MagnumOpus

11 ms·

1.
by MagnumOpus 2mo ago
The last 18 months have proven that the rule of law doesn’t apply to those who are rich enough to ~bribe~ lobby anyone who would enforce the laws. (A donation to the presidential library, a new RV for the judge, a PAC that runs campaigns fo
2.
by MagnumOpus 2mo ago
But better cost for the same performance. According to AA, Opus 5 _medium_ is as smart as Opus 4.8 _max_, at 1/3 the cost and twice the speed. And if you need a better response, you can turn it up to 11.
3.
by MagnumOpus 3mo ago
Of course you can walk. But can you walk to your workplace, your kid’s nursery, your local bakery/supermarket, your doctor, your dentist, the pharmacy?
4.
by MagnumOpus 3mo ago
So it seems like they have been spot on? TFA quotes the OBR as estimating a 4% negative impact and the CEFR estimate of -5.5% cumulative impact.
5.
by MagnumOpus 3mo ago
But Apple’s excuse not to comply with it is privacy-related.
6.
by MagnumOpus 5mo ago
You are comparing monthly individual wages in Pakistan to annual household income in the US. That results in your numbers being nonsense.
7.
by MagnumOpus 6mo ago
Why should your children not pay tax on the valuables that they acquired without any work, when everyone else has to earn money and both pay income tax and then pay sales tax to acquire the same jewellery? (And you don’t enter into the eq
8.
by MagnumOpus 6mo ago
Yes. They were talking about 8,000 metres of altitude. (Talking about Mallory should have been a clue too.)
9.
by MagnumOpus 8mo ago
One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up… (Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central Lond
10.
by MagnumOpus 8mo ago
Hckrnews.com is a far better frontent. Implemented the long line fix, and also preserves topics that were upvoted to the top and subsequently flagged to death by bot farms or the owners.
11.
by MagnumOpus 9mo ago
Many European countries still have their own (single-country) versions of debit cards - EC card/giropay in Germany for instance - and they are often accepted more widely than credit cards. But international travel becomes painful. (Hen
12.
by MagnumOpus 9mo ago
No, this is an artifact of Russian reserves getting frozen in 2022 and autocracies the world round getting more careful about having all their eggs in that basket. The PRC’s SAFE is selling dollars and buying gold in a very covert but absol
13.
by MagnumOpus 9mo ago
Nitpick: it is one life per year for the billion invested. Which after the typical metro infrastructure lifespan of a century is actually viable because the cost for a working-age US life in medical and other contexts is probably around t
14.
by MagnumOpus 9mo ago
No need to rewire anything - just get a universal plug adapter for NEMA 6-15P (or whatever your kitchen outlet is going to be) from Amazon, plug it onto the UK plug of your kettle, and Bob’s your uncle. (The building inspector doesn’t need
15.
by MagnumOpus 10mo ago
It has both lossy and lossless modes.
16.
by MagnumOpus 11mo ago
Bloomberg reported last year that Sam is angling for the board to give him 7% of the company, and the board was seriously discussing it. The optics weren’t right at the time, but you can rely on something being in planning. Sam doesn’t do a
17.
by MagnumOpus 11mo ago
Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximis
18.
by MagnumOpus 11mo ago
COVID was a black swan, the completely irresponsible and unnecessary redistribution from taxpayers to company owners that was the PPP was a choice. (One that most other governments worldwide didn’t make.)
19.
by MagnumOpus 11mo ago
That is very very variable. In the last five years, raw lithium carbonate world market prices have been swinging from $10/kg to >$70/kg and back. So right now LiFePo is getting cheaper, but if lithium explodes in price again, b
20.
by MagnumOpus 11mo ago
Macbooks shipped to Europe don't ever touch US ground (and I'd wager 99.9% of their parts don't either). So US tarriffs should be irrelevant - and the EU doesn't have big China tarriffs outside of EV and solar panel anti
21.
by MagnumOpus 11mo ago
The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mi
22.
by MagnumOpus 11mo ago
“Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works. If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce pea
23.
by MagnumOpus 11mo ago
That’s not the EU’s fault, is it? At best the import taxes (if any) are on the EU. VAT is added by your country, and if something is more expensive after everything than importing it yourself, that’s on a lack of competition in your marketp
24.
by MagnumOpus 11mo ago
At least since the mid-1990s Echelon revelations in the EU parliament anybody who cares knows that Bad Aibling (and similar stations all across Europe like Bude/Morwenstow in the UK) had been operated by the NSA in collaboration with U
25.
by MagnumOpus 1y ago
Incorrect. The decision was made by the SPD (leftist)+ Green coalition government in 2000, and was a condition by the Greens to enter the coalition (and then was adopted by an SPD chancellor who later took a job with Gazprom). When the cons
26.
by MagnumOpus 1y ago
> the Russian state very quickly tucked its tail in after that Russia retaliated by disallowing tourism to Turkey in the summer of 2016, causing about $5 billion of damage to the Turkish economy. https://carnegieendowment.org&
27.
by MagnumOpus 1y ago
Some do, some don't. Traditional banks will ask for a proof of address (and only accept a council tax bill, utility bill or rental contract). Some new online banks like Revolut will allow you to get around that step.
28.
by MagnumOpus 1y ago
I know - I went to Oxford instead of LSE for my masters degree exactly because the reputation of the latter is not there outside a narrow subset of finance/econ professionals in the UK. Even though the LSE programme was older and more
29.
by MagnumOpus 1y ago
Cambridge's reputation for sciences is the best in the country, way ahead of Oxford outside a few niches. The tripos part III Masters programme is selective and demanding - and most students are doing it while applying/angling for
30.
by MagnumOpus 1y ago
> people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates Young people do care - but the "checking on friends&q

More ›