Before an American lights their house on fire, do not plug a 120V appliance into an 240V circuit using one of these adapters. If you live in North America, a 240V appliance will not use an ordinary plug, and the 120V ones that do will probably light on fire if you plug it into one of these. You need to import a 240V appliance from a different country, and then it will use the plug from that country and not an North American plug.

Also for the non-Americans, 240V circuits in NA need 4 wires (2 hots, 1 neutral, 1 ground) instead of 3, so usually only 1-2 circuits in the entire house will be 240 and the rest are 120. If you want to install another 240V outlet, you probably need to install a completely new circuit at the breaker and run new copper wires from there to the new outlet, which is very expensive.

Also, wires heat up according to their current. Normally the breaker at the panel can open the circuit if the current is too high, but 240V circuits are often rated for much higher currents (e.g. 50A instead of 20A), and the appliance itself will draw a lot more current than it expects if the voltage is double, which can internally overload it even if it doesn’t trip the breaker. E.g. if you plug a 120V 15A kettle into a 240V 40A circuit, it will draw 30A according to Ohms Law, which will probably cause wires within to overheat and eventually light the kettle on fire without tripping the breaker.

On Linux, you run windows programs through wine, which is an additional layer that can theoretically slow down the program.

Also, windows supports certain constructs like io completion ports or WaitForMultipleObjects that historically haven’t been emulated efficiently on Linux since it lacked comparable primitives, although those specific ones have been greatly improved in recent years with io_uring and FUTEX_WAIT_MULTIPLE.

There have been similar issues with direct3D since wine used to have to emulate it in OpenGL, but with vkd3d, wine has more opportunities to efficiently implement the d3d apis.

Basically wine being slower was the norm until quite recently.

It’s funny you mention that since YouTube led the web in dropping support for IE 6: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

That kind of thing isn’t quite in their DNA anymore, but you never know.

The blacklisting is interesting, but a 1% default rate doesn’t seem particularly high. E.g. the US default rate has possiblity never been that low (graph only goes back to 1991): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRSFRMACBS

Economists think that directly tying wages or prices to inflation can cause inflationary spirals. CPI is based on prices, and raising wages will eventually raise prices and CPI, so if you raise wages based on CPI, it can enter a positive feedback loop.

It might be ok if the feedback is slow enough or if the minimum wage influences a macroeconomically insignificant proportion of wages.

Stock buybacks don’t reduce profit for the company. They are not accounted as an expense that offsets income. Investors pay capital gains tax instead of income tax that they would pay on an equivalent dividend, which is probably what you are thinking of.

Net revenue, gross profit, operating income, EBITDA, and (net) profit are some well understood measures that take various things into account. E.g. net revenue subtracts the cost of inventory, but it doesn’t subtract wages, so it’s probably a good starting point for a discussion on redistributing earnings among workers.

Debtors prisons are still illegal and don’t exist in the US. It’s all explained in the article, but the issue is really that poor people have bad legal representation, local judges aren’t all great, and private debt collection is out of control.

In the US, your creditors should generally only be able to garnish your wages up to legal maximums. You can’t get prison sentences in civil trials.

Arrests are a last-resort way for a court to force someone to appear. The other jail time is basically contempt of court for failing to comply with court orders. These should probably exist in general, but they are likely misapplied for the above reasons in these cases.

Write to you representatives about the above stuff, not debtors prisons, since they won’t know what you are talking about.

Also most workers at tech companies are not computer programmers. Marketing, sales, support, success, operations, managment, recruiting, HR, accounting, project managment, and product managment usually make up most of the employees. You are probably better at these jobs if you have prior experience in the same industry, but what job isn’t like that?

They could potentially bring a related criminal suit later. I’m not an attorney, and there are a lot of specific rules about, but the stakes are lower in a civil case (i.e. no prison) and the burden of proof is easier, so you can more easily prove things or get the defense to admit things in a civil case that can sometimes make a criminal case easier.

Even if you can’t cite the civil case from the criminal case, just the fact that the civil case ruled one way gives the prosecution confidence to commit to a criminal case and leverage if they negotiate a settlement.

These are all so old that I think it supports the point. A lot of today’s useful materials, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals were invented by corporations around that time, but in recent history, corporate labs have been gutted and cherry pick out of universities.

E.g. in recent history, AlexNet came out of utoronto, Google bought Alex’s startup shortly after, and then Google started developing deep learning models.

They didn’t actually win. It had the some procedural non-decision that the Colorado bakery case had (i.e. the regulator failed to be sufficiently neutral). They got fined again and that is being appealed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_v._Oregon_Bureau_of_Labor_and_Industries

Details of the 10b aren’t public, but we know it’s a multi year deal, so it’s possible that OpenAI doesn’t actually have the full amount in cash now, and they could go bankrupt before they unlock the full amount. In the event of a bankruptcy, Microsoft could be in a position to acquire their assets for themselves on the cheap.

I would upgrade openssl until the fire crashes.

They are geologically young: under 1 million years old.

Mostly NixOS unstable. I have one machine still on Arch, but i plan to switch that to NixOS too.