LastNevadan

I'm amazed that CdC is still around. I remember dialing into their BBS, Demon Roach Underground, in the mid 80s. That was nearly forty years ago!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Roach_Underground

For anyone out there about to try Vegemite on toast for the first time: the secret is to only apply a VERY THIN layer.

The first time I tried it, I gooped it on like jam. Don't do that!

I learned this from my Aussie friend.

There's an interesting and detailed PDF linked from the first page that is packed with history and statistics about Russia's present and past manufacturing of missiles.

https://assets-global.website-files.com/65ca33870401867f9de4...

If you were, say, the President of the United States, during critical points in the transition, what would you have done differently?

China held the cards.

No amount of jawboning by western democracies would have stopped China.

Taking economic steps (like banning China from SWIFT or imposing sanctions like we are doing with Russia now) would have been ineffective and costly.

Military action would have been absurd.

There was no solution to the problem other than to let China do what it wanted with HK.

I'm interested in portfolio theory when I see something like this.

Let's say that the $1B is invested and reliably earns 8% when inflation is 3%, therefore leaving 5% to distribute as tuition. That's $50M for the first year, allowing for each following year to distribute 3% more than the previous year to account for inflation.

Tuition is $59K and there are 1,258 students [1], so the cost is $74M a year.

With my assumptions the endowment would slowly bleed away, but it would fund students for a long time. Perhaps less time, if the school added capacity. Or perhaps more time if there is some other endowment money or other funds from somewhere, or if not all 1,258 students get the benefit for whatever reason.

Whenever I read something like this, my jaded mind wants to think that the benefit being claimed is clearly not matched by the amount of money contributed. But in this case, the amount of money contributed is approximately the required amount of money needed to achieve the claimed benefit. So, good for Ms. Gottesman! She will have a good and achievable result.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein_College_of_Med...

Remember that no good deed goes without punishment!

I read a similar article a few years ago about Californians moving to Idaho. Californians were making Idaho even more red, because the ones that are moving are self-selected to be conservatives.

https://www.idahostatesman.com/entertainment/ent-columns-blo...

My favorite example in English is this sentence: "I peered at a pair of pears on the pier."

As a native speaker, the sounds in peer/pair/pear/pier are slightly but detectable different. But non-native speakers can almost never say or hear these differences.

I'm sometimes amazed by how many people work at some of these companies.

Nine percent is about 1,000 jobs. So, a back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that about 11,000 people work there. I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!

I remember being an electronics store once and seeing some cables intended for audio that described themselves as being "low oxygen" cables. My god, the nonsense that people fall for!

I have been using Optery (YC W22) and are happy with them. It's more money than I wanted to spend on this. But they have cleared my name out of more than a hundred sites.

The article linked here refers to ten data brokers. But there are far more than that that are handling and selling your data. There's no way you can delete your information from all of them without subscribing to a service to do it for you.

There was a family in Siberia who went off-grid and lived in the Siberian forest for 42 years. They were discovered by the Soviet authorities in 1978.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/lykov-family

Along this topic, there is an interesting film called "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" [1] based on the true life story of Lee Israel [2], who forged letters from famous deceased writers and actors. She was eventually caught and plead guilty.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4595882/plotsummary/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Israel

I used DJGPP quite a bit for several projects at work a few years ago. Worked really well. I was happy to use modern versions of C++ compilers for DOS apps.

A similar film is Silkwood, which is about the life of Karen Silkwood, who reported concerns about corporate practices related to health and safety in a nuclear facility where she worked. She was severely harassed by her employer and then died in a suspicious car accident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Silkwood

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/silkwood

I had the same reaction! Before I clicked the article, I was thinking that a bunch of Twitter or Salesforce people were going to jail.

The price of crypto coins (bitcoin, etc) is quite volatile. Stablecoins allow you to price products and services without caring about volatility of the currency.

Changing the topic slightly: I used to fly on an American direct flight from San Jose to Austin with some frequency.

The flight attendants called it the "nerd bird". lol

Why isn't that a great solution to a problem?

It's likely that self-driving cars will eventually be better drivers than real people. Obviously, it's not like that at this point, but AI gets quite a bit better every year.

Think about the number of man-hours people spend behind the wheel. Taxi drivers are automated, and people who own cars and do something else while in their cars besides operate the car. It's a huge stress and efficiency boost for society.

I lost him when he said this:

And RAM goes a lot deeper too. Look at these two sticks of RAM. See how the one on the right has twice the number of memory modules? That allows the individual stick of RAM to pump through data more quickly than the one on the left, even though both of them are rated at DDR 3200 and CL22.

The bus width is defined by the DIMM standard. A 64-bit DIMM (which is what he is showing) always has a 64-bit data interface, regardless of what devices are on the DIMM. The DIMM with fewer devices on it just has 16-bit-wide microchips on it. That doesn't have anything to do with the latency or clock speed of the chips themselves.

And it's strange that he calls each microchip a "module". I would call that a microchip or a device. A "module" is an assembly that contains multiple microchips.

I just get the vibe that he's someone skilled at putting systems together but doesn't have any real engineering background.

You're presumably referring to California Civil Code §2870 [1].

When I had a side project going on and asked my California attorney if this was enough to protect me from my BigCo employer, she said something like, "No. If they want to stop you they'll just drown you in legal procedures that you can't afford to pay. That you're right isn't really that relevant."

[1] https://casetext.com/statute/california-codes/california-lab...

I'm no expert on the topic, but I think that Argentina has more of a tendency toward socialist economic policies.

Argentina is especially known for Juan Perón [1], who implemented a lot of socialist policies that were quite popular with the working class but were not generally helpful for Argentina.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Per%C3%B3n

It's hard for me to name a single source of this quote, but it's clear it shows up in a lot of economics texts and blogs if you search for it. I've seen it lots of times over the years.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Brazil+is+the+country+of+the+futur...

I read a lot of economics blogs. A lot of them seem to have the joke, "Brazil is the country of the future, and it always will be!"

The meaning is that Brazil should be a more successful country. Great location, favorable demographics, lots of natural resources, peaceful neighbors, large population, mostly stable government. But it just never quite becomes successful. But in could, in the future! But that's what people also said in the past.

Somewhere I read that around 1900, Brazil had the same GDP per capita as the United States. And that was the peak of Brazil.

I'm not trying to pick on Brazil. I have a favorable opinion of Brazil and its citizens. I hope that Brazil proves the economists wrong and becomes the country that it can be.

You might take a look at this:

https://earlyretirementextreme.com/

This isn't the poster you replied to, but someone with a similar point of view of trying to live simply.

Wow, I remember playing this on the Commodore 64! As soon as that screen appeared in my browser I recognized it even though the DOS UI looks a bit different.

You're obviously being sarcastic. But Uber really is an improvement on pre-Uber traditional taxi services, where you can call and not really be sure if or when a taxi will show up.

Uber was really two innovations: (1) using an app to reserve a taxi and (2) making the process and the product reliable, customer-friendly and consistent.