I heard an interesting observation that a lot of the price increases are driven by price-gouging rather than supply shortages since the price stayed high after supply chain blockages cleared, and continued to rise. Oil prices are well off peak levels as well and doesn't account for the rising prices in the various goods and services. Essentially, companies observe that consumers expect that prices are going up in this inflationary period, therefore they've got a greenflag to raise prices on consumers. Normally you'd hope that a competitor would undercut them by selling cheaper and stealing their share, but having also recognized the opportunity to raise prices and their margins, they too are taking advantage of the opportunity to raise prices rather than attempt to take market share. The incredible growth in corporate profits and margins is both evidence and incentive for this behavior.

If this observation holds true then, raising interest rates doesn't stop the price inflation, because supply shortage wasn't the cause of the price inflation anyway, it was market sentiment that everyone can raise their prices. So the main tool of the Fed to combat inflation may not be relevant to the type of inflation we're seeing today. In which case, new tools for combating price inflation may be needed. Price manipulation is heavily frowned upon because in the past it was foolishly wielded to disastrous results by setting prices below cost of production, causing supply shortages and skyrockets blackmarket pricing. However, if price ceilings are set to curb unjustiable price growth in an inflationary period, at a level where it's still profitable to continue producing at existing margin levels, then hypothetically it'd be possible to stop inflation more directly. The challenge of course is figuring out how to implement such a mechanism without the many many unintended consequences it could incur if such direct action is carelessly applied.

Yeah, the federated sites are a lot less intuitive than Reddit. I feel like the kbin one is a lot more reddit-like in look and feel though, maybe it'll get there someday, but I don't know if it's good enough as a substitute today.

Can the federated social media system scale to handle something like Reddit's volume? Technologically, I'm guessing that it can, but does the model impose costs on instance owners in a way that'd be impractical for them to scale to that kind of volume?

Yes, I'll definitely miss Reddit.

People keep saying:
1) It's easy to set up a replacement.
2) No good alternatives exist.

If both of those 2 claims are true, that's an inherently unstable state. Here I am back on Slashdot after being away for so many years because after clicking through several of those alternatives, so I'm pretty confident #2 is true. I'm thinking #1 is wrong. I've checked out those federated social media sites and the barrier to entry is too high for it to ever scale to be anything like Reddit. Low barrier to entry is an absolutely essential quality for growing fast enough to hit critical mass and see accelerating growth.

Also, who would want to invest in building another Reddit if the predecessor(s) are so thoroughly unprofitable and fickle?

Perhaps someday a good alternative will come, maybe not, but I think that in the best case it'll be a long wait for a replacement, and more likely, a replacement won't come and people will just silo into passive consumption of Instagram, tiktok 1-way postings rather than large-scale conversational forums.

Try Mirror's edge too, very minimal violence. Arguably, if the player needs violence it means they've failed to play the game as intended.

Take a look at Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. Class-based arena shooter, but just mild semi-cute cartoon violence.

I think Putin is crafty and Machiavellian is a great way to describe his choices.

But with that said, we don't have to assume Putin to be insane or foolish to concern ourselves with nuclear escalation. His gradual conquest of the Ukraine is a calculated risk that essentially says to NATO, "I bet you haven't got the balls to stop me, I can take what I want."

He's moving slowly and boiling the frog in the water slowly so that he can get what he wants with slower and safer escalation...but it's still escalation. He's planning to push until he himself is convinced that NATO is actually willing to go to war to stop him.

Basically, he's started a nuclear game of chicken, and the worst part about nuclear war is that the best outcome goes to the one who issues the first strike since it's hoped to at least partially blunt a portion of the counter-strike. In a nuclear missile crisis, you can't know when the point of no return is crossed because at that point, there's no response to the opponent's latest gesture of escalation, at that point the missiles are simply fired without notice to reduce the enemy's response time as much as possible.

I don't expect nuclear war to be imminent right now, but with the trajectory Putin is taking, I expect that he won't stop until he's pushed us all to the very brink of nuclear war, and the risk is that Putin may accidentally push us just a hair too far and find us in a situation that even he cannot de-escalate from since he won't know when he's overshot his limits.

"We did not evolve eating carbs"

I'm confused, do you mean processed sugars or something rather than "carbs"?

I mean, carbs are all over the place. Fruits, roots, grains, etc. We had definitely evolved eating carbs, Isn't the trope of monkeys loving bananas suggestive of carbs as being a part of man's early diet?

I keep seeing this complaint, but it doesn't make sense. Are people assuming that for every 1 police officer, they will hire 1 video reviewer to watch that officer for his entire shift? That's silly.

Any real-world application, would be local recording on the device. When an incident is reported, the police officer logs the time of his response just like he/she already does all the time. He/she turns in his camera, and any video corresponding to the officer's incident report is then archived and tagged to that incident. You don't need to save 12 hours of video per officer. You just need the time of the incident which will be very brief indeed. If you want more manual control of the evidence. Let the officer pick the video times he wants to log, submit it to evidence dept., evidence dept. fast-forwards through the video to simply verify the officer selected the right times to capture the incident (if not, kick it back to the officer to reselect his times and resubmit to the evidence dept.).

The result is 1) The officer is the only one picking out the video to archive, and no personal/private information will be submitted without the officer's consent. 2) Someone who isn't the officer is ALSO explicitly responsible for ensuring that a video of the incident was submitted to evidence that day. 3) You don't have 4 hours of video recording an officer just filling out paperwork.

This is spot on. I have thin, cheap, builder-grade (i.e garbage) windows that were original to the home's construction in 1986. They leak heat like crazy but it'll cost $20k to replace them. Meaning I'd have to live here about a decade to make that cost back in energy savings. But I've also picked up a new job where relocating for 2-3 years is a strong prerequisite for advancement. The major outlays in energy efficiency that would make a big difference for me are incredibly wasteful from a financial perspective. I would love to get my windows replaced, improve wall insulation, get solar panels, solar water heating, the works...if it meant I could save money in the long run. But because I can't take any of that with me, or recover a decent portion back in the home's sale price, I'm never going to do any of those things until I move into a permanent home. Even when I think I'm settling in for the long term, life can be unpredictable, and I'll always have some uncertainty as to how long I'll live in a home before I'll want or need to move. Just last night I was reading in the local paper that a company is attempting to assert right-of-way to build an oil pipeline straight through my suburban NJ township to pipe oil to NYC, which will further impact my home value. Not something I had been planning on happening 4 years ago, but something I might have to move to escape from.

You started off pretty well with a reasoned and comprehensible response on the topic of what the future's energy generation profile might have to look like. ....Then you went waaaay off topic and into paranoid-insane areas and crash-landed into talking about Noah's ark and space space stations. Don't you hear how crazy that sounds? I mean, at least it was interesting, but joking aside, maybe get that checked out or something.

I really liked Europa Report and I recommend it to sci-fi fans. But the criticisms against that movie were well placed, and Best Dramatic Presentation? If anything, the movie was intentionally downplaying the inherent drama of their predicament in order to keep the movie grounded in a more documentary format. Sci-fi fans should definitely check out Europa Report, but I don't think it would have won here.

I'm seeing a lot of incorrect responses to you. The SEC isn't directly involved here at all.

For the time being, the SEC is merely the hosting site. Twitter voluntarily disclosed this factoid on it's own. All public companies in the US must file quarterly reports (a.k.a 10-Q) to the public, and all of those are filed on the SEC's site for investors (or aggregators) to access. Twitter decided to disclose this fact in it's latest report because it's important information for investors to have (and they don't want to get sued for withholding material information from investors if this somehow leaks out).

If Twitter is suspected to be withholding material information or puts out incorrect information, THEN the SEC might start to get directly involved.

I like the advice I heard from an economist on a Freakonomics podcast when asked by a teenager what economics can teach us about romance(specifically with regard to asking a girl out to prom).

The economist starts off by admitting he doesn't know anything more than anyone else on romance. But he suggested that many people suffer from "loss aversion", a tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... ). The young man was afraid of rejection, which might sting briefly, but will likely have minimal negative impact and likely no long term impact. But if she says yes, he'd have a date to prom and a memory of prom he can look back on for years. The guy was just focused on the possibility of rejection.

Unfortunately, "Reduce your loss aversion" isn't as catchy as "YOLO" or "Carpe Diem". But it's more practical life advice for many people.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/da...

"If and when Valve ever makes Half-Life 3, you wonâ(TM)t have to get Steam to play it. In an interview with IGN, Valve says that it wouldnâ(TM)t dream of using its software division to make exclusive games for the Steam OS, because that just isnâ(TM)t the way Valve looks at the world.

âoeYou wonâ(TM)t see an exclusive killer app for SteamOS from us. Weâ(TM)re not going to be doing that kind of thing,â Valveâ(TM)s Greg Comer told IGN."

"...âoeBecause if it can run in both places, we donâ(TM)t like to create those artificial barriers to accessing content. We believe that, in maybe five years from now, folks will find it a quite antiquated notion that you should assume that when you change devices or platforms, that you lose all of your other games and friends. Weâ(TM)re hoping to unify, to get Steam to be as platform- and context-agnostic as possible. You shouldnâ(TM)t have to shed that every generation, or even slightly shed it.â"

Well, let's look at it more closely. If he'd announced a massive general layoff at all levels due to falling profitability, I'd agree that it's a sign the company has one foot in the grave.

But really, a little more than 2/3rds of the layoffs are redundant positions taken on in a recent acquisition. Layoffs are always sure to follow in large acquisitions like this. The remaining third is targeted at MS itself to reduce the layers of management that they've accumulated (i.e further reducing redundancies)

MS was also heavily panned as a company from a financial perspective for piled on bureaucracy, redtape, and piling resources into dead-ends. Under that light, wouldn't it make sense for MS to reduce bureaucracy, red tape, and dead weight?

Really, at this point, the only thing this CEO is known for is announcing a restructuring of MS that has been called for, for some time now.

If he had fired core personnel from the profitable branches of the business, then he'd be hurting the company in the long term for short-term savings. But in THIS case, he's getting rid of redundancies that are hurting the company in the short-term AND in the long-term.

Today, MS is seen as simply a dividend stock with strong profits but little growth to look forward to. But they have a considerable cash balance and they're increasing cash flow from the layoffs. Cash allows a company to try things, and to change things, and so long as they've got the cash for it, there's still the possibility for them to put the cash into a successful venture. 6 months in, it's too early to determine whether this new CEO has found such a venture, it's also too early to write him off.

In the meantime, I hope these employees will get decent severance, and hopefully an even better job elsewhere at a company that needs their skills. There's no sugarcoating it, there is an immense human cost to putting 18,000 people out of work, that will likely affect many more lives than just the 18,000 employees.