I don't agree with you, but I definitely think it's more probative (and interesting) to talk about people's best and least favorite DS9 episode. Best series of the franchise; TNG at its best is only an average 6th season DS9 episode.

If I didn't use the word "enlightened", it was not an accidental omission.

That's extremely disingenuous; you characterized the whisky rebels as manifesting superior and contrary values to celebrity-obsessed moderns. If you aren't saying they were fighting for the true values of the revolution, which we should all say were enlightened, then what are you saying?

Look deeply at the situation and you will find within yourself a subconscious (you see and understand that word "subconscious", right?) need to display your cleverness and to appear "right" in the eyes of others, i.e. what is commonly called insecurity. It leads to all sorts of absurd behavior like this.

I think what's going on is you're one of those people that constructs an argument so abstruse and subtle, so obfuscated by insinuations, and so muddled by generalization, that it fails to say anything, and for every 100 words of positive argument you spend 1000 words telling people they're interpreting you wrong.

The point (that you had to work to miss) was: in a supposedly representative republic that supposedly carries out the will of The People, extremely unpopular laws were impossible (and downright dangerous) to enforce.

Well, except for the fact that Washington won, with broad public approval (western Pennsylvania notwithstanding), and the law stayed on the books until Jefferson repealed it.

They didn't tax whisky because it was an opiate, they taxed it because it was being used as a commodity currency.

I'm well aware of the whisky rebellion, the people involved were really concerned about being able to make and market whisky, their resistance was little more than illegal brigandage. So yeah, they weren't concerned about "singers or actors," they were too busy beating people up for trying to enforce a law. The average whisky rebel's motivations would be easily recognizable to the average confederate soldier.

Is the Whisky Rebellion really your sine qua non of an enlightened citizenry defending its rights? Sit-Down Strike much? Or Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion? These are people that were fighting for real rights, their livelihoods, their liberty and their lives, as opposed to mouthing empty-headed platitudes in order to get out of paying a tariff.

I've had a lot of luck with the Blender/STL workflow, YMMV.

Blender?

To gain an insight into the odds of that happening, Paypal processes around 9 million transactions per day, or 100 per second. Paypal's revenues were $6.6 billion last year [paypal-media.com].

Just throwing it out there, but it's really hard to talk about Paypal profits in dollars compared to a miner's profits in Bitcoins, mainly because BTCs are expected to appreciate relative to dollars (and in the steady-state case, will appreciate relative to consumer prices). A lot of Paypal's profits are not in the transaction itself but in interest of the significant float on Paypal's books: they hold the money for a day or two before you transfer it out, and this is a huge amount of money in aggregate, and this is a kind of profit that's impossible to quantify just by looking at the blockchain.

Mathematical modeling isn't speculation; it's not a guarantee, but it's a lot more than an unfounded guess, which is what the contrary position is. Economics is a science, it's not astrology.

The problem with transaction fees is there's no way to properly market them-- theoretically the higher a transaction fee you pay will give you a higher quality of service, but in practice the terms under which your transaction is processed are completely voluntary. It might happen, it might not, and it's definitely in the interests of large mining guilds to run up the price, and the large guilds are very effective at locking out upstarts. A cartel of two of them would easily control a majority of the blocks that get signed onto the chain, and thus set the price of transaction processing.

Given that Silicon Valley is mostly what it is due to its startups

Hrm, I'd say the the Valley is what it is mainly due to California's education spending in the 60s and 70s, and the presence of a very large and important land grant university in the city, those things are what caused the startups. It certainly wasn't due to Palo Alto's state and municipal tax situation, if that was a factor, Google would have been founded in Austin.

If labor laws become too problematic, then Silicon Valley becomes Detroit

Trade unionism is what workers do when the law is too friendly to employers.

The Detroit issue is important, it'll depend ultimately on how workers in SV decide to organize -- if they create a guild-like system, like a German works council system, things will probably be just fine.

One of the problems is that the number of people who are actually eager to work under these conditions is quite large.

I work in the film industry and the problem is really similar -- this is why Hollywood has a guild system. It's really the only way to make sure that there's any reward at all for being good at your job and sticking with it; it also makes things like health care and retirement planning much more portable and less dependent upon employers.

There's a collective action problem, particularly in businesses where the work isn't a commodity, where high-skill labor exists and employers may want to hire it, but competition with other firms on prices keeps their margins low, and thus keeps them from ever being able to afford it. It just becomes easier to hire whatever is churning out of the school system, burn those people out, and then move on to the next group. You can make a lot of money but it's not sustainable, eventually the employers in such a trade will tend to turn to collusion or lobbying to keep high-quality competitors out of their market (many national film industries work this way, like Italy's and Spain's).

Stipulated.

This is simply a consequence of the fact that tech startup remuneration schemes just don't work anymore, and people have been coasting for the last decade hoping the 90s would come back, and they just aren't. You can't just take programmers who would make over six figures in the market, pay them a pittance and stock, and then never have the stock pay off -- this'll work the first few times, but not for years.

We also can't ignore the fact that, though we measure "innovation" in the number of startups that are founded, a lot of these startups are just really dumb, unsustainable ideas that would be much better off being developed by larger companies (if at all), and the whole reason its a startup, and not a MS/Apple/Google R&D project, is to give the founders a big payday from VC funding rounds, and to give the venture capitalists a big payday off of some patent the company will file. Yay intellectual property! It's just a big rent collection scheme dressed up as entrepreneurship.

Tech startups are rarely designed to make money, they aren't really supposed to, they are really just a fiction to get the connected parties as much cash as physically possible before the whole thing burns out. It's been a scam for a decade, but a lot of tech people are deeply emotionally invested in the system, because it means catered meals and beers in the fridge and Ferraris for everyone up and down the Camino Real and satisfies their deeply-held emotional belief that being a computer nerd entitles you to vast wealth and privilege, because you're "reinventing the world" or some such nonsense.

A very similar thing happened in the film industry between the early twenties, where it was basically a gold rush from the end of World War I to the invention of sound film, and there were hundreds of little fly-by-night producers making movies left and right, and there was tons of "innovation" in the sense that a lot of content was getting made, but everyone under the producer was making nothing. Then everyone unionized.

A lot of tech will say in Silicon Valley, it's just too close to Stanford and all the good people. But, they'll actually have to be paid for the work they do, in money and not in magic beans.

Sports, voting, etc are ALL yes or no answers with very very limited possible ways to get there. Real science on the other hand frequently involves situations where the answer isn't really known and the possible ways to get there are infinite

That's about right. There's a sort of basic ontological fallacy in an article like this. Just because we can construct a question like "To what extent is climate change responsible for the cost of disasters?" it doesn't necessarily follow that it can be answered quantitatively, or that it even has a meaningful answer. Basically the article is two or three graphs and a bunch of qualitative analysis-- it's punditry in scientistic drag.

Running the numbers can never tell us what we have to do, right and wrong aren't subject to cost-benefit analysis. Always be wary of people that try to apply such logic, considering that the wrong thing to do tends to be the cheaper thing.

There's a difference between "is" and "aught." We hold people responsible for failing to do as they aught, not for what they are.

GitHub relies on Git, not the other way around.

Eh... GitHub is a huge brand presence for Git, if we consider Git as a business concern. I'm certain a lot of people elect to use Git because they know that they'll be able to host it with GitHub. If we lived in a world where BitBucket had been the more aggressive first mover, I'm sure things would be different.

The other thing Git has going for it is Linus, but just because Linus uses $X DVCS doesn't mean that people are clamoring to use $X. Very few people need to pull kernel diffs and Linus is atrocious at marketing.