Viewing profile — fiatmoney

"But if the government can essentially revoke a private individual or company's copyright merely by incorporating otherwise protected text into legislation, that can have adverse e…

Who's "that dude on reddit"?

Financial networks interpret regulation as damage and route around it.

That part of the opinion is nonbinding dicta - basically the judge freestyling, without setting precedent.

He was charged with "criminal possession of a controlled substance". Your point?

That is a recipe for centralized power unaccountable to the population they are theoretically protecting.

The relevant data is here. https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

Those numbers conflate "ever sold" with "sold in the last N days", and yearly vs. weekly usage rates. For regular usage (which would be expected to track sales, and possession) the…

Docking fees & maintenance are what get you.

Simplifications. "Arrest" has specific meaning in most jurisdictions. "Seizing" would be more appropriate; one can seize property as well as persons, and in the case of persons the…

Cannot "arrest" something that's not a natural person, but yes, they could absolutely seize a bot under a number of civil forfeiture laws, or likely as evidence. The burden would b…

There is zero incentive to recognize money laundering "too well", particularly because it means essentially whatever FinCEN wants it to mean. It's an issue for lawyers to hash out …

Well, in one sense it has notches. In another, the legs are crooked.

It's almost like a government-encouraged oligopoly is maximizing the amount of value they can seize from people regulatorily encouraged / forced to buy their product.

Just wait until enough democratic voters are imported to overturn Proposition 13 (caps property taxes at roughly what they were when you bought the house, and requires 2/3 vote in …

"one human is a pretty constant unit of work" Trivially false; human productivity routinely differs by a factor of thousands to millions.

I'm saying they're modelling the problem incorrectly as a CS endeavor when it has a lot more to do with analytic philosophy. "How do I make a program make beautiful music" is a CS …

These are not asking the right questions, although they kind of hint at it, and they are not fundamentally questions about AI. Example: "Can we transform an RL agent's reward funct…

It's odd (but maybe not surprising) how much fixation there is on concentration camps, the focus of the book, as a synecdoche for Nazi Germany as a whole, when they were only reall…

It is difficult to look at "% of users who become addicts" in a vacuum, since it's a population selected for willingness to take illegal drugs and hang out with the sorts of people…

"Birth control" is ridiculously available. "Hormonal birth control" can have serious side effects and interactions, at least at the level of something like tylenol-fortified opiods…

"Surprise" is relative; "blitzkrieg" (or "shock and awe") might be more apt. Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan, Grenada, Panama all fit the pattern. Kosovo doesn't as much, but then aga…

US defense doctrine mostly revolves around massive surprise first strikes on countries with limited ability to retaliate. Aircraft carriers are OK at this, if you want to, eg, bomb…

The fact that 1/3 of the world's population (in a world where 1/2 lives in urban areas) does not live in such circumstances strongly suggests that that is an arrangement is not emp…

Frankly, I'm OK with trading off massive economic growth and reduction of human misery, including conquering darkness itself, in exchange for having to take a trip out to the count…