If you live in a country with a highly functional banking system and no kleptocracy, Bitcoin is probably a bit puzzling unless you have family in Cuba. But it's not puzzling at all for those of us who live somewhere in the middle of the broad spectrum between Switzerland and Somalia, because most places have a little kleptocracy. Argentina is far from being "a failed state," but if you want to send US$500 abroad via non-Bitcoin means it's basically impossible, and the only broadly available savings vehicle is real estate ("ahorrar en ladrillos"), which of course grossly inflates real-estate prices, with a substantial part of the capital city occupied by empty apartments someone bought "as an investment". Historically Argentines have saved by buying dollars but that's limited to US$200 a month now, and then only if you have a non-under-the-table job (about a third of total employment is under the table):
You can see that in September 02019 when this measure was imposed the price of a dollar was AR$63.50; now it's AR$147. So whatever savings you had in pesos in 02019 have lost 57% of their value to peso devaluation.
In 02001 a lot of Argentines had saved dollars in their dollar-denominated bank accounts. This did not preserve their savings through the financial crisis that year; the cash-strapped government limited withdrawals to a trickle, then converted dollar deposits to pesos at a one-to-one rate, then released the exchange-rate peg, at which point peso went overnight from being worth US$1 to being worth US$0.25 before settling at about US$0.31 for the next few years.
You suggest, "alternatives to banks like credit unions where customers—as owners—hold more power," but Credicoop depositors suffered the same two-thirds confiscation of savings as depositors in for-profit banks. And they pay the same 3% tax on bank transactions including checks. That's more than a fast Bitcoin transaction fee of US$15 for transactions over US$500.
But we're not a failed state. There are no gangs of bandits roving the streets in Argentine cities (though there are some pretty bad slums where you'll get robbed if you wander in without knowing anybody). Courts, free public hospitals, and roads continue to function, though there are more potholes than a year ago. Argentine infant mortality is 10 per 1000 live births, down from almost 20 in the late 01990s and the same as the late 01980s in the US; life expectancy at birth is 77 years, worse than Switzerland's 84, but the same as China and Hungary, and better than Saudi or Mexico. (Somalia is 54.)
Most of the world is worse off than Argentina, although not necessarily in such a statistically transparent fashion. About one fourth of the people in the world are unbanked, 51% here in Argentina; even advanced countries like Russia, Hungary, and Uruguay have roughly a quarter of the population unbanked:
And if your family lives in a country like Iran or Venezuela subject to US sanctions, and you live in the US? Good luck sending them an ACH, instant or otherwise! It's well known that Bitcoin is very popular in Venezuela, which kind of is a failed state, so one of the Venezuelan governments is trying to tax Bitcoin remittances at 15%.
Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars per year in such remittances. This might seem like a trivial amount of money to someone in a rich country, but in poor countries, it's enough to keep several million people alive.
Even in the US, it's common for the police to confiscate large amounts of paper currency just because they can ("civil forfeiture"); US bank accounts are probably fine for US$100K but probably somewhat risky for US$10M if the bank thinks you don't seem like the kind of person who ought to have it. US$10M in US$100 bills fits in a box you can wheel around on a dolly, but Bitcoin is a lot more practical. (And of course US$10M in dollar bills loses about US$200k per year to inflation.)
So, Bitcoin doesn't have to be a cypherpunk utopia to be a big improvement on the status quo ante. For those of you living in stable countries where your worries are things like "instant and extremely low-fee ACHs" and "decentralized utopia", this may be very confusing, but try to remember that most of the world lives in places with much more pressing concerns, concerns that Bitcoin helps a lot with. And you may live there too, soon — the loyal subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm in 01913 certainly didn't expect that in 15 years they'd be in the middle of a hyperinflation episode that remains legendary a century later.
The “more throughput for your buck” seems to hold even as you move up beyond “filter taped on a fan”.
The air filter I built out ran me about $200 without the filters. (Lumber, inline duct fan, foam tape for sealing, window screen, some other accoutrements. The bulk of the cost was the fan.)
The filters are two 3M MPR1500/MERV12 5” deep furnace filters that ran $75. They’re prefiltered with some activated carbon sheet and some window screen (to avoid the filters clogging with pet hair). This is a similar filter to what runs in my furnace and they generally last over a year in there—the 5” filters have a lot of surface area.
So all in let’s round up and call it $300. Looking at Amazon and ignoring the questionably rated all-caps-manufacturer style products, looks like they would get me an air purifier rated for 600 square feet at two air changes per hour. Similar deal at Home Depot.
At two changes per hour mine’s good for about 3000 square feet. Which means in the space it’s in it can do more like 10 air changes per hour, or one every 6 minutes.
In reality that’s a lot of moving air and makes quite a lot of noise. Day-to-day I’m running it at around 20% and sitting at two changes per hour. But when we’re cooking something smoky or during wildfire season, it’s one knob to turn up a bit and the air cleans up in here almost immediately.
I run an AirQ which measures PM1/2.5/10, among other things. Without the filter on they all hover around 20ug/m3. When we’re frying food it can easily hit 300-400ug/m3 in here and unless we open up a bunch of windows it takes a long time to come down.
With the filter on it’s 0. Not 0.something, just a flat 0. If I turn it off and get it up to 300-400 in here and then turn it back on to about 60%, we’re back below 100 within 15 minutes, and down to something that rounds off to zero about a half hour after that.
Which is all a long ramble to not really say anything except that it was a fun project.
I own several Texas BBQ restaurants. We have a pitmaster but here are the things I know:
1. Not all beef/cattle are created equally. You must start with a high quality brisket. Just because it is a prime grade brisket is not enough. We tasted brisket from many farms and we centered on Creekstone Farms.
2. Not all smokers are created equally. Test the extremes including low-slow (12-15 hours) vs fast-high (8 hours). We found offset is good for low-slow, but gas powered is better for fast-high.
3. Not so secret: you must rest the brisket for 12 hours in a warmer after it is finished cooking. This gets the fat rendered inside, so you can get those grooves / mountains and peaks within the meat. This also achieves the most tender brisket.
4. Before wrapping with butcher paper, we put beef tallow on the brisket. This creates a juicier product for us.
5. Injecting and/or putting brisket slices in broth never worked for us. Instead of tasting like juicy brisket, it tasted like "brisket and broth".
6. We trim a lot to get a more even brisket with consistent height, and use trimmings for other products. Consistent height means your flat lean side won't dry out by the time the fatty point side is cooked.
(3) As you work for clients, keep a sharp eye for opportunities to build "specialty practices". If you get to work on a project involving Mongodb, spend some extra time and effort to get Mongodb under your belt. If you get a project for a law firm, spend some extra time thinking about how to develop applications that deal with contracts or boilerplates or PDF generation or document management.
(4) Raise your rates.
(5) Start refusing hourly-rate projects. Your new minimum billable increment is a day.
(6) Take end-to-end responsibility for the business objectives of whatever you build. This sounds fuzzy, like, "be able to talk in a board room", but it isn't! It's mechanically simple and you can do it immediately: Stop counting hours and days. Stop pushing back when your client changes scope. Your remedy for clients who abuse your flexibility with regards to scope is "stop working with that client". Some of your best clients will be abusive and you won't have that remedy. Oh well! Note: you are now a consultant.
(7) Hire one person at a reasonable salary. You are now responsible for their payroll and benefits. If you don't book enough work to pay both your take-home and their salary, you don't eat. In return: they don't get an automatic percentage of all the revenue of the company, nor does their salary automatically scale with your bill rate.
(8) You are now "senior" or "principal". Raise your rates.
(9) Generalize out from your specialties: Mongodb -> NoSQL -> highly scalable backends. Document management -> secure contract management.
(10) Raise your rates.
(11) You are now a top-tier consulting group compared to most of the market. Market yourself as such. Also: your rates are too low by probably about 40-60%.
Try to get it through your head: people who can simultaneously (a) crank out code (or arrange to have code cranked out) and (b) take responsibility for the business outcome of the problems that code is supposed to solve --- people who can speak both tech and biz --- are exceptionally rare. They shouldn't be; the language of business is mostly just elementary customer service, of the kind taught to entry level clerks at Nordstrom's. But they are, so if you can do that, raise your rates.
https://www.ambito.com/finanzas/dolares/cronologia-del-cepo-...
You can see that in September 02019 when this measure was imposed the price of a dollar was AR$63.50; now it's AR$147. So whatever savings you had in pesos in 02019 have lost 57% of their value to peso devaluation.
In 02001 a lot of Argentines had saved dollars in their dollar-denominated bank accounts. This did not preserve their savings through the financial crisis that year; the cash-strapped government limited withdrawals to a trickle, then converted dollar deposits to pesos at a one-to-one rate, then released the exchange-rate peg, at which point peso went overnight from being worth US$1 to being worth US$0.25 before settling at about US$0.31 for the next few years.
You suggest, "alternatives to banks like credit unions where customers—as owners—hold more power," but Credicoop depositors suffered the same two-thirds confiscation of savings as depositors in for-profit banks. And they pay the same 3% tax on bank transactions including checks. That's more than a fast Bitcoin transaction fee of US$15 for transactions over US$500.
But we're not a failed state. There are no gangs of bandits roving the streets in Argentine cities (though there are some pretty bad slums where you'll get robbed if you wander in without knowing anybody). Courts, free public hospitals, and roads continue to function, though there are more potholes than a year ago. Argentine infant mortality is 10 per 1000 live births, down from almost 20 in the late 01990s and the same as the late 01980s in the US; life expectancy at birth is 77 years, worse than Switzerland's 84, but the same as China and Hungary, and better than Saudi or Mexico. (Somalia is 54.)
Most of the world is worse off than Argentina, although not necessarily in such a statistically transparent fashion. About one fourth of the people in the world are unbanked, 51% here in Argentina; even advanced countries like Russia, Hungary, and Uruguay have roughly a quarter of the population unbanked:
https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/worlds-most-...
And if your family lives in a country like Iran or Venezuela subject to US sanctions, and you live in the US? Good luck sending them an ACH, instant or otherwise! It's well known that Bitcoin is very popular in Venezuela, which kind of is a failed state, so one of the Venezuelan governments is trying to tax Bitcoin remittances at 15%.
https://archive.fo/ZRXzS
Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars per year in such remittances. This might seem like a trivial amount of money to someone in a rich country, but in poor countries, it's enough to keep several million people alive.
Even in the US, it's common for the police to confiscate large amounts of paper currency just because they can ("civil forfeiture"); US bank accounts are probably fine for US$100K but probably somewhat risky for US$10M if the bank thinks you don't seem like the kind of person who ought to have it. US$10M in US$100 bills fits in a box you can wheel around on a dolly, but Bitcoin is a lot more practical. (And of course US$10M in dollar bills loses about US$200k per year to inflation.)
So, Bitcoin doesn't have to be a cypherpunk utopia to be a big improvement on the status quo ante. For those of you living in stable countries where your worries are things like "instant and extremely low-fee ACHs" and "decentralized utopia", this may be very confusing, but try to remember that most of the world lives in places with much more pressing concerns, concerns that Bitcoin helps a lot with. And you may live there too, soon — the loyal subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm in 01913 certainly didn't expect that in 15 years they'd be in the middle of a hyperinflation episode that remains legendary a century later.