Unseelie

8 ms·

1.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Insurance Company A has mercenary company B and diplomat C on retainer in case of conflict with foreign nations. Really, we pay taxes, and taxes cover things like the aforementioned ambassadorial services. It is arguably doable that we coul
2.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Well, I don't want to come off as libertarian, but presumably you could buy insurance against this in an environment where there's a bunch of people who need such a service. There's more such arguments, like suggestions that you need a nati
3.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Vocal pauses are natural, and they happen. Our brains can handle them. Why is it even considered personal betterment to expend energy replacing them with whitespace?
4.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Clearly, if there was fuel left that you could derive motion from the thing, it wasn't quite empty...
5.
by Unseelie 15y ago
I think the whole point of the involvement of computers and the internet as fair godmother in their scenario was to handwave away problem 2 through someone else's very hard work at making a very, very good process for automatically vetting
6.
by Unseelie 15y ago
I love the applications of the luddite fallacy to IT..the treatments of code as looms or steel mills hit hard on the fact that economists are historians, and prone to assumptions that past performance will indicate future performance.
7.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Granted that's what games are about. But gamification is about using game mechanics (mechanics being things like -scores- which let you understand your position against that position of other people, and rules, which keep you from doing wha
8.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Yes they do. First of all, saving energy is in itself a reward. Moreover, that's easily gameable by simply comparing yourself to a group of strangers at their energy efficiency house. Airline miles is kinda a hard one, except for the people
9.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Devil's advocate for a moment, but every way that I'm aware of Monsanto letting people die is essentially an economical one: They ruin people's ability to buy or labor for food...which makes the comparison to the RIAA just one of a differen
10.
by Unseelie 15y ago
I do love Avatars for these reasons, and having a signature as an entirely vain engagement. But quite often, I find myself removing the signature because...as shown on that site, they're quite large, gaudy, and bloody repetitive.
11.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Saying that 'engage your users' is a better terminoligy for what's going on here than 'gamification' basically ignores the whole point of the idea, which is that people like to be making progress towards goals..not 'engaged', but metrically
12.
by Unseelie 15y ago
I don't want to simply reply to a comment, there's a theme flowing through this thread, that capitalism makes everyone better off in a society, that our choices lead to where we are. I think you're ignoring a fundamental truth. There aren't
13.
by Unseelie 15y ago
You're connecting the two examples too much. While releasing this information may well have malicious intent, robbing a bank to give away money (as this information was hacked -to leak-) isn't exactly malicious. Leaking information that can
14.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Doesn't this UX guy know what he's worth? Isn't it on his head to decide where he's going to work, at what pay? Of course his belief in this founder's dedication plays into that, he's trying to find a job that'll last. But let the UX guy d
15.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Frictional unemployment is a good way to handwave away the discovery, or not, of new jobs. You just wiped out that whole -type- of job, replaced it with (much lower employment) error checking. If you assume that for a portion of the people
16.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Is this an argument claiming something can't ever happen, not because its impossible, but because its -bloody hard-? That's a ridiculous argument...and remember, the example was ridiculous, talking about a world where only 10% of people had
17.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Some people may, but especially in this specific example, there's a large societal force that would positivley squash such behavior. We call it 'fashion' (which is actually quite often linked to inbuilt, brain-hardware based ideas about aes
18.
by Unseelie 15y ago
To talk about jobs lost, there were 4 million farm horses in Briton before the industrial revolution, and then over a period of 25 years in the nineteenth century, that population dropped to under a million. Ford, and every other company, r
19.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Many, many people use tax-deductable donations to do just this. Soo...this is already done. To make it done more, there should be non-profits. Non-profit insurance organizations, non-profit post, mail, private schools. Seriously, just encou
20.
by Unseelie 15y ago
The argument is much that you can't just socialize the health care, you have to tear it to shreds and then paper-mache it back into a more serviceable shape. This is a process that takes time, and would leave people scrambling all over the
21.
by Unseelie 15y ago
They've gotten past lobbying Nevada. Nevada's building the regulations for it, which counts as "google has gotten Nevada to allow driver less cars"
22.
by Unseelie 15y ago
The issue isn't so much the distance from the train, so much as once you take it off the train, you split it up into much smaller loads....with different owners and destinations, and those loads probably change hands, and are pretty hard to
23.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Well, Rail is efficient in that it ships huge quantities...fifty, or a hundred standardized containers. Trucks do a bit less than one of those, and so are -amazing- if you only have to ship that much between points C and W (point A being a
24.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Well, to take another example, we don't use horses for labor anymore...Some part of the labor force -has- been replaced.
25.
by Unseelie 15y ago
I rather think that it has nothing to do with either. Comp engineers may be creative, but they're not in a creative field. They're in a field of artisanry, where they produce specialized, more or less hand made goods. Some of those people b
26.
by Unseelie 15y ago
I can't argue on any point except your money point, given my own experiences. (except for the fact that as netflix and TPB are sources for simmilar goods, then yes, they are competitors) My peers are generally not computer programmers, no,
27.
by Unseelie 15y ago
I'm not sure this article is worthy of hacker news. It doesn't cite any new information about De-Grey, just rehashes the same arguments he's been making (but not testing) for the last decade at least. In such, its really not news to anyone
28.
by Unseelie 15y ago
Are there addresses that no country can't claim as in their jurisdiction? Seems to me that you have to be in jurisdiction somewhere. Not to argue that American jurisdiction is necessarily the best..
29.
by Unseelie 15y ago
I'm going to assume you're not in the 15-25 set, by even claiming there's wide commonality between people 15 and 25 years old. 18-25, perhaps. The first major difference is that people approaching 25 have a great deal more money than people
30.
by Unseelie 15y ago
No, "Just Lie" is not the correct choice. The properly examined overprotective option is to use a service that doesn't require such age restrictions. And I fail to see any situation where teaching a 9 year old that its sometimes ok to lie w

More ›