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pierre_Mon Portal as a required college text

It's also boring, ugly, and at a level of sophistication roughly equivalent to a depressed fourteen-year-old kid's poetry

Waaah, life sucks And you're going to die Isn't it horrible And meaningless?

Portal at least has some craft to it.

pierre_Mon Chile Wants to Borrow US Entrepreneurs for $40,000

How is it "borderline scam"? How are they hoping to profit at your expense by offering you $40K and then not letting you spend it?

pierre_Mon Chile Wants to Borrow US Entrepreneurs for $40,000

Isn't the scale of it comparable to YCombinator?

YC certainly gets a lot of mentions here (not entirely unrelated to the fact that they run the site, but still...).

pierre_Mon East India Company brand returns after 135-year absence

At its peak, the company employed a third of the British workforce and was responsible for a huge tranche of global trade.

I knew it was big, but a third of the British workforce? That's insane.

Anyway, I welcome the East India Company back. I realise it has almost nothing in common with the original entity, but I personally might buy their tea if it becomes available here, just for the illicit non-PC pro-colonialism thrill.

pierre_Mon An 18 Billion Mile Journey is almost complete.

"Same position in space" isn't well-defined anyway. There's no fixed set of coordinates permeating the entire universe. But it's clear enough what is meant in this case.

I wonder, though, it should be in the same position in the sky, right (after accounting for the Earth not necessarily being in sync with regard to its rotation)?

I'm not sure what you mean "after accounting for the Earth not necessarily being in sync"; since it isn't in sync it won't be in the same position. But if you were viewing it from the centre of the Sun, then yes, it would be in the same position in the sky.

pierre_Mon Why Drinks Taste Better When Sipped Through A Straw

OK, that's part of the answer: now why do some other drinks (beer and wine spring to mind) taste worse through a straw?

pierre_Mon [dead]

It's not really nitpicking, "easiest" isn't well-defined. Quickest, lowest effort, or highest probability of working? I know a way to make a million dollars in the next 24 hours, but its probability of working is very low. I also know a way of making a million dollars with 99.9% probability, but it involves decades of hard work and thrift. I also have several intermediate plans, which still involve a lot of hard work and a probability of success which I am frankly completely unqualified to estimate. And finally I have several high-probability low-effort quick ways to do it, like the grandparent, which are nonetheless contingent on you having other things lined up in your life (eg a millionaire who wants to marry you, or rich parents, or a chest of pirate gold buried in your backyard.)

Which one would you like?

pierre_Mon [dead]

Trite BS. I don't know what the going conversion rate between pain and dollars is, but I'm sure if you go down to your local homeless shelter you can find someone who has suffered many millions of dollars' worth of pain and doesn't have two dimes to rub together.

pierre_Mon [dead]

Why, that's easy.

1. Get a job that pays $50,000 a year.

2. Live off the first $20,000 a year.

3. Put the remaining $30,000 a year into the highest-yielding savings account you can find.

4. After about thirty years, you will have a million dollars. Enjoy it!

That is the easiest, damn-near-risk-free, way to make a million dollars. If you can get a job that pays more than fifty grand, you can save more money each year and get there even faster.

But I really hope you're not expecting some kind of get-rich-quick scheme here.