spiralx

It helps if you think about it in accounting terms where assets minus liabilities needs to add up to zero. When a bank makes a loan for $100 it adds $100 to the balance in your account - which is a $100 liability - and the $100 loan to its assets, balancing the books. Bank deposits aren't stores of physical cash, they're numbers in a ledger indicating what the bank owes you, and when you get a loan it means the bank owes you more money and not that it owes anybody else less money.

This Bank of England paper is by far the simplest and best explanation of the whole process, well worth a look even if just for the summary on the first page :)

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

I can recall visual "snapshots" of my road and places I know, but I can't hold them in mind or do anything with them, and as far as I can tell those flickers of visual memory are in part reconstructed from facts about those places, general knowledge and other snippets of visual memory. I very rarely don't know where I am or how to get somewhere, but that's based on knowing the connections between places as a network, not visualising a journey.

> Yeah. People say things like "I don't like the movie because it's not what I pictured in my mind" or "the character doesn't look like what I pictured while reading the book." I always assumed they just meant what I would mean if I said something like that... based on the literal description on the page, the character in the movie doesn't match the described hair color, height, etc. But no... I have more recently realized they mean they literally have an almost photographic picture in their mind of the character as they imagine it when they are reading the book. So wild.

Yeah it's a weird experience recontextualising something that's such a qualitative difference from the norm and that crops up so frequently yet so subtly throughout your life. I read books voraciously and incredibly quickly and I'm pretty sure not having to engage in visualisation helps with that speed. And also why I found Tolkien and his endless descriptions of the scenery incredibly tedious :)

Sounds like audial daydreaming, where white noise would be perfect for triggering almost any memory of music depending on the fluctuations of frequencies. Staring at the static on an old TV does the same thing visually if you look at it and relax your focus.

I only realised that I barely had any ability to visualise in the last few years and I'm over 40, it's something that's never been there and because it's not the same as lacking either visual memory or imagination there's not really much in the way of cues to make it obvious - the last time I was asked to "picture this in your head" was probably at school three decades ago...

Given I can replay music in my head on demand (called audiation according to a comment below!) with reasonable fidelity even for songs I don't have strong memories of, it seems likely my aphantasia is the developmental deficit of the connection between visual memory and my executive function due to ADHD in both stability and throughput.

Which, as the article says, is an inaccurate model of how modern monetary economies actually work. Bank loans create new money, they don't lend out existing deposits, and repayments destroy that money. Reserve requirements - in countries that have them - don't affect whether a loan can be made or not.

I wrote an XSLT stylesheet that would turn any page into a pretty-printed source view of the HTML just by including it via the <?xml-stylesheet?> tag. That was during the years I worked at a publishing company that stored, generated and edited everything via a combination of XML, XSLT, XPath, XInclude and XQuery, and now I'm working somewhere else that generates documents I do miss the flexibility of that combination... unfortunately it's hard to sell anything XML-related to people who've never seen it used effectively.

0 to 3 would be a quat, 0 to 4 a quit, 0 to 5 a hext and so on.

What's happening is that all of these rapid changes have left people with whiplash and feeling dislocated from the institutions that make up the societies they live in and play a large part in the establishing of norms. And FPTP voting systems inherently lead to a two-party system which breeds polarisation and turns into arguments about differences instead of searching for solutions to systemic problems.

The surface of a black hole is also the most efficient information storage possible - each 2x2 Planck lengths area can store a single bit. Of course there's no way to read that data...

It depends on how quickly you pass through each order of magnitude milestone. I remember reading about how MySpace grew something like five orders of magnitude in less than a year, and no matter how scalable your architecture is you're going to hit a point during that where you need to rearchitect your whole system.

Slower growth allows for forward planning and incremental architectural changes.

> First job was everything XML. We had our open source CMS that stored all documents as XML and used XSLT to transform it into the HTML we needed.

Docato/XHive? Been there as well.

Specifically they have an entire court system for corporate disputes which - along with the general clarity of Delaware corporate law - is what provides the expertise and capacity to produce sensible and speedy resolutions (relatively speaking lol).

Even better, the influx of gold from the New World was preceded by the period called the Great Bullion Famine where Europe-wide shortages of silver and gold led to long periods of deflation across the continent!

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

My personal user style for old.reddit.com extends the comment width to the whole screen and moves the horizontal action list for each comment to align with the username and the right side of the screen, while changing the font to one I find easier to read as well as bumping the font size and line-spacing, as well as generally adding some small amounts of space and colour here and there to help separate elements.

It's evolved over a few years now and the combination of changes means that I don't generally lose much in the way of content density in the general case of a post with mostly small to medium comments where the increased body text size is balanced with the removal of the space for the action bar. And it was even better before I got a bit older and decided that I should bump the font size up another pixel to make things easier on my eyes :)

Her job was to come in, make a bunch of unpopular changes and then move on, leaving the existing management who wanted those changes free of any associated blame. Quite literally her job was to be a scape-goat, it's quite a common strategy for companies who want to do unpopular restructuring or other large changes, and I'm pretty sure one she was well-compensated for.

Which is not to say that the amount of hatred and bile she received wasn't - unsurprisingly - wildly excessive and disgustingly misogynistic.

Really “cavemanship” was small tribes with basically a socialist economy and that only scales so far, what we have today is 14,000 years worth of societal progress towards social structures that can support more than 150 people who all live together and know each other. If we fell back to that state we'd start developing past it as soon as there were enough resources available to support more than that amount of people - the end result might not be what we have today, but it probably would be more similar to it than to the starting point.

Engineers are famously over-represented amongst terrorists, so probably.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....

Are you talking about the difference between proximal and ultimate causes? As in the proximal cause of these people dying was an explosion from a bomb set by Kaczynski, while the ultimate cause was that the things that caused Kaczynski's poor mental health that led him to those actions.

Separately I like the phrase "a reason is not an excuse" quite a lot. I can empathise with people who make terrible decisions and understand their reasoning, but that doesn't make me excuse the choices that they made.

Didn't both KotukuInAction and TheDonald get shut down by the sub's original creators due to them going off the rails and then forcibly re-opened by the admins and handed over to new moderators who were happy with the massive growth in a direction the original owner never intended and actively did not want?

Maybe you get the scams because from Facebook's demographic model of you, you fall in to the lonely and weird categories targeted by scammers? It can only go on what you've given it after all.

The US financial infrastructure is remarkable in how far behind the rest of the world it is though, which is one of the reasons I think Bitcoin took off in the first place. Fast and free transfers of money never seemed quite so magical when every bank in your country already offered that service.

It's redundancy, not waste, in the majority of cases. Look at what's happened to the Russian army to see what happens when there's no redundancy built-in to your logistics and supply chain, redundancy is essential to the capability of US military might.

Or that both ketamine and the blind had very similar pharmacodynamics and perhaps we should explore anaesthesia as a mechanism of action more broadly?

We are many meat computers layered on top of each other and interconnecting, with consciousness being the newest and thinnest layer on top.

Yes, I've recently come to realise that ketamine allows me to slip into a meditative state as a result of its consciousness-suppressing anaesthesia. For someone such as myself with ADHD and aphantasia this is a revelation as normally I find myself unable to quiet my restless mind enough to get there. And explains why both my most profound epiphanies and my greatest changes of mindset have all involved ketamine in one way or another.

And RxJS is itself an implementation of the language-agnostic Reactive framework.

Reminds me of a place where every screen, dialog and domain object was specified in a single table with hundreds of fields that could only be accessed or changed via a custom app that looked like a primitive DOS spreadsheet app, and often contained pointers to other objects in this table via their line number "pointer". There was a week-long training course when I joined just to explain how this worked.

Oh, and everything in the app was done via messages which were again specified by their line number in the same table as above and processed by a single ginormous switch statement with huge amounts of fall-through being used which led to messages being dealt with in whatever arbitrary order made that work, and which often then sent their own messages in a recursion hell.

They were part-way through updating the app to Win32 when I joined, and apparently gave up that project after I left in 2001, to a new job where the world of Java applets running on the Microsoft JVM seemed like a whole new modern world.

> This is the dirty little secret of billionaires' private foundations. That 5% has a lot of latitude and little oversight. For example, it includes administrative costs. A private foundation can pay each family member a salary (allowance) and that's a valid cost against the 5%.

Here's an example of a 503(c)(3) organisation (in politics often referred to as "dark money" organisations due to their lack of need to report the identities of individual donors) putting a family member on the payroll:

https://vtdigger.org/2018/07/29/sanders-institute-little-sho...

There's also the "buy from myself" tactic which possibly isn't that important for the Mormon Church but can certainly be used to boost apparent popularity or to change the format of money:

https://www.greenmountaindaily.com/2019/04/25/bernies-own-bo...

Add `// -----------------` in between blocks to work around this issue, and IMO provide much better delineation of content blocks e.g. imports vs definitions.

I do miss C#'s use of macros to allow defining arbitrary blocks that can be named and folded though.