>At $3/coffee (black, nothing fancy) purchased on average four times per week across 4.5 years of school, the total came to roughly $1,700
$3 x 2 people x 365 days = ~$2K
A decent fully automatic Espresso machine is ~$1K. You load the beans once per week, water every day, and run the descaling cycle once every few months. And these things are modular as hell: if you are not intimidated by reading a service manual and know how to get around with a multimeter, you can get replacement parts from specialty shops and maintain them yourself at reasonable cost.
And the best thing is, you don't need to go anywhere. You wake up, crawl to the kitchen, press the button and enjoy the coffee.
Sadly, this is not very practical. A lithium cell in itself is a chemical time bomb: if it gets mechanically damaged or short-circuited, it has enough oomph to burn your device, skin or house. For factory-produced battery packs this effect is mitigated by having protective circuits that monitor charge level, temperature and a bunch of other parameters, cutting off the power if the cell is deemed too dangerous. But once you take a random lithium cell off the street and try to revitalize it, you are opening a can of worms: depending on how it was used, it might be full of dendrites [0], ready to cause a fiery short-circuit a few charges after. It might have structural damage due to gas buildup, or someone literally stepping on it. It could have been under direct sunlight for longer than it should, and so on.
It's fine to tinker around with it for your own experiments, but you don't want to ship it to anybody who's not going to be using it in a fireproof lab wearing eye protection.
A better idea would be to find a way to properly recycle the raw materials (i.e. extract the lithium from a dead cell), but that could be several orders of magnitude more challenging.
The quality of the political leadership is a direct consequence of what average people want from their leadership.
For the past decade or so the modus operandi has been:
1. Print more money, give it to bureaucrats and corporations
2. Toss in some non-monetary issue that will piss of ~50% of the population, while making the other ~50% feel entitled.
3. Promise one half to serve their interests by punishing the other half.
4. Print more money, give more to bureaucrats and corporations.
5. Rinse and repeat.
It seemed to work for over a decade: people gave up dreams of retirement, property ownership, having children, we were headed straight for normalizing living with parents while eating factory-produced bug proteins. Thankfully, the black-swan COVID-19 happened, the money printer got too cocky and people finally started to notice a problem.
The quality of life will decrease in the short term. But once enough people admit it's a bigger problem than being offended by what somebody on the Internet said, there will be finally demand for competent politicians offering viable solutions.
It's from a press-release that is intended to minimize the fears among investors. So the number likely includes part-time youtube moderators, cafeteria staff, and a lot of other minor jobs with incredibly high churn.
May I humbly ask for an example? In my personal experience, trying to rush a short-term solution while ignoring the long-term implications always makes situation worse. Like eating planting stock to address immediate hunger would cause a devastating famine next season.
>You don't get anything "for free", and cutting supports like this will inevitably doom a sputtering economy, when the actual solution was almost certainly more government spending, not less.
Government spending isn't free magic money either. You increase the amount of money in circulation, hoping that people will produce more goods. Instead, you increase the size of the bullshit economy - low-effort activities that only exist under the abundance of money. So more and more stuff gets imported from China because nobody in the right mind will take a $1/hour factory job if you can be a wellness youtuber for a multiple of that. The amount of useless bureaucracy grows, the number of people willing to take responsibility dwindles, but everyone is happy because, well, Mother Government takes care of us all.
Occasionally you notice that the wages don't grow and the housing is unaffordable because the workers don't really have any leverage anymore, but you brush off those thoughts because there are far too many distractions anyway.
Then BOOM, that fragile supply line involving slave labor in China and natural resources from Putin's friends gets broken, and suddenly, we have a shortage of everything, can't manufacture our own stuff, and that freshly minted dollar can buy you many shitcoins, but won't get you any baby formula.
I think, we are about to find out that excessive spending was nothing more than borrowing from our future prosperity, and the time for that debt to mature is coming fast.
Like it or not, the mainstream liberal arts education has devolved into a religion of its own. For instance, we treat climate change not as an engineering problem worth solving (how many "climate studies" prepare actual engineers for building nuclear power plants?), but as a source of irreparable guilt used to push back on ambition and launch personal attacks on people that do not agree with this viewpoint. This is textbook original sin straight from the medieval times. There are many other examples. Trying to call it out publicly very quickly gets you labeled with one of the modern-days equivalents of a heretic, and anyone trying to defend you will be considered a heretic by association.
There are many, many people who are not happy with the status quo, and they are looking for others who share their opinion. And since the media and the social networks are actively working on deciding who's opinion gets amplified, and who gets memory-holed, the people disagreeing with the mainstream agenda will have no choice but to join existing opposing organizations and adopt some of their views, even if they don't fully agree with them.
That's polarization of the society happening in front of our eyes.
I also remember Air Canada or WestJet doing the same to some small air company offering cheap flights from Kelowna (?), but I cannot find the news piece. Does anybody here have a better memory than myself?
The utterly inefficient and overpriced Canadian telecoms exist only because we allow one specific behavior:
1. A new local player comes to town, builds their own infrastructure (e.g. connects one building to fiber) and starts offering competitive service.
2. Rogers/Shaw/Bell/Telus immediately offer better terms for the residents of that building.
3. The competitor runs out of money and leaves.
4. The telecoms revert to their usual pricing.
This hurts competition, this hurts customers, this hurts long-term infrastructure resilience, but not a single politician ever comes close to even admitting the problem. I understand you cannot do it on the federal level where both major parties are on the telecoms' payroll, but it could be a very low-hanging fruit for someone running for a municipal position to address. But nope, identity politics, words, feelings and fighting climate change with paper straws seem to be what the electorate wants instead. Sad.
Heat keeps leaking out. The amount of stored heat is proportional to the cube of the linear size, the leak rate is proportional to the surface area (square of the linear size). Hence, the bigger the storage, the higher the efficiency.
Same why a flea can jump >10x its height, and a human cannot (square growth of strength, cubic growth of weight).
Don't blame the VCs, blame the public. Extra headcount absolutely increases your perceived credibility at an IPO, so they are growing this metric.
In defense of the public, if 10 devs out of 30 decide to leave and open a competing business, you're screwed. If 10 out of 1000 do that, nobody will notice.
They can and will use legal means to go after anyone trying to use the network this way in order to make the content less discoverable and discourage others from following suit.
Being coined as the Napster on Blockchain is the worst possible PR one can think of in their situation.
Curiosity question: has anyone done any work on reverse-engineering the Sony Mega Bass feature they used to have on old analog players (and ported to some early MP3 ones)? It sounded so much deeper than any phone/sound card would give. I'm wondering if it's some purely analog schenanigans (some tricky extra capacitors?) or if it can be replicated in pure software.
That would paint a huge red target mark on filecoin's back, given that they raised over a quarter-billion. They would take it down faster than you can have an 8TB HDD shipped to you.
More like an ad company driven by dark patterns that needs to pretend being good and nice and innovative as otherwise it will lose goodwill just like Facebook did.
>I can't think of a way to do things like proving that a particular debit happened.
Prove to whom? Banks have multiple layers of redundancy (including internal logs, paper/PDF statements, etc). So in case of any software error or a single-employee malice, it will be just fine.
>Part of the reason that bank errors are so inexpensive to fix is because transfers take 2-5 days.
That's a feature, not a bug. It gives you time to stop a transaction initiated by someone who stole your identity. With blockchain, you lose keys - you lose coins.
>For example, who wouldn't want a system that forces banks to track customer balances in a secure, private, and auditable data structure?
Crypto doesn't force banks to do that.
Also, if it was a real problem, there would be legislation for it since RSA became a thing.
And if it was, having a 3rd-party timestamping server and regular cryptographic signatures would be enough to solve it. No bank in their right mind would burn terawatts of power to prevent an error that has a 0.00001% chance of happening and costs virtually nothing to fix.
It's not that easy. Lots of Amazon's profits come from countless unprofitable startups blowing VC money on AWS. Google is swimming in money because numerous companies have generous ad budgets. Apple relies on people exchanging their smartphone every year or so because why not.
You cannot expect these things to go unchanged if the Fed stops throwing money around like it's used to. And if it doesn't, a bag of rice will soon cost $1000 because we have an shortage of farm workers and an oversupply of wellness bloggers, influencers and administrators.
$3 x 2 people x 365 days = ~$2K
A decent fully automatic Espresso machine is ~$1K. You load the beans once per week, water every day, and run the descaling cycle once every few months. And these things are modular as hell: if you are not intimidated by reading a service manual and know how to get around with a multimeter, you can get replacement parts from specialty shops and maintain them yourself at reasonable cost.
And the best thing is, you don't need to go anywhere. You wake up, crawl to the kitchen, press the button and enjoy the coffee.