Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
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$2000/year per person, would be $167/year per person. It’s not $0, but sounds like a reasonable amount for anyone except the most marginalized groups
Medical procedures are indeed a problem, but my understanding is their price is artificially inflated due to intermediaries, so taking a harder approach to that, would partially solve the issue, and pave the way for further regulation.
M4A should be the goal, something most 1st World countries have already, but I also understand it would mean upending a lot of industries and their interrelationship in the US, so a step-by-step approach seems like a wise one.
Maybe… but before sharing files, his priors include selling stolen phone numbers, some shady stock manipulation, an embezzlement sentence, running an illegal hedge fund, and other shenanigans.
As well as copyright infringement, Dotcom faces more serious charges, including money laundering and racketeering. He has long argued that he should not be held liable for copyright infringement carried out using his site
Ok… so what about that money laundering and racketeering, once again?
Really not sure how to feel about this. The copyright infringement damage claims are bonkers, but this guy is not exactly an upstanding citizen either. He already got some jail time in the 90s, fled to NZ, changed his name to a joke, and has been involved in random shady stuff over the last decade.
consumer cameras were made with a certain type of complexion in mind
Not sure if it’s what you’re talking about, but consumer cameras, and most graphics systems, have been using logarithmic encoding (gamma) to fit a larger dynamic range into a reduced data range… which has the effect of reducing de detail level of larger areas of an image, with the idea that the human eye would struggle to see them anyway. It didn’t have anything to do with complexion, but with pushing technology to a minimally acceptable level on a limited budget. HDR cameras with linear encoding, are still quite expensive, way out of the consumer market range, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change too soon.
Air dominance means being able to fly anywhere anytime, without having to worry too much about the enemy. In post-WW2 wars, it meant ground troops didn’t need to worry about random bombs falling on them from the sky.
Right now, neither Russia or Ukraine have achieved that… which is kind of crazy; at the beginning of the “special operation”, everyone assumed that Russia would control the skies from day 1. And yet, Ukrainian jets and drones keep flying around, slowing Russia’s progress on the front to a crawl.
We will indeed see how things evolve, but Russia faces a problem now: if they pull troops from the front, which they’re barely holding, it can mean the difference between crawling forward, and crawling backwards.
Lightning Network is not centralized, anyone can run a node with their own wallet. Not everyone will want to, since there are management and safety tasks involved, but that’s up to each one.
Funds are stored in your own wallet… but again, you can use some bank’s wallet if you want to, up to each one.
Transactions are almost instantaneous, no need to wait for the channels to settle. You only need to wait when moving Bitcoin between non-LN and LN wallets or, if running your own node, when a channel closes.
You can find a list of physical stores accepting LN… mostly in El Salvador, but still.
They’re not legal tender, not at all commonly accepted, and anyone accepting them (mostly in tourist areas) will charge an exchange fee because nobody’s going to take them as payment for their bills.
They’re all the same as casino tokens though, because they don’t have an intrinsic value, like for example an ounce of gold.
- Fiat represents the trust an issuing bank has in everyone trusting it at a faster pace than the expiry of its loans.
- Casino tokens represent the trust a person has in the casino paying out when getting the token back.
- Crypto represents the trust in that someone will want to exchange it for something in the future.
Since the end of the gold standard, economy has been running on trust (aka: credit). These are just different representations of that.
HIMARS is a launch platform, its range depends on which rockets it launches.
ATACMS is a missile that can be launched from HIMARS, it has a way longer range, the difference between a rocket and a missile is that a missile can maneuver freely, and the ATACMS can also carry a nuclear payload.
I know about the eternal warning stuff. In this case I think it’s more about plausible deniability: it’s harder to accuse Ukraine of initiating a nuclear war, if they don’t even use nuclear-capable missiles against Russian territory. I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin was ready to nuke some small city of his own, just to have an excuse to launch some tactical nukes against Ukraine.
Russia hasn’t been able to establish air dominance for 4 years, they advance at a snails pace, fighting for every 100m of land against swarms of drones decimating their troops, while Ukraine has been conceding each 100m of land by losing drones with as few people as possible.
Now Ukraine has invaded Russia, taken over a GazProm control station, and gained control of a rail line that Russia used to supply its troops on the front. For how long will they be able to advance those 100m by 100m, without supplies?
Ukraine now also has some F16s they can use to tip the scales in air dominance.
A month or so ago, Ukraine announced plans to produce at least one million drones by end of year. That’s a thousand drones for each Km of the Russian front, or one drone per meter, organized in swarms and waves with “mothership” control drones. It’s a strategy with no historical precedent, that Russia has no clue how to respond to… or at least has been highly ineffective in responding to.
Peace talks right now are being proposed by Russia, which usually means they’re in a weaker position and they know it. They’re running out of money, to the point that they want to crack down on the rampant corruption that held the whole system together. If they really do, then all bets are off on which general will be the first one to propose sticking Putin’s head on a spike.
Barter is not a unheard of way to conduct business, even between countries without sanctions. The SWIFT network itself has become a sort of barter system.
I’m guessing in this case, they both distrust each other’s currency, so they might as well trade in Bitcoin as in any other currency they’d both trust more… if there was one.
Still, the USD losing that chunk of trade, weakens the USD, which the US might feel the need to strengthen with some “decisive action”.
No it’s not.
Stocks are based on the “valuation” people give them, for whatever reason they want. Check Gazprom’s recent stock valuation for a reality check; it doesn’t matter what “real goods or services” it keeps providing, everyone who held Gazprom stock, got exactly $0 for it. For further information, check how much company shares are worth.
(Spoiler: they’re ALL based on “hype and sunken cost”)
You can hide your identity on Monero, not so much on Bitcoin. BTC either gets linked to a series of identities, or is freshly mined, both of which can be allowed or denied by exchanges via law enforcement.
In the traditional finance system, hiding relies on bribery, mules, and straight up hacking. Those are common to both systems, and law enforcement knows how to deal with them.
Unless you can defend that plot of land against a few of the largest superpowers combined… that land is only yours as long as your country wants to defend your ownership of it.
Water is already not yours in most places, and supplies are not guaranteed to last. Education gets lost with age, amnesia, dementia, and death. A sturdy pair of boots rarely lasts as much as a single lifetime.
Perhaps there’s already an alternative out there somewhere which is actually useful and not based on avarice, fraud, unsustainable resource usage, or unsustainable hype
The USD… /jk 🤣🤣
No currency or money system can avoid those, they are intrinsic features of capitalism, which is an intrinsic consequence of “whoever hoards more X, gets more of most things in life”.
And can you blame people for wanting to hide their cards when hoarding X? Have you tried consulting real-time stock values, with market depth, and a list of market orders? Have you checked the pricing plans for a Bloomberg terminal?
Crypto is a world of transparency and freedom, compared to non-crypro markets.
Suggestion: don’t use your family when discussing politics.
There are also, as they say, five levels of “truth” to any person:
- Public: the persona they project outwards
- Private: what they say when “no one is listening”
- Intimate: what they only let their closest family know
- Secret: what they don’t tell anyone
- Subjacent: what they don’t even realize about themselves
You may or may not know their secret thoughts, and you usually need to spend a lot of time with them (years, decades) to learn about why they hold them.
And following my initial suggestion, I won’t tell you how I confirmed this to be true.
Russia already has a huge manpower advantage
Manpower is not as important as training, which is not as important as technology and strategy.
Russia is already on its “4th army”: best trained forces are gone, reservists are gone, prisoners and noob recruits are gone… they’re now fighting with skeleton crews and mercenaries.
Ukraine on the other hand, has spent the time building up expertise in state of the art drone warfare strategies… which are completely novel and haven’t had a chance to get history books written about how to beat them.
It isn’t as simple as “manpower”.
The one thing that Russia has, and hasn’t used yet, is nukes… but that would open a full box of nasties.
Some religions to this day decree when a female is “unclean” and should be isolated. The problem are people with that mentality.
The same “yuck” factor lies at the root of not thinking rationally about tampons, abortions, childbirth, lactation, etc. Controlling a population’s approach to inherent bodily functions, has been an effective way of brainwashing for ages. Stuff like vote of celibacy, vote of silence, vote of reclusion, fasting, and similar. Convincing people to sacrifice for a doctrine, gets them invested and pulls them into a sunken cost fallacy.
I’d call it Evil… but that is going onto their territory, so laughing it off with Weird, is probably a better strategy.
I’ve been going to Facebook as of late, following some science, comics, LGBT+, and MLP authors. The off-topic stuff I get, are some news, airplane stuff, dashcam videos, and so on.
I just checked my Twitter feed, it’s full of ponies, furries, space, and some game memes, plus random ads. My alt account is still full of R34.
I get 0 news about where I live, I refuse to follow any politicians or influencers on either platform.
Just opened Chrome, and the first 2 pages of Google suggested links, are all stuff I want to read (mostly science related).
The Algorithm giveth and The Algorithm taketh away. Tame thine Algorithm to thy desire.
Alternatively: the only people who can invade Russia are the Chinese… and there won’t be a Russia to fix anymore. Hopefully the EU can sign a peace treaty on the EU-China border.
The first China-Spain train already arrived in 2014:
What I’m wondering is, how is a Russia-controlled domain still working, if it’s been banned by Russia?