1. They never returned 92tons of gold. The vast majority of the national treasure is still in Moscow. I hope the EU ties this to the current Russian assets frozen in the EU.
2. Bolsheviks ? Russia collapsed in 1917 and Bassarabia voted to join Romania. There was no Russian control in Bassarabia, no war, no fight.
Nobody forced them, true, they were in dire circumstances, but it proves even more how much Russians can be trusted. 0. Shitty country since forever.
1. You use 'ex' to mean except ? In common parlance ex means 'example'. So your phrase becomes: National treasures (example gold) were returned in '35 and '56.
Which is what I responded to.
Gold was part bars and part rare historical coins.
Also still unreturned, which is extremely valuable:
Queen Marie’s jewels were not returned
The Romanian Crown Jewels were not returned
Royal and dynastic archives
Private deposits of Romanian citizens
Orthodox Church treasures
2. Who were these Bolsheviks ? There was no government, they weren't Russian / Soviet - what were they ? Give me some source that shows Romania was fighting Tsarist Russia / URSS / Russia (?). Your article doesn't clarify that at all. I wonder why.
Romania entrusted Tsarist Russia with its national treasure.
Do you deny there's state continuity from before 1918 ?
You meant to say "ex." is common, noting the period for the abbreviation. Whereas ex is commonly used (See "ex dividend".) as I did above.
I'm skipping the rest of your reply because it's a waste of time after you loaded up with a spiteful tone -- "you don't know what you're talking about"-- only to be wrong about language and somehow you dispute the Wikipedia article which clearly mentions (anti-)Bolshevik opponents.
You linked a dictionary that's paywalled and further, all of the 12 stub entries appear to refute your interpreted meaning of "ex" from earlier and affirm my usage.
Then your piggybacking on their infrastructure. I don't think they are unreasonable. "It can be done for pennies, but I won't" sort of implies that it does indeed take more than pennies worth of effort.
It's a yearly fee that amounts to a couple hundred dollars. That's about an hour of an engineer's salary. Zulip's customers make this less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a rounding error.
Zulip is a kind of annoying name, and every time I encounter it it's in the context of some open source platform hiding their community discussion forum behind a login. I'm left with a not very great impression.
FYI, for a while now you can mark any Zulip channel as public, which means the chat history for that channel does not require a login to view. See https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option for more details.
I assume they mean the fact I myself know what Mattermost is but I've never heard of... now I even have to go back and load up the comment to find it's name again, Zulip
I don't like the way they push you to give a subject to every discussion. In a way it's more like a newsgroup replacement than Slack, whereas Mattermost is a straight-up Slack clone.
One thing that always bothered me was his use of currency. In the French original he mentions at least 5-6 types of currency and it seems they all have common sub-divisions, despite some of them being Spanish or even Italian.
Was France using other people's currrncy back then ?
The nation of France as we know it did not exist at that time and there was no standardized currency among the kingdoms that made up the crown. Livres, sous, and deniers were the standard unit of accounting but each major polity produced their own coinage. Kings also sometimes devalued their currencies to help pay for wars so traders preferred to use more stable currencies like Spanish and Dutch coins (Louis XIII did a major devaluation about a decade after the time period of the book, which colored perceptions of the time).
It was very common before nationalism and the standardization of currencies. I read primary sources about conquistadors and the contracts financing and supplying the expedition might involve a dozen currencies because each trader supplying the wood, food, animals, etc would work in their own preferred/local currency.
One niggle: France was mostly made up of duchies, not kingdoms. The King of France had allegiance from some of the duchies making up modern France, but notably Burgundy was the one who captured Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) and turned her over to the English - so clearly not all.
Not sure about the Occitan; IIRC Eleanor was considered a queen in her own right as rule of Aquitaine, not a duchess.
I'm no historian, but back then, coins were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume...
It’s more that there was a standard unit of accounting (livres, sous, and deniers) and everyone could convert from one currency to that standard and back to another currency. It moved a lot slower than modern foreign exchange so except for local fluctuations, it was rather predictable.
> were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume
Are you sure you know what the coin paid you is made of? A merchant of the time wasn’t. Those who care not to be scammed have never found it simple.
Experienced traders can make a quick estimate of the purity by rubbing it against a touchstone, which has been used since ancient times. And by treating the rubbings with mineral acids you can make even more accurate determinations, although I'm not sure if this was done in the 1620s.
You are discussing absolute certainty, but in practice a box full of Spanish dubloons was very likely to be a treasure trove, and people generally trusted coinage, even if they had doubts. A filed silver penny still often bought a penny's worth of goods.
Everyone used whatever currency was locally availible, with every merchant in border regions being very aware of conversion rates. Throughout history there was also a cronic shortage of smaller-denomination cash, stuff for normal people to buy normal things. Today, we see "clipped" coins as evidence of forgery when in fact much of that was likely related to a lack of loose change. Nobody in town able to break a gold crown? Well, maybe you buy a horse with a slice of gold from that crown.
Clipping and dissecting a coin into smaller pieces for down-conversion are very different things. The piece of eight wasn't haphazardly cut, but instead pre-indented for breaking cleanly.
If you want to buy something worth 6% of a gold coin, whacking off an edge of one is a weird way to do it. You'd need a scale handy.
Man, why did no one tell the people who invented bronze that they weren’t allowed to do it until they had a correct definition for metals and understood how they worked? I guess the person saying something can’t be done should stay out of the way of the people doing it.
>> I guess the person saying something can’t be done should stay out of the way of the people doing it.
I'll happily step out of the way once someone simply tells me what it is you're trying to accomplish. Until you can actually define it, you can't do "it".
The big tech companies are trying to make machines that replace all human labor. They call it artificial intelligence. Feel free to argue about definitions.
I'm not sure what 'inventing bronze' is supposed to be. 'Inventing' AGI is pretty much equivalent to creating new life, from scratch. And we don't have an idea on how to do that either, or how life came to be.
Intelligence and human health can't be defined neatly. They are what we call suitcase words. If there exists a physiological tradeoff between medical research about whether to live till 500 years or to be able to lift 1000kg when a person is in youth, those are different dimensions / directions across we can make progress. Same happens for intelligence. I think we are on right track.
I don't think the bar exam is scientifically designed to measure intelligence so that was an odd example. Citing the bar exam is like saying it passes the "Game of thrones trivia" exam so it must be intelligent.
As for IQ tests and the like, to the extent they are "scientific" they are designed based on empirical observations of humans. It is not designed to measure the intelligence of a statistical system containing a compressed version of the internet.
Or does this just prove lawyers are artificially intelligent?
yes, a glib response, but think about it: we define an intelligence test for humans, which by definition is an artificial construct. If we then get a computer to do well on the test we haven't proved it's on par with human intelligence, just that both meet some of the markers that the test makers are using as rough proxies for human intelligence. Maybe this helps signal or judge if AI is a useful tool for specific problems, but it doesn't mean AGI
Hi there! :) Just wanted to gently flag that one of the terms (beginning with the letter "r") in your comment isn't really aligned with the kind of inclusive language we try to encourage across the community. Totally understand it was likely unintentional - happens to all of us! Going forward, it'd be great to keep things phrased in a way that ensures everyone feels welcome and respected. Thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts here!
any serious business will(might?) have hundreds of Tbs of data. I store that in our DC and with a 2nd DC backup for about 1/10 the price of what it would cost in S3.
In my case we have a B2B SaaS where access patterns are occasional, revenue per customer is high, general server load is low. Cloud bills just don’t spike much. Labor is 100x the cost of our servers so saving a piddly amount of money on server costs while taking on even just a fraction of one technical employee’s worth of labor costs makes no sense.
Outlook ? Lol. In 2 years-time Outlook will only connect to MS365 and that's it. You're betting MS will switch to JMAP ? Lol again.
P.S. ("New" Outlook already only connects to MS365 servers and then stores your credentials and data on Azure, while they proxy to your actual IMAP/SMTP server )
I guess Russia has always been a shitty country.
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