I’ve heard some of those mattresses are vulnerable to bugs.
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I thought about it once, and came to the conclusion that the raw ingredients for fertilizer and ammunition are nearly identical. Corner the market on potassium nitrate and phosphates. Don’t worry about the gold, that will come to you in time.
Not that it would help me, I would be among the first to die because of health reasons. No amount of prepping will save me from that.
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The means to produce safe drinking water. Possibly to filter radioactive particles out of it.
@the_borderer I agree with you on those ingredients. Of course ordering them now would get you a visit from the FBI. Look on the bright side–most of the society collapse scenarios wouldn’t be worth living through, anyway.
Don’t worry about long lasting, if the world ends then hanging around is likely to be unpleasant. Instead, invest now in toilet roll, and I guarantee that come the apocalypse you’ll be sitting pretty.
Yes, as quoted from the article. I agree that Buterin should not be regarded as the final voice on such matters, but his is a strong one in the Ethereum community for obvious reasons and some stakeholders will defer to him.
I hope that the “logic” expressed by him about in re: the DAO situation does not continue to hold, but that attitude about popularity and maturity determining whether critical fixes should be applied is not a good one. I hope the rest of the stakeholders see that, at least if they want Ethereum to succeed in the long term.
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Oh there’s no doubt it’s about a dev’s hubris. It’s why I tend to write very reliable but obvious code. If it’s a bit slow I’ll profile it when it becomes a problem to see where I have redundant calls and then clean that up. But beyond that, the well worn path with the fewest quirks I find is the best. It’s also why I don’t do much FLOSS development as there’s too many hipster devs that rather do “clever” code than correct code.
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It seems to go a bit by language and technology, as far as I can tell.
I do a lot of development in Python, and I think that because a lot of people who use Python these days actually come from math and science backgrounds (I do) and not software, it doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue. Sure, I’ve seen code which is too hip by half, but in general a lot of the code I see is understandable.
Don’t get me started on Ruby…
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Full disclosure: I’m not inherently opposed to the idea of cryptocurrencies, nor do I own any or have plans to. Every imaginable form of currency (fiat, specie, crypto, magic beans) is vulnerable to catastrophic collapse in various ways. I’m happy to let smarter or more invested people argue about which basket of vulnerabilities is worse.
But from what’s presented here, it seems like an analogous situation would be every $10 bill in the world vaporizing. It wasn’t supposed to be possible, but someone tried to counterfeit a $10, and this was the unexpected result. Now, we can possibly do some magic that would restore all the tens, but it might undo all cash transactions for the last week. Or create a system where there were twice as many tens, and half of them might vanish again at any moment. Or something equally disturbing. Or maybe it would all be fine! But maybe it wouldn’t.
What I mean is, I can understand why the powers that be of this particular cryptocurrency I’d never heard of before today would rather deal with $300M worth of righteous fury than call attention to the risky and arcane magicks necessary and possible to do in order to set things kinda right. (Right here, a knowledgeable crypto advocate says, “This isn’t arcane at all! It’s how the system is designed to work!” But that’s not the point, since people also expect the system to work without that ever being done. Again, analogies with fiat currencies abound, so this isn’t a crypto-specific issue.)
The stakeholders here aren’t just people with Ether in their virtual pockets; it’s anyone with any kind of crypto-coin. Whatever happens will not be dictated by fairness or being “clued in” to the larger virtues of cryptocurrencies; it’ll be the result of what is best for the people exerting the most leverage on the situation.
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Whoa, those shirts are going to be amazingly popular! I’m going to create several derivative financial instruments based on the volatility around their intraday sales volumes, then get into the business of selling insurance on the bundles of those derivatives I’ll repackage for the secondary market. I’ll use the profits to buy ETH on margin at the bottom of the crash, then flash-trade them for BTC which I’ll short sell in the corresponding BTC crash/ETH rebound. With the money I get from that, I’ll buy shotgun shells and gold, then use those to barter with doomsday preppers for canned beans. Then I’ll have beans for dinner.
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That’s one of the core problems with cryptocurrencies at the moment. They’re often created by Libertarians who define themselves as superior to others first and foremost by their technical skills: selfish bros who use money as a dick-measuring tool and who also have great difficulty admitting they made a serious mistake.
I do think that the cryptocurrency sector is maturing beyond them, mostly due to governments and banks that have to take the needs of those pesky end-users into account. But we’re still a few years off.
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hahaha, your comment is hilarious 
Definitely there is a revenue problem, but Mark addresses it in the link. In ten years the US GDP went from 12trillion to 16trillion. So a larger economy means that more taxes will be collected. The problem is that the US has been cutting taxes since the 60s. And certainly more of that share has been offloaded from Corporations on to citizens. Despite the constant talk about the US being the most taxed country in the world it is simply not true. It is easily checked, just look at the OECD taxation figures and the US is near the bottom third. The huge increase in debt in recent years was the global financial bailout. And really much of it is that the US should start collecting taxes. Why is there a need for deducting mortgage interest expense - I couldn’t believe it when I heard about it as a Canadian. Maybe it might be good to encourage home ownership but really it is giving a tax break to higher income people that don’t need it.
As for post collapse society - chickens, goats, milk cows, and books on how to do stuff, agriculture, raising animals metalworking, how to convert vehicles from gas to woodgas like the Germans did during the war. My dad recalled seeing a lot of those as a kid in WWII Europe. Btw at the end of the war, the big curreny were cigarettes (Lucky Strike) that came over in Red cross packages. Chocolates were another.
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If I were building a tax system from the ground up I would never include such an exemption. If I were revising an existing tax system I’d be extremely careful about messing with such an exemption. That’s some suddenly-1,000,000-people-can’t-pay-their-mortgages-triggers-collapse-in-housing-prices-triggers-repeat-of-2008 level stuff.
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Yes of course it is harder to take things away. Start by reducing it at the top end, say $1.5 million plus.
Also start going after offshore tax havens. According to the book Treasure Islands there is an estimated $29 trillion hidden in tax havens.
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The difficult thing is that it’s actually not that easy to buy a bunch of potassium nitrate. It sends up red flags. (When I worked at the ag supply, there was literally a whole procedure when anyone wanted to buy some.)
A Toronto-based would-be terrorist cell got themselves caught this way years ago in a very famous case. I imagine there are many, many less famous cases of people interested in bomb-making doing the same.
Definitely this. And the ability to fabricate components needed to do so.
Also, distilling. There are a lot of uses for alcohol, and so many things to make it from.
I suppose you could make your own gunpowder. But I’m sure it might be much easier to buy a lifetime supply ammunition and the guns for it.
Ultimately, you would need to be in a community and in defensive location. Certainly in Europe a lot of the old castles would be re-occupied. Which is also why farms in North America and Europe differ - generally here you have a homestead with surrounding farmlands whereas in Europe everyone would live in villages and go out to the farmland. Villages would not be walled or anything but typically farm houses would have a closed courtyard with a gate and a house for living in with a barn for animals on the other side.
