pjc50

17 ms·

541.
by pjc50 4mo ago
> We don't need Visa or Mastercard: just route payment instructions from payee's bank to payer's bank. That sounds simple, but yet is basically nowhere as a payment infrastructure. Various countries have their own low fric
542.
by pjc50 4mo ago
Like a lot of these things, it's all fun and games until someone gets injured. This happened the other week in Edinburgh: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/woman-knock... Previously, there had
543.
by pjc50 4mo ago
The UK however had pre-existing authoritarianism due to the Troubles. Acceding to ECHR in Northern Ireland and rolling back the authoritarianism there in favor of an external human rights court was a critical part of ending the cycle of vio
544.
by pjc50 4mo ago
Eh, I think they meant the general colour of "not quite social media" that was present at the time: chain emails and blogs. But the patriotic fervor was nuts . While there were substantial anti-war protests, that was very much no
545.
by pjc50 4mo ago
I do think spending a trillion dollars on Iraq might have something to do with the deficit.
546.
by pjc50 4mo ago
Shareholders will happily vote to hand all the money over to the CEO if he's charismatic enough: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-05-27/how-elon-m...
547.
by pjc50 4mo ago
HN will flag you for being stupidly confrontational or promoting known conspiracy theories; you can introduce facts provided you back them up with non-insane sources.
548.
by pjc50 4mo ago
> as an EU citizen on my brokerage account, where I have real USDs, they automatically yield when they're idling. "money market fund". If they're yielding, they're holding bonds. Normally this distinction doesn&#
549.
by pjc50 4mo ago
> scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives The entire field of crypto was an attempt to create scarcity where none existed, by turning scarce electricity into special numbers.
550.
by pjc50 4mo ago
> should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse It was a crash weapons program disguised as a civilian energy program, that very nearly went badly wrong at Windscale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#
551.
by pjc50 4mo ago
> can't be criticized for externalities As soon as you open up the externalities discussion, the wider question of increasing electricity prices and turbocharging global warming comes up, not to mention RAM prices. AI is a machine f
552.
by pjc50 4mo ago
It isn't. This was a problem.
553.
by pjc50 4mo ago
Banking is different in that the banks swap in and out. The 8086 segments were all available at the same time once you loaded the segment register, and they overlapped. Banking was one solution to the 1MB limit; was it extended or expanded
554.
by pjc50 4mo ago
I was under the impression that the permissions only kicked in once you were in 32-bit mode on the 386, what Windows called "386 Enhanced" mode.
555.
by pjc50 4mo ago
True, but if you start counting codeine as an opiate the bucket gets a lot larger. And includes the Purdue Pharma scandal. Lots of people use opiates under medical supervision, with varying degrees of help and harm. > assumes bucket size
556.
by pjc50 4mo ago
Fun for the first person that prompt injects their way to a billion dollars, I suppose?
557.
by pjc50 4mo ago
> Can they not manage to open a dollar-backed account somewhere? Outside the West, the answer is quite often "no". And trying to open an account in the US from outside will run into ID+residency requirements.
558.
by pjc50 4mo ago
However, I think there's an argument that the existence of that backup, or at least its marketing, might of itself encourage people to make the institutions fail so they can profit from it.
559.
by pjc50 4mo ago
Yes, and: it's not completely exclusive to crypto. The UK FCA had to ban "binary options", a financial instrument using traditional money, due to the high volume of scams. https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers&#x2F
560.
by pjc50 4mo ago
While this has a very reasonable point about access to dollars, it's also funny to contrast it against the breathless propaganda from crypto advocates that the dollar itself is going to be the victim of hyperinflation Real Soon Now.
561.
by pjc50 4mo ago
This is a "vice" thing. Vices are things which match this pattern like alcohol or drugs: - many people don't indulge at all - many people indulge occasionally to no real harm - some people indulge in a way that
562.
by pjc50 4mo ago
> The public's trust in markets is finite. Every dollar lost on a self-referential game labeled a market consumes a small piece of that finite trust, and the consumption over fifteen years has been considerable Yes, and not just in
563.
by pjc50 4mo ago
I think I could agree with that, until the Iraq war.
564.
by pjc50 4mo ago
Right, yes I think this is just a confusion caused by my use of "technocrat". I've always used it for the technologically assisted bureaucracy, the tendency to view the economy as a cybernetics problem that can be solved by P
565.
by pjc50 4mo ago
No, it very much isn't, although obviously the Kissingers of the world want to pretend that they're in the first category of clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists while they're actually in the second. That doesn't m
566.
by pjc50 4mo ago
> he gives it a name "The sensorium effect" and treats this as some brilliant insight And of course is unaware of prior work in this area! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State / https:&#
567.
by pjc50 4mo ago
> I now work with governments around the world at the Tony Blair Institute, which means I spend a lot of time in rooms where people ask the same question: what can we actually trust these systems to do? Oh no - we're going to end up
568.
by pjc50 4mo ago
This car is explicitly intended as a taxi. If - and it's a big if - the taxi can charge while waiting for jobs, that's going to be fine.
569.
by pjc50 4mo ago
The SUV branding is ridiculous. The Fiat 600 brands itself as "SUV" to appeal to this sector. It's basically a hatchback with a slightly elevated driving position. In a few years all cars will be called "SUV", and t
570.
by pjc50 4mo ago
Parallel to how the UK car industry local brands collapsed, but Nissan Sunderland has just kept going nicely.

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