I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

Agreed. For kicks I asked ChatGPT:

Apparently the reports of the horrible casualties are all wrong and fake news! I love the idea of getting a text summary of bloated, ad-infested YouTube videos, but Jesus....

Yup. It's past comical how much bullshit nonsense (no doubt most of it AI slop these days) gets put before a recipe on most sites. I've started going to AllRecipes by default most of the time, just because it doesn't do that.

The Firefox extension Jump to Recipe automatically clicks a "Jump to Recipe" link on the page if one exists. It works pretty well for me.

Agree and disagree. While I share an affection for the simpler hardware and instruction set and do see value in being able to fully understand the whole thing end to end, the simplicity and limitation also gives rise to complexity in the search for performance and capability.

You can "understand" the assembly code (or even machine code), but when a program is using esoteric or questionable techniques to eek every last clock cycle of performance out of these chips, you can end up with code that requires a larger breadth of knowledge - everything from binary math hacks (fast inverse square root) to processor quirks (16-bit loads in four clocks vs 8-bit in one) to undocumented ISA "features" like abusing obcodes with flag side effects that end up being faster than the operation you're really interested in.

Some people enjoy this kind of hacking (using the word in the best possible way) but it definitely requires an additional, different, and sometimes very broad mastery of the systems. I think this is both good and bad (but mostly bad once longjmp gets involved...).

Astonishing. You're proposing MOVING TO A DIFFERENT PLANET that cannot support literally ANY FORM OF LIFE without a massive support infrastructure instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, moving away from burning fossil fuels, and making a few other relatively simple changes to keep the earth habitable for human civilization.

This sort of stupidity would be unbelievable if it wasn't parroted so often by clueless and/or paid-for oligarch mouthpieces.

I'm certainly guilty of this, though I also use bookmarks. For me, an unloaded tab is much more "in your face" than a bookmark hidden away in a menu. I tend to use my list of tabs (about 30) as a todo list and bookmarks as "this might be useful again in the future".

This may sound weird, but I think the biggest problem with bookmarks is finding them again. Whether you try to organize them into 1000 folders (IMO a lost cause) or use the Gmail approach of just search everything (also a lost cause, because not enough metadata is associated with the bookmark), even if you know you bookmarked something in the past, unless you remember the title of the page you probably aren't going to find it again.

I'd really like to see a better system for keeping track of pages. Personally, I set Firefox to never, ever, forget my browser history, so I can search it going back years. That's helped me dig up a lot of old stuff that I couldn't quite remember where I found something.

Is Trump still going forward with Musk's recommendation to deorbit the ISS in 2027?

SpaceX was awarded a $843 million contract to deorbit the ISS back in 2024 (Biden was president) in the year 2030.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3F...

Was there an update to this plan that I didn't hear about?

Great, so now there will be useless AI generated video slop next to the useless photoshopped product images - and I'm certain Amazon will heavily promote these trash AI videos to try and justify the expense. 90% of product videos on Amazon are already completely useless for learning anything about a product and this will just bring that up to 99%. Guess it's time to make a uBlock filter to hide all videos on Amazon.

I'm actually surprised they didn't go for AI-gen product photos first. Think of the thousands of man-hours that could be saved by having a computer create all those shitty counterfeit product photos.

Disney has pleasantly surprised me with how they're dealing with Star Wars. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

LK

Sometimes, they write love letters to the fans.

LK

The problem is you cannot donate to Firefox directly - only to the Mozilla Foundation. If they let people vote with their (donation) dollars, it would be much more clear to them where people want them to expend their efforts.

As an optional (or even promoted) extension, Pocket was a great idea. Integrating it into the browser was pretty dumb. Fakespot as a website is pretty cool and I used it a number of times over the years. Mozilla buying it was incredibly stupid.

If I knew my donation had been wasted on either of these, I'd be pissed enough to never donate again.

Coitus interruptus

HBO might not mean anything to Gen Z and later but for us Gen X and earlier, there was still a level of prestige associated with the brand.

It was stupid to throw that away.

LK

I called it out on another branch of this discussion but I'm talking about things like, someone posts a question that goes something like this:
"Am I The Asshole for declining a second date with the chick I met on Tinder after she told me she was trans?"

Topics like this are ban honeypots because even getting too close to a verboten position will get you banned by Reddit.

I have seen it. I have been threatened with a ban for expressing the opinion that 8 year old children shouldn't be given sex reassignment surgery.

Reddit is toxic.

LK