thenmar

Why would a socialized healthcare system have fewer resources?

Really? We're "decelerating our technological progress"? That's a bold enough claim that I think the onus is on you to provide evidence for it beyond, "someone made a dumb iPhone app instead of curing cancer".

I assume the book goes into more detail about the actual economics behind the ideas. It would be silly to turn discussion about this hype piece into a pseudo-intellectual argument over methodology we haven't read.

It's hard to break this down because there are so many different problems going on here, but let's pretend for a minute that the moral issues related to privacy and dignity are irrelevant, and that the arbitrary credit score threshold of 640 that necessitates this system is reasonable and determined by transparent and fair processes (it's not, but stay with me).

Does this _actually_ solve a problem? Are cars that difficult to repossess? Is it possible this is a marketing gimmick and the securities backed by it are sold to investors who just really like the idea of being able to f*ck over a poor person the second he or she misses a payment? Is this really an economic innovation that lets riskier borrowers have cars, or is it a sales tactic appealing to veiled social darwinist sympathies?

If anyone is curious, it looks like it was the fault of Lockheed. NASA's contract specified SI units: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

Very interesting, considering the existence of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalimotxo which sounds a little weird but actually tastes pretty good.

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by "the politically correct crowd"?

I don't think customers are always informed of that risk though, especially when a company is simply ignoring regulations that the customer assumes are being followed.

Lots of criticism in the comments so far. Maybe Ticketmaster is acquiring them in order to resurrect their bad reputation and improve their services. Or maybe that's just what they wrote on the checks to Eventjoy...

One easy change you can make is to give up meat at restaurants, which rarely use meat raised through sustainable practices.

Would you mind sharing some of that evidence? I certainly understand the desire to be cryopreserved, but given the lack of proof of concept (I'd love to be contradicted here!) and how little we know about the brain, it seems like a desperate Hail Mary marketed to wealthy tech folks as sound science.

So would you disagree with the general sentiment in the west that most Russian media is state controlled and relatively unfree compared to most western media?

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by "capable"?

Did you miss the part where they cancel the rides?

Mind linking to the first hand source, or at least something with a better reputation than Daily Mail?

What about the civil rights movement?

FYI Manning identifies as a woman.

How would that work though? Would the government hand out smart phones to everyone, and offer classes on how to prevent accidentally deleting your life savings?

But we aren't seeing anywhere near the same number of tech IPOs today as we were in 1998-2000. As I understand it, the "bubble" came from companies too easily selling their shares to ignorant, every day consumers who assumed "internet" meant the company would be huge. The only people investing in the companies you think are overvalued are VC firms with huge amounts of capital.

Now, are these VCs providing the same amount of capital that the IPOs of 1998-2000 were? Hopefully someone with more insight can comment on this, but intuitively it seems to me that the burst couldn't possibly be as bad, since there's just less easily available money to suddenly dry up.

Sounds pretty encouraging. I hope Facebook's financial backing can turn this into a mass market product in a few years. Also interesting that the development kits cost only $350. I wonder if that could drop lower with a bigger production, or if the economy of scale benefits have already been reaped via 3rd party hardware producers.

I think it's that we just enjoy the spectacle of companies that seem like terrible ideas or based around an ethically questionable action. Nobody gets excited about "tech startup grows revenue to $100k on niche, hard to understand product and delays investor round to avoid dilution"

I felt like towards the end it started reading like one of those old style email chain letters with bulleted lists of fake statistics that support some kind of "kids these days"-tinted conclusion.

Please don't politicize civil liberties. If progressives and libertarians can come together on anything, it's this.

Do you think equal time should be given to all opinions on scientific issues that are not backed by evidence? Should we teach Christian creationism next to evolution? Should we teach about the balance of humors next to germ theory?

I think it's worth mentioning. Propagandistic terms such as "entitlements" frustrate discussion and make it even more difficult to communicate. It belittles and trivializes the opinion that poor people are entitled to things like healthcare or food, making people who hold that opinion unwilling to discuss it.

Do you really think that the authors missed such a completely obvious flaw, something so simple that a random internet commenter could use it to invalidate the entire work in one sentence? It's hard to take this type of criticism seriously without any specific references to their methodology.

I think people probably said that about cruise control when it was introduced, and that turned out okay.

How do you go about getting a landlord to enforce a lease agreement? As long as the landlord is getting paid on time and the place isn't destroyed, he probably doesn't care. This seems like a textbook example of an externality that's only solvable by regulation, or by more strictly enforcing any city laws that require landlords to forbid short term sublets.

Can you elaborate on who is normal and who is not? Thank you for clarification.

Um, it did come from a Native American group. Not that your opinion on whether or not something is an "actual movement" matters to anyone but yourself...