vec

18 ms·

151.
by vec 9y ago
The thing about dollars is that I can pay my taxes with them. Let's say I think dollars are worthless, and my whole community works off something with real value, like shiny rocks. I'll still have to pay the IRS next April. They
152.
by vec 9y ago
That's roughly what I got out of the article as well, I'm just not sure it actually holds water. Sure, Bitcoin is less expensive to mine where energy is cheaper, so if I happen to want some Bitcoin anyway I should try and purchase
153.
by vec 9y ago
No, I pay almost exactly a dollar to mine the Bitcoin in China. If I could mine it for substantially less than a dollar, then I could use 1kWh of Bitcoin production to buy more than 1kWh in the Chinese energy market, independent of internat
154.
by vec 9y ago
I have $1. I use that $1 buy 0.0001BTC (not the actual exchange rate, but I don't think it matters). That 0.0001BTC took just under 25kWh to mine in China. I go to my American electric company and purchase 0.0001BTC worth of electricit
155.
by vec 9y ago
So - and maybe this is a stupid question - how do I go about converting my Bitcoin back to electricity? Say 1 kWh costs $0.20 in the US and $0.04 in China. I am in the US, and I have a machine that requires exactly 1kW to run. How does Bitc
156.
by vec 9y ago
I worry the average consumer's reaction to that is going to be as follows: "All the tech nerds were worried about this net neutrality thing, but since it got revoked my Comcast bill is cheaper than ever. In completely unrelated ne
157.
by vec 9y ago
For issue (1), what's wrong with keeping a vestigial means tested welfare state around? If a UBI works as advertised, the number of people who need further assistance will shrink dramatically. Who cares how inefficient (say) food stamp
158.
by vec 9y ago
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that's not actually the issue in question. The comments to the FCC board were made using (publicly available) real name and address pairs. Someone submitted a comment using my legal name and curren
159.
by vec 9y ago
Yeah, you're totally right. Running an ER has huge fixed costs. Running an ER will inevitably have huge fixed costs because emergencies are, by definition, unexpected so they have to be ready for anything. In most of the developed worl
160.
by vec 9y ago
Yeah, but isn't that also the "problem" with subsidizing K-12 public school? One doesn't need a high school education to wait tables or stock shelves, and most apprenticeships and trade schools could probably be started
161.
by vec 9y ago
Free southerners (to massively oversimplify, and with recognition that this excludes the very different concerns of enslaved southerners) were worried about the federal government getting both strong enough and regionally diverse enough to
162.
by vec 9y ago
I expect this is intended to be a rhetorical question, but there's a lot of hidden premises here. First, it assumes that Bill Gates did in fact work hard. Please define exactly what you mean by "work" and "hard", si
163.
by vec 9y ago
I'm the same way. My instinctive reading of a 5 star system maps it onto a bell curve. So if I received exactly the service I expected, with zero complaints, that's obviously a 3 out of 5. 5 stars means two standard deviations a
164.
by vec 9y ago
I think this is key. All the conversations we're hearing are about data breaches . In my opinion, that's merely a predictable and unavoidable symptom of data hoarding . We need to move toward a recognition that collecting PII is
165.
by vec 9y ago
> But in this case, you have to decide who to take the word of. That is true. And by refusing to give the allegations credence you have implicitly decided whose word to take. > There is no way to logically analyze the claims and come
166.
by vec 9y ago
Yes, at least one dyed-in-the-wool Democratic operative is now attached to this scandal. And yes, at this late date the only realistic alternative is that the seat goes to a member of the other party. I would hate to be a Republican partisa
167.
by vec 9y ago
*Accusers, very much plural at this point. But more to your point, Roy Moore has not been arrested. He has not been, and probably will not be, charged with any criminal or civil infraction. He has, however, accepted his party's nominat
168.
by vec 9y ago
I did choose a pathological case, partly because there's no way to write the `md` helper function in a way that react will just treat as always safe, other than wrapping it a component. But then components requires a single root elemen
169.
by vec 9y ago
> Some of these directives ship with core, but some are third-party, so you have to remember which is which, and which your team has added. Not to nitpick, but I think this might be the nut of our different reaction here. Some of our dir
170.
by vec 9y ago
Because "simple" and "easy" are not synonyms. For example, Backbone is much simpler than React. React keeps a full virtual copy of the DOM in runtime and uses complex diffing algorithms to decide when and how to actual
171.
by vec 9y ago
No, Vue's templates do not allow arbitrary JS. The syntax is very Angular-like, in the sense that everything is pseudo-html using custom tags and attributes. But the builtins are extremely well thought out and in practice I rarely find
172.
by vec 9y ago
I'm not the author, but that quote lines up almost exactly with our experience. First, Vue shares most of the things that actually make React exciting. Component oriented, one-way databinding, virtual DOM, a first party Flux-inspired s
173.
by vec 9y ago
A UBI scheme can't just create value from thin air; it has to come from either taxes or from devaluing the currency by printing more, which is basically a tax by another name.* Given that fact, there must be at least some class of rela
174.
by vec 9y ago
As an empirical observation, in the US we currently have one group of politicians advocating for a larger safety net and a different group strongly advocating for lower taxes. Sometimes the bigger safety net people win, taxes go up, and pay
175.
by vec 9y ago
Oh, come off it. Not every team gets to be made of 100% 10x supergenius ninja rock gods. And no one gets to be at their absolute best for every line of code they're ever going to write. Everyone, no matter how gifted, does a better job
176.
by vec 9y ago
In the US at least, in theory the proposal for a long time was just to not keep track of people in the first place. The federal government collected taxes on things like property and tariffs that were hard to avoid, they performed a census
177.
by vec 9y ago
Yeah, but why did Threadless possibly need to "maintain growth"? They had a sustainable small business model. They could have consciously leveled off when they hit their natural equilibrium and remained a profitable niche vendor i
178.
by vec 9y ago
With enough practice, I could see this being much easier to read. There's no jumping from the end of one line and searching for the next, plus each line is visually distinct from the ones immediately above and below. I wonder how much
179.
by vec 9y ago
My wife is an audiologist, so I admit to being a bit biased, but it seems like most of the comments are missing one of the main drivers of hearing aid cost. Traditionally, audiology offices undercharge dramatically for their initial consult
180.
by vec 9y ago
Hearing aids aren't actually covered by insurance nearly as often as one would expect. The majority of patients pay out of pocket already.

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