ribuck

There was a time when our daughter, then a toddler, was desperate to have a sharp knife she'd seen us using. So we got a knife and an apple, and sat down with her. I find that sitting with my head at the same level as hers often calms her. Then we showed her how we peel an apple, and let her have a try. There were a few "ouch" moments, but no blood drawn, before she realised that using a knife is hard work and not actually that much fun. We assured her that using a knife would become much easier as she grew older, and she lost her interest in knives for years after that.

Here's an example of a cool-looking house that was built inexpensively using concrete blocks: http://www.viralnova.com/dream-dome-home-thailand/

My guess is that people such as Josh get a buzz from "doom porn" for much the same reason as some people cut themselves: it's the only way they know to feel energised and alive. It's sad that regular life doesn't provide the same buzz for them, but it's a common situation in modern societies.

3D home printing is sure to become widespread in the future, but it's going to be a long time before it is inexpensive. By its nature, 3D printing is slow and expensive, but extremely flexible and versatile. As an analogy, consider a newspaper. Most homes have a 2D printer that can print a newspaper, yet (when you count the cost of the inkjet cartridges) it's perhaps a hundred times cheaper to buy a newspaper which has been mass-produced and transported to where it is needed. Similarly, printing simple parts using a complex device subject to wear-and-tear is going to be much more expensive than mass-producing them using a technique such as injection-molding. Yes that's not a problem. The structure needs to be designed with 3D printing in mind, but that's no big deal.

It's nothing to do with being hopeful. Instead, it's mathematics. If, on average, each person (before they recover or die) infects more than one other person, you get exponential growth and an epidemic that's hard to stop. If, on average, each person infects less than one other person, the epidemic will die out naturally (and can be helped to die out faster). Ebola is a particularly horrific disease for the affected individuals, but it won't affect huge populations. Josh, I'm wondering why you chose to post that part, since it's not supported by any of the sources that you quoted.

Ironically, the high death rate stops Ebola outbreaks from spreading widely. On average, each infected person infects less than one new person, so each outbreak will be contained.

Large epidemics are unlikely to be a problem in the west. Outbreaks start with contact between humans and bats or primates, which is why outbreaks often occur in areas where people eat primate meat. Outbreaks do spread between humans, but not fast enough to stop the outbreak dying out. These outbreaks can be contained faster by improving hospital facilities and practises in the countries in which outbreaks start. I'm pretty sure your post is sarcastic, Josh [edit: based on content which you have since deleted], but others might not know that Ebola is way down low on the list of things that people in western countries might want to worry about.

What do you see as the problem? Networks (such as sewers) work just fine in a competitive environment. You might choose to sign up with a local provider that owns just a hundred metres of sewer pipe to the next street, but it's your provider's problem to negotiate service agreements with other parts of the network. If your provider can't get a good deal (perhaps because there's only one provider in the next street), your provider can extend their pipe in the other direction to reach a different provider, or they can implement some other system (such as incineration). Just having the ability to do this is usually enough to get a better deal from their service partner. It's similar to your internet connection. You sign up with your chosen ISP, and you leave it to them to negotiate service agreements with the rest of the internet. Anyway, individual septic tank systems are still used in much of the world (including much of England). It's no big deal. A truck comes once a year to pump out the tank. Composting toilets work fine too. There are enough disadvantages with the usual western model of sewerage that, if someone was designing the system from scratch today, it would certainly be quite a different system.

There are many good options for poor people, but those options are either prohibited by building codes, or burdened with so much bureaucracy that they are only available to rich people. For example, many traditional building methods are cheap. Really cheap, in terms of the cost of materials. They do, however, require many times as much labor as modern commercial building. So they are perfect for people who are cash-poor but time-rich, and prepared to work on their own house. Examples include plastered straw bale houses, yurts and mud-brick houses. Many poor people would have their needs met by a high-quality but tiny house, however many places impose minimum size requirements on new build. Land that has been granted permission for housing has its price artificially forced up. For example, in the UK you can buy farmland for £6,000 per acre. After a property developer gets that same land re-zoned for housing, it sells for £600,000 per acre. There are many good ways that housing can be allowed to become more accessible to poor people, but I don't think concrete houses are the best way.

Putin thinks that Russia might lose the allegiance of Ukraine as a whole, so he wants to make sure that Russia doesn't lose militarily-important Crimea. It's not correct to say that Russia holds interest in Crimea "all of a sudden". Russia has a long history of interest in Crimea. It was as recently as 1954 that Kruschev transferred Crimea to Ukraine (which was then part of the USSR). After the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became independent, Russia has been continually and intensely interested in Crimea (details).

The way I see it, the brutalists are out to improve their situation, and stuff everyone else. The humanists realise that freedom allows win-win situations where everyone benefits, without their benefit causing harm to others. Ultimately, the distinction doesn't matter. The brutalists don't care about others, but in a free world the brutalists can be as selfish as they like and everyone else still gets the win-win advantages (even though the brutalists don't realise this).

I remember the same study, but... If I prick myself on a thorn, the pain is nothing. If I pick up that same thorn and try to prick myself, it's too painful to do deliberately.

By the time you're an old guy like me, you will have encountered people who match every one of the characters in Atlas Shrugged, We The Living, and The Fountainhead. Then you can read the novels again and you will get much more from them.

Yes I agree with this, and the same thing applies to the UK too. Most of the new money being created is going to those who are wealthy and well-connected. It's no surprise that the price of yachts, antiques, artworks, rare stamps, high-end properties, vintage wines etc is skyrocketing. Those things are not measured in the usual inflation statistics.

James, you may be well-meaning but you are commenting without knowledge. Einstein's famous equation does not refer to twice the speed of light; it refers to the speed of light squared. It does not refer to this as how fast you can go, but as part of a calculation for how mass converts to energy. And yes, the conversion between mass and energy has been observed consistently in experiments. It's ignorant to say "it's all hear say" (because anyone can experimentally test the conversion of mass to energy in a very simple laboratory). It's ignorant to say "No one have tested" (because even high school students experimentally test this). It's ignorant to say "it was never explained how much the mass grows" because it's precisely explained by Einstein's formula for relativistic mass (which equals the rest mass divided by the square root of one minus v^2/c^2, where v^2 is the velocity squared and c^2 is the speed of light squared). If you want to understand this, a great place to start is Wikipedia's page on Mass-energy equivalence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence

The relationship is not simple and linear, because the gold price is also affected by additional factors: (1) variation in the production and industrial consumption of gold, (2) investor sentiment as to how much monetary inflation there is going to be in the future, and (3) speculators aiming to profit by predicting changes in the gold price. Of these, I think (2) is dominant. Here's an interesting chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_price_in_USD.png In this chart, the red line shows the gold price with CPI-U inflation stripped out. Those who bought at the 1980 peak have not recouped their losses in real terms. This is not surprising, because gold is not a productive asset like farmland or a factory, hence we don't expect it to increase in value in the long term. That's a common misconception. There has not been a deflationary spiral in Japan (or anywhere in the world ever, for that matter). Here are the inflation figures for Japan: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi Since 1992 there have been periods of inflation (but never above 3%) and periods of deflation (but never below -3%), and neither an inflationary spiral nor a deflationary spiral.

No-one claims that the big bang is a testable theory. Like James E Mahler mentioned, the Big Bang is what you reach if you play the current universe "backwards" according to the known laws of physics. As such, it's the best-supported model for what happened in the distant past. But if we discover something new about physics (for example, if it turns out that some physical "constant" changes over time) then Hawking will be happy to embrace the refined model. James wrote: You do accept that matter can be converted into energy, don't you? After you discharge a battery, it weighs a tiny bit less. The same number of electrons flowed out of the cathode as flowed into the anode, but some of the battery's mass has been transformed into energy.

For sure, there are many other factors affecting the market price. But the great thing about markets is that they process more information than any individual market participant has access to. The Bitcoin price tends to rise with each new business that accepts Bitcoin, and tends to fall each time a Bitcoin exchange gets hacked or runs into banking problems. The price fluctuates with each new regulatory development, and tends to rise with each wave of users brought in by a newly-published press article. There is also plenty of irrational "groupthink" affecting the market price, such as a prominent community member hinting at some rumor, or some mathematical pattern developing on the price charts.

LanceD, it's difficult to respond adequately and in full to a post like that one. I admit I took the easy way out and cherry-picked the one part that interested me. When you write "The whole idea of evolution is weird to me. I can't see any way for it to work without a guiding force behind it making decisions, and we all know that is nonsense" it's clear to me that you haven't put a huge amount of effort into learning about evolution. So how can I respond adequately to your entire post without writing a book about evolution? If you're interested in how complex creatures can arise through evolution, a great place to start is to look at the evolution of eyes. This process is well-understood. Furthermore, the process is understood for many different types of eyes which evolved separately. For example, vertebrate eyes evolved completely independently from octopus eyes, and as a result there are some very interesting design differences. Insect eyes evolved independently too, and ended up as compound eyes. Interestingly, there are still species surviving that show almost all of the intermediate stages in the evolution of highly-developed eyes (because those species gained some other evolutionary advantage). The Wikipedia page on Evolution of the eye is a good introduction to this subject. If you prefer a simpler video introduction, here's an extract from a practical demonstration by Richard Dawkins: It doesn't work anything like that. Numerous genetic changes get mixed back into a substantial portion of the population of a species (because of sexual reproduction). At some point, some of those changes turn out to be incompatible with different changes that exist in some other portion of the population, and from that point on we have two different species. This is well-observed in nature. You may find the Wikipedia page on Ring species interesting. We can study a species that populates a range of environments (e.g. from the coast to the mountaintops). There are many different adaptations found in the population that inhabits each environment. Typically, each population can breed successfully with the adjoining populations but not with the distant ones. If the intermediate population dies out for any reason, we end up with two distinct species which then evolve further and further apart.

Someone (or some organization) has been making trouble for Mt Gox by exposing a bug in their system for reconciling BTC withdrawals. As a result, Mt Gox has (supposedly temporarily) suspended BTC withdrawals. As a result, some people with BTC on MtGox have been panic-selling their BTC for ridiculously low prices, compared with the market price on functioning exchanges such as BitStamp. Prior to this incident, MtGox imposed limitations on the rate of fiat withdrawals. There's no way that the MtGox price can be regarded as the market price of BTC.

Have you seen any Great Danes procreating with chihuahuas recently?

Ayn Rand's first novel, "We The Living", is a compelling story of the decline of the city of St Petersburg after it succumbed to communism. One by one, the mechanisms that maintained the city were extinguished by the state. It'sa very readable novel (and much shorter than her later novels).

Whenever the value of any form of money has plummeted, it has invariably been because of monetary inflation, which cannot happen with Bitcoin. The worst-case scenario would be that Bitcoin loses its utility for some purposes while retaining it for others, which would cause a slide in value but not a race to zero. Anyway, for the foreseeable future it's a race to the top, so it makes sense to embrace Bitcoin for as long as it's the most sound monetary instrument that's available to us. You understand that this "special example" is unsustainable, right?

st434u, history disagrees with you. Whenever something has been used as money, it has traded at more than its "intrinsic" value. Conch shells have little intrinsic value, Yap Stone Money has little intrinsic value. And the US dollar is of course the ultimate example. The reason its called a "regression" theorem is because the monetary value can be traced (regressed) back to some original intrinsic value. Where in von Mises' work does it say anything about the monetary value being forever tied to the original intrinsic value? This is not to say that Bitcoins will have monetary value forever. Forms of money come and go according to their utility, and when they fall out of usefulness their price returns to their intrinsic value. When we use money, we prefer money which is maximally useful and which has minimum risk of losing its monetary value. For certain uses (such as low-cost international remittances), Bitcoin is extremely useful. For a long-term store of value its not so clear, but Bitcoin at least has the advantages that it can't be counterfeited and that its supply is limited and predictable. It has disadvantages too: it's hard to secure a stash of Bitcoins, there is a lot of friction imposed on Bitcoin-to-fiat exchange, and there are few places where you can spend Bitcoins (although that's rapidly changing).

Elliott Hulse is not just some strong, loud guy. He is literate and well-read, and is a great surrogate father figure to thousands of youths who find themselves having difficulties in life. Here is an interesting interview that Elliott did with Jake Desyllas of The Voluntary Life:http://www.thevoluntarylife.com/2013/10/128-be-more-expansive-than-your.html