comrade_ogilvy

A rather stretched poetic usage of Schwarzschild radius, and it seems the author simply stumbled away from the denotational meaning. Nonetheless the metaphor worked for me.

I am unaware of a specific name for the concept that a larger rocket has diminishing returns because of the disproportionate addition of fuel weight. Like the article suggests, one has to wrestle with the payload requirements to get out of this trap.

While I think the OP does add some useful nuance to an often oversimplified topic, I would say that I am happy for him that he has had it so easy. Happy because he has apparently never known anyone whose is very smart and very hardworking, but whose success and happiness in some novel area has been actively sabotaged by parents who use love as a weapon with never an iota of remorse.

To have such a person dear to your heart is to peer into Mordor. And, yes, encouraging such a person to chuck their parents' love into Mount Doom may be the best course.

Whether or not additional examples of graffiti are actually the work of the same artist is a fact to be determined by a jury. What do you expect the prosecutor to do? Believe the defendant's word of honor, only after being caught red-handed?

Choosing to commit a crime that closely mimics the details of previous criminal activity by others (or yourself) is not the brightest idea. That is a kind stupidity that I am not sure we need special consideration for.

I found Charles Shaw unpalatable, but I did find some enjoyable $4, $6, $8 Italian wines. Up to a point though, you are buying something with price: reliability. I got a lousy run of our favorite $4 nero d'avola. Never bothering to buy that one again.

A friend of mine makes wine, here in SF bay. My wife and I splurge the $30 on his blended white, because we so rarely find white wines that excite us like his does. Are we overpaying? As an occasional treat, it is nice to know you will get something we will really like, rather than being so "clever" as to save money and not get a truly enjoyable glass with our meal.

That is a good point. Why is a successful person with resources not allowed to openly admit they are in need of personal growth? Is such an admission more legitimate from the mouth of a less successful person?

While I do sympathize with the homeowners when it comes to resenting poor behavior by visitors, that thing you are calling "his backyard" is not his. He never paid for it.

English Common Law encodes many centuries of traditions about easement for travel. This topic is not a new thing. That an area might bear ever more visitors over the march of years is just a fact of life.

It is "poison" insofar as success often leads to the particular kind ambition increasing in dosage until toxicity is achieved. What is your prescription? If one fails, also increase the dosage.

You are supporting the author's point.

Ambition is simply a tool for achieving goals, thus it cannot be inherently good or bad. It is the worthiness and nature of the goals which define whether a particular tool is good or bad. For example, I would argue the "constant pursuit of perfection" in child-rearing is bad approximately always.

Under our system of laws, the corporations own this data, and they can do what they please. Sell or give it away to the NSA? Well, why not?

Even if the FISA court is eliminated (fat chance), it will not change much in the long haul. "Cooperation" will be encouraged by many legal means.

We should not expect that corporate-owned property will be used in a way that we are all happy and hunky-dory about. If we do not like that, change the laws.

I encourage people who are concerned about this to voice their opinion. I am not greatly concerned myself, however...

I am more concerned about the Bigger Issue. If Congress obliterated the FISA court, it would not matter. The NSA would eventually find means to convince large corporations to "voluntarily" offer selected bits of their corporate-owned data for gov't inspection. We have no legal standing to complain about such things, because corporate-owned data is not ours, even if it happens to reveal everything about our habits and activities.

The NSA is playing catch up here. The coming wave of corporate controlled data mining is going to blow away the value of a simple Call Detail Records database.

What we need to do is spell out our privacy rights, in a manner that is understandable and enforceable in the modern age. Any less is just a band-aid.

In reality, I could write in my neighbor's dog on the ballot, to demonstrate I am a politically engaged individual who is likely to vote for a human candidate if the candidates change their tune.

That is the superior answer to the mythical doctor visit, as well.

I would further argue that refusing to be involved may have resulted in cancer in both the left nut and right nut.

Unfortunately the analogy may be a bit too applicable for comfort, eh?

For some. But most of the loudest voices are higher up the food chain, and do not directly benefit from the security apparatus. Most of those on the payroll as part of the apparatus must maintain some semblance of calm competence, thus they cannot participate directly into feeding the hysteria.

Implying mercenary intent absolves the voters of any responsibility.

I find the article a little superficial, but there is an underlying truth that can be valuable: sometimes the best way to be great at something is simply to become better and better at that thing, rather than hoping one or three bold and brilliant choices will reap a windfall.

I would cite the Wright brothers as an excellent real life example. They were very far from the brightest, best educated, hardest working, or best-financed. But they did do a lot of careful, incremental improvements. And most importantly, they chose to improve themselves: they decided that learning to become skilled at both flying and building gliders would be an important step, before daring to strap on a powerful engine to see what happens.

I bet it is very useful. If you have one or two suspicious persons who happen to be a member of a particular lodge, church, mosque, etc. you can probably usefully winnow down the list of associates to further investigate without a large and intrusive effort investigating the entire group.

People easily imagine the worst case scenarios, but the okay case scenario is surely more typical, e.g. when a man travels to eastern Pakistan to allegedly visit relatives for several months, the FBI can look at the 9 people he spends time with rather than creating dossiers on the 112 people who so happen to attend the same mosque.

(Whether and how the Constitution cares about the "good case", "okay case", "worst case" is a different question.)

In public policy circles, it is understood that the reason that controversies even exist is always because the issue involves trade offs between competing important values. (Those issues that do not involve difficult tradeoffs are sooner or later resolved, and then forgotten because the solution is acceptable as the status quo.)

IMHO people are trying to hard too get what they "like", too often looking for a simple magic bullet, when they should be in a conversation with their elected officials about what tradeoffs are reasonable in light of our values. We should elect people who ask us to be uncomfortable at times, but for well-thought out reasons.

Our politicians are acting highly rationally, in the context of the incentives the voters offer. "Voting the bums out" is not going to change anything, until the voters opt to build a better kind of electorate. The first step is diagnosing the actual problem, rather simply believing that the problem is always Team Them.

That is a reasonable policy choice, which is worth considering.

It so happens that law enforcement officials and national security officials and politicians do not think that the voters will accept 3 to 6 Boston bombings per year, without their careers being destroyed. Do they misunderstand the public mood?

"Nobody who was presuming that when he said it"

That problem lies with the voters, and the candidates are not going to change their behavior until the voters own up to their responsibilities.

Voters prefer to be told these little white lies about great intentions, rather than be bothered to apply basic knowledge of our federal gov't that should have been gained in junior high school. Voters whine and complain that it is the politicians fault, but voters' own behavior reward that which they claim to dislike.

That is what the bad companies will always say, even when it is not true.

Landlords will happily allow the tenant to pay the cost of renovating the bathroom. Good companies understand that certain basic creature comforts for employees are a cost of doing business, and it is very little money in the long haul. Penny-pinching here is a bad sign (unless it is a very early start up, or the company anticipates moving offices within a couple years for some reason).

At no time and no place did a history degree really pay off in terms of monetary compensation for knowledge of history. It was always commoditized, because precise knowledge of historical facts is not greatly compensated for, as the norm.

It paid off in terms exercising a mind in the craft of delving into an ambiguous question, forming complex ideas out of evidence, and expressing those ideas in a more concise and accessible form. A history degree is about as a good a "pre-law" or "pre-sales and marketing" degree as any other.

As a society, we benefit from people knowing a bit of history. But that is one reason we have public schools, theoretically.

What is great dating advice is to be comfortable about who you are, built on a well-founded confidence that you have a lot to offer a partner, friends, the world. "Moral fiber, a zeal for life, etc..." is on the right track.

When that is achieved your dating options will explode (relative to whatever they are now). The fact that 80% of them are shallow will be irrelevant because the pool of candidates will be much larger.

But if your pool is small and scant of fish, and is destined to always be that way, keeping your standards low would be useful advice, yes.

TOS showed technology, but the technology rarely interfered with people being people as we know them from every day life. People in TOS had replicators; we have fast food.

The coming next generations of technologies may well remake our species is ways that make everyday experience difficult to understand and distracting to narrative story. They may be intellectually interesting, but it would be difficult in a movie. From third paragraph illustrates the point.

I do like your first point, with respect to Star Trek. Certainly we can have both minimalism and exotic baroque lushness, sitting side by side.

Unfortunately, simply reaching the ground may not be sufficient. The ground is not necessarily a good enough conductor to dissipate the full charge quickly. The rest of the charge flows near the ground looking for more ground.

Most lightning strike survivors are probably surviving "near misses", albeit sometimes ones where substantial electricity flowed through their body. A direct hit is probably going to be lethal nearly 100% of time -- there is a lot of energy in a lightning strike.

I once saw a very detailed article on what to do if under threat of lightning. Here is what I recall:

(1) Get away from high ground. (Duh.) (2) Get away from trees. (Duh.) (3) Do not go for low, low ground or any ditch. A very small local high piece of ground in a general lowish ground is good. (4) Do not lie down. (5) Squat down. (6) Put your heels together and spread the balls of your feet apart.

The latter non-obvious, points is because a strike will cause enormous local current near the ground in the immediate vicinity. Yes, the discharge wants to neutralize against ground, but the ground itself is not a good enough conductor to necessarily dissipate the full charge quickly. The discharge will therefore fly along the ground"as best it can.

What you want to do is avoid letting the powerful surface currents run right through your heart or head. Lying down is therefore bad. Putting your heels together might short circuit a current flow along the ground, while away from your torso. Being on a very smallish hill increases the chance that you can ride above the worst of near strike. A ditch or other low point puts your head and torso exactly where you do not want to be.

And, yes, your shoes are irrelevant.

That choice of prioritization of targets could reasonably be interpreted as circumstantial evidence of fraud, because it bears strong semblance to how certain criminals behave (e.g. people who steal from old ladies).

Common sense for honest folk suggests you go after people with money when you have a legitimate claim -- in other words, go after the large businesses whose violation of your rights will look embarrassing under the bright lights of a courtroom. The alleged troll is choosing the opposite strategy.

Thanks! That is helpful.

The bottom line is that Jobs knew that he was offering HC a fair deal. For HC to argue that they needed a bigger cut was based on smoke and mirrors. "Gee, if you want to make only the same amount of money you could just give the authors, um, more money, right?" That is an elegant way of calling a bluff.

Agreed. It demonstrated that Jobs probably understood the numbers approximately as well as those he was negotiating with. It not so subtly alluded to the fact that HC was attempting to seize a bigger slice of the digital pie, without being confrontational.

"Gee, you could make the same amount of money by giving the authors, um, more."

Stop right there and read your own post carefully.

If those groups are indeed "political opponents" of the current administration, then the IRS has good reason to believe those groups are "political". Political groups have a different tax status than a group that is a church or other non-profit fraternal organizations. That is the law, and the IRS is correct to scrutinize them, in order to properly ascertain what category they fall under.

Slam dunk for the IRS, right there.

I think what is important is that you understand who you think you are hiring, and can set expectations of behavior for both the contractor and the customers. The little chart, hopefully, precipitates that decision, or at least brings forth the idea that there are tradeoffs.

Let's keep some things in mind.

Adolescence is the onset of adulthood before the capacity to function as a real adult in the real world is reached. One of the things that adolescents search for is some form of personal validation besides their parents and immediate family. It is probably close enough to true that we are biologically driven to look for this outside acceptance.

Unfortunately our society favors heavily segregating children based on age. That results in confused & clueless teens begging for acceptance from equally clueless people from the same wing of the same asylum.

Once in the real world a functional adult who can hold down a job finds there are a million ways to find personal validation. Teens do not have that opportunity; they (often) imagine that the opinion of other teenagers is the only path to validation.

Right. Tesla going bankrupt would have been the least surprising thing to ever happen. This is news exactly because it is unexpected.

I would also suggest that, like the Wright brothers, Tesla had no choice but to make a number of long term focused decisions because doing anything else would obviously fail.

Not clear. Remember that at least one of the pre-climax battles involves a massive fleet vaporizing. Are you sure you did not see that?