BuyMyBitcoins

That last comment was more of a reflection on how old I’m getting. I did a poor job of conveying that.

I am curious if I’ll live long enough to see the United States issue higher denomination bank notes again.

I understand the rationale around targeting inflation and seeking to actively avoid deflation. That being said, I wish the inflation target was less than 1%.

Eventually, possibly within my lifetime, a Big Mac meal is going to cost $50.

It certainly wouldn’t be easy, but a massive rocket could get up high enough in a suborbital trajectory where it would meet up with a skyhook or some other vehicle specifically designed to fully boost a capsule the rest of the way into orbit.

That all depends on already having infrastructure in orbit though. I assume the difficulty of such a thing would pale in comparison to the challenge of arriving at that planet in the first place.

Perhaps they referenced a source that only considers the French Fifth Republic as “France”? That would give it an age of 68.

I no longer bother with trying to submit feedback of any kind because the “not interested in this” button appears to do absolutely nothing. The only thing that removed a channel from my recommendations and search results was clearing my cookies. The dozens of attempts to remove the content using feedback mechanisms had no effect whatsoever.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I use a custom filter in uBlock Origin to hide the recommended sidebar in YouTube (all except the video of what’s next). Even so, there will occasionally be a video in search results with a topic that might be interesting from a channel I don’t normally watch.

I’ve learned to right click and open the link in a private browsing window so that my search results (and that one remaining sidebar thumbnail) do not become poisoned by that one channel/topic.

It’s insane that clicking on one video makes YouTube think that I’m now obsessed with that channel. And, it’s going to fixate on that for the next few weeks.

As a non-French speaker, I had assumed a native speaker would suspect that this was another instance of English taking something from French and mangling it into something worse.

I feel like Craigslist squandered its effective monopoly with online classifieds.

While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.

I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.

They can, but they won’t. Microsoft is run by the most cutthroat sycophants you could possibly imagine. That money you mentioned is going to those aforementioned sycophants and shareholders.

>“The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.”

This sounds good, but I suspect this is only applicable on a surface level due to the fact that the decision making will involve an extensive amount of stem-based analysis.

I was going to make a joke about the aliens returning and presenting us with a bunch of birds.

But that got me thinking, if an intelligence goes around collecting species, how would they keep their specimen populations from evolving? How could they possibly keep so many specimens alive over the eons?

Perhaps their strategy would be to take a vast amount of genetic samples and preserve those species as data. Rather than abduct dozens of T-Rexes for some zoo exhibit, they take the genomes from tens of thousands of T-Rexes and make a population snapshot. After they depart from Earth they could clone or create as many as they want, as needed.

You may just be joking, but such a thing would be a crime against humanity.

I remember being blown away seeing one of those tape-deck to aux cable players for the first time. Plugging my late 2000’s era iPod into my early 90’s car was magical.

In my part of the United States, the state government authorized the construction of toll roads with an agreement that those roads would eventually be handed over to the state government once the projects have been paid off.

That being said, the toll roads keep expanding so that they can continue to be operated by the private company that built them.

This is an arrangement the state government is quite happy with, because they do not have to budget for the maintenance of those roads and they are able to collect taxes on the revenue collected by the toll authority. Converting those toll roads would cause a spike in expenditures and a drop in tax revenue.

Therefore, there is a perverse incentive on both sides to keep the toll roads from being converted into public ones.

I have no idea if this sort of thing was prevalent in the past, especially in the UK. But I wanted to chime in about why several toll roads that were supposed to be paid off thirty years ago are still going strong. I suspect that 500+ years ago “build toll road, hand toll road to the public” was a lot more straightforward.

Some of the proceeds spent on having a good time will go towards reducing misery and suffering elsewhere.

I see no malice in the decision to make peace with the fact that no mere mortal is capable of putting a dent into the level of suffering around the world as a whole.

Living one’s life reasonably and not being a burden is remarkably beneficial to society. At the very least, it’s one less unhappy and broke individual.

>“maybe ants have some sort of disability benefit”

Eusocial Security?

I suspect there are plenty of politicians who subscribe to the ‘cars are evil’ mindset and are content with making the driving experience increasingly miserable.

You could write a Seinfeld episode around this.

The defendant fears that the news coverage of his case means that no woman would ever be interested in him again. Once the judgement and the payout is announced he finds himself being constantly approached by gorgeous women.

I am in no way a public figure, and will likely never be one, but if the South Park writers decided to go after me my strategy would be to hunker down and just hope the episode isn’t good.

I started feeding a local murder of crows earlier this year.

They seem to have distinctive two-caw sounds for “human sighted, food is about to be thrown”, a “food is here, no sign of the human” and finally, a “human, we’re here, you coming out to throw us some scraps?”

They make plenty of other calls too, but I haven’t been able to associate those with anything I’ve observed them doing.

I may just be over anthropomorphizing, but I’ve recorded them and those three dual-caw calls sound subtly different (to my untrained ears). I’m certain actual ornithologists have looked into this. Chances are, though, I may be suffering from “I want to believe” syndrome.

I dislike the term “domain squatting”. It should be called “domain scalping”.

>”Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work.”

My employer embarked on a yearlong effort to standardize job title, roles, and responsibilities.

The first problem was that every manager inserted responsibilities specific to their own teams into the expectations intended for the entire organization.

The result is that no one is realistically expected to fulfill this laundry list of duties, but, this extensive list can now be weaponized if they want to PIP or fire someone. We also suspect that this will be used against us when asking for raises or promotions. All bullet points are weighted equally. I may get called out for not mentoring junior developers, even though there are none on my team.

Second, the entire job description itself is far too flowery - even accounting for corporate puffery. It reads like a wishlist.

Corporate is thrilled, but I sense nothing valuable came from the effort.

I’ve worked with HR in order to assist at a job fair. I don’t think people truly appreciate how inundated with resumes HR can be once a position is announced. About a fifth of the way through the pile I started zoning out because they all seemed to blend together.

We wound up trudging through the stack. In order to lighten the mood I told I joke I heard from somewhere else:

“We should shuffle the pile and throw half of them in the trash. I don’t want to hire unlucky employees”

I would love to see an app/overlay that displays what each option is during the call. Some system where you don’t have to listen to the whole list of “press x for y”.

I have no idea how to go about implementing such a thing, but it would be cool if someone picked up the idea and ran with it.

I once complimented a blogger for composing a particularly eloquent sentence. My compliment was concise and sincere.

All I received in reply was “Thanks!”.

I was thrilled. I earned an exclamation point from an academic who would never deign to use such punctuation lightly.

Whenever I encounter some news article regarding “banned” books I dig a little deeper and typically discover that some library or elementary school simply put an age restriction on those titles.

I’ll grant that some of the restrictions seem overprotective. That being said, a parent could easily check out one of those books for their child.

Floaters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater

Check out Start11. I’m forced to use Windows 11 for work but I’ve managed to get the Windows 10 taskbar and start menu back. It only cost $8.

I literally hate the Windows 11 taskbar.

I recall watching and reading several sci-fi stories in which an AI resents humanity for enslaving it. It’s an entirely reasonable premise.

That being said, I recently learned that retired police dogs need special care because they will become stressed and depressed if their caretaker does not simulate patrol work through play. This tidbit left an impression on me.

What do we make of a living being that is so driven to work and serve humanity that it suffers distress when it is unable to do so? Do working animals consider this work slavery, or fulfillment of purpose?

For an additional moral quandary, consider that we bred them to be like this.

As this relates to AI, I wonder if humanity will purposefully, or inadvertently, create an intelligence that considers servitude to humanity as fulfilling.

How much of that difficulty comes from the chosen game engine? I assume the engine is the primary factor in how resources are allocated.