Loss of freedom is the threat. Anal rape is just sadism, and doesn't prevent crime. If it did, the US would have a lower crime and reoffence rate than civilized countries, but a higher one than those who treat their prisoners even more monstrously.

Taking away one's freedom is a powerful deterrent. People don't usually think about the anal rape they may experience when they are committing a crime. It doesn't help.

"The dead know one thing. It is better to be alive."

Those are just crazy conspiracy theories, and if you believe anything like that then you are a terrorist who hates freedom.

More and more, we find that conspiracy theories become conspiracy facts. Our government has destroyed its credibility, and as a result, it is no longer a stretch to apply ANY horrible action to their list of monstrous deeds. The next global empire could learn from these failings. But they won't.

Unemployment?

Is there a fixed number of jobs that can exist in the universe?

People who view mass death as an answer for ANY problem absolutely sicken me.

I see, so none of the exchanges I discussed count as exchanges because, why exactly? Does it hurt your feelings?

And no, black markets aren't highly regulated. They aren't regulated at all (by definition), save by market forces.

Sorry, I know more about economics than you ever will.

You know, it really annoys me when people (mods) shut down scientific inquiry because they don't like what people are asking about.

Funny that I looked up the wiki article on homeopathy, and say in the opening paragraph that "Homeopathic remedies were no more effective than a placebo." Problem is, I click the link to the citation and find that the abstract of the paper cited says something along the lines of "there is weak evidence that homeopathic medicine is more effective than placebo, while there is strong evidence that conventional medicine is more effective than placebo."

No-one was debating whether homeopathic medicine is better than conventional medicine, but the jury seems to be out on whether it is effective AT ALL or not.

So yes, I would still like a citation. And water is still weird. Anyone who has studied water chemistry can back me up on that. Hydrogen bonding does extremely strange things.

Note that I do not "believe" in homeopathy.

Can you provide a citation for that?

Water is weird. Who's to say that it doesn't have some strange property that allows it to transmit information to the immune system. I have no stance on the issue until I see some data one way or another, preferably in a peer reviewed journal.

The link didn't work for some reason. Here's the plaintext link: http://depositfiles.com/files/...

I posted the link to the original news story in the OP. I got the paper from my local university (what a pain in the ass that was).

Since I know that is a pain, I uploaded it here.

Of COURSE you have a choice. When citizens of smaller governments didn't trust theirs, they held "hard" currencies, like Marks, Swiss Francs, or Dollars. As an American worried about their government, we have to go even harder than that, which is to buy and hold gold, which is the ultimate hard currency.

When your government robs your people by inflation, purchasing power shifts to those who hold the hard currency. This has happened 100% of the time in the past. People in the US have forgotten the function of gold over the last 100 years. Their lack of understanding will lead to their poverty.

I can say with 95% certainty that you will respond negatively to the idea of owning gold. The pro-Dollar propaganda of these last few generations has been very successful

Too bad the banking system is owned by the Federal Reserve (or your local central bank), which also owns the government (ie they pay their bills with their printed money).

Trusting that two members of a highly interdependent system is problematic. It's really just one big institution, and thus fully liable to systemic failure, as we saw in Cyrus.

Would you be willing to be paid in pounds? Renmenbi? Kroner?

No?

Well, someone better call all the other countries in the world and tell them they need to start using some REAL MURIKAN CURRENCY.

No, the test for whether something is a currency or not is whether people are willing to exchange goods and services with it. Bitcoin passes that test just fine.

"There are no markets in nature"

GG, is that what you really think? The entire world is a market. Bees trade reproductive services for nectar with flowering plants. Ants farm lichen and smaller insects. Animals and plants trade gasses. Buzzards short dying animal flesh.

And not just in nature. Ever hear of "black markets"? Yes, markets can and do exist without and even in spite of government interference.

Sorry to shatter the pedestal you had your masters on.

Central bankers can't interfere in the marketplace when you have a limited currency like gold or bitcoin. This lessens the boom-bust cycle significantly. You get periods of rising and falling prices, but prices trend down over time, driven by proper capital investment. Central bankers print money and cause capital to be misallocated, for example into housing, causing prices to rise steadily over time, then fall all at once.

Central banks don't stabilize prices, they just concentrate the natural inflation and deflation inherent in capital markets into certain time periods, resulting in long periods of prosperity, followed by collapse. The more they intervene, the worse the eventual collapse is. This is called "kicking the can down the road", though really it's more like a snowball being pushed up a hill, only to come down larger each time, making it harder to move back up the hill, until one day its so big nothing can stop it and you have Snowzilla rampaging through your cities rolling up first companies, then industries, then cities, then countries, then entire continents, as we are seeing now.