NateNate60

7

New York does have a point system. If you get 11 points within 18 months, you will get an automatic driving ban. Speed violations are worth a minimum of 3 points.

https://dmv.ny.gov/points-and-penalties/the-new-york-state-driver-point-system

But in order to be assessed points, you have to be caught. And many times, prolific traffic lawbreakers do things like cover up their car's registration plates to avoid being ticketed by automatic speed cameras.

NateNate60 @lemmy.world 4d ago

I am no expert, but these are my guesses:

Exporting energy, in many cases, involves the movement of physical goods. Global shipping has become riskier (and therefore more expensive) because of the deteriorating geopolitical situation.
Once a country installs renewable energy capacity, that capacity stays forever and essentially never degrades. Who's ever heard of a wind farm getting torn down? Renewable energy such as hydroelectricity, solar, and wind are getting cheaper and cheaper by the year as technology improves, making it an attractive alternative to fossil fuels.
Countries are starting to become more cognizant of their energy sovereignty. Developing domestic energy production is now an important national security concern worldwide. Nobody can shut off your sunlight, your rivers, or your coal mines, but unfriendly neighbours can threaten to cut off your supply of imported oil or natural gas.
Many large exporters of fossil fuels happen to be on the receiving end of geopolitical turmoil. Russia is still balls-deep in shit in Ukraine and their biggest customers (China and India) are demanding discounts as a result of the international reaction to that. Venezuela just had its president kidnapped. Iran and the UAE are being bombed to smithereens by American and Israeli ordnance.

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 5d ago

Selected quotations:

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 1w ago

The required input for the computer is usually inscribed on the chassis at the bottom. However, the text is usually faint and can be easily rubbed off after the computer has been used for some time. Mine says 20 V 2.25 A.

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 1w ago

A hundred "rifts" have opened up in the MAGA movement, but this does not seem to have had any noticeable effect in policy-making decisions.

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 1w ago

If you are using the laptop at the same time, there is a chance that the charger may not provide enough power to the computer to operate and force it to temporarily draw from the battery to supplement the power from the charger. This causes additional wear on the battery.

For example, if you plug in a 15 W charger and the computer wants to draw 20 W, it will draw it from the battery. Spikes in power consumption are not uncommon during ordinary use as the CPU will temporarily engage turbo mode during certain tasks, such as when it is loading a Web page or starting a program. Depending on your operating system, plugging the charger in may also cause the OS to disable battery conservation features which leads to more frequent spikes in power consumption.

None of this would be a problem if, for example, your charger delivered 45 W of power, because during those spikes, it just means the battery receives slightly less power as more of it is consumed by the computer.

If you are not using the laptop at the same time as you are charging it, I can't think of any potential negative effects.

NateNate60 @lemmy.world 1w ago

Other countries which Mossad targets may speak Arabic

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 2w ago

Okay, so let me put it this way:

Housing might, in theory, be guaranteed in your home town. This is a strength of China's system, I grant, and it's one of the few examples of one of their socialist policies which actually somewhat works. Their national pension scheme is the other thing I can think of that functions decently well.

But it's certainly no Soviet Union where if you go up to local officials and say "I have no job and I want to work", they'll find something for you to do pretty quickly.

NateNate60 @lemmy.world 2w ago

You are definitely right that 90% of the functionality of NFTs is already implemented in current systems. But the difference is that NFTs integrate cryptography in a way that makes these actions much more efficient. It's easier to plug a smart card into a computer and generate a cryptographic signature than it is to sign a document in person, and it's also harder (but not impossible) to argue that cryptographic signature wasn't generated by you. And when it comes to deeds, it's often times necessary to search up what encumbrances exist on the deed and what happened to it in the past. Blockchains don't turn this from impossible to possible (a land office can already just have a clerk find and deliver this information), but they do make it faster, and the blockchain's properties store this information and make it accessible in a way that we already know how it works.

I want to stress that while most cryptocurrency assets follow the principle of "code is law", there is no reason that NFTs representing real world assets can't follow the principle of "law is law". As in, human law written by legislatures and enforced by courts.

In a real world implementation of this system, private keys would probably be stored on a physical device, in a way that said keys are never exposed at all. The functionality already exists to embed the signing software onto a smart card, and that smart card can be one's ID card (smart ID cards are already used for this purpose in Hong Kong, where they can generate cryptographic signatures that replace physical signatures on contracts).

In addition to that, there is always the escape hatch where, according to an established legal process, a court or government authority can declare a token invalid and re-issue it.

While NFTs could, in theory, entirely replace paper deeds, the argument you make is one among many reasons why doing so would be a bad idea. Instead, deeds would probably only optionally be recorded as an NFT.

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 2w ago

You're definitely right that existing systems already implement 99% of the functionality that one would ever want out of these assets, but I do want to note that the notion of "code is law" is pretty optional when you're talking about these Government-backed assets. Code is not law. Law is law.

If an asset is transferred on a blockchain, it's only presumptively authorised, not conclusively. Just like a paper deed bearing what looks like your signature next to a notary stamp is also only presumptively valid. You can go to court to overturn that presumption. By similar logic, a "master key" can exist to allow transfer of the assets by court order. And because the blockchain is still just a human concept which has only the value humans assign to it, if all else fails, a court or government can just declare a problematic deed NFT to be invalid and re-issue it or go back to paper.

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 2w ago

NFTs were a thing before they became associated with monkey images. They have a real use case, and arguably are the most useful thing in the whole cryptocurrency space. I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out on this. And before you ask, I don't own any NFTs.

NFTs were never meant to represent ownership rights to monkey pictures, and that is indeed a stupid use case with absolutely no utility. They were intended to represent ownership rights to tangible, real-life assets, like stocks, bonds, or land. The idea was that you could have any of these assets, which in real life typically take the form of a paper certificate or digital book entry, and then replace it with an NFT so you can do fun stuff with it. Most of the benefit comes from two properties: firstly, that everything done on a blockchain needs to be authenticated using cryptographic keys, and secondly, the calculations which occur must come from public source code which people can audit and trust (note: blockchains typically punish excessively complicated code by making it more expensive to run), and therefore automated programs can carry out many actions typically entrusted to humans.

Let me give some actual examples o real-world utility:

Land registry: An NFT deed can be recorded on a public blockchain. Past transfer history can be seen, and transferring that deed would require a cryptographic signature from the owner. Depending on how the system is designed, it can also be made to require a secondary signature, which could represent a notary stamp issued by a notary public. This system is much more resistant to low-level deed fraud which pops up on local news channels from time to time.
Public asset transfers: The land registry concept can be expanded to include everything, including bonds and stocks, all of which would require cryptographic signatures to transfer, and which leave records of the transfer, useful for law enforcement purposes or to detect fraud.
Virtual mortgage: An NFT can be mortgaged, and that mortgage could also be optionally crowdfunded (if the system allows for it). Interest payments would be calculated automatically, and the presence of the mortgage would encumber the deed token which prevents it from being transferred. While the technical capability exists to allow the token to be repossessed and auctioned off automatically if the mortgage is defaulted, obviously this is not a good idea to automate and there would need to be court supervision
Escrow: A deed token can be held by an automated escrow which transfers the deed upon payment of an agreed purchase price.
Collateralised loan: Similar concept to the mortgage, but can use an NFT representing some other tangible asset instead, like stock certificates and bonds.
Auctions: NFT deeds, bonds, and stocks can be sold at auction by automated auctioneer programs which automatically collect payment from the winning bidder and transfer the token. This can be combined with the escrow from before.
Stock exchange: Stock exchanges already sort of exist. They are called DEXes. But with NFTs that represent actual stock then they can operate as real stock exchanges. The benefit of doing it this way is that because everything is public and verifiable, it's easier to catch and prove securities fraud and insider trading.
Government bond: Government bonds can automatically pay out their interest and maturity according to the terms of the bond. They can also be pledged as collateral for loans (see above).
Identity control: It is possible to restrict any or all functionality for any given NFT by defining the accounts allowed to interact with it. The reason I mention this is because it is usually desirable to know who the real-life identity behind an action is. It is possible to design a system where only accounts tied to real-world identities can interact with the financial system.

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 2w ago

sanctions evasion? In my drug-buying app?

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 2w ago

I do have to agree with you there. Though too much urban migration does come with its own problems. Chief among them that I observe is that it severely depressed wages and lack of work. China is moving through its own sort of gilded age right now with rapid technological advancement and extreme inequality.

For a purportedly socialist country, China lacks a lot of state infrastructure that comes along with that. The USSR guaranteed work and bread, at a minimum (mostly), but in China, a curious sight emerged which I observed in some of the poorer neighbourhoods of Hangzhou: old people pushing around carts of discarded cardboard boxes and tin cans. They weren't employed as cleaning workers. They were collecting these to sell for their recycling value. And even though the Westerner might laugh at the notion of making a living collecting literal garbage for pennies, it only takes fourteen pennies to make a yuan and ¥5 will buy a bowl of rice, fending off starvation for another twelve hours. Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn't claim to be a socialist country.

China has no functional social safety net, government assistance is minimal, and workers are exploited by a ruling class of wealthy elites with minimal interference from the state, in a shockingly similar way to capitalist countries. You cannot even form a real trade union in China, because all big companies are already "unionised" with workers represented by farcically corrupt organisations which work in tandem with the capitalist bosses.

I will give one more example: Coco is a nationwide chain of beverage stalls which sell tea, coffee, and juice drinks. I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country. I took a photo of this but I couldn't find it to post.

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 2w ago

As someone who is Chinese and living in the US, Americans who have not been to China overestimate its shittiness and people who have been to China once or twice overestimate its glamour. Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes. I've been to a tea plantation where there were a total of six electric plugs in the entire village and the toilets flushed with a bucket which had to be filled from a pump outside. It's not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it's a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US, where at least people usually have electricity and running water.

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 2w ago

Sorry, but I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to "freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services". You don't even need to speak English to access those most of the time. In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.

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NateNate60 @lemmy.world 2w ago

Can't believe Portugal is nearly the same size as Portugal