Anecdotal: the app "One Sec" broke my twitter habit over the course of a few weeks.
Via iOS' automations feature the app allows you to configure a per-app waiting period during which you can decide you don't actually want to open whatever app you've tried to open.
Do you find yourself making better use of your time, or do you substitute one time waster with another? I can definitely see how this would help me be more productive during my work hours though...
That's usually where those things fail for me. Still, I don't really consider them worthless - the goal is not to prevent you from wasting your time, but to make you aware you're wasting your time and turning a muscle memory action into something you actually have to think about.
In my experience phisical separation is the best for when you don't want to use your phone (for example, when going to bed or if you want to focus on discussions when having lunch) but that is not always possible - then apps like one sec or other tricks like setting your phone to gray scale, moving icons around, focus mode, screen time... All serve to nudge your brain into thinking if you really want to waste time.
For making better use of your time... Eh. Everyone struggles differently of course, but I'm unlikely to go out and run, or do focus work, when I would waste 30 minutes scrolling through Instagram. But if you make sure to have better alternatives (reading a curated feed, listening to a audiobook/podcast) then they can nudge you that way. Finding a better alternative is entirely up to you. I do find that writing down things you want to do, no matter how silly it sounds ("of course I want to read more books!") helps, especially as you can always reference to that list later when you're bored.
Second data point. I love that app. Well worth all the money.
I've also customised the automations so I have added friction to opening, for example, Slack after 6PM or on weekends. However it opens immediately during working hours.
Can vouch that this has worked for me as well with Instagram. Just hope one day they would give you the option to remove the "Explore" page. Same with YouTube shorts.
> Given a simple problem A, when adding more options, at some point, choosing among the options requires more effort than solving the simple problem, if only by brute force.
Looks like they may have launched a hypersonic missle that reached speeds of ~Mach 10[1], and the US (publicly, at least) seems to be lagging behind China and Russia in Hypersonic R&D - at least as of 2019[2].
How long would it take for a missile traveling at Mach 10 to reach a point where a high-altitude EMP attack[3] would cripple the west coast of the US?
Is that time longer than it would take for aircraft to return to a place where they could land? If NORAD spots a bogey moving that fast, is the rule right now just... everything stops until we understand what's happening?
Would love for someone who knows about hypersonics, NK missle capabilities, EMP attacks, etc. generally to say more.
I'm not an expert, just a rocket enthusiast, but "hypersonic" really just means "near orbital velocities".
There's a lot of noise about admittedly really impressive low-altitude air-breathing scramjets, but - as your articles point out - those are still a long way away. The war hawks like to complain that we're not spending sufficiently many billions on developing futuristic hypersonic scramjet missiles. They point to our lack of a working scramjet as evidence that we're doing poorly. And look! North Korea's launched a hypersonic missile, China's launched hypersonic test missiles, Russia's launching hypersonic missiles; we're behind in the next war and it hasn't even started yet!
But those are just orbital or sub-orbital rockets at 50-100km altitude. Of course they're hypersonic, but that's not really that difficult - just build a big rocket, go up for a while, then turn sideways. We've been doing it since the 50s, tech is good enough now that relatively small companies like Firefly Space are launching small satellites to LEO with Series A fundraising of just $75 million. Tada! Hypersonic! The main point is that everyone has the capability to launch lots of these simple rockets, which can be devastatingly effective. Not as effective as highly steerable reentry vehicles or hypersonic scramjets, but enough that no one wants to be a target.
"Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle For the Soul of American Business"[1] by Bob Lutz tells this story really well, from Lutz' vantage point trying to salvage General Motors from the clutches of an army of MBAs.
There's a decent summary of the book (and the general problem) in the 2012 Time article "Driven off the Road by MBAs"[2] as well.
The room my wife and I booked in 2019 offered a panoramic, bird's eye view of Bangkok's skyline from one of the higher floors in the building. Not bad at ~$90 / night at the time.
Bangkok is absolutely full of view likes this, in no small part due to lax planning regulations. Also there are many tall buildings with bars on the top.
My wife and I once visited a friend of a friend who was “living like a king” in northern Thailand. He had a walled compound with a Mets baseball theme, a half dozen Burmese slaves, and had recently downsized from multiple wives to 1. He explained that there were three ways people make money in Thailand, drugs, money lending, and prostitution. And that he didn’t touch drugs...
It was one of the saddest and strangest experiences of my life.
But yes. People do this. It is weirder than you think.
Just to tamp down on the hyperbole a little, while Burmese legal refugees and illegal immigrants are mercilessly exploited, slavery (and polygamy for that matter) are illegal in Thailand, and many Western people who think that their money insulates them from the legal system find out the hard way that no, it does not.
This was 13 years ago, so the political situation may have changed. But this guy was very much operating in the open, and definitely breaking all kinds of laws. He’d been doing it for more than a decade, and no jail time yet.
He did also finance construction of an elementary school and some other community improvement stuff. He didn’t explicitly talk about bribes, but I’m sure he was paying people off. At least at the time he seemed to have figured out a way to avoid the law. But maybe corruption is down and it finally caught up with him - I’m definitely out of date here.
So do? Plenty of companies hiring remote, and you will be far (far far far) from the first tech worker to move to South East Asia. Bangkok in particular has world class (and affordable) health care, food, and night life, and you’re only ever a couple of hours from the beach
Thai police can be corrupt sometimes (not always - I've even been busted for pot twice, talked my way out of it both times even though they knew they could have gotten some western cash out of me), but Thai justice system is usually quite fair even for foreigners. There are exceptions of course, but usually you won't get into real trouble unless you are doing something that is obviously illegal (doing drugs, running prostitution ring, something something royal family). Even some my friends have sued and won against a big bank or people hustling money from them.
I haven't researched much about this but India seems like a better fit for tech workers? There I'll find folks who share my interest and the culture is good too.
When's the last time you went to one? I had three different reasons to go to one in the last 3 years and each time I was in and out in under 30 minutes with almost no wait time. This meme is garbage.
Whether or not we are in a bubble is increasingly the wrong question to be asking in an age where failure for sufficiently-large institutions is no longer permitted.
The question used to be pretty simple: "has a sufficient portion of the market been priced out to the extent that demand collapses"?
As we've seen in equities / derivatives (and increasingly, commodity) markets - the answer to that question is now perpetually "lol, number go up" because large investment banks have essentially infinite access to free money and will be bailed out if they get in trouble.
On a long enough timeline the end result of this is that more and more Americans write their rent checks to institutional investors. [1]
Sure, many Americans own their homes now (or have a nice cushion of equity). But what happens as wage growth continues to stay relatively flat while cost of living rises dramatically and folks need money for medical bills or their kid's college tuition (or w/e)? They sell and become renters.
There's a pretty bleak future for American housing absent regulation in this space.
> more and more Americans write their rent checks to institutional investors
Homes as a wealth vehicle has been the standing wisdom for a while. That being less and less true (by virtue of requiring a higher and higher degree of wealth to even play) is scary in that there isn't an immediately obvious alternative with nearly the same odds. Also scary in that a lot (a lot a lot) of rules have been written and enshrined with the assumption of that fading wisdom.
At what point does it cross a type of pandemic level where fighting it isn't the best strategy but mitigating it and finding alternatives is the only route forward?
I mean, regulation is why the housing market is so bad (SFZ environmental review etc), so really what we need is forced deregulation.
Edit:
Some people might have misunderstood what I said so here's what I mean:
What we really want is states to force localities to reduce zoning restrictions on new construction
Based on your subsequent comments, it seems like what you specifically mean is "reduce (probably zoning-based) restrictions on the construction of new residential buildings".
Phrasing this as "forced deregulation" is...not going to get people to recognize what you actually mean, because 95% of the time, when people say they want "deregulation," what they mean is they want big businesses to be allowed to exploit the middle and lower classes however the hell they want with no consequences.
If you do, in fact, mean specifically "reduce zoning restrictions on new construction", I suggest using phrasing like that, because it'll communicate your intention much more clearly. (If you don't, then I have misunderstood you, and apologize for the confusion.)
Also just as an aside, I'm in favor of large, expensive intervention for both climate change and the environment in general but Environmental review at least in California is basically worth nothing compare to investing a billion dollars in solar cell research or building a nuclear power plant.
In NYC, people call for multi-year environmental reviews to stall putting in something as good for the environment a new bike lane. Not sure where you live, but if you just look up where SEQR is referenced NYS lawsuits or sit in any local CB meetings on buildings and zoning, you'll see it often come up around both buildings and bike lanes as a way to kill momentum on a project for years.
Maybe not environmental review, specifically (which differs quite a bit state to state), but zoning and onerous building regulations more generally are a significant factor. At this point the burden is really on detractors to explain why artificially limiting supply for decades didn't affect prices.
I mean, there are specific regulations we can point to that are making houses and housing more expensive, I don't see how "allowing people to build more houses" could destabilizing living?
Oh come on. Obviously people aren't clamoring for bringing back asbestos or dumping sewage into the street.
Regulations are written for a wide range of reasons- legitimate safety issues, quality of life concerns, propping up values, funneling money to groups favored by the politicians or bureaucrats crafting the rules, political grandstanding against imaginary problems, particular rules favored by coordinated special interest groups, etc.
I once lived in an area where several suburbs all met, you could drive a few blocks and cross imaginary lines separating different legal cities. They had different regulations for minimum lot size, how close structures could be to the property lines, how trees on the property needed to be handled, whether you could put two separate structures on one property, etc. Obviously none of these things impacted safety, but did impact density, home prices, etc.
Less safe does not mean unsafe. Marginal gains in safety after a certain threshold may not be worth it. People wear helmets on bicycles, but no one wears a helmet just walking around.
Several years ago I read a German interview with a construction engineer who complained about the industrial lobby that pushes more and more regulations that, incidentally (/sarc), increase a (forced) demand for their products.
He gave several examples, of which I remember one. It is now law in Germany that new homes with French windows must have extra strong glass in them. The reason? What if a toddler on a tricycle ran into the glass and suffered serious injuries or death?
Now, said the engineer, there are no cases in Germany of this actually ever happening, or at least we do not have any records of them. But this what-if theoretical scenario increases construction costs of new German homes by a thousand euro or so. (And increases a basically guaranteed demand for products of a few certified safety glass vendors A LOT!) Take forty or fifty such extra requirements together and their cumulative effect on price of the finished home starts being significant.
But no one wants to be known as a potential child killer, so it is not worth opposing such measures.
The level of safety gained by such measures is nevertheless dubious. People didn't die in homes built to the less stringent standards of 1990 like flies.
Yeah, just to be clear, I was specifically talking about land-use regulations. I don't know anything about how stringent material requirements are for building houses, but i'd wager we have some dumb ones on the books in the US.
>The securities that were so instrumental in triggering the financial crisis of 2007-2008, asset-backed securities, including collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were practically non-existent in 1978. By 2007, they comprised $4.5 trillion in assets, equivalent to 32% of U.S. GDP.
This is a total nosequitor, building more apartment buildings would make apartments cheaper, being allowed to build two houses on your one house lot would make houses cheaper etc. Like do you have a reasonable path from "people have more latitude to build on their own property" to putting families or individuals in a dangerous financial situation.
Ownership of single-family residential properties by large financial institutions should be limited to their traditional role - i.e. custodial ownership of a home for the duration of a mortgage.
We certainly need to build more, but that's no panacea. If you want the market to be efficient we first need to account for the systemic inefficiencies.
There exist good arguments for the existence of rentals in some capacity. However, the rentier class have abused their power enough to distort the market in their favor without adequately maintaining their properties. Once property has decayed too much to provide an adequate return the owners are left with a few options: massive capital investment that they won't make back for ages and in many cities won't justify a rate hike, insurance fraud, go bankrupt and walk away clean leaving a toxic eyesore to rot while keeping the all the illgotten profits. Holding corporate stakeholders personally liable for their properties externalities, and management failures, would help chill the burgeoning rentier class buying up everything they can rent, flip, or airbnb without a thought about how their actions effect everyone else. Sure, people will take a bath on their misguided 'investments', but that's what happens in efficient markets. 90% of Americans shouldn't suffer so a small class of people can make gains out of inefficient distorted and government reinforced markets.
Development companies aren't innocent here either, the crap they get away with doing and not doing is insane and dangerous. I don't think regulation is the answer to developer fraud, instead I believing strengthening the rights of owners/tenants and funding actions against bad developers to chill the industry against taking shortcuts is a better solution. If a developer knows that their own house can get taken for cutting corners they're going to be very invested in doing things right, and having the paperwork to prove they did it right, the first time. Sure massive companies building cardboard boxes might go bust, but that's what we want in an efficient market right?
I don't know about you, but for me the obvious way in which politicians and other powerful sorts have abused and perverted religious devices (and systems of control) to achieve their own ends has left a really bad taste in my mouth generally w.r.t anything "control-y' about religion.
The religious motivation behind control in monasteries is something different, though (at least when uncorrupted by politics and power).
Monasteries are, by design, very controlled environments. That's _exactly_ what they are supposed to be.
A place where you can safely get lost in ecstatic bliss, altered states of consciousness and the sometimes-difficult psychological territory of self discovery that typically follows these experiences.
The guard rails are put there by people who have travelled the road before and know what the pitfalls are.
For anyone curious about that (from a Christian monastery context):
* Cloud of Unknowing (Anonymous)
* The Dark Night of the Soul (St. John of the Cross)
* The Interior Castle (Teresa of Ávila)
Similar material exists for guiding e.g. Buddhist monks through the sort of territory that comes up when people spend a lot of time alone in contemplation (The Visuddhimagga, The Vimuttimagga in the Theravada tradition, The Tibetan Book of the Dead in the Vajrayana tradition).
Shamanic traditions likewise have very strict schedules of diet and spiritual preparation before aspirants can consume psychedelics - and ceremonies are (traditionally) performed under exquisitely controlled conditions.
Incidentally - westerners who play with meditative technologies or "psychedelic" therapies absent a regular, working relationship with a guide who know the territory do so at their own peril, IMO.
Thousands of years of contemplative and meditative practice have yielded independently arising systems in many different cultures which call for a controlled environment where a practitioner is surrounded by peers who know what to do, and more importantly what _not_ to do when things get a bit weird.
That's JUST for the individual practitioner.
Now add another layer for "things that can go wrong when trying to manage / lead a large community of people doing these things together".
Many mystical traditions (particularly eastern ones) solve this problem by having rules about how long monks and abbots can stay in one place.
Here, we see some western solutions to the common problems of community governance (at least: the sorts of problems one was likely to encounter at the time).
I've meandered really widely around the point! :)
Really I just wanted to call out that there is a valid (within the context of the goals of spiritual practice) use for a very controlled environment that should be considered separately from the common understanding of "religious control" (i.e. the powerful and political abusing religious devices to exert control over the masses).
For a very good (but not exceptional) developer, I wonder if ending up "out on the street" would be a reasonable expectation if something like this became truly widespread.
If companies like Google were no longer able to filter false positives __at Google scale__ using their current hiring practice, I wonder how long it would take to decide that the next best thing is to contract some tunable number of N contractors for K positions where N >> K and only keep the best M (K <= M << N) of them. (I expect a company like Google to occasionally keep more than K because they can't afford to throw away rockstars if they get a great cohort).
So, even if you're pretty good - if you aren't better than the bottom x% of your cohort (or some other aggregate measure) - you're out. Stack ranking for C2H, basically.
There are cryptocurrencies like monero whose primary purpose is to facilitate transactions between wallets that cannot be observed (I think).
If they've traded into that currency somewhere, how does one know where that money pops back up - on however many exchanges, under however many identities, in however many amounts, over whatever period of time they drip it back in?
I'm reminded of a paper I read a while back about deanonymizing VPN traffic if you have sufficient observability of nodes in the overall network and something else I can't remember at the moment.
Seems different though. The time they could take to drip money back in to the visible network (for conversion to fiat or appreciation in a "visible" coin) feels like a factor.
edit - heh, just now seeing the article you posted about the FBI's team explicitly mentions a case like this with Monero.
Via iOS' automations feature the app allows you to configure a per-app waiting period during which you can decide you don't actually want to open whatever app you've tried to open.
Very grateful for this tool.