The problem with the world isn't too many physical credit cards. It's too many lines of credit.
217 karma · joined May 20, 2011
http://mikegagnon.com
I was implicitly assuming founders of non-profits care about salary. I think it's very admirable that there are people willing to forsake salary for a greater social good. It sounds like this might describe the Watsi crowd.
I am only intimately familiar with one non-profit, whose founder spent years launching her non-profit --- with the financial support of her spouse's salary. I have heard anecdotally of other non-profits whose launch was only possible because the founder was financially supported outside of the non-profit.
But it doesn't have to be this way. I don't think it's intrinsic that potential founders must choose between salary and launching a non-profit. For example, founders could make a salary working part-time for for-profit companies and spend the rest of their time running their non-profits.
Maybe YC could help facilitate such work relationships. I think it would grow the pool of people willing to pursue non-profit endeavors.
My only point is that while there is a __financial__ incentive for for-profit founders to eschew short-term salary, there is no __financial__ incentive for non-profit founders eschew short-term salary.
Despite my financial analysis, I still think this initiative could great for non-profits. I am really excited and optimistic to see what comes out of it.
Venture capital economics is premised on founders accepting low initial salaries based on the hope for long-term big payoffs. Which makes it OK for seed funding to be very small (on the order of tens of thousands).
However, non-profits have no hope for long-term big pay offs and therefore have no financial incentive to seek small amounts of seed funding.
In other words, it is sensible for a for-profit startup founder to accept zero salary (or close to it). However, it is nonsensical for a non-profit startup founder to accept close-to-zero salary.
I believe the YC non-profit initiative could still be beneficial to non-profits for the sake of mentorship, networking, etc. But I don't think many non-profit founders will drop their day-job salaries to launch YC non-profit startups.
Edit: s/sensical/sensible/g
"The New York Times and ProPublica said they were asked not to publish their findings by intelligence officials who argued that their foreign targets might switch to newer forms of encryption or communications if the NSA tactics were revealed. 'Some specific facts' were removed, the New York Times said. The articles do not say which mainstream encryption systems have been effectively broken."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/05/net-us-usa-securit...
For example, scientists tend to hold the belief that the laws of the physical universe are constant. But in fact, there is no __logical__ reason to believe that. It is merely an inductive belief that could be violated tomorrow. The theory of constance transcends scientific experimentation and logical proof; it is simply held as an axiom (which could plausibly be wrong).
Beyond logic and science, the multiverse theory is just as plausible as the universe theory. Your intuition tells you that simplicity implies a universe, where others see that simplicity implies a multiverse, where still others find no reason to believe that reality is rooted in simplicity at all.
This paradox does not say anything about the objectiveness of reality. Rather it just points out an interesting scenario in which individual perceptions of objective reality won't match up.
Thank you! Yes, I made the UI. It's open source: sidenote.io
> I like the idea of the doorman but what if you could somehow pass back useful math to the client?
I think it would be great to have clients perform useful computations instead of just burning cycles. But that's not MVP, even for a research project.
However it would be bad.
Under-committing resources (thus removing the need for an OOM killer) will NOT lead to a net gain compared to over-committing resources (and thus requiring an OOM killer of some sort).
If we are unwilling to overcommit resources then it would be woefully uneconomical to run algorithms that have bad worst-case performance (because to avoid over committing you would necessarily need to assume the worst case is encountered every time).
It's just not feasible to avoid algorithms that have bad worst-case performance. Rather, we need to develop better abstractions for dealing with components (e.g. computations, programs, processes, threads, actors, functions etc.) that go over budget. Here's my attempt at developing a better abstraction for web servers: mikegagnon.com/beergarden
Ultimately, we need to treat every system like a soft real-time system, because at the end of the day every program has timeliness requirements and has resource constraints. The current POSIX model does not provide such abstractions and I think that's why we have these debates about OOM killers.
Even though the game was "pointless" (aren't all games) I think it lends a surprisingly deep allegory for life, community, and collaboration.
I think the game (and our collective response to it) is fascinating. I would love to study how adding/removing game elements affects players' and observers' emotional responses.
I find it fascinating that this article compares the labor system more to socialism than to slavery.
Humans have an amazing capacity to hold contradictory views.
> Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine? (honest question, I don't understand)
If you disown your government, you relinquish any hope of fixing it through democracy.
People lie all the time, to themselves and to everyone else.
That's not how democracy works though. Fundamentally, democracy is premised on mistrust in authority (hence voting citizens, checks and balances, the bill of rights, etc.) In a democracy, the citizens aren't expected to blindly trust the authorities. The citizens must be informed, the citizens must make their own judgements, and then they will vote for legislators and executives who share their platforms.
I believe the government's stance is "but if we debate these issues publicly, it will tip our hand to the terrorists, which would defeat the whole purpose of mass surveillance in the first place." That's a legitimate concern.
However, my stance is that in a democracy not every form of law enforcement and secret surveillance is possible. If a law or policy only succeeds if it is kept secret from the citizens, then that law or policy is incompatible with democracy. Only that which can be publicly debated can be made law.
The key in debating these issues is that opponents and advocates need to discuss and debate the issues without assuming each other are evil. And everyone must maintain an open mind. Because otherwise, we will never find ways to overcome our differences and address the root issues (differing values and concerns).
To me it seems like they share some commonalities, but also have significant differences.
Belloc's main thesis seems to be that the Mass Media is "the true governing power in the political machinery of the State, superior to the officials in the State, nominating ministers and dismissing them, imposing policies, and, in general, usurping sovereignty — all this secretly and without responsibility."
I believe Manufacturing Consent somewhat agrees with that thesis, but Manufacturing Consent goes further by explaining how business interests align with mass media and government, and how it results in propaganda.
I haven't read "The Free Press" so perhaps there are greater similarities than what I could glean from the short NYT book review. After all, both "The Free Press" and the Propaganda Model predict that NYT aren't incentivized to give a fair review of "The Free Press."
I agree with her.
I think it is important to realize that authorities aren't necessarily caricatures of evil like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers. I don't believe Gen. Keith Alexander is conspiring to undercut democracy. I believe he is earnest but misguided. And I believe the present institution rewards and promotes those who are earnest and misguided. I believe it is simply an emergent phenomenon.
Of course there exist evil people who will intentionally abuse their power for selfish gain. I do not believe though that blatant evil is the dominant force in the world. I think the most common case is that there are just people in power who are trying to do something "good," yet they share different values and concerns than their opponents.
How could someone be "good" yet conduct mass surveillance? (1) The belief that terrorism represents a grave threat, (2) the belief that mass surveillance is the best way to combat terrorism, and (3) the belief that their implementation of mass surveillance doesn't represent a significant threat to civil liberties.
This is important to consider when you oppose someone's actions and policies. It won't be productive to assume your opponent is evil. Rather, it will be better to have an honest intellectual discussion and debate about your values and the pragmatic dangers of secrecy and mass surveillance.
Rather, the risk is that surveillance, censorship, intimidation, selective law enforcement, and so on are targeted at specific political opponents --- such as Aaron Swartz, Barrett Brown, Glenn Greenwald, Marin Luther King Jr. and so on.
Such authoritarian harassment presents a straightforward threat to democracy because it stifles political dissent.
Democracy is incompatible with the stifling of political dissent.
I believe it accurately predicts mass media's biases in this situation.
The propaganda model says that propaganda is an emergent phenomenon in democratic societies. Similar to how macro ant-colony behavior emerges when individual ants follow simple pheremonal rules --- propaganda emerges when journalists, managers, PR agents, government officials, etc. each optimize for their local objective functions.
The relationships between all the agents in the system are complex, but ultimately, according to the propaganda model, mass media's incentives align with business and government incentives.
Sure, I could give someone a dollar and that person could use it to buy a small portion of their last hit of heroin which finally ends up killing that person.
This message is saying that I am responsible (at least partially) for that person's death.
The bigger causes of that person's death is that this person is a heroin addict, and something caused this person to be a heroin addict, and that someone is selling heroin, and that someone is making heroin, and so on and so on....
When you account for all the causal factors that led to that person's death, this one dollar is just the straw that broke the camel's back. The real cause of the death is all the other factors that brought that person to become addicted to heroin to the point of overdose.
If the government printed money and gave it directly to the impoverished it would be equivalent to a tax on everyone else (and the wealthy would experience the largest absolute wealth loss).
Money is only useful in so much that it represents a fraction of the total money supply. It represents a kind of point system for the distribution of wealth. I might own one trillionth of the total money supply, whereas a more wealthy person might one one millionth of the money supply.
Thus, when you print money it reduces everyone's wealth (except for the new money holder). So let's say today there is $1 trillion in the money supply, and I (the government) print another trillion and give it directly to the impoverished. The value of every dollar has just been halved. So every millionaire has essentially become a half millionaire.
So yes, if you printed $1 trillion and gave it to the impoverished it would be equivalent to a tax on everyone else (and the wealthy would experience the largest absolute wealth loss).
However, in today's banking system newly created money disproportionately ends up in the hands of the wealthier. In this way, creating money (today) is a tax on the impoverished and the lower earners in society. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation