nostrademons

3 ms·

1.
by nostrademons 5d ago
Eh, it's true that Google's incentives aren't really aligned with bookmarking tools, but the magnitude of the effect is much less than you're thinking of. Basically 100% of Google's revenues come from commercial-se
2.
by nostrademons 5d ago
They are very common all down the SF Peninsula because of the Caltrain tracks. There's California/Carolan all through Burlingame (which has some of the most dangerous train crossings in the country because you can get stuck on th
3.
by nostrademons 5d ago
That was the main one, and also in case you ever ended up with car trouble you had a record of every place you had filled up and every time you had the car serviced. It was also financial: you could tell how much you were spending on gas,
4.
by nostrademons 5d ago
It's less of a difference than you might suspect. The personalized curation is in which forum you choose to visit . HN is quite niche by numbers; it's a lot smaller than say bodybuilding.com or even AR15.com. That you choose t
5.
by nostrademons 5d ago
The sum total of things going on in the world is far more than any one human being can process. The function of the news media (either human or algorithmic) is to cherry-pick the stories that are presented to users. Because they are cherr
6.
by nostrademons 5d ago
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do. We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean
7.
by nostrademons 5d ago
As a side note, this thread is a prime example of the point I was making: that people are stuck on the object level of "what should a society's values be?", rather than being able to zoom out to the meta level of "there
8.
by nostrademons 5d ago
I was certainly think of U.S. red vs. blue politics. I think it's bidirectional though: blue team doesn't realize how unpopular some of their key policy agendas are with red-team America, which is why they keep getting their teet
9.
by nostrademons 5d ago
I like that terminology. I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history &
10.
by nostrademons 5d ago
Overton window fragmented such that it is currently non-overlapping. Some fragments consider the behaviors that Snowden reported on abhorrent; others consider them fine; still others think it's a moot point because they are powerless
11.
by nostrademons 7d ago
Huh, interesting. During the ZIRP period (~2016-2017), I remember suggesting somewhat tongue-in-cheek here that the rational response to negative interest rates is to borrow as much money as possible, use it to raise an army, and then go c
12.
by nostrademons 8d ago
It feels better only as long as everybody else cares too. Being the only one competent in a room of imbeciles is a terrible feeling. Hmm, this is perhaps why we get socially-negative businesses that often have very friendly (and driven, an
13.
by nostrademons 8d ago
You've never met a stupid employee who doesn't use all of the tools available in their organization? Decisions are made by people , not by countries. People have limited capacity in their wetware and frequently take shortcuts in
14.
by nostrademons 8d ago
I assume you're going off the 1.365M + 1.2M combatant strength listed in the Wikipedia article? Those are figures for the total size of those national armies at the time. It'd be like saying the Iran war involved 3M people beca
15.
by nostrademons 8d ago
To some extent yes, but the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was never really as threatening as western propaganda made it seem. In basically all metrics that matter - population, GDP, military spending, technological advancement, etc. - the e
16.
by nostrademons 8d ago
There've already been numerous postmortems published about what happened with the school strike. The school was located on a former military base. 10 years ago, that location was a legit military target. Nobody bothered to update the
17.
by nostrademons 8d ago
The biggest Thucydides Trap wars were WW1 and WW2, which happened specifically as Britain (the first major power to industrialize) lost its hegemony over industrialization and faced competition from Germany, Russia, Japan, the US, etc. Thi
18.
by nostrademons 8d ago
Bitcoin as the new Bancor. A stable, simple cryptocurrency is ideal for this. Not only is it not controlled by any nation state, it's not controlled by anyone . It's just there, a tradable asset that has mathematically-defined
19.
by nostrademons 8d ago
Would assume it's in reference to things like the EU offering associate membership to Canada, or China's trade deals with Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, etc.
20.
by nostrademons 8d ago
It's kind of a prelude to a Thucydides Trap. The problem with replacing the world reserve currency with something else is that nobody can agree on what that something else should be. Expect to see a lot of jockeying for power as peopl
21.
by nostrademons 8d ago
That's recent, just as of the last couple months. Historically the children's foundations have been a sideshow and he's given the bulk of his wealth away to the Gates Foundation. You can see that from the dollar amounts: th
22.
by nostrademons 8d ago
Your wording is pretty revealing: > This framework creates a moral basis to rights The Constitution (and the thinkers that it was based off of) creates a moral basis to rights. At the time the Constitution was written, this was a pret
23.
by nostrademons 8d ago
There are a wide variety of middle-ground views between them. Copyright law itself is one of them: it provides exceptions for transformative "fair uses", and there are some courts that have ruled that AI is one of them. Another
24.
by nostrademons 8d ago
He was giving it to the Gates Foundation for Bill & Melinda Gates to manage, but that deal went into limbo when Bill showed up in the Epstein files and Melinda divorced him.
25.
by nostrademons 9d ago
They used an even easier method than what's described in the other comments: the salt comes from the initial construction of the SPR caverns. When they first built the SPR, they filled it with water to wash away any easily-dissolvable
26.
by nostrademons 9d ago
In the salt it's pretty similar. The salt caverns are basically just like the conditions where the early, easily-exploitable oil deposits ("gushers") were.
27.
by nostrademons 9d ago
There was a good comment on r/oil by someone who worked on the engineering for the SPR. Unfortunately it's fallen off the front page and I can't find it now, but: > Also, the more water we pump in, the more salt leeches i
28.
by nostrademons 10d ago
The second part is a more complex issue, and also a completely separate one from the question of when/whether/at what number the U.S. population will peak. It is theoretically possible to grow per-capita GDP without growing popula
29.
by nostrademons 10d ago
The peak has been moved up by decades in the last year. The 2080 figure is from Nov 2023 [1], before Trump administration cuts in immigration. The Jan 2026 CBO report predicted a peak of 2056 [2]; a similar Institute for Family Studies re
30.
by nostrademons 10d ago
They don't really fix the problem, though. Problem is a lack of commercial activity in the region because people don't want to die. Turning the place into a literal warzone (again), launching nukes, or other crazy things does no

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