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ridgewell

992 karma · joined July 15, 2014

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ridgewell··on The Italian towns selling houses for €1
>A core idea is that a house sells for a positive value. But that presumption is likely false. Houses at unattractive places in poor condition might actually represent a negative value.

This reminds me of an incident in Vancouver, where the city sought to expropriate single room occupancy (SRO) hotels (read: slums). They felt that each property was worth negative value, but they estimated the value as $1 because:

> We are unaware of any instances of property being transferred with a negative value. Therefore, a value of $1.00 is concluded for the subject property with the knowledge that a purchaser would be required to assume the financial obligations with either holding or demolishing and redeveloping the property.

[1] https://council.vancouver.ca/20191106/documents/cfsc2.pdf

ridgewell··on Batch Mode in the Gemini API: Process More for Less
It can depend a lot on the shape of your batch to my understanding. A small batch job can be tasked out a lot quicker than a large batch job waiting for just the right moment where capacity fits.
ridgewell··on Taking over 60k spyware user accounts with SQL injection
I'm not familiar with this app but based on the read, it sounds like they're essentially relying on someone to sneak into the target's phone, install an apk with a 'Settings' logo, where you grant it all permissions (I assume the installer facilitates the process of manually granting full permissions for each permissions type and disabling battery optimization). Android does allow you to effectively delegate full permissions to an app like that, albeit in a manual way.
ridgewell··on Why Do Swallows Fly to the Korean DMZ?
>The thing I found most remarkable is that house prices there are not much less than in Seoul proper (that's what I was told at least), which just seemed utterly absurd - what market forces could drive prices of a farmer village (because that's what it is, really - although the houses looked nice) surrounded by landmines and that is a pain in the ass to get in and out of to that of a first world metropolis?

You are literally paid to live there and be a human flagpole through a tax-free salary of $82,000 USD for agriculture (as of 2013, likely higher now), as well as free education, agricultural incentives and preferential tax treatment. [1] On top of that, there's only a handful of homes, effectively amounting to an artificial housing scarcity.

[1] https://modernfarmer.com/2013/11/guarded-growing-farm-centri...

ridgewell··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA
The one that I frequently hear of as a layman (not a lawyer) is Toronto Pearson Airport's Preclearance, which has a very strict and narrow view of the TN Status eligible occupations.
ridgewell··on I built a failed startups goods website and named it VcSubsidized.com
I remember at the start of COVID, scoring a Steelcase Leap v2 from a guy who was scooping up office chairs from failed Silicon Valley startups and hauling them up to Canada. Super chill dude, and totally upfront about basically making a 100% profit margin by gluing on new armrests to these wholesale fire-sale finds. It really highlighted the interesting economics of the time - a lot of businesses probably thrived just by redistributing stuff from regions in freefall. You have to wonder how much of the "supply chain" was actually just people moving stuff from places that were dying to places still kicking. Kind of a morbid redistributive supply chain, when you think about it.
ridgewell··on Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
In Canada, they use gross income instead of net income for student grants.
ridgewell··on Buy hi-resolution satellite images of any place on earth
Google Maps in many urban areas is actually aerial imagery. Satellite imagery serves a different use case - often for difficult to access areas where aerial photography is not viable or permitted.
ridgewell··on Tiny Tiny RSS
I love Miniflux. I found TT-RSS to be much too cluttered and I enjoyed Miniflux's focus on minimalism & privacy, but that's a personal opinion. It also doesn't require a mobile client: it works just fine in a mobile browser, a big deal when most Android apps for self-hosted RSS readers are either ugly or unmaintained.

Setting up Miniflux was problematic because documentation around its pSQL & environmental variables aren't too well-documented or universal in implementation.

However, I've noticed a lot of people really don't like Miniflux because it is very minimal and doesn't try to do everything.

ridgewell··on German government to bail Lufthansa out of bankruptcy with nearly $10B state aid
Lufthansa: Where fuel surcharges don't match up with reality.
ridgewell··on De-Googling: My Progress
DuckDuckGo is just Bing, with the optionality of geolocation by country.
ridgewell··on [dead]
This website unfortunately has a reputation for the extreme levels of spam employed used to promote the platform.
ridgewell··on CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
Is the situation improved by using the Privacy Pass add-on [1] from Cloudflare?

Supposedly:

>Privacy Pass is a Chrome/Firefox browser extension to make browsing Cloudflare-protected websites a better experience for users. In particular, if a user IP address is designated to have a poor reputation then the user may have to solve a Cloudflare CAPTCHA page before they can gain access to such websites. Privacy Pass uses elliptic curve cryptography to generate 'anonymous' tokens after a single CAPTCHA page is solved. These tokens can be used in future engagements with Cloudflare websites to prevent having to solve more CAPTCHAs. The extension generates 30 tokens for each CAPTCHA solution and thus can be used to reduce CAPTCHA pages for each user by a similar factor.

[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500199265...

ridgewell··on Warp, Cloudflare's Free VPN, Is Now Publicly Available for iOS and Android
Still protects you from hijacking at public wifi hotspots. Doesn't let you watch geolocked content (US Netflix), and probably doesn't let you torrent either.
ridgewell··on Warp, Cloudflare's Free VPN, Is Now Publicly Available for iOS and Android
What's the underlying technology? WireGuard (via BoringTun)?

I see there's two tiers, Warp and Warp+. Supposedly Warp+ has better/optimal routing that lets you avoid local ISP congestion. It's $7 CAD/month. This would be pretty cool on desktop for gaming, etc.

ridgewell··on Don't donate canned goods to food banks (2017)
Donation bins for nonperishable goods are there for a few reasons.

1. Promote Awareness of the Food Bank, and to create connections with either potential clients or donors. Having a presence that you walk by on your way to buy lettuce can have a long term benefit on name recognition.

2. Improve store relations. Donors buy products from the store at full-markup, and the store has more incentive to continue to support its own community initiatives from the reminder that the store supports the food bank. Grocery stores tend to have some autonomy on the causes they can support.

3. Some people genuinely do not like the idea of donating money to the food bank. They prefer the physical act of buying something to donate, whether it be because they're worried about mismanagement of funds, the money going towards paying staff, or wanting to have a direct impact on the program itself (I only want my money to go towards food). Some people limit their contributions to stuff that's about to expire in a month from quarterly pantry clearing, or when they're about to move.

On a side note, some people don't want to end up on a fundraising list or hassled for donations. Cans are effectively anonymous. A small donation of $10 to a food bank that sends out quarterly fundraising mailouts can mean $6 of your donation went into fundraising.

ridgewell··on Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies
I would be surprised why game developers and publishers don't cancel out old keys from free giveaways to prevent hoarding and reselling then.
ridgewell··on Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies
>2. Tactically/strategically reselling keys legitimately acquired cheaper (giveaways, review keys, differentiated pricing between markets)

Key reselling from giveaways could be mitigated if we somehow figured out a way to make keys expire shortly after the giveaway period (ie, keys expire 5 days after the giveaway ends).

I'm not aware if Steam or other marketplaces have this functionality yet.

ridgewell··on Mail a Letter Online
I would appreciate if you transparently disclose your pricing instead of making me register to see pricing.
ridgewell··on Cloudflare's CTO Wants to Shake Up How We Think About VPNs
Cloudflare uses a reverse proxy design for its CDN features.
ridgewell··on Indonesia election: More than 270 election staff die counting votes
Furthermore, in Canada (Federal), deputy returning officers are chosen by the party or candidate received the most votes in the last election and poll clerk's are chosen by the party or candidate that came in second in the last election.

In practice though, a lot of folks are hired afterwards through the nonpartisan process.

ridgewell··on Spurious Justifications for Eliminating Price Caps on .org and Legacy Domains
I saw Derrel Fincher, a Oklahoma House Representative, wrote a comment against the price cap removal. [1]

This was relatively interesting since I've never seen a politician participate in such a niche request for comment process.

[1] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-org-renewal-18mar19/...

ridgewell··on U.S. Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs
A balloon at 50,000 feet rapidly descending doesn't fit the bill at all?
ridgewell··on Setting Up an Ad-Blocking VPN with WireGuard and Pihole
To be perfectly fair, a good chunk of VPN providers primarily see P2P/bulk downloading and streaming traffic.

Ordinary web browsing probably isn't a significant part of VPN traffic when you think about it.

Agree it would reduce bandwidth costs, but there's also a cost to maintaining such infrastructure.

ridgewell··on U.S. Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs
>Others say they’ve seen white, Tic-Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind, and no exhaust.

These sound like weather balloons to me. I don't think most engineers or academy graduates are trained in meteorology either.

Not that I'm saying this is the definite answer or that I am somehow correctly inferring all of this. I'm just proposing that legitimate explanations exist.

ridgewell··on People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours
Medicine is an interesting case. The prioritization isn't so much on the health of medical practitioners and nurses, but on patient safety.

It is argued that patients have higher survivability rates when patient handoffs/shift changes are kept to a minimum. The focus has never been on the health of doctors, nurses, X-Ray technicians, etc. but from a public health perspective.

This has far-reaching consequences in itself.

ridgewell··on People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours
People like to bring up the long hours that workers in Asian countries stay in the office or workplace for to justify long work weeks in North America and Europe when needed.

In practice, they drag out their work day (eat breakfast, take showers, go to the gym, go on their phone) and don't really work significant hours in the end. Their productivity in terms of economic value produced per hour is markedly lower than most western countries. [1]

Doing real work for 65-70 hours is markedly dissimilar and very detrimental to your health. Not even sure if most people could say they could last for a few more months.

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/09/11/commentary/j...

ridgewell··on Americans Are Among the Most Stressed People in the World, Poll Finds
Instruction on stress management and anger management is driven by parenting and school environments, not by state-mandated education and mandatory stress management workshops.

If you see your parents constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and lay-offs, struggling to pay off medical bills and resorting to shouting as a stress relief mechanism, then odds are, you'll grow up thinking this is the norm.

ridgewell··on In England, rhubarb is grown by candlelight
I sell forced rhubarb on the internet.
ridgewell··on Americans Are Among the Most Stressed People in the World, Poll Finds
I wonder if the root cause for all of this is poor instruction on stress management and anger management.

I am starting to wonder if many of these issues are actually culturally driven, rather than biologically driven. American urban and industrial culture as-a-whole is one that prizes productivity, grinding, and individual work, rather than looser workdays, efficiency and teamwork.

I am aware there are exceptions.

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