ashtonkem

U-6, which covers people who have been temporarily discouraged from working but want to come back is 7.3%.

If anything is keeping people out of the work force, it’s childcare issues, not anti-work.

It’s complicated. They’re clearly frustrated with the pay and working conditions typical with work these days. But I’ve seen no evidence of people going on the dole or retiring there. By and far the most common commentary there is people advising each other of their legal rights around how bosses treat them.

Like most of Reddit, the style and rhetorical flourishes are over the top. But the substance being posted does not seem to match what a surface analysis would imply.

This is roughly the equivalent of a reporter quoting a tweet as “people are saying”. Anti work is angry about work conditions, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that they’re all quitting to lounge about. In fact, there are tons of stories there about people quitting bad jobs to get better jobs.

The phrase “great resignation” also implies that people are just quitting, when in reality they’re changing jobs. The unemployment rate is lower than it’s been in a decade (except a month or two here and there), people who are resigning are getting new jobs.

> Another consideration for each miner is to look for cheaper and more abundant energy sources

And thereby offsetting other inelastic demand for electricity, forcing them to count on non-renewables instead.

Bitcoin might be renewable if every single miner pinky swears to turn their rigs off the moment renewables stop over-producing, but come on, nobody believes that'll happen.

> Despite what the born-again eco-warriors have to say about consumption and the environment, Bitcoin can actually be an incentive for safe energy sources.

Interesting you've got to put an ad hominem in there about people who care about the environment. Probably not a good sign for the second half of this sentence, and it makes me wonder if you're representing other's positions in good faith.

Also, oops: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/bitcoin-miners-resurrect-fossil...

Sure, bitcoin miners will use cheap renewables if they're available. They'll also happily use whatever the hell is available too given the opportunity, since they need to use so much of the stuff. They're particularly notorious for driving up electricity rates locally as they turn previously abundant renewable hydro energy into a over-subscribed resource, requiring towns to import electricity from, yes, fossil fuel plants.

Funny, I've always been a pinot noir guy. I never watched the film, but I would've turned 21 roughly five years after this movie came out, and now I can't help but wonder whether my preference for Pinot was influenced by this movie and how it affected the quality and quantity of wines that were available to me as I started drinking it. Would I have preferred Merlot if this movie had never come out or if I was older, and I'd been around when quantities of Merlot were roughly equal to pinot? An interesting counterfactual.

My parents prefer cabernet sauvignon, by the by.

> However, considering Netflix uses FreeBSD on their edge nodes and has put a lot of work into the upstream to improve networking (among other things), it wouldn't surprise me if it's technically superior to the Linux stack.

Possible. But it's also possible that the founder of the team was a BSD person. You occasionally get cases where the preferences of one key person affects things in the long run. At this point I'm sure that they're baked in, because removing all that code would not be worth the effort too, so even if it was better when Netflix went online, that doesn't guarantee that it's still true today.

That being said, Linux is also used in a ton of places, including high network jobs. It would take a decent sized amount of evidence to convince me that all of those other places were wrong and basically only Netflix was right to use BSD in network heavy cases.

My suspicion is that either:

1. The difference is minimal to negligent, and not enough to justify mixed OS development

or

2. The difference is significant, but you have to be pushing your network much harder than most teams ever do for it to show up.

> But the fundamental elements of all crypto, namely anonymous transactions over decentralized Blockchain, is the only element that is giving regulators heartburn.

No, it's not. See wave after wave of stories about people thinking that crypto was anonymous only to be arrested for drug crimes and tax evasion.

I think the thing that's giving the regulators heartburn is the fear that this is looking like a massive bubble.

It might not be what the inventor imagined, but this is hardly an unexpected outcome. BTC in particular was doomed to either be a forgotten novelty, or the wild speculation instrument we see today. It doesn't really have a good mix of features for a usable currency, and its appeal as a currency is largely limited to those ideologically pre-disposed to value anti-inflation over other limitations.

The limited throughput of the blockchain was always going to be a particularly bad problem.

> but the difficulty is adjusted based on demand

Only indirectly. More precisely the difficulty is based on supply of hashing power. If more people hash, the blocks will be minted faster and the difficulty will be adjusted higher at the next re-adjustment. It doesn't really matter if those blocks are actually full or empty, and in fact the system would continue to work if most of the blocks were empty and the trading happened off the chain in exchanges.

I say indirectly because the amount of hashing power on the chain at any given moment is driven by the expected reward per block minted. Nobody wants to run thirsty machines if the cost of electricity exceeds the expected rewards for successfully minting a block. So the number of machines online and is directly proportional to the value of bitcoin, which is driven by consumer demand.

> I guess if the price of BTC goes up, then it makes it more "worth it" to throw more energy at mounting a double-spend attack

Close, but not correct. As the price of BTC goes up, so does the expected reward for mining any given block, making it profitable to spend more electricity in pursuit of the rewards. This results in a net increase in electricity usage as everyone spends more in an attempt to capture the rising value of mining a block successfully.

In practice each miner is incentivized to spend an equal amount in electricity per block (at local rates) as the expected reward per block will net them. This results in a 51% attack being inordinately expensive, which was the point of the original design.

Which is speculating on the relative difference in inflation rates, not actually investing in either currency per se.

The idea of a "currency"[0] attracting investment is kinda crazy in its own right. Normally currencies don't attract investment; you can bet on the difference between them, but you usually "invest" (buy) large amounts of it specifically to do business with the country or economic entity that issued it. You buy Euros to do business in the EU, not to "invest" in the currency itself.

0 - Which crypto currencies actually function as currencies is a matter of debate.

I think they were using NixOS, not just Nix, which means that you can't fall back to the "OS package system" because Nix is the OS package system.

The difference between Nix and NixOS was a branding mistake by the Nix team. It's unnecessarily confusing.

> Maybe this is nitpicking, but: the Nix language is about as straightforward as "JSON plus functions". Maybe that is difficult for people who haven't had an experience with pure/functional programming?

I've programmed professionally in Lisp (SBCL) and Clojure, and done a lot of hobby work in Haskell and Rust. I found Nix the language utterly incomprehensible largely because of documentation and tooling reasons.

The real break for me using NixOS as a regular driver was that I just could not figure out how to get Ruby on Rails to play nice with it. NixOS breaks a lot of assumptions that programs make about $PATH, and even if it's done for good reasons it plays holy hell with the development stack of some languages. I eventually gave up and moved my dev setup back to OSX (and then that PC died anyways). Maybe they've fixed it since then, I haven't tried.

I do continue to use it for my homelab infrastructure though. It is extremely good at handling new versions of configuration of Prometheus, and I would never consider anything else at this point. Just not what I'd use as a dev environment.

Also, the idea that government intervention damages the "free market" implicitly relies on the idea that the market and the government are two distinct and potentially antagonistic entities. Personally I'd argue that they're symbiotic at best; you generally don't get country wide markets without governments either purposefully creating them, or accidentally creating them in the process of trying to do something else.

Why would you? That is hardly a fringe position for someone to take. "Regulate the bankers rather than bailing them out every X years" was probably the majority position around 2010 or so, depending on how you phrase the question.

Also, C suite phone numbers are worth their weight in gold for sales teams. Confusing that with another person’s number is a pretty bad mistake.

My first instinct is that this would be a short term strategy that trades off the company’s good name for marginal sales, but I guess not!

A good deal if you can get it, but probably not the ideal outcome if you’re a citizen paying for it or dealing with systems engineered by them.

It keeps locking out my printer for using LDAP. It's extremely annoying to go and re-check the "yes, allow 'insecure' access" every N months. I complain a lot in the box, but obviously nobody is reading them.

It won't though. The UN's models on the area say that world population will continue to grow (population has momentum) until the end of that century, at which point population growth will be very close to 0, with an estimated population of 10.5 billion people. So even in total numbers, we won't run out of people anytime soon.

Even when global populations begin to fall, we can still keep immigration up. There's nothing at all inconsistent with falling populations and immigration. Economically there might be a lot of pressure for people in places with falling populations to emigrate, because of the economic effects of sudden population drops.

And that’s why I said “most”.

I had a fairly similar physical reaction to overwork, interestingly. Thankfully an ER tech took a bit of extra time to ask me if my stress levels had changed recently. This led to rapid re-evaluation of my life choices, and me quitting shortly afterwards.

Even as a lay person I know that most fluorine molecules are not to be messed with.

> Nobody's saying "tamper with the evidence to demonstrate favourable outcomes" here.

Yeah, so you have badly misread my point, and you're arguing against something completely unrelated to what I'm saying.

Of course you can add randomness to the results to hide individuals without messing with the results in aggregate. That's obvious, and I'm not disputing it. The issue is that that's a PR nightmare. Nobody here might be saying "tamper with it to change the outcome", but I guarantee you that people out wider media will accuse the CDC and Pfizer of doing exactly that. I can see the chyron now, "CDC ADMITS TO MANIPULATING DATA".

Organizations like the CDC need to think not just about how their message will be heard, but how it might be twisted and abused by bad faith actors. You are absolutely right about how you can safely introduce randomness, but you are completely wrong about how that will be handled by the public after bad faith actors get their hands on that fact.

The Bolsheviks were completely correct in being paranoid about western attitudes and intentions towards them. But that’s a far cry from “the UK is going to seize Moscow”

Personally I think that the difference between a CIA backed coup and direct military invasion is a distinction without a difference if you live in the country. Either way you have a stronger foreign power stripping you of your local political autonomy and threatening your physical safety.

I think you're drastically underestimating how many people emigrate to America. As of 2018 44 million Americans were born in another country and immigrated here[0], representing one fifth of the world's immigrants. As a percentage of the US' population (13.7), this is very close to the all time high of 14.8% in 1890. Our immigration wave right now is damn close to the peaks of the Ellis Island period of Italian and Irish immigration in the late 1900s. And that's as a percent of the current population, by total numbers this is the biggest wave ever.

Japan is trying to increase its immigration for the same reasons I mentioned, and they're struggling for the reasons you mentioned. Only 2% of their population is foreign born[1], which is up from past figures, but still a drop in the bucket compared to the US system.

You're totally right that there's going to be political and cultural issues over immigration, there always is. But America has the political and social institutions necessary to maintain a high level of immigration over long periods of time, which can help damped the blow of fertility change even if it's insufficient to fully reverse the trend.

0 - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...

1 - https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e025d47d-en/index.html?i...