chabska

I'd love if the people who put a tape over their laptop webcam could answer this.

Most central banks in the world hold their USD reserve in the Federal Reserve. There's no need at all for a the currency to be exportable, for it to function as a reserve currency.

Do you actually believe that the Central Bank of India is hauling Benjamins in wheelbarrow through the Delhi international?

We knew how to make synthetic hydrocarbon one hundred years ago. Nazi Germany used the Fischer Tropsch process to make synthetic fuel after the Royal Navy blockaded their oil import. The only reason we're still digging up fossil fuel is because it's cheap. According to some calculation, green hydrocarbon from atmospheric CO2 and electrolytic hydrogen could be commercially viable when fossil petroleum reaches $200/barrel , which is really not that far off.

The South Korean government was a military dictatorship at the time. And the North was wealthier. Without the power of foresight, you couldn't justify the war as bringing democracy or economic prosperity, it was purely a geopolitical struggle. It took a lot of historical revisionism to erase that inconvenient little fact from western consciousness.

I didn't mean a literal tree that has leaves and bark. I meant the tree structure that you get when you trace the ancestry of all organisms. A tree coordinate system would assign a number to every node, so instead of saying Tectona grandis, you say 2.44.32.543.45.33 . If that looks like IP address to you, yes, an IP address is actually a tree coordinate system.

They spent a whole section glazing the Linnaeus system like it's a perfect thing, but as someone who has delved into taxonomy a lot (due to playing Metazooa and Metaflora), there are quite a few glaring issues with it.

1. political tussle. australian botanists managed to hijack the "acacia" name from the original African Acacia, to the totally unrelated australian plants that were also called acacia. I noticed that japanese botanists also have a habit of insular naming.

2. western bias. Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.

3. the eight rank taxonomy that only accidentally kinda work, but not really. The original ranks were domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Modern taxonomy only pays a glancing homage to this system, because the actual evolutionary path that we found out there doesn't care about this neat categorization system, and so we had to shoehorn in hacks in the form of sub-phylums, sub-classes, sub-sub-sub-families, and sub-species. We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.

There are a lot more to Criminal Botany. There's the chaotic evil variety, like planting an invasive species, planting bamboo near your enemy's house, and sprinkling mint on someone's garden plot. There's the chaotic good variety, like broadcasting native seeds on a grass lawn and releasing moles onto a golf field. There's chaotic neutral, like making air layering on trees that you don't own, or otherwise taking seeds, cuttings, or plantlets from them.

This Schroedinger's Freedom is getting tired now. They happily label themself as free-market democratic liberal progressive when you're justifying bombing a poor third-world country, but suddenly claim to be unfree undemocratic oligarchic whenever anyone asks them to act on that principle.

One thing I really don't like about this video, is that he was specifically describing the advantages of that specific van and drivetrain, that being Toyota Sienna, and he's not wrong at that, but then he made grandiose general statement like "Hybrids are simple" and "minivans are great".

No, quite a few other hybrids are just an electrical motor tacked on to an existing ICE drivetrain, and they are actually more complicated than a regular ICE car, with horrible reliability and repair cost. And other non-hybrid minivans are either seriously underpowered, or require a seriously big engine that eats fuel.

The complaints that people have against hybrids and minivans are valid, if they're not talking about Toyota hybrids or this specific Toyota minivan.

> By virtue of how hard it is to get any information on creatine

What exactly is hard about that? You can get all sorts of information about creatine, it is one of the most studied supplement ever.

> Creatine breaks when cooked

Into what?

You mean like building an AI data center in the middle of a residential area, and fitting it with gas turbines that deafens the entire neighborhood?

These people are perfectly fine with depicting React developers as corporate zombies that can't think for themselves. Good faith is bidirectional.

What do you think of the medical doctor Dr Tai that "invented" calculus in 1994 and called it Tai's Model?

I can accept this for a hobby project language that unexpectedly blew up in popularity. Go is not that language. Zig's developer also had grandiose plans for his project language, based on his writings, so I had expected more care put into its design.

Programming language development have been happening for 60 years. We have tonnes of prior art, we have a rich history of experimentations. If you're a language developer that doesn't study the history, and keep making the same mistakes that other people know to avoid, I don't respect your product.

Rust language mistakes are understandable, because they do a lot of novel stuff so they encounter situations that no one have seen before. For the three languages that I mentioned, their mistakes are fairly well-known errors with obvious consequences. How hard was it to foresee that lacking generic in Go is a mistake, when the language was created well after Java had generics?

You don't think having a package management system in the compiler is weird?

Zig, Go, and Python developers do this thing, where they announce that "We have removed the radiator fluid from the fuel tank", and all their supporters cheer about how this is good for the language, how performance will surely improve significantly, and I'm over here wondering why did they put the radiator fluid in the fuel tank in the first place.

If the difference didn't matter, we wouldn't have so many different lisps. Obviously the difference mattered enough to the people that created Common Lisp when Scheme already existed. Rich Hickey thought it mattered when he created a completely new Lisp instead of just porting Scheme to the JVM.

The way to see if it's actually a fallacy, look for in-fighting between the two supposedly opposing camps of goombas.

I've seen internet commenters say China is overstating its economic numbers to look more intimidating, and that China is understating its economic numbers to receive more favourable WTO trading terms, but somehow these two camps never called each other out, which makes me think they're the same people believing that China is both overstating and understating.

The point is that it's the job of the democratic legislature to codify what you just stated here into law, so that all money managers have to abide by this standard, not just those that have a personal conviction for it. That's the essence of rule of law.

That sounds nice in theory, but real programs have multiple channels of IO going on: std IO, logging, network, database, file system. I follow discussions in Haskel groups sometimes, and combining and untangling multiple monads is a persistent problem that doesn't have a good solution yet.

As the title indicate, this article is comparing construct-to-construct, not idiomatic code to idiomatic code. You probably won't use struct initialization in C++, yet the feature still exist, so it may be useful to someone to compare it to the similar feature in C.

You might want to read that article carefully. It doesn't disprove what I said.

There is no legal definition of terrorist. As far as international law is concerned, those "terrorists" are civilians.

A quick google query says 15% of US households own a personal computer in 1989.

Would you say the same about a 40 year old suburban USA dad who is a Walmart store manager, who served in the US army for 8 years in his twenties? Is that a "valid military target"? Can Iran drop a bomb on the Walmart that he works in?

This topic deserves so much more nuance, but it's always reduced to "barefoot running doesn't work" in internet forums. In every articles about the harm caused by barefoot running I've read, those reported injuries all end up being overuse injuries. The article you linked is specifically about bone marrow edema, which is basically bone bruise. Other possible injuries include muscle and tendon soreness.

If this were a bodybuilding discussion, you would get advice on how to manage DOMS symptoms and how to plan your loading schedule, nobody would say that weightlifting "doesn't work" because a beginner got sore after lifting a 80kg barbell for the first time. But people has been conditioned to think that running is a purely cardio activity, so we don't talk about how the muscles and tendons in the foot need to be loaded up gradually just like your bicep.

Barefoot running is a weightlifting activity. Your calf muscle has to lift your entire bodyweight for the forefoot stride. "No pain no gain" applies. Proper posture and techniques are important. Proper workout schedule and loading plan with rest days are important. Sufficient protein intake are important.

I managed to make an ESP32-controlled RC car move by sending it commands from a webapp running on my Android phone last year. I don't believe I have telekinesis magic power, so I'd rather believe that this is not in-fact iOS only.

To deliver very high torque, the clutch plates needs to be pressed very hard together to generate enough friction. This also means that it take a lot of force to pull them apart, if you use a simple lever, as older machines do.

Modern machines may use complex mechanical linkages to make the clutch easy to pull apart but still maintain a firm contact, but that also means higher cost and fragility. Or they use pneumatics or hydraulics to assist, sorta like power steering.