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apoorvkumar

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His insinuation seems that crime would immediately (eventually?) spike up once police doesnt have the same financial means. So a citation that says lower police funding correlates to higher crime (specifically at current levels of police funding) would help.

Not analogous. Sons are practically obligated by family (and indirectly by the immediate society) to marry even against their will for keeping the tradition. Also females were considered unfit to get married after a certain (very young) age creating a pressure on girl's family to find a groom as early as possible. People created pseudo scientific and religious basis for enforcing these.

It was a social evil has rightly been banned but slavery was both a social evil and individual maliciousness on part of people who partook in it - and there were a few black folk too in that group who were selling their own people. No society 'mandated' slaverer to sell people as a way of life. There were always other professions if it didn't fit well with their conscience. No one would make your life hell for not actively selling slaves by making you into a social outcast.

Fractional reserve banking is independent of the currency. You can implement a bitcoin fractional banking system if you have trusted party available (the bank) and as long as you consider bitcoins to be homogeneous. Although it'll be funny (and borderline eco-terrorism) to use bitcoins if there exists a trusted party (like CME for bitcoin futures, bitcoin wallets, bitcoin exchanges, your ISP, your hardware manufacturer).

Limited bitcoins doesn't make it any less vulnerable to being marketed (yes, there is a lot of marketing $ behind it) as a get rich quick scheme. In fact, the growth of fiat value of bitcoin is the biggest reason people see it as an investment vehicle. Bitcoin system might be helpful in countries with oppressive governments and no trustworthy party, but I don't see largest orders of bitcoins coming from North Korea.

Interesting read. Thanks for sharing that.

I read Nobel in Economics as 'Nobel in maths (largely statistical optimization) and behavioural psychology'. I personally believe the field adds significant value to society.

That said, I do think the award is rather liberally given away. We credit scientists only when their theories test out in practice with sufficient evidence whereas we are more willing to give economists a pass in the name of 'not enough data' or 'valid under certain conditions' . I think we should award only the fundamental time tested truths (statistical or otherwise) which are so entrenched in the way of the world that its discovery has little or no bearing on its exact function. This would award Nash/Selten but not Merton/Scholes. The basic option pricing ended up being just a bunch of really cool but limited equations which tend to be self fulfilling prophecies until when they don't.

It's quite standard political hogwash saying how net neutrality is disincentivising investment. What is really curbing investment is the monopoly of the few network providers. There are a lot of net-neutral countries in the world with significantly better infrastructure than the US.

Yes, in this case what is good for public also aligns with what is good for GOOG and FB. So what? It's like saying you're not convinced about children getting good education because it aligns with 'big money'.

I'm not sure you can use 'energy conservation' to determine ideal diet patterns. Everyone should be drinking kerosene otherwise.

Cattle can digest fiber and can eat tons of fodder to extract sufficient protein - both of which humans are incapable of. Eating meat is then consuming refined and concentrated version of that fodder.

Java EE 9 years ago

just because you like Clinton better.

Upvote for illustrating my point. In your universe there are 2 mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups - Trump people and Clinton people. I couldn't care less about Clinton. Go ahead and make fun of her all you want. My issue is with coupling of the personalities. When you retort to a comment about Trump with the 'oh but Clinton' defence you're trying (poorly) to take away legitimacy of individual criticism.

'When it came down to it' - well it comes down everyday. You have an option to not defend an immoral human (very objectively immoral, by the most basic of human moralities accepted in most civilized cultures).

Java EE 9 years ago

I never quite understood why a mention of Donald Trump needs to have a comparison of Hillary Clinton along side - and for that reason anyone? He is a vile and despicable human being and the fact that a big fraction of US voted for him doesn't change the fact. So we can criticise and ridicule him at every step without having to qualify it by mentioning every disliked person in history of humanity.

I believe that's how free trade works. US has dominated in technology due to the same effect.

But the most important part is when a country chooses to not specialize in something, they have the ability to specialize in something else. US has to decide whether the opportunity cost of getting manufacturing back is worth it, given it won't be a very employable area with all the automation.

Actually these high energy particles tend to be order of size of proton or less - so make that 6 orders of magnitude smaller than smallest transistor.

An alpha particle for instance is atleast an order of magnitude smaller than smallest transistor. The maximum damage it can do is effectively 1 bit.

AFLFast vs. Erlang 10 years ago

I think the author implies that 9 (unique) crashes are with limited number of executions due to slow speed. Besides, all 1800+ crashes might not be unique.