In France you have 3 official choices :

1) Candidate A
2) Candidate B
3) "White" which mean you don't vote for A or B

But you also have the number 4

4) Don't vote.

In the past "white" was counted, but many years ago we said "ok now we will not count it".
So many people are not voting because if they vote "white" or if they don't vote at all, the result is the same.
In France when you want to vote you need to go the place where you were "born" (usually).
Why should I moove to vote "white" if it will not count ?

Many people including myself are asking the government to count "white" as a vote.
But why the government is against it ?

Because like you said you need at least 50% to elect someone, with the "white" vote, we don't have them...

We should use a system where the last candidate is eliminated  and do it over and over (like TV show).

Thank you for the reply. I came across those as well and have sent them an email inquiring about a cost estimate. Will report back with my findings

if you tried to stop it by having politicians sign a 'conflict of interest' contract where they cannot have any form of other job/other investment aside from their government salary then big-business will simply promise them a job at the end of their political career.

if you tried to prevent politicians from entering the corporate world after politics. then thats like saying that students who went to state schools can only work for government roles the rest of their life. or saying a state funded doctor cant work in private hospitals. state teachers cant do private tutoring. public transport workers cant then work for a private trucking company..
.. in short it just wont happen

as for things like limiting donations. well if someone can only get $10k per 'business' then 10 board members wont agree to write 1 business cheque for $100k. but instead each board member would write 1 personal cheque each for $10k

..
my problem with politics is that politicians seem to have a heck of alot of spare time to affiliate themselves with others. they dont actually work  40 hour week 48weeks a year doing political stuff. the whole attendance rate of things like US senate and UK parliament is poor. imagine if amazon had 650 staff on contract. and most days on average only 100 turned up. whilst amazon didnt do anything about it and the workers excuse was they were doing other things.. most rational employers would sack them and employ someone more loyal to the job role requirement

Booker is out and Bernie is surging (at exactly the right time).  Warren lost too much support when she flipped flopped on M4A.  

The leader of the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll has gone on to win the nomination for the last 6 cycles, Bernie for the first time in his 2 attempts at the nom has reached 1st place in that poll.  If the last 6 cycles are any indication Bernie will win the nomination!!!!

The MSM, Biden campaign and the Trump campaign have finally started to realize that Bernie has a shot at the nomination, and all 3 are spending time going after him now!

Bernie is by no means a sure shot at this point, IA AND NH are absolute must wins for Bernie BUT if he can manage to win them both it could be the momentum he needs for Super Tuesday!  Bernie leads the polls in CA as well.  Bernie is very popular with latino's as well and NV should be another momentum builder.  SC could end up in play for Bernie if he can win IA, NH and NV.  If anyone other than Sanders wins IA and NH, Biden will win the nomination and Trump will win the general!

Bernie needs to bring out the "traditional" non voters as the boomers who vote in huge percentages still don't like him.  Bernies strength has always been in bringing in "new" voters and over performing the shitty primary polls!

Buttigieg is a non starter at this point, he spent his load in IA and is trending down in the IA poll.  The best he can hope for at this point is for Biden to win the nom and then the general so he can get a high profile cabinet position.  In a few cycles when the neolibs are dead and withering in the streets Buttigieg can flip back to being progressive and run again (this time he would have executive branch experience).  Everyone will forget how much of a neolib twat he was in this cycle.

Warren shit the bed when she flip flopped on M4A, she came off as another corporate politician trying to walk a line rather than an authentic person who believed her ideals.  There was 12434636 candidates against M4A and 2 for it, once she wasn't one of the 2 supporting it she lost to much support to the only other candidate that does support it.

40% of the US wants to vote for a "burn the whole fucking thing down" candidate, this is a big part of the reason Trump drew the inside straight flush draw to win in 16.  Bernie has been trying to BTWFTD since Vietnam and his message is inspiring to the people Bernie needs to win.  Bernie has been on the right side of history (anti war, civil rights, globalization etc etc) for 40 years and voters can see his authenticity and they like it and his 4 decade messages.

The GOP base is SOOOOO energized right now (hyper partisan politics at it's best), the only real chance the Dems have to beat Trump in 2020 is to bring out the largest voting block in the US (non voters...).  Biden (HRC 2.0) will get stomped in the general, he doesn't inspire ANYONE and he (along with Trumps campaign HAMMERING him) will suppress the dem vote worse than Hillary did! Bernie will win most if not all of the only ~8 states that actually matter

It's time for Bernie to go hard after Biden and Warren tomorrow night.  If done right Bernie can really keep the pressure on going in to IA.

In my opinion we should know (with about  90% accuracy) after NH if the nominee will be Biden or Bernie.

Hey Squatz what happened to it being a 2 horse race between Biden and Warren, what happened to "Bernie will never win the nom"....??

I like this idea!

Bad idea, you'll get reported and banned (for a couple of weeks):

No problem!

I'll give it another try, and compare it to BlueWallet. If there are more of them, I'd like to try other custodial wallets too. If I use more different wallets, I can spread the risk of losing funds to them.

I'd like to setup a service that instantly pays any Lightning request of (say) 1 satoshi, posted on the forum. I already scrape all posts, so getting the requests will be easy.
But I don't know how to setup the LN-part, and I don't think a custodial wallet that can sent payments from a script even exists.

Username: iluvbitcoins
Post Count: 4920
BTC Address (must be SegWit): bc1qqx3gkd7tnpwvcz3nkpf8te0l2j23ywu64jx9dl

I don't think you guys understand how capital gains taxes work. This isn't new, and this isn't something which is just present in the crypto world. Every single market where trading occurs - Stocks, Bonds, Real Estate, Commodities, Forex, etc are all subject to capital gains taxes.

If you buy something at 100 and sell it at 1000 within a few weeks, then you're going to be subject to short term capital gains.
If you buy something at 100 and sell it at 1000 after a year of holding it, then you're going to be subject to long term capital gains.

Short term is going to be the most expensive, tax wise, of these two. These capital gains are also reliant on your income bracket.

But to address your question, as it revolves around 'what if I lose money, does the government pay me' Well kinda.

If you buy something and then sell it as a loss, you're able to 'take a loss' on your tax return and use the loss to lower your income for the year (you can only take a loss of 3000 per year on your return, so if need be you'll continue to carry forward your loss until you've exhausted it) So yes, the government does in a way compensate you for your losses.

Don't think that capital gains is just present in crypto. This is present everywhere.

Well yes, but this is all assuming that you have some sort of stable job. For most people, getting involved in Crypto should be something that they do on the side and they shouldn't be dumping enough money to bankrupt them when their tax return comes around.

The people who got fucked were people who continues to buy and sell Bitcoin as it ran up in price, problem was that these people never took their gains. I'll give you an example of this:

Bob had bought $10000 in Bitcoin when Bitcoin was worth 1000, which means that Bob bought 10 bitcoins. When Bitcoin went to 10000 per coin he sold it all, great for Bob. Bob didn't even have to wait that long for the run up to happen, this all happened in the span of one year and Bob sold his Bitcoins in December right before the year ended so he could buy some Christmas presents. Right now, Bob has made $90,0000 in profit (disregarding transaction fees, etc). Due to Short term capital gains laws in the US, Bob has to pay 12 percent tax on this, which equals abut $10,800 for the US government. Not too bad for them, they made some good money.

But the problem is that Bob later bought 90,000 worth of Bitcoin at 20000 after the year ended. This means that Bob bought 4.5 Bitcoins, which he then sold when it went down to 3,000 in this situation Bob has now lost 76,500. He is now left with about $13,500

The problem presents itself when Bob notices how the taxable situation works. When it comes to calculating any sort of taxes, Dec 31 is the ending part of the year. That's when you should set aside 10,800 (from before when he made money) and say this is the money that will be used to pay taxes. Bob is left with 13,500 in USD and owes the US government $10,800 from last year.

Yes he can carry forward the loss that he has from before, but it won't affect his prior year return.

After paying his taxes, Bob is left with $13,500-$10,800= $2,700 from his gains. He's also left with $76,500 in losses that he'll be carrying forward on his return for 25.5 years (unless he offsets other gains with this money) Don't be Bob, set aside money for tax time and take sometime to understand the tax law.

If anyone has any questions about Crypto tax, I'm more then willing to explain things.

The biggest risk is that someone fucks up and it results in Nukes flying.

Came pretty close the 60s:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almost-everyone-you-know-owe-your-life-to-this-man/

tldr;

Russian Sub goes stealth (no communication) and heads to Cuba a few weeks before Cuban Missile Crises
US finds them, and starts dropping explosives alternating on their left and right to signal them to surface. 
They think they're being attacked, and the US assumes they know about the crisis and would understand the signals.
The sub has a nuclear torpedo equivalent to the Hiroshima Bomb.  Because they are completely cut off, the protocol is to fire it if 3 men all agree it's appropriate.  
2 of the 3 say fire it and some guy talks the 3rd out of it.

Then it almost happened again in the 80s during the cold war:

https://time.com/4947879/stanislav-petrov-russia-nuclear-war-obituary/

Russias missile detection systems malfunctioned and showed 5 ballistic missiles incoming. The protocol was to return fire before the incoming missiles were halfway there, but the guy basically chickened out.

Public funding of election campaigns with an individual cap and also zero allowances for corporations and businesses to make donations.

Corporate interests always use the excuse that a corporation is out to make money when they're caught doing shady shit. Well, if that's true then they shouldn't be allowed to participate in politics, since they're only interested in a fundamentally corrupt tit-for-tat sort of transaction with the politicians and the political parties involved.

Public funding, would ensure everyone gets some exposure.

An individual limit would ensure that the rich don't get amplified too much.


The most important thing in my view would be paying citizens to attend the most important elections.

If everyone got $100 to vote then the turnouts would be huge. That money is money that would go straight back to the economy thus it would regenerate a decent amount of taxes and economic activity (since the recipients would largely be working poor).

If you strictly limit campaign financing, then it just supports different types of influence. If powerful interests want to influence government, they're going to do it no matter what. (It's not as if they're going to break laws very often: they'll just find alternative ways to exert influence.)

If for example every campaign was required to be 100% publicly financed, then it would be difficult for anyone to stand out, and this would greatly benefit the established parties and incumbents, even in >2-party systems. Since most voters wouldn't know much about any of the candidates, or wouldn't be able to distinguish between them, they would usually just vote for their favorite party. Upsets would occasionally happen, but not frequently enough to make a difference. Powerful interests would move more toward cozying up to the parties themselves. For example, a CEO might be active within the Republican party, and when a Republican president needs unemployment to go down, he'd ask the CEO to avoid layoffs; subsequently, there'd be an implicit expectation that someone in the Republican party would repay this in terms of more favorable policies in the future. Or a billionaire under investigation for something or other while a Democratic president is in office would "just happen" to donate $50 million each to Planned Parenthood and the Brady Campaign (ie. ideologically Democrat organizations). This kind of thing happens a lot even now, and happened even more in the past when campaign financing laws were more strict. The boost to incumbency and party strength might actually make influence more streamlined, since politicians would have to worry less about being primaried, and would therefore have to care less about satisfying their base. Though honestly I don't think that campaign finance laws have that much effect on anything: powerful interests will find ways to influence things regardless.

Democracy is just inherently not a good way for decisions to be made. In the specific case of government, where citizenship is more-or-less involuntary, maybe democracy is on average better than very top-down/entrenched political systems. The US Framers' original intention (now mostly lost) of having three separate power bases -- president=monarchy, Senate/Supreme-Court=aristocracy, and House=democracy -- was probably also a good idea to improve things a bit. But the real solution is to limit the role of government as much as possible so that its inevitably terrible & corrupt decisions don't have as much impact.

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It'd be interesting if you could pay $1000/vote to the Treasury in order to get additional votes, without limit. Obviously profit-motivated actors are only going to do this if they can extract more value from their votes than they're paying, but this already happens now with PACs, lobbying, etc. Even before Citizens United, you had groups such as the sugar lobby which spend money to get policies enacted which clearly help them at everyone else's expense (in the case of the sugar lobby, tariffs and price fixing). Paying for votes directly would at least have the money spent to achieve these bad policies going somewhere a bit more useful than toward lobbyists and political ads. Instead of paying for extra votes via the Treasury, you could also allow people to sell their votes, and this'd end up as almost a UBI-type welfare system!

(That isn't really a serious proposal, since I think it'd probably be worse than the status quo, though it would be interesting.)

That only works if you have an income for that year. They aren't going to pay you back if you earn 0. They are only able to lower the tax due for the year, so if you have a job and your trading loses you money, you're fine, as long as the loss is greater than your wage. If it's not, the government couldn't care less. They will tell you to sell your property or take a loan

Not going to happen. They are going to introduce their own state run digital fiat versions. Eventually they will try to regulate free crypto out of existence using the pretext of preventing money laundering, terrorism, pedophilia, global warming, drug dealing, hackers, and any other bullshit they can tack on to the list.