jpatokal

64 ms·

631.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Pedantic nit: the FedEx story involved a punt on blackjack , which at least involves some skill and where you can eke out a thin theoretical edge against the house if you count cards, not on black as in roulette.
632.
by jpatokal 9y ago
This pretty much sums it up: The point is to build new decentralized protocols that will not be owned by any one central company, but will instead be the property of all of their users, who will fund their development by buying coins and w
633.
by jpatokal 9y ago
In the long term, perhaps, but in the short term there's going to be MtGox-or-worse level carnage in the markets if Bitfinex/USDT is exposed as a scam and people start panic selling to cash out.
634.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Yes, that's exactly what many people think is going to happen, and in fact there's already a small but persistent spread in BTC prices between exchanges that price them in USDT (like Bitfinex) and those that use actual USD (like G
635.
by jpatokal 9y ago
With all due respect, the scale of support enquiries you handle is probably orders of magnitude below what Coinbase has to deal with. Scaling any kind of support well is hard, scaling tech support for something as complicated and user-host
636.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Cramming 110 million people almost entirely along the coastline of a California-sized country also helps.
637.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Not really: just because the market cap of an altcoin is in the billions doesn't mean there's more than a tiny fraction of that amount actually invested (as in, bought with fiat) into it.
638.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Marketing. People want notionally imperial Russian vodkas like Smirnoff and frou-frou pseudo-French brands like Grey Goose, not Costco "undenatured purified food-grade alcohol".
639.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Internet personality Saara turned speaking fake languages into a career with this amazing little clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw And her pitch-perfect imitation of 14 different musical genres is equally am
640.
by jpatokal 9y ago
On paper, yes, that's exactly what they promise. In practice, they "suspended" this last April: https://tether.to/announcement/
641.
by jpatokal 9y ago
How does "possession" work when everything's in the cloud and instantly accessible to anyone?
642.
by jpatokal 9y ago
A simple figure to put this in perspective: there are currently $2,248,665,722.36 (that's $2 billion) Tether in circulation, which are all supposed to be backed 1:1 by USD. https://wallet.tether.to/transparency
643.
by jpatokal 9y ago
They did not claim to directly manage 300 people, and it's somewhat bizarre to assume they did.
644.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Australia's eBay is Gumtree.com.au, which was purchased by eBay quite some time ago.
645.
by jpatokal 9y ago
The parent's comment is valuable overall, but nextstep is quite correctly pointing out that that particular observation is phrased in absurd terms. You know how people joking referly to something that was a recent fad as being &quot
646.
by jpatokal 9y ago
The one major non-finance option is Google, which has a large and growing engineering office there. https://careers.google.com/locations/zurich/ Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in ZRH.
647.
by jpatokal 9y ago
If you eat them raw, they're obviously different, but after cooking, they're virtually indistinguishable.
648.
by jpatokal 9y ago
It doesn't. Both Kuwait and Oman try hard not to make waves so they can profit off both sides. Incidentally, so does the UAE: a huge portion of local investment, especially in Dubai, is linked to Iran, and not just regular trade but s
649.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Remember, these are all royalties where power is concentrated in a few people. Local politics consists basically of various family factions jockeying for power, so it gets very personal very fast and egos are a huge thing.
650.
by jpatokal 9y ago
The subway in East Berlin was formerly (and is now again) part of the Berlin U-Bahn, which predates Moscow's metro by a good 30 years. So while in a Communist country, it's not really a Communist- era metro.
651.
by jpatokal 9y ago
If anything, the Pyongyang Metro is even more ideological: AFAIK, it's the only metro in the world where all stations are named after concepts (Comrade, Red Star, Glory, Complete Victory), not nearby places, although there are occasion
652.
by jpatokal 9y ago
I hate to rain on the parade, but many of the ancient Japanese inn entries are a bit dubious. They're mostly based on traveler's reports that there was an inn at X/a new hot spring was found at X in year Y being conflated wi
653.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Way easier. Canada's points system is a shining beacon of transparency in comparison to the US.
654.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Per article, regular uniforms are not made from vinylon, only some custom orders from officers.
655.
by jpatokal 9y ago
For clarity, while the link is to Google Patents (a public service for searching patents), the actual patent is from Juniper Networks, not Google.
656.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Delhi-Mumbai and Shanghai-Beijing are already in the world's top 10 busiest routes, but AFAIK there is no regular A380 service on either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_...
657.
by jpatokal 9y ago
You don't have to even leave the big cities. In Gurgaon, India's "cyber city" next to Delhi, home to lots of shiny skyscrapers and glitzy shopping malls, you can drive along the main drag MG Road and see women squatting
658.
by jpatokal 9y ago
Finn here: it reads like language that's tediously formal to the point of being awkward, kind of like an old translation of the Bible ("And verily X did beget Y"). "Natural" spoken Finnish abbreviates a lot and disp
659.
by jpatokal 9y ago
"Hokkien" is an approximation of how "Fujian" is pronounced in Min Nan, which in turn means "Southern Min" (dialect/language). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Min
660.
by jpatokal 9y ago
As long as there's money to be made, which there undoubtedly is (right now), Bitcoin mining will just move somewhere else. Also, as the Chinese proverb says, the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. Liberal use of the death

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