skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In every state where fracking got authorised, earthquakes above 3.0 have increased by an order of magnitude (or even appeared where they were considered essentially inexistent).

Hundreds if not thousands of buildings have been damaged across OK and TX because they’d been built with no quake resistance as they’d been built in zones considered inactive, insurers have jacked up their rates and the USGS had to revise their risk maps.

The risk to populations is also non-negligible, because aside from a lack of quake-proof constructions the populations are not trained for or aware of quake safety for the same reason that the areas are historically stable.

I don’t think that’s happened yet in the US (as no fracking quake has exceeded 5.0 yet), but in 2019 fracking started killing people in china: the Sichuan basin, historically a geologically very stable region, got hit with 4 quakes between 4.9 and 6.0, at least 15 died and hundreds were injured.
> Copyright © 1978-2022 Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
They could also stop business in russia.
Thanks! Had to give google the benefit of the doubt (even though I don't like them) because this sounded absurd.
Fewer middlemen? Now to buy from your dealer, you have to go via a marketplace, after converting your real money on an exchange. That's at least two other intermediaries...
> You must know very little of history, to think coverage is only due to race.

Exclusively due to race.

> Show me another country with the same nuclear arsenal, or with the military might, invading countries this large, in a location which has started two world wars

Might as well say "show me another country also named Ukraine." How about Syria? Where Poland, specifically, sent its forces to train separatist rebel groups and had an airforce positioned to support the rebel offensives? Help me understand the difference, considering when refugees from Syria get to Poland they're rounded up, beaten up and expelled.

> Playing the race card is... weak.

Calling it weak helps skirt around the cognitive dissonance at seeing two tragedies, exactly the same barring ethnicity, and fabricating scenarios that justify one and disregard the other. The same people who are fascinated with what's happening in Ukraine are the same ones who had "Je suis Charlie" over their Facebook profile photos in 2015. They see fair skinned Europeans in crisis and their opinions change dramatically. This is an extension of missing white woman syndrome[0] and part of the training the Western world receives as children to disregard the suffering of non-anglophone and non-Europeans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome
Yes, it’s all trust based. I.e. if some random bank in Iowa decides to just create $10,000,000 out of thin air, the Fed will eventually find out and then they would lose banking license, lots of penalties.

Same goes for countries. If a countries fed just creates new money out of no where and acts as if it’s always existed they risk everything. I.e. losing access to the global banking network, insane currency fluctuations, use your imagination.

The premise is the same though. Our entire financial system as it stands today is based off of trust with auditing oversight and harsh penalties for breaking that trust.
That all assumes he's trying to invade and take over Ukraine, which I don't think is the case at all. Hence why they're not destroying the air force, internet and other civilian infrastructure.
> Much of our huge value creation in insurance is attributable to Berkshire’s good luck in my 1986 hiring of Ajit Jain. We first met on a Saturday morning, and I quickly asked Ajit what his insurance experience had been. He replied, “None.”

> I said, “Nobody’s perfect,” and hired him. That was my lucky day: Ajit actually was as perfect a choice as could have been made. Better yet, he continues to be – 35 years later.

This made me laugh. I wish my hiring process was this robust! I'd be curious to know more about why he actually chose him.
Ask HN: Should all politicians be banned from Twitter?
Many people had the hope that politician's presence on Twitter would enable more direct contact with the citizens. However, all political sides mainly use Twitter to dumb down discourse, virtue signal and blast out propaganda.

I think it is time to return to the pre-Twitter days.
Development version: GIMP 2.99.10 Released
Haha, indeed. I do not get informed on either Twitter or Facebook. Everyone is an expert there in everything, and 99% is bullshit.
Isn’t price gouging with security called a protection racket?
4.4M! So cool.

For over a decade I've been holding my breath believing that our computational power would eventually cross the line on the graph where the likelihood of identifying life on other planets (even with a conservative expectation that it exists)—due to the amount of data processed—would be extremely high. I figured a discovery like that would be unifying and humbling, but that we would miss the message because we (global we) imploded into some irony fueled blackhole by destroying ourselves.
> I would say it's time to take the gloves off. If you want Putin to listen, you need to speak his language.

> Remote wipe and brick all iOS, Android and Windows devices in Russia, then cut off their internet and see how they can "live with it". I've seen arguments like "But... but... how can other countries trust FAANG after that?".

If they can do that, the intelligence value of keeping those devices active surely outweighs any advantage of disabling them.

But I don't think that's "speaking Putin's language." To do that would require some kind of military action (e.g. shooting down Russian aircraft over Ukraine at the very least, and maybe airstrikes against Russian invasion forces there). Basically showing some backbone and willingness to risk escalation.

These kinds of more-severe sanctions, while stronger than last time, still show fundamental weakness. In the end, I doubt they'll accomplish anything besides pushing Russia deeper into China's arms.
nukes for sanctions and no software? What are they gonna do? Nuke Apple HQ?

Nukes are unusable, no one wants to be a king of a desert. Turkey killed Russian soldiers and downed their planes. No nuclear response QED.
>It's unclear what Russia is even trying to achieve at this point.

That's really the crux of the matter here. What is Russia's goal here?
If you're operating on the assumption that they indeed want to capture the entire Ukraine, it then indeed looks like they aren't doing as well as a lot of people seem to have expected, thus far.

However, it's possible that Putin is using the Russo-Georgian-War (2008) playbook again which didn't aim to capture the entire country, with the goals of ultimately capturing only some of East Ukraine (Dombass in particular, and keeping Crimea) and forcing the remaining Ukraine in negotiations to become a "neutral" state located between Russia and NATO/EU. While again embarrassing the West and their military and diplomatic resolve as a cherry-on-top. That Russia has been hitting targets in the west of Ukraine might have been to destroy Ukrainian military's capabilities and capacities, in this scenario.

Even if it's the Georgian playbook again, I still think Putin might have grossly overplayed his hand there. The NATO and EU will likely not let go as easily this time, especially not because in particular Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states as NATO and EU members feel very threatened and expressed themselves as such.
I felt like this year's games disappeared in all the news: pandemic, truckers, Ukraine
It's not kicking countries out, it's just kicking Russia out. It will be a blow for all the Western countries and banks conducting business with Russia, but a necessary one.
There is something wrong when it's a clear political statement to use the wrong term
They are wishes, not facts.
By some definitely, but there's still a democratically elected majority that wants to keep them going in North Europe.
Nice website! Reminds me of some of those crusty, old-looking tools used in finance (e.g. Bloomberg) which are actually really functional.

There is a typo on https://regatta.page/team:

> Former Software Engineer at Fortune 100 Financial Serivices Company
You have to keep in mind that these are human beings, who generally grew up in relative poverty (around 1/10th of the income of the average westerner), are fed constant Russian propaganda on TV, and by many recent reports, thought they were doing military drills until within days notice they were suddenly sent across the border with sugar-coated justifications (there's on outbreak of Nazis, go save the Ukrainian people and Donbas from them).
Bankrupt Russia's oligarchs and Putin will be dead within a week.

Just saying.....
That website doesn't inspire confidence..

The sidebar says

> You're now losing -1% of your money to inflation per year or 1.0% per month

That math doesn't seem to check out. I don't really know whether I can trust anything else there.
I don't disagree.

The problem is

1. This Bully has nuclear weapons

2. This Bully has historically shown they are willing and able to take more pain for their cause.
Meanwhile, the intellectuals of America's right wing party are calling people who encourage others to get vaccinated government propagandists[1] and shilling cryptocurrencies[2]. This guy studied at Princeton and Harvard. He knows what he is doing.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/tedcruz/status/145710850449864295...

[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/tedcruz/status/149703184598422732...
Because Japan deals with natural earthquakes all the time, japan has quake-safety standards. They were written in blood, and don’t exist in places which don’t routinely have earthquakes, because quake safety is constraining and expensive.

Retrofitting an entire country for quake safety because you’ve decided to create artificial earthquakes is inane.
I'm sorry, but the title of the post is completely misleading.

Passing a B2 (=basic) level exam is definitely not equal to "I learned French". It is a realistic goal to get to the B2 level in a year, if you devote sufficient time to it. But a B2 exam is just that - an exam, with certain types of questions that you can prep and pass, without that actually meaning much in terms of your language skill.

How do I know? I am currently attending a C1 course in German. Yes, we do learn new words, phrases and expressions, but actually, the major parts of a C1 exam are:
* understanding and summarizing texts (either written or spoken)
* doing a 5 minute presentation on a given topic, with very strict rules (the outline structure is given, the expected speech parts are given etc).
* knowing grammar rules, which even the native speakers don't really know or care about.

As a matter of fact, C1 is more like a university preparation course, and not so much like a language course. Also, it is so much more dense than the previous levels, that it might take one person the same time to go from A1 to B2 as another person to go from B2 to C1.

In the meantime, the following are not really checked or prepped:
* understanding real native speakers (not on radio or giving a speech, but the real everyday speech)
* making sure the basics are there, eg. how do you organise your life? How do you make a phone call, talk to the postman, your colleagues during lunch, how do you ask your mechanic what is that creaky noise while you are driving your car...?
* speaking and writing without (many) errors. Yes, you can speak, but judging the face of the person who is listening to you.... not very well. Actually, in my case I almost always immediately recognize when I say something stupid, but I still say it...

One can pass the C1 exam, and be almost completely unable to fit in everyday life. This is even more so if the area you live in doesn't speak the "mainstream" of the language, but some weirdo variation of it. For example, if you think you speak German B2, I challenge you to try to speak to a random person on the backstreets of Munich or Vienna... if you are lucky, they speak some English :)

To end on a more positive note, achieving B2 is ABSOLUTELY a worthy goal in any language, and your life will be better for it. Just set your expectations accordingly.
“Civil forfeiture” does not and has never meant “fiat forfeiture.” If the government tells you to forfeit your assets (justly or unjustly!), you can be certain that they will not be amused or deterred by attempts to hide those assets via cryptocurrency.
There needs to be liability established for publishing private and personal information; ideally criminal liability but even civil would be a nice start.

They don't have meaningful security because they don't have to have meaningful security.
You're not going to tank a stock by publicly telling people you're going to buy a bunch of it. A bunch of people will try to get in front of you and bid you up.
Note that folks who claimed their bank accounts were frozen because they were “donors to the convoy” never actually verified that that actually happened [1]. At the same time the government, the RCMP, and the banks have come out and said “that didn’t happen” [2]. Last, the government ceded its emergency powers after about a week total, despite claims on HN and various thinkpieces that they would be extended in perpetuity [3].

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mp-mark-stra...

[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-rcmp-banks-an...

[3] https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2022/02/23/justin-t...
SWIFT is not just for dollars. I used it to transfer Euros and GBP.

The reason people like the US dollar is not just because SWIFT exists.
We should not make offensive moves - down that path lies further escalation.

We need to isolate Russia using non-violence. Primarily, refusing to buy their oil and gas.

Remote bricking all iOS devices in Russia would be an offensive escalation because it would directly harm Russian assets.

Barring Russia from SWIFT… does that amount to a refusal to trade with them? That feels appropriately non-violent, but I’m unsure exactly what it would involve.
Why should we? Is Ukraine really that important to the United States? Is provoking greater enmity from Russia on behalf of a faraway irrelevance really in our best interests? Would we have been wiser to have acceded to Russian requests that we abandon the idea of NATO membership and participation for Ukraine several years ago when this invasion could have been avoided?

Americans have short memories, and don't recall President Obama saying that, while Ukraine is a critical security matter for Russians, it is not so for America, and that we shouldn't allow concern over Ukraine to overshadow our greater national interest. It's a pity that neither his administration nor the two following ones have consistently followed that principle. Our meddling in Ukraine is a large part, though by no means the whole, of the cause of this action.
Your dealer… may just be buying online (and stepping on it).

Depends on what they’re supplying. Something locally grown, ok, but overseas labs synthetics can involve a lot of middlemen.
Maybe it's time to stop cultivating this hatred. Otherwise, you’ll have to keep hating other nations. It's a road to hatred hell - many countries and nations in Europe had conflicts.

Separate a regime from a nation. I don't know any Russian (I’m Russian in Spain) who would have any negativity to the Poles. Maybe it would be better to stop the hatred from another side as well.
Have to wonder what the end goal is here. Putin is human, but he’s also pretty calculating in his actions.

People have mentioned before China’s competing system to SWIFT and this move potentially being to their benefit. You also have the EU and US spinning up their wheels against a boogeyman, which in some ways, has the effect of strengthening and/or testing their relationships.

In other ways, it forces the West into really tough and expensive policy positions, with plenty of opportunity to damage relationships as well.

Perhaps it really is just as simple as they wanted to prevent Ukraine from joining the EU/NATO. Maybe it’s a mixture of all the above.

Blinken mentioned it - and I agree - that I don’t see whatever plan that’s currently underway as intentioned to stop at Ukraine.
'Don't waste a good crisis' and all that. Everytime the world goes topsy turvy, there is a large uptick in hacking. During the pandemic ransomware went rampant as people capitalized on so many people being online.
To be fair... Winter Olympics don't typically get much attention, this year was an exception and it actually got _more_ attention.
Your statement is unclear, are you saying it doesn’t matter if dams and bridges get destroyed, or that it doesn’t matter if rural habitations get destroyed as long as they’re not destroyed near infrastructure?
I'd say at least two for anything practical (having a settled daily life in Mars). Once settled, it will be... very interesting.
India and China will still trade with Russia. Europe is not a single entity also. They need Russian gas now just as much as before.
https://youtu.be/o6t31R4tI10?t=123

Second plane
Not sure what your question means. One presumes that the EU's goal here is the obvious one, namely to make trade increasingly harder for Russia until they stop invading other countries.

To "impose a sanction" in this context is to apply a costly restriction to yourself, using the negative effect your self-restriction has on other parties to punish those parties, usually hoping that the negative effect is worse for them than it is for you. Any given trade happens because both parties want it; artificially making trade harder makes both parties worse off. The EU does not have to benefit from the intervention at all; they are apparently willing to pay that cost to make trade harder for Russia.
Just donated US$150 to UNHCR’s Ukraine program while I still can. Don’t know if online bank card payments will still work after SWIFT is disabled for us.

If you care, you could do that too.
There are two purposes to sanctions.

The first is to harm the enemy. Cutting Russia off from SWIFT does that. The second is to reduce moral culpability. The idea that we shouldn't let our work, our infrastructure, be used to further aims we find detestable.

The former is an exercise in balancing costs and benefits. In this, the evidence for cutting Russia off is mixed--they will likely develop a vassal relationship with China that offsets the cost enough to let the regime survive. The latter is an exercise in measuring evil and involvement. In this, the evidence is fairly clear.

Adding an automatic off-switch triggered by total withdrawal from all of Ukraine, including Crimea, or Putin's surrender to a NATO member (or evidence of his death) would give the whole thing a sharper edge.
Gas Embargo Would Hit Russia Hardest
Chemex usually is a bit harder to get a nice cup of coffee consistently from,

A V60 pourover is usually much more better ( and easier to clean and less chances of breaking too )

For me atleast V60 usually provides consistently better coffee then a chemex brewed one and is also less effort.
It'll be great in the long term finding different sources and fuels.
Wait did you understand the question, what will EU get?

EU is not afraid of russians or nukes.
You're starting at a local max as a baseline and then comparing after what happened from the sanctions of 2014 (after Crimea) paired with very low oil prices followed by the coronapocalypse when their economy was starting to kick back into gear.

This [1] page shows the yearly drops more clearly. But I think most importantly is that as the US (and increasingly everywhere in the world) emphasizes, GDP/capita often is a poor measurement of how the people themselves are doing. Here [2] is a graph of the change in real wages [2]. That is better than most places in the EU and is continuing upward in spite of ever more sanctions.

The big question is what impact the current wave of sanctions will have. And how that will jive with what may be persistently very high oil prices.

[1] - https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp

[2] - https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/wages
> don’t know if bank card payments will still work after SWIFT is disabled

Russia is being threatened with cut-off, not Ukraine.
I think he was hoping to avoid this war. It was an option, obviously, but not a preferred one.
https://www-bazonline-ch.translate.goog/abschreckende-kriegs...
It would come down to people would not be able to send money to them, I.e. they would say you can’t send money to Russia anymore, and if an institution went around SWIFT to send money and they get audited they could get into a lot of trouble.
> Do people in China and Russia can watch US propaganda easily?

Don't know about China, but it's not like people don't go to youtube, reddit, twitter or other social media patfroms.

> Why does this exist at all? Like why does an american company allow that?

Obviously, because the company operates in the said country (at least in Russia), makes money, and even installs their their own hardware in ISPs datacenters. Obviously, they will be forced to comply with local regulations.

Funny thing is that more confrontations between Russian government and these companys boil down to government pressuring them if they block some Russian media for violating some "internal rules", as if they are operating in American jurisdiction and feel like they have a right for "private discrimination".
> Remote bricking all iOS devices in Russia would be an offensive escalation because it would directly harm Russian assets

It's still nonviolent.
I saw a video with a guy analyzing how well Elvis could play guitar. And ultimately arrives at the conclusion "well enough to express himself musically".
Elvis's guitar playing in the video below is pretty simple cords. But it has a purpose. It matches the story he's telling through his music. It's like cinematic movie, the camera moves in a way to help tell the story. So not sure if AI will get there because does AI really understand what the story is. Being simple but purposeful beats complicated and pointless which all of electronic music seems like to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMkyIJ0g5sg

Its like movie scene with a KONG FU FIGHT where the opponents puts on a wheelhouse show with impressive moves. But ultimately get knocked out with one simple effective counter punch when they clash. And ultimately you know who the real master always was.
Why the wait? It only allows funds to move in the meantime. If it's going to be cut off there should be no warning.
> Its clear the Russians planned this as a "shock & awe" blitzkrieg

> the Russians are not stupid

these 2 points have been on my mind unrelated to your argument. I do not think they're stupid which is why I can't help to figure out why they botched this up. The whole thing looks like an unhinged ego trip of a single ruler that has grown increasingly isolated (maybe because of the pandemic), like Stalins final days. But Putin isn't Stalin.

So either they failed on strategy, nobody was brave enough to question Gerasimov, or the bigger plan is yet to reveal itself. For now it's Occams razor I think.
Russia Started Blocking Tor (2021)
Isn't 30 days essentially a military and political failure though? I can see in Putin's thinking that a 3-5 day long decapitation strike would be feasible, and then they occupy Kiev and it's fait accompli.

But 30 days, with almost all of the world against it? It's way too long and someone else may get involved.
I use it everyday, but I don't use it for everything.