good_gnu

I don't understand why this is a problem specifically with bitcoin. Is this not a problem with any other currency? I mean I appreciate the sentiment but how does it even matter in which currency the rich are rich and the poor are poor?

The purpose of all the jargon that Scrum introduces is to avoid naming collisions with prior terminology.

You probably have a good idea of what a product manager should be doing but someone else in a different company might have a different opinion. Introducing a new term eliminates this source of confusion.

Admittedly, all the jargon you encounter when learning about Scrum can make you feel like you're joining a cult. However, there is a reason behind introducing it.

Did aristocrats in the middle ages ascribe their position in society to their individual actions or to their being born into aristocracy?

Your cousins are misrepresenting the situation in Europe at least with respect to Germany.

People in Germany do not generally make binding decisions on their specific career path until they are sixteen and after that career switches do happen.

In your particular case you might have been recommended for a vocational path at age 10 or so and then you could have disregarded that recommendation (possible at least in Germany's most populous State). If you had followed that path, you would have still been able to switch after any semester if your grades were considered sufficient. Or you would have completed that path and started an apprenticeship as an electrician. This would also allow you to enroll at any state university in a related major (e.g. electrical engineering). There are also courses that you can take to obtain the general university entrance qualification necessary for enrolling in any field of your choice.

The point I am making is that there is much more flexibility in Germany than you currently imagine. There are many who still criticize the German system otherwise (me included), because straying from the recommendation that your elementary school teacher gives you does come with some friction. Also, there is some empirical evidence that the recommendations can depend on the social class of the child (i.e. kids with rich parents are put on the academic path) in practice. However nobody is "locked in" to any career progression.

Generally, the rationale of term limits seems to be to prevent a dictatorial or monarchistic system from emerging.

However, consider the rise of the National Socialists in Germany: In 1930, they first got a result > 3% in a federal election. By the end of 1933 all other political parties were banned. No practical term limit could have prevented this dictatorship, even though they never got more than 44% of the vote in a federal election, i.e. never enough to really change the constitution by democratic means. So we definitely know that term limits are not a completely reliable measure.

Yes, but if everyone speaks to you whenever they need to, you might be interrupted in your work very frequently which can be stressful. If only people could communicate all of these issues say once a day or so...

Breaking News: Twitter is free to not boost his tweets for any reason of their choice or no reason at all in exactly the same way that Fox news is free to only cover things from a conservative point of view.

Curiously, you only see Scott Adams complaining about one of these things.

>The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims.

Basically things that Ayn Rand hates are bad--except when Ayn Rand does them and then it's because the things are unreasonable, not Ayn Rand.

So now after 3 layers of us trying to coax you into giving us a little bit more concrete detail on your argument, you link an article in German which a lot of people here cannot read?

Anyway, the article's argument is that the certificates for renewable energy are created in e.g. Norway and Switzerland where it is easy to produce cheap hydropower which cannot be transported to Germany. Meanwhile the Norwegian and Swiss do not buy energy with certificates because they "know" that their energy is clean.

This is indeed true and a valid argument. However Norway and Switzerland produce only a finite amount of these certificates. If demand for certified green energy does not exceed this supply then this is simply a sign that not enough people are willing to pay extra for certified green energy which is regrettable but not a fault of this system.

So, basically you believe that people are gaming the system but you have no examples of how this happens or which companies might be doing this?

In (1) you assume that people buy green energy mainly or to a large extent to reduce the emissions they personally suffer from. Have you considered that a big reason for many people to buy green energy might just be to provide incentives for green energy production in order to combat emissions globally without regard for whether they personally benefit from it? If everyone consumes energy "covered" by certificates, this increases viability of producing green energy.

In (2) you say that the scheme is likely to be gamed. Can you elaborate on how that would look like? Does this "Occam's razor" necessarily mean that only simple laws are effective?

Also in (2) you claim that there is not enough real green energy available to satisfy the demand. This is obviously true but this means that the demand creates an incentive for companies to produce green energy wherever possible.

Overall what this system really provides is an option for consumers to optionally subsidize green energy producing companies and so far I have not really heard of any concrete case in which this system has been gamed. Do you know any?

For me, this looks MUCH more like Haskell than Python and I think that this is symptomatic of an erroneous claim that some functional programming proponents seem to constantly make: That declarative, "mathy","deconstructive" programming is somehow easier to learn than imperative, "algorithmic", step-by-step constructive programming.

In reality, most people in the world struggle with abstract mathematics and find it much more intuitive to think about a program as a series of steps and in terms of control flow. Programming beginners want to draw nice pictures on their computer, not struggle with understanding and implementing some recursive function.

This is of course not to say that recursion is not an important concept or that functional languages have no merits. They are however complicated abstractions over simple concretions that are much easier to understand for a beginner.

And in this way you end up with 0 regulations, which I assume we are supposed to consider a feature, not a bug?

Source?