579 karma · joined December 1, 2010
So clearly I was homeless all the years I lived with roommates.
Privacy is a fence. Tall fences make good neighbors, because they help define what is and is not your business. My life is not the business of the government, nor should yours be. At least not until they have enough information to get a warrant.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
For what it's worth, Thiel seems to have the view that Trump isn't actually going to do horrible things, and will invest in infrastructure and American businesses.
This seems deluded for the same reasons that some American liberals were about Stalin, and purging him for his authentic and not apparently horrible beliefs would be the same mistakes that we did during the McCarthy era.
At it's best, it's a process for communication between ops and dev where folks use a common platform to do what each do best, while collaborating on things which are shared concerns.
We run a trade deficit with Mexico, which can be looked at as arbitrage of the USD as a reserve currency. We pay an IOU and get cars, they give us cars and get a means of parking their money safely.
This being said, comparative advantage is a simplistic but not terrible way of looking at international trade in general. Though US workers are more productive at making cars than Mexican workers, they're also more productive at other things and you end up with more net production at some form of equilibrium when the workers that were making cars do something else.
Now, the funny thing about auto manufacturing is that the job losses we've seen are all due to automation. We keep making just as many cars, and it's unlikely that we'll ever employ as many people making cars as we used to, because people can only use so many cars at once. Mexico could fall into the ocean and this trend would not change.
The problem isn't going to be putting everyone out of work, it's going to be putting a quarter of the country out of work or loosely attached to the labor market.
The social costs for this are going to be absolute huge. Our norms are not ready for that many people to not work, and you only need a handful of people with little to lose to have massive social disorder.
These are aren't mutually exclusive.
But suffice it to say people just happen to have similar opinions about fashion, religion, ideologies, etc. as what is needed to fit in and global media has accelerated the process. The fact that people like stuff isn't in question, but we're amazingly good copy machines for reasons that helped us become the dominant species on the planet.
Life is short, dark and unfair. The fact that you can recognize this means you're conscious.
> I'd like to be something -- more than just an office person. More than just someone who works that 8-5 shift.
Do you want to be in the history books? Do you want a family? God willing, you have a long life ahead of you. But opportunity cost is real when your life is limited. You have to make decisions, and many of the most rewarding choices in your life won't be fun.
School may or may not help you, but until you've defined your goals you can't break them down into the pieces needed to achieve them.
In this case you'd still be taking money from rich men and women and giving them to the people going to college, only without the services rendered.
It's like asking whether I'd still do IT if I were paid to hang around playing video games. Obviously I'd rather study, tinker or engage in leisure rather than do my job. This doesn't answer the question of whether the exploitation is right or wrong.
http://www.razerzone.com/swtor/keyboard
At around $200 this is a lot more likely to sell.
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Highlight_all_search_pattern_match...
Just to make sure we're highlighting everything we search for set:
:set hlsearch
Next, click on the link in the above page that says:
"Searching"
From the resulting page:
"In normal mode you can search forwards by pressing / then typing your search pattern. Press Esc to cancel or press Enter to perform the search."
So press /, e and finally enter. Done. Crap, I'm missing the upper case Es? Search for "vim search case insensitive", get:
http://joysofprogramming.com/case-sensitive-search-vim/
Oh, I need to do:
:set noic
Try it again, get all the letters highlighted, 3-5 minutes later I'm done.
Why was websurfing more productive in this case? Obviously because I can spend the remaining 15 minutes posting the trivial solution to HN. ;)
This isn't the fault of the game, it's a problem with not matching you with players near your skill level.
You are probably quite efficient with the tools you have today. You know how to get your work done. You have the problems and the solutions mapped to your brain.
This isn't a bad thing, because it likely means that you are competent at what you do. It does however mean that seeing potential improvements in what can be done is more difficult because none of us are working with a blank slate.
We don't know. At some point 450ppm was considered acceptable, but at this point the maximum acceptable level may well be 350ppm (pre-industrial revolution it was around 275ppm).
Right now we're at around 390ppm, so whatever it ends up being we have to reduce emissions from their current levels on at least a per-capita basis if not overall.
In the case of the labor of an employee or a contractor, the person you're working for. Value is what someone is willing to pay, or trade, or work, for something.
For example, diamonds aren't valuable because they are rare or hard to make (anymore), they're valuable because people are willing to pay large amounts of money to signal to loved ones how loved they are, to signal how rich someone is because they can spend a large amount of money on a rock, etc.
This doesn't mean that price is equal to value. How about the value of the diary of your hypothetical dead grandmother? It may be "priceless" to you while it's in your possession, but there is some absurd amount of money that someone could offer that would make you part with it ($10,000, $100,000, $1,000,000,000, etc.). This isn't its market value, however, because the price some person (a historian perhaps) would be willing to pay for it is likely quite a bit less. And there is certainly a price you'd be willing to recover it.
Take for example family photographs, I recently had a coworker bring in a computer with a dead hard drive. This hard drive had thousands of family photographs that weren't backed up. I made sure that the hard drive was really dead and not just mostly dead and let them know that taking it to a lab was their last option. The cost would likely be between $1000-$4000 and they wouldn't get a guarantee that they'd get anything. They thanked me for my time and decided not to attempt to recover the images.
To make the problem even more interesting let's look at a commons. How valuable is Wikipedia to you? Assuming that you haven't donated to it, nothing. This doesn't mean that it isn't useful to you, or that it doesn't benefit humanity as a whole, or that it is necessarily a waste of everyone's time. It's valuable to the people that run it, it's valuable to the people that donate to it, but everyone else lacks skin in the game.
You might try to calculate its value by summing the labor of all the contributors of the site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value), but this would make it more valuable if people made it less efficient to add content to the site (perhaps requiring that people mail their edits in triplicate in approved forms obtained from the local post office on a tuesday morning).
The reason why the tragedy of the commons is a problem is because commons are frequently more valuable to everyone than they are to someone. You can't hope to solve these problems without understanding what value is.
>(3) writing effective advertisements that persuade people to by my product rather than a rival's which is actually slightly better for their needs (hugely valuable to me, negative net value to the world)
To defend people in marketing, somebody has to let people know about products and services.
> If you care about doing something that's valuable overall then being well paid is no guarantee whatsoever of that.
Right. Many people value work that benefits society as a whole, or work that satisfies their own curiosity, or work that helps their religion or political beliefs, or work that has high status in the society they live in. Due to this millions of people forego higher wages.
None of this makes people getting paid lots of money better people than people getting paid less money.
Unless they're getting paid at a rate determined by regulations, by definition the value of their work is what their employer is willing to pay.
Of course, throwing more money at NASA is actually a pretty good idea, even if the sexier things people want to do are unlikely to get off the ground in the near term (say 50 years or so). But a reusable shuttle was never cost effective for manned spaceflight at the scale that we did it at.
The missing element may be learning itself. If you don't come out of college with an ability to learn new things on your own or with the help of others you may have missed the point.
I've spent a significant amount of my adult life teaching people how to use Microsoft Office products (i.e. I've done tech support in some fashion or another for a while now). Some of them have been seasoned office workers, others have been older folks and still others bright young people that know how to pilot a browser but are confused by a 2 paragraph e-mail (with pictures) on how to connect to the corporate network via VPN.
Almost no one I've ever supported wants to know how to do something differently. Everyone is mad that things are changing and the thing that they've done for several months, years or decades, no longer works for some inscrutable reason. The time they've spent learning is real and the changes they see seem arbitrary at best and frequently counterproductive.
I've supported people that were fine with e-mail, but thought that wikis weren't a good use of people's time. Others can figure out how to google things and look through forums, but most have difficulty sorting noise from useful information. I've supported people with PHDs that are incapable of reading any error messages because they have been trained not to read them by crappy software.
We have so many, many tools available to us today and we're not using them in many businesses, even when they've already been purchased. And even more businesses are still using paper and duplicating effort into multiple spreadsheets (and using Excel as a CRM, etc).