mdeck_

So, in reality, virtually identical to a common-law (US/UK-style) legal system.

“Frag” as a portmanteau of FRagmentation and AGgregation is hardly a non-ambiguous choice of terminology.

> What's more, the 5L detergent can last well over 3 years of daily wash, while the rinse aid can last almost 12 years! Over those time you would have spent £2088 on Bob cassettes, and who knows if they will even be around then.

They certainly will be if even a small percent of their customers buy into their ridiculous subscription model. Look at those sweet, sweet margins!

I am a lawyer, and you’re correct. It’s typically called a “jurisdictional hook.” In certain regards the US Constitution limits the U.S. Congress’s ability to legislate to issues that touch on “interstate commerce.” If it all happens within Montana’s borders, that’s typically for Montana to handle in its own state legislature. So, for the DOJ to investigate something, they have to then satisfy whatever jurisdictional hook that the Congress put in the law, which in turn makes the law constitutional (in the sense of: within the Congress’s jurisdiction to legislate about). Here, the Congress will have required a proof of “use of interstate wires” (or something to that effect).

> Conclusion

> We can see that referees’ bias towards away sides has completely changed without an audience in stadiums.

> Previously, away sides used to get more yellow cards in all leagues, and they also had an inferior fouls to cards ratio. However, without an audience, the disparity has disappeared, and in fact, the trend has reversed in some leagues.

Um, where is the analysis explaining why these circumstances are concluded to be evidence of differential referee treatment of (identical) behavior by the soccer players rather than identical referee treatment of differential behavior by the soccer players? This seems like an enormous premise that—correct or not—is accepted without a moment’s consideration.

–Carl Sagan (which you’ve just slightly misquoted) Credit where credit is due :)

You’ve got your causation backwards.

He made a series of purchases... ok... of course his last purchase was shortly before the story was published. As to this being his last purchase, well of course—why would he keep buying after his insider advantage had evaporated? At that point there would be nothing more to take advantage of. Anyway, this does not show awareness on the part of the reporter.

Yes, the fact that his last purchase was close in time could show that he received timing information, but it could be that he was making lots of purchases over time and simply stopped once the story came out.

You note that he started selling after the scoops were published. Again, this doesn’t prove anything about the reporter’s (non-)complicity. I.e., OF COURSE he started selling after the story published. What did you expect him to do? He was waiting on the story to be able to trade on effects of its publication. Once it was published, the stock’s price would have shifted (presumably upwards) based on those facts—no more reason to hold the stock!

He bought options, which have time decay. Ok, but we don’t know that he bought options expiring within a few days or weeks rather than months. Anyway, these deal scoops were going to come out sooner or later—but reporters want to avoid being scooped, so they typically come out sooner.

Overall, I’m not convinced there’s anything here. Of course a criminal trial would/will make this all clearer...

> What's not being said here is that for the trader to have timed his bets so precisely, the reporter would have had to tell him when the story was coming out.

Based on what are you speculating this? I just looked at the indictment, which is linked in the article. Page 8 shows that the timeline between the relevant inside activity and the article’s appearance in Bloomberg running to multiple weeks or even a month. More generally, I don’t see anything that would require an inside trader to know exactly when a news story on these kinds of topics is going to come out. If they know a stock is likely going way up SOMETIME in the near future, that is enough to conclude that the trade is a sure bet. So, no need for a specific tip (as to article timing) from the reporter, and therefore presumably no need for complicity by the reporter.

*I do not intend this comment to mean I believe the actual reporter actually was not complicit. I don’t know the facts of this case beyond what is stated in the story linked here.

In retrospect, it’s not clear to me why I somehow expected this project to be something more literally arboreal. I even got my hopes up further when I clicked the link and saw that photo of plumerias.

Yet, this project is cool enough that I’m not even disappointed.

The point is that (a buyer expects that) the value of the stock itself is increasing. Whether it pays dividends is not the pertinent question.

Hm. But is there anything particularly special about a hovering ship... a hovering... craft? :)

This is yet another philosophical problem: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/

By definition philosophy has come to refer to the study of things that cannot be resolved by empirical inquiry. So, every time human advancements have ACTUALLY allowed us to answer a question, it ceases to be the realm of philosophy.

For instance, Plato and other Ancient Greek philosophers theorized about the basic building blocks of matter—what their shapes and natures were. That question has become one of physics.

That’s why philosophy is referred to as the Mother of the Sciences.

This hardly makes philosophy worthy of your description as lacking “tangible results.”

It galls me every time I see “neuroscientists”/“neuropsychologists” and the like considering themselves to have essentially discovered the problem of mind-brain duality, fundamental questions about what consciousness is, and so forth, as if philosophers haven’t been carefully studying these topics for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years—and as if many were not continuing to study it in philosophy departments to this day.

This guy for instance seems not to have read much or any philosophy. The interviewer appropriately poses question regarding Searle and Chalmers, but from his answers he doesn’t seem familiar with these quite important thinkers.

I’m genuinely confused—what is it that makes someone who calls themselves a scientist want to avoid having their lit reviews include writings categorized as philosophy?

Your networking equipment example goes to the same point. Why do I care how many bits are transferring per second? I don’t. I want to know bytes, since everything on my computer is measured in bytes.

Regarding media encoding, there I’m less sure. I guess those values were originally in small enough absolute values, and have not continued to climb exponentially, such that measuring in bits maybe continues to make sense.

Anyway, thanks for sharing those examples.

Between this issue, the general untrustworthiness of the reviews, and the fact that I can quite often find a better deal on masking tape, undershirts, or whatever else at my local brick-and-mortar store or a more specialized big-box retailer’s website, I actually rarely shop at Amazon anymore. I do still buy there—especially for certain categories, such as streaming videos—but I used to do SO much of my shopping at Amazon. All in all, Amazon just doesn’t feel to me like the outstanding store, the “shiny object” that I once thought of it as—it feels much more like a typical “rent-seeking” operation. But clearly they aren’t suffering for it—so they must be doing something right. *shrug*

This may be a historical explanation, but it also seems a tacit agreement with the point above, when it says “no one wanted to be the one to switch to a ‘lower’ number.” No one measures anything in kilobits or megabits today (nor has for decades)—except ISPs measuring the speeds they promise to customers.

This is nothing new. Just another example of corporations screwing over consumers with ambiguous/confusing measurements.

See e.g.:

- ISPs advertising network speeds in megabits per second instead of megabytes (who ever uses megabits otherwise???)

- Banks advertising interest-bearing accounts with APY and advertising loans with APR.

Do folks have other good examples? I’m sure there are lots.

Both of these points are mentioned in the article.

It is a not-completely-frivolous argument in this procedural context, you could say. This is not the final determination in the case; it is just a question about whether the law can be enforced right now, while the case is pending. If the ISPs could show e.g. that there was significant harm to them and no harm to CA in temporarily barring enforcement of the law, then the judge might be obligated to rule in their favor. It’s more complicated than this, but this is the general idea anyway.

It’s still a BS argument, to be clear, and good that the judge rejected it...

For the non-lawyers: as the article indicates (but doesn’t really explain), this is a ruling on a request for temporary relief (called a “preliminary injunction”). This is not a final judgment. It can (and presumably will) also be subject to appeal. Nothing remotely final about this. The judge has simply said: “CA, you can go ahead and enforce your law for now.”

Now, this does also mean the judge would quite likely ULTIMATELY rule in CA’s favor. But it is not a guarantee. And, as I said, then there’s appellate and Supreme Court review.

For reference, the 4-element test/standard for a preliminary injunction generally accepted in US courts is set out here:

“[G]enerally a plaintiff seeking preliminary injunctive relief must satisfy a four-factor test: (1) that he or she is likely to succeed on the merits of his claims; (2) that he or she is likely to suffer irreparable harm without preliminary relief; (3) the balance of equities between the parties support an injunction; and (4) the injunction is in the public interest.”

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/wom...

thatsthejoke.png

It is not possible to make baby formula (the only thing besides breast milk that babies under 4 months can eat) at home.

Dante has no living paternal-line descendants. The reason for the unusual (for Italy) double last name Serego Alighieri was to preserve the Alighieri name despite there being only female descendants left at the time (in the 1500s). Source: https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alighieri#Storia_familiare (in Italian)

Fair enough—I think we’re agreed, then! :)

Well, you’ve got all kinds of problems baking at altitude. You may need to make all kinds of adjustments to your recipes. So it feels to me like this is just one of a dozen issues you’ll have.

But yes, I did not mean to endorse measuring by volume—only that you can avoid much of the problem if you follow proper measuring technique. As I noted in my post, I personally use weights when baking.

As for the historical justification for using volumetric recipes: you’re probably overthinking it if you’re connecting it to geography, and especially if you’re connecting it to altitude. More likely the reason would just be that volumetric measuring was easier and cheaper to reproduce until quite recently. Scales can be expensive, can break, etc. Cups are cheap and durable.

The next logical step here, it seems to me, is to scrape tens of thousands of recipes and apply this more broadly. There are, alas, perhaps a dozen or more dimensions along which recipes are going to be difficult to sanitize and normalize—there’s weight vs volume, variations in how to describe similar ingredients, and perhaps worst of all is the actual steps!

But are these challenges insurmountable? Well, maybe a few would limit you in some respects, but it certainly can’t be denied that some intrepid coder-cook could push this concept somewhat further.

You could also turn this all around and have a “consensus recipe generator.” Type in “pesto genovese” and it gives you a best guess of ingredients and amounts, with links to some recipes roughly matching those consensus amounts, perhaps with notable variations/“nearby” recipe clusters (sun-dried tomato pesto? or just the most popular pine nut substitute?) noted too.

Well, it CAN vary quite a lot theoretically, but that’s why there are guidelines on how to measure a cup of flour. https://www.mashed.com/182198/youve-been-measuring-flour-wro... Yet, to your point: when I bake (at least when I bake sourdough, which is virtually all I make), I always measure using a scale, and I measure in grams. No reason to go for imprecision when you don’t have to.

But these guidelines for how to measure flour by volume are also important simply for historical reasons: lots of the most respected cookbooks measure by volume, not by weight.

Just a couple of kilometers. https://goo.gl/maps/je6UmVghPLGGwxMW9