Nbox9

This depends on the cause of the inflation. If an asset loses value because it becomes less scarce then no value is lost. Inflation can happen for other reasons to.

Yes. Root comment states that government regulation protects wealth by giving examples of several situations in which a government regulation protects wealth. Root-1 comment gives an example of government regulation destroying wealth, by giving a concrete example involving an asset class referenced in root comment.

I would say that the two comments together point towards a complex relationship between governments and the wealth of it’s citizens.

Both buying a house and investing elsewhere are very sensible options.

Inflation was under control in 2009. The reasons people are worried about today’s economy are very different than 2009.

Government corruption in the US (compared to China) was discussed very recently on Freakonomics podcast [0]. It’s an interesting listen for anyone that is interested in the different types of corruption, the different names of corruption, and the different effects it can have.

[0] Episode 481 11/3/21 https://freakonomics.com/archive/

Gambling has a similar distribution to most markets. 20% of the gamblers generate 80% of the gambling revenue. Most people that gamble don’t ruin their life. Most people that drink don’t ruin their life/health.

There’s some ethical concerns where the gaming industry (and liquor industry) will market more towards problem users or in ways to generate more problem users, but buying $20/lotto tickets a month isn’t a guaranteed start of a problem, nor is having wine alone sometimes.

Bella DePaulo Ph.D. has been writing about this for at least 14 years now [0]. This article is actually a good summary of her thesis and perspective which is simply society is biased against single people. Her book titles include Singleism, Alone, Singled Out, and Single with Attitude.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ABella+DePaul...

PS3 clusters are limited in supercomputing tasks largely by RAM, each PS3 having 256MB which is anemic.

I wonder to what extend plastic packaging and the ubiquity of low quality food often found inside is contributing to obesity related illness.

I don’t know if it’s even possible to tease out this number. The US Army even purchases Skilcraft pens [0] in large part because they are manufactured by the visually impaired. Basically every dollar they spend has multiple purposes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skilcraft

I’ll retire when I age out of coding. Maybe I’ll find something small to provide some income, but I’ve been saving a very large sum of money every year for my entire career and I am finically independent. I’m in my early 30s, and I’m seeing people one or two rungs ahead of me in the ladder begin to age out of coding despite very strong attempts to stay at it. I just can’t imagine enjoying any other career nearly as much as coding. I don’t expect I’ll be able to stay a coder past 45, and 40 might be more realistic. I’m optimizing my career for time spend in an IDE.

It’s just another door into the profession, one that is honestly more accessible than many others. We cannot remove all barriers to being a software engineer, because people have to learn the skills somewhere.

The benefit of open source is that anyone can contribute, thus someone that cannot afford a university degree or does not have the social network that comes with high status can still prove their skill as a software engineer and find a high paying job.

It would be terrible against a full nuclear triad nation. It’s assumed that the US has nuclear weapons in silos, on airplanes, and in submarines at all times and under certain conditions each silo/plane/sub is capable of making the call to attack.

A surprise attack would only prevent MAD if you were to simultaneously disable each individual silo/sub/plane which is practically impossible.

Oh, and it’s entirely possible the US has classified space based retaliation capabilities as they have had a number of highly classified satellite launches.

We abolished biological and chemical weapons because they are considered obsolete tools of war after nuclear was invented. Who enforces the abolishment of bio/chem? States with nuclear arsenals. There’s little appetite in nuclear powered nations for nuclear disarmament. There is appetite for nuclear nonproliferation among nuclear powers, in large part because it maintains the power imbalance.

If you want to push for nuclear disarmament you’ll have to find a different model than bio/chem disarmament.

How is raising the information processing capabilities of humanity anything but a net good thing?

> AZ Natural Disasters

AZ suffers from heat waves, which are steadily getting worse over time. Last year in a heat wave Phoenix saw several days above 115F. A 115F heatwave is a natural disaster mitigated by air conditioning. Hopefully a heat wave doesn’t coincide with a 2020 Texas sized electrical blackout.

This isn’t a massive problem now, but imagine how bad AZ heat waves will be by the end of his factories life.

Maybe, if there are important reasons why this factory should be in a desert state. I think everyone agrees that chips are vitally important now, but chip shortages aren’t nearly as bad as a water shortage is.

Most people I know that eat 0.8g protein per lb of body mass use protein supplements to achieve such a high protein intake.

I’m confirming that I could not eat a beyond burger because the burger was too close to the taste of real meat and my tastes have drifted.

Can I ask, what tastes better to you a beyond burger of a beef burger?

If I die earlier due to my love of methamphetamines, well that’s a price I’m willing to pay. /s

In all honesty people cannot perform a cost/benefit analysis without accurate cost data.

Fellow vegan here.

I’m torn on this topic. I personally would not be a customer of lab meat. However if someone is going to eat meat it’s much better for the environment if they eat lab grown meat. On the other hand, they are not experiencing the health benefits of eating a plant based diet.

In the end, I’m neither in support or oppose to this research. I do wonder if the investment is better spend on Beyond or Impossible (which I am not a customer of either.)

Take this source with a grain of salt, but someone has calculated at over 2.5x[0].

[0] https://plantbasednews.org/lifestyle/animal-food-industry-ta...

The other day I decided to try a beyond burger for a change. I had to throw it away because I could not eat it, because eating something even close to meat was unappetizing.

There are plenty of vegan athletes, and even vegan power lifters [0]. It’s totally possible to eat a plant based diet and have a lot of muscle mass.

[0[ https://www.greatveganathletes.com/category/vegan-powerlifte...

Even if we had fusion most of the mass in the solar system exists in the sun, so that’s where most of the energy is. E=mc^2.

In your favor “How can we go faster” has been a question people have been asking for thousands of years, and we’ve made pretty steady progress on it.

I could imagine humans fighting over the limited energy harvested by Sol’s Dyson sphere in 10million years. It would give any group of human’s controlling it a massive advantage, similarly to the advantage having the only A-bomb gave US briefly.

I’m unsure the human rights aspect is going to be the limiting factor. Humans are constantly doing inhuman things. We have a history of forcibly migrating people, it’s not uncommon in our history at all.

I think it’s just as likely that we never spend the engineering effort on a multi-generation colonization ship. Compared to inner-stellar travel inter-stellar travel requires much much more space, robust systems, and reliability. For example, the distance between Earth and the nearest star is over 100,000,000 times the distance between Earth and Jupiter. It’s questionable we’ll ever put the effort into being inner-stellar, but the difference between inner-stellar and inter-stellar is greater than the difference between a paddle board and an aircraft carrier.

Gift card balances do not have to be held by a bank. If it were held by a bank you’d need to provide ID for purchasing one and there would be more regulation around _gifting_ them. You can’t just _give_ someone a bank account.

However, balances held by PayPal or Venmo? Yeah those are backed by a bank.