gpsx

That is a good point that it is not like many other factors that affect evolution. I think there could be an evolutionary impact if the high cost of resources for one tribe, in tribe versus tribe competition, or a family, in family versus family competition, put the tribe or family at a disadvantage.

I think this is a noble idea. One thing that makes it difficult is that a computer is designed to execute arbitrary programs. People will always be tempted to "improve" whatever the specification is for this forever computer.

A related thing to think about is what it would take so we don't lose the ability to view old documents or run old programs. Presumable header info in documents, saving versions of programs and having emulators for old machines would by part of the solution. I'm not sure if it would be worth the effort to enact, but it is probably worth thinking about.

OK I get it, rounding error in calculating the square roots.

I must not be understanding the problem here because this seems pretty simple. If someone told me to add two lists of numbers (the square roots) and then take the difference of the two sums and the sums were potentially too big for the computer to handle, I'd start differencing before I finished the sums. (For example find the total of sum1 - sum2. While processing values, if the running sum is positive take a number from list 2. It it is negative take a number from list 1.)

That should be linear in the total number of elements in the list.

I would like to see more about work-fare, where people are given jobs if they are unemployed. I think it is very important people have work to do, and not all people are as self motivated as the hacker news crowd. Secondly, this would hopefully help productivity.

Previously job programs were giant public works projects, like building the Hoover dam. Today, with computers it would be easy to give any person a job, right out of their own house.

I do like allowing self motivated people to create their own jobs, and that should be factored into this kind of program.

I have been warned of this before. Technically it seems easy enough. I do not treat it as a scare tactic but would be interested in hearing opinions on it from others.

I think one problem in the US is that we have a medical system that is paid to medically treat people. We need a health care system that is paid to keep people healthy. In this case, advancement would mean more people are healthy. It might include, for example, figuring out how to get people to eat better food and exercise.

I don't know about your first sentence. It seems more likely animals and humans would evolve to eat what they needed. That certainly seems like it would be evolutionarily preferred. But I do agree junk (which didn't exist through most of evolution) is easier to eat and that is part of our problem.

Warning - opinionated non-expert here.

I don't buy that it is as simple as the writeup implies. (I didn't read actual research it is based on however.)

Is energy balance true? Yes. But as the paper implies, we don't have direct control of that. I suspect it is _what_ you eat.

Does insulin response matter? Yes, I assume so. But that is not the only factor.

If you are not getting proper nutrition, your body will ask for more food. Naturally we know what we need. We get a taste for broccoli if we need nutrients in broccoli. But if people have somehow short circuited their food sense and don't realize they need broccoli and instead they eat more hamburgers or fruit loops or whole grain bread, they won't get the nutrition they need, and they will probably still want more food.

So insulin response, nutrition, and I am sure there are other things too.

You mentioned transaction fees, the other is "inflation" or mined coins. As mentioned above, this is the same as gold and many other things. I guess it is just a matter of definition if you want to say that is a negative sum game. It is not unique to bitcoin though.

I think you are a little unfair in your comparison of bitcoin and gold. Gold has advantages over bitcoin, but bitcoin also has advantages over gold. Storing gold is more expensive then storing bitcoin. Transacting gold is much more difficult than transacting bitcoin. One of the downsides of bitcoin is that it could go to zero for some reason. I think gold has less of a risk of that, but other investments have a significant risk of going to zero.

I am not sure I understand the negative sum game you mention. The first payment miners get is (I don't know the proper name) a bounty, which is equivalent to a gold miner obtaining gold. This can be seen as a built-in inflation, which not only gold but also any fiat currency has. The difference is there is no known limit on this inflation factor for gold or fiat currencies. For gold we assume some gargantuan deposit will not be found and that it will maintain its scarcity. I don't think anyone thinks there is an inflation limit for the US dollar or any other fiat currency. Bitcoin has a known amount limit. (As a disclosure, I own gold, bitcoin, and US dollars.)

The other part of what miners make is a transaction payment. That exists in every other payment system I assume, except I guess physically handing an object to another person, which covers a pretty small fraction of transactions.

I've had one of these forever. Great purchase. (I am sure it still works great but I never print anything anymore.)

I get your point that a node in the network can transfer a different packet. But I think people will have to be more creative with the protocol. For example, other nodes can hear both your transmission and next hop and can detect the packet was changed. I'm not sure you could make it 100% reliably, but the network could be self policing. Hopefully it would be one of those things that doesn't work in theory, only in practice. (And if not, then the rules would have to be updated.)

I don't know what is going on in the ham radio space, but it does seem like there are a lot of potentially interesting applications.

Regarding mesh networking, you don't have to have encryption to do that. It could still be very interesting, you just have to know that people can inspect your transmissions. If they didn't allow this restriction, I imagine the system would just be overrun.

I think it would be very popular even with just a clear text internet over ham radio. You would probably even need additional restrictions to keep it from being overrun - like maybe only dedicated "ham radio internet" web sites would be allowed, as opposed to being just access to the (standard) internet.

The producer side would be the much more effective option if they could get a significant fraction of people to do the same. That might not happen now, but if enough people get fed up with Google maybe it will.

There are definitely tradeoffs. In javascript I can cavalierly code knowing that a sequence of lines will not be interrupted by another thread. (Unfortunately, I still have some mental overhead because I keep thinking, "This program will be screwed if they ever introduce multi-threading".)

I think the role of a tab in a code editor is different from the role of a tab in a document editor. I have always used dedicated code editors and prefer tabs (but like you, I use and specify spaces for code style). I think people who use editors that are multi-purpose generally see these alternate usages of tab as problematic or even illogical. I think this is often the linux people, and they are often the most experienced and influential coders. I think that is why spaces are generally seen as the preferred method.

I assume this statement was made not long after Einstein discovered the equivalence between mass and energy, so it's understandable it may not have been obvious at the time that we could generate power that way.

This is market forces at work. There is not necessarily someone to blame, generally speaking. I expect we'll see prices going up, wages going up and margins going down. I think that is good since I think we have gone too far in the other direction.

What frustrates me about economics (with my one intro class level experience) is that they could only talk about equilibrium. The dynamics of things changing like this is what would be really interesting.

Maybe that is why wealth inequality keeps getting worse? I'm hopeful that it will be different right now because of the various current circumstances, but we will see.

I have heard that income inequality has decreased in recent times of high inflation, but I do not have a source for that. Who is worse off depends on the inflation. If wage inflation is bigger than price inflation, then that is good for working class, and bad for margins of business and associated stock prices. Hard assets generally climb in price though they may just maintain their value.

In the past 10+ years we have had low wage inflation but high asset inflation. I think this has been helping the rich.

I didn't do this when I bought my place 20 years ago. I looked for houses I liked and could afford near where I worked. Being single, school districts were not as much of a concern, though that would probably be the biggest factor for families and a big driver for house price.

I was admittedly heavily biased by where I lived before, because I am used to that area, which seems to be true of my friends, independent of where they actually work.

Maybe this is just the Bay area. For me at the time Palo Alto and Menlo Park were too expensive, so I was looking in Mountain View, Sunnyvale or Redwood City. Fortunately for me Mountain View has gotten a bit nicer in that time.

They could use this for an all wheel drive mountain bike.

It is a pretty tough task to measure how productive you are (for the sake of better expectations). Assuming you do succeed at measuring your maximum productivity. The you have to measure is your distribution of productivity over time. This again is quite a tough task. A short cut is to just not beat yourself up over your productivity on a given day. Granted, that maybe easier said than done, but maybe that is what the OP should strive for. Or, maybe he is on the path to doing that.

Just to add this explicitly, to expand on some specifics, motorcycles have the added complexity of angular momentum and its effects. As you mention, turning the wheel effects your lean angle through angular momentum conservation. The cone then is the dominant factor causing the bike to turn.

The speed matters because as the speed is faster, a smaller angle change in the handlebars corresponds to a bigger sideways tilt motion of the bike.

FOMO. This is what causes bubbles. Of course it isn't any consolation that people can keep getting rich off of overpriced assets for a long time. As the saying goes, "The stock market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." In this case however, you aren't going insolvent, just suffering jealousy.

I'm not saying to jump in - the crash my come tomorrow. Or I'm not saying don't jump in - the asset prices may melt up with inflation and people who were out are left poorer. There are risks either way.

This doesn't apply to the high paying jobs I think. There you just have to decide what you really want and be happy with what you can get. As many other comments say, money doesn't equal happiness.

I have been working on a large side project which is no longer just a side project. I am not getting as many hours of work in as I would like, but at the same time I know if I tried to do more, I wouldn't be productive. In fact I'd do negative work. Years ago I would push through and work anyway (I am a real goal oriented person.) Knowing what I do know now, all I can do is shrug my shoulders. It's like distance running - for all the desire to work harder and do better, speeding up won't get you to the finish line faster.

If you have some sense of your limitations, you no longer can really feel guilty about being lazy for this. It may be worse though, because then you can feel bad about your capability. Hopefully that is something you can just accept.

What is the zoning? Can you use the land for anything other than a ABM site? /s

I am guessing this is misstated because so often lack of survival is the reason there is less reproduction. But yes, it comes down to who passes their genetic material to the most offspring.

Yes - in order to have a change be that fast it would have to be something that makes those people dramatically better at surviving, like X-men type mutations, or reproducing. I don't think the change of this blood vessel is really turning the tables between survival and death, or making these people that much more successful at reproducing. But with the prevalence of online dating these days, maybe it is a big help by allow people to navigate faster? /s