conchy

As someone who makes cold brew every day, this is one of the two approaches I've considered to speed things up, the other being one of those magnetic stirrers they have in chemistry lab. However, after careful consideration, the real low-hanging-fruit here is the time it takes to grind the coffee, load it, fill the water, clean the filter, and rinse the jar. If a cold brew machine could automate these steps (like some hot coffee machines do) you wouldn't care about making a cup in 3 minutes because you'd always have an automatic jar ready for you from 24 hours ago.

Odd that the "Soul Glow" late-70s/early-80s greasy hair product revival didn't get a wiki mention

"Why don't you just make ten a little harder, and make ten be the top number, and make that a little harder?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven

wow, seems like they are still around: https://github.com/possibly-wrong/blackjack

Very nice writeup on this calculation, thank you.

Around the turn of the century I was also interested in calculating such a thing, but I am a lousy/lazy programmer so I wound up finding C++ code by a programmer called "Eric Farmer". Is that you?

Governments are awesome at fighting the last fight

When money used to have a firm link to the real world, when it was lost (like when gold coins sunk to the bottom of the sea or were stolen by pirates) it was really lost.

Certainly it can been seen as a "feature" of the current fiat currency regime that your lost/stolen money can be "recovered". But it can also been seen as a "crippling fault" when this "feature" can be so easily exploited by those running the system.

they should just enroll inmates with room and board at Harvard ... it is apparently cheaper than jail.

Because the people who control the money everywhere on this planet all simultaneously debase their phony currencies all the time over and over again, creating a hidden inflation tax that there was no way to avoid until bitcoin was invented.

A lot better looking, and nearly as expensive:

https://www.humantouch.com/pc-laptop-desk

That was also my first reaction when I saw their choice of name for this. Daimler-Benz owns Unimog, I'm sure they have plenty of lawyers hanging around ready to defend their intellectual property.

Any answer here that includes the word bitcoin will be downvoted to oblivion, but it was the right answer 10 years ago and it is still the right answer today. Ignore and downvote at your peril!

Continue to ignore the best investment of the last decade? Good idea.

bitcoin

they permanently closed my checking account for buying bitcoins ... in 2011. haha jokes on you now JPM!

I feel like I'd like to see some photo verification on who exactly is the equity trader he was supposedly named for.

yes, it's a lot better. first time a new MacBook Pro shipped with a new keyboard that is actually better to type on.

The article brings up an interesting legal point as to whether bitcoin will be afforded the special legal status of paper cash that protects innocent recipients who accept stolen money ... but really paper cash has no such protections when you're talking about millions of dollars of it, so the point is entirely moot.

This story is really a parable for government involvement in anything vs. the free market.

you can add the emergence of Lightning Network Pizza for your 2019 entry: https://ln.pizza

There was the guy that pitched a no-hitter: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dock-ellis-lsd-nohitter/

No surprise coming from The Economist, this article has done the best job (that I've seen) of explaining these complex topics in a language accessible to most. I now understand the significance of this new discovery and its limitations. And I like how they've stayed humble with their tie-in to Watson's famous prediction in the last sentence.

nope

LOL the best investing advice everyone in this generation ever got is "buy bitcoin" ... and not one of these clowns said it (before OR after the fact!)

Why the repost? This article is from last year.

Stuff like this seems to happen in tech all the time: they follow exactly the literal meaning of all the words in their terms of service, but the actual reality is the exact opposite of what the words imply.

Over hundreds of years of proximity to nearly limitless natural lumber, North Americans have evolved a highly complex network of water mains, smoke detectors, fire hydrants, and fire fighters to quickly come and put out the fires that inevitably happen before everyone burns because we build nearly everything out of flammable, cheap wood!

Imagine how much money and effort we could save if we build shit of of something that doesn't burn!

What kind of test is going to burn a cinderblock?

Seems like this analysis has vastly under-appreciated wood's tendency to burn. Yes, I see they've mentioned how in one specific type of burn test "modern cross-laminated timber panels perform better in fire tests than steel ones" ... but come on, are they suggesting that any kind of wooden house is safer than a cinderblock house? Storm risk?

It's great that wood is environmentally friendly and all, but does this opinion really consider how many more humans would likely die in house fires or tornados if we all moved into wooden homes?

Vast swaths of this planets are covered in nothing but cinderblock structures, and you know another thing they don't really need to worry about? Fire departments.

This guy is the Sylvester McMonkey McBean of pharmaceuticals