For those sports fans who are feeling a bit starved of action during the lockdown... don't worry, there is still plenty happening, and plenty to watch:

2020 Crossroad Dash
International 4x4 Pushchair Final
Tooting Dogging Final
Drag a Load of Tat
Dog Racing
Pigeon Dressage

I think we all knew this was going to happen. Might be an idea to quarantine page 5.

No, it doesn't mean that at all, that's nonsense. Trump is about as far from a socialist as you can get. Same here in the UK with Boris Johnson.

"Normal" free-market globalised capitalism works fine when everything is going well... if by fine we mean the rich skimming off the profits and the poor being allowed to just about survive. Then as soon as the shit hits the fan, the general public are expected to pay up. Privatised profit, socialised risk, as always.

So when things go bad, say a financial crisis or a global pandemic, that wonderful free-market capitalism collapses and it is left to national governments to sort out the mess. They can't just bail out the banks this time, they have to bail out everyone. Any socialist-style policies are implemented not from ideological purpose, but as a last desperate attempt to prop up an economy that has been hollowed out by decades of capitalist exploitation.

The elites like the status quo; it has been set up precisely to benefit them at the expense of everyone else. They will do anything to perpetuate the existing system. They'll even hold their noses and implement partial socialism as an emergency stop-gap until the elite-feeding money-train is back on track.

Apologies for the poor Photoshop skills*



*It's difficult getting his face to be a human colour. Especially with all that red light coming through the window.

Glad to hear it's getting a bit better in Italy. Hope you're okay over there. We have to look for any positives, and an improvement in the curve is a good sign!

There are other important factors to consider, too. Germany appears to be following Italy very closely on this chart, but the data (table below) tells a different story.
The table gives Italy a 10.19% death rate (8215/80589), but Germany only 0.62% (304/49344).









Now there can be several factors that influence this discrepancy, for example Italy's healthcare system is under more strain than Germany's, as evidenced by the Italian doctors saying they are having to choose who to save. Quarantining can also be a factor, as those countries that act early and get the most vulnerable people at least partially shielded will see lower mortality rates. However I do believe that the extent of testing is the major driver here. Have a look at the table below (excerpt from the full table here).




We can see that Germany had conducted almost as many tests by 15 March as Italy had by 20 March - and this despite the outbreak in Germany starting after that in Italy.
It does seem likely that actually there have been hugely more cases in Italy than have been reported, with only the most serious patients being tested, and that the actual death rate is considerably lower than stated, arguably by at least an order of magnitude.

Not sure if that helps or not, but there is a wealth of data out there, and the above does seem to suggest that Italy has had many more cases than stated, and so is further along than most countries towards achieving a decent proportion of the population with immunity.

If they're teenagers, it might be worth having a look at the Bitcoin Billionaire game. I think the suggested age is 12+, so probably suitable, but have a look to make sure. Sounds like you need to tread a fine line between education and fun in order to pique their interest!

Thanks, glad I was of some help Please bear in mind I'm not an expert, though - it's just my understanding here.


No, it's not impossible to break the security at source. QKD as with many things has vulnerabilities where the theory meets actual real-world implementation. This article goes into some depth on the subject, and may be of interest.

So how is QKD any use at all? Well, the strength is not that the key can't be intercepted during the transmission process, it's that the entangled nature of the photons means that the recipients are able to determine whether or not the key has been intercepted. QKD isn't a perfect solution, it's just a mechanism that employs properties of quantum mechanical systems to improve upon existing classical processes.

Quantum cryptography does continue to advance, and it may one day provide ultimate 100% guaranteed security, due to its basis on and exploitation of immutable physical laws. But for the immediate future, we also need post-quantum cryptographic algorithms to for example protect bitcoin.

I think the purpose of the quarantines isn't to stop the outbreak completely, but rather to slow it to such an extent that hospitals aren't overwhelmed. It's certainly a fine line to tread, because whilst we obviously don't want economic collapse, we also don't want thousands of people to die who could otherwise have been saved. If we go for herd immunity without any quarantining, then we face the risk of spiralling death rates. The second example on this coronavirus simulator page demonstrates how effective quarantining can be. Probably a slowish, managed herd immunity is the way to go now, through varying degrees of quarantining - in the absence of any quick vaccine, at least. Your argument about introducing the least-at-risk groups to the virus first is, I agree, a sound strategy, although in practice it may be difficult for e.g. parents to deliberately expose their kids.

Arguably the optimal strategy would have been for national governments to start quarantining all people entering the country, as soon as the first cases were announced in China. Unfortunately governments are reactive rather than proactive, which means that a virus with a silent 5-day incubation period can wreak havoc.

Euthanasia raises profound questions about consent and morality.

First, taking up your distinction between active (lethal needle) and passive (removal of supply that is keeping the patient alive)... I think that this often has more to do with ethical and legal considerations on the part of the practitioner than it does with alleviation of the patient's suffering. It is far easier to convince yourself that you haven't killed someone if you turn off say an air supply than it is if you are actively applying the agent of death. As it's a legal grey area too, there are often considerations of whether it constitutes a criminal activity. Say someone gets hit by a car - are you more responsible for killing them if you are driving the car, or if you are a passerby who failed to shout out and warn them? Is the choice of a passive approach simply a method to alleviate guilt on behalf of the practitioner? If passive means they experience months of intense pain before dying, then how is an instant needle worse?

This does of course also impinge on the issue of consent. Can a doctor ever be 100% certain that the patient who has given consent is of sound mind? What if the patient has both terminal cancer and dementia? It's an ethical minefield.

There was a case in the Netherlands a couple of years ago, where a dementia patient had said that she wanted to be euthanised, but also wanted to specify when it would take place. She said this in the early stages of the illness, when she was of sound mind. Of course when the time came and she said 'now', the disease had progressed considerably and arguably she was no longer capable of giving consent. The case went to court. How could the doctor know whether or not the woman had changed her mind, if she was judged no longer capable of making that decision?



In this case the doctor was cleared of any wrongdoing, but crucially it took a court case to determine that. Is the doctor always right in these situations? Arguably, no. One single case can't be treated as a legal precedent to be followed, because each situation is different and each set of circumstances is different. Berna van Baarsen, a medical ethicist in the Netherlands believes that consent is now being inferred far too easily:

_{https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-47047579}

So that's the question of when consent is given, is that real consent or not? We also have the question of cases when consent isn't given. Some doctors are arguing that in certain circumstances euthanasia should be performed without consent. And this returns us to the active/passive element, too. We have the below from Len Doyal, emeritus professor of medical ethics at the University of London (previous link):


And inevitably there has been opposition to this, too. We have the below from Peter Saunders, director of Care Not Killing:


So this is in the UK, legally different to the Netherlands, as the Netherlands is different to other jurisdictions. The situation is summed up neatly by the British Medical Council: "We have a neutral position," said a spokeswoman. "We leave it to society to decide."

I don't know. The chart at the link supplied does have that sharp drop at the end of 2017, unless I'm reading it incorrectly - the lighter of the two blue colours is the MDIA?


But how can MDIA increase during high accumulation? If we mean new money coming in from fiat, or even just into new bitcoin addresses, then that's a reduction in MDIA, surely? More significant if the price is rising, but still true regardless of price. Even quoting from the site: "Every price top so far was accompanied by a drop in the mean coin age and with a significant drop of mean dollar age. During the top on January, 2018 the dollar age went down to just 9 weeks."

A sharp drop in MDIA has to be tied to new money coming in, which is generally when prices are rising, so an inverse relationship between MDIA and price. And then with a long bear market and no new money coming in, the MDIA rises at almost a day per day. That's all it's saying, isn't it? I can see that the metric is of some interest, but I can't see any profound insights.

Each new COVID-19 thread creates several new threads.* I'd like to see some statistical analysis of the R₀ of thread-based transmission against physical transmission.




*I may have started one myself, but shut up, that's not relevant.**
**Have you noticed how the asterisk symbol bears a striking similarity to the virus? Also how the initial asterisk has now spawned 5 new ones? I'm glad this is in meta

I'll have a go. I assume you're talking about Quantum Key Distribution, - please correct me if not!

The process is that an interferometer generates the entangled photon pair, then the photons are sent one to each party. So 'Alice' receives one photon and 'Bob' receives the other. As for the mechanism of transfer, it can be optical cable or (as in China's QUESS) a satellite signal (as attenuation through vacuum and thin atmosphere is negligible) - anything really so long as the mechanism can keep signal loss to a minimum - or quantum repeaters can be used to maintain the signal.

The result then is that Alice and Bob each have the secure information received from the photon. Once the photon has been received, its data has been received too, and there is then no need to actually hold the photon itself. The point is that due to the fact that each photon is part of an entangled pair, they each contain the same information, which can then be used as a shared key.

That's the process, anyway. For information about security, probably first have a look at the BB84 protocol, and then go on from there to later developments such as Kak's 3 Stage Protocol (quantum double-lock)... but I think we covered security a few months ago in this thread.

It certainly exists, and work is progressing rapidly on a number of fronts. There has been a recent discovery that may pave the way for standard computer chips to perform quantum operations...

We have talked at length about what a qubit 'is' in an informational sense, but comparatively little about what it is in a physical sense. There are a huge variety of approaches, from miniature superconducting circuits (as in Google's 53-qubit machine last year) to optical lattices and Bose-Einstein condensates. But the holy grail is to be able to use magnetically-controllable nuclei embedded in silicon, a combination of magnetic resonance and quantum dot... a Kane quantum computer.

A Kane QC as theorised uses precisely-spaced phosphorous atoms beneath the surface. As well as being manipulable through magnetic control, there is a benefit of a huge decoherence time (at low temperatures), estimated at 10¹⁸ seconds - decoherence is one of the biggest problems in QC.



The theory is over 20 years old, and has not so far been properly implemented in practice because it is hugely difficult to control a single nucleus magnetically without the field affecting neighbouring nuclei too.

... which brings me to the new paper. They have used antimony rather than phosphorous - antimony crucially has a non-uniform charge distribution, and they have demonstrated that because of this it can be moved comparatively easily between spin states through the application of an oscillating electric field. This is kind of a big deal, as this possibility was first predicted more than 60 years ago, but has not been observed until now. Antimony is bigger than phosphorous, and has 8 spin states rather than the 2 of phosphorous, but this isn't a problem as it just means that each antimony nucleus is analagous to a 3-qubit system.

There is still a lot of work to be done, it's very early on, but if in the end a QC can be built in silicon, then this really is a huge advancement.

It is kind of interesting, and I understand why they are making the approximation whereby "For each coin we see how long it has stayed at its current address and we compute the average of all those ages." ... It must be insanely difficult to calculate otherwise.

But I'm not convinced it's telling us a huge amount. Unless I am misunderstanding, then a big influx of new money - for example end of 2017- will cause the MDIA to drop to a very low value, and then after this if we see very little new money coming in - for example due to the protracted bear market - then the MDIA will rise steadily. Indeed if the new money coming in is almost zero, then the rising line is perfectly straight.

So in general, you'd expect an inverse correlation with BTC price?

You can't compare Ethereum to SLP. Well, I mean, you can, but you really shouldn't.

Ethereum is a Turing Complete smart contract platform.
SLP is just a very basic method of issuing tokens, it's ERC20-lite.
Not the same thing at all.

I'm not saying SLP is a bad thing. It's not, it's a great way to get basic tokens out, it's perfect for that sort of thing, it's perfect for what it does, low fees and scalability are nice too, but it just doesn't have the sophistication or scope of ETH. They may seem superficially the same if you are looking at them as just 'things' that tokens can sit on, but really they are very different.

I'm rubbish at analogies, but say ETH is a car roof and SLP is a sheet of metal. Tokens on both are sitting on flat metal surfaces, it's just that one has a fully-functioning car under it.

You can write any code you like on ETH; its functionality and potential go way way beyond being merely a 'thing' that tokens can sit on. SLP mimics a small part of ETH, that's all.

Long forgotten, indeed.



I'm not religious, but this is a great demonstration of the necessity of humility. Nature is a greater authority than man.

Yes, since wheat domesticated us.


Whilst it's certainly a serious problem and absolutely should be treated as such, I'm not yet convinced by the mortality rates. Testing is often only performed for people exhibiting severe symptoms. We have the stand-out case of Germany, with 29,056 cases and 118 deaths (0.4%) which surely is due in part to the fact that they are conducting a huge 160,000 tests per week, and so picking up carriers with mild symptoms or who are asymptomatic... carriers whom other nations are likely to miss. Of course there may be other reasons; it's too early to make definitive assessments, but still, this seems a likely explanation.

Under GDPR, you only need to have a "lawful basis" to process someone's data. Article 6.1 of the GDPR legislation explains that consent is one of the six lawful bases - meaning that actually consent isn't always required.

_{https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/consent/}

The Information Commissioner's Office (UK) covers these five alternatives to consent. You can process personal data if it’s necessary for:
_{https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/consent/when-is-consent-appropriate/#when6}

These means that companies are at first glance technically able to apply the legitimate interests basis under 'commercial benefit'. However, the individual's rights and interests also come into account here. The Information Commissioner's Office adds:


So currently PECR/GDPR rules mean that you do need consent for e-tracking practices.
... which brings us (finally) to how these companies are breaking the law: consent must be explicitly given.

From the GDPR legislation again (link above):

Instead of 'opt in' many companies are treating consent as a failure to opt-out, which is a very different thing, and against both the spirit and the letter of the law. Particularly as this often results in nested consents, where permission is assumed by the company, they sell the data to their clients, you then in turn sell to their clients under the initial assumed permission.

I think the failure here is not in GDPR itself, but rather that compliance is not being policed effectively. Perhaps ePR, once finalised, will lead to greater compliance - although the ePR is not expected to come into force until 2022.
How this will apply to the UK (which obviously is leaving the EU) is unclear; the general assumption is that alignment with the EU will continue, although obviously this may change.

We get socialised risk and privatised profit, same as we always do.

Governments are implementing what look like socialist policies, but whereas a socialist government would do so from ideological conviction, the current administrations, Trump in the US and Johnson in the UK are simply doing whatever the f*ck it takes to keep the economy alive. Some of these new policies, with their staggering outpouring of money, may appear to be implemented in order to care for voters in their hour of need, but are actually implemented in a desperate bid to retain the status quo, where the rich get richer and everyone else gets slowly ground into the dirt.

These policies may look like socialism, but they are not socialism at all.

Absolutely true. This is because the government is not trying to rescue and support the people, it is trying to rescue and support the economy. US, UK and probably most other governments are throwing money at this thing and implementing policies that only a few weeks ago would have been anathema, and condemned as 'socialist'. It's not really socialist at all; it's simply whatever measures might work right now to prop up a failing economy. Those in charge haven't suddenly developed a conscience. They couldn't care less if some people fall through the cracks, so long as the economy holds up.

Yes, we do. I've posted about UBI before, and it's been trialled in a few places. Now perhaps might be a good time to try it on a larger scale. I don't know how much time and money it would cost to evaluate each of thousands (possibly even millions) of applications for assistance on a case-by-case basis, against a backdrop of a country (metaphorically for now) on fire. Far better to try UBI, and free up resources that would have been wasted in needless bureaucracy to instead face and fight COVID-19.

The Patriot Act bit is a valid point, but I'm sure that was the government exploiting the situation rather than engineering it.
The CV bailouts is again a reaction, they are responding to the pandemic with desperate measures to keep the national and global economy afloat. It's not a deliberately engineered situation.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories, and you can of course believe what you want, but if you think the current situation is deliberately engineered, then you are putting a lot of faith in the government, you are saying that they are capable not only of implementing this whole thing, but also of keeping it secret. I would suggest that the government is slow, conservative, reactive rather than proactive, and incapable of keeping a secret on this sort of scale. More than this: that if it's deliberately engineered then they are working against their own best interests.

The status quo works so well for the elites already; they siphon off all the profit whilst socialising risk. That's how society is set up, that's how it's been for centuries, and no government is going to jeopardise that money train by creating a virus and letting it wreak havoc (or creating the illusion of a virus and letting it do the same).

Also the help/hurt Trump idea is too insular. This is not all about the US; people are dying all over the world. More than quarter of a million infected now, and rising rapidly. The idea that 50 vs 8000, flu is 160 times more deadly is not just factually incorrect, it's either moronically stupid or else morally abhorrent. See the links in this thread for an understanding of how COVID-19 spread compares to flu. Also see the comparison to how measles would spread in an unvaccinated population for a visual demonstration of how anti-vaxxers are idiots.