5,145 karma · joined March 2, 2010
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machine[dot]keane [at] googles email service [dot] com
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No one measures the environmental impact of unnecessarily forcing office workers to the office, the press doesn’t ask corporate leaders about their hypocrisy, so leaders just force workers back the consequences be damned.
This simply isn't true, outside of large chains or supermarkets. Many smaller businesses like pubs, "kiosks", barbers, non-chain restaurants, and so on, are cash only.
It's a combination of tax avoidance and trying to avoid the insane level of paperwork needed for bascically every aspect of life, but especially if you have a business, no matter how small.
Source: live in Germany, near a large metro area.
https://www.bundesbank.de/en/press/press-releases/payment-be...
"BNB can be used to pay for fees when trading on Binance, and usually at a discounted rate. Due to the primary utility, BNB has seen massive growth in interest throughout the years . Several rounds of token burn events have appreciated BNB price and pushed it up as one of the top-10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization."
It could be easily argued that providing an end customer with access to digital products they bought is part of the service that data subjects signed up for, so retaining PII indefintely is 100% allowed (unless the data subject explicitly requets their account to be permanently deleted).
I remember PG quipping words to the effect of "google searches are like scientology, what's true, is what's true for you" so the trend was clear even at that time (maybe 10-ish years ago?)
According to journalist Paul Thacker, the Lancet letter "helped to guide almost a year of reporting, as journalists helped to amplify Daszak’s message and to silence scientific and public debate." This affected reporting on the origins of the virus, "characterising the lab leak theory as unworthy of serious consideration".
I myself have a huge OneNote notebook, with all kinds of interesting projects or snippets that I've collected from HN or Reddit over the years. Being able to query that like a super-smart friend ("what was the error I ran into when I tried to implemt a self-hosted Synapse instance? How I can I fix that?") would be insane for personal productivity.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
At the time, operating YouTube was eye wateringly expensive and lost billions. But google could see where things were going: a triple trend of falling storage costs, falling bandwidth and transmission costs (I’m trying to dig up a link I read years ago about this but google search has gotten so shit that I can’t find it).
It was similar for Asic miners for Bitcoin. Given enough demand, specialised, lower cost hardware specially for LLMs will emerge.
Got the idea from this youtuber[1], he has some nice ideas on setting up a home server.
I have a Philips SHP-9000 headphone with a vmoda boom pro mic, which plugs into the 3.5mm jack on the headphones. On the other end, I sometimes attach a cheap Chinese Bluetooth receiver, which can be plugged into any 3.5mm jack, so any wired headphones can be made wireless as needed.
It's common for employers to subsidise the private insurance at least.
And no, it's not messed up like in the US, although it's a large expense by European standards/cheap by US standards (the insurance companies raise the rates every year, and are protected by legislation in doing so, a bit like a utility company).
It's using common crawl and wikipedia among other sources. The original purpose is something else.
Another anecdote that I find amusing is that Google Translate was trained on EU legal texts (among other sources), which are (generally) translated into 26/27 languages of the EU members. A huge, multinational bureaucracy, generated the texts by hand, but Google gets all the credit. I'm guessing that's part of the reason that Chinese isn't so accurate compared with other translations.
Plenty of countries have monthly child benefit payments, just a few examples I know of [1], [2] [3] [4]. You can easily google "child benefits [country]" to find loads more examples. There are direct government payments and/or tax breaks in many countries. Countries with decent social welfare systems usually have some form of financial support during parental leave, for both mothers and fathers too.
These efforts don't really have much of an impact to raise birth rates.
[1] https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/social_welfare/social_...
[2] https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/social-security/child-ben...
[3] https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/benefits/child-benefit/bef...
[4] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/03/asia/south-korea-worlds-l...
How can you fix low birth rates once the process is in decline? Are there any successful examples of a country that has gotten rich, or is getting rich, that has done it succesfully? Every example I've read says no, regardless of geography or culture. It seems an impossible problem to fix.
In South Korea for example, I've read they've tried a veriety of incentives, and none work. The pressure to climb into or stay in the middle class, squeezes families or would-be mothers to work more, leading inevitably to lower birth rates as wages have stagnated over the past few decades (oversimplyifing but this applies everywhere).