Querk [they/them]

Collectively agreeing to raising prices is anti-competitive collusion and illegal.

Collectively raising prices is anti-competitive coordination and legal.

Pandemic and supply shocks is a perfect excuse to do the latter.

Good luck to whoever is trying to solve this.

The patent story reveals a lot.

Government:

• creates and enforces a patent system

Also government:

• does essential research and doesn’t patent their own discoveries

Donate to propublica.org - they produce a lot of great journalism.

Well, the far right faction of Republicans did already side with Dems to oust the speaker.

Shit. I just bought one few months ago.

Yes, but expecting corporations to do it on their own is silly. They operate in a competitive environment so game theory should tell us what’s going to usually happen. The laws and regulations exist, and a lot more are needed, but it’s also not as simple because costs of enforcement also range from inexpensive to infeasible. In the end, it’s people making self-interested decisions, whether on behalf of themselves or on behalf of corporations. I don’t know of any easy solutions - my feeling is that those don’t exist - so the best bet is to steer society towards better and more effective politics. More distributed and less concentrated power structures, checks and balances, enforcement, novel, effective, and efficient systems through science based analysis, as well as lots of trials and errors and fast iterative improvements based on rapid feedback loops. In short, the world nowadays moves faster than the current government systems and it’s a losing battle until governing adaptability can increase in speed.

If they are gonna burn religious books, why not include more of them? Burn bibles, qurans, vedas, tanakhs, etc. Make the event more inclusive :)

Same reason people at home just come up to each other and start talking (which actually requires immediate response) even when the topic is non-urgent whatsoever, instead of leaving notes around the house.

It’s all based on differing conventions among people, so saying a call “demands immediate response” is putting your convention above others as the only true one.

In my family the convention is a bit different. A single call does not signal any urgency and so no one is expected nor obliged to answer if they don’t feel like it. A second call after the first one wasn’t answered implies importance. Third and more calls imply urgency and then emergency. If something is important or urgent and calls aren’t getting answered, a message is sent.

I like my convention. I also have slightly different conventions with some friends. I am also aware different people may have different conventions and I don’t hold mine to be superior or theirs inferior.

Engineering: It’s not stupid if it works.

Sounds dope. I wonder if it will bring more clarity or more puzzles. My bet is on the latter. Which is great.

“I should speak less and listen more”

Exactly. Spreading and replicating like viruses across host bodies. And just like certain viruses, some can stay dormant for years, never fully going away - e.g. “The Game” (sorry not sorry). :p

You can! And we do! In fact, then you can skip the whole fusion step, since the sun laser is already powered by fusion, and just collect the energy. I think that tech is called soul… Soul-Harp-N-L.

That would be an atypical rocket, but it checks out.

Steamer :)

That’s incorrect. Any base system has the same property. For base 12, we would just have two extra digits, and we would be counting powers of 12 instead of powers of 10. Let’s say those extra digits are X for ten and Y for 11. We would write numbers like so (starting with zero and incrementing by one): 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, Y, 10, 11, 12, …, 18, 19, 1X, 1Y, 20, 21, …, 29, 2X, 2Y, 30, …

For example, in base 10, a number 265 means we have 10² twice and 10¹ six times and 10⁰ five times (100 + 100 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1).

Same number in base 12 has 12² once and 12¹ ten times and 12⁰ once (144 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 1).

A “round” four-digit number in base ten is written as 1000 (written in base twelve as 6Y4). If we subtract one, we get a three-digit string of nines (highest single digit): 1000 - 1 = 999 (written in base twelve as 6Y3).

A “round” four-digit number in base twelve is written as 1000 (written in base ten as 1728). If we subtract one, we get a three-digit string of Ys (highest single digit): 1000 - 1 = YYY (written in base ten as 1727).

I hope this shows you how there’s symmetry between the bases and there is nothing special about base 10 other than we’re familiar with it. If we were familiar with base 12, the “round” numbers for us would be (writing in base 10 here): 12, 144, 1728, … which we would be writing as 10, 100, 1000, …

Big if true

What an appropriate homage - linking to one of markdown’s originator’s Wikipedia page using markdown.

“In 2002 Aaron Swartz created atx and referred to it as “the true structured text format”. Gruber created the Markdown language in 2004, with Swartz acting as beta tester … Markdown: Swartz was a major contributor to John Gruber’s Markdown,[249][250] a lightweight markup language for generating HTML, and author of its html2text translator. The syntax for Markdown was influenced by Swartz’s earlier atx language (2002)” from wikipedia

Best 5 seconds of excitement happened at end of Q2 when Max placed 10th and there were still 2 drivers putting their final time in. For a brief moment, I thought Gasly might knock out Max. Good times.

Proof of work “toll” for each request or session seems like a good option.

My supply of popcorn is running low. It’s a good problem to have :)