barnbuilder

> Step 1: We create a database and use estimated point/mile values found online, such as those provided by The Points Guy. While not ideal, this approach provides a necessary starting point.

If you're going to do this, you could at least cite the source of the values. I'm not seeing that on there.

That said, I find the values from TPG to be absolute junk, applicable only to those who would buy nothing in life but international first class airplane tickets and luxury hotel suites, and it's a disservice to pass them along as fact.

I'm worried about this and feel like "vim" as actively maintained software probably also died today.

How many things are there on earth that you can suddenly sell $1 billion worth of, and not lower its price? I never hear this criticism of any other assets even though it applies to virtually all of them.

Social media communities really ought to observe a "leave no trace" rule with respect to GitHub and other such spaces. This commit from February 2022 is now as of today littered with a bunch of joke comments from being linked from here and previously somewhere else earlier (based on timestamps).

> He lost

Sadly this is not true. Wright was ruled to have won the case but had the damage award reduced to only 1 pound.[1] (Wright is being bankrolled by billionaire Calvin Ayre. They are not worried about the money here.)

How someone can win a case while found to have "advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial" just goes to show how utterly deranged the British legal system is. As long as it is such, scammers like Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre will continue to torment innocent people.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/01/craig-wri...

Why is this an app? It sounds like a nice service but I don't know why I need to install software on my phone and interact with a small touch screen in order to use it.

I would be careful working on this sort of thing during the next 2 months while you are still technically under the employment of the company.

> No, you aren't making it more costly for the bank.

I sure am; almost all of my spending earns a rewards percentage that exceeds the rate charged to the merchant. (This is not even counting the significant sign-up bonuses.)

Anyone (with good credit) can do the same with a modest amount of research.

I don't feel bad about extensively using these rewards cards. If you are a net recipient in this distribution, your participation doesn't directly correlate with any higher participation by any of the victim groups. We simply make it more costly for the bank -- if anything, discouraging them from issuing such cards.

However I do withhold recommending these cards to others because they only make sense for people who don't carry debt or spend recklessly, and I usually cannot be certain that others meet those criteria.

Coinbase has not been a bitcoin company since 2017, when they were on the losing side of a debate on whether the protocol should be modified to support commerce at the expense of decentralization.[0]

Since then they have gone all in on Ethereum and the 10,000 other tokens, encouraging users to try their luck on which one of them will blow up in price like bitcoin did. (Meanwhile they collect trading fees on the way up and/or down.) For them, bitcoin is a legacy product and a thing to say they have to get normies' feet in the door, so they can steer them into daytrading the other tokens.

As a result I am sadly not surprised that they were wholly useless for a person actually trying to buy and use bitcoin. For that I would highly suggest a bitcoin-focused company like Swan, River, Strike, or even CashApp.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Blocksize-War-controls-Bitcoins-proto...

> Before Kalshi, markets that allowed you to trade on economically relevant events were illegal or unregulated.

Totally untrue. PredictIt was legal and regulated and well-loved for many years, operating with the permission of the CFTC under a no-action letter. Then Kalshi hired former CFTC commissioner Brian Quintenz and soon, PredictIt was suddenly deemed by the CFTC to have committed still-unenumerated violations of the no-action letter.

This is a rotten way to do business and shame on YC for being involved in it.

https://karlstack.substack.com/p/a-textbook-case-of-regulato...

Some people think it's good to trade some of bitcoin's security for extra features, or at least, think that enough people will feel that way in the future to make these tokens good investments today.

Those people look particularly silly on days like this.

Mea culpa, searching for the actual original name “Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications” pulls up a number of interesting stories about the origins of the company running telegraph lines along the rail tracks. Example: https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-ra...

However I do not see anything resembling cell phone service happening until the 1970s.

I guess this is the person who posted recently about their very sad hobby of intentionally spreading misinformation on here and Wikipedia.

It's one thing to have excess power, and another to have excess power in the time and place that you want to do these things. For example excess solar energy in the middle of the country is never going to be able to be deployed to desalinate water in the ocean because you will lose it all in transmission and storage (or you will spend more than you would just generating new power near the desalinization plant).

This is what makes bitcoin mining so unique as a way to make use of excess energy. First of all, securing a censorship-resistant digital monetary system is not pointless nor a scam. Second of all, energy from anyplace on earth, at any time, can be deployed for this purpose -- all you need is a mining machine and an internet connection.

The miners don't need to be running at all times. If the cost of power exceeds mining returns then they definitely should not be running -- they'd be losing money AND wearing out their equipment. There is a middle ground where mining returns exceed power costs but don't fully cover capital expenditures, but the miner doesn't have to operate during that time if they think they are better off making no revenue but avoiding the wear on their machines. The question is whether you think you will have a period of cheap power in the near future, and in this case miners can benefit from the cyclical and predictable nature of power demand in answering that for themselves.

One can easily imagine a scenario where miners run overnight when power is cheap, turn their machines off during the day when power is in high demand and expensive (and you'd either lose money by having them on, or you would make less than you would by conserving your hardware and optimizing its usage), and earn a profit overall (while leaving the power producer better off too by letting them sell power that would otherwise be wasted).

There is no reason PoW-incentivized energy development would have to be only used for PoW.

PoW means there can now be a buyer of last resort no matter when and where you are generating power. Newly developed renewable based electricity can be sold at "x" price when there is residential or commercial demand, and at "y" price (y < x) to a PoW miner otherwise.

In this scenario there may not have been enough demand at price "x" to finance the renewable development, but the PoW buyer of last resort makes it feasible.

Yes he probably knew about Twitter's pervasive spam problem before but today has been a particularly bad day, as spammers are deploying a large number of hijacked verified accounts to impersonate the Ethereum founder coinciding with a major network change happening today.

While all spam is bad, scams posted from a fake "verified" account are particularly odious.

The spammers impersonate famous people and then spam the replies of other famous people, for example the fake Vitalik in the OP is a reply to one of paulg's tweets.

If you read the threads under certain people's tweets (or anyone's tweets containing cryptocurrency related keywords) you will have no choice but to wade through copious amounts of this muck.

That iPad has enough content, gamification, and social aspects that it keeps you motivated to work out on a consistent basis. For many people that effect (especially if it leads to health benefits) is worth paying a lot of money for, and it's easier to just spend the money than to try (and likely fail) to be self-motivated enough to do the same thing on a conventional stationary bike without the tricks.

In other words, better to pay ~$1500 + ~$44/mo on something that gets you working out hard every day, than to pay $150 for a big ugly clothes hanger.

Also highly misleading is the phrase "crisis pregnancy center" referring to a facility which has the objective of dissuading pregnant women and girls from seeking abortions.

I would suggest journalists and other neural entities (and of course anyone on the side of women's rights) find a more accurate way of describing such places. I don't think there is any obligation to use their own dishonest framing.

Just wanted to retract that about the license -- I missed on the Youtube page that it does have a Creative Commons license listed there.

Apologies, I did not see that image in the article's history. I assume it lacked a free license as the other commenter mentioned.

Interestingly, the current image on that article appears to also not be legitimately freely licensed. It is a screen shot of a Youtube video uploaded by a resort in New Mexico. The uploader[0] gives no indication on their user profile that they are affiliated with the resort, while putting a Creative Commons license on the screenshot that the Youtube page makes no indication of.

The uploader is also now suspended on all Wikimedia projects for abusively using multiple accounts, and their main account[1] has on their talk page lots of records of deleted political-oriented images with many instances of inaccurate licensing and poor quality.

(If someone has a Wikipedia account it would be nice to flag the image on Ronchetti's page for deletion!)

All this to say, Wikipedia's editing process can by its nature be pretty messy and often produce some suboptimal results, until such time as someone comes along and fixes it. This should not be confused with a concerted effort by the people running the project itself.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Melvingatez34

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Over9000edits

Ronchetti's Wikipedia page has never had any other photos. And the article was protected[0] due to a series of vandalism edits on July 10[1] that had nothing to do with his page's photo.

You are right that his article has a poor quality photo, which seems to be due to it being the only free-licensed photo available, but it's simply wrong to use this article as evidence of some sort of "partisanship on Wikipedia". If anything it is an example of bias towards incumbents, who get professional taxpayer-funded public domain portraits that are easy to drop into Wikipedia pages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Ronchetti&ac...

You may feel like your accounts are stable and nothing is disappearing but by CPI inflation calculations (https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), any money you had in that account 30 years ago has lost half its buying power.

If you want to keep the money that you have worked for over the long term, your checking and savings account are not going to cut it.

Once someone sends their bitcoin or "crypto" to a lending platform, they no longer own this asset. What they now have is an IOU for that asset that the platform may be unwilling or unable to fulfill in the future, as appears to be the case with Voyager and numerous others before it.

The people getting wiped out by the collapse of Voyager, Celsius, etc. were not putting their money on bitcoin. They were giving it to a custodian who thought they could beat bitcoin by investing in altcoins (or lending to those who do so).

This is definitely not "everyone's strategy"; plenty of us bitcoiners have been warning against this sort of irresponsible activity for a long time.

You're completely right.

Hashpower between chains is only relevant if they are compatible (same consensus rules), as the accumulated proof of work is used as an indicator of which chain should be followed. Once a chain hard forks to alter the consensus rules like Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc, there is no amount of additional hashpower that would make up for the incompatibility -- a node will simply ignore the invalid blocks.

What is the difference between something explained by the "Greater Fool Theory", and any of the numerous things that simply increase in value over time due to increased demand and/or rising scarcity?

It seems to me the only difference is whether the speaker is predisposed to not like the thing in question.

The Times is the newspaper whose headline Satoshi referenced in his genesis block: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". So I would have thought even though all newspapers do a terrible job of reporting on Bitcoin, they might be a little more inclined to do it well.

And yet here they are uncritically repeating the claims of known plagiarist and con artist Craig Wright.