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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: 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?