mdemare

> If you reduce the value of your currency by 25%

It is the dollar that has appreciated, not the yen that has depreciated. The dollar has appreciated against most currencies in the last year – probably because people expect interest rate hikes this year. It has nothing to do with Japan per se.

I see a lot of people in this thread claiming that massive QE equals fiscal profligacy, that it means that the Keynesians have gotten exactly what they want.

I see QE more as a band-aid, used because fiscal stimulus is politically unattainable, since Keynesians are out of power nearly everywhere. Hence my comment - it was not meant as a nickpick.

QE is definitely not the opposite of austerity. Fiscal stimulus is.

QE means that the central bank buy up bonds. The hope is that this lowers interest rates on bonds, making it less attractive for banks to hoard bonds instead of lending money to companies wanting to invest.

Krugman doesn't claim that the U.S. has experienced (significant) austerity during the last couple of years, especially compared to Europe. See the chart, which shows that austerity peaked in summer 2011. [1]

[1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/the-obama-bounce...

Japan's economy is growing, albeit slowly.

If there's one country where Uber is needed...

When I was there last year, we were given a list of 5 taxi phone numbers. When you needed a taxi, you'd cycle through the numbers until you found one that 1) answered the phone 2) was available 3) managed to understand where you wanted to be picked up. When we were leaving and needed to catch a bus, I made 15 fruitless phone calls, then asked somebody for a ride.

Some facts about cycling in the Netherlands:

- After dark, head- and taillights are mandatory for cyclists, and you will be fined if you don't have them.

- Cycling on the sidewalk is prohibited. This too is enforced.

- Cyclists in the Netherlands are not generally very respectful of traffic laws - they will run red lights when they can.

- Practically nobody wears helmets.

- 184 cyclist deaths in 2013 (out of +- 10 million active cyclists)

Suppose two men are in a lake, and one man is on top, pushing the other man down below the water surface.

Is the position of the man on top infinitely preferable to the position of the other? Absolutely!

Is that an argument for acting as the man on top? I wouldn't say so.

1. Higher wages would lead to more expensive (and therefore lower) exports, and to higher consumption, leading to higher imports. The government can cause wages to rise by raising the minimum wage, raising the salary of its employees, and hiring more government workers (e.g. for infrastructure projects).

2. The assumption that Germany's high saving is good for Germany is debatable. If Germans save more than they consume, some other nation must consume more than they save. Germany has been, and might be again in the future, forced to bail out those countries.

3. I can also recommend the Khan Academy lectures on economics.

Luckily, both crocodiles and tigers eat pythons, so this problem should be easily solved.

And because it worked for you, it'll work for everybody...

Isn't that obvious?

Pull Requests! Can you imagine a democracy editing its laws through pull requests and code review?

Salamanca Spanish. Of course, there are 30 dialects of Spanish, many of which are incomprehensible, just like lisp.

Interesting metaphor.

However, the difference is when you expect a large influx of water in the future (e.g. the company is undervalued). Then tipping the container will cause each share to rise much, when the water arrives, than if you would drop the lid.

The same applies in reverse when the company is overvalued.

Also, people who can't pronounce voiced consonants at the end of syllables (such as german, dutch, french people) can't help but hear it as FuckBugs.

"Ve still neet a buck trecker, I vas finking about Jira, or do you haef a better idea?" "Yes, I recommend FuckBugs!"

How is it news when the country's most infamous court awards damages to patent trolls? They always do that, and then the defendant always appeals. Boring. Predictable. Not News.

Relatively easy, i.e. compared to viruses.

I agree that soldiers and sailors are not particularly productive in a country that's been at peace for quite some time.

Nevertheless, if you've got potential candidates who make stuff that the rest of the world is willing to pay for, maybe you should hire them either way. They'll pay for themselves after all.

And if you're going to hire them either way, why fire the sailor? (Unless of course it's the sailor you want to hire for a more productive endeavor...)

"Jobs for young people" is not something that's supposed to cost money. The value of what employees produce is supposed to exceed their salaries.

Higher tax compliance would help the government pay their bills, but it would in equal measure harm the people's ability to pay their bills.

Greece's biggest problems are not high debt payments, they are 25% unemployment, and GDP having dropped 27% from its peak.

How would firing soldiers and sailors help with their unemployment rate?

In the U.S. average inflation over the last century has been 3.2%, while the average interest rate of 10 year treasuries has been 4.9%, so you'd been able to grow your fortunes 5.4 times in real dollars, at a rate of 1.7% per year. That rate is smaller than the average rate of GDP growth, however.

So, after investing your money for a century, you'd be a lot richer than in 1915, but you'd own a smaller slice of the pie.

How about using affiliate links for products that are relevant to your audience? E.g. books about programming, hardware, etc...

no_future (dead) says:

I've actually tried both Postgres FTS and Elasticsearch(in conjunction with a Postgres DB) and found Elasticsearch easier for search. It's much more robust - for my specific case I needed a bunch of Japanese text to be searchable alongside english text; Postgres has very poor support for this - and its API is excellent and its very quick and painless to set up(documentation is not stellar though). You don't have to worry about things like vectors or indices with ES, you can just put the data in and it will be easily searchable, and it's miles more efficient when searching across large data sets. It Java-based so it is a pretty big resource hog though, so I can see the advantage of someone who just needed very lightweight search for their project using tsearch.

To all those cynics who bitch about the price of this space mission: this mission cost $74M in total. India has a population of 1252M, and a per capita income of $1500.

That means that after paying for this mission to Mars, Indians have still $1499.40 left to spend on other things.

Now stop bitching.

When I was sixteen, I attended open house classes for computer science for both universities in Amsterdam, the UvA, and the VU. At the UvA, they let us draw Mickey Mouse in Pascal on an ancient Mac.

At the VU, Andy Tanenbaum gave a lecture on operating systems, and handed out floppy disks with Minix at the end. All I knew then was DOS. Mind blown. Thank you ast!

I put a few outdated textbooks outside with the trash in Amsterdam, and when I came back after getting groceries, there was this homeless guy sitting on the curb, enthralled in Structure of Computer Organization.

3 tweets this year is not what I would call active...

XCom is also available on PC, Mac, and last-gen consoles. I bought it for all three, but I prefer it on the iPad.

"From what I'm seeing, the entire US Taxi/Limo market is $11bn in value." That sounds incredibly low. That's twice the value of KING, and cabs are a lot bigger than Candy Crush.

Maybe you mean the market is $11bn/year in revenue (or even in profits)?