herdrick

I suppose a garage sale might be worth the effort since you can do everything at once.

Unlike alcohol, for example.

In retrospect I should have given her honey or the like just in case she was having her first ever diabetic shock.

(edited: semi-conscious -> lethargic)

That's not really what happened. Steve had specific technical knowledge and experience that he wouldn't have gotten in school anyway. Also it sounded like most of that technical knowledge was irrelevant to the new position.

I imagine most of what happened is that the interviewer decided to trust his own judgement and gut about Steve's raw brainpower and ability to learn. And there's the issue of not having a degree - you rely on people sizing you up to be competent at it.

You shouldn't take a company's PR at face value.

Honestly, I've never hard a harder time trying to figure out what an HN story was all about.

So you like the Cosh too?

Regarding your point #2, yes I agree. But bailing banks out is exactly what Japan did. The certainty of regulatory capture by banks makes it better to just remove the government ability to bail them out. Let them fail. A moderate approach would be to limit bank mergers - too big to fail is too big.

And it's only 70 cents only because the suppliers of new debt, the US authorities, are sensitive to interest rates too. Investors can, net, only buy as much debt as the government is issuing, right? So if the Federal authorities are so worried about a liquidity trap, let them limit their debt issuance! If they do that, then your dollar put into Treasury securities means a dollar worth of other investors' leaving. No more liquidity trap. (At least as far as "highly-liquid and safe assets" == US govt debt. They could find other safe and liquid harbors, perhaps Japanese govt debt.) But the Feds aren't doing that, thus, I think that "having the government borrow at essentially zero cost and invest that money in public infrastructure projects" would in fact be bad for real wealth and prosperity because that borrowing brings some more money to T-bills and away from other investments, some of which would be private investments, for example. Of course if those projects are needed on their merits, not as make-work, then great, do them.

The same is true of your example of "parking cash in the bank". Parking cash in the bank means making investments. Where does the bank put it? They invest it. A bank is not a destination for money, it's a conduit.

I was thinking that we got lucky and TARP ended up not costing much (not counting 2nd order effects pushed into the future). Also, I'm seeing 'only' about $5.3 trillion of new debt from 2008 to now: http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/federal_deficit_chart.html

Wow, that 'autoescaping the commands in parens' syntax is great. But it doesn't seem to be list related. For example: grep pattern (echo "foo.txt") just passes the result from the echo to grep. It's grep which is doing the right thing with a list, right? Still this is interesting. So fish stuff isn't necessarily written left to right and joined with pipes, instead it's written in nested form like in a more modern langauge.

Alas you still need to use the "find | grep" technique in fish because of the argument size limit. For example:

    grep pattern (find .)

Failed to execute process '/usr/bin/grep'. Reason: The total size of the argument and environment lists 34kB exceeds the operating system limit of 34kB. Try running the command again with fewer arguments.

The equivalent in bash gives you:

-bash: /usr/bin/grep: Argument list too long