base698
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Everything posted by base698
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I don't agree with the tinfoil hat crowd but do think bitcoin solves some pretty serious problems. The first being data leaks, like the recent Target leak, isn't an issue with bitcoin payments. Once you pay with bitcoin no one can recharge you. As a merchant you don't have to worry about the merchant freezing your account or the buyer issuing a chargeback. Micropayments are the last issue. You could charge .001 to read an article online. It's silly to think of it as a replacement for the USD, but it is a great compliment.
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I didn't say it was, that's why I made a distinction between the consumer and the merchant. I would much rather use bitcoin to buy something instead of having my credit card information stored by a third party indefinitely.
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I think at current difficulty it would take hundreds of years to mine a block. You'd be better off buying lottery tickets :)
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One thing that's gotten lost in the speculative talk is its utility. Buying online is much less of a risk with bitcoin. As a merchant you don't have to worry about charge backs. As a consumer you don't have to enter a long form proving you are the card owner, since it operates more like cash. Consumers also don't have to worry about the merchants leaking their card information. There is also multiparty payment useful for contracts. You can make it so two of three parties have to agree for the transaction to go through. Useful for arbitration in absence of a notary.
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I reduced my holdings to 10% of what they were before this run up. I've done this 3 times now, seems like a good strategy.
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But they aren't anymore, which is kind of why it isn't as big of a stretch as it would of been if people still used shiny rocks for money. Given shiny rocks are limited it's harder to start trillion dollar wars or use them to finance billion dollar business deals and real estate deals. I know, it's like a libertarian wet dream. Completely unregulated free market. You can easily see the importance of some of the controls we have in the current monetary system as well as supply and demand in real time. Quite fascinating to me, and that's not even going into the technical side which is even more fascinating.
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I don't know what this has to do with the discussion. It's a currency, so it has no underpinning of value like the US dollar. The volume I've messed with it over the past 4 years has never resulted in a problem of transferring it into another currency.
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I'm fine with today's monetary system too. I see bitcoin as a compliment not a replacement to our monetary system. I look at it as a growing opportunity for the third world who don't have enough capital for the 1st world to care to solve their problems.
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I don't understand this line of thought. Why is it all or nothing? Can't you just invest 1% in it and hold? If you'd of bought at previous highs and held for a few years your return would be astronomical. Three years ago some friends from work and I bought $300 worth when it was at $12. Over time it sunk down to $3 and I bought a few more. He sold when it went down and lost then his shit when it skyrocketed. I had kept it and offloaded it at $200. If you think through the issues of today's money and understand the problems bitcoin solves, then it isn't that sketchy. One of the problems is how to loan $100 to a goat herder without the bank taking 50%, or how to keep bankers from over leveraging your money. It has insane practical value, but it is speculative and risky, but risk is something that can be managed. Mining requires a huge investment now, and you'd never mine a block of bitcoins without being part of a mining pool.
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It hit $900 a piece today briefly. Settling around $750. http://bitcoincharts.com/ The senate had a hearing about bitcoin today that was very positive. Likely part of the increase.
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It wasn't gross receipts for the business, but it was the take home gross. I'm sure they took home $1.2 after taxes. Why don't you explain since you're close to the trade :) I just remembered some story about Goldman. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2013/07/24/how-goldman-sachs-and-wall-street-manipulate-alumnimum-and-other-commodities
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Horse cocky. Farmers are the farthest from free market you can get. The government pays subsidies for all kind a of things they shouldn't and even have protections and price controls. Not to mention the market manipulation by commodity traders... My wife used to specialize in auditing medical practices. It's anecdotal, but they were all making $2 mil a year. I'd always here stories of them bitching about $200 fee making her job harder.
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I have used these two: https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/on-the-trail/wrist-worn/foretrex-301/prod30025.html http://www.suunto.com/Products/sports-watches/Suunto-Ambit2/Suunto-Ambit2-Black/ The Foretrex you can just turn on in the plane and forget about. It's also useful to know how far past the spot you are before you exit or get to the door. I just got the Ambit2, so I can't speak as much about it. I made a display that has ground speed, glide ratio and altitude which seemed to work well on the 2 jumps I used it.
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I've used a garmin wrist mount for most of this data and never had issues with it acquiring a signal. I've had tracks where my forward was more like 80mph and when maxing out a vampire3 forward speed is as high as 110 mph. When I'm relaxed it's about 80mph.
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I removed mine from the goggles and am looking for other spots to mount it in my helmet. Anyone else do this? When it works it works super well. The peripheral below does suck a lot.
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It's really not an absolute trade as you claim. You can force a single group to take longer in the door, which fixes both issues--you get two distinct landing groups and have extra horizontal separation. People are going to continue to make bad decisions under canopy. If you can solve both problems that seems best. All this is even sillier when considering the winds have to be just right for it to even be an issue.
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I'm using the data from the fatality database for United States. Would like to have all the data further back, if you have a link let me know.
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Ok, so you didn't read anything else I said, but I'll address this first. You're essentially saying that vertical separation is meaningless and then attributing horizontal separation to a single variable of which there are at least a dozen: Upper wind speed, how much movement the group makes, the direction of tracking the groups pick, how long they track, how much time they give between groups, time under canopy before the next group opens. Everything has to go completely wrong for there to be even a chance of collision. My fear is that this was adopted with little actual reason and caused a much larger risk in it's place. Yes and instead of using AADs people could just open higher. I frequently land out and doing it every jump when I was on a highly loaded canopy sucked. I am in the process of upsizing because of it, but tell that to the new swooper with 500 jumps while he takes out a canopy he didn't see due to high congestion.
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Collision is the 30 column. I left unlabeled ones in of which there are three. After 2004 the total fatals go down but collisions go up. I wish the data went back further. Changed the alignment so that is clearer.
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I'm not sure what you're saying. The data says to me total fatalities went down and collisions went up. Roughly in the same time frame free fliers out first started to become the norm. Using a flash movie that only takes into account one variable of the whole issue seems shortsighted. To boot I don't remember a rash of freefall/canopy collisions to spur the change. For the sake of this argument it's only wind drift that matters.
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It's somewhat meaningless by itself and there doesn't seem to be enough data further back, but using the fatality database there seems to be many more collisions after 2004 as a proportion of fatalities. There is also limited data as to what the parties involved in the collision were doing. I would attribute it more to the jumper in question moving around the whole jump than freefall drift.
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At the expense of how many canopy collisions because free fliers on their new hot cross braced canopies zoom through all the belly fliers?
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Except for all those other variables like unintentional horizontal movement, picking the same line tracking and getting out at the exact wrong time. The risk of collision is easily mitigated by adding more time at the transition.
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^ My argument is that doing it this way increases traffic, not that it prevents freefall collisions. The freefall collision risk can be circumvented by just adding a longer time between the transition.
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I did most of my jumping at a drop zone with free fliers out first, and I never saw a problem either. I think this was a solution in search of a problem and more importantly I believe it to be such a gross oversimplification as to be useless at best. Most importantly I think it congests the landing area by causing the transition groups to open at the same time. If freefliers are out first then they have the exit separation + the extra time created by moving at a higher speed to move out of the way of the next group both vertically and horizontally. I've had a belief for some time that the increase in canopy collisions incidents are at least in part due to mass adoption of free fliers out last. It congests the landing area by having the transition groups in both belly and freefly opening at almost exactly the same time. Too bad you can't tag posts as controversial :) There are other reasons I believed it to be silly, but they dwarf the main reason.