gahahaha

Maybe he cheated to get in?

I don't feel the need to be constructive towards the whole taxes=theft crowd. Engaging them would just encourage them.

Competent bureaucracy is what they've got in Sweden. You obviously don't believe public goods exists. That's stupid.

The more underfunded the government is, the less it can invest in schools, mental health care, the environment, infrastructure, a competent bureaucracy and so on. All things that are necessary for economic growth. Americans' allergic reaction to paying taxes is just one more reason why the country is circling the drain.

I think we both realize that solving the two job problem is much harder. Hands off government and giving people the freedom to fuck up their life is great for middle class kids in super supportive families, but can be disastrous for less fortunate children.

Not too easy if you're working two jobs to provide for your family. By giving all the responsibility to the family you sacrifice those vulnerable children who weren't as fortunate as yourself growing up.

So what is the implication from the fact that it is impossible to block porn for people who are not "an adult that has a fully formed identity and personality"?

Turns out the fancy math mania among economists didn't help us leading up to and during the great recession. We should now go back and pick up again the lessons learned after the Great Depression (like Keynes' Animal spirits). Math and models are still important (they are in fact essential, without them we can't think clearly or rigorously enough) but they and their interpretations have to take into account the complexity of human nature to a greater extent, not rely on a simplistic and almost non-existent homo economicus.

Because productive developers write more code or because productive developers write worse code?

Yea - I'm not really sure what the take away message here should be (although I found the article interesting).

I'm currently working at a late project right now that started early enough, but took too long to hire enough people to finish the project in time, and didn't use the time at the beginning of the project well enough to gather information about the current and future processes. Maybe that's an example of what the author means, but it certainly gets more complicated than "started too late" quite quickly...

Pretty sure the vagueness was intentional so as not to identify him.

Agriculture was terrible for our health - even before sugar became a part of our diet.

http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...

Making a great algorithm _combined_ with suing the fake reviewers might be even better.

No he didn't. He argued that we need inflation to stop hoarding of money and make people spend their money and create activity in the economy. This is important because in the economy as a whole TotalSpending == TotalIncome

I think you'll observe that there are periods of inflation offset by periods of deflation, meaning that over time the value of money was somewhat more stable than your image implies.

It didn't use to matter much. Consistent inflation is a rather new phenomenon that basically only appeared after WWII. There was for example almost no inflation in Britain between 1814 and 1914.

For the record, in case there still are Ron Paul fans/goldbugs out there: moderate inflation is generally considered a good thing by economists today and inflation is probably too low at the moment.

No - that has probably more to do with guilt after WWII than the low birth rate. A low birth rate (within limits) is obviously a good thing - the world is over populated as it is.

Only 3% of Norway is farmable land. This makes it MUCH more difficult and hence expensive to make food in than for example Sweden (or the US). IF you want to produce your own food so that you won't have to starve in case of a crisis, you will have to accept higher food prices and farm subsidies.

Perl 6 was misnamed

Damian Conway agrees with you - but Larry Wall decides, and he insisted on calling it Perl 6. Maybe Conway has a point, but maybe so many people wouldn't have worked so hard on it for so long if it was called something else.

Many people (myself included) don't trust Drobox, so being able to handle my data myself is regarded as a plus.

(having Condoleezza Rice on the board is just _one_ obvious reason not to trust them)

Supposedly, 95% of Americans were killed by diseases, so it didn't feel as bad. Especially if your perspective on the matter was (and it really was) that "God has given America to us and the proof is that he is is killing the Indians to make room for us"

I can't imagine that this stuff is legal - the NYT has paid Krugman to write this, and Genious is just copying the text and adding a few (to my mind inane) links and comments. It all seems very shady..

Hans Rosling explains this quite elegantly with boxes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVk1ahRF78&t=11m

The war on drugs is still going on in Oslo, and the human cost is evident in the human misery on the streets (and filling up the prisons). The dutch have reached a more enlightened stage in the fight against drugs, and it shows.

It wouldn't cost 6x as much to have Norwegian standard prisons in the US because prices/salaries are quite a bit lower. Also, the fact that the US if effing huge would mean that economies of scale would bring down the price even further.

On the other hand - widespread poverty to an extent that is completely unknown in Norway - would mean that US prisons can't be too nice, or they would be more attractive than life on the outside. (I don't know if this concern is a real problem, but it's worth mention it)

He risked much more than his income - he risked (and is risking) his life.

It might not be a better alternative to Comic Sans for /that/ particular use case - but for most situations where Comic Sans is used today, Comic Neue would be an enormous improvement.

That Israel has exactly zero interest in peace with the Palestinians. Continued conflict is the perfect excuse for continued oppression and occupation. The insight came as a flash - and now I can't understand why I didn't see it sooner.

Why would it be bad to put hot air into the engine?

For blast furnaces you want to preheat the air going in so that it does not cool down the furnace. Is it just about cooling the engine down, or is it something else?

I guess this was before Moravec's paradox was "discovered" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox