ewanmcteagle

What you are missing is fairly straightforward. Inflating away debt is a form of default. People don't want to lend you money when that is how you plan to pay it back -- same outcome as a default. I guess you could do it once but only if you plan to not borrow again.

This is completely incorrect. Even if you believe the premise, you cannot expect others to lend money to you when you obviously refuse to pay back previous creditors and then the premise becomes incorrect because the debt will not be a safe bet.

Agree. Maybe people are thinking of asfoetida. A very different thing.

But in fact anyone who reads the article will see that your assumption is incorrect.

This is definitely not proven beyond a doubt. In fact it's fairly well documented that he was not the cause.

Sounds related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness

As Charlie Munger says, envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that has no upside (isn't even fun).

The uniformity of thought here is somewhat concerning to me. Here is a detailed review of the Piketty by an academic who disagrees: http://www.deirdremccloskey.org/docs/pdf/PikettyReviewEssay....

When can we hope to see some form that will allow the public to play against this even if it is pay to play for each game or a weaker PC version? I hope the system does not end up being put away like Deep Blue was.

Also, what kind of hardware results in this level of play and how is hardware correlated with strength here?

This is not correct. In the professional ranks 1p is often no weaker than 9p because often the young players start out at 1p and are very strong because selection pressure is much greater. The 9p rank in Japan also came partly out of just playing a lot for a lot of years so that accomplishment was not as great as it seems. In any case, active professional players for the most part are not dramatically stronger than one another. The range for the most part is about 2 stones, maybe 3.

Even though Fan Hui is not an active professional in the traditional sense this is an absolutely huge accomplishment and leap in playing ability by computers. BTW, Michael Redmond is not particularly strong by professional standards.

(Edit: The correlation between strength and rank now as noted below is due to promotions more often coming from acheivements: If you win at X you get promoted to 7p immediately, if you win at Y you get promoted to 9p. You cannot win a big tournament and keep your low rank. Here is an example of someone who went from 3p to 9p in one match: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_Tingyu. But professionals cannot give each other 6 stone handicaps when one is 9p and the other is 3p)

Buffett is on record supporting the pipeline.

It's not sneaky. This is the way returns are calculated in the industry. 1.09 * 1.09 * 1.09 would be 3 years of 9% returns compounded. In the same way if the total return over 3 years is 50% you take the cube root of 1.5 to figure out what return each year would give you the same. In this 50% over 3 years example it would be around 14.5% a year.

In what scenarios would this be useful? Just to experiment?

This quote changes the meaning. It says that to secure inalienable rights, governments are instituted among men and to do that those governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. It is not consent of the governed in the sense of everything should be decided by voting. According to this document government exists to secure basic rights. The people who wrote this were wary of democracy. They certainly didn't believe that it solved the problems of tyranny. Another man once wrote: 'There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary…it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.'

Seems to be the same John Tromp of the Computer Go bet. http://dcook.org/gobet/

sorry, by 'read' I meant calculate. Calculation is the chess term, reading is the Go equivalent.

I don't think it's that strange. Ultimately you have to play in order to read ahead in the game. People who think they can sit down and learn to read ahead will struggle. But if you start actually playing, a lot of the basic reading ahead will become second nature and then it's on to harder/deeper reading. The same is true of chess. Someone given the rules and a set can't hope to get it in any meaningful way though it is theoretically possible. For Go, if you can find people better than you to play against and keep it up for a year you'll look back and realize that even your initial worries were just a misunderstanding. DGS is not a good place to start. You need to play in volume. Bulk practice.

Seems the anti-glare/glare issue has been turned into some kind of compromise. I don't think I'll be able to get this.

This can't be correct when it comes to the larger screens. I found the text on the iPhone 3G to be fuzzy but not on the iPhone 4. I don't like Apple's antialiasing but on the iPhone 4 it doesn't matter anymore. Antialiasing becomes irrelevant. However, my 17 inch Macbook still has text that looks fuzzy to me and the antialiasing is still bothersome. I'm really hoping that there is some increase in resolution for the larger displays coming.

I would submit that the biggest reason for this view and the reason many people hold it is that 37signals as well as most of the programming jobs are CRUD jobs where non-algorithmic skills are probably more important than algorithmic skills and IQ is also less important. Brainteasers are an IQ test where you are not concerned about false negatives.

Why are the students afraid of lower grades? If you don't go to a PhD program, does it matter all that much? I think this emphasis on grades is something we should work to undo. You can learn, you can relearn and get extra help, but if the grades cause you to quit too early then grades are not having the effect we want.

I think this is a valuable alternate perspective. Students will become discouraged from time to time and this will vary by field. Frankly, most professors don't care about undergraduate education. I know this from direct experience. They will typically list their priorities as: research and grants, graduate students, and only then, undergraduate teaching. And teaching is hard enough even when it's a top priority. You always lose some students without dedicated effort put into teaching and that will be worse in harder classes. High school doesn't prepare students for a rigorous college experience and if we don't bridge that gap somehow that will be one more reason someone will get out of a tough curriculum.

It's useful for weeding out this place as an employer. As a male programmer who intends to remain a programmer, I'm disheartened by this future where I may have to work for juveniles and have these types of discussions.

Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease:

http://www.ajcn.org/content/early/2010/01/13/ajcn.2009.27725...

You must ask this question of every single piece of stock advice ever given freely or sold. If you knew about future price movements with some degree of accuracy, the least profitable thing you could do would be to tell others.

Will they allow motorola employees to work on google things? I've known motorola programmers and they are not at all of the same caliber as google programmers

If you back out the $30/share in cash the P/E looks to be around 12.

For those examples are you saying that science or research is clear? I think it isn't for any of them.

It was the refuse of Europe that made this continent what it is not the elites. We would be selecting for qualities that have an unknown relationship to our past results (and perhaps values).

Why? Was this country built up by the best of Old World or those that were considered the worst? Our bigger risk may not be on the dimension of education and skills but political and economic attitudes.