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Stealthisbook

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The North American bits are a little weird. Colorado has an entry for Bent's Fort but not for Fort Vasquez, though both are rebuilt tourist attractions. Then there's Bishop's Castle, an actual norman style castle built outside of Pueblo by some crazed guy

Sadly, my computer has apparently rebooted multiple times this week. I didn't do it, but Microsoft decided it was for the best. I remember when a restart was something you were asked to consent to, and before that you had to affirmatively decide to perform an update.

I remember the exploration of alcohol consumption stats from one of Michael Hobbes' podcasts and how hard it is to untangle both self-reporting and confounding factors. Like, the population of reported non-drinkers is dominated by both religious abstainers who may otherwise differ culturally from the broader population, and alcoholics who've needed to cut out drinking entirely

The quoted number is awfully specific. Monthly active devices? Why not licenses since that's what they are theoretically in the business of selling? Active devices would be relevant to their ad revenue, so I'd be interested to know what's the context for the statistic and what they're actually tracking. Are enterprise and other installs that block ad telemetry included?

The Copyright Office doesn't have much to do with copyright enforcement. That's almost entirely hashed out in court. If anything, the office provides one of the few streamlining mechanisms in an unwieldy system by maintaining registration records so you can track down ownership and at least arrange licensing for works that would otherwise represent an unknown rights minefield.

There are so many layers of fraud to make this scam work. Fake enrollment seems easy enough, but financial aid requires a valid identity with real tax info. If you've already stolen an identity to snag a tax refund, I guess might as well file a FAFSA. But, the lion's share of financial aid goes directly to the school while only any remainder after tuition and fees goes to the student. I feel like unless this is happening at scale committed by relatively few actors, the return isn't worth the effort... if there isn't some further institutional coordination helping things along

AI necessarily offers strategies that are already available, and at this point can't be expected to reason out if anything is especially effective. There are services like rocketmoney that can identify subscriptions that you may no longer want or gain savings through mechanically gamed processes, and AI could certainly copy that.

It's true that the top line tuition is generally discounted through financial aid, but that's been the case for decades. People aren't shocked at the absurd tuition, but at the rate of increase that vastly outstrips aid, making the normal discounted cost increasingly unaffordable.

The actual shocking costs are buried well below the top line as services and facilities that you'd expect to be paid through tuition are separately charged but mandatory fees.

YT Music is generally as good or better for casual listening. There's a potential deal breaking quirk in that some tracks are user uploads. You can find obscure stuff that's not easily available elsewhere, but I've found quite a few tracks that are low quality CD or vinyl rips, and concert bootlegs. If you build a playlist, it's not easy to weed out the trash.

I wonder how the accounting nets out when you consider quite a lot of the costs are likely billed internally for use of Amazon infrastructure. Charging market rate for AWS hosting, billing services, etc, could helpfully make a low margin profitable operation into a tax deductible money pit.

It helps that board members are often fellow CEOs or members of multiple other company boards. They have an incentive to negotiate high pay packages and shareholders in general get presented with a yes/no question

More use? I'd challenge you to find that European freight is substantially diverted from rail to road. In most cases I'd suspect it's a matter of small or mixed loads over short distances, which in Europe might still be multinational. Frankly, for the kinds of loads that in the US would travel by rail freight, the alternative to rail wouldn't be air, but sea.

These stories seem to always exaggerate the losses on these types of commercial properties. Inevitably, the buyer is paying off a big outstanding loan and possibly a tax bill, but the headline purchase amount is just the winning bid to pay for the privilege to settle the outstanding debt. No doubt the value of these properties struggling to find tenants is lower than it was, but not nearly what they're trying to show in these stories.

I haven't seen it mentioned about RTO yet, but I'm sure some managers really just want to be able to conduct certain conversations and behaviors in person, completely off the record. Working for these people would range in badness from being victimized to potential accusations of conspiracy.

Servicing the debt is an entirely political act. If the US government wants to pay its bills, it does. The alternative is unlikely, but interesting-what if the US just says no? What enforcement mechanism is there? The biggest trade partner, biggest military, and cultural hegemon says "what are you gonna do about it?" and you do what?

He doesn't seem to recognize that the government debt is backed by not only the entire productive capacity of the nation, but also the willingness of creditors to tank the world denominated currency. It's possible that some political fights could temporarily sway the market but it would take a broader societal collapse to actually kill the dollar.

While there might not be much innovation available in the ad tech space, there's plenty to address in gaming (and ad tech may have lots of arbitrage given different legal regimes)

If Unity made their engine just more usable, much less more capable, than UnReal and others they would gain market share. That's ignoring the other lucrative arenas games engines have entered like movie vfx and vr.

The CEO going full tilt into enshittification is just a symptom of terrible leadership

With the phrase 'throwing their toys out of the pram' I immediately knew there was a problem with this article. There might be overblown anxiety over uncertain outcomes related to fees or from developers that would never realistically be affected, but it's totally reasonable to be pissed that terms of service can change retroactively to include both products in development and existing games. Having a Unity based game available for download suddenly becomes an undefined liability that might bite out of nowhere based on it going viral, or even malicious intent.

In the same vein, the average car on US roads is 12 years old. So the average driver is dealing with the safety considerations of a vehicle that isn't a perfectly maintained current model.

Maybe making the point of comparison with professional drivers in fleet cars would be more accurate, but I doubt that data is available.

US government debt is mostly bought by Americans who might reasonably be expected to step up and take a loss for their country. The rest is countries like China who are looking safely stash some money or to get dollar currency to make purchases denominated in dollars.

The US government has, from its inception, pretty much operated with a deficit and done fine. With such a gargantuan GDP and supreme position in foreign relations, the US should be a utopia for its citizens

Sailcargo 3 years ago

I kept reading to try and find where the design innovation was that allowed containers on these traditional schooner sailing ships. It seems they're not meant for containerized cargo, and that's a big problem. Loading and unloading these things is going to be a lengthy and expensive process.