jcriddle4

It is interesting that when Facebook and Twitter are confronted over some censorship they will often talk about needing to be more transparent over and over and over and over...

It isn't just getting kicked off the platform that you should worry about. You have zero control of long term pricing. Developers sometimes even develop without doing any math on what the services they are using cost in year one. Ask people how often they have already had to go back and rework code and shutdown servers because the bills coming in were out of control. The myth that you can just migrate if costs go crazy is completely nuts.

The link below is on historical gas prices. Also include a link on US dollar to Euro. Depending on the state we are currently at about 2.50 and have been over 3.50. The dollar menu going to 5 because of a 10% or 20% drop in currency doesn't seem likely. We, and also other countries, can have fairly big currency changes without much internal inflation or deflation(can depend on country size). A number of countries have actually deliberately devalued their currency in order to encourage growth. The question that is more interesting is can we lose high productively jobs(manufacturing...) and still keep high standards of living. The data indicates we cannot.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/204740/retail-price-of-g...

https://www.macrotrends.net/2548/euro-dollar-exchange-rate-h...

A 10% drop in currency would in your example, assuming no cost of shipping oil, US would go from 3.00 to 3.30 at 20% drop would mean 3.60 and even a US currency drop of 40% only gets you to $4.20. The data on trade indicates that countries that cheat on trade have epic growth rates and countries that do the "free trade" have close to zero growth or even declines. The data indicates local manufacturing has synergistic effects that massively outweigh the additional costs to consumers. See economist Ha-Joon Chang.

Point taken but the oil example isn't the best example on imports as we have since about 2010 really dropped imports with Obama's "All of the above" energy strategy which included opening the Arctic to drilling twice. Here is an example article on the subject: ...U.S. Exports More Petroleum Than It Imports In September and October https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2019/11/26/making-hi...

The US would benefit from a weaker dollar as it would protect what remains of our manufacturing base and also act as an export subsidy. Currency valuation, and in particular currency manipulation, is equivalent to a tariff or an export subsidy depending on which side of it you are on. Yes people like to pretend that if something goes up in cost 20 percent because of currency change that is somehow normal but slap a 10 percent tariff on something and that is completely different.

If you have several thousand stored procs and triggers then having to not rewrite all of that is actually likely over a million in savings.

So given 68 million USA twitter users, if this rate continues, it wouldn't take long to get half the USA switched over. I am assuming most of the new users are USA. I suspect a fair number will use both systems for awhile. There could also be events like say a famous person moving over or being forced to move over that could result in even higher switching rates.

Obviously you don't have experience with Oracle or you would have written hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees... /s

I suspect it is more company/occupation specific. High paying white collar workers are probably much more likely to be able to stay home. Low pay workers, likely have much less vacation benefits and all and must come to work. Me specifically I have over enough PTO with no prior vacation commitments that a week off it not a problem.

Well I am glad nobody is going to lie. /S

Until companies start to drop open office plans I hope to see articles like this fairly often.

Pictures of the actual building on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House

Are you asking if there is a phase of the disease where the body temporarily wins most of the battle but the virus continues to inhabit the host? Sort of like hiv? Maybe even a phase where the immune system keeps the virus count so low only fluid transmission? Given the way the virus progresses this seems unlikely but new viruses can have new behavior...too early to tell.

Isn't this the point of every third or forth Dilbert cartoon? This seems pretty universal. Humans are very flawed. There are those who accept that reality and those who like to believe in some fairy tale that for really "important" things that somehow we can put some management and twenty point processes in place, some motivational posters, a big team building group hug and then we will walk on water(NOT).

If the ticket is fully refundable then it is also not a sunk cost. The land example also has potentially the same issue if the land can be sold for the purchase price. If the land can be sold but at a 20% discount then the sunk cost is only the 20%.

You might have been joking but yes that type of question is being asked because a child friendly channel, if so classified, may see huge revenue cuts depending on how the regulations finally fall out.

The proposed new rules might mean an over 50% cut in revenue to a channel possibly driving the smaller players out. Very interesting side effects of regulations.

Reddit has an option to sort on controversial on a group and also on comments. I suspect the algorithm is probably looking for things with a combination of upvotes and downvotes. Take a look at any reddit group or the comments and sort on controversial if you want to see what it looks like. If you defined controversial as any thing that has a 15% to 55% down vote ratio that would be fairly specific. Maybe over 60% downvote it may be off topic or spam? It would be an interesting experiment, for a few days, to change the default from "hot" to "controversial".

"Companies want the flamebait...." The moderation system on reddit seems to heavily promote group think. Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.

It reminds me of a saying about democracy which is something like "democracy is a terrible system except all other systems are worse".

There is absolutely zero ways for WhatsApp and other to comply unless there is a back door. If the Senate votes on this treaty then it has the exact effect of legislation.

I suspect Facebook has wanted an excuse to remove the end to end encryption and avoid the negative publicity at the same time. Done.

Interesting, some of use find the current generation has plenty of stories that seem dedicated to showing men as total losers and women as three million percent better. Yes it is painful, ham-fisted, sexist and vapid.

Yes college is like crack cocaine. The lives I have seen wrecked by it is amazing. Just the other day a good friend of mine was talking about getting his hundredth PHD. He was looking into possibly Quantum Mechanics next. Such a powerfully addiction. We need to make sure education is incredibly expensive if we want to keep our young kids safe from it. /S/S/S

No major or even minor political party is talking about just "canceling" the debt without paying the lenders. The lenders are still going to get paid so this isn't a "taking". The debt is just transferred to the the US balance sheet instead of being held by the student.

Google probably wants one stream of data coming in that they have complete access to. Also probably make it more convenient to tap for the NSA

I think people believe Blue's much slower approach to space is because of more testing and planning. I am a skeptical person and believe you can learn much more by doing. As long as missions are unmanned then frankly why not take tons of risks and learn and grow lots faster. The approach Blue is taking feels like it should have diminishing returns in regards to safety and maybe even worse safety as the longer timelines may not play well with actual clearer and better thinking.

"...In 2018, Agrawal...studied...661 open source and 171 in-house proprietary projects. In that sample, over 89% of all projects were hero-based..." In theory a "professional" project would want efficiency so all developers contributing fairly equally however the data does not support that. Wide variances in developer productivity are widely documented. I would think open source projects also have to work to onboard and mentor new developers or they would eventually die out. You might say that professional projects are possibly larger but the study indicated size didn't matter "...the bug injection distributions of heroes and nonheroes is barely changed after stratifying the data according to project size. Hence, when discussing the external validity of these conclusions, we need not explore issues of team size and hero prevalence." I don't see any data that suggests this study would not generalize to professional projects.

Not directly, but yes the U.S. has quite a bit of leverage over the IMF.