Releasing a database of personal info? Shame on you! But we have laws against that...

That's too much future tech, but for now -- why not install a titanium plate? At least it won't cause rejection issues, and functionality wise is no worse than current transplants. And, instead of on-lookers getting revulsed, you'll get looks of awe. Severely disfigured wetware makes people say they offer compassion, but in reality they're severely disgusted and feel an urge to distance themselves from you -- because biologically, looking ill means something potentially transmissible, which our instincts try to protect us from. A visibly artificial face avoids all that.

Assuming equal regulatory burden, fission power is cheapest, not most expensive. For example, for an equivalent safety level, coal plants would need to capture every bit of reaction products (which currently are vented into the air), store them safely, and place somewhere where they'd no longer cause harm if released. Which for combustion products means forever. The plan itself would need decade-long studies wrt its localisation, many rounds of votes among the regional population -- etc. And throw in another 10x cost factor of bureaucratic costs.

The reason? Completely banning nuclear power was unfeasible politically, but adding layers after layers of "safety" was easy to be voted in.

Result? Hardly any new plants have been built. A good part of existing installed power dates back to the first generation -- which was indeed unsafe (as expected of any new technology). All three plants that failed have been built in the '60s.

Not if the party in question has been repeatedly caught concealing malice. You'd be a fool to trust, or even assume good will, when dealing with anything by Microsoft, NSA, Facebook, etc.

Here, we have something that looks bad and has been done by a prior offender. Thus, it needs to be viewed with suspicion by default.

Not so surprising that red-socialism and brown-socialism are almost the same.

Not any different from using Windows without AI.

Even if you do keep the key safe, it's impossible to keep YOU safe. A heart attack, a drunk truck driver, a falling meteorite -- are all pretty good at destroying wetware.

I haven't been paying close attention, thus my first question: did they manage to factor an arbitrary number larger than 21?

No. Economy is movement of value, not of money. That's just speculation.

As little kids in a socialist country, we got fed the following tale:
Heating fuel in a mining town was very expensive. So the protagonist took a cart and a friend, went to the other side of a forest to buy wood cheaply, and with much effort, hauled it home. When asked why he won't haul another load and sell it at home, the guy answered: "I'm a worker not a speculant".
Abstracting from the nonsense of the price difference of wood being so high on two sides of a forest, the commies who produced this piece of propaganda inadvertently produced a nice example why trade is good despite not producing something by itself: the value it creates comes from moving goods to where they're appreciated (ie, needed).

Thus: economy is the movement of value (goods, services) between different owners who value those goods and services differently.
On the other hand, movement of money or similar tokens (eg. a wash trade) isn't valuable by itself.

If inflation is not a tax, then where does the value of newly printed or fractionally lent money come from? Money has no intrinsic value, it's a mere token -- if you add more tokens, the value of every existing token is suddenly lowered.

People not spending money is bad... how? This doesn't slow the economy any, nor does it freeze any value -- all it freezes is some _money_. Any money that's temporarily out of circulation increases the value of any actual assets that are in use.

As for borrowing costs, you got that reversed: if there's inflation, borrowing gives you an advantage by having the real cost decrease as time goes. With deflation, you need to actually pay to borrow.

Yet the world's average inflation goes around 5%, not 1%. Surely, they wouldn't be so incompetent if they meant it?

They don't claim that an inflation of 20% is good, indeed -- but only because with the economy hurting so much even financial institutions can't reliably make money. But, their claim is that any deflation, even of 1% or lower, is worse than a runaway inflation. And that's pure bullshit.

Well... and how, pray tell, the regular folk could make their voices heard? By now 2/3 of those polled who gave a yes/no answer want to Brejoin, yet your three largest parties all swear to keep out.

There's no need for a "backing", what matters is that it's impossible to "print money". Physical metal coins are only one way to do so, and not even the best (as they can be mined, and take up metals that could be put into useful work). Of course, current cryptocurriences are not that good, either -- waste of electricity, waste of disk space (Bitcoin currently needs 700GB to meaningfully participate), transaction costs, etc. Metal coins are merely the most traditional one.

Too bad, those in power (and money = power) have grown too attached to the ability to pull money out of thin air. Debasing of coins was popular for thousands of years, most countries defaulted in early 20th century (Germany 1914, UK 1925, US 1933) then successively removed remaining safety barriers (US went into freefall in 1971). And most of money from nothing is "produced" by banks rather than governments.

We are told that "inflation is good" by economists -- for me, it's nothing but a tax. Asking an economist whose very paycheck comes from inflationary measures is same as asking a christian Bible scholar whether the Bible is trustworthy.

That you don't self-identify as a racist, doesn't mean that you're not one. You insist that members of a certain race should have benefits above others, for no reason relevant to the people concerned.

DEI is advertised by its proponents as "anti-racism". And as such, it's to racism as antimatter is to matter: weighs the same, behaves the same, looks the same, has some colors flipped, acts violently when in contact with its counterpart -- but as long as all of the flipped "colors" remain flipped, indistinguishable from it.

So here's a math exercise: assuming a normal distribution (which is incredibly "infectious" as long as the scores have multiple different causes), generate a population of scores for group A and for group B, with group B having the average lower by X points. Now select the best candidates, using any of the following strategies:
* quotas: reserve A/(A+B) spots for group A, B/(A+B) spots for group B
* Affirmative Action: give every candidate from B X extra points, pick from the global population
* meritocracy: pick from the global population based only on the scores, completely blind to race/gender/zodiac sign/odd-or-even date of birth/etc
* penalty for the "inferior" group: subtract X points from every candidate from B, pick globally
* traditional racism: pick from only group A
Now compare the total score of candidates you picked for every strategy.

It doesn't matter if groups A vs B differ by race, gender, etc -- the mechanism is the same.