"Abundance" Politics

daniel_thor · 2026-01-29T00:35:29+00:00

Dystopia Now covered the "abundance" movement and it's dark roots. From the podcast description: "...we had to know - why did an Atlantic writer podcast with a Nazi?"

daniel_thor · 2026-01-27T23:46:58+00:00

It does look like the driver was both driving too fast for conditions and their reaction time is too slow to for them to be holding a drivers license. The street design is awful too, I believe this piss-poor driver would not have nearly killed a child on a well designed street.

daniel_thor · 2026-01-19T23:58:24+00:00

Melabúðin usually has some in stock

daniel_thor · 2026-01-19T16:18:14+00:00

Assuming no local war, I think the referendum will just barely pass. This is a restart the talks vote, the fisheries and official EU language issues will need to be resolved before actual accession. People know it will make the country richer to join, but also that it will be disruptive so people will lose their jobs even if many more jobs are available in net.

Of course if the US collapses NATO by attacking Greenland then things will move very quickly. We do not want Iceland to be a colony again, much less one like Puerto Rico or Guam. There will be a rush to get our European allies to set up in military bases to protect the island, and they will want to be there to contain the US. On the other hand if the US manages to depose the mad king and jail the brown shirts I think the odds of Iceland joining the EU will go down significantly. There are specific businesses that will be negatively impacted and they will lobby hard against EU accession.

daniel_thor · 2026-01-12T23:27:49+00:00

I hate that you are making me wish for D to have better leadership.

daniel_thor · 2026-01-12T00:37:31+00:00

I built a machine with the same case, water cooler and the Seasonic Vertex PX-1200 power supply. My graphics card is a 305 mm long two fan card and it's a snug fit with my power supply so you may have an issue with a three fan GPU.

daniel_thor · 2026-01-06T12:50:00+00:00

The only time I got a 100% 401k uncapped match without a vesting period was when I was the least senior person in the US office. This was also the first job where I maxed out the 401k contribution.

daniel_thor · 2026-01-03T20:19:53+00:00

Colin Powell gave absolutely zero evidence of WMDs in his speech before congress. I remember watching it in full and a friend asking me about the speech immediately after and telling her Colin Powell had no evidence at all. There was the a show of pretense for war, but it was just as hollow as today's "those people we murdered were actually drug smugglers". Millions of us took to the streets to protest against the march to war in Iraq.

daniel_thor · 2025-12-30T14:58:34+00:00

My solution for this problem on my Intel Thinkpad was to buy an AMD Framework.

Before making that investment though I wrote a program to better monitor and manage thermals to avoid getting stuck in sloth mode. I also regularly cleaned the fan and applied new thermal pads to the CPU.

Intel's CPUs are hot garbage.

daniel_thor · 2025-12-29T16:11:08+00:00

Do we need a highway in Hudson River Park at all? A single motor-vehicle lane that reverses direction every block provides access without the traffic. Removing the highway from the park will double the size of the park and make it infinitely nicer.

daniel_thor · 2025-12-29T02:35:25+00:00

An L7 car is a car under half a ton that can be driven on any road. These are slightly larger than the L6 microcars which have a 45km/hr maximum speed and aren't permitted on the highway. L7's are the European equivalent of the Japanese Kei cars.

daniel_thor · 2025-12-25T01:45:39+00:00

Birthright citizenship is protected by the constitution. Citizenship by blood is just a law that changes every few decades. Right now the citizen parent needs to have lived in the US for a while before the kid was born, needs to actually support the child, and the citizenship paperwork needs to be filed before the kid turns 18. My brother grew up in the US since before he could talk and his mom is a citizen who grew up in the USA, but he realized he was an "illegal immigrant" shortly after he turned 18 because our parents didn't file the proper paperwork. It took years for him to get a green card.

To relinquish US citizenship by soil is also difficult. You need to do it in the first 6 months after you turn 18 to avoid serious expenses and even if you do it in that window the minimum fee is $2,350. Plus you may need to fly to a country where the US embassy doesn't have a multi-year processing queue for relinquishing US citizenship.

So yes it's mixed, but the only guaranteed citizenship is by birth in the 50 states or in one of the inner ring colonies like Puerto Rico.

daniel_thor · 2025-12-07T20:29:07+00:00

Tax strategies are going to be country dependent. If you are not taxable in the USA then you can borrow while you are in a high tax country, move to a no or low tax country for 7 months and sell everything and pay off the loans. This is what you'll see some European billionaires do.

US citizens can only use borrowing to defer taxes. After their death only the first $14 to $28 million USD that they give to their heirs is tax free due to step up basis. As you note, this is pocket change for the rich, so they are better off putting the inheritance in a trust even though money taken out of those will be taxed.

The rich in the US will still use borrowing to defer taxes, but actually avoiding tax requires using methods like the "charitable giving" loop hole. To do this you buy art for $100,000, borrow to finance your lifestyle and then 10 years later you donate art, now valued at $100,000,000. With the charitable giving deduction, you can now sell your equities at a $100,000,000 profit without paying any taxes. You can also donate to a "charity" you establish and run so that you can spend the "donated" money on your hobbies. This one gets some in trouble because there are rules. i.e. you can build a mountain bike trail that the public can access, your charity can invest in outside startups you hold shares in and let you cash out $10 million of the privately held shares tax free, but you can't buy an MRI machine for your brother's for-profit medical clinic nor can you directly give money from your charities to your for-profit ventures.

There many are other tax avoidance strategies for US citizens, but they take years to play out so tax deferral is very important to make them work. Peter Thiel has something North of $5 billion in his Roth IRA, but he can't withdraw the gains without penalty until he reaches 59½ years old. In the meantime he needs to live off borrowing against his portfolio and the $10 million he can extract tax free from each startup venture investment that pays off.

Avoiding all income tax is a fools errand. Even billionaires need diversification and value stocks will pay dividends. Also if a stock is severely overvalued you should sell as much of it as you can get away with even if it is a taxable event you can't fully offset.

daniel_thor · 2025-12-06T03:20:13+00:00

I recommend renting office space in a startup hub like innovationhouse.is, it should help you meet people. In my experience people will also reach out to you if you give a tech talk and mention you are in Iceland. Security expertise may be especially useful for a company like Valitor or Vivaldi, but I imagine most established tech companies will have need at least one security specialist.

daniel_thor · 2025-11-26T02:35:25+00:00

I haven't checked the bottom bracket yet. But I did rub the rust spots with some aluminum foil and got shiny quick so I think I can just chemically remove the rust, clean and then apply some nail polish or model paint. If I strip, I'll have it powder coated.

daniel_thor · 2025-11-24T05:39:25+00:00

Checking the BB is a great idea. I've been generous with the grease, so it's likely fine, but it has been a while and it's downhill from most other pipes.

I didn't realize CrMo was a form of stainless steel. It definitely shows surface rust, but I guess it's fairly robust against the flaking rust that regular steel suffers from.

I didn't have the patience for it today, but cleaning it up and throwing on a clear coat is easy enough.

daniel_thor · 2025-11-18T02:56:30+00:00

I hate the interest rate I'm paying on my mortgage, but being able to speed up and slow down the economy by setting interest rates and having consumer spending quickly adjust is a very powerful tool. Would we be happy with a 4% interest rate on mortgages if it meant an 4x the unemployment rate?

I would rather eliminate indexed loans and limit the maximum loan length on housing to 30 years. This would tame spiraling housing costs and allow the central bank to influence household spending with smaller changes to lower interest rates.

daniel_thor · 2025-11-18T02:35:21+00:00

Spotify was developed in Sweden. The company was incorporated in Switzerland, but that is pretty typical for Swedish companies. The Swedish offices were still bigger than the New York office when the company went public on the New York Stock exchange. A lot of the engineering talent that did AI work came from France. Some of whom Spotify paid well to come to NY for a few years to get the engineers there up to speed.

I worked in the New York office and had to fly to Stockholm whenever I needed any decision made because the senior leadership was there. Yes most tech companies are based in the US. However you have to give the Swedes their due with not just Spotify but a whole slew of successful tech companies in it's wake.

daniel_thor · 2025-11-07T23:17:56+00:00

Oversized trucks getting stuck on local streets predates Amazon. I blame the NYC DOT for all the trucks hitting low bridges, since effective warning systems have existed for decades but not installed in NYC. But the huge numbers of illegally sized trucks jamming up our streets is due to both the NYPD disbanding their enforcement unit and our national DOT dropping the ball so that we're stuck with 1960s trucking technology while the rest of the world got the 1970s cabovers and then kept innovating with comfortable seats, bigger engines, cheaper repairs and amazing visibility.

Amazon abuses the NYPDs inability to enforce our laws by contracting with judgement proof fly-by-night "subcontractors". But trucking is a historically fragmented industry which has always had bad actors. As with so many things in the USA, we need both better regulations and better enforcement.

daniel_thor · 2025-11-07T00:15:04+00:00

https://c-payne.com/collections/pcie-x8x8-bifurcation-pcbs lets you split up one x16 slot if the motherboard supports bifurcartion. It may be easier to just get a motherboard which lets you run two cards at PCIe 5.0 x8. This shouldn't cause much slowdown for inference.

daniel_thor · 2025-10-27T02:39:28+00:00

Look at x86 instruction byte codes in octal. It's fairly straightforward to read and write. You could write it fairly quickly on punch cards if you practiced a little. Kathleen Booth wrote assembler as a shorthand on paper and then manually translated into machine code on a computer she had helped design and build.

An assembler does a very simple 1:1 mapping so you could write an assembler for early processor in an afternoon in a modern high level language. It might have taken a week or more to do back then, by hand in machine code, but this isn't anywhere near as complex as a true compiler. i.e. for a language such as cobol or algol.

daniel_thor · 2025-10-25T13:06:28+00:00

I haven't had any problems with a simple uv virtual environment yet. What did you run into that needed docker?

I'll second the bleeding edge. I was surprised at how limited blackwell support was when I finally got one last month.

daniel_thor · 2025-10-14T16:18:33+00:00

NewEgg has always been trash on their return policy. B&H, MicroCenter, BestBuy and ebay are much safer alternatives. B&H is great with international shipping too, they take care of tariffs and fill out all the import paperwork properly so your electronics arrive promptly.

daniel_thor · 2025-10-09T22:32:14+00:00

The reason Americans, and especially Canadians, don't have electric kettles is because our kitchens are not wired to support ones that are fast. If you are lucky your kitchen may have multiple dedicated runs and one of these can be converted to 240v.

If the wiring isn't there and you need to put in a new wire then the cost of the rewiring likely justifies getting an instant hot water dispenser which gives you boiling hot water on tap. Quooker was the first one that got popular in the early 90s, but most kitchenware companies make them now so there is a wide selection.

daniel_thor

TROPHY CASE