joyjoyjoy

1. Pension bomb — as you see, is about to go off in Europe.

Honestly, I would expect it to go off first in the US. They rely heavily on the stock-markets and have much higher payouts. Many employee funds may just implode (e.g. Illinois teachers fund)

3. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.

This is not how it works in China. But Xi will unlikely be still in power in 10 years. His successor will be younger, so not a big prediction.

5. Chinese-American co-dependency crumbles like a bitter divorce This is a 50/50 chance.

6. Brexit — no comments needed Well, the verdict is still open (I am skeptical)

"much faster than say ext2"

Mordsschnell!

Why not?

http://www.iaauae.org/media-files/2007/10/16/20071016_Hitler...

Yeah. Because we know that post-soviet Russians are very happy people. Not.

Source: I am there once a month.

"How's life in China?"

"Great!"

Source: I live there!

This is the mistake you're making regarding stuff you have no idea of.

"What they aren’t good at is making people happy. See Hong Kong for the last 6 months."

Wrong Chinese people are very happy. In some rankings they belong to the happiest people. Here they are medium range: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/09/10...

My prediction:

We will see an economic depression, also caused by energy problems. The current quantitative easing is actually the first sign of the problems with energy: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/09/12/our-energy-and-debt-pr...

PS: The US is also pretty good at making other countries unhappy. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran to name a few :-)

I would appreciate an article about "The secret afterlife of Belgium Mail"

The Belgium postal system ranks below Moldavia. It is a third world country and the postal system is dysfunctional.

Now wonder Boris Johnson is leaving after he lived some years in Bruessels.

"I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good."

I could agree with that but I am worried about foot items. Do you know why a Pharmacy NEVER takes back any medicine for resale? Too much risk that the product has been tampered with.

The same is true for food items.

And since we are on it, if I had a wish I would wish a nerd password option for one time passwords based on regular expressions.

"This should not be a surprise, as this supports the NIST's revised recommendations (from June 2017!) that passwords should not expire [0], because it actually leads to less-secure passwords for this exact reason."

THIS. 10 Times This.

Would somebody be so kind to tell this to the eRA Commons website maintainer of the NIH?

And when you are one it, please tell eBay I don't want to change my PW if they think someone else tried to log into my account based on their shitty Tracking metrics. I mostly switched from Amazon to eBay but the constant PW change request really annoy me. I have one plain vanilla browser with no anti track plug-ins only for eBay.

I once send them a message, that I consider their security guy an idiot, told them to forward him my cell phone number and ask him to give me a call to discuss this PW policy. He never called. :-)

"the death of one is a tragedy. the death of a million is a statistic" Stalin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU

"An account of the “epic human tragedy” that unfolded when Allied troops landed on the shores of Normandy on D-Day"

Stopped reading there. Google: "By the end of the first day, none of the assault forces had secured their first-day objectives. Allied casualties on June 6 have been estimated at 10,000 killed, wounded, and missing in action: 6,603 Americans, 2,700 British, and 946 Canadians."

10k killed on your worst day? "an epic loss"?

The Soviet Union lost like 15k people. Per day. Over a week, a month, a year, in the end, over 5 years. It was a German-Russian war in Europe and the "Omaha Beach" looks more like a birthday party for children.

Meanwhile, in the late-twentieth-century phase of the arms race, the role of unpredictable chance increased. When hours (or days) and miles (or hundreds of miles) separate defeat from victory, and therefore an error of command can be remedied by throwing in reserves, or retreating, or counterattacking, then there is room to reduce the element of chance. But when micromillimeters and nanoseconds determine the outcome, then chance enters like a god of war, deciding victory or defeat; it is magnified and lifted out of the microscopic scale of atomic physics. The fastest, best weapons system comes up against the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which nothing can overcome, because that principle is a basic property of matter in the Universe. It need not be a computer breakdown in satellite reconnaissance or in missiles whose warheads parry defenses with laser beams; if a series of electronic defensive impulses is even a billionth of a second slow in meeting a similar series of offensive impulses, that is enough for a toss of the dice to decide the outcome of the Final Encounter. Unaware of this state of affairs, the major antagonists of the planet devised two opposite strategies. One can call them the "scalpel" and the "hammer." The constant escalation of pay-load megatonnage was the hammer; the improvement of detection and swift destruction in flight was the scalpel. They also reckoned on the deterrent of the "dead man's revenge": the enemy would realize that even in winning he would perish, since a totally obliterated country would still respond -- automatically and posthumously -- with a strike that would make defeat universal. Such was the direction the arms race was taking, and such was its destination, which no one wanted but no one knew how to avoid. How does the engineer minimize error in a very large, very complex system? He does trial runs to test it; he looks for weak spots, weak links. But there was no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes. No maneuvers, no computer simulation, could re-create the actual conditions of such a battle. Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation.

You don't want your family to use my setup. I breaks many things.

A person not in IT is probably just fine if you install ublock Origin.

Or you would have to train your family to use different browsers for different things and you want to have at least one "vanilla" browser on your system. Just recently my US CC website stopped working with my browser. For such things you want to have one major browser without any plug ins.

e.g.

1. Google Chrome (Vanilla, no plug ins). Used when needed (recently to pay my CC). 2. Chromium: Facebook, Gmail 3. Firefox: buying tickets etc. 3. Vivali Browsing the internet

Again my setup does not work so well against fingerprinting. My plug-in combination is so unique that I can be tracked via my plug ins.

Use browser plug ins

* ublock origin

* no script

* cookie auto delete plug in, deletes cookies if tab is closed

* (I use also I don't care about cookies for the EU cookies clusterfuck)

* Canvas blocker

* Privacy badger

* Glyph detection blocker

* Decentral eyes

* Privacy settings

* Privacy-Oriented Origin Policy

* WebRTC leak protection

* https everywhere

* I have a browser spoofing plug-in too but don't think it works so well.

Use VPN

use different browsers for different purposes.

use startpage.com instead of google

Here, try your luck:

https://amiunique.org/

https://panopticlick.eff.org

Does not work so well. Instead of preventing canvas, fonts, browser ID etc., the plug-ins should randomize it.

We always had climate change. Not having climate change is the exception. Is it man made? Is it caused by CO2? Ist it getting warmer? Is this a good or a bad thing? Can we and should we do something about it? This are many questions and climate change is one of the most complex phenomenons. I have a STEM PhD and would not be able to make a quick judgement.

"Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think"

Given that all the statements are true, something that is seldom discussed, who is "We"? People with real estate in NYC, Amsterdam and Miami? Maybe. People in super hot climates? Probably.

How about people in Greenland? Russia? Canada?

"The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products."

Windows 2000 was actually a pretty stable system, considering MS previous standards.

"user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like:"

For me Mac OS was always a terrible system. I was forced to work with some Mac OS during my PhD studies in the lab. Terrible. Today Mac OS is a tax for people who are either to stupid or to lazy to put a decent linux on their machine.

No, it argued on a mathematical basis for this.

I came across an article about DNA but did not had time to read it and lost it. It was about some ideas why DNA has 4 bases (and not 6 or 8). They also mention why 20 (?) amino acids. It was something similar to degrees of freedom.

Not sure where I saw it. hackernews? Might have been Scientific American.

I anyone remembers I would appreciate a link.

The difference being made that people are willing to spend big on short term things but are stingy on things that they use a lot. Be it a keyboard, shoes, bed sheets or whatever.

I just ordered a "new" keyboard. IBM Model M, space saving version. With below USD 200 a steal!

"you're not spending $1600 on a keyboard to improve your"

Well, it is $1600 for a keyboard that you are using 8h a day for the next five years vs a $5 Latte that you are enjoying the next 4 minutes. You do the math.

Ah, yea. Could well be. Nomad Capitalist likes it: https://nomadcapitalist.com/tag/georgia/

It has some advantages. I like Tbilisi (the capital) but in the end it is too far off the beaten track to be my base. I need an airport. A good airport!

Ukraine is an interesting place too (not for taxes).

You don't know much about Europeans. You don't know much about businesses either.

What sense would it make for a plumber business or restaurant to move there? None.

What sense would it make for a high tech business to move there? None. No VC, no subsidiaries, and most important, no other business that you need. A hardware start up need tons of expertise from highly skilled suppliers.

Yes, for digital nomads it might work. But so does Panama or wherever.

" (and am currently doing something similar on the Black Sea coast of a different non-eu country)."

Would you mind naming the country? Thx

That is sad. Biggest advantage of a beeper over a cell phone? Privacy. The beeper just receives and does not send your location.

If this is true then this is bad.

I always warned that the F35 is a one trick pony. Can't fly fast, can't fly far, can't carry much load, can't dog fight, needs ton of maintenance and may or may not be invisible.

By definition, no plane can be invisible. It is a questions of frequencies and angles you look at it. This plane was not build to bomb Syria or Iran. If the German radar can see it, they Russians and Chinese can detect it for sure.

"location as the fastest transfer hub"

Not sure what this means. How is Helsinki better suited for this than Moscow to serve Asia<>Europe? Aeroflot is one of the most underrated airlines.

When was the last time you took a train from Paris to New York?

This was on HN last year but nothing has come out of it: http://www.ivelope.com/invite/RunItUpTheFlagpoleHackerSeaCha...