But, efficiency is not the whole picture as one can't get a 100% Efficiency rate. Some energy will have to be used to get the oil. One can spend tons of energy on acquiring new and more effective drilling methods. The energy used in these endeavors must be used in the formula. Once again, you're not using the term "efficiency" correctly. You're using it as a synonym for EROEI. The term you are looking for is Coefficient of Performance (COP), which is usually over 100%. In terms of energy usage, oil drilling is always over 100% "efficient" otherwise we wouldn't do it. In terms of percentage of resource recovered, however, it is always less than 100%. You are confusing the two. Pick one and use consistent terminology. EROEI is the most fundamental metric. It is a foundation for almost everything. To an economist, perhaps. To non-psychopaths, it's a metric that is useful within a specific context. It only takes a single match to burn down a forest. The EROEI on that would be in the tens of millions. Sound like a good investment to you? Increase Efficiency is not always good. A balance needs to be maintained. The more out of balance there is the harder the crash when nature corrects it.
Often Increased Efficiency = Increased Unemployment based on current Population So to increase employment, either decrease efficiency or population.
Alternately, increased efficiency is always good and increased population is not. Because of the above, IMO, BitCoin is the most useful as a transactional currency (quickly in and out of BTC for payments) that can be the first truly international payment system.
This is a ludicrous notion. Every Bitcoin has to be held at all times by someone. If it were even possible for everyone to do what you suggest, Bitcoin's value would fluctuate wildly without any velocity to speak of, and it would be worthless as a "transactional currency", which is a fiction anyways. |
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So do you remember past lives then?
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3) Enable a DWOLLA hub page
I guess you like being disintermediated then? |
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NOOOOOOOOOOOO. This is exactly backwards. This implies that the wasteful drilling methods of the past were more "efficient" than those today, which is absolutely false. Oil extraction today is far more advanced and efficient, recovering a far greater portion of the total potential supply than in the past. EROEI is a useful metric, especially for renewable energy sources, but it is not synonymous with efficiency when dealing with finite sources. |
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Surely the phytoplankton are capturing solar energy, and doing "useful" things such as creating oxygen and feeding the food chain, does that count? Of course it counts. And until we have enough solar panels to cover the oceans, phytoplankton at 0.5% efficiency is one of the most economically beneficial activities on Earth. Further, the burning or "flaring" of stored energy from natural gas quickly destroyed on the order of half or more of all hydrocarbon energy stored on the planet. And this is of course one of the most wasteful, of which I am perfectly aware. While this could be considered a "use" (in this case making way for oil extraction) It does qualify as a use, but please take note that it is not a natural energy flow except in a few areas. So it is not an economical use as far as I'm concerned. it demonstrates that some kind of efficiency of use should go into the calculation?
Efficiency affects the "percentage of natural energy flows captured and used," so yes of course it must be included. But in many cases, solar for instance, efficiency has zero bearing on the fact of whether those natural energy flows are captured and used, so it is in those cases nearly irrelevant. 1% of anything is more than 10% of nothing at all. |
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Velocity is just a crude approximation of economic interdependence and thus complexity. It is not an end in and of itself.
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They scale perhaps for internal corporate usage. Not for a large website. MySQL is the best at that. But even so there are limits. Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site’s massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep up with the number of transactions the database must serve. http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebook-trapped-in-mysql-fate-worse-than-death/ |
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About ten years ago I stumbled upon an article by a computer programmer Hubert Tonneau, the author of the Pliant programming language. He argued against the relational database:
<snip>
At that time I looked around to find similar opinions on the internet but found none. Moreover, when I repeated it to my colleagues I was ridiculed: "Nonsense, we abandoned hierarchical database exactly because it wasn't good, and relational one is better". But look around now, we are now in the age of NoSql, Redis, and Mongo databases. How did that happen ? Ten years ago was the height of LDAP's trendiness. Today it quietly backs most large-scale authentication databases and technologies like Active Directory which hipster admins regularly cream their pants over. You aren't aware of this because old, functional, standardized technologies aren't the stuff of blogs. How did we get here? Relational databases don't scale. Few organizations wanted to put the resources into supporting hybrids (separating hierarchical data). And it turns out that throwing hardware at a kludge like NoSQL makes more money in the short term. So, basically, we got here by doing things as half-assed as humanly possible. That's the story of practical computing in general. In fact I could probably turn this into the fault of the Federal Reserve, given enough whitespace. But I'll stop there for now. |
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If only there was some other low-power activity we could be doing instead this would be great.
Slavery is pretty low-power. You should try that. |
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Nice find. That's less than $50/day right now. The site says their data is transmitted hourly. That's not bad. Unfortunately the provider seems to be defunct: However a mystery about the final fate of the original Worldspace satellite radio service still remains because despite the company's very public insolvency and the liquidation of all of its various commercial entities two or more years ago (in 2008/09) the company's Afristar satellite still continues to remain in geostationary orbit to this day (as of the end of the first quarter of 2012) and still continues to broadcast three radio stations:- BBC World Service, WRN 1 and WRN 2. I wonder whether that pricing is right. Maybe someone would be interested in buying this case study in order to find out? http://hbr.org/product/worldspace-satellite-digital-radio-service/an/W11518-PDF-ENGIt sounds cheap, but the info I'm finding makes it seem feasible. They supposedly had 62 channels, with a final revenue of $14 million and net losses of $170 million. If each channel were 128 kbps, even with just a single continent, that could earn them $300 million a year at $10/MB. |
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It is kind of funny how most of these people complaining about Bitcoin being "cheating" propose as a "solution" the blackmail and robbing of Bitcoin users in-game. However, the more popular concern seems to be that people can use Bitcoin as an invisible, unbreakable chest outside of the Minecraft world, unavailable to other players, in which Bitcoin users may keep their valuables. While it is true that value in the form of Bitcoins cannot (barring hacking) be taken without a user's consent, that does not mean it cannot be stolen... Here are just a few of the ways that Bitcoins can be taken:
* Threaten to attack a town, unless Bitcoins are transferred to you.
* Attack a town, and occupy it until Bitcoins are transferred to you.
* Harass and grief a town, and demand a payment in Bitcoins to stop.
* Imprison a player, and require a payment in Bitcoins in order to release them.
* Threaten to release the coordinates of a secret location, unless a payment of Bitcoins is made.
* Pretend to engage in a Bitcoin-denominated business transaction, but take the Bitcoins and run.
* Set a large bounty of diamonds on someone, which you promise to remove if they give you their Bitcoins.
* And many more!
The seller is compensated with something that still has influence in the world but is not contained within the world and does not have to be protected in the world, unlike an in-game currency like Iron that honest people use. http://www.reddit.com/r/Civcraft/comments/sb92r/you_dont_need_bitcoins_to_store_value/tl;dr: Using Bitcoin is cheating because it prevents me from robbing you. |
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This game looks like the bastard child of an orgy among Civilization, Sim City and Doom.
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But if the assassin remains anonymous after collecting the prize--which would be necessary for the system to work--how can the next assassin (or anyone else for that matter) be confident that the prize was really disbursed? It sounds like there'd be no penalty disincentivising the host organisation from simply keeping the prize money.
A few things. First, I don't think anonymity is normally an absolute requirement. The idea is that it's just betting on predictions, not a "prize". The number of participants merely following the market would tend to outnumber the actual assassins which makes it difficult to distinguish between them. Second, there would be enough edge cases in the market (elderly politicians like Castro) to enable participants to build confidence over time that the system worked. And lastly, it's ultimately just a futures market so the disincentive is the same as any other, reputation and continuing in business taking a cut of the trades, same thing that keeps Mtgox from taking the money and running. |
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re. Assassination market. How are would-be assassins assured that previous 'winning' assassins actually received the pay-out? (if there is no such assurance, they presumably wouldn't take the risk).
One way assassination markets work is via prediction markets. So, instead of being paid directly, an assassin would make a bet that "such and such political figure is assassinated prior to such and such date". Theoretically this would pay out because of the number of regular market participants demanding adherence to the contract. In fact John Poindexter tried to setup such a market as the DARPA head before he was shot down (pun intended) by Congress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office |
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Interesting find.
By his argument, a state could adopt Bitcoin without making it legal tender. That's not controversial. Even in this economy, states (even small states*) control vast discretionary funds. So even if you ignore his suggestion to collect taxes in an alternative currency, this could be huge. I've been suggesting for almost a year now that this is exactly what Bitcoin needs -- local economy. And it's clear that in the very near future, states may be in dire need of an alternative like Bitcoin.
Right now, though, a small state without a large dependence on the Federal Reserve System could generate local economic growth merely by paying some percentage of contracts and salaries in Bitcoins. Even if the Bitcoins don't remain and circulate in the local economy, the effect of rescuing a small part of the local economy from the FED's money-printing, and attaching it to an alternative currency instead would be extremely beneficial.
The problem with this plan, unfortunately, is that Bitcoin is not the best choice. Bitcoin requires some investment in transaction processing equipment to be a good local alternative. His suggestion of centralized gold-backed accounts is easier to implement at the moment, though still not without it's own issues. An electronic state currency system based on mag-stripe cards would have all of the fraud-risk of a credit card, with none of the economies of scale. Smart cards would be more expensive, and would necessitate investment in point-of-sale readers. But the benefits of bridging that hurdle could be huge, and would open the door to Bitcoin as well.
*New Hampshire, for instance, in 2006 generated annual revenue at the state level of 3.7 billion dollars.
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Here are a couple of sites to get you started:
btcnearme.com
bitcoin-otc.com
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