Validated parking isn't validated transport. So, this is a bit different.
Shopping PSA: if you go to the Houston Galleria, and you expect to be there more than an hour or two (I forget the exact payoff moment, but it's in that time frame), it's actually cheaper to valet right behind Neiman-Marcus (entrance from Post Oak) than it is to park in the public lots.
It's usually on a corporate account if you're paying per flight. If you're flying three or four times a month, though, it might be worth it on your own dime to stay connected to business. If you're flying three or four times a week, it's a no-brainer.
You buy BTC in your country of residence by arranging a deal. Let's say that I want to evade capital controls on exporting money, but there are no controls on exporting, say, scrap iron. You want to move $10M of assets out of your home country. I'm your BTC man; I take your local currency and give you BTC, when I've already arranged a deal with Mr. X to sell me $12M worth of scrap iron for the price. You sell your BTC for whatever currency you want. I take my $12M of scrap iron and sell it for a profit after chartering a cargo ship.
Bitcoin has some intrinsic value, though, so long as the blockchain is maintained. What follows isn't an example I came up with; it's an example that I once read, and found intriguing at its very least.
Let us say that you and I wish to do a business deal. We negotiate a contract. We put it in a computer-readable format. We then carry out a BTC transaction that effectively transfers no money between us, but is signed by both of us. And in the data section of the blockchain entry (it's not large, but it's there), we put the SHA256 hash of that contract file. It's signed by both of us, so you know we agreed to it. Nobody else has to know what that contract says. It doesn't have to be put in a lawyer's office; it can sit on our own devices. But if we ever end up in litigation, either one of us can prove that this is the file containing the contract we agreed to. That's actually a pretty valuable service on its own. Depending on how BTC transaction fees go, it could actually justify the current pricing. Obviously, this all falls apart if people stop recording the blockchain, but hey, every currency has its weaknesses.
MPXPLAY was the software. Encoding was a much bigger pain back then, and storage hadn't gotten ridiculously cheap yet - I think my HDD was 5 GB or so at the time. CD recorders were just starting to fall in price. Late 1997.
Yeah, I remember having a player that would actually play MP3's on a 486 running DOS, and it even had a decent little visualization thing in it. It doesn't take an enormous amount of computing resources to play music.
Six figures is a nice income most places, but it's not exactly going to have you rubbing elbows with the Rockefellers, and you still need professionals who have a lot of other job opportunities. There are people who will work for peanuts because they believe in The Cause, but not enough. After all, if SPCA offers $100k/yr, and the World Wildlife Fund offers $300k/yr, guess who the animal-loving fundraiser with connections is more likely to work for? They will easily pay for themselves.
I know a guy who caused a few UFO sightings in his day. Army helicopter pilot, training on flying low and fast at night, all lights off, is following the terrain in Oklahoma when he spots a pickup cruising down a lonely road. He settles in for a bit of practice following a target at a consistent distance - and then when it's time to head back base, well, he flips on their multi-million-candlepower search light and banks hard to one side before flipping it back off.
That's really not a bad transaction fee for the size of the stuff they work with. If you want to give someone $5 a month, 2.9% plus $0.35 is around fifty cents. If, instead, you just mailed them some cash, that's barely more expensive than a first-class stamp - ignoring the cost of the envelope and having to get stamps, take it to a mailbox or post office, etc.
The dextrose in artificial sweeteners is mostly there so that they will pour and measure like cane sugar on a volume basis. It's pretty easy to find plain old sucralose (the sweetener in Splenda) dissolved in a liquid (water, maybe a bit of alcohol for solubility). Carbs basically nil.
particularly for the give-it-to-me-NOW generation who can't stand having to wait for anything, even if it's a 15-minute "quick" charge
Not exactly limited to the new generation. If a six-hour drive becomes a seven-hour drive due to recharging time, that's not a huge deal. It's the fourteen-hour drive becoming a seventeen-hour drive that's a problem. Fourteen is unpleasant but doable. Seventeen starts to run up against the limits of humans to stay awake while doing an incredibly boring job. Once they're self-driving, this will matter much less.
This is basically correct. Part of blood typing is that you do a screen for the most common antibodies that aren't in the ABO/Rh system, and then you test the patient's blood against the actual unit they're potentially going to receive. O negative isn't a panacea, it's just statistically the least likely to kill someone with a transfusion reaction.
FWIW, you can't give anything other than O negative unless you have a valid type and crossmatch from your own blood lab. Blood type is thus basically useless as a tattoo. I'm an anesthesiologist; I give blood to people about once a week.
Most Euro-spec cars haven't gone through the required testing to be sold in the US, so that doesn't really matter. The car I rented on my last trip to Europe was a Mazda 6 station wagon with a manual - not for sale in the US. Too bad; it was comfortable and reasonably spacious.
Modern insulin is dramatically better if you develop an allergy to animal insulin sources. I still see the occasional patient taking Armour (slaughterhouse) thyroid extract instead of levothyroxine, but bovine/porcine insulin? Never. It's always recombinant.
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They don't let you fill up first if you're a cash customer, or if your card is declined for the preauthorization amount. Haven't for years.
Validated parking isn't validated transport. So, this is a bit different.
Shopping PSA: if you go to the Houston Galleria, and you expect to be there more than an hour or two (I forget the exact payoff moment, but it's in that time frame), it's actually cheaper to valet right behind Neiman-Marcus (entrance from Post Oak) than it is to park in the public lots.
It's usually on a corporate account if you're paying per flight. If you're flying three or four times a month, though, it might be worth it on your own dime to stay connected to business. If you're flying three or four times a week, it's a no-brainer.
You buy BTC in your country of residence by arranging a deal. Let's say that I want to evade capital controls on exporting money, but there are no controls on exporting, say, scrap iron. You want to move $10M of assets out of your home country. I'm your BTC man; I take your local currency and give you BTC, when I've already arranged a deal with Mr. X to sell me $12M worth of scrap iron for the price. You sell your BTC for whatever currency you want. I take my $12M of scrap iron and sell it for a profit after chartering a cargo ship.
Bitcoin has some intrinsic value, though, so long as the blockchain is maintained. What follows isn't an example I came up with; it's an example that I once read, and found intriguing at its very least.
Let us say that you and I wish to do a business deal. We negotiate a contract. We put it in a computer-readable format. We then carry out a BTC transaction that effectively transfers no money between us, but is signed by both of us. And in the data section of the blockchain entry (it's not large, but it's there), we put the SHA256 hash of that contract file. It's signed by both of us, so you know we agreed to it. Nobody else has to know what that contract says. It doesn't have to be put in a lawyer's office; it can sit on our own devices. But if we ever end up in litigation, either one of us can prove that this is the file containing the contract we agreed to. That's actually a pretty valuable service on its own. Depending on how BTC transaction fees go, it could actually justify the current pricing. Obviously, this all falls apart if people stop recording the blockchain, but hey, every currency has its weaknesses.
MPXPLAY was the software. Encoding was a much bigger pain back then, and storage hadn't gotten ridiculously cheap yet - I think my HDD was 5 GB or so at the time. CD recorders were just starting to fall in price. Late 1997.
Yeah, I remember having a player that would actually play MP3's on a 486 running DOS, and it even had a decent little visualization thing in it. It doesn't take an enormous amount of computing resources to play music.
Yeah, pretty much a wasted story here. Could be useful on more mainstream sites, but anyone who's still hanging around here knows this kind of stuff.
Six figures is a nice income most places, but it's not exactly going to have you rubbing elbows with the Rockefellers, and you still need professionals who have a lot of other job opportunities. There are people who will work for peanuts because they believe in The Cause, but not enough. After all, if SPCA offers $100k/yr, and the World Wildlife Fund offers $300k/yr, guess who the animal-loving fundraiser with connections is more likely to work for? They will easily pay for themselves.
It would have been the early nineties or so. He also might have obscured certain details; it may not have happened in US airspace.
I know a guy who caused a few UFO sightings in his day. Army helicopter pilot, training on flying low and fast at night, all lights off, is following the terrain in Oklahoma when he spots a pickup cruising down a lonely road. He settles in for a bit of practice following a target at a consistent distance - and then when it's time to head back base, well, he flips on their multi-million-candlepower search light and banks hard to one side before flipping it back off.
That was my point: transaction costs are a real thing. They have not magically found their way around them.
That's really not a bad transaction fee for the size of the stuff they work with. If you want to give someone $5 a month, 2.9% plus $0.35 is around fifty cents. If, instead, you just mailed them some cash, that's barely more expensive than a first-class stamp - ignoring the cost of the envelope and having to get stamps, take it to a mailbox or post office, etc.
The dextrose in artificial sweeteners is mostly there so that they will pour and measure like cane sugar on a volume basis. It's pretty easy to find plain old sucralose (the sweetener in Splenda) dissolved in a liquid (water, maybe a bit of alcohol for solubility). Carbs basically nil.
particularly for the give-it-to-me-NOW generation who can't stand having to wait for anything, even if it's a 15-minute "quick" charge
Not exactly limited to the new generation. If a six-hour drive becomes a seven-hour drive due to recharging time, that's not a huge deal. It's the fourteen-hour drive becoming a seventeen-hour drive that's a problem. Fourteen is unpleasant but doable. Seventeen starts to run up against the limits of humans to stay awake while doing an incredibly boring job. Once they're self-driving, this will matter much less.
This is basically correct. Part of blood typing is that you do a screen for the most common antibodies that aren't in the ABO/Rh system, and then you test the patient's blood against the actual unit they're potentially going to receive. O negative isn't a panacea, it's just statistically the least likely to kill someone with a transfusion reaction.
FWIW, you can't give anything other than O negative unless you have a valid type and crossmatch from your own blood lab. Blood type is thus basically useless as a tattoo. I'm an anesthesiologist; I give blood to people about once a week.
Actually, Uber does. Kind of useless if it doesn't know where you are.
Nope.
Yes, the lines from Neuromancer that won't work anymore: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. ".
They can't make you pay it, but you have to be sure you're never going back to that state.
Most Euro-spec cars haven't gone through the required testing to be sold in the US, so that doesn't really matter. The car I rented on my last trip to Europe was a Mazda 6 station wagon with a manual - not for sale in the US. Too bad; it was comfortable and reasonably spacious.
My hometown airport had an observation deck... you could see someone off at the gate, then walk outside to watch them taxi out and take off.
Modern insulin is dramatically better if you develop an allergy to animal insulin sources. I still see the occasional patient taking Armour (slaughterhouse) thyroid extract instead of levothyroxine, but bovine/porcine insulin? Never. It's always recombinant.
I was talking about the ones at McDonald's. Supermarket ones are generally not that great, really only worth it if you only have one or two items.