spiralx

It was actually inspired by Perl as much as Bash if you read one of the asides in the O'Reilly book written by one of PS's developers lol.

Stephen Baxter's books are along the same lines, start with one of these:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel)

I mean any type of energy is just as intangible as potential energy, so I don't see that the energy stored by doing work (i.e. interacting with one four forces) is that different to the idea of energy stored by being in motion. You never measure "energy" directly after all, but it's a useful abstraction - after all, everything in science is an explanatory position.

Because gravity distorts _space-time_ - not just 3-D space - then the event horizon is the boundary at which gravity means that all future paths (technically everything within your future light cone) lie either on or within the event horizon, leading to a stable orbit at the horizon or spiral into the centre of the black hole respectively.

Space isn't distorted at the event horizon and you wouldn't notice any effects from crossing it - other than no longer being able to see the outside universe.

Which then significantly exacerbates the potential for a negative equity trap, because moving now requires paying all of those deferred taxes. So the longer you've lived somewhere the more you need to down-value when you move...

Same here. I'd been using GFA Basic for a couple of years when I came across Turbo Pascal which really helped - being a version of BASIC with code blocks, variable types including records, functions and procedures and even references - so I picked up Pascal just by reading the help documentation and studying the numerous very clear and helpful examples included on almost every page.

This was a good couple of years before I discovered the Internet at university so there was no easy access to learning resources. I'd tried to pick up C a couple of times without much luck before learning TP, and it wasn't until after that that I then was able to transfer what I'd learnt from Pascal to C - although again that was aided by another great Borland product, C++ Builder :)

The article is saying that the inherited wealth of the remaining 20% of today's billionaires is greater than the wealth of those new-made billionaires, there's no contradiction there at all. And obviously you'd expect most new billionaires to have a net wealth close to the $1bn mark, so all it would take is each of the 20% to inherit four times as much on average.

This page lists nine people who inherited over $50bn each, and another 23 who inherited between $4bn and $50bn, totalling just over $1.1tn of inherited wealth. Easy to see how that would outweigh the wealth of a larger number of new billionaires.

https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizatio...

And that list doesn't include any of the inherited wealth of the various royal, noble and other old money families around the world...

But that already happens with property taxes - just look at all the people in California who can only afford to live where they do because their property taxes are fixed at their original rate, and so they cannot afford to move anywhere else within the same area.

Nice one, I remember writing a 2D graphics library in Turbo Pascal using embedded hand-optimised assembly for the actual drawing code when I was your age, but that was back before I discovered the internet so it ended up being something I'd enjoyed writing but never did anything with, so well done on taking the next step turning it from a personal project to one that other people can see and maybe use themselves - it all looks very tidy, well-commented and the README is clear.

Putting things out there for the world to see can be a scary thing, but remember that what people say is often as much about them than it is about your work, especially so when what they say is about you.

PS I'm actually more interested in Motes than this myself, going to experiment with it now :)

The use of a continuous roll of paper with punched perforations to control a loom was invented in 1725 by Basile Bouchon. Then in 1745 Jacques de Vaucanson invented the first fully automated loom using punch cards which unfortunately was not well received at the time - perhaps due to pushback over the automation making the draw boy role redundant - and it wasn't until after his death that Jacquard reintroduced the idea alongside other improvements and was a success. de Vaucanson also invented the chain drive and slide lathe apparently, he was all about automation.

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

Funnily enough the Smithsonian doesn't mention his invention in their article on him:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/eighteenth-century...

Probably not possible because it wasn't thought of when the system was first implemented and introducing such a change would involve getting new hardware with the jump feature and quite probably new hardware both to read the new card format and to produce the cards themselves. And everyone else also having to do so given the dominance of the IBM 12/80 card format.

The KKK may be a shadow of its former size and power but that has just lead to lots of smaller groups with similar beliefs forming that aren't so attention-grabbing.

So starting in 1983 that's roughly five conversions a year assuming the figure of 200 people in the article. So a 1,000 years to get through all 5k members according to bruceb's post. The man is a legend but it goes to show how difficult it is to deradicalise people who are deep in an ideology of hate. Something relevant to think about with things going on around the world right now.

Stopping people from going down the rabbit hole in the first place is really the only viable long-term solution - easier done with individuals than entire communities sharing that ideology as the norm.

Of course they did that. So you'd have to use a user script to read each account's profile to see if they have a tick, which would be a pain even with caching the results.

Just opened Twitter to nose at their HTML, it still hasn't managed to load the homepage in the time it's taken me to write this entire comment lol.

Having nothing but random comments by $8 subscribers at the top of every post has been pretty terrible for any sort of discussion between posters and followers already, but at least you could ignore/filter posts by their blue checkmark. Now you'll still get the above but you'll also get a bunch of $3 subscribers straight after the $8 posts, but without any obvious marker to show they've been boosted artificially.

People have often accused Twitter of being full of people trying to shout the loudest and drowning out useful discussion, yet all of Musk's changes seem to be aimed at making this issue worse and worse. Soon there'll be a caste system where the only actual discussions will be between people on the same subscription tier.

And of course physical currency - i.e. M0 - is only a small portion of the total money supply measured by M2.

Why should they? Other people have already done that, and it's not good for Bitcoin.

As of 2021 Russia supplied 15% of China's oil and 6% of it's natural gas, and those pipelines are a) for gas, not oil, and b) increase from 38 Bcm to 88 Bcm, while total imports via pipe are 2,000 Bcm, which c) doesn't account for LNG imports via ship.

https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/CHN

In other words, Russian pipelines supply very little of China's energy needs, and that's not going to change anytime soon. The only thing that could really change that is global warming enabling Russia to ship fossil fuels from its north coast to China.

LOL, almost all of China's oil supply runs through the Straits of Malacca which the US Navy could blockade with a carrier fleet and a few submarines. Why do you think they've been so heavily focussed on building relationships (and pipelines) with Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Russia and building up their deep water navy in the South China Sea?

Although this issue is why the next five or six years is basically China's only window for trying to seize Taiwan, and its leadership is not so crazy as to not know that, but possibly crazy enough to think that acting on it is a good idea while they can.

Only the UK and Taiwan have a nation-wide single-payer healthcare system, although Canada comes sort of close with each state having its own separate single-payer system. Most countries use some sort of insurance model with varying levels of public/private provision and government and employer contribution. Switzerland is the only country with 100% private healthcare provision, but it offsets that with generous subsidies and having insurers offer a mandatory not-for-profit plan meeting legislated minimums.

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/13/21055327/everybody-covered

You have to remember that originally those exchanges would also have had a public option available to compete with private plans.

Romney got on board with the push for increasing healthcare coverage in MA and helped get the Medicare waiver required for MassHealth, but he didn't propose the system and vetoed significant parts of it, most of which was overridden by the state legislature. "Romneycare" was the name his GOP opponents gave it when he was running to be the Presidential nominee in 2012.

Yup. The CBO have in the past even estimated a generic public option as being revenue positive due to replacing ACA subsidies for private insurance plans.

https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options/2013/44890

Single-payer is unlikely in the US for many reasons, if you're interested in the topic though the CBO did a thorough look at all of the different things that would be required for such a system:

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-05/55150-singlepayer.p...

The Netherlands has a system very similar to the ACA and the Swiss system mandates insurers offer a not-for-profit plan with minimum requirements, as well as offering generous subsidies to those with lower incomes. Both have cost controls though, which the US lacks.

The ACA included a public option to remove that tie to employers, but it was removed due to the opposition of Joe Liberman and his insurance company backers.

The creation and implementation of the Massachusetts health care system had little to do with Mitt Romney other than him trying to outdo Senate President Robert Travaglini's initial proposal for reducing the number of uninsured people in the state and later attempting to veto parts of the proposed legislation such as making employers contribute towards their employees coverage, letting legal immigrants with jobs use the system and providing dental care to those in the lowest income brackets. "Romneycare" was a pejorative term used by other Republicans to attack Romney when he was going to run for President.

The group responsible for the actual legislation was the Affordable Care Today Coalition which consisted of a lot of different interests:

https://www.wbur.org/news/2007/04/10/affordability-clash-wbu...

And they've open sourced a lot of the code they use for their infrastructure:

https://github.com/nordic-institute/X-Road

They also had a blockchain-based timestamping system a year before the Bitcoin white paper was released :)

I'm sure the author considers himself a giver :)

Surely this is the more apposite link when talking about libertarian tropical island paradises? :D

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/michael-oliver-r...