the being offended itself, it's about why those people were offended. If they had a good reason to be offended, perhaps that good reason actually should not be allowed to occur. If they had a bad reason for being offended, then their taking offense doesn't matter. So saying that being offended is not harmful is completely besides the point - it's not about being offended, it's about something being offensive, and those are not the same thing. The interesting topic here is whether the poster was offensive - it doesn't matter if someone was offended by it.

The US spends a larger proportion of GDP on health care than any other member of UN except East Timor. The US also has an enormous GDP compared to most other countries. So costs are definitely not lower in the US compared to most single payer countries. Those are just the facts, I don't know where you got the idea that US health care costs were low. You are not getting good health outcomes compared to other countries either, by the way. I'm also not sure that I want to negotiate a good price and shop around for an ambulance company to come get me while I'm having a heart attack. I also don't want to have a discussion with 911 while I'm having a heart attack about which insurance company I've got so they can look up in their files which ambulance company they should be calling. When the only sensible choice is to use whatever service you can get in touch with right now, competition is meaningless.

Treatment of infectious diseases must be a government issue for the same reason that putting out fires must be a government issue - letting the fire burn is obviously stupid, yet then you end up putting out fires for people who didn't pay you. The only people who can do that is the government. Making poor people go around sick isn't just a moral problem, it's not cost effective. It's not one of those questions where you can either sell your soul for a million dollars or keep your soul but get nothing. This is a question of whether you want poor people to die and infect you or whether you want to save money.

I think you are saying that having HFT around leads to a stable price, say, a second sooner. So if I wait a second, there shouldn't be a difference in this regard compared to if HFT was not around, or at least the non-HFT market won't be more than one second behind. Is that what you are saying?

I may be confused about what you mean by risk. You wrote that HFT decreases MM risk since with HFT you can avoid people moving against you by being faster than them. You also write that many market makers are losing big because they are getting moved against by other people using HFT. That seems like an element of risk to me. The only way I can make these two things make sense to me is to say that SOMEONE is fastest, and then that someone can do MMing without risk since no one else is fast enough to move against them. However, that wouldn't lead to tighter spreads as I see it, since that fastest person could then exploit everyone else trying to do MM by being faster, so no one else could do MM, resulting in no competition which is going to increase spreads. Costs also increase due to the overhead of maintaining the lead in HFT. I think I'm misunderstanding your point.

If the channels that pay to get to you are in the base plan, then the base plan would be more expensive without them. I don't hate those channels so much that I'd pay money to avoid having them delivered to me. I can just not watch them.

You are right that some of the labor is mechanized, which is also true when a store clerk does things. I feel for you if 20 minute waits is the norm.