Here’s why government debt is irrelevant, other than as political leverage:
I just set up a country. It’s called Mikelandia.
As countries do, I created a currency called Mikebucks. Needing some walking around money, I also loaned myself a million Mikebucks.
Tired of being in such enormous debt, an hour later, I paid off my loan to myself with a million and three Mikebucks.
So….
retweet if you use subtitles https://t.co/LoPWbV0BZu
— Nyle DiMarco (@NyleDiMarco) March 3, 2018
I use subtitles! For a variety of reasons.
1) I have crappy hearing. Many explosions. Particularly if I am eating, I can’t hear what the speakers are saying.
2) I watch quite a few foreign TV shows where I don’t understand the language.
3) Sometimes dialogue is just mumbled or incomprehensible.
I don’t understand why this is such a big deal for some people?
Superintelligence is limited by the speed of light in this universe. It’s probably possible to create/evolve something significantly smarter than a human, but probably not 10,000 times smarter. Maybe not even 10x smarter. Not on a human timescale, anyway (I mean operating mode).
It’s possible then to have a superintelligence that is slow but mostly irrelevant to humans, or have a very high intelligence that is relevant to humans (and still dangerous, perhaps) but is not insurmountable to comprehension at some level. And no “foom.”
Unfortunately, the AI “debate” is full of utter morons on both sides, so you must think about it completely on your own, really, or you’ll never understand anything.
Both the Right and the Left hate evolution and wish it weren’t true. The main difference is the Right hates evolution 90% and the Left hates it 50%.
The Right wishes it weren’t so altogether, and the Left wishes to believe it doesn’t apply to humans (and perhaps to dogs, cats, and farm animals), and that we’ve somehow transcended it.
Sure, the Right is worse, but in many ways the Left’s views are probably more long-term harmful as those views also infest academia.
I bought one of these. The Kobo Aura One is the largest e-reader that I could find that didn’t seem to be designed by aliens or completely broken in most ways.
So far, I like it. It’s just large enough where it doesn’t annoy me, though I wish it were a bit larger. It’s got a 7.8″ screen that, while not perfect, looks pretty good.
You can see in the photo at the right how large it is in comparison to the Tinker Bell-size e-readers that are mostly available. As you probably know, I find those completely unusable as I don’t like turning the page every 0.2 seconds.
It doesn’t work very well with PDFs, but I was expecting this. I will only use it with ePubs and the like. I also wish it had physical page turn buttons as I don’t really have any moisture on my fingers ever because I just don’t sweat much at all, so capacitative touch screens work very poorly for me.
However, at the price point and with what’s available on the market (which probably only actually serves about 40% of the possible market), it’s pretty good and I am glad I bought it.
“Ask five economists and you’ll get five different answers; six if one went to Harvard.”
-Edgar Fiedler
The first ten on today’s playlist:
Paratrooper Richard Ojeda is redefining what it means to be a Democrat in a deeply red state.
82nd Airborne Division alum, represent!
Ha, ok, now that I have that out of my system, I love that they accurately identify him as a “paratrooper,” not a “former paratrooper.” You are never a former paratrooper. It’s not a qualification that is lost when you leave the military, unlike rank. And it’s not something that leaves you in so many other ways.
Among the paratroopers, there’s a saying: “Once a paratrooper, always a paratrooper.”
This isn’t referring to just the qualification, of course, but as I briefly delved into above, it gestures to how being a paratrooper makes you a different person than you were before. It changes you and how you look at life and risk and the world.
Every paratrooper (still) alive has their story collection of hairy incidents, tree landings, high winds, iffy drop zones, hostile wildlife, etc. to recount, most of which sounds like far-fetched fantasies to people who’ve never been in that line of work. Paratroopers don’t need to tell tall tales. Quite the opposite: we often have to tone down our anecdotes so that they sound believable to non-paratroopers!
By the way, there’s a really good chance I met Ojeda back in the 90s. He was a platoon leader and company XO in the 37th Engineer Battalion, which is part of the 82nd Airborne Division, during that time. I did many things with that battalion in those years and knew many people in that unit. Though I have no specific memory of him, there’s about a 95% chance I did meet him at some point since I had to deal with a lot of officers.
Wish I could find out how many jumps he has, though. Not as some comparison but just curiosity. It’s something every paratroopers asks every other paratrooper.
If Firefox were still relevant or worth a damn, this would be a good guide. However, Firefox is essentially turning into malware over time.
Note that as of Dec., 2017, there are no WebExtension add-ons capable of removing LocalStorage items due to limitations in the Firefox WebExtension API.
Joke browser is now just having a laugh at our expense.
Does anyone know when the term vulture funds started to get used? First reference I can find is at some point in negotiations between Argentina and hedge fund creditors a few years back
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) March 1, 2018
I don’t know first use, but I started hearing the term “vulture fund” and the related “vulture capitalist(s)” during the 1990s, and possibly in the 1980s but I was not paying as much attention then.
However, the earliest historical reference I can find is from 1964, in The Bankers Magazine, Volume 174.
That the term is used without quotes in a stodgy magazine like that (though it has an explanation) implies it was already in relatively-wide usage well before that.
If I had to guess, though I could not find any earlier evidence, I’d say that it probably originated in the 1930s informally.
I want my e-readers big and my phones small.
This seems to be the opposite of what nearly everyone else wants. If I had a smartphone with a 3″ screen, I’d be chuffed. And if I had an e-reader with a 9″ or 10″ screen, that’d make my month.
Big phones are the worst, and that’s seemingly all anyone is interested in selling. I can’t understand it.
The “progressive” Left will be less eager to celebrate these sorts of removals after the corporate censorship lens focuses on them. This is inevitable; there has already been a push to censor left-leaning ideas. So this isn’t speculative; it is already happening.
Though I know it feels good, and even I agree with removing content in some cases, this simply is not how you win ideological or political battles.
In other words, the Left may win this relatively-meaningless skirmish that has nothing at all to do with the real problems or issues, but that makes it all the harder for them win in other arenas — and guarantees the firehose of corporate censorship will be turned on them at the very first opportunity.
Strategic thinkers they are not.
We’re seeing increasing political activity from younger people because of mortality concerns — accurately-assessed ones. They are being killed in the immediate sense as in Parkland High, and are under the threat of demise due to climate change and nuclear war.
Being threatened with death has a way of sharpening the mind.
They’ve realized all too well that older people, mostly not being imperiled by future threats like global climate change and wars relating to that, are going to do absolutely nothing to help them. That, in fact, those over 40 or so are most likely to hoard all resources for themselves, kick them in the face while pulling up the ladder, and then tell them it’s their own fault they plummeted into the pit below.
Expect the culture wars to worsen as the stakes are now literally life and death. The younger generations know this and hardly anyone walks into a potentially-preventable death meekly.
Why Carrie Coon Was 2017’s Best Actress.
Completely agreed. No contest. She’s one of the few people that I will watch whatever they are in even if the quality is otherwise poor. Luckily, everything she’s been in so far has been good to great.
And Nora Durst is one of the best characters — if not the best — to ever appear in a TV show.
Also, fuck Breaking Bad. Just had to add that in there. Nora Durst is like the anti-Walter White in all the best ways.