ChemicalWarfare

>> Here is the hard thing to swallow: Some people are worth more than others.

I would add a qualifier here - "in some situations". As human beings per se we all are "worth" the same.

When acting in a specific capacity, however, your ability to perform in that capacity determines your objective worth in that role. And of course it's pretty obvious that some occupations are better suited for ppl with different abilities. Master programmer will (most likely)be a worthless pro running back and (most likely)vice versa.

The thing is - ppl are very accepting of the physical differences between individuals but contrary to what the article is saying - intellectual differences are way more of a taboo.

in some circles it is considered "cool" to be admixed or foreign. there's also a fair amount of virtue signaling attached to that as well.

how far of a distance before the line is drawn? by that logic chimps are also " a group of humans that genetically differ to an unexpected degree from modern humans."

>> We don’t describe speeders as “illegal drivers.”

that's not apples to apples. "illegal driver" would be someone who is breaking the law by the very fact of them driving - ppl with no DLs for example. same with illegal immigrants - they are breaking the law by the very fact of being present in the country they are not permitted to be in.

I'll just pick on the low hanging fruit here:

>> Conservative media does a very good job at keeping at least 50% of the country comically uninformed...

goes both ways depending on your "camp". it's funny though how this contradicts your point about US being "divided" since clearly this statement is as partisan as it gets.

>> The "American Dream" gives people the impression that working hard solves everything and that their country is the best in the world period

what's wrong with that exactly?

debit cards(not to be confused with bank cards) are closer to credit cards than ACH. in some cases - for example "signature debit" vs "pin debit" - just about identical from the flow perspective.

which is why you can use debit cards in most situations where you would use a credit card where instant check of funds availability and hold is required - e.g. hotel incidentals etc.

>> but has a delay for clearing...

not only is there an ODFI-clearing house - RDFI delay caused by the actual "clearing" process - the whole flow starting from the merchant->payment processor step is a sequence of nightly batches with cutoff times factored in to boot.

from the merchant perspective, however, ACH payment is cheaper to process than a credit card payment and is way less likely to end up in a chargeback.

>> Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency.

not really. it's a "...peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution..." according to Satoshi himself.

depends on your definition of "career". there's nothing preventing you from getting to a senior architect/staff engineer/senior consultant etc type level working from home.

if your goal is to be an actual manager (not to be confused with a PM) then yea wfh can impact that prospect. most companies I've dealt with (not all though) explicitly required anyone who had direct reports under them to either be in the office every day or at least be located within a reasonable distance from the office and come in couple of days a week.

Speaking of backups :) We had a very large mission-critical system that we developed and hosted for a fortune 50 client. Long story short - prod DB with tons of records took a crap, proper RCA was never done I suspected HW failure of some sort.

The kicker was - the client grudgingly OKd the restore understanding that they will loose few hours worth of data. BUT. When a DBA attempted to restore - the backup was corrupt lol. They went back day by day - all of the recent backups were corrupt, the "freshest" working backup was about a month old. Some heads rolled as a result.

ok, so 4 pools have over 50% of the hashing power, add 4 more pools right under them and you're at >70%. (https://blockchain.info/pools).

if that's not centralized I don't know what is.

the only argument I can think of here is that BTC isn't currently used for "important"/"mission critical" stuff, tx volumes are negligible compared to fiat methods of payment and ppl who use it are mostly crypto enthusiasts, so if hypothetically these pools go offline and it takes forever for their txs to be processed these users would be ok with that. Along the lines of what happened couple of years ago during the DDOS attack.

From my personal experience (which probably has to do with working in industries where incoming data has a wide array of clients who need it ASAP) - the biggest challenge with any distributed DB system is the problem of "reading your own writes" and how the system approaches it. Not to be confused with tx isolation levels.

It's a balancing act between two extremes - locking everything down and ensuring the tx has been committed on all nodes/propagated to all consumers on one hand and sending an "ack" back to the client with a loose promise of eventual consistency on the other.

Not sure why he's getting downvoted. for a "decentralized" currency bitcoin is quite centralized and is not that hard to control "IRL" so to speak. We're talking like 10 subpoenas/cease and desist orders to bring the whole thing down.

Or one executive order to block a couple of ports on the great firewall of China (I'm oversimplifying but not by much actually).

NoSQL is a great fit for OLAP-type systems where there's tons of high volume writes, eventual consistency (or BASE in general) is good enough, strict schema is not enforced and the consumer - data scientist or a customer service rep etc is not affected too much if they have to wait a few extra seconds for the search results to come back.

for me personally the bigger issue is the actual 9-5ish work hours. I'm way more productive later in the day, so if the schedule would allow something like a Noon-4 pm/break/8 pm -midnight type breakdown I'm all for that. this is sometimes possible with telecommuting arrangements, whenever I'm able to do that I'm more productive, more rested and feel like my personal work/life balance is better.

Well, yea there are scenarios where encryption alone doesn't help, but again it's one of the cornerstones of data safety. Other security measures like restricting data access to a limited set of source ips, masking of the data returned to the browser etc are typically put in place when dealing with sensitive info in addition to encryption of data at rest.

Also, that's not what happened at Equifax, at least based on the "struts vulnerability" narrative that Equifax has been pushing.

>>Encryption is not a panacea.

Sure. But it is a good first step, a must really when dealing with sensitive data. Proper encryption at rest, like let's say a 256 bit AES encryption with a symmetric key itself encrypted with a PKI key pair with private key physically stored on a separate physical machine and frequent key rotation procedures in place would go a long way towards protecting the data.

It's not 100% clear exactly what happened at Equifax so it's hard to tell if at-rest encryption would have helped, from what I understand the working theory is that apache struts CVE-2017-5638 was exploited but it's not 100% clear exactly what went on so yes encryption might have not helped in this particular case.

>> Sugar is 3x as expensive in the US as it is in latin america. Why? We have restrictions on imports, and thus we have to have american companies growing sugar.

not sure this example applies to China blocking FB for example. they are 1 - creating job opportunities for their devs and 2 - taking the piece of the pie straight from FB and putting it into their pockets. (+ probably whatever data they want to collect on their citizens instead of FB doing that).

some protectionism is "good". the problem I have with it is it skews the playing field unless all players do the same thing.

Not sure why he's getting downvoted. Unions are only interested in company's existence but even then very often they are willing to see it go to the brink not budging on concessions etc. Not to mention the whole objection to the "right to work" approach.

there are some pretty notorious organizations out there who did "something good" at some point in the past, but that still doesn't justify bringing them back or endorsing them.

Before something like this happens we need to address the costs. There are ridiculous situations where you can pay $X in cash but when using insurance the charge against the policy will be $X*4 or higher.

Or the fact that ~half of what your provider charges goes towards their own insurance they have to keep to cover lawsuits against them etc.

Also, not sure what the breakdown is outside of the US - here about 50% of the population (the "bottom 50%") effectively don't pay any taxes so the burden on the rest of the population can be significant if there's any movement towards using taxation to pay for universal healthcare.

What about sales engineers though? I've never seen them get commissions even though in a vast majority of cases they are the ones doing the heavy lifting of convincing the client's tech team[s] to go with the product/solution the company is selling?

A little less obvious case, but still - what if we're talking professional services type situation and the architect/engineer assigned to the customer does such a killer job the customer decides to spend more money on their services. Sales person's job at this point is minimal but they still get the commission but the tech person doesn't.

Ok, so how about we lower the tax the "american workers" (more like upper middle class) are paying? Get rid of progressive tax system maybe? Fix the situation where the "bottom 50%" aren't paying anything thus making them an easily manipulated group by promising higher taxation of the "evuhl 1%"?

upvoted. as far as the rural areas vs ACA are concerned - before ACA a lumberjack/construction/handyman/hunting-fishing guide etc type dude could by themselves cheap health insurance that wouldn't break the bank off-season. now it's an ordeal.

>> So you understand that the amount emitted over time is not equal to the amount currently present?

I do, but you don't seem to since you came back with an attempt to quantify the "amount emitted over time"

my question was: >>> what percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is attributed to human activity?

...and I even answered it myself :) ... it's ~4%

that's not apples to apples. how much CO2 was naturally emitted in that timeframe? that would be an apples-to-apples comparison.

>> You talk about a 4% yearly excess as if that was a small amount!

This analogy would only make sense if somehow this 4% wasn't spent or was spent differently than the rest of the money. Also don't forget we're talking .3% if you take all of the greenhouse gases into consideration.

>>...if you think computer models are junk, that discounts many of the positive feedbacks proposed, but also the negative feedbacks which would have to exist, to lead to zero warming.

This sounds like mental gymnastics trying to single out the evuuhl CO2. Given the fact that planet Earth went through multiple heating/cooling cycles way more severe than the current warming trend without any antropogenic influence, applying Occam's razor here would lead me to believe the issue lies elsewhere.

...except that figure is less than 4%. about 8 gigatons are attributed to humans out of ~220 gigatons injected into the atmosphere overall on a yearly basis.

the kicker is - the percentage of CO2 in the overall greenhouse pool is also in the single digits, the most significant (volume-wise) greenhouse gas which comprises about 95% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is water vapor.

so if you factor that in - if humanity ceases to exist tomorrow, there is a potential for a .3% change in greenhouse gas volumes.

That's not what I asked. If total CO2 in the atmosphere is 100%, what portion of that number is attributed to human activity? Also, CO2 itself - out of all of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - what percentage belongs to CO2?

>> anthropogenic warming is down to the direct heating effect of CO2...

OK, let's say this was the case. First question - what percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is attributed to human activity?