squirrelicus

1) https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...

2) the diarrheal diseases generally don't need much money at all. 16oz water, fist of salt, three finger pinch of sugar. Unfortunately, the adults in charge of those children tend to remain ignorant even after the Western doctors tell them about the cure. So money won't do anything for that. You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with family corpses, ya know.

Income inequality is weakly correlated with everything. It seems to be a necessary consequence of both the most and least prosperous societies.

Honestly, income inequality is a red herring of left politics and public schooling. If the most prosperous societies have high income inequality, then the question must be asked: does it matter?

Unless you want to design a utopia. That goes swimmingly every time, I promise.

Edit: If income inequality is a consequence of freedom, it's a very, very tiny price to pay. Don't optimize for the economy. Optimize for freedom. Empirically, that's how you create prosperity.

Okay, that's my point.

If you have a thousand wealths and I have one wealth, that's worse than if I have a million wealths and you have a quintillion wealths.

No, not trickle down economics. It's history. The standard of living of the impoverished is dramatically higher than the rich of yore, and continually rising. And the reason is unequivocally capitalism.

Your view of the wealth gap is just not relevant because economics is not a zero sum game. The pie is not a fixed size. The promise of capitalism is that we get to grow the size of the pie. This isn't speculation or opinion. It's one of the few things we know for certain in economics.

Yes, the wealthy are getting wealthier faster than the poor are getting wealthier. But the one thing people who think that's a bad thing cannot explain is why that's a bad thing. It's not obvious that it's even possible to dramatically enrich everyone like capitalism very definitely did in the past without disproportionately enriching the few. That just may be a consequence of the only process of collective enrichment that appears to have ever existed on the planet.

Politics has vastly more time for nuance when politicians are allowed to do their jobs instead of being Twitter celebrities constantly on the lookout for the next scandal, both defensively and offensively.

I suspect if we didn't hear from our politicians for 2 years, everyone across the country would like the outcome.

I might be a pro lifer, but I have to support this distinction.

Now the dark hilarity of describing the fatality rate of abortions as 0.6 per 100k abortions, on the other hand...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271

That's not obviously true by itself without some underlying unspoken premises we probably do not share.

I reject mercantilistic views of economy. They belong in the 1600s where they died.

Which doesn't address the flexibility of the margin. Carbon fiber might cost more than an operator of a machine that turns carbon fiber into a useful good.

Pretty all costs eventually go into the hands of workers through the beautifully complex web of economy.

I know this isn't the same as distinguishing between cost of labor and cost of non labor things like keyboards and shovels. But the cost of those things benefits the average person that build them, or built their components, and so on.

Even the profit taken by the rich ends up benefitting the average person because, well, where does all that loan money come from?

Not sure what your point is beyond a humanities professor ignorantly preaching saying "profit bad"

Subsidies have the same problem if they target a class of recipients. If they target recipients directly, then we are simply in crony capitalist land where politicians' friends and doners get competitive advantages and risk monopolization.

It also creates an incentive structure that can have toxic implications for the company and products, since the government is effectively a customer, but the product being purchased is subsidy qualification -- potentially at the expense of the laborers or customers. Imagine if your product manager had to take the politicians' product whims into account when prioritizing your backlog.

Edit: my political commentary: this is the fundamental problem that converted me to conservatism from center-leftism. I believe it's not possible to create an equitable structure and a level playing field while the government meddles in the economy.

Tax breaks and similar incentives exist to nudge the market in the direction the government would like. I may not approve, as a conservative person, as I always advocate for a simple flat tax on all entities. But I'm not the politicians who decide they want to incentivize various behaviors in the market.

The real point I want to make is in order to simplify the tax structure, you rob the politicians of their main economic design power. No more tax incentives for solar, high efficiency windows, developing in high crime areas, and the like. I'm willing to pay that price, but are you? (The royal you, i.e. us).

The final point, the real crux of the matter, is that politicians cannot predict all the consequences of the tax breaks they create. If tax breaks exist, people should try to get them, otherwise the whole incentive structure doesn't operate. Then some people who were not intended to get the break find edge cases in the legal language to exploit. If the politicians can't predict all the edge cases of the incentives they design (which they can't) then we end up with things that seem outrageous until you read the law and go "oh, that's the loophole. Shitty, but seems legal.". This is why the federal code is so complicated. People making the tax code more complicated over time to try to specifically target the incentives. Just like a legacy codebase, in fact. Except that it's subjective when you evaluate it.

Edit: typos

What do you mean "if the margins are due to labor costs"? Margins are always due to all costs and the sales price.

Adding reasons why opting out of social media 10 years ago was and remains a good idea.

It never ceases to amaze me how the JDK and dotnet core have flipped in their relationship to the software engineering community.

What was once open is closed. What was once closed is open.

> Unless you got into tech solely for the money (you monster), it's stuff like this that we nerds live for.

I take offense to that! :P

The rabbit holes of my past are half of why my paycheck is where it is. (The other half is interpersonal skills)

Excellent point! I wonder if safety levels are set based on heavy metal toxicity or radiation, since one is likely to be the dominating factor.

Ah scare mongering. The safety limits are put in place such that the exposure causes no measurable effects, plus a buffer for safety. The precision of our instruments is very, very high.

Naturally occurring uranium has a very long half life. Which means it radiates very small amounts in comparison to other radioactive elements like certain isotopses of cesium and iodine. By many orders of magnitude.

You could drink 10x the "safe" levels of uranium your whole life and have no ill effects. Holding a kg rod of pure uranium gives you exposure between normal background and a plane flight.

The outrage you're looking for isn't here. It's not another Flint.

It really depends. In the 30s and 40s, many scifi [comic books] were largely based on well defined and plausible rocket theory. Hollywood though...

I guess the distinction between scientific hypotheses and scifi that extends beyond well understood science is that you have to have scientifically rigorous reasons to think the hypothesis might be true. So not mere notions, e.g. there is no cold fusion reaction hypothesis anymore.

I can't help but get the sense that your economic materials analysis is based on a video game crafting economy. If the profitability of leather is low enough, then people will trash the raw hide but butcher and sell the beef. There's a lot of labor and logistics and materials that goes into producing the beef you cook or leather goods you buy beyond (cow) -> (meat,leather) -> (food,clothes). Remember, nobody knows how to make a pencil.

Don't worry. The first time a Republican wins the popular vote, but Democrat carries the state, people will cry about their vote not being counted in THAT race, will drop out of the compact fast, and electors will probably defect no matter what the state does. NPV doesn't really solve the problem.

tl;dr the rule holds, the answer is no. :]

Though i have to admit to bring skeptical of his analysis that suggests the rainforest is a net zero on oxygen production.

I think you're minimizing the impact of antifa psychos. And I'm no moderate. Antifa is explicitly about violence, racism, and is associated with the Dayton Ohio shooter as well as the recent attacks on the ICE facilities.

The industry is very new. The rise and fall is natural (lolwat data mining?). But the function is not uniform. MongoDB might be one of the worst tools on the planet for relational data, but data that's only accessed by id and is dominated by variable length data? There's no better db on the market. Agile? Well, nobody's figured any of that stuff out yet, to say the least. We can't even estimate basic tasks still, so planning is strictly fucked until we can.

Additionally, there are so many things to learn, especially for up and coming developers that it's nearly impossible to select good tooling to learn in the first place. So you'll have them randomly spread across the tooling which, again, is indistinguishable from each other from the perspective of a new developer.

I guess my point is that you're complecting two orthogonal concerns: the process of figuring out this software thing (still in it's infancy), and the process of bringing up juniors. Consequently, what juniors do before they gain sufficient training shouldn't have much impact on the value of tooling. That is, unless the tooling in question causes the juniors to make unnecessary critical mistakes because the tooling encourages it. QED I suppose.

This is one of the cons of non-discrimination laws. We can't tell people like that why they got fired.

Something tells me that if I could tell someone I fired them because of their support for antifa or the alt-right, that evil nonsense would bleed itself out of our society in a short time.

Woo there buddy, slow down there a gorsh durned second.

The nature of our republic and bicameral system is a recognition that both the elites (in the form of states, in this case) and the population have important things to contribute. If your fundamental theory of politics is that the elite don't have anything extraordinary to contribute, then how about you start by cleaning your own house and getting rid of superdelegates before you go on trying to change the entire country to match your pet political power distribution

It is not possible to create a non arbitrary system. You may attempt to create what appears to you to be a more parsimonious system, but know, at least, that in doing so you will change the fundamental power dynamic.

Thank God we need the consent of a supermajority of Congress and 3/4ths of the states to change the electoral college. It's not going to happen, just give it up.

I wish I could talk to you 5 or 10 years down the road when you have discovered and internalized the reality that a) there are no good programmers b) the programmers you're complaining about will never go away c) you're one of them

My contention against OOP is that it is a pattern that encourages critical mistakes that composition-based systems does not encourage.

My contention against FP is that it discourages small amounts of state (e.g. that doesn't leave the scope of the current function) and instead encourages many mental leaps to wrap your head around the transducer or whatever.

But if I had to pick one, FP tends to produce higher quality code.

I certainly am conservative but the things I said are not false. The USA government is not merely a representative democracy, it's more formally a republic.

Consider this: the purpose behind the bicameral legislature is that in order for the federal government to act, it requires the consent of both the majority of the population and the majority of the states subject to it. If the population and the states can't agree, then we shouldn't do it at the federal level. It's foundational to the structure, and it's a process of slowing down the system against them whims of both the elite and the masses.

If you disagree with this, that's perfectly fine. I don't know a conservative that isn't in favor of CA and NY seceding. After all, most of the wealthy people live there anyway. Conduct the Marxist cleansing behind the border wall, but don't bring the rest of us into the shit. Let CA burn itself to the ground, we don't have a problem with that. Don't bring the rest of us down with you. We shouldn't have to support the insanity.

The electoral college was created to strike a balance between valuing a diversity of perspectives and popularity of perspectives. The probability that a geographically restricted monoculture gets it right is very close to zero.

I'm not sure this map is trustworthy given CA's propensity to label everything under the sun as unsafe. I bought a turning signal to fix my grandpa's boat trailer and it had the famous CA cancer advisory. Crying wolf, man.

How about this: is the turning signal more likely to give you cancer than living with an indoor smoker? Unlikely. And yet living with secondhand smoke is associated with a ~20% increase in risk, i.e. from ~6% lifetime risk to ~7.2% lifetime risk

This has nothing to do with calculus and everything to do with the fact that there are an infinite number of irrational numbers between any two rational numbers. Indeed, if you randomly select a real number, you can be almost certain that you will select an irrational number. Of course, almost certain has a specific rigorous meaning: the probability of not selecting (in this case, an irrational number) is greater than zero, but less than all real numbers, i.e. Infinitesimal.

Edit: spelling

Edit: the infinitesimal belongs not in the real numbers, but in the hyperreal numbers, if you want to learn more