pakled_engineer

Machines making decisions due to our own man made complexity, wonder when this will become the norm for all facets of government, until the machines create their own massive complexity making it even more difficult for humans thus we end up completely relying on them.

A steady influx of cocaine, which became too expensive when said shady agencies stopped what they were doing and local dealers decided to boil the expensive coke into crack so it became more affordable to addicts. Now there was a $5 per point addictive drug flooding poor areas with zero law enforcement to control it.

I remember big protests with black community leaders accusing the police of racism for not arresting crack dealers as their neighborhoods had become so dangerous police totally avoided them. They demanded new laws. Their newly elected reps ran on a platform of new tougher laws. The heavy hand of government then solved this by creating mandatory minimum sentencing and other laws that were blanket applied regardless of individual situation and created mass incarceration.

Because of the damage addiction does to communities. When these laws were passed it was people in those affected communities demanding them. People forget there were huge community marches in the 80s/90s crack epidemics with locals demanding police rid their towns of crack dealers.

Here activists called legalization the new prohibition because of all the regulations like no dispensaries within a X distance from each other, a school, church ect so drove them out or cemented monopolies for the existing dispensaries which can raise prices. Then they created high barriers to entry with massive licensing fees and other regulations. This of course spawned online purchasing and delivery business models that's worked well for now, until more regulations on delivery.

One problem with the distributor in this story is he is constantly getting high off his own supply while in care and control of a vehicle which makes nobody want to work with him. That's heatbag behavior asking for problems. His comment on firearms about pulling out a gun during an argument is also something only heatbags do, the guys with side arms on the farm he went to are only armed to deter getting jacked for their product not win arguments.

You can't have a record and operate a dispensary here either, which was designed to keep bikers and other org crime out but they get around this by partnering with somebody that has a clean record.

Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only for teenage possession. Friend in Seattle did that to erase his record and open a weed business.

Problem is those $700k condos are being bid up to $800k, and often sold so fast there's no time to go back to your bank and request an additional $100k mortgage. The Chinese buyers have cash to make the sale immediately.

The newer buildings are now exclusively luxury condos, like the tower being built on Harwood St that's one unit per floor for offshore millionaires.

There's a NK defector where I live who runs a restaurant, who's family spent some time in a NK prison when he defected (he bribed their way out) and claims there is financial incentive for defectors to come up with the most sensational stories possible. Even the author of that book the movie is based on admitted he fictionalized parts of it a few months ago so the movie, which is merely based on the book is likely a complete fabrication. Not saying horrible things don't happen in totalitarian gulags but I wouldn't trust that movie to be anything except fiction.

The defector here uses Kakao Talk to contact his NK family every day, and he manages to send them money on a regular basis at only a 15% fee through some Chinese Hawala-like network. Most of the military and party officials like to gamble remotely in Chinese/Myanmar casinos so there is widespread unregistered money transfer networks in place across the country.

I did books recommended from here, and lots of math stackexchange searching/questions.

I started with Basic Mathematics by Lang, Eccles book on Mathematical Reasoning, A Course of Pure Mathematics by Hardy combined with the lecture notes of MITs honors single variable calc and Polya's How To Solve It, currently doing Advanced Calculus by Loomis & Shlomo.

I would imagine if you're interested in advanced math you would go to free university seminars from visiting professors and network with whoever is there as a self learner.

I get up 3hrs before work everyday and read a chapter then do as many exercises as I can. Repeat until done, or I get stumped and skip that exercise then come back to it later.

According to this older HN posted article the way to slow down HFT strategies is get rid of the subpenny rule, such as pricing securities in increments of $0.0001

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_whats_broken.htm...

Many years ago I worked for a stint at ebay and I was definitely considered a pariah for not flaring out my desk with juvenile toys. I did that in Grade 9 with my locker

I've read the letters, Hitchens books on Orwell, listened to his lectures on Orwell, read Orwell's essays, and his books. The message is to me, that resistance is hopelessly futile once totalitarianism is firmly entrenched and the state has absolute power over humanity itself. That's why Winston is broken and loves Big Brother at the end of the book, because there was no other possible outcome.

It's a warning that if you don't stop it by recognizing it's rise through dictatorship over language, over emotions, and finally over thought it will be impossible to resist. Well, that is what I (and apparently Hitchens) see in his writing. I also see plenty of parody, especially towards Emmanual Goldstein and his book (Trotsky), purges blaming foreign conspiracy, and the illogical party slogans.

1984 is definitely influenced from the state propaganda Orwell saw coming out the Soviet Union such as the book character Emmanuel Goldstein who is quite obviously Trotsky, and the state rewriting history by editing Goldstein out of party photographs is Trotsky again, the idea of loving a leader and hating the party, many more parallels.

It's written as a warning of how futile it will be to resist totalitarianism in a future advanced technological state

The taxes are also high https://simpletax.ca/calculator

Select BC and enter in the typical income for an experienced developer in Vancouver which is 75k. Your take home salary is $59,000 plus you aren't offered any options usually just straight pay. This doesn't include all the other deductions such as EI and CPP.

Now convert CAD to USD and you're a professional experienced developer making $42,000 USD per year, in one of the highest cost cities on earth.

I might be reading your posts incorrectly but you appear as highly ideological and combative as said Republicans you know who sound 'crazy'. This is the problem with politics, everybody has their ideology and anybody with different ideology is insane, a heathen, inhuman, ect.

I've taken lately to becoming a Trump contrarian in social settings full of ideological group think which are students I hang out with for an Advanced Calculus by Sternberg and Loomis study group where afterwards the conversations always devolve into politics. Not that I would support any current politician let alone Trump but he was the easiest candidate to find blatant media misrepresentation, and I do find it an interesting social experiment to witness normally friendly people go into witch trial mode for daring to challenge their ideology.

When they demolish and sell in Vancouver its given to the lowest contractor bid so will fall a part in a few years. Common to see huge cracks in new house walls, uneven garage doors that can't close and loose tile work galore. Glued together homes sold to absentee buyers made to last until next sale.

Vancouver, Canada when bars were forced to shut down at 2am, resulted in thousands of drunks pouring into the streets all at once and mass brawling with each other. Laws were changed to allow 4am last call and legal after hours, and the gigantic street brawls disappeared. A barwatch association was started to keep out chronic violent offenders and known gangsters from clubs and bars too which helped.

There's also juiced up goofs here running around one punching random people while their friends film their crime and yell "worldstar" (worldstar hiphop) which is the site where all the recent knockout game idiocy originated.

Like the actual police reports I guess http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/17/julian-assange-...

I realize this is a highly politically charged issue and Assange is a hero to most people (and me) but there is merit to these charges, which will never get cleared up in a court room because of US shenanigans with backdoor rendition hanging like a dark cloud over the whole thing. I can appreciate his work and not his character, just like I can appreciate the Unabomber manifesto argument without endorsing his personal actions.

This was the complaint of the two girls in Sweden

The complaints in Sweden were originally due to him refusing to use a condom which would explain the 4 kids from 4 different women. There is somewhere truth in these allegations that Assange plays games with birth control without obtaining consent to not use it, problem is he is almost certainly to be renditioned to the US on a CIA gulf stream if he ends up in Sweden so can't own up to these charges.

I have a daily schedule/ritual to keep productive, after a week it just became the norm https://books.google.ca/books/about/Daily_Rituals.html?id=-t...

As an aside a good example of this politically evasive precision in speaking was Clinton's famous "I did not inhale" line when confronted if he had ever used marijuana. His answer was true, he's allergic to smoke and was well known around campus for baking/eating marijuana not inhaling it.

Speaking of Clinton and document leaks, next time Hillary Clinton is asked about the classified email server scandal take note of her precise replies, it is impressive how politicians can fire out precise answers when pressured to both deflect and deny accusations and protect themselves at the same time by later claiming precision.

I recall he took pretty much everything there was to take, including the active operations db, and only released a small fraction of documents to Poitras/Greenwald. Those 2 drives full of docs were hastily dumped inside the HK airport on his way to Moscow and are no doubt in the hands of Chinese spy agencies (who also were likely set up beside his hotel room in HK trying to get his passwords).

I did a ridiculous amount of LSD made by Nicholas Sand in the 90s and never had a bad trip. I did it in the worst possible settings due to idiocy of youth and all is good. Don't take too much if you've never done it, and stay away from traffic and you'll be fine.

I didn't have any profound experiences, it was just fun to do. I did liquid and blotters, started at two doubles, then over time usually two "quads" which is 8 hits of insane quality Sand produced acid. It was way too much but I was never out of control, when it got crazy I just thought wow this shit is great.

I did however always get sick whenever I tried Shrooms, that was pretty awful tripping and puking at the same time.

Some additional advice for anybody doing so regardless of where they live or the market they service:

- Contract a legitimate 3rd party ID verification service like bitstamp does. You get API access where the entire verification process can be automated on your end, and it's out of your hands, so you have some kind of legal protection offloading the KYC risk to that party.

- Encrypt all internal employee messages, regardless if they are totally innocent looking a prosecutor will find some way to twist the emails and chats into a crime. Have a written data deletion policy for internal messaging so they are not saved forever, as deleting them to satisfy a business operations policy will prevent possible future obstruction or evidence tampering nonsense charges.

- Avoid any and all political ideology, don't call your service DownWithTheFedCoin. Notice how the prosecutors made a point about Liberty Reserve's name.

- If you create an asset pegged to a currency don't use USD.

Finally have clear, concise instructions to resolve disputes, and some kind of phone number escalation procedure for users to actually talk to somebody. Better yet have a disinterested 3rd party to help moderate customer disputes in a totally transparent way instead of merely freezing accounts and ignoring their emails. As soon as somebody has their funds seized or delayed they run to regulators and lawyers to complain which in turn spawns government attention on your little cryptocurrency related service.

Their biggest issue (besides being a centralized service thus easy targeting) was not encrypting internal communications and allowing comments to accompany transfers which were typically "For 200 dumps of CCs" or something similarly illegal. They tried to avoid KYC regulations by just providing the internal ledger, you had to go through 3rd party exchangers in order to buy in or cash out of the system and these parties were supposed to do KYC.

Pecunix and C-gold are other centralized, closed book-entry systems still around though Pecunix changing to a voucher system.

Roger Penrose writes about how fractions are incorrectly taught in school in the preface of "Road to Reality" always the pie visual is used as an approximation which later confuses students.

For now we can strip DRM, what if all near future readers have a TPM-like hardware key that can't be copied or sniffed that must be present to decrypt the text.

Unless Amazon cooperates with the regime in the future to censor the ebook too, most publishers won't but a major distributor like Amazon might if doing so allows them a large government contract with said regimes, or entrance to the market like Google's Chinese censorship.

I also like the "airgap" benefits of books vs proprietary readers, nobody can log into a book and ninja edit for future political reasons or delete them for copyright reasons.

He crowdfunded some of the legal fees https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/gregory-alan-elliott-...

Unsure if it's even worth incurring more lawyer fees pursuing the loss of employment as the women will likely have no money to pay him, file endless appeals and delays, ect.

You have to get a new address every 30 days from their website or pay $1/mth https://tvunblock.com/donate/