I used to teach ESL to some banking IT people, COBOL programmers whose skills were still in demand half a century after COBOL came out. Because the banking systems written half century ago still work, and when it comes to handling other people's money, breakages, mistakes and downtime are absolutely not an option.
If Musk really wanted to run government like a business, he'd do like the banks and leave a working system damn well alone.
Of course, he wants to run government like one of his businesses, into the ground like Twitter or soon Tesla.
PS The only bank they knew of implementing newer tech for handling the money was a brand new one with no existing systems the new tech might break.
Europe's economy (from which the Church's income was largely derived) didn't go into overdrive until the Renaissance / Columbus landing in America.
That growth being offset by the Reformation, with a lot of Europeans leaving the Roman Catholic Church.
The somewhat decentralized nature of the Church, with a lot of assets in the hands of monastic orders and semi-autonomous archbishoprics.
Perhaps an absolutist theocratic monarchy is not the most conducive form of government for economic and population growth.
The population started to tick up with the Renaissance, but when Italy essentially unified under a more modern constitutional monarchy in 1861, ending the Pope's temporal power over the city, Rome's population growth went stratospheric.
In addition to the points others made, Rome has not always been a bustling city.
Its population declined from more than a million in AD 210 to 500,000 in AD 273 to 35,000 after the Gothic War (535–554) reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins, vegetation, vineyards and market gardens.
The city's population declined to less than 50,000 people in the Early Middle Ages from 700 AD onward. It continued to stagnate or shrink until the Renaissance.
Given that the US government has recognized how unprotected technology (like unencrypted messaging) leaves its individual employees vulnerable to Chinese snoopers, I wonder if China is starting to realize just how vulnerable its pervasive unencrypted tech could leave it to US snooping.
Chinese fintech giant Alipay has for some years now had the "Smile to Pay" system: Alipay users can pay for something by just smiling into the camera in an Alipay "Smile to Pay" POS terminal. IIRC KFC was the first place to have it.
In China, many operators of public toilets seek to prevent theft of toilet paper (I shit you not 😉) by having some kind of rationed dispenser (a certain user can only receive a certain amount of paper in a certain amount of time) or a vending machine.
Public toilet + toilet paper vending machine + "Smile to Pay" = facial recognition in toilets.
That was something I liked about ZeroNet; in addition to it being incredibly easy to universally block a specific user, there were also block lists anyone could create or subscribe to.
(Although IIRC ZeroNet blocks would only mean you didn't see blocked users; others could still see that person's comments etc on your content.)
klu9 @ klu9 @lemmy.ca Posts 12Comments 266Joined 4 mo. ago
I like how Justin Frankel created something to help you get stuff to really whip the llama's ass with :)