liamconnell

Interestingly, the moment when property was supposedly deemed sacred was the end of the 18th century ("Life, liberty, estate", derived from Locke but was codified in society with the US Constitution and French Revolution). This idea is deeply ingrained in our values, but let's investigate what those founders actually believed.

At the time of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were in agreement about playing down the protection of property. Franklin saw property as a "creature of society"[1]. This is why they changed the language of the Declaration of Independency to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". The last is not meant to be a stand-in for "property" or "estate," it actually derives from a separate clause in the Virginia Declaration of Rights[2]: "life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Jefferson intentionally dropped the property clause in the Declaration of independence, reflecting how he saw property: not an inalienable right.

Entering into the early US, the majority of fiscal revenue was based off of taxing property (there was no income tax). This aligns with Franklin and Jefferson in basically saying that the state has a claim to the property that is possessed by citizens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_... [2] The Virginia Declaration of Rights was an influence on Jefferson's Declaration of Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...

> the engineering-related department consuming the ETL’s output should likely be the ones writing/maintaining it.

This is exactly the author's point. The Data Scientists are consuming the ETL's output, so they should learn how to write and maintain ETL since it isnt very hard or time consuming with modern tools.

Many muslims also believe that the beauty of the Quran's poetry is proof of the existence of God. Although they believe it is explained by the prophetic status of Muhammad, I've always found the belief to be surprisingly humanist for such an old religion, in the same sense as Kreeft's quote.

I'm seeing a lot of comments about the lack of non-MNIST neural network tutorials. Well here's mine. It uses financial data and the goal is to build a trading strategy. Its a work in progress and comments/criticism is welcome.

https://github.com/LiamConnell/deep-algotrading

Anyone have an argument (or the argument Tainter provides) for whether the "trick" that a civilization exploits has to be (1) singular, (2) original, or (3) not exploitable by contemporary civilizations?

And who wants to chime in their two cents about what the USA's "trick" is in maintaining its global pre-eminence?

> You have to get the amount of salt right

Correction: you have to simultaneously have TOO MUCH salt and TOO LITTLE salt. I read David Chang one time...

(just practicing how to spin this article for maximum snobbery)

I studied under the author of this book [1] and I can anecdotally say that I finished with a very strong understanding of the subject. Learning linear algebra and being able to whip out some of the less common theorems has been very valuable to me as someone who uses numpy, pandas and tensorflow regularly.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-Applications-Otto-Bret...

I think its about putting the next generation to work. The Chinese model of manufacturing, which has really been the world's model for two decades, is that cheap labor is more economical than technologically advanced industrial robots. That is eventually going to change, and maybe sooner than later [1].

Then what do you do with half a billion unemployed people? Even doing nothing for them but giving them offices is better than letting their communities decay, even if it loses money in the short AND long term. And who knows, maybe after a few boom and bust tech cycles the innovation labs will actually make something useful and profitable. That's just an added bonus.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966

> Look around you. Every single item you see was given to you by "capitalism".

If (god forbid) you or a loved one gets sick in America, "capitalism" will also take away everything you own to pay medical bills. If you were born in a poorer neighborhood in America, "capitalism" will give you a terrible education, push you into a terrible job market, and do everything it can to keep you from becoming one of the owners of capital. If you want to get an education but you're parents can't pay, you graduate tens of thousands of dollars in debt. If you get old and you dont have a lot of savings, "capitalism" will put you into a shitty retirement home while your kids are too busy working their asses off to visit you.

I'm not even trying to propose an alternative model here, in fact I think the kind of admiration for the vikings that the article pushes is misplaced. I just think that personifying "capitalism" and using the loaded language of "taking responsibility for your life" are pretty irrelevant and counterproductive in the 21st century.

> did the large banks really attack risk systemically? Or did they just line up their bets all in the same direction?

Again they're banks so they don't really line up their bets at all. Like you said, they are mostly making connections. I'm like 75% sure that I'm using the term right if I call them "market makers" when they do their job of making connections. And as market makers, they make money by brokering transactions, even in the abstract sense of the word.

So they can make good markets or stupid inflated markets. A good market is loaning to businesses that want a little boost in growth and packaging that risk for investors. A bad market is lending huge amounts to people while using the house that they are paying off as collateral (sub-prime) and then packaging those assets in a hundred ways and telling your salesmen to push it, making the whole system so complicated that no one knows whats really going on. Most banking actions live in the middle of that.

begin_rant{ Speaking of global risk again. I need to look into it more but the biggest banks play a huge role in making the market in foreign investment especially the relatively new area of "emerging markets". I really think this ends up fucking over small developing economies on so many fronts. * The American/European money crowds out domestic investment, but then at the end of the day when the small country's currency starts inflating (it always does), the debtors owe their debt in dollars which is a terrible situation. * American/Euro money might suddenly disappear when there is an American market scare. Small countries are so small that a blip on the American market can rock them into a crisis. That's why things that only temporarily shocked large companies and banks in the US changed entire political regimes in Argentina and Indonesia in 2001. Can you imagine an entire country (big ones!) more vulnerable to the market than a single US corporation thats actually being publicly traded? * Politicians are humans. What inevitably happens is one political party in a country gets tons of under-the-table (with 21st century nuance of course) money by opening their country up to US investment. Monsanto and Rio Tinto and Starbucks move in and no local companies will ever compete again. History has not been written yet but I have a bad feeling this is what Mauricio Macri wants to do all over again with Argentina. Argentina will become a more favored subject nation to the global powers while the Macri family gets rich. He will deal with a few short-term economic problems while sacrificing the future of the nation to exist without the tyranny of globalization. } end_rant (excuse me)

Making a connection inherits risk. On a small scale, a bank loans money to people and then packages those investments into financial assets which it sells to investors who want to buy it. The mortgages HAVE to be packaged otherwise the investor wouldn't have incentive to buy it from the bank rather than directly lending. And the packaging itself has some level of risk since the actions of the buyers or sellers are unpredictable.

I'm not saying its a great thing, just that its the modern accepted role for big banks. If we take them away no one would be able to ACT on their global view of risk. You can have a global view but be too small to act rationally based on it. But that might not be a bad thing, its not like the current big banks are developing the right financial tools...

I think the bar is a LITTLE higher now. If I could add one skill, its being able to read math language. It's a great skill to be able to read about a new technique on arxiv or a blog and be able to understand it beyond the surface level.

In fact being mathematically literate is really the bee's knees. Its why I suggest anyone in a stem undergrad to take their math department's Real Analysis or (my favorite) Abstract Algebra. The content is rarely relevant any jobs, but then you'll be able to teach yourself almost anything in the future.

> Few academics and laymen regard romantic love as an addiction

I think dozens on pop songs say otherwise.

Jazz: "Like someone in love" "you go to my head" Pop: Kelly Clarkson's "Addicted", Kanye's "Addiction", Kesha "You're love is my drug" (and those are just the "K" artists!)...

> It is either true (and then it'd still true be even if you dislike it) or false (and then that's the important aspect), or maybe something in between that requires some clarifying.

Well first off I dont think anyone's going to come here and wave a scientific article proving or disproving the "laziness" of an entire race (Mediteranean Europeans), so there isnt really a true or false verdict.

"Something in between?" Ok let me expand on OP's "racist analysis." Humans dont think in complete logical arguments they use narratives that align with their understanding of the world. A particularly destructive narrative is one that whole peoples, whole countries, are doomed because of racial degeneracy. Economic growth as well as debt figures that align with that narrative feed it, but the narrative completely ignores historical factors, especially in this case that a group of technocrats came to every country in Europe promising some things that sounded great under a single currency, when in fact it killed the economies of the mediteranean countries which are based on high quality exports while setting the perfect environment for the rise of ikea et al. Now not only are the countries worse off economically than they were before, but they are said to be "culturally unfit" for the 21st century. The world is a complicated place, and simplistic narratives that historically align with something as destructive and ugly as racism should be examined before you say "so what"

The irony in the whole situation is that it was only a half dozen decades ago that much of the US was controlled by southern italian families! These two swede's vision for the future is basically a vanilla version of Sicily and Naples anyway. Government with no power while people network without oversight sounds great, except that its the very power vaccuum that allowed for the rise of Gomorrah, Cosa Nostra, the five american families, and mafias all over the world.

So glad you called that out, I was about to do the same thing. The authors had extremely narrow and simplistic views, especially considering that they carry such lofty tiles as Philosopher and Writer. And at the end of the day, its their narrow views that keep them from seeing the things that will keep their [boring and soul-less] vision of the future from coming to be: I'm thinking of the fact that when people are left to network while the government shrinks they tend to organize criminally. Power vacuums get filled unless you are way more creative than these guys.

But back to parent's flag: Its really easy to see where the right-wing politics from in Sweden and other scandinavian countries by reading this, even though I presume that those guys would consider themselves socially liberal. Its completely infested with unfounded cultural superiority rhetoric.

Based on economic incentives, I would guess that the mining industry would conquer the new frontier way before any commercial space travel for humans--one way or two way. Unfortunately the mining industry today is the scummiest on earth. I honestly hope that Elon Musk and SpaceX get into space mining before say Rio Tinto, just because he deserves the billions more and would probably reinvest it for more socially good projects as well.

My vision of how it could be in [N=no_fucking_clue] decades: Completely unmanned from the beginning (just like mining on earth nearly already is), with a large-scale base on the moon. It starts with mining on the moon that is processed on the moon and shipped to the earth and the infrastructure is set up so that [M] decades later it would be the hub for inerplanetary mining operations as well.

Get building Mr. Musk!

Number 3 doesnt sound like a good idea. It seems like a way to ghettoize a large part of the population. The fact is that there will always be competition to be living physically close to the best community, so a low-cost urban center in the middle of nowhere would turn into a place like Newark.

One of the author's first arguments is a common one, but one that I think is an oversimplification: That after WWI art started depicting the awfulness that Europeans had suddenly been exposed to, and therefore became "unpatronable" in the traditional sense since it wasnt pretty pictures of lily pads anymore.

Look up fin de siecle Vienna if you aren't familiar with it. Decades before the war, artists in every discipline were pushing in weird directions (not necessarily in a bad way!).

I think its important to recognize this. Then more than now art was an important aspect of everyday life, and I dont think they write in history books that "many people in Austria and Germany were going batshit crazy" was an important part of the classic WWI "powderkeg".

Nah I hate that kind of thinking. Someone or some group of people have to be deemed responsible. Here's my thought process with this:

So in China, and every country there are a few relevant players. Farmers, farm owners, politicians, and scientists.

Farmers (laborers) have to survive and most work wages so they arent accountable. Farm owners have to compete and if they dont they go out of business and someone will take their place so they're not really accountable. But its the law that makes the rules of the game and so it is the responsibility of the political class to avoid designing "tragedy of the commons" scenarios.

There are at least SOME good-willed politicians who dont want things like antibiotic-apocolypse. The problem is that they have a ton of scientists whispering different things in their ears so they dont know what issues are big threats and which are scientists trying to get funding into their own field of study. Its therefore also the responsibility of the scientific community to effectively communicate with the political class.

See? At least some people out there arent perfectly rational!

Just had myself an asado (barbecue) here in Buenos Aires the other day! :)

A few things about the culture and article:

The meat is not universally great. One has to find the right butcher- he will be a lifelong friend. Also, the chicken here is really pumped full of hormones, so I hear...

The good meat, however, is great. And it is given the proper respect it deserves. At a proper asado it is served without condiments and enjoyed by all. The asador is a hero when the meat is well-cooked.

Ok, the title of the article might be misleading, but I suggest you actually read the article, because it talks about the evolution of the microbial community that lives inside you, not your genome at all.

To paraphrase the study by Sonnenburg: It is theorized that a depletion of the microbial biodiversity caused by a low-fiber diet is responsible for many chronic diseases. Mice that were fed a low-fiber diet developed less microbial diversity, but if they were put back on a high fiber diet, their microbial community recovered quickly. However, and most revealingly, if they gave birth to a litter while on a low-fiber diet (and therefore with a weak microbial community) the second generation mice were unable to develop a strong microbial community regardless of diet.

The conclusion is that microbes already present in one's body can adapt according to diet. If a microbial species metabolizes fiber and the host does not consume fiber, the microbe will possibly enter a "dormant" (my invented term) state, but it can be recovered to full strength. Still, "dormant" microbes will not be prevalent in the birth canal to ensure transmission to the next generation, so that generation will not have that microbe species regardless of diet. Over generations, this could lead to extinction of entire microbial species.

THIS is the evolution that the article talks about, NOT genome evolution.

> In that time [decades] we'll start altering the general human genome, and likely remove countless inherited conditions out of it either directly or indirectly.

What's the rush? You're talking about altering the human genome, something COMPLETELY IRREVERSIBLE in a single generation. This article asserts that an enormous part of our bodies was barely beginning to be researched five years ago! The reason this hubris is so common is that a few parts of our bodies are relatively simple and easily understood: the circulatory, respiratory and other systems that exist as meat. On the other hand we barely understand the many systems that live in a complex state of delicate equilibrium: endocrine, immune, and microbial which seems to be apart of both of them.

This comment is completely unacceptable and racist at its core.

> ignorant majority ethnic group

In fact Indonesia is has thousands of native tribes that constitute many different ethnic groups with a huge diversity of cultures and languages. These are the NATIVE people of Indonesia: Indonesians.

> rides on the backs of the East Asian immigrant populations that actually value education and hard work

Those Chinese immigrants are notorious in Indonesia for being exploitative businessmen who treat Indonesians, regardless of education level, as an underclass, funnel money out of Indonesia and into China, and hiring exclusively Chinese to work in their businesses. Because of the weak government (Indonesia was admirably non-bloc during the Cold War years, leaving it economically vulnerable), Chinese businesses since the 90s have been able to bargain their way into the country in order to harvest its natural resources while giving as little as possible to the Indonesian people.

> actually value education and hard work

The argument presented in JPKab's comment is a common slander against poor countries. Similar arguments have been made by the US about basically the entire people of Latin America, and by imperialist European countries. But an examination of what motivations are actually driving them reveal the true sentiment: "You're not harvesting your countries resources for me well enough!"

The "absurd laws" that aim to protect the Indonesians people and their land are some of the most promising things, as they are long-term assurances that the country will not grow up to be a two-tiered society, ruled by the Chinese.

JPKab and those who think like him would do better to do business in their own countries rather than forcing their way into countries who dont want them while simultaneously spreading bigoted lies about thousands of tribes and hundreds of millions of people that make up the "majority ethnic group[s]" of Indonesia.

> Almost all diseases that happen after a species' reproductive age is very difficult to select out either in a positive or negative way unless it happens to be strongly genetically linked (either through sharing genes or being very close on a chromosome) to a different positive or negative trait.

Well that's not entirely true. I think humans evolved (and still evolve) on a tribal level. So an individual's traits that strengthen the tribe are also good for the survival of the tribe since one's entire gene pool would be wiped if the neighboring tribe killed all of you, even if the individual is post-reproductive age. I find that most people never talk about evolution on a tribal level like this.

I'm with you. I think that maybe we take in media passively so often these days (movies, music, radio) that when left to our own devices our mind get a little too excited.

Someone correct me if I'm way off, but I've been thinking that leveraged markets and margin trading have more of a negative effect than just creating risk of a domino effect. They also resist change (change that is sometimes needed).

If tons of huge banks have tons of money on the line in leveraged crude oil futures, then there would be resistance to global movement away from fossil fuels. Larger financial markets should in theory provide oil to the gears of the economy, but I think that if the industry becomes so bloated it will actually cause additional friction.

Please point me in the right direction if there is anything written on this topic.

Great article. At the risk of fear mongering, the point about supermarkets was very powerful. "Greed is good" is fine until the money controls the entire infrastructure of society.

I live in Argentina, where so many factories were abandoned in our 2001 crisis that workers decided to re-open many of them. Would American workers have it in them if there were a serious liquidity crisis?

Upvoted because its well thought-out, but here's what I'm thinkin...

> If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.

Sounds like a funny way to try to make the internet more "sophisticated." If you dont like the content of the regurgitation engine, then you wouldnt visit the site and so wouldnt be supporting it.

So something else is at play. I think that a huge portion of the public actually likes the regurgitated content. They come home from work and just want to chill out and be mildly entertained by buzzfeed. So addblockers dont reduce the velocity of the crap engine, they take away your patronage and therefore your vote for what content you want to see.

I think that there is so much low quality on the web because people value it very low. They only pay by viewing adds (and with privacy) so the media produced will reflect that.

Now think about what might happen with contributor. Those that hate viewing adds and some that block them will decide to pay for the add space of the pages they view. Then the value of addsense space goes up since advertisers are more confident that the people seeing the adds will not hate them and the website also gets money from those who are contributors. So the value of content goes up as well and that should bring the quality up as well.

> However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.

You're not really paying google. Google takes a commission, which they deserve, and the money goes to the content creators. Tivo and DVR are bad examples since they actually did end an era in television and were not free so not very widely used for a long time.

My girlfriend just came home and I told her the study about rating yourself 1-10. She replied, "Everyone already knew that. I learned nothing from these two minutes."

Not to be a smartass, but some might find this point of view interesting:

Mathematics never pays attention to what objects ARE, but rather what they DO.