I'd rather trust a website with a reputation based system, than a taxi driver.

Ah yes, a taxi service (in all but name), with all the reliability and safety of Ebay and PayPal.

Currently existing reputation systems are junk. Companies like Ebay find it more profitable to just sit on their network-effects based hegemony and smooth over the worst failures with PR, rather than making an actually useful reputation system. Reputation systems are much like airport security - to make you feel safe, not actually make you safe.

I shake my head at the ingress text: "the taxicab industry that currently enjoys regulatory capture"

Some things people should know about Uber: It's backed by Silicon Valley venture capital and Goldman Sachs, to the tune of 1.2 billion dollars.

Yet, it's the self-employed, unskilled labor in the cottage industry of driving taxis that "enjoys regulatory capture". Yeeeeah, right.

The taxi industry is regulated to protect consumers, not drivers. All Uber is, is some rich people who decided that they'd become powerful enough to simply ignore regulations on driving people for profit. When the reality of why that regulation exists comes crashing down. they count on their ideology/PR department to smooth over it, and write new regulation tailored to give them a monopoly.

Preventable deaths of adults is the kind of death we should care about because

* While we like kids, they're already pretty good at not dying.
* While we like old people, they've lived a long life and are going to die comparatively soon anyway.
* Non-preventable deaths are hardly productive to focus on.

Your sig:

"If it's worth doing, it's worth doing for money."

Think tanks, many on the "left" too, are in it for money. They write to further the economic interests of their backers. Some see the truth as something that must be carefully tiptoed around when it's not beneficial for what they promote. Others just don't give a damn and have decided that any position, no matter how dumb, deserves a defense lawyer as long as they can pay. And if they have to employ the Chewbacca defense or the Shaggy defense, so be it.

GWPF is in the latter category. Pure paid-for hackery. Bengtsson would never have fit in there; he actually believes in what he says on account of his political views.

It is 2014. It is not 1974.

Funny you should say that, as the rate of female computer science graduates was apparently higher back then.

Whatever biology says, we see that the gender ratio varies greatly with time and place. Our biology hasn't changed much since the 70s, so we can at the very least get the gender ratio back to what it was then. Probably, our biology is flexible enough to support pretty much any gender ratio.

This means we can probably change things, if we really go for it. The question is should we? The issue is that a society can score high on gender egalitarianism, and high on opportunities for everyone, and yet that seems only to make people make more traditional choices when it comes to education. What does that mean?

I haven't got an answer. But this is a "should" question - so no naturalistic fallacy, please.

You mostly need to use science to see it, unless you live in unfortunate areas like the arctic. It still happens gradually enough that you can conveniently forget that things were ever different if you go by your trusty, truthy gut feeling.

The crisis doesn't happen the year the ice sheet is entirely gone and we say "Yup, sea level is 10 ft. higher!"

We will live more than long enough to see bad consequences of sea level rise, let alone global warming in general.

But sure, at every step of the way there will be people saying "we dont know if it will actually get any worse than this", "The rise in the rate of change of temperature appears to have flattened out", etc.

Yeah! Just like we adapted when the dinosaurs died out and we could no longer ride them.

That's a good idea, because the least accountable branch of government is surely on your side! /s

The judicial branch and the supreme court serve much the same purpose as the Tsar in old Russia. No matter how bad it gets, it's not the Tsar's fault. It's the noblemen's fault. The Tsar just has bad advisers. If only we could get past them and talk to him and make him understand, it'd all be OK.

Frankly, you're not impressing anyone with your tough-nose naturalism. Mosquito bites me because that's it's nature. I murder mosquito with prejudice as often as I can because that's my nature.

Not an entomologist, but it seems you have some awfully mammalian assumptions here.

I hope this is satire to mock climate deniers.

Yeah. Pretty much everyone agrees on the first bit, that somehow Mt Gox got into trouble, and tried to get out of it by gambling with the customers' money like a bank (but uninsured!). The question is what that trouble was. It does not go back to when bitcoin was worth pennies, that I'm pretty confident of. I'm also pretty confident that it wasn't the transaction malleability bug itself - at worst, that could have drained the

However, the transaction malleability bug might have been the trigger - or rather, the bank run it provoked was the trigger. As people were trying to withdraw bitcoin, Gox tried to dip into their long-term storage (cold wallet) - and they made an unpleasant discovery.

What? That some of the cold wallets were empty, drained by an unfaithful employee? That they'd lost the passwords to some cold wallets? I don't know. Anyway, they briefly tried some desperate things with the money they had, in order to fix the problem before anyone knew. It failed. Then they went to other exchanges for a "bailout", trying to buy more time to fix the issue. Then the other exchanges demanded they come clean and reported them to the authorities.

Don't put your ignorance on display. The bug in bitcoin was that something you would think could be used as a transaction ID, wasn't in fact usable as such. Making it possible to trick people to resend money they had in fact already sent. No money was duplicated, and by itself, the bug did not allow theft (it only enabled some form of social engineering attacks).

Not this again.

There are a number of things that are valuable, even if you personally think there's no reason they should be valuable. Old Magic the Gathering cards, most of the stuff on exhibit in MoMA, pieces of paper with numbers on them from foreign lands, etc. If you steal these things, you're still a thief in the law's eyes.

For that matter, if you steal something which has no market value, but only value to the owner, you're still a thief. Don't go stealing people's family albums.

In some jurisdictions, even the stuff people throw into the trash is illegal to take.

Bitcoin does not have to be a currency to be recognized as valuable. Since it provably has a market value, the state would have to preemptively declare it worthless, or claims about it unenforcable, for it to lack protection. If you steal bitcoin and get caught, you're going to jail.