Viewing profile — FredPret

You then still have the issue of standardized advertising prices. Right now, a company can say they sell gadget X for $999, which would not be possible if they had to work out item…

That would centralize power to the larger taxing authority. Right now, there's a huge number of elected people in the US who wield real local power through these taxes and other ru…

The US has too many tax permutations for this to be practicable. Companies would have to make prices a bit higher to accommodate unexpected sales tax increases in some or other jur…

Until we mass-scan people’s brains, there will never be reliable data on this. Facebook-tier research and anecdote is all we’ll ever have on happiness. When “the larger consensus” …

Not even Erlang can beat Gauss

> https://xkcd.com/224/ > “My God, it’s full of ‘cars’” Classic

> “Europeans… so much happier than… Americans” Citation needed, and not to a Facebook Quiz-tier “how happy are you on a scale of ten” questionnaire. My experience is obviously anec…

I would add exercise and sunshine. But yeah, our ancestors lived in constant danger of getting eaten by sabre tooth tigers, freezing in the snow, catching maalria, and, in general,…

I have learnt to love and embrace the BEAM. Wikipedia says "Originally BEAM was short for Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine, named after Bogumil "Bogdan" Hausman, who wrote the orig…

This is also the argument against overregulation. A little bit can be very good, a lot can strangle everyone but the biggest players

That I can agree with. But there’s a lot of daylight between that and fining newspapers with extra taxes because the regime considers their opinions verboten.

> "You may have noticed that the traceroute progressively loads in lines above the bottom line. Web pages can only load forward. Since I didn’t want to use any JavaScript, I did th…

After the great success of centrally-planned economies over the last century, now comes the next thing they'll try: Centrally planned information environments! It's sure to work gr…

Almost any problem is better than that solution

Awesome - are you on an Android? I tried to do something similar on my iPhone, but couldn't get a reliable (or any) way to get an rsync script running. I ended up with pen and pape…

But the multi-pod strategy means you can give the machine soap to use in various cycles. Put some in the little flap, and some just in with the dishes. I'm not sure if my machine e…

I applaud this man's commitment to dishwashers. But you can buy a large box of generic and very cheap no-bullshit pods at Costco, and simply put two or even three of them in a load…

1800x turbo? What happens if you fast-forward a whole lot, any easter eggs?

I thought this would be an article about how ozone is heavier than oxygen and the molecules move slower or something. I found that surprising, but not as surprising as suddenly rea…

I always thought that instead of learning to meditate in the snow and brave the cold, or learning to be zen despite a punishing heatwave, is helpful but still greatly inferior to i…

When I get dividends from US stocks, I pay a US witholding tax before the cash lands in my Canadian account

This is a good counterpoint, but forcing companies’ hand with investment will at best distort the economy, and slow it down long term. Companies are single-purpose wealth creation …

Depends on what it gets spent on - capital purchases dont reduce net income. You can write it off, but there are rules limiting how much. So you could have a situation where you ha…

It also takes money away from the corporation, when they should be doing one of these: - spend their profits to try and grow, but fail; thus spreading their capital into the rest o…