cbr

Why not just shrink the strike zone a little?

    when your entire purpose is to transmit a signal

reconnaissance satellites

Are there flights without charging ports nowadays?

    This is demonstrably not true in London where rent
    just keeps on going up and hardly any new housing
    is being built.

http://www.london.gov.uk/priorities/housing-land/renting-hom... claims only a quarter of people in london rent? So the "if everyone rented" bit isn't being met. Because property values and rents mostly move together, as long as most people own their homes you have more people backing policies that push them higher than lower.

I don't know the London political situation very well: what makes it so expensive to build new units? Are there strict historical preservation laws? Rules that let neighbors veto or slow nearby construction? Permits and taxes?

    He can't afford to rent a 4 bedroom house
    anywhere near Westminster

"Anywhere near Westminster" apparently means "within walking distance". A 30min public transit commute covers areas where renting a 4br would be ~£26/year.

    you can expect it to be under water for a few years

I'm not sure what you mean by this. You're saying if you build a flat and sell it then people are buying them at prices at which they wouldn't be able to resell them? Is this just because there's a premium for new construction? (Cars in the US, for example, lose ~20% of their value when they're bought for the first time because they stop being "new". So you could say that if you buy a new car you expect to be "under water" at first, but no one would say that.)

    everyone except the lucky few who can get
    rent controlled apartments

No, that's not the problem. As you say, rent control can't be both pervasive and rare at the same time. The real problems with rent control are:

* It's hard to move. Say you change jobs and now work in a different part of the city, or your kids move out, or you'd like to move in with a partner. Normally one of the benefits of renting is that you can move, but with rent control that means switching to a place that's much more expensive.

* Landlords benefit from having their long-time tenants leave. Without rent control landlords love long term tenants because they're reliable and they mean less work finding people for the apartment. Rent control reverses this, and the landlord loses the incentive to upgrade the apartment and otherwise keep the tenant happy. Yes, the landlord is being a jerk when they do it, but sometimes the best fix for widespread jerk-ness is changing the incentives.

* It keeps out outsiders. People who want to live in your city enough that they're willing to give up their existing local connections and start over in your city are really valuable, and rent control means they pay a lot more than people who've lived in the city longer.

* It depresses new construction. Yes, I know new buildings aren't subject to rent control, but in a place where everything is already built out you can't put up a new building without taking down an old one. Rent control means you either have legal restrictions saying you can't replace buildings, or you have protests against people doing this and displacing existing tenants. But in a growing city, without new construction housing is going to get more and more expensive.

* Rent control puts off dealing with the problem of housing costs. If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more affordable. Rent control means that the long-time community members who would be best at this political change don't really feel much urgency because they have nice cheap places with rents set a decade or two ago. (But to be fair, homeownership is also a problem here, because rents and property values move together and homeowners want their property to become more valuable.)

    RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment
    will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are
    doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in
    need of expanded protections under the law.

Rent control hurts renters. I don't care about real estate investors. That $3k isn't why we need rent control, it's because we have rent control.

It's not secret: cables appear on navigational charts so you know where not to put down your anchor.

Here's what my family's spending looked like over the last 12 months:

      $8,824  housing
      $1,870  food
      $2,965  medical
      $8,982  personal and transit
     $55,306  savings
     $52,761  taxes
    $130,708  donations
    
    $261,416  total (income)

For most of this year it was me and my wife, with our first child being born 2/3 of the way through. This is with both of us working; let's imagine instead we had two kids, one $100k income, and one of us stayed home with the kids.

To adjust for there being about twice as many people, let's double the first four categories. And because we're talking about a $100k income let's decrease taxes proportionally down to $20k. Now tax rates are graduated so we would really pay less than that, and kids cost less than adults per person in terms of food and housing, but let's be conservative and stick with this. What do we get?

    $17,648  housing
     $3,740  food
     $5,930  medical
    $17,964  personal and transit
    $21,753  savings
    $20,000  taxes
    $10,000  donations

   $100,000  total (income)

When an $100k income can support four people with enough left over to donate 10% and save 22% then I feel pretty confident calling it "rich".

(This is Boston, which is not quite as expensive as the bay area, but nearly so.)

A CRT TV will generally make a 15.7kHz squeal because of the flyback transformer. Not everyone can hear this high: between ages 20 and 40 most people lose hearing down from 20kHz to 10kHz.

     You seem to assume the incentives are always correctly
     aligned, and agreed on concepts of "better" are
     immutable. They're not.

No, I agree with you. I'm not very confident futarchy would work out in practice. I can theorize about how you need to set up your metrics so your country doesn't get exploited by others, but getting the metrics right is very important and they're going to be constantly under attacks to separate them from what they're actually trying to measure.

If this was the first question, and both incomes are equally common, then before they asked your income they would estimate your chances of siding with the plaintiff as 62%. They ask the question, and either your chances go up to 75% or down to 50%.

If one of two answers gives "no effect" then so must the other.

Let's make a very simple model:

    poor? side with investor 100% of the time
    rich? equally likely to side with either

And again for simplicity, before they ask you what your income is say they think you're equally likely to be poor or rich, and that this is the first question.

Before they ask the question they think there's a 50% chance you're poor and will definitely side with the investor and a 50% chance you're rich and will side with either. In other words they think you're 75% likely to side with the investor. Then they ask you the question. If you say you're poor then they both update your probability upwards from 75% to 100%, if rich then downwards from 75% to 50%.

In this system there's an agreed-on concept of "better", and this is standard one-person-one-vote with no money involved. If these "smart, effective rich people" then bet that certain policies will be better, but in fact these policies turn out to only be better for them and are worse for everyone else, they will lose lots of money for betting wrong.

No, it's still one-person-one-vote. Voting is used to get agreement on what counts as a good outcome. The money and betting come in when trying to determine what policies are most likely to lead to the desired outcomes.

     What is your total household income?

If you select "Under $50k" they say "More likely to side with plaintiff". If you select "Over $50k" they say "No effect on either lawyer". That's not how conservation of expected evidence works. (Several other questions work the same way.)

To handle questions like "And a good meal is ten times more than a beef soup shop in Taiwan?" we can use "Purchasing Power Parity". And adjusting for PPP we still see that an income of $100k is in the top few percent worldwide: http://jefftk.com/world-income-distribution.png

> If you think this is "only a problem on those crazy Windows 8 notebooks"...

Many Chromebooks also have touchscreens.

fusion plant -> mains electricity -> your tesla

It's under the Apache license and all; what more do you want?

If you think that selling ebooks is simple and Amazon doesn't bring anything to the market, then why aren't publishers just selling ebooks directly?

Say there are five sites that would normally be returned for a query and they have scores A:20 B:18 C:10 D:8 E:4. The results will look like "A, B, C, D, E". Say none of them support https, and then the search engine adds https as a positive ranking factor worth +3. Site C turns on https, the order still is "A, B, C, D, E". Now site B turns on https, the order is now "B, A, C, D, E".

Imagine instead they had added "lack of https" as a ranking factor worth -3. The rankings on the page would have changed exactly the same way.

"not having an inbound link" can be thought of as a negative without changing rankings. In the example above, if getting an inbound link from apple.com would move you up 4 points, then if B got a link from apple that would put them at 22 to A's 20. If instead "not having a link from apple" was worth -4 points, then A would be at 16 and B at 18.

If X is a positive signal, then not-X is a negative signal.

Funny; google.com works fine for me for this, even though it's definitely https.

They have lots of pixels, though, which means you should be able to go higher than nyquist with some clever work.

With two time samples you shouldn't be able to learn anything about the state of waves in a pool, but if each sample is a photograph with lots of pixels you can actually tell a lot.

I didn't say there was conclusive evidence, and I agree that correlational evidence is low quality. A large randomized study on Omega 3 consumption would really help here, but in the mean time we have to use the evidence that's available.

(Though http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/omega-3-fatty-ac... judges the evidence behind the pills as "strong scientific evidence for this use" in several categories.)

There's some evidence, enough that some doctors will recommend you take them, but there's not strong enough evidence that the FDA will let you make the marketing claim.

You're interpreting "their lawyers won't allow them to say X" to mean "they don't actually believe X", "they can't substantiate X", or "X isn't true". Except with medical advertising, at least in the US, there's very strong restrictions on what medical claims you're allowed to make for your product.

    This regulation is all very good, as it limits the
    extent to which one's credit history can harm one's
    prospects at financial progress

Credit history can both help and hurt you. Imagine some people are Q and some are R, and Q-people are more likely to default on a loan than R-people. If we prohibit taking Q-vs-R status into account in making loans this is good for the Q-people because they'll get lower rates, but it hurts the R-people who will get charged higher rates.

Looking at your example of someone who made decisions in their 20s that left them with lots of debt, declared bankruptcy in their 30s, and now is trying to take out loans in their 40s. Do you think that they're more likely to default on these loans than someone who didn't go through that process in their 20s and 30s? If you do, then this is a Q-vs-R thing and one group is being helped but only by mixing them in with another group that's then hurt. (Or if you don't think they're more likely to default then they shouldn't be charged more for loans. And if they are charged more for loans, you/someone could go into business loaning to these people and make a bunch of money.)

Some examples are a lot harder than others, though. Say one race, as a group, tends to default a lot more. There are probably lots of reasons for this, with poverty being a big one, but say even after you take into account the rest of the data you can collect (income, age, years at job, profession) race still has lots of explanatory power for predicting whether someone will default. Should you be able to take this into account? This is another Q-vs-R thing, but it's not based on "poor financial decisions" or in fact anything within that individual's control.

On balance this regulation may well be beneficial, but we also need to acknowledge it has costs. (One thing in favor of regulation: the costs tend to fall on richer people and the benefits on poorer people, so because of the diminishing marginal value of money it could be worth it even if the benefits were smaller than the costs in absolute terms.)

Austin is much drier.

    Those advertisers paid for thousands of fake clicks,
    and I ended up with a decent chunk of change.

I see how you know the second one, but how do you know the first? Maybe they have a grey area of fraud detection where they pay the publisher but don't charge the advertiser?

    OH but you NEED a CSS minification tool! You HAVE TO HAVE IT!!!!1111

One way to keep things simple while still getting the benefits of minification is to code your whole simply, and then later install an optimization package like mod_pagespeed on the server. This keeps your code and flow simple, and then later on when it's worth your time you can install/enable the optimizer.

(Disclaimer: I'm the TL for mod_pagespeed.)