ebiggs

As a homeowner I see little benefit for me for the insane value of my home. Do I want to pay more in property taxes? No. If I sell it’s to just buy a different insanely priced home. I suppose I’m privileged in that I have other retirement plans so my kids will inherit my home - and that’s good I guess if they ever want to afford a home. Homes being an investment is the wrong mindset for a healthy society. Have cheap homes so you have enough money to invest in something else. I couldn’t care less if the value of my home plummets if all other desirable homes did too. Heck, I’d celebrate it. Seems to me the people who care are those who invest in real estate instead of just want a nice place to live.

On a world scale this is interesting:

Jews are only 0.2% of the World’s population, but 17.46% of the World’s billionaires. Thus their representation is 8,730% of their population share.

Of course any non-idiot would see this as simply an interesting fact worthy of researching out how being a jew correlates with success in a merit-based competency hierarchy... and not a reason to hate jews for conspiring to take over the world. While we're at it, we should probably also chill out on white men in general too.

As somebody who's just incapable of acknowledging group-identity diversity is a thing worth respecting (though, I find individual diversity beautiful and fascinating) This was something of a rollercoaster:

Oh wow, a woman headed react? That's cool.

Oh wait, a trans-woman... so that's socio-cultural diversity though not biological diversity - still born a white male.

Unless transgenderism isn't a choice but part of somebody's biological nature, then it is biological diversity, right?

erm, is being biologically predisposed to not liking chocolate also biological diversity? Wow, how much biological diversity goes unnoticed by diversity advocates? Maybe fb is biologically diverse after all!?

Isn't it cool we're all unique individuals with unique interests, although fb has mostly people who all share an interest in tech. True diversity would be to get people not interested in tech at fb.

Nope, he never said so. He used the word "considering" - to interpret that to mean it's a done deal is stupid, and all the risk you take is your own.

Unfortunately, Prop 13 passed with 62% :(

The Prop 13 problem is easy to solve technically, if you see the problem as described in this piece... but that's not the problem that needs to be solved. The real problem is California's referendum system that allows such populist lunacy to pass at all.

Sorry I can't answer your question, but I'd bet money it's not a coincidence.. Scheduled births (whether induced or c-section) are prevalent enough that people will just avoid "yucky" dates even if they're not superstitious.

Anecdotally, I went in with my wife for an ultrasound on a Friday the 13th and it was definitely less crowded that day. Rest assured, no Rosemary's Baby detected, nor any heart defects, etc. I just benefited from not having to take a seat in the waiting room :).

They made the first fully electric sports car (Roadster).

Does the tZero from AC Propulsion that inspired the Tesla Roadster not get the credit because it was just a kit car?

Soc sec. number is used as an immutable unique identifier for Americans since that's really the only piece of information that can be used in such a way. I'm not aware of anybody relying on it as a sole means of authentication... if it's used for authentication it's always combined with additional information such as "you had a revolving credit account with: a, b, c, or d".

Even when there isn't a data breech I don't understand how all big 3 credit agencies survive doing their business as they currently do... which is to expose people to the injury of identify theft by default, and then tell them to pay up if they want a product that protects them from that threat.. How is that not seen as akin to a gangster protection racket?

I'll try and keep it simple. It helps make code more readable.

When I see a bunch of Maybe monads, for example, I can instantly know that the programmer's intent was maybe to not just have a type safe null and avoid null pointer exceptions, but also to possibly make use of Maybe's toxicity.

What I mean by toxicity is you know how in some languages you have "not a number" aka NaN? A NaN times / divided by / added to / subtracted from anything is a NaN, that means that if you have a complex formula, if you throw a NaN in there anyway you get back a NaN. Maybe works the exact same way but with all functions not just arithmetic operators. That's what I mean by its toxicity.

Without Maybe you'd have to explicitly apply that logic everywhere you'd otherwise apply a monadic "join." The reader would then have to study your code much more carefully to understand that intent, and probably look at it with some skepticism that the toxicity works perfectly every time or is in every place you might expect. And of course not everyone values brevity and expressiveness, but when done right it makes code more readable not less, and Monads done right facilitate that.

Maybe's toxicity is just an example of pretty much any "magic" you can build into a Monad. You could for example have a Future Monad that will handle asynchronous control flow for you.

As a side matter, it's not just working around Haskell's strict type system that make Monads a good fit for IO, but also Haskell's non-strict execution.. monads help things happen in the right order which is crucial for IO. That's kind of neat when you think about - the bridge between the mathematical rigor of pure functional code and real world devices that make computing useful. Functional purity makes code easier to reason about and less error-prone.

At large airports most, if not all, domestic flights are not serviced in the international terminal for the very reason that once you're past security in the international terminal you are going to be subject to customs and border protection if you were to leave that secure area (recall departure and arrival share the same secure space)

I don't know if this was meant to be a joke but it's rather preposterous. Justices do not make laws, they interpret and apply them, and must do so while being rationally bound and yes accountable to laws and precedent under the framework of common law. Judicial activism is a pejorative term for good reason: they're not there to create or destroy laws. If they did start abusing their power to interpret laws they would be impeached: they actually ARE accountable to congress same as the president.

Also, if the equal protection clause was misinterpreted by the judicial branch, the legislative bodies of the federal and state governments have the power to revise and make it clear that the law was never to be interpreted that way.

SCOTUS has far more than faith. It derives its powers from the constitution, and a constitutional amendment would be needed to destroy it, not merely a lack of faith, and until its destroyed it has the ability to set precedent and make rulings. To say it has no police or armies is simplistic as well, once departmentalization of constitutional interpretation starts occurring, you have a divided nation on the path to civil war. The thought that there wouldn't be Americans willing to take up arms in solidarity with supreme court rulings, and with SCOTUS rulings as their justification is rather naive.

The only time the executive has ignored supreme court ruling I believe was when Lincoln was in charge, and well, to say the nation was divided at that time would be an understatement.

I used to think this was a good approach to take, to just eliminate marriage, but I eventually changed my mind, and here's why: This isn't a matter of state and religion it's a matter of state and CULTURE. You need to take it into consideration with the idea of kinship bonds as a whole.

Take for example the kinship role of fatherhood. This is something the state is rightly committed to taking a stance on, and there's a branch of law (family) to deal with rights, obligations, etc around this kinship bond.

What is a father? Is it a biological father who has not given up his rights? Is it a biological father who has no custody rights? Is it a biological father who has terminated all rights? IS it a non-biological father who has adopted? Is it a step-father who has a different name and doesn't have custodial rights but has been called daddy as long as the child can remember? Is it the man who's name is on the birth certificate but whose dna proves it's not his?

Or should we abandon the word father all together and say "civil custodial guardian." instead to try and separate culture from the state?

The separation of culture from state signifies what you hear all the time on fox news: a culture war. There was a culture war around civil rights 50 years ago too, and now nobody thinks twice about it. Eventually the same will be true around gay rights. The idea that you have to step around terms like wife, husband, or marriage - because they get folks riled up would be like stepping around "father" because it might get some folks riled up - it just doesn't happen to as much right now.

One could argue that marriage is an affinity kinship bond, not a descent kinship bond - and thus fundamentally different than parenthood. But that's a biological distinction - not really a civil distinction given all the tremendous amount of legal work that has gone into removing and assigning parental rights for both biological and non biological children.

Marriage isn't a dirty word, it's not a religious word, it's a cultural word that describes an incredibly important affinity kinship bond. A society with plural cultures does not require that we rename everything under sterile newspeak words.

Debtors need to take control. They need to collectively seize the paper at the giant discount and then dismiss the debt.

How to do such a thing? Seems impossible, but even a 4x or 5x overhead would be a giant bargain for the debtors next to the sharks, and the sharks wouldn't be able to compete on those margins.

Start up times could be a big deal to compete with iOS? Especially in similar app lifecycle models where apps could be stopped and restarted implicitly by the OS?

Not only is this irrelevant to a hacker-entrepreneur it's also somewhat irrelevant to a simple programming career. The sheer dearth of good programming talent makes it a fairly easy field to break into if you're highly motivated. You will undoubtedly be a lot better after 10-20 years of experience than you will just starting, but I've seen countless examples of kids who are more capable and better resources than some more dispassionate experienced programmers. It's such a fast moving field, and so diverse - that the opportunities for green talent are massive... far better than most other technical fields.

Being a loser is a good thing. Every success I've had is just me failing a little less hard each time :)