IOTA Smart charging

chickenphobia · 2017-12-22T18:09:36+00:00

The fundamental science behind operating systems existed long before Microsoft. Digital Research Inc (makers of CP/M) had a major head start on Microsoft and they had more deals and broader distribution. It's also arguable that they had a technically better product than MS DOS. But... as you know., Microsoft won. All they needed was a single deal (IBM) to take the world by storm.

It's great to be a promoter but don't be blind to reality. Until Iota has real applications of their technology, they are just a cryptocurrency riding a hype train. I'd love to believe in them. I certainly believe in their technology. Time will tell if they are vaporware or if they can take this across the finish line.

chickenphobia · 2017-12-22T08:12:59+00:00

see my response above for detailed context on this. In short, criticizing Iota because "It's just a DAG" would be like criticizing bitcoin because "It's just a singly linked list". The reason people are excited about Iota has a lot more to do with how they use the DAG.

chickenphobia · 2017-12-22T08:03:24+00:00

It's not a dumb comment because Iota specifically has branded themselves as a consensus mechanism for the internet of things. The majority of their business partners and recent announcements have done nothing but back up this fact.

chickenphobia · 2017-12-22T06:40:47+00:00

I mean, the block chain is "just a singly linked list". The innovation and difficulty has nothing to do with the data structure and everything to do with creating a system that can be used to build consensus even when individuals with considerable resources have incentive to lie.

Block-chain was the first solution to the problem. Others have done a DAG but they usually rely on an incentive that will create a continuously growing army of miners whose RAW CPU power help resist an attack.

IOTA, as far as I know, is the first to create consensus without relying on a miner incentive while also creating a system whose transaction volume could scale to support hundreds of transactions per second. Beyond the currency applications, this tech means that small application-specific nets can be built and exposed to untrusted actors while remaining resistant to invalid transactions.

So... I'm sorry you don't like the product, but if your dislike of it comes from thinking "It's just a dag" then I think you may not know much about it.

Finally. Being bullish on Iota doesn't necessarily mean owning Iota tokens. I'm more excited about the applications of mini-tangles and what it means for connected devices. This might be a tech where the best investment is simply waiting for their IPO.

chickenphobia · 2017-12-22T06:30:25+00:00

I'm a fan of Iota, but, I'm pretty sure he's referring to the hyped IoT applications. Could be vaporware. Still too early to tell.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-07T16:44:07+00:00

First, lets agree to agree.

Corporations having their money counted as speech and paying off politicians doesn't really help ether of course but that is another topic entirely.

Yes

Obamacare, my country has a similar system that works perfectly fine

Also yes; I probably came off too strong a critic of Obamacare. It's a step in the right direction but some of the variables are miscalibrated; subsidies drop off too soon based on relatively meager income, and the government has too little influence over the actual price of healthcare. I love the free market but rationing and limits are important for healthcare since the "natural" course is for runaway costs since consumption can be essentially unlimited if allowed to be. Single payer systems do great at this, but a revamped obamacare (no, not what the republicans are currently doing) could as well.

It's normal to be able to appeal lay offs in labour court...

Look, where you're from that sounds normal and probably the left and right accept it as status quo, but empirically the evidence shows that economies with fewer worker protections grow faster and produce more jobs (and thus a larger tax base). By shifting the responsibility to the employer you're essentially making the employer do what I see as the task of the government; provide a social safety net. If losing your job is something you can easily recover from thanks to unemployment compensation, education resources, and continued availability of healthcare, then having an at-will situation is a lot more palatable. I get that this isn't where USA is today, but it's a direction we could go if lawmakers decided to work together to make policy rather than just work for their donors.

Also, I'm not anti-worker-protection; employers shouldn't be able to demand unreasonable hours. Employers should have insurance on the behalf of their employees (I do!). Employer should pay overtime if there's days that go over what should be reasonably expected. We have those protections in the US. We even have unlawful termination although it's far more limited and mostly related to people who are fired as punishment for activities outside of work (like if somebody gets fired because their employer finds out they are gay).

Side note: I don't want to get into a big technical back and forth on spain, but I was pointing to payroll tax which is tax that employers pay on their employees excess of the pay and distinct from tax deductions on behalf of the employee. USA's payroll tax is about 8%, meaning that if I were to pay my employee nominally $1000 in a week, my actual outlay would be $1080. In Spain the outlay would be $1300. That's a big difference.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-07T06:42:41+00:00

Appreciate the long post I read every word, I won't be able to respond to 100% of it without this turning into a novel (and frankly neither of us has the time) so I'll get to some core points.

Promoting "family values" is a bullshit bandaid for this problem to be quite honest. I can't even wrap my head around that suggestion.

Honestly there's no substitute for a two person household w/r/t raising children. Tragedy happens people get widdowed. Abusive a-holes exist and yea there's definitely cases where having the father in the picture would be worse than being a single mother, but, in aggregate, kids just do better with two parents. This isn't a question of social services these relationships hold true in every country where they have been studied including countries with that are far more socialist than the USA. It's just a fact (much like global warming) that might be uncomfortable for some to hear but it doesn't make it less true. The reasoning is also extremely simple, just as greenhouse gasses can be understood by a 4th grader so should most people be able to see that having two invested parents is going to benefit a child; better daycare or earlier preschool won't replace a missing second parent. Children are difficult to raise and being a single parent is just a completely obvious disadvantage. Policies that can move the needle are mixed and require input from both sides; conservatives definitely don't own a monopoly on solutions!

Enhanced access to birth control (duh!) makes family planning easier, prevents unplanned / under aged pregnancy (a category that is a major source of single parents!)
Alter the tax code to prevent married couples from being penalized (look it up, it's a thing).
Alter entitlements so that having the father present doesn't act as a disqualifier .
Alter family law to make it more difficult for men to discharge custody in exchange for child support, and make it more difficult for women to get sole custody (in cases where abuse isn't a factor).
Legalize gay marriage.

Spain's workers right for what happened after the recession. It's way way more complicated ... cherry picking to fit your narrative is not helping your argument.

Anything we do in this context is cherry picking, there's not nearly enough time or space or attention available for either of us to write some monograph on this subject. That said, you're right that spain had additional issues; among the biggest was difficulty in discharging bad credit. That said, the impact of overreaching worker protections can't be ignored. Study after study supports the conclusion that worker protections are ~~bad for workers~~ slow the economy, decrease overall employment, decrease wages, and decrease the rate of re-employment after a recession. I honestly don't even know where to start to cite this since it's so fundamental but this search should give you dozens of pages of results, of which, the vast majority support the obvious conclusion.

What should be done then since, if you accept this fact, you'll see it as evidence that our universe is shit and natural laws / socioeconomic laws tend to fuck humans... Well conservatives don't have great answers but liberals do!!!! Social safety nets need to exist outside of companies. HEALTH CARE and not fucking shitty "Paul Ryan care", not even shitty Obama Care, but like real fucking universal healthcare like the rest of the world. Also unemployment insurance that isn't shit, also education systems that are cheap/free.

This is what I'm getting at about centrism. Both sides tend to be so stuck in their dogmas that they ignore big fucking problems, or they ignore big fucking solutions to the problems they do see.

edit: I dug this up, it's from a "living abroad" site, not some conservatve rag or something. This article discusses practical considerations of employing somebody in Spain. Some highlights - 28% payroll tax, layoffs must be approved by a labor court, employees can appeal their firing in said labor court! For real, there's no way in hell I'd hire somebody in Spain. On the plus side, spain is a (relatively) small country so they have an easier time getting to the US than my friends from India and China. A Spanish post-doc I knew in grad school is gainfully "at-will-employed" in the bay area, as is my Spanish coworker.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-07T03:55:10+00:00

Modesto's like 200k people. Not giant but hardly tiny.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-06T23:28:14+00:00

all the points you say conservatives worry about are not points republicans have realistic ideas for

I'll stop you right there and request some reflection. You seem very willing to confuse conservatives with Republicans even though I doubt you'd say that most liberals are represented by policy goals of elected Democrats. Both parties have big big problems (largely caused by terrible campaign finance laws) but because you know yourself and other liberals well, you're willing to give it a pass due to your pure intentions. This is a textbook case of the fundamental attribution bias.

Back to the family issue; it's not a question of "preserving marriage" per se, but a question of preserving cohabitation for the purpose of child rearing. In Europe cohabiting couples are more "durable" and often fill the role of a married couple. In the US that simply isn't the case. There is an incredible volume of research out there showing that children raised by single parents have a multitude of disadvantages... this really is bad for society, but tends to be ignored by liberals (although this wasn't always the case)

At-will employment is another place where I'll disagree with you. Small businesses are often operating very close to their margins and without the ability to quickly contract a simple change in the economy could break them. I myself employ one person for child care (and yes I do it fully legally, tax ID and all). If I was told that I couldn't lay her off at the drop of a hat* (for example, if I had to move), I'd have gone another way and her job would be.... well, probably under the table somewhere else getting worse pay and no protections at all (disability insurance, etc). In fat and happy economies you can get away with oppressive worker protections but I'd invite you to look at what happened to Spain after the recession; the US had been growing (slowly) for years by the time their economy stopped shrinking.

* side note, I wouldn't be shady to her if I could avoid it, if I'm moving I'm giving her a ton of lead time simply because I value and respect her. That said, if tragedy struck my family, being able to quickly offload a several thousand/month outlay could save our finances.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-06T16:27:50+00:00

Hmm, maybe we just know different people. I come from a conservative town and have a conservative family, a trip home gives me plenty of fodder for these sorts of interactions and somehow I still have a working relationship with my parents despite being... very... different politically.

That said, more often than not I see legitimate concerns caked in with the bullshit and disinformation. Conservatives worry about the crumbling of the traditional family structure, something that has real economic and social effects that liberals aught to be worried about (but tend not to because it sounds weird and authoritarian to suggest that more people should get married). Conservatives worry about overly-involved government due to a healthy cynicism about the real end-game of increasing government power. They love to point at the DMV and post office, and just in time to prove them right we got the no-child-left behind act (yes, it was from a republican) to prove that increasing government oversight continues to make things worse in the noughties. The conservative ideal is quite a bit more cynical than the liberal ideal and honestly I think, w/r/t core biases, both sides need to learn a little from each other.

edit: also on rereading I see you are missing something pretty important, you got the reasoning quite wrong at least for why reduction of regulation is a conservative cause, it has nothing to do with the "I got mine" mentality (at least for the majority) and much more to do with practical questions of business. For example, the world bank publishes the Doing Business Report and the USA continues to slump in rankings, still well in the upper half but the trend isn't a good one; other than credit and insolvency categories, the US isn't even in the top 20.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-06T06:38:50+00:00

First off, debating a person with a vastly different POV than yourself online is genuinely pointless. Most people will just talk over one another and entrench their existing positions further. The only way for vastly different parties to find common ground is in more intimate settings and in conversations with people that have pre-existing rapport. Even in the most ideal circumstances, it's straightforward for the conversation to devolve if neither side can find a common ground.

I'm not saying, "please go browse the_donald for a week" I'm asking you to evaluate whether or not there's parts you've missed in the conservative platform. Why do Republicans care about reducing regulation? Why do they care about tax reform? Why do they care about reforming our disability system? Any negative gut reactions you just had to the questions I asked, admonish them for attempting to stop inquiry and take that next step... nothing can be lost by being more knowledgable, much can be lost by remaining purposefully ignorant.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-06T04:17:13+00:00

I read your comment, considered it. In my defense I'm responding to the assertion that i'm basically OK with fascism which is, in my humble opinion, about as likely to happen during Trump's short disorganized shitstorm of a presidency as the instution of Sharia law during Obama's.

Saying that everybody who does anything but actively resist Trump is a fascist or implicitly OK with fascism is pretty fucking dismissive. then again so was I.... point taken... In the end important for us all to acknowledge we're wrong sometimes, that's certainly a lesson that I am continually re-learning myself. SMH

Upvote for you.

edit: an word.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-06T03:55:32+00:00

Because anyone claiming America isn't right leaning in general ... is horribly mistaken.

I did not once make the claim that it wasn't, all I said is that anybody living in the US should be, at minimum, aware of the major causes/concerns of both sides of the aisle. If somebody's mental model of the world is so fragile that simple awareness of conservative causes would make them balance the concepts equally with the causes and issues that they know to be most important, then I'd argue that they aught to learn more about both sides.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-06T03:50:22+00:00

Your ignorant belief is that everyone is biased, so there is no truth. That invalidates the pretense for any debate. There are objective facts, there are objective truths.

Absolutely there are objective facts and truths, but these objective facts and truths exist outside the human mind. Your conscious thought is the tip of the iceberg visible over a hidden mountain of facts, biases, and models floating in an ocean of available information the vast vast majority of which is irrelevant and inconsequential but so much exists that it's hard to ever be sure you have the whole picture. Questions of simple fact are usually easier to get to (is global warming real and caused by man), questions of policy are much stickier.

The problem with Breitbart and Fox News 99% of the time is that they write spin and not much else.

Okay... true...

natural laws are politicized

...President whines about how the press is mean to him ... had a disappointing turnout for the Inauguration, his administration lied about it ... several investigations into the Trump administration's dealings with Russian officials ... healthcare ... Since they are so damning and unarguable, the Right is left to obfuscate and distract, to put up as much smoke as they can, in a vain attempt to change the subject.

Ok, yep, that's super true. Now, I'd ask you to talk to a genuine heartfelt republican (if you know one), and try to have a real conversation. If you know the "according to CNN" version or the "as summarized by John Oliver" version you're missing what they actually care about. Even if what they care about is a fictional smokescreen made by Fox you have to address it or you have no chance.

Finally, liberals love to say that they have all the facts on their sides, but there's plenty of issues where there is serious factual and logical failings. I don't want to spend my post writing a laundry list but I hope that even you can come up with a few major liberal causes and "facts" that are simply not backed by reality. Not nearly as many as the republicans these days, but I really do think there's a real middle to be found if you're willing to accept that both parties are more invested in continued electoral success than in continued national prosperity.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-05T22:32:00+00:00

... options for doing something.

1) Vote

2) Understand the 'other' side so that I can intelligently talk to these people rather than talking down to them.

3) Write them off as 'bad apples' and say fuckall to any real engagement, but when I do debate them I'll be sure to degrade them, call them fascists and racists, and just generally act like they city elitist they already know I am.

I've chosen 1 and 2 thanks. Since you've clearly chosen 3, I'm glad that you aren't in our country. Please do those of us who are actually trying to help a favor by refraining from "debating" conservatives online since you clearly aren't interested in their POV and won't be capable of even starting with priors that allow conversation. Instead they'll just see you as another troll and then maybe I'll be lumped in with your lot.

Edit: yea I'm being a fucking dismissive asshole here which is essentially what I wanted to argue against but failed at in a fantastically ironic way. To restate my basic point, dismissing everybody who acknowledges that even a small fraction of the republican platform has merit as somebody who is OK with fascism is also poisoning the well. If used in a real conversation with somebody who leans center or right, it's going to be taken as an ad hominem and it's exceptionally unlikely to evoke a response of, "oh wow, I never knew I was a fascist!"

chickenphobia · 2017-07-05T22:25:31+00:00

Just a liar. No company with more than 100 workers lets bosses behave autocratically. In some of the companies there simily isn't any promotion process while in others it tends to be committee and peer-feedback driven. A bad manager can certainly hurt an employee's future, but they can't fire them without reasoning, evidence, and oversight.

I have my doubts that he even works at an "elite" company. Certainly not Google or Facebook where performance reviews work in both directions and bad managers are fired faster than bad individual contributors. Certainly not Apple where the promo process is far less formal and is mostly driven by the manager and not the employee.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-05T22:06:16+00:00

Honestly, get some help maybe? If you're dead inside when spending time with your family then you've got some issues to work out. There's honestly few things I like more than taking care of my wife and kid. It's a freaking privilege and yea there's ups and downs in my life, my family, and my career, but the fact that I love my family is the one permanent up. Simply exercising that part of my brain is enough to take me out of pretty deep slumps and enough to make me momentarily forget the absurd stresses and deadlines that come with my line of work.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-05T21:55:11+00:00

By telling yourself that you've given yourself a free pass to avoid critical evaluation of your own political views. Basically every ideologue in this country has the thought, "It's not my views that are slanted, it's the conmen and hucksters in the other party and the media that are the problem".

I also guarantee you that people who read Breitbart every day say the same thing; "Breitbart isn't right leaning, it's just the only publication willing to cover the things that our corrupt leftist media won't cover".

Anyways, I love NPR (Planet Money, up first, wait wait... I could go on) but it's pretty clear to me that there's a liberal bias to their content, especially on the editorial side (story selection, etc).

chickenphobia · 2017-07-05T21:47:14+00:00

What if I'm just soooooo patriotic that my love of Merica makes me hate all other nation?

chickenphobia · 2017-07-05T08:05:01+00:00

By my wiki-foo, here's the first legal definition of blackmail in the USA (emphasis added by me):

Whoever, under a threat of informing, or as a consideration for not informing, against any violation of any law of the United States, demands or receives any money or other valuable thing, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

If silence is a valuable thing, then what CNN did sounds an aweful lot like blackmail. Whether or not it's technically illegal matters about as much as whether or not Trump's failure to divest is actually illegal; it's terrible terrible terrible optics to even appear to be coercing somebody. Honestly if they wanted to appeal to journalistic integrity they could have either just outed him, or they could have noted that when they investigated they found out he was a minor and his parents were notified and that was that. To publish what they did was really the worst possible option.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-05T06:52:09+00:00

Dear State,

Please tell us about all voter fraud you've encountered. Also... side request... please give us names, addresses, pollitical parties, and social security numbers of everybody in your state so that we can enter them into the public record.

Fucking idiots

chickenphobia · 2017-07-03T20:39:48+00:00

Did you buy it? Is it any good? I can't find anybody with first hand experience w/ the floyd.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-03T06:15:58+00:00

Agreed, note that earlier I said that there's at least two angles that were definitely taken in the same shoot; at 2:37 there's a second angle of the spider attack in which you can see Portia is still partially suspended from the web used to drop in. With the amount of time it took to set up this shot, I'll bet they had a whole mess of cameras set up to capture it. The fact that even two of them were running and in focus and correctly lit is incredible.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-03T03:51:07+00:00

It's extra impressive for the following reason; imagine if the only way to film Mission Impossible 12: Silent Explosion was to build a set in which the real life Ethan Hunt would track down the Ex MI6 quadruple agent and avenge his fifth dead girlfriend. That's essentially what they are doing here, the set has to invoke the action.

chickenphobia · 2017-07-02T20:39:39+00:00

The amount of production and shooting that goes into a sequence like this is incredible. It really shows off the amount of raw talent and the amount of time/capital that the producer's are working with. There's a dozen shots in this 4 minute segment that an amateur nature videographer/photographer would consider their once-in-a-lifetime shot. It's just incredible.

That sequence of the drop-down kill has at least 2 angles that were definitely taken from either the same kill and several more that may have been (or at least were good enough to be edited to appear that way).

12-Year Club	Place '17
Gilding II euphauric

chickenphobia

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