ataggart

at a certain point, it’s too expensive to keep fixing bugs because of the high-opportunity cost of building new features.

While I may agree with this in the abstract, in practice most folks don't really know whether they're at that point. It also doesn't consider cumulative effects over time.

Bugs don't just affect application stability or user experience. A system that does not behave as designed/documented/expected is a system that will be more difficult to reason about and more difficult to safely change. This incidental complexity directly increases the cost of building new features in ways difficult to measure. Further, new features implemented by hacking around unfixed flaws will themselves be more difficult to reason about and more difficult to change, exacerbating the problem.

The larger the system grows over time, the more people working on it over time, the faster this incidental complexity problem grows over time. At a certain point, it's too expensive to not fix the bugs because of the increasingly high cost of building new features. At that point, folks start clamouring for a rewrite, and the cycle begins anew.

Or 3g of shaped explosives.

https://youtu.be/HipTO_7mUOw?t=67

"shouting fire in a theater."

Relevant Christopher Hitchens: https://youtu.be/4Z2uzEM0ugY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TE3WYUVj4U

If their next best option to working at an Amazon warehouse is starvation, then it's a pretty good thing for them that Amazon has a warehouse there. That said, I strongly suspect they have better "next best" options.

I'm curious to know these workers' next best employment option, the one they're forgoing to work at an Amazon warehouse.

Knights of the Old Republic

I'm not clear on why I should be prohibited from accepting more pay in exchange for being more available.

172. First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machine off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite — just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of softhearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.

I find it curious that when someone suggests leaving an area of human action unregulated (i.e., not _a priori_ restricting otherwise non-criminal acts), others rush to read that as allowing crimes such as fraud to go unprosecuted.

Suppose a dollar of this loan has an expected value of 99 cents for the bank, while generating $2 worth of taxable economic activity at a 10% rate.

Apart from miscalculating the expected returns or mispricing the resulting goods and services, I'm having a hard time imagining a realistic scenario in which increased economic activity from a capital injection can result in increased tax revenue to the state but not increased interest revenue to the lender.

I will drink a toast to the day the last auto dealership goes out of business.

Unfortunately, manufacturers are prohibited from selling directly to consumers in many states. As usual, scratch below the surface of a "market failure", and you're likely to find some regulation getting in the way.

The only truly egalitarian algorithm is a random sort.

How curious that being the best in a competition is seen as anti-competitive, and that keeping one's innovations secret is seen as a barrier to entry.

"[T]he English language... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

Perhaps a first step would be to stop referring to it as "identity theft". That phrase places you as the victim, thus implicitly any injury is yours to bear. The proper victims of the fraudsters are the businesses falling for it, thus those firms should be the ones on the losing end (instead of you). Perhaps if they had to bear the costs of fraud, those firms would care more about shoddy identity practices.

Free markets are awesome eh? ;-)

Care to make your point here more clear?

Predatory pricing.

Offering a lower price to consumers than your competition is not coercion against a competitor.

Buying up necessary capital.

Offering a higher price to suppliers than your competition is not coercion against a competitor.

Paying other companies to not deal with you

Entering into exclusive deals with other firms is not coercion against a competitor.

"free" and "free of governmental interference" are not the same thing.

Since "free" in this context means absence of coercion against extant or would-be competitors, and since government regulatory efforts are a source of such anti-competitive coercion, unless one is concerned with firms sending hit squads against each other (which would more rightly be considered "crime"), the distinction isn't particularly useful.

Correctness can often arise naturally when the implementation reflects the function's intent by composing "correct" functions. E.g.,

  (defn values-in [m ks]
    (vals (select-keys m ks)))

Some of the comments here bring to mind a quote by Eugene McCarthy:

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."

Sorry, I don't see why you consider what I wrote "inflammatory". Children in developing countries starving and going blind is the status quo. Opposing an existential solution without bothering to provide an alternate existential solution is de facto preferring the status quo. This should not be a controversial statement.

Considering the opposition to golden rice (sometimes violently [1]) to fulfill this role in other parts of the world, these bananas are probably DOA. So long as middle-class Westerners imagine someone somewhere might end up making a profit, they will prefer children in developing countries starve and go blind [2].

[1] http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2013/08/activists-des...

[2] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/03/15/go...

I am reminded of a quote:

"Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."

Sure, Apple can do with its platform what it wishes, but the arguments I see being put forth here are troubling. "The ignorant masses are making the 'wrong' choices for themselves, and we in our benevolent wisdom should substitute our preferences for theirs." Where does that sort of thinking end?

That is, users systematically spring for games with lower cost-benefit tradeoffs simply because they are offered for free.

Except that's not what the paper says. It just notes that the decision-making process that goes on in people's heads doesn't just include the monetary cost (duh), and that when one option is "free" some other non-monetary factor is revealed (e.g., removing the mental cost of even having to do a cost/benefit analysis).

That said, I'm troubled by your notion that when people's actual behaviour does not conform to a model, the problem is with the people.

A good indicator for the seriousness of an article is how quickly the corpse of Ayn Rand is draped over the subject's policy positions.

You're either ignorant or amoral.

Unfortunately rayiner is neither, as a look at his comment history makes clear. His morality is just antithetical to yours and mine.

To paraphrase and invert an H.L. Mencken quote, it seems in any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is his instinct to side with the government; he is for all efforts to make men virtuous by law.

Terms like "net neutrality" and "reform" are often used to trick an audience into agreeing with the speaker by having the listeners fill-in-the-blank with their own favourable definitions.

So, when it comes to state action, "net neutrality" will mean whatever the government says it means. Your definitions won't matter once the bill is passed and/or the regulatory interpretation is promulgated.

the police have always had broad authority to conduct warrantless, intrusive searches at the time of an actual arrest.

Only insofar as needed to protect the arresting officer from harm or to prevent the destruction of evidence.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_v._Gant

So, X contributed to Y, therefore Y could not exist without X. Is there a name for that kind of logical fallacy?

I wonder why so many people always assume that increased productivity means fewer workers instead of more goods.