I think the problem is the loss of the middle class. The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left. It doesn't matter how hard or how smart you work.
I think you sum up the type of despair people feel pretty well.
It's really more helpful to look at "middle class or better." Because yes, the middle class has shrunk. But more of that share went to the UPPER income tiers.
The middle class went from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023. But the lower income brackets saw a +3% change while upper saw +8%.
Economists and rich people indeed think in terms of scarce resources. Any economics book will tell you that it is about managing scarce resources. Rich people will never allow for example the government to give increasingly more money and resources to lower income people, because they fear there's note enough for them. They don't believe in abundance for everyone.
>If it's not static and it grows, then it cannot be scarce
Elaborate? Scarcity means demand for the resources exceeds the available supply. There is essentially unlimited human wants and only finite resources. The resource quantity can grow but it will never meet demand. Even if all growth goes to the people with less resources, the resources will still be scarce.
Being "middle class" is a mindset, not a category of wealth. It's something of an anachronism from when there were two distinct classes: nobility/clergy, and the peasants. The middle class, the bourgeoisie (because they lived it towns, bourgs) didn't fit into either existing class. One can be wealthy or poor and still be middle class. Social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and emphasis on external, impersonal values are the hallmarks of this mindset.
I think that's a neat idea. I often use Google Sheets as a database for my projects. I read 'setup' data and 'log' data. Works well. Most often just append a row at the end for writing. But I can see why a CSV can be a decent idea too especially if it can be edited with a spreadsheet app. So I would put this on a server (a file share) and edit it as needed with Excel/Numbers/Google Sheets etc... and click save. My apps can read it and if writing appends a line then hurray! cool idea.
I think both are great. It depends on what you need and the requirements you want to hit. I use an RPi for as a Pi-Hole for example. It works great. Low power and just that one task. Performs nicely. And cheap. However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it. Also works great for that task. So I think of it in terms of 'task' and it's footprint (ie storage/mem) and throughput.
You can't run a DNS server on the same mini PC? Seems like that would be ideal.
I run PiHole on a Pi Zero, which isn't really comparable to any mini PC in cost or performance. It uses such little resources that I'm surprised that most new routers don't offer the DNS filtering features out of the box these days.
Pi-Hole specifically has a limited number of officially supported OSes - https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/. PfSense/Opnsense run on top of FreeBSD which is not supported by Pi-Hole.
I assume this is true of pfSense, but Opnsense has a number of available DNS server options built into the distribution.
Pi-hole is a little easier for someone who's not into networking to deploy. I would give a beginner Pi-hole much sooner than I would introduce them to OPNsense. (I run both, OPNsense for my studio network, and Pi-hole + Asuswrt-merlin for my homelab)
I installed pihole once. Not a fan. Since then I've been using Adguard Home. It's a single go binary so it would work fine on pfsense/opnsense either directly or in a jail.
Often yes but sometimes they both go down. However bonds don't decline as fast. The actual strategy I follow is stock/bond/short-term. The short term is like a buffer currently invested in short term treasury fund. Think of it like a game. If stocks are low then sell bonds and when that is also low then use the short term investment to live on to wait out the market recovery. Also if you are retired like me you would tighten expenses when drawing from the short term during a downturn.
Lookup VUSXX. It is a vanguard short term treasury fund. That's where I put my cash. It is currently paying 4.24% that is state tax free (I live in Oregon).
Unfortunately it is hard to predict if that rate will stay high enough. Previously I had 'cash' in iBonds which for a while paid 8-9% early in the pandemic when inflation was high. If none of the above pays well enough I look into treasuries, or CDs.
Yeah, I think current tech assumes a server relay. However imo, and if I were to imagine a solution, in this case I think a message would need a ttl, say 24 hours. In a local mesh/hive everyone would store a copy of the undelivered messages. When people move between hives they would sync these undelivered messages where ttl didn't expire. With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. Undelivered means a destination user that didn't show in a hive. Wdyt?
> With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages.
If you want this to scale you'd need a scheme to deal with limited cache per device. Something like having each device assign a random priority to each message it has in transit. That way everyone culls a different set when things fill up.
> would need a ttl, say 24 hours
Probably better off scaling priority by age. That way you deliver if at all possible, until it eventually falls out of cache. Some people will be able to dedicate much more storage than others.
I do think this approach would be fairly tractable within "hives" where most of the members have few-hop connections to all of the others, most of the time. The trouble is that there would be so many unpredictable cases:
- Regular travelers between cities (e.g. flight attendants) might be the only reliable links between those hives. Travel patterns change, war breaks out, etc and the hive suddenly splits into two (or more).
- A lot of people probably move around too much, and too unpredictable, to participate in a hive that's stable on scales necessary to maintain a TTL of <24h and a reasonable amount of cache for storing others’ undelivered messages.
Maybe I'm being too pessimistic here… I do think it'd be fascinating and instructive to try to build and use a hive/mesh messaging system like this at scale.
Basically, if you visit the Galapagos and you're so inclined… you leave a letter for someone else, and you sift through the letters that have been left there, and try to find one or two that you could conceivably hand-deliver when you return home.
The latency is 100~1000x longer than "normal" snail mail. This is basically with one "hive" constructed around tourists and researchers in an unusual location. But it basically works.
In simple terms, if I understand quantum computing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the big benefit is parallel computing at a massive scale whereas classical computing is serial in nature. If yes likely both method are useful. But a very useful use case for quantum computing is AI training to create the models. Currently consumes a lot of GPUs but QC has nice chance to impact such a use case. Did I get it right?
> the big benefit is parallel computing at a massive scale
The problem with this line of reasoning is that, even though a quantum system might have many possible states, we only observe a single one of those states at the time of measurement. If you could somehow prepare a quantum system such that it encoded the N equally-likely solutions to your classical problem, you would still need to rerun that experiment (on average) N times to get the correct answer.
Broadly speaking, quantum computing exploits the fact that states are entangled (and therefore correlated). By tweaking the circuit, you can make it so that incorrect solutions interfere destructively while the correct solution interferes constructively, making it more likely that you will measure the correct answer. (Of course this is all probabilistic, hence the need for quantum error correction.) But developing quantum algorithms is easier said than done, and there's no reason to think a priori that all classical problems can be recast in this manner.
I think that the big challenge is to recast any classical computations as quantum computations with a superpolynomial speedup.
I think that all classical problems can be cast as quantum computations because quantum computation is just computation - I believe that one can implement a turning machine using quantum gates, so arbitrary computation is possible with quantum gates.
The superpolynomial speedups are the thing.. I wonder if these will be limited to a class of computations that have no physical realization - just pure maths.
Ahaha! Read the subtitle of the blog, literally at the top:
"If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't
solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel."
I just watched a YouTube video of a battery powered train in the UK [1]. If longevity and number of cycles is much higher than lithium ion coupled with a safer profile then I think this would be an ideal application for sodium ion. Really cool.
Edit: I'm talking about for both onboard batteries (for the safety profile) and the BESS container mentioned in the video. Not to mention trains wouldn't have to compete with the lithium ion battery supply that is taken over by EV cars and trucks.
I'm very much rooting for this. A lot of train tracks are not electrified simply because it is not economical to do so. I know that most of Denmark(outside of greater Copenhagen, and Aarhus) is still operating Diesel trains. Such battery backed "electric" trains may be just the thing to turn those Diesel trains into cleaner ones without needing a huge capital investment of electrifying vast track networks that are not used justifiably as much.
New battery powered trains unfortunately are even more expensive of a capital investment.
Especially when it comes to maintenance over classic electric trains.
What I always found weird is that a power rail system isn't used. One could do it even without a third rail...
I can imagine running electric wires along tha tracks is a big challenge. However I think using the container BESS mentioned in the video above receiving trickle charge from the grid would leave opportunities for local solar generation to augment the grid too. Think of it like a decentralized solution. Scales much more and provides resilience against outages.
(strictly technically speaking not direct to grid but yes)
The problem is gaps in electrification. So you might have electrified two parts, but with a big gap without wires
This lets the train cross those (and mind you this would have to be something a larger gap, if it's a smaller gap without stops, let's say 1km, then the train just doesn't care)
I rode in this as a railfanning child while on a day trip somewhere in the Siegerland. Looong ago. 1978/79 maybe? So exiting, because having never seen them before :)
Much, much later somewhere in the 'Ruhrpott', around 199x, feeling rather surreal because of switching back and forth slowly through the apocalyptic yards of abandoned industrial ruins, with brand new Nokia regional HQ in the midst. Shiny new glass buildings with multiple large satellite dishes on the roof. And a soon to be opened S-Bahn track to there.
Oh, imagine frieght trains that carry a few battery coaches, and periodically stop at charging stations in the middle of nowhere and then continue on their journey without polluting and being a menace to the urban grids..
Now, if only such battery systems could come down in cost so much that it becomes a no-brainer.
There are regions where the grid and the plants powering that are separate from the maingrid. (West-)Germany was like that, still is. For historical reasons, like different frequency of 16 2/3Hz. It's called 'Bahnstrom'.
If your'e wondering wtf!? 16 2/3Hz at all, that was because at the time of early electrification with AC (less transmission loss over longer distances), that frequency produced less sparks/arcing with the then available electro-motors for that single phase of AC, RPM, lack of advanced (mobile(power))electronics, and so on. Legacy...
DC had different trade-offs.
Since you wrote freight-trains, which isn't light-rail, which also had its own power-plants and grids, and mostly still has?
Nice job! That's a neat use case. Impressive too. You got texts, image generation using AI and storage and retrieval and display. All with a low cost. This would make a nice solution for a kiosk or displays you see in stores.
