A and B are not necessarily a person or a government.  They can be a decision.  You were talking about drone strikes.  There is nothing in democracy, even in a direct democracy, preventing a drone strike to be voted by the majority.

You can regret the outcome of a vote, but if you say it results from people being not independent or free, you basically say that they are stupid, ignorant and that you know better.  Which you seem prone to do, btw.  And anyway it does not change anything to the fact that the vote was democratic.

It's not because a democratic process results in decisions you disapprove that it's not a democratic process anymore.


Again, you wrote:


Democracy has nothing to do with whether or not people minds are independent and free.   Democracy is about giving an equal power of decision via vote to everyone.  It is not incompatible with people being dependent and not free.

Ok it's on youtube now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6kRZo63IPE

God damn it.  "It's none of your concern" is an idiom.  Don't take it like that.

You were saying something like "how can there be democracy if people are not independent and free?".

I say democracy consists in letting people contribute to decisions via vote.  Why they vote for A and not for B is not the problem.   You can't know that anyway as you're not in their mind.  So it doesn't concern you if you worry about this process being democratic.  That's what I meant.

Of course if the candidate you didn't vote for is elected, you can feel sorry and thus concerned, but that's an other matter.  You can feel concerned about the poor decisions made by your government, but those decisions do not change the democratic status of this government.

The very point of letting people vote is to accept their opinion without discussing it.  Otherwise we wouldn't vote, we would have eternal debates on internet forums.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/reasontv-video/reasontv_video_178145.mp4

Wow.  I think that's the most positive TV talk about bitcoin I've ever watched.


I'm putting it on YouTube.  It will be here once uploaded.

I was trying to make you realize how unacceptable your argument sounds like.

I was saying initially that you are not in people's mind, so you should not question people's choice and vote.  If A vote for X, you can't say his vote is worthless because A had not a "independent mind" and is not truly "free".

It's like saying someone is too stupid to have the right to vote.

The reasons why A voted for X are none of your concern.  He did vote for A and that's what matters.

It's just that your argument "real democracy can't exist if people are not independent and free" pretty much sound like what a communist would say to justify totalitarism.   Like you know better what's good for people.

I'm tired of these stories about Robinson Crusoe and the value he gives to things he finds on his island.

Money, not just bitcoin, not just gold, is pretty much useless when you're alone.   Lots of things are useless when you're alone.  Basically, communication tools.  Had Robinson Crusoe found a mobile phone, it would be the same (assuming he has no network, of course).   A phone is useless if you can't call anyone nor receive calls.


And yet, has anyone ever claimed that a mobile phone has no intrinsic value?

You're not supposed to judge whether or not someone has an independent mind.   You're not in people's mind so don't you deny their capability of making choices and having opinions.

Saying that using or not using is equivalent to a vote is far fetched.   It is not a vote.

   Great quote.

Maybe I have too a restricted idea of what democracy is (no sarcasm here), but to me democracy is a system where divergences of opinions are resolved via vote, not secession.

NGC 4172 was missing in this photo, so here it is:




Now we can go on with number 4176.

Above all, democracy should happen where it is needed, and there is no need for democracy in free software.  The code is free: if you're not happy with it, fork it or don't use it.

Ten years ago, I was the kind of SF-fan guy who didn't like Star-Trek.  I even had some kind of contempt for it.  It seemed way much more fantasy than science-fiction.

And yet now I have stopped enumerating the kind of things that modern science come up with and that was depicted in Star-Trek.

Can you solve the Navier-Stokes equations with a pencil and thus predict the weather next month?

If so, please contact the Clay institute:  http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Navier-Stokes_Equations/

The metamaterial is an actual device that allows to simulate stuff on a table top.   That's a neat bonus as we still can't efficiently solve the differential equations of general relativity.


From http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1130:
« Such metamaterial models provide a table top realization of metric signature change events suggested to occur in Bose-Einstein condensates and quantum gravity theories. »

I'm kind of sick of graphene.  It was exciting a few years ago but now it's just annoying.   There is a new article about some new amazing property of graphene pretty much everyday in phys.org.

Yeah, graphene will be awesome.   Someday.   But I fear it will be the material of the future for several decades.

I just whish I was a bit smarter so I can understand all these amazing stuff:

http://phys.org/news/2013-02-metamaterial-similar-3d-minkowski-spacetimes.html

Just check out the titles of the papers of this guy:

http://arxiv.org/find/gr-qc/1/au:+Smolyaninov_I/0/1/0/all/0/1


"Modeling of causality with metamaterials"
"Quantum Mechanics of Hyperbolic Metamaterials: Modeling of Quantum Time and Everett's "Universal Wavefunction"

Could you imagine what hassle it would be to keep a track and verify the names and addresses of all bitcoin users?  I'm not even sure it would be possible to do this in a decentralized way (some have tried with alternate systems, and it's not much convincing).



So basically bitcoin is anonymous because it's much simpler this way.   Also, nobody prevents you from publishing all your bitcoin addresses and to refuse payment from anyone who does not give his real name.

Gavin kind of struggled when he had to respond to the "bitcoin is not democratic" argument.

I think the very concept of money is actually not democratic, or it should not be.

What I mean by that is that money should be like any thing that can be exchanged in a market.  So like any consumer product, it is not democratic because its use does not depend on some decision made after a vote.

Money is democratic only in a system where only one form of money is allowed.  The decision of which kind of money and how it should work MUST then be taken and the democratic way of making this decision is the vote.

But in the liberal way of dealing with the concept of money, there is not limit in the number of competing currencies in circulation.   In such a system, a currency is no more democratic than any stuff that can be exchanged on the market.   Is the iPhone for instance a democratic product?  Well, in a way it is, since it is used by a lot of people.   But in the pure sense of the expression, that is in the political sense, it is not democratic at all.

Same with bitcoin.


More generally, digital technologies offer more choice to people, and this increased number of choices decreases the need for a normalization of the way of doing stuff.   Democracy was a way to fairly organize this normalization.  With more choices, the need for democracy decreases because less normalization is needed.    So in a way digital technologies make democratic concepts more obsolete.  That's a point that was missed in the debate imho.