My experience is similar- It makes me fascinated by things and creative in a way that I was when I was a child. It's like it turns off a part of my brain which years of experience has taught to filter out many ideas before they even reach my conscious mind. Mostly hare-brained ideas, but interesting ones nonetheless, and in entertaining them sometimes something brilliant comes out.
Definitely. You know when you get an x-ray at the dentist and they put that lead blanket over you? I love that thing. I wonder if they make those in a king size...
One way to deal with flooding is to build highways in a manner where they become channels in such events. Kuala Lumpur, for example, has their SMART tunnel[1] which acts as a roadway normally but can be turned into a stormwater drainage tunnels.
Houston had a prime opportunity in 1996 to do something similar[2] when I-10 W was rebuilt- and engineers recommended building a conduit under I-10 to carry flood water from the Barker and Addicks reservoirs to the ship channel. Alas, that proposal was ignored so West Houston flooded during Harvey.
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't find figuring out which product to buy a painful or emotionally draining experience. I rather enjoy researching different models and features, comparing and contrasting. How hard is that?
I think the bigger issue is why FB hasn't been able to create the kind of conversations that reddit does- the lack of real threading and the lack of a true downvote (preferably anonymous) keep conversations on FB abysmally superficial. You can't engage in a debate with someone if the back-and-forth gets impossible to follow after the second reply, especially with more than two participants. Likewise, FB and users have no idea whether people disagree with a post or are simply ignoring it; or on something like a critical article, whether a user agrees with an article and it's the article's subject which makes them angry or the user disagrees with the article and the post itself makes them angry. FB, with its status as the defacto social network could be a place where people have real constructive discussions, but instead its inability to foster real dialogue has a lot to do with the current stupidity of political discourse and the problems with reality bubbles and whatnot.
It is, however, really obnoxious when you click on an ad once and then are subjected to ads for that same product everywhere you go for months. I clicked on an ad for a Purple mattress a while back and now that's what I see on half the sites I go to. FFS, people, I don't want the mattress, okay!?!?
Can I get a bank account which works like a normal bank- accepts EFTs in dollars, has a debit card which pays in dollars, but where my balance is stored in BTC and everything is exchanged to/from BTC at the current rate on the fly? With enough of a balance, it seems like I'd be able to weather any fluctuations in the exchange rate and my funds would for the most part appreciate at a much greater rate than the measly interest on a savings account. Does that exist? Would that be a terrible idea?
>And finally, because it's entertaining to think about, Crypto could drive the biggest pyramid scheme the world has ever seen. There is absolutely no SOFTWARE of structural limitation to running a $1 trillion dollar end game pyramid on Crypto. In fact you figure out the privacy side, add in mass adoption and you could just leverage the current ICO structure for it.
Couldn't Crypto itself be the big pyramid scheme? It might never get adopted enough to become the defacto currency (can you imagine the gov't accepting BTC for tax payments?). In the meantime the SEC, or Congress, or maybe some big, multilateral "anti-money laundering" international agreement might do something that threatens it enough to start a run on the "bank", driving the exchange rate to nothing. Those who bought a ton a long time ago and who since cashed out would then be the winners. No?
I don't know about the day/night thing, but we could definitely get used to more gravity. When coming in for landing you could decelerate over the course of the last year or so at a slowly increasing rate to an effect of slightly more gravity than the planet you're landing on. You slowly grow accustomed to that and then when you land, you actually feel lighter on the surface of the planet.
It's more like "tax the guy whose work is being disproportionately rewarded in comparison to everyone else". I wouldn't argue with the idea of a doctor making more than a dishwasher, or possibly even a good hedge fund manager making more than a doctor. But 1,000 times more? No way!
Our top marginal tax rate starts around $418k(single) to $470k (joint). It seems ridiculous to me that every dollar beyond that amount is taxed at the same rate, whether it's dollar 500k or dollar 500m. IMHO, we should have several more brackets, like for the top 0.25%, 0.1%, 0.01% and 0.001% of incomes, with the rates rising sharply. Tax the shit out of the ultra-rich and spread it around.
The top 0.01% has an income over $8m/year. I dunno about you or anyone else here, but I'm in the top 5% and that is still light years away from being "like me".
The problem is that people making that much can see their income grow without even lifting a finger while real wages remain stagnant for the bulk of the working population. Profits paid to investors are wages denied from those actually creating the value.
We have similar drainage fees here in Houston, based on the amount of impervious ground cover on the property. We've had a lot of flash flooding in the past 20 years because of the growth of neighborhoods and commercial properties with large parking lots on what used to be prairies on the perimeter of town. New commercial construction typically has to have catchment basins, permeable concrete, or other runoff mitigation strategies. There is, however, a lot of legacy properties which don't handle their runoff, and an outdated storm sewer system, so we still have problems.
Is there an independent body that certifies that a site uses good practices? I mean, I have no way of knowing whether a website is storing my password in the clear (unless they email my password to me), using a symmetric cypher, a site-wide salt, etc. It would be nice if a trustworthy party could investigate a site's security practices and certify that they are doing things properly.
I second that- when I was a kid I had tons of common bricks (1- and 2-by-N's) and regularly built decent-sized houses with full-height walls and multiple rooms and such. My 5 year-old daughter recently graduated from Duplo to Lego and I don't see a good way of building up a decent foundation of just "normal" bricks from which she can build lots of things. I definitely feel like there's a lack of sets with good quantities of them. Even the large "Classic" sets are pretty light on them compared to other pieces, and what they do have is spread out over like 15 colors, so you can forget about trying to make anything match.
I've looked on eBay, but most of what I see in bulk there are lots of just one size or one color bricks, or just pounds of completely random pieces. I'd love it if I could find something like an assortment of 1,000 mixed 1-by-1/2/3/4/6/8 bricks in 4-5 colors, or the same with 2-by-N bricks.
>Taxation is more of a tricky topic, but yes, we all agree everyone owes taxes so not paying them is a crime.
So... If someone does (perhaps completely legal) contract work, accepts payment in BTC and makes their purchases with BTC, how are you going to know what they owe in taxes?
Yes, the anonymity (most) users enjoy on Reddit is interpreted by some as freedom to be assholes or trolls. Even then, especially in the more heavily moderated or off-the-beaten-path subreddits, you get some very high quality conversations. It's not uncommon to see threads of multi-paragraph comments going back and forth many comments deep. I think Facebook's lack of anonymity already goes a long way toward keeping things civil there, and what little shitposting does happen there would probably get downvoted and possibly hidden by default when below a certain threshold if FB had that capability.
Not to mention that in the USSR and East Germany the process, while the attempts may have been earnest, they were still heavily politicized and often unscientific in their approach. Aside from the lack of computational capacity, there was still a sort of economic Lysenkoism to deal with.