ta0987's comments

And to the most common objection: yes they are. Gun control proponents often bring up and praise the UK (near total ban) and Australia (significant limitations compared to the U.S.) as examples to emulate.

And in Chicago and DC, before the Supreme Court cases, there were effectively total bans. And when the plaintiffs sued, they didn't say, "well I guess we went a little too far, let's establish a regulated framework under which responsible, qualified and trained citizens can own guns". Instead, they went all the way to the Supreme Court to try to defend their bans.

So, even if a gun owner agrees with a particular piece of proposed regulation (and I'm sure plenty do), they would be acting against their own long term interests giving the block trying to ban guns political momentum and capital.

That's because those increases are never compromises or exchanges. They are simply demands. Republicans and the NRA look at what the gun laws in DC and Chicago were before the Supreme Court cases and think: "That's their end game. Zero guns. Because look: when they had the political power to take them away, they did." They have no rational reason to support increases in gun control that come in exchange for nothing.

If the Democrats offered a compromise, in the form of a constitutional amendment, not repealing the 2nd amendment but detailing it out, we could probably see real talk and progress. If it's not an amendment then it's simply "pray I don't alter it any further".

If the progressives were willing to accept the Swiss laws in the US under the stipulation that they would never again be made more strict, the US gun owners should be thrilled.

Part of the problem is that US gun laws are often motivated by misunderstanding or spite rather than reason or compromise.

The value is, for starters: branding, people remember sites.

The value is also vendor-lock in. What you called "annoying" above. The value is not having to do that annoying thing, that is value, and it's what the registrar can now use to extract money from existing .org domains.

The value is also, that if you let your .org domain lapse, since you don't want to pay for it, now someone else can take it and pretend to be you.

I mean, it would certainly be right for the government to limit the increase in the cost of .org registrations to inflation, or better to cap the profit margin, since costs are likely to decrease, but just because it's right, doesn't mean it'll happen. .org domains are an artificial scarcity that wasn't even created by a corporation. At least the telephone was invented privately, so you could argue phone numbers are fair game, but with domain names even that argument doesn't hold. There's no reason a private company should be extracting economic-rent from it.

Patents, copyrights, and trademarks are sometimes used as examples of government-granted monopolies.

Third paragraph from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

So, yes, HBO does have a monopoly on Game of Thrones, and my email provider does have a monopoly on my email address.

This is, for example, why they explicitly passed a phone number portability law, because phone companies were abusing their monopoly power over individual phone numbers, to keep people from switching to different providers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuse_sky_radiation#/media/F...

If you look at 460-470 nm where the spike is in the LED spectrum, it's much lower in the blue sky spectrum.

I think the concern is something about the relative amounts of blue light. Not sure what exactly but something like, the human perception of brightness and therefore the self protection of the eye is calibrated for natural light, so the pupil contraction, looking away, etc, is not done correctly in with that unnatural distribution. Anyway I don't know if that's a real effect, but that's what people (should) mean when they're talking about "too much blue".

How would you like it if your phone company started charging you extra to keep your phone number, and told you, there's plenty of other phone numbers you can have, we won't charge extra for those

https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led-strip-lights

https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led-strip-lights

https://www.benkuhn.net/img/lux/ledspec.png

Google is like a feudal lord. In exchange for owning you, they'll protect you from everyone weaker than they are. Google doesn't want to break into your office computer as long as they can shovel ads down your throat. And their reputation for security is much higher than a small startup regardless of the startup's competence and intentions. See e.g. Project Zero or Chrome vulnerabilities vs Firefox.

increase retirement ages

Yeah, that's one of the negative consequences of the demographic collapse. Not that old people who can still work are owed a vacation funded by the young, but the world isn't exactly fair in handing out pain, and not everyone who can't retire will be deserving of not being able to retire.

reduce age discrimination

Maybe. Old people too broke to retire don't have tremendous leverage in the labor market, and historically market forces don't tend to fix discrimination, see, e.g. Blacks in the US.

You can't eat money. The problem is not financial, it is economic. Ignoring the few durable things that can be stockpiled, the money retirees spend, whether it comes from savings or taxes can only be spent on goods and services produced at the time the money is spent, by the labor force available then. The smaller this labor force, the higher the wages, the less purchasing power money has. Retirement saving becomes a positional good, it's not enough to save enough, you have to save more than the other retirees, because you're all competing for the same scarce resource: labor.

If that doesn't make sense, try thinking about it from a purely physical point of view. Retirees need physical goods and personal services (e.g. nursing). Both of these require humans to produce. The fewer producing people there are (young and middle age adults), compared to consuming people (retirees) the less there is per person, regardless of who you tax or how.

The problem is picking a company you can be confident in for both:

1. Competent security

2. Good support

Google meets 1. but fails at 2. Every time this topic comes up there are many suggestions meeting 2, but without any arguments or evidence that the suggestions also meet 1.

According to HN security guru tptacek the top three most secure companies are Google, Apple, and Microsoft. (Paraphrasing from memory, any errors are my own.)

Apple and Microsoft both have retail locations unlike Google, which could in principle be used as a last resort for recovery, but I don't know if they actually are. Without good process and training that could open a weakness from social engineering, similar to SIM jacking at cell phone shops.

Does anyone here know if Apple, Microsoft, or any other company meets both 1 & 2?

Does anyone here know if Apple or Microsoft account can be recovered at retail locations with an ID? And if that process is social engineering resistant?

Edit: the thing to consider with self hosting is that there is no such thing really. You have to register your domain somewhere. What is that provider using to authenticate you? Not saying you shouldn't have your own domain, just that it's also a thing that can be lost or attacked. You also have to run your VPS or server somewhere. Do you own a datacenter? Do you have a backup generator and redundant internet at your house? Not saying you must but there's always trade-offs.

At the undergrad level I think the main benefit of a high end school is simply being grouped with other high end students and so getting a curriculum tailored for you. As if the Honors and AP classes in high school were only available in a few schools that were selective and more expensive.

I don't think this is completely true but I think there is a lot of truth to it... you go to fancy schools for the other fancy students as much as anything else.

Point being, at the undergrad level Harvard isn't better because it's Haaaard-vard, it's better because their curriculum is more advanced, which they can do because they have sufficient concentration of high-talent students who can handle it.