Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!
When I was a kid, nobody thought it was anything unusual to have a reporter from the local newspaper come out to your house and write an article with your home address and phone number.
And now those articles are searchable on newspapers.com!
I do have to admit it was fun finding my mom's old Red Cross activities and my dad's chess tournaments. Any chess players remember Sammy Reshevsky? He was a friend of my dad's and would sometimes stay with us when he visited Eugene for a chess tournament.
Here in Finland the companies operating the phone books and directory services still exist, and you can still search people's phone numbers and addresses online or by calling/texting directory services - just no printed books anymore.
(and you can of course unlist yourself)
I'm somewhat interested, did it go down differently in e.g. U.S., i.e. are directory services gone, too?
In Iceland you can put whatever you want as your job title (or degree) so you have people calling themselves beefcakes, lion tamers, tetris players etc.
It helps to see if you have the right person.
Norway is one such country (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239) but I think some others in the Nordics also does the same, not sure exactly which though and Google is not being very helpful this evening.
It's not exactly true that your salary is public -- what's public is your taxable income, taxable wealth, total estimated tax, birth year and postal code. Various deductions apply to the income which makes it non-straightforward to deduce a person's actual income, and as for taxable wealth the minimums are high enough and deductions are substantial enough (especially if you own a home) that a lot of people with wealth much greater than zero will be listed with a taxable wealth as zero.
Given that the image is cropped and it's hard to tell which part of the frame the cropping is for, I think you can easily guess which airport this is nearby, but definitely not at the house or even street precision.
The thing about unbiased random noise is that it cancels itself out! And for the most part, we can compute exactly how many data points are needed to achieve a particular level of precision in the result.
I don't think so. You only need 1 flight to locate him pretty accurately. If you do the thing you said, you'd need 2 flights along different axis to get a pretty good idea, with a larger amounts, you'd just improve accuracy a bit. Regardless, I think it doesn't matter. So what if they know where he lives, it's not like this sort of information is hard to come by anyway, and the risk profile of this is... not interesting, IMO.
I built a high frequency trading system on early mount gox and had a ton of bitcoins as a toy project. I abandoned it because everyone kept telling me I was wasting my time.
I would be a billionare today— How do I deal with it? Just move on. Ultimately it is our own fault for not doing what our gut was telling us. So just move on and do something else.
I heard about BTC very early and I considered buying some. If I had invested even 1/10th of the amount that I was putting into individual stocks at the time, I might be extraordinarily wealthy today.
I say "might" because I recognize that I would have undoubtedly sold some along the way. Maybe when it hit $500, $1,000, or $10,000. I would have been a fool not to have sold any along the way. So it's easy to look back and think of what I would have had. But I'm overestimating the gains I would have actually realized.
There's also opportunity cost. If I had put a few thousand into BTC that would have been less to invest in individual stocks. The stocks I ended up picking did very well. Not as well as BTC! But close inspection shows the difference is not as great as it seems in my BTC-dreaming mind.
In your case the opportunity cost might have been your relationships. Think about how busy you would have been running a company that is so successful. It would lead to great wealth. But it would also cause stress in relationships. Maybe you have better relationships because you didn't hit it big. And maybe your relationships are more genuine because your friends are not benefitting from your largesse.
Read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. He talks about this a lot, but in the other vein. He was probably the most powerful man in the world and constantly reminded himself he is nothing but a sack of meat and bones.
I’ve been reading the new translation recently. Is it just me or are there entire sections which are impossible to make sense of? Much of it is really great, but I’ve found myself skipping all the longer sections because they are all but unparsable.
It could be I need to get a different translation.
That’s the one I have. I don’t usually have difficulties with reading comprehension, I’m a big fan of Dostoyevsky translations. But for some reason I can read some chapters in the Hays translation a dozen times without having any idea what he’s saying.
If that’s an issue unique to me, it probably means I need to push through and it’s an opportunity to improve. The reviews seem positive and I’ve heard it recommended many times.
Well, he wasn't writing to be understood by anyone. He was writing to himself. Some wont be easy to understand. Some requires history or philosophy background and some is impossible to grasp 100%
