Until recently when we switched to VoIP I ran a few telephone switches for work. I could send arbitrary caller ID through the phone network, but didn't because we want people to be able to call our customers back if they're called.

If I had sent a fake caller ID, could the destination phone company figure out that I was sending it? Yes, but it would be non-trivial once it had gone through a few PSTN switches run by different phone companies and they all had to track it back through their switches to find out where it really came from.

It may be easier with VoIP but I don't really know how that works once the call leaves our system. With the old PSTN switches it would be something like "yeah, the call is coming in on line 12 and leaving on line 17".

In my experience, smart people at best found school worthless, dumb people found it a waste of their time, and midwits loved it. Midwits are smarter than most teachers and the teachers tell the midwits how smart they are and give them gold stars and certificates that say they're smart. Which is like cocaine to a midwit.

When I see someone talking about how great their government school teacher was and how much they learned, I assume they're a midwit until proven otherwise.

Seems to me that most government school teachers go into teaching because they're not smart enough to get a real job and where else will they get a pension, job security and long vacations?

Or because they want access to kids.

> Thinking starts with foundational knowledge taught in schools

Every smart person I know would laugh at that idea.

If a kid can't think by the time they get to school, they probably never will. Dumb kids can't learn much and the idea that a 100-IQ teacher can teach a 150-IQ kid how to think (or anything much else really) is laughable.

Government schools were created to turn kids into compliant industrial drones. They have served no purpose since all the industrial jobs were shipped to China, but teachers' unions have ensured that millions of teachers continue to have jobs anyway.

Also Africa has a heck of a lot of sun in patterns that are more consistent all year round. Close to the equator you may get less sun in the day but you don't get a 4x difference between the peak summer production and minimum winter production as we do here.

More consistent output means it's easier to plan around, and not having winters at 40 below zero means even if the power is out for a while you're probably not going to die.

Lastly, of course, with local power production there aren't thousands of miles of copper cables and tall metal pylons to cut up and steal.

Someone on the email list said it can give a 6-8% performance boost because the pointers are half the size so you get better cache utilization. For some uses that's going to be a noticeable win.

That said, I've never heard of any software using it rather than just requiring a faster CPU.

Humans are omnivores. We're not designed to live on vegetables.

If eating meat was bad for us, we would have evolved out of it long ago.

> As evidence has grown that inflammation, metabolism and mental health may be far more connected than scientists once believed,

I remember some bloogers talking about how many of our health problems were caused by persistent inflammation years ago. But The Science said they were cranks.

Weird.

LiFePO4 is much safer, but has a lower energy density. It's great for in-house battery backup, less so for verhicles and probably a non-starter for planes.

Where traditional lithium batteries spout flames if punctured and lead to thermal runaway, LiFePO4 mostly just spew noxious gases which can be vented and don't cause nearby cells to ignite.

You are heading down the right path.

A book that made things more clear for me is "Non uniform random variate generation" by Luc Devroye (https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~mascagni/Devroye.pdf).

The generation of different distributions can be done algorithmically, but the algorithms get to the core of the processes making the noise. E.G. 1/f noise can be made from summing many exponential decaying functions. Electrons falling in holes in silicon - same thing. So we have 1/f noise in silicon. The type of process determines the type of noise whether quantum electron events or rain or insects chirping.

While noise does emerge from quantum things, it also can emerge from higher level processes.

Claims of perfect randomness from quantum physicists are always wrong.

1) The claims rely on some detector being 50/50 (they never are), always detecting individual events (they often see multiple or none) .
2) Randomness amplification is a subfield of entropy extraction and it cannot give you full entropy (aka perfect randomness).

NATO literally puts weapons on trains and trucks and ships them into Ukraine. If things get spicy, China will blockade Taiwan on day one and no ship or plane will get through.

Also, Ukraine had the most powerful military in Europe when Russia invaded. Taiwan's military is weak and notoriously corrupt.

There's nothing they can buy which can compete with Chinese factories churning out missiles and launching them from the parking lot outside the factory. All these fantasies about the Super-Dumper American Navy protecting Plucky Taiwan from Hitler Xi area complete nonsense because China can massively out-produce the US in weaponry and they'd be fighting on their own doorstep rather than thousands of miles away.

1. The US can't defend Taiwan from China without attacking the Chinese mainland. Which leads to a collapse of the global economy and nuclear war.
2. Taiwan will join China sooner or later because their future is with China, not the US. Xi is well aware of this, which is why he's in no hurry to invade.

Why?

I mean, seriously. How exactly is it a good thing that someone driving past a school bus with some flashing lights gets a more serious punishment than someone who crashes into a school bus and kills a few kids?

It's owned and operated by private companies in the US because US laws make it difficult for the government to introduce the surveillance state directly. All across Europe these cameras are just owned directly by the government.

> This is what happens when you let a handful of people have too much power.

Yes. This is why we need to get rid of 99% of government.

Without which, the billionaire oligarchs couldn't function.