Sent.

Sounds good.

Yes, epub version of both of them.

The two at the link here.

http://recherche.fnac.com/ia1048023/Gilles-Lipovetsky

(warning, it's in French)

I'd be willing to pay the full cost plus whatever fee you consider reasonable for your trouble.

But even if real wealth creation grows, that doesn't mean the size of the currency pool grows. Since most debts are denominated in currency rather than something like multiples of the CPI, the systemic concentration theory still holds.

I agree that the correct interpretation for how to resolve it is to point to the fact that eventually there has to be a collapse. And that's why I point to what I think is the highest evil in the modern monetary system: unnatural collapse prevention financed on everyone else's backs.

Here's what I can think of:

1. Privacy. Right now, there's a strong disincentive for many against getting checked for conditions or even buying medicine because the results might find their way into insurance companies' databases and you'll get a much higher premium if you ever want to change your plan. But imagine if you could buy drugs to treat your medical condition or get a checkup without giving out your name at all. If you want to limit sales to prescription-only, you can even do that while retaining privacy by using Bitcoin addresses as pseudonymous medical IDs - doctor wants to prescribe you $10 worth of a certain type of pill per week for a year, you give him one of your addresses, he types in to the system that that address is allowed to buy up to $520 of that pill, and the patient deposits money into that address first and uses the value stored in that address to pay if he wants to buy some.
2. Brain wallets (see guide here: http://bitcoinmagazine.net/brain-wallets-the-what-and-the-how/) - if you have a seed for a private key memorized you can pay on the spot no matter what condition you're in, even if you don't have a credit card on you.
3. No national borders - if you have to buy healthcare in some other country you happen to be travelling in, there's (1) no risk that you'll have no way of paying and (2) no undue fees or payment waiting delays due to the international money transfer bureaucracy. Selling worldwide health insurance plans also becomes a piece of cake.

"Also, ICBIT is not a place for money laundering, so we are not going to enforce any AML measures like ID verification requirement."

Hehe...

Not necessarily.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=74952.msg830254#msg830254

I know that SpendBitcoins once had the "Buy Anything" option where you can point to a URL and they will buy the product for you and charge you in BTC. Does anyone know if such a service still exists?

This plan makes unemployment benefits no longer create a superunitary marginal tax rate (see http://mises.org/daily/3822), so it works for exactly the reason why it should.

How interesting. I've heard some other people say this, but my opinion is the exact opposite: I find German quite pleasant, but I just can't stand Spanish.

Approval voting. It's also relatively resistant to single-party takeovers as it would actually require close to a 51% attack rather than just more votes than anyone else.

A file trading site? Which one are you talking about there?

There is a simple fundamental reason why economics will never become a scientific theory that can accurately predict market failures no matter how hard we try: it's self-defeating. Anytime an economic theory is released that accurately predicts X, speculators armed with that theory will be able to bet on X happening and change the result in the process. If X is a depression, people will stock up on supplies and employers will hold off on starting major projects so they can do so with cheap otherwise unemployed labor. If X is a period of economic growth, banks will lend freely, savings rates will go down, and the projected graph of increasing prosperity will turn our much different from how it was originally predicted as people embark upon such various means to drag some of the prosperity of the future into the present. Then there are the self-fulfilling prophesies: a theory that predicts a bank run can cause a bank run, a theory that predicts a speculative bubble and crash will cause, or at least reinforce, the bubble and crash, etc.

Economics needs to accept a simple piece of wisdom from the field of computer science: it is impossible for a system to accurately predict the workings of a system more complex than itself.

I think the right will inevitably become libertarian soon. The internet is not a place where money can win you the loudest voice, and more and more people are moving there every day.

Very true. Things like scope insensitivity (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/), where people are willing to pay almost as much to save 2000 birds as 200000 birds, and the fact that people prefer volunteering over donating to charity show this clearly. Volunteering is far less efficient than donating; every hour that you spend volunteering could be ten times as productive in terms of the charity's goal if you had spent it working at a normal job and then donated the proceeds to the charity so some professionals could do your work. "Volunteer vacations" where people are flown to Africa to volunteer are even worse; the net value of one to the charity is likely negative. But people still do it. Why? Because the good that the charity is selling is not satisfying people's utilitarianism; it's socialization. You volunteer because it's fun and because you get to spend time with people who have similar interests to you. This is why arguments that "true charity" must be anonymous are doomed to failure, and charity through donating money is most effective when it's done in group settings like fundraisers, *-a-thons and churches - we are not utilitarians, we are diverse individuals with distinct individual motives.

For something like HUMANLIVES, the problem really is calculation. There are many short-term projects, like food, water and vaccination, that can clearly be shown to save 100 lives or 10000 lives, but what do we do about long term effects? How can we possibly know how many lives creating a school to educate 200 people up to grade 10 level saves? Also, even something as simple as food and water in the long term can get very intractable, and very political at the same time. Some argue that any food and water aid just allows the local corrupt government to steal the same amount of food and water elsewhere, leaving the citizens at just that bare subsistence level that the government needs for its economic base to stay functional. Others argue that it's all useless due to Malthusian considerations. Others, however, argue that making people healthier now also makes people more productive in the long term. It's impossible to weight such concerns while remaining politically neutral; the arguments often descend to the basic disagreements about human nature that political viewpoints are founded on in the first place.

They're a synthesized substance available in pill form that embeds cryptographic Satoshi powers into your DNA, courtesy of GlaxoSmithKlein.

I know it's theoretically possible to do international money transfers with Bitcoin cheaper and faster by buying bitcoins locally, sending them and then cashing them out locally, avoiding the hassles of direct international money transfer, but has anyone managed to actually do this and save money?

Consider also:

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Americas/Accounting_for_the_cost_of_US_health_care

The US's health care costs exceed income-adjusted OECD averages the most in:

1. Outpatient care (by 436 bil, or 51%), which includes many discretionary services. It's been shown http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/rand_health_ins.html that medical spending actually has zero marginal value, so much of this is likely just plain unnecessary.
2. Drugs and nondurables (by 98 bil, or 39%), which is largely the work of the patent system. Notice how relatively small this category is (145/2053 billion total spending).
3. Health administration and insurance (by 91 bil, or 63%), which is partially the work of the excessive spending on advertising but is also connected to the issue of litigiousness.

http://mdsalaries.blogspot.ca

The US has the highest medical salaries (http://mdsalaries.blogspot.ca/) for general practitioners and nurses and the third highest for specialists - for this some blame licensing (cheap doctors from Vietnam can't just import themselves here) and many cite the issue of the US's higher educational system (medical school costs a lot of money that students don't have).

I'm sure court investigators have had many chances to hone their photoshop detection skills these past two decades.