metallic_z3r0 @ metallic_z3r0 @infosec.pub

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2 yr. ago

If you go by 3.5e, they're hardly immobile, and are more like demi-gods than temporarily inconvenienced liches.

'E pluribus unum' was pretty good, but I liked 'mind your business' too.

Trump apparently likes his well-done steaks with ketchup.

I have no strong feelings one way or the other.

illustration: https://youtu.be/_eTsrtZdAJc

So is the "phrase" of Chat GPT therefore akin to "queef"?

Proton is basically a wrapper for wine with pre-installed dependencies for whatever program you want to run, often with specific fixes and settings for it, in its own instance/environment (usually with a separate C: drive and all those associated paths). It gets rid of the headache of trying to run all of it manually, but it's good to know how it works in case something breaks or you want to tinker with it, but even then there are programs to automate that process (like protontricks for those specific instances or winetricks more generally).

The Day Watch were right bastards under small-minded leadership until Vimes sorted them out.

Fortunately, our much closer mammalian cousins were brave enough to swim back, and now some of them tip over boats for fun.

As Kochevnik81 wrote 10 months ago:

I just wanted to speak a bit towards that website. I think that specifically what it is trying to argue (with extremely varying degrees of good arguments) is that all these social and economic changes can be traced back to the United States ending gold convertibility in 1971. I say the arguments are of extremely varying degrees because as has been pointed out here, some things like crime are trends that stretched back into the 1960s, some things like deregulation more properly start around the 1980s, and even something like inflation is complicated by the fact that it was already rising in the 1960s, and was drastically impacted by things like the 1973 and 1979 Oil Shocks.

The decision on August 15, 1971 is often referred to in this context as removing the US dollar from the gold standard, and that's true to a certain extent, but a very specific one. It was the end of the Bretton Woods system, which had been established in 1944, with 44 countries among the Allied powers being the original participants. This system essentially created a network of fixed exchange rates between currencies, with member currencies pegged to the dollar and allowed a 1% variation from those pegs. The US dollar in turn was pegged to $35 per gold ounce. At the time the US owned something like 80% of the world's gold reserves (today it's a little over 25%).

The mechanics of this system meant that other countries essentially were tying their monetary policies to US monetary policy (as well as exchange rate policy obviously, which often meant that US exports were privileged over other countries'). The very long and short is that domestic US government spending plus the high costs of the Vietnam War meant that the US massively increased the supply of dollars in this fixed system, which meant that for other countries, the US dollar was overvalued compared to its fixed price in gold. Since US dollars were convertible to gold, these other countries decided to cash out, meaning that the US gold reserves decreased basically by half in the decade leading up to 1971. This just wasn't sustainable - there were runs on the dollar as foreign exchange markets expected that eventually it would have to be devalued against gold.

This all meant that after two days of meeting with Treasury Secretary John Connally and Budget Director George Schultz (but noticeably not Secretary of State William Rogers nor Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger), President Richard Nixon ordered a sweeping "New Economic Policy" on August 15, 1971, stating:

"“We must create more and better jobs; we must stop the rise in the cost of living [note: the domestic annual inflation rate had already risen from under 2% in the early 1960s to almost 6% in the late 1960s]; we must protect the dollar from the attacks of international money speculators.”"

To this effect, Nixon requested tax cuts, ordered a 90-day price and wage freeze, a 10% tariff on imports (which was to encourage US trading partners to revalue their own currencies to the favor of US exports), and a suspension on the convertibility of US dollars to gold. The impact was an international shock, but a group of G-10 countries agreed to new fixed exchange rates against a devalued dollar ($38 to the gold ounce) in the December 1971 Smithsonian Agreement. Speculators in forex markets however kept trying to push foreign currencies up to their upper limits against the dollar, and the US unilaterally devalued the dollar in February 1973 to $42 to the gold ounce. By later in the year, the major world currencies had moved to floating exchange rates, ie rates set by forex markets and not by pegs, and in October the (unrelated, but massively important) oil shock hit.

So what 1971 meant: it was the end of US dollar convertability to gold, ie the US "temporarily" suspended payments of gold to other countries that wanted to exchange their dollars for it. What it didn't mean: it wasn't the end of the gold standard for private US citizens, which had effectively ended in 1933 (and for good measure, the exchange of silver for US silver certificates had ended in the 1960s). It also wasn't really the end of the pegged rates of the Bretton Woods system, which hobbled on for almost two more years. It also wasn't the cause of inflation, which had been rising in the 1960s, and would be massively influenced by the 1970s energy crisis, which sadly needs less explaining in 2022 than it would have just a few years ago.

It also really doesn't have much to do with social factors like rising crime rates, or female participation in the workforce. And it deceptively doesn't really have anything to do with trends like the US trade deficit or increases in income disparity, where the changes more obviously happen around 1980.

Also, just to draw out the 1973 Oil Shock a little more - a lot of the trends around economic stagnation, price inflation, and falls in productivity really are from this, not the 1971-1973 forex devaluations, although as mentioned the strain and collapse of Bretton Woods meant that US exports were less competitive than they had been previously. But the post 1945 world economy had been predicated on being fueled by cheap oil, and this pretty much ended overnight in October 1973: even when adjusted for inflation, the price essentially immediately tripled that month, and then doubled again in 1979. The fact that the economies of the postwar industrial world had been built around this cheap oil essentially meant that without major changes, industrial economies were vastly more expensive in their output (ie, productivity massively suffered), and many of the changes to make industries competitive meant long term moves towards things like automation or relocating to countries with cheaper input costs, which hurt industrial areas in North America and Western Europe (the Eastern Bloc, with its fossil fuel subsidies to its heavy industries, avoided this until the 1990s, when it hit even faster and harder).

" I know the gold standard is not generally regarded as a good thing among mainstream economists,"

I just want to be clear here that no serious economist considers a gold standard a good thing. This is one of the few areas where there is near universal agreement among economists. The opinion of economists on the gold standard is effectively the equivalent of biologists' opinions on intelligent design.

You want to get their interest, but as this might be one of those deal breaker questions, you should get it out of the way early. There's no shame in breaking up from an incompatibility in attraction or sexual preference, but there should be some shame at sticking with it expecting another person to change for you.

Devious femboy/furry?

Very fair point, thanks.

While you are correct in that macOS primarily isn't composed of tools that "do one thing well", macOS is still UNIX-certified under the Single UNIX Specification (identical to saying it's POSIX-compliant and X/Open Curses compliant) and is literally a UNIX system. Most Linux and even BSD systems are not UNIX these days, though I'd say a higher proportion of their tools/components follow the UNIX philosophy.

The blue door implies that your current existence is the one changing your past, i.e. you retain the knowledge of your current existence. The 'you' that made those mistakes therefore still exists, as you would remember the mistakes you've made in order to correct them. The mistakes still happened, your timeline still exists/existed, you're just now in an alternate timeline where your brain was surgically implanted into your younger self.

The sun is made of plasma, and its energy is predominantly from hydrogen fusing into helium. Plasma is what happens when atoms are so energetic that their electrons get stripped from themselves and are bouncing around in a sea of atomic nuclei and other electrons, which does a lot of things with electromagnetism. All that plasma moving around at crazy speeds and low density is what causes a sort of electromagnetic convection in addition to the normal heat-based kind, which is how you get sunspots and solar flares.

As far as fire without carbon, any metal that can oxidize can burn, because it's the reaction with oxygen that releases heat. The issue there is that it's usually not self-sustaining because most of the oxidized metal stays on the surface, so there's no more metal exposed to oxygen. You can get around this by increasing the surface area of the metal, maybe by having it in dust form (so if you had fine enough iron dust, for instance, you could burn it into rust without needing carbon, and that would very much be the image of fire). You also don't need oxygen in molecular form (i.e. O2), it can be part of other metals (like iron oxide, rust), and that will burn with other metals so long as the chemical reaction is self-sustaining (famously, like the thermite, which is rust powder and aluminum powder mixed together at high enough temperatures). These fires aren't "normal" but I think they count.

As far as fire without oxygen at all, while not "normal" and I don't think that counts under strict definitions, there are exothermic (heat-producing) reduction-oxidation reactions that are very close, like when hydrogen gas and fluorine gas combine to make hydrofluoric acid, and those might be close enough that they can look like fire in the right environment (which, again, those environments would be far from normal).

It makes sense that it would be, even if it's the same person, I'd want plausible deniability after that too.

Fire is a sustained chemical reaction where carbon-based molecules are broken up and combine with oxygen, releasing carbon dioxide, sometimes methane, and heat (and thus light), which primes the remaining carbon-based molecules for continued chemical reactions with oxygen.

Same for me, my only difficulty is discerning whether the commenter is promoting relevant discussion or doing some variant of gishgallop or sealioning.

It's not enough to reign in assholes, the system has to be designed in such a way that carriers of "dark triad" traits (i.e. the usual bad faith actors in a system) are still incentivized to contribute to or improve society without gradually dismantling it to increase their wealth/power/status. That's a hard problem to solve.