mamon

> How has the USSR ended up in horror?

By killing roughly 20 millions of its own citizens? By forcibly deporting the whole nations from their homeland to a different part of the USSR? By forcing the surviving rest into poverty? By enslaving other countries for half of the century?

I'm always surprised how unaware people in the West are of all of that (unlike Nazi crimes which are well known).

You might think that Hitler was the most evil person of all the time, but Stalin really tried his best to outdo him (and succeeded, some would say).

EDIT: Actually no, I'm not surprised that Western countries forgot about Stalin's atrocities. It was a deliberate choice - in order to win World War II Churchil and Roosvelt needed Stalin as an ally, but they couln't admit to their societies, to their voters, that they made a pact with the devil, so they made sure that Soviet crimes are forgotten.

Reports about what's happening in concentration camps had been coming to Allied intelligence agencies since 1941 ([1]) but obviously they did not include any video footage, so they were hard to believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilecki%27s_Report

When supply is fixed the price gouging serves as an important mechanism promoting efficient use of it. If a 30 oz bottle of hand sanitizer costs $50 then everyone would ask themselves: "Do I REALLY need 5 bottles of it?"

Usually this is not true: they are not employees at all, contracting company also hires them as subcontractors, each of them running their own sole propertiorship (at least that's how it works in my country).

But even if they were employees, they are not really getting fired from the contracting company - it can still try and find them another gig, for a different client. So you can say they are not getting fired at all, just suddenly have no work to do (but still have a valid employment contract).

Of course if contracting agency can't find them another position in reasonably short time they will fire them as well, but that's not on Google anymore, so Google can't be sued for that.

One of the reasons for conflict between ancient Egyptians and Jews (as reported by the Bible, iirc) was that Jews had their Sabbath every 7 days, while Egyptians would get their free day every 10 days. That's part of the reason why Jews decided to leave under Moses's leadership. Of course that was almost 1000 years after the Great Pyramid was built, if it even happened at all.

First of all, it's not just that he selects what songs enter the voting. He manipulated results afterwards, with the stupid excuse of "just removing fraudulent votes"

As for "he was State Security informant" - that's really important factor to consider because it tells a lot about person's character. I mean what kind of scumbag would voluntarily provide information that might put people who did nothing wrong, other than oposing communist government, in jail, or worse yet, killed by "unknown perpetrators"? And for what - money, chance to advance his career? Once an asshole, always an asshole.

Exactly, and it was also suggested that for years the show producer would take bribes from artists for placing them at the top of the list.

The song in question here actually ended up in the fourth place, was placed on 1st deliberately - it was kind of a political statement by the show producer.

In my country workplace regulations forbid working on laptop screen anyway - if a worker is supposed to work on computer for more than, iirc, 4 hours a day, then external screen is mandatory. And it's not really about a screen size, it's more that you are not supposed to be looking down, so the external screen top border must be at the same height as your eyes.

Usual explanation is that doing census by place of birth was actually Jewish idea - because the "12 tribes of Israel" concept is so deeply ingrained in their culture, so whey Romans requested census Jewish leaders simply tried to kill two birds with one stone, and Romans didn't really care so they agreed.

By reducing number of apartments from 18 to 10 - I assume that by this time the garage had already been built so downsizing it was not possible.

Also, I've just noticed: why on earth would they build affordable housing next to the beach? Is this some twisted take on equality, that poor people also deserve view at the ocean? If "affordable housing" competes for the same land as luxury residences it will end up just as expensive.

Facebook has network effects: you use it because all of your friends are using it, making a cost of switching high. In the ride sharing business however, there is zero consumer loyalty - installing a new app in your phone takes one minute. Riders can have multiple apps and order ride in the one that offers best prices, and all the drivers will probably be using multiple apps already.

Also: you don't need to have "the best app in the market", just a reasonably good one. Advertising cost is more of the issue, but you can do that by starting in one local market, get some market share and use it to attract more VC capital.

And when they do raise prices another competitor with loads of VC money will appear, trying to "disrupt" them.

The barrier to entry in ride sharing business is so low it's almost non-existent, which makes the whole strategy pointless, unless they can lobby in Congress for some regulatory framework that would make starting a new ride-sharing business harder.

In some sense yes, you're paying rent to your bank. But the difference is: with a landlord you would pay that rent indefinetely, with mortgage you pay it for 20-30 years and then the house becomes yours.

>> In the USA, over 60% of housing units are owner-occupied

Does that include houses with mortgages? Because in my opinion if you're not really the owner until you've paid off your mortgage fully.

Because AMD is a company with a long history of making crappy processors, that only recently created a decent one, by lucky coincidence. Intel is exactly the opposite.

Even now Intel architecture is still superior in some areas, the biggest downside of it being the fact that they are stuck on the outdated 14nm++++ process.

Once the Intel's 7nm comes out there will be no reason to buy AMD, except for the price (I expect Intel's 7nm process to be roughly equivalent, or even superior to TSCM's 5nm)

I'm still thinking about my cheap Ryzen-based PC only as a stop-gap solution, until the "real deal", aka Intel 7nm CPUs, premieres in 2021 (fingers crossed) .

Free markets are pretty close to democracy, except instead of voting with ballots people vote with their money.

Government officials currently in office are probably excluded from the dataset.

UBI will be introduced, just not in the way most of us would like. It will be throught Quantitive Easing, as currently done by FED.

What QE does is - it concentrates the wealth in hands of 0.1% of society. Each financial crisis (2008, 2020) only speeds up this process. Once top 0.1 owns more than, say 90% of wealth we will be back to ancient Rome - "panem et circenses", wealthy people throwing some scraps of wealth towards mases, just enough to keep them from revolting.

Gig economy will also play some role: we are slowly cooking the frog, getting people used to the fact that they don't own their homes, or their cars, they do not have pemanent jobs. Everything they have is a short term rental. They are living using borrowed things, on borrowed time...

My rough estimate is: 2cm finger movement per 800px scrolled.

No, they are in "move fast and break things" camp.

Touch bar is stupid idea because it is so narrow,and located in such place that it is hard to see it clearly due to the angle. If they really wanted to add touch capabilities to MacBook they should have put touch display in place of TouchPad, like Asus did: https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-05-asus-zenbook-pro-15-scre...

>> I use the VGA port in many conference talks I give. Modern, digital projectors are still not a guarantee and it is very awkward to go ask around for another laptop or a dongle

Ever thought about buying your own dongle? Sincle you give many conference talks it might be a great investment :)

>> There are apps in use now that monitor drug use for psychiatric patients by trying to detect that a drug was ingested using a sensor inside the pill that can be detected with a patch placed on the abdomen

Wouldn't that be easily fooled by just pressing the pill against your abdomen for a while, and then throwing it away? Or sticking it with a piece of duct tape?

Seems like this solutions kind of assumes that all pshychiatric patients are stupid.

Plumber's job with a single customer usually lasts one or two days, so the plumber's income is not dependent on any single customer. They might be willing to risk it and take a job without a price set beforehand, because the worst case scenario they lose, say, a single day pay.

For me as a developer it makes perfect sense: top of the range is equal to company's budget for that position, and if they are not willing to give you top of the range salary then the changes are that some other, more skilled candidate will show up and take the job.

So, simply put: if they don't want to give you top of the range it means that they weren't impressed enough by you, and you should continue your job search until you find a company that is.

So, in response to epidemic cities are limiting the only transportation mode that is safe during the epidemic - yes, that makes perfect sense :)

And if it doesn’t grow you can repeat the test in a week or two - even modern tests have this issue since early in the pregnancy hormone levels might not be high enough yet.

Regarding false positives - since you’re detecting hormones that are not produced outside of pregnancy time, then the only possible reason for false positive could be some genetic condition, or maybe some serious endocrinologic disease, maybe ovarian cancer.

>>> Sweden's death counts are the most statistical precise ones so far, exactly because every death from someone tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 is counted as a death from CoViD-19.

So if the 95 years old who already withstood 3 heart attacks dies from the 4th one, and he tests positive for SARS-CoV-2 you then blame his death on CoVID-19, and not on his weak heart? Doesn't make much sense to me.

So far the net result of Sweden's strategy is that they have 2,021 coronaviris deaths, more than 4x more than Poland, which also has almost 4x bigger population - so Sweden has 16x more deaths per 1M of citizens than Poland.