My mother used to say she felt like she had "foggy brain" a lot. Turned out she had sleep apnea.
ImplyingImplications
joined 2 years ago
Poor little British man
*cranking the brightness up*
Hehehe
How are they still in business? Every single farmer, bar none, has to know about their business practices
Wendover Productions has a decent video on John Deere's market dominance. tl;dw It's by cutthroat capitalism of course.
John Deere has bought out all their competitors and continues to do so. Every single breakthrough in farming equipment technology in the last decade is owned by John Deere. As a farmer, you either choose to sign a one-sided contract with John Deere or you use outdated inefficient equipment that John Deere hasn't purchased the patent rights to. Or, of course, you sell your farm all together. Large corporate farms don't care much about the John Deere contract since they have the power to negotiate a better deal. A lot of small farmers have been making the choice to sell out.
Soon, all farming will be done by one megacorp, buying their seed from Monsanto, using John Deere equipment, and cashing in a ridiculously fat subsidy cheque from the government.
TIL its not a chandelier
Economics really sucks at accounting for the value of human life. I remember there was a study on the financial impacts that smokers have on society. The idea going in was that smokers would get health issues which would cause a financial drain on societies which pay for people's healthcare. The study actually found that smokers weren't a drain at all. Smokers tended to die quickly, meaning no chronic health treatments. More importantly, they died young. Meaning they didn't cash in their government pensions. Governments were essentially profiting off smokers. The study did another analysis, this time putting in a fake number for the "value of life" and the result was as expected. Smoking is a negative because it kills people.
There was a jogging app known as Strava that posted an image on their Twitter that was a heatmap of all the jogging activities of all of their users. Their idea was just to show how popular their app was by showing the entire world lit up. Twitter users were able to locate secret US military bases on that data alone. Turns out nobody jogs in circles in the middle of the desert except GIs.
Recently a group of Harvard students did a demo where they used Meta's camera glasses and a chain of commercial programs and products to find out people's names, address, workplaces, and family based only on their facial data.
These are just two examples off the top of my head. Essentially, the more data someone can accumulate, the more info can be analyzed from it. With things like AI tools, that analysis is incredibly fast even with huge datasets.
The computer was probably cheating too. Creating AI that understands the strategy of resource management is hard so most devs just give the computer a steady stream of resources and faster build times. That way the computer doesn't need to worry about planning, they can just spam build.
He's throwing you a few bucks so that you will ignore the billions of dollars of graft his government is committing.
It's amazing how little people need to be bribed to ignore serious offenses. Recently, TD bank got hit with a massive $3 billion fine for money laundering. They admitted to aiding in laundering $670 million from likely criminal sources. What's more is that bank staff were paid a total of $57,000 in gift cards to not report the large undisclosed payments and transfers. Fraud likely in the billions being ignored by bribes in the ten thousands.
It also helps to have so much wealth you don't need to worry over things like affording food and housing.
This made me curious as to how many different legal systems there were. This wiki page has a global map of systems. Surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of variety. Most legal systems tend to be based on legislation (called civil law, originating in Rome), court rulings (called common law, originating in Britain), religious texts (called canon for christian, sharia for muslim, and halakha for jewish), or some mixture of those.