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The culture is at least somewhat relevant if it gets in the way of efficiently performing the mission.

I don't know, but I can speculate. For example, there is no evidence I'm aware of that the hacks were politically motivated or that the results of the hacks were used to assist one candidate or hinder another.

This is a semi-variant of Hyrum's law.

Here's how it works. If those were the only charges, then your standard of proof would be "beyond a reasonable doubt" (i.e. 97-99% likely). They aren't. Since the other charges were already proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant is already going to be incarcerated for the statutory thirty years to life. Now the judge has to decide how much time to give. If the defendant is a saint who made a mistake, maybe they get thirty years. If the defendant is the devil, they might get life. I don't know what standard of evidence the judge is required to use to make this decision, but I'm under the impression that it is not "beyond a reasonable doubt." It is probably more like, "preponderance of evidence," (>50% likelihood). So if the judge believes the most likely scenario is that the defendant is a super bad guy, they might give a harsher sentence.

As an aside, epistemically, you seem to be confused about the meaning of "evidence." Evidence is stuff that causes you to believe something more. Evidence does not imply that there is a 100% certainty of something being true.

? I quoted the judge in the case, who does have the evidence . . .. She didn't presume guilt. She factored evidence of guilt into her sentencing decision.

> As long as a conviction feels good, it doesn't much matter if the due process of law is followed

What? I don't believe I said anything about "feeling good" anywhere in my comment, so I struggle to fathom how my argument can be equivalent to an argument that includes that term.

> It's strange that sentencing can be increased for crimes you haven't been convicted for.

I feel like judicial discretion in sentencing is pretty well understood, but I guess it could seem strange if you haven't spent much time reading about or experiencing the legal system.

I don't know. I don't know too many prosecutors, and whenever I read about them, it's normally related to sensational news stories or even more sensational fictional TV shows. Perhaps you have more direct experience with these elusive creatures and have a better understanding of their mentalities.

It actually is how the law works, though, since (for better or worse) there is judicial discretion in sentencing.

I quoted someone who was intimately involved in the trial saying there was ample and unambiguous evidence. Your theory on why those charges were not included is one of a number of possible explanations. Another possible explanation was that they felt they had enough to nail him sufficiently on the other charges, and didn't want to bother to prove unnecessary additional offenses.

Well . . . the charges themselves were all for non-violent offenses. But part of the reason why the sentencing was so harsh was that whole thing where he paid to have five people killed.

> "I find there is ample and unambiguous evidence that [Ulbricht] commissioned five murders to protect his commercial enterprise," Forrest [the judge in the case] said, leaving out one alleged attempted murder for which Ulbricht was charged in a different case.

-- https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-creator-ross-ulbrich...

You do not understand correctly. r vs. g has little to do with the return of debt vs. the return of certain classes of securities (since neither is pegged to economic growth). Rather, the return on deposits and the return on stocks are both part of a composite (r) that is meant to be greater than g.

The "liquidity requirements" you refer to are the fraction in "fractional-reserve." If I deposit $1, and then the bank's capital requirements are 75%, and they lend out $0.75, the total amount of money is now $1.75. This is what people are referring to when they say banks create money.

Well, at a very high level, banks can use saved money to lend to businesses or individuals at a given multiplier. If a bank has insufficient deposits, it can't lend any more money. This is called fractional-reserve banking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking So when you make a deposit, you are effectively causing a fraction of that deposit to be available for lending. This is what you're getting paid for when you get interest.

On the other hand, when you invest in a stock, you're providing liquidity to whoever held it last. That doesn't directly provide money to a company. But it has an important function: people only buy stocks when they are confident they can later sell it. If there were no buyers for stocks in the secondary market, nobody would participate in IPOs.

As far as which is better for the economy, this is beyond my knowledge. However, any normal person with any financial savvy knows that market returns are much better than deposit returns, so most of the time when such people say "save" they mean "invest in the market."

You're not wrong that that effect can exist. And I'm not saying that investing is a totally altruistic, virtuous action. However, the criticisms of the stock market as not being "real investing" are largely off-base. Liquidity encourages investment -- illiquid investments are universally less preferred than liquid investments, all other things being equal. Even if non-IPO investors/subsequent issuance investors are not directly providing capital to a company, nobody would participate in IPOs or other stock issuances unless they were confident of a market for that stock in the future. Therefore participation in the secondary market for stocks is necessary for a primary market to exist in any meaningful way. (In a similar way, if the public market did not exist, there would be much less private investment, much fewer startups, etc.)

There's an enormous amount of complexity here. For one thing, it's not like there is an infinite amount of beef available at a fixed price. Bob's eating that burger probably on the margin increases the supply of beef, but it also on the margin increases the cost. Now everyone else has to pay 0.0000001c more for their hamburgers.

Or what if Bob bought a filet mignon instead of a hamburger. Maybe farmers will now be (on the margin), breeding cows that produce less hamburger but more steak. This could increase the price of food that poor people eat. If Bob buys a Tesla, maybe Bob helps expand the supply of Teslas, but now buying a Corolla is slightly more expensive, because there are slightly fewer economies of scales in sedans. (This is actually happening, BTW, as Americans buy larger cars.) I also spoke of Bob taking a vacation. He spent a thousand dollars on plane tickets, which has serious deleterious environmental effects, and for the most part represents a purchase of oil, not labor services. Oil workers wages may have gone up a bit, but most of the money just went into the pocket of whoever owns the oil.

These are just some examples of possible things that could happen. Without empirical testing, we could not know what the exact impacts of any given decision are, and realistically, we do not have the resources to track the impacts of each decision through the economy.

> Yes you should. Bob supported a host of vacation-related workers and kept the economy moving. You sucked money out of the economy and sat on it.

Eh. I'd rather say that Bob diverted labor toward supporting his luxury consumption, whereas I made capital available for increased production (of cars, houses, food, etc.). The truth is somewhere in between. I think your read on this is a little too simplistic.

> If the goal is to spread wealth more evenly . . .

If the only goal was to spread wealth more evenly, then what we should do is simple appropriate all wealth beyond (num_wealth / num_people), and give it to all the people who don't have that much wealth. Then it would all be even stevens. :)

But there is not just one goal. Another important goal is to still have a functioning economy after applying your policy choices. All tax policy must at a minimum consider efficiency as well, from a purely pragmatic standpoint. Otherwise you end up in a situation where you have destroyed your economy by eliminating important incentives.

There is are also moral arguments about what is "right" (for those who believe in such a concept). If Bob and I both did work worth $10k, but Bob used the money to have a fancy vacation and I saved the money against future needs, should I be taxed more? Maybe! It depends on your moral outlook, and also your beliefs about how spending and investing affect the economy -- both are needed to some degree or another.

Historically, wealth taxes have been tried. They are generally not very popular, and do not raise very much money. They have a tendency of hitting middle and upper middle class retirees, as well as high income people. They also can't be very large in magnitude without seriously degrading investment returns (and thus incentive to invest). They also tend to target a group of people who are a "flight risk." Unlike income, which is often not possible to relocate out of a given nation, wealth is easily transported across national lines to jurisdictions without a wealth tax. Read about France's wealth tax on Wikipedia for more information on this.

Most shareholders (holders of the wealth represented by companies) are members of the wealthy class? :P You don't say.

I'm of two minds on this. Wealth and income are not the same. You get wealth by not consuming all of your income, and instead by investing it. Of course, if you have just enough income to survive, then you cannot accumulate wealth. But most people (in the US) are not in that boat. One of the phenomena that continuously fascinates me are the differences in wealth accumulation between people in the same income brackets. Sometimes there are good reasons for it (e.g. medical issues), but my sense is that in the vast majority of cases, there is simply a difference between the elective consumption levels of different households.

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/relationship-income-and-weal...

For example, I have a sibling whose wealth is in the 98th percentile for his age bracket. However, his income has never been above the 60th percentile, and has often been lower. This is an example of how a certain attitude about consumption can have a strong impact on wealth accumulation.

I definitely think that the rich (broadly defined -- both via high income or high wealth) need to be contributing more back to society than we are. But, as a saver, I'm biased towards targeting high-income more than high-wealth.

Didn't someone just recently post a DQN solution for Montezuma's Revenge (the game that according to this article they cannot solve)?

> "Though DQN is great at games like Breakout, it is still not able to tackle relatively simple games like Montezuma's Revenge"

Yep:

https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/09/google-deepmind-ai-monte...

https://blog.openai.com/learning-montezumas-revenge-from-a-s...

It's far too early in this research to say what exactly what can and can't be solved by RL.

My iPhone has been through three major OS releases. My MacBook has been through two, and the previous one survived three. However you came to your current beliefs, I don't think there is good data to support them. Apple is quite good about OS upgrades in general.

That is not a very good take. There have been dozens if not hundreds of similar leaks from people who thought they could handle the backend and used more traditional technologies. There's precious little evidence that I'm aware of that these apps are systemically less secure than apps that use bespoke backends.

OK, all of this is true, and concerning to me, despite that I would never buy a Tesla (when there are perfectly good used Nissan Leafs out there!). This is part of the reason I never invest in individual stocks: I have no tolerance for the risk, and no confidence that I can interpret all these facts to come up with a coherent estimate of whether the price will go up or down.

I guess my question right now is: if the situation is so dire, and the facts are all out there, why is TSLA not priced lower? Is it that there's enough dumb money holding/buying it propping up the price? Or are investors confident in Musk's ability to raise money and eventually turn the corner? Or something else entirely?

In the case of adversarial legal disputes? They are rarely economically productive in isolation. Normally it's actually negative-sum.

Well, since we don't know the terms of the settlement, we don't really know. Presumably one team's shareholders are slightly better off, and the other team's are slightly worse off than before, but it's hard to say by how much. In terms of global benefit, it's very hard to say, but humans aren't global optimizers.

> This begs the question, why doesn't Facebook just completely redo their apps? I'm sure it wouldn't take long to achieve feature parity with the old app

It's hard to tell on the internet . . . you mean this as satire, right? It would take a hilarious amount of time and money to achieve feature parity.

The price of gold is not defined according to some fixed utility function. There's a demand component, yes (which is not fixed). But there's also a supply component.

I normally think of financials as things that don't need to be heavily encrypted, because we have laws limiting liability in case financial information is stolen and misused. What makes you feel it needs encryption?

A facile response. Sometimes prohibited activities are not observed. In these cases, it's hard to impose consequences.

But it's much more complex than this. There's a question of how much we want to prevent such things, and, even supposing we're willing, how many resources we're willing to dedicate to the solution. There's also a question of prevention via cultural change, which is a hard problem if there ever was one.

You mean, assuming it happened? It's probably not permitted. It'd fall under the category of cruel and unusual punishment, or maybe extrajudicial punishment. Plenty of things happen that are not permitted.