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Value is multifaceted, but in this case it should be pretty clear. If the demand for something only exists at a price less than the cost of production, then the product will not appear on the market (at equilibrium, all else being equal, etc.). If something costs you zero to make, the price of the item will probably fall to zero (at equilibrium, all else being equal, etc.), regardless of demand. A crappy statue has multiple valuations, one of which is the cost of production (in addition to use value, exchange value, market value, labor value, etc.).

Treating labor as a commodity is by definition dehumanizing. Dehumanization “entails a perception of other people as nonhumans — as statistics, commodities, or interchangeable pieces in a vast ‘numbers game’. Its predominant emotional tone is that of indifference ... together with a sense of noninvolvement in the actual or foreseeable vicissitudes of others” (Bernard, Ottenberg, and Redl 1971, 105-6). Even in cases of slavery, the slave's labor is not what is actually considered the commodity. Commodification of labor has lead to real declines in the US and abroad in terms of worker quality of life, wage stability, worker freedom, power relations, worker skills, and democratic involvement.

Labor is a complex commodity because it is linked to a human being. It's natural and right that the value of labor is influenced by supply and demand. However, value is also determined by the cost of production. What is the cost of production of the laborer? The very fact that labor is intrinsic to the laborer sets it apart from other commodities, and gives it additional social, cultural, and moral dimensions. Labor laws are designed to address these additional aspects. In the same way, treating labor as a pure commodity is dehumanizing and exploitative.

If you want to see really un-ironic irresponsible ideas, go read the post on the anarchist solution to healthcare. I'll give you the tl;dr: anonymous healthcare for bitcoins.

32 pounds of marijuana in that case. If you were going to do a test run in this way, you could send a single schedule IV Xanax or something. I'm not saying it's a good idea but the likelihood of putting your neighbors in danger is probably smaller than many common actions. It's probably less dangerous statistically than giving them baked goods with nuts.

All I was responding to is your statement, "One of the most irresponsible things I've ever read." If I ranked all statements I've ever read in order of irresponsibility, this is pretty middling.

Why?

Apple increasingly proves that intransigence in response to customer feedback is not a defining feature of Apple's aesthetic. Another example is the reduced motion setting in iOS7. There's no need to piss people off just for the sake of purity; Steve gave that to Apple, but it is fundamentally distinct from Steve's primary gift - his vision of consumer products. Steve would have berated you for using Applescript, until Apple released the update a year later that supported Applescript.

I work in an open-office layout and when people want to write or code they often work from home to avoid distraction. For every serendipitous conversation I have, there are ten distracting and useless conversations. I would kill for a cubicle - right now I work in a 6-person bay, 3 people on each side, sitting back to back, without dividers.

I'm sure it does, but they don't have a problem assigning other required classes, such as a one-hour-a-week communication of science class. One hour a week for a year is enough to cover a lot of material.

As a graduate student in the life sciences, I was required to take a course on ethical conduct of science. This gave me the tools to find ethical solutions to complex issues like advisor relations, plagiarism, authorship, etc. We were also taught to keep good notes and use ethical data management practices - don't throw out data, use the proper tests, etc. Unfortunately, we weren't really taught how to do statistics "the right way." It seems like this is equally important to ethical conduct of science. Ignorance is no excuse for using bad statistical practices - it's still unethical. By the way, this is at (what is considered to be) one of the best academic institutions in the world.

If you reread my statements, you will realize there is no implication that we need more government. As an ideologue, you have projected onto my statements a position that you want to argue with. To say that the government never relinquishes power is a statement of ideology, not fact. The Supreme Court, a branch of the government, has taken away government power to regulate political donations to PACs, and decided that certain state governments are not beholden to the federal government while modifying voting policies. There are two examples. Repeal of Glass-Steagall is a congressional example. Federalist political movements only make sense in the context of reform to shrink the power of the federal government.

"any implication that the government is hugely understaffed and desperately needs to grow larger is an ideological claim I'll dispute."

This is only an ideological position if you view the rule of law as a ideology. I guess it is, but it's the foundation of civilization, so it shouldn't be controversial. If the government passes laws, it should enforce them. Currently it doesn't have the staff to enforce passed laws. That is a statement of fact. YOUR position, by comparison, IS ideological, because you are holding that the government has more employees than you would prefer based on your political beliefs.

If a bigot makes a product I want, I have to punish myself in the act of punishing them. If instead they are "punished" for being bigoted (or better, disallowed from acting bigoted), the punishment is no longer mutual. This is proper, since my position of antidiscrimination is not worthy of punishment.

Tim's argument is really more from the perspective of human rights than economic justification. The link to economic activity is only that, "we undermine people's potential and deny ourselves and our society the full benefits of those individuals' talents." The cost of this is distributed and small (to the company), and therefore he is not making the argument that companies that do not discriminate will out-compete companies that do. He is making the more subtle argument that increased human flourishing and creativity that result from antidiscrimination laws are good for business. The title is misleading and the argument is muddled - advocates of Tim's position would do well to avoid this line of argumentation and make the stronger point:

Antidiscrimination laws advance human flourishing and cause our society to be more just. Therefore they are worth having.

I agree. Sexual orientation, however, rises above political belief and religion as a matter of personal identity. In other words, it should be clear that discrimination for reasons of gender, race, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, and genetic information should be illegal. If you're going to move above that and ban other forms of discrimination, religion and politics are a natural extension.

Seems more like "two rights make a right" - companies benefit from public institutions and in return companies do not discriminate. Both of these things are beneficial to everyone. Only in libertarian ideology are either of these things considered as wronging people, and only for ideological reasons that have no foundation in the real world (nebulous appeals to abstract principles).

Seems ideological rather than factual. It's well known that the level of employment at the IRS prevents the government from collecting billions of dollars of revenue they are legally owed. In other words, the government is understaffed relative to what is necessary to enforce the law. The way you put makes government growth seem like some nebulous cancer. Make tax law simple enough to be enforced by the current staff, or properly staff this branch of the government. This is categorically different than Google needing to invent new tasks to hire people for. Your ideological position, that the government is not understaffed because the government does too much, is by definition unrelated to objective statements of fact, such as the government is understaffed relative to their task of enforcing law.

Except from my understanding the government is generally hugely understaffed with a large backlog of tasks that are mandated at the congressional or higher executive levels.

Card replacement - my credit and debit cards as well as RFID cards (college ID, T pass) - is THE killer feature. This is the only feature that would cause me to switch platforms.

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Because pro-gay-rights activists have so much blood on their hands compared to homophobes and bigots.

Oh right, it's the other way around. In America, a "vote" with a wallet means as much as a vote with a ballot.

Bioengineering and synthetic biology will never be like electrical engineering, but some of the differences can be exploited.

For one, you can use directed evolution to optimize a biological system without relying on rational design.

For another, biological development is massively flexible. Consider that when you evolve a longer arm, you don't need to mutate genes to ensure you have longer muscles, tendons, nerves, etc. In fact, you can grow an entirely new arm by just initiating a limb bud at the correct time in development. By contrast, in electrical engineering all design aspects are "rational" - when you change one part, you must change the other parts to compensate.

Modularity and reductionism are "problems" only in the sense that they reflect differences between our engineering strategy and the substrate we are trying to engineer. We must discover the engineering principles that match the substrate.

I think it's actually quite promising. We're good at cell biology but poor at systems biology. If we can convert neuroscience to understanding what types of neurons exist and how they function, that is probably very tractable. In comparison, even measuring the connectome is an insane problem, and modeling trillions of neurons to reveal brain function seems intractable.

I hope people in the connectome camp take this to heart. I strongly doubt that modeling the connections of neurons will reveal the way the brain works. The mouse and rat brains are very similar in connectivity, but the behavior of the mouse and rat are quite different. One explanation is that the individual neurons are actually processing information differently, and so differences arise out of neuron functionality rather than connectivity. This research bolsters the argument that meaningful information processing occurs within individual neurons, and even at the sub-cellular level.

There is no reproducibility crisis in science.

1. Reproducing work is a waste of resources. Use the money and researcher hours to develop tools that are more reliable, cheaper, and easier to use. A major reason why no one reproduces experiments is that the initial work was very difficult. Let's invest in technologies that make science easier. Reproduction (of experiments) should be done in high school biology classes.

2. Technical reproduction is rarely done, but conceptual reproduction is common. Findings in the literature become incorporated into disparate subsequent hypotheses tested by many other labs. If something doesn't add up, this will often increase the impact of the paper and eventually be addressed through experiments to resolve different models of the phenomenon.

3. There is no widespread fraud in science. Your academic career rests on your integrity. When I publish a paper, I do my damn best to make sure it is accurate. My reputation relies on it. When scientists continue to publish results that are false or fraudulent, they become discredited within the community. All graduate students in the life sciences are required to take a class on the ethics of science.

4. Publishing is a bitch and a source of real rot within the community. Fortunately, many researchers and academics recognize this problem and are addressing it. Look at the new journal eLife, or open access journals, or the increasing interest in arXiv.org (moving to a publishing model closer to that found in math and physics, which appear to be healthier research communities than life sciences). As experiments become more technically advanced, the expectation for methods sections have increased, not decreased.

5. People want to commercialize scientific findings that are relatively new - it's obvious that is risky! Why put the burden back on (under-funded) scientists? Drug companies are the ones that would benefit financially. Or wait until the phenomenon is better understood. Notice they're talking about drugs for complex diseases like cancer, metabolic disorder, etc., not Mendelian diseases. It's as if people complained that they couldn't get their lasers to work using a 1917 understanding of the physics of light. But Einstein demonstrated the fundamentals! Why did it take 40 years to make it work in practice?

I think this is a horrible idea. The average age of R01 has risen to over 40! Why add another 2 years by requiring students to reproduce work that is already published? It adds virtually no value to a graduate degree. The most difficult part of science is creating new hypotheses and designing and executing the experiments to test them. It takes years to learn how to do this as is, without adding on time to use a method you have no interest in, to re-demonstrate an experiment that has already been designed, to test a hypothesis that is already in the literature.

People wear perfume. Some people are allergic to perfume. So what. At some point it's the person with the allergy's responsibility to manage their immune response through medical treatment.

It's funny how often people are happy to pay for something, but when you offer them something for free suddenly they want more. Overland Park should have taken a good deal when it was offered, but they got greedy, they wanted protection for some potential future costs, although the benefits of Google Fiber to the community probably greatly outweigh these potential future costs. Can't blame Google for moving on - they're sending a strong signal to future Fiber communities.

I see what you're saying, but I personally use LaTeX for fine control of layout; I've spent a while writing a bunch of custom style docs that are tweaked out to my exact specification. It seems like this is what the author is trying to do with his applescripts, which was my point.

Good point about InDesign, though, if you want to do this kind of layout manually in a graphical environment. It's powerful software indeed.

If I found myself going through all this work to set up applescripts and whatnot, I would just use LaTeX. It's the correct tool for people that want complete control over their document formatting. I actually like iWork 5 MORE now, precisely because it does what it sets out to do even better than before - it's a basic text editor that creates fantastic looking layouts. You know, for when I don't want or need to fire up LaTeX.

It seems like Apple has been clear about the security of your fingerprint on your iPhone. Could the NSA be hacking your phone and retrieving this information? Nothing is impossible, but probably not if Apple has done what they describe.

A lot of the paranoia on Reddit and even HN seems misplaced to me. Federal and state governments already have large fingerprint databases. Most of you probably don't even remember when the police visited your grade school and taught the class about finger printing. Guess that they were collecting. So it's possible but unlikely that the federal government will collect your fingerprint data. However, we KNOW that the federal government is widely collecting communication metadata. This information is a much greater threat to freedom than your fingerprint. Both datasets are identifying, but one reveals a lot of additional information - about your lifestyle, habits, politics, speech, ideas, etc. The fingerprint conveys none of these.

The government has lots of ways to identify you if they want to. Most of these methods of identification are MUCH easier to implement than fingerprints (communication metadata and patterns, face recognition, license plate tracking, etc.). In the end, making a cell phone call is more convenient but less secure than other types of communication, but we accept this trade-off. The trade-off for using a fingerprint to facilitate dozens of daily interactions with your phone seems possibly more favorable in terms of privacy.

Why do you think this wouldn't be accepted? I know in my field of biology if a person were to disprove an existing theory it would be an important work. My colleague was just scooped in Science on work that disproves the ribosome spacing hypothesis when it comes to translation initiation and codon optimization.