johnzim

I remember the Idle Thumbs podcast made a running joke of the fact that 2010 was supposed to be "Year of the PS3" because I believe Kaz Hirai had suggested that it would take multiple years for developers to unlock the true power of the system.

Which is an excellent way to brand how much of a pain it was for Devs to wring performance out of it.

I had a similar situation with London. Ironically I moved to California as the new annual fires started.

The U.S. did nothing in the arrangement because their position wrt the CCP was one of engagement to balance against the USSR.

It was the UK, which caved because, as revealed in now-declassified democratic cables from 1958, Zhou Enlai flatly stated that the PLA would invade if HK was given independence.

The UK quite simply could not defend HK. It had failed to defend it in WWII against Japan (it couldn't even defend Singapore) and would have no hope against the CCP, even without the Harbour Tunnel to the Kowloon Peninsula, which had already been operating for some time.

Instead it opted for an agreement in the joint declaration and a hope that the CCP would lean more towards international norms as the Shanghai cadre assumed more control. Objectively a poor solution but, I have to say, probably the most rational.

Of course, we all know what happened. Deng's best laid plans came to naught and another 'great leader' emerged.

Doublethink is a skill that takes some time to learn.

While you're still waiting to get up to speed, just understand and accept that all Chinese people are the property of the Emperor. It's much easier to make sense of things.

I loved lugging this computer to school. Definitely made good use of the rubberized edges with a few "drop tests".

The only bad part of the design was in the power chord, which like many of those era's cables, suffered from fraying at the point of connection.

It was particularly great to be able to save school work to an FTP server (or run one yourself from the iBook) and then print from the network computers in the lab. No floppy, no problem

I have no idea who thought this was a good idea. The trackpad is even off to the left to accommodate it.

I'm not a fan of symmetry for symmetry's sake, but I do think some affordances for the human body might be a good idea. How do southpaws enjoy this keyboard setup?

The ergonomics of laptops are bad enough without stuff like this.

Yes! It's one of the few things I can watch and understand reliably in Japanese. It doesn't contain lots of slang or fantastical words.

He absolutely disputes the allegations of, rape which are at the crux of the his larger cancellation.

> So I wrote up a statement saying I had slept with women at events and sometimes I was a dick. The statement was heavily (and perhaps hastily) worded in an effort to convey my understanding of the gravity of hurting people and my desire to set a good example. The internet, though, misinterpreted some of what I had said and began accusing me of rape. No one has ever accused me of raping them. But twitter latched onto that narrative and couldn’t let it go.

This is DEFINITELY a feature.

I bet users are copying and pasting values from the WordPress editor into a word processor and HATE seeing   so they probably asked for this solution.

This has always been part of how Bitcoin works and it’s been the reason I’ve felt like I’ve been taking crazy pills for well over a decade trying to understand its popularity amongst criminals.

Do people realize how HARD it is to trace regular currency!? It’s a nightmare! At law there’s an entire equitable principle devoted to the tracing of money. You can’t just prima facie say $A Dollars are $B Dollars, you have to convince a judge to invoke and principles of natural justice to imply such a connection!

Meanwhile, Bitcoin literally stores _every transaction ever_.

To be fair, the reserves are largely a national security requirement given the risk of potential Chinese aggression (trade or otherwise).

Given its remoteness, Australia is quite vulnerable to blockade. While the country is of immense size, global shipping lanes are consolidated and pretty easy to block.

Copyright tends to run from the death of the author for a period (in the US is 70 years after death). As for where it's assigned to an institution, it'll still have a long time to run - decades!

More devs should know about Intl - it's a great resource for a HUGE number of tasks as well as being a great way to smooth localization. I only became fully aware of it in the last 12 months, so I'd wager there's a lot of other devs who've missed out.

One helping hand is that libraries like date-fns (http://date-fns.org) use it liberally under the hood.

Well worth a watch - Abnett is the best writer in the GW canon by far and a significant asset. I remember when it was mostly Andy Chambers and Gav Thorpe writing the best stuff and Abnett was a new hand on the tiller.

The Gaunt’s Ghosts series in particular is a jewel.

Lovely website and incredibly consistent. What a treasure trove.

Yep - your options trickle in over a vesting period.

Typically there’s also a ‘Cliff’ at the start - a period during which no options are available to you.

addendum: the ‘standard’ Silicon Valley stock option deal is: 4 year vest, 1 year cliff.

Eg: first 12 months, no options

Day 1 of 13th month - 25% of your options are available to you

Then the rest of the 3 years vest at a regular pace with the remaining 75% of your options dropping on a monthly cadence

The exception being Amazon who basically give you nothing for 2 years and then ramp up significantly.

Plus we can rely on survivor bias! The stuff that’s still working was clearly built very well. The stuff that wasn’t isn’t working.

“flight proven”

He uses a Psion! OPL was my first programming language after basic!

I made some fun games in OPL. It was a really wonderful basic variant, perfect for the device.

This is great advice. I was in a similar position till we moved to the Bay Area, which flipped the financial calculus.

Other than breast-feeding, Dads can do everything that's required and pumping works out great for everyone.

Canada's defence spend last year was $22.2b

As they only met 1.31% of their 2% spend (which would be $37.5b) the shortfall is ~$15.3b annually.

Still sounds like a bargain.

This argument would be more persuasive if more countries actually met their recommended NATO spend. In reality it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Take for instance Germany. The federal republic increased their spend to $63.8b last year but that's still a shortfall of ~$27b relative to what a 2% spend would be.

Aggressive estimates (above official estimates) of the UK's (a similar sized ally) spending on Afghanistan in 2011m put the total figure at $26b for 10 years.

The cumulative shortfall in NATO contributions for Germany over that period is more than 10 times greater than the entire invasion and continued operations in Afghanistan during that period.

(edit: grammar and dollar signs)

I agree, but I'd note that as you've pointed out, Germany essentially has systems in place to mitigate the default behavior that arises out of the 'few players' problem. Almost all countries do.

The US has plenty of healthcare regulations but none that successfully tackle cost. Nowhere near enough work is done to force price transparency, and it's not just that this data is known but not displayed (like a Pharmacy's formulary) but rather that it's often _not known at all_ because there's so much money sloshing around, people just stick their finger into the wind and pencil in their best guess.

I think the German model is actually the easiest for the US to achieve and one with the best outcome - a public option under the ACA would be a great start. A *default* public option under the same scheme would be pretty much all we'd need to have the same framework to build from.

I think I read that 75% of Germans choose the non-government option and the rest stick with it. That seems like a very healthy balance.

Extremely high barrier to entry + (necessary) complex regulatory structure = industry with fewer players.

And in that situation, you've basically got breeding grounds for cartels and price-fixing. Even if not all the players hold the line, prices will take a long time to come down rather than how quickly they would in a high-competition market.

Heck look at how long it took carriers to stop charging insane money for SMS! It did eventually happen, but over the course of years as each carrier in turn put through small incremental price reductions to show growth for shareholders.

It's almost as if the people who voted for it held some ideal up as more important than wealth.

Here's a Nuffield College survey on the subject: http://csi.nuff.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Carl_Rea...

I didn't vote for it but maybe taking people at their word for why they voted for it is a good idea?

Would you rather other people assigned their own ratios as to why you made your voting decisions, or actually listened to you?

Most people can understand the arguments for both sides of most debates, it just involves a little work to grok what they haven't themselves, concluded.

I agree in some respects but comparing the nature of the internet today compared to the internet we remembered back in the 90s, it’s abundantly clear that consolidation and centralization are significant forces.

We’re not really making the same progress on decentralizing the web that we thought we would. Is it really that difficult to see further consolidation as the most likely outcome?

You definitely could do that to my recollection, I remember doing so to ferry files around.

Here's an apple support doc showing how:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201544

The headline isn't too stupid, it's the follow up that's dumb, talking about the massive value being distributed.

All that would happen is the price of those metals would rapidly approach $0. There wouldn't be inflation or massive wealth, it would just obliterate scarcity in specific metals.

You end up with a situation where say 20% have shifted and 80% haven't. Then over time, like planets falling into a ring of orbits, everyone ends up shifting back because too many other people are on the other schedule. These sorts of things need critical mass to have effect.

That said, with all the lockdowns and isolated living, I do wonder if the social conformity effect will be as strong going forward.

Germany has 2 advantages: 1) A deliberate political aim to maintain a manufacturing base, prosecuted over decades; and 2) A currency which is deliberately kept cheap by use of ballast (the PIGS - Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) - countries whose currencies would, on their own be considerably cheaper than the amalgamated Euro.

The US could, if it wanted to have both of these advantages, which is why I'm pretty bullish on the potential for the US manufacturing future, if not on the reality:

1) is political and requires expensive action that is broadly not favored by either party - protectionism, boosterism, technical training, PPPs. Concerted effort at Federal and State levels. We do it for Defense but not for other sectors.

2) would look reasonably achievable but somehow the Fed has missed its inflationary targets for the few years, so I'm a little skeptical about the chances. Also if you look at the dollar's relative price over the last 30 years it broadly approximates a sine wave that we're on the upwards slope of (past performance yada yada etc)

The big issue has been with the labelling for these thicker bags. The marketing term has been "Bag for Life" - but the goal of that term was that this bag could be replaced for free at the supermarket so that they could be recycled properly.

In reality, very few people understood the setup and people have instead been treating them like the usual disposable plastic bags that just happen to cost a bit extra.