bjhoops1

> non-groupthink outliers of one century who overturn the previously accepted scientific consensus of the century before

These outliers are just that - outliers. They are rare and it is not productive to lionize them, especially in the context of science deniers who may fancy themselves as "skeptics". Also, scientific consensus is not groupthink, and the scientific establishment is by its very nature self-correcting. Which is why when a major breakthrough comes along that discredits old models, it is typically quickly accepted. That major scientific breakthroughs are repressed and covered up by the scientific establishment is a myth told by quacks.

It's also sad that people typically spend a small fraction of effort determining what it is they believe, then expend vastly greater effort arguing and promoting those hastily-formed (or most often, inherited) beliefs.

> the concept of 'collateral damage' has no place outside total war

So damn true. People forget that we really haven't been truly "at war" in the traditional, collateral-damage-is-to-be-expected sense for almost a decade! The Iraq War was over in weeks. Same with Afghanistan. Since then it has been an occupation. Big difference.

I think that the whole War on Terror thing has largely been spun as a "war" because in war you accept things like collateral damage. Never mind that "War on Vague Concept" is utterly absurd! Imagine if we used drone strikes to take out cartel bosses in the asinine "War on Drugs." Ridiculous. Makes me mad.

Wait, your wife has a sex tracking app? Of course if all couples are as prolific as my wife and I, I can only imagine what kind of scaling problems you'd run into tracking such vast oceans of data...

I was really hoping "making more" would be followed with "love". Money's great too, though. :)

I say this all the time - I would gladly pay substantially higher taxes if that money went towards things like universal healthcare, public education, infrastructure and social programs for the 90%+ of the population that will never have to worry about paying substantial income taxes.

Today's conservatives and libertarians remind me of Captain Hadley in Shawshank Redemption, when he tells his men that his estranged brother left him $30,000 and immediately proceeds to curse the fact that the government will take a large chunk of it. Perspective, my friends! If you make enough money to qualify for the top income tax bracket, be happy about it! It should be an honor to pay more than "your share" of taxes to support your nation, community and less fortunate countrymen.

John Kenneth Galbraith said it better than I can:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Interesting observation. I completely agree that as the amount of information needed to be synthesized to understand any issue multiplies exponentially, the capacity of an individual voter to grasp all of the necessary information is quickly exceeded. So people resort to shortcuts, voting based off of quick proxies for true discernment such as party affiliation or ideology.

I would even say that ideology can be considered as little more than a shortcut, a cache if you will of information and answers to tricky problems. Unfortunately, most people's "cache" never actually expires and they go to their grave still holding to hopelessly outdated data.

A couple of thoughts:

1) A hard upper limit on the intellectual capacity of an individual human being does not directly necessitate a corresponding limit to the capacity of humanity as a whole. There are now reliable means of preserving past knowledge and experience, and population growth means more minds are available to ponder difficult problems.

Interestingly, this is somewhat analogous to where we are today in computer hardware - an individual processor's power is limited, but large gains are yet to be made by adding more processors, and storage of information is increasingly exponentially.

These kinds of gains are not linear as you would expect from an increase in processors' speed, but they are gains nonetheless.

2) Even if you do assume that the individual human's finite capacity does imply an upper limit on human progress, it is still possible for progress to increase indefinitely; the gains will merely be increasingly marginal.

I agree that the idea that progress is an inevitable force of nature is completely false. It is a goal, not a natural force. I personally don't know anyone who actually believes this though, so I feel like this is something of a strawman.

But how many of those involve lying on a beach all day long?

I didn't say he wasn't right about this. Just regret that I provided traffic to his site.

I read this whole post before realizing it was written by that prick, Tucker Max. I wish I could unread it.

It's really quite remarkable how much good will a simple apology can generate. I wish more individuals and organizations recognized this.

I had to choose Lotus Sametime. Now I must go weep alone.

I think it is important to understand the limitations of the profit motive. Too often it is held up as some sort of panacea, as if all problems are the result of gov'ment getting in the way of heroic capitalists seeking glorious profits.

Fact is, unfettered capitalism will innovate to the direct extent and in ways that it is profitable to do so. Which is why you see very little "innovation" being done to benefit poorer citizens - why innovate for a market that can't buy what you're selling? Rather, let's spend millions developing "solutions" to the problems of those who have so very few of them. A sad irony, that.

This is where a well-run government can improve things - by artificially creating profit motives in important areas where there was none before. A tax on short-term investing or day-trading would be a great start to discourage utterly worthless short-term speculation and HFT, and is a great example of how unobtrusive policies can create desirable incentives.

I was planning to post a sarcastic "Great! Now I can live longer just by walking fast!" comment, but your comment makes that pointless. Damn.

> in my experience, there seems to be a correlation between people who love to study algorithms and people who love doing this.

Very well put.

In my experience, some of the smartest, best guys at algorithms and puzzles make some of the worst coders. No one can understand their code, it's brittle and their work eventually gets replaced by code written by somehow with half their IQ but a decent sense of organization.

The addition of export = is great. This was a glaringly obvious deficiency that I'm glad they resolved.

It blew my mind when I heard that "Happy Birthday" was copyrighted. So glad to find out that it's bullshit. Make those lousy, greedy bastards pay for being epic trolls.

When I come across exceptions that get silently "eaten" I want to throw the dev out of a window. I've lost days of my life tracking down inscrutable bugs only to find something like this: catch ( Exception e ) { /eat it/ }

Can this approach (especially the nesting of grids in the table example) be taken with bootstrap as well? Wondering if anyone has any links to a similar post showing how to leverage bootstrap in a similar fashion.

But of course we all know that the greatest ROI of all is tax cuts for the hallowed .1% job creators so they can continue creating jobs and wealth for the grateful masses.

Swedish government - or Lisbeth Salander?

I would certainly agree that the methods for bringing virtuous and valuable jobs more into alignment are quite limited, and it is a vain pursuit to hope to bring them into perfect harmony. However, I would disagree with my libertarian friends and say that such limited methods as we have are worth employing, and new ones are worth seeking out, as the endeavor has merit. The difficult part is finding a balance between seeking to control and throwing our hands up and saying "nothing can be done."

As an aside, I agree that this is a very difficult proposition for incomes, but gains are to be made with a strong public sector which provides numerous basic services such as healthcare, education, and affordable subsidized housing, so that the unfortunate man with a virtuous job of little economic value is not left out in the cold. Or dying of long-undiagnosed cancer due to lack of access to prohibitively expensive preventive care, like my wife's cousin is currently.

Also, there is nothing illogical about saying "this person or source of information has a reputation for being wrong or deceitful, therefore I will not be spending my time examining their claims." This is not really an ad hominem, just saying that due to the unlikelihood of an individual having anything to contribute, you are choosing to not engage their argument. I suppose this falls under "running away from the argument".

Funny how most things that make you mad are less outrageous when you hear both sides of the story.

Nonsense. Just because "is" will never fully attain to "ought" does not make vain the pursuit of a better, more just world.

> Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures

There are so many examples (a single one of which disproves your "universal" claim) of idealists bring "is" more into alignment with "ought" that it would be almost impertinent to even begin enumerating them. Here's a small handful: Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage, and (from an economic perspective, since that what you seem to insist can never be touched by notions of "ought") the rise of Organized Labor, which made it possible for former wage slaves to earn a decent living wage.

If Hayek and Rand make you feel better about the fact that most of us over-earn relative to the "virtue" of our labors, fine. But IMHO it is best to be honest about the inequities and fortuitous circumstances which make our success possible.

An interesting book that jives with this is Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. One of the interesting things the author finds about the nouveau rich is that they are typically more dismissive of the poor and less charitable than the "old money." Probably in large part because they think "I made it because of my own merits - if you don't have the things I have, it's because you are lazy or incompetent."

As for trashing a redwood forest, not sure what makes that seem OK. :)

It would be nice if Texas' governor only worked part-time. Rick Perry is an utter moron. http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2011-10-28/just-say-no/

I suggest you read Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

The artifical famine of 1932-1933 was not a natural famine. It was a calculated effort by Stalin to undermine the Ukrainian peasant farmers, a class he viewed as a threat, and force them into collectivization. It was perpetrated by the Communist party through the steady increase in grain quotas. It is a matter that of historic fact that Ukrainians starved to death while trains shipped away mountains of grain that they themselves had grown.

Feel free to distrust "Western media", but there are primary sources that support this narrative. For instance, Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko's account, or the narrative of American (and up to that point Soviet sympathizer) William H. Chamberlin (although perhaps you might not trust his account since he's a Westerner).