drewvolpe

It's an addiction and really hard to stop. Facebook spends billions designing it to be as addictive as possible.

In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.

When I was learning to code, programmers had to know about a lot of low level details like memory management, disk I/O, process scheduling, etc. Today, the average JavaScript programmer never thinks about these things.

I could imagine a world in the near future where most programmers don't think about databases.

People are irrationally concerned about low-probability but high severity risks, which is what nuclear is.

The chance of someone in the US dying from a terrorist attack is about 1 out of 3 million. It's a rounding error compared with heart disease (1:6), suicide (1:93), storms (1:35k) or even sunstroke (1:6k). Yet, the US spends $52B / year on the department of homeland security.

That's fascinating. How popular are seed boxes? And does the consumer get them from their internet provider directly?

It's owned by banks but run by government appointees. Most Americans who watch the news and follow finance understand it's a public-private hybrid structure. As Lyn notes, this isn't unusual. Many national banks are not owned by the government, including Swiss National Bank.