deftnerd

I'm particularly interested in some kind of overview of what your goals were, what you learned in the process, and what was particularly successful or unsuccessful.

I've had similar aspirations before but without a strong background in actually running a business and knowing how much work goes into the management, I've been unable to determine if the work effort to automate a large portion of it is worth the time.

For optimization, I would just make it easy to remove the payment process and selecting the fuel grade.

Everytime a car drives up, use a camera to determine their license plate number. If they are a new customer, ask them if they want to save their payment information and fuel grade preferences. If so, everytime they come back, the pump can display "Welcome back John Doe, you can begin pumping".

If you don't care about your transgressions, the public won't care either or you will weather the PR storm. They're been spot on about that.

Oddly enough, ca-central-1 is in Montreal... even further east than their Ohio and Virginia data centers.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/

Scroll down to AWS Global Infrastructure Map

Looks like they're getting closer to using hCaptcha rather than ReCaptcha [1] for the Privacy Pass service, which could be a trial of hCaptcha before rolling it out on all of the verification pages.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-latest-version-of...

Flat subscription of $10 a month for the app store. Once a month, your phone tells the store what percentage of time you spend in apps from that store. Firefox has 40% of your time? They get $4.

I wonder what criteria is used to determine "the most operationally optimal seat in the restaurant".

If it's a standard formula that most agents use because it's tried and true, then it could be viable to bug one or two tables in select restaurants in the DC area.

Basically, cast a wide net and see what information you get.

Same could apply at restaurants where business deals are discussed in order to perform insider trading, but unless they have a "movers and shakers" booth or room, it would be harder to pick the right table. Probably easier to pay waiters for intel.

Basically, but I would consider checking with your legal council on the exact terminology that you use to make life easier :-)

> The relevant question isn't really why religion is declining in the US, but why it hasn't declined sooner.

It's possible that religion is treating the symptom of another problem. Assuming someone religious attends an organized function related to that religion, it's making them part of a community and might be helping them feel less lonely.

2018 study shows that half of Americans feel lonely. [1], but a similar kind of study on people in europe surveying if people had anyone to ask for help or discuss personal matters has a much smaller amount [2]

The European study indicates that income inequality has an effect on social isolation, with the lowest incomes having twice the amount of isolation.

The income inequality in America is even more pronounced, and geographically, many of the areas with the highest levels of religious beliefs seem (on a map) to line up pretty well with levels of poverty and income inequality.

Usual disclaimer about correlation/causation and everything... But perhaps economic conditions that cause people to tend to be socially isolated are being self-treated by pursuit of religious groups because the community it gathers results in a decrease in the isolation symptom?

[1] https://fortune.com/2018/05/01/americans-lonely-cigna-study/ [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...

Those are some excellent points.

You know how some people have pointed out that McDonalds wasn't in the food business, it was in the real estate business to franchise owners? They often hold prime real estate locations.

The Post Office also has prime real estate locations.

I think that Churches, collectively, hold some of the most desireable property locations in our communities. Especially older churches in city centers have been there and grown organically since cities were founded so now they're very valuable.

Even if it does descend into a flame war at some point, I feel that it's interesting to observe people's viewpoints.

Personally, I'm not religious and I tend to view the tech world through that filter. I forget that some tech people might have other philosophical or religious beliefs.

At some level, I assume that Tech people are smart, and thus don't believe in religious.

This is obviously untrue, so now I'm curious to see if people's religious beliefs, or lack of them, impacts the tech work that they do.

i.e. is there any crossover in the venn diagram of religion and tech, or are they entirely isolated from each other.

Historically, religious groups sometimes funded purely scientific endeavors. Of course, sometimes religious groups went after science that was inconvenient to belief... But both actions indicate a precedent.

I'm not personally religious, but it always struck me as odd that modern churches don't take more of an socially progressive activism role. The historical Jesus was quite the rabble-rouser, activist, and not conservative in the least.

From my personal observations, the religious groups that seem to be activists tend to be activists with puritanical and conservative motivations (i.e., yell at people who they perceive are doing ungodly things even though modern society has deemed those things to be acceptable)

The other side is religious groups that are socially progressive (be kind and open, pray for people, provide services to those who need it, etc) but tend to be more of a passive supporter of equality.

Churches have had their "brand" tarnished because a few extremist religious groups wrapped up bigotry and social conservatism in a cloth of "religious freedom" and were really loud about it. The more progressive churches didn't speak up to fight back and counter it, and now the whole religious community is tainted. The "abusive priest" controversies didn't help matters either.

If there were churches that supported and encouraged the social justice that actually resonates with today's population, especially the young population, they would find a far more receptive audience.

I would consider going to a church if it was leading Extinction Rebellion marches, organizing protests against businesses that were bigoted, pushing their members to support the community and vote for new libraries, citizen investigation boards in police departments, fair elections, progressive drug treatment diversions instead of prosecution, etc.

Some side effects of this that are worth thinking about...

As churches see less membership, at some point congregations merge and one church is shut down.

Many churches do outreach and provide services to the community, the poor, and the homeless. This often includes shelter from the elements, soup kitchens, food pantries, meeting places for groups like AA/NA/etc.

When a church shuts down, the distance that the population has to travel can increase, and there might not be enough room to provide the same resources to those populations.

Additionally, it's not necessarily a problem, but more of a musing... What happens to all those old churches? The impact on the property market has to have local effects...

I wonder how many churches are shut down, but are just maintained by a skeleton crew of maintenance people in the hope that their customer base will increase enough one day to restart their services and reopen the property.

I assume churches don't pay property tax, so as long as the church is in hibernation mode and not actually totally dissolved, could they hold onto the property indefinitely for just the cost of maintenance? Or would them not providing religious services anymore cause them to lose the exemption?

I suppose, but they did say that they accounted for health and lifestyle factors, so I'm pretty sure that means that it's another cause they hadn't pinned down at the time of the study.

From what I understand, the current theory is chemicals used to make plastic more pliable ended up being endocrine inhibitors, which decrease testosterone production. BPA, and other similar chemicals.

Also, reports that many flame retardant chemicals do the same thing. The law requires that furniture with fabric and curtains and things like that have those chemicals to lower risks of fire. But, those chemical treatments physically break down into dust and we get exposed to them.

There are probably other contributing factors too.

Oh, here's a random idea that might integrate with your business model.

Some companies like to offer profit sharing. You could support that by allowing the company to issue a token of some kind to employees on a regular basis as part of their pay check or manually as a bonus.

Either the ownership of their tokens could make them eligible for proportionate distribution of profit share payouts (during the holidays, or whatever) or the token itself could hold the value and the employee could convert it to another crypto when they want to cash out.

I imagine that one of the difficulties is that a woman who gets pregnant and doesn't want to have the child finds that the process of pregnancy and birth is very difficult financially. It increases expenses, and decreases available time for employment which affects their finances from the supply side too.

Many people find that practical concerns, like finances, override any moral qualms they might have on the concept.

If the US ever gets a socialized medical system, it'll be interesting to see if abortions decrease and babies available for adoption increase. Pregnant people will still face a decrease in finances on the supply side because they'll have to take time off work, but removing the expenses could reduce the problems with the practicality of basically being an incubator for needy parents who want to adopt.

I'm having a hard time understanding why someone with HIV or a disability would still be excluded. The US has pretty strong protections for people with disabilities, which makes me feel like we're supposed to honor and include those people. I wonder what the logic is that prevented us from extending that philosophy to immigrants.

HIV is also more of a chronic condition as apposed to a public health hazard these days. It's cost of perpetual treatment isn't significantly different from dozens of other conditions or diseases, and the risk to the public is similar to other diseases like Hepatitis.

Anyone have insight that I'm not understanding?

--

Edit: elliekelly gave a well-thought out reply below that makes logical sense, even if I disagree with the policy

You already mentioned payroll and vendors, so I think you're already thinking of what I'm about to suggest... and then I might try to talk you out of it.

When I think of business cryptocurrency financial stuff, I also think of those things. Employees need to be paid, and they might want their paycheck in crypto or in fiat, or a combination of the two. Vendors that need to be paid will usually just want fiat, either through some kind of fiat electronic transfer, or a "bill pay" check that's printed and mailed.

The problem is that payroll is HARD. That's why banks, who handle business accounts, don't do payroll and it usually falls onto specialist companies. Given the "global" nature of cryptocurrency, many of your customers will likely have employees spread across the world, which also adds payroll complications when it comes to withholding, legality of cryptocurrencies, etc.

You might want to just partner with a payroll company otherwise you'll find that most of development (business, software, and legal) will end up being sucked into that blackhole side of the business that doesn't even have a high margin.

Paying vendors? That's relatively simple in comparison. That's why most banks DO provide bill-pay and transfer services.

What I suggest for your "secret sauce" is being very internal bureaucracy friendly and give out employee corporate debit cards freely.

Build your system so when a business signs up, they can make accounts for all their employees and managers and set up authorization workflows. If Bob in accounting wants to buy a new chair, he should be able to submit the request for the funds. If it meets various criteria (ex: less than $500, only needs manager approval and not department head approval) and gets approved, then your system makes the cost of the chair (plus some buffer) available on Bob's wallet which has a linked Multis debit card.

If the business only provides debit cards to managers and up, then it would make the funds available to the managers crypto wallet (and associated Multis debit card) so they can purchase Bob's chair.

Lastly, if you put in place this support of business organization structure, use the same structure for the multisignature systems. One of the signatures could be Bob's manager, or maybe it would require the manager and the department head, etc... But not Bob and his wife, who happens to be a manager in an entirely different department at the business.

I've done crypto work before, and also have recently build a "corporate bureaucracy friendly" authorization system for a SaaS I'm working on so putting those two experiences together seemed natural :-)

"One particularly disturbing study, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2007, indicated that men’s testosterone levels plummeted 17 percent from 1987 to 2004—and that’s controlling for health and lifestyle factors, such as obesity and diabetes, that are known to affect T levels. The study found not only that individual men were losing testosterone as they aged (which is fairly normal), but that same-age men from later eras had substantially lower T than their predecessors: a man who turned 65 in 2002, for example, had much lower T than a man who turned 65 in 1987." [1]

While I don't doubt that social and economic pressures have a lot to do with decreased occurrences of sexual relations in the US, it's quite possible that decreases in average testosterone levels are also a factor. Low testosterone is highly correlated with a decreased sex drive.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-mystery-of-declining-test...

It kind of makes sense to me with some further caveats to the analogy.

If you think of the ant as a 2 dimensional creature living on a two dimensional surface of the balloon, the expansion is occurring in 3 dimensional space. The two-dimensional ant has no way to observe the space north or south (above and below, to us) its plane of existence.

Now, imagine that the balloon is in a vacuum. It had a burst of air (the big bang) for a moment to get it started but it's not the further addition of air that's driving the expansion, it's the desire to equalize pressure between the exterior vacuum and the interior matter.

With that in mind, push everything up a dimension. We're 3 dimensional creatures living in a 3 dimensional universe. That 3 dimensional universe exists as a plane in 4 dimensional space.

The 4 dimensional balloon (that our universe is surrounding) is continuing to expand into the "nothingness" on the ana plane of the 4th dimensional universe because of the "pressure" imbalance on the kata plane of the 4th dimensional universe. (In 4th dimensional spatial terms, ana and kata indicates directions on the w axis, similar to up/down on the x axis, left/right on the y axis, and north/south on the z axis)

At least, that's how I see it in my head, but I'm an odd ball who has never had a problem intuitively visualizing 4th spatial dimension objects and how they might interact with 3rd dimensional space.

As for the increased speed of the expansion... actually, I hadn't thought about that. Does it indicate that equilibrium will never be found? The balloon analogy might be a useful tool, but our universe isn't made of rubber so it might have the capability of being able to expand infinitely without breaking and without its "nature" constraining the expansion speed.

Anyway, if this is a reasonable analogy, the "nothingness" in the ana direction isn't as interesting to me as what might comprise the "pressure" that's in the kata direction that's causing the expansion. It's nothing we'd ever be able to observe or sample since it's outside of our plane of existence, but it's awfully fun to speculate about the composition and nature of it.

There might not be atmosphere, but lunar dust is notoriously abrasive and also "sticky" because of electrostatic charge.

Those are serious issues that would have to be resolved before an investment in a telescope should be made.

I think the United States Web Design System might fit in that category. It's made by the US Digital Services, and describes itself as "A design system for the federal government. We make it easier to build accessible, mobile-friendly government websites for the American public."

It's a well thought-out framework and from what I've read, accessibility was taken into account in the very first stage of the redesign of the new V2

https://designsystem.digital.gov/

Totally free since it's paid for with US tax dollars.

That's an odd position to take. I purposefully make my primary account a non-administrator and elevate permissions with my administrator account when I need to perform administrative tasks. This prevents scripts or programs from misusing permissions without my knowledge.

It's also the default policy of my work, a university. Staff do have local administrator access to their machines, but are not supposed to use it for regular operations for safety.

To open the home page? True... But to view search results? I get captcha demands from google all the time depending on the search query (sometimes a query I make looks like something a bot might supply, like searching for a few IP addresses in a row) or if I'm using a VPN or Tor.

This reminds me a lot of the cancers attributed to HPV, a common virus. The researchers who discovered that link have likely saved millions of lives.

Almost every instance of cervical cancer is attributed to HPV. 70% of throat cancers, 90% of anal cancers, 60% of penile cancers, 75% vaginal, and 70% vulvar cancers. [1]

It always stunned me that one little virus that used to be seen just as an embarrassment was re-categorized as being a huge risk factor for deadly cancers.

If the person who identified a common bacteria being responsible for almost all ulcers got a Nobel price, the HPV <--> cancer researchers should also have been considered, IMHO.

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/i...

I have one of the variants of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic condition that changes how collagen proteins are folded. The results of the condition vary wildly depending on how specifically the proteins fold, but in my case it's pretty minor. I'm "hyper flexible" and I'm more prone to fungal infections.

My skin is a buffet for fungal infections and I've been fighting a persistent Malassezia infection for years. It's caused me to have intense dandruff and lost a lot of my hair as the infection clogs my hair follicles.

The only thing that helped was taking oral anti-fungals, but once I stopped, the infection came back within a few weeks.

Reading that the specific fungus I'm fighting is also plausibly responsible for pancreatic cancer is a bit frightening.

I wonder if I can get routinely screened for pancreatic cancer without appearing like a crazy person to an uninformed doctor.

I would like to see Firefox make the choice of which DoH provider to use as easy as they make changing addressbar search engines.

Its easy to change from Google to DuckDuckGo on that preference page. A similar user accessible option to change providers (or disable DoH functionality entirely) would go a long way to soothing the community.

I moved recently and let my ex keep my network gear and went with the default Spectrum cable modem and WiFi access point.

The new modems not have user-facing access pages to check connection status and signal levels. Additionally the bundled WiFi access point let you change everything you want except for the DNS settings your routers local DHCP pushes out.

They are actively forcing users to use their DNS unless you buy your own equipment. Its too bad because its actually a pretty decent WiFi router (1+ Gbps AC, 4 gigabit ports, no crashes with excessive usage, etc)

For a comedic version of this concept, check out the fake infomercial "Live Forever as You Are Now" (1)

Great example of the promise of virtual immorality done badly with bad software

(1) https://youtu.be/xg29TuWo0Yo

Sadly, our system of infrastructure funding is predicated on increasing populations and growing tax bases. A population decline would result in bankrupt cities and even worse infrastructure problems.

With a future of climate-induced migrations, we will likely face these problems anyway as people leave areas and never come back (or simply die) after "edge case" disasters strike.