campground

I think it's a combination of two things. Historically, credit card companies agreements with retailers disallowed them from passing on fees to customers, so effectively anyone paying with cash or debit was subsidizing the fees of credit card customers. Those agreements were made illegal in 2022, but retailers seem to be reluctant to actually start charging credit card users so far.

Then, credit card companies take some of their profits and give them back to customers in the form of reward programs.

So we all end up paying more for nothing, but the incentives make it a difficult collective action problem. I don't know why retailers don't take advantage of their right to pass fees through to customers. That would solve the problem. I guess it would make some stupid people angry. And maybe there is some other pressure the credit card companies are using.

Accurate to what though, and for what? We decide what the standard is, and it seems like it would be a lot easier to have accurate time if we aren’t adding or subtracting seconds here or there. Does it really matter if the sun crests the horizon a second earlier than it did ten years ago? If it does, isn’t it much easier to just adjust your sun-cresting time?

I think the reason the negative luminance is potentially important for secrecy is that it means the average of the signal you’re transmitting is zero, making it indistinguishable from noise.

This is the year of Linux on the Desktop!

One compelling theory for why we have not encountered intelligent life is that any sufficiently advanced civilization will eventually stop exploring the universe and immerse themselves entirely in virtual reality, to the point that they harness the total output of their star for computation, and disappear.

Relativity means that the Star Trek vision of a galaxy spanning society is probably an incoherent fantasy. Why pursue expensive, dangerous, and disappointing adventures in the real world when you can conjure any conceivable reality with perfect verisimilitude?

I'm convinced that wealth and taste are perfectly orthogonal.

That’s a good place to start building intuition, but it can also distract you actual understanding. What that visualization really is is a bunch of arbitrarily bounded Fourier transforms of little windowed slices of a piece of music. The true Fourier transform of a time bounded piece of music is a single unbounded function over an infinite frequency spectrum.

Here's a little function that I use pretty often when I want to install a package but I'm not sure what the exact package name is. Give it a keyword and it searches apt-cache and dumps the results into fzf.

  function finstall {
      PACKAGE_NAME=$(apt-cache search $1 | fzf | cut --delimiter=" " --fields=1)
      if [ "$PACKAGE_NAME" ]; then
          echo "Installing $PACKAGE_NAME"
          sudo apt install $PACKAGE_NAME
      fi
  }

But all of that labour could have gone into building actually productive assets or infrastructure that meet some of the many real needs that exist in the world. This is a terrible allocation of resources, barely better than him paying them to go into the desert and dig a giant hole and then fill it in again.

I don't the Jeff Bezos personally is the problem, but he and his peers are symptoms of an economic system with very messed up incentives.

If by “rid ourselves of the unintelligent” you mean improving public education, then yes, that is a goal. It’s a weird way to put it though.

“…the evil authoritarian beast just across the way”

Can you say what this is referring to, because I’ve read the piece and I can’t figure it out.

Iran may not have been colonized but their democratic government was overthrown by the US and Britain to prevent them nationalizing their fossil fuel supply.

I often wonder what the Middle East would look like today if Iran has been able to use their oil wealth for their own democratic civil development.

Depends which people. The quantity of meat that many Americans eat is absurd and probably unhealthy.

I fully agree that there is a future for meat, but it’s got to be smaller amounts of higher quality, pasture or otherwise sustainably raised meat.

The way I eat meat these days is more as a supplement. A ham hock simmered in a large pot of soup. A single chicken breast in a large stir fry with a bunch of vegetables. It provides a huge amount of flavour and enjoyment, I’m able to afford to buy the best quality, and I’m convinced that it’s a healthier nutritional profile. I think it’s also a lot closer to how most people ate meat historically.