“if Republic of China want to become Republic of Taiwan, they probably should publish the declaration of independence”

They don’t have that choice. While independence is quite popular in Taiwan, the PRC has made it very clear that they see any movement toward Taiwanese independence as cause for war. Going so far as to fire literal warning shots over the island in 2022 and 1996.

Depending on where the burn is you can just put the burnt part in a container with cool water instead. It’s much more practical to walk around with your hand in a cup than to be standing next to the faucet.

But the PRC is not a direct continuation of the Qing.

The USA can’t lay claim to Great Britain just because they used to part of the same country before the revolution.

Repeating what they heard is very different from automatically processing the chat to harvest personal information about the participants.

Just because some data is publicly available doesn’t mean all processing of that data is legal and moral.

You’re both getting side-tracked by this discussion of recording. The recording is likely legal in most places.

It’s the processing of that unstructured data to extract and store personal information that is problematic. At that point you go from simply recording a conversation of which you are a part, to processing and storing people’s personal data without their knowledge, consent, or expectation.

There are LED bars for mounting in your rear windows to display text to those behind you

Aluminium smelting is so energy intensive that Iceland, a country with a population of less than 400 000, is the world’s 12th largest producer of it, even though the raw materials aren’t mined there. Iceland just has cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power.

Then you just pay the president for a pardon. No worries.

It’s petty funny to see them rediscover why we have all these financial regulations

Being “fungible” means that something is functionally equivalent with something else.

For example even though every dollar bill is unique (they have unique serial numbers), they are all fungible. If you deposit $100 in the bank, then withdraw $100 later, you are not getting the same bills, maybe not even the same denominations, but you don’t care because it doesn’t matter.

In the digital world copies are cheap and perfect. There is literally no way to tell a copy of an image from “the original”. So in the digital world all copies of something are fungible, and originals don’t meaningfully exist.

NFTs try to introduce artificial scarcity to the digital space by creating a distinction between “the original” of something and the copies, by introducing a sort of chain of custody tracking system.

What if we took the art market, where prices can be whatever, so it’s really easy to launder money. Then we let people easily set up multiple accounts for wash trading. And we supported currencies held in stupidly large amounts by people who can’t legally use them for anything useful.

I just assumed that if a motherboard had an RGB header you could control it from the BIOS, because that’s how it worked ten years ago. But no, these days you need their software, which crashes on install under windows and doesn’t support anything else.

If you are lucky OpenRGB might work.

One common misconception about meditation is that meditation is and end goal, not a practice. That to meditate is to sit down and have your brain be quiet, and if you can’t do that, your session was a failure.

But that’s like saying weight lifting is about deadlifting your body weight, and any session you don’t manage do that was a failure. That is something you might be able to do after years of training. But you start with the smaller weights, learning form and technique, setting reasonable goals, and find a practice that you can make a habit out of. Because a five minute walk every day beats a day at the gym/retreat once a year.

More generally, feelings do not care about facts. We must accept how we feel, even if those feelings don’t “make sense”. Trying to reason with feelings is a fools errand.

That doesn’t mean we can’t change how we feel. It just doesn’t happen by denying reality.

I have no idea if this is true, but it certainly fits the very strange vibe of the game.

It’s like how I would imagine the most violent cops see the world.

All people are awful. Every criminal is a heavily armed, highly trained, fearless lunatic, who does not care if they live or die, as long as there’s a tiny chance they can hurt more people. Civilians are uncooperative, ungrateful, and suicidal.

Every deployment, no matter how routine, will likely lead you into an ambush by dudes with assault rifles.

Avoiding bloodshed is almost impossible and even trying is likely to get you killed.

A stronger argument IMO is that those types of crimes are premeditated, calculated and committed by those who have many other options. So deterrents are likely to actually work against them.

Not that I agree with you. But there’s an argument to be made for using deterrents where they are likely to work. Rather than against the desperate or impulsive.

If it’s pornography of an unwilling subject, surely the distribution and consumption is harmful to the subject, as it’s a violation of their privacy and integrity.

If someone had put secret cameras in your bedroom, would you be completely cool with them selling the pictures online?

What if you were abused, let’s say threatened with a weapon and forced to undress in front of a camera, a traumatic experience for sure. Afterwards you learn that the film is being traded between people who get off on this stuff. Would that really not feel like a further violation?

Would you really be unaffected by the knowledge that for the rest of your life, at any time, there could be creeps getting off on your abuse?

Just shifting the tax burden from salaries toward capital should make it less of a problem. When capital income is taxed less than salaries wealth concentration gets worse as workers are replaced.

But hey, GDP line goes up, so it must be good right?

Moving fast doesn’t have to mean poor workmanship.

To make an analogy, if you want to be able to make a cup of coffee fast, you need to make sure that the coffee beans, the water, and the brewer are all near each other, that there is electricity and that the water is running. These are all things that enable you to move fast, but they don’t decrease quality, if anything they increase quality because you aren’t wasting time and effort tackling obstacles unrelated to brewing.

Which is in fact the point of the article. That you should make sure you have a good development environment, with support systems and processes, so that you can work effectively even if your developers are not savants. Rather than trying to hire people who are good enough to do a decent job even in the worst environments.