jwie

Marshmallow tests are more a test of the child’s priors about adult reliability.

If the child has reliable parents they tend to pass the test. The children of reliable parents do better in life, which is obvious.

The test also fails to account for a temperate child that doesn’t actually want more than one in the first place and isn’t playing the researchers game.

Our Man in Havana is a very good book about the topic.

Secrets are a dark illiquid market where there’s high demand for things that don’t exist. So naturally there’s a lot of supply for that information. The fact that is almost all bogus is irrelevant.

Might not be the same, but reading computer code and Ancient Greek or Latin are remarkably similar skills.

I could be convinced that parsing a language at that resolution isn’t how language processing works for general use, but that’s like saying diagraming a sentence isn’t speaking a language. Technically true but missing the point.

This is Google saying “if anyone is going to monetize your site’s reputation it’s us.”

Orders should have some durability and it would probably change behaviors enough to make hft go away.

If you list a buy or sell order it just has to be in force for some period of time, say a minute or something.

HFT shops will say this would reduce liquidity, but it would only make clear what real liquidity was in the first place.

It is a little curious that the skin was applied with consent, but not removed with it.

I was lead to believe that Harvard was where smart people were. The simple thing to do would be to remove the book from circulation, not destroy the thing that made it interesting.

This is essentially the purpose of money laundering, so a lot.

The fact that there's no formal difference between tax payments and scam payments should be tickling the part of your brain; this means something.

The Dead Internet Theory was only slightly ahead of its time.

Used to be real people pretended to be girls on the internet. These days I can’t even get an honest real fake person pretending to be an attractive female on LinkedIn.

This has the same pattern as the Vivendi deal with Blizzard back in 2007.

In both instances, the game end of the deal had peaked already, and there was nowhere to go but down. Nothing a few billion dollars can’t fix, maybe some “new content,” says the business guys.

Meanwhile their product becomes worse by the month. The magic is fading. All the people who made it great move on, not wanting to deal with the business parasites who showed up to squeeze a buck. Repeat.

It's amusing watching streaming turn into cable, but somehow worse. At least we got some public access programming out of cable.

Piracy is a service problem. Valve proved digital piracy can be beaten by commercial solutions. The problem is the media cartels being intransigent with digital delivery, not piracy.

As a member of the collectible asset class, Jordans are not falling like the rest of the cohort.

Most collectibles are -90% these days. Jordans selling at humble discounts isn’t a sign of weakness all things considered.

Huh I wonder if I could setup a local police force to do keyword research now for cheap with a few overbroad warrants.

Destroy the cameras.

With any sufficiently large industry if that industry produces externalities powerful lobbies will emerge to make the harms as unclear and detached from the industry as possible.

We only see the failures of this activity. There are many more big lobby success stories, where the externalities a line of business produces are removed from public discourse. In some cases, veggie libel laws for one, the lobby is so successful that criticism is practically illegal.

Globalism is an economic system so fragile marginal increases in shipping costs produce existential threats.

This is either an unserious article or the entire notion of global economics needs revisiting.

This is a significant omission from the article.

The other part is how do you really measure efficacy of these systems? Unless you did some secret shopping, which in this case would be paying people to defraud public services occasionally, how would you really know how effective these systems were at reducing fraud costs to public services?

The first order problem with spam calls/sms is you probably opted in to something. Most spam, like it or not, you asked for, and they can almost certainly prove it.

The TCPA lawsuit business was so lucrative for years that a lot of effort goes into producing proof that the contact is legal. Rather than stopping spam calls these laws basically guarantee spam, but legal spam.

Also carriers have pretty well cracked illegal spam through their own analytics. Some still happens, but it’s cleaned up extremely fast.

One key problem is nobody, none of the suits anyway, want to believe that there are essential, hard problems that can't be outsourced, can't be commodified, can't be shortcut in any way.

It's the business version of the get-rich-quick scam course hucksters. The truth that there's no silver bullets can't compete.

Good for what?

Analytics are an instrument panel, it’s a set of gauges. How it looks depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and the conditions of the system.

LEOs are ideal enterprise clients. Predictable, high budgets, very easy lock in, one success will create many other opportunities.

Eventually the surveillance drone will identify the criminal, sell the criminals information to a bondsman, and try to line up a defense attorney for the defendant, and set a court date. Imagine the efficiencies.

You could deploy them to schools as well to increase the funnel velocity.

Perhaps we should modify our schedules rather than altering the time the clock shows. The time doesn’t really change.

We should abolish savings time and stick to standard time year round.

The real arguments for savings time are for economic (ie consumption) reasons. More daylight later means more spending after work.

If you look at who supports and lobbies for savings time it should be clear who the enemy is.

Put yourself into the oncall rotation for starters.

For a US exempt employee it would be fairly straightforward to push oncall expectations into a role. But in other countries with robust labor protections it might be more challenging. Ultimately the solution is money.

But doing it yourself goes a long way to convincing your team it’s necessary. I personally do this as a manager and I find it helps a lot. If you get paged a few times at 3am it really helps align your priorities with your team.

It’s unlikely this is as interesting as the headline suggests.

Maintaining a list of professionals is challenging. There are very simple input problems with this kind of data.

The professional, in this case a therapist, but it really doesn’t matter what they do, just isn’t going to keep their portal updated on the insurance network aggregator.

The insurance companies can’t make the anyone update their listing, and the professionals don’t have incentives. They’re full up on work so there’s no real need for them to do anything to get clients.

This is a bog-standard supply and demand problem.

When a capitalist degrades his products to ensure profits it’s good for the economy and he’s a captain of industry.

When the worker degrades technology to ensure a job he’s a Luddite and terrorist.

Argon is more dense and inert.

The easiest way to get a geolocation is to ask the user. Maybe they’ll just tell you, and if that’s good enough for your application there’s no need for such solutions.

Interesting that they won’t infer a location from an IP or other information they have. Seems like they just want the location data and have an excuse to demand it.

Tenured faculty at university still exist to provide an aspiration to academic labor that they too can receive tenure. They're more like jackpot winners. Casinos need to produce some winners, but only because nobody would play otherwise.

The casino, however, is more fair. At least in the casino the winners don't have to submit their bets for approval to a committee of former winners who don't understand that they are a product of chance and had published many books and papers on gambling strategies. Awarding tenure at random might even produce better outcomes.

When creditors sell debt to collections they should be required to allow the debtor to buy their debt back at that price.

Of course they'll never actually do that. Usurers are unreceptive to any notion that you won't pay every last extortionate penny. They'd rather sell it to collections for 5 cents on the dollar than let you settle for 50 in a straightforward conversation.