bruiseralmighty

Wasn't the 'protest' of overpriced or non-existent public APIs for popular websites really the additional server cost due to endless web scraping? The whole concept of a general strike of subreddits seems like an antiquated way try and strong arm Reddit into complying.

If all these subreddit had instead migrated their users to a hastily built alternate frontend that web scrapped reddit.com, the entire mother site could have been taken down quite effectively.

There's plenty of methods for routing around ip-address blacklisting or region blocking.

Just as there's no law against web scrapping there's no law protecting the labor rights of the moderators who work for free. Overall it just strikes me as a weaker axis of attack.

> All we need are the right people to vote. None of the wrong people. And then we can bribe [20th century respelling of educate] the right people to vote the right way. Then democracy will work. ̶/̶s̶a̶r̶c̶a̶s̶m̶

Rousseau agrees. I'm glad we've finally reached terminal Enlightenment.

This is true, but the tradeoff is that now your central DB is a bottleneck that is difficult to scale.

Having the applications keep a cached version of the db means that when one of them runs a complex or resource intensive query, it's not affecting everyone else.

My current driver is a pre-2010 vehicle. I really don't want to buy any of these newer cars. Maybe I can import one from Cuba.

> Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited

Although I agree with the Treasury's actions here so far, this is a potential issue. They should instantiate more stringent rules for banks that who cater to business accounts and then raise the cap for insurance on those accounts to a number that makes sense for small businesses across the country.

Too many CEOs and CFOs were allowing their business checking accounts to sit in dangerously uninsured positions. Headliner being Roku with nearly a half a billion dollars sitting in a single checking account with SVB. But plenty of smaller businesses leave ten million plus dollars in their accounts as a course of business as well.

The actual amount those accounts can be insured for needs to be formalized and it should probably be higher than the standard quarter million for consumer accounts as this is way too low for business larger than a half dozen employees.

Its not so much a problem for the government to be metering out private keys on proof of heartbeat, but rather that it will always want to tie them to an actual identity.

Nobody wants to or has enough trust in telecommunications to present their driver's license in order to participate in an online forum. If DoD really could provide a private key to bypass captcha tests then it could be useful, but there is a zero percent chance that it doesn't get tied back to people with real-world consequences almost immediately.

A persistent, costly ID for online communications and commerce is good and well implemented in an OS like Urbit, but relying on DoD maintaining them is too risky given the current laws around government surveilling, policing, and an ascending domestic 'war on terror'.

Play is important to a child's development. Try to refocus and retain that the context of the conversation is about medical interventions not playground games.

It is self-evident that reversing a decision to play freeze tag is orders of magnitude easier than reversing a dental tooth cleaning; a mundane medical procedure.

> Declaring the body to be correct and the mind wrong seems arbitrary...

Hardly, our understanding of the human body is more experimentally valid and much more aesthetically developed than our understanding of the human mind. If there is some kind of 'mismatch' as you say and the body appears well regulated, then the medically responsible move is to defer to it.

There will never be a clear cut definition of health, but most people can innately tell what a well regulated body looks like for their culture.

For instance, most Americans know they're fat or obese and that this is not good for their long term health outlooks and will have detrimental affects on other aspects of their lives. Some may choose to be okay with this, but very few sincerely argue that being fat is 'healthy'. Most will try to lose weight (excess fat) at some point in their lives.

Sometimes we remove body parts that are no longer well functioning within an understood ordering of the body. Inflamed tonsils can be removed, large wisdom teeth pulled, even ovaries can be discarded if they're found to be hosting cancers, but all of these are examples of organ dysfunction. We know what is regular, non-painful, and non-disruptive about the human body because many human beings spend a lot of time in that state and most begin life in that state before transitioning to a disordered state. When that transition happens, medical science seeks an explanation for the dysfunction: how did these tonsils become inflamed?, why do wisdom teeth crowd the mouth?, how did this woman's ovaries come to carry so much cancer?

We look for the cause of a dysfunction in order to treat it.

If instead we remove the well functioning breasts of a 15 year old, or replace a healthy penis because a patient informs us that they abhor their member, or prescribe a blocker for an otherwise well regulated puberty, then we have inverted the entire thrust of centuries of medical understanding. We are taking a healthy body and searching for a malady that we have been told must be there. Once there is no longer a discernment between the regular and the dysfunctional for a human body then an explosion of maladies abounds all begging for treatment.

If enlarged breasts are causing spinal issues then perhaps they should be reduced in order to correct those issues. But why not removal? We remove enlarged tonsils, why not enlarged breasts? Surely the removal of them would also correct any spine issues. In fact, it may even be ethically easier as the doctor and patient do not have to contemplate a correct breast size. But of course it is unlikely the patient or doctor ever considered the wholesale removal of the breasts in these cases because both approached the question with an idea already in mind of what a healthy human body would look like despite they're not having any precise agreement on the topic beforehand.

And in fact, we should question the ethics of both vasectomies and birth control. In 2023 these treatments are mostly, though not entirely, considered mostly in the pursuit of carefree pleasure and fun. Why should either be condoned? We condemn being fat on entirely the same terms. Often Americans are fat because they eat too often and always in excess due to eating feeling good. If one doesn't praise obesity, then what ought they find desirable about self-imposed sterility?

Of course what compounds these ethical concerns is that in these cases the subjects are children. On the whole this takes the acts from merely questionable or wrong-headed to monstrous.

It's not really the conflict directly so much as the sanctions campaigns that followed.

Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to anyone by sea.

The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing going, heat people's homes, and run the lights.

The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in the global scheme of things.

The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-sanctions.

I agree for one-offs and for simple mappings. If I had to do this problem as part of some personal workflow used only by myself, then I would just use `pandas` or some equivalent for the entire thing and have it live in a jupyter notebook.

However, if the mapping is even somewhat complicated, or this pipeline has to be shared and productized in some way, then it would be better to load the data using some `pandas` like tool, store it on a `tsql` flavored database or datalake, and then exported as a .csv file using a native tool or another `pandas` equivalent again.

Having a pipeline live solely on a notebook that is passed around leaves too much risk for dependency hell and relying on myself to create the csv as needed is too brittle. Either have the pipeline live on its own container that can be started and run as needed by anyone, or dump the relevant data into the datalake and perform all the needed transformations there where the workflow can be stored and used repeatedly.

> Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the West.

I think your treating 'globalization' as equivalent to 'American-style liberal democracy' in your last sentence there.

If only a hemisphere of the globe is 'globalized' than clearly the term has become disconnected from any literal meaning at that point. Both democracies and autocracies are increasingly de-globalized at the moment, its a statement about the network and not the nodes on it.

Although not yet directly comparable to the surveillance state that the CCP has created, there are have been highly successful forces within our own government to generate and implement systems of oppression within the United States. There is a definite inclination among regime elites to favor more centralized control of the public.

Just recall efforts to nationalize voting, policing, housing, and the internet. To say nothing of the covert surveillance or the plans to phase out non-digital transactions in order to curtail 'money laundering', or the gentle reminders of the IRS that they will pursue ever smaller transaction amounts. Or even the sword of 'regulation' that hangs over the head of social media companies should they not heed the _"""advice"""_ of executive agency functionaries.

It may be less formalized than China, but there can be no mistaking the current of this undertow.

> attempted assassination

That "Where's Nancy?" line comes from the report of a single police officer on scene, none of the others heard it. We don't have the cam footage or sound from the PD or the Pelosi residence yet. When CNN reported that (and they are the only ones who have done so, everyone else is regurgitating their report), they were trying to make political hay out of the situation.

Paul Pelosi refers to the assailant as 'friend' to the 911 dispatcher. Perhaps that was coded language to protect himself, but we do not know.

We do know that the attack on Paul Pelosi occurred in front of police after they arrived. It is simply too early to know for sure what the motivations or intentions were of either Paul Pelosi or David Depape that morning.

Poster didn't even talk about giving additional time, just faithfully fulfilling their end of the employment contract. It's bare minimum respect to your coworkers and clients/users to care about your work and make it as polished as you can.

A mentality of doing as little as possible makes life harder for the people around you as well. Twitter is low-stakes; no one will die due to some developer slacking off, but if you don't want to participate, then the least you can do is leave.

So proposing a hypothetical. If the only issue here is obligation to the U.S. financial system what if the only on-off ramps to e-coins were cash only?

So as an individual, I convert my cash to e-coins through some e-coin dedicated ATM-like machine. And I can redeem my e-coins for cash at another e-coin-ATM somewhere else (maybe anywhere in the world).

Would coin pools like Tornado Cash then be acceptable? It would not be tied in any way to the credit or banking systems, it takes cash only, and then just a basic utility internet connection. Maintenance for the machines and paying the internet utility would just be a fraction of a percentage fee on each transaction.

Now all e-coins would simply exist as a privacy themed alternative ecosystem to cash.

Since we are not joining the U.S. financial system, these e-coins should not be expected to have any obligations to that system correct?