jcbrand

I love my OnePlus 9 pro phone. What would be a good replacement?

"War department" is the older name, not "Defense department".

Also, is it really a defense department when you're starting wars of aggression every 15 years or so?

I still use perplexity. Which tool is better currently?

It's not capitalism that requires infinite growth, it's our current monetary system.

New money is created by lending it into existence, with interest.

That last bit is key. In order to pay off the interest, you need money, which was also loaned into existence with interest.

The only way to maintain this is through constant economic growth. Without it there's a deflationary collapse.

The Austrian school does not dominate academia, not even close. Even the Wikipedia article you linked to says it's a heterodox school, meaning it's not mainstream.

Academia is dominated by Keynesianism.

I used Lit components in a large FE project, enjoyed doing so and am happy with my choice. I don't use the shadow DOM at all.

The project is Converse.js, an XMPP chat client. It's an old project that was originally created back in 2013 with Backbone.js.

I first replaced all templates with `lit-html` when I first heard about that, and then when lit-element (and now "lit") came out, I started rewriting the project to use that.

This app has since been integrated into many different websites that rely on other frameworks like React and the fact that Converse.js is a web component (<converse-root />) makes this easier.

If you're interested, here's the Github repo: https://github.com/conversejs/converse.js And you can demo it here: https://chat.conversejs.org/

You'll need an XMPP account (see https://providers.xmpp.net/ for possible providers).

Being able to hold on to wealth is an underestimated and undervalued ability.

It's actually pretty easy to lose money. Everybody is happy to help you part with yours.

Your website is very clever, I like it, but unfortunately Google has classified it as a dangerous site with a phishing risk, which I think is understandable because you're effectively pretending to be Google.

For junior developers in developing countries this can still be a worthwhile salary.

I'd also like to know, I love the look.

Taking a sabbatical and spending more time on an open source XMPP web client that I started 10 years ago already.

https://conversejs.org

The website is a bit old, but lots of exciting changes are happening under the hood and I finally have the time to make big architectural and performance improvements.

South Africa does have wealth distribution policies in the form of requiring all companies that do business with the state or which need licences (like mines or telecoms) to have a minimum number of black ownership and black employees.

South Africa also has affirmative action.

In fact, there are more race based laws in South Africa currently than during Apartheid.

https://freemarketfoundation.com/race-law-in-south-africa-30...

Now maybe you're talking about violent wealth redistribution. That generally doesn't work. It results in collapse and everyone gets poorer.

Zimbabwe bring the prime most recent example.

The first vowel tells you from which country it comes.

Grey is UK English, so think "e" for England. Gray is American English, so think "a" for America.

Yes, there was a spike in suicides after Goethe published his first novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther).

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/04/22/the-werther-effect...

I worked for two years full-time on a consumer-facing product that was canned less than 6 months after launch.

Spending a month on a useless pipeline doesn't seem that bad to me.

The US gets paid by the "exorbitant privilege" of having the global reserve currency.

That was the deal since the second world war.

they all seem somewhat casually cruel to one another

So you're saying it's the same as just about any other sitcom?

Besides joking at one another's expense, a super common trope in US sitcoms is the lie to avoid embarrassment which builds up tension throughout the show, inevitably leads to exposure/confrontation and then resolution (forgiveness) near the end.

So many situations would be resolved quickly if the characters just 'fessed up immediately instead of trying to deceive the others to save face.

But then, there'd be no show with cheap laughs.

VAT isn't charged on goods exported outside of the EU, so it has nothing to do with the US except for the fact that the US isn't part of the EU.

Go to low-income neighbourhoods, where incomes are closer to those in Europe, and you’ll find tax-inclusive pricing

This is a pretty funny but largely ignorant dig at Europeans.

Every country I've ever been to except the US includes VAT in their prices and I've been to over 30. It's not just a European thing but a world thing, where the US once again is the odd one out.

It's possible to make record profits one year and a loss the next if you don't react early enough to trends.

"Defund the police" is a large attack on an institution that's not coming from the GOP. It's unfortunate that people immediately blame the other side in a knee-jerk reaction.

As a bank, you can't easily liquidate them without that showing up as a huge loss, thereby affecting your reserve requirements and potentially making you insolvent.

If you don't have to sell them and can keep them to maturity, they don't appear as a loss in your accounting.

It's the difference between mark-to-market versus held-to-maturity accounting. If you have to sell, you are forced to mark-to-market. If you don't have to sell, you don't have to account for losses due to bond prices falling in the market.

The rest by design is to be lent out, that's how banks offer loans, mortgages etc.

When banks lend out money, they don't lend out existing deposits, they create new (debt-based) money from nothing and this new money is fractionally backed by deposits.

With 10% fractional reserves, if they have $100 in deposits, they can lend out $1000, thereby creating $900 of new money from nothing.

Every single man-made institution devolves into corruption. Capitalism isn't the outlier here.

And this is exactly why "tripping" is heavily frowned upon by serious meditators and spiritual practitioners.

This is needlessly judgmental. I know life-long meditators, 30+ of years disciplined practice who sometimes take psychedelics.

I'm not a fan of various aspects of the psychedelic scene, e.g. the spiritual bypassing and the narcissism that can sometimes come from it, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Usage of psychedelics can be profoundly healing and helpful.

Fascinating how nowadays people are excusing clearly unethical (and sometimes criminal) behavior and instead decide to blame it on something nebulous such as the "system".

While it might be true that Joe felt pressure to lie due to the environment he was operating in, that doesn't absolve him from lying. Just like being really horny doesn't absolve someone from raping.

Higher uncertainty obviously influences a risk-benefit analysis.

If there is higher uncertainty about the validity of the purported benefits as well as the claimed safety, then it might very well be fine to decide to not participate in something, especially if you don't fall into a demographic that's particularly vulnerable.

If the current clinical trials find potential negative consequences, that hardly helps the people who already took the vaccines, many who were pressured against their will.

If skepticism is warranted, then it's wrong to be pressured to go through with a health procedure.

The MRNA vaccines that were introduced were novel and used a mechanism that hasn't been used at scale before and without long term human studies.

And increased amount of skepticism in such a case is completely warranted.

so I hung out in the lobby for several hours waiting for anyone brave enough to get me to the badge people

Did you consider asking someone going in or out to help you get a badge or to put you into contact with the right person?

Sounds like you passively waited for someone to come and help you, which might be fine for a short while, but eventually it's better to take action.

I've never heard of a "professional bench warmer" in software development. It's not as if devs get injured regularly and need replacements. Why do you think they'd hire you just to not give you anything to do?