Honestly, it sounds a bit weird :/

$1,000 donation sent https://blockchain.info/tx/1a1d76d15a701595d42c72962981d4b87d06de43a5deb8b635f814b50e417379

They wouldn't be having favelas, or riots, if it wasn't.

Great. Since I don't drink, I guess I'll end up being the designated driver, piloting a jet full of drunks to wherever the hell it is you all call home.

As for the hostess issue, here's how you can save money, and still keep us happy:

If you believe that people who are best at doing specific things should be the ones doing those things, and that people who work better than others should get higher compensation, then you shouldn't be for Communism.
If you believe that positions like manager or factory owner should be voted on, whether or not the person being picked actually knows how to run things, and you believe that everyone should get the same amount of pay pased on the job position, regardless of how hard they work or how difficult their job is, then you should be for Communism.

Yes! Because outside investment (foreign corps and businesses) would come in and employ the hell out of all those poor workers, since they are already used to being paid almost nothing, then over time (noot a very long time) these workers would learn skills on the job, demand higher pay for hiquer quaality work, and because there will be fewer of them available to employ (unemployment will go down), and many of them would end up in lower-middle class status. Exactly as it happened in many of the Southeast Asian countries, where people were poorer than they are even in Brazilian favelas, but are now way richer than them.

I was just pointing out that interest on money is analogous to paying rent to get use of something. So, when I am borrowing money and paying it back with interest, I am in effect renting many dollar bills, and paying monthly rent on each one.
So, if we use the type of money that has nominal interest rates reaching zero, isn't that the same thing as renting a car for $50 a day, with the car being so fragile and shitty that it loses $50 a day in value? I don't think any car rental place would bother investing in such a car, since they won't make any money renting it to others.
This will also apply to money. If everyone in the world used the same money, which had built-in demurage or some other method of making interest on lending be 0, landowners with trees will still make Discount Rate judgements, and chop down their trees for something else they believe will hold or rise in value.

How do you have a planned economy with a democracy and elections? You believe people are capable of making decisions as to what it takes to run each and every business, or even if they only vote to pick one person to run one company, you think they can know the person's qualifications, how well they will fit into the company, and be able to evaluate their ongoing performance?
Even better, you think people will actually take the time to study these things before voting, instead of turning the entire planned economy into a popularity contest?

The immage is of a favela, a shanty town in Brazil. It is also an example of what you get if your country ranks 126th out of 181 in "ease of doing business" rankings from excessive regulations which prevent private investment,  and a corruption score that places Brazil 72nd in the world, worse than Italy, which is known for its mafias and corrupt government officials, and even worse than African nations like Ghana and Rwanda.

Yes, this is a perfect example of what happens when there is the exact opposite of a "free market" in a country.

Final update: The wire trace found where the money went, but Bitstamp never found the transaction, so last last week mom put in a request to wire the money back directly from the receiving bank (basically to undo the unclaimed wire). Hopefully she will get it back within a week or two. Once she gets it, she plans to just use Coinbase. The reason we tried using Bitstamp in the first place is because their 0.38% fees make purchases of larger amounts cheaper, even with wire fees.

*facepalm* Ok, one by one...


Bitcoin is rare at every point in time between now and 2140. Right now, no more than X bitcoins can exist. Period. Tomorrow, no more than X+3,600 bitcoins can exist. Period. Their supply is constrained, and thus they are rare, unlike, say, USD that can theoretically have an unlimited supply and created in any arbitrary amount at any point in time.
Using your claim, I can say that gold is not rare, and its "rarity" will not be reached until all the gold in our solar system is mined, which will likely be beyond 2140.


Plenty of metals do not rust, do not turn fingers green, and last for a very long time. Like Aluminum for example. Or brass. The only reason gold is worth more than those other metals is because it is rare, aka limited in supply.
Likewise, Bitcoin is used because it is decentralized
Unlike fiat, bitcoin has no counterparty risk
Bitcoin makes better money, because it is not based on debt, and can be programmed to do things money by itself can't.


At over 20,000 different merchants. Thanks to services like Gyft, that even includes Amazon and Target, where you can buy almost anything you need.


Yep. From Burger King, Red Robin, Applebees, TGI Fridays, and directly for a bunch of restaurants around the world.


Yep. There are plenty of bars around the world that accept bitcoin directly. One just started taking them in Baltimore just two weeks ago.


Walk into a Burger King, and give them this proposition. IF they do take your gold, chances are you will severely overpay for those things, compared to gold's actual exchange rate. If only because it's a pain in the butt to convert gold back to fiat. Higher chance that they will tell you to go away, because they don't have the equipment to check whether your gold necklace is made of real gold.


And this is why you fail so embarasingly bad. You are making the typical mistake of looking at bitcoin as a funny internet currency, and are not even bothering to look at where it can be spent, let alone what it can actually do.
First of all, at the moment, I can basically live off of bitcoin entirely, and aside from having to use my credit card for gas, I actually do, as do many other people. And second, bitcoin is not a "currency," it's a globally distributed asset ledger. We can use bitcoin coins as currency, or we can use bitcoin coins as tokens to represent something else. Think of ANYTHING that requires proof of ownership representing an asset. Title to a house or a car, gold backed currency, commodity ETFs, stocks, bonds, you name it. All of that can be linked to a fraction of a bitcoin, and be traded on the blockchain directly, making the jobs of notaries, trust lawyers, title storage services, investment banks, brokerages, and many other financial system jobs obsolete. Until you realize this, you don't understand what bitcoin even is, let alone what it is worth.

Are you implying that free market capitalists are against this?

I think a version of this video that would fit the current socialist government model would involve someone in a police uniform approaching every one of those people, forcing them to give up some of their money under the treat of authority, and using it to pay some designated "helper" to provide help to the next person in line. Because that's how government works, not with people being nice enough to help each other, but with government taking everyone's money so that the government can hire public employees to help people.

Sure, they took out all the aristocracy (my great-grandparents were among them), confiscated all land and houses (my great-grandmother's mansion became a kindergarten), and raided all the wealthy merchants and businesses. And then they didn't know much what to do with it, other than grow food. Yay for basic agricultural economy.
And no, the transformation started before Stalin. Lenin was possibly even more evil and ruthless than Stalin, but we just didn't get a chance to see how much more. Stalin was just carrying forward Lenin's ideas.

Yes, Soviet Russia was marketless. We had three guys in our neighborhood, who owned a bakery, manage to get a higher allowance of flour, which, instead of using to make basic pasta like the their bakery was required to, they used to make extremely good pierogis using their own cooking skills and recipes. There was still pasta, but we all loved their pierogies, and paid them extra for it. When the government found out they were trying to make a profit selling their own stuff, all three were disappeared into a labor camp, and we never heard of them again.
I know my history, because my family and I live it. And I don't go to free-market web sites, or know of any. I just read a lot about global business and economics in various countries.

No one said they can't organize, or be smart and scheming. It's just that...


... if they take the machines, including the "machines" of business structures and supply chains, they won't know how to run them, and those machines will be useless to them. And if they do know how to run them, they will simply become the new bourgeoisie, being all arrogant in thinking they "know how to run things" or that the machines and the business "won't run without them," or even having the audacity to ask for higher pay, just because they think their jobs are "more important" or "more difficult." And this cycle will continue, until there are no more bourgeoisie left, and no one knows how to run the machines and businesses equally.

We could say the same about you, including your binary thinking.

No "Laissez Faire style Capitalism" here. Just the natural conclusion to any power system with the incentives aligned in the way that they are in government. Germany and France will get there soon enough.

And more work for Phin (and myself)



Didn't see any problems with this one.

Then there's this


Another one of those "Great charity! But they accept bitcoin already  "
Should we just set the rule as "if you recently started accepting, you still qualify," with "recently" being within a month or two?

They fixed their issue as well, and $1,000 donation sent!
https://blockchain.info/tx/4d63195a66937c2b82a3d8b97aa0d11899a36715b5cf4186918ff6b540fa914d

Mike the burro man reminds me of Bruno for some reason. Probably the hat and the big bushy beard. All you farm folk look like to us yuppies 

Or I can read opinions of people who lived in USSR, or now live in Cuba, Venezuela, China, Iran, and North Korea. Well, maybe not North Korea.


But the private shareholders were the ones who put the money together to get the company those workers are working in started in the first place. And the only reason they gave the money to form the company, and thus give those workers jobs, was because they were promised returns or dividends from that company.
Does fair distribution mean much higher amounts go to the people at the top who are running the system, and much smaller to the lowest workers who are just watching the machines, or cleaning the floors, or pressing a button all day?


How do the workers in the union know what level of skill is required to run the company and how much that person should earn? And what if their "fair" wages end up with them not being able to hire anyone to manage the company?

You don't have to tell us about how smart and fancy the writer of that is, when everything he wrote is so blatantly factual and obvious. That list stands on its own regardless of whether the author has a high IQ.