another-one-off

Flat earthing is maybe a little more extreme than I am comfortable with, but it is easy to see how the same psychological mechanisms that produce flat earthers would also produce some truly original research.

The obvious parallel is the old story about hot water freezing faster than cold water [1]. An experimental character who notices this and gets laughed down by the vast and overwhelming majority of people who who only agree with consensus facts could logically end up in a /weird/ mental space.

They'd basically discover that they are surrounded by people who don't assess the facts directly, but do so through a lens of other people's opinions. It wouldn't take much to push them into conspiracy theories - clearly no-one around them is dealing directly with reality. Any who didn't take to conspiracies would probably be grounded enough to drive real change in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect

If I move into a house with a grid connection only, I budget on power costs = cost of grid connection + grid power price.

If I move to a house with solar panels, I budget on power costs = cost of grid connection + X * grid power price + (1-X) * solar price (which is the capital cost of the panels smoothed out over their useful life).

The issue here is that I can't maneuver into a situation where my power price = solar price without sacrificing my ability to do anything after sundown without candles. Clearly, the true cost of power in a solar-enabled house is going to be higher than the cost of the solar panels.

No problem with UBI as a theory, for all I know it might be strictly better than the status quo. Handing money out seems to have worked out for the banking system, hahaha. :[

The issue is that the economy is outrageously complicated and it isn't obvious that the people who want to bring in a UBI are the same people who will be working to bear the cost of a UBI. If it turns out to be unfair and negative, as any ambitious economic policy can be, it could be politically very costly verging on impossible to unwind.

The theoretical argument would be that one teacher gets sacked and their 27 students get distributed amongst the other teachers bringing the student:teacher ratio back to 30:1.

Indeed, if this doesn't happen (which is fully possible) you get an interesting avenue of inquiry about market inefficiencies.

As an aside, I personally know of a case where a school needed to cut costs, and they did that by increasing the student:teacher ratio. That ratio is a metric that gets attention and consideration; at least in the Australian system it is not some arbitrary number.

Well, I don't believe that corporations should be required to create a social safety net. I think the government should do it directly.

The goal of a minimum wage is difficult to pin down, because laws are written by large groups of people with potentially differing motivations.

That being said, I hope it isn't about a safety net. What a minimum wage really does is outlaw jobs that provide less value than the minimum wage (eg, if I have cleaning work that requires 1hr of labour and generates value of $10, it theoretically will not happen under a minimum wage regime of $11/hr).

With this frame, there does seem to be much debate about the interaction between the market price for labour and the value-add of different work. People want to make decisions here and I suspect they don't consider have all the facts. Politics as usual :].

> I also think the author should be willing to accept 100% blame for the debt, which it seems like they aren't.

This isn't a productive way of treating bad debt - and it is particularly questionable in light of the treatment the major banks received in the 2008 crisis.

The system, and it is a pretty good one, is that the lender is responsible for judging the risk of who they are lending to. If they judge correctly and the venture succeeds, the money comes back with interest. If the venture fails, then the money is lost in bankruptcy and the slate is wiped mostly clear.

Debtors prisons are stupid, holding people to the past is foolish. Once someone can't pay money back, then they can't pay it back and that should be the end of the matter. This idea that student loans can't be discharged through bankruptcy is one of the grossest unfairnesses that the US foists on its young people. Pretending that a lenders hands are clean when they have given $100,000 to somebody studying an English major is crazy.

You might be doing yourself a disservice. There are a lot of people who would be extremely competent in practice who are put off by the dirt and competition of the election process.

Choosing officials by lot is also extremely resistant to the money-in-politics problem and corruption amongst officials (it becomes easier to detect, and occasionally you get incorruptible people in the role).

The ideal political system could well be random lot to determine a small pool of candidates (I think 3-4), then voters choose 1.

I'm just going off the wiki articles [1] and some random articles [eg, 2], but given the rarity of 'Fukushima type meltdowns' I'm still confused about why people are worried about them. Flooding and violent storms are much more dangerous. Fukushima's meltdown doesn't appear to have posed (or be posing) any particular threat to humans, given the drought of observable impacts. That said, I'm starting to understand that the risk is to farmland (although I am /extremely suspicious/ that most of the people who don't like nuclear haven't figured that out).

Given how hysteric the response is to radiation risk, I'd really like to see a trustworthy source describe how and why the legal limits are set to what they are - maybe one day I will.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136

That starts to rule out a lot of English speaking countries, including probably the UK.

I mean, in the UK alone you'd need to evaluate what, if anything, separates the modern British morals from the morals of the British Empire which was not a very nice organisation [1]. They technically didn't overthrow and bully, but that was because they conquered and colonised. I don't think the lineage of government institutions has changed that drastically.

The modern anglosphere (UK, Australia, US, New Zealand, Canada) are all part of the spying-on-everyone gig.

The social security system and environmental comments I'll grant you; but the reason for that is (ironically, given your comment) that people don't want to contribute taxes for it. Work life balance I have no comment.

[1] EDIT The stereotype I picked up was that a good foundation of modern British wealth was a bunch of things they 'found unattended' overseas. I gather the Indians still claim that some parts of British royal jewelry were stolen from them and should be returned with an apology.

> And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita.

I agree with your main point, caveat that I don't know anything about the current state of French science because I don't know any French.

With this aside though, Australia has an order of magnitude more land than France, and half as many people, so individual Australians should have an absurd amount of raw resource available to them. In a sense, Australia should have a GDP per capita 20x France's purely on raw resources.

Comparing material wealth and academic success isn't really fair. Academics depends on small communities, and is a highly cultural endeavor. Wealth depends on resources and stability, which is less so.

There is a selection bias - 'child prodigy discovers X' is a little more newsworthy than 'eccentric person discovers X after lifetime of mucking around'.

I expect that the average age is probably older than 30 [1]. But 35 year old scientists making discoveries about science doesn't make a very good story; neither does an entire field making slow steady progress. People like to have one genius to study.

Same as how history tends to remember heads of state, but all the actual work is often done by small, highly effective groups of people who nobody remembers (eg, parliaments - I can name a couple of European monarchs from the olden days, but nobody from the Dutch Republic or the East India Company leadership).

[1] http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/age-amp-science...

It says nothing about anything, really. There may be specific jurisdictions where Apple maps or Google maps falls over because that is an area they happen to have some bad data for - we can't really tell.

Strategically, Apple maps is in a good spot for Apple - Google's offering isn't the major choice of users for a piece of critical functionality.

Everything you said is actually pretty strange. I'm on board with it, but the default what-humans-try-on-the-first-pass approach is to consider each case on its own merits including the people involved (and runs smack-bang into the various -isms, eg, racism). The idea that a scummy and a sympathetic defendant will get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice. This system is under constant pressure to revert back to more primitive approaches, where 'good people' get good outcomes and 'bad people' get bad outcomes. It just happens that, in practice, what we have now is better than that.

We can't criminalise making mistakes, even if it is lawmakers who are making them.

I see wisdom in a general amnesty for light drug crimes if it is decriminalised; but it isn't like there is a double standard being applied here. This is how a fair legal system works - the consequences of your actions are clearly known when you act, and you face the consequences of your actions once the legal system catches up to you.

I'd liken it to Repblicanism vs Monarchism. The differences between the positions are pretty extreme; to the point where it is hard for normal people to educate themselves.

It looks like something I'd be in favour of. Not because I don't understand monetary policy but because I disagree with its goals, methods and outcomes.

Those concerns are orthogonal to the type of mastery Rich is talking about.

If neither of your developers has mastered software development, it doesn't matter which you pick - they're both going to need a lot of training and handholding.

If they have both mastered software development, then you may as well pick the specialist if you have a specialised task, or the generalist if you have a general task.

The point is that someone's ability to add business value (or practical value if you aren't in a buisiness, maybe artistic value in some settings) isn't a function of their programming languages and platform experience.

Realistically, nobody has mastered programming because they 'know X platforms'. All that experience guarentees is that they can reach their skill cap really quickly in any setting. This means nothing. It might even be a negative value-add if their skill cap is low enough. More information is needed to say if they are good programmers.

Realistically, sunshine has caused more cancers than every nuclear disaster added together.

If we could, we would absolutely ban it. It is grossly unsafe.

You aren't trolling, but it is trivial to come up with larger numbers that are, in a sense, just as practical. Memory suggests that if the universe has a finite size then there is a finite amount of information that can be stored in it. "The states of data that could be stored in the observable universe interpreted as a hard dive" is a much, much larger quantity than size of the universe in Plank Lengths.

However, what if we want to theorise about what, if anything, sits outside the observable universe? You seem to be suggesting that it will always be finite, which is optimistic to say the least. Just because we can't observe something doesn't mean that it isn't real, and that we won't get utility out of modeling it. Infinity might be out there.

> The biggest problem with political correctness is the friction between politically correct ideas and actual empirical reality.

Maybe. Nobody has enough grey matter to comprehend actual empirical reality even if they had it all laid out for them, and in practice most social maneuvering other people do is unobservable. There is a very strong layer of realpolitik in reality where actors must ensure that their in-group has power, facts be damned.

The real issue is when in-groups don't believe in the growing-the-pie mentality that benefits everyone. A belief that the resources we have are fixed and that only by taking from one group and giving it to another is the single biggest problem. We've seen that belief play out in horrific ways on the left, right, intellectual and populist spectrums and any other axis of thought you care to name. I see danger in the PC crowd, whoever they happen to be, if they believe that one persons wellbeing comes at the expense of another persons speech. That isn't tied to any particular issue; cultures have survived being wrong before.

This is a very rehashed point; but just because these cars crash into things in stupid situations doesn't mean that they are less safe than what we already have. Shouldn't you already be giving semi-autonomous, fully-autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles wide berth?

I assume you mean rides [a motorcycle], which is ~35x more dangerous than driving a car according to Wikipedia, and I'm guessing driving a car is already the most dangerous thing people do in a day. They would be completely illegal if we worried more about safety than about cost-benefit ratios. Even if AutoPilot/SuperCruise vehicles are 10 times safer than regular drivers they are still going to take out the occasional motorcyclist.

None of the things my grandparent mentioned are externalities.

The cost of energy consumed is directly borne by the people mining the bitcoins. The costs of the power gluts should be being directly borne by the customers (I'm pretty sure it is in Germany, I don't know about California).

The energy market is distorted by government interference, sure, but the costs are clear and (unless the regulators are doing something really stupid) being borne by parties with skin in the game.

That is cool, but the reason the existing monetary system doesn't have those properties is because government purposely didn't include them. Things like "Uncensorable" and "Non-governmentally bound" and "Untraceable" might yet be tested and turn out to be illegal - falling afoul of, eg, laws against financing terrorists.

If bitcoin attracts regulations, the technical aspects will lose to the social aspects. Overwhelming majorities of people obey financial law - see also, the tax system; people aren't in that voluntarily. These are not proven positive values. Yet.

So you haven't explicitly stated this, but I'm reading into your comment that the early bitcoin investors made a lot of money ergo it is a good investment. That argument isn't sensible, and if you are making it I caution you to stop.

We can all point to examples where:

1) something was valued low,

2) then it was valued high, made the people who bought it low rich

3) crashed and lost the people who bought it high a lot of money

Mine is Isaac Newton's bankruptcy because he has some name recognition.

And further we can all point to examples where people did something stupid, got lucky and benefited from it. Hacker News is a reasonable place to ask, because it is a good crowd to assess bitcoin's technical aspects.

The gold analogy makes me so nervous. Gold has specific and permanent properties (eg, high density, an entry in the periodic table :P). Many detractors of gold claim those properties are not valuable, but it still has them and is specific and unique.

Bitcoin has mathematical properties that can be 100% cloned. The only thing that makes bitcoin unique from some random bitcoin clone is that it has the backing of a big mining networks.

I firmly believe that whatever value bitcoin has is tied to the size of the mining network, and by extension to the energy burned to transact bitcoins. This simply isn't close to being permanent in the same way gold is. It could potentially work like a social thing, and go the way of, eg, MySpace. I don't see how that can hold its value for a generation; the risk of current prices being a blip is still very high.

I'll just add in some empirical results. German power has risen to be some of the most expensive in Europe since they started the Energiewende. They have very low wholesale prices (driving the coal producers out of business) combined with very high retail prices (might be top 3 in Europe?).

The high retail price appears to be driven by the mechanisms driving the Energiewende ie transition to wind and solar.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...

https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-elect...

> eating that embarrassing, soggy PB&J ... can be very demotivating.

I don't follow the American labour market so office wages are a bit outside what I want to look up. However...

Using the average weekly wage for men >25 years old [1] I get an annual salary of ~50k. $3.3k is ~7% of that, or half an hour each 8hr working day.

Eating a soggy sandwich is not so terrible that it is worth staying at work for another half hour each day. Figuring out some method of socialising without that 15 dollars (which isn't that hard, talk is proverbially cheap) would be well worth it.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat37.htm the average weekly wage

It is an apples to oranges comparison, but wouldn't the honest comparison would come out about the same?

My memory is that nuclear emissions from a coal fired station are comparable to a nuclear station, and nuclear doesn't produce smoke. So nuclear should still come out 13,000 people/year ahead.

The idea of a 'fair share' isn't so important here, because the numbers are huge and have to come from somewhere. It isn't like $100 billion sits under a mattress, it will already be out in the economy, invested in something.

Raising tax is one part of the people getting what they need. The other questions that are just as important are how to provide services as cost effectively as possible and is it worth the loss of investment in the economy. Also maybe is existing investment channeled effectively by the existing tax structures.

I'm in agreement with you; I listed 4 things and medical outcomes were only a part of it. But I'm not sure that my point was clear so I'm going to restate it while choosing my words as carefully as I can:

For the sake of argument I'm happy to say that this is a rape, that it is bad and that it does deserve some sort of punishment.

Leaving aside any legal framework which isn't at all relevant to what I'm saying (and how many people on HN are up-to-date on Swedish law anyway). But that leaves the question of what punishment is appropriate (not necessarily mandated by law, but appropriate given a reasonable person. Opinions will differ).

I think that a sincere apology and a monetary fine seem like an appropriate level of punishment. I don't think international condemnation by strangers is called for.

1) No actual harm appears to have been done done

2) As I've said in other parts of the thread:

2a) The evidence that this was intended to humiliate or remove any sense of agency is not convincing

2b) There is evidence he complied with everything the women asked him to do, except in one instance where he should have worn a condom

I don't think these circumstances raise grave questions about Assange's moral character. If this is rape, which strictly speaking it may be, then I ask rhetorically why is it outrageous?