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mrbluze writes:
"An interesting blog post by Charles Hugh Smith on Why Banks Are Doomed: Technology and Risk.:
The funny thing about technology is that those threatened by fundamental improvements in technology attempt to harness it to save their industry from extinction. For example, overpriced colleges now charge thousands of dollars for nearly costless massively open online courses (MOOCs) because they retain a monopoly on accreditation (diplomas). Once students are accredited directly--an advancement enabled by technology--colleges' monopoly disappears and so does their raison d'etre.
The same is true of banks. Now that accounting and risk assessment are automated, and borrowers and owners of capital can exchange funds in transparent digital marketplaces, there is no need for banks. But according to banks, only they have the expertise to create riskless debt.
...
One last happy thought: technology cannot be put back in the bottle. The financial/banking sector wants to use technology to increase its middleman skim, but the technology that is already out of the bottle will dismantle the sector as a function of what technology enables: faster, better, cheaper, with greater transparency, fairness and the proper distribution of risk.
There may well be a place for credit unions and community banks in the spectrum of exchanges, but these localized, decentralized enterprises would be unable to amass dangerous concentrations of risk and political influence in a truly transparent and decentralized system of exchanges.
It's still early days, but can new electronic currencies such as Bitcoin become mainstream without the assent of governments?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday February 24 2014, @01:51PM
All governments use force and punishments to enforce a set of rules of behavior. You can't get away from that: Even in a modern democracy, every single day police use force to capture people who want to avoid standing trial, and every single day prison guards use force to make inmates follow the rules of the prison. At its core, government is a claim by an organization or person to determine when and how force may be used among a particular population or over a particular area.
You seem to be equating "Sometimes might is necessary to enforce good behavior" with "Might makes right". If you've determined, for reasons that have nothing to do with superior force, that murder is wrong, and someone commits a murder and refuses to submit to legal judgement for that murder, does that not justify the use of force against the murderer to compel him to stand trial?
Every task is easy if somebody else is doing it.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday February 24 2014, @02:42PM
What one person calls murder another may call accidental death, self defense, or justifiable homicide. The one who makes the call is the one with the most power; the biggest gang with the most guns. The only difference between government and thuggery is the matter of scale and the pretence, illusion, and often belief, of righteousness.
(Score: 1) by Silentknyght on Monday February 24 2014, @04:25PM
No. I don't have time to distill years of philosophy study to elaborate on the proof, but your statement is a fallacy, and one of the earliest ones I learned about in my philosophical education (presumably, among the earliest everyone learns about).
Let's try this: You could make the argument that nothing exists except in the state for which it is perceived or defined (i.e., by us). I could make an argument that such is not the case. The whole "tree falls in the forest" bit. Extending that from "things" to "actions," an action (e.g., murder vs. accident) exists as it "is", not merely as it is defined by others.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday February 25 2014, @12:30AM
The events themselves are indeed as they are, but "murder" is a human concept. If it's so cut and dry, why would the same action with the same motivation be murder in one jurisdiction but self defense in another?