My bank has been using this for a few years now, and it quickly became my preferred method of logging in. Open the bank app, scan the code, punch in a PIN on the phone and the browser bank opens almost like magic. Very easy to set up for non techies as well.
That probably is just an second factor QR-code login, but not the same as SQRL login. In the open source SQRL standard you also have an solution to revoke your identities for each site/app and recover when your device gets stollen.
My UK bank requires a password and a separate secret phrase that they do the letter selection from. You need to supply the password and 3 letters from your secret phrase.
As my phrase is quite long I pretty much always end up writing it down or using an editor.... :-)
>Dissolve land-use regulation, pay residents to allow developers to build new structures, and distort the market in favor of the renters by levying a land-value tax.
"Or they could heed the advice of Henry George, an American follower of Ricardo who in the 1880s made the case for a land-value tax. It has many theoretical virtues. Most taxes dampen, distort or displace economic activity by changing incentives on the margins. But a land tax cannot reduce the supply of land, and it would stimulate economic activity by penalising those whose land is unproductive. And your tax base is always right there—a city lot cannot be whisked off to Luxembourg.
The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, hopes that taxing vacant lots by value will help deal with urban blight in the Bronx and elsewhere. But there are practical problems with a land tax—perhaps the largest of which is that by its very nature it hits the well-connected rich hardest. Even fiscally purist Estonia, which adopted a land tax in 1993, has complicated it with multiple bands, including an exemption for homeowners."
As criticism goes, that is so weaksauce it's a 0 on the Scoville scale.
It strikes me that a land-value tax is the opposite of what is needed. To me, cities' great failing is that they so completely destroy the natural environment that they become inhumane and unlivable. This is largely because undeveloped land is seen as an economic inefficiency rather than as an asset. Having green spaces, undeveloped fields, and the like mixed in with the rest softens the harshness of urban life and helps the city seem like somewhere for humans rather than simply cars and concrete to live.
This is the idea of "nature deficit disorder", the idea that exposure to natural environments helps be be more happy/creative/healthy/etc. Governments should subsidize undeveloped land ownership rather than taxing it out of existence.
I'm not sure what political angles the economist has played to historically, but I find it fascinating how the death of paid-for content is spurring a decline in the quality and scope of news across the board - especially at once-respectable establishments.
When your revenue is driven by ads, which are driven by views, you are incentivized to publish inflammatory articles that play to mass-approved tropes, such as "burn the 1%" and "the police are all evil/out of control". Not to say that these pieces are unmerited, but I've observed their quantity and quality to be moving in opposite directions.
I think Bloomberg Businessweek is killing it right now. They've onboarded some of the best talent (Paul Ford, Matt Levine) and revamped the style of their publication to appeal to the young, ADD, super-exuberant tech/finance crowd (myself included). I believe they are heavily subsidized by Bloomberg's other business ventures, so this seems to be a more viable way to fund and disseminate high quality content.
> I believe they are heavily subsidized by Bloomberg's other business ventures, so this seems to be a more viable way to fund and disseminate high quality content.
How are those incentives less perverse than those engendered by current funding models? I don't imagine reporting on stories that show those other business ventures ina negative light may not been seen favorably at some level of management.
I see it as the patron model, where a wealthy individual bankrolls an artist to do basically whatever the artist pleases as long as the artist paints a nice picture of the patron every once in a while.
Of course, I have no idea how closely the other branches of Bloomberg's empire tie into BusinessWeek, but from many of the articles I have read, I get the feeling that Bloomberg LP is holding off on pushing some annoying agenda until they absorb enough market share from The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, etc.
One could easily argue that given revenue is driven by ads, it is a corporate agenda that will be enforced upon people and people will be nudged towards that.
If by chance you missed it, there is a glossary at the end of the book. (I've seen some comments from people who didn't notice until they finished it.)
Also, if you enjoyed the Shaftoes and Waterhouses of Cryptonomicon, consider putting the Baroque Cycle before Seveneves.
I didn't notice the glossary and I am actually glad I didn't. By the end of Anathem all of the strange names for things become second nature and you understand from the context what their meaning is. It is almost like what happens when you learn a new language and are able to think in that language.
27 here ("Wow, you have excellent colour vision.") with fairly typical red/green colorblindness. I also fail the the Ishihara plate (dots) test like clockwork.
Does this test different hues (or brightness even?) of the same color rather than the red/green blue/purple of the dots? (Can't tell myself, am after all colorblind.)
This test seems to be about something else rather than traditional colorblindedness.
^ This is it. I can be GMO as a human and have acme free skin? Thank you and here is your $25,000. This will be seen as medical benefit since it cures disease and I can have Green/Hazel eyes.
Seriously I refuse to eat Chipotle with their fear mongering Anti-GMO stance on the front window.
Yeah, Chipotle's anti-gmo stance has really killed my desire to eat there. It's is a shame because they had previously been relatively good on the environmental front. Then they fell into the pseudo-science deep-end and here we are.
Hell, no. CRISPR has the benefit of specificity, but the kit must be delivered to the cell by live virus, which can cause problems (heavy immune response), especially if you are infecting with a high enough titer to affect a majority of cells.
I'm not sure I agree with ending racism. Maybe you were being tongue-in-cheek.
I mean, presumably someday far in the future, everyone will have access to the ability to alter fully their entire genome.
I would think in the next XX years, though, there will be plenty of remaining distinguishing features beyond skin color, and more importantly, plenty of people without the money to make any changes.
Besides that, I'm hopeful that we'll still retain diversity, so I'd think we'll still have plenty of races for ignorant folks to hate.
When racism is done, we'll just continue hating for other reasons. I speculate class will lead the charge next.
>plenty of people without the money to make any changes.
>I speculate class will lead the charge next.
Exactly, it transforms the race problem into a class problem. People will probably discriminate based on how many designer genes you have. With time, most governments (not necessarily the US) will realize how much they can save by giving people healthy genes from the start, and it won't be as much of a class divide.
Fads will come and go regarding some group of genes being better from such task or other. Like diets and workouts today, it will become tiresome for most people quickly enough.
This is good. In the last century we transformed race from a military problem to a political problem. In this century it will become a technical problem. There will be plenty of nastiness, but each step reduces nastiness by an order of magnitude.
>I'm hopeful that we'll still retain diversity
We will win a whole new diversity. There will be people with chameleon skin walking among us in this century.
>With time, most governments (not necessarily the US) will realize how much they can save by giving people healthy genes from the start, and it won't be as much of a class divide.
The poverty-as-disease model already shows that governments could save money by treating/preventing poverty rather than providing lifetimes of palliative care[1]. The problem is the moralizing about poverty.
Every town used to have their own local time based on the sun being at zenith at local noon. For example, a place like Oxford would be a few minutes behind London.
With the advent of railways, it became necessary to standardize things a bit. You can imagine the difficulty if each town a train stopped in had its own timezone!
We had software choke on a birth date once. For some reason these were sent in milliseconds, and that particular instance, midnight July 1st, 1937 didn't exist for this particular locale. At that time, the time was changed to a different meridian, and the clock was moved forward a few seconds.
In the 1940s, the nazis set all of occupied Europe to Berlin time, and it stuck. Before that time, Europe had a large number of time zones.
