Bitcoin's value is in the kostenlos nature of the services and transaction network; it has far lower transaction cost, carry cost, etc... than does the USD.

As for the USD, it is backed by debt, death, and utility. You can say it's value is from taxation, but that isn't accurate. The dollar has value to those who pay no taxes.

Banks offer no true safety. By engaging in fractional reserve lending, they rob from everyone with every loan they make. The value of every dollar is eroded by each loan. This is similar to the government spending money that it doesn't make in tax revenue. More dollars chasing the same number of goods/services will result in monetary inflation and eventually in price inflation. Right now, we are seeing this trend in various investment and asset class products/services, but it's making its way into everything slowly but surely. Those banks damn near collapsed in 2008 as the market dictated that they ought, but the government stopped that from happening because their cronies cannot be allowed to fail.

Getting rid of money is the wrong idea. Do you really think having no money would be better? People what, barter? Club each other to death and take each other's shit? Or are you a zeitgeister/venusprojecter/digitalcommie? Human wants and needs are infinite and resources are finite. This means that there will forever be inequity. As that is the case, we must have a way to figure out what things are worth relative to something else, and distribute goods efficiently. The market has been proven to be the best at this task. Every command economy has introduced deprivation, and market economies have produced bounty. Since the introduction of fiat currency, price floors, and 3 letter agencies dictating to industry, the US economy has had its worst boom/bust cycles ever... furthering that with more government control isn't going to magically make things better.

Just a constant whining about how more socialism is needed because people do not want to take any responsibility for their own lives.

Everyone sits here talking about how they want a UBI. The thing is, government is your problem here not business. The government makes it possible for companies to pay so little. The welfare system is effectively just a subsidy for corporations like Walmart. If there were no welfare system, Walmart would be forced to pay a living wage. Because welfare exists, Walmart does not need to pay a living wage. You have welfare and public transit, why do you need so much money from Walmart?

Further, the entire idea here is that labor isn't needed and therefore we must find a way to pay people so that they may live. This ignores what happens to money when it is spent into existence. If you arbitrarily print money to provide more for the non-working, those non-working are not producing anything of value. You have more money chasing the same number of products and inflation occurs. This inflation will hurt the poorest the most, as they will have no way to increase their incomes to keep up with inflation and they have no store of wealth from which to draw for their own survival. This dream of a UBI would then rely upon taxation. The taxation you wish to levy would be necessarily limited. If the taxation renders too many incomes below the threshold of UBI, then people will stop working and take UBI. If you raise taxes on the rich disproportionately then the rich just take their money and leave and/or stop working since they are already wealthy. Ultimately, those who pay will also resent those who do not, and the resentment will grow as the taxes grow. The corporations themselves will also relocate to avoid taxes levied upon them to pay their customers, and in your minds the ultimate outcome of the "Super Evil Automation Armageddon Of Super Evil Corporation Master Satans" is that you would just have absentee owners and everyone else.... The owners are not going to give up money just to have you turn around and give it back to them. There is no fucking point to that. They would just create shit for themselves and let everyone else fucking rot. What would be the point of running the machines for everyone else to give them money that was stolen from them?

I hate the mega corps as much as the next guy, but the mega corps can only be so large due to government protection. This is the nature of democratic systems and regulatory capture. With even marginally open markets, politicians who must run for office can and will be bought. They in turn will pass legislation that helps the corporations who provided their campaign funds, and/or the corporations who employ large numbers of voters in their home states. As a result, any democracy will devolve to a semi-fascist corporatocratic nightmare... kind of like the USA, where even war is waged just to pad the pockets of government contractors and keep the current Senate and House representatives in office.

The only solution here is to end the state, not grow it. If you grow it and give governments more power this problem only worsens.

You're an idiot. In a corporate environment, macOS offers a UNIX system and development environment with support contracts, administrative tools, and rich application environment. Why would this be a bad thing? As for iPhone and iPad, they are powerful and trusted and have fewer issues receiving updates that does Android. Updates which are important within corporate environments, yet Alphabet cannot seem to get their industry partners to push updates to end users' devices in a timely fashion. Adding to that is the iPhone 5/5s/se which have shared form factor allowing the continued use of various mounts and cases meaning that corporations can continue deploying the devices in the field with little change required elsewhere. For your home use, you may prefer BS like Windows and Android. I will continue to prefer RHEL, AIX, macOS. I will continue to get work done, and I will continue to not need to tinker with my hardware and risk down time.

>New Intel and AMD Chips Will Only Support Windows 10

Microsoft will only support new Intel and AMD chips in Windows 10.

or

AMD and Intel will not be writing drivers for previous Microsoft Windows versions.

The sad truth is that most of the "innovations" or recent society are all that innovative and are far more iterative. Even the move to cell phones and smart phones was an iterative rehash of an old RISC platform. I would argue that our period of greatest innovation was from the mid 1860s through roughly the mid 1940s, roughly an 80 year span. Cronyism wasn't as strong it allowed people to experiment in the market with new ideas. The advent of the telegraph relay switch allowed mankind to start automating. The modern era was merely materials science catching up with logic and design that mankind already had in mind (see the Annoted Turing if you doubt this). Also, medical technologies have been largely stagnant since the 70s, and I would argue that that is due largely to big pharma lobbying congress and keeping the most revolutionary ideas out of mainstream use. At any rate, it feels as though innovation is lately in the software field where there is still some modicum of freedom, but that too is slowly being erased under the auspices of "safety".

You made some truly good points. I especially like your point about the cloud/sharing economy.

I worked at a few webhosts, but one in particular for quite a while. We mostly served the adult industry, but we had a number of non-adult content customers as well. The struggle to keep things secure is active and never-ending. Companies are normally rolling out patches as attacks are coming in to other servers. There is never a guarantee that things are secure, and you can usually bet that some number of a company's servers are already exploited. Why? Software costs. Even with free software running the servers, you have the actual site code which will need to be updated for newer versions of PHP, Java, Python, NodeJS, Apache, SSL, etc... and companies are loathe to spend on that. Plus, it's a massive amount of work for the SysAdmins/SysEngineers to overhaul everything. Many companies' employees are not even aware of how many physical machines they have, how many VMs (if they even run VMs) are on each physical machine, or even what sites and services they own/run. They instead rely on the host to know all of that. The people at the host have hundreds (sometimes thousands) of customers, and have to hope that someone, at some point, updated the data on their side... and if not, you just write up a quick expect script to loop through IPs owned/leased by a customer to get hostnames, run a check for web server software, and then report back with configured domains/subdomains. It's a mess. At any given point in time, the entire world's could infrastructure and network infrastructure is 15 minutes from total failure and it is only through constant effort that everything is kept online. While I would love to say that this is confined to the web services world, it isn't. Government and financial systems are very similar. So, yeah. People really shouldn't trust the "cloud" and people should never really trust websites/webhosts.

As this entire thing is about OS switching, I would imagine that saying "use Kubuntu" or even "use KDE" is within scope. It is especially within scope as both Mint and Kubuntu are Ubuntu derivatives, and essentially only replace the DE anyway. To make your complaint even more baseless: the parent comment to which "Use Kubuntu - Problem solved..." replied was a guy who was showing a decent amount of knowledge. "This is what's wrong with the Linux user community" You cannot just move into a community and start bitching about it. If you don't like it, go elsewhere.

What you appear to be asking is: What country or countries would actually respect my liberty while still managing to provide a relatively stable place to live? What are the pros and cons of these countries? Switzerland and Iceland offer protection from the USA. They are stable. They have legal codes similar to any other Western nation. They are cheaper than the Scandinavians. Germany is very similar to the UK and USA when it comes to law, but they do have a better track record human rights (post WW2) than the UK and USA. New Zealand is another option, but they are no longer quite as welcoming toward US immigrants due to the vast number of neo-cons who showed up. In Australia, things are alright, but all of the wildlife is deadly. Nicaragua and Chile are both great destinations. Things are inexpensive, you have a great deal of liberty, they are relatively stable, and they are generally welcoming toward people who actually wish to live there and acknowledge that they are choosing to become Nicaraguans or Chileans and not just Americans who live in an enclave. There are a few MASSIVE issues you need to be aware of when leaving the USA: 1) People around the world are not always welcoming of the USA because the USA does some fucked up shit. Most people are smart enough to realize that those things are actions of the US government and not necessarily representative of the US's population, but it still happens. 2) Do not move somewhere and start talking about your politics or philosophy because no one is going to give a shit, and you will most likely just piss people off. 3) Many things that are inexpensive in the USA will be more expensive in some places. As an example, clothing is often more expensive in Europe than in the USA because Europeans typically do not trade with countries that do child labor. Another example, while it is easy to get a gun in Chile, guns are more expensive because they're imported from the USA, and the dollar is strong against their currency.

I'm sure my system would cry if I tried to play crysis or something. But, playing Borderlands2, SC2, LoL, HotS, Diablo 3, Mirrors Edge, etc... everything runs just fine.

I use an r9 270. I bought it when my old card starting showing age and acting up. For about $150 it runs every game I play on highest settings without batting an eye. That's with an AMD Athlon x2 btw... The whole race to specs domination doesn't add much.

People can get really picky about keyboads, and to a point I can understand. It does kind of suck to sit there and type on a keyboard that you dislike. One of my biggest issues is that home/end/command+left/command+right/function+left/function+right in OS X is very non-standardized across applications. This isn't a keyboard issue at all, but it does affect my ability to type quickly. Aside from that, I default to using a Kensington "Keyboard for Life". It's incredibly basic. No real bells and whistles, no extra keys, etc... It isn't too noisy though, all the keys are in the right place, and it can take a beating. It's only real "feature" is that it can tolerate getting stuff spilled on it. I use an Apple Wireless Keyboard at work, but only because I am using OS X at work. I use the keyboard built into my MacbookAir when out and about, but on the desktop and on the MBA when at home, I use my Kensington. I also use the Kensington when I'm in data centers, and when using a keyboard with my Raspberry Pi, and when I am using my MiniDisc deck I use the kensington with a PS/2 to USB connector.

First, you cannot tell me that NASA shouldn't study the Earth. The Earth is part of the cosmos, ignoring it does no one any good. Second, while I am an anarchist, I have to agree with the POTUS on this one... it's time for NASA to step aside and start getting private industry into space. This is happening to some degree already, but allowing the market to control development and having NASA along for the ride is far more economical and the pace of change is faster. When the government signs contracts, those contracts are very long term and usually benefit someone in office financially. This is bad for a group that aims to be scientific in nature. Having outside companies directly court NASA on short term contract bases just seems a far better way to do things. Third, NASA is one of the only organizations on Earth with a very good ability to analyze Earth and compare their findings to those of studies done on the atmospheres/climates of other planets. To do a good study, you need things like controls, comparisons, and experiments. Those are hard to do with systems as large and complex as planetary climates. I would argue that the study of Earth and other planets is really the only way to get an accurate understanding of climate change and the Earth's climate more generally.