good_gnu

What you see here is a common argumentative tactic by climate change deniers: "Scientists have been hysterical about global cooling in the past and that has not happened. Therefore claims about climate change in general are not to be believed."

I refer you to the wikipedia article on global cooling for reference. Especially take into consideration the line chart at the very top.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

With regards to the Paul Ehrlich quote I would add that he is not actually talking about climate change at all but overpopulation.

I don't understand why this is a problem specifically with bitcoin. Is this not a problem with any other currency? I mean I appreciate the sentiment but how does it even matter in which currency the rich are rich and the poor are poor?

The purpose of all the jargon that Scrum introduces is to avoid naming collisions with prior terminology.

You probably have a good idea of what a product manager should be doing but someone else in a different company might have a different opinion. Introducing a new term eliminates this source of confusion.

Admittedly, all the jargon you encounter when learning about Scrum can make you feel like you're joining a cult. However, there is a reason behind introducing it.

Did aristocrats in the middle ages ascribe their position in society to their individual actions or to their being born into aristocracy?

Your cousins are misrepresenting the situation in Europe at least with respect to Germany.

People in Germany do not generally make binding decisions on their specific career path until they are sixteen and after that career switches do happen.

In your particular case you might have been recommended for a vocational path at age 10 or so and then you could have disregarded that recommendation (possible at least in Germany's most populous State). If you had followed that path, you would have still been able to switch after any semester if your grades were considered sufficient. Or you would have completed that path and started an apprenticeship as an electrician. This would also allow you to enroll at any state university in a related major (e.g. electrical engineering). There are also courses that you can take to obtain the general university entrance qualification necessary for enrolling in any field of your choice.

The point I am making is that there is much more flexibility in Germany than you currently imagine. There are many who still criticize the German system otherwise (me included), because straying from the recommendation that your elementary school teacher gives you does come with some friction. Also, there is some empirical evidence that the recommendations can depend on the social class of the child (i.e. kids with rich parents are put on the academic path) in practice. However nobody is "locked in" to any career progression.

Generally, the rationale of term limits seems to be to prevent a dictatorial or monarchistic system from emerging.

However, consider the rise of the National Socialists in Germany: In 1930, they first got a result > 3% in a federal election. By the end of 1933 all other political parties were banned. No practical term limit could have prevented this dictatorship, even though they never got more than 44% of the vote in a federal election, i.e. never enough to really change the constitution by democratic means. So we definitely know that term limits are not a completely reliable measure.

Yes, but if everyone speaks to you whenever they need to, you might be interrupted in your work very frequently which can be stressful. If only people could communicate all of these issues say once a day or so...

Breaking News: Twitter is free to not boost his tweets for any reason of their choice or no reason at all in exactly the same way that Fox news is free to only cover things from a conservative point of view.

Curiously, you only see Scott Adams complaining about one of these things.

The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims.

Basically things that Ayn Rand hates are bad--except when Ayn Rand does them and then it's because the things are unreasonable, not Ayn Rand.

So now after 3 layers of us trying to coax you into giving us a little bit more concrete detail on your argument, you link an article in German which a lot of people here cannot read?

Anyway, the article's argument is that the certificates for renewable energy are created in e.g. Norway and Switzerland where it is easy to produce cheap hydropower which cannot be transported to Germany. Meanwhile the Norwegian and Swiss do not buy energy with certificates because they "know" that their energy is clean.

This is indeed true and a valid argument. However Norway and Switzerland produce only a finite amount of these certificates. If demand for certified green energy does not exceed this supply then this is simply a sign that not enough people are willing to pay extra for certified green energy which is regrettable but not a fault of this system.

So, basically you believe that people are gaming the system but you have no examples of how this happens or which companies might be doing this?

In (1) you assume that people buy green energy mainly or to a large extent to reduce the emissions they personally suffer from. Have you considered that a big reason for many people to buy green energy might just be to provide incentives for green energy production in order to combat emissions globally without regard for whether they personally benefit from it? If everyone consumes energy "covered" by certificates, this increases viability of producing green energy.

In (2) you say that the scheme is likely to be gamed. Can you elaborate on how that would look like? Does this "Occam's razor" necessarily mean that only simple laws are effective?

Also in (2) you claim that there is not enough real green energy available to satisfy the demand. This is obviously true but this means that the demand creates an incentive for companies to produce green energy wherever possible.

Overall what this system really provides is an option for consumers to optionally subsidize green energy producing companies and so far I have not really heard of any concrete case in which this system has been gamed. Do you know any?

For me, this looks MUCH more like Haskell than Python and I think that this is symptomatic of an erroneous claim that some functional programming proponents seem to constantly make: That declarative, "mathy","deconstructive" programming is somehow easier to learn than imperative, "algorithmic", step-by-step constructive programming.

In reality, most people in the world struggle with abstract mathematics and find it much more intuitive to think about a program as a series of steps and in terms of control flow. Programming beginners want to draw nice pictures on their computer, not struggle with understanding and implementing some recursive function.

This is of course not to say that recursion is not an important concept or that functional languages have no merits. They are however complicated abstractions over simple concretions that are much easier to understand for a beginner.

And in this way you end up with 0 regulations, which I assume we are supposed to consider a feature, not a bug?

Source?

If anybody wants an example of how programming languages can be designed with an emphasis on empirical evidence over mathematical proof, take a look at https://quorumlanguage.com/

Sometimes getting input from lobbyists can actually be an all-around helpful thing to do. Think about things like industry norms such as the default sizes of shipping containers. Politicians who write such documents rarely have the technical knowledge to understand what the norms should and should not prescribe and the citizens do not care.

In such cases it is actually helpful for the lobbyists to decide, so long as different sizes of companies and different industries are represented.

Tip for people who want to compile LaTeX from the command line: latexmk is basically a build tool for latex, which can also do things like incremental compilation and listen for changes. It's part of MacTex and can also be installed with the package manager of your choice if you use texlive.

Another tip: If you usually write markdown, pandoc can turn Markdown interspersed with LaTeX code into pdfs.

I don’t know why either. When I found out that the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg is kind of the center of this global hacker-encryption culture, I was surprised.

There is a strong undercurrent of right-wing movements in Germany, right?

This is a bullshit insinuation. The Chaos Computer Club was founded by leftists in Berlin and they have consistently criticized projects of the CDU, Germany's largest right wing party. They tend to be much more left wing libertarian than right wing libertarian and they are very far from being conservative in any way.

It's hard (if not impossible) to pick a single attribute of 'Lisp' that's shared by all the languages that are part of the Lisp family of languages.

homoiconicity

"Bild" is basically Germany's Fox News. The author has worked for the NSA in the past and seems to somehow glorify their unconstitutional mass surveillance crimes. The same guy has also claimed Snowden being able to speak German is somehow proof of KGB collaboration. Botice how the articles headline talks about "The Kremlin", when in reality this is one senator who has said something that could be construed as meaning that Snowden "brought intelligence".

But there is a bigger overriding issue with your post. Somehow the KGB is "blood thirsty". Why do you think that? Have American intelligence agencies never killed people for political goal? Maybe it was just not disseminated in American news? Why do you not have an allegiance to values such as reason, humanitarianism or freedom as opposed to some flag?

I would like to raise the issue of nature vs. nurture in this context: Does Myers-Briggs really identify stable characteristics of someone's current personality or merely the way in which it currently expresses itself.

E.g. consider someone who has previously worked in a dysfunctional corporate environment but was unable to quit that job for financial reasons. They were very well rewarded for superficial qualities like punctuality and tidyness and thus learned that it was necessary to prioritize these values.

Does that mean that this person now has a personality which prioritizes these values? What if their ``natural'' personality in another environment would have been to only emphasize utility to their company even at e.g. the cost of tidyness. What if their natural personality will quickly adapt once they are put in an environment that emphasizes these qualities?

These issues seem to be given oddly little weight by advocates of Myers-Briggs classification for the purpose of hiring decisions.

According to your logic, sophistication implies better predictive power. You completely ignore the fact that someone could devise a very elaborate system for judging e.g. fitness for a certain job, make very good assumptions and work very hard and still achieve poor predictive power.

Even when behavior is mostly learned rather than hard-coded, the ability to learn itself must be hard-coded. Such code occupies hundreds of megabytes of data. Consider the first generation of software for self-driving cars. NVIDIA’s deep-learning drivers for self driving cars utilize “27 million connections and 250 thousand parameters.”5 Good programmers try to restrict their functions to no more than 6 parameters when writing code. Thus, a driving system with learning ability depends on over 40,000 programmatic functions.

Obviously the author has completely misunderstood what is meant by "parameters" in this context. The parameters here are those of a neural network and thus they are a result of, not a precondition for the learning process. Instead, he should strictly use the implementation of the neural network for comparison, whose uncompressed human-readable size is probably going to be almost small enough to fill into his size constraints.

And that is assuming there is not a sufficiently good algorithm for learning animal behaviors that is much simpler than CNNs.

Or we could keep the factories, accept unemployment as a result of technical progress, realize that the total amount of goods created has not diminished at all and stop tieing the right to consume to participation in the production process. The "human in the production process" paradigm is doomed to fail as technology progresses anyway.

Stopped halfway through because the author is apparently one of those people who think "making stuff up" becomes productive if you call it "spiritual".

"there is no money to maintain millions of people that do nothing". You underestimate how technological advances boost productivity. Consider driverless trucks: As soon as they are legal, companies will adopt them very quickly because of the obvious savings. Naturally, millions of truck drivers will be unemployed but the overall production stays the same (or even rises slightly). Thus it WILL be possible to pay all of these truck drivers a basic income without damaging anyone else's livelihood. Extrapolate this trend to other industries and you will see that in a few decades, it is completely possible to automate away most work while still paying the former workers approximately what they were earning before.

More fundamentally, you are making the mistake of thinking of work scarcity as a fundamental problem when technological advances are rendering work less and less scarce every year.

http://lrt.sagepub.com/content/26/2_IEStrans/95.abstract

The abstract of this paper offers a data point that is consistent with the claim. For the purposes of this discussion, it is safe to say that the claim is not too far off.

This is merely a different version of the old linguist joke that "In English, all letters are silent". Leaving this here for the interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_English_alphabet