Projects of the organization .. Fueling Freedom, which seeks to "explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels" by rejecting some opinions on climate change.
That was B2B - it was a golf course brag for executives. Customers camping outside Apple stores was something different. That's personal identity defined by not merely consumption, but parasocial relationship to a brand.
Apple isn’t unique. There’s all sorts of products like that. Concert tickets, sports events, recreation permits, and especially video game stuff.
People camped out when the Nvidia RTX 30xx series launched a few years back. There was a massive line of people, a real wtf moment. That’s just a graphics card.
Video games are a good counter example. The others you've listed are fandom specific which is distinct from having a relationship with a brand per say.
I hadn't heard about camping for the 30 series, thats nuts.
> Scale changes as population grows and usage deepens.
^ IBM was the brand in a time when no computing products existed for the Man on the Clapham omnibus.
Earlier examples of consumers having a parasocial relationship with a branded identity exist, just not particularly in the computing tech field.
Dresses, artworks, perfumes, performers have famously had cult like followings in times past - Lisztomania had fans camping out for a glimpse and prime seats.
Funny, I always thought that phrase was ironic and actually a joke against IBM bad quality/pricing ratio but abundant and aggressive marketing targeted at non technical managers. ( I actually have no idea of IBM quality/pricing ratio, I don't work on fields in wich they are present)
I dare say it became ironic .. but I lived through the zenith of IBM in business sales and they had a cult following with many and a solid stranglehold on federal, state, and local Governments (and various corporate sectors) in a great many countries.
That lessened with the rise of PC's in the office and the spread of non-IBM PC clones. It's a dim memory today and has been for three decades and more.
And yet the company has been doing pretty well. Just because they're almost unknown in the startup world doesn't mean they aren't a major computer industry player.
IBM was more known as a sales-oriented company rather than marketing. Although, of course, they spent (and spend) a lot on marketing/advertising as well. IBM 2024 revenues were >$62B.
Interesting that your linked algorithm manages to avoid costly divisions, but it uses an even longer loop than Newton's Method -- one iteration for every 2 bits. NM converges quadratically, doubling the number of correct bits each time, so a 32-bit number won't ever need more than 5 iterations, assuming >= 1 bit of accuracy in the initial estimate, which is easy to obtain just by shifting right by half the offset of the highest 1-bit.
There are trade-offs (constant time, perhaps?) and many differing applications ...
For example: Pipelined RISC DSP chips have fat (many parallel streams) "one FFT result per clock cycle" pipelines that are rock solid (no cache hits or jitter).
The setup takes a few cyces but once primed it's
aquired data -> ( pipeline ) -> processed data
every clock cycle (with a pipeline delay, of course).
In that domain hardware implementations are chosen to work well with vector calculations and with consistent capped timings.
( To be clear, I haven't looked into that specific linked algo, I'm just pointing out it's not a N.R. only world )
Yes, they go by many names but that is their historic name, The Fabian Society. Today you might call them globalists.
Sarcasm isn't really appropriate or warranted.
If you've read and researched their work, both back then and today, you know they support and promote a collapse to non-market socialism, albeit the form of that collapse is indirect and only recognized once you resolve the contradictions in their ambiguous material.
As system's go that form of socialism inevitably fails in unpredictable and chaotic ways, starting with shortage, slavery, famine, then death.
So in many respects, it should be called a dark cabal since at the rational conclusion of their efforts it will be a death cult. The people involved certainly don't seem to believe that is a possible outcome, but neither do delusional terrorists when they blow themselves up believing they'll awaken in paradise.
Blindness to the consequences of your actions and reality is a characteristic of truly evil people.
Sixteen years ago $50 million USD was the absolute low bar of interest when reporting on IPO capital raising for mineral development projects.
We tracked any global mineral exploration activity; leases changing hands, ground chemistry surveys, geophysical survey, drill survey, technical reports, etc.
But, for the purposes of informing investors on the Toronto TSX and elsewhere, anything less than $50 million on development was too small to be worth mentioning. It was literally the lowest least interesting amount.
I think you just ended up supporting my argument, because you perfectly explained why most people hate bean counters.
Again: $50 million dollars is an insane amount of money, even moreso since it's American tax dollars and we're apparently spending it buying condoms for other countries. What the sincere fuck. That is not what I'm paying my taxes for, and I'm willing to bet a lot of Americans will agree with me.
Spend that $50 million dollars on anything for the direct benefit of Americans: Student debt, food stamps, Medicare, public schools, or condoms for that matter, I don't care. Spending this money on anything for Americans is better than spending it buying condoms for other countries. Absolutely noone can convince me this is a wise and justifiable use of our (my) taxes.
> Again: $50 million dollars is an insane amount of money
Again, that's not "insane" .. it's literally the least outlay for a very small publicly listed mine; it covers a few 100 tonne haulpaks, machine shops, staff, screens, small crusher, a few conveyors, and sundries.
It strikes me that you might well be out of touch with the cost of various activities.
It strikes me that you might well be out of touch with how we are talking about American tax dollars being wasted on very questionable foreign expenditures.
> Absolutely noone can convince me this is a wise and justifiable use of our (my) taxes.
HIV affects everyone. It's best to reduce it wherever you can.
You either want soft power influence or you don't. If you cede influence to other nations they will happily take it over for you.
A reduction in soft power influence will make the US smaller and weaker. Nations will form business and military ties with whoever wants to be the next world hegemon (i.e. China).
>HIV affects everyone. It's best to reduce it wherever you can.
Again, "can" is the keyword.
In case you weren't aware, the US is literally trillions of dollars in debt. Not only can we not afford these expenses, we are literally borrowing money to pay those expenses which aren't even for our own benefit. Again: What the sincere fuck. This is a budget that would get taken out back and shot in any other sane circumstances.
We have countless pressing concerns right here at home where that $50 million dollars can make a significant impact to the benefit of all Americans. Even if there wasn't a line item, we can still slash $50 million dollars off the budget and reduce the debt which again is beneficial to all Americans.
And don't give me that "just print more dollars" bullshit either: That leads to inflation for everyone Americans and otherwise. It's ridiculous that spamming the printing presses is considered acceptable.
If China or whoever wants to buy condoms for other countries then they are very much welcome to. We can't fucking afford these stupid line items when we have a laundry list of our own. Screw "soft power influence", if the Pentagon and CIA line items weren't somehow enough already then we should also slash those too and get rid of all the waste.
>A lot of tax dollars are being left on the table.
Indeed, revamping tax laws are definitely on the table. Tariffs will also indirectly and partially compensate for those avoided taxes.
>This will make America weak again. It will put America last.
In the immortal words of our Vice President, "I don't really care, Margaret." I don't want our taxes spent buying condoms for other countries (among many other things) and I don't believe I am the only one.
> Tariffs will also indirectly and partially compensate for those avoided taxes.
Tariffs will just get you counter-tariffs. After Trump's direct threats to Denmark, the EU is working on a bundle of counter-tariffs to apply if needed. That will equal lost export revenue as US products get priced out of the market:
We're in his second term now with a very different landscape and wherever this train is heading it's just getting started.
>Tariffs will just get you counter-tariffs. After Trump's direct threats to Denmark, the EU is working on a bundle of counter-tariffs to apply if needed. That will equal lost export revenue as US products get priced out of the market.
Good. Denmark policies should be Denmark First, and so on.
>It's better to be involved in the world than to be a hermit kingdom.
We can be involved in the world without buying condoms for everyone.
Note that we're not even talking about the big ones like slashing the Pentagon's budget (yet), we're literally talking about slashing the money spent on buying condoms for Palestine/Mozambique and y'all are already screaming bloody murder.
I repeat: I don't really care. I don't want our taxes spent on this bullshit. Period.
Nihilism won't get you anywhere. You're not even arguing if the program is effective or not. That's an actual case you can make but it requires taking an interest.
Pi now 3
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