I think some kind of privacy sandbox & data escape logging would suffice to allow data leaking apps, to run on a libre type OS.
The main thing an OS like this needs is the a ability for it's users to run their own "cloud" infrastructure and attach that to their own phone.
Company can offer this as a SAAS service paid, providing they to proper end to end encryption and are not able to read the data they store. Also a good way to fund future development.
The DTES is a shit hole, but it was kind of engineered to be that way.
As for the safe injection site stuff, I lived and worked in the area around the time that place was opened.
It was a shit hole before it opened and continued to be so after it opened. I never went in the site, and never cared to. Nothing special around it. People shoot up in the streets all the time and I'd still be careful where you walk to not step on a needle and don't wear sandals ;)
But supposedly this:
Rates of HIV infection dropped from 8.1 cases per 100 person-years in 1997 to 0.37 cases per 100 person-years by 2011. By 2015, the 40-block area surrounding the safe injection site had a 35% decline in overdose deaths.
The DTES in Van is a pretty interesting place. It's not as bad as it looks. I personally never had any problems in the area. But it's still a shit hole.
Gold has been used as a store of value for countries which do not trust their fiat.
It's also used to speculate.
It's also used in industry.
It's actually pretty easy to turn gold into fiat and vice versa outside of north America. It's also fairly easy to do it in North America as well. The spread between buy/sell is also quite low.
I've been running e-commerce stores for 12+ years.
The main business I work for started to accept bitcoins for our physical goods in 2014ish. I did the integration.
I adopted Bitcoin because I'm not a huge fan of payment processors, I'm a cryptonerd and because I wanted to provide a use case for a technology I believe in, which wasn't illegal. I've also helped chime in with devs on open Bazaar and assist them with issues people who run stores have.
Over the years we've processed ~10,000 dollars worth of Bitcoin transactions.
We've ran into issues where confirmations take longer than our fulfilment center are used to, so we needed to wait to ship out orders.
We've run into issues where refunds get weird due to price fluctuations.
I've always noticed customers buying our products when the price of Bitcoin was too high and due for a crash, but since it's run up over $2000 I've noticed barely any transactions.
This is a fundamental change in how people are using it, and due to the high fees and slow confirmation times, it's no longer useful for us and it seems people would rather HODL than use.
Personally I enjoy the tech, but never cared for it as a speculative asset, which now I believe it has become (but kinda always was).
I've always been really skeptical of those language performance comparisons which refer to PHP.
As stated above PHP7 has similar performance when compared to HHVM which was made by Facebook. Additionally PHP has an amazing performance debugger by FB called xhprof.
PHP performance could always be increased hugely by making sure is cache buckets have enough memory (opcode cache, realpath_cache_size).
Secondly with any web framework your app will most likely be limited by IO (database, file lookups, networking) before it becomes limited by actual code execution performance.
If anyone's ever worked on a project where the performance problem was the language and not IO I'd be really interested in hearing about it, but in my career of making websites I've never ran into this problem yet.
Ni200 which is a pure nickel wire was invented for temperature control. Required a specific device and chip to use as it has almost 0 resistance. Some stupid uneducated people or vendors sold it and and used it in non temperature controlled devices and poisoined themselves (not fatally), or blew up their batteries on non-regulated devices.
I just started vaping last month, and while I bought some kanthal wire, I also bought some ni200 and Titanium wire, which is dangerous if not used correctly. I personally didn't know, but also didn't use it until I looked it up.
With that said, ni200 wire did invent temperature control, which is a method of vaping these days.
I personally think ecigs are an interesting experiment in free markets.
A bunch of like minded people who had a habbit which was the leading cause of preventable death coming together to figure out a way to kill themselves less.
Have there been things in the industry which were poisonous and could kill you over the course of it's history. Yes. Lots. Have those been slowly fased out as concerned consumers voice opinions, yes. Ni200 wire is a good example. Battery mooch is another.
The lack of regulation has certainly led to it being more dangerous for uninformed consumers, but it has also lead to lots of independent entrepreneurs innovating fast in the space.
Personally I see it as a great example of free markets vs. regulation. I also think it's only been able to exist because it's in a market which of its own is hazardous to health.
Also this entire industry as I understand it came from China.
I quit smoking a while ago for 4 months using a vape, then Thailand's military junta banned them and most shops closed.
It's been a couple years now and tonnes of online shops started to sell and I'd see lots of local vapers while having coffee, so decided to give that a go.
It's been a month since I've had a cigarette now since I've started vaping. Energy is up and sense of smell is coming back. Used to smoke a pack a day.
I do run the risk of deportation, jail or heavy fines/bribes if caught with the thing, but I feel it's worth it for health reasons.
Also gov just increased tax from 130THB a pack to 150THB a pack.
"Clinical trials of NRT in patients with underlying, stable coronary disease suggest that nicotine does not increase cardiovascular risk. At worst, the risks of NRT are no more than those of cigarette smoking. The risks of NRT for smokers, even for those with underlying cardiovascular disease, are small and are substantially outweighed by the potential benefits of smoking cessation."
Good vote spamming business will be completely automated. They'll have accounts in reserve pool, with ability to spin up thousands more in a couple minutes. Most likely they make a couple hundred accounts a day and prime them with VA's with real content & votes with the intention of burning them with fake votes once aged appropriately.
If you run a website and you're getting spammed, the worst thing you can do it also ban the accounts as this give spammers feedback that the account is no longer valid to use and they'll rotate it out. Best thing you can do is /dev/null the account. To the user it will look like account is working as expected, but on the back end anything they do doesn't actually do anything. Harder for spammer to know when that account is burned.
Good vote spamming business will be completely automated. They'll have accounts in reserve pool, with ability to spin up thousands more in a couple minutes. Most likely they make a couple hundred accounts a day and prime them with VA's with real content & votes with the intention of burning them with fake votes once aged appropriately.
If you run a website and you're getting spammed, the worst thing you can do it also ban the accounts as this give spammers feedback that the account is no longer valid to use and they'll rotate it out. Best thing you can do is /dev/null the account. To the user it will look like account is working as expected, but on the back end anything they do doesn't actually do anything. Harder for spammer to know when that account is burned. This way they'll continue to use it, and you can use this data to find related accounts and /dev/null them as well.
The rates in Hong Kong with Stripe for non-hong Kong issued cards is 3.9% + 2% conversion fee if you don't charge in HKD. Additionally they're unable to deposit into a US denominated bank account.
So if you want to process USD to US clients in HK with stripe the fees are 5.9% which is fairly laughable.
With 4+ million USD yearly volume, the only discount I could get would be 1% off the conversion fee to start.
The main thing an OS like this needs is the a ability for it's users to run their own "cloud" infrastructure and attach that to their own phone.
Company can offer this as a SAAS service paid, providing they to proper end to end encryption and are not able to read the data they store. Also a good way to fund future development.