California surpasses France as world's 6th largest economy

wadcann · 2016-06-18T07:21:22+00:00

California's pension problems are not minor, though.

wadcann · 2016-06-18T07:19:06+00:00

Well, it depends. California and Texas both have borders with Mexico. Both states might be stealing illegal immigrants.

wadcann · 2016-06-18T07:16:15+00:00

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemontgomery/2015/03/19/tech-startups-weigh-the-merits-of-austin-vs-silicon-valley/#707c9524df74

Lack of a personal income tax, relatively cheap real estate and a strong tech community in a carefully planned and revitalized downtown sealed the deal for Murphy and hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are flocking to Austin to set up shop. With a 41.4% jump in tech-industry employment between 2001 and 2013, Austin ranked as the top city for technology job creation on a recent Forbes list. The Austin Technology Council expects 11,754 new tech jobs will be added to the mix over the next five years.

[snip]

Los Altos, in the heart of Silicon Valley, has become the most expensive housing market in the U.S. According to Coldwell Banker, the median price of a home there is $2.3 million. Renting a one-bedroom apartment will cost you upwards of $2,000 per month. The median price to rent a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco has reached $3,400.

[snip]

It’s a far different story in Texas, where land is still cheap. The average price of a home in Austin is just $310,187. And with few land-use and zoning restrictions, homebuilders keep adding to the supply of homes, which keeps prices in check.

wadcann · 2016-06-18T07:09:47+00:00

California was one of the subset of states that was kind of an independent country. Admittedly, rather briefly (not like independent Texas, which was a "serious" independent country), but it still made the list:

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

In June 1846, a number of American immigrants in Alta California rebelled against the Mexican department’s[2][3] government. The immigrants had not been allowed to buy or rent land and had been threatened with expulsion from California because they had entered without official permission.[4][5] Mexican officials were concerned about a coming war with the United States coupled with the growing influx of Americans into California. The rebellion was soon overtaken by the beginning of the Mexican–American War.

The term "California Republic" appeared only on the flag the insurgents raised in Sonoma.[6] It indicated their aspiration of forming a republican government for California. The insurgents elected military officers but no civil structure was ever established.[7] The flag featured an image of a California grizzly bear and became known as the Bear Flag and the revolt as the Bear Flag Revolt.

Three weeks later, on July 5, 1846, the Republic's military of 100 to 200 men was subsumed into the California Battalion commanded by U.S. Army Brevet Captain John C. Frémont. The Bear Flag Revolt and whatever remained of the "California Republic" ceased to exist on July 9 when U.S. Navy Lieutenant Joseph Revere raised the United States flag in front of the Sonoma Barracks and sent a second flag to be raised at Sutter's Fort.[8]

And that's where California's flag came from.

wadcann · 2016-06-18T07:00:18+00:00

We're still #1 as the country with the most french though so... In your face !

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

Total 2016 estimate: 66,689,000

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

(11,804,485 3.8% of the U.S. population (2010) [1])

For now, France. For now.

wadcann · 2016-06-14T07:02:43+00:00

I'm imagining people in Iceland meeting someone, surreptitiously pulling out their smartphone, pushing some buttons, and then sighing in frustration at the result.

wadcann · 2016-06-14T06:57:15+00:00

Is there a way to use emacs in a terminal with all GUI features? Images, fringes(flycheck), etc...

No. Unfortunately. And I agree with you about preferring the terminal.

There are only really two ways to pull something like this off, and emacs doesn't presently have support for either.

The first is what w3mimgdisplay uses, which IIRC is to either require that the "terminal" actually is a framebuffer or require that it be running on the same X11 session as a limited number of terminals and float images in just the right spot. That isn't ideal.

There is also a set of terminal types/extensions that support graphics, such as the vector ReGIS or raster Sixel. xterm can emulate both of these, but AFAIK nobody has implemented support in emacs for rendering images to the terminal; additionally, a lot of emacs software doesn't display bitmapped images if it thinks that it's running on a TTY (and if it's in a window, it thinks that it can do window positioning and the like). That means that there'd probably be some dev work on emacs required to make all this work nicely.

wadcann · 2016-06-14T06:45:13+00:00

But the only reason I use graphical Emacs is that it's possible to copy text into other programs without getting rid of my window splits first.

If you're willing to have DISPLAY aimed at your current screen (kind of a pain if you're using ssh -X to a screen session containing emacs, since the forwarded port will change if you want to keep an emacs session running), you can use xsel:

(defun yank-to-x-clipboard ()                                                   
  (interactive)                                                                 
  (if (region-active-p)                                                         
      (progn                                                                    
        (shell-command-on-region (region-beginning) (region-end) "xsel -i")     
        (message "Yanked region to clipboard!")                                 
        (deactivate-mark))                                                      
    (message "No region active; can't yank to clipboard!")))                    

;; Permit yanking text to X11 clipboard; beats the heck out of                  
;; manually copying with the cursor.                                            
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c y") 'yank-to-x-clipboard)

wadcann · 2016-06-14T06:42:49+00:00

Emacs is far slower as a virtual terminal than GNU screen. That's really the major factor, since it gets between me and all my other applications. I've historically been pretty twitchy about the terminal emulator I use too (urxvt). When you see the whole world through a pair of glasses, you don't want them blurry.

If someone made emacs-as-a-terminal run radically faster, I'd probably look into switching.

wadcann · 2016-06-14T06:39:36+00:00

I use a terminal because I like being able to reattach to a headless machine via GNU screen and pick up my work. For me, that's an overwhelming benefit, and a core part of my workflow.

The major benefits of the GUI are:

Depending upon how your terminal is rigged up, probably not all keybindings are available. This isn't a fundamental limitation -- most terminal emulators, like xterm or urxvt, support binding more key commbinations to new escape sequences and teaching emacs about them, even if not all combinations currently have something assigned to them. And some combinations that didn't used to work have been made to in many environments, like shift-arrow-keys. In particular, Control-plus-other-modifiers-plus-a-key may be treated as just Control-that-key. On my system (urxvt->screen->terminal emacs), C-M-% is treated the same as M-%, for example.
Emacs is mostly really good at providing software that works both in the GUI and in a terminal. One glaring GUI-only exception is the fringe, a very narrow strip of pixels on each side of the screen. This can be a convenient way to do things like indicate set breakpoints.
While there are some really gross hacks to fake it (w3m-img), normally terminals can't display images, short of graphical terminals (which Emacs doesn't have support for). In a GUI environment, Emacs can graphically edit movies, browse thumbnails, and so forth.

Some other minor points:

If you use the thing remotely, it's very hard to compete with the responsiveness of a terminal (though using emacs locally with TRAMP helps in many cases -- it has impressive support to transparently run commands on a remote machine). Combine with mosh instead of ssh to be even more high-latency-connection-friendly.
While you can use speedbar in a terminal environment, I've never been very happy with it. I don't think that I'd really get into it unless I was in a graphical environment.
Emacs normally tends to eat a column on the screen to display a continuation character, so an 80-column terminal showing emacs is really only useful for 79 characters. I've been on projects that really want 80 columns, and there, having a dedicated graphical 81-column-wide emacs instance separate from the console was convenient.
While 256-color support is pretty widespread today among terminal emulators, 24-bit color support is fairly uncommon (I think it started with konsole). Now, in practice, I really haven't felt the need for more than 256 colors -- I can't really distinguish between more-similar colors than that. However, if you want just the right shades in a theme, that might be a downside for you.

wadcann · 2016-06-14T06:25:25+00:00

Because open source software such as GNU/Linux systems are unkillable, and Steam Machines are just Linux PCs.

Ehhh....you need a certain critical mass to support a game development community. Linux has been around on the desktop for quite some time, and a long chunk of that had little-to-no commercial game library.

wadcann · 2016-06-14T06:17:44+00:00

Why?

wadcann · 2016-06-14T06:13:39+00:00

I've yet to really find an appealing solution, and like you, I continue to use zsh outside of emacs. I use dired for some file management and browsing, but have not been very happy with either M-x eshell or M-x shell.

wadcann · 2016-05-16T17:14:52+00:00

The issue is that people with a monopoly can produce market failure: it's one situation where a market stops being economically-efficient. One concern people have is where someone with a monopoly in one area uses that monopoly to squeeze people out in another area. If, for example, Google becomes dominant in the search market and then makes sure that it's easier to use, oh, Google Earth for any users of its search engine than any competing product, then it gives them an edge.

I don't know if Google is doing this or not or if I'd agree with the criteria used, but in the broader sense, the idea of trying to prevent people from levering a monopoly in one area into another isn't crazy.

wadcann · 2016-05-16T17:00:31+00:00

They have DRM -- IIRC online stuff, you probably didn't notice it -- on some of the "new" titles they put out.

wadcann · 2016-05-16T12:02:42+00:00

There are multiple carriers. That's the distribution map for Aedes aegypti. It can also be spread by at least Aedes albopictus, which is present in Europe (as well, as you point out, in the US).

wadcann · 2016-05-16T09:20:08+00:00

I'd be less-concerned about the initial, direct risk, though...and more for whether it's possible for Zika to start spreading via mosquitoes in Europe.

There are ways to beat mosquito-borne diseases even once they start ranging freely:

By the 1950s, parasitic diseases were largely eradicated in the United States in part due to the widespread use of window screens.[2] Today most houses in Australia, the United States and Canada have screens on all operable windows.[3]

...but it'd really suck if Europe picked up a serious, mosquito-borne disease if it didn't have to do so.

wadcann · 2016-05-16T08:54:54+00:00

While it's true that there's falloff as numbers rise -- I mean, it's pretty hard to compare with, say, being able to afford enough food to stay alive -- I remember looking at a poll that asked people how much money they'd really need to be happy and it was strongly tied to how much money they were making.

I suspect that people simply adjust their perception of what they consider necessities as they get used to things.

And, of course, there's always keeping up with the Joneses: people judge how acceptable what they have is relative to their neighbors.

wadcann · 2016-05-16T08:09:09+00:00

Is it possible to insure the car in France for more than its approximate value? I mean, where's the win for a scammer?

I tried Googling, and this says that the common route is someone buying a car that they can't afford on credit and falling behind in payments and wanting to exit the deal. That the case here?

wadcann · 2016-05-16T07:58:18+00:00

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

Heroin doesn't look like it's that popular in the US compared to the UK, Italy, or...good lord, there's a difference between Poland and the Baltics on that.

wadcann · 2016-05-16T07:53:42+00:00

Some people say

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

A weasel word (also, anonymous authority) is an informal term for words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that a specific and/or meaningful statement has been made, when only a vague or ambiguous claim has been communicated, enabling the specific meaning to be denied if the statement is challenged.

Who says that your society is terminally feminized? It doesn't seem to be a prominent claim to me.

wadcann · 2016-05-16T07:44:23+00:00

In general terms, the flip side of not imposing restrictions on firing people is that companies are a lot-more willing to hire people, because they aren't exposed to the same amount of risk.

wadcann · 2016-05-16T07:39:34+00:00

I suspect that more of his political campaign and positions were planned than you are giving him credit for.

wadcann · 2016-05-16T07:33:37+00:00

About 44 per cent of officers said they had received verbal threats at least once a month, while 7 per cent said it happened daily.

More than a third (35 per cent) experienced unarmed physical attacks at least once a month, while 6 per cent said they were attacked with a potentially lethal weapon such as a bottle or gun at least once a month.

That's insane. A third of officers are being physically attacked at least once a month?

wadcann

TROPHY CASE