MarcusBrutus

10 ms·

31.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
There's physics and there's metaphysics. That's known since the times of Aristotle and Plato. Attempts by physicists to solve the "hard problem of consciousness" are doomed to fail. Different tools are necessary for
32.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Spot on! I skimmed it very quickly and I also got the feeling that portraying "shiny metals" as something that, in the beginning, only "a few crazy ones" liked to possess (attempting to draw a parallel with BTC's or
33.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
I beg to differ. I did have "no exchange value on account of other employments" at the time the very first BTC was mined, and I suspect quite a few months after that. The same cannot be said of paper money as from the moment of it
34.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
The passage above should be clearly be understood as "No good can be employed _for the long run_ ...". Otherwise various local currencies that have risen and died over the years (e.g. "Ithaca hours") could also have been
35.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Has anyone yet been able to articulate a defense for BTC against von Mise's "regression theorem" for the origin of money? or show that von Mises was wrong? "this time it's different" is not good enough.
36.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
"After serving two years in prison during his mid-twenties for inadvertently killing someone during a bar fight, Aaron Jones turned his life around ...". To be honest, at that point I kind of wondered whether I was reading a parod
37.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
It's so much comforting to know that the unwashed masses can look up to people such as you or the "experts" to protect them (with compassion) from themselves or from those who seek to manipulate or take advantage of them, suc
38.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Bogus analogy. You have no business repairing airplanes because you may endanger lives. People should be free to squander their money in their folly if they so choose. Otherwise outlaw lottery, gambling and horse-racing as well.
39.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
All other fiat currencies are similarly backed by a government that enjoys monopoly of legal force over some geographical area. That's why when governments die (lost war, revolution) the value of their fiat goes to zero and only "
40.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
I argued that the US govt. can deploy its force to protect the dollar (as has done in the past even to the point of going to war) and the assurance of such a powerful guardian undergirds the trust in US dollar. Other have already answered a
41.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Exactly, Bitcoin will ultimately fail as money as it has no intrinsic value or real scarcity. As to those who might argue that fiat money has no intrinsic value either I beg to differ. The "intrinsic value" of, e.g., the USD is th
42.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
I get: No such schema 'com.canonical.Unity.Lenses' when running the script, and a few lines below: E: Unable to locate package unity-lens-shopping
43.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Inability to hold educated conversation on Wittgenstein should not be taken to reflect badly on anyone's intellect.
44.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
I 'm not convinced. Such a "media" for thinking the unthinkable already exists. It's called "written language" plus maybe a drawing here or there. Has been used for millennia and once internalized by a mind wil
45.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Bitcoin is fiat, it's not backed by anything of real value and doesn't have a government or a strong (and I mean national-government-kind strong) player behind it that is willing to devote actual resources to prop it up (which is
46.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Nope, that's from the Hobbit. And there's no "much" if memory serves right.
47.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
How many legitimate real world services and products currently accept Bitcoins? I understand it is only the Chinese search engine. I also take it for granted that any major Euro/US-based organization (be it Google or Domino's Pizz
48.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Actually I was not sarcastic at all. I really loved that sentence as I too have a penchant for long-winding sentences that are hard to parse but in closer inspection have no noise and every word in them is essential. Comes from my days of r
49.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Wow. How long did it take for you to articulate the gem of a sentence "Everything might.. itself" and what have you majored in, really?
50.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
It's a very real problem for some individuals, no quarrel there. But it's not a "real social problem". As a matter of fact I could so far as to say that I would be hard-pressed to find any "real social problems&quot
51.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
We should really stop calling it "war on drugs". It's really the "war on what people are allowed to consume, for their own sake" and so is on par with the "war on raw milk" and who knows maybe the "wa
52.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Did these guys ever exercise more control over the "spaceship" than the various primates and the Soviet space dogs we've put to orbit? Don't get me wrong, they were heroic and all that cause unlike Laica they knew exactl
53.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Even assuming that man-made global warming is true and that high concentrations of CO2 is a bad thing, what does science tell me that's really actionable? Coordination is impossible in prisoner's dilemma type games. No solution, n
54.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Man-made climate warning is most likely a hoax that fuels a multi-billion-dollar industry and is used, among other things, to erect protectionist barriers against Chinese and Indian cars. So there are extremely powerful vested political and
55.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
This is South Park material. I would love to see an episode with ManBearPig, Al Gore and the crying meteorologist.
56.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
I wouldn't normally want to comment on that since it's not relevant to the original thread but what exactly do you mean "no birth right to it"? Like, I can't bequeath anything to my kids cause that would confer an &
57.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
> John H. Lienhard is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History, getting his PhD from UC Berkeley. Close enough for me. Frankly I doubt that he honestly believed every word he wrote. People in high places have to routinely
58.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
It couldn't have been efficient since it is patently idiotic. Just spread 34 groups of 7 stones each on the ground and count them! That's all you have to do. No algorithm at all, just symbolic logic, and you need fewer stones, and
59.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
I fail to see the ingenuity, or even any common sense in this. If to "run" the algorithm you are required to have as many stones as the end result (actually quite more if you count those spent on "evil" holes), you might
60.
by MarcusBrutus 13y ago
Thanks for articulating so eloquently what I failed to communicate in [0]. Great post. Moreover, I feel we may have been horribly misled by Asimov's vision of robots. Come to think about it what we really need is not machines to be our

More ›