I want to see stickers that say "We could have fed and sheltered a homeless person for nn days for what it cost to make and hang this sign."

I sort of understood the premise for chain-of-custody style use cases, but the other side of the coin is that these usually, or always, have a final arbiter of validity. Typically it's a court system or an end purchaser who decides if the data is valid.

For example, an obvious use case is "record a will or deed on the blockchain, cryptographically signed and timestamped, to eliminate any disputes about ownership." Except the same problem is trivially solved by a scheme where I could register my will/deed with the legal system itself, which is already pretty good at storing documents, and no need to cart around a big, heavy blockchain. Most of the problems in that space come from spotty, inconsistent record keeping (why aren't these documents centrally registered in the US?) and more centralization solves them.

That's why the fixation on decentralization is often a waste. I suspect the real appeal is fear of human institutions. A banking or legal system subject to laws and social norms might refuse to honour the documents you file, but soulless decentralized code will dance as it's told to. For example, I could imagine wiring a smart contract triggered to irrevocably pay on the event of someone's death, while writing "hitman fees" in the memo of a paper cheque probably raises a few eyebrows at the bank.

We just subtly redefined the economy. It no longer involves provision of essential goods and services to actual people. It's all a scoreboard of stock prices and interest rates.

Cults never change: we're all going to transcend and become beings of pure energy Nevada Limited Liability Corporations that no longer need food or housing because we can subsist on Lord Kalutika's Golden Light eternal 9% annualized paper growth.

I wonder if Arizona burnt red too early. They had a lot of election denial fracases early on and I wonder if all but the kookiest will be fed up by November. Feels like the air is falling out of Kari Lake, for example.

At this point I want to just see the signing ceremony, where at the end Putin reminds everyone "you could have gotten this exact same deal in March 2022."

This war now is basically to salvage the legacy of the Overpromoted Comedian, and the west as an entity. Anything less than a fantasy victory that cedes everything west of Vladivostok to Kiev will be evidence their obstinance cost thousands of lives.

There's also an efficiency factor. Procedurally generated maps worked fine on machines smaller than today's high-end keyboard controllers. We're not asking you to heat up the room and fire up extra coal plants for mediocre results.

Yes, although I personally prefer "central planning enthusiast".

I think we're approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing tour is a reasonably fun way to spend an hour and a half.

Take the Acela to Baltimore and sigh that it's the closest thing to HSR America can offer. There's a nice aquarium there, or a well-renowned railway museum if you want to keep the theme. At the time I went (2016) the Acela fare was like 3x the standard Amtrak fare, and I think there might even be cheaper commuter-rail options.

There's a fiddly little island (Theodore Roosevelt Island) in the Potomac which would make for a nice hike, I recall it being conparatively deserted when I went.

I've been playing with Stable Diffusion too, and the gacha/slot machine comparison is apt.

1 out of 50-100 images feels worth going through the followup of upscaling, tweaking and making something presentable for my low stakes desire of "gallery of wallpapers matching my particular taste."

The big deal for me is "low stakes." The catboy twinks have the wrong number of nipples? Your 20-page nobody-actually-reads-it report goes rampant and screams "pork pie!" in the middle of page 12? Nobody dies, no important process is at risk. I don't trust LLMs with code because "plausible nonsense" isn't good enough there. One missed subtle ! or & compketely changes the behaviour.

I should try ComfyUI; to be blunt, I went with Automatic1111 because there was a decent walkthrough on how to set it up on a Radeon card (using distrobox to isolate the nastiness that is Ubuntu from the rest of my machine)

XD centering a div: even AI can't get it right the first time!

(Context: for many years, even professional web devs had trouble vertically centering content. Flexbox made it much less of a hassle)

Russia did city scenes from 1995 onward. This managed to backfire when they used the "wrong" version of a scene (ISTR it was a cathedral when the crucifix was removed during Soviet times). So America would illustrate New Orleans by showing Katrina wreckage and a slave ship docking in the same picture.

Many socialist states used idealized worker/soldier figures (i.e. some recent DPRK notes, 1938 series Soviet notes, 1980/1990 PRC notes). Could America do "fat commodities trader in a $2000 suit"?

Scientists and engineers might be good choices because the technical accomplishments can often stand outside of a political context. But then you end up with Steve Wozniak on the $50.

If you cycle the designs frequently, you can lip-service many constituencies.

I wish there was a meaningful civilian corps in my country. The military tends to offer two selling points:

• Employer of last resort that takes most-all comers
• Disciplined, all-inclusive experience

which would be valuable for many young adults, but there's no reason we can't get a similar model without the whole "die for hegemony/oil/to impress rightwong voters that you're tough" factor. Surely we've got plenty of Corps of Engineers atyle grunt work thete.

The girl is clearly winning the race too. Clearly they have so demasculinized their population that soon there will only be the WNBA in China.

My interest has been shut down by the hostility to running under Linux.

I no longer need to dual boot for Genshin, so expecting me to wade back into Windows for a new ritle is a big ask.

There's plenty of other choices.

I was very satisfied with my Umidigi back in the day. ISTR it had great band coverage, so it just worked when I went abroad; some phones are very skimpy, like they'll only get 4G data on one or two carriers or not in some countries. Fall-induced screen damage made it uneconomical to fix so I got a $150 Nokia and said meh It's enough for Jerboa and a stack of 2FA apps.

The Oukitel designs with dummy thicc batteries look compelling, but I'm not really in the market.

Elizabeth was the polite respectable grandmother, and Chuck is the mildly uncle who you wouldn't be surprised to have a hydroponics setup in the basement, or keeping tarantulas, or something else benign-but-sovially-awkward.

I had sort of hoped he would use his public presence to focus on environmental causes, but it's not really as prominent as it could be.

I do think he has committed an unforgivable sin: so he signed off on a new coin series with flora-and-fauna themes and large numbers to make the denominations easily understandable. Then puts two bees on the £1 coin. The only one with two prominent objects on there, exactly engineered to confuse the illiterate/innumerate/foreigners. Did nobody focus group this?

Put the bees on the £2 instead, and the weird mutant plant that grows four national symbols on the £1, like several types before it.

Crypto also pushes a lot of libertarian/ancap delusion buttons: code-as-law eliminates the need for human trust and consensus, the network is immune to the meddling of the state; you no longer need banks/middlemen/regulators as we know them. Proof of stake and proof of worth are both basically flavours of "buy your own authority."

Would not be surprised to see parentheses around some of the nouns in some versions of those arguments.

There is the occasional conceptually interesting thought on the philosophical aspects of money as a social construct, and attempts to solve pain points in financial ecosystems, but it pales in conparison to the speculative shitshow cryoto became.

"

This seems like it would be setting off terrible, terrible signals to the investor class too.

For American manufacturers, even if they have a somewhat higher labour cost structure, they should have a few "home field advantages" to make it at least initially competitive:

• They should understand their customers better than the foreign devils-- have the Chinese manufacturers even DRIVEN anything with more horsepower than a freight locomotive and a carbon footprint two-thirds that of the entire city of Chongqing? How would they possibly understand what Americans want?

• Some aspects of their cost structure might be more amenable; they aren't schlepping supplies and vehicles across entire oceans, they have established dealer and service networks, they've already paid the right bribes to various regulators.

If they can't at least compete in that scenario, then basically all you have is a firm that lives as a protected novelty, subject to the whims of government subsidy and trade policy. That feels like telling an institutional investor "Go and buy stock in a tourist heritage railway, that's a vital growth business right there!"

On a high level, we can assume this is going to be a repeat of the 1970s with Japanese imports: Detroit continues to do what Detroit does while haemmoraging market share, eventually they have a series of come-to-Jesus moments where they make the electric K-car (or just start selling BYDs under license in the Geo style) to try to reposition themselves, but eventually the size of the market meant that "foreign" cars ended up being made domestically anyway. The smart play would be to jump to the end of the board: which state wants to be the first to get a Chinese EV plant running and generating local jobs and tax revenue?

When will someone make an affordable model kit of the almighty AA20-class steam locomotive? :cry:

I need four tater tots and a small cheeseburger.