Paperweight

Rural counties are conservative, urban counties are liberal, and never the twain shall meet.

I posit that there will always be this conflict until cities have a blue federation superimposed on a red countryside. But the constitution isn't set up that way. Maybe next time.

Did you even read my comment?

Finance is always gambling, ponzis, and fraud. But hey, that's not a bad thing.

Gamblers add liquidity, which is better for society than them hiding in a basement playing cards.

Stocks are essentially ponzi scheme financing. They have all the hallmarks. Then often literally use the cash from sales of stock to pay dividends. Most companies will never pay dividends, though, so the idea for a purchaser is to hold on and cash out while it's big before everyone else does.

Fraud is the worst when people have an expectation of trust, assuming they're protected by regulators. They never are. Madoff. Bre-X. Enron. Even highly regulated markets are always riddled with fraud. People should expect the market to be riddled with fraud and act accordingly - it keeps the populace wise.

Regulations are an attempt to get something for nothing which always just ends up with a bunch of friction, corruption, barriers to entry, and lawyers.

Yup, but at least they're better than the black market alternative. :)

Since the curated boutique App Store idea got perverted, perhaps the cure is to go back to Steve Jobs' original plan to use PWAs.

It's a simple model - make a genetically engineered S. mutans that slightly out-competes the existing, but without generating the lactic acid waste products that softens tooth enamel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine#Attempts_using_...

Dr. Jeffrey D. Hillman invented it in the 1970s-1980s at Harvard under NIH grants (https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-DE004529-10). Swab inoculation and you're done. It worked perfectly in animals and humans.

In the 1990s, he founded Oragenics, to try to commercialize it. The FDA gave them the runaround for about 20 years before they finally mysteriously gave up. In 2016, he got a 17-year patent, so I guess it'll be shelved until 2033 at least.

There's something fundamentally wrong with this picture. Why should a simple application of genetic engineering from the 1980s take 50+ years to make it to market? It's either a complete scam or a conspiracy.

But will the drug approval agencies allow genetically engineered therapies for anything disruptive? For example, they've been blocking the caries vaccine for decades.

Same goes for myopia and crooked teeth.

I've asked my optometrists and orthodontists what cause these problems and just got shrugs and big bills.

Where's the disaster menu?

The only problem with YouTube is that it's not organized. It's not indexable or printable. Videos are on Google's servers - here today and gone tomorrow. Videos are GREAT for stuff that you can't put into text, and YouTube excels at getting info out there from people who aren't that good with computers :)

What I'm thinking is a real-life open-source "tech tree".

I love this! Is there a larger technologist wiki from which you can learn the principles of how to actually build everything from raw materials and generic tools?

Examples: casting iron, making blades, making paint, making plastics, making printer ink, making pharmaceuticals that actually work, etc.

It really seems that at this stage in the game we should be able to form "off-grid" villages that actually have a pretty good standard of living. Or is that all forbidden knowledge in this stage of our technological enslavation? ;)

Honestly, it was corruption. The FDA simply made the requirements for human trials so restrictive as to be impossible.

Life is a series of realizations that you were playing the wrong game.

Political theory: The study of how to maximize the knowledge of decision-makers while minimizing their conflict of interest.

I doubt their state education system is full of literature teachers who encourage a lot of looking past the surface narrative of things.

If you push down the front of the learning curve, the back gets steeper.

I'd say the unit cost of running a proper streaming-rental service is about the same as burning a copy of a DVD (20 cents per movie). There's way more to it than just bandwidth.

Sure you could still pirate (just like you could copy DVDs) but if the path of least resistance (factoring in quality, legal and moral costs) is to just rent it legitimately then that's what people would do. Video stores could have just copied DVDs and the studios were very afraid of DVD-Rs when they came out, but that didn't pan out because it's obviously illegal and immoral.

There was a company in California in the early days that had actual people putting actual DVDs into actual DVD players that would stream on demand across the internet, but they folded when they got a legal threat. It might be legally OK - I don't think it's ever been tested in court.

I used to help out a video rental store, which closed this month. I made them a mail-order rental catalogue (https://rent.leosvideos.ca/) and looked into this whole fiasco.

When you buy a DVD, you can rent it to others without a license. Physical ownership.

When you buy a digital file, you're not allowed to rent it out to others without a license. Digital non-ownership. But you have the bits - that's physical ownership.

People want "one place to rent movies" but that will never work. They'd be a middleman monopoly between you and the studios - and middleman monopolies always turn out bad.

In my opinion, there is a "free market" system that the invisible hand wants, which is a digital analogue of what we had with physical distribution, that reconciles the fact that a digital file really is a (virtual) physical object (on a hard drive), and nothing else will work:

You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.

Result: There would be multiple online streaming rental stores that have huge catalogues of whatever you want.

Speculation: Everyone would just use those. Studios would raise the prices for digital files to $10k+ because they know it will be rented out. The total sales of units would amount to the high water mark of the number of people who want to watch a file at the same time.

We'd have a rich market where there are multiple players in each layer.

Amazing! Thanks!

We need this for YouTube as well, though the blacklist would be extremely large.

In fact, I wonder if this could be implemented as a filter list for uBlock Origin?

Weren't there single-button ones that would continuously drive forward unless you pressed the remote control button, which would switch it to reverse-left?

So to "stop" you had to keep tapping the button.

The UI design of calculators is fascinating. Where do you put the buttons? TI and friends have a randomish layout, let alone the TERRIBLE mobile calculator apps.

(Self-promotion) I always wanted to design a calculator and finally got around to it as a lockdown project - https://ucalc.app

Fine. Not garlic. But that's not my point.

I'm not suggesting trying to cure or prevent the disease, but to promote its symptoms to emerge in asymptomatic carriers so that they can self-isolate.

I lieu of adequate testing, I wonder if we could use mild proinflammatory immune response as a way for carriers to self-detect - i.e. so that they feel more sick, quicker, rather that just carrying it around for days unknowingly. Perhaps garlic?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4417560/#sec4ti...

Highly-automated, "clean" manufacturing is all well and good for billion-dollar highly-capitalized, politically-sheltered megafactories, but what about the other 90% of manufacturers?

Manufacturing is a dirty, dangerous, manual business. I think the small guys will tell you that environmental regulations killed manufacturing in the west, not labour costs. We've been living in lala land with it all offshore, out of sight. If US/EU-level environmental regulations got applied and enforced globally, we'd be sent back to the stone age. Not to mention the litigation risks, intellectual property risks, trade union cartels, needing to hire an electrician to change a lightbulb, etc. (All added up, it's hopelessly calcified, but whatever...)

Don't get me wrong - I really care about the environment - but most regs here are just to look good, not actually about stuff that matters. And pushing it into the third world, where they don't protect the environment at all, is counterproductive.

Zed makes it clear in that book that he hates C and doesn't use it anymore due to its undefined behaviour.

Perhaps better than a book, can anyone authoritatively point to a few small-and-readable but best-in-class open-source C projects to use as a reference?

"Surely this core cryptography library with 21 contributors and led by a superstar Node.JS dev with 9+ million weekly downloads and 1000+ dependants will be a great example to read and learn from..."

Opens source code.

Closes source code.

"Well, looks like I'm going to be a Rust developer from now on."

Haha, I mean if they'd actually improved every part that prematurely broke on the Lada for the past 40 years it would probably be the perfect car by now XD

But Henry Ford lost this argument 90 years ago when GM proved that styling newness trumps all other factors when it comes to sales.

Have they actually improved its weaknesses, though, besides upgrading the engine from time to time?

For example, today I replaced a front wheel hub-bearing on a FWD car. These are designed with a cast steering knuckle that the axle goes through. The bearing assembly is mounted on the front of the bore, the axle goes through the bore into the hub-bearing from the back, and there's a little seal on the back of the bore that the axle rides on.

Diagram: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Steering...

The weakness is that water inevitably gets into the bore around the back seal (since the axle moves around a bit) and the only way out is through the bearing out the front. It rusts out. Nobody has improved this design for the past 50 years, as far as I am aware. Perhaps a weep hole? Perhaps they need to be completely filled with grease?