LeonB

It’s “1-bit, for particularly large values of ‘bit’”

Very unlikely in the first place, but second, that way lies far worse chaos.

Similarly, when Julius Caesar turned the republic into an empire, and was subsequently assassinated: it did not mean the empire reverted back to being a republic - rather that centuries of increasingly despotic emperors lay ahead.

I generally agree.

This bit I see differently, though only with ~ 30% confidence.

> vast majority of the companies in the S&P 500 have nothing to do with defense, shipping or natural resources.

If you were evaluating the impact that a road has, and you looked at all the vehicles that passed over it every day, most of the vehicles you see would be in other industries — retail, industrial, commercial, domestic — very few of them are professional bitumen pourers who make roads. So clearly bitumen pouring only affects a low percentage of the city.

> if we dole out UBI to everyone to cover basic living costs, will that simply result in the cost of rent going up to absorb the whole amount?

For that to be true, rent-seeking would have to literally capture all surplus. In which case UBI wouldn’t be an option in the first place.

The marginal increase in the purchasing power of someone who went from having $0 to $n would always be greater than the increase in purchasing power for someone who went from $1 billion to $1 billion + n - even with inflation.

I carry around a little illuminated square on which i interact with imaginary friends. Right now I’m imagining that `mmooss` has just asked me a question.

Only thing is, how do I know for sure that I’m not the imaginary one?

Turned out there was only room for about 4 oligopolist cloud providers.

Awesome Tom.

Snout were v good.

I’ve lived in scenarios where people saying either of these things would be a huge violation, and I’ve lived in scenarios where people saying either of these things would be natural.

Living in the latter scenario is a far better place, and nothing like, the former scenario.

King co-wrote the song!

(Carole King that is)

No one knows why it happened! It was possibly one rogue triple Z volunteer on a bender, not some organised putsch.

We’ve known Paul and David from custard for a long time now. Only time we ever talked about that was waaaaay back, around 1996 when we interviewed David for Semper, the UQ newspaper.

(“We” is my wife and I… girlfriend back then)

I watched the teaser video and was disappointed to see that — despite half a century of precedent — these so called experts failed to include, and focus on, some really gnarly stacks, nosedives and face plants.

Lots of airplay, apart from that time they went into the 4ZZZ studios and found a bunch of custard cds and tapes were all smashed up… leading to the song “fantastic plastic” off Wahooto, “I wish that triple zed would play us…”

Love Custard with my heart and soul. Thanks for bringing them up Tom Howard!

M1 changed in a way that made M1 larger.

So explaining M2 in terms of M1 only works if you include those definition in the equation. Otherwise it will falsely look like M2 fell by the amount that M1 rose.

I’ve found the following 2020 note about a change to M1 definition (not M2) and which didn’t make M1 supply look smaller but larger.

I think you should back up your claim with a reliable source.

> First Monthly H.6 Statistical Release As announced on December 17, 2020, the Board's Statistical Release H.6, "Money Stock Measures," will recognize savings deposits as a type of transaction account, starting with the publication today. This recognition reflects the Board's action on April 24, 2020, to remove the regulatory distinction between transaction accounts and savings deposits by deleting the six-per-month transfer limit on savings deposits in Regulation D. This change means that savings deposits have had a similar regulatory definition and the same liquidity characteristics as the transaction accounts reported as "Other checkable deposits" on the H.6 statistical release since the change to Regulation D. Consequently, today's H.6 statistical release combines release items "Savings deposits" and "Other checkable deposits" retroactively back to May 2020 and includes the resulting sum, reported as "Other liquid deposits," in the M1 monetary aggregate. This action increases the M1 monetary aggregate significantly while leaving the M2 monetary aggregate unchanged

Source — https://www.federalreserve.gov/feeds/h6.html

There will always be work for people who are smart, hard-working, creative, and willing to do exactly what their billionaire-owner asks.

Jeff is specifically donating money to causes which improve the political system, enfranchise (not dis-enfranchise) voters.

Some people would still contribute. It’s an intrinsic drive. (But I agree with your point in general)

You might find this hard to believe, but I find that helping other people is genuinely rewarding all by itself. And it’s rewarding in a way that money can’t buy.

Stack Overflow helped it to scale really well, too. You could answer a question, just once, and over time it could help dozens then hundreds then thousands of people.

It’s easy to be cynical, but actually that was really awesome.

“I found a body with no head.” (singular)

“I found a body with no legs.” (plural)

As opposed to: “I found a body with no heads.” (Weird alien concept!)

“I found a body with no leg.” (Ambiguous meaning)

“I found a body with no left leg.” (Zero of “left leg” is not plural, while “zero of leg” is plural.)

Consider, Alien Crimescene show: I found a body. Someone had chopped off the leftmost head. The remaining heads stared at me with their 47 dead eyes.

Oh trigger warning, gore, btw.

I find “co-ordinating distributed transactions” to be very hard. Getting any kind of optimum cooperation between self-centred agents is tricky.

Also — “Jevon’s paradox”. That one is nasty! For example: just about anything we do to decrease use of fossils fuels by some small percent, makes the corresponding process more efficient, more profitable, and thus happen more. That’s a nasty nasty problem. I guess it’s not specific to computer science, but all engineering.

International tax agreements are crucial if any progress is to be made on preventing climate disaster.

Which major parties support it? Who is even talking about it?

It’s such an obviously needed mechanism, but hard to get anyone enthused about it.

This group have some proposals on the topic —

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_the_Taxation...

Mullenweg needs to be more careful doing this. The moment Mullenweg realises exactly what Mullenweg’s doing to WordPress, Mullenweg will deactivate Mullenweg’s account.

Can you suggest an organisation that does?

One of the weirder types of comparisons is comparing “the number of combinations” (Eg …in a lottery game) to the quantity of a thing (e.g. grains of sand on the beach)

Although: Comparing that type of comparison to the general case of comparing quantities of different countable objects (“trees on earth versus stars in our galaxy”) is itself a different type of comparison that is even weirder. Maybe?

And if you’re feeling particularly Sadomasochistic there’s always the Windows Registry.

Woah — following your link is how I learned that Greg Bear passed away, two years ago. Brilliant writer. RIP.

That’s a shocking case.

Several layers of problem there, particularly that a “criminal record” doesn’t mean you’ve been found guilty, only charged, and that the stay on proceedings means an innocent person can never clear their name- allowing the Canadian police to sweep their faulty charges under the rug.

“Pattern”

“We don’t wish to cause any alarm, but is there any one on board who is familiar with regular expressions, cron expressions and parameter expansion rules in bash?”

From the “useless web” links provided above, I learned:

> The project was built and launched as part of Netlify’s Dusty Domains project, where for each project built and launched on an old domain money was donated to charity! Ultimately over a hundred thousand dollars was raised for a variety of individual charities.