Nifty3929

This is why it's so important to have guardrails that limit what the government can do. The US tried to do that, and has probably been the most successful at it - though there's still been a lot of scope creep outside their constitution already. And that's probably a one-way street.

Not really the point of the article, but I'll use it as a soapbox anyway: Privacy (of the sort supported by Tor) is never a technology problem - it's a government / legislative problem.

Whatever you try, whether Tor or VPNs or whatever - doesn't matter when the cops come knocking. VPNs are coming under legal attack now, and more and more sites refuse to work with them. You can say you're just running a relay, but if it came from your server they will put you in jail. Or consider the cyrpto anonymizer services - the folks running them might claim ignorance of where the crypto is coming from or going to - but they still go to jail.

If you want privacy, you have to get it at the ballot box.

Revenue tells you scant little about the health and profitability of that business. Care to share profit and gross margin numbers? Grocery stores are notoriously low-margin.

Exactly, and "Early reports indicate losses are already approaching 300,000 euros, but could run into several million euros nationwide." - IOW, the attack has cost far less money than it would have cost to prevent it with better security.

Here's a fix that I think could work:

1. Transition water rights from basically unlimited (subject to priority) to a specific, generous amount (i.e. double your yearly average over last 5 years or something). This would still be subject to priority order, and the sum of amounts would still be far more than the available water. So in this step, practically nothing changes. But it moves the problem from unlimited rights to a shared resource, to limited rights.

2. Have the state do a reverse auction to start buying back the water rights, starting with very low bids. Remember that those at the back of the priority line still aren't getting any water anyway, so buying those rights should be very cheap. The state keeps buying back the rights until whatever our goal is has been achieved.

In some sense, everybody would win. The people of the state get back control of the water. The lowest value use gets sold back or shifted to higher-value use. And the farmers don't have their water taken from them - in fact they get to sell it back if and only if they want to.

Water in California IS plentiful! But 85% of the water that is used is used by agriculture, leaving people and businesses to fight over the rest. Also, water "saved" in homes actually does not save any water, because it then gets used on a farm. Each gallon Californians reduce in homes produces one additional almond, but it gets used either way.

What's worse is that California is effectively exporting 40% of the water in the form of agricultural products. That is, half the food produced is exported. California sells their water, much like oil, to the rest of the world. And half of the exports are foreign exports (rather than to another state).

Did you know California exports a very large amount of rice to Asia? There are rice paddies surrounding Sacramento.

I bet that lumber mill wasn't union, but your examples are.

"Bring back forums" - I'm with you. I prefer forums as well, but when I think about it a little bit I can't say exactly why. Threaded conversations on specific topics, with moderation? That's basically Reddit (and forums). So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore? Is it something fundamental about the system/experience, or is it just a "nobody goes there anymore... it's too crowded" problem?

Maybe the difference is the post/comments framing? Rather than an opening post with sequential follow-up replies? Maybe something about voting? Maybe it's all the bolt-on features?

Profit is the best way to measure that economic outputs exceed economic inputs, which is the whole point. But profit doesn't work so well as a measure when the outputs are hard to measure per individual beneficiary. Inputs are generally always pretty clearly measurable, but outputs aren't always, as in the case of roads and bridges - although even there often you can.

Electricity is super-duper easy to measure the individual benefits of, so profit is a really simple and easy way to measure the overall effective economic benefit. It's not perfect though - there are external costs to consider which aren't paid for directly, but we have lots of experience with that across all sorts of industries and usually solve for that via taxes and regulation, which become part of the profit equation.

Remember that when private equity buys out a business, there is at least one major winner in that moment: the current owners who have been building up that business over years.

One foreseeable consequence of this bill is that it reduces the ultimate value of starting and building your own practice, leading to more consolidation among existing large operators. As this is foreseeable, I also imagine that it's an unstated goal.

Not really. Monopolies are an invitation to competition: Your margin is my opportunity, as it were. They are therefore hard to maintain absent some kind of external force to support it: Regulations (regulatory capture), licensing, explicit grant from the government, intellectual property laws, or some kind of collusion or market manipulation (more leading to oligopolies rather than monopolies).

This is how industrial barons of the early-mid 20th century operated, as an example, with collusion and price fixing type things. Or hospitals and medical facilities today with certificate-of-need laws enforced by the government.

Americans are too busy working for all that. Their GDP per capita is almost double leading EU countries, except for a couple of outliers like Ireland and Switzerland.

You can complain about what you don't have, or you can work to produce it.

Then again, Americans are sometimes called workaholics, working far more hours. So in some ways this is just a lifestyle choice.

As an amateur (but competent) player of both, when I play go it almost feels like I'm playing multiple smaller games at the same time on the same board. Even if I might be struggling in one area, I can make it up in another. So it's very hard for a lesser opponent to beat me, even if they do gain an advantage in one area. Likewise in reverse when I'm playing a superior opponent. I might get in a nice kill, but next thing I know we're playing a different battle on the other side of the board and I get crushed.

So I think there's truth to what you're saying.

One can navigate by stars as well, at least at night.

Really, all modern conveniences like grocery stores and plumbing are "unnecessary" in the sense that we survived for 100k years without them.

Remember that function calling doesn’t mean that the model is actually calling a function for you: what it does it interpret the intent, then return back to the application the function and arguments, then the application runs the function with those arguments.

Think voice control for your device. You speak, and it returns back instructions ( a function and arguments) for your device to be execute.