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monob

Re:How inflation swindles the equity investor (1977) on Sunday February 25, 2018 @09:18AM (#16459053)
Ten years?

People have been saying that since before Clinton got in office.

Catastrophic inflation from government spending has been just around the corner for 40 years now. The 1970s were an odd time for many reasons, and they won't repeat again. But for some reason too many people base their predictions of the future from what happened between 1974 to 1984.

Re:E-Stop and Fuel, software that keeps you awake at night on Sunday February 11, 2018 @05:12AM (#16352055)
Fixed point isn't any better than floating point.

If anything errors in floating point numbers are graceful and give you a lot of leeway before they become catastrophic. Fixed point works until you hit 2(n-1) bits then probably breaks unexpectedly. Where n is the last exponent you have seen in business.

That's a very naive way of looking at the world.

Economics is only allowed a free reign so long as it meets the goals of those currently in power in a given political unit.

Try selling nuclear technology to Iran if you don't think that it applies to the US as much as to China.

Doing it strategically to prevent a nuclear war 30 years down the line is the lesser of two evils.

You have use value and exchange value.

Exchange value is most often price, but it is in reality the vector of the equivalent amount of goods and services you will receive for a unit of some good or service.

The point of money is that it collapses all exchange values to two vectors, one for selling to money, one for buying with money.

The downside of money is that it hides many very obvious relationships. In a topical case, that the cost of video cards has essentially stayed constant when expressed as etherium units.

tl;dr: money lets you calculate prices as n, exchange values needs n^2.

Because it destroys the local industry which you will need at some point.

As simple example: the British supported the German chemicals industry prior to WWI.

At the start of WWI, the money the British spent had been turned into German chemical expertise. This lead to the development of the Haber process, poison gas, and generally making Germany a powerhouse in chemicals in the same way Britain was in mechanical manufacturing.

If a tariff had been put in place on German imports to Britain the German chemical industry would have been much smaller, with much less capability and WWI would have finished in 6 months because Germany would have run out of nitric acid for their explosives.

It's first mover advantage in the same way surviving is a first mover advantage. You're fine if you're profitable, but with constant improvements that won't be the case for long, unless you too start moving to new technology.
If no one cares about wealth I'm sure the wealthy won't mind a 100% wealth tax then.

After all it's only numbers in a bank account.

Re:A simple makefile is a unicorn on Thursday January 11, 2018 @07:43AM (#16123316)
>This is the very same narrative that vim users proclaim

Sounds like a solid reason why makefiles are great to me then.

Vim is so good it finally is letting emacs-OS have a real editor.

First the mempool clears, second >30% of top value.
This is the 4th time this has happened.

Why is anyone surprised? The only shocking thing about this bubble is that it took 3 years.

A good predictor if the latest bubble has burst is if the suicide hotline number is a sticky on the bitcoin subreddit.

Currently it isn't there so we have a while yet.

Re:Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @02:56AM (#15967822)
>The citation that it works is in the article.

What worked in the article?

It only says the battery supplied less than 2% of the lost power for about 5 seconds before regular power generators took over.

Re:Tesla big battery outsmarts lumbering coal units on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @12:53AM (#15967362)
>It's important to note it is something special. The battery works, and it works better than the existing solutions.

[[Citation needed.]]

How much was the shortfall?

How long could the battery have sustained the shortfall?

How much damage would there have been at the usual response time?

How what is the ROI without government subsidy to building huge battery storage?

Re:Modern life is lonely – We all need someone to help on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @06:39PM (#15965568)
Best by food availability, shelter, labor.

Given that even in good years a large portion of the population was malnourished in whatever time period you want to pick before the middle of the 20th century, the rich were always better off than the poor and rich families were better than poor ones.

A sale larger than the demand would.

An every day analogy: saying a river can never flood because there it has a big dam.

Re:Modern life is lonely – We all need someone to help on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @06:23PM (#15965450)
"Back then" you would try and kill your oldest brother to inherit the 2 chickens and a goat your parents would leave to him.

Read no further than the histories of nobles and their feuds and murders to see how bad the best families were.

Re:There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @06:20PM (#15965419)
>It’s not a currency. It’s digital gold.

Abstract: A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Re:Modern life is lonely – We all need someone to help on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @05:00AM (#15959080)
The only people who long for a large family are the ones that aren't in one.

Look at how much constant violence and bullying there is between any siblings when an adult isn't around to stop it.

Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope on Saturday December 16, 2017 @08:34PM (#15943415)
>If this code had been in core-Firefox, we'd never have noticed it. Counter-intuitively, maybe it wouldn't have felt as invasive, because I know that Mozilla controls core-Firefox, not me. (And I choose to defer to their judgement, because my other options are to defer to Google or Apple.)

The code is available. I'm pretty sure the tor project would have noticed it.

Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope on Saturday December 16, 2017 @07:40PM (#15943192)
I'm saving you a t-shirt for when you finally see the light.
Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope on Saturday December 16, 2017 @07:37PM (#15943185)
Honest question:

Pretty much every site on the internet does that.

Why are we spending 500 replies and all this developer time on an issue that if done by, say google on their home page, would be considered at best a fun little doodle at worst business as usual?

Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope on Saturday December 16, 2017 @07:30PM (#15943151)
Kernels aren't any more important than compilers, xorg, user space utilities and so on. That Linux managed to get its name on the whole stack doesn't mean much. You might as well be complaining that linux distributions are vulnerable to power outages.

If anything the major distributions are defined by their package managers, of which there is a large and healthy number - aptitude, dnf, pacman, protage, and a heap of weird and wonderful other ones with minuscule usage.

In physics at least you need to write and typeset your own papers for the most part.

Look at arxiv.org, that papers there are made purely by academics from start to finish and are already publication grade (if not better).

Re:New silicon structure opens the gate to quantum computers on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @05:20AM (#15913328)
Do you have a paper on approximating NP complete problems and the bounds on the error in the solution?
Re:NASA to test prototype Kilopower nuclear reactor on Monday December 11, 2017 @06:03AM (#15896312)
Inverse square law. Every n AU you go out from the earth you will need n2 are of mirror to focus on a solar panel to get the same power. That assumes you can even build a structure that can keep that shape.

Say you have a mission to Uranus, you will need a mirror with 400 times the area of the solar cells to get as much power as they would in earth orbit.