ashtonkem

That's assuming that the Saudis are being rational with their money. Given that they are currently trying to build a city that's a straight line[0], and a "shape based" floating octagon city[1], that assumption might not be correct. It's entirely likely that the real answer has less to do with Softbank's performance and their need to diversify, and more to do with MBS liking Masayoshi Son.

0 - https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/saudi-arabia-build...

1 - https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/saudi-arabia...

The period between 1945 and 1970 in the United States really stands out. Improving wages, narrowing gap of health outcomes across racial groups. It wasn’t a perfect time, but clearly metrics were getting better.

Conversely, we can observe the effects of policy since the 1970s and declare it to be a failure. Despite long periods of economic growth, income inequality continues to grow.

The catholic church’s involvement in the slave trade is much more complicated and morally ambiguous than you’re implying here. Popes have generally been consistent about the enslavement of Christians, but have waffled back and forth about the enslavement and transport of Africans and native Americans.

Never mind all those serfs the church used to have…

It’s kind of incredible that we now treat income inequality as this impossible to tackle problem with insurmountable difficulties, as if we don’t have over a century of experience of how policies can increase and decrease inequality in this country, let alone in other countries. We’ve literally done this before.

As someone who works on west coast time, it’s easy for me to forget that Latin America is largely east of the continental US. Not an issue for remote work, but something that caught me off guard when I started working with people living in that continent.

It seems like you were talking about Apple, and I was talking about Valve.

Then the sources I found were out of date.

Best I could find is that they’ll wave fees on the first $15,000 in sales, which is pretty damned low. Then it’s 30% until you get in the millions of dollars, and then they’ll cut it to 25%.

I’m not sure about “vast majority”, but I’m sure that lots of devs are making no money purely because they sell basically no copies. But if a game has even a moderate success, it looks like Steam’s cut will be 30%

Fun related fact. Cases where a law is violated specifically to seek a precedent on appeal is sometimes called a test case. Tons of famous civil rights litigation were test cases where one or both of the parties purposefully sought an unfavorable verdict in order to appeal. Plessy v. Ferguson, the Scopes Trial, and Brown vs. Board of Education were all test cases.

IIRC the legal community used to kind of dislike these, and I think there might have been a penalty for doing it. But obviously that’s no more

Sending Lenin to Russia wasn’t about causing a revolution, that had actually already happened, but it was about trying to affect who would win the following fight for power.

Related, there are stories of the USSR turning its own spy satellites on itself to estimate correct crop yields because of the culture of lying and exaggeration internally. Basically nobody at the top really knew what was going on, because everyone below them constantly lied to avoid getting in trouble.

No, it’s more complex than that. A Segway is counting on the fact that it’s sitting on the ground. The force vector on the rider is purely a function of angle. A jet pack has the issue that there is a moveable center of gravity and moveable sources of thrust that feed back into each other. It’s doable, I’m sure, but it’s also much more complicated than a Segway + another direction.

Flying has gotten more expensive, but not that much more expensive if you’re really motivated. Kit airplanes can be fairly cheap, $30k for a kitfox, and often can be maintained by the owner because they’re amateur built.

The issue is the same as Lindbergh’s day though. Amateur built airplanes are not safe.

Right, and that’s probably never going to happen because of noise issues alone.

We solved stability for a rigid drone that’s symmetric and designed for purpose. That’s a lot different than solving for stability for a variable size and weight human that’s wriggling around.

> Could say the same about the wright brothers in the early 1900s.

Yes, you could. But that’s not actually an argument that jet packs will follow a same development path, it’s just survivor bias in action.

It’s not the cable. Same exact cable to other nearby machines gets the maximum throughput.

It might be the laptop. That machine has always been more finicky than other laptops I’ve had, and it’s way less stable than my Mac mini.

It’s not a religious thing, it’s a geographic thing. Wild dogs are a serious problem in some areas, and whether or not dogs are viewed as common pets varies wildly. To pick one example, a mere 16 million homes in India have a dog, and that is up a lot over the past decade. Compare that to the 63 million homes with dogs in the US, a much smaller country by population.

I went back to wireless specifically because I was noticing issues on that hub. I went to the trouble to setup control plane to disable wifi when Ethernet was plugged in, and zoom performance tanked. Going back to wifi solved it. I think that the adapter was dropping packets, but I never bothered to triage since wifi works great in this house.

It’s worth mentioning that my setup has very, very low latency. Lag between me and the speed test server in city is 5ms wired, 10ms wireless. My router is way overpowered for what I ask of it, so throughput and latency tends to be very good.

To be fair, my wifi setup is a bit … extra. I’m running 5 APs, two switches, a controller, and a dedicated router, with a dedicated AP for my office that’s a combo wired/wireless outlet. I’ve turned it down so that it’s basically only serving my office, and it has a dedicated cat6 backhaul to the network cabinet, no sharing airspace with other APs. If I hadn’t gone to all this trouble, I’d probably upgrade my hub and go wired.

950 down, 50 up. Wifi will pull 450 easy, but my hub will only do 100, despite claims to the contrary.

450 is good enough for my use case, so it’s easier to just not worry about it and avoid running another wire up the sit stand desk. If I upgrade my hub to something that’ll pull the claimed 1G, I might change. Or maybe not. I dunno. Literally nothing I do on the internet can get close to saturating it.

Edit: wifi adds a mere 5ms of latency in my office. I consider this beneath my notice for basically everything but gaming. And even there it probably is meaningless given my relatively low skill level.

Bandwidth is typically what I’ve measured. Never had a noticeable issue with packet loss. Or latency.

Edit: the difference between my work laptop (wireless) and my gaming machine (wired) in my office is a mere 5ms to the same external server. That’s in the “meh” territory for me.

Currently I have five APs inside and outside my house, and they’re averaging about 5-6 clients per AP. The really network intensive stuff is connected via Ethernet to avoid crowding out the airwaves. In my case that means the Apple TV and my gaming rig, both of which are conveniently non mobile and close to wall plates.

The issue for my work laptop is that the cheaper USB C hubs only pull 100mbps. So I can get 100mbps wired, 450mbps wireless, or the full 950 by replacing my hub. On the balance the wireless is more convenient, especially with a sit/stand desk like mine making more wires more annoying. If I replace the hub I’ll reconsider, but 450 is plenty for my needs.

“Dogs are pets” is one of those cultural background assumptions that can be pretty jarring when you realize it’s not a universally held belief. There are pretty large chunks of the planet where dogs are mostly unwanted pests at best.

Opposite for me. The wifi in my office beats out my USB C adapter by a factor of 4.

Wifi is great, consumer grade routers are not though.

I did that until I updated the wifi in my house. There’s a combination wired/wireless wire plate under my desk, but I don’t bother wiring it into my work computer, because the wifi is faster than what the cheap USB C adapter can offer.

This is one of those arguments that the stock market doesn't really align value with social need. Making games is good and all, people like and need entertainment, but from a social perspective we need ARM more than we need Activision.

Eh, I don't really mind if the batteries are a pain to replace as long as they only need it every 3-4 years. Especially if the tradeoff is that the battery is bigger and more water resistant thanks to its internal placement.

I recall back in the era of user replaceable batteries they tended to not last very long, and were of incredibly spotty quality.

This is one of the things that keeps me with Apple. They're far from perfect in the reliability front, but they will keep supporting the software for much longer than I expect my phone to last. Looks like the oldest phone they still support is the 6s, and typically they support phones for a bit under 7 years after launch, and 5 after discontinuation.

Obviously they get slower and fewer features, but that's better than "Good luck LOL".

The seasonally adjusted U-3 fell below 3.9% in May of 2018 for the first time since October of 2000[0]. I might’ve been a bit glib about “a few months”, it was closer to two years, but the general sentiment that the unemployment rate is extremely low right now still stands. It’s far lower than the entire period of October 2000 to May of 2018, which coincidentally covers the vast majority of my working life.

There are still some issues around childcare that need to be worked out, which is probably the biggest source of the gap between U-3 and U-6 right now. But this is still one of the hottest labor markets in most of our lives.

0 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/

No. Because housing and healthcare costs have been outpacing inflation for years. It’s only in the past year that inflation has been on the table discussion wise, while the average home doubled in value since 2012.