bmcusick

Organize for growth. Windows will continue to be a big fountain of money for decades to come, I'm sure, but the desktop market isn't growing. Mobile and Cloud are growing, the MSFT lost the war for Mobile. It has to go all in on Cloud, and it cannot allow Windows turf protection to prevent it from winning the biggest possible slice of that pie.

Bricklayers are probably safe from a robot that can perfectly replicate human bricklaying skill. What they're not safe from is whatever machine-built module that can be easily assembled by unskilled labor on site replaces brick walls.

Buddy, may I introduce you to the concept of comparative advantage? :-)

Globally, the main thing is that married families have transitioned from small farm cooperatives (where the husband works the fields and the wife in the house) to market-based work for both of them. The problem with market based work is that it's usually incompatible with keeping one eye on small children, unlike the household chores of a farm. Also, kids are pure burdens until they can join the market themselves, whereas farm kids could help collect eggs and feed chickens starting pretty young.

In America at least the cost disease of education, housing, and healthcare all make it worse, but the first part is the primary culprit. And I'm not sure there's any fix for it besides long parental leaves and subsidized childcare.

That website gave me a good chuckle. Was that your actual website from back when, or did you just "take inspiration" from the old days?

IPFS is its own standard, so your homepage might look like ipfs://blog.iagovar.co

But since most browsers don't support IPFS natively yet there are IPFS gateways that allow you to access IPFS sites through them.

Not necessarily. IPFS is sort of like Bittorrent on steroids. You can think of yourself as the first seeder of your website, but as long as there are other network participants that have a full copy of your site, your home PC doesn't need to be online for people to access it.

Fantastic. The web falling into the AmaGooBookSoft silos has been convenient, but it hasn't been good for censorship or personal sovereignty. Making it push-button easy to publish to IPFS a great way to return editorial control and ownership to individuals, without the downsides of needing to run and maintain servers.

I hope Hearth or someone like them expands beyond websites to self-publishing of store front ends, crypto payment, social feeds, real time video, and all the other services we expect AmaGooSoftBook to provide today. And to integrate Tor as necessary.

Right, it’s in the public interest to keep open vulnerabilities that China and Russia can exploit.

America needs to figure out what it wants from diversity efforts. Does it want--

1. To just achieve color-blindness.

2. To achieve color-blindness AND help counter-act the cumulative effects of past discrimination.

It is wants to achieve 2, you can't use a purely meritocratic system for college admissions or hiring.

Venus all by itself is minimal. These planets would be closer and there'd be a lot more of them. If they're supposed to be Earth-like they'd also have clouds, making them reflect more like than airless worlds like the Moon does. I bet there would be a measurable effect.

I love how turning the entirety of the asteroid belt, and maybe Mercury, into livable space stations "is a much more modest scope". :-D

Not that I disagree! We also have the Hilda, Trojan, and Greek asteroids (in Jupiter's Lagrange points) to work with. The Jovian and Saturnian moons too. It'll be a long, long time before we need to worry about dismantling the gas giants themselves.

On our path towards maximizing the livable land area in the Solar System, I wonder what we will run out of first. It looks like water, iron, carbon, etc. are all pretty abundant. We'll run out of* some rarer element (like Phosphorous or something) before we ever approach maximum constructed land area.

*And by "run out of", I mean even with perfect recycling, the spot market demand for the material maintains a price level where it's uneconomical to develop further, barring discovery of new supplies or more efficient usage.

It's real question how dark these planets would ever get. With 416 planets reflecting light, the closest ones would be pretty bright all the time. Maybe even visible discs from the surface, although I'm not sure. Brighter than Venus is on Earth though, and lots of them.

You'd have to take that into account when doing your global warming models too.

Although obviously ridiculous in many ways, the ability to design large stable systems is relevant for when thinking about the question "How many O'Neil cylinders can we build in the habitable zone?".

If we mine the asteroids, Mars, and Mercury for materials we can build habitable surface areas that are in aggregate many times greater than Earth in size. Each carbon fiber Bishop Ring could have an internal surface area the size of India.

This simulation reminds us that space is really, really big, and really, really empty. If you can fit 416 planets, just think how many space stations you can fit.

I am completely, 100% cool with banning people based on "off platform" activity.

I know that making Nazi comparisons is cliché, but would you allow a Nazi on your platform even if he only did Nazi stuff off your platform? I wouldn't.

There a larger number of people I can amicably disagree with. I'd be unable to function professionally or socially if that weren't the case. But there are limits, and that's fine and good.

I'm completely cool with this, because -All platforms have the right to exercise editorial discretion, and -Those people are awful, and -This will only drive the adoption of censorship resistance platforms, which I'm generally in favor of.

Free speech is important, but people too often forget about the freedom of association, and its inverse the freedom of non-association. And Medium should have the freedom to not associate with the alt-right any other conspiracy theorists if it chooses to.

These Amazon contest ads are getting out of hand. The story is unreadable on mobile.

Bitcoin is a great export product for Iceland. Their biggest disadvantage is being so remote from the rest of the world, so the ability to produce something locally that has zero shipping costs isn't one to be missed. It's effectively a way of turning local geothermal power into money, providing tax revenues to all sorts of services.

And with so little wear and tear! Sure, the ionizing radiation will eventually do a number on the paint job, but compared to any other car that's travelled 180 million miles, it looks FANTASTIC!

This NASA filing undercuts Elon's claim that the Roadster is headed for the Asteroid belt. 1.7 AU is past Mars (1.5 AU) but well short of Ceres (2.77 AU). I think it's fair to call him out for unreasonable exaggeration on that one.

Uber, but for Ceres

Came here just to make the XKCD reference. Good stuff.

So what’s a whole human genome sequence cost? That’s the usual metric machines are listed by.

Oh MAN this is exciting! And I realize it's the first Falcon launch in some time where no one is confident it won't blow up. The Falcon 9's record of flights and landings in 2017 were so consistent it almost started to feel "normal". But not anymore!

I sure wish I could see this one in person. Maybe one of the later Falcon Heavy flights once the hype has made the tickets more accessible and affordable. Heck, last year I was able to get to see a Falcon 9 launch for no additional cost beyond admission, so maybe it won't even be that long.

Seven miles is WAY outside the range of any sniper rifle.

Once Blue Origin and SpaceX have rapid-turnaround, their rockets will be able to fly, land, refuel, and fly again within a day or two. It's not just a cost thing. Rapid reusability also increases the launch cadence.

What they’ve accomplished is amazing engineering. I’m sort of scratching my head at the economics though. Their cost to orbit is about $15,000/kg. That’s more expensive than the Space Shuttle was. And the CEO has said they’re not working on reusability.

Their goal of rapid manufacturing and frequent launches seems laudable in an expendable launch vehicle world. I’m not sure how they plan to survive when SpaceX and Blue Origin achieve rapid reusability though.

Link is dead

The cameras are a positive step anyway. The political debate cannot help but be effected every time a cop is caught on video doing something shady, but nothing happens. Over time this repeated evidence will cause social change, even if it doesn't create justice for the particular victim of that particular moment.

But for cameras to be really effective a couple things need to happen:

1) They have to be on by default, and not turned on and off by the cop.

2) The video needs to be archived with a neutral party that can provide the raw source data to attorneys for both prosecution and defense on equal terms.

3) The law needs to change and juries need to change so that cops are actually held to the same standards of violence and self-defense as any other citizen. This is necessary for US police to claim to actually be civilian police, and not a military occupation. But nonetheless this last one will be the hardest and slowest change of the three.

I have no idea whether there are services for this. I'll just offer this, based on my experience-

1) Electrolyzing is overkill. Steel wool and elbow grease is fine. If you really want to go to town, get a steel whisker brush for your hand drill.

2) Don't try to re-season it all in one day or weekend. After dinner in the evening, before you start watching some Netflix or checking Twitter, rub a coat of oil on it and run the oven for an hour. Set a timer so you don't leave it on by accident. In the morning the pan will be cool and ready for the next coat. Maybe 2-3 minutes of work per day that's easy to fit into your schedule.