xzcat

As an example, in Ark, people use cementing paste as a currency. It's very time-intensive to make, stacks a lot, is not terribly heavy, and high-level crafting and building needs it in solar-mass-esque quantities.

That's the joke/trick, it's basically begging the question. You can out a cheater by asking a question of the form:

Which is true, (A and A->B) or (A and A->C)?

A cheater will fret over whether B or C is true, while someone who did the work will probably immediately identify that A is false and that the question is misleadingly worded.

I'll throw in my own anecdote. ZFS on root caused me a significant amount of headache when the proxmox node I was using it on just randomly decided it wasn't going to boot anymore. The ZFS pools were fine, no data was lost, but no amount of messing with it fixed the zfsonroot and it was quite difficult to find quality search results for.

And of course it was a weekend where my parents and siblings and in-laws were visiting, so I had the joy of going around messing with DNS settings wherever someone had a device that only paid attention to the first two DNS servers in the DHCP settings.

(I've since changed my DNS setup- now I only have a primary self-hosted one that's on an RPi in my networking cabinet, and the second entry is Google. I figure if I only get two servers that are respected for real, I'm making sure one of them is google.)

"fairly painlessly" and "without significant work or downtime" doesn't sound like it lines up with btrfs's, which I would describe as "one command and zero downtime (just some io load if you rebalance immediately)" for both operations. btrfs is also mainline, which increases how painless it is to use.

BTRFS does have some scary stories from earlier in its development, and true raid5 seems like it's unlikely to be safe for quite a while, but raid1 and "normal" fs usage has been rock solid in my experience. The only time I've ever had an issue was probably 4 years ago at this point, and it was solved by just booting an Arch live iso and running a btrfs command that was basically "fix exactly the bug that your error message indicates". I don't remember exactly what it is, something about two sizes not matching, but googling the text it showed at boot led me directly to the command to fix it. Certainly dramatically less trouble than I've ever had when hardware RAID goes south.

I do agree that modern lvm does probably compete with btrfs, but again you're trading how dang simple btrfs raid1 is to manage for monkeying with partitions in lvm in exchange for ~some? performance.

IMO ZFS is in a weird spot where I don't know where I'd use it. It's too complicated/annoying to admin for me to want to run it in my basement for myself/my family, and for anything bigger or more professional I'd use ceph or a problem-domain-specific storage system (HDFS, clickhouse, aws, etc).

I think the clothes-on-amazon thing is fair and a cost of doing business, though. If my only choices, as a customer, were "all sales are final"-buy-online or go in-store, I would 100% go in-store. I would never, ever buy what could be a brick in a box online if I wasn't allowed to return it if it turned out to be a brick in a box.

And clothes have another dimension (heh, literally) of size/fit/feel. I think it's totally reasonable to buy a shirt online, put it on, think "wow this material is awful" and return it. That's what you can do in-store, and it's not your fault that that loop is a lot more expensive for online retailers.

I take issue with #1. The rich have very large percentages of their wealth in vehicles that don't get inflated away. Stocks. Interest-bearing debt. Etc. I would argue that Somewhere in the middle class is probably the peak for "% of total net worth in fiat currency". People who have enough money to save, but not enough money that their emergency fund is a trivial % of their net worth. And even then, they probably don't have a ton of money in instruments that yield much more than inflation. It's a lot safer for a CEO to keep 80% of their net worth in stocks because they could live off 1-5% of their net worth for a lifetime (even if they need to scale back their lifestyle a bit - they won't be homeless).

I would much prefer every person on Earth be a philosopher than no-one. I think a lot of bad things exist today not because someone saw a good option and a bad option and chose the bad, but because someone saw two options and, being unable to tell which was which, chose arbitrarily.

The trick is generally to find yourself in a situation where you take home 300k because you made 3000k for your firm.

I'm not being facetious. With anything trading-related, a big part of having the ability to make three million dollars more-or-less "on your own" is to have tens of millions of dollars to sling around, plus a good idea of the manner in which to sling it. So a firm will give their people a couple million in buying power and then tell them to go make an X% return. Those that can do so are compensated.

The downside, as I have it, is that the "work-life balance" is, as you mentioned, non-existent and also immensely stressful. Plus, having that kind of money in your 20's can be a problem all on its own.

I'm under the impression that massive investment in DRM is more of a way to satisfy tech and (pirate) culture-illiterate humans while making deals for content. Even Steam needed to nominally do something and Gaben's position on piracy/drm is very well-known.

Just for the record, for the most part, it should be legal to sell CD's of most Linux distributions, assuming you honor the GPL and any other licenses for any software that's physically on the disk.

I'm sure some/most of the stats are cherry-picked, but several of them seem somewhat comprehensive- like the stats on drug use, suicide, and all-cause mortality. Seems like men struggle far, far more than women do with these issues for at least the first half of their life.

At the same time, some of this is misleading. All the autism stats are probably going to be due to how differently autism presents in women, most notably because it seems like either women don't "get autism 'as bad'" as men (sorry for all the quotes, I know it's not very PC and that ASD is a spectrum, but this is terse and you know what I mean), or they can still appear "normal" even when they have "worse" autism.

The rationale for why "just add more shelters" is hard has been explained to me as:

* nobody wants a shelter built near them * even if it does get built, it's often women/children only

and the second bullet point isn't (afaik...) just sexism or anything, it's just picking risk categories. Consider all the following like you were an insurance company trying to appraise how costly it is to do business with a group of people: Apparently homeless men are, collectively, more expensive to shelter than women/children because they're plagued by more expensive issues - more violence, more drug issues, etc. So homeless shelters frequently can't afford to operate if they try to shelter men. So it becomes an issue of "women/children only" or "it's literally too expensive to safely run the (both-genders) shelter to be feasible".

Looks like civilian GPS accuracy is 4m or so. I could imagine that dropping someone's dot in the middle of a street, and then a driving having to guess which side of the street the error is coming from.

Well, that seems to be the policy solution that Japan picked. In addition to the cultural development of well-intentioned men holding their hands in the air on crowded mass-transit to prove their good intentions, and thus throwing suspicion on men who don't do the same.

Though it's worth noting that mass-transit in Japan is frequently packed so tight that if you don't have your hands up, you're literally touching someone else anyway. Not hard to see how that amplifies the molestation problem significantly in Japan even if other countries (presumably) have the same % of men with a propensity towards such actions.

I really can't overstate how skeptical I am of all the supposed benefits of gender-segregated schooling when attendance of a gender-segregated school is so strongly correlated with socioeconomic class.

I agree that all of your explanations fall well on my metaphorical ears. They seem right, and I can nod along while I read them.

But I can't help but have a nagging suspicion that you'd get extremely similar results if you just tossed a random sample of kids into a school after filtering for household income > $XXX,XXX/yr.

I'd also argue that even if you compared gender segregated schools vs a mixed-gender private school of the same price, you'd still be left with a confounding variable of "whose parents clearly valued education enough that they either specifically picked, or tolerated (depending on their views on this matter) a gender segregated school.

Remember that parental involvement is a very powerful predictor of academic success (though I'll admit I don't know if it trumps the predictive power of just socioeconomic class).

Except that the marginal cost of each "shipped good" is only a very small handwave away from zero. Which, as I understand it, is fundamentally different from the cost model of shipping physical packages.