I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion. I did as you suggested. $100 invested 50 years ago into gold would be worth $3000 today. $100 invested into the S&P500 50 years ago would be worth $6870.
They can be nice for running low footprint VMs (e.g. in LXD / Incus) where you don't want to use a container. Alpine in particular is popular for this. The downside is there are sometimes compatibility issues where packages expect certain dependencies that Alpine doesn't provide.
Have you seen how bad the Nix documentation is and how challenging Nix (the language) is? Not to mention that you have to learn Yet Another Language just for this corner case, which you will not use for anything else. At least Guix uses a lisp variant so that some of the skills you gain are transferable (e.g. to Emacs, or even to a GP language like Common Lisp or Racket).
Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of Nix and the way it handles dependency management and declarative configuration. But I don't think we can pretend that it's easy.
The documentation is not great (especially since it tends to document nix-the-language and not the conventions actually used in Nixpkgs), but there are very few languages on earth with more examples of modules than Nix.
Not really. Smart contracts ensure that if all the conditions are met, the contract will be fulfilled. They achieve that through decentralisation: no one person can decide whether or not it will be fulfilled.
No real world contract can replicate that - you have to go to court to enforce a breach of contract and it isn't certain you will succeed. Even if you succeed the other party can refuse to comply, and then you need to try to enforce, which also may or may not work.
On the contrary, I think many real world contracts replicate the property that a bunch of people have to sign off on it and no one person decides whether it will be fulfilled.
> Not really. Smart contracts ensure that if all the conditions are met, the contract will be fulfilled.
Not really. Smart contracts ensure that if all the conditions IN THE CHAIN ITSELF are met, the contract will be fulfilled.
"The product you paid got delivered" is not on chain. It can't be verified without trusted party putting that info in the chain. Sure, it can be made into multiple entities confirming if needed but it is still dependent on "some people" rather than "true state of reality.
> No real world contract can replicate that - you have to go to court to enforce a breach of contract and it isn't certain you will succeed.
The oracle can lie and be unreliable too. It would be great system if you mangaged a video game where the currency system can see the objective state of the world, but ethereum can't, needs oracle(s).
In both cases you basically rely on reputation of oracle, or escrow company in case of old money transaction, to have high degree of safety.
As long as you are white British. If you're anything else you're probably going to be worse off under Farage.
It's a shame that if you want to vote for someone with different policies to the two main parties, you have to accept that you are also voting for an outspoken racist.
There are plenty of instances of Reform politicians saying things that are just outright racist (e.g. Sarah Pochin) and receiving no real reprimand from the party leadership. The only people not seeing the racism are the people who don’t want to.
Reform is also headed by a guy who regularly used phrases like "Hitler was right", "gas them all", and "go home, Paki" as an 18 year old (confirmed by 20+ former classmates).
Ordinarily we might give him the benefit of the doubt: maybe he's matured and grown up since then. But the fact that he's called all of those classmates liars says that either they are all liars, or he is dishonest about his racism.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for the Jewish community, but I would expect that they feel less threatened by something a child said in a playground during the 1970s, but rather the rampant antisemitism that has risen in our society, spearheaded by the toxic alliance of the hard left and the Islamists. Those are the ones who are assaulting Jewish people on the streets and hanging around Synagogues to “demonstrate”, or rather to intimidate them.
IMO, statistical fluke, more likely a few years of delayed migrations post-pandemic got squeezed together and it's now back to the previous trend: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c246ndy63j9o
Net migration is only falling because of record high numbers of British and European people emigrating, against a backdrop of huge (800K+) levels of gross immigration.
Firstly, why do you lump British and European together? Because they are the same "race" in your eyes?
Non-EU net migration has fallen sharply too.
It proves what was always obvious to anyone who looked at it, that high net immigration was temporary, especially the peak post covid and the special scheme for Ukrainians.
Levels of EU vs non-EU immigration has been a particular subject of interest for the UK before and after Brexit.
And note also that the UK and EU share high-quality education systems, Western Judeo-Christian culture and Western-aligned geopolitics.
Recent waves of immigration from countries in the Middle East and North Africa are importing wholly different culture, geopolitics, and crucially, we are importing from countries with measurably lower standard of literacy and numeracy.
These are objective facts, and they are not criticisms or judgements on the character of those who are migrating.
I would make exactly the same choices as our Pakistani, Somali and Eritrean friends, if I were in their position.
Half of Europe's cultural development was initiated by Muslims and the Renaissance started with Muslim scholars in Islamic Spain, which was Islamic for the lion's share of a millennium, leading to the hilarious fact that a state in the New World settled by Spanish-speaking settlers gets the "Calif" in its name from the muslim term for a leader due to it being so totally embedded in culture. But OK, yeah. Judeo-Christian.
The roots of the renaissance were established much, much earlier in Islamic Spain. It is essentially forgotten history (and largely systematically erased history, at that)
Track down a copy of Bettany Hughes’ “When The Moors Ruled In Europe”. I think it is on Youtube. It is long but exceptionally clearly presented.
Put simply, were it not for the Reconquista, what we understand as the renaissance would be very clearly perceived as Islamic in origin.
And maybe don’t trust ChatGPT to do anything but regurgitate the prevailing interpretation of history, which was, in fact, reshaped radically by Catholic propaganda.
Seems you've found a leftwing historian who chooses to endorse the violent Islamic conquest of Southern Europe, re-imagining it as a vibrant exchange of cultures, predicated on extreme timeline distortion.
The Renaissance is defined as follows:
> The Renaissance was a European cultural movement from the 14th to 17th centuries, marking a "rebirth" of classical Greek and Roman learning after the Middle Ages. It was a period of significant innovation in art, literature, science, and philosophy, with key developments like humanism. Notable figures include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and the movement began in Italy before spreading across Europe.
Islam did not even exist in the time of the Classical Greek and Roman periods.
Neither Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael ever met Muslims directly, travelled to the Islamic world, or interacted with Islamic institutions.
Hard disagree on this. Immigration was the only realistic option to shield against demographic collapse and stabilize unskilled labor supply for decades, and it is no suprise that politicians took it.
I honestly think that if politicians had blocked this (reform style) in 2000, the resulting economic slowdown and increasing cost for labor intensive products would've seen them voted out in short order.
I do agree that negative consequences of the approach were played down/underestimated/neglected, but painting it as pure uncaring negative is just disingenuous.
"stabilising unskilled labour" in this context means dumping the salaries of the natives, making it so unskilled sectors no longer provide a living wage.
Sure, but local supply of labor was looking even worse than now back then, and cost of labor intensive stuff like daycare, nursing homes/residential care have gone through the roof, still.
Just look at how Brexit alone affected lorry driver wages; if you cut immigration 25 years ago, you'd have seen the same effect across multiple sectors magnifying each other (because labor supply is simply insufficient), and there is a lot of people that would have suffered from higher costs in all those sectors without getting any compensation.
As a "sanity check" for this: If the UK economy did not "need" immigrant labor, you would expect significant unemployment and very high difficulty in finding unskilled labor jobs. Neither is the case.
Or you can pay £0 per month for 99% of the content.
I'm a bit like the parent comment. I've always wanted to be able to pay a monthly fee (even a high one, say £50 a month) to have access to a good quality selection of movies and TV shows. The thing is, it's always bugged me that you can get a much better experience by pirating than by paying for legitimate access. That seems the opposite to how things should work.
This pre-dates streaming. DVDs came with FBI warnings and other screens that couldn't be fast-forwarded or skipped. You couldn't buy a DVD in the US and play it in a DVD player in Europe because the "region" didn't match. You couldn't easily transfer it to watch on a device without a DVD player because of the DRM.
All of this means that, even ignoring the fact that it's free, it's just far more straightforward to torrent a movie and watch it wherever you want using whatever app you want.
Is anyone in the UK really complaining that it's difficult today to show you're eligible for hospital care, voting, employment, or buying a drink? I can't honestly remember a single time in my life where someone told me this was a problem for them. It's certainly never been a problem for me.
This sounds to me like fixing a problem we don't really have. At a time when we have plenty of genuine and serious problems that need fixing and aren't being fixed.
I'd rather see my tax money spent on tackling climate change, or decreasing hospital wait times, or hiring more teachers, or reducing dependence on Russian oil, or any of the other countless things that would make a genuine difference. Instead, we're going to blow a load of money on something that isn't going to improve people's lives (except maybe in a very negligible way) or make the world safer, and is probably going to erode my privacy and security.
I'm not sure that's still correct. There was an uplift because of Covid and people having more spare time, but whatever more recent (2024 - 2025) sources I can find suggest the trend has reversed.
It's worth also considering demographics. If you narrow the focus to just younger generations (who, we can guess, are more addicted to smartphones) then the numbers look pretty bad. E.g.:
My son, who is away at college as a freshman this year, recently phoned me and apologized for calling me a bad dad and thanked me for not allowing him to have any devices in his bedroom after bedtime growing up, as it made him become a reader. He said he was amazed when he got to school and nobody else reads for pleasure.
Exactly. I share the view that it doesn't make sense to effectively have two window managers running (one in my WM and one in Emacs) with different philosophies and shortcuts. But, and in a more general sense this is the great thing about Emacs, if you don't like its default behaviour you just change it.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat... https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...
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