AngrySkillzz

that's the joke.

Pesticides are used on organic food too. Often they use much larger volumes of less effective pesticides to compensate.

Because admitting that Snowden was a whistleblower or a patriot would imply that they had not been doing their jobs as overseers. It would also potentially limit the power of the intelligence apparatus, which would in turn limit the power of these congressmen as some of their clout comes from being on a committee overseeing a constellation of powerful agencies. Their incentives are completely misaligned.

It's mostly because (to my knowledge) we don't currently know of any ways in which quantum computing will make artificial intelligence faster or more feasible. If you read up on the relationship between quantum and classical complexity classes, and what effective quantum algorithms we've developed so far, this may be more clear.

What expertise do you have that makes your judgement of central bankers meaningful? Do you have any understanding of macroeconomics, forecasting, monetary policy?

In gaming, they call this "humane design," techniques like giving players an obvious place to take a break. By contrast, things like the infinitely-scrolling news feed and the autoplay video queue are grossly inhumane; they serve to obfuscate the fact that there's a decision point there, subtly trying to make the choice for you even if you might have wanted to do something else if you had thought about it. And of course it works, that's why everyone does it.

It doesn't matter whether a tax is progressive or regressive on its own. What matters is its place in the overall system of taxes and transfers. You can have a progressive wealth redistribution system based mostly on regressive taxes (sales tax, carbon tax, vice taxes) by ensuring that transfer payments and tax breaks are heavily directed towards low income residents. "Regressive" is not an end-all reason to reject a taxation scheme that has many other desirable properties, namely internalizing externalities and directing market forces towards less pollution-intensive technologies.

Judging by "Computer data storage," I assume their algorithm has conflated Nas with NAS.

Principle of charity, give the person a break. Obviously people are going to think about that before enacting a carbon tax. Funnel some of that money into offsetting transfers to low income households and you're all set. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I don't see anything online about that happening to the Baltimore subway. Source?

Yeah, that's still 255 bits worth.

If you are a member of a disadvantaged group, you often do not have the ability to identify as a professional first and a group member second. That is the effect of being disadvantaged. Other people will make your life seem primarily about being a group member. Think about dealing with sexist/sexually-charged comments, racial tension at the office. Even if you want to just be a professional, other people will get in your way (and not always intentionally). Maybe imagine what life would be like for one of those people.

Yes, it is. Ignore these other people. Darjeeling in particular has a subtle sweet white grape flavor that you will taste if it is real. Not all teas have a distinct terroir but Darjeeling in particular definitely does.

Lots of them [1]. Anything you buy at the store labeled "organic" could involve any of these substances, among others. In addition, because organic pesticides are less effective per unit, much more is applied to get the same benefit. [2]

[1] http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f10...

[2] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogss...

There is no commercially grown GMO wheat. I have no idea where you heard this nonsense. And within different non-modified wheat varieties, gluten content varies greatly. Ex. Hard, red winter wheat has more gluten and is often used as bread flour. There is no incentive to breed wheat for higher gluten content anyway.

To 1, it actually isn't or at least not as much as you might think. Relevant factors are utilization and average age of your credit accounts, going back 10 years; an account doesn't stop aging when you close it, and it doesn't fall off of your report until 10 years from the closing date. If closing an account decreases your amount of available credit enough that your utilization spikes (over 20%), then you should leave it open. Otherwise it's fine.

According to you two random greens.

This is definitely true. What would you rather do: buy everything from Amazon, or have a big list of distributors that you can shop and for individual categories like books, office supplies, electronics, etc.? Would you rather have to keep track of some of your friends on Google+, some on Facebook, some on Myspace, some on Diaspora, or just have them all in one place? There is a usability problem with distributed services in this way.

No one is talking about physics, these students are obviously not studying physics. They're talking about "theory:" rhetorical, social, economic (not the empirical kind), historical, etc. Liberal arts stuff.

He is implying there is no economic benefit to the users, not for the app in general but for engaging with particular bits of offensive design. If a user actually sat down and consciously decided whether or not to take a particular action, they likely would have gone the other way. See autoplaying videos. You probably didn't want to watch that next video, but if Google/Netflix gets their way you'll do it anyway for any number of psychological reasons. But that next video was not something you wanted, potentially it's value to you is zero or negative because of opportunity cost. That won't stop you from watching it though, if they can manipulate you and distract you from making that decision consciously.

This is what everyone means when they say "the medium is the message."

At the same time, Wright is obviously a chimp himself. I doubt I know anyone with any combinatorics knowledge who would describe it as "a process," mistake permutations for subsets, and then cite Lovasz to define binomial coefficients.

Partly. As an example, well-intentioned midcentury relief workers did a lot of damage to minority communities (like you see in Malcolm X's autobiography). Eliminating means testing and data collection saves money and is significant for the people involved in the program.

There are a lot of labor market benefits as well; one of the big problems with means-tested programs is that they screw up the tax structure at the low end of the income scale. If your options are being jobless receiving welfare or getting a job that forces you out of welfare, there's a large disincentive to seek work. You would be paying an effective tax rate of ~100% by losing that payment.

That really isn't true though. You can find the data on this almost everywhere: we produce enough food to feed the entire world's population more than adequately, but it doesn't get to the people that need it because of poverty. [1]

[1] http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20f...

I think they are talking about employee shareholders.

They don't even have to be genocidal; they could just be Richard Nixon.

In the same way that an "encrypt everything" future decreases the current power of a warrant, the current power of a warrant is far above its historical level.

The transition from physical to digital massively increased the amount of data being stored. Your "papers" never recorded your historic location, biometrics, metadata and contents of all (or most) of your communication, etc. It used to be that the government could never access most of that information, warrant or not. Now they can, because our smartphones track all that stuff. The more I think about it, the more I see our digital assistants as extensions of the mind rather than an ever-growing stack of "papers and effects;" it's a difference in magnitude that produces a difference in kind.

I'd argue that the encrypt everything future is more similar to the pre-digital past than not. Before the telephone, law enforcement could never access the contents of a private conversation without physically putting a person in the room or questioning someone involved. I wouldn't say that it's exactly the same; there's a big difference in effort between using Signal and enciphering all of your physical letters, which will admit a difference in adoption rates.

Like the other commenter said, it brings back the importance of HUMINT. But like you said, adding a law enforcement loophole to encryption is not the answer; that would only serve to increase government surveillance power, even if it was gated with a warrant. It's the equivalent of putting a surveillance device in everyone's pocket. Historically unprecedented, even if you need a warrant to access the data on it. Problem is that law enforcement desperately wants to keep that power now that they have it.

At the end of the blog post, they mention that they're working on creating the ability for European companies to store data in Germany if requested. This is interesting as the implication is that European businesses don't see the US as a safe place to store their data anymore.

You still end up ahead. [1] Even if you invest at the worst possible times, investing early and over a long period of time will still make you wealthy. This isn't necessarily the case in all situations; I think you would have lost money in the Japanese stock market over the past decade if you don't consider dividends/potential deflation. But it has held for the US market for a long time.

[1] http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-...

If it costs you more than $8bil to write a chat app then you're doing something wrong.