manholio

Sorry, I got confused about the example, you are of course correct, it's a basic center squeeze.

The IRV case here is simply a cheaper way to organize a delayed runoff; voters are usually adept at understanding the implications of strategic voting, as long as it's framed correctly: in case your preferred option does not make it to the second round, would you still go to vote, and which would be your other choice? In Europe there is a long tradition for the two round delayed runoff, but it's certainly not presented to the voters as "you can chose anybody in the order of preference and it will be magically solved by the system".

Two round is in almost any case superior to FPTP, so if you can get it by simply tweaking the ballot paper and allowing second and third choices (IRV), it's an easy upgrade.

Approval voting might be closer to a Condorcet winner in some cases, but it's not a panacea to center squeeze because it's vulnerable to honest voting. What we see in practice is a tendency to function as FPTP, as all sides have an incentive to demonize the center and train their voters to mark a single option. So, in your example, the Sunni or Shia Muslims which can't stand themselves enough to approve each other but would still prefer islam in the second round (if secularism is not available), would lose the approval vote to a well disciplined contigent of Buddhists.

IRV solves that by not providing any help to competitors in the first round, and moving the "lesser evil" decision into the second round, encouraging more honest voting. Short of some Condorcet method (which will never be practical or intelligible by the average voter), IRV is an "acceptable compromise".

I don't follow your example. If the religious vote according to their genuine preferences, they would pick their brand of theocracy as the first option and the secular option as the second. IRV would then eliminate two theocracies in the first round and then secularism would win by a landslide in the instant run-off.

Yes, there are games which can be played that increase the chances of some minority group in the second round, for example not listing secularism in the hope that it won't make it to the runoff. But it's a dangerous game of chicken for which the optimal strategy becomes apparent only after the results are tabulated. Alaska is a good example where even with excelent information and pooling data the Palin voters were stil unable to coordinate to skew the results. The existence of that risk is heaven and earth compared to an FPTP election which pretty much guarantees theocracy in your example.

Even if your technical argument would be correct (it's not), you would be trying to fix the problems of democracy by purposefully skewing the vote away from the desires of the electorate. That's a bad idea because it prevents democracy from working and exposing the leaders to the unfiltered democratic will of the people; so you get unaccountable leaders that can maintain power by gaming the system instead of catering for the interest of the public.

Essentially, any power-mad dictator and authoritarian regime has some variant of this argument. Yes, we love democracy and voting, but we definitely cannot let those kinds of people vote or get elected. You are just espousing the softer version still accepted in some countries of "yes, the voting system is not ideal but it gives our side an advantage for now, realpolitik always trumps democratic principles".

> I just want to make clear for others: this "ranking" is just bhauer's opinion.

It's also a non-sensical claim, any voting system "ranking" depends on specifics of the electoral system. For example, larger multi-winner districts using some sort of proportional or Condorcet system are always better that any ranked or approval result in a single winner districts.

The fact vs. value distinction is fundamental in establishing functional and peaceful political structures where rational apes can collaborate and achieve common goals despite their inherent disagreements.

It's completely irrelevant if a bike is factually a superior urban vehicle to a car or a tram. Or if a purely imaginary political border passes to the west of a certain field of maize, making it part of Russia, or to the east, making it Ukraine. The existence of a great being in the sky cannot be factually proved, but tell that to ~5 billion people.

Humans care very deeply about many contentious "facts" that are not settled and widely accepted. The only way to not implode is to call them values, and agree to disagree while establishing systems that can reach conclusions despite them, for example the democratic process. This also provides a frame where people can discuss such issues and expose "values" that turn out to be simply wrong facts, for example anti-vaccinationism.

How is that specific to razor blades? Surely this scenario of sharp bendy steel blade meets soft material is common across many industries.

Can't get natural gas from your distributor? Burn wood or put on a blanket.

Yes, economic substitutes exist for almost all human needs except perhaps air and water, not really pertinent to this debate.

Or it's also possible some grad students with a null hypothesis result are hyping their own startup idea - they have a patent on making better steel for such high toughness applications. Surely that's a technology that would have wide impact on a large number of industries, they probably chose razors as a low mass, high value MVP and hope to scale up.

This is simply a demonstration in essential opsec: don't reuse handles across sites (especially uncommon ones), cycle handles often on high leak platforms (such as Hacker News), don't link your identities by creating profiles.

Anything you put online is perpetual and will be used against you, any innocent hobby will or adolescent joke will become a major transgression at the right time in your life and for the right audience. Even slight grammatical idiosyncrasies in the words you type can be used to root you out by motivated parties.

Curate you official public profile like you are preparing to run for office, one day you just might; anything else should be anonymous.

> Scalping does provide a value… it creates liquidity in the market.

That's invalid economic reasoning. Tickets are a monopoly market with a fixed supply. The monopolist (band/label) can issue tickets at whatever price they want, but once that price and quantity is set, additional resellers are only rent extracting, they are gouging consumer surplus and providing zero service in return - the exact same number of tickets are sold to the exact same show.

There are many legitimare reasons for a band to issue tickets bellow market clearing prices, i.e. leave some fans with money in their pockets even if they would be willing to pay more. For example, building a long term relation with their fan base, providing a good service for a "fair" price etc. Essentially it's a gift economy where people exchange more values than just money (trust, appreciation, artistic expression etc.); the scalper is throwing sand in that transaction by maximizing its own financial revenue.

The insane thing is that, because the VPN has a 1GB/month traffic limit, there is no way to enforce it unless they associate all traffic with a Microsoft controlled user identity. Cloudflare literally has to keep track of any sites you visit and associate them to your ID to make it work.

Though, I do believe that for connections from public WiFi it's somewhat of an improvement. It establishes a minimal security baseline of: "ok, we'll sell your data and let FBI snoop on you, but we won't inject trojans in your downloads and then hijack your webcam to create ransom-porn (though the FBI/??? might)".

You won't get to the point where neo-nazis demonstrate inability to participate in a civil community following guidelines and etiquette. The mere tolerance of them will drive legitimate users away, people by large DO NOT practice freedom of speech. Ignoring that reality is an ideological fantasy, you either blacklist or will be blacklisted.

> there are undesirables in this world.

Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc. Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.

> says that Hertz’s computer system has a “glitch” that has led to the company-wide pattern of reporting cars stolen

We meet again, my oldest and dearest enemy, SAP.

> EU publishes tons of written material, and basically all of it has to be translated.

But only legislative text needs to have translated versions officially recognized as equivalent. The rest can be produced and published in English, and member countries can translate them as required, if necessary. It's a huge expense that exists only to placate French linguistic nationalism.

This is mostly snake oil, perhaps efficient against the dumbest of criminals. The newer generation coin laundry service, for example Chipmixer, will have pre-funded addresses already waiting in the blockchain before the "client" even makes an account. In exchange for a deposit in a wallet controlled by Chipmixer, the client will receive a set of corresponding private keys that add up to the total value being laundered.

You might trace that the coins went into a laundry, but you will never associate with the previously laundered coins that the client got.

> They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators.

Now that the UK is out of the Union, it would be nice for sanity to prevail and most of those translators be made redundant. Except for drafting official multi-language legal documents, the bulk of the proceedings can go on in English, and EMPs that require translation services should request them from their own countries.

It will never happen, but one can surely dream.

> After receiving the letter 5 days later

Meanwhile, my same country mail takes up to 2 weeks to arrive. No wonder I'm not making any ground breaking advances.

This type of result is unavoidable with anonymous cryptocurrency, and it will only get worse if we continue to accept anonymous transfers as a legitimate source of income. The new European MiCA regulation goes a long way into establishing traceability in crypto-transactions, but is still short of what's required.

Essentially, the whole current lot of cryptocurrencies should be detached from financial markets because they operate, by design, like a large money laundry service.

Leverage, by definition, is having others depend on you.

One could safely assume he drank and ate some substances during this event.

To add, the energy devoted to Bitcoin hashing is a product of the bitcoin price, block reward, and the wide acceptance in the Bitcoin community of the idea that provable energy burn is a good way to ensure rarity of the coins.

Even if we maintain proof of work chains as the fundamental consensus tech, there is absolutely nothing (aside from momentum) stopping the community from decreasing the block reward to the a lower value required to prevent double spends of reasonable size. The current hashing power and energy burn in Bitcoin is absurdly oversized for that specific purpose.

You could even maintain the current coin issuance schedule - there is absolutely no need to burn coins into existence, you could simply distribute them randomly to existing holders.

Employment is a relation of power. The employer holds the capital and controls the synergy that makes your work valuable - you have limited and fungible human capital required to make their business work. The employer is large and you are a single person, so unless you hold exceptionally critical and rare skills, like say, Michael Jordan at the peak of his abilities, you are quite fungible and hold very little power in this relationship.

Any employment contract you can ever sign is with company that needs gritty people. You are not a partner, you hold no capital, you are not a unique snowflake the company values, you are just a cog in a money making machine that needs to work reliably - by easily replacing damaged and worn out cogs.

The whole obsession with startups and stock options in them on HN is nothing but the aspiration to reverse this power asymmetry. So that you too can get the power to set the rules of the game, and that others, that you employ, follow your decisions. Money is just another name for power, and the rules of power are the same since the days we started walking on two legs, and probably before that too.

Why would I need to install an operating system on the flimsy SoC the manufacturer embedded in my TV, with the sole intention of turning it into an advertising terminal? How fast will that hardware - software combo go out of date compared to the useful life of a TV? I own a 10 year old, non-Android Sony Bravia TV that looks superb, do they support that?

Sorry, but I don't see it as a problem worth solving. Just make sure your TV is airgaped, use it as dumb terminal and deliver signal from a suitable and well maintained device.

Les might not agree.

> And then slice/view variants of all the above.

So all in all, about a dozen kinds of strings.

> 1. the capacity to signify a digital original and 2. to decentrally organize ownership (though it's more like possession) of these items.

There is nothing novel in this. You could do it in Bitcoin too by agreeing that a certain transaction structure that includes a digital hash is a valid way to signify an original with that hash, and a spend from that address represents an ownership change.

It's simply a convention, and people don't do it because it's mostly a useless diversion from established ways to record and trade IP.

The true NFT innovation is the marketing gimmick that such a convention has any real world relevance and somehow magically makes the IP non-fungible. This enabled massive speculation on essentially worthless (and fully fungible) IP, expressed in a clunky and impractical distributed database.

You should take into account that regen braking (even with resistors) only works at high rpm. The final phase of the braking you need to put even more energy into the coils on top of what the they already must dissipate for braking the car. Electrically, you would need to run the engine in reverse to come to a full stop.

In the money quote, he puts it quite eloquently:

Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.

> The resource curse is that easy riches drive out honest efforts elsewhere.

Thank you for the response, I believe this is an oversimplification. The resource curse is not your typical creative destruction typical of free markets.

If, say, a large part of the population was employed with collecting dung and firewood as energy sources, an abundance of energetic resources will surely collapse output and employment in those sectors. So yes, those people will be worse off in the short run, but the economy as a whole will drastically benefit from access to more energy per unit of labor, produce more, grow and improve real wages across the board, which in turn will create opportunities for the former dung collectors. They stopped collecting dung because that's exactly what should happen as the economy develops, a honest effort (or even an extreme one) in a low productivity role is a waste if more efficient - and possibly less "honest" - alternative exits, such as stock brokers or lawyers.

To unfold this entire cycle we need to assume some type of competent government that will exploit the resource and either distribute it to the citizens (protectionism), or, much more effectively, sell it on the world market and reinvest the proceeds in high growth opportunities. Yes, even in that scenario you can see some exchange rate distortions (Dutch disease) that harm other sectors in the economy, so care must be exercised, but overall we see net welfare increases in the long run, at least if we discount the ecological and provisioning costs you bring up.

But those effects are not a substantive part of the "resource curse" in my view. The real issue is the dramatic effects easy accessible cash resources have on the political structure. An easily extracted rent once you gain power means you are no longer dependent on tax revenue or a functional economy to maintain your grip on power, see for example conflict minerals. There is a strong and well known correlation between oil reserves and authoritarianism. This can place countries in bad equilibria where the oil revenue is funding their own economic stagnation.

To unlink growth from a political structure interested and capable of promoting growth is a gross western-centric bias. It reminds me of the "Washington consensus" economic approach promoted by the IMF in the 90s, that encouraged eastern European countries to adopt market reforms that they weren't institutionally capable to implement, such as privatization of state-owned enterprises lacking a well consolidated stock/capital market and strong regulators. The ensuing economic collapse and widespread fraud has political consequences to this day, there are people dying in Ukraine as we speak due to the democratic backsliding induced in Russia by failed economic reforms that ignored the social and institutional realities.