Variance

6 ms·

1.
by Variance 11y ago
Very valuable data to finance - commodities and macro trading could use this data to understand supply and demand trends, like a robust version of "Helicopter Edge": http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-
2.
by Variance 11y ago
It's great to see Matt Levine on HN - for those interested in finance, his Money Stuff [0] daily column is absolutely excellent. His writing has a really fantastic funny and informal style. He does a great job presenting a fair and dee
3.
by Variance 12y ago
Gfycat seems to use a randomized adjective-adjective-animal_name for their URL structure. Certainly more memorable than the imgur six-character alphaneumeric string.
4.
by Variance 12y ago
So teachers will also eventually get fired for teaching Evolution in a Creationist school district. Tenure doesn't seem to actually do anything other than add red tape and drag out the process. Voters, via school boards, get their sa
5.
by Variance 12y ago
So teachers can only teach evolution temporarily until the school board fires them and implements Creationism?
6.
by Variance 12y ago
On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily? Tenure doesn't help any particular agenda, such as science and evolution; rather it enables all agendas, and
7.
by Variance 12y ago
Joe is right, you did contradict yourself. You originally said that tenure allows teachers to violate stupid school board decisions and to teach evolution anyway. Here, you said that tenure does not allow teachers to not teach evolution
8.
by Variance 13y ago
> Forbidding short-term rentals, in theory, can increase the pool for annual rentals, thus bringing the cost down. That's completely contrary to how supply and demand would work--if you forbid short-term rentals you move all the short-t
9.
by Variance 13y ago
Some nice minor gestures, but these will hardly "redefine French business as we know it."
10.
by Variance 14y ago
The Clinton administration bears a lot of blame for that--the government had a unique way of not, you know, actually making the credits conditional on rolling out nationwide fiber. Business is as business does, government is as government d
11.
by Variance 14y ago
Your sarcasm aside, 4 seconds can be very perceivable when you can already do a full cold boot in Win 7 in just 15-20 seconds with a good SSD.
12.
by Variance 14y ago
Indeed. No one should be pitied for losing money in the stock market. If you know what you're doing, you'll know that there's risk involved; if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be picking stocks in the first place. People who
13.
by Variance 14y ago
There's as much wealth created when the price rises again as there is destroyed when the price first erroneously falls, all other things equal. What's really being described is turning a profit on prices that are, for whatever reason, set t
14.
by Variance 14y ago
It's interesting that you think that this is an issue of capitalism, when it has nothing to do with capitalism at all. The vast majority of space junk is the result of governmental programs like NASA and its peers [1]. [1] http://www.faa.go
15.
by Variance 14y ago
May I also add, in addition to the excellent rebuttals that other commenters have made to you, that you're making a false analogy between welfare and contract law by confusing positive and negative rights. Positive rights entitle people to
16.
by Variance 14y ago
This was already answered in my big comment. There is no trend towards any unemployment at all; there never has been any unemployment associated with tech growth; tech growth is smoother and more iterative than people are conceptualizing, s
17.
by Variance 14y ago
That's a flagrantly false analogy. But see above--it's not time for humans to be outmoded quite yet. And when it is, it won't just be low-skill jobs that disappear.
18.
by Variance 14y ago
>if what you're really trying to model isn't that common. Technology increases are quite common. Again, look at that GDP per capita chart I linked; the logarithmic growth of technology as measured by GDP per capita benefit has been both
19.
by Variance 14y ago
Past data isn't limited at all. We have at least 2 centuries of rapid innovation to draw on when we note that unemployment has not skyrocketed with technological progress. Real GDP per capita has risen almost uninterrupted over the last 200
20.
by Variance 14y ago
Note that we don't have a 75% unemployment rate following the industrial revolution. You are hardly the first person to make this argument--it's been made for centuries. The market mechanism is an amazingly effective thing at providing jobs
21.
by Variance 14y ago
The fact that you have to work in order to be able to live doesn't mean that you're a slave. You might as well say that "life is slavery". This is all quite insulting to the plights of people who were slaves throughout history, and those wh
22.
by Variance 14y ago
It sounds like you already figured this out, but you can't encode classical information into the system in such a way that would allow for FTL transfer of information. Depending on what you are specifically thinking of as "encoding", there
23.
by Variance 14y ago
I've never had a problem with the distinction between 2ch and 2chan.
24.
by Variance 14y ago
That really sounds like a job for a niche subreddit with a throwaway account, not a 4chan BBS.
25.
by Variance 14y ago
Deferring to a body that knows far more about these topics than either you or I is hardly an authority fallacy. The FDA will be aware of the animal models and birth defect studies, and I trust in them to adequately regulate pesticide use in
26.
by Variance 14y ago
>I would love to see links to human studies that prove pesticides have no effects on the human reproductive system What you're looking for doesn't exist, since you can't prove a negative. But the FDA, which exerts a very high level of s
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by Variance 14y ago
The people who think that non-organic foods are low in vitamins are probably also likely to be afraid of far worse health issues that could potentially come from consuming the "chemicals". So while it certainly makes economic sense to take
28.
by Variance 14y ago
It would've been pretty easy to see what sort of health impact cigarettes had if there had been much rigorous study at the time. The common pesticides used on farm goods, quite to the contrary, have been very rigorously evaluated by numerou
29.
by Variance 14y ago
Yep. Thanks for the clarification--I sometimes rely on contextual implication more than I should.
30.
by Variance 14y ago
Perhaps for you, but I anecdotally find that many people who buy organic tend to think that it's also more healthy in terms of vitamins. There's a tendency to think that organic has a "higher nutrition density" because of the naturalistic f

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