leot

Taxes, central bank, military, and existence of cash all preserve value of fiat.

And, further, fiat currencies aren't perfectly liquid with respect to each other.

Assume near-perfect liquidity among x-coins. Assume, also, that software makes starting a new kind of coin as easy as starting a small business. This implies that the crypto-currency market cap will be divided among far more than "21M".

So, given near-perfect liquidity, what makes any particular coin valuable? For shares it's earnings per share. Will we need something akin to "earnings per coin"?

> up to a max of 600W. Not nearly enough for sustained flight of something this size.

Which size? Why? Human powered airplanes exist. Max sustained human output is around 400W. Are RTGs significantly heavier than humans?

Globalization of wealth is a result of treaties between sovereign nations.

But if so much wealth is hidden and not tied to each nation's fate, those with the most power and influence lose the connection to their compatriots.

This has led to the brittleness of the current international order. Since the fall of the USSR, national treaties no longer bottom out at the self-interest of each countries' residents. We are trusting a legal framework that has had its foundation severely degraded over the past 30 years.

> If we didn't have critics we'd still have kings with divine right. This seems like an exaggeration, but it's really just to say that we need people to look at things critically.

That's an extreme straw man that trades a lot on what a "critic" is.

Martin Luther didn't criticize the papacy because he doubted the papacy's capacity to realize its ambitions. He criticized the way the papacy was then operating.

People holding forth on how something can't be done are best described not as critics but doubters (or haters). "I can't imagine a way to do X, therefore X can't be done." How many impossible things does Musk have to do before people take serious Musk's ability to realize his visions?

Hating is so easy. But today's capacity to develop technology is utterly unprecedented.

Lead. Follow. Or get out of the way.

Counter-proposal?

Even with forward osmosis?

So, that's institutional?

All of those look to be accidental. Can you show a bias in technical errors that's partisan in nature? When Fox cut it was deliberate.

FOX News literally circulates a memo, every day, that guides its treatment of political subjects.

That they have a primary goal of pushing an agenda is made manifest by FOX's abrupt termination of coverage of a meeting between President Obama and the GOP when it began to show Obama in a sympathetic light. Name one example of another mainstream media outlet being this institutionally cynical.

https://mediamatters.org/research/2010/01/30/fox-cuts-away-f...

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/kja25r/the-daily-show-with-jon...

Interesting. Thanks!

I've been wondering what happened to this story, which was doing better than most but didn't appear anywhere on first 15 hn pages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557020

https://twitter.com/trottiest/status/779036903517491200

One thing I've been curious about for a while: would it be possible to survive free fall into water if equipped with a sufficiently long spike-shaped "base"? The sharp part of the spike, which would probably have to be 100+ ft long, would be oriented so that as it entered the water it would displace more and more water, reducing the g-forces experienced by the spike, and you atop it.

A few improbable things would need to also hold: 1) Spike would need to stay straight as it entered the water. 2) Spike should not significantly increase terminal velocity, at least not for most of the descent

I think (?) it's doable, but would be fun to see the physics worked out. E.g., how long should the spike be? What should be its shape? How could it be kept maneuvered into the right orientation for entering the water without significantly increasing terminal velocity?

(Shameless plug)

CleverPet Hubs work with cats, too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzXwrXEkmHM

Also, there have been rumors that the Hubs will be user-hackable in short order. And they use Particle Photons in any case ...

It is obvious that genetics matter. What isn't obvious is how, or how much.

Ontogeny is context dependent at every scale of analysis. As such it is sensitive to precise manipulation in myriad ways, the vast majority of which are likely not yet known. We remain profoundly ignorant of what intelligence is, let alone what underlies it.

It's likely that large population differences are the result of a synergistic interaction of genetics and culture, with each depending on the other. Ashkenazi Jews benefit from one such interaction, but there may well be many others yet to be discovered.

I disagree that the social theorists as a whole are entirely ignorant of basic biology. I think they would argue that the cultural forces swamp genetic signals often enough to be worthy of criticism.

There are no doubt theorists with views that are more extreme, but the appropriate response isn't to counterweight by going further in the other direction.

Group membership cannot be destiny. If it is we're not free.

> All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore the demographics of a profession should exactly match the census.

That is rubbish. A straw man. I've spent more than a decade within the so-called Overton bubble at a university, and this is decidedly not the consensus as I experienced it.

All biology is known to yield population variation. That is obviously true by necessity. However, there are both ontogenetic and phylogenetic influences on outcomes. The progressive/egalitarian view is that the cultural dynamics that result from small population differences (that are in any case too high variance to be reliable for making individual discriminations) should not inhibit phylogeny. Put another way, an individual's self-expression should not be limited by the fact of their membership in a particular category.

Further, while there may well be, in lab settings, reliable significant population level differences, these differences at an individual level may entirely be swamped by cultural influences, rendering them insignificant.

Lastly, the sources of the population differences may, in some instances, be factors that are entirely culturally malleable. Males as a population may have a slight predisposition not to understanding mechanisms better, but instead to finding them interesting, which over the course of development leads to greater competence. This predisposition may be easily changed at a young age by an encouraging mentor or compelling Hollywood film. Similarly, someone may be predisposed to kidney failure not because of bad kidney cells, but because they don't have as strong a compulsion to drink water (a deficit trivially remedied).

What do you mean by "flourish"?

Increasing biodiversity?

How bad does a leader have to be before supporting him is a genuine moral outrage?

How is it baseless and anti-intellectual? If Trump were elected, he would be able to push through an agenda by exercising a significant aggressive minority of the population. This power to summon millions (who call legislators, picket, rally, etc.), who are compelled to participate if only for the spectacle, would be unique among American presidents.

One simple explanation is that procrastination starts as a symptom of breadth-first search behavior (which can look like slow progress, and is slow progress if you have a poor algorithm/memory), and then it gets significantly aggravated by a shame/guilt feedback loop.

Do you have a citation on phones using inertial navigation?

It still requires some cooperation, which means it's subject to game theory and defector risk. And there are numerous after the fact approaches to enforcement.

Just make a $1,000,000 reward for anyone exposing a conspiracy to rig an election, and audit the voter rolls on close elections, and impose stiff penalties for voter fraud.

These are all cheaper and probably more effective than voter ID laws. Strangely, these kinds of approaches come up far less than imposing an ID requirement. Also, mail in voter fraud is a far greater risk, yet is also ignored.

Voter ID laws are a cynical and despicable evil.

You know this because you've been?

What does "cool" mean to you?

Could someone please describe a plausible scenario in which an election is impacted by so-called "voter fraud"?

While elections have been rigged from the very beginning (ballot stuffing etc.), "voter fraud" is an invented concept that didn't exist before passage of the Voting Rights Act.

"voter fraud" requires a conspiracy to be remotely effective. Laws should just target that by offering a big bounty for snitchers.

Because gov't grants are awarded by a committee of people with lots of different opinions, while corporations have only one interest in mind.

Every decision a machine makes benefits from the accumulated organized efforts of hundreds (if not many thousands). In a sense, so too do human decisions, but in practice we can much more quickly improve the decision-making of machines, over time leading to them having the advantage, especially in routinized tasks.

> "Requiring a supermajority is just privileging the side that prefers the status quo."

Rather, requiring a supermajority is to privilege the status quo, period. There are benefits to stability, no matter how it's constituted. These benefits are codified through mechanisms like supermajority votes.

A more rational referendum would have been a far more serious endeavor, perhaps one in which the population voted multiple times.

Big changes should, in general, not be easy to make.

The 18th and 21st amendments to the US Constitution come to mind.

This decision feels very much like it's on the wrong side of history, but perhaps that's just the denial.

What's stopping Britons from having another referendum?