jabretti

6 ms·

1.
by jabretti 9y ago
>Incentive alignment is a good thing - it's the whole basis of capitalism. The government taking your money and giving it to other people for votes isn't capitalism, it's corruption.
2.
by jabretti 9y ago
The US Civil War killed 620,000 people, and ruined the lives of many others. That's pretty freaking bad. On the upside, it freed about 3.9 million slaves, but really there should have been a less costly political solution to the slaver
3.
by jabretti 9y ago
>Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted. That's true, and it should be the case. But how do we distinguish between "that which is currently broadly accepted" an
4.
by jabretti 9y ago
Thanks, death penalty opponents, for insisting that scarce budgets be spent keeping him alive all this time.
5.
by jabretti 9y ago
It's possible nowadays with a bit of effort to create entirely new "facts" via a one-two shuffle between news sources and Wikipedia. First, you publish an article on some news source, asserting the fact. Then you update Wikip
6.
by jabretti 9y ago
This is fine as far as flat Earthism goes, but flat Earthism is a ridiculous outlier even among ridiculous fringe theories. By making your prototypical example of a dubious minority opinion the flat Earth theory, I think you risk falling in
7.
by jabretti 9y ago
The US is also a major outlier among the places you mentioned, in that it's still breeding at above-replacement rates. I wonder if the difficulty of getting a house/car that can comfortably accommodate multiple children is a big f
8.
by jabretti 9y ago
So we split Facebook into multiple companies which must of necessity coordinate all their activities with each other?
9.
by jabretti 9y ago
So I could no longer be Facebook friends with my friends on different continents?
10.
by jabretti 9y ago
You could contract different lines out to different companies. I think Tokyo does this. At the very least, though, you could contract out the running of the whole system to a company for five years a time and let different companies compete
11.
by jabretti 9y ago
In the US, the price of unskilled labour has been deliberately driven down by decades of non-enforcement of immigration laws. Even a year after the election of a President who was supposed to deal with this issue there's been very litt
12.
by jabretti 9y ago
But they can opt out of any order they don't want to fulfill, right? Who would choose to fulfill that crazy order for the price on offer?
13.
by jabretti 9y ago
Women tend to desire men who are older, richer and more educated. Men tend to desire women who are young, hot, and of good character. Men can't always get what they want, either, but nobody writes articles about how that's a crisi
14.
by jabretti 9y ago
It seems that this "voting rights act" is a form of mandated gerrymandering, which ought to be done away with. I can't say exactly what the boundaries ought to be, but taking the colour of people's skin into account when
15.
by jabretti 9y ago
I don't think it's so bad to mix metric and imperial units; I'm in favour of using whatever units keep the numbers readily comprehensible. Grams of protein per ounce of food seems like a good example of this.
16.
by jabretti 9y ago
And also the present, and at least part of the future.
17.
by jabretti 9y ago
The job would be made even easier if Rolling Stone went back to being about music, though, and tried to avoid talking about Trump or Clinton, and the like, except where strictly necessary for talking about music.
18.
by jabretti 9y ago
>My point was just that the US and Colombia aren't radically different in terms of economic inequality. What if you take into account the non-linear value of money, though? This seems to be missing in most accounts of inequality.
19.
by jabretti 9y ago
>He memorized pictures and bios of all 90 students in the first year class at Olin College of Engineering. It's impressive not so much that he did that, but that he bothered to try. Most lecturers (myself included) will try very har
20.
by jabretti 9y ago
>I believe this is because nicotine is an insecticide? Okay, but how would a bird know that?
21.
by jabretti 9y ago
Damn, I'm a foreigner. Will I be banned from speaking about US politics on facebook?
22.
by jabretti 9y ago
Yeah, but that's also what I said when it hit a dollar. (On this very site, but I can't remember what my username was back then so I can't look it up and prove myself stupid.)
23.
by jabretti 9y ago
But in all cases it's just allegations, nothing that's been proven in a court of law. And in that case, then Bill Clinton, who has been credibly accused of rape, should also be losing his endorsement. Hoo boy, twitter really mad
24.
by jabretti 9y ago
Let's sit back and take a chill pill. Will this capability exist? Yes, probably. Am I concerned that this capability will be deployed against me? No, not really. Theoretically it could, but then again, so could a dude with a gun. I liv
25.
by jabretti 9y ago
If I'm going to pay for search it's better be a lot better than google. And google has a twenty year head start and a gazillion dollars and can rapidly implement any clever feature you might think of.
26.
by jabretti 9y ago
Depends where you go. Some firms have a very bright line between "quants" and "programmers", and you don't want to wind up on the "programmer" side of it.
27.
by jabretti 9y ago
> My position on 2A is probably that I wish it didn't exist, but _given_ that it exists, I'd want to tread very cautiously around violating constitutional rights From my perspective (as a foreigner who has spent a lot of time i
28.
by jabretti 9y ago
Counterargument: this would lead to the H1B visa allotment being taken almost entirely by tech and finance companies in HCOL areas. Universities, for instance, would have real problems. Universities can often use other visa classes, but not
29.
by jabretti 9y ago
The Ohio-class submarines of the US Navy date back to 1981, and their replacement isn't due until 2029 (and probably won't happen until later than that). The Taiwanese are still operating a submarine which was launched in 1944. So
30.
by jabretti 9y ago
Interesting. It's nonsense, but it's a higher grade of nonsense than you'd get from just using a Markov chain or something. Sentences are of an appropriate length, and largely make grammatical sense. He woke and threw desper

More ›