And your father's knowledge is broader and more accurate than this report's ..... because?

There was certainly a time when wage disparities were truly enormous, though not that big. But the entire premise of this story is that what we knew to be true just ten years ago is now out of date.

I suspect your father was giving you information that was once correct but no longer is.

When Bitcoin was launched, Satoshi had only been mining for a day or so. If you had been paying attention to the right forums, you could have started mining more or less at the same time he did and in fact some people (like Hal Finney) did exactly that.

What's more, Satoshi does not appear to have dumped his coins. Nor did he engage in much pumping. Indeed once people started hyperbolically talking about how Bitcoin would bring about world peace, trying to get Wikileaks to accept it and so on he retreated into the background and eventually left. His coins are still there.

Creating something new with no built in advantage for yourself, being totally honest about it, and then when its value soars not selling ..... is pretty much the opposite of a pump and dump scheme.

How many people are using their savings just to play the market like stocks?!

BI is different to social security in one crucial way - you get it regardless of need. Even rich people get it. That's why it fundamentally can't reduce the divide between rich and poor. The idea is to break the cultural link between receiving income from the state and being a layabout.

I guess it's time to start punishing those who are unable or unwilling to keep their computers secure.

But as most people just use the tools they're given and can't control how secure those tools are, in practice that would mean punishing computer programmers.

If you want the usage of C and C++ to be considered equivalent to suicide then this would be a great policy to bring about such a world.

He said universal basic income, which is certainly not high enough to allow anyone to buy anything they want. There would still be a divide between rich and poor with such a policy.

BTW I don't think basic income has ever been tried. Certainly massive nationalisation of all industries a la Soviet communism is not it.

At the cost of ensuring any attempt to enforce the law results in a massive and relatively even firefight that is likely to result in a whole lot more blood spilled?

Generally, sane countries want police to have a systematic advantage over criminals when it comes to basic things like weaponry and ability to drive fast. The UK is able to have a mostly disarmed police force because the population is also mostly disarmed. So you can solve it in both directions.

It's been well established that the long term fall in violent crime is primarily (or totally?) due to the removal of lead from petrol, not due to changes in any policing policies. Also, the UK has extremely strict and well enforced gun prohibition which makes it very hard to engage in violent crime, gun crimes have been falling for the last 15 years or so.

No, you've got to do better than, "I wouldn't think of doing such a thing" when it comes to 21st century governments.

Alright. What do you propose?

Fundamentally, encrypting all traffic all the time requires a public key infrastructure and the only way we know how to build one that works is to have trusted third parties. You trust your browser, for example. Your browser maker outsources ID verification of websites to CA's.

Ultimately SSL cannot survive being explicitly banned or subverted by the state. It just can't. They can force browser makers to give them a back door. No system can survive explicitly being banned by the state. Luckily this has not (yet) happened - strong SSL is not illegal and there are no documents in Snowden's archive that discuss compromises of CA's, probably because when armed with a bunch of zero days you don't need to exploit a CA to strip SSL, you just infect the target. Much more stealthy.

What's more, Google is pushing certificate transparency forward quite hard. CT is a system that requires certificates to be published to an audit log for a browser to accept them. It should make it much harder for a CA to issue certificates in secret. The audit logs can be data mined to look for bogus certs, e.g. certs that are issued but never show up in production usage, either by big well known targets like Google or by third parties. So far it's the best proposal that exists for how to raise the security of SSL. All others are busts.

One function of special vocabulary is for specialists to easily communicate. But another, important, social function is as a badge of in-group membership. If you use the words correctly (from the point of view of the group) you show that you belong, and that you probably know and understand all the other explicit and implicit rules of the group. If the word use spreads too far it loses this function and the group needs to find new words and expressions instead.

You dislike "gelling". You dislike "paradigm shifts". It would probably be a fairly risk-free bet on what you think of expressions like "optics" (as in "the optics of this decision is good") and the like. You dislike these words and refuse to use them. Which signals to management people that you are not management and should not be treated as part of their in-group. "gelling" works exactly as intended, in other words.

Asking for words to not be used like this is futile. It would be like asking people to no longer care about fashion (another in-group signal) or to not form groups of like-minded people at all.

The libertarian view is that everyone should check that the vehicle is safe and the driver competent before making a contract to be transported with them.

Hardly. The anti-Uber-banning view (call it libertarian if you like) is that governments already require drivers licenses to check for competent drivers and road vehicle licensing to ensure safe vehicles, which is why most people are totally OK with getting into the car of a random friend or relative. But we're expected to believe that once you pay someone for a trip, suddenly all those existing licenses become irrelevant and we need extra new (invariably very expensive) licenses to provide safety and competency.

Here's a thought. Maybe if someone trusts Uber to do a better job of policing their drivers than their local government, they should be allowed to test that theory out? So far I haven't actually encountered anyone who has had a bad experience with Uber. I'm sure they exist, but people with bad experiences of regular licensed taxis are a dime a dozen. It's not like paying a big fat fee to your local city magically makes people awesome.

Unless you're the person in the lane next to the Uber car when its high-mileage, improperly-maintained components break, or the person crossing the road in front when the Uber driver falls asleep, and then you get to be in the accident too.

So I guess travelling salesmen have to get special licenses too, or anyone who has an especially long commute? I guess this government licensing regime applies to anyone who drives more than a certain number of hours per day? No? They apply only to people who are paid to take passengers around and thus have money to squeeze? Hmm.

Regulations on commercial drivers exist for a reason, and it's not just for the benefit of the passengers inside a commercial vehicle.

The entire Uber hullaballoo is happening exactly because nobody seems able to clearly articulate the value that this giant pile of red tape brings to the table. People handwave and say "of course regulations make things safer", but why Uber can't achieve the same outcomes better is not exactly clear. I don't think a government license magically makes people less likely to fall asleep at the wheel, for example - rules around how long any driver can drive would do that, but that's not what taxi licensing achieves.

It seems pretty clear that technology can solve some of the problems that historically have been achieved through government licensing. Governments are NEVER going to decide that some laws can be replaced with new technology, their history of doing this is non-existent because the people who pass laws are not technologists. So conflicts like Uber vs taxi licensing regimes are inevitable. But that doesn't make Uber automatically in the wrong. It's just a sad reflection on the lack of software ability at the top of our societies power structures.

The first airplane was created by Orville and Wilbur Wright, American brothers. No other craft was capable of flying prior to this. This is undisputed.

Interestingly, after inventing the airplane they then filed patents on it and their company stagnated, technologically. Meanwhile planes were being invented at around the same time in Europe, and they weren't protected in the same way, so by the time World War 1 started the American's had to fly in European made planes because the US ones weren't good enough. Eventually of course the patents expired and US aircraft caught up pretty fast.

Not many other countries intentionally bankrupt accident victims the way the US does.

I don't live in the US, and I agree. But, if you're found liable for an accident you will tend to pay a lot of money in any country; the accident victims likely have life or accident insurance and their insurance company will want to get reimbursed.

So good, comprehensive accident insurance is a very good idea no matter where you live. Usually we have that as part of our home insurance or other thing like that, and if you own a car you have mandatory insurance for that.

But in a case like this you may well be completely uncovered. The vehicle insurance is likely not valid for commercial traffic, and your home insurance may well not be valid either. As I said, I would never, ever get into a car like this without first being absolutely sure that the liability situation is crystal clear.

What they do need however is a license to operate a taxi, and that's determined locally, with a criminal background/medical/eyes check, and a very stringent but outdated local geography test that has been rendered completely useless by mobile applications such as Google Maps Navigation and Waze.

So require that the drivers have it, outdated or not. It's required by all commercial passenger traffic so it's not as f it discriminates against Uber after all. If they really don't like it, they're free to lobby and argue for a change to the relevant laws. Just arguing that "but we don't wanna follow the law!" gets tired really fast.

In the US, Uber covers you for up to one million dollars.

That's a pretty pathetic sum for traffic insurance. Remember, you may potentially be economically liable for several injured, permanently disabled or killed people, property damage and other costs. And again, as the one that commissions and pays for the trip, you just might find yourself shouldering part of the criminal liability too, if you didn't check that the guy you hired had a valid license for commercial traffic.