I think you mean "Caveat emptor".  "E pluribus unum" means "from many, one".

It's newspeak.  They know what it means, they also know what most readers believe it means.

...all that this system lacks is a secure distance payments system.  A hub and spoke network of goods movement.  Similar to UPS but with much smaller vehicles, tighter spokes and cargo UAV's instead of massive cargo aircraft piloted by pairs of trained humans earning $100K+ per year.

http://matternet.net/

They even intend for it's primary use to be the distribution of high value goods, such as medicines.

Just wait until the SilkRoad get's in on this one.

Religion has next to nothing to do with it.  The term that you are looking for is belief.  Specificly a belief that the unknown constitutes a threat.  In the age of city-states and before, that unknown was the intent and abilities of differing cultures beyond the line of sight of the city tower.  Governments formed for the collective defense of small communities, thus appointing the most able among themselves to direct such a collective defense against threats both real and imagined.  Over generations, however, the families who abandoned yeomanship in favor of professional security became a warrior class; distinct from the community they were intended to protect.  After this point, the lack of identity with the community at large would create a situation wherein the ambitions of those in the warrior class (during periods of particular peace and stability) led to the creation of a political class in command of the warrior class.  And thus the betrayal of the common citizenry was complete.  Essentially, all governments are up-sized protection rackets.  The modern pretense of civil control is simply a matter of progression.

+1 Yuusha

Small loan repaid on time and in full.

Loan repaid in full.  Thanks!

argumentless opinion = meritless noise

Another may be responsible for letting you eat lead paint as a child, but then they are primarily responsible to you, not for you.  It is not, in any capacity, the liability of society and civilization at large for your heavy metal poisoning or it's associated effects.  If society wishes to take such into consideration in the collective punishment (normally called 'justice' although it tends to be far from that) imposed upon you for your actions, society can choose to do that.  However, that in no way implies that society is at fault for your condition, nor responsible in any way for your actions.  The primary goal of modern justice systems isn't either restitution of the wronged nor even punishment of the wrongdoer.  The primary goal is to limit the liberties (both in time and scope) of the wrongdoer in order to limit the further harm to society in general that the wrongdoer can commit.  If it benefits society to commit resources to 'reform' the wrongdoer so that said wrongdoer can be released and support himself, that will happen to the greatest extent that it's actually possible.  If it's not possible, and particularly if the wrongdoer is of particular risk to the public (such as a serial murderer) then reform is dropped in favor of simply indefinite incarceration.  If someone (successfully) uses the mental incapacity defense to evade a conviction, the justice system still commits them to the care and incarceration of a state mental hospital; because anyone who has a history of causing harm and lacks the capacity of self-regulation, they are even a greater threat to society at large than the career criminal.  The nutter cannot be reformed, but the mobster commits crimes due to the pursuit of profit and the belief in his own capacity of evading the police.  If he can be convinced that the profit doesn't justify the risks, the mobster can be reformed.

Fortunately for me, that isn't an argument that I made.  I can't even see how you came to the conclusion above by distortions of what I said, unless you just didn't bother to read them and just jumped in.  I would agree that all humans are equal under the law, but certainly not identical.  Again, it's not relevant that one person can be more influenced than another.  It's a prerequisite of an adult that s/he be able to rationally control their own deviant tendencies regardless of whether those tendencies are the result of nature or nurture.

Such as?

I do not have to trust you at all.  I think you don't understand bitcoin.

No, he is saying that outside influences have no bearing on the morality of the choices, and thus little to no bearing on the type of response from society's justice systems.  Having a mental dysfunction is already a consideration in the modern concept of justice and morality, it's just not an excuse.  If you ate lead paint as a child, and then go out a do crazy things as an adult, is that cause and effect?  Clearly it is not, considering the large number of people who were also exposed to lead as children who did not grow up to be clockwork orange characters.  And the excuse about the kind of family one is born into is just as faulty, for all of the upstanding and generally successful people who came from broken, criminal and dysfunctional family influences.

No matter what kind of devil made you do it, you are still responsible for the consequences of your actions.  That is the very definition of adulthood.

Some variation of this 'scheme' is inevitable.  When Wal-Mart is mining, they might reject fee paying transactions from known Target addresses; and withhold some of their own transactions to be included only in self generated blocks.  If Wal-Mart (or other large, international corporation) were to consolidate all of the small transactions they produce in a given day (that can be delayed) into a single, self-generated block, they might stand to save a fortune in fees.  This assumes that Wal-Mart has enough miners to reliablely generate at least one block each day (or week, month, whatever).  Once this is commonplace, it will become very difficult indeed to discern this kind of delayed transaction processing for economic reasons from delayed transaction processing for anonimity reasons.

If you are using a client on your computer, you can't.


This would have to hit the blockchain at some point, even if it's only 6 confirmations before you use it.  Of course, that would be pointless.


Don't tell anyone.


Which is why you use a different receiving address for each transaction, or at least each customer.  If you desire real anonimity, you are going to have to put in some effort.  Using a mixer or a shared online wallet would help.

I recommend that you peg the monthly rent to some other currency of more stability, perhaps with a clause that prevents the monthly rent from increasing or decreasing by more than a certain percentage, say 10% either way.  This way both parties accept some of the currency risk.  Gold, silver, copper spot prices; the Euro, Yen, and even the US$ are more stable references than Bitcoin.  This will still help the bitcoin economy to grow, which will increase stability in the future; but it's not in the interests of anyone if either party to this deal ends up getting hammered and bailing out due to massive swings in the Bitcoin exchange value.

If that's your ZAS kit, I think that the bullet to the head plan is more practical.  I carry more than that in my briefcase.

EDIT:  For that matter, I wear a Leatherman Wave and a Fenix LD20 on my belt everwhere I go except to take a bath or to bed.  My wife used to insist that I leave them at home when we went to church; until 9/11.  I have never been to church without such tools since.  (I had a Gerber and another flashlight at the time, but have since upgraded my belt tools.)  My children have never seen me without them while I was awake.  Ever.

And as I write this, there is a 14" Kukuri knife on the top of my roll-top desk, two feet away; and a stocked pantry cabinet capable of feeding my entire family for at least 30 days (except water) four feet away.  Even my house is prepped (prior owner was a security nutcase, I even disabled some of the features because I agreed with my wife that they were over the top) and the enclosed staircase leading to the bedrooms has it's own security door with a dead bolt lock (and a different key) and the stairwell leads straight up to a landing with a blind corner.  Be them zombies or criminals, that stairwell could be a shooting bottleneck.

If that's all that you could understand from my responses, then I would guess that I can't answer it for you.


I'm a libertarian, not an anarchist.  Try and understand the differences in the ideologies before displaying your ignorance.  Corporations are a creation of the state, and thus the state has the right to regulate them.  I'm opposed to regulations without basis or merit, which just happens to be the majority of them in our modern world.  That said, not all companies are corporations.  Corporations exist for the purpose of limitation of liability, which wouldn't even be allowed in a true free market economy.  Private companies that do not seek to limit their liabilities by hiding behind the skirt of mama state should not have to deal with the false regulations imposed by that same state.


Yeah, I don't think you're going to make it.

I didn't say that they lied.  Don't try and put words in my mouth.  I said that their financial statements don't reflect the reality.  A lie implies the intent to deceive, which I don't believe that most corporate auditors participate in.  They simply don't know all the details themselves, because those individuals within the corporation that oversee those datasets have many incentives (personal, professional and political) to not share them.  The financial statements often don't reflect reality, in part, because you believe that you can interpret them.  But you can't, and neither can I.  No one really can, outside of the insiders who helped to create them.  They exist to blow sunshine up the skirts of regulators and mutual fund managers alike, and they work very well at this.  The only detail of any value that I've ever been able to grok from any of those statements is, whenever those things are all sunshine and happiness, it's often because the dark clouds are so dark that even the insiders don't have a viable avoidance stragedy and are afraid to put it into ink for fear of making it too real.  I exited from a strong position in GE common stock, based mostly on the overly optimistic annual report, the Thursday prior to a rumor about the sale of GE core manufacturing plants (such as Louisville Appliance Park) sent the stock price from over $30 to $12 over the following several weeks around May of 2008.  That one annual report saved me quite a tidy sum.  It's what those financial statements don't say that is the most valuable.


They also used creative accounting that most certainly still is allowed.  Encouraged, in fact.  Feel free to search for the term, "Marked to market accounting" and compare that to what is actually allowed.


That is exactly the point.  Enron was an extreme example of the practice, but they did it because they were a company in decline, and they knew it.  What they did, whether it's 'legal' or not, is still standard practice with regard to public reports.  The companies that are doing well, have no incentive to resort to such actions; but because some reports cannot be trusted at face value, the rational investor cannot trust any such reports at face value.  If, for no other reason, he is not an insider and cannot possiblely know when a viable company has crossed the rubicon headed for ultimate failure.


Get your's straight before calling someone else a liar.  Don't forget who you are talking to, either.  You continue to express your "opinions", about my character and my viewpoints, by my own leave.  I will only suffer such abuse for so long before you cease to have a vioce at all.


Hedging is one rationalle, not the only rationalle.  That said, just what do you think that buying bonds are intenteded to do for a company, if not to hedge against inflation of the fiat currency? That's also what gold is good for, btw.

Who do you think that you are arguing here? Logically correct, but still irrelevant to the topic.  Try and focus.

Of course you would focus on the bit about the suit, and ignore the point completely.  I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you simply didn't understand the point.

Gold isn't an investment.  Gold is money.  If you are buying gold, silver or even oil futures as a speculative investment, you are as likely as not to lose capital.  If you are seeking an alternative currency to the default, gold is (historicly and generally) the best choice for capital preservation.  I.e. hedging against currency risks.  Most people would simply call this "saving".

I have.


You seem to assume that the publicly available financial statements honestly reflect reality.  Any rational review of the past statements from such corporations such as GM, Enron and half of the Fortune 500 should expose the lie in this belief for even yourself.  As for gold not being listed as cash, this is true, if it's listed at all.  However, generally speaking anything that the Powers that be (tm) consider to be a "cash equivalent"; such as money markets and government bonds (and basicly anything else with a highly active secondary trade market, such as oil futures within certain constraints) can be reported upon such summary statements as "cash reserves" even though they most certainly are not sitting on cash.  That cash is already back out in the market, because the finance managers don't want to be in a true cash position any more than anyone else does in an inflationary environment.


Those facilities can, and generally are, provided by the oil companies as part of the futures contracts.  Thus oil and steel can be bought and sold as easily as corporate bonds, and thus are liquid assets.  I can buy a futures contract for vastly more oil than I can actually do anything with, with a built in delivery date three months out, and sell it to a refinery (or anyone else) two days before delivery confirmation.


As noted above, yes they are liquid enough to be considered as part of the 'cash reserve' figure in a summary financial statement, if the trading of such commodities is not a fundamental part of the corporation's core business model.  You really should try this thing called Google, it's your friend.  If you work in this field, I feel sorry for your childrens' future.

This seems like a great place for a quote from a recent Wiskey & Gunpowder article (commodities traders, Wiskey & Gunpowder, get it?)

"Oh dear. The gold price in dollars is volatile because the US dollar is volatile. An ounce of gold has almost always bought you a nice suit at any time in history. The volatility in the gold/dollar exchange rate is all on the dollar’s end. And that’s because the supply of dollars is always increasing. Also, the futures exchanges have been pretty active boosting margin requirements on gold contracts. That’s made for some larger-than-normal price moves. But the value? Rock steady over time, baby.

And that’s the point. Gold isn’t really an investment. It’s money. And it’s money that holds value well over time. You only worry about capital gains if you’re investing in gold. If you’re buying money, you’re more focused on preserving purchasing power."

http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/you-can%e2%80%99t-eat-asset-allocation-either/

Yeah, things are going to get bad in the next couple of years.  I don't think you're going to make it.

Yes, I do refuse to play your game.


And a summary of my answer...

Some do, some don't.  We can't really know to what degree that those who do, do so; nor can we know if those that we don't think do, actually don't.  For either of us to speculate on which do or do not, would be a particularly futile form of mental masturbation.  Again, I'm not willing to play in the dirt with you.  Not again.


There is no defining distinction.  Not one that can be agreed upon by all players, anyway.  The differences are both personal to the observer and temporal.


In general, and over long periods, yes.  Local, and near term conditions can render such a statement overly broad, and thus false for a particular set of conditions.  Not knowing any particulars, or not caring enough to do the research, any particular individual investor (saver) or company is likely to do as well or better with gold than anything else.  However, there are many companies with enough 'cash' to manage that hiring a finance manager to do the research is worthwhile.  This is one reason that companys might not (again, we can't really know what they do if they don't really want to tell us) invest liquid reserves into gold while the general statement that gold is history's overall greatest store of value remains true.  Another possible reason is that said finance manager is, in fact, criminally irresponsible and his employer simply doesn't understand that (yet).  Bernie Maddof was considered one of the greatest investment gurus in the country up until a few years ago.