natnat

I worked as a manager in the USCB for a few months last year, so I think I can give a little insight as to why the Census is so expensive, and why we didn't use an online form.

Virtually all of the money spent taking the Census was on enumerating non-responding households, hiring people to go door-to-door to count people. Only a few million were spend mailing out forms.

The problem with online submissions is that it's quite difficult to uniquely identify people online, and a large portion of the population doesn't use computers. It's also expensive to go through records of people who submitted both online and mail-in forms with slightly different entries and determine what is and isn't a duplicate.

Government software projects are also very expensive. I know you could throw this thing together in about an hour, but this isn't the same thing as the US Census. The Census doesn't get to assume that everyone uses a Google account that's tied directly to their real-life identity, and they need assurance that their software is extremely secure. It doesn't justify the obscene prices many contractors charge, but keep in mind that most corporations overpay for software, too (e.g. Oracle database)

There's a reason the government doesn't offer to pay people to turn in their census forms. It incentivizes people to turn in multiple forms, making the count less accurate.

There's also not much utility to a form that anyone can customize. Sometimes, when you're dealing with 310 million people, it's easier to treat them as cattle even if they really are all unique snowflakes.

Doesn't burning nuclear waste just turn it into a gas or a pile of ash with the same radioactive elements? Burning is a chemical reaction, so the actual nuclei of the atoms shouldn't be changed at all.

The "funeral excuse" section of the website has a logo for "Fisher & Sons Funeral Home" that's appropriated directly from the HBO show Six Feet Under.

The headline, perhaps, but the article itself is a very good read. It's more about what made Buffett successful and what makes a good business a good business than about plutocracy. The plutocracy bit was a sort of throwaway line in the middle of the interview used as a linkbait headline. But the interview as a whole was a lot less political than you'd expect from the headline.

Airlines may have pretty big revenues, but their profit margins are tiny, and at the end of the day, net profit is what matters to investors. In 2010, Google only made $30 billion in revenue, which is only a tiny bit more than Delta airlines made. But Google is worth $184 billion, while Delta is only worth $8 billion.

The costs of servers scale extremely well, while the costs of airplanes and jet fuel don't. So web companies have much higher potential profits than airlines, and they're consequently worth a lot more.

Groupon is worth a whole lot more than Twitter because it has a realistic way to make boatloads of money. Twitter is influential, but that doesn't mean its stock is worth a lot of money. As far as I can tell, Twitter's business plan is something along the lines of, "advertising or something?". Groupon takes 50% of the money from each groupon sold.

Crocs, Inc., the company that makes those awful rubber shoes, has a higher market cap than The New York Times Company. That doesn't mean NYT is less important than Crocs, but it does mean that it is not as good at turning a profit.

Most physical infrastructure is insanely costly to create in the first place. If a utility charges too much money for your liking and you don't have a couple billion to compete with them, tough shit.

The infrastructure of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter could be replicated by a small team of smart developers in a matter of months, probably costing only a few million dollars. The only thing they have going for them is network effects, which are less powerful than we think when there is a viable competitor (e.g. MySpace being overtaken by Facebook).

Risk-taking isn't one of those things that's universally bad or universally good. For entrepreneurs, who have little to lose and a lot to gain, most risk-taking is good. For established companies, which have a lot to lose and a lot to gain, it's much more of a balancing act.

There are a lot of risks that have a moderately large upside and a huge potential downside, that tends to be delayed, that a lot of CEOs are given a lot of incentives to take. Mark Hurd with HP comes to mind: it's pretty risky to cut payrolls, gut R&D budgets, and focus mainly on really high-margin products like overpriced ink. The upside is a big bump in profits, but the downside risk is making your employees hate the company and getting killed when someone else starts selling slightly less overpriced ink. The downside tends to be delayed a bit, though, so CEOs who make $25m and get a golden parachute don't need to worry about it.

Whoops, I totally misread that.

>"Many people can work after one beer, but I doubt many people can do serious knowledge work very productively after four or five."

This might just be because I'm a student, but I can't remember the last time I got any serious coding done before five in the afternoon.

Anti-trust laws are enforced when and only when the political pressure from people who feel like they're being abused by a monopoly exceeds the political pressure from that monopoly's lobbyists.

First of all, it's the Federal Reserve, not congress, who is limiting transaction fees. Second of all, 12 cents is not an unreasonably low cost for a transaction. The payment networks cost virtually nothing to operate, and this becomes abundantly clear when you look at the profit margins of companies like Visa and MasterCard, which are higher than virtually any other company out there.

There is very little innovation in payment networks. There are established players -- Visa and MasterCard -- who charge merchants 1% or more of every purchase made. They pass along much of this money to banks, and payment networks essentially end up competing on how high their fees can possibly be so that banks choose their brand of card. And because the payment networks demand that merchants charge the same price for cash or card, retailers are forced to increase their prices for consumers who pay in cash.

If there were real competition, we would see payment networks competing to lower their fees. But you don't see that.

You can require anyone trying to sign up to complete a reasonably difficult programming problem. It could either be sandboxed on the server, like Facebook's engineering puzzles, or require a short output like Project Euler. This would drive away people who can't do FizzBuzz and nontechnical people who want to hire someone to make Facebook for dogs or whatever.

I think it's something like saying, "I'm not a feminist, but I think women are people too.". Environmentalism, like feminism, tends to be associated with a lot of fringe people who believe crazy things, even if the mainstream of the movements are totally reasonable things. A lot of people see organizations like the Earth Liberation Front or whatever and thing that's what environmentalism is about, when it's really just about giving a shit about something we all need.

Before saying that nuclear power isn't safe enough, consider where we get most of our electricity from today: coal. Coal may have been around a long time, but it is far more dangerous than nuclear power. The fly ash produced by coal burning often contains substantial concentrations of uranium (not too bad) and radium (very bad), as well as all sorts of other toxic but non-radioactive chemicals like lead.

Although there is a lot more net radiation coming from all the fly ash we produce that there is from our nuclear reactors, the EPA doesn't bother to treat fly ash as hazardous waste, so most people don't think it's scary. This means we already have a bunch of radioactive waste dumped into our landfills without much oversight at all.

While nuclear waste is very dangerous, there isn't a whole lot of it, and it's quite safe when it's stored properly in a radiation-sealed container. It doesn't end up in our landfills, or our air supply. It's a point source of pollution, which makes it much easier to take care of, and it is much nicer to leave future generations some concentrated, shielded radioactive waste in remote areas than to leave them tons of low-level waste in their water supply.

I'm an advocate of solar energy, and nuclear power is a hell of a lot less safe than I'd like. But as long as we're burning coal, we should be worried more about the risks of that, even though they may be less scary-seeming, because they truly are more dangerous.

Demand for grains is actually quite elastic. When the price of things like corn and wheat is low, farmers feed them to animals and people consume more meat. When the price increases, people consume less meat and more grain, and in doing so, consume a lot less grain.

In economies where people are too poor to afford meat, fluctuating food prices are a much bigger issue. But in the US, we use more food than we need to in order to enjoy a luxury commodity.

OPEC also has an interest in keeping oil prices low over time. When oil prices are higher, people start investing in more efficient technology, reducing their overall need for oil, and consequently, OPEC's potential for political pressure.

I think poverty may have a bigger effect on test scores than race. If you break down the PISA scores by state, the three lowest performing states are Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia. While Mississippi has a huge black population, New Mexico is only 2% black and West Virginia is only 3%. While New Mexico is 44% hispanic, West Virginia is almost entirely white non-hispanic. One thing these three states have in common, though, is that they are all very poor.

There is definitely a correlation between a higher population of blacks and lower test scores. But there is also a strong correlation between higher rates of poverty and lower test scores, and a very large number of hispanics and blacks are poor.

Black students in Massachusetts perform much better than black students in Mississippi. Virginia, which is nearly 20% black, is one of the top-performing states, while West Virginia, which is 96% white, is near the bottom.

While the US is richer than most of Europe, our income inequality means that we have a much higher poverty rate. When you control for poverty, the U.S. outperforms every other country tested.

A lot of grocery stores get charge money for shelf space, though, which brings in guaranteed revenue in exchange for more expensive products.

Oh wait, you were agreeing with me. Sorry.

Apple and Google may mark their apps up less than the average department store or grocery store, but it marks them up a hell of a lot more than most highly-efficient retail operations. Walmart marks up around 20%, and Costco never marks its products up more than 14%. And actual retail stores need to pay for their property, their employees, transportation, and utilities to keep their stores running. Apple and Google have none of these expenses. Additionally, both Apple and Google only operate app stores as side businesses to help sell their high margin hardware or get people to look at ads.

I don't see what's wrong with congresspeople being wealthy. In fact, I'd rather see congresspeople be richer than they currently are. When a congressperson has more money, it becomes much more expensive to buy their favor with campaign contributions and expensive lobbyists, and they are less likely to be pulled into lobbying themselves after they quit.

It's pretty much impossible to bribe a billionaire.

Google takes all of AdWords, since it's on their own site. They take a 32% cut of AdSense.

The thing is, advertisers could use other channels to put ads up on the web. They can advertise with Chitika or whatever and get a bigger cut than they would with Google. They typically don't, because AdSense adds a lot of value by targeting the ads well. On the other hand, if you want to sell software on an iOS device, the only way is through the app store. Apple doesn't need to add any value to protect their 30% cut from competition because they don't allow competitors.

I don't really see how much damage hackers could do with quant code if they don't have the capital to execute significant trades.

If they're working independently, there is no way they could have anywhere near the amount of capital as Morgan Stanley. If they're stealing the code on behalf of the Chinese government, we should probably be more worried that the Chinese government is actively trying to steal from American banks.

I wasn't really referring to the article in particular; I was more just ranting about something that I was thinking about before that the article reminded me of.

I think the problem runs a bit deeper than people thinking they're experts when they're not, though. I think when most people try to diagnose themselves, they look online for symptoms and such. If they already have some conviction in their diagnosis, they might think that they should also have other symptoms when they don't, or start noticing borderline things that they otherwise would easily ignore. Then, when they finally go to the doctor, their list of self-reported symptoms is no longer a list of what they independently noticed but a laundry list of whatever they read on webmd.

I'd be interested in hearing if you think this is actually the case, since you definitely have more experience and knowledge in it than I do. I'm basing most of this off of the personal experience of a few of my friends and the modicum of knowledge I have from a few clinical psychology classes I took in college.

I've become really disillusioned with clinical psychology because of things like this. There are certainly people with specific personality types. In this instance, we have brilliant people who don't like to follow other people's arbitrary rules, and are attracted to new information. There are also certain people who will stay up for a week at a time, binging on cocaine and meth and driving to Mexico without sleeping and then becoming nearly suicidal for a few weeks after that.

The first person has a lisp-like personality. The second person has bipolar disorder. The two sort of resemble one another, but in the lisp programmer's case, they aren't doing anything really harmful to themselves or anyone else. They aren't hurting anyone, they aren't hurting themselves seriously; they're just acting a little quirkily. They might be bipolar-like, but they don't have a disease like the person who goes on cocaine binges and then tries to kill himself does.

The same principle applies with ADHD. Some people literally cannot sit still for a minute, and will disrupt every class they're in because they simply cannot pay attention to the work. This behavior is a problem for themselves and others. However, most people have some trouble concentrating on things they find boring. It's practically tautological.

The problem is, when we start using medical disorders to describe personalities, we conflate the two. Suddenly, everyone has a disease. This isn't a problem in itself, but we tend to try to fix these diseases with medication. If we try to give every lisp programmer some lithium to cure his bipolar behavior, he's going to become substantially less brilliant (lithium taken early on tends to knock off a few IQ points). If we give him adderall to treat his supposed ADHD, he might end up getting addicted to amphetamine.

I think we really need to accept the fact that some brilliant people are going to have problems no matter what, and they are fundamentally part of their personality. I don't think teaching a lisp programmer Python is going to make him write code more consistently and still write code that's just as beautiful. I don't think we can slice the "tortured" part of "tortured genius" off without cutting off some of the "genius" with it.

>But consider: even a mildly avid Library Guy might visit once a week. Add a couple of thousand of that type, and we've covered 25% of the visits with 6000 people. 25% are using the internet. The other half? Declining.

>Sorry, that just slipped out. Didn't mean to ruin your day with more facts.

Those aren't facts. Those are numbers you just made up.

I was up until recently a bus-riding apartment-dweller, and my driver's license is from out of state. I was able to get a library card with my voter registration card, which I got with my electricity bill. In Boston, you can get it with just about any form of documentation, including a credit card, a health insurance card, a student ID, or a photocopy of your lease agreement, and it's free to sign up.

It's a huge problem that homeless people can't get registered to vote, but I don't really see how shutting down libraries is going to solve any problems for the homeless.

Like I said before, if you can't prove residence because you're homeless, you're probably better off reading the books inside the library anyway. Anyone can do that, regardless of residence.

You really seem to hate libraries. In a thread with thirteen comments (as of now), you've posted seven of them, mostly in response to your own posts. Do you think you could constrain everything to one main post and responses to what other people say? It gives casual lurkers the impression that there is a consensus of opinion against libraries, when there's really just one really vocal person.

I don't know about your community, but in everywhere I've lived, library cards are free. I'm pretty sure anywhere they aren't free, the fees are pretty nominal (i.e. $2-$10 every few years or if you lose your card).

Anyone can look at books inside of the library, though, regardless of citizenship or being able to afford the zero to ten bucks every few years they need to pay to take books home. For the homeless, this isn't even much of an issue, because the library is probably the best place they could read.

It's often more helpful to explain why things work in terms of the physics we understand right now that not at all. Sure, it's dissatisfying to hear "the arrows can't stretch because that's the way it is", but it's a useful metaphor that can help explain time dilation and why we can't go faster than light. Physics answers often end up with "because that's the way it is", but that doesn't mean that the things you've learned up until then are useless.