StormChaser_5

Agree 100% but for my own mental health I like to pretend loyalty does exist day to day but give myself a wake up call if that credit account as you call it is getting too big

The rule of thumb I use for chip design is that verification takes at least 2/3s of development. Sometimes more. 50% would be nice but I think is optimistic

I think you would just buy a cheap FPGA board and use that wouldn't you? No need to do a full chip until you know what you are doing. That would be like building a server farm just to do your software hello world

Not sure that's true. America's military keeps peace for trade to happen in a lot of the world... Not always successfully but it's there. That works because they have the reserve currency and can therefore print money for free. Which benefits the US greatly in all sorts of ways. But everyone else also sees some good. If that goes away its going to have impacts on everyone else as well as America. Maybe not as much of an impact on the rest of the world but this is not good for anyone. I can get the anger at the way the US acts, particularly over the last couple of weeks, but that doesn't mean that them doing badly helps the rest of us

It's not like the tariffs are gone. It's still 10% for everyone but China. That only seems small in comparison to what was being proposed before. I wonder will EU and others wait out 90 days while negotiating or match the 10% in kind

Here in Ireland I've never had to wait more than a few hours to see a doctor to get a prescription for an infection. Can be a bit harder at the weekend but still seen the same day

It's on the list. They have to pay 10%

Great company. Looking forward to seeing how this goes.

If it's not such a far away conflict then why isn't Putin looking for a way to stop? If anything the war shows how little Putin cares about his own people, even those close around him and how willing he is to spend their lives to burnish his legacy. In that case why would you think that any backing down on Ukraine leads to anything other than him or his successors wanting to swallow more?

Personally I don't see any real chance of nuclear escalation over Ukraine on both sides. The war needs to end but to do that Putin needs to be given a way to deescalate and claim a win at home. But that can only be allowed to happen if Ukraine is made safe and secure once again and if Putin is willing to swallow that. And I see no evidence of that being true.

Depends what their costs are but if all claims would take 85.5 of their premiums with the rest their overhead costs then I think most of their customers would be happy

Surely that sory of video would be easy to fake if needed these days?

New jobs or new environments in general can be hard. I'm starting a new job soon and not looking forward to that aspect of things. I guess making an effort to talk with people about their projects even if you are not directly working in them might help. I'm going to be in a similar situation - new office, working on something different from everyone else there - so any advice anyone has would be welcome.

Yes. Or at least here in Ireland

Ireland was probably a bad example. And agree GDP is a silly metric. A lot of macroeconomic metrics seem to be :-( . But comparing GNI per captia [1] (which AFAIK excludes profits from multinationals) Ireland is at more or less the same level as US (slightly ahead in 2021 apparently but only slightly). So I think my point still stands?

As for national incomes - see my comment below but unless you are subtracting out costs for healthcare and other services offered to all citizens that are not offered by the US government you are not comparing apples to apples either.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD?location...

So you are comparing the income you get in a country in the EU after taxes that for the most part will pay for healthcare, education, etc and comparing them to the US median income which famously doesn't.

Apparently healthcare in the US is something like $10k per person per year? Seems fair to take that from the US median income so we are comparing apples with apples. Looking at your wikipedia link that would put the US down around 11th... After Belgium, Norway, Austria, etc and that is before we start talking about education.

Look - your point that people in USA have more money is mostly true. But when you add in the extras you have to pay for the difference is not as big as you might think. And none of that explains why pregnancy related deaths are so comparatively high.

Not sure where you ate getting that comparison. 2 mins on Google tells me [1] that ireland for example has a ppp per capita gdp of 79k vs USA average of 63k. Which would seem to imply that the first country in EU I compared with is significantly higher than at least some of us states? And that isn't a recent development.

The choice isn't about getting massively poorer, it's just whether you want to be able to look your fellow citizens in the face and know you aren't for supporting a system that sees their children die so you can save a few dollars more in tax.

[1] https://georank.org/economy/ireland/united-states

I read a lot on RR too and support a half dozen authors on patreon. But I've also seen those authors complaining when their work gets pirated from RR or patreon and put elsewhere. It's a good model but I don't think it is any more immune to loss of earnings from piracy then the models that have gone before.

I think it may be being down voted as it can he read as saying stop reading entirely rather than just stop reading a particular book, ie an attack on reading as an activity. Doubt the comment was meant that way though and I agree with you, dropping a particular book if it's not rewarding is something I do although I do still struggle with myself when doing so.

Have you tried "The player of games"? Based on the others you have there you might like it.

Why entitlement? If you just searched for Greg Egan and got a bunch of images for Greg Egan's that would be fine. But google is pulling together info as a bio of Greg Egan the science fiction author, presenting it as authoritative, and including a picture - not someone with this name but that specific person. The author being annoyed that Google is falsely saying this is what he specifically looks like doesn't sound entitled to me

Me too. I would love to be able to make anything I write free while having all my material needs seen to and only writing for the love of it/prestige.

But we don't live in that society.

I guess we could argue about semantics but depriving me of my ability to legitimately profit from my work while the IA wrapped itself in a flag of doing good seems like at the very least a very low form of behaviour, as well as illegal. And I doubt many people would describe us any word other than theft.

I will agree that the writing is not stolen when you give every line of code produced by you or that you will produce in the future or any code produced by any company you have ever been part of or invested in to me for free to use as I wish.

Until then if you want to read an authors work then you need to pay their (usually very small) fee.

As a self published author I have to say that the publishing industry is providing a huge service to me and the rest of the industry here.

The IA blatantly stole the work of thousands of people. They saw a problem and wanted to act - laudable. They could have done that be arranging to buy unique copies of each book they lent out. Or they could have tried to come to some agreement with the publishers. Or a bunch of other alternatives.

They didnt.

They stole the work and thankfully there is some players with enough clout in the market to do something about it.

If the big publishers ever do go away it will be a bad time for those like me who are never going to make enough revenue from our works to warrant a court proceeding while our works are stolen.

Because its cheaper.

An off the shelf AP is often going to have a lot of functionality you are not going to use but you are going to be paying for. It's going to consume power driving signals back and forth to the specialised printer chip. Its going to cost money to control inventory and deal with two chips when one could do the job. It may be end of lifed at an awkward time causing you to have to redesign or store a lot of inventory.

And it really isn't that much more expensive to develop one big SoC if you are already developing a specialised chip to go with the AP.

I work at a company that does these sorts of custom ASICs for a variety of customers all the time. $5M for the second example is a bit low but the right ballpark. Even allowing for 2 mask sets (mistakes happen) and $1-2M for an off the shelf bluetooth IP it would be difficult to see this going much over that.

I'd estimate a team size peaking at < 10 over 12 months to go from initial specification discussion to GDS-II. Another $1-1.5M for qual and support through production plus silicon validation.

Put that all together and <$7M sounds to me like a good estimate and I've seen a lot of more complex projects come back for less.

Not wanting to be a gobshite here but how did you manage to spend >$20M for something like this? It sounds like you were being seriously ripped off if you were paying $1M per engineer for design tools - you might want to push your tool vendors on that next time negotiations come round.

In Ireland you do sometimes hear someone looking for a "cuppa cha". Not common but you do hear it

Why would an event in NK cause a change in gravity? Wouldn't the energy liberated in a nuclear event would cause the same amount of gravity to be felt elsewhere as the mass it came from?

If you would like a modern take on Lovecrafts ideas (with a whole bunch of IT geekery) try Charles Stross' Laundry Files

This argument breaks down in a couple of different ways but lets just look at one:

Assuming there is no wealth redistribution then you had Joe and Jane have $19.128.28 and $69,330.20 respectively. Lets say they both die on the same day and leave all their wealth to Joe Junior ($19,128.28) and Jenny ($69,330.20).

Now it turns out that Joe Junior works hard and is really smart. He can get a 5% per annum return. Meanwhile Jenny is a bit of a flake but can still get 1% per annum from her investment.

After 50 years Joe Junior has $219,351.63 and Jenny has $114,022.65. So the hardworking Joe has turned his more modest beginning around and overtaken the less hardworking Jenny. The total wealth pool is now $333,374.28.

However if we had equalised their wealth on the death of their parents so that they had both started with $34,816.57. Jackie would then have ended up on $57,260.44 while Joe Junior would be on $399,255.53 for a combined wealth of $456,515.97 - significantly more than if wealth equalisation had not taken place

So that is one way it makes sense for the economy a a whole to redistribute wealth. Another is the fact that both Joe Junior and Jackie may have seen fixed costs (Medical bills?) on their life journeys. Jackies initial capital advantage measn she could weather those a lot more efficently then Joe Junior even if the return on her wealth she is generating is less.

And of course the same is true without having to wait for the next generation. Just because person A made good use of their resources for 10 years is no indication that they will always continue to do so and so are going to generate the best return on those resources - and the opposite is also true. That said while past performance is no indicator of future success it is a whole lot better then nothing.

TL;DR While completely flat wealth distribution is obviously a daft idea a simple argument shows some level of movement seems to be in the best interest of the economy as a whole.

Ireland has at least one representative per 30K people [0] and that works reasonably well. At least you can usually meet and speak in person with your representative in the run up to an election.

Of course the flip side is you probably get a lot more 'parish-pump politics'. Candidates looking after their one tiny constituency to the detriment of the country as a whole.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1il_%C3%89ireann#Number_...