dylandrop

So 1 million per cubic meter of C02 = a regulation? You mean, because it would be of great burden to business with a high tax?

I guess what I'm saying is that a tax becomes a regulation at the point where you can't afford it anymore. Also you have to realize that a carbon tax is usually on everyone -- not just corporations. In most cases that affects the lowest people on the totem pole more than the higher ups. You have to realize that for certain people, what you say is "disincentivising" is actually materially affecting their ability to live. If you were to try to distribute that disincentivizing evenly across the totem pole, I'd be on board with it.

He has stated he's in favor of agencies which protect environment, health, water, etc. He wants market-based solutions like a carbon tax where they will work better than heavy handed regulation.

I could theoretically get behind some of that. However it doesn't look like Gary Johnson actually supports a carbon tax:

http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/26/gary-johnson-no-to-carbon-...

Perhaps the hard political position libertarians put themselves in is between the "no taxes, no regulation, ever!" conservatives and people who aspire to only have regulatory institutions where it makes sense (perhaps such as yourself). Moreover, at a certain point, it seems like market-based solutions and heavy handed regulations become essentially the same. Imagining an extreme scenario: what if you had a carbon tax of $1M per cubic meter of CO2 burned? It would certainly seem a lot like a regulation at that point.

I realize I'm a bit biased because I like the libertarian principles: prioritizing individual civil liberties, stopping human rights abuses and unnecessary wars, and streamlining government.

I think those are completely reasonable things to like in his policies. And as a caveat, I don't personally dislike Gary Johnson (the man) himself. I just haven't heard a compelling argument for what he'd do to address corporate overreach, which I (personally) find the biggest problem average Americans face today, whether it is O&G companies destroying our environment or financial institutions causing global financial crises. I'm not saying (by any means!) Trump or Clinton would do any better, but I don't see how rolling back oversight on the private sector really solves the problem. I wish solving our problems was as simple as dismantling our governments but I don't see how that would help us, as it's our only (very flawed) leverage. I think doing so would decrease the little leverage we have. So to answer your concern, I think the reason people don't like Johnson is because he was running for a political office where they believe he would act against their own best interest.

It depends what you're manufacturing, but the obvious answer is probably either

• visit their website

• buying their product and looking it up the parts online

• talk to your vendors

For the last one, this is particularly relevant if you're buying in a market with few suppliers.

If this scares you, consider donating.

http://climatesciencedefensefund.org/

(I posted this as a reply to one of the comments but I want to make sure it's seen, given the gravity of the situation.)

http://climatesciencedefensefund.org/

Edit: Also, I don't know if you happen to be extremely wealthy, but this was an interesting read. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/business/energy-environmen...

Trick: add up digits, if they are divisible by 3 so is the number. In this case 117 yields 1+1+7 = 9, and sure enough so is 117. (117 / 3 == 39).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisibility_rule#Divisibility...

"I tried to be as objective as possible"

"Finally what do you really care about: name brand or doing cool work?"

I did a lot of boring, mundane work during my time at some startups as well as interesting work at others. It's either subjective or not informed by enough experience to say that only startup work is cool work and you can't find cool work at a larger company.

I feel like making a much smaller power inverter would be worth a hell of a lot more than $1M.

You don't have to give $276, you could give $27.6 or even $2.76. I think he was just targeting that amount, since it sounds nice and likely his target audience can afford it. Also I think Kickstarter/Indiegogo would be a bad fit for this -- not only does this organization already have a donation page already set up, but they also would receive a lot less money from making a campaign for that. Lastly, you aren't going to be getting a reward for contributing.

That make the world a worse place.

Maybe not your opinion, but giving campaign contributions to bigoted causes would be considered making the world a worse place to many. All of this is morally relative. Maybe 15 years ago he would have just been seen as someone with a politically conservative slant, but we're moving closer and closer to a society that sees him as someone with bigoted views. While I agree that there are unfortunately much more evil CEOs out there than Eich, it's silly to say "oh, well, there are worse guys out there, so let's let the moderately-morally-reprehensible ones go."

Anonymity is definitely a big problem, but there's something to be said for a network that doesn't have a central authority. I don't think the problem with Silk Road was the anonymity, it was more the fact that it was a central authority - once that was taken down, the whole system stopped. As the article says, it's very difficult for the feds to take down a network like this if there's a ton of people using it.

Yeah, look at the footnotes at the end:

"Dr. Messerli reports regular daily chocolate consumption, mostly but not exclusively in the form of Lindt’s dark varieties"

Just out of curiosity, what could this possibly be spent on? Assuming it is going to be used to build out in foreign markets, is this mostly advertising/marketing costs? It already seems like they have a pretty good foothold in foreign markets. I can't imagine with $250M/yr in revenue they really need that $500M for hiring people. Also - how much does this leave the founders with in terms of %?

One speculation I have that might answer my first question is that they're going to spend this on lobbying and legal battles.

If we allow people who we consider morally reprehensible to practice their business without question and profit off of us, perhaps there is something flawed with the business-as-usual approach.* It is only when you take a stand against these business-as-usual mindsets that pervade our culture do things change. We can't always expect perfection by people speaking out, but if we yell and scream at people who are angry and browbeat them into complacence, the problems (Rice's awful track record) are deemed acceptable by society and are likely to repeat themselves.

*By business-as-usual, I'm referring to your statement -- that someone can freely practice business no matter what acts they've committed, or wrongs they've perpetrated on humanity.

If by "target audience" you mean "young people", Girls and Game of Thrones (which are also HBO) both seem to be doing just fine. If instead you mean techies... well, I don't think the target audience of this show is purely people in Silicon Valley. HBO is doing just fine, even with the advent of the internet.

Also the OP mentioned something about not being told his Miranda rights -- keep in mind the police only have to tell you your rights if you're being interrogated.

If they're trying to haul your friend off for something, the best thing you can do is say nothing about it, sadly. Otherwise you'll be brought in for obstruction of justice which will likely be deemed a misdemeanor (as opposed to an infraction, which is sorta bad news for you).

Way to completely ignore what I said. I explicitly said that I don't believe Googlers/ techies are at fault or are perpetrating some great wrong, but rather that this guy's argument of "rich taxpayers shouldn't have to be good caring members of their communities because they pay taxes" is a shitty one.

Let me first start by noting that I am not of the opinion that attacking Google Buses is the right way to go to fight rising housing prices, nor do I believe there should be some class warfare raged.

This being said, why does paying collectively $14.5B in taxes mean that you are exempt from attack if you commit a societal wrong? I think this is extremely backward logic, that perhaps Mr. Malchow by which feels threatened -- the belief of "why would there be a world where you can't pay your way out of being a good member of society?" This being said, I do not believe that Googlers and the like are necessarily perpetrating some great societal misdeed, but Malchow's argument is highly problematic.

Yes, it's luxury in many ways. But it's also a coal mine of its own sort.

Except you won't die from sitting home in your pajamas.

You will, however, be very to die for a multitude of reasons in a coal mine.

I'm a programmer. Yes, my brain is engaged constantly. But that's fun to me. It's not like I rue the day I became a programmer and I had to perform the terrible labor of sitting around with friends/acquaintances, sip free coffee, and make web apps. However, if you're in a sweatshop, forced to work many hours a day and likely suffer a variety injuries, you aren't doing as well.

Hysterical articles about sticking our heads in the stand honestly don't really help at this stage, they just perpetuate the sense of controversy without contributing positively to the debate.

See, this is problematic. If we don't have articles documenting the problem, no one will care. Right now the possibility of the Keystone-XL pipeline is on the president's table, and for those of you who don't know, the Keystone-XL pipeline will double imports of tar sands oil, thus bringing climate change to even a bigger problem than before [1]. If we stop this, we have a chance of improving the problem.

I realize that you said we should "[cut] back judiciously on fossil fuel usage", but when things like the Keystone-XL pipeline are a serious consideration, not being alarmist is a problem. The idea that the fossil fuel industry's thinly veiled "jobs creation" argument (when in reality, the pipeline would create very, very few jobs in the larger scale [2]) could be one that gets this pipeline built, puts us in extreme jeopardy. It's time that people are scared about the world changing, because there are certainly too many people who don't really care.

I also don't think anything we do at this stage could slow down or stop the process, other than banning modern civilization.

This is just wrong, and part of why we're experiencing a problem now. Germany is installing tons of solar panels [3]. Buenos Aires is switching to LED lighting to cut down on electricity costs by as much as 50% [4]. We should also be investing in sustainable technology, because this is going to be a serious problem.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/aug/23/tar-sands...

[2] http://www.livescience.com/38735-putting-keystone-pipeline-j...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/business/energy-environmen...

[4] http://www.treehugger.com/energy-efficiency/buenos-aires-swi...

Where are the currency codes? I couldn't find a list on https://support.stripe.com/questions/in-which-currencies-can...

In either case, this is really awesome. What sets this apart from Stripe's competitors, is that those companies (or at least Braintree) require you to set up a different account for each currency, which is a huge pain in the ass. Or at least this was the case last time I checked.

Realistically, as a programmer, you know the market is about to be SUPER saturated. In my opinion these people know they are being scammy, so the only appropriate response is to scam them back: build one Flappy Bird clone, sell this one clone to each of the hundreds of people trying to get rich off of you, and cackle to yourself while the world burns with countless Flappy Bird clones.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm well aware you weren't claiming that people are planning to kill Armstrong. I'm just saying you're making ridiculous claims over a fairly tame paraphrase. Even from the well established metaphorical usage standpoint, this is nothing like a lynch mob. It's one guy expressing his frustrations. And he should be able to do that without you saying that the people supporting/upvoting him are like a lynch mob. Why do you think that everyone else responding to your post drawing those comparisons also thought the use of the term "lynch mob" was out of place?

In my time as a CS student, I've never needed to use C nor understand its syntax to get through my classes. I think you're confusing the necessity of learning C with understanding how a computer works, and the two are not the same.

I think the most useful class I took that explained this (in my sophomore year) was a class on digital logic and micro-architecture. Just about every school I know teaches some class like this early on in your education (at least teaching the basics -- gates, latches, flip-flops, adders, etc.) In mine, it even carried up through some basic assembly code. This class gave me enough to know how computers are working at a fundamental level to be able to use that to my advantage when implementing projects.

Lastly -- you're getting a CS degree, not a programming degree from a vocational school. Does everyone who researches... quantum computing, or natural language processing, or graph theory have to know and communicate in C? I think there are other pursuits beyond programming that you get from a CS degree, and to say it's necessary to learn C pivots your school closer to a vocational school. Not that that's bad -- it's just different than what you signed up for.

I think saying "I'm utterly appalled" on an online chat board is a lot different from joining a mob to kill someone. Let's not make any Tom Perkins-esque comparisons here [1].

And people should certainly be allowed to react when those in positions of power say appalling things. Whether he thinks that is absolutely unacceptable is doubtful, but he clearly thinks that the $7.1M in healthcare spending is something that should have to come out of the workers' 401k. The OP wasn't quoting Armstrong, but what Armstrong actually said/did clearly mirrors OP's paraphrasing -- that health spending shouldn't be the duty of AOL, because it should be passed on to the employees through the form of a 401k cut.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230454950...

"We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan." -- Armstrong

Whether or not it's absolutely unacceptable to him is debatable, but it is clearly acceptable to use the cost of preserving the lives of his employees' children as a scapegoat, when many other expenses (large engineering salaries, "digital prophets" [1]) could have been noted as examples of excessive expenditures. What ekidd is mad about, and I think reasonably so, is that the attitude of "oh, our employee's child almost died which was costly, so let's cut some benefits" as an acceptable mindset to Armstrong is very troubling. In so doing, he is passing on the price of expensive healthcare costs from AOL to his employees, in the form of a slashed 401k. Now that seems to be pretty close to ekidd's paraphrase -- Armstrong does consider it unacceptable for AOL to pay for his employee's child's healthcare, because he wants to pass on that cost to his employees vis-a-vis 401k cuts.

Now at least in my view, I'd hope my employer would place employees' wellbeing first, and consider cutting benefits as a last possible option, but maybe you have a different view.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/shingy-aol-digital-prophet-20...

You could make the same argument about recycling. Making unnecessary packaging is a source of evil, in that it uses tons of unnecessary energy and resources. Recycling makes this system incrementally better. Additionally, recycling in some cases uses more carbon than it saves (through transportation, processing, etc.) -- I've heard this figure in relation to NYC's recycling program, in particular (although I don't have a source offhand).

I see what you mean about the idea of efficiency vs. consumption (Jevon's Paradox), although this still ignores the idea that certain automobiles will continue to be used (such as ambulances, construction vehicles, etc. as I mentioned before), and also ignores resources should be eventually used in as much of a closed loop as possible (i.e. solar power to charge your Tesla). For the time being, we don't have the infrastructure to support solely public transportation, so in the meantime it is reasonable to use electric vehicles.

Will they fix the problem? Certainly not. Are they a step in the right direction? Almost certainly yes.

The main problem with cars I see is that they're inefficient as opposed to mass transport (as Rees seems to suggest in the first article). Additionally, by suggesting that they are the solution, this creates a false sense of security in people having "done their part" to save the planet. For example, if I recycle, that's good, but it hardly means I've eliminated my carbon footprint.

However, where I disagree is that I believe developing these technologies -- engines that can run more efficiently on electricity -- are inherently useful to us building a more sustainable future. If we're able to build electric tractors, boats, ambulances, ATVs, etc. built on top of this technology, then that is no doubt useful.

Is this really the best usage of your funding cash? Seems like half of 53's $15M can go down the drain with this sort of thing. I sort of expect FB Paper to flop like the Facebook phone OS thing; if I were 53 I wouldn't be going so ballistic over this. Best case, they get the trademark and Facebook whittles down all of their funding in order for them to get it. Better for them to just move on and recognize that their product and Facebook's are different enough and it's not worth having the SEO from people searching the word "paper" to go into an expensive legal battle.