Seems to me it would be easy to make a stable stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Just make this rule: for every $1 increment of currency minted, the company behind the coin puts $1 USD into an account. The public must be able to compare the account balance to the stablecoin supply. As long as there is always an extant dollar for every $1 of stablecoin, the value of the stablecoin should remain stable. Oh, also, a stablecoin holder must always be able to exchange coins for USD at a rate of 1:1.

Of course, this defeats the purpose, but it solves your gradient problem.

Well, maybe you're right, AC. It's possible I created the account in 2002 and ignored it for 7 years. Okay, I'll change my sig.

I don't know why I'm arguing about this with an AC, but Slashdot started in 1997. I started lurking in 1998, and the date of my first logged-in comment is 2009. Now, I'll admit that I don't remember exactly when I created my account, but I'm guessing it was around the time of that comment. But if the AC has better information about when I created my account, I will concede the point.

First, I didn't say anything about current inflation rates being defensible. From my reading, the inflation has more to do with big businesses who are making record profits and still increasing prices using inflation as an excuse, but that's beside the point.

I'm not saying Peloton was a good choice. I'd certainly prefer go out and actually ride my bike for exercise rather than pay $40 per month to sit on a stationary bike and have some fitness goon "encourage" me from a tablet on the handlebars. But the House has a certain budget for employee benefits, including fitness benefits. Nobody is going to get "impeached" for voting for this because it wasn't a bill on the floor of the House that members voted for; it was a contract entered into by benefits administrators who decided (perhaps as a result of lobbying) that this was a good use of employee wellness benefits dollars.

Employers do this all the time. My employer has contracts with various service providers that so I can get access for reduced cost. I don't use most of them. I get a small discount on my phone bill because of one of them. It's a very typical deal to offer a 'perk' to employees.

The last time I participated in hiring, it was for a basic API developer job. We got 50+ applicants, and easily 80% of them were Chinese guys with dubiously related skillsets (one guy was all about PCB lithography, another had a lot of experience doing electron microscopy). None of them claimed any significant programming skill, or any knowledge of what an 'API' was. We rejected them all. (In addition, we had no ability to provide work visas to international applicants.) I can easily see how an AI trained on datasets like this could come to the conclusion that Chinese need not apply.

The cost is the cost. As long as it is not hidden

Problem is, it's often hidden. AT&T will tell you the "cost" of a phone plan, but in the small print, they say that the cost does not include various fees and taxes. They don't typically provide an easy mechanism to find out what those fees and taxes are. The last time I went into an AT&T store to buy a phone (granted, this was many years ago) the salesman said that he could not tell me what the amount of my monthly bill would be, that I would just have to wait and see what it came out to. I had the same problem buying cable internet (not from AT&T)... the guy behind the counter couldn't tell me what the actual monthly bill would be. The "cost" they tell you is only an approximate lower bound on what they'll actually charge.

Ah, for the good old days, when I would go to any length to avoid clicking a PDF link because launching Acrobat Reader took 5 minutes, by which time I'd've lost interest. (I actually used a script for my web browser at the time to decorate links to PDF files so I wouldn't accidentally click them.)

The House of Representatives [...] will provide taxpayer-funded Peloton memberships to all of its staff, costing taxpayers roughly $100,000 per month.

$100,000 per month, that's a lot!

$10 per month for each staffer who chooses to enroll, according to Fox Business. With high participation among House staffers, the monthly cost of the contract for taxpayers could exceed $100,000 per month.

Oh, okay, so $100,000 per month is the hypothetical maximum. And $10 per month is a very small amount of overhead expense for a staff member. And there is no information in the article about whether this money was already allocated for employee benefits, in which case it would cost taxpayers $0 extra.

Of course, the story comes from Fox, who are trying to make this out like an indefensible luxury that will bankrupt the country while the rest of us starve from inflation.

Because one facet of the narrative they're using to attempt to destroy public education is that public school teachers are pedophilic "groomers" who are trying to indoctrinate the kiddies into lives of perversion.

Thanks -- that was, indeed, actually-somewhat-interesting.

I worked at a place where one of the upper managers (not mine, thankfully) loved little slogans. His favorite was "lead, follow, or get out of the way." By which he meant, "I will lead, you follow, or you're fired." He was not known to appreciate initiative on the part of his workers.

I wish I could find any substance to this story. The first link, to the Register, basically says what the summary says. I can't read much of anything at the second or third link because I don't have a Twitter account. As far as I can tell, the summary is the whole story. Jeffrey Snover created PowerShell, got demoted (from something to something else), and later got promoted again (to something better than he was?), and then it was now.

I think Capaldi could have been great, if the writing had been any good. But this has always been the way with Doctor Who. They had a great high mark in the 70s, and then the writing deteriorated until the 80s when the BBC kept threatening to cancel the show, pausing production and meddling with casting, until they finally did cancel it in 89. Which I thought was too bad, because the writing seemed to be getting better by then.

Peter Davison started playing The Doctor (#5) when he was 30. Matt Smith was 28 when he started (#11). They're not my favorites, but we've certainly had younger people in the role before.

a completely pointless act that will be useless to is declared cause within 5 years

But, if you RTFS, you will see that the law is for a moratorium that lasts only 2 years...