pragmar

Cantillon effect says it's just a matter of how "close to money" you are. So living under a central bank is good, but borrowing directly from one is best.

Makes one wonder who is setting the priorities of anonymous, I thought this was satire on first watch.

Didn't downvote the parent, but I'd be willing to bet that if the comment didn't lead with "You are living in a dream world" it'd be the same shade as other comments. Often it's not the point, but the tone. In the author's mind, it may've been intended as funny or light-hearted, but as bare words on a page, it comes across as personal and contemptuous.

There's evidence that it was neither. Blood tests of athletes that competed in the Wuhan Military games in October 2019 point to the virus circulating earlier. The timeline that much of the conversation rests on feels kind of weak.

This happened in earlier in the year. The paper was subsequently published in The American Journal of Therapeutics. The full text is online if anyone is interested.

https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/Fulltext/2021/...

I'd prefer my deed committed to blockchain (by a government registrar) than held in a local instance of filemaker pro, or in a paper file cabinet, is where I was going.

>>> How will blockchain make it better?

You're focusing on patents. Countries operate copyright offices--clerks, submission fees, red tape, human error. With blockchain, I can produce and store an md5 of a audio file, pdf, or video for next to nothing. You now have cryptographic signed proof of generation at a particular time, and a system that stores the data perpetually. Yes, you still need courts and judges to adjudicate conflicts, I never said it was a 100% solution.

Here are a couple.

Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism.

Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.

Controlling for party affiliation within the context of a negative ad campaign would've yielded much more interesting results. In all but Wisconsin, this paragraph in particular almost seems counter to their argument with back-of-napkin controls:

> In Georgia, despite Black people constituting 32% of the population, they made up 61% of the ‘Deterrence’ category. In North Carolina, Black people are 22% of the population but were 46% of ‘Deterrence’. In Wisconsin, Black people constitute just 5.4% of the population but made up 17% of ‘Deterrence’.

You're right, but the Siberian heatwave is also a weather event. It's contextualized in climate science, but let's play it out. The article says carbon is a 600x likelihood multiplier. That's one region in one season. What is the likelihood of such an event in any region over 4 seasons? These sorts of stories promote misunderstanding of exactly your point.

> Has anyone found a non-criminal use case for blockchain yet?

As others has pointed out, DeFi is impressive, though still mostly fueled by speculation at this point. Digital collectables is another (think digital trading cards with limited supply). Might sound silly at first, but could prove an economic lever for artists and game designers.

> Preferably one that isn't better addressed by a single Postgres instance?

And here's the problem. Blockchain is expensive. A central, trustworthy server is going to be ridiculously inexpensive in comparison. For all the cost, the major benefit is resilience.

Don't know about saas, but it would seem like you could set this up on AWS lambda, or an Azure function.

Alternatively, you could write a webpage on your site that does what you need (server-side), and point Uptime Robot at that.

Also known as "sweat of the brow." The US Supreme Court rejected such protections in the 90s. I'm sure it's complicated, but copyrights are not presumed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_State...

Been using self-hosted Matomo (formerly piwik) for about 6 months. It does everything I need, but mileage will vary by use case. In terms of a feature matrix, it's significantly less powerful than GA.

There was a paper by Rasool and Schneider in 1971 that was behind this, I think. "Our ways" would've been industrial particulate pollution, where a 4x increase, sustained, risked kicking off a new ice age. Schneider later retracted the findings in 1974.

Definitely, there was an "albedo yachts" solution that was floated a while back. Basically kicking up mist from the oceans. It's all just theory, and the repercussions are probably not well understood, but the idea is out there and implementation would be relatively inexpensive.

I don't know if it helps, but these are the papers the media cooling stories came from. They are peer reviewed and quantitative, but perhaps not exactly what you need (that is to say, not sufficiently predictive).

Rasool and Schneider 1971 [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4db2/1045b17ebcdd6a8c6adeb1...

Earl Barrett 1971 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003809...

Hamilton and Seliga 1972 https://www.igsoc.org/journal/14/72/igs_journal_vol14_issue0...

Chylek and Coakley 1974 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/183/4120/75

Bryson and Dittberner 1976 https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%28197...

Sean Twomey 1977 https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%28197...

[1] edit: Schneider later retracted findings

While I don't have a good sense of the market, I think desktop has some compelling advantages.

On the developer end, what would you do if you had an EC2 C5XL with a massive disk for each and every one of your users, for free? From a startup scenario, there's runway to be gained by offloading storage and processing to the client, desktop can bring monthly ops costs down to the basement.

On the consumer end, a single user perpetual license can be extremely cost effective. I'm watching the Google Stadia release for an idea of what a resource intensive cloud solution will really cost. I think it remains to be seen.

Desktop is certainly becoming niche--but I think it will rule certain software domains, specifically those that have high storage and processing requirements, for a long time.

NES and the subsequent revival of the console was on account Nintendo being bold enough to invest when the conventional wisdom was that video games were a fad whose time had passed--that combined with a leap in AV quality over the Atari 2600 (the last mainstream console). 70s/80s culture seemed to churn every few years, it was riddled with fads, so the feeling was grounded in reality.

Outside of the console market, between the 2600 and the NES, there was growth in gaming on personal computers, but it was driven by floppy pirating. I'm not sure there was a lot of profit there.

On the work itself, if it isn't being micromanaged, there's an opportunity to adapt it to what interests you. What do you want to get better at? It doesn't matter if it's generalization or specialization, the company likely wants a low maintenance solution regardless of how you get there. In the long run, an important part of work is making it your own, getting what you can out of it so you don't feel stifled.

It's possible I'm unaware of how far to the right he went. I've held a soft spot for Solzhenitsyn from his earlier literature. The KKK reference struck me as a slime and I felt compelled to reply. I'm willing to stand corrected, where is he calling for the incarceration of dissidents?

The literature stands on its own, aside from whatever personal political evolution occurred in his later years. In the 90s, it certainly appeared as though Russia was getting set up for exploitation by the west under Yeltsin. A nationalist move in ideology within that context is rational.

So Governor Ige claimed the employee pushed the wrong buttons and followed up with the screen capture showing how confusing the menu system was. With the story having changed dramatically to a misinformed, intentional alert, the state government has burned their credibility. If there's anything to learn here, it'll come from the federal investigation.

I think this is the study on rats sanguy is referring to:

https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/results/areas/cellphones/

The American Cancer Society called it a "paradigm shift" in our understanding of the effects of non-ionizing radiation, FWIW.

There are some interesting points in the article's comment thread.

>>> Amir Epstein - Money for big hits is in streaming on DSP’s. Spotify pays $7,000 per million streams. That may sound like nothing, but when artists like JB get 100,000,000 streams (that’s a conservative number) that’s $700,000. And then there’s apple itunes, which pays around the same, and google play which pays a little more. And if you are lucky and getting decent numbers on Tidal, it pays $23,000USD per million. Not too shabby

>>> Anonymous (response) - That Spotify money you just referenced $7,000 per 1 million streams goes to whoever owns the MASTER. Typically the record company, NOT the songwriters. Do your homework

There is a pot of money out there, but you're unlikely to see it unless you're the one writing the record contracts.

Probably the best deep dive I've read on the cost of higher ed was published a few years ago by Robert Hiltonsmith. This addresses US universities and colleges as opposed to UK, so the issues may not be one to one and the data is a little dated (published in 2015). Still, a worthwhile read.

http://www.demos.org/publication/pulling-higher-ed-ladder-my...

Probably the most persuasive rebuttal I've read in trying to follow memo story. It has an honesty about it. So the issues with the memo are lie largely in the subtext and motivations, it seems. When framed this way, it's easier to understand.

One issue I have is that the author implies the memo is alluding to a lack of aptitude, where in my reading of the original memo, the issue was of a lack of interest (wrt affinity towards people vs. objects and so forth). Perhaps that's six of one vs half a dozen of the other from a certain perspective, but it comes off as a misrepresentation.

I'd say it depends on whether you're fundamentally serving documents or an application. The new breed of js frameworks probably isn't the right choice for Wikipedia, and jQuery probably isn't the right choice for Spotify player. A generalization, for sure, but that is how I tend to think about it.

I should clarify. My comment was in regards to the views of society, broadly, and the political class in particular. What I was trying to say--the justice system that elected representatives have constructed speaks to a cruel, vindictive thread in the national psychology. Furthermore, the system is not a "mistake," it was created with purpose. I don't approve the current, puritan flavor of justice. What happened to you wasn't right.

> I'll go back to the original thesis of the OP and say that why the fuck should people like me even TRY to find gainful employment when all society wants to do is rip it away from us for not conforming to often-arbitrary norms?

I could not agree more.

> Was this the outcome society wants me to have?

Unfortunately, yes. Drug enforcement and sentencing may be on a slow decline, but moralizing every perceived character defect is on the rise. There's no more effective way to do this than than through policies that not only punish the convicted, but add liability to any landlord or employer that would ordinarily feel that you've paid your debt to society.