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This was breaking news a couple weeks ago, but I just realized that nobody had translated it into english and that none of the english-based media reported on it as far as I can tell. It's based on the Lord's Prayer from Matthew 6:9–13, although the spanish version is slightly different, which in this case makes it better. ---------- "We have now the Delegate's Prayer, because we cannot leave without this spiritual endeavor.Delegate's Prayer:Our Chavez which are in heaven, in earth, in the sea, and in us, the male and female delegates; Hallowed be your name.Your legacy come, to take it to our people here, and to those over there (over there are the international comrades)Give us this day your light, so it can guide us daily.Do not let us fall into the temptation of capitalism, and deliver us from the evil of oligarchy, such as the crime of contraband: For ours* is the fatherland**, the peace, and the life, for the centuries upon centuries, amen, long live Chavez!"----------* emphasizing male and female again, not using the more common neutral pronoun** motherland also would apply here because of the way the term is used in spanish, although literally it means fatherland

It seems that these people believe that those of african ancestry are incapable of refraining from beating their children, and in the case of african men, they're also incapable of refraining from beating their wives. Apparently, it's white privilege that allows you to rise above such primitive barbaric practices, but you should not speak about or to those who are not blessed with your wonderful peace and rationality, because they're beyond salvation anyway. How interesting. I mean, I've heard this before, but it's usually from people who consider africans to be sub-humans, never from the so-called "anti-racists". The similarities are strikingly illuminating.

Something important to consider on why all secessionist movements are for the better in the long term, and should be supported:

Like Stef said, at one point, people like Peterson were not even considered to be a full person, they were slaves. Whipping a slave who disobeyed their master was supported by the community, as long as the slave was not hurt so bad that he still couldn't stand after a few days. So I guess that was perfectly ok too.

Of course we all know that beating an adult woman is terribly wrong, but beating a 4 year old kid, especially if it's a boy, and especially if the one beating them is the person who's supposed to care for them and protect them the most, is not only perfectly fine, it is in fact imbuing him with healthy discipline and teaching him to become a good person, as well as the proper way solve problems. If you haven't seen it yet, here's Stef's superb take on it. I wish he was made aware of the murder of Peterson's other son, that could have made the presentation even better.

No, that is not the case at all. I explained everything I said in detail. You're just taking one sentence and pretending that it was not shown to be true in what came above it, what's more you seem to be pretending that I didn't put forth any arguments to substantiate it. Also, you keep repeating lies about what I said. The first time I let it go as a misunderstanding, but this is the second time you claim that I said that bitcoin is not money, even after I replied to your post letting you know that not only I never said that, and that my position is that it is; in fact I showed you that I had stated this just a few posts above yours, and pointed to it with the post number and all. At this point I must assume that you are not trying to have an honest discussion.

I don't see what implications I don't appear to understand. You're claiming that a crytocurrency can be so much more than bitcoin is. Maybe it can, and maybe it can't. I haven't seen any evidence that it can. All I've seen is a lot of "the entrepreneurs will figure it out", "things will be upgraded somehow", that sounds like a bunch of nothing to me. If something great can be made out of this, then do it, or at least propose how it's going to work. So far, the only remotely important feature that some people have came up with (and I had thought of this before hearing about it from anybody else; and it would really only make sense to apply this to an entirely new cryptocurrency, not to bitcoin itself), is using most of the hashing power as a means to produce a service that will have C/P demand. I've addressed this in the other thread (also linked here in post #10) Whatever the case, it would still have nothing to do with the soundness of bitcoins as a money.

No, I don't really know what you're trying to say. If you like the idea of cryptocurrencies in the future in order to develop something entirely different than what already exists, fine, but that has nothing to do with the soundness of bitcoins as a money. The reason gold is the basis for the value in gold-backed currencies, AKA gold certificates, is that those gold certificates can be redeemed for gold. If the basis for gold's value was in turn nothing but empty speculation, then gold certificates would not be a sound currency/money, because gold would not be a sound money. You can say that the basis for the value of your bitcoin certificates are bitcoins, but that doesn't really count for much once you've already established that bitcoins are not a sound money.

I don't know what you mean by "ontological sense" or "ontologically" or "epistemic", so I will simply ignore these terms, as to me they seem to obscure rather than illuminate. I don't know what you mean by meta coins, and searchs for the term came up with many different things that don't seem to be related to each other. In any case, I watched Stef's video on backing up bitcoins with gold, and as I said elsewhere (in either this thread or the regression theorem one, I don't remember), at that point those bitcoins just become a gold certificate. But why would you use bitcoins as the certificate instead of using just a certificate? In any case, if that did happen, then this whole argument is pointless, as bitcoins (or at least those bitcoins which were used as gold certificates) would no longer be the same things we're discussing here, they would be an entirely different thing, and if you want to discuss gold certificates that's a whole other story. Also, if only some bitcoins are used as gold certificates, and others are not, that doesn't give the bitcoins not being used as gold certificates any more value, at least not in any significant way.I mean, this is like saying that US Dollars are not so bad because the Federal Reserve could decide to convert them into gold certificates again (or convert some of them into gold certificates and not all). Well, yeah, they might, but then we'd be talking about a completely different type of legal tender currency. Any arguments against the US Dollar in it's modern form, from a monetary theory perspective, are based on the fact that they are not a gold certificate, or a certificate for anything else other than more US dollars. Well then what are you arguing here? I said bitcoins the units in their current form will collapse and they will lose all their market value, you seemed to be saying I was wrong. Now you say you don't care about bitcoins the units. You can't have it both ways. I'm not interested in discussing other problems here. I'm sure they exist and I'm sure some of them might be patched, and others won't. If you see things my way, at the end of the day, when you are talking about the fate of bitcoins, none of that matters. You can phrase things like that and still be entirely correct, which is what Mises did. But the terms you used are vague and can be easily misinterpreted, that's why I was very careful in the way I phrased things. If you are trying to build a strawman by getting me to accept your terms, and then attack those, that won't work. You can say that the price of a barrel of oil is subjective, or you can say it's objective, and be right in both instances depending on how you define your terms. If you want a barrel of oil, and you don't happen to own an oil well, you will have to pay what the market is asking for it. Trying to talk your oil supplier into selling you a barrel of oil for $1 "because price is subjective anyway" would be pointless.I don't see what point you are trying to make when you say that the existence of cryptocurrencies is a proof of this.I never said that bitcoin was not money. In fact just a few posts above (#41), I said it is money. I said it's not sound money and it will collapse. I don't know why you are making an argument I never made, and then trying to say that I wouldn't make that argument. Yes, you're right, I wouldn't make that argument and I never made that argument. I never said bitcoin doesn't have value. I said it will stop having value in the future. (again, talking about market value here, as whenever I don't specify)But no, it doesn't have value because it's money. As I've explained, nothing has value simply due to being money. Rather, something which has value can be used as money, as long as it continues having value. Computers and water and garbage are all made out of atoms.Computers don't have value because people agree that they have value, computers have value because actors in the market are willing to give other things of value in exchange for them, in order to either consume them, or exploit (utilize) them for the production of other goods or services that others in turn want to consume or exploit for the production of yet another good or service which again has C/P demand. And I still have no idea what your point there was, but hopefully what I said answered it. I never used the term "objective-use value".Peter Schiff made good points in that debate, yes. But I'm not asking you to consider Peter Schiff's arguments, I'm asking you to consider mine.I am not arguing the regression theorem, because as I've said many times, Mises used terminology that was vague and easily misinterpreted. He was essentially saying the same thing I'm saying, and so was Peter Schiff, and Murray Rothbard. But again, I'm not asking you to consider Mises's arguments, I'm asking you to consider mine. I want money that will continue having value in the future. Bitcoin will not. ------------------ Kevin Beal said: "In whatever way you want to transfer or store value, the bitcoin protocol can cover it. I personally don't care about a commodities based currency, and that will come with certain costs and advantages. One of those costs may be that it doesn't last as long as a currency that is based on commodities, but so what? Programmable money can cover almost any use case, and the thousands of alternative cryptocurrencies, side chains, meta coins, etc will be developed to fit the needs that people have, including tying cryptographic and distributed representations to physical property.This is much bigger than you seem to realize..." ------------------ No, it isn't. It's just a bunch of fluff and fireworks. There's no core, and there will never be.

Yeah, that would work. How are things in Uruguay? I've been there a couple times over the last few years, but I didn't leave with as good an impression as I had before going. I encountered a lot more socialism than I was expecting. Still a lot better than Argentina, though.

That's not what it is about. The US is one of the only countries in the world who tax you on income you earn abroad after you leave, even if you never set foot in the country again for decades, and have no income coming from within the US, they will still tax you on what you're making elsewhere. I think the only other country that does that is some obscure tiny country in the middle of Africa. As a tourist maybe. Like you said, many countries that allow pretty much anybody with a passport to come in will charge a special fee or put restrictions for US citizens in particular. But more importantly, try opening a bank or brokerage account in Switzerland or pretty much anywhere in Europe (as well as increasingly the rest of the world) and you may suddenly find that they will only open an account for you if you're not a US citizen, or at least you will encounter significant restrictions that are not in place for non-US citizens.

I don't know what you mean by supercomputers. But do you really believe that if the Federal Reserve, or the World Bank wanted to do this, they could not buy or rent enough computing power to do it? Or what if all the computers at NASA were put to this use for a few days? And I'm not even getting to the level of multiple central banks/governments cooperating with each other, let alone all of them. I heard that if they control 51% of the network, then they can validate whatever transfers they want, and at that point they can steal all the bitcoins from everybody. Maybe what I heard is wrong. Or maybe in order to do that it takes a supermajority that is much greater than 51%?

As I've explained, there is a difference between a payment service having value, and a form of money that the payment service processes having value. The Mastercard payment service has value coming from the demand of consumers and producers. Assume for now that the Mastercard payment service could only operate in US Dollars. If US dollars suddenly stopped having value, then the Mastercard payment service would stop having any demand from consumers or producers, and it would become worthless. This is the situation that the bitcoin payment/transfer service is in. This would not be a problem if the bitcoin units could be relied upon to continue having value in the future, but because they have no intrinsic value, they can't be. In fact, as I've repeatedly stated and argued, the reasonable expectation is that they won't. Value to an individual is one thing, here we were discussing market value, which is not determined by any one individual, but by the price mechanism whereby some individuals demand the item for purchase, and others supply (offer) it for sale. I don't know what you were trying to say about gold, but as I've explained, gold does not fundamentally have market value because of those qualities. Those qualities simply make it better than other things that have market value to be used as a medium of exchange and store of value (both market value and individual value, in this case; although market value is the main one). As I've defined it several times, intrinsic value simply means market value that is derived either from consumption demand coming from consumers, and/or production demand coming from producers. I've also termed this C/P demand.And perhaps I should add that in the case of money, you want things that not only have C/P demand at the moment, but perhaps more importantly, that can be reasonably expected to have it in the future. One could say that something that doesn't have C/P demand in the moment, but that can reasonably be expected to have it in the future, does have intrinsic value in the present, and I'd concede that point, but that would make my explanation of what I mean by intrinsic value more complex, and it seems I'm already having a lot of trouble getting people to understand it in the simple form. Not that this makes any difference in the case of bitcoin (and here, as any other time where I mention bitcoin or bitcoins and don't specify, I mean the bitcoin unit itself, not the network or payment/transfer service), because as I understand it, it never did (or almost never did), does not, and never will have C/P demand, at least to any remotely significant degree (e.g. people saying that they like to collect bitcoins). Back to gold, the fact that it is demanded as a medium of exchange and store of value (monetary demand) does increase it's market value from what it would be if there was only C/P demand, but it does not create it in the first place, and it can never be the basis of the market value. If gold suddenly lost all C/P demand, and it was clear that it would never regain it in the future, and only monetary demand was left, it would sooner or later lose all market value as well. Bitcoins did not suddenly become valuable out of the blue due to monetary demand, but rather due to empty speculative demand. That is, speculative demand that is based on the expectation that there will be further speculative demand down the line, which would again be based on the expectation of future speculative demand down the line, and so on and so forth. As I've said before, this is exactly how a pyramid scheme functions.

Besides the jokes about the fact that they say there's no inflation, the funniest part is how they said this is just supply and demand, and how there's so many people requesting the form now, that they had to jack up prices. It makes you wonder what they think this says about the political situation in the US, since so many people are willing to pay just to be able to leave. By the way, in case someone doesn't know, just because you pay the form, doesn't mean they have to approve it. You're not paying for your ability to leave, you're paying for your ability to request permission to leave. And they can literally come up with any reason they want to reject your plea to renounce your US citizenship. For instance, if you say (or even if they have reason to suspect) that you want to renounce it because taxes in the US are too high, they will automatically use that as a reason to reject your request, even if you've already paid them all the taxes they want, including the exit tax. For people who are US citizens, especially those living abroad, this should be a wake up call. It looks like things are only getting worse, and if you don't renounce your citizenship soon, you may never be able to. It's not an easy choice to make, but it is certainly something you should be considering.

From my limited understanding of the intricacies of bitcoin, I can say the following: This assumes two things. First, that the entity which at any given point in time acquires 51% of the hashing power at that given point in time, plans to continue having the same hashing power used for bitcoins in the future. It could be the case that the given entity has the necessary equipment to acquire 51% of the bitcoin hashing power at a given point in time by simply switching their equipment from whatever else it was being used for, into hashing bitcoin at the given point in time, for the sole purpose of becoming the owners of all bitcoins during that period, and doing whatever they want with them. Second, it assumes that this entity has making a profit as it's prime objective. It may be that the sole purpose of this entity is to destroy or discredit bitcoin; for example if this entity was a coordinated effort among several or even all world central banks/governments, or even just one. - Then again, as others here may already know, I'm not really concerned with issues such as this, because I think that bitcoin will fail regarless of whether any of this happens or not. And because State agents, if they're smart, should realize that the best they can do is leave bitcoin to collapse on it's own, then they can say "I told you so" and get people back into fiat money with more faith than ever. For reference on my views on bitcoin's (and all other cryptocurrencies's) problems from a monetary theory perspective, visit these threads: https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/38337-bitcoin-intrinsic-value-and-mises-regression-theorem/ https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/39541-bitcoin-fanatics-say-the-darnedest-things/

No. I don't see how it could be. They are not violating anybody else's rights, and they are not creating a monster who will violate anybody else's rights. It can't be argued that it is in the interest of the fetus to be terminated, so there is nobody's rights who are violated here. It could be perfectly okay though, to have contractual obligations whereby all people living in a gated community or apartment complex agree to do it as part of their conditional ownership of their individual property/homes. They are not the same person in the least. That randomness in genetic combinations is a large part if not most of what differentiates one person from another. Yes, environment and resulting epigenetics play a role, but it is by no means the entirety of the difference. Then again, as I said before, I would support the practice if the first one is confirmed to have Down's Syndrome and the second does not, but this is an extreme case and I would certainly not apply it to all forms of genetic or embryological problems. In any case, I would be doing it for the benefit of the parents only. Claiming that you are doing it for any other reason seems dishonest. And I suspect that Richard Dawkins would be one to argue for other such reasons, and completely disregard the benefit to the parents. But they are not the same person. Having an operation at birth (or before birth) to artificially create Down Syndrome, if that was even possible, is clearly and intentionally aggressing against the (present or future) baby's body and property. However, carrying to term a fetus that developed Down Syndrome on it's own, without intentional intervention, would not be the same thing at all, since the damage to the future baby's body and property would generally not have been intentional, but rather a result of an accidental genetic mutation which is mostly unpredictable and unwilled. It would be different if the parents did something during the time of conception or shortly thereafter to willfully alter the environment inside the mother's body (or the father's) so as to intentionally cause or increase the chances of Down Syndrome developing in the embryo/fetus. An interesting gray area that I just thought about, would be if the parents used in-vitro artificial insemination of many eggs and among those, selected the one with Down Syndrome to carry to term. I don't have an answer to that one.

Both of these have always been present in human history, arguably moreso in the past than today, yet rates of obesity have skyrocketed in present times, so at least we can say it's not that simple.

Ok, well if it's easy to do, non-invasive somehow, and highly reliable, then I would support the practice. But I still wouldn't call it immoral not to do it. That shows a rather significant misunderstanding of what the term implies. But then again, Dawkins is a socialist, so that is to be expected.

I would not say it's immoral. But I wouldn't say it's immoral to do it, either. Although personally, I would want to make pretty darn sure that the tests were reliable before I went forward with something like this. Because of this, I find Dawkins' statement troubling. What if the tests are wrong? In that case you've just condemned tons of perfectly healthy fetuses to die based on your calling the lack of an abortion in these cases "immoral". Also, it can be a slippery slope. What about less severe problems, like cleft palate?

Except that the calories in, calories out formula doesn't tell you anything. There's no arrow of causality in the equation. http://youtu.be/BNFlbRjOeHA?t=19m46s And telling people to try to change numbers in the equation doesn't work. (watch the entire 3-part presentation if you're interested, it starts at 4 minutes in part 1, but I linked to the part about calories in > calories out dogma) People are getting a lot more skin cancer today than they did in the past, yet most people don't get skin cancer. Does that mean that Stef caused himself to get skin cancer by living a particularly unhealthy lifestyle, when compared to the rest of the population? Of course not. He just got unlucky. And some people get unlucky in another way and become obese, whereas their counterparts who live the same type of lifestyles do not. Am I saying that nothing can be done to solve or mitigate obesity, or cancer? No. But that wasn't the point.

No, that doesn't follow, because it could be that certain factors in the environment (more processed and/or GMO foods, more vaccines, more radio waves, or whatever else it is) predisposes some genetic clusters to obesity, and not others. That is, it could be that everybody is living mostly the same way, but in some people this causes obesity, and in others it does not.

I still don't know who it is. I looked, and didn't find anything. But I don't know how it would disprove my point anyway.

I don't know who Bernie Fedorowicz is. I wasn't talking about fat acceptance, I was talking about the video. But in any case, how do you know what kind of guys these women date?

Do you think you've discovered some sort of inconsistency in what I said? You haven't.

I am often accused by feminists of being a misogynist, but this was terrible. This guy is not only hugely aggressive, but he generalizes his standards onto the whole planet. For instance, when he compares before/after pictures at 7:14 and 7:21, to me the girl looks a LOT more attractive AND healthy in the first picture than in the second one. I get that he thinks otherwise, and that's fine. But I know a lot of other guys who would agree with me. When watching this video I finally got what the feminists were saying all these years about people trying to aggressively push women into becoming anorexic or fitting their narrow standards of beauty. And since he likes going back to "the good old days", well, if you go back 100 years, or probably even 50, nobody would've thought that a woman with 6 pack abs and weightlifting arms was the ideal standard of beauty. Also, he missed the point entirely about the criticism of the coach. She wasn't being criticized for the way she looked, but for implying that any woman that doesn't look like her is just making excuses to cover up how lazy and unhealthy they are. Genetics and the environment in the womb and early childhood play a huge role in how a person looks. Also, not every woman has the time or desire to work out several hours a day, 6 days a week just so they can look like her, and that is perfectly fine too, it doesn't mean they are making an "excuse" to cover up something. I am smarter than almost everybody I know, would it be ok to imply that anyone who isn't as smart as me is just too damn lazy and shallow to pick up a book or think about something in detail? No. Quoting a compulsive chain smoker who herself gained a lot of weight after finally quitting smoking subsequent to her development of lung cancer may not be the best way to convince women about how healthy it is to lose weight. Let alone the fact that the video is the very opposite of inspirational. You probably deserved to get blocked. Not that I use FB anyway.