The combination of checking account, debit card, and local bank branch helps businesses:
- take care of the cash that accumulates on premises.
- take care of routine bills.
- purchase goods by distance sales
The article discusses the loss of these benefits. Bitcoin won't solve them until it's more widely accepted.
Sure, you can convert your cash to other stores of value (bitcoin, gold deposits, and so on) and that may be better than keeping cash on premises. But, again, I think most business owners have better things to do with their time than deal with these kinds of transactions, and they don't like the exchange rate risks.
The buy sell spread on LocalBitcoins seems to be in the region of $150-200/bitcoin for cash deals. That doesn't seem too attractive for using bitcoin as an alternative to a checking account.
Of course their top 3 cellphone providers had no knowledge of this... (our American companies said the same thing). They probably got the cellphone data from the NSA. (For a small fee of course, added to our black budget.)
This is interesting though and something I think we should consider if we Americans ever get the courage to stand up to our government for it's abuses of power. It semi-happened with Occupy but they were barking up the wrong tree. You can only force a private bank/companies hand with the power of government. They can stand out their all day and do whatever, but it would be easier if a law or resolution were passed.
How do you know if someone at a protest is a 'plant' whose job is too incite violence so as to show the protest as negative regardless of their stated goals.
I was thinking of a system maybe, that would definitely be reputation based, but one where you could verify someones identity while still maintaining a certain level of privacy. Maybe something similar to how bitcoin works. Everybody could have a public key that anyone at the protest could scan if needed and say 'ya this person's legit, they have XXX amount of reputation, we are connected by XX people, etc' or 'woah, who are you? you have -XXX reputation and no one here knows you'... but this idea needs to be developed further...
When i put my 'evil' cap on and think how I would use the data if I had all the data in the world and I wanted to stop people protesting me, I would use those kinds of cellphone SMS messages to intimidate people in the area and I would want them to be divided by those who want to achieve revolution nonviolently and those who would easily engage in violence if given the opportunity. Taking it a step further, I would use that system the NSA made that tracks internet browsing history especially for porn, to threaten people that their data might be 'leaked' if they continue to protest. Or perhaps sent messages and calls can be 'rerouted' to different people to cause confusion in their communications. Or perhaps I'd use a few 'if-then' simulations to put the right police officer in front of the right protestor so that violence would be most likely to occur. evil cap off.
The rest of the world seems to be taking the lead in standing up to corruption, but when America catches up, I want us to lead by example of how it should efficiently and safely be done.
It probably has to do with how the YBB+ portrayed some teacher in a bad light. The integrity of those 'excellent' professors and tenured careers has to be protected.
I wish my university even had all those reviews we do at the end of the year available for all to see. They don't do sh*t with it. I once wasted my time by suggesting my university create an API for students to easily get any data about the school. B/c then we would all see how 'great' some of our professors are and what we each think about them.
Sure 3rd party website like 'ratemyprofessor' are good, but they don't have the ease of acquiring rating data like schools do that pass out reviews to each student at the end of a semester. They have to protect the 'wizard of oz' lest we all see who really is behind the curtain.
"anticipatory shipping", this is pretty much just saying that local warehouses/stores should anticipate demand by using as much data as possible. For Amazon that means wishlists, viewing history, shopping carts, emails etc. This is good Jeff Bezos, but not good enough. I could do this better.
In order to best anticipate demand, they should be trying to make deals with manufactures instead. This system would initially work best with subscription based products. And then we could figure out how to turn everything into a type of subscription.
Manufactures have a release cycle that is important to them staying 'competitive'. So they have to constantly make new models and 'retire' the old ones by planned obsolescence forcing us to buy the new slightly improved model that has a time bomb built in it to go off when the next model comes out.
So basically Amazon needs to place their customers in a 'release preference' category. With names like, 'bleeding-edge','beta','stable','2 generations back', or 'annually/biannually'. This could make manufactures more responsible and get the latest designs out of secret labs and into consumers hands quicker.
Customers can choose which category they want to be included in for different product families. So for example, I might choose the 'bleeding-edge' release cycle for my phone, but prefer a biannual subscription for a refrigerator or car.
And unless someone has a brand preference, the best products can be automatically chosen based on reviews from amazon and social networks and blogs and benchmarks on hardware/battery life/speed/etc
Discounts will be given for recycling your previous models, and as our 3d printing becomes better and closer to home, eventually we might just get 'ink' credits to print out phones, computers, cars, furniture, TV's etc.
On a side note, this kind of system would be the system of all systems and it would be hard for competitors to start (without the data owned by Amazon). So I don't think 'Amazon' should get to boast and claim this system as their own and keep the profits. I would like to see this type of system organized at the national level at first (until we fully embrace globalization) and we could vote on an open source 'shopping and distribution' system whose profits go back directly to the people in the countries they operate. Then people could join and accept a national system to be proud of, one whose contributors, ideas,transactions,money,etc are all open and viewable by anyone to encourage accountability.
blah blah Obama just talking, trying to keep us on the edge, give the dogs a bone.
These government people move way to slowly, how long does it take with todays technology to communicate and figure out what needs to change? The longer we just keep 'talking', the longer they can continue with their scraping of data and secrets.
Someone or something is going to have the data; there's nothing that can be done about that. Marketers have been doing for a long time, the NSA just got CAUGHT. Marketers use it to make money by making sure you see the best ad for you, the NSA uses it to make money by 'stopping terrorists'. But what if all the data was free and the programs turing it into useful information were open-sourced? That would change the market entirely. Anyone could see the most important scraped news of the day, whether its a terrorist threat or just thrending news. It could be like a social network that everybody has already joined. Privacy would be interesting. Maybe you could only see from others what you choose to share yourself. But thats too long to get into here...
Clearly what needs to be done is this: the data that the NSA collects should only be accessible by the program. It needs to be fully autonomous. The biggest concern with the vast collection of data and secrets is the human element. So we should simply take the human element out of it. Make an open-sourced program and algorithm that reads the data when it needs to and automatically gets the results to those who need to see it. The code could be posted on github and master pulls can be voted on by the whole world, but we can start with just America maybe at first.
All of America shuts down for simple things such as football and the superbowl, dead peoples birthdays, religious holidays. I think we could dedicate a day or two to a simultaneous conversion about important things happening in our country moderated by artificial intelligence and by the end of the day take action on what we agreed upon. Gallup releases 'polls' so quickly, how come nothing comes from those?
But if we don't trust an artificial intelligence then WHO can we trust? Obama? Clapper? The Pope?
We could physically implement this system ourselves if we needed to, after we figure out what we as a nation/world want. There's a data center in Utah. We could literally go there and take control. but how many people would a 'protest' like that require? and if we come to the conclusion that thats the only other option, we should hurry before the military and Google finalize the perfect humanoid robot. Or else all hope might be lost. The people vs armies of drones and robots. Elysium here we come.
this is great but with these devices and 'the internet of things', the most important part is not the devices but the data. And with this, instead of Google getting all the data, Spark is getting the data, and the data is where the money is. And once they get more data and learn to use it, they will become a more valuable company and eventually might get acquired.
I think for something to truly be open-source and beneficial for everyone, everything about it must be open, including the data. The data from all the connected devices globally could be stored on an open database that anyone can access and use. Its one thing to 'learn' with the limited data that one device might generate, but for a machine to 'learn to learn' it should be able to study ALL the data that might be useful.
This kind of organization could lead to a type of opensource corporation where anyone can be an 'employee'. Employment and compensation could be based off a public list of contributions to the project. To each according to his contribution.
This idea could be applied to anything that's used in public and generates data. Autonomous cars, home automation, drones, (NSA data, slightly more complicated but still could be open sourced). But as long as we're tricking ourselves into thinking we need 'money' to survive, the organization or company with the most of it wins.
The best way we can get the attention of the companies is by causing them to lose profits. This is best done by an organized boycott of their goods and services. It will get their attention very quickly. But currently we don't have a central website to browse and search boycotts and other forms of protest.
In addition to protesting, we should also consider building a free open source network thats protected and run by the community. (It could be run by the government, but until the government is 'for and by the people', we'll crowdsource the maintainance and seek to rapidly automate the work that nobody would volunteer for) We can give ourselves the best, but lets start with free gigabit internet wired and wireless for all of America! What would this 'cost' in terms of money? millions or billions? But the resources are here; just being hoarded until money is traded. Would AT&T build a free network for us? Not if it meant losing money to Verizon. But what if it wasnt about money? The value in having a fully connected country is priceless.
Thankfully we have the government to protect us against trusts and monopoly's. But what if the trust or monopoly was a community one? If AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile colluded to give free gigabit internet to America, they could combine their separately walled gardens and use those resources to further the human race. But this would have to be a guaranttee so that once everyone put all their time and resources into this, some CEO cant just flip a switch and start charging. Once free, always free. So if they did this it would probably mean giving up their pride and names. I mean, would this free network be called Verizon? Why do they get their name on it? So we could crowdsource a new name for our free network so no one can boast. US Telecom, US Net, Free Net, the name can be anything, something we would all be proud to get behind. the most important part is the 'us' and 'US'. All of us in the US have the resources to take care of all of US(just focusing on America now, but eventually we could help the world). These telecom companies will either become part of the solution or they will precipitate out.
Again though, this would be a huge project and there's currently no website we can go to in order to find and take part in these country and perhaps global initiatives. Imagine a mix of Kickstarter and Change.org. First a project or idea is petitioned to the community and if enough people like it and think it would be the best solution, then its opened up to a crowdsourcing page to collect funds and not just money but people can also donate the final resources that are ultimately needed, which is what the money would eventually be traded for anyways....more to come, working on this website...
Wow, Eric Schmidt is blinded by his desire to maintain power. His greatest fear is losing his power... He says private drones should be banned and mentions nothing about the commercial use of drones by companies, especially his own company. And then he uses a small isolated example of drones being used for evil as to why they should be banned...terrorists? come on! Nothing is mentioned about drones being used for search and rescue, global natural resource tracking, travel, or even space exploration! This is clearly an attempt by a frightened individual to maintain control.
What we should start considering and making plans for is pooling our resources together in order to setup a system of public, open-sourced drones whose data is freely available to everyone, with an official, central repository backed up and stored at the NSA (after we open-source that and get a public API working).
Google's street view cars would no longer be needed. We could have a real-time digital duplicate of reality running using the NSA's resources. Anybody can plug in and 'teleport' anywhere in the world. Any crime that would happen would be recorded live, and emergency broadcast systems can be implemented.
Unfortunately, no person or company could profit from this publicly available data. Any monetized analysis tool would be duplicated and hosted publicly for free via the NSA web services. All open source and anyone can view and improve the code and master pulls can be voted on by the community.
This is great for location and mapping data, but what about taking it a step further and maybe we could use these drones as a sort of 'opt-in' activity tracker. We've heard of the military using gait detection from drones to track 'terrorists'. Well, how many people can one drone track at a time? Also, can it measure heart-rate, steps taken, breathes per minute, O2 levels, etc... There goes fitbit and fuelband...
This is just getting started, there's still traveling and shipping that can be freed and open-sourced...
