Here is a place that sucks the money out of the poor for no particular benefit: check cashings.
You cash your check for a good percentage of it. If they had a bank account they wouldn't need to spend that money. I don't know how it is in other states but the last time I opened a bank account in California it was a pain. The amount of information needed is certainly not possible for a huge chunk of people.
Australia has another business model that is predatory on the poor: home appliance renting.
The dole payment isn't large enough to afford the price of a washing machine - but it is enough to afford the rent for one. Of course in the end you'll wind up paying much more than the outright buy price, but you can't help it, you can't afford to buy the machine.
(Of course these places rent out much more than the "needed" appliances, you can also get fitness equipment, Playstations etc.)
Unless you were in on the ground floor with CPU mining, you aren't getting many coins now. There was only 6 months where you could use GFX cards, and now the "room full of ASICs" take the cake.
Bitcoin is useful if you have goods, services, or currency to convert to it. It is not "free magical money".
Its main attribute is that it is stateless... and that's a big deal and also not a big deal to those whom are in poverty.
Well, for starters, you need a computer that can create the public/private key pair for a BTC transaction. That's nowhere near free... Whereas most banks allow creation of an account for $50
BTC highly fluctuates, making storing money in this currency highly unstable. It's good to pay someone across the world, where US banking regs get in the way.
Getting into the BTC ecosystem is hard, unless you have hard currency to trade, or goods/services. Poor people are still at the whim of those whom have.
>Well, for starters, you need a computer that can create the public/private key pair for a BTC transaction. That's nowhere near free... Whereas most banks allow creation of an account for $50
Cellphones can do that, so while not everyone has a cellphone, anyone that does could create a bitcoin wallet to doesn't charge you an additional fine when your newly opened checking account drops below $50.
> a sign of the continuing global trouble from plummeting low oil prices
Gas is one of those things I have no control over. If it's expensive I have to pay, if it's cheap I have to pay. I'm dependent, and in a city like Los Angeles the alternative is impossible. They raised the price of public transport to a point where it is not even convenient.
So when I go to the gas station and it's cheap I'm happy. I fill it up and have a smile on my face. Am I doing it wrong?
Generally it isn't bad for you if you're not in the oil industry or an oil-dependent country. Places like Venezuela, Nigeria, and even the fabulously rich KSA are in trouble though.
It may be bad if you're in an energy-intensive business that's just made investments in reducing its fuel costs, because now the payoff for those investments is worse.
The US was just starting to transition to an oil exporter due to unconventional oil, but now the price has collapsed the boom in North Dakota etc goes away.
If it's cheap because demand is low, and you work in an industry which is susceptible to world demand, then a low oil price might mean your industry might be about to enter a downturn. So while you might be happy about the cheap oil, you might worry about your job prospects.
If the price you pay doesn't cover the externalities (i.e. tax that includes the cost of cleaning up an equivalent amount of CO2 etc. emissions) then yes you're doing it wrong. If you're covering all that then sure, enjoy.
In the more general case, rapid price swings cause trouble all round (they make it hard for everyone to plan) even when the price adjustment is "correct". For the economy as a whole, low prices are better than high prices, but a stable price would be better than a volatile price even if the volatile average price was lower.
Curious - it renders quite normally here, on an iPad Air running iOS 9.3 beta 2 (13E5191d), plus Safari Adblock. Perhaps the issue's been fixed in the latest WebKit?
Let's encrypt looks so cool with its very few steps. But then you install and you get all sorts of errors not me toned on the page. I spent a good 5 hours debugging yesterday.
When it finally works I see that the certificate expires in 2 months.
Not everyone is having five hours' worth of problems -- many people are getting it to work right immediately -- but there are clearly also people who are running into difficulties which it would be great to figure out how to address.
There needs to be a shared hosting static page generator solution. WordPress does have a plug in but the average user doesn't even know it's a problem.
If you create a website with wrongly attributed quotes Google will pick it up. And the more people complain and link to your website as incorrect the more popular it will get and eventually people just start making memes and sharing on all social networks and then the quotes becomes true in the eyes of the googlers.
> If enough people say that the quote is attributed to the wrong person then does it become fact like the redefinition of "literally"?
I think that's funny as a question, but has the wrong premise. There is no 'actual' meaning of words; they have meaning only by mass human consensus. (What is the actual meaning of 'flumbiliable'?) By contrast, there is an 'actual' first utterer of a quote, whether or not there is any consensus on his or her identity.
(I suppose that you could argue, though, that it is only mass observation of a quote that makes it a quote per se, rather than just something I said; if I mutter something under my breath, and it later occurs as a widely quoted line in a movie, then should it be attributed to me, to the screenwriter, or to the character who said it?)
