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Comment Nothing backs it (Score 5, Insightful) 110

There is no reason bitcoin can't slide back to being worth a dollar a coin. There no guarantee of value behind it. You can argue about whether fiat money is any better once the US went off the gold standard, but there is still a bit of irreplaceable value there; "the full faith and credit" means you can use it to transact business with the government, both by contracting to do public works for which the government pays you, and paying taxes and fees which are used to perform government functions and give you tokens such as licenses which show that you've contributed your share. Money's very liquidity for these purposes is a source of value, even if you can't redeem your picture of a President for precious metal. By contrast, Bitcoin literally isn't worth anything unless you can find someone (for some reason the phrase "bigger fool" comes to mind) to trade you something for it that does have value.

Comment Re:Think of the school children (Score 1) 141

DST works by tricking people to wake up and get to their daily activities an hour earlier than they normally would. And it is sold as "giving" people an hour extra in the evening. They could do that without changing their clocks by just waking up at 5 instead of 6 and working 7-4 instead of 8-5, but most people don't want to wake up earlier. So we use DST to trick them into doing it.

Doing DST as a whole society also helps for people who don't have flexible hours for their daytime activities.

But i realized a while ago that the twice a year time change is the PRIMARY reason why DST even works. Because without the constant change, people would just adapt to the new timezone. Daily activities (like school and work) would shift to starting an hour later. Lunch would start being eaten from 1-2 instead of 12-1, as the new time would be when the sun is at its highest. Dinner would be 6-7 instead of 5-6, because that is closer to when the sun is setting. It would take several years, but eventually, society would shift its schedule to closer match the sun. And the way that DST "tricks" people into getting up an hour earlier would stop.

btw, your preference (and mine) for year standard time is the way most of the world works. Gray countries in that map do not do DST. It's really only US, Canada, Europe and a few other places. And I'll never understand DST in Alaska, which is already entirely in the wrong time zone.

Comment Re:Simple solution (Score 4, Interesting) 17

It's a "simple solution" because you have missed the point entirely.

The extra cost of ApplePay to banks isn't borne by the individual using ApplePay (almost certainly Apple's rules for issuers using ApplePay will expressly forbid charging customers a fee for using it). Rather the cost of ApplePay to banks must covered by whatever base costs they pass on to all consumers (whether they individually use ApplePay or not). So no, you can't just "Use your bloody physical card" to avoid paying for ApplePay.

I imagine Apple would argue the use of ApplePay brings other cost savings (eg fraud prevention) and even "new business" that more than offset whatever Apple charges so there is in fact no net-cost to issuers that they have to pass on.

That might even be true!

Comment Re:This will be interesting for industry (Score 1) 99

I know of several legacy industrial systems running DOS, as they depend on software with built-in drivers which must communicate with long EOL ISA or PCI interfaces. It's expensive, but there are sources for legacy hardware (as well as old surplus) for this very market. Yeah you might pay USD$10K for a machine capable of reliably booting MSDOS 3.3, but it's cheap compared to the $250K CnC lathe or mill for which there are no more modern controls.

Comment Re:Why ? (Score 1) 114

I'm inclined to agree, but thinking about it there might be some things that an "agentic" AI could help with. Like "fill out my timecard for today" or "every time Outlook web logs me out, log back in with my credentials." You know, the things that would give the bureaucrats a heart attack if they knew I could do them instead of wasting my time.

Assuming I trusted the AI enough, of course.

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