thecabinet

Someone on Twitter made the excellent quip, “Every government program is either too big to change or too small to matter.”

The story I’ve heard was that GPS was invented due to Sputnik. The Doppler shift in its beeps proved its speed and thus its orbit. Somebody (in the Navy?) wondered if the “reverse” could be done: could you listen to various shifting beeps and figure out your location?

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

“They are uneducated, backwards, mouth-breathing bigots! My tribe was tricked by using words that we have a negative reaction to.” Oh wait.

I’ve been telling people this for years. Bookmarking is for dynamic data. You bookmark the weather website. You don’t bookmark recipes. Personally I use Evernote and its web clipper. Unfortunately it doesn’t download images, but I wrote a little program using their API to replace the img tags with embedded resources.

Sure, but much of the fairness we argue about as adults is due to fundamental disagreements about morality or how the world should work. “It’s not fair that tax cuts benefit the wealthy.” Republicans think it’s not fair to take money from people who earned it. Democrats think it’s not fair for some people to have more wealth than they’ll ever use while others have so little. But the concept of “fairness” doesn’t do anything to help us resolve that disagreement.

Fair is a word for children. It’s unfair to the Italian restaurant that you’re eating Mexican. It’s unfair to the grocer that you’re eating at a restaurant. It’s unfair that you’re buying groceries instead of seeds. As adults have told children for thousands of years, life isn’t fair.

No, it’s not unfair to treat it as bad without any other evidence. When all you know is “Mexican restaurant” you judge by that. You can’t live your life only making judgements once you have “all” the facts, as if that’s even possible. There seems to be this unspoken assumption that the thought process must be stereotypes leading to death camps. It is possible to say, “Based on my life experiences thus far I do not enjoy the company of black people/Mexican food/whatever” without thinking “and therefore we should kill all those people”.

Does anybody actually take the SPLC seriously anymore? Violent racism having been largely eliminated from the US, they accuse ever more moderate and irrelevant groups with being the reincarnation of the Clan. I don’t want a dozen idiots who like to drink beer and play dress up with hoods and swastikas as my neighbors, but they’re not an existential threat to anybody either. When you treat these minor groups like the reincarnation of Hitler, you don’t have the ability to call out serious threats when they do arrive. When everything is Nazis, nothing is Nazis.

It’s impossible to avoid relying on third parties. Somebody has to lease you the DNS name; we’ve already seen that used to punish sites. Somebody has to host your server or sell you an internet connection. Moving to Tor is the only way to protect yourself from those means of punishment, at which point you’ve lost 99.99% of any audience you might’ve had. You might as well just go to a physical newsletter.

Assuming lithium reserves work anything like oil reserves, the quantity of reserves depends on market process. When oil sells for $20/bb, oil that costs more than that to extract doesn't count towards the reserves. As the price goes up, the reserves increase, because you can extract oil from more challenging circumstances. This is why we've had 20-30 years of oil reserves for the last 50 years.

Since reading doesn’t actually involve a letter-by-letter examination of the material, I wonder how a lossy compression algorithm that used words with the right shape would do compared to lossless compression?

A magnitude 7 earthquake releases approximately 5 PJ over less than a minute, so let's say 100TW. A Tesla supercharger provides 120KW, so even if the braking system is equivalent, you'd need 1B cars.

I feel like I'm missing something. (Or this article is just FUD.) $30B over ten weeks? That's no money. Total AUM in the US is over $50T.