Hello, hope you have an amazing week!
Articles to Read.
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This is a list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you couldn’t, or didn’t even know you could.
I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are (especially the free ones).
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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BANK ROBBERY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour of every day. This is the story of how a bandit culture took over the city.
Almost all of the drug-fueled bank robbers were of the one-on-one note passer variety—one bandit robbing one teller with a “I’ve got a gun, give me the money” type note. These rarely ended in violence. Not only was this breed of bank robber not violent by nature, but the banks’ instruction to their employees was simple: give them what they want and get them the fuck out as fast as possible before someone gets hurt. So despite the seriousness with which law enforcement was treating the soaring bank robbery rates, it never rose to the level of concern of other problems they had on their hands, such as gang violence and domestic abuse. But all that was to change in a single day.
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Inside India’s booming dark data economy
Thanks to lax privacy laws and high consumer demand, details on everything from how you shop to who you date are all for sale.
According to Kunwar Vikram Singh, the chairman of the Association of Private Detectives and Investigators in India, it’s now common for wealthy families to assess the suitability of a potential bride or groom by hiring a private detective, a vetting that usually costs around $500. He attributes this to India’s changing social mores, especially among urban elites. “Work culture has changed. Values have changed,” Singh reflected, citing the influx of women into the workforce as one contributing factor. “We tell people, ‘You spend lakhs and crores on marital ceremonies; spend a few thousand on investigators’,” he said.
Whatever the reason, India’s private-detective services have been growing over the past decade. Singh estimates that the sector is now worth roughly $1.2 billion nationally. But because of the sensitive nature of the field, it’s impossible to know for sure: There are no official statistics, and many clients still pay in cash. “They don’t want to leave any footprint,” he noted.
The services offered by the detectives mainly fall into two categories: corporate and personal. The corporate investigations often involve banks hiring investigators to get information on shifty borrowers and financial firms looking for background checks on employees. The personal services range from child monitoring to matrimonial background checks. Every agency has its own specialization. Karnam Choudhary, a Jaipur-based detective who operates the Siyol Detective Network, which has around 1,500 freelance private investigators across the country, says that “since 2016, personal cases make up almost 70%.”
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The Impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway 📝
Over the past decade, Broadway has replaced large sections of traditional orchestras with synthesizers, playback systems, and electronic drum pads. I’m not in support of that, but that’s a story for another day. The point here is that Broadway’s reliance on computer-driven rigs has increased, while the typical budget required to build high-end stable rigs hasn’t increased at the same rate.
Due to budget constraints, many shows end up using Mac minis. Historically speaking, the Mac mini’s computing power has been a bottleneck for electronic music designers on Broadway. In a perfect world, we’d all like to use the best-sounding sample libraries for our work, but that was never feasible with the Mac mini. Thus, the compromise was always to reduce sound quality to fit within the Mac mini’s compute constraints.
Apple Silicon changes everything for Broadway electronic music designers. The new M1 Mac mini is capable of running high-end sample libraries and virtual instruments in a stable manner, and it’s only going to get better with M2, M3, and M4-series chips in the future. The performance per dollar characteristics of Apple Silicon machines are going to have a huge impact on Broadway’s sound, and I’m very excited to see, or hear, what happens.
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Living in space can get lonely. What helps? Talking to random people over ham radio
The International Space Station cost more than $100 billion. A ham radio set can be had for a few hundred bucks.
Perhaps that explains, in part, the appeal of having one of humankind’s greatest scientific inventions communicate with Earth via technology that’s more than 100 years old. But perhaps there’s a simpler explanation for why astronauts and ham radio operators have been talking, and talking, for years.
NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock was just a few weeks into his six-month mission at the space station when feelings of isolation began to set in.
“It allowed me to ... just reach out to humanity down there,” said Wheelock, who interacted with many operators, known as “hams,” during that stay at the space station in 2010. “It became my emotional, and a really visceral, connection to the planet.”
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More to Check Out:
- 100 Tips For A Better Life
- Interview advice that got me offers
- How bad is your spotify?
- Slower news
- building my own chess engine
My Update:
In SF for the next 2 weeks. :)
Excited for 2021. See you then!