Everything has a supply curve and a demand curve, including gold and bitcoin. Where the curves cross, that is the price. This is economics 101, which you never took.

Air is more "innately valuable" than gold, but you don't pay money to breathe.

Here's a free book for the politicians in DC to read to learn why central planning always fails.

I mean it's only been out 106 years, so maybe they haven't heard of it yet.

TL;DR local cities have more information about what they need.

Of course corruption happens at all levels and some folks in cities still have DSL for that reason.

I asked chatGPT. It basically recommended all of the things they've already done: using strategic reserves, easing import restrictions and reducing refinery bottlenecks. Then I asked if it was aware that the US is at war with Iran. So it searched the web, presumably read some recent news and recommended reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

So maybe they did ask chatGPT.

it isn't faced by nomadic hunter-gatherers

Hunter-gatherers are generally nomadic because of the tragedy of the commons. They show up, hunt and gather out the area they're in with no motivation to manage it sustainably, then move elsewhere to do the same thing again. Nomads don't "face" tragedy of the commons, they pack up and leave. It becomes a problem that needs to be solved for civilizations because they give up that option.

It didn't. Hash trees are nearly 50 years old. Bitcoin's novelty was proposing a 1) a practical proof of work system based on computing hashes 2) a distributed transaction system based on it where the users would perform the processing.

The proof of work system has proven to be enormously expensive and Bitcoin processing was quickly taken over by large organizations so it failed to achieve (2) as well.

The SEC thing the story is about has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It uses "smart contracts" which is an Etherium thing. Etherium notably started with a different proof of work algorithm to try and fix the problems with Bitcoin's, then dropped proof of work entirely.

I am fully expecting him to propose renaming America into Trump Land at some point, so he did miss a trick. It should be T & A.

Well, there have to be correct incentives for someone to be in software, I got into it because I liked the idea of being able to control a machine, to be able to tell a computer what to do and it would do it.

Would I have the same interest in it 40 years ago if controlling the computer meant writing in human language that is imprecise and nuanced and receiving back code that I couldn't start to comprehend? Maybe, maybe not, I am not sure actually. If there was still a way for me to do this without the AI I probably would have gone that route but how many people today would do it? I mean people are telling Agents to write their letters for them, not code, just letters. People are telling agents to do all sorts of things, all of which probably saves some time, make some errors, creates some problems while solving others, it is just that none of it is actually understood by the user.

How many AI users understand how any of it works? But that was the point, to understand how the thing works to be able to control it.

It is similar to car mechanics, people who like to tinker with cars, how interesting is it to tinker with a car where you are not allowed to understand half of it and you cannot fix most of it, if something breaks you have to order an entire replacement part because it has a built in computer interface.

Flat taxes are regressive because the poor spend more of their money on necessities, unless you then issue corrections in which case there's no benefit to doing a flat tax because it doesn't save you any effort.

I"m getting so tired of this perineal complaint.....

So what?

Everyone needs to have skin in the game. The very very poor get EBT, so, there's their help...and if you wanted make food taxes a bit lower but other than that....have everyone have skin in the game and pay flat tax or fair tax or whatever you want to call it.

This is what happens when everyone you have contact with is a yes-man or a tech shill. You think this kind of baby-babble makes some kind of sense. You think it sounds like anything but shilling.

They've been fighting between Android and ChromeOS for years. Each wanting to win. Toss in Fuchsia from the remnants of the PINK a project with Apple.

IMHO there are teams inside Google that are creating products(OSes etc) searching for a market.

I saw it with a group of four people.

Three of us enjoyed it quite a bit.

I didn't mind it but nothing was surprising to me.

I saw several scenes that could have been more cleverly written but I was glad to support the group that saved a creative work from the burn pile. The idea of killing a movie for accounting losses seems sinful.

The motion-control photography, practical effects, and integration of animation were at least as good as Roger Rabbit.

If you enjoy the craft of filmmaking it's at least worth seeing.

I didn't see any marxist social commentary. Perhaps folks in the "Flock does nothing wrong" camp might feel otherwise.

The US version of HIGNFY is not a patch on the BBC version.

Voting doesn't matter - it never did

Bullshit. By repeating this you're among the worst offenders. You're encouraging other people not to participate in their democracy. You guys have steeped yourselves in propaganda for your entire history and an active corruption and anti-education campaign for at least the last fifty years but you're not that far gone. Yet.

Plus my votes potentially won't count in the next election.

Yeah, voter suppression is bad hey? Stop doing it. Encourage people to think about their vote, cast it, and protect it, because it does matter.

hey will deliberately put their military forces in or near schools and hospitals.

Like these ones? The US department of defence operates more than a hundred schools, many of them on military bases. They pretty much all have hospitals too.

Are you American and eligible to vote? If so, then you are. That's what the very first line of your constitution, "We the people" means. It's a declaration of popular sovereignty, the idea that political power originates with the citizens.

If you voted for the president or representatives who placed Hegseth in power then you're extra responsible. Ditto if you didn't try to recall for those representatives or if you don't vote in the next election for the candidate most likely to ship off anyone involved to be tried for war crimes.