Gregg is not the way to go if you're looking for a shorthand
that captures text in the way you would need for programming or science and I don't know of a good shorthand for this [if it wasn't already APL.]
Gregg is very much a "visible" sound system from a time when people just needed to capture the conversations and later expand back into text with the aid of a secretary. That is, if you didn't mutate your shorthand for your own purposes.
That being said, Aaron Hsu's handwriting is beautiful, but not my cup of tea for thinking on paper--my initial reaction to his scanned pages was unpleasant because it wasn't what I was used to from my own hands.
Am I the only person who immediately thought: WHY ISN'T YOUR BOOK NEXT TO YOU INSTEAD OF ON THE CART ONE LEVEL BENEATH THE SCAFFOLD? Was this seriously the A/B test?
You know, I had a sad thought about fusion-powered CO_2 and that was once it will be built, the energy is likely to be used not for CO_2 scrubbing but instead to mine Bitcoin.
N=1 situation: Found that drinking more water helped the joints of my back ease and reduced lower-back-pain.
After that, you need to do functional movements and lift-heavy-things, often. Not too heavy, but enough to prompt your body to improve its capabilities.
Direct democracies like this are a recipe for disaster and no "politician" taking this pledge is going to get any kind of help from the entrenched system which will be quite hostile to this "radicalism" of listening to the electorate. It doesn't make the currency of politics visible: money, power and intent. Even if somehow, somewhere, a politician who took the Sovereign pledge was elected, they would fall in a blaze of shame when a scandal derails their brand.
You cannot delegate your desired leadership to a third-party that cannot be "instantly fired" from the office---this is the formula that for decades, even centuries, enables systemic corruption. These ideas come and go cyclically, but the corruption and power always remains with those who play the game the way it has been played.
So anarchists will always continue to sit back and watch the trains collide on time, as the State intends.
I really don't understand this fascination with enabling new "banking products." There are only five (4) features in the MVP of banking:
* Protection: I want my SoV to remain mine--which means the bank should not be corrupt [ghost transactions, transaction reordering for generating unnecessary fees] and it should not be incompetent [vulnerable to social engineering, easily hacked, denial of services, etc.]
* Transactions: When I send MoE to someone else, it should get there and everyone agrees that it did, and if it didn't, some explanation why.
* Privacy: How much SoV I have and where I send/receive MoE should be between me and the bank and no one else.
* Audit-ability: Every interaction between the bank and my account(s) should be audit-able by myself. If someone is sniffing my account(s) for social engineering purposes, you had better believe that I want to know that someone tried to call 100 times asking about my accounts and the customer service rep should know it too.
Out of these, the UoA is the only matter where banks have the least control except in their use of fractional-reserve banking in the sense of lending money back into the economy. When banks over-cook this and put too much debt into the economy it screws with the UoA.
SoV == store of value
MoE == medium of exchange
UoA == unit of account
"Banking products" that only seem to concentrate on sales of more debt aren't something that end-users care about and in fact should be wary of. While there is an application that "sings your bank account information" using this Open Bank Project API is probably one of the most ridiculous ideas I have ever seen with banking systems, at least it isn't selling you more debt.
I don't think there are barriers at the "entry" level at all. You can't build something like Amazon or Walmart over-night, the sustain and focus in these corporations are only doing what the economic "fitness function" tells them to: Sell more stuff at a lower price with lower costs [and quality]! When these systems get so large and impersonal, fraud can only escalate--fake goods sold to invisible personas who can only write strongly worded letters that are immediately tossed into /dev/null, if they even knew what /dev/null was.
This will always come back to bite us all because you cannot legislate long-run self-destructive self-interest away. Consumers will almost always prefer the lowest price and wholesalers will prefer to move more units in fewer transactions to retailers--because that is less work for more money. Once you get big enough to influence the wholesaler/manufacturer price everyone is captured and if you introduce a "price freeze" in an attempt to make people more "equal" welcome to a world of shortages and more robust black market/System D environments.
This is a cultural/people problem--not a legal problem--that is not likely to go away any time soon short of a particularly bad pandemic that changes the focus away from price to authentic relationships between people. I've got no problem dropping $25 for a 5# pasture-raised chicken raised by wonderful people, but other people less fortunate must buy the $1.99# factory-fresh-concentration-camp-chicken from Walmart because they need to eat, you know?
This makes me wonder, has anyone used the Walmart "drive-up" shopping system where you shop online, drive to a specified location and they load your groceries after you pay?
> Spark, which launched in July, is a social feed of photos. It is similar to Instagram, but open only to Prime members.
There is the reason--thinly veiled way to encourage people to buy Prime. Facebook succeeds because "everyone is there." Not everyone can afford Prime.