- Fucked up predatory remittance money shops, and forced them to lower their fees and actually start competing.
- Offered a more stable unit of exchange for people in places where fiat was not usable.
- Cheaper alternative method for fast, large transactions. Forced big banks that traditionally accommodated these transactions to innovate.
Some of my favorite quotes, from my favorite McCarthy book, Blood Meridian:
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
--
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
--
In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.
--
They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.
And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
> continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.
It occurs to me now that this echoes a scene late in Moby Dick in which Ahab smashes his sextant to the deck and declares that henceforth he will navigate by dead reckoning alone, without reference to the sun or stars or like works of God.
Holden is presented as immortal, a figure for the devil in the Christian sense (in No Country For Old Men, the assassin Chigurh approximates this). Moby Dick's white whale is perhaps immortal, though not a devil figure to any modern reader.
Captain Ahab is mortal and goes down with all but one of the crew of the Pequod, like Glanton who dies along with most of his gang at the hands of the Yuma. Both leaders are proud and defiant to the last and are justly killed (though we have to feel first mate Starbuck at least deserved better).
Both Glanton and Ahab are undisputed masters of their respective expeditions, and both leave behind young families at the outset, though for different reasons: Glanton flees the law, Ahab sails voluntarily.
My favorite of his is As I Lay Dying. I find it much more readable than The Sound and the Fury. The latter is his most famous, and McCarthy's favorite work by Faulkner. But Faulkner himself said As I Lay Dying was his magnum opus.
Good Lord these quotes. What have I been doing in my life that I've never read this man? The imagery in these passages are so vivid, I reflexively started reading aloud after the first one. I gotta find his books now though with his passing, I suspect many will have the same idea.
I have read a lot of tgese, and still felt compelled to read them aloud. To my 6 and 7 year old children, no less. I did need to skim them first, though. He's not particularly known as being "safe for work" as they say in the Reddit world.
> ...on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.
Here McCarthy employs again to great effect his device of a narrator that knows and will tell of all physical events past and future. The narrator however does not know, though will speculate upon, thoughts of the characters:
... with them now rode a boy named Sloat who had been left sick to die in this place by one of the gold trains bound for the coast weeks earlier. ... He rode near the head of the column and he must have counted himself well out of that place but if he gave thanks to any god at all it was ill-timed for the country was not done with him.
Something something Glanton... he was complete at every hour... he would chase the sun to its final endarkenment in the West as if it had been ordained ages since...
That's one of the ones I remember, if you loosen the definition of "remember." I liked it because here's the ostensible leader of a gang of homicidal mo fo's, and not because of that, not despite it, but possibly quite irrelevantly to it, he's just as sure of himself and his "vision" as any other person we would normally think of as a leader.
The Delawares stared into the fire with eyes as black as gunbores.
--
... they watched like the prefiguration of their own ends the carbonized skulls of their enemies incandescing before them bright as blood among the coals.
I love that he didn’t shy away from prose that almost read as biblical even though he risked drawing comparison to it. The authority and confidence he wrote with.
Brings to mind Thucydides: “Of the Gods we believe, and of man we know, that by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they shall. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted on it. We did but inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time. And we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do.”
Many have already pointed that there have been studies to measure the accuracy of sleep analysis by wearables. They aren't that great. If you have a concern, you should definitely seek out a polysomnograph, and wearables should not be a replacement for that. However, you can't get a polysomnograph every night, and wearables are probably the best option for regular analysis. Just because they're not that great doesn't mean they're useless, and doesn't mean they won't improve.
Most devices (Fatigue Science Readiband, Fitbit Alta HR, EarlySense Live, ResMed S+, SleepScore Max) performed as well as or better than actigraphy on sleep/wake performance measures, while the Garmin devices performed worse.
Purely anecdotal but I know way more TVs with an Apple TV device than I know humans with an Apple watch. In most cases they are households with many TV-Apple TV pairings, and maybe one or two people in the household have an Apple watch.
I don't see familiarity being with the touchscreen buttons being the issue. The issue is that actually touching a certain amount of pixels on a disembodied screen, while driving, while the car is in motion, is actually annoyingly difficult. No matter how attuned you are with them. I owned a Tesla for several years, and it never got better. It distracts the driver considerably. Unless they drastically increased the size of the interaction points on the screen and/or improved the gestures used to interact, I just don't see touchscreens being a good primary point of interaction between the driver and the car (at least until the driver really isn't regularly "driving" anymore).
> Brave | do not use | This term perpetuates the stereotype of the "noble courageous savage," equating the Indigenous male as being less than a man.
Should we get rid of bravo then as well? I assume people making these lists have good intentions, but efforts like this really get lost in the sauce. They are effectively parodying themselves.
Tangentially related, Russ Roberts of econtalk had a good interview a few years ago with the founder of a free market hospital in Oklahoma. Super interesting.
I think of this every time I encounter a healthcare worker who talks about how it’s “impossible” to estimate and brings out some edge case of a routine $50k procedure costing $500k with complications and leaving out the part how there are many instances where it only costs $25k.
It’s like hospitals pretend to be idiots when other industries can estimate a median cost and price accordingly. And they have estimates good enough to be profitable.
Even barbers charge $30 for a haircut when some take 5 minutes and some take 30. If a barber didn’t post prices because it’s impossible to estimate how many minutes it takes to cut hair I wouldn’t use them unless my life depended on it.
It's much easier to offer estimates for specialist clinics.
In hospitals? The honest answer is they often don't know the true costs. They'll know the costs specific to a department, but the "shared" costs of the hospital, staff (who work across departments), etc are a major shit show.
That's not to say they can't find out, but it's not easy and frankly they don't do it because they don't have to.
You might get an operation in a hospital and stay one night. They could tell you the cost of the bed, but what about the lab tests (which is another business unit). Then you've got nurses who might work across two different units. Then imaging which is another unit.
My friend who worked at a major hospital said it's a massive shit show. For simple out-patient procedures, they have the costs down pretty clean. But for in-patient stays, they often have no clue at all what the real costs are.
They know on average. How else would they project how big of a hospital to build?
It’s a massive shit show because they don’t care. There’s no cost incentive to be efficient. And many healthcare providers are cost plus so if they have higher costs it actually results in higher absolute pay.
I have been under the good faith assumption that most (though definitely not all) of the employees that have departed Twitter were probably necessary and valuable to the company. I left the article with the same impression as you. This single person did this very important job, seemingly well, and didn't appear to be drowning in the work. What were the other 8-9k doing?
