Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.

Prior to Discord, there was IRC.

There are already lots of viable strategies for getting rid of brine, they are just more expensive than the naïve approach of having a big pipe on the shore spewing it into the ocean. Diluting it with seawater seems to be the most viable right now.

I wonder if something like a 10 km underwater pipe with small holes in it that only let out a little bit of brine at a time would work. Might be a hassle to lay, at least to start, but I think that once it is in place it could operate without maintenance for decades. And piping is not really that expensive. Perhaps there are already researchers studying it, or it has been proven to not work. It seems like such an obvious idea.

And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

—a story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato

The tariffs will go away, but the companies have realised that you’re okay with paying $10 for something that used to cost $8 anyway so you’ll be paying $10 from now on

The social security number can really be retired altogether. There already exists a form of national identity card in the US, and it’s called the passport card. It contains all the information found on a passport except the visa pages, contained in the form of a smart card. It already has RFID capabilities. The only thing is that passport cards are not universal, but they can be if they are made free and the Government phases out social security numbers for passport card numbers in all contexts.

Step 1: Go to station ticket office

Step 2: Tell ticket agent where you want to go

Step 3: Give cash to ticket agent

Step 4: Receive ticket

I can’t comment on the practices of Italian transit agencies, but in the US, when you buy a train or bus ticket, the email just contains a QR code which you give to the train conductor or bus driver to scan. It also typically includes your name as well (tickets are not transferrable to prevent resale) but I don’t see a reason that you couldn’t design a system with simple bearer tickets.

So this system could just take your payment (which is not anonymous anyway since a name is required to process card payments) and then show you a QR code and tell you to take a screenshot of it.

Digital signatures are enough to transact millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. It’s not that they are “not ready”, it’s that there isn’t enough surrounding infrastructure for it. If everyone was issued a digital signature key embedded into the smart chips of their ID cards and every phone and computer came with the hardware and software needed to read and sign things, paper signatures would be the ones regarded with suspicion for not being digital and not the other way around.

The technology to embed digital signatures into smart chips on cards is already used on payment cards. We’re just not making full use of the technology available to us.

The ideal set-up would be that everyone’s ID card comes with a smart chip containing a private key issued by the Government. Everyone has a phone app that can sign and request signatures for messages. The public keys associated with any given identity can be freely accessed on some public database.

To sign a message, the card can be tapped against an NFC reader or inserted into a chip reader. This will cause the hardware inside the card to sign the message and return a signature to the requesting device. The requesting device must send the signature to a Government server in order to timestamp the signature and verify that the person who signed is the person they claim to be. The message itself does not need to be sent, just the signature and the hash of the message.

When your card is used to sign a message, you’ll get a notification through the app on your phone. Allow for some short timeframe (perhaps 24 hours) when the signer can cancel their signature without excuse, so that unauthorised signatures can be quickly caught and cancelled and the damage limited. If your card is lost or stolen, reporting it as such will revoke the corresponding key on the database and any messages purportedly signed after the revocation date will be invalid.

This set-up would also allow for 2FA to be implemented easily by using a simple PIN scheme where users configure a PIN in advance and this PIN must also be reported to the server in order for the signature to be regarded as valid.

The fastest way to get one minute on a microwave is to press the “add 30 seconds” button twice

Cannot say why decimal time didn’t stick, but a similarly-proposed semi-decimal calendar with 12 months of 3 weeks each of 10 days was abandoned in France solely because Napoleon didn’t like it.

It was also designed to frustrate Sunday church attendance because Sundays being every seven days would usually fall on a weekday on a workweek based on a ten-day week. While Revolutionary France experimented with state atheism and then deism, it eventually returned to Catholicism.

France spread its decimal measurements (the metre, gram, and litre) to the countries that Napoleon conquered or tried to conquer, but by that time, France was well beyond the “stamp out all semblance of religion” phase of its revolution, so a calendar designed with the intent to stifle religious attendance in mind was never going to stick very long once the French had left those territories. Besides, doing maths on length, volume, and mass is something that people do far more often than performing those calculations on dates. Sure, it would have made some things more convenient, but I’m guessing that for most people, the ten-day weeks just stuck out like a sore thumb.

Well, the Popeis the absolute sovereign dictator of Church dogma, so if he says tomorrow that Luigi is a saint, then all 1 billion Catholics worldwide must listen

I think he will see that very few people give a shit what the mountain is officially called. People who want to call it “Mount McKinley” will continue to call it “Mount McKinley” and people who want to call it “Denali” will continue to call it “Denali”.

Pope Francis has the opportunity to do the funniest thing here

As for your family discussion, generally it’s advised to avoid bringing up controversial topics because it almost never ends well.

That being said, I’ve found that the following statement is pretty universally agreeable:

Thompson led a company that was number one in the industry in denying coverage for routine and life-saving healthcare to people who had paid good money for and were legally entitled to coverage, meaning it’s almost certain that multiple people have died as a result of the policies he oversaw the execution of in the name of profit. So while I don’t condone murder as a method to solve problems with the healthcare system, it’s difficult for me to feel any sympathy for the victim.

It’s funny because the actual physics explanation is “they just do”.

I think I really agree with you here. Trump may have only had concepts of a plan but the Democrats denied even needing a plan in the first place.

I feel like they would have fared better if they went all in on the “corporations are gouging consumers” line and not try to convince people with GDP figures or the unemployment rate.

Since when have these people cared about the opinions of women

If that happens I will happily accept a CDU+SDP grand coalition. Just no fucking AfD please for Christ’s sake