Not discussing war isn't going to magically make war stop. Discussing it is the only hope you have to stop it. War begets war, so you cannot fight your way to peace. Discussing the wrongs of war is the only hope to bringing enlightenment about its evils. You say you want peace, but then you seek to block the only path to it.

There's no such thing as "off market" in bitcoin. Everything is on the blockchain.

Maybe the guy who backed out of the bet is the guy who told on MP to AWS, so he would have a reason to back out of the bet.

This Sunday (October 12) will be the end of pay period 4? Or are we in 5 now? (According to your spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19fk7QjLFO54-a-UHdjq4Srw5rjUSRmFhdRbAY5LxwDY/edit?pli=1#gid=0)

I think this sentiment is subject to confirmation bias. You have a stereotype, and then selectively remember or emphasize all the instances where your initial prejudice is confirmed.

Well, I wouldn't say totally unrelated. Price is simply where supply and demand meet, but would there be much demand if the BTC protocol was bunk? The fact that the protocol is stable and works makes the demand possible.

If I was a merchant accepting btc, I'd immediately convert to fiat too. I wouldn't be able to risk the price fluctuations negating my profit margin.

So suppose I believe you don't believe the things you say. That means you don't believe them.


This works the opposite way too. You can only have a positive if it's in reference to a negative. That means all your positive thinking creates bad things in the world. Maybe your thoughts are just an exercise in evil!

This doesn't make sense. Supply has been rising slowly and predictably as more bitcoins are mined into existence, 25 coins roughly every 10 minutes. The fact that the price has declined so dramatically over the past several months shows that demand is not keeping up with this slow supply increase. If demand was higher right now than it's ever been, as you say, you wouldn't be seeing a 50% drop in price over the past several months.


You have it right that if demand outpaces supply, that's what will cause price to rise, but you're assertion that there is no reason it won't isn't based on anything but conjecture. There has to be a catalyst for demand though. Last year, when btc broke $1000, it was the novelty and mania surrounding it that drove it so high so fast. Under your logic, there's no reason the price would ever decrease, if rising prices always cause more people to jump on the bandwagon. But what happened at the top of that rally last year? People started taking profits by selling btc for fiat to lock in their gains. That's bitcoin's problem, is people will convert it back when the risk of holding bitcoins is too high. You can further tell bitcoin's problem by the fact that people always quote the price of bitcoin in dollars. That's how you know bitcoin will never replace the dollar, it's measured in dollars.

I kinda expected this to be a big mess of conspiracy theory, but it was more factual and even-handed than I was ready for.

Would someone working for the campaign be able to confirm when the current pay period ends? Even if you're using that range of 4-10 days, could you give us the range of when this pay period is expected to end?

Guys, this is some serious tinfoil hat shit. I mean, we all missed the entire Congress being overthrown and something something inbreds from Europe and the illuminati are hunting down.... oh darn, I lost interest.

Probably your problem is the same problem cops have: that you view everyone they deal with as criminals. Cops don't have the qualifications to make that call, that's what the courts are for. Everyone in America is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Maybe you've heard of that before? It was a revolutionary concept because it's supposed to keep the government from arbitrarily enforcing laws and supposed to ensure due process, so that people aren't wrongly executed in the streets like this guy was by this overzealous cop.

There are different degrees of murder. Since you're hung up on definitions, why don't you break out a legal dictionary, since that's the definition that matters here.


Second degree murder. Still murder.

I assumed when you said hate was useful originally, you were speaking to some evolutionary advantage it bestowed to have the capacity to hate other beings. Short of that, I don't buy the premise at all. I don't see the usefulness of hate at all. I don't deny it's part of human nature, but my comment about civilized society is that we know better now than to let our actions be hateful and aggressive towards people who don't deserve it.

I think hate became outdated around the time we expected to live in a civilized society. I don't see much function for it now. Hate leads to aggression, and the initiator of aggression is always wrong.

Countries always get pissed when another country tries to meddle with their internal affairs. Look how it turned out for the Germans before the US entered WWI when they sent a secret telegram to Mexico offering Mexico parts of Texas and other areas of the Southwest if Mexico declared war on the US to keep us too busy to fight the Germans. (Google the Zimmerman telegram if you don't know what I'm talking about.) You'd think we'd learn from history, but it seems we never do!

Are you under the impression that cops regularly don't get away with murder? I'd love to see nationwide statistics on what how often police departments rule their own shootings to be justified, but those statistics don't exist because police aren't interested in being overseen by civilians.

Police departments shouldn't be able to investigate their own shootings. Every single one that results in a life taken should be investigated by an impartial, outside source that has no ties to the police department. In Wisconsin, police shootings used to be investigated by the police department that did the killing. In every single case over 129 year period, not one shooting was ruled unjustified. Does that seem likely to you? It sounds to me like police looking out for each other, and not the public they are sworn to protect.

I highly recommend this story about a shooting in Wisconsin that spurred one father's fight to get the law changed so that police departments couldn't investigate their own shootings:  http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/what-i-did-after-police-killed-my-son-110038.html

tl;dr his son was sitting on a street corner in police custody with his hands cuffed behind his back. A cop shot him in the head twice at point blank range (he pulled the trigger twice because the first shot misfired). The shooting was ruled justified by the same Wisconsin police department that shot him because the officer believed that the handcuffed kid sitting on the curb was trying to get his gun. An outside review determined the officer got his gun holster caught on a car mirror as he walked by it, mistook this for the kid reaching for his gun, and his first instinct was to shoot him in the head twice while he was still seated with his hands cuffed behind his back.

It's been my experience that people hate things that tend to challenge their sense of self-identity. If you hate the idea of having to change the way you live your life (don't drive the sports car or gas guzzling SUV you love) because you feel society is imposing a set of values on you that you don't share and it's threatening your personal freedom, then you're probably going to hate environmentalists. I think the same thing goes for feminists, though that seems a more complex issue. For some reason, some people are really offended by the notion of a group of women who identify themselves as victims of other groups in society, and seek to empower themselves. Perhaps the offense comes from not sharing the view that they're victims in the first place, or the belief they're manufacturing their own circumstances. I don't quite see it. To me, it appears the pushback on feminists stems from men who view women as subservient and want to keep it that way. But I don't really know, I can't speak too much to that particular mindset.

The point I was making is trying to fight them creates more of them. They are radicalized by our intervention. Our current problem was caused by our interventions to solve previous 'current problems,' which arose because of our interventions in trying to solve the 'current problems' before that. This is a predictable never-ending cycle. The solution it seems to me, is to break the cycle, not perpetuate it.

I suppose in a way, our biggest problem is that war is profitable, and very rich and powerful entities have influence in Washington. If war wasn't profitable, you wouldn't see us engaging in so much of it. But the uncomfortable truth about the American middle class is that a chunk of it is made possible by the high tech arms and defense industry, which employs many people and whose functions support many other not-necessarily arms-related businesses that employ many more people.

Right, it's our "second warning."   

Puts on tin hat, digs a hole and buries all intangible assets in super secret, untraceable location.