brownbat

76 ms·

661.
by brownbat 9y ago
In the US there are several cards marketed to travelers, so zero fees for intl transactions and competitive exchange rates are becoming common. Even so, most tourists may not know their card's terms, and probably couldn't immediat
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by brownbat 9y ago
The network is still the third party. With cash, or bottle caps, or any physical token, all you need are two people that agree it has value. Possession is the ledger.
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by brownbat 9y ago
> "guaranteed expiration" You could make the database so noisy that there's a proof-of-storage cost on anything over a day old. No guarantee, but something. Adversaries would want to store only those messages of interest,
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by brownbat 9y ago
> First of all, it's not about whether you work at a university and have a PhD. People can do excellent research without a PhD, and certainly not everything that a PhD-holder does deserves to called research. I appreciate this dismi
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by brownbat 9y ago
We were certain we had split opinions on a softer and a firmer mattress in the store. We bought one for the master and one for the guest room just in case we changed our minds. I think we switched them at least once, but honestly can't
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by brownbat 9y ago
The best fast and fun one is "How We Got Here" by Kessler, I think it's free if you send an email. Draws a really clever line of related inventions from swords to microchips. Specific areas after that... "Brilliant"
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by brownbat 9y ago
Has Japan ever gotten "correct?" To your point, economies can be weird for a long time.
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by brownbat 9y ago
I wasn't being dismissive of tech conferences, I genuinely meant there's a lot of valuable research done by small teams. Sure, it's not work with the large hadron collider, but assuming the only thing that advances human know
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by brownbat 9y ago
Ha, and now it hits me that I used the video without any actual humans... Maybe the cheap humans are falling by the wayside.
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by brownbat 9y ago
Stitcher is trying to do this. I love their UI, but the fact I can't load RSS feeds directly is making me look around for alternatives, so maybe it's a risky bet.
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by brownbat 9y ago
On a recent trip back home, I had some downtime and my device was broken, so I threw a bunch of podcasts on the Apple TV. A few weeks later my dad calls to tell me he doesn't know how any of this works, but now he gets amazing content
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by brownbat 9y ago
Click farms are often a room full of phones on racks with cheap labor: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-11/look-inside-chines... I don't think they're primarily doing "click fraud" for ad
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by brownbat 9y ago
> The internet is worse, because of the content that is paid for by the methods you describe, than the internet of the 90s... Yeah, when people comment that online content must be subsidized, I always find it a little ironic. They'r
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by brownbat 9y ago
> tiny sliver of research that doesn't require staff or expensive equipment Like anyone who presents at tech conferences.
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by brownbat 9y ago
> First, is there any basis for assuming a more fuel efficient car is in fact more expensive to produce on a per-unit basis? Great question! There's actually some pretty good literature on it from energy and policy economists. The a
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by brownbat 9y ago
> I find it extremely doubtful that rollback of extant standards will ever accomplish a reduction in vehicle costs. That was honestly my initial assumption too, I thought this would probably get washed out by other factors determining ve
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by brownbat 9y ago
In some sense "more urbanization faster" does solve some of the problems here. But keep in mind you'd be transplanting people away from their social support networks into a higher cost of living area with a different economic
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by brownbat 9y ago
Great question! The answer is that it won't always, but it will sometimes. Because this is very counterintuitive. Here's my back of the napkin model, caveat emptor. Say we're calculating total cost per mile. What inputs do we
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by brownbat 9y ago
Agree in part, but note that tailpipes are only responsible for a small fraction of vehicular PM10 and PM2.5.[0] Tailpipes provide the greenhouse gases, but the EPA regs were about local pollution, which is driven by tire breakdown, road su
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by brownbat 9y ago
I'm generally in favor of emissions regulations, but I think the devil's advocate is that: * raising the costs across the board for transportation may be neutral for competitors in that industry, but not for people who are consume
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by brownbat 9y ago
"In more extreme situations, taxpayers could be subject to criminal prosecution for failing to properly report the income tax consequences of virtual currency transactions. Criminal charges could include tax evasion and filing a false
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by brownbat 9y ago
> Today we don't think twice about throwing away a cup we drank out of for 20 seconds. In the past such waste was shocking and absurd. This reminded me of Hocking's analysis showing that the energy to make and clean reusable di
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by brownbat 9y ago
> > I wish I could specify other specific priorities > I tend to think that's overkill :) Yeah, I think you're right. It's like that old Knuth quote. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time worrying about the spee
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by brownbat 9y ago
It feels like everything Walmart does is in part a response to Bezos. And given Buffett's exit last year, maybe him too. It's not a totally crazy response, though. Even considering Berkshire and Amazon haven't announced any r
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by brownbat 9y ago
That's a great concept, I always wondered why "best X for the money" (like the columns on tomshardware) weren't just automated, given the availability of crowdsourced benchmarks ( http://www.userbenchmark.com )
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by brownbat 9y ago
They seem about middle of the pack to above average. They're definitely not New Jersey: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-state-has-the-wor...
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by brownbat 9y ago
Agreed we shouldn't cherry pick countries. One interesting thing about France and Australia is that by the Ease of Doing Business Index over the last decade, France is gaining on but still behind Australia. (FRA: 44 -> 31; AUS: 6 -&
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by brownbat 9y ago
Great recommendation. It's snarky, but entertaining and raises some good questions. > Using a neural net... would be a useful way of generating custom Ross-Chernoff plots, and also allows me to include “deep learning” in the author
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by brownbat 9y ago
Most drivers avoid the most serious penalties, and more importantly most victims are denied restitution, not because of sympathetic juries but because of insolvency. The chance someone will cause a grave accident and the chance someone is i
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by brownbat 9y ago
There was a good meta analysis in 2016 on this, you lose the mortality benefits of moderate drinking once you correct for study design, which can basically dictate results here. One big confound, a lot of current strict abstainers are forme

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