mamon

> delegate your decision making to the lowest possible level [...] this will make the average decision slightly worse.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Information going up the chain of command will always be a bit outdated, distorted, and incomplete (unless you can just live-stream video with sound to your command center). So with properly trained soldiers decisions made at lower level can actually be better than those made by higher-ups.

In Europe salaried employees are expected to work 8 hours a day. Anything above that is overtime, and not only it is paid overtime, it actually pays 150% of your normal hourly rate. or 200%, or more, depending on the country.

Broken clock shows the right time twice a day. Biased people being correct is an exception, not the rule. We should be suspicious of people with know biases.

Depends on your definition of "discovery". Christopher Columbus's trip to America changed the course of history. Any previous visits by the lost at sea sailors are not important.

But why put that info in commit message instead of a comment in the file itself?

Which still makes it only 97th biggest city in the world: https://www.worldometers.info/population/largest-cities-in-t...

"Past performance is not indicative of future results"

EDIT: it might be a lawyerspeak, but it is still a good advice: there's a reason why Bitcoin has been down $14k this week and that reason is the settlement with NYAG in the Tether lawsuit. Situation has changed, there's one fewer scam company there to artificially inflate Bitcoin price, so expect downward trend for at least the next few months.

So down from the 2 billion peak?

>> the Supreme Court is a political creature and tends not to stray too far from popular opinion.

Supreme Court's role is to be a stabilizing factor, because majority can switch from Democrats to Republicans every four years. Supreme Court's partisan composition is basically a moving average of the last 5-6 presidential election's results, thus smoothing out temporary whims of the society.

Tangentially related: there's a guy in Poland running a blog about personal finance (i.e. some advice how to save money on your bills, or how to start investing in stocks, etc.) Some time ago he self-published a book, promoted it through social media, and of course through his blog. Later he made a blog post about how much money he made on that book. Believe it or not, but in 3.5 years, on the limited Polish market (the book was in Polish, so no more than 40 million people speaking the language worldwide) he grossed $2M in revenue, over $1M after-tax profit for about 90k copies sold.

For those of you who speak Polish (or are willing to go with Google Translate) here's the link:

https://jakoszczedzacpieniadze.pl/ile-zarobila-ksiazka-finan...

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=pl&tl=en&u=htt...

Do you think it is fair for a person who owns $2M worth house to still receive benefits paid from taxpayers money? Because my take on this is: you're millionaire so you can take care of yourself, no public money for you.

Also, no, they wouldn't have to move to Stockton, they wouldn't have to leave their home town. Sell your house for $2M, buy two condos, for $1M million each, move into one of them, rent out the other, and you're set for life, and you will still have your original $2M to pass to your grandchildren after you die. Or you can invest your $2M in ETF, and live in the rented condo, cashing $100k of capital gains profits every year.

For someone with $2M (or 1.5M, or even 1M) net worth possibilities are endless and living off of taxpayers money shouldn't be one of them.

Pretty basic question: the author states in the very beginning: "I used to work at AWS". Is it possible that things went smoothly for him, because they still remembered him, and prioritized his requests because of personal relationship?

You're missing the point: trading means that you have to find someone willing to do the trade with you. If no one wants to buy your Tethers then you're doomed. Redeeming is completely different - the issuer of your asset has a legal obligation to buy them from you (or at least that's how it should work for assets that aren't scam).

Combined net worth of Metallica members is almost $1B (, so it's basically "billionaires at war" case. No reason to root for them as underdogs.

Ok, so now I get why Bitcoin is regarded as "deflationary": on long enough timescale almost all bitcoins will be lost this way, and the last man that still possesses his wallet keys will be a trillionaire. /s

Since properly learning a programming language is such a huge time investment for most people, once they do it the language becomes part of their identity. Many people will, in professional setting, introduce themselves as "Java/GoLang/Python Developer". When such developer hears a critique of their language they hear personal insult.

> You do realize that most gold and silver traded on the COMEX is also "fake" in the sense that they're trading in amounts of underlying gold and silver that could never ever be delivered at the COMEX prices?

Which means that gold is UNDERVALUED - there's a lot more demand for it than can be fulfilled with physical metal, hence the "paper gold" in form of contracts. If the COMEX scam comes to an end we can see gold price skyrocketing to 20-30k USD per ounce.

US military power still has it's limits. Imagine for example that China refuses to trade in USD, demanding payment in physical gold for all the goods manufactured there. Or Russia refuses USD payments for oil and gas. No way the US Navy would be able pull of an invasion.

> most plausible explanation is that they're almost completely backed with bitcoin.

Even if that's true it would be a direct contradiction to what they promise to their customers, that Tether is fully backed by USD. Any angry customer can then sue them for fraud.

That has been done multiple times. It is easy: just record the sound and compare acoustic signatures. And yes, Stradivarius is different. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/may/21/scientists-f...

How about [1]? Corrupt organizaiton's loyalties typically lie with those who sponsor it.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-pled...

So Google is still getting all your email, you're just never logging in to Gmail UI... Don't see the point.

Some companies make a business out of it: https://www.crunchydata.com/products/crunchy-postgresql-oper...

100m of German speakers are concentrated in three neighbor countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland. It's not like a German can go to a different continent and find people speaking their language (like a Spanish or French person would). I don't really understand their unwillingness to learn foreign languages - is it just their pride? :)

I guess it depends on the country. In Poland my experience is that every time EU passes some regulation Polish parliament passes the corresponding bill implementing it. So even if we left EU tomorrow those bills will still be in effect.

Also, I'm not sure about this "immediately enforceable" part - I recall some cases where member states delayed implementing EU laws for years, sometimes ending up being sued to European Court of Justice.

He says that bitcoin has "no intrinsic value" and he's wrong about that, because value of something is not decided by financial experts, but by people willing to pay for it (even if those people are criminals looking for new ways to launder their money).

He has also been predicting that "Bitcoin bubble will burst" for the past few years, and he's been wrong about it so far.

So yes, I would say he is clueless when it comes to Bitcoin.

That's exactly how "Proof of Work" consensus algorithm works: hasking a single block has to waste enough electricity to make forking the blockchain too costly.

Bitcoin exists for just over a decade now. Give governments and financial regulatory bodies some time to catch up and they will destroy it, maybe creating their own cryptocurrencies in process.

Nouriel Roubini has a well known hate for Bitcoin, which probably originates from the fact that it escapes his alleged "expertise": he hasn't foreseen its popularity, and rise in value. Now he hates it, because this past mistake threatens his status as financial guru, "Dr Doom".

EDIT: I wouldn't take anything he says about it seriously, he's basically clueless on the topic.

EDIT2: In free markets value of something, e.g. Bitcoin is not decided by some panel of experts, like professor Roubini, but by people buying and selling it. If people want to pay $45k for a Bitcoin then that's it's true value. Roubini's claims that "fundamental value of Bitcoin is zero" is riddiculous. Bitcoins are collectibles, same as, say, baseball cards, and baseball cards can go for some insane prices despite having zero practial usefullness.

>> Sports are a special case as, arguably, they're mostly boring

This only applies to american football, where you have on average 12 minutes of actual gameplay over 3.5 hour match.

Soccer or basketball are much more dynamic, and therefore can be entertaining on their own, no social context required.