The problem is, the people jumping on the bandwagon don't even know what arbitrage is, let alone what to look for in a currency. It's one more example of tech assuming it can do $X better than the industry built up around $X, without understanding how $X even works.

Actually I did :) Flu, sorry!

According to the link below, approximately 5% of people in state prisons in 2012 were incarcerated for possession with no other crime. http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cm... I think it is highly dependent on where you live and the color of your skin. There is a huge racial disparity in police letting offenders off with a warning.

Are you claiming that online banking does not exist? Do you think banks are shipping paper back and forth when transactions occur? And paypal stores value in (wait for it) Dollars. Gold is a commodity, and has value (although we could argue about whether the current value is inherent or speculative). Likewise land and housing represent resources/goods and have value. But like all goods prices fluctuate, and (other than resources like gold and land) depreciation is a killer. If you are "storing" your worth in a house, land, etc., viewing it as superior to more diverse assets, you are a goof. Even if you buy that the housing market in general is fairly stable (can we lay this theory to rest?), individual markets surely are not.

No because deflationary currency is unstable, and Bitcoin is a hype bubble.

My mother regularly says she'd want to die were she in the throws of dementia. It's a sad state of affairs that we give dogs a more humane death than humans...

Confinement is certainly a good thing for some, but jails/prisons seem like the wrong setting for non-violent addiction-related issues. The focus of prisons (from my limited observation) is rarely to rehabilitate.

Do you store your wealth in Beanie Babies, or use them as a means of payment? You talk about "store of value" and "payment network", but that's exactly what a currency is, and a failed currency is a terrible option for either, because it has very unpredictable value.
The algorithm behind Bitcoin is interesting. It's just not a functional currency. The lack of built-in scaling means it would be deflationary purely due to population growth, if nothing else.
I'm not saying Bitcoin has not given us an interesting case study, or possibly laid groundwork for some more functional accounting algorithm, but I have not seen any economically sound argument for its stability.

Did you even read gp before you vomited your opinion to the screen?

He didn't say the threat wasn't rational. He said the person wasn't rational. Big difference. In either case, the desired effect of a death threat is usually a dead person, not a youtube takedown :)

It's like my right to drive, or my right to buy the linguine my grocery store just stopped carrying. They eroded my past :(

Not to mention that while national currencies can be manipulated to affect the economy, Bitcoin floats wherever the masses bid it up/down to. It has all of the instability with none of the control mechanisms and no underlying value. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is inherently deflationary. It's really a disaster of a currency in any financial sense. The only people touting it seem to be ideologues and get-rich-quick types.

Which reminds me -- My partner's brother was reemed by a clueless judge/history teacher at his middle school science fair for not having a control group in his observational study of moss growth across local tree species.... Observational study is awesome, especially when all you care about is correlation between a known and an unknown, rather than causailty. The US school system likes the word "experiment" too much for its own good.

I think gp's problem is with this specific type (U-Pb) of dating.
I don't understand how initial values are determined. (Is there some method by which the original ratio of the two elements is known? Or the proportion of radioactive isotopes?)

But, from the wikipedia article

so it does not sound at all un-tested.

While GP is correct that we cannot experimentally confirm the specific mechanisms here (radioactive Pb decay over one million+ years...) , we have a very good description of radioactive decay across the board (table?) and observational results sound extremely consistent. Direct experimentation is not the only form of scientific evidence, despite what [creationist intelligent_designist whatever_nut] might say.

Most users never encode a single video in their life. (Except for cameras on devices, and who is doing 4k video on thier phone these days?)
And if encoding takes 50x longer, that's 50x the resources Google needs to keep up with the work flow.
So you have it totally backwards.

Not to mention that we are talking about 4k-targetted codecs, so you should be comparing to H.265, not H.264. The additional computations for encoding H.265/VP9 are to reduce bandwidth requirements. If you don't care about bandwidth, feel free to generate a 5GB H.264 video.