good_gnu

I refer you to the wikipedia article on global cooling for reference. Especially take into consideration the line chart at the very top.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

With regards to the Paul Ehrlich quote I would add that he is not actually talking about climate change at all but overpopulation.

You probably have a good idea of what a product manager should be doing but someone else in a different company might have a different opinion. Introducing a new term eliminates this source of confusion.

Admittedly, all the jargon you encounter when learning about Scrum can make you feel like you're joining a cult. However, there is a reason behind introducing it.

People in Germany do not generally make binding decisions on their specific career path until they are sixteen and after that career switches do happen.

In your particular case you might have been recommended for a vocational path at age 10 or so and then you could have disregarded that recommendation (possible at least in Germany's most populous State). If you had followed that path, you would have still been able to switch after any semester if your grades were considered sufficient. Or you would have completed that path and started an apprenticeship as an electrician. This would also allow you to enroll at any state university in a related major (e.g. electrical engineering). There are also courses that you can take to obtain the general university entrance qualification necessary for enrolling in any field of your choice.

The point I am making is that there is much more flexibility in Germany than you currently imagine. There are many who still criticize the German system otherwise (me included), because straying from the recommendation that your elementary school teacher gives you does come with some friction. Also, there is some empirical evidence that the recommendations can depend on the social class of the child (i.e. kids with rich parents are put on the academic path) in practice. However nobody is "locked in" to any career progression.

However, consider the rise of the National Socialists in Germany: In 1930, they first got a result > 3% in a federal election. By the end of 1933 all other political parties were banned. No practical term limit could have prevented this dictatorship, even though they never got more than 44% of the vote in a federal election, i.e. never enough to really change the constitution by democratic means. So we definitely know that term limits are not a completely reliable measure.

Curiously, you only see Scott Adams complaining about one of these things.

Basically things that Ayn Rand hates are bad--except when Ayn Rand does them and then it's because the things are unreasonable, not Ayn Rand.

Anyway, the article's argument is that the certificates for renewable energy are created in e.g. Norway and Switzerland where it is easy to produce cheap hydropower which cannot be transported to Germany. Meanwhile the Norwegian and Swiss do not buy energy with certificates because they "know" that their energy is clean.

This is indeed true and a valid argument. However Norway and Switzerland produce only a finite amount of these certificates. If demand for certified green energy does not exceed this supply then this is simply a sign that not enough people are willing to pay extra for certified green energy which is regrettable but not a fault of this system.

In (2) you say that the scheme is likely to be gamed. Can you elaborate on how that would look like? Does this "Occam's razor" necessarily mean that only simple laws are effective?

Also in (2) you claim that there is not enough real green energy available to satisfy the demand. This is obviously true but this means that the demand creates an incentive for companies to produce green energy wherever possible.

Overall what this system really provides is an option for consumers to optionally subsidize green energy producing companies and so far I have not really heard of any concrete case in which this system has been gamed. Do you know any?

In reality, most people in the world struggle with abstract mathematics and find it much more intuitive to think about a program as a series of steps and in terms of control flow. Programming beginners want to draw nice pictures on their computer, not struggle with understanding and implementing some recursive function.

This is of course not to say that recursion is not an important concept or that functional languages have no merits. They are however complicated abstractions over simple concretions that are much easier to understand for a beginner.

In such cases it is actually helpful for the lobbyists to decide, so long as different sizes of companies and different industries are represented.

Another tip: If you usually write markdown, pandoc can turn Markdown interspersed with LaTeX code into pdfs.

>There is a strong undercurrent of right-wing movements in Germany, right?

This is a bullshit insinuation. The Chaos Computer Club was founded by leftists in Berlin and they have consistently criticized projects of the CDU, Germany's largest right wing party. They tend to be much more left wing libertarian than right wing libertarian and they are very far from being conservative in any way.

homoiconicity

But there is a bigger overriding issue with your post. Somehow the KGB is "blood thirsty". Why do you think that? Have American intelligence agencies never killed people for political goal? Maybe it was just not disseminated in American news? Why do you not have an allegiance to values such as reason, humanitarianism or freedom as opposed to some flag?

E.g. consider someone who has previously worked in a dysfunctional corporate environment but was unable to quit that job for financial reasons. They were very well rewarded for superficial qualities like punctuality and tidyness and thus learned that it was necessary to prioritize these values.

Does that mean that this person now has a personality which prioritizes these values? What if their ``natural'' personality in another environment would have been to only emphasize utility to their company even at e.g. the cost of tidyness. What if their natural personality will quickly adapt once they are put in an environment that emphasizes these qualities?

These issues seem to be given oddly little weight by advocates of Myers-Briggs classification for the purpose of hiring decisions.

Obviously the author has completely misunderstood what is meant by "parameters" in this context. The parameters here are those of a neural network and thus they are a result of, not a precondition for the learning process. Instead, he should strictly use the implementation of the neural network for comparison, whose uncompressed human-readable size is probably going to be almost small enough to fill into his size constraints.

And that is assuming there is not a sufficiently good algorithm for learning animal behaviors that is much simpler than CNNs.

More fundamentally, you are making the mistake of thinking of work scarcity as a fundamental problem when technological advances are rendering work less and less scarce every year.

The abstract of this paper offers a data point that is consistent with the claim. For the purposes of this discussion, it is safe to say that the claim is not too far off.