ricecake

Yes and no.

It's a collection of numbers with properties related to how they're found that make them difficult to counterfeit, and the way they're recorded makes it difficult to steal. This, as well as a handful of other properties, give digital currencies behavior not entirely unlike the things that make cash useful.

Unlike money, it's not backed by a government. This means that it's much more volatile in terms of value. Say what you will about the state of the US, it's unlikely that the dollar will significantly change value over the next year. It's essentially guaranteed that the price of every cryptocurrency will be wildly different a year from today.
Put them together and you've got a wonderful vehicle for laundering money or bribery, which is what this all is.
The other key aspect of money that it's missing is being generally useful outside of speculation. I can reliably use my dollars to pay for goods and services, and most significantly to pay taxes and satisfy debts in the eyes of the law. Cryptocurrency is inevitably either instantly converted to money once someone gets it, or it's held onto under the assumption it'll be worth more later.
Money has value because it gets you "stuff". Cryptocurrency has value because it gets you money.

It's fake money, but it's a very complicated and realistic fake money.

I have not read the book, but from reading some summaries and commentaries, I got the impression that other people took the message as being different from "marriage makes your life measurably less happy" as the chart implied.

The figure takes on a different meaning, however, when we remember that “How satisfied are you with your life?” is not a simple question. When answering it, people think of significant events in the recent past or near future. People who are recently married or expecting to marry are likely to retrieve that fact, which affects their answer. But those who are not do not think of marriage when answering. The graph could be read as the likelihood that people will think of their marriage when asked about their lives. This demonstrates once again how we are “blind to our blindness”—how we are unaware of the heuristic mistakes that we make. In evaluating this graph, people do not understand that respondents have substituted their answer to how satisfied they are with their life with how easily they can think of happy events in their lives.

Just for the record I looked at how they encrypt and sign the data and it's nothing I would call over the top or particularly troublesome.
Signing data that's used to configure a piece of hardware isn't unreasonable in my book.

It would certainly be better to have a mechanism for custom tags, and better yet the ability for you to trust a filament producers key, but the mechanism they've used for the signing really doesn't say anything to me of note.

That's the rough bit: they're still useful, and they won't withdraw their support. What are they gonna do? Vote for a Democratic representative? You'll just see the pro-trump republican lose to the anti-trump republican, and that's a difference that only goes as deep as campaign speeches.

You don't have to go out of your way to defend things that are putting a nice veneer on eugenics.

And for the record, if you read the article it's clearly about them being arrogant and generally absolutely fucking weird. "If more people like us don't have children, the world will stop seeing innovation and economic prosperity. It's very important that the right people reproduce."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_and_Malcolm_Collins

Well that's just a fucking trip of dysfunction.

Just that bit is a lot.

If the population declined and it makes the economy do less well, won't people just have more children like they did the last time the economy was in that state? Every environment has a carrying capacity for the creatures that live in it. It's not uncommon to see fluctuations above and below that equilibrium point.
Instead of pushing people to ignore the factors that cause the limit in humans, like not wanting or needing more children, maybe find a way to organize society so hitting that limit doesn't cause massive problems, or try to eliminate some of the factors creating the limit. It's insanely difficult in our society to have even one child who's healthy, cared for, and prepared for their adult life while also being personally healthy, prepared for old age, and enjoying the variety of pleasures of existence.

That's much easier. If you weigh 100kg (220lb) it's W/(100 + W) = 0.8, and solving for W gives 400.

If you eat 400 kg of wine powder then 80% of your mass will be wine.

This will kill you, and it doesn't actually matter what powder you choose to eat.

The flip side is we don't think about the old ACs that destroyed themselves inside the expected lifetime, we only see the freaks that blast on regardless of damage and just never deteriorate. If the old ones all lasted 50+ years, we wouldn't see people needing to buy new ones.

It's still probably the case that older devices without plastic control boards lasted longer, but it's worth remembering that we only see the edge cases.
Also, some of the old appliances will keep trying to function even when they've degraded to the point of being nearly inoperable, where the new device will be able to detect that it's not working right and shutdown, probably before it's not worth it to run anymore, but probably in time to be reparable.

A lot of the new ones, as you said, take longer because they default to an eco mode and use less resources. Mine at least has a mode that ignores that and just goes all out.

I usually don't use it because it's easier to just plan ahead and I don't really ever need it to finish that fast.

It's also nice that it can tell if something needs more or less washing by checking the water occlusion.

You were backing someone up? I responded to someone asking how people weren't upset and you replied about how it's the worst. Telling someone they're wrong for not being irritated by something kinda feels like you care.

The whole thing is great, but for me 3:50 is where you can really pick up the whole vibe in just about a minute. Particularly the perfectly respectful way of handling not knowing how to pronounce someone's name. And then lapsing into a hallucinogenic zone out time.

Alright. It's entirely incidental to the point I was making so I don't feel particularly invested in defending his actions being the way he said they were.
Replace it with one of the news stories about a politician wearing blackface if it makes you feel better, or fill in what you think would work better as a racist caricature outfit depicting someone from Puerto Rico.
I stand by my original statement that if you think to yourself "I'm going to go to this Halloween party as a Puerto Rican (or any race)" you honestly shouldn't do that, regardless of what comes into your mind when you picture that race, since races aren't costumes.

I'm not sure why you would think Boricua is related to food. It means a person from Puerto Rico. It's like arguing that "#new-yorkers" is about food. If it was about food, or his costume wasn't what it was, why would the picture just randomly be labeled with either this unknown food term despite no food being in the picture, or why would you go to a costume party not wearing a costume or as a generic baseball fan and post a picture of yourself labeled "Puerto Rican"? And then resign, referencing the Halloween costume amongst the list of racial insensitivities behind that choice?

The person in the article who used the term brownface is a person who actually worked with him and would presumably be able to tell if he had put on makeup to change his skin tone.