Saturday, October 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 October 2021

Top Story

  • Where exactly is Tether's $69 billion?  (Bloomberg)

    Tether is a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged at 1:1 against the dollar.  Tether says they can do this because they have a 1:1 ration of liquid dollar assets to the Tether coins issued.

    Tether acts like a bank, but this report suggests it's somewhere between a hedge fund and a Ponzi scheme.


  • Unexpected sanity:
    It’s a sign of Australia’s COVID parochialism that we seem to think allowing 10 people into the homes of the double-vaccinated, instead of five, is a measure of radical risk-taking.
    That's two academics from the left-wing Sydney University writing in the left-wing Sydney Morning Herald to berate the left over their COVID psychosis.

    Being what they are they feel obligated to take a dig at Donald Trump before they get on to criticising the Labor Party here in Australia.
    Perrottet’s political calculation is that we are now ready for take-off. This is one politician who isn’t afraid of freedom. His instincts tell him that the people of NSW increasingly aren’t either.

    For Labor and those on the political left, there is huge political danger in all of this.

    If it works, Labor is sunk.


Tech News

  • Hydrogen's moment is here at last.  (The Economist)

    Not.  None of the problems with storing and transporting hydrogen in bulk have been solved.  It's a lousy fuel.


  • Hydrogen has its faults, but oil isn't necesarily any safer.  (The New Yorker)

    The F.S.O Safer, to be specific, which is a former oil tanker turned fuel store, sitting unpowered and unmaintained just off the coast of Yemen with a million barrels of oil on board.

    This being Yemen, it may also be surrounded by mines, preventing it from being moved to safety by tug boats.

    This being Yemen, the person in charge of laying mines in that area is dead, and there aren't any records.

    The only question is whether it leaks, causing an ecological disaster for the Red Sea, catches fire, causing an ecological disaster for Yemen, or simply explodes and kills everyone in the area. They can't close the port either, because there isn't another port available.


  • How the .NET Foundation kerfuffle became a brouhaha.  (Rob Mensching)

    .NET is Microsoft's development platform, or one of them anyway.  .NET Core has been made open source.  The .NET Foundation manages that open source project.

    Poorly.


  • Apache has released an emergency update for the incomplete fix in the emergency update for the bug they introduced introduced in the recent update.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Someone's having a bad week.


  • Nijisanji EN Wave 3 - named Ethyria - just launched.  (YouTube)

    Pomu is the only one I follow regularly; with Hololive EN Gen 2 so active there's rarely a need to actually look for content.  But I like all the ones I have watched and will at least check in on the new ones.

    There's four in Wave 3, instead of three previously, and wave 4 is likely due before the end of the year.


  • Also, since I finally have a day off - I've been working nights, weekends, and public holidays lately - I've been playing some Minecraft.  Found some glow berries today, and caught my first UPRP.  I've seen one before but I fumbled the capture and couldn't find it again.

    There's a huge mineshaft system under Camp Pandaton and now I have tons of iron, gold, copper, diamonds, and other goodies that I need to get back to base, 2500 blocks away. 

    I'm thinking of finally checking out the Nether at this point, since distance there is 1/8th of the overworld.


Disclaimer: Roboco-san, nooo!!!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:22 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 602 words, total size 5 kb.

1 I've been saying for years that the simplest and safest method for storing and transporting hydrogen is to make a sort of slurry of it with carbon.  The difficulty comes in seperating the two elements at the end point, but we can let the engineers figure that part out.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 10 2021 05:00 AM (obo9H)

2 Hydrogen is not a fuel, as it does not have exergy. It's just a container, losing energy on the in and the out processes. And any leaked to the environment is lost to space.

Posted by: Will at Monday, October 11 2021 12:51 PM (8548M)

3 Well, we are totally going to crack fusion tomorrow morning, and we hydrogen skeptics will all look really silly then.

Wait, sorry, was I promising viable fusion power again?  I misread my notes;  I should have been promising cheap thermonuclear weapons for the world's poor. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, October 11 2021 01:08 PM (r9O5h)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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