To Manela's credit, while he advocated for nationalizing of banks, gold production, other mining, and the abolition of private property, he didn't enact these policies when he eventually took control of the government. He was smart enough to understand that SA badly needed foreign investment, and nationalizing industry and destroying property doesn't get you investors.
So he was smart enough to use communist rhetoric as a first stage, and then jettison it to fire stage 2 and insert South Africa into a successful orbit.
Would that all communists were that smart. We could have avoided a lot of problems.
True story--in order to get my California driver's license I needed a birth cert. A copy would not do. I had to go back to my place of birth and get a copy with a raised seal on it. This was not easy to do directly or quickly. An expediting service was the most reasonable way to do it. The expediting service used security questions to assure that it was really me. There were several questions. Most of them were easy. Then I came to... "which one of these is a phone number you used in the past 10 years". Oh crap. I don't know anybody's phone number now. It's "open list, select Jerry, dial". Jerry's number? Couldn't tell you to save my life. MY number? I never dial it of course. It used to be staring me in the face on my bill all those many years ago... until the bills became an automatic charge on my credit card... and I moved several times... into different area codes.
I stared at the numbers. One looked familiar. I went with my gut. I was right; but I was sweating bullets.
Actions that will ruin my entire life do not "incent" me to act worse, they in fact very much incent me not to ruin my life.
What happens when your life is ruined whether you act or not? For some people life is becoming a choice between ruin in anonymity, or ruin with some notoriety and a chance to strike a blow for justice. If enough people feel that way, we're ripe for revolution.
I'm the first to admit that anything quantum blows a wormhole through my head. I struggle to find anything that will allow me to grasp it. I'm a programmer, dammit.
"God doesn't play dice with the Universe"
OK, whatever.
Maybe, just maybe, "God doesn't waste CPU cycles rendering windows that are trivially culled from the scene graph".
So. When you observe the particle its window comes to the top and The Program has to do all the rendering calculations.
Cue attempt by actual physicists to explain why this attempt to grasp the concept is totally inadequate or the more enjoyable funny bits about how the Universe is written in either Lisp or Perl.
It "dies" in the sense that it fails as currency. That doesn't necessarily mean that it loses value. Many things have value but are not used as currency.
For example, any given art collection at a major museum is a financial success in terms of wealth preservation; but a failure as currency. Nobody trades fractional Metropolitans. Any sales to or from the museum are converted into currency first. Auctions are conducted in currency, etc.
You might say that comparing bits to art is ridiculous, since one has aesthetic value and can draw tourists and the other doesn't. Art, however, is a matter of taste. All value apart from bare essentials like food, shelter and clothing is somewhat of a collective delusion. There's nothing to bar one BitCoin from beating the Mona Lisa, except taste.
I learned to code simple things in basic, use a compiler, and run a program around age 11. But I did not learn programming until two years later using FORTRAN
I learned BASIC and then assembly when I was 14. I'm not sure when I learned programming. Arguably, none of us have.
If the Commodore 64 taught us anything it's that the language shipped with the system is crap and you have to dig deeper. Maybe yesterday's PEEK and POKE assembly programmers are reflected in the next generations. Maybe there are "screw these web apps, let's hack the browser" kids in grade-school today. That will lead them into C, C++ and even assembly if they're curious enough.
we spend more money on HC in america than any other country
We spend more money on bullshit that calls itself "health care" in America than any other country. FTFY.
Insurance administration. Byzantine pricing and "network relationships". Malpractice insurance. Fake cures. Over-the-counter tomfoolery: herbs -- may or may not have medicinal value, and may or may not be used properly. Homeopathy -- placebo value only. Vitamins -- not needed unless you have a specific deficiency, which you probably don't.
Home Ec was under that cloud when I was in school; but some of us saw the writing on the wall when it came to typing. The typing class was still majority female. The teacher was this very prim, older woman--the classic professional secretary look. Taking that class "so I could use my computer better" was one of the best decisions I ever made to guide my own education. Absolutely nobody pushed me to do it. I think that fact that my father had been a Yeoman in the Navy and then later an administrator for DoD helped. He could type 70 wpm on a manual. They taught us with manuals in school. I tested at 45 after a semester. I still pound the shit out of my keyboards. People in the same room complain about it sometimes.I suppose I should make an effort to get over that...
I hate FaceBook as much as the next guy (and refuse to use it) but their business plan is actually pretty straightforward. They sell ads and data about users to advertisers. They're part of the cadre that's turned the Internet into 21st Century TV.
The better criticism of FB's current valuation is that it projects too much growth. The user base is kind of saturated. Once you have a double-digit percentage of the entire planet, it's hard to go much higher. If they try to grow revenue through increasing advertising, they run the risk of alienating users.
Hale-Bopp was a spectacular sight on the evening commute from Washington DC, headed west. That's quite spectacular considering the light pollution there. Hyakutake was also visible in the morning in the same area. Growing up I had read about spectacular comets. I thought I'd never see one; then we got two in just a few years. For some reason I have fonder memories of Hyakutake. It reminded me of the comet on the Netscape logo. Netscape peaked about the same time those comets did. Also, there was no time for anybody to put together a Hyakutake death cult because it was fast moving and a bit of a surprise.
Halley's comet? It was a smudge in my binoculars. That was the only way I could see it. I thought I'd never see a great comet...
You can't jump to conclusions about the weather. The thing about France is telling. They didn't drop until 2006, and I remember hearing some truly awful things about what the heat did to the elderly there. If I had to guess, I'd say that some change in government policy had something to do with it. UK is not as strongly tied to Europe. Some of these other countries are tied in economic union; but they are still sovereign. Perhaps France was able to provide good retirement benefits just a bit longer. That would be the first place I'd look--the impact of government policies that impact the elderly. If you suddenly have to take an early retirement and aren't getting the same benefits that will impact your lifestyle.
Government policy impact does a better job of explaining discrepancies between countries, the sudden change, and why some are not affected even though they share a similar climate.
Of course my speculation is no better than theirs. The people that are getting paid to do this need to go back and analyze their data some more.
There's a big problem with punishing people for having children after the fact. The Nth child didn't do anything to deserve growing up in a poorer home. That's why we actually subsidize the Nth child.
If you want to reduce population, look to the countries where it's declining. I don't claim to be any kind of an expert on this kind of thing, but they seem to have some common factors. They tend to be advanced consumer nations where the culture encourages longer education. That seems to delay entry into the workforce, which delays household stability, which discourages people from having children. Of course birth control helps; but you have to have an incentive to use it.
Instead of fining people for having children, you could reward them for avoiding the first child. Each year without a child, the stipend goes up by some percentage. Some people would use this to save up, create a stable home, and bear children. By the time they did that though they will have chewed up some of their fertile years.
LLVM has got to be dynamically linking and stripped by default. There are switches on the other compilers that will let you do that, and it looks like they're being ignored.
They used to tell us that if technology ever got out of hand, we could always pull the plug.
Of course you are asleep when the problem occurs. If this were a low-wattage appliance you could just use one of those timers that people use for Christmas lights. You might be able to hack a heavy duty version of that by using a timer that moves a lever that knocks a bowling ball off a shelf. The bowling ball is tied to the Tesla power plug. That oughtta do 'er.
Ahh, but you say the Tesla doesn't always take the same time to charge? Easy. You just need to program it to tweet charge state to your phone. Then your phone can send something to the device that pushes the bowling ball off the shelf that pulls the plug.
Oh, but wait. Tweeting the location of your car isn't secure, and you may not have access to the car's APIs anyway. Besides, they're buggy and suspect.
So. You need to have a separate secure device in the car that monitors the charge state, and logs in to your web site with HTTPS and relays that information securely to the device that pushes the bowling ball off the shelf that pulls the plug.
There. All fixed. I just hope the ball doesn't roll off the shelf the wrong way and dent the car. To make sure that doesn't happen we need...
I never worked for Amazon, but I worked at a much smaller warehouse that handled fragile items. Our mode of work was nowhere near as brutal as what they're describing. The warehouse was about the size of a large gymnasium. We picked, then packed so that broke up the monotony. Looking for irregular but functional items was also fun. These were randomly given free to employees at various times. That was about the only real perk. A lot of other things sucked. The management just didn't have a lot of respect for the employees. It was all about "discipline" and I left over a dispute involving working straight through lunch. I think it flew just under the labor law radar there. There was a trash compactor there that broke a guy's arm allegedly, and they just welded that stupid thing back together. The lack of respect probably ran both ways. One of the guys slid on some boxes and used it as a pretext for disability. I saw the guy. He looked fine to me.
I only did it for a few months, then did a few more jobs and went back to school.
Anyway, as sucky as the job was this Amazon thing sounds like the pits. In a small warehouse you're always in conversational contact with another human being, or close by. You're not alone too much. It sounds like these pickers are just listening to a machine and running through a football-sized warehouse all the time. It doesn't sound like they get a chance to pack, sweep, clean, or do other stuff that could break up the monotony and allow them to socialize while working.
A company as smart as Amazon could find a way to solve these problems; but I think the solution will be to simply have pick-bots do the work and fire the employees. I have mixed emotions about that. Crappy minimum-wage jobs have a purpose sometimes. If you're not going crazy as a picker and day-dreaming about something else, schlepping back to the flat and commiserating with your buds about a crappy job, then what are you doing?
blaming the violence on Snowden and his release of the documents - not on the real source of the problem which was the covert activities of the US, and it seems now also the Australians.
Maybe this will end up like software patents. All the countries on the planet will agree to cross-license their hatred. We could avoid a lot of conflicts that way.
My turn of phrase was awkward there. I should have said something more like... "when your money doesn't circulate, it no longer functions well as money". You've raised a valid issue. You can divide money into two allocations:
Circulating and non-circulating
True, when the supply of circulating money drops you have deflation. This is why the Fed can get away with what it's doing. Their balance sheet is inflated, but the lower tiers have less money. The lower tiers are more likely to circulate their money, and if all the QE got to the lower tiers, then yes, you'd have inflation.
Income inequality in the US has been like this before in the 1920s, then flattened out during the Great Depression into the 1950s. It'll flatten out again. The only question is "how?". It can be more or less disorderly. We can suffer from inequality for a long time though. Why does it cause problems?
I used to be part of the "oh noes! socialism" crowd, but when you look around the world and start thinking about it, you realize disparity is a problem.
I always like to pull this out of politics, and conduct a though experiment. The experiment is this: What would happen if one king had all the money?
That's the absurd projection of where we're headed. IMHO, what would happen is that money would lose its value. Long before the king had all of it, people would give up on money. They'd go to barter, or invent their own form of money.
Well, guess what? We've seen alternative currencies that people ignored like gold and silver become more popular. We've had people taking interest in novel currencies like BitCoin. Why?
Because the original money is hoarded by the wealthy. The original money game has been won. A strange thing happens when you win the money game though. Your money doesn't circulate, so it's no longer worth as much as money. Surprise, surprise, the elites are pressed to devalue the dollar. The Fed is just responding to the fact that a hoarded dollar cannot have much value.
So. If you want the dollar to have value again, it must circulate more widely. The dollar might die, but money will live on. A new generation will build wealth some other way, because the old generation is winning the money game, and... if they are allowed to fully win it they'll be left with a lot less than what they think they have. It may be due to loss of relevancy or loss of revolution.
The next typhoon might wipe out sensationalist headlines. Yeah I know, that'd be one heck of a storm. It takes a mighty wind to compete with what passes for journalism online. That storm might not be mighty enough to take out Congress though. Wheeeew, Nelly!
PI is irrational, 1/3rd isn't. 1/3 could be represented perfectly if the implementation had a "repeating" bit. AFAIK, there isn't any commonly used FP hardware that has such a bit, so yeah; 1/3 is not perfectly represented.
This reminds me of the arguments you get from people when you try to explain that 0.9 repeating is exactly equal to 1.0.
Their minds really get blown when you explain that 0.9 repeating is just 0.3 repeating + 0.3 repeating + 0.3 repeating. All those 3s add up to 9, all the way out into infinity. It's the same as 3*(1/3), so plainly it equals 1.0; but their minds still have a hard time dealing with 0.9 repeating equaling 1.0.
A more succinct way to get over it? Repeating decimals are just alternative representations of numbers. The symbol known as 0.9 repeating just happens to map to the same number as 1.
Slashdot Mirror
To Manela's credit, while he advocated for nationalizing of banks, gold production, other mining, and the abolition of private property, he didn't enact these policies when he eventually took control of the government. He was smart enough to understand that SA badly needed foreign investment, and nationalizing industry and destroying property doesn't get you investors.
So he was smart enough to use communist rhetoric as a first stage, and then jettison it to fire stage 2 and insert South Africa into a successful orbit.
Would that all communists were that smart. We could have avoided a lot of problems.
When I see a bag of radioactive or biologically hazardous material being stored improperly, I call the authorities.
He where's Dan? I dunno. Some guys from Homeland Security took him away shortly after lunch.
True story--in order to get my California driver's license I needed a birth cert. A copy would not do. I had to go back to my place of birth and get a copy with a raised seal on it. This was not easy to do directly or quickly. An expediting service was the most reasonable way to do it. The expediting service used security questions to assure that it was really me. There were several questions. Most of them were easy. Then I came to... "which one of these is a phone number you used in the past 10 years". Oh crap. I don't know anybody's phone number now. It's "open list, select Jerry, dial". Jerry's number? Couldn't tell you to save my life. MY number? I never dial it of course. It used to be staring me in the face on my bill all those many years ago... until the bills became an automatic charge on my credit card... and I moved several times... into different area codes.
I stared at the numbers. One looked familiar. I went with my gut. I was right; but I was sweating bullets.
Actions that will ruin my entire life do not "incent" me to act worse, they in fact very much incent me not to ruin my life.
What happens when your life is ruined whether you act or not? For some people life is becoming a choice between ruin in anonymity, or ruin with some notoriety and a chance to strike a blow for justice. If enough people feel that way, we're ripe for revolution.
I'm the first to admit that anything quantum blows a wormhole through my head. I struggle to find anything that will allow me to grasp it. I'm a programmer, dammit.
"God doesn't play dice with the Universe"
OK, whatever.
Maybe, just maybe, "God doesn't waste CPU cycles rendering windows that are trivially culled from the scene graph".
So. When you observe the particle its window comes to the top and The Program has to do all the rendering calculations.
Cue attempt by actual physicists to explain why this attempt to grasp the concept is totally inadequate or the more enjoyable funny bits about how the Universe is written in either Lisp or Perl.
People have to **USE** Bitcoin or Bitcoin dies..
It "dies" in the sense that it fails as currency. That doesn't necessarily mean that it loses value. Many things have value but are not used as currency.
For example, any given art collection at a major museum is a financial success in terms of wealth preservation; but a failure as currency. Nobody trades fractional Metropolitans. Any sales to or from the museum are converted into currency first. Auctions are conducted in currency, etc.
You might say that comparing bits to art is ridiculous, since one has aesthetic value and can draw tourists and the other doesn't. Art, however, is a matter of taste. All value apart from bare essentials like food, shelter and clothing is somewhat of a collective delusion. There's nothing to bar one BitCoin from beating the Mona Lisa, except taste.
I learned to code simple things in basic, use a compiler, and run a program around age 11. But I did not learn programming until two years later using FORTRAN
I learned BASIC and then assembly when I was 14. I'm not sure when I learned programming. Arguably, none of us have.
If the Commodore 64 taught us anything it's that the language shipped with the system is crap and you have to dig deeper. Maybe yesterday's PEEK and POKE assembly programmers are reflected in the next generations. Maybe there are "screw these web apps, let's hack the browser" kids in grade-school today. That will lead them into C, C++ and even assembly if they're curious enough.
we spend more money on HC in america than any other country
We spend more money on bullshit that calls itself "health care" in America than any other country. FTFY.
Insurance administration. Byzantine pricing and "network relationships". Malpractice insurance. Fake cures. Over-the-counter tomfoolery: herbs -- may or may not have medicinal value, and may or may not be used properly. Homeopathy -- placebo value only. Vitamins -- not needed unless you have a specific deficiency, which you probably don't.
Home Ec was under that cloud when I was in school; but some of us saw the writing on the wall when it came to typing. The typing class was still majority female. The teacher was this very prim, older woman--the classic professional secretary look. Taking that class "so I could use my computer better" was one of the best decisions I ever made to guide my own education. Absolutely nobody pushed me to do it. I think that fact that my father had been a Yeoman in the Navy and then later an administrator for DoD helped. He could type 70 wpm on a manual. They taught us with manuals in school. I tested at 45 after a semester. I still pound the shit out of my keyboards. People in the same room complain about it sometimes.I suppose I should make an effort to get over that...
I hate FaceBook as much as the next guy (and refuse to use it) but their business plan is actually pretty straightforward. They sell ads and data about users to advertisers. They're part of the cadre that's turned the Internet into 21st Century TV.
The better criticism of FB's current valuation is that it projects too much growth. The user base is kind of saturated. Once you have a double-digit percentage of the entire planet, it's hard to go much higher. If they try to grow revenue through increasing advertising, they run the risk of alienating users.
Hale-Bopp was a spectacular sight on the evening commute from Washington DC, headed west. That's quite spectacular considering the light pollution there. Hyakutake was also visible in the morning in the same area. Growing up I had read about spectacular comets. I thought I'd never see one; then we got two in just a few years. For some reason I have fonder memories of Hyakutake. It reminded me of the comet on the Netscape logo. Netscape peaked about the same time those comets did. Also, there was no time for anybody to put together a Hyakutake death cult because it was fast moving and a bit of a surprise.
Halley's comet? It was a smudge in my binoculars. That was the only way I could see it. I thought I'd never see a great comet...
You can't jump to conclusions about the weather. The thing about France is telling. They didn't drop until 2006, and I remember hearing some truly awful things about what the heat did to the elderly there. If I had to guess, I'd say that some change in government policy had something to do with it. UK is not as strongly tied to Europe. Some of these other countries are tied in economic union; but they are still sovereign. Perhaps France was able to provide good retirement benefits just a bit longer. That would be the first place I'd look--the impact of government policies that impact the elderly. If you suddenly have to take an early retirement and aren't getting the same benefits that will impact your lifestyle.
Government policy impact does a better job of explaining discrepancies between countries, the sudden change, and why some are not affected even though they share a similar climate.
Of course my speculation is no better than theirs. The people that are getting paid to do this need to go back and analyze their data some more.
There's a big problem with punishing people for having children after the fact. The Nth child didn't do anything to deserve growing up in a poorer home. That's why we actually subsidize the Nth child.
If you want to reduce population, look to the countries where it's declining. I don't claim to be any kind of an expert on this kind of thing, but they seem to have some common factors. They tend to be advanced consumer nations where the culture encourages longer education. That seems to delay entry into the workforce, which delays household stability, which discourages people from having children. Of course birth control helps; but you have to have an incentive to use it.
Instead of fining people for having children, you could reward them for avoiding the first child. Each year without a child, the stipend goes up by some percentage. Some people would use this to save up, create a stable home, and bear children. By the time they did that though they will have chewed up some of their fertile years.
I think the personality trait you're looking for is a sense of Humour
LLVM has got to be dynamically linking and stripped by default. There are switches on the other compilers that will let you do that, and it looks like they're being ignored.
Next year or so 100GB phones will be commonplace...and you will have your Hitchhiker's Guide.
Pffth. I don't need that. I just need to remember that it's "mostly harmless".
They used to tell us that if technology ever got out of hand, we could always pull the plug.
Of course you are asleep when the problem occurs. If this were a low-wattage appliance you could just use one of those timers that people use for Christmas lights. You might be able to hack a heavy duty version of that by using a timer that moves a lever that knocks a bowling ball off a shelf. The bowling ball is tied to the Tesla power plug. That oughtta do 'er.
Ahh, but you say the Tesla doesn't always take the same time to charge? Easy. You just need to program it to tweet charge state to your phone. Then your phone can send something to the device that pushes the bowling ball off the shelf that pulls the plug.
Oh, but wait. Tweeting the location of your car isn't secure, and you may not have access to the car's APIs anyway. Besides, they're buggy and suspect.
So. You need to have a separate secure device in the car that monitors the charge state, and logs in to your web site with HTTPS and relays that information securely to the device that pushes the bowling ball off the shelf that pulls the plug.
There. All fixed. I just hope the ball doesn't roll off the shelf the wrong way and dent the car. To make sure that doesn't happen we need...
I never worked for Amazon, but I worked at a much smaller warehouse that handled fragile items. Our mode of work was nowhere near as brutal as what they're describing. The warehouse was about the size of a large gymnasium. We picked, then packed so that broke up the monotony. Looking for irregular but functional items was also fun. These were randomly given free to employees at various times. That was about the only real perk. A lot of other things sucked. The management just didn't have a lot of respect for the employees. It was all about "discipline" and I left over a dispute involving working straight through lunch. I think it flew just under the labor law radar there. There was a trash compactor there that broke a guy's arm allegedly, and they just welded that stupid thing back together. The lack of respect probably ran both ways. One of the guys slid on some boxes and used it as a pretext for disability. I saw the guy. He looked fine to me.
I only did it for a few months, then did a few more jobs and went back to school.
Anyway, as sucky as the job was this Amazon thing sounds like the pits. In a small warehouse you're always in conversational contact with another human being, or close by. You're not alone too much. It sounds like these pickers are just listening to a machine and running through a football-sized warehouse all the time. It doesn't sound like they get a chance to pack, sweep, clean, or do other stuff that could break up the monotony and allow them to socialize while working.
A company as smart as Amazon could find a way to solve these problems; but I think the solution will be to simply have pick-bots do the work and fire the employees. I have mixed emotions about that. Crappy minimum-wage jobs have a purpose sometimes. If you're not going crazy as a picker and day-dreaming about something else, schlepping back to the flat and commiserating with your buds about a crappy job, then what are you doing?
blaming the violence on Snowden and his release of the documents - not on the real source of the problem which was the covert activities of the US, and it seems now also the Australians.
Maybe this will end up like software patents. All the countries on the planet will agree to cross-license their hatred. We could avoid a lot of conflicts that way.
My turn of phrase was awkward there. I should have said something more like... "when your money doesn't circulate, it no longer functions well as money". You've raised a valid issue. You can divide money into two allocations:
Circulating and non-circulating
True, when the supply of circulating money drops you have deflation. This is why the Fed can get away with what it's doing. Their balance sheet is inflated, but the lower tiers have less money. The lower tiers are more likely to circulate their money, and if all the QE got to the lower tiers, then yes, you'd have inflation.
Income inequality in the US has been like this before in the 1920s, then flattened out during the Great Depression into the 1950s. It'll flatten out again. The only question is "how?". It can be more or less disorderly. We can suffer from inequality for a long time though. Why does it cause problems?
I used to be part of the "oh noes! socialism" crowd, but when you look around the world and start thinking about it, you realize disparity is a problem.
I always like to pull this out of politics, and conduct a though experiment. The experiment is this: What would happen if one king had all the money?
That's the absurd projection of where we're headed. IMHO, what would happen is that money would lose its value. Long before the king had all of it, people would give up on money. They'd go to barter, or invent their own form of money.
Well, guess what? We've seen alternative currencies that people ignored like gold and silver become more popular. We've had people taking interest in novel currencies like BitCoin. Why?
Because the original money is hoarded by the wealthy. The original money game has been won. A strange thing happens when you win the money game though. Your money doesn't circulate, so it's no longer worth as much as money. Surprise, surprise, the elites are pressed to devalue the dollar. The Fed is just responding to the fact that a hoarded dollar cannot have much value.
So. If you want the dollar to have value again, it must circulate more widely. The dollar might die, but money will live on. A new generation will build wealth some other way, because the old generation is winning the money game, and... if they are allowed to fully win it they'll be left with a lot less than what they think they have. It may be due to loss of relevancy or loss of revolution.
They tried to toss that design into the trash can, but it got ejected and landed on the keyboard.
The next typhoon might wipe out sensationalist headlines. Yeah I know, that'd be one heck of a storm. It takes a mighty wind to compete with what passes for journalism online. That storm might not be mighty enough to take out Congress though. Wheeeew, Nelly!
You'd need more than one extra bit to represent reccuring binary fractions because you need to store the point at which the pattern repeats.
Grrr.. yep; one bit would only cover cases like 0.789789789... It would fail on 0.768989121212...
PI is irrational, 1/3rd isn't. 1/3 could be represented perfectly if the implementation had a "repeating" bit. AFAIK, there isn't any commonly used FP hardware that has such a bit, so yeah; 1/3 is not perfectly represented.
This reminds me of the arguments you get from people when you try to explain that 0.9 repeating is exactly equal to 1.0.
Their minds really get blown when you explain that 0.9 repeating is just 0.3 repeating + 0.3 repeating + 0.3 repeating. All those 3s add up to 9, all the way out into infinity. It's the same as 3*(1/3), so plainly it equals 1.0; but their minds still have a hard time dealing with 0.9 repeating equaling 1.0.
A more succinct way to get over it? Repeating decimals are just alternative representations of numbers. The symbol known as 0.9 repeating just happens to map to the same number as 1.