If after all these weeks the government doesn't have the capability, they will never have the capability.

There is a mechanism where people who want to prioritize their transaction can pay a fee to prioritize their transaction in the queue. If miners drop out because the mining reward is too low, then the ability of the network to process transactions will be reduced. But if transactors offer a high enough fee, then the miners will stay. This may simply be a swap from miners earning bitcoins as a hash reward, to earning income from processing fees. And fees may become the norm if it takes several hours or perhaps days to process with no fee.

$600 per month is not a basic income. Here in the United States it would qualify for extreme poverty. Of course people are not dis-incentivized from working. This study cannot prove what individuals might do if given enough money to subsist.

I bet you thought that former DNI James Clapper was telling the truth in front of Congress, right?

A lack of military preparedness does not prevent war. It encourages it. There was no shooting war in the 1980s.

I disliked the term "excluded languages" from the article. Noone is excluding your language. If noone reads or understands or cares about things written in your obscure language, then that's a "you" problem, and not because of anyone else excluding you.

The old statement that "money talks" always brings true. Organizations are most likely to change if their source of income is about to get slashed. And until that change happens, then why should Americans pay for a failed organization?

Even if the big sites manage to eliminate price gouging, there's nothing that prevents the sellers from setting up their own sites, thereby cutting the big websites out if the action. Just last week I was getting a ton of 3rd party ads for N95 masks. And if they try to crack down harder, then the authorities might actually popularize the Dark Web. It's like they don't actually know how any of this works....

A few days ago, the quarantine plan in Italy was leaked, causing some travellers to accelerate their travel plans to beat the quarantine. Thus, the virus has spread more. Sadly, some people who are privy to information will abuse it to benefit themselves to the detriment of everyone else.

Should have diversified. Get that Foxconn plant in Wisconsin up and running already. Automakers figured this out decades ago, that you should have multiple suppliers in case one of them has a shutdown. If you want to be a billion dollar company, then you need to start making smart decisions. I don't feel sorry for those who make easily foreseeable mistakes.

The Ministry of Truth is almost here. The book 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a guide.

It is my understanding that the fats from those cooking oils can already be reused for other industries, such as cosmetics. But the more uses, the less waste, the better.

From the article:

Because new laws and bureaucracy on fledgling industry always improve competitiveness, right?

I remember there were a number of scary predictions in the past, like The Population Bomb which predicted hundreds of millions would die from starvation by the year 2000. And Peak Oil, where the world would run out of reasonably priced fuel. The predictions of doom, of course, never happened. The models are usually wrong, and they often don't account for free market incentives to produce or innovate.