joelwilliamson

12 ms·

31.
by joelwilliamson 4y ago
The Russians didn't keep the doomsday machine secret to improve its effectiveness. The Russian ambassador says: "It was to be announced at the Party congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises." You don'
32.
by joelwilliamson 4y ago
If printing money doesn't cause any net inflation, then what is your theory about what does cause inflation?
33.
by joelwilliamson 4y ago
A family from Costa Rica just moved in down the street from us, and the wife was complaining that the bananas here are terrible compared to her home.
34.
by joelwilliamson 4y ago
I suspect that's mostly because Indian labour is much cheaper. Making a loaf of home-made bread uses about $0.30 CAD of flour, and yeast, salt and water don't add much to the cost. (Edit:) Also of course anti-competitive behaviour
35.
by joelwilliamson 5y ago
In 2019, 84% of the S&P 500, 69% of the S&P MidCap 400 and 53% of the S&P SmallCap 600 paid dividends. I would not characterize dividends as "relatively rare", and I'm curious why you think they are. https:/
36.
by joelwilliamson 5y ago
Shouldn't the objection be to anything less than Level 4, rather than Level 5? Level 4 requires that the vehicle can safely stop itself and wait for a human to take over when it is faced with a situation it can't handle. (There&#x
37.
by joelwilliamson 5y ago
In the hands of a master like Plato, this style is heuristic; that is, it allows the reader, indeed leads him, to discover things for himself. [...] "A master like Plato," we said - but there is no one "like" Plato. Othe
38.
by joelwilliamson 5y ago
It doesn't superconduct at 300 K, the metastable phase can survive heating to 300 K and superconducting will resume when cooled back down to 26 K.
39.
by joelwilliamson 5y ago
Bernanke used it in a speech for the first time in 2002, but it was coined back in 1969 by Milton Friedman. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money
40.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
Just use an adblocker. The only time I see see ads on YouTube are when I'm using someone else's browser.
41.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
The Shadowstats methodology is to take BLS CPI and add 3%. If your theory about what's wrong with CPI is "BLS is subtracting 3% from the true value" that is a useful fix. If you're concerned about the basket of goods the
42.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
100 MW for 10 ms is 28 Wh.
43.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of electricity.
44.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
It's useful for any Unix that has BSD sockets, not just Linux.
45.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
Khwarizmi was Persian, not Arabic.
46.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
I think it's Window Animation Scale, Transition Animation Scale and Animation Duration Scale.
47.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
That article was rife with errors. Notably "recall that the seed for a 32-bit random number generator must be a 32-bit number" is quite obviously wrong, the seed size is constrained by the generator's state size, not its out
48.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
Rogue is two years older than River Raid and also used procedural generation.
49.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
That 10x figure doesn't sound right to me. Between the Taliban and government forces, Wikipedia says there were over 130,000 killed. Have over a million Mexicans died in the drug war? Otherwise, (as I assume) you are comparing foreigne
50.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
A buyback is just a way to structure a dividend for better tax treatment. Do stock buybacks and dividends form a larger fraction of corporate earnings now than they did historically?
51.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
> The idea of explicitly returning value to investors wasn't common until the 1980s Dividends were very common pre-1980. What makes you think they weren't? > I think stock is supposed to be like gold, you invest in the value
52.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
That's the whole point of a joint stock company. If capital is never returned to investors, why would they invest in the company in the first place?
53.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
Civ3 and Alpha Centauri both have separate Build Road To... and Build Railroad (or Magtube) To... automation modes.
54.
by joelwilliamson 6y ago
Just an FYI, Algonquin is the third largest Provincial Park in Ontario. The largest is Polar Bear (3x larger than Algonquin), but it is only reachable by air and you need special permission to visit. Wabakimi is also a bit larger than Algon
55.
by joelwilliamson 8y ago
China is also quite decentralized. The provinces have an enormous amount of power to resist central government demands to do things they don't want to do. Look at how much trouble they are having trying to crack down on highly pollutin
56.
by joelwilliamson 8y ago
"[The sun] blasts unimaginable quantities of energy into space each instant, and virtually every joule of it is wasted entirely. Incomprehensible riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from this eternal ri
57.
by joelwilliamson 9y ago
I recently upgraded from an Aura to an Aura ONE, and the backlight is much better. It can be amazingly dim, and at night it uses a hue that has almost no blue light.
58.
by joelwilliamson 9y ago
In 2016, China had 70 GW of installed solar power, compared to 40 GW in the US. They installed another 50 GW in 2017. China has 320 GW of installed hydro power, compared to 80 in the US. China had 160 GW of installed wind power in 2016, com
59.
by joelwilliamson 9y ago
American universities being fairly conservative architecturally is hardly a new development. Look at how popular faux-Gothic is at any Ivy League school. They are all full of modern buildings trying to look like Oxbridge.
60.
by joelwilliamson 9y ago
If it actually crucial, they can pay enough to guaranteee they get the visa.

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