AngrySkillzz

We do that all the time in mathematics though; generate some random examples of the phenomena you're investigating to see if there are any "easy" counterexamples. If not, try to visualize them and see if patterns emerge. This is an easy way to build up intuition on a problem: seeing "how" something behaves gives you clues about where to look when you go to prove it.

Because we can't trust our fellow Americans that much. You can plainly observe the current anti-Muslim, anti-refugee rhetoric and make that assessment yourself. You remembered what public discourse was like right after 9/11. The NSA's dragnet surveillance would be of great help in, say, Donald Trump's recommendation to make a database of all US Muslims.

We do, that's what monetary policy is for (and fiscal stimulus, when warranted). The purpose is to target aggregate demand in an attempt to shift GDP towards its estimated potential. But that doesn't mean that the pre-recession level of output is sustainable, and that it corresponds to the demand level we should be targeting.

As an example, with housing prices so high there was a surge in homebuilding. No one really needed or wanted all those homes, so the demand for ex. shingles was artificially high. It would make no sense to introduce some kind of stimulus program to prop up the shingle market to its housing bubble peak. Nobody needs or wants that many shingles at that price.

The issue I take with the article is that their study compares growth levels during recovery to growth levels right before a market crash. It's not sensible; of course the latter will be higher, that's how market psychology works. It doesn't make sense to think of "potential growth" as "the highest growth we've seen."

I'm talking about what you might call "artificial demand," not capability.

Example: our corporate customers decided to buy 5 more widgets in 2007 than in 2008 because they saw the economy improving, mostly due to the growth of household on-paper wealth and the associated increase in consumer spending, and were forecasting a growth in their own business. When the housing market collapsed and consumer spending fell off a cliff, those customers no longer had any reason to buy the extra widgets.

In that way, you can say output is artificial. A large mass of people spending above their means because of a perceived increase in wealth, along with other psychological factors, leads to an economy with rising demand. When it turns out that wealth increase was a phantom and those psychological factors disappear, there is less demand for widgets and thus output decreases.

Output isn't "how much we can make," it's "how much we DO make." The amount we produce is proportional to the demand for that product.

Wouldn't a simpler hypothesis be that output trends before a recession are artificially high? We know fairly well that economic trends tend to feed back on themselves; the idea that growth leads to an acceleration of growth which overreaches and ends in a crash isn't particularly far-fetched.

In addition, the war in Afghanistan significantly destabilized one of the world's largest opium producers, leading to much higher supply and thus lower prices. With heroin cheaper and more available, it is more easily seen as an alternative to opiate pharmaceuticals.

> the author ignores fusion

As he should. Fusion is still at least twenty years away, the same as it has been for decades. We need to work on solving these problems now and not depend on the possibility of magical future technology to clean up our messes for us.

There is a Scheme compiler called Stalin[1] which apparently does some very sophisticated full-program and lifetime analysis. This of course leads to very long compile times, but the code is also very fast compared to other Schemes, and even C in some cases, from the benchmarks I've seen[2][3] etc. You can find more benchmarks for it, and similar compilers like MLton.

Of course, I can't comment on whether or not it is actually usable in a real-world environment, just that the techniques do exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_%28Scheme_implementatio... [2] https://justindomke.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/the-stalin-comp... [3] http://www.ffconsultancy.com/ocaml/ray_tracer/languages.html

Seriously. The term is scale-free network[1] and they could have just dropped it at that. It's not really even a new discovery, we've known that animal neural networks are scale free for at least ten years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network

Which is definitely applicable in this case. There is more data to be obtained from a person's smartphone than could ever have been obtained from their papers or personal effects; no one in the past could have anticipated recording data on that scale themselves.

I would argue that it's a difference in quantity which produces a difference in kind. When the "papers" in question contain e.g. a complete history of your location for the last four years, along with all of your communications to everyone you know, any search of those papers is by definition open-ended.

You size your bet with regard to the probability that the bet will inform a change in policy. Or maybe you hedge it by also betting on that change in policy.

They offer a strictly inferior, more expensive product in an industry that has been effectively commoditized.

Yeah, it's as simple as that. When their product that is 25% more expensive than competitors and less useful (accepted at less retailers), they deserve to get knocked off their pedestal. No one cares about the Amex brand. They are a commodity provider in the payment market.

It's not theft; it's not even piracy. It's copyright infringement.

Yup. No one cares until its their kid or the neighbor's kid getting shipped off to some far away warzone. While I disagree with the draft on moral terms, I think pragmatically it is the only way to properly align the incentives of the populace against wars that don't matter. Otherwise, the government can wage whatever wars they want and no one will be that bothered (as we've seen).

what is a toxin

There are also alternative storage solutions, like flywheel and pumped water storage. I don't know where those stand at the moment, but I imagine that a they are at least competitive with batteries, seeing as current batteries have fairly low storage capacity and need to be replaced regularly.

No. Cryptography is complicated, it's not just something you dabble in and then put together a complex protocol like Bitcoin with few mistakes. Not even mentioning the large programming task to implement that effectively. Cryptography is it's own sizable field of study that takes a lot of work to master.

Most of the oil-rich nations have reasonably large sovereign wealth funds, so they have broad investment exposure to the rest of the global economy. I think the plan is to draw on those as necessary to transition their economies into something more diversified and sustainable.

I'm not sure if I would call them "not that high", the CAPE is still fairly high by historical comparison. [1] Just not absolute lunacy like around 2000.

[1] http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/

Implying that they'd fit right in because they're brown and Muslim is some seriously ignorant shit. Remember all the ethnic tensions in Europe, in the Balkans? And religious tensions, even between different sects of Christianity? To imply that doesn't exist in other cultures is to attribute complexities to your own race and deny that they exist elsewhere. Ignorant.

Lessig discussed an idea on this topic in Republic, Lost. If I remember correctly, it was something along these lines:

Donor makes a donation to a politician, which is anonymized. That money is then temporarily escrowed, along with all other recent donations, and the money trickles into the account held by the politician over a certain period of time. That way, donor can't say to the politician "$3mil coming your way, it's from me." On top of that, all donations are refundable so the politician can't trust that the donor actually gave them money and didn't revoke it.

The point of the concept is to limit the information flow between the donor and the politician. The politician can't find out who donated the money, or how much came from a single source, and they can't trust outside information about who their supporters are.

If the victim is using Dual_EC_DRBG and Clyde Frog can obtain ~32 bytes of RNG output, they can figure out in reasonable time what the seed to the RNG was (assuming they know how the curve parameters were generated).

"This is a huge deal in the case of SSL/TLS, for example. If I use the Dual-EC PRG to generate the "Client Random" nonce transmitted in the beginning of an SSL connection, then the NSA (sic) will be able to predict the "Pre-Master" secret that I'm going to generate during the RSA handshake. Given this information the connection is now a cleartext read. "[1]

So, Clyde Frog can figure out your RNG state and predict what key you will generate for your TLS session. That's how they obtain the private key.

[1] http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/the-many-fla...

Yeah, I've heard it called "server relief." Slow password hash is computed on the client, then transmitted to the server and run through a fast hash before being stored.

Yeah, probably.

That's really not true: "the medium is the message" applies just as much to computer technology as it does to things we would more traditionally view as media. Think about the difference between a conversation you'd have on the phone versus one had over instant messenger versus one had via text message. The content is informed by the way in which it is conveyed; the properties of a piece of technology shape how we use it.

Seriously though, I don't understand how our entire grid has made it this far with no storage. All the electricity used in the US is produced at basically the same instant.

Flywheel storage systems would be a great idea to supplement renewable energy, or even to supplement our current electricity generation technologies. Peaking plants are crazy expensive and most of the time base load pretty greatly exceeds actual usage; it would be great to be able to store some of that energy and use it instead of a peaker.

Your second point is pretty hollow, as there are MANY nations that we trade with that violate the basic human rights of their own citizens or those in neighboring countries/territories.

Yeah, but most unencrypted data doesn't look like random noise. If you run a few statistics on a packet/file/whatever and it looks random, you can comfortably assume its probably encrypted.

Think about it from a historical perspective: religion has always been a tool used by the powerful to motivate the masses and mask their own agendas. Think about the Roman emperor Constantine, who converted his empire to Christianity. Most would argue it was an attempt to preserve the integrity of the empire so he could maintain power. How different is this from a radical group in the Middle East using religion to motivate other to join their cause? Or using Islam to cover up their actual political motivations?