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v768

62 karma · joined April 17, 2016

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v768··on Venezuela Forcibly Converts Pensions into Petro
Living in Venezuela: After more than a year of official announcements about the petro, nobody knows what it is, nobody has ever bought, sold, owned nor seen one. Some people have sent other crypto to some sort of pre-sale, but never got anything back. I don't know what is the petro, but it hardly exists and it is certainly not a cryptocurrency.
v768··on Venezuela Forcibly Converts Pensions into Petro
Corbyn described Chavez as socialist, not Maduro. Maduro has undone the "socialist" stuff that Chavez had more or less enhanced like free healthcare and free education. Maduro certainly labels himself as socialist but, living in Venezuela, I can't identify any socialist policies going on.
v768··on Can Repelling Magnets Replace the Spring in a Pogo Stick?
Yep, still quite hard to read.
v768··on Bitcoin forks and airdrops
United Bitcoin seems to be a scam: https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7j21nw/anoth...
v768··on A 12pt Font Should Be the Same Size Everywhere (2012)
It is strange to refer to measurements in inches when complaining about a lack of dimensional standards...
v768··on Venezuela arrests 4 bitcoin miners as trading highs continue
800% is soooooo 2016. The International Monetary Fund is planning 1600% for 2017. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/07/19/congratul...
v768··on Venezuela arrests 4 bitcoin miners as trading highs continue
At this point it's not about capitalism or socialism really, it's mostly years of terrible administration, creating money black holes.
v768··on Venezuela arrests 4 bitcoin miners as trading highs continue
In some regions, especially close to the borders where there is lots of smuggling, it is hard to find gas. In Caracas you can buy as much as you want but I don't really see the point of having a full tanker truck on my garage lane.
v768··on Venezuela arrests 4 bitcoin miners as trading highs continue
Well we "pay" in bolivars but I converted to USD. The price was 0.50 Bolivars (VEB) since I remember. In 2008 they converted to the "Bolivar Fuerte" (Strong Bolivar = VEF) so the price became 0.0005 VEF. The exchange rate is 3684 VEF/USD.
v768··on Venezuela arrests 4 bitcoin miners as trading highs continue
I updated Wikipedia. I live in Caracas and just had a look at my invoice.
v768··on Venezuela arrests 4 bitcoin miners as trading highs continue
I live in Venezuela and just looked at my electricity invoice: In November I paid 0,00004 USD/kWh. The prices were raised in December: 0,00016 USD/kWh. If you prefer having your own generator, diesel fuel is 0,0000001 $/L. You can get 7356000 Liters for one dollar. So basically energy is free.
v768··on Concorde
Something was quite wrong with their navigation if they where around Cuba between Caracas and Paris! ;-) Not even flying to New York would take you over Cuba.
v768··on Australia Is Drifting So Fast GPS Can't Keep Up
Reading this article is quite painful due to all the measurements given only in feet & inches, why not give the data in both systems of measurement? Only 3 countries in the world have not adopted the metric system (Australia did) and this is about GPS and worldwide measurements. Not even NASA uses the imperial units anymore.
v768··on I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
Most of the laws are never applied and specially in the case of the ones like this one that are clearly impossible to apply and mostly for the show.
v768··on I Lived Like a Baller for a Month in Venezuela on Just £75 (2015)
Things have changed a lot since this was written in December. I live in Caracas, there's massive national food shortages. Now you can't have 3 meals a day for a month with 100€, and would spend quite some time finding it (on the black market). Last time I saw sugar, it was around 3€ per kilo.

Edit: If you want a realistic picture of how is life today, read this piece, written by a foreign journalist that actually lives there (sadly, most things I see in foreign media is written from outside): http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7c0464c1dd404aca99458a8a19930...

v768··on Excel: Error when CSV file starts with “I” and “D”
https://xkcd.com/1700/
v768··on Falsehoods programmers believe about time and time zones
I would add most programmers don't know some time zones have offsets in minutes. In ancient times, some were in seconds. I live in UTC-04:30 and regularly encounter bugs because of it.