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The most important is that they capture enough light, for which the lenses must have a large diameter. 50mm is typical. Magnification around 10x is good. This is referred to as 10x50. I have a Celestron Skymaster 15x70 myself, which is specifically for night sky observation. The 70mm is very good, but the weight and the magnification make it difficult to hold still without a tripod, though you can still use it without, e.g. lying on your back

Try a good monopod. They're significantly more portable and give just enough stability in most cases to give good views whille allowing less restricted movement than most tripods.

According to the article, the other way around didn't happen: the legalization didn't decrease illegal gambling


That would put a damper on things.

Though the pre-2018 situation was that personal (that is, not intermediated by a company) gambling was legal, which provided an out.

Again: I'm positing the argument, I'm not advocating for it. And it does appear to be counterfactual.


This is true of other vices as well. Many have argued that legalized sex work will decrease the amount of human trafficking, when reality has shown it actually increases it.


I'd really like to see an in-depth analysis of multiple such cases of ... what to call it? Vice permissivity? And what effects stack up.

I strongly suspect that one element of legalisation is that it normalises the activity, which lowers all sorts of social and psychological barriers to participation.

Another is that it creates self-organised self-interest groups. This is actually a really great way to ensure the longevity of governmental programmes, with both positive and negative examples: welfare systems such as Social Security, Medicare, and the ACA in the US are all immensely popular with the elderly, a staunch voting block, to the extent that its general trend toward conservativism doesn't fully mute interest in social welfare. The military-industrial complex is another, and a recent discussion I'd heard of the Inflation Reduction Act highlighted the constituencies built in to support it even in deep-red southern US states.

In the case of legalisation of gambling, drugs, and sex work, what had previously been the purview of criminal gangs now becomes "ordinary business" (though the thought occurs that the distinction between the two may be less than is commonly understood). To the extent that established businesses prove to be highly effective at defending even the most indefensible of practices (tobacco, alcohol, asbestos, lead, plastics, fossil fuels) is well established, and the risks of that path should be strongly considered.

Another option is to decriminalise rather than legalise a practice, but focus on policing the most problematic elements of the practice. That might be the provider side (as with drugs and gambling) or the consumer side (as with sex work, targeting johns), or on going up-market and tightly limiting or prohibiting private aggregators (e.g., pimps, drug lords) rather than focusing on low-level actors (streetwalkers, individual workers, street crews within drug operations).

State-operated operations (gambling, lotteries, alcohol and tobacco sales, drug distribution *with integrated treatment), is another option, though it too isn't a surefire solution. My view is that lottery programmes in the US are out of control and a net negative, though in part that itself reflects the public-private partnership in the operation of many of these.


The problem with legalized sex work is that when a cop is faced with a human trafficking victim, there is nothing he can do if the trafficking victim does not testify and explicitly ask for police intervention, which is a high bar to clear for a victim that would at best become homeless in a foreign country and at worst receive severe repercussions for an escape attempt.

The solution to this problem would be mandatory sex worker licenses and mandatory yearly counseling that acts as an escape path for trafficking victims.


There are three frameworks of legalisation in Australia, none of which ban the selling of sex, all of which limit or criminalise brothels and forms of "organised prostition by third parties".

There are many women police officers in vice and many means with which to tackle sex trafficking, with or without the testimony of specific victims (bearing in mind that sex trafficking almost always involves many victims).

Yearly contact seems ... sparse... there's more sense to be had in mandatory weekly or fortnightly STI checkups, etc. which incorporates contact with trained medical professionals familiar with the ins and outs of te game.


It's a lot easier for the IRS to track your betting earnings when it's reported to them directly by the broker.

Of course doing it in a way so it can't be tracked keeps the IRS ignorant, which is a big deal to many people


Huh TIL that the usa taxes gambling winnings, and that you can offset with losses up to the amount of winnings (https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419)

Guess it's good my luck was terrible in Vegas or I might've inadvertently committed tax fraud. Though now I'm curious if I had won a few hundred dollars would there have been tax due?

I'm pretty sure it's tax free in most countries.


In the UK you can choose to pay tax on your stake when you place it, so that your winnings are tax free, or not, in which case your winnings are taxed.


Are you sure? I never make bets over £20 or so, but my understanding is if I hit it big there's no tax to worry about - this source seems to agree, unless you're a professional gambler which somewhat makes sense https://intelligentodds.com/gambling/do-you-pay-tax-on-gambl...


According to that link, it changed in 2001. I left the uk before that. Now I feel very old.

Thanks for the correction.


That is not when an encryption algorithm is usually considered to be broken, it just means that a certain key length is not sufficient anymore. You can break 20 bit RSA with pen and paper, but as long as a linear change in the key length causes an exponential increase in the decryption time, the algorithm is not broken. At this moment, the record for the factorization of a specific RSA key is one of 829 bits, which suggests (by extrapolation) that within a few decades 1024 bits may not be safe if your adversary has the resources. No (reasonable) key length can be expected to be safe forever, even without any mathematical breakthroughs


I’d say it’s a break if the encryption you once used (512bit and below RSA) is now trivially decrypted thanks to mathematical advances.

RSA 2048 hasn’t been broken but 512bit RSA definitely had been by any definition.

I feel “RSA is fine because much longer key lengths still work” is hiding what happened here. Yes we can still get into the infeasible realm with RSA and really long keys but the algorithm has definitely let us down multiple times thanks to mathematical improvements in factorization that just keep coming.


You don't need to buy a place to live in the cities. In Amsterdam, 70 percent of the places are for rent and over 2/3 of those are in the social sector (almost 50% of the total), meaning that there is a cap on the rent.


It is ironic that you would speak of a country's values, especially in the context of the USA, where many people that consider each other Americans don't even accept each other's values


I think this inverts cause and effect: they often were money lenders because they were excluded from more traditional jobs and/or land ownership


It's not inversion, but not going for a root cause far enough. You are of course right. Jews were not allowed to pursue most/all "honorable" professions.


It's because Christians and Muslims banned lending money with interest, cf usury.


I thought deicide and a general concept of 'otherness' fueled antisemitic restrictions which in turn fueled antisemitism.

But yes, Jews were often moneylenders because there were no other options available and that niche was conveniently not open to Christians.


The 8x8 is just a choice made for jpeg, the DCT can be done for any m x n array (or m x n x k x ...). Here the full image is transformed


A real image not, but a digital image built up from pixels certainly is band limited. A sharp edge will require contributions from components across the whole spectrum that can be supported on a matrix the size of the image, the highest of which is actually called the Nyquist frequency


Not quite. You can tell this isn't true because there are many common images (game graphics, text, pixel art) where upscaling them with a sinc filter obviously produces a visually "wrong" image (blurry or ringing etc), whereas you can reconstruct them at a higher resolution "as intended" with something nonlinear (nearest neighbor interpolation, OCR, emulator filters like scale2x). That means the image contains information that doesn't work like a bandlimited signal does.

You could say MIDI is sort of like that for audio but it's used a lot less often.


Another thing that was done in football, and could be done in chess as well to reduce the number of draws, was to grant 1 point for a draw, but 3 points for a win, up from 2 points in the 90s (earlier in England)


> Chernobyl was entirely a product of design compromises due to cost savings, combined by a totalitarian system suppressing the known impact of those design decisions.

This sounds exactly like what could happen when a private for-profit company would exploit nuclear, which is already happening


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