dhork @ dhork @lemmy.world

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4,324

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm guessing that UC Berkeley Professor's PhD was not in English

Hurry up and clone that ASAP, this is gonna get taken down once DOGE realizes what it is

He is missing a key point: his dad built his real estate empire in Queens, and when Donald Trump took it over in the 70s, he had aspirations on Manhattan. But while he could make deals there, the deal makers there never fully accepted him.

https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-11-13/donald-trump-raised-and-rejected-by-new-york-city

Though he is the scion of a wealthy real estate family, the city's old aristocracy never quite accepted Trump. In a tribal city, Donald Trump has no real tribe.

Since he began running for office, much has been made of Trump's often failed efforts to gain approval from the Manhattan elite. That hardly made him unique: Many strivers never gain entrance into New York high society.

It's quite clear to me that he is so obsessed with NYC because nobody that mattered accepted him as an equal. So like so much in MAGA, the animosity is explained by a long grudge over hurt feelings.

In today's environment, a Chinese national asking for special permission to do science is equivalent to putting a big sticky note on his own back saying "deport me". He shouldn't have smuggled it, but asking permission wouldn't have worked at all.

Sadly, his best bet would have been to take his research somewhere else. (Edited to add: oh wait, it was the girlfriend's research? Now they're both getting deported)

It is likely the car USB port is looking through directories for MP3 files, and thats not now those iPods present themselves when hooked up via USB. You might be able to find an audio-to-bluetooth adapter, but it is likely you will not be able to control the device through the car's interface, so you would have to press play manually.

(Side note: older cars with USB might have a very low-level relationship with the USB sticks, where they read files in the order they were written to the device, without regard to what folders you put them in. There are utilities that can reorder the files' physical position on the stick so that albums play in order)

"Not just any Democrat.... a lady Democrat. We'd go to war at least once a month!"

Trump certainly has no problem with people who cross-dress. If you haven't already, search teh intarwebs for "Trump Giuliani drag". It's a real thing.

The grift was peanuts compared to now, though, because Trump hadn't found religion in crypto yet. He didn't release his shitty NFTs until 2022. That's when he found out how much money there is to be "made" by attaching his brand to digital tokens.

Don't forget installing Starlink uplinks all over the federal government to upload sensitive information to Russia the Cloud....

I think it's an indictment of the zero-sum mentality that is driving the Trump Administration's thinking, and to a lesser extent was behind this scientist's deportation. It's hyper-focused in the present, and how someone can "win" a deal right now, ignoring the long-term repurcussions.

But maybe not ignoring them entirely: once these researchers go back home and improve science outside of the US, the same people who ejected them will use their progress in other countries as an excuse to hunker down even further and exclude more foreigners. So while it's a losing proposition for the country as a whole, it helps consolidate power for the people making the decisions. And what is more important, really?

It's because the administration is not counting on winning the case on its merits. They are counting on winning the case because they expect judges that Trump appointed to create new precedent in his favor. He wants "his" judges to do what he wants. Judges that don't immediately comply (particularly conservative judges) will immediately be put on the "nasty" list.

Do not forget all the J6ers he pardoned. These people showed they would do violence for Trump once, and they got rewarded for it. They will do it again. Also, the administration has already started arresting judges they don't like. And for all the compliant judges, we all know that the Supreme Court recently made bribes gratuities legal, and the President is literally making his own currency now. So he has both sticks and carrots to use to get his way.

Congress has rolled over in submission to King Trump, and he is now working on the judiciary.

There's been talks that Elon would use ketamine as a suppository.

I bet you just pulled that one out of his ass....

Don't forget installing a bunch of Starlink access points all over government to upload all the data to Russia the cloud ...

Trump’s remarks were a far cry from his statement in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s diagnosis.

“Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis,” he wrote. “We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.”

There's no way Trump actually wrote that

You can mint tokens on solana, cardano and plenty of others.

Exactly. And most of those tokens are shitty, because anyone can make them, and they are not useful for anything. The few that have utility are only useful because they have been declared by their founders to represent some other asset: dollars (like Tether), votes in some governance protocol, even access to the President.

Whereas SOL and ADA can't just be made on demand, by anyone. The native cryptocurrency has some scarcity at least. And utility, but let's face it, their main utility is to create the shitty tokens. (I bought some ADA in the hopes that their smart contracts would be interesting, it turns out all I bought was regret.)

Still, I'd much rather buy SOL or ADA than the craptastic tokens they enable.

Maybe I would take a closer look as to where, exactly, Google puts the pin when you tell it to go to a town. If I tell Google Maps I want to walk to the village I am currently living in, it puts the pin in a random spot sort of in the middle of the village. (It happens to be in a parking lot by a bakery, so now I am hungry).

So, you may be measuring it with regard to when you reach the town limits on that road, but Google may be putting the pin in some oddball place, off the road you are biking down.

The main use case for cryptocurrency ought to be as a method of payment that relies on trusting no third party. Think Venmo or PayPal or Google Pay, without having to trust Venmo or PayPal or Google. You might not value not having to trust any 3rd party, but maybe you should.

But this is why I say the worst thing that ever happened to crypto was for its price to skyrocket. Because now nobody cares about trustless transactions, they just care about Number Go Up.

The ecological impact is entirely optional. Not all cryptos consume massive amounts of power to validate transactions. Ethereum successfully transitioned away from a power-intensive algorithm and now has massively reduced power consumption

https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

Bitcoin could do the same thing, but won't, because it's development team doesn't want to.

People need to understand that there is a difference between cryptocurrencies that have their own blockchain, and tokens that ride on smart contracts on those same blockchains.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are two examples of cryptocurrencies with their own blockchains. This means that new coins are released periodically based on some algorithm that all nodes agree on, and the rules can't be changed arbitrarily. (Ironically, the first real memecoin, Dogecoin, is basically a clone of Bitcoin with some tweaks, but it has its own blockchain and its own set of rules).

Neary all of these memecoins (Dogecoin being the main exception) do not have their own blockchains at all. They are just smart contracts riding on top of Ethereum or one of its clones. Anyone can make a new memecoin simply by starting a new smart contract. Anyone. You can literally make a new token with a marketable name out of nothing, with trillions of tradeble units, then send a bit to crypto exchanges and pay them to set up trading with the liquidity you just gave them. People start trading, and now this coin (you made from nothing) has a price attached. It may only be a fraction of a cent, but you have trillions. If it catches on, and the price goes up, you can now release more and sell it for real money.

You simply can't do that with established currencies with their own blockchains, because the creation of new units is governed by so many rules. You could always create your own Bitcoin or Ethereum clone, but then you are stuck building your own validation network until other people decide it's worth participating in validation. The only entities who have been successful doing this lately are exchanges (who then use their captive exchange coin to enable smart contracts to sell shitcoins on).

So yes, memecoins are scams. Crypto on its own blockchain is not, but if it's main use is to enable scams then what's the difference? Bitcoin, Ethereum, and (ironically) Dogecoin are fundamentally different than most shitcoins (and the exchange-owned Ethereum clones that only exist to enable trading in more shitcoins.)