solalf

They do explain why they want to live at 200m.

As per the article:

> With current diving at 150 to 200 meters, you can only get 10 minutes of work completed, followed by 6 hours of decompression. With our underwater habitats we’ll be able to do seven years’ worth of work in 30 days with shorter decompression time. More than 90 percent of the ocean’s biodiversity lives within 200 meters’ depth and at the shorelines, and we only know about 20 percent of it.

Also mind you, this is coming from an academic. Yet there’s no proof being brought to the argument that this gap does exist and they’re not saying “may or might”, they’re making what appears to be a purely ideological statement.

I believe the term is appropriate. Not only would the books have mostly disappeared due to local conditions, they can indeed be, and often are, digitized.

Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy.

Millions of Indians escaped starvation thanks to this policy and an astounding body of knowledge survived and was consequently studied, helping elevate Indian culture in academic circles. But no matter, this created “knowledge gaps”.

From their bio: “My dissertation was a linguistic and cultural examination of disability as portrayed in Medieval Icelandic genre of the Sagas and Þættir of Icelanders.”

If they weren’t a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you’d think this was straight out of Portlandia.

And the paperback is $50. What happened here?

The article gives some details we can go off of. 5 suitcases with $500k each, is $2.5M. Alfassi charged 10% so $250k.

Out of that you have to manage all the logistics (as they said his fee covered it). - Pickup of the cash - Counting - Hiring and managing mules (which means paying for Clarke’s salary and expenses who lives between Dubai and London, with, I assume, lots of flying and housing for her and her family required) - Getting mules to your location - Paying for things like Covid tests, a few expenses (I assume some food, and other little things) - Driving them to the airport - Flying them in business class to Dubai - Paying for a local resort while they stayed put a few days - Flying them back to the UK

Now they flew two people at a time, so all of the above is doubled for each trip.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this added up to around $50k per trip, which is 20% of the $250k fee for just transportation of the cash (does not include the actual laundering being done locally).

Margins are likely still “respectable” in the end, but you can’t have mules taking 10% of the suitcase’s content if you’re to run a profit.

I don’t think this is about how technically complex that would be. That’s clearly not where the moat is. The moat is in the commercial operations powering the cash machine that Google has built across its numerous properties.

You can build this engine but it won’t give you the richness of the data Google collects through Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Analytics etc… on its users. You could argue that Apple could try, through its own properties, but it would go against the privacy stance (essential to their image now).

Not saying they aren’t capable of dancing around this problem either, but then you start eroding your brand (which sells lots of iPhones). That’s when you start seeing that it’s just simpler to externalize this cost to a third party that you can then openly criticize and use as scarecrow to reinforce your market position, all the while collecting tens of billions in profits from them.

Yes profits, they don’t pay anything to operate Google Search. Given that Google gives them a third of revenue on Safari, that means Apple would need a product that does multiple times what they get for it today. That also requires a sales force they don’t fully have (although that’s been increasing for their own properties like AppStore and News).

Anyway, looking at it from this angle, it’s kind of genius not to change the status quo.

Well this is actually still very common in Paris! A number of subway stations have adopted them for long corridors connecting platforms of different lines within the same station. They move people at 4km/h on average, but the one in Montparnasse station goes up to 9km/h (used to be 11!). They’re mighty useful to hurried Parisian commuters.

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trottoir_roulant_rapide

Peak human population is expected to reach 10.4B in 2084 and slowly decrease from there. This is according to the UN[1] but other estimates envision a much earlier peak by the 2040s at 8.5B followed by a sharp drop to 6B by the end of the century[2].

[1] https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population

[2] https://earth4all.life/news/press-release-global-population-...

Not on the “practical” side but not seeing anyone mention this here. This is a highly emotional time. I would add a personal letter for your spouse, children, surviving parents etc… Something to remind them how much you love them and that you’re grateful to have shared your life with them. Or whatever words fit.

Could somebody walk me through why ARM based servers are so inexpensive compared to their x86 counterparts? Is performance much lower? 16 cores & 32gb of RAM for less than 25 euros seems like a bargain.

Amar’s LinkedIn profile description says: “ Enjoying what comes next”

I guess it’ll be prison?

Just get a point and shoot camera. If you also need a GPS, you can get one of those TomTom devices they used to put in cars. Dedicated MP3 players are also still a thing if you want a soundtrack for your life. Now all you need is that sweet candy bar phone, throw all this in a large fanny pack and off you go. PS: an old school wallet would also be useful, Symbian OS doesn’t have Apple Pay yet.

Awesome initiative! I wish Apple Notes would support Markdown. This is my go to app for so much of my life, à Notion style editor would be an absolute game changer.

I meant wether the user converts, no clicks through.

I’ve actually heard of many restaurants doing this as well.

“May I recommend the salmon today sir?” often means the chef got a good price on it and the restaurant will gross more.

Source: a friend of mine who bused tables for a few years. Not sure that’s statistically relevant in any way, but it’s an interesting anecdote.

Booking.com - the biggest travel website in the world, already does this and has been for years. They mainly charge via greater conversion fees (ie a bigger slice of the booking), as opposed to a cost per click model (which I think is Amazon’s preferred model). This way, they have a huge incentive on making the ad as relevant as possible, otherwise they’ve wasted inventory through not monetizing the click at all (whereas cost per click means you make money regardless of wether the user clicks through).

On your point on Normandie, you can even go further! Ethnologically speaking Normandie, comes from its inhabitants’ name: the normands. This name is composed of “nor” and “man”, so it’s literally North Men from the French perspective - aka the Vikings.

The reason the French King gave them the region as a duchy, is because the Seine river, which passes in the middle of Paris, ends its course in present day Honfleur, Normandie. So Vikings would move their drakkars ships upstream from there and sack the city. Having Rollo installed as Duke put an end to the raiding.

It is said that when Rollo was made to kneel before Charles the Simple, to swear allegiance, he grabbed onto the king’s feet and threw him in the air. I don’t know if this is a true story, but it’s always amused me!

If you drive around Normandie today, you’ll see plenty of cars with drakkar stickers on their bumpers. A sign that many still identify with this heritage.

Saudi Arabia put up a blockade (with an Arab coalition support) of Qatar for a number of reasons[1], one of which being Al Jazeera’s incendiary (in their opinion) coverage of sensitive topics within the Arab world during the Arab Spring. Saudi Arabia wanted the channel shut down. They never intended to invade and the biggest factor was Qatar’s relationship with Iran (Saudi Arabia’s arch rival). The link with AIPAC? Why would the Saudis, who have no formal diplomatic relations with Israel care? Sounds like a complete made up conspiracy theory.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_diplomatic_crisis

Reminds me of that famous Oscar Wilde quote they had Leonard Nemoy whisper you in Civ: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

Ah and your use of the “f” word is full of taste. Grandiose.

How is this a stereotype?

I live in the Middle-east (the region of the world where Doha is located), trust me, it’s full of sand.

You don’t need to feel insulted for me.

> heads in the sand.

Quite literally?

I think your statement may be a bit broad here.

Let’s say upper management considers they need both feature A and B to win the market by end of quarter. But suddenly your team is half the number of people it used to be. You’re not realistically going to achieve more than you used to just through sheer elasticity. So either A or B will get done and it becomes a matter of prioritization.

Smaller companies and shops are nimble because they don’t have the burden of the past, red tape and standards that exist at scale. For engineering orgs the size of Snap’s things take longer and having more people very often does solve the velocity problem.

> TikTok's app is the result of designing an app around a recommendation algorithm

First time I hear of TikTok in those terms. Could you expand on what that means?

From their latest earnings call “Average revenue per customer in the quarter was $68.90”.

This seems extremely low, and suggests the vast majority of their customers are on their base $5/month plan.

Doesn’t the company have sales teams? If not, why is that? And if they do, why are they so ineffective?