mrfredward

In thermodynamic terms, an air conditioner is a heat pump hooked up the other way, though in practical terms I realize a heat pump is a device that is used for heating.

While not as mathematically elegant a comparison, you could certainly run the numbers for gas or any other heating method and find a similar cost comparision. They key point is that a computer heats the way a space heater heats, and heating your home with space heaters is expensive even in spite of the 100% efficiency at turning electricity into heat.

Modern heat pumps can get a coefficient of performance of around 3, meaning that for every watt of electricity going in, you get 3 watts coming out inside your home (the other two watts are being removed from the air outside). For everything that isn't a heat pump, energy in = energy released in your home (coefficient of performance=1). So in the end, you get like a 33% rebate on cpu usage via heating cost savings(very rough number, since the actual coefficient of performance varies wildly on outside air temp)...non-negligible, but it doesn't make it free unfortunately.

To trade you need to open an account with your name, social security number, address, occupation, and other details. Your broker will have to verify most of these details under federal anti-money laundering regulations. Immediately following the hack, your brokerage will be asked to provide a list of people who traded around the hack and benefited. All of your personal information will be in the hands of the SEC and FBI within a few days, and you will be one of very few people with no trading history who made a million dollars out of no where.

Yes, the FBI can do much more with having all your personal and financial information handed directly to them then they can with the IP address of a VPN exit node in a server log. There is no comparison.

I think it's worth looking at how deplatforming happens here. Whether it is someone being fired or a tweet deleted or a community banned, the "cancellation" is almost always done by a company.

Companies operate more like amoral optimization functions than they do moral beings. In this case, the incentive driving them is bad press...companies are terrified of being on the wrong end of a media cycle. The driver of bad press, in an era where tweets are constantly used as primary sources in news articles, is social media.

The result of all this is that speech in society is now partially governed by twitter outrage. There is some benefit to this, as the loudest voices on twitter are willing to stand up to power (as opposed to letting the elites determine who should be fired for speaking out on their own), but it's also horrifying to think that twitter anger is, to a growing degree, governing speech in our society and setting the standard for right and wrong.

Twitter mobs are incapable of handling nuance, and yet productive policy discussions can't happen without it. That's a pretty serious problem.

Printing money to get through a recession vs printing money as the primary way of funding government programs are wildly different things. The mere suggestion that U.S. officials were serious about running a deficit of a large percentage of GDP could send people fleeing U.S. dollar denominated assets, and thanks to the exchange rate effects cause a spike in inflation before the programs even started.

The thing that makes a green piece of cloth valuable is the powerful government and the massive reserve bank behind it. If a dollar bill starts to look like an IOU from an entity that has no capacity to pay, it will be valued as such.

Just remember that you won't change anybody's mind by alienating them.

Telling your climate change denying uncle he's an idiot won't change his mind, but it will ruin thanksgiving. That's why it's important to consider if your emotions are leading you to do something counterproductive.

The business codebase I'm working on now was written by OOP crazy people who thought inheritance was the solution to every line of duplicated code. When they hit roadblocks, they filled the base class with things like if(this.GetType() == typeof(DerivedClass1)){...

I would do anything to have the duplication instead.

Most developed nations have highly regulated healthcare systems, and part of the government involvement is in setting prices.

The U.S., through everything from safety regulations to IP laws to insurance regulation has destroyed competition, but outside of medicare isn't involved in determining prices. The result is predictable.

Markets work great when the incentives are right. It's hard to get incentives right in healthcare and most nations want medicine to be part of a government safety net, so they go the direction of socializing healthcare. Almost anything would be better than the system the U.S. has now.

>If you imagine a dial with a yellow warning at "8" and a warning redline at "9", the US is currently arguing over whether turning it from 1 to 2 is going to be the end of the world. The limit does exist, but it's a long way away.

The moment people think a currency is shaky, they get their money out of it and into something else. That leads to a huge oversupply of that currency in exchange markets, crushing exchange rates, and making the prophecy of inflation self-fulfilling. Much like borrowing, the moment people think you need to print money to survive is the moment everything goes to hell.

That being said, I think the fed's policy has been pretty reasonable. Europe and Japan have been more aggressive with monetary policy than the U.S. over the last decade, making the dollar very strong and worsening the trade imbalance.

Or this one (I'm on android): Tapping the "cast" button to send to a Chromecast while in the middle of a show causes a random jump. On a good day, it would start playing at the beginning of the show, on a bad one it would jump to an entirely different network.

I assume my experience was unique somehow because it's too egregious of a bug to ignore (it basically gave me a choice of ditch the Chromecast or ditch YoutubeTV, in the end I did both), but I was using an android phone and a gen 3 chromecast so I can't imagine why this only affected me. Never got fixed in the ~1 year I had the service.

The pressure of the tires pushes horizontally outward on the sidewalls and helps them hold their shape, so they can absolutely be in compression and not fold up.

Earn a living is taxed. Groceries and clothing are taxed (in my state at least). Homes are taxed. Investing your hard earned savings back into our economy is taxed.

Getting a large sum of money from your extremely wealthy parents is also taxed.

Why is the last of these things less deserving of being taxed than the ones before it? If anything, it should be the other way around.

A very cynical answer to what's the logic here: objective measures get in the way of many non-academic college admission goals, so colleges want to do away with them. One of those goals is racial diversity, and that's the only one colleges openly talk about because it's the only one that can positively impact society. Other goals include raising more money by admitting the children of major donors, improving the prestige of the college by admitting top athletes (even when they lack academic ability and motivation), and connecting the college with as many important and powerful people as possible(to bring both money and prestige to the college, and/or to help high ranking administrators make connections).

Of course colleges do all these things already, but imagine how much easier it will be for them when they don't have these pesky test scores showing the students they want to admit aren't qualified.

James Gunn, director of "Guardians of the Galaxy" is the first person to come to mind for me. He's not a stand-up comedian per say, but humor was undoubtedly part of his job and he got fired for some very poor jokes he made on twitter a decade prior.

I kept holding down a key in the email boxes thinking the story was going somewhere...but then I looked at the source and it turns out each sentence is randomly picked from an array of inspirational sentences.

The top entry in my link above simulates 50 million years in 6 seconds for an n=6 system. That's 11,000,000,000,000X running on a normal PC.

There may not be an analytic solution, but solving the n-body problem numerically with newtonian physics isn't a difficult thing to do...it's simple enough that it has been used as a benchmark for doing computations: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

In addition, that up and down motion is annoying to passengers, and a waste of energy. The suspension has dampers, and the tires have hysteresis (it takes more energy to squish a tire down than you get from letting it spring back up), so more energy is put into the "up" parts of the cycle than is recovered from the "down" parts.

And so the difference between May and June futures should be constrained by the cost of storing oil for a month (the price of oil for June should be <= may + 1 month storage). Of course, storage facilities take time and money to build and shutdown, so there ends up being supply and demand based fluctuations for the cost of storing oil, and so if we run out of storage space (as happened at the end of April), you can get a huge difference in prices for futures that are a short time apart (which also happened at the end of April).

I believe adc is still commonly used as a way of reading the carry bit. For example, assuming eax has already been zeroed, adc eax, eax would be the idiomatic way of reading the carry bit into eax.

The carry flag gets set by all sorts of instructions other than addition and subtraction (comparisons, bit shifts, multiplication, etc) so this is more useful than you might think.

The 20KB stripped down Windows kernel that shipped on the XBox isn't hard to emulate...emulators such as CXBX do this for many functions by calling the respective windows function on the host. Low-level emulators (XQemu) take the opposite approach by emulating well understood hardware (hdd, cdrom, usb) and then running a binary dump of the xbox firmware (which contains the kernel, it's not on disk) directly.

To my understanding the hardest problem in XBox emulation is the GPU, and unfortunately this doesn't help with that.

The other problem with declarative code on a runtime you didn't create is traditional forms of debugging go out the window. You can't set a breakpoint, or single step, or even printf debug declarative code directly, though you can peek behind the scenes a little if you control the runtime.

Amusingly, the introduction to "Seven Habits" starts off arguing against a hollow "personality ethic" approach pushed by other self-help books. I could be misinterpreting, but I believe that this is Covey insulting "How to Win Friends."

I found both books full of obvious things, but also found that reading and reflecting on obvious things can still go a long way for self-improvement. Personally, I didn't like "7 Habits" though because Covey is always saying his methods/truths are "self-evident" and he uses the "this is true because it would be dumb to think otherwise" line of reasoning at the points in the book when I thought his argument was weakest.

It's really comforting to hear this explained. In the past, when I saw a username with several reasonable comments showing as dead, I was worried it was the work of bots or some conspiracy flagging things unfairly. I'm glad that's not the case.

My last newegg experience was ordering parts for a computer with the free shipping option (2-10 days?). Power supply hadn't shown up 6 weeks later, so I tried to do an online support chat. Sat in a queue for 2 hours before it crashed. I called, and got a time slot for them to call me back. No one ever called. Tried again the next day, support chat was down. When I eventually got through, they said they'd file a claim with FedEx, and if FedEx agrees they'd refund me. Power supply showed up on my door a week after that. Had to repeat the process to do a return.

I'll never touch newegg again. Their own system said I never received something I paid for, and yet sorting it out took 2 months and 6 attempts contacting customer support.

Software development doesn't exist in a vacuum. The author talks about these design principles as if they are supposed to satisfy the software team's personal values, when in reality it needs to be more about the organization's goals and values. Take this statement:

>Usability is more important than profitability.

For a bootstrapped company in danger of running out of money, it's ridiculous to prioritize perfecting UX over making sales. For an open source team, profitability isn't part of the equation at all but user experience might be a top priority. My point is, these aren't just matters of personal taste, the "design principles" have to mesh with the rest of the organization.

Fashion isn't the best example for this, because often people are paying for prestige more than quality. A $3,000 purse isn't 100X as good as a $30 purse; the exclusivity of a brand that expensive is the attraction. People who opt-out of this competition however, may instead brag about what savvy shoppers they are.

There is a relevant theory in economics called "the market for lemons" that speaks to what you are saying though. The idea is this: if someone is trying to buy a washing machine as cheaply as possible, they would rationally pick an $1000 machine that lasts 15 years over a $500 machine that lasts 5. The problem, however, is that the consumer often can't tell if the expensive machine is really better quality, or just going for a higher markup. With that uncertainty, it is safer to buy the cheap machine. Manufacturers know this, so they compete on price and features more than longevity. Without a time machine, consumers can't see if the extra money they spend is worth it, so cheap crap is the equilibrium for the market.

Yes, fully agree that economic instability from hyperinflation hurts far more than reducing the wealth gap could help.

In recent times, the fed has been below its 2% inflation target.If it missed on the other side, and inflation went to 3-4%, I think that would be totally reasonable economic policy. Double digit inflation, however, would end up making everyone poorer.

>Future generations pay this back not through taxes but through inflation.

I don't think that's a fair characterization. Inflation helps people with student loans (salary grows but debt stays the same) and hurts people with retirement accounts full of bonds. Broadly speaking, inflation helps the young (by closing the wealth gap between haves and have-nots).

And the underlying economic reason for Apple's shares to go up when it wasn't paying a dividend is that as Apple accumulated cash and became more profitable, the chances that it would pay a fat dividend someday (even if not in the near future) kept going up.

If companies didn't ever pay a dividend or buyback shares, the whole thing would be a ponzi scheme. The company takes money in an IPO, and then investors shuffle money among themselves to make it look like they have a profit, but it would collapse if people want to cash out. When companies eventually distribute profit to investors however, it becomes possible for cash to leave the system without all the paper value disappearing into thin air.