UkrainianJew

>At $3/coffee (black, nothing fancy) purchased on average four times per week across 4.5 years of school, the total came to roughly $1,700

$3 x 2 people x 365 days = ~$2K

A decent fully automatic Espresso machine is ~$1K. You load the beans once per week, water every day, and run the descaling cycle once every few months. And these things are modular as hell: if you are not intimidated by reading a service manual and know how to get around with a multimeter, you can get replacement parts from specialty shops and maintain them yourself at reasonable cost.

And the best thing is, you don't need to go anywhere. You wake up, crawl to the kitchen, press the button and enjoy the coffee.

Sadly, this is not very practical. A lithium cell in itself is a chemical time bomb: if it gets mechanically damaged or short-circuited, it has enough oomph to burn your device, skin or house. For factory-produced battery packs this effect is mitigated by having protective circuits that monitor charge level, temperature and a bunch of other parameters, cutting off the power if the cell is deemed too dangerous. But once you take a random lithium cell off the street and try to revitalize it, you are opening a can of worms: depending on how it was used, it might be full of dendrites [0], ready to cause a fiery short-circuit a few charges after. It might have structural damage due to gas buildup, or someone literally stepping on it. It could have been under direct sunlight for longer than it should, and so on.

It's fine to tinker around with it for your own experiments, but you don't want to ship it to anybody who's not going to be using it in a fireproof lab wearing eye protection.

A better idea would be to find a way to properly recycle the raw materials (i.e. extract the lithium from a dead cell), but that could be several orders of magnitude more challenging.

[0] https://www.batterypoweronline.com/news/a-look-inside-your-b...

I find it rather worrying in the long term. Russia has been an extremely inefficient and corrupt state for the past 2 decades. Export oil & gas, import everything else, let the cronies pocket the proceeds, while having most manufacturing, defense and tech exist mostly on paper. People like Rogozin were promoted based on the loyalty and willingness to give a cut of the pie further up the ladder.

Currently this trend appears to be reversing. The country is getting increasingly authoritarian [0], the economy is switching from a highly corrupt trickle-down-oil-money model, to centrally managed industrial economy driven by the war needs.

I don't like where this is going. If Russia is pushed back into its borders, it will take a couple of years to ramp up weapons production and will retry. If it manages to successfully take over Ukraine, it will very likely press forward to attack other ex-USSR states. If China decides to join the party and rally out against Taiwan, we pretty much have a guaranteed WWIII until mutual exhaustion.

[0] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/07/14/vladimir-putin-enact...

The quality of the political leadership is a direct consequence of what average people want from their leadership.

For the past decade or so the modus operandi has been:

1. Print more money, give it to bureaucrats and corporations

2. Toss in some non-monetary issue that will piss of ~50% of the population, while making the other ~50% feel entitled.

3. Promise one half to serve their interests by punishing the other half.

4. Print more money, give more to bureaucrats and corporations.

5. Rinse and repeat.

It seemed to work for over a decade: people gave up dreams of retirement, property ownership, having children, we were headed straight for normalizing living with parents while eating factory-produced bug proteins. Thankfully, the black-swan COVID-19 happened, the money printer got too cocky and people finally started to notice a problem.

The quality of life will decrease in the short term. But once enough people admit it's a bigger problem than being offended by what somebody on the Internet said, there will be finally demand for competent politicians offering viable solutions.

The best time was at the peak. The second best time is now (*)

* - not an investment advice.

It's from a press-release that is intended to minimize the fears among investors. So the number likely includes part-time youtube moderators, cafeteria staff, and a lot of other minor jobs with incredibly high churn.

May I humbly ask for an example? In my personal experience, trying to rush a short-term solution while ignoring the long-term implications always makes situation worse. Like eating planting stock to address immediate hunger would cause a devastating famine next season.

>You don't get anything "for free", and cutting supports like this will inevitably doom a sputtering economy, when the actual solution was almost certainly more government spending, not less.

Government spending isn't free magic money either. You increase the amount of money in circulation, hoping that people will produce more goods. Instead, you increase the size of the bullshit economy - low-effort activities that only exist under the abundance of money. So more and more stuff gets imported from China because nobody in the right mind will take a $1/hour factory job if you can be a wellness youtuber for a multiple of that. The amount of useless bureaucracy grows, the number of people willing to take responsibility dwindles, but everyone is happy because, well, Mother Government takes care of us all.

Occasionally you notice that the wages don't grow and the housing is unaffordable because the workers don't really have any leverage anymore, but you brush off those thoughts because there are far too many distractions anyway.

Then BOOM, that fragile supply line involving slave labor in China and natural resources from Putin's friends gets broken, and suddenly, we have a shortage of everything, can't manufacture our own stuff, and that freshly minted dollar can buy you many shitcoins, but won't get you any baby formula.

I think, we are about to find out that excessive spending was nothing more than borrowing from our future prosperity, and the time for that debt to mature is coming fast.

Like it or not, the mainstream liberal arts education has devolved into a religion of its own. For instance, we treat climate change not as an engineering problem worth solving (how many "climate studies" prepare actual engineers for building nuclear power plants?), but as a source of irreparable guilt used to push back on ambition and launch personal attacks on people that do not agree with this viewpoint. This is textbook original sin straight from the medieval times. There are many other examples. Trying to call it out publicly very quickly gets you labeled with one of the modern-days equivalents of a heretic, and anyone trying to defend you will be considered a heretic by association.

There are many, many people who are not happy with the status quo, and they are looking for others who share their opinion. And since the media and the social networks are actively working on deciding who's opinion gets amplified, and who gets memory-holed, the people disagreeing with the mainstream agenda will have no choice but to join existing opposing organizations and adopt some of their views, even if they don't fully agree with them.

That's polarization of the society happening in front of our eyes.

I also remember Air Canada or WestJet doing the same to some small air company offering cheap flights from Kelowna (?), but I cannot find the news piece. Does anybody here have a better memory than myself?

The utterly inefficient and overpriced Canadian telecoms exist only because we allow one specific behavior:

1. A new local player comes to town, builds their own infrastructure (e.g. connects one building to fiber) and starts offering competitive service.

2. Rogers/Shaw/Bell/Telus immediately offer better terms for the residents of that building.

3. The competitor runs out of money and leaves.

4. The telecoms revert to their usual pricing.

This hurts competition, this hurts customers, this hurts long-term infrastructure resilience, but not a single politician ever comes close to even admitting the problem. I understand you cannot do it on the federal level where both major parties are on the telecoms' payroll, but it could be a very low-hanging fruit for someone running for a municipal position to address. But nope, identity politics, words, feelings and fighting climate change with paper straws seem to be what the electorate wants instead. Sad.

Heat keeps leaking out. The amount of stored heat is proportional to the cube of the linear size, the leak rate is proportional to the surface area (square of the linear size). Hence, the bigger the storage, the higher the efficiency.

Same why a flea can jump >10x its height, and a human cannot (square growth of strength, cubic growth of weight).

Don't blame the VCs, blame the public. Extra headcount absolutely increases your perceived credibility at an IPO, so they are growing this metric.

In defense of the public, if 10 devs out of 30 decide to leave and open a competing business, you're screwed. If 10 out of 1000 do that, nobody will notice.

They can and will use legal means to go after anyone trying to use the network this way in order to make the content less discoverable and discourage others from following suit.

Being coined as the Napster on Blockchain is the worst possible PR one can think of in their situation.

Curiosity question: has anyone done any work on reverse-engineering the Sony Mega Bass feature they used to have on old analog players (and ported to some early MP3 ones)? It sounded so much deeper than any phone/sound card would give. I'm wondering if it's some purely analog schenanigans (some tricky extra capacitors?) or if it can be replicated in pure software.

That would paint a huge red target mark on filecoin's back, given that they raised over a quarter-billion. They would take it down faster than you can have an 8TB HDD shipped to you.

More like an ad company driven by dark patterns that needs to pretend being good and nice and innovative as otherwise it will lose goodwill just like Facebook did.

>I can't think of a way to do things like proving that a particular debit happened.

Prove to whom? Banks have multiple layers of redundancy (including internal logs, paper/PDF statements, etc). So in case of any software error or a single-employee malice, it will be just fine.

>Part of the reason that bank errors are so inexpensive to fix is because transfers take 2-5 days.

That's a feature, not a bug. It gives you time to stop a transaction initiated by someone who stole your identity. With blockchain, you lose keys - you lose coins.

>For example, who wouldn't want a system that forces banks to track customer balances in a secure, private, and auditable data structure?

Crypto doesn't force banks to do that.

Also, if it was a real problem, there would be legislation for it since RSA became a thing.

And if it was, having a 3rd-party timestamping server and regular cryptographic signatures would be enough to solve it. No bank in their right mind would burn terawatts of power to prevent an error that has a 0.00001% chance of happening and costs virtually nothing to fix.

It's not that easy. Lots of Amazon's profits come from countless unprofitable startups blowing VC money on AWS. Google is swimming in money because numerous companies have generous ad budgets. Apple relies on people exchanging their smartphone every year or so because why not.

You cannot expect these things to go unchanged if the Fed stops throwing money around like it's used to. And if it doesn't, a bag of rice will soon cost $1000 because we have an shortage of farm workers and an oversupply of wellness bloggers, influencers and administrators.

IANAL, but I think what they are trying to say here is "We are not a bank. Dear SEC, please don't treat us like one - go ask Metropolitan for all your regulatory cravings".

"Therefore, each Customer is a customer of the Bank", ehm, does the bank know about it? Each bank account must have a legal owner (or multiple ones for a joint account) and I somehow doubt Voyager would put their entire customer base as the joint owners of their bank account.

The "Cash in the Account is insured up to $250,000 per depositor" part is deliberately misleading. As far as the bank is concerned, there is only one depositor - Voyager.

In general, you need to look at specific scenarios:

1. Voyager goes belly up and you still had $1000 on your account. You could:

1.1. Sue Voyager. The court will likely rule you as a creditor granting you a claim against some fraction of their residual assets. You will get anywhere between $0 and $1000 depending on other creditors, their claims and the amount of remaining assets. Quite likely, not much.

1.2. Sue the bank. The bank will show that the omnibus account still holds some USD (that might be less than the end users' deposits) and will tell you to go sue Voyager as a creditor.

1.3. File a claim with FDIC. They will tell you to bite dust because they cover the business between the bank and Voyager. You are neither of those and have no business with them.

2. The bank goes belly up. Voyager will file a claim with FDIC and get $250K for ALL users. This will make them default on the users' claims, hence go to 1.1.

>So does that mean anyone with less than $250k is guaranteed their money? Is there any legal backing?

No, it means that up to $250K of Voyager's USD is protected by FDIC in case their bank flops. That is the combined limit shared between ALL of Voyager's customers.

It doesn't protect from Voyager telling you that they sold your 1 BTC for $20K USD as you requested, while actually still sitting on 1 BTC, hoping to sell it tomorrow for $30K and pocket the $10K difference.

Similar to "not your keys - not your bitcoins", no written agreement with a regulated bank - not your dollars.

>That is gross incompetence.

Not necessarily. As a CEO, you suddenly see your sales plunge. You run the numbers and think: is it just a panic/fluke? Is it going to bounce back? Are we losing the sales to a new competitor?

You eventually conclude that the drop is due to a market downturn. You realize that you have a runway of 1 year, and cannot raise more capital. Se, your choices:

1. You keep cruising like nothing happened. The sales may bounce back within a year (in which case it was a good decision). They may decline further 6 months in (dropping your runway to 3 months). Or they may stabilize at the new level for a while (so when the runway reaches 6 months, you think again).

2. You fire X% of the people. Your runway is now Y years. If the sales bounce back earlier, it's a hassle to re-hire, but is doable. If the cooler market lasts longer, you may need to reiterate.

Making the correct decision is always a guess. Like trying to figure out whether to buy or sell a stock. You observe the market, you try to understand, and then you decide.

As a CEO, if someone asks you on the spot "are layoffs planned", any answer rather than a complete denial will be treated as a "yes": people with better offers will leave, other will start looking for jobs. If in a month the sales bounce back, you lost your bet.

Yep, the cleanest country on the planet, where the biggest share of the GDP is flipping the real estate to the Chinese capital, proudly made with no environmental roadblocks in sight. Your kids will never afford a house, but the liberal policies and guilt-tripping in schools will make sure they won't want it in the first place.

Unpopular opinion: any reasonable policies and restrictions are always compromises between the 2 polar opposite extremes. For example, killing all humans on Earth would completely stop climate change, but the price is unreasonably high. As the opposite extreme, reducing food waste hardly has any disadvantages, but is not sufficient on its own to stop the warming.

Compromises are found iteratively - moving the lever too far creates pressure on the opposing side, and the regulation changes back.

Globalization eliminated the feedback loop. Each time the West hardens environmental standards, a some "dirty" production just moves to less developed countries, along with the jobs, knowledge and culture for achieving things. That CO2 is still emitted overseas, but we conveniently turn a blind eye to it, arguing whether we should have shorter showers or ban plastic straws. Now it's biting us hard, since it turned out those countries have much less political stability, so as the shit finally hit the fan, we suddenly have a shortage of everything.

Maybe, just maybe, having the emissions managed on the state level will let different states explore different potential trade-offs between being green and being dysfunctional, and we can hopefully find a better compromise that takes a more complete picture into consideration.

It's not just that. The job of the companies is to make the most money using the legally available means, and the job of the government is to create regulation that makes "good" behavior profitable and imposes heavy penalties for disruptive things.

Except the government got addicted to printing money and throwing it around to boost GDP (and taxes) through bullshit business models and bullshit investments. They literally created framework where being an overstaffed money-bleeding behemoth creates higher returns for the shareholders than being a lean-and-mean niche business.

Tesla P/E is at 94, Ford is at 4, so they are overvalued by quite a lot.

The interest rates will likely reach 3% by the end of the year, and may need to go all the way to 8% to have a meaningful effect on the inflation.

Every measurable economic metric suggests we are rolling full speed into a recession. And driving your old car for another year or two instead of upgrading to that nice luxury EV is one of the first things many people would do.

So, their sales will likely plummet. Taking on more debt will become quite expensive, and the share prices will very likely correct by a lot. They are doing everything well, if you ask me.

Well, then as patronizing as it may sound, if you are looking for regular developer job, you should care more about the technology stack (as it affects your resell value for the next job), what big features the company recently delivered (to see whether you'll be stuck doing soulless maintenance) the cash part of your salary (since you don't really control the value of that equity), the amount of work hours per week, and how much of an asshole your boss is going to be.

Well, if you can properly formulate these questions, distinguish a good answer from a bad one, AND know how to write code, you should be talking to investors (or prospective customers) rather than applying for coding jobs.