Jeff Bezos has a 233 billion net worth. It's not because Amazon users overpaid by a 233 billion but because his share in Amazon is highly valued by investors.
My own Amazon investment in my pension has also gone up by 10x in the last 10 years, just like Jeff's. Where did the value increase come from?
Is this idea of the stock market good for us? I don't know, but it's paper money until you sell it.
Because the same thing has happened successfully in most other European countries. Nationalist parties talk about scary immigrants, ordinary parties tighten immigration rules, and the nationalist parties fail to gain power.
For example, Denmark created the highly criticized "Smykkelov" in 2016 which lets us confiscate any values asylum seekers have over 10.000 DKK (e.g. jewelry as the name says, but never actually used for jewelry just cash) in 2016. It has been hardly used (10 times in the first 3 years), but it had enormous press coverage. The largest left party (and the party of current PM) voted for it.
The previously largest nationalist party (DF) have never been in power, despite existing for 30 years and getting 20+% of the vote in 2015 -- at most they were a support party to the right-wing government.
Spending some months with a TDEE spreadsheet can be helpful but requires logging a lot of CI and weights -- if you go to any online TDEE calc you might overestimate your activity level.
I was surprised that running 6h/week and 15k/steps a day gave me an TDEE activity level at barely above "Light Exercise" and I need about 2460/day.
The "Moderate" activity level is if you actually work construction and haul bricks all day!
I found the backslash as separator of multiple statements on one line curious. I guess that's because I was used to BASIC on the Commodore C-64/128/Amiga and later the magical Amos Basic, so there were more differences in some of the other dialects.
I've been slowly documenting these differences with a series of Wiki articles. Generally though, there's three major "families":
* The original Dartmouth BASIC turned into a wide variety of mainframe versions. These are marked by the use of the CHANGE statement and supporting the MAT statements.
* HP's dialect had array-based strings (like C) and string slicing... LET A$[1,6]="HELLO.
* Timeshare's SUPER BASIC, which turned into BASIC-PLUS, which turned into MS BASIC, lacked those features and instead used MID/LEFT/RIGHT.
There's many other more minor changes from dialect to dialect, but those are the main differences.
That was an amusing post to see pop up here, as I believe I came up with the "copyover" name when I copied Melvin Smith (aka "Fusion") idea about "hot reboot" from his "MUD++" code base to the popular Diku-based MERC/Envy etc. bases -- that was 2000 or probably earlier. Whether Melvin originally got the idea from somewhere else I don't know.
That version just used exec, and closed all files but network descriptors already logged in, the mapping of fds -> login names was saved in a file. When the new copy started up, it would log the users on existing file descriptors. Today, using explicit file descriptor passing (so you don't accidentally keep files open) or a long-running proxy would be preferable.
Back then C/C++ were often used by the developers, and we were at best CS students. There were surprisingly few segmentation faults, but I remember a few mysterious memory corruptions...
according to the patches in the source posted on your website the main work was done 1996-1997 ;-)
i am actually surprised that this didn't happen earlier, given that Diku itself was inspired by LPMuds which could do live code update already in the early 90s. of course the motivation for Diku was to produce something more stable than LPMud, so maybe they didn't think that live updates were a good idea in the first place. (that said, i don't remember LPMuds being unstable myself, but i only played from about 1992 at which time it may have improved)
This kind of reminds me of a story I heard about how they passed around raw function pointers between servers as an RPC mechanism at Yahoo back in the day. They'd disabled ASLR to make that possible. I guess there were few enough segmentation faults :).
I get the ideologues here being mad… but I don’t get mad to the point where people need to pretend this guy isn’t highly intelligent. Doesn’t it make it better that there are really sharp people on the “DOGE” team.
It's good that smart people are involved if we take it at face value that they're trying increase "government efficiency," as opposed to, say, dismantling the welfare and regulatory state; if the latter are their aim, and if we don't want them to accomplish such a goal, we should not be cheered to learn that they're such clever lads.
Pretty sure that's exactly what the US voted for in the last election, considering that was pretty explicitly promised. I think most of the US is cheering them on as they do it.
People don’t elect presidents, states do, and states elected Trump with a 312 to 226 electoral vote margin — so the states overwhelmingly voted for Trump. The purpose of the United States federal government is very strictly spelled out — and the 10th amendment makes it very clear that powers not expressly mentioned in the Constitution are reserved for the states. The U.S. is a republic, not a democracy.
Electoral votes don’t support a president’s agenda, people do. Being underwater already at the beginning of his term means the other politicians that have to work with him (who also have to get elected) are more under pressure not to. That’s why not having the support of most voters is relevant in Trump getting things done. Grand parent basically said this guy has a mandate from the American people and he really doesn’t. Heck, it was big news that his disapproval rating is almost the same as his approval rating now, the most popular he has ever been but still not liked by most Americans.
Trump won by a very small margin, 1.5%, and didn't even get 50% of the popular vote. It isn't a "landslide" or "mandate" no matter how many times they claim it. Yes, Trump won, but that isn't grounds for ignoring the constitution. There is a separation of powers and Trump can't delegate powers which aren't his to Musk to delegate to technoboys.
Unfortunately the only leverage Congress has to stop Executive overreach is impeachment.
If they refuse to impeach, then they are tacitly handing the Executive ever more power, essentially moving us from a republic to an elected dictatorship.
And given that the GOP has a majority, no matter how slim, it seems very unlikely they will impeach.
Why do MAGA conservatives cheer the over-turning of Chevron, dramatically limiting the executive branch's power to interpret law, while also simultaneously cheering Trump's initiative to seize Congress's power of the purse?
What's the internal logic that rationalizes executive regulatory power being unconstitutional with a legal presidential power to unilaterally ignore Congress's funding allocations?
Are things you disagree with bad by definition or assumption? Or because you were told… because unless you have a front row seat, everything you know is because someone else already parsed that info for you.
What’s bad about finding waste? Many appropriations are expired yet still keep getting paid out. That’s crazy.
The liberal media echo chamber is preventing people from using common sense. When media and congressional democrats literally call us “Nazis” — it’s hard to take any of it seriously.
“Trump is a fascist”
If that’s true, he’s the first fascist in history to attempt to make the government smaller.
Apparently being interested in free speech and smaller government and reducing waste, fraud, and abuse is fascism.
The problem with it is that if you're claiming Musk gives a rat's ass about free speech, there are many, many examples that disprove it. He has literally banned people on X or taken away their checkmarks or added checkmarks to people because he didn't like what they had to say. He's not a free speech absolutist, he constantly censors people who say things he doesn't like.
In theory, DOGE isn't a bad idea, but you look at the implementation, and you look at the moves Musk has made to remove his enemies from their positions, and you look at the things they won't touch - their goals align more with making the billionaire class richer than anything relating to free speech or reducing waste. Musk lies constantly, with and without reason. I personally think he's so used to it, he can't help lying at this point.
People are upset partly because the new administration is taking the law into its own hands, and partly because it seems to be acting without any planning or research, and seems to be going about it recklessly and without concern for consequences.
Regarding USAID specifically, it was set up in the aftermath of the Foreign Assistance Act by John F. Kennedy, and as an agency it was later established as law by Congress. Trump cannot legally shut down USAID without another act of Congress, and he cannot legally redirect its funds, which have already been appropriated. The administration is well within their right to change how the funds are allocated, but so far the stated intention has been to shut off all foreign aid, not change what aid is provided.
The fact that Warren Christopher etc. wanted to get rid of USAID 27 years ago is irrelevant, since that plan was never adopted and did not call for shutting off foreign aid, so it's not comparable. It's just misdirection.
It's also difficult to take arguments for "government waste" seriously in the case of USAID. First, the agency has a tiny budget of around $50B (2023), 16x less than Medicare, or around 0.8% of the entire state budget. Secondly, it was explicitly set up to give away money. Waste is its raison d'etre! Reports show its admin overhead being around 7.7%, which is very low for an aid organization.
It's pretty clear that USAID isn't cut because of waste, but because the Trump administration wants to stop giving aid to poor foreign countries. However, they're not so inclined to say that out loud.
It's also a self-own because USAID is an important soft power tool. It's one of the ways the US can project a positive image on the world, something it has been very good at since the post-war period.
Here in Denmark we have an online lexicon which is managed by (barely paid) scientists and experts. For every article you can see which scientist was involved in making it, what expert is responsible for the area etc. https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/
reply