bmcusick

I've been using this technique for years and highly recommend it. I've only had to re-season my main pan from scratch once in five years, after accidently forgetting about it on the back porch for a week (that's Florida humidity for you).

It's great. I've seen people warn you to not wash your cast iron with soap so as to not damage the seasoning, but I use soap without fear. I've heard from others they even put their cast iron in the dish washer, although I haven't tried that personally. This creates a base layer of seasoning that's REALLY hard to get off.

Maybe it sounds like a lot of work, but it really isn't as long as you're not in a rush to get it all done in one day. I'd add a layer of oil, run the oven while I gave the kids their bath, and turned it off after. Maybe 5 minutes of work per day over 3-4 days.

I'm a corporate attorney. I'm pretty sure I know what it means.

> it means the organization exists for a purpose other than profit

The guy making $4 million/year in salary doesn't seem to have gotten that memo.

Without any details on whether this means funding SLS for another $4 billion/year to accomplish nothing vs. fund some real innovation like Blue Origin or SpaceX, it's kind of "Meh" as announcements go.

I hope everyone's in on the joke that "non-profit" just means that someone other than a class of people called "shareholders" siphons off all the profits. It doesn't mean "low cost".

Yep. As I told people in the bitcoin space years ago, the Roman Empire and Ghengis Khan and Imperial Britain all existed with decentralized, fungible, untraceable money called "gold and silver coins". That didn't prevent the State from existing or collecting taxes or imprisoning people or enforcing its sundry laws.

Bitcoin may change things, possibly a lot, and maybe for the better, but you have to be realistic about how much change is actually feasible.

The current governments exercise a lot of power through the banking system because it's convenient. If Bitcoin (or some more private successor like Zcash) makes the whole finance sector "go dark", like "Tor for money", those governments will still be there doing their thing, just using slightly less convenient methods.

This really reminds of the essay "Technologies of Control and Resistance"[1], which has really shaped my thinking over the years.

Bitcoin itself is a technology of resistance. Private crypt-currencies more so. (Cash too) But as long as you have to go through central portals (like Coinbase) to access the rest of the economy, the government will lean on those central parties to regulate you indirectly.

Central parties are technologies of control.

[1] https://blog.elidourado.com/technologies-of-control-and-resi...

Free advice: don't try your hand at FX trading until you've spoken to your accountant. Profits from FX trading aren't tax free.

My friend, have you heard the good news about Public Choice Theory?

>> Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it.

That's not quite what I was getting at. My question is: Why are they making alumni find the $120M in grants, when they could just forgive the loan directly?

There's nothing that says a lender has to collect on its debt. It can choose to forgive the debt.

So it's possible for Brown to charge $50K/year generally, collect it from the rich kids, and then forgive the debt incurred by the poor kids.

But that's not what they're doing. They're keeping the money, and asking alumni and other charitable institutions to pay them.

Nick Szabo is a credible guess, but it's just a guess. Nakamoto was very good about protecting his identity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo

Why even use TAs for lectures? There's YouTube. There's automated software for quizzes and testing. Textbooks should be open source documentation, printed-on-demand.

I'm not saying remove the human element entirely, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit in education to consider where technological automation can help improve the productivity of educators.

Check out how Georgia Institute of Technology is offering a real CS Master's Degree for a fraction of the cost using similar stuff: https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M?

The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board.

This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people.

Efforts to reduce the cost of tuition, rather than shift the cost burden to different people, are the real humanitarian work here.

Here's a story from 2013 on Texas's efforts to create $10,000 Bachelor's degrees. https://www.texastribune.org/2013/01/30/guide-getting-one-te...

Yup, good summary. The coercion angle is one more reason why maintaining "full employment" is a pro-labor policy. By keeping the number of job openings larger than the number of people looking for work, you create bargaining power for workers to increase wages.

The UBI angle works both for and against worker negotiating leverage. On the one hand, workers know that their entire income isn't on the line if they quit, so they have more leverage. On the other hand, they know that they're getting X from the government, and while they need Y to live, they'll accept work at Y-X.

Are they worth X though? What if they produce X-1 in value? Would you hire someone who cost more than they produced?

Someone's wage has an absolute ceiling at the level of "this is how much value I produce per hour". No one will hire you for more than that. And currently, there are some people who cannot be hired at minimum wage.

A UBI (and national health insurance) would help a lot with wages though. With less fear of losing their job, employees would have more bargaining power. They'd also have more resources to spend on commuting or time off work for interviews. By expanding the number of potential employers a person has access to, you indirectly allow them to bargain for higher wages, even without explicitly setting a minimum wage.

Ignoring whether the study's assumptions are accurate, one problem with this sort of rhetoric is that "the US economy" isn't a political constituency. There's just people, and their claims on the economy in terms of personal wealth and income.

It's sort of like when you say "NAFTA grows the US economy but $1 trillion" and the guy who's job was outsourced to Mexico ask "Okay, but how does that help me make rent or buy groceries for my family?"?

Basic Income (and other welfare schemes) are like that too, except for the rich. They're absolutely worse off if the economy grows 10% but their personal wealth and income declines by 20%.

Personally I'm a fan of UBI, but I sell it as (1) welfare is the right thing to do, and (2) UBI is the most efficient way to do it.

I'd probably start with something less than $1,000/month though. I'd offer a package deal to employers and the rich that looks like this: the government will pay healthcare costs and provide $500/month to each adult and $250/month for each child, and in return we abolish the minimum wage.

> Underneath all that is the real debate: should we able to express ugly, unpleasant, or unfortunate truths in public as facts?

I think "the fact" that Damore continues to air his views in public, and no one is stopping him from doing so, is proof that we have this freedom in spades.

The fact that the people at Google don't want to work with Damore anymore is also freedom. Would you force Googlers to work with someone they disagree with so strongly that they cannot be civil?

Very creative! I'm a lawyer, but not an ADA lawyer. Interesting idea though.

Just to expand on that, I want to point out that there's two ways to look at people who choose to air controversial opinions.

1) Say they're wrong. Argue the facts. Point out that historically speaking, similar predictions or theories have been presented by others and none of them have proven to be correct.

2) Point out that in an organization the size of Google, even an organization like Google that hires very academic and smart people, only a percentage of them care to debate a particular set of views. Another (larger) percentage are just going to write you off because they don't have the time or the inclination to discuss that thing; they have too many other things on their plate. So you're kind of a moron for antagonizing xx% of the people you need to work with on a daily basis. You're deliberately breaking the "No Brilliant Jerks" rule. So the professional consequences should be perfectly predictable before you ever opened your mouth, and no one is at fault but you for getting fired.

People who are color blind see things differently too. That doesn't mean red doesn't exist; just that they can't see it.

It should be obvious though that Damore wasn't fired for his views per se. There's probably plenty of people still at Google with similar views. He was fired because he aired views in a way that upset a lot of people, and Google is a business that needs to manage a workplace that's collegial and cooperative. Firing Damore was more practical than firing the 20% of the Google workforce that didn't want to work with him anymore.

I find much greater benefits avoiding vegan foods like sugar, excess alcohol, and overly processed carbohydrates. I've seen "vegan" brownies and cake.

My diet is rich in minimally processed foods like vegetables, fruit, flour I mill myself (I have a home mill), but also meat, egg, and dairy.

Liver is an amazing nutritionally dense food, and there's no benefit to not eating it. Eggs are great too. Fish are great. There's nothing wrong with red meat either in reasonable quantities.

All of which is saying that I see "vegan" as sort of orthogonal to dietary health. It includes things that are bad for you and excludes things that are good for you.

I'm not a vegan, or interested in becoming one, but this "study" is just stupid. Just look at some of the basic assumptions:

"researcher Mary Beth Hall began by estimating the impact of converting all land now used by the livestock industry to cropland for human food"

Why on earth would you do that? Livestock are much less efficient at using land than crops, in terms of how much land you need to produce a calorie. Furthermore, a HUGE percentage of our current crops are used to feed livestock. Without even Googleing it, the assumption should be that we would not use all pasture land for crop land. The total amount of land under crops might even go down under the vegan scenario, since eating the food directly would be more efficient.

Also:

"Burning the excess waste would add some 2 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, they estimate."

First off, is burning the most likely way this would be disposed of? Why not compost.

Second, crops are carbon neutral. They take CO2 from the atmosphere when growing, so how can they add CO2 to the atmosphere when burnt?

"Fertilizer demands would also go up while the supply of animal manure dwindled."

Again, only true if the amount of crops increased. I'm doubtful.

The points about nutrition are better made though. Animal products are rich in some minerals and vitamins that are sparse in a vegan diet. Not entirely missing, but sparse. But then that's why I'm not a vegan.

I didn't know that gas was more expensive than coal in Germany. It's cheaper in the USA; a lot cheaper. But then we have chosen to implement fracking and Europe does not.

I'm very supporting of Germany's carbon tax and renewable goals, but the fracking bans and the shutting down of nuclear plants seem to be doing themselves more harm than good in the medium term.

Weaknesses identified by Bloomberg: [1] It's decentralized; there's no CEO [2] It's open source software people can copy [3] It's subject to competition from new coins

Ha ha ha. These are only problems to institutional people who are investing in Bitcoin as an asset. For people who want a decentralized, censorship resistant medium of exchange, these are all features.

Tell me that doesn't look like the Terminator version of the Demidog from Stranger Things 2

>Las Vegas' self-driving bus IS HIT BY A HUMAN DRIVER THAT WASN'T LOOKING WHERE HE WAS GOING in first hour of service

ftfy

If I can make a suggestion, you might want to look into the structure of the blockchain networks that use a network of known super-nodes to watch and verify each other.

If you have hundreds of known, diverse nodes distributed globally (run by very different institutions like Harvard, Bank of America, the Vatican, the Red Cross, the Gates Foundation, the House of Saud, etc. etc.) they can all watch each other, and the odds of them all going offline at the same time or cooperating to deny a specific user's transactions are very low.

> I can't figure out why we couldn't have miners just sign a growing dag of transactions and once a subset of the dag is accepted by 51% of the stake that network can prune the excess data (all the signatures)

Because of Sybil attacks.

> So in your example, if Alice signs both transactions and she doesn't have the funds to fulfil both of them the transaction causes Alice to lose 100% of her money.

Remember, the goal isn't to punish Alice. She's losing 100% of the bitcoin no matter what happens. The goal is to assure Bob (or Charles) that the transaction they receive will be recognized as valid by the rest of the world.

If you're Bob, and you know that Alice can invalidate the transaction (e.g., burn the bitcoin you just received) by signing a second transaction in the future, why would you ever accept Bitcoin?

Don't punish Alice. Assure Bob.

How do you "switch" from a global shared ledger that everyone uses to a shared ledger that no one uses? I mean, you an, you can fork Bitcoin and start your own, but what does that get you? No one else will use your coin. There will be no market for it and it will have no value.

I mean if you're REALLY lucky you'll start something that's as popular as Litecoin and it will be worth 1% of what your Bitcoins were worth.

Bitcoins are only worth anything because you can go anywhere in the world and people will accept that there is one and only one blockchain, and if you own bitcoins on that blockchain then you own them, period.

Proof of Work allows you to solve bad actors without switching away to a new network and losing all your Bitcoins. Your solution doesn't. If you have a centralized system that centralized party could refuse to honor your bitcoin holdings and wipe out your balance.

This really isn't a new solution. I was serious before when I said David Chaum's ecash (from 25 years ago) was an approximation of this .

Hi Paul. I'm Brock.

I hope we're not talking at past each other, but I read your post as proposing a system where there's a central party that computes transactions "in the open" in a way that third party observers can verify.

That's hardly useless, but it's not a replacement for Proof of Work. PoW is for decentralizing the ability to choose between competing valid blockchains. It prevents double-spending by making the benefit of double-spending (the value of the your transaction) far less than the cost of double-spending (the electrical cost of 51% of the mining power for 1 hour or so).

Your system uses a centralized host (see "Services with Secure Ledgers", paragraph 2), and (I presume) third-party observers can verify a "secure ledger" by seeing which one has been more recently signed and time-stamped by the single host.

I mean, sure, centrally hosted servers are more efficient than Proof of Work. No one who know what they're talking about disputes that. But the whole point of PoW is to allow decentralization without a single host.