The democratic recourse is that you stop using it. You can opt-in and opt-out; there is no institution coercing you into using it.
Why should we expect that 99/100 people have anything insightful to say about currency? Even the person who is college-educated and took maybe 1 or 2 economics classes is way out of depth talking about it. There are maybe a "handful" of people who could give a meaningful evaluation of bitcoin or some alternative currency... similarly the requirement that someone be code-literate and have algorithmic "chops" to change bitcoin is good -- you don't want a person who doesn't even know what a distributed system is trying to make changes to something they don't understand because they read an article on huffington post about it and decided it was "problematic" because it didn't fall quite in line with something they believed rather strongly but without good reason to be true.
Actually, I do want everyone to have a say in their government, even if it's as simple as voting for a politician who listens to those policy experts and makes decisions.
I'm not saying, "everything must be direct democracy."
I'm saying, "people have a right to access political power."
I've never been ok with "you're too stupid to know how this works, I'll take away your ability to decide," even though there are lots of things where I'd consider myself better-informed about stuff than the typical dumb idiot on the street.
(Yeah, even those typical dumb idiots, I want them to have a say in how society is structured too. That's how strongly I believe in democracy as a human right.)
Right now, bitcoin is totally a choice, and one very, very few people are making. If bitcoin ever spread beyond this very fringe state, to where people would be compelled to use it for whatever reason, that's where it's important that those people have a say in how it's designed and how it operates.
I empathize with your concerns for civic engagement, and I encourage you to read some of the other comments responding to your original point as I believe you will find an idea there very much in tune with your democratic ideals: namely that bitcoin is not the only digital currency and that in a hypothetical future of widespread adoption these currencies would compete for a share of the total transactional manifestation of value. It doesn't necessarily make sense to alter an existing digital currency as democratic control takes place through popular selection of currencies based on their ruling mechanics. This offers much more democratic control of our currencies (emphasis on plurality) than any illusion that central banking falls under any shred of democratic influence.
I appreciate your attempt to bridge the gap between democratic governance and the contemporary digital currency.
I am sympathetic to the idea of "let the people decide and let the best ones fall out of the mix," but the problem I see is:
Having multiple "competing" currencies defies the usefulness of currency at all. If, as a medium of exchange, I have to keep several around to do business with you (because you accept dogecoin, kanyecoin, and I'm carrying dogecoin and Frondocoin), then I don't think that's a very good situation.
And say Frondocoin wins out; for whatever reason, it takes over and 90% of people accept and carry some with them. Well, great, right? Except for the people who are growing up in the Frondocoin regime, whose economic lives are now dictated in some ways by the Frondocoin design goals.
Telling those people, "well, just start your own, and then persuade enough people in your local economy to start using it, and then maybe it'll grow enough to let you do interstate trade..." gets us right back to the start. Now people are once again stuck using a currency they didn't ask for and have no say in the operation of.
You might say "vote with your actions, your actions will help pick the winner."
I say, "vote with your vote, you have a right to periodically refresh your government by a well-defined, accessible process."
So, I guess I just still don't see how what you're proposing is either effective as currency or as democratic governance.
The points you raise here are where I think this topic gets potentially very interesting.
The idealism of common currencies emerged largely as the result of rapid globalization among hard currency regimes (case study: the eurozone). The obstacle of exchanging currencies in that context makes sense. I think this obstacle is / can be largely removed however in the context of digital currencies. I don't see the competing market of digital currencies as a king of the hill scenario seeking currency monopoly (as centralized national currencies current do), but rather as a continuous plurality more akin to one's stock portfolio. The key here is substitution of software processes for physical processes in transactions, and the inherit flexibility that such a transition results in. Now if you're thinking that trying to figure out how to manage a complex portfolio of competing currencies for every day financial transactions seems incredibly confusing, I'd agree with you! But simplifying that process is precisely the role that software enabled currencies can address.
In this respect, electing new currencies is analogous to electing new governments, consistent with a well-defined accessible process. The difference is that the election of (multiple) currency regimes is now decoupled from the election of representative intermediates. It's nice to think that our political institutions provide us democratic control over central banking, but who actually takes the nomination of the next Fed chairman into account when that consideration must share the collective attention span with so many other issues de jour?
Why should we expect that 99/100 people have anything insightful to say about government? Even the person who is college-educated and took maybe 1 or 2 government classes is way out of depth talking about it. There are maybe a "handful" of people who could give a meaningful evaluation of government or some alternative governing system... similarly the requirement that someone be literate and have the "chops" to change government is good -- you don't want a person who doesn't even know what congress is trying to make changes to something they don't understand because they read an article on huffington post about it and decided it was "problematic" because it didn't fall quite in line with something they believed rather strongly but without good reason to be true.
We shouldn't. I don't vote because I don't delude myself into thinking that I'm informed, or that it's possible for me to be reasonably informed.
We should minimize the amount of decisions people make about government. The best way to do this is to mostly do away with the federal government and maybe the state government, deferring as much as possible to small, local communities where it's possible for people to be reasonably informed.
This is a very disappointing article. It's a regurgitation of cliches. "Education is about critical thinking and 'self enrichment'; Steve Jobs was a Prophet; Mark Zuckerberg is a Public Hero" -- how much was the author paid by Apple and Facebook, or is this what a "stupid sheep" looks like? The conflation of STEM with "Asian educational systems" is hackneyed; every person who does serious things in STEM knows that it's not just memorization. Speaking of which, why is it that people who aren't in STEM (the journalists and politicians) are so vocally worshipping it and "whining" about women and minorities being under-represented?
"No matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write." Ironically the author has none of these skills, and the best thing for him to do would be to avoid the humanities and take several rigorous math courses -- maybe then he will learn how to define his terms and stop writing things that mean essentially nothing.
You are essentially attacking the person instead of his argument. But, the article never claimed STEM was about memorization. Perhaps you should re-read more carefully.
People like him should be "attacked", if you want to dilute the meaning of "attacked" to include non-violent criticisms of character. If he's going to litter his article with first person pronouns and make it personal, then he's "fair game."
I said the article conflated STEM with "Asian educational systems", which are conflated with memorization. Read:
>But technical chops are just one ingredient needed for innovation and economic success. America overcomes its disadvantage — a less-technically-trained workforce — with other advantages such as creativity, critical thinking and an optimistic outlook. A country like Japan, by contrast, can’t do as much with its well-trained workers because it lacks many of the factors that produce continuous innovation.
>Americans should be careful before they try to mimic Asian educational systems, which are oriented around memorization and test-taking. I went through that kind of system. It has its strengths, but it’s not conducive to thinking, problem solving or creativity.
> to criticize (someone or something) in a very harsh and severe way
To be honest, you are a prime example of the article's point. There is more to education than just STEM. The fact you failed to realize the person you were replying to used the word "attacked" correctly, for instance, can lead to a failure of communication. Failures of communication lead to things like this:
> Ironically the author has none of these skills, and the best thing for him to do would be to avoid the humanities and take several rigorous math courses -- maybe then he will learn how to define his terms and stop writing things that mean essentially nothing.
Yet another flaw in your style of argument that could have been corrected with classes in the humanities.
"Attack" has violent connotations; so does "harsh." There is more to language than prescriptive definitions. Have you heard of "meaning as use", Wittgenstein's "motto"? The first half of my college education was spent as a philosophy major, which I think was useless, both personally and economically.
Please don't call me arrogant. (However much you might dislike me I can assure you I dislike myself more.) I don't have any pretensions to being intelligent or having something worthwhile to say. What I wrote was a knee-jerk reaction to what I read, and I criticized his character because the idea of his existing as a person "made me angry", and because I could not fully articulate my problems with the content. Maybe someone else will be able to do that. Part of it is that I spent a portion of my life believing in things like "self enrichment through education" or "being a well rounded person" -- the general sentiments expressed in the article -- but now I think they're meaningless. I learned Homeric Greek and read parts of the Odyssey in it, but the idea of an engineer going home after a day of work and reading the Odyssey in Greek and thinking to himself, "boy, this really makes me think; I am a well-rounded person. Maybe tomorrow I will start Gravity's Rainbow" strikes me as ridiculous and makes me laugh, again for a reason I can't fully articulate, probably because I once had thoughts like that and I no longer do.
There is nothing wrong with that last quote about his writing style. It is vague to the point of meaninglessness. My experience with the humanities has taught me to reject most writing. In fact I have "unlearned" most of my writing style and now try to be as honest as possible. Many people assume I am uneducated, so I guess it's worked.
> "Attack" has violent connotations; so does "harsh." There is more to language than prescriptive definitions.
He communicated clearly and you are simply being picky because you believe restricting the word to its more violent connotations is "superior".
The belief that a person is "wrong" because they do not meet your subjective expectation is a conceit. Sorry, you can't simply expect the rest of the world to bow to your subjective expectations.
> (However much you might dislike me I can assure you I dislike myself more.)
I don't dislike you or have any opinion of you beyond the assumption you don't seem to realize how you come across and that word relayed that message. The fact you would complain about a person's diction when they are literally correct is precisely in line with that behavior.
> There is nothing wrong with that last quote about his writing style. It is vague to the point of meaninglessness. My experience with the humanities has taught me to reject most writing. In fact I have "unlearned" most of my writing style and now try to be as honest as possible. Many people assume I am uneducated, so I guess it's worked.
> Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed economies.
That is pretty direct.
I'm dropping this mainly because at this point I am leaning towards this being another troll account, honestly.
I agree with everything you said, but I found most disturbing in the article was: "You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world, but you can’t sell it for $300 unless you’ve built a story around it."
So when Beats®, Monster Cable® and Bose® trick the weak-minded into overpaying for commodity products, that is a good thing?
"The value added is in the brand — how it is imagined, presented, sold and sustained" Gee, we used to call that the "rip-off"
Who cares if he is racist? I don't. It is the most irrelevant thing to talk about. An operating system cannot be racist. Consider a career in HR if you like being so ridiculously petty.
you didn't think about your question very hard, did you? investors, for one. no one wants to fund a company whose founder is publicly racist (sans other racists). at the very least we can agree it is a PR nightmare?
more though, i'm surprised to hear someone call racism "petty". there is a first time for everything i guess.
i'm curious as to why aren't you posting on your real account?
It's a PR nightmare because money-grubbing journalists realize the amount of money they make is a linear function of the amount of "controversy" they can produce. Take Ferguson, for example. I would fund anyone with a good product because I don't care for grade-school gossip about what type of inflammatory posts someone might write on obscure forums in his free time - which, by the way, is why contemporary racism in the West is petty. As much as the media's incessant race-baiting would like to convince you otherwise, the only legitimate expressions of racism seem to be on obscure online forums. If we could reset the clock 50 years racism wouldn't be petty, but racism as a concept has been so diluted by the media that it is hard to take seriously any more. Calling someone a racist is just a way to make money now, and the public, especially the younger generation, is so forcefully anti-racist that is hard to care if one or two people are racist, even harder to see how it undermines one of their technological accomplishments.
This is my real account. I joined a week ago. People seem to dislike everything I say.
At the simplest level, because we the people design laws that allow the company to exist. Without our consent, these invented human things called companies would have no legal standing. So, because we say it should be so.
We support a common police force because it makes sense that government has a monopoly on force. If private security forces did the job of police, that person or persons employing the private force would be a society unto themselves, not a part of the same society as the rest of us, and when conflict developed between their police and the common police (or the police of a 3rd party -- another private security force), then we would be at war. In other words, you don't understand why everyone in society supports the police.
I largely agree now -- in fact I think that women and men (since it's the 21st century and all types of people go on maternity leave) should be able to go on paid maternity leave. The leave will be funded by all corporations for social good -- no point in limiting it to the one the person worked for, since a person on maternity leave contributes equally to all of them. Paid maternity leave is a human right, like clean drinking water and fast internet, and I demand corporations provide us with it!
Most developed countries (the USA being the most notable exception) have some form of paid paternity leave as well, ranging from just a few days, to the same level as maternity leave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave
Where the state provides some or all of the financial assistance for parental leave, one could argue that it is already funded by all corporations, as it would be derived from tax income.
Why should the company provide maternity benefits and not the state? I don't think it's fair for some three person startup to go bankrupt because employee #1 got pregnant and continues to draw down salary while staying home.
If the person is adding value while not on maternity (or paternity) leave then it would be worthwhile to pay them while they are gone so they come back and continue working for you. If you don't do it, some other employer probably will, and they may choose to work for the employer with better benefits instead.
Why should we expect that 99/100 people have anything insightful to say about currency? Even the person who is college-educated and took maybe 1 or 2 economics classes is way out of depth talking about it. There are maybe a "handful" of people who could give a meaningful evaluation of bitcoin or some alternative currency... similarly the requirement that someone be code-literate and have algorithmic "chops" to change bitcoin is good -- you don't want a person who doesn't even know what a distributed system is trying to make changes to something they don't understand because they read an article on huffington post about it and decided it was "problematic" because it didn't fall quite in line with something they believed rather strongly but without good reason to be true.