Or would that just be a firehose?
Who watches the watchers?

This got me interested. What exactly is he saying there? Does it mean what I think it means - that they immediately shift that money around, possibly through some mixers, to muddle the origin? And, of course, make it better suited to pay their proxies now that Qatar isn't sending suitcases of cash to them anymore?

Thank you for writing that. I was starting to think I'm going crazy and I can't possibly be the only one who sees through that.

And if you realize that Trump is just the clown at the helm. There's literally an entire bureaucracy underneath him doing most of the planning, deciding and executing.

Douglas Adams was right. The role of the president is not to excert power, but to distract from it. President of the Galaxy, president of the USA, no difference.

This.

You don't need billions to be care-free. Even double-digit millions in some nice safe assets already give you enough fuck-you-money to be good. And while everyone looks at the super-super-rich and they're in various public lists and tracked by not just the tax authorities, barely anyone knows the multi-millionaires. I know three or so that I'm sure nobody on here has ever heard anything about. They stay quiet, comfortable, private.

Don't you think you have the absolute best reason to not be revealed right there?

Can you imagine what criminals the world over would do for a few percent of that money?

Ever thought about moving the gaming PC? :-)

But seriously, there are cheap wireless KVM solutions for 1080p, and slightly less cheap 4K HDMI wireless extenders. I haven't seen any 4K + USB, but they probably exist. But I'd imagine anything wireless is going to be artifacty.

If you can run a single Ethernet cable in a crawlspace or attic, you can get a KVM extender for $153, and that presumably would be a clean, near-zero-latency HDMI and USB repeater (because it's probably just a bunch of level shifters).

Why would you use Steam Link for a TV and waste precious network bandwidth and suffer compression artifacts and lag just to avoid running an HDMI cable? Even if it is in different rooms, $90 plus a point-to-point Cat5 cable will solve the problem permanently without all the hassles associated with using software workarounds.

Steam Link makes perfect sense when you're talking about headsets that are mobile, but streaming to a fixed device like a TV set sounds like a niche use case that would be better served with dedicated hardware.

And the Russian people continue to endure despite their quality of life falling through the floor, runaway inflation, an inability to buy foreign goods and services, an inability to travel freely, and having to deal with an infinite number of flight delays for those who can still afford to travel to other countries.

I'm struggling to understand who still supports any of this. It's not enough to be a vatnik anymore; you have to be a literally insane vatnik.

Perhaps because it's not as bad as some media commentators think? The BBC's Steve Rosenberg has some of the best reports I've seen from Russia. They've had high inflation for all the years I've had teams there (2014). Hardware isn't really a problem to acquire. In fact, I got a decent and current MacBook Pro for one of me team members whose price include Russian VAT was less than the US list price sans sales tax. It didn't come with the standard Apple warranty, but the devices are pretty reliable these days anyway. Russian supply chains have realigned through China. Cars? Maybe a different story. Services also tend to be an issue, for example Visual Studio online activation doesn't work anymore and CLion can only be updated with a private VPN connected. Some websites also actively block Russian connections, on top of filtering by the Russian government.

As for travel, my colleagues have been on holiday in Japan and other countries in SE Asia and non-EU Europe. We sent one team member to Brazil - she got a Visa card from a former Soviet republic so she could use Uber while there. We're bringing some others over for team meetings in EU in a few months. So I'm not sure why you think travel is impossible.

It's a really interesting question why people tolerate the situation. It's bit like boiling a frog I guess. And fighting the system can have major life ending repercussions.

Cynical, but also incorrect. The team members ask to switch to Teams, which they were surprised to discover has better audio quality (but we agree, the rest of the app is shitter). We also don't do much with video, just audio and screen sharing. Slack is better for collaborative screen sharing.

Slack Huddles have also been taken out for most of the past month too. Slack in general still works, but huddles see people unable to join or continuously losing their connection. It also might be ISP specific (some users can use huddles, while the majority cannot). The general consensus amongst my Russian team members is that it's mostly about Telegram and broad blocking or filtering of AWS IP address ranges. Maybe it's something else, it's hard to say.

If by simple, you mean simplistic, then yeah. What you're forgetting is that every time a bomb kills someone's mother, father, brother, sister, wife, son, or daughter, another America hater is born. So there's likely to be an endless supply of irrational leaders, so long as they are put into power by someone bombing the previous leader along with random military targets.

The only regime changes that are ever really positive long-term are regime changes led by the people of a country against their leaders. All other regime changes are statistically more likely to make things worse than better.

Let me restate that. Most of what makes neighborhood streets dangerous is vehicles and pedestrians using the same space at similar times.

Who has priority is largely uninteresting, because ultimately if a car hits you, you're still probably dead whether you had the right of way or not.

Ostensibly, sure, if you got rid of all the cars, streets would be safer for pedestrians, but they would also be a huge waste of space, because pedestrians don't need huge roads to walk. Roads exist principally for cars. The fact that pedestrians have to cross them is just an unfortunate design constraint that's hard to avoid cheaply, and giving pedestrians priority is mostly just feel-good policymaking that doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems.

The only truly safe way to share the space is to ensure that pedestrians aren't in the road when cars are. The best approach, at least in cities, is second-floor walkways, so that pedestrians and cars are never vertically at the same traffic layer. A slightly less optimal, but still reasonable approach is to give pedestrians a separate walk cycle in which the entire intersection is theirs. Pedestrians have priority during that cycle, and cars have priority the rest of the time, and as long as everyone follows the rules, nobody gets hurt.

But none of those solutions work for neighborhood streets, which is why the presence of pedestrians on neighborhood streets without sidewalks and proper traffic control for pedestrians results in the roads being inherently more dangerous than other streets.

Attacking nuclear facilities is at least moderately rational. Various countries have done that half a dozen times over the past few years. Attacking drone manufacturing and storage might also be reasonable.

But...

What does an illegal decapitation attack have to do with nukes? Do you think the new supreme leader is going to somehow be more rational than the last one? There is a fundamental difference between going after clear military targets to prevent Iran from developing weapons that threaten their neighbors and going after civilian and government targets.

No, they will keep doing this until they are a nuclear power. They've seen what denuclearization did for Ukraine, and it's hard to argue with their logic. Having nuclear weapons is a strong deterrent to invaders, who realize that the response could be swift and devastating at a scale that countries never recover from.

It's unclear what other things they will do at that point. We can only speculate. Mind you, I don't like the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran, but again, I see no evidence that anything happening over there right now is going to change anything, or even delay it enough to matter.

Is anything that the U.S. government is doing right now going to change that reality? The way you prevent them from laying mines is the same way that you prevent oil from leaving Iran — bombing ships the second they leave the harbor. If you're not willing to start with a full air and naval blockade, you've already failed, and the only thing continuing the war can do is increase the number of ways that you've failed.

My AI says there aren't enough em dashes, so you're probably both wrong.

At 3 A.M.? Probably. At 3 P.M.? Unlikely.

Most of what makes neighborhood streets dangerous is pedestrians. After dark, this concern goes way down. At some point, it becomes effectively zero, and the only thing increasing the risk is the number of driveway entrances, and in particular, blind driveway entrances.

And, of course, the presence of small children who behave erratically. In general, you should drive those speeds whenever you see evidence that small children are playing or are likely to be playing anyway, e.g. when driving past parks before sunset, when you see small children walking down the sidewalk while tossing a ball back and forth, etc.

And when there's no evidence of children, it doesn't make sense to slow down nearly as much.

Cyclists and pedestrians are also a big risk. They often behave in unpredictable ways. Also, if you pull out in front of cyclists, this is a very bad thing. But all of those factors are also highly timing-dependent. When there are no cyclists nearby, a road can be 45 MPH, but when cyclists are nearby, you need to slow down. Drivers need to have the situational awareness to realize that driving at the speed limit is not always safe, because the alternative is for the speed limits to be set so low that they are always safe, which results in miserably slow roads.

I've heard of neighborhoods pushing for 5 MPH (8 KPH) speed limits. When cyclists and even some pedestrians would be ticketed for exceeding the speed limit, you're doing it wrong. Even at 15MPH, there's only a 9% chance of an accident seriously hurting a pedestrian even if you don't slow down at all, so the benefit would only come from drivers who are completely not paying attention, and would likely be cancelled out by a higher number of drivers zoning out and not paying attention, in which case the chances of pulling out in front of a cyclist (who realistically won't be going that slowly) goes up. No free lunch. But that doesn't keep people who don't understand statistics from saying "If 25 (residential default) is good, 5 is better."