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Hi Peter, at what age does it start to become more difficult to get a work visa, and does it depend on the type of visa it is?

Exactly - just a Linux box, mounted with SSHFS. To be fair, I have spent some time over the years writing my own scripts for SMART alerts, but the end result is better monitoring and alerting than a NAS would provide.

This is why I always use an encrypted file system, where the encryption keys are only known to the client (and not the NAS or other storage provider).

I agree, if the lender makes cheaper credit available, and if borrowers are automatically provided with drops in their loan rates. If borrowers have to shop around for a better deal and pay fees in the process, this would dull the effect of a lower base rate.

Some other reasons that the ECB wishes to fight deflation are described here:

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2016/html/sp160404....

Euros exist in physical form (notes and coins). There is a digital form of Euros already, called "reserves". However, only banks and other financial institutions are able to hold these reserves (they are allowed to have reserve accounts at the ECB).

What you have in your bank account is "credit" from the bank to you. You can currently ask to withdraw this credit in the form of physical Euros.

A "Digital Euro" would mean that regular people could hold digital Euros at an account they hold with the ECB, just like the large financial institutions do.

This could be useful to allow the ECB to fight price deflation, because:

1. The ECB can directly credit the accounts of hundreds of millions of Europeans (without having to go via banks). This would mean they could fine-tune policy by depositing small amounts every single day in every single account. This solves the "pushing-on-a-string" problem of the ECB making it cheap for banks to lend, but finding that the banks are still unwilling to lend or that people are unwilling to borrow. The ECB could also decide to only top-up the accounts of people with low balances, so that aid is targeted.

2. The ECB can more effectively increase money velocity by enforcing negative interest rates. You can currently avoid negative interest rates by simply withdrawing physical Euros from your bank. But if the ECB discontinues or restricts the availability of physical Euros, you will only be able to withdraw Digital Euros from your bank. If your Euros are digital, you cannot avoid a negative interest rate.

Although price deflation is great if you have money or are owed money, price deflation makes it difficult for people who owe money to repay their loans. This is because their labor is earning them less money each year compared to the debt they owe. This is why the ECB and other central banks are very concerned about price deflation.

MP3 link (248MB): http://traffic.megaphone.fm/KM1843288847.mp3

It's important for the US dollar to maintain reasonably constant and predictable purchasing power from year to year. This is part of their dual mandate. Their target is just under 2% inflation per year, as measured by the Core-PCE index. If the dollar didn't have reasonably constant and predictable purchasing power, people would be afraid either to issue or to take out loans denominated in USD.

Manipulating the supply of the dollar via interest rate adjustments, along with open market operations, is how the Fed attempts to control inflation.

I notice that the OpenJDK build is only available as a .tar.gz and not as .rpm

This means that to upgrade from Oracle JDK10 -> Open JDK11, you'll have to write a script yourself to modify the symlinks e.g. to redirect the existing "/etc/alternatives/java -> /usr/java/jdk-10.0.x/bin/java" to the new installation. There are 46 of these symlinks that need changing (for javac, jstack, etc etc).

I hope that's the only change that is required and that I'm not missing something. Anyone know if there is anything else necessary?

Edit: here is the script I just wrote to print out the commands required to change the symlinks:

  #!/bin/bash

  existingJdkBinPath=$(dirname `readlink /etc/alternatives/java`)
  newJdkPath="/opt/jdk-11"

  find /etc/alternatives -type l | while read link; do
    target=$(readlink "$link")
    targetPath=$(dirname $target)
    targetFile=$(basename $target)

    if [[ $targetPath = $existingJdkBinPath ]]; then
      newTarget="$newJdkPath/bin/$targetFile"
      echo ln -snf "$newTarget" "$link"
    fi
  done

> Why is it so crucial to their business model that the customers' deposits are deposited directly with the Fed

Note that whether interest was earned via IOER or via the Fed Funds market, the funds would be deposited with the Fed either way (whether in the bank's own Fed account or overnight in the Fed account of the counterparty of a Fed funds loan).

It wouldn't be possible to accept transfers from other banks, to send funds to other banks or to participate in the Fed Funds market unless the bank had an account with the Fed.

On the point of "risk-free", the TED spread was north of 1% for much of the 20 months between August 2007 and April 2009, and peaked at over 4%. So it's not always what I'd call negligible risk. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TEDRATE

Do you happen to know how much Cloudflare charges for this?

Because then you have counterparty risk, which means you then have greater regulatory/compliance costs and have to pay up to 0.4% on assets for FDIC insurance.

The "Confidential Transactions" scheme for cryptocurrencies uses homomorphic encryption.

The idea is that you can prove that the encrypted input and output amounts in a transaction balance to zero, without having to actually reveal what any of those amounts are.

See https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt

That is absolutely not true. OneTab has never, ever transmitted any information about your tabs outside of your browser, and will never divulge them. I'm the developer. OneTab has never made a penny, and absolutely does and always will deliver on the privacy promise.

The situation is confusing, because of the difference between physical and financial assets. It's possible for everyone to simultaneously save physical assets, but mathematically impossible for everyone to simultaneously save financial assets.

Imagine two people alone on a desert island. Both can save up firewood (a physical asset) during their entire working lives. They can then both retire and enjoy their savings (firewood) during their retirement. So it is possible for everyone to simultaneously save physical assets.

However, financial assets are reciprocal. One person's financial asset is another person's liability. That liability can be thought of as an 'obligation to perform'. In the desert island example, they both cannot save up obligations from each other and then retire, because there would be no one working to perform the obligations.

If everyone has 'saved' as many obligations owed to them as they've accumulated obligations they owe to others, then that's the equivalent of no one having saved at all.

So it's mathematically impossible for everyone to accumulate savings in the form of financial assets. Either everyone has net zero savings, or some people have financial savings and other people have financial debt.

Therefore the healthy approach is for people to work while they can to accumulate financial obligations owed to them by the next generation, so that when they retire there is someone around to fulfil those obligations.

Therefore everyone saving prior to retirement is certainly virtuous, because it means you've done work for others so that when you retire, they're not just forced to provide for you for free. It would have been a fair deal where you did something for others and now they're doing something for you.

So just because not everyone can save, that doesn't mean it's not virtuous to save during your working life.

Can there ever be a mechanism that prevents people from reverse engineering the protocol to announce to the network that they're viewing ads, so that they can earn BATs for doing nothing? Their incentive would be to use these BATs to pay for premium content. This would undermine the value of BATs and damage the ecosystem.

FYI this functionality is 'automagically' implemented by specifying just a web site URL within the http://www.protopage.com RSS reader. It scans a web site and figures out which are the article headlines and links.

"Symbols of status matter, but the symbols aren’t your car, house, or clothes." What are the symbols that matter?

This project deserves a lot of credit, and hopefully will get enough attention that the author will be able to crowdfund a security audit.

Thanks for the tip - unfortunately that mapping changes too many other things on the keyboard at the same time.

Any recommendations for a simple keyboard remapper that is compatible with Sierra? All I need is to swap the @ with "

Maybe the solution would be to have Swiss style direct democracy so that people could directly approve or disapprove of any particular system of data collection.

If it's impossible to reverse the tide, what if this could become a database of innocence instead of a database of guilt?

Instead of cops pulling over some poor innocent guy every few weeks because he has a suspicious looking beaten up car, instead the police computer would green flag the person. The records might show that:

1. CCTV shows the person has not been driving in the vicinity of any crime they might currently be looking for suspects in connection with

2. The person has been stopped before, but was not involved in any criminal activity. This prevents unintentional repeated harassment.

3. The person has no known associations with any people involved in criminal activity.

Just like Uber, we'd be glad people were recording feedback about us because it helps people get a ride even in a high crime area where taxis would be otherwise afraid or unwilling to service.

It's staggering how quickly things can change. In 2014, Venezuelans were some of the happiest people in the world, and according to Pew happier than the average American [1]

Now it easily tops the Bloomberg misery index for the second year in a row [2]

[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/10/30/people-in-emerging-marke...

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-04/these-are-...

The OneTab extension can also be used to convert all your hoarded tabs into a list, saving you memory and CPU.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

If governments made loans for university education available to a billion more people, that would dramatically increase their future earnings potential and quality of life. Yet this would be flagged as a "worrying increase in inequality" if you count their debt against them but don't count their newly increased earnings potential in their favor.

Similarly, increasing access to healthcare would extend people's working lives. This is a fantastic outcome. But this would increase the number of years that people would be able to save over, and so this again would be flagged as rising inequality because some people will have been able to save for longer. Instead of people retiring at 50 with far greater savings than 18 year olds, you'd have people retiring at 60 with even greater still savings than 18 year olds. Yet those 18 year olds will when they are 60 achieve the same "wealth", so those 18 year olds are not being "wronged" by this inequality.

The primary adjustment that needs to be made is simply to start counting earnings potential as an asset, instead of ignoring it and claiming as a result that people are worse off than they really are.

Larger size video: https://www.instagram.com/p/BAqirNbwEc0/

The availability of credit will allow those that are asset poor but with reasonable earnings potential to compete for resources fairly.

There are of course very serious implications when, for example, asset bubbles and unfunded state liabilities will create unfairness between generations. That's an example of real inequality. There are many other forms of real inequality. Fake inequality is when two people with comparable earnings and abilities to purchase assets are treated as not equal simply because one is older and has had longer to save.

I feel the serious point Oxfam are looking to make is let down by a definition of wealth that is very distorted.

Their headline is based on a report by Credit Suisse [1] which defines net worth as: "the marketable value of financial assets plus non-financial assets (principally housing and land) less debts."

Consider two people who will earn exactly the same amount of money at every stage of their lives. But one is 18 and has just started working, the other is 65 and has just retired. Is the 65 year old really 1000x richer than the 18 year old, because the 18 year old has saved $100 so far and the 65 year old has had time to save $100,000? Is this really 1000x inequality? For the purposes of determining inequality, these people should be considered equal, because it's simply the case that one person is older and has had more time to save.

A fair assessment of a person's wealth, at least when determining fairness and inequality, should include more than this. It should include an estimate of their future earnings potential plus the social security/welfare state entitlements and state pensions that they are entitled to.

Otherwise you have hundreds of millions of people in the West with negative "wealth" who in reality will enjoy a far wealthier life than someone in the developing world with small positive financial assets and no debt.

Someone with $100 in assets and no debt does not get to claim that they are single handedly "richer" than the combined net worth of tens of millions of university graduates that each have a total career earnings potential of millions of dollars, but who each still have outstanding student debt and thus negative net worth.

Also see this article on the "the wealthy living paycheck to paycheck" [2] which points out that people that will enjoy very wealthy lifestyles are spending rather than saving their income, and therefore really are rich yet will be written off as being far "poorer" than others in terms of financial assets.

[1] http://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/inde... [2] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/25/wealthy-amer...