jabretti

Incentive alignment is a good thing - it's the whole basis of capitalism.

The government taking your money and giving it to other people for votes isn't capitalism, it's corruption.

The US Civil War killed 620,000 people, and ruined the lives of many others. That's pretty freaking bad. On the upside, it freed about 3.9 million slaves, but really there should have been a less costly political solution to the slavery problem, as was found in every other country in the Americas at around the same time.

"All civil wars are bad" produces logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad.

The fall of the Soviet Union didn't occasion a Civil War.

Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.

That's true, and it should be the case. But how do we distinguish between "that which is currently broadly accepted" and "that which is currently the leading theory but other theories are also quite widely accepted" and "that which is probably the leading theory, by a narrow margin, but then again might not be, because nobody does polls on this stuff, so we're basically just going by what wikipedia editors reckon"?

What, for instance, should we do if 80% of people believe theory A and 20% of people believe theory B? (Suppose this is one of those rare cases where we're fortunate enough to have actual polls).

Thanks, death penalty opponents, for insisting that scarce budgets be spent keeping him alive all this time.

It's possible nowadays with a bit of effort to create entirely new "facts" via a one-two shuffle between news sources and Wikipedia.

First, you publish an article on some news source, asserting the fact.

Then you update Wikipedia with that fact, citing your own article.

Other news sources check Wikipedia, find your new fact, and incorporate it into their own articles. Now you have a bunch of extra sources for your Wikipedia article.

This is fine as far as flat Earthism goes, but flat Earthism is a ridiculous outlier even among ridiculous fringe theories.

By making your prototypical example of a dubious minority opinion the flat Earth theory, I think you risk falling into bad mental habits. If you go round thinking "people who disagree with me on subject X are just like flat Earthers" then you're doing both them and yourself a disservice -- yourself because no matter who you are it's certain that on some issues it's you who are wrong.

What I'm saying is that flat Earth is a bad example because it maps poorly onto just about any other real-world disagreement.

The US is also a major outlier among the places you mentioned, in that it's still breeding at above-replacement rates. I wonder if the difficulty of getting a house/car that can comfortably accommodate multiple children is a big factor.

So we split Facebook into multiple companies which must of necessity coordinate all their activities with each other?

So I could no longer be Facebook friends with my friends on different continents?

You could contract different lines out to different companies. I think Tokyo does this.

At the very least, though, you could contract out the running of the whole system to a company for five years a time and let different companies compete for the contract every five years.

This isn't a panacea, but it can sometimes help if the main problem is corruption-induced inefficiency as it seems to be for most major cities in the US.

In the US, the price of unskilled labour has been deliberately driven down by decades of non-enforcement of immigration laws. Even a year after the election of a President who was supposed to deal with this issue there's been very little action.

In Australia we have control of our borders and the price of unskilled labour is more respectable.

But they can opt out of any order they don't want to fulfill, right? Who would choose to fulfill that crazy order for the price on offer?

Women tend to desire men who are older, richer and more educated. Men tend to desire women who are young, hot, and of good character.

Men can't always get what they want, either, but nobody writes articles about how that's a crisis.

It seems that this "voting rights act" is a form of mandated gerrymandering, which ought to be done away with. I can't say exactly what the boundaries ought to be, but taking the colour of people's skin into account when drawing them is clearly wrong.

It shouldn't be hard to just write a damn algorithm to divide the state into maximally compact, equal-population regions.

If this results in very different sorts of people being binned into the same district, then... well, good, I guess?

I don't think it's so bad to mix metric and imperial units; I'm in favour of using whatever units keep the numbers readily comprehensible.

Grams of protein per ounce of food seems like a good example of this.

And also the present, and at least part of the future.

The job would be made even easier if Rolling Stone went back to being about music, though, and tried to avoid talking about Trump or Clinton, and the like, except where strictly necessary for talking about music.

My point was just that the US and Colombia aren't radically different in terms of economic inequality.

What if you take into account the non-linear value of money, though? This seems to be missing in most accounts of inequality.

He memorized pictures and bios of all 90 students in the first year class at Olin College of Engineering.

It's impressive not so much that he did that, but that he bothered to try.

Most lecturers (myself included) will try very hard not to learn anything about their students because they consider actually dealing with undergrads (particularly first-years!) on an individual level is beneath them.

I believe this is because nicotine is an insecticide?

Okay, but how would a bird know that?

Damn, I'm a foreigner. Will I be banned from speaking about US politics on facebook?

Yeah, but that's also what I said when it hit a dollar.

(On this very site, but I can't remember what my username was back then so I can't look it up and prove myself stupid.)

But in all cases it's just allegations, nothing that's been proven in a court of law. And in that case, then Bill Clinton, who has been credibly accused of rape, should also be losing his endorsement.

Hoo boy, twitter really made problems from themselves when they made a blue checkmark mean anything other than "famous person, identity verified".

Let's sit back and take a chill pill.

Will this capability exist? Yes, probably.

Am I concerned that this capability will be deployed against me? No, not really. Theoretically it could, but then again, so could a dude with a gun. I live in a democratic first-world country, the capabilities of my own government are likely to exceed the capabilities of those who want to kill me. And theoretically maybe my government might want to kill me... but it could already do that anyway, using a dude with a gun.

If I'm going to pay for search it's better be a lot better than google. And google has a twenty year head start and a gazillion dollars and can rapidly implement any clever feature you might think of.

Depends where you go. Some firms have a very bright line between "quants" and "programmers", and you don't want to wind up on the "programmer" side of it.

My position on 2A is probably that I wish it didn't exist, but _given_ that it exists, I'd want to tread very cautiously around violating constitutional rights

From my perspective (as a foreigner who has spent a lot of time in the US) I think the second amendment has a lot of downsides, but I find myself siding with the gun rights crowd on principle, because the anti-gun-rights people seem to be so dishonest in their methods. The US Constitution provides a mechanism for amending the US Constitution, so if you don't like what the US Constitution says then you should be moving to amend the US Constitution, not moving to ignore it.

If gun rights opponents would just come out and say "Let's amend the Constitution to repeal the Second Amendment" then maybe I'd agree with them, because they'd be making an honest proposition to do things in the legally correct way, and they'd have to clear the appropriate bar to make it happen (incidentally I think the US Constitution should be like the Australian constitution and not changeable without a referendum, but that's another story).

But it seems that gun rights opponents almost never take this tack -- they're always trying to just straight-up ignore the US constitution.

Counterargument: this would lead to the H1B visa allotment being taken almost entirely by tech and finance companies in HCOL areas.

Universities, for instance, would have real problems. Universities can often use other visa classes, but not always -- eg the J1 visa can't be renewed after five years.

The Ohio-class submarines of the US Navy date back to 1981, and their replacement isn't due until 2029 (and probably won't happen until later than that).

The Taiwanese are still operating a submarine which was launched in 1944.

So yeah, a 30-year-old submarine is merely middle-aged. On the other hand, Argentinian maintenance standards are not exactly the envy of the world (cf http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/23/argentine-destroyer-... )

Interesting. It's nonsense, but it's a higher grade of nonsense than you'd get from just using a Markov chain or something. Sentences are of an appropriate length, and largely make grammatical sense.

He woke and threw desperately, his fat skin twisted in black, and the long wind was closing around, the watchers pushed past the walls, while the wildling fights set bread and hizdahr’s fires, the galleys of the night’s watch ate their food for the last time.

The way it intersperses dialogues with descriptive text feels like a real novel, and it correctly figures out that the grammatical construction of things inside quotes can be very different to the grammatical construction outside quotes -- e.g. characters can say things like "Lord Eddard has gone south" and "We have no glory, only a world upon my roofs" but the voice of the novel has to keep to third person simple past tense.

I have no idea how to get from here to the point where it actually constructs a story, even a bad one, though.