Interesting. Two things that jumped out to me were 1) why do the regions of the standardization line not overlap or at least meet? And 2) What's up with the small but clear minority of people who took all the 'unlikely' phrasings to mean somewhere in the realm of 90 to 100%? My guess would be they're misreading the question and that is their estimate of unlikelihood?

Wait you are missing an instrumental point.

The “razor and blades” pricing is (as the market demonstrates) a dominant strategy. The other pricing strategy (cost-plus) is preferable for the customers printing a lot, not for customers who print little. Then add some customer myopia: I need a cheap printer, where cheap is initial out of pocket, not total cost of ownership. And there you have it: all suppliers ‘must’ follow the dominant pricing strategy because the myopic customer demands it. The twice as expensive printer up front just won’t get store space.

Brother might be (or, was?) somewhat of an outlier for the informed consumer. But who buys a Brother right? HP and Canon dominate the market.

General point is that individual suppliers in a multi supplier market have to take the dominant pricing strategy as a given, or differentiate along other axis.

A really good book on this topic is Byron Tau’s Means of Control. His contention is that this surveillance data has made NSA warrantless wiretaps old news. Cops don’t need to do the spying themselves, they can simply buy the info.

I am of the opinion that at this point, Americans only believe we are less surveilled than people elsewhere. It’s not visible so people forget about it. Yet it is so deeply embedded into the government that it will never be removed.

This appears to be the press release the article is based around: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2708

Which appears to have absolutely nothing to do with crypto mines, and everything to do with controlling what foreign people own real-estate near military installations. The only link to crypto currency is the same rule was once used to remove a Chinese company that bought land close to an air force base, and happened to be using that land (at least ostensibly) for crypto mining.

This appears to be the executive order that removed that Chinese company: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...

To the extent that the order relates to crypto currency, it appears to be that the company was bringing in non-standard electronic equipment built in China (unsurprising for a crypto mining company), and the US wasn't confident in their abilities to set up a program to monitor it and ensure that the equipment only did what it said and wasn't actually (also) surveillance equipment.

Strange paragraphs like

> Cryptocurrency is a computer intensive process, running trillions of formulas every second, and generally requiring the use of supercomputers. Having one next to a military base that's owned by an adversary is problematic.

appear to be entirely an invention of this article. This is, of course, not the issue with having farms of adversary controlled electronics next to an air force base.

I would claim in a completely informal way that the optimal degree of utilization is ln(2)=0.693, around 70%.

This stems from the optimal load of self-balancing trees.

A little bit of slack is always useful to deal with the unforeseen.

And even a lot of slack is useful (though not always as it is costly) as it enables to do things that a dedicated resource cannot do.

On the other hand, no slack at all (so running at above 70%) makes a system inflexible and unresilient.

I would argue for this in any circumstance, be it military, be it public transit, be it funding, be it allocation of resources for a particular task.