polymatter

If your roads are an obstacle course then it sounds like they shouldn't have cars on because they're clearly not wide enough. That's endangering the lives of all traffic, not just cyclists.

Social condemnation of torture would be a great start. But unfortunately the average Joe strongly believes that its easy to tell if someone is holding out and that torture is an effective way of extracting information if they were. Programmes like 24 reinforce this image (but are not really to blame - they would hardly be popular if they were realistic).

Extending such social ostracism to descendants is ridiculous though. It wouldn't deter the torturers (many of whom probably believe they are doing what is necessary) and would just lead to witch hunts. You'd have better luck with "I'm not going to the prom with you, cause you support torture, so I have no idea what other perverse ideas you think are ok".

I'd be interested to hear any other potential solutions. Seems to me the choice is either:

a) basic income, or

b) all the unemployed who can not get a job in the new economy are given a government job. The work in the job doesn't matter, as long as it provides a fig leaf to allow the government to give them the money they desperately need to live.

If its not entirely clear, I think that these non-jobs are are an unfair and incredibly expensive way of giving out benefits. The richer would be better off with a basic income (free money! smaller more efficient government meaning taxing the rich less!). The poor would be better off with a basic income (no social workers or benefit admins judging you! future is predictable so able to start investing for the future!). Its only annoying for those of us in the middle, those who will not benefit much from a basic income (because it won't be a huge amount of money, our taxes are unlikely to decrease) but will also not see much benefit from it (I probably already had a safety net in terms of friends and family, and the basic income will be too small to support the lifestyle I am used to anyway).

I'm not sure if it was edited, but reference to China has now gone.

> This is essentially the problem which you are seeing from a different angle and that's okay.

Having thought about this, I think you're right. I can see how keeping salaries secret doesn't cause the issues I suggested it does. Sorry, reading my post now I come across as needlessly combative.

Personally, being transparent about salaries makes me trust the management more. I think more transparency is generally a good thing and I don't think there are any big negatives to keeping salaries secret. But it doesn't cause the issues I suggested it does.

You are right I shouldn't refer to a woman in her early 20's as a girl. Its a habit when I thought "girl" meant, woman younger than me. Sorry.

Horses are expensive to maintain, even if they are gifted to you for free. But people use all sorts of basis for gossip.

But keeping salaries secret leads to rumour and speculation. How is that better? Especially when you make it so taboo to talk about, it just makes it more exciting. Especially so since you can't hide the externalities.

I'll give you an example. When we learnt a girl from finance owned her own horse, the gossip around the office was not how did she skrimp and save, but what she needed to do to whom to receive such an obviously large salary. I have no doubt she did just save her money well but thanks to keeping everyone's salary secret, we have vicious rumours instead of fact.

If you are really hiring people who honestly believe that everyone apart from them contribute little to the company, then you are hiring incredibly arrogant people. If you are really hiring people who honestly would be surprised that some people earn more than others, then you are hiring incredibly naive people.

fwiw, I earn £27,000 as a C#/Java developer in central London and I know I am extremely poor at salary negotiation so I expect I am grossly underpaid. This causes me resentment. Salary negotiations involve me having to justify myself or backhandedly belittling the contributions of my colleagues. ie. exactly the sorts of problems you believe that keeping salaries secret solves.

There is only one reason for keeping salaries secret, and that is to keep wages down. That benefits employers, and it benefits those who are great at negotiating.

I think his ultimate point was that embik is being naive. That it is just a simple coverup with a thin, obviously untrue excuse.

> so financially ignorant

I agree, and specifically I think of the confusion between gross profit margin and net operating cashflow. Tesla makes money on every car sold (as they actually have a gross profit) but have been spending cash really fast (as they have a negative cashflow). All this really tells you is that Tesla is investing a lot of money, which is to be expected for a company that is trying to spearhead a paradigm shift within the entire automotive industry.

Also, since one big weakness in Tesla is whether it relies on government subsidies and loans for its continued survival. Thats something I don't understand and if I had a horse in this race, I'd be weary of a company that relies on the whims of political support in order to survive.

what made you change your opinion? I love it when there are translation notes on screen. It feel inclusive to explain to me what's going on.

I can't speak Japanese, am not embedded within current popular Japanese culture and did not go to a Japanese high school and therefore there are references which I will not understand. These include jokes that rely on wordplay such as puns and malapropisms, and historical notes about Japanese history, geography and society which I am mostly ignorant of.

Without those translation notes, you exclude me from understanding anything but the surface of what's going on.

its probably a short term fix while they work through the process of working out how to identify the defective machines and isolate them properly within Windows Updates.

still incredibly dodgy though.

be interesting if we allowed prisoners the choice of prison, haha.

optimise by a score. score is calculated as a function of price and some quality metric. unfortunately this can get complex.

do you have any recommendations on such tutorials/introductions that teach category theory?

I agree that more can be done to increase incentives for manufacturers to produce better packaging. I would caution against outright bans, as that often exacerbates unforeseen circumstances. You might end up encouraging massive deforestation as manufacturers switch en mass to bamboo packaging or suddenly roads are clogged up as truck drivers are told to maintain a maximum 30kph to avoid damaging products. Human systems are ridiculously complex, that was the chief failure of state-directed Communism.

> I don't get to choose how the stuff I buy is packaged

I think an economist would say you do get to choose. You could have chosen a different product that was packaged better. Since the onus is on you to sort out the packaging, you should have incentive to prefer products with packaging that you don't have to manage.

Re: 1, the following is a quote from the aforementioned licence pag (http://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1)

---

Even though SQLite is in the public domain and does not require a license, some users want to obtain a license anyway. Possible reasons for obtaining a license include:

* You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the public domain.

* You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the right of an author to dedicate their work to the public domain.

* You want to hold a tangible legal document as evidence that you have the legal right to use and distribute SQLite.

* Your legal department tells you that you have to purchase a license.

I highly recommend CGP Greys video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU) for a good overview of the issue.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341055 for similar discussion.

Not being double-blind makes it cheaper. Hence takes less budget, lower taxes, everybody cheers.

Anybody proposing to make it double-blind is going to need to find the money, either from other departments or by raising taxes. Without a chorus of public support behind them, this is a very hard sell. And easily reversed after the next election.

Work does not imply job.

Jobs are where people are financially rewarded for work. Work that is not financially rewarded still exists. See topic: Hobbies, Charities, Volunteering.

I highly recommend the following CGP Grey video for further detail about the problems of First Past the Post voting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo).

> But instead we have FPTP, and why?

Its the simplest and most naive electoral system so Joe Bloggs understands it. Its just "the person who gets the most votes wins". The problems this system causes are ephemeral statistical problems that require more than a 10 second soundbite to explain or even to detect happening. So from Joe Bloggs point of view, you want to change his fundamental right to vote based on the fact that your intellectual busywork has concluded that the wrong person can win the election. That's how the UK failed to get Alternative Vote passed in 2011.

> you simply offer a bottle of vodka for a cell-phone photo of the ballot marked the way you want

you have to keep tens of thousands of people quiet for that to work without any suspicion at all. with e-voting you can commit major fraud without anyone noticing and with much much less evidence trail.

But it also means that a virus that intercepts your PIN and your ID card can log in an hour later and vote for someone different. You then would have no way of knowing.

That was a very interesting video but I think you misrepresent it slightly. Its clear the Estonian E-voting system was designed very very well in comparison to the ridiculously bad Diabold machines of yesteryear. The problem was that the current state-of-the-art hasn't advanced enough to make major fraud at least as hard as the paper ballot. And that means that e-voting makes it plausible for state actors to dictate election results, which in a democracy is a very bad thing. In other words, there was no way Estonia could make it perfect and anything less than perfect is broken.

The important point for me was that getting e-voting right is so incredibly important to a democracy that it should be treated as a national security issue. The Estonian E-voting system was clearly treated as a government IT project as procedures like "don't plug in a personal USB stick into the master counting server" are violated if its more convenient than replacing the broken DVD drive. Worse, politics gets mixed in which means that security concerns are dismissed with complacent and technically questionable statements like "nice people who care about computer hygiene have no viruses".

I couldn't find any obligations. Its probably a good idea to keep your PIN secure to reduce the probability of ID fraud. As far as I can tell its a state backed digital signature and authentication system so wouldn't confer any obligations.

However, there is some discussion about whether its a completely new legal status which would do things like make you liable for double taxation. Personally I find that highly unlikely, but IANAL, YMMV etc.

Interesting stuff.

btw I think the type of your the function h is a -> c. I know its a minor typo, but it confused me while I was trying to follow.

Confucianism is a religion. No blurring out of technical theological details is required. Confucianism has a holy city, temples where people pray to him, miracles attributed to him, unquestionable holy books and an organization to promote itself. It doesn't lack anything that other religions have so it makes sense to call it a religion.

Seems to be similar to a list at http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/irregular-verbs/

!java means limit search to Java documentation

!scala means limit search to Scala documentation

!golang means limit search to Go documentation

!cpp means limit search to C++ documentation

etc.

see (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html) for more.

I believe he is using the term "bullshit jobs" to mean jobs that are pointless, produce no producivity and are mainly created for the sake of appearances. In other words, the administration and civil servant jobs that you refer to. Jobs such as farm laborer jobs may be boring and tedious, but since they are very clearly productive, are not "bullshit jobs".

This term comes from the anthoropologist David Graeber in his essay 'On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs' (http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/).

1 and 2 also applies to many adults and their peers. I think the main difference is as you stated that teenagers haven't internalized those lessons yet.