hakfoo

39 ms·

901.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Part of the multiplier is that they enjoy second-mover benefits. The US buys a lot of very expensive first-of-its kind defense bric-a-brac. The rest of the world-- both foes and allies-- can ride on this expenditure. 1. They can watch wha
902.
by hakfoo 3y ago
It's interesting to look at some of the leaders on a long-game perspective. I feel like Fidel Castro, for example, didn't really use the office as a vehicle for self-enrichment and seemed to bow out in a graceful attempt to preser
903.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I never quite understood the bugabear about money laundering in the abstract. If there's fundamentally a criminal or security problem, it seems like that should be the core thing that law enforcement should be chasing. Disguising the s
904.
by hakfoo 3y ago
That might not work as he expected. Some items are "condition rarities" -- it's worth a fortune in never used condition, but nothing special when worn. Other items are rare as long as they can be reliably attributed. You cou
905.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Yeah. I went from various cheap irons to an equally cheap Yihua station, and it's such a quality of life improvement. You don't have to try to fight a too-short cord that's about to pop out of the socket, and the station is
906.
by hakfoo 3y ago
It's interesting how we've seen the rise and fall of titan walled gardens from Compuserve to AOL to MySpace to Facebook, and yet on the other side of the world WeChat seems to go from strength to strength. What's their secret
907.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Phoenix has a nominal channel 5, but it's on RF 17. There's only two notable broadcasters on VHF, both above the FM band (8 and 10). https://www.rabbitears.info/searchmap.php?request=result&stu...
908.
by hakfoo 4y ago
We don't have a great track record of converting "money supply" into the things we need, particularly if there's a long event horizon. If you give investors free cash, will they build the tens of thousands of kilometres
909.
by hakfoo 4y ago
It seems like we had no problems bumping broadcasters off of the higher UHF channels to open up space to sell to telecom companies, so how hard would it be to reallocate, say, channels 5 and 6 to public use? I'd expect that a lot of br
910.
by hakfoo 4y ago
The idea of "only one transmitter" might have made sense in 1950 for analog signals with no chance of replay, but I have to think we've learned a lot about multiplexing and collision detection. If we allocated broadcast bands
911.
by hakfoo 4y ago
I suspect part of the problem is that since there's no "off-the-shelf" solution, and with the entire category being more-or-less off-limits for the hobbyist, pirate-style radio is going to be done with random mispurposed or h
912.
by hakfoo 4y ago
Perhaps the business case is for "we want the Open Source product, but we're in a compliance-oriented business and need to have someone selling us a support and maintenance contract behind it." I'd suspect the moment you
913.
by hakfoo 4y ago
The implicit message is that you control your instance of the distributed system. You don't necessarily have access to the centralized system, and if you do, it's unlikely you have push rights, so your ability to improve the syste
914.
by hakfoo 4y ago
I wonder if it's less cost and more about a support angle. If they get a mere handful of customers tying up service people on "the AM radio was crystal clear on my 1992 Camry with manual-everything, it must be my new $60k electric
915.
by hakfoo 4y ago
I always found it interesting how every business that used to sell a product based on demonstratable customer value and quality user experiences wants to instead cling to the ad industry. Whether or not there's a little more money to b
916.
by hakfoo 4y ago
There was a time when Microsoft themselves realized the crapware experience sucked. Back in the Windows 8 days, Microsoft had a few physical mall shops trying to capture some of the Apple Store magic. One of their selling points was "
917.
by hakfoo 4y ago
> Taiwan was only "unified" (if you can call the China of that era "unified") with the mainland for about 4 years since 1895 and even that ended close to 75 years ago. I will admit to having only a highly cursory know
918.
by hakfoo 4y ago
I have to think that especially the China/Taiwan issue has quite a bit of historical baggage, because it can be read as the slow-motion failure to finish the prosecution of a very "internal" political process. Can we imagine
919.
by hakfoo 4y ago
If it were used as an environmental toxin, would it cause the soldiers to begin shooting at each other?
920.
by hakfoo 4y ago
I think the tube infrastructure is a bit harder than the physical tube. You might be able to get, say, a VGA monitor but need to hook up a composite-only console, and that means a hairball of adaptors and converters. I could see some merit
921.
by hakfoo 4y ago
I wish our leadership would be more direct about their intentions. Don't dance around with claims of 'national security' and 'spying' and 'protect the children' which seem to always lack vital details on h
922.
by hakfoo 4y ago
I always figured a lot of it is covering over garbage hardware in software. Whatever "clever" feature it had doesn't actually work and they fake it in the drivers, or they're having to patch around a maze of different b
923.
by hakfoo 4y ago
I could see something like a prominent disclaimer: This page was edited May 20, 2022 (1.2% of text changed) and September 16, 2021 (85.3% of text changed) with a link for "See archived versions". If you could see "okay, they
924.
by hakfoo 4y ago
If we didn't have such siloed mindsets, you'd expect that foreign aid would come right out of the limitless "national security" spigot. How many incredibly expensive "peacekeeping" and "regime change"
925.
by hakfoo 4y ago
We tend to think of "soft power" as "They watch our TV and eat our fast-food franchises, so they'll implicity love us." Did we underestimate the soft power of actual wads of limited-strings-attached cash? This is a
926.
by hakfoo 4y ago
There's some interesting technology and philosophy angles there. ("What exactly is money and how does it work?") But the moment crypto became a speculative asset, it jumped the rails. We get a lot of obviously not-ready-for
927.
by hakfoo 4y ago
Universal healthcare falls victim to the "I'm an above average driver" brainworm. "I'm a healthy 22-year old male with no family history to worry about, go ahead and ravage the program to save me a nickel on taxes.&
928.
by hakfoo 4y ago
I've used them for keyboard plates. They charge a small penalty fee (it was $8 on $60 worth of plates last time) because you're punching a huge number of tiny holes in, but it's still dramatically cheaper ($70 for five versu
929.
by hakfoo 4y ago
> Here's how I know that TikTok is some sort of psyop: it's an entirely separate app in China. The algorithm does different things, explicitly. Can you explain that a bit more? Of course it's going to behave differently.
930.
by hakfoo 4y ago
Is that really viable? I figure there's tyo opportunities to steer design decisions: * When the schematic is being developed * When the order picking is being prepped. The second choice is an easy win for them, but probably limited to

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