ribuck

Mike has a brilliant mind and is a smart guy. But deep down he still has a little bit of central planner inside him, and I think he is burned out and disillusioned that he cannot convince everyone else that his ideas are correct. I happen to share Mike's preference for a prompt block size increase. Bitcoin transaction volumes will continue to grow. If the block size is increased, then everyone will be able to make cheap on-chain transactions, but not everyone will have the resources to run a full validating node. If the block size doesn't increase, then it will be expensive to make on-chain transactions, but the "little guy" will continue to be able to run a full node, and there will need to be linked side-chains for small payments. Ultimately, it doesn't matter much. Bitcoin will survive just fine one way or the other. If it requires a hard fork (or the credible risk of a hard fork) to resolve this, so be it. Bitcoin will come out stronger than ever after it has shown that it can transcend internal politics.

That's not a decision I'd like to make. What a pity your grandma is forbidden from living in Australia with you permanently. I doubt it's in your child's best interests to be away from both of his parents for six months, even if he has the best grandma in the world. When my wife and I had young children, we cut down our work hours a little and shared the childcare. But we still needed to send our children to a childminder for two afternoons each week. It worked out really well, but if I had my time again I'd definitely want us to each work half-time so that we wouldn't need to employ a childminder. I don't think it's possible for a couple to be focused on two careers and still hope to be fully involved in raising their children. Something has to give. In the long run, few people regret spending less time at the office and more time with their children.

The video may be quick and to the point, but it's simply wrong. It dramatizes the number of poor people, then contrasts one million annual immigrants with the annual birth rate of 80 million, as if to suggest that immigration is a hopeless way to reduce world poverty. Yet that mis-represents the situation. Poor countries (as a whole) are already reducing their poverty at a greater rate than their birth rate. So the dumbed down gummy-ball demonstration should be adding 80 new balls each year, but removing more than 80. World poverty is decreasing, not increasing. Anyway, back to immigration. Immigration can reduce global poverty even faster. An immigrant from a poor country is ten times as productive in the west as they are in their home country (due to infrastructure such as transport and energy, due to increased urbanization, due to freer markets, and other factors). From this increased generation of wealth, they pay taxes to their new country, they spend some of their remaining income in their new country, and they send the rest back as remittances to their families back home. This bypasses the taxes they would have paid to their corrupt rulers if they were earning in their home country, and provides the capital which is needed to boost productivity in their own country. Much of the capital expenditure is in the form of mechanical equipment, most of which will be supplied to the west, which completes the cycle and returns the money to the west. In their new country, the immigrants do not displace existing jobs. There is not a fixed number of jobs in the world - a job is created whenever someone does stuff that generates more value for society than the cost. In general, the existing population is better-educated than the immigrants and will move up into the better-paying positions that become available as a result of the added purchasing power of the new (and lesser-skilled) immigrants. And in the long run most immigrants return to their home country once their families back home have become more prosperous. If all countries removed all barriers to immigration, poverty would be a thing of the past within ten years. The effect of a tenfold increase in the productivity of poor people is just that big.

What a wonderful article, Darius. Thanks for writing it!

Harry Browne's book "How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World"is an inspiring book showing how other people needn't stop you from being happy and free. Many people have rebooted their lives after reading it.

Maybe there's a market opportunity for someone here: create an app that combines webcam video with realtime screen capture.

That's a fair question. There has been a lot of interesting material posted in this thread, and I have re-evaluated my belief every time one of these posts has caught my interest enough to me to invest the time. Every time, and sometimes after spending several hours, I find that the material posted here fails as evidence. Not yet have I found one "anomaly" that isn't straightforwardly understood. For that Saturn photo, I installed GIMP and replicated pretzelogik's findings, then hunted for the original photo, only to discover that it was described as a composite therefore the "fraud" described by pretzelogik did not happen. So pretzelogik acknowledges that he "might" accept this, then immediately moves on to something else. My life is too important to spend investigating instance after instance of claimed frauds, when all of them so far have turned out to be straightforwardly understood. I will reflect the question back towards A4E and pretzelogik: "What would it take for YOU to re-evaluate your belief?". I invite you to select your most powerful item of evidence, and state that you will re-evaluate your belief if it fails as a piece of evidence. I will do likewise if it succeeds. For example, if you consider "layered cross hairs" to be powerful evidence, I am willing to look into that. I will investigate the origin of that photo. I will investigate the construction of the camera and the mechanism by which cross-hairs are overlayed. This should show whether the photo as presented is consistent or inconsistent with the official story. If you consider "wrong shadow on Saturn's rings" to be powerful evidence, I am willing to look into that. I will investigate the geometry of that photo. I will even make and photograph a model of a planet with rings, to test whether or not the photo depicts an impossible shadow. If the evidence is inconsistent with the official story, I will reevaluate my belief. If the evidence is consistent with the official story, I will expect you to reevaluate your belief and to refrain from posting new evidence unless you have subjected it to a similar amount of investigative scrutiny (rather than just reposting some image from some website). I do understand that governments have lied to the public many times. But that does not mean that every government communication is fraudulent.

An alternative to a contract is a Memorandum of Understanding, which sets out in writing the expectations of the parties. But it's not a legally-enforceable document. It's focused on the positive, rather than on the negative like a contract. Regardless of whether you sign a contract, or a memorandum, or nothing, you need a written understanding of what will happen if you and your partner develop an irreconcilable difference of opinion. Typically the arrangement is that one partner will make a bid to buy out the other partner's share. The other partner can choose to accept that bid, or to buy out the bidding partner's share for the same price (assuming the shares are 50-50). Harry Browne discusses this in his book "How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World".

I tried this in GIMP and was able to easily replicate pretzelogik's observation of overlapping rectangles. So I searched for the NASA source of the photo and found it here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA01364 The caption clearly states that the picture was assembled from multiple Voyager 2 Saturn images. So it's not surprising that cranking the brightness up will show 1-bit differences in the background brightness of the different photo elements.

Did you read the linked article? Individuals in NH will continue to be able to send BTC to each other. Businesses will continue to be able to sell goods for BTC. But if an entity is in the business of exchanging dollars for BTC, they will need to apply for a license and follow certain rules (e.g. to maintain a certain liquidity ratio). Of course the regulations are undesirable and counter-productive, but let's at least discuss the real situation and not something imaginary.

All that's needed is the bench: unnamed, unlabelled, stigma-free. The use of the bench will occasionally foster social interaction, just as the playground does, just as the lunch room does, just as the bus ride home does, etc.

Almost all of my spare funds are invested in the stockmarket. This has two advantages: 1. In the long term, the UK stockmarket has grown at 5.1% (plus inflation) per year. By the time I factor in costs such as the sales tax on share transactions, and various holding and trading fees, I reckon on my savings increasing by 4% plus inflation per year. So for every £10,000 of shares I get about £400 per year of ongoing passive income. 2. The UK has a tax system that is heavily skewed towards the investor. If you earn £20,000 in wages in a year, you get approximately £10,000 tax-free and you pay tax on the remaining £10,000. But if you earn £10,000 in wages and another £10,000 in capital gains on your shares, the whole lot is tax-free (because there are separate tax-free thresholds for income and for capital gains tax, and you can stack them together). You can also transfer shares to your spouse so that they also get a £10,000 tax-free threshold, but you can't do the same with wages.

Shopping channel is the worst!

Exactly right. Obviously in the early years there is a risk that the pot could "go negative", but in the long run you can't lose. Now, the only thing that could send my pot negative is if my house burned down. But that's an incredibly rare event which I will deal with if it happens, and I have saved more than £5000 over the years in house insurance alone. And, ResidingOnEarth, thanks for the invitation. I'm in north-west England. I don't tend to get to Cambridge often, but if I'm heading down that way I'll send you a message.

In the UK, Insurance Premium Tax has just gone up from 6% to 9.5%. For this reason, I self-insure for almost every risk. The main exception is motor vehicle third party, where one risks being caged if one doesn't purchase insurance. In the short term, being self-insured might cause greater volatility to one's wealth. In the long-term, one can't lose. In addition to saving the Insurance Premium Tax, one also saves the insurance company's overheads (their marketing costs, their administration costs, and the costs to honest policyholders of the fraudulent claims of others). These savings accumulate, so in the long run one will be much better off.

I am not very artistic, so I find it easy to determine if art is good. If I see a piece of modern art (for example, a skateboard dipped in paint and propped up at an angle and titled "Youth Angst"), I say to myself "I could have done that", and then I know that it's not good art. Good art helps me experience thoughts and emotions that I otherwise wouldn't experience. Bad art doesn't.

You certainly don't need to feel guilty for accepting benefits that others are offering to you, provided you are not the one using or advocating force to obtain those benefits. A free society would certainly have its own ways of helping those who, like you, have encountered extremely difficult circumstances. Having said that, it's also true that you would probably feel better about yourself if you were working. Perhaps there's some type of work-from-home you could do (such as being an Ebay trader, or making videos about your plastering knowledge). Could you find a way to get a few hours away from care so that you can do some part-time plastering? Even if you spend the income (instead of saving it and breaching your £3000 limit), it should improve the quality of your life. You could even purchase some paid care for your wife and son, to make it easier to find time to do your part-time work, and to give you a break.

The S&P500 and NASDAQ have been rising continually since 1st October 2015, which was near the bottom of a trough, so he couldn't have been more wrong on that one. That's enough counter-evidence that I don't feel the need to investigate his numerology further.

Alan: Jake didn't say he was planning for the "economic calamity". He said he is "interested more in the learning", and there's not a lot of learning that centers around old silver. Jake: LOL, I'm glad you're not planning to mine using the Raspberry Pi itself, but by plugging one or more ASICs into the USB. That's viable, and it is also useful for the Bitcoin network. One time in the past I tried mining on my phone, but I didn't do it for long enough to get any coins. Like you, I was doing it out of interest.

Dmitris and Maria, There is a thriving Greek community in Sydney, Melbourne, and no doubt elsewhere in Australia. I think they would make you most welcome. I'm not currently living in Australia (and I'm not Greek), so I can't direct you to this community, but you could start at the Greek Welfare Centre: http://www.gwccs.org.auwho I'm sure could point you towards the local Greek community. You could volunteer for the GWC for a while, where I'm sure you would make good local contacts. A mathematics degree should be in strong demand in the countries you mention.

Jake, you mentioned using a Raspberry Pi. It gets a Bitcoin mining rate of around 200,000 hashes per second. The whole Bitcoin network is currently running around 500,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per second, and generates on average 150 Bitcoins per hour. That's 12,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per Bitcoin. So your Raspberry Pi could be expected to mine one millionth of a Bitcoin (worth about 1/30th of a cent) every 60,000,000 seconds (which is about 700 days). If that's interesting to you as a cool technical project, then go for it, but it's not financially meaningful. Reference: "What hash rate can a Raspberry Pi achieve?" https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3165/what-hash-rate-can-a-raspberry-pi-achieve-can-the-gpu-be-used

Hey JakeN, The viability of Bitcoin mining depends mostly on your cost of electricity. Unless your electricity is amongst the cheapest in the world, you are unlikely to break even. If you think that Bitcoin will eventually go "way up to the thousands", the most profitable strategy is to buy some and hold.

Coming back to the original question (Public areas in a free society). This really needn't be a big issue. Even today, in the United Kingdom, there are private charitable organizations whose goal is to provide public areas. For example, I am a life member of the Woodland Trust. It owns and operates parks and woodlands all over the UK. The parks are not just open to members; they are open to everyone. They look and function just like any other public park. Most people who visit them don't even realise that they are not taxpayer-funded. In a free society, there would be plenty of "public" amenities like these. They exist because the someone is willing to pay for them. They are open to everyone for free because the marginal cost of additional visitors is near enough to zero, and certainly not enough to justify the overheads of collecting entrance fees or installing gates and locks. Much of their funding comes from money left in people's wills. People often leave money for public purposes.

Squirrels often eat bird eggs, so most birds will try to eject a squirrel from their territory.

Did you get permission from the people who invented the alphabet, before you copied "their" letters into your post?