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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @jimmysong 16 Sep \ parent \ on: Priority lanes at amusement parks, yes or no? AskSN
I did wear my hat. Definitely makes it cooler on hot summer days and helps my family keep track of me in crowds.
I suppose there's some lesson about a willingness to suffer or something, but there are lots of ways to teach that outside an amusement park context.
Funny, my experience at the same park in Osaka this past summer is what changed my mind.
- From a pure economic perspective, you'll get roughly double the number of rides by buying fastpass, so depending on how much of a priority you put into the ride experience, it's not a hard calculation to see if it's worth it.
- For me, not buying one is penny wise and pound foolish. The point of going to these places is to have a good time. Waiting in line sucks (especially outdoors in hot weather) and detracts from your experience, so reducing that has significant utility, beyond the time savings.
- Ultimately, this is a case of skimpflation, where they degrade the main experience because they can't easily raise the prices of the general ticket too much without taking a big PR hit. If you're on a Bitcoin standard, the tickets are getting cheaper in BTC terms, even with the additional cost of a priority pass. You don't need to be a cheapskate or have your experience debased.
If you can stomach it, pemmican. It's got an insane shelf life (reports of it being good after 50 years buried in the ground).
You can get 2 lbs of it for $47.12: https://grasslandbeef.com/products/salt-free-pemmican-pail
At least according to explorer logs, 3/4 lb is enough for a man for 1 day, so that's about 2.75 day's worth.
Fun fact: the short stories that the series is based on is by my good friend Ken Liu (he wrote the foreword for Programming Bitcoin). There are also various Bitcoin references on the show, which I'm sure he had a hand in.
If you're serious about this, the two books that were recommended to me are "Buy then Build" and "HBS Guide to Buying a Small Business." I've read both and they're very good.
The main obstacle for me is that it takes about 12-18 months to find one that's actually profitable and reasonable to take over and in the right geography. Also, these days, you're competing with a lot of private equity firms who are bidding up anything that's actually profitable. Fiat money has found its way to even small businesses.
But yea, if you do pursue this, it's not a short process and you'll need a good accountant and lawyer at a minimum. All that said, I hope you find something profitable to do with your time.
A slightly less technical, but still very good takedown of quantum computing which I send to anyone that starts spewing nonsense about how it'll break the internet: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-computing-as-a-field-is-obvious-bullshit/
These are unbelievably nitpicky examples. Lots of people are not native English speakers and don't listen to podcasts all day to know little details like that. To use this as evidence that a whole group of people is retarded is itself retarded.
If anything that shows me that these people get information primarily from reading which is a lot more thoughtful and indicates a deeper engagement with the material than someone who pronounces words correctly but parrots establishment opinion on everything.
What's retarded is going along with COVID lockdowns, or supporting a stupid war or going along with trans men playing women's sports. It's the people unwilling to question main narratives that have the deeper intellectual flaw.
It's so hard to get Grok to help simplify even reasonable math equations. I've gotten pretty frustrated at trying to get AI to help, so something better would very much be welcome. I remain a bit skeptical, but something like this would be really fun to play with and use.
But in a deflationary world you'd have to literally cut their wages every year, which will cause social unrest.
The main reason this would cause unrest is if people are using loans to fund their activities. This was a major reason why bimetallism gained traction in the late 19th century, because farmers needed to pay loans back but their goods that they were selling to the market kept getting cheaper due to deflation, making it harder and harder for them to pay the loans back. Solution here is that they need to be zero-interest loans (Saifedean has an interesting theory on why this would be the case in a hard money economy eventually) or fewer loans and much more savings. I personally think the latter is much more realistic given that in a deflationary economy, savings is deeply incentivized.
The solution to not cutting wages, though, is to increase productivity of each worker. This requires near-constant innovation, which most companies in a functioning economy do. Of course, this might mean not as many jobs, but then, those people are freed up to do other more productive activities. The main flaw here is assuming jobs are for life.
Have you seen Emin Gun Sirer on campus and though he's not a professor there anymore, is he still influencing the CS program?
I saw the title and thought it was about the bits BIP I authored years back: BIP-0176
175 sats \ 0 replies \ @jimmysong OP 13 May \ parent \ on: Non-Standard OP_RETURN transaction Data bitcoin
The answer to almost all of these if we're answering honestly is that we don't know. We have no idea because Bitcoin is not a centralized system and that's a good thing. We want people to make decisions based on their own values and profit calculations, and not on centralized dictates.
We have incentive guidelines based on economics. We know lowering the price means more people buy. We know that friction and bad user experience prevent people from adoption. But ultimately, playing with incentives to try to get a particular result is technocratic hubris. Particularly for the reason you point out. We really don't know what the second and third order effects will be. This is the main failure of central planning.
That said, I think the way to solve this is more decentralization. We should be encouraging nodes to be more self-sovereign and decide for themselves what they relay and encourage hashers to decide for themselves what they mine. Power to the people, I say.
154 sats \ 2 replies \ @jimmysong OP 13 May \ parent \ on: Non-Standard OP_RETURN transaction Data bitcoin
That probably can't be measured as easily, but it's safe to assume it is sometimes.
I'm not sure it can be measured at all and at the very least, there are lots of of outputs that are functionally the same in the form of lost private keys. And if they can't be measured, it's futile to make concessions to them, no? Imagine if a mafia don came to your place of business and started extorting you. You have to pay some amount that he says each month. If he suddenly says, if you do X for me, I'll knock of $50 from what you owe next month, you have no idea if he'll actually knock off $50 because he determines the amount each month anyway. That's what this seems like to me.
As far as I can tell, this is the argument that if you give them OP_RETURN, perhaps the bad guys will put stuff there instead of where it hurts. I don't trust the bad guys and have no interest in conceding anything to them, especially when there's nothing stopping them from doing what you're trying to prevent them from doing anyway.
What we know from the data is that non-standard OP_RETURN is cumbersome and costly compared to normal transactions. You have to wait longer and pay more. If you make the wait shorter and the cost less, it'll naturally mean more people will use it, not just the bad guys, but lots of people that weren't even thinking about using it.
There was a show called Extracted, which was a lot like what you described, but people were pissed off at the ending.
Being famous, writing a book, being really good at an instrument, getting fit and healthy, being in charge of a large organization
BBQ: La BBQ, Interstellar, Leroy and Lewis (beef cheek on Fridays)
Other Meat Restaurants: Garrison for steak, Lonesome Dove for prime rib (Friday lunch), Perry's for porkchop (Friday lunch again)
Bars: 6th, Rainey, The Domain
Coffee: Mozart's, a bunch of places on the East side and South Congress
Entertainment: Alamo Draft House, Top Golf, Austin Bouldering Project, Crux Climbing
You should also join the Austin Bitcoin telegram group and ask there.
There's also a lot of cool stuff that opens up all the time, so check TripAdvisor/Yelp/Google Maps.