BearGoesChirp (u/BearGoesChirp)

BearGoesChirp commented on US regulators charge three Bitcoin operators with fraud engadget.com/2018/01/19/c... · Posted by u/spacemanspiffy

buahahaha · 8 years ago

It is theft. It's not a scheme, or a game, or a trick. They are stealing money. It needs to be made punishable.

As these frauds get more sophisticated, it won't just be "dumb" money getting burnt. The answer to "someone stole this from me" isn't "well you shouldn't have been so dumb" - whether it is your wallet, a package from your doorstep, or a bit. Theft is theft.

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

There is a dead comment here that I think raises an interesting question (even if perhaps not in the most appropriate way).

When dealing with electronic goods, where do we draw the line with theft. Even in video games, electronic goods do have an effective market value (even if real money trading is banned), and there have been a few court cases surrounding items of great value. Often times the items stolen has a market value too small to be worth investigating, but what of the cases where there is a significant investment. Eve Online has some interesting cases where the market value being above a few thousand US dollars. Diablo 3 use to have a real money auction house with items worth up to $300, and with a gold market that allowed for items to be sold for even more than that.

Now, Diablo 3 bans scams and would take action against players engaging in them. But in Eve Online, it looks like some of the tactics used are allowed. In another game, Path of Exile, scamming people is allowed (and there even seems to be some protections for scammers). While Path of Exile bans real money trading, there is still a black market and certain items do have a market value, some worth noticeable amounts.

And while I can't think of any case yet, it would be possible for a video game to be created where the in game currency is a crypto currency that is usable outside the game as a crypto currency as well.

I'm not saying we should legalize all scamming, but I do think it is worth discussing further where we draw a life, if we draw a line, and what that line looks like.

BearGoesChirp commented on Can (a ==1 && a== 2 && a==3) ever evaluate to true? stackoverflow.com/questio... · Posted by u/_nalply

whack · 8 years ago

I was just about to laugh at JS, when I realized you can do the exact same thing in Java also. a.equals(1) && a.equals(2) && a.equals(3) can evaluate to true, if you overload the equals method with a particularly dumb interpretation. I believe the same principle will also apply to any language that supports operator overloading, such as C++.

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

Should be pretty easy to do in C# as well.

    private int _a;

    public int a { get { _a++; return _a;}}

BearGoesChirp commented on It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii washingtonpost.com/news/m... · Posted by u/zonotope

datpuz · 8 years ago

The UX in most software made for the government is terrible. At the end of the day, I think anyone clicking any button in that list should have been well aware of what those buttons do especially since clicking that button was a routine part of the shift change process in that shop.

Bad UX, sure. But that person dun goofed.

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

People are going to goof at a certain rate. We need to design systems to withstand at least some rate of goofing. We wouldn't get rid of seat belts and just tell people to not goof. Sometimes the goofing is criminally negligent, sometimes it isn't. In this case, I'd say it wasn't.

BearGoesChirp commented on It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii washingtonpost.com/news/m... · Posted by u/zonotope

MaxBarraclough · 8 years ago

That's a good example. Shockingly poor foresight.

It's similar to the "A gun is always loaded" principle. Unless you can tell at a glance that a firearm is not in a ready-to-fire state, you treat it as if it is. People are clumsy and forgetful, and you only have to mess up once.

Leaving the live rounds right next to the blanks, in that way, is pretty indefensible. (Ignoring of course that blanks can still kill, for this analogy.)

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

>Unless you can tell at a glance that a firearm is not in a ready-to-fire state

Chance you are actually able to say that vs. chance you made a mistake in reasoning that conclusion? Still not a bet worth taking.

BearGoesChirp commented on How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking” vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873... · Posted by u/JackFr

vijayr · 8 years ago

Reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic accident and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for accidents to pedestrians

To me, that is the craziest sentence in the article. Reporters were outsourcing writing to the auto industry? Of course they blamed the pedestrians! In what world is this ethical?

What is next? Sending overdose details to pharma companies for them to blame the drug users?

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

> In what world is this ethical?

How many people would be willing to let someone else do their job for them when the cost is adding a little extra bias, something that isn't even a big deal in a single case (but which adds up over time)? It feels like ethics will quickly take a back seat for some small boon.

BearGoesChirp commented on CES Was Full of Useless Robots and Machines That Don’t Work thedailybeast.com/ces-was... · Posted by u/tlb

mentos · 8 years ago

guess you could just clean the clean dishes again

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

Should I be ashamed of how quickly I considered this solution? It would be quite wasteful, but oh so lazy.

BearGoesChirp commented on Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency iconow.net/goldman-sachs-... · Posted by u/justboxing

EpicEng · 8 years ago

> more like gold

But without that nifty property of intrinsic value.

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

Why are we so certain it does? It has certain properties that give it some value. Maybe that value is much much less than the current price and maybe there will be competition that is better in every way, but is there not some small intrinsic value in owning something electronic that I can transfer which has scarcity enforced by algorithms instead of a centralized system?

Then again, if the intrinsic value is worth less than the effort to use it, is there a difference from having no intrinsic value at all?

BearGoesChirp commented on Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina fortune.com/2018/01/10/bi... · Posted by u/downvote_me

jstanley · 8 years ago

> So a miner will never reduce the cost to include a transaction into their block, even when they aren't getting enough to fill up the block?

Sure, if you want to twist the wording like that, they "lower the fee" to the point where they can fill the blocks. But they're not really "lowering their fees". They don't even have a concept of the fee level they're "charging". They can either accept the fees that are available or not.

If they are mining at all then they want to accept the best fees that are available. There is literally no rationale for them to be mining non-full blocks when fee-paying transactions are available to put in the blocks. It's not like it costs more to mine a larger block. The cost to mine a block is fixed, so you may as well get as much fees as you can find.

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

>They can either accept the fees that are available or not.

Couldn't the same be said of a brick and mortar store? They either accept the offers they are given or they don't. That for some item they only accept offers of exactly 9.99 (plus tax), rejecting not only lower offers but higher offers, doesn't change that the interaction can be described in the same fashion.

All the rest also applies to normal supply and demand. When you do a production run of some item, the cost tends to be fixed per item. Doing another run at a different time may cost different, and it is possible for something extreme to happen (factory accident), but in general the cost of production of a single run is the same.

I see nothing about this that would void basic economic reasoning, where things like 'reducing fees' happens in certain conditions.

BearGoesChirp commented on Rents dropping significantly across the Seattle area after new construction seattletimes.com/business... · Posted by u/jseliger

philipodonnell · 8 years ago

I wish more people though this way.

If something is a rule then the majority decided it should be that way. If you don't like it, then you are in the minority. If that surprises you, then you may not be accurately measuring the real majorities and minorities, and it would benefit all of to try to understand what the real rules are.

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

>If something is a rule then the majority decided it should be that way.

Few systems are direct democracies. Isn't it more likely the people decided the rule maker should be who the rule maker is (or makers are) and the rule maker(s) then decided what the law should be. And that is just some of the political systems you can model.

Think of like how congress like a <25% approval rating but most of them keep getting voted back in.

BearGoesChirp commented on Rents dropping significantly across the Seattle area after new construction seattletimes.com/business... · Posted by u/jseliger

AnthonyMouse · 8 years ago

> I wonder, if you count agents in a market economy as having not just money to spend making rational purchases, but also political power as a sort of alternate currency (represented by a vote each), is NIMBY really a rational market reaction.

The problem comes when you realize what you have to do to get a vote, which is to buy a house. If you can't afford to live there then you can't vote for policies that will reduce housing costs there because you aren't a resident. And once you have a vote because you own a house, now you want housing prices to go up rather than down.

There is no way for the people who need less expensive housing to vote for it, and the opposite incentive for the people who could vote for it to actually do that.

BearGoesChirp · 8 years ago

I was more just thinking about how political actions/will/impacts can be simulated as a second resource in an economy much like how we simulate money. Think simulation/exploration/explanation of the idea, not recommendation.

I've developer a few simplistic economic simulations in the past for fun, some of which included land ownership, but I never considered adding each agent having the ability to modify the law of land ownership as part of the simulation. The comment made me think of what would the impact of adding it be, and if there is less validity of models which don't include it.