duncanawoods

Big Tobacco settlement - $206 billion

Deepwater settlement - $20 billion

VW Emissions settlement - $14.7 billion

> By comparison Steve lived in a simple house on a public street.

Up until his death, he was in a court battle to demolish and rebuild his mansion that sat on a 6 acre estate.

We can play the word game of hunger too. Any claim of hunger that is not followed by eating when given the opportunity is suspect.

When a child complains of being hungry and pointing at the donuts, we offer them an apple and they storm off in a huff, we say "ha, you weren't really hungry". We reject the claim of hunger and instead suspect a desire for sugary stimulation.

Hunger is not a pure mental state but a case where physical sensations are labelled as hunger and we should often doubt that labelling. If you are on a diet there are common maxims like "are you hungry or just bored?" with advice to seek distraction because a momentary physical sensation will fade. We confuse many physical sensations for what we might want to strictly define as hunger especially when eating makes those sensations cease e.g. dyspepsia, low-mood, boredom etc. Initial assumptions of hunger can be relabelled just like the "I am excited not anxious" trick before public speaking.

The physical sensations driving the type of hunger from habitual anticipation of food are caused by observable changes in the body as it prepares itself (hormonal changes / stomach acid etc.). That gives some empirical baseline beyond qualia. So for this person on the sofa, too lazy to go eat, we should be suspicious of their labelling but can look at what their body is doing.

It's also notable that if you do any long term fasting (weeks) you find people talk about hitting "real hunger" and it's startling different experience from everyday hunger. I expect there are related physical changes but it's quite a different mental sensation - it's almost like fear - the feeling of an alarm cord being pulled and an "oh shit, I have to eat now".

Or have you mislabelled your internal experience? No observer could describe you as curious. Identifying unknowns is universal but if it doesn't motivate you into action, surely that is the definition of incurious? Laziness is no doubt one of the reasons behind incuriosity just as poor impulse control one of the attributes of the most curious. Would it be more accurate to say this experience was the "desire to be curious"?

Anyway, it's all a word game which is why I would expect a researcher to focus on observable phenomena and not define it in terms of qualia.

> Is curiosity a desire to gain knowledge? Is it a desire to see if you are right or wrong? Is it a drive to test existing hypotheses? Is it a motivation sparked by novelty or uncertainty?

It would be odd to describe it as an emotional motivation and not a behaviour.

I'd say the behaviour is a pursuit of not immediately necessary information. The subject is drawn to unravel unknowns in their environment. It might be broadly focussed to flip every stone or narrow to a subject e.g. people or a topic.

The various motivations for this behaviour probably encompasses all human motivations. It might be delight/entertainment/play of discovery, collector/completionist type obsession, fear/anxiety/pessimism/paranoia of unknowns, ego preservation to be the "one who knows", procrastination in the face of aversive tasks...

You are getting downvoted but this is the traditional history of philosophy as I understand it too (the history of Christianity will be different).

Hellenic culture and texts had permiated Africa and and Mid-east. There were various ancient libraries and academies. Byzantine scholars at the Neoplatonic Academy fled to Persia after it was closed by Justinian. Later in the 8th Century, the Greaco-Arabic Translation Movement gathered books and translated original Greek texts into Arabic at the House of Wisdom (Grand Library of Baghdad). Study of hellenic philosophy restarted in the Arabic world until the Golden Age of Islamic Philosophy with Averroes whose commentarities reintroduced Hellenic philosophy to Europe in the 12th century.

I don't think that particular flow needs any Irish Monks but <shrug> I don't know the specific sources of books used by the Translation Movement.

I used InSync with a mounted drive. I rebooted and it ran before the drive mounted and deleted my entire online google drive contents and then deleted the local files when the drive mounted.

The google UI is such garbage that you can't undelete 1000s of files so I had to write a script against it's API that ran for a few days restoring everything. Sucked.

Understandable but it didn't seem to happen like this in commercial GPU sales.

That feels a like a partner dipping into the scalper world whereas you want the top level companies to set out something more transparent.

It's a Taiwanese company around since the 90s. They may be more Europe focused with a German office. I've never heard a US reviewer mention them but in the UK, they offer cards cheaper than the other brands. Beyond that, I don't know much about them. I've bought a couple of their cards and never had an issue so they get a thumbs up from me for N=2.

Yes, soon after posting I realised I was referring to Asus/MSI/Palit etc. rather than Nvidia. It means either two levels of auction or the Nvidia chip sale is a % of the end unit sale.

It's a puzzle to me why companies like nvidia didn't just raise prices and instead left both customers and profit to the dirty world of scalpers.

I guess it's "brand damage" but I feel there would be something more fair and honest if in times of tight supply they ran their own ebay-like store and auctioned them off. It wouldn't feel like a price hike and prices could automatically settle as supply/demand reaches parity.

> Computer Shopper was such an amazing magazine to go through

I really miss that type of advertising. I don't want advertising intruding on unrelated activities, ruining tools and destroying my neighbourhood with billboards.

But there are times I want to be sold to. I want 100 firms to show off what they have and extol their virtues in an easy to browse format.

> That is despicable on Dell’s part

Meh. It was well known when I bought one so it's not underhand and I find it a pretty irrelevant feature anyway. Ubuntu logs-in very quickly so using a power button finger print reader is a more convoluted gesture to me than putting hands on the keyboard. It would need that newer feature that caches the fingerprint from the power-on event to be worthwhile.