Communism works incredibly well but only in very small groups where pooled resources are necessary for survival.
In other words extended family situations where there is a strong emotional bond between individuals who actually know each other to a degree.
partnership with corporate interests in the lead up to WWII.
No, WW1 plus a punitive peace treaty plus social crisis lead to WW2. Partnering with corporate interests was just a tactic for state control of industry. It was an implementation detail not a cause.
How does private industry justify for investors the expense when a payoff may not even be realized, fortunes lost or it takes another generation to see any profit?
It won't take a generation to see a profit. Consider space tourism, it is currently outrageously expensive but that is OK. The handful of people willing to pay such sums exist. Such willingness to pay is a tried and true factor that supports initially expensive products and services.
Investors won't go for that.
The quarterly focus that you assume is for publicly traded companies. Privately held companies can have longer perspectives.
In fact, the only reason the U.S. even had a space program is because of the funding and taxing power of government.
That is just a phase. A necessary phase, but one that people move beyond. Just as sailing from Europe to North America was once only an activity that governments could afford.
And as for extinction-level events, life survived; we are here. Who are you to decide what life will survive on this planet millions or billions of years from now?
The one and only known species that is aware of this issue and can have a conversation about it and can do something about it, i.e. not limit itself to this one planet. That's a pretty special species.
That is correct. Evolution is still happening. There were no humans here two million years ago and there won't be any in another two million years. What's the big deal?
To continue with the glass is half full/empty metaphor, you ignore the fact that someday there will be no glass. More mass extinction level events will happen. And the big deal is that it would be a shame to lose the only known intelligent species capable of contemplating and studying the universe in such an event, and lose whatever species may have developed from this intelligent species.
Occupying more than one rock in the solar system greatly increases the species chance of survival. Plus the amount of resources available in asteroids and such dwarfs everything we have acquired from the earth.
The enormous expense involved in manned space flight and habitation is temporary. Yet that expense may well seem paltry if we can get past the bootstrapping phase. I have greater faith in the civilian commercial space industry in this regard than I do with government based projects.
The space program is a lot more productive now than when we were focused on a retarded war with the Russians. Unlike the 60's, we're actually doing basic science and planetary science missions now instead of chest thumping bravado.
Much of the science and tech of today's planetary missions are the result of military tech and those glory days of NASA manned missions. Those manned lunar missions were preceded by various robotic lunar missions.
The cold war greatly benefited the space program, it funded its tech. That chest thumping got the public behind all that spending on space. NASA and the US space program suffer today because of a lack of interest by the people. Fortunately the civilian commercial space industry seems to be coming along quite nicely.
From your description, I think you're better at hand-crafted assembly than most people. I suspect it would take a lot of time and work for me to get that good.
Well I am a little rusty but I have done it off and on for 30 years, 6502, 68000, 16- and 32-bit x86, PowerPC, ARM and a few odd micro controllers. And CPU architecture is something that I enjoy learning about. So yeah, not the average C programmer. I make no claims that the average C programmer who can read assembly for debugging purposes can beat the compiler. Someone who is knowledgeable about the hardware architecture and has some experience with assembly would be required, although the experience does not necessarily have to be on that architecture. I did pretty good my first time out in PowerPC. It also depends on the code. Not all code can be tuned, or is worth tuning. I also tend to think about the architecture when coding in C/C++, that helps too and is a nice side effect of the assembly experience.
Now, how much experience is enough to beat the compiler. That's hard to say. For someone like me who is a "freak" and actually enjoys assembly, there are probably some recent college grads who can do it. I've also seen people with 30 years of experience who have occasionally written assembly when absolutely required who probably will get beaten by the compiler. I think its one of those things you have to have some inherent interest in. When I work on a new architecture I like to re-write some code in assembly for fun and curiosity on my own time, one such example is some vector/matrix math code going back to a 3d graphics class in college. Again, I admit this is "freaky".
There was a large fleet of German civilian ships in the Atlantic between 1941 and 1945, although they were all submarines.
They did have torpedoes on board, but they were civilian torpedoes. For defense.
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"Actual" currency is just the middleman to trading goods and services.
No. Goods and services are not only traded using currency. They may be traded using other non-currency assets as well.
Where is the straw man you are arguing against that said the word "only"?
Currency is not **the** middleman, it is **a** middleman.
I'm not arguing against bitcoins. I'm pointing out that it is an asset in various legal jurisdictions and that this has huge implications that are only now coming to light.
If anything, this demonstrates another example of how bitcoin will never catch on as an actual currency. It's a middleman at best
"Actual" currency is just the middleman to trading goods and services. So I guess dollars will never catch on either.
No. Goods and services are not only traded using currency. They may be traded using other non-currency assets as well. However trading assets has a capital gain/loss tax implication in the U.S.
A recent IRS advisory said virtual currency is to be treated as an assent not a currency. So lets say you receive some bitcoins. At some future date you spend these bitcoins. Since these bitcoins are an asset you have to account for their gain or loss in value for the days that you held them and declare a loss or gain on your taxes. In short spending bitcoins has the paperwork overhead of selling stocks, its not like spending dollars at all.
Ex. You buy one coin at $500 and another at $600. Coins are priced at $800 at the time of a future purchase. You buy something for $1,200, 1.5 coins. Using FIFO (first in first out) your basis for the outgoing 1.5 coins is $500 + $300 = $800, and the basis for the returning 0.5 coins is still $300. You experienced a gain of $400 on the 1.5 coins at the time of the sale and that $400 would seem to be taxable income. Apologies if I botched the math, hopefully the point gets across.
So if you buy a laptop from Dell and the IRS discovers you paid in bitcoins you may be expected to provide some sort of accounting for the coins used, date acquired, value on that date, etc.
Assembly is also much less common today because the compilers have improved a whole lot since 1991. It's a lot harder for hand-crafted assembly to beat an optimizing compiler now.
I've been hearing people say "compilers are finally good enough that assembly is obsolete" for about 20 years. Its never been true. Someday maybe. I doubt its a lot harder, however I would agree that it is a lot less necessary. Computers are so overpowered for typical tasks it hardly makes any difference whether one uses C or assembly.
I haven't written any assembly in about 5 years. However every hardware generation or so I compare some assembly code I wrote about 10 years ago to the current compilers. The assembly still wins. I'm not claiming this is typical results. The key to big wins in assembly is not to out micromanage the compiler when it comes to scheduling, rather it is to use knowledge and info that can't be represented in the language nor communicated to the compiler through the language.
FWIW, the reason I haven't written assembly in over 5 years is that I haven't worked on something that is extremely time sensitive in recent years.
Advertising (i.e. money) has limited power, the true power, the true currency of politics is votes.
Advertising gets votes, ergo it is a distinction without a difference.
You are missing my point. Expensive media campaigns (ie. money) only persuades the indifferent and the uninterested. If you can convince a person that something matter, get them interested, then the media campaign will not change their mind no matter how much money you throw into it. That is why money is inferior to votes.
Advertising doesn't get all or even most votes but it doesn't have to. It merely has to get enough to tip the election which advertising demonstrably can do. You will not find one person who has been involved with an actual campaign who will tell you money doesn't matter. It's not the end-all-be-all but it matters quite a lot.
Ask someone in an actual campaign if they fear, in he U.S., the NRA or AARP because of their money or because of their motivated voters who are highly likely to show up on election day. These two lobbyists are the most powerful in the country because of their motivated members not because of campaign contribution.
A motivated and well informed voter is not swayed by advertising. Only the indifferent or disinterested are swayed by advertising.
First off I guarantee you that a well informed voter can sometimes be swayed by advertising. Happens all the time. Second, there are LOTS of disinterested voters out there.
Of course there are. That is why the 1%'ers have more political power than the 99%'ers. My point is that the 99%'s delude themselves if they think the problem is money. The problem is their own indifference.
One of the biggest ways that this indifference manifests is in party loyalty. If you vote for your party rather than candidates, including other party candidates, then you can be ignored. Your party already has your vote so you can be ignored. The other party can not get your vote so you can be ignored. Roughly 2/3's of U.S. voters remove themselves from the game through party loyalty, being part of the loyal base.
I am regularly asked to vote for local officials who I know absolutely nothing about and even when I care I simply have limited time and motivation to learn about them. People demonstrably tend to vote for people they've heard of over those they haven't regardless of their actual positions on issues. That's how incumbents tend to get re-elected. Guess what a really good way to hear about someone is? Advertising!
Actually its a pretty poor way to get informed, the info is highly biased or misleading.
In the U.S. recently an upstart college professor spent $100,000 in an election and defeated a power incumbent who spent $5,000,000. The professor had motivated voters, the incumbent had money.
That's pretty much the exception that proves the rule. You neglected to point out that the incumbent was a high ranking member of congress who had spent relatively little time campaigning in his district. He screwed up. No amount of money will help you if you don't actually pay attention to what matters.
Actually it proves my point. The winner tapped into a groundswell of motivated voters who were really pissed off. It was not simply that the loser didn't spend enough time in his district. If anything is exceptional in this case it was a large number of motivated voters showing up on election day, that is the formula for reform, for the 99%'era to regain control. Because the true currency of politics is votes.
Never underestimate the power of advertising and lobbyists.
Advertising (i.e. money) has limited power, the true power, the true currency of politics is votes.
A motivated and well informed voter is not swayed by advertising. Only the indifferent or disinterested are swayed by advertising.
In the U.S. recently an upstart college professor spent $100,000 in an election and defeated a power incumbent who spent $5,000,000. The professor had motivated voters, the incumbent had money.
As for lobbyists in the U.S, the most powerful are those who deliver motivated voters on election day, not those who merely make campaign contributions.
"Hey Ivan, check your six." -- Sidewinder missile jacket patch, showing a Sidewinder driving up the tail of a Russian Su-27