penrod

Hear, hear. The freedom to vote with your feet is one of the most important characteristics of the American experiment.

Among all voting methods it is uniquely effective and accessible - you get a large roster of fifty 'candidates', and the cost of moving to another state is much lower than the cost of buying an election.

When power is ceded from state to federal level, diminishing the diversity of candidate states, an important form of democracy is curtailed.

Any discussion of Singletons is incomplete without https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/singleton-consider...

Quite. Who cares whether the NYT revised the article? The more salient criticism is that the article is a deeply lazy and tendentious exercise in using insinuation to push a predetermined narrative.

I wonder how many people would cite the War on Drugs as the primary reason they identify as Libertarian.

It is no surprise that Treasury made a profit on its investments in troubled companies, since the fact of investing in them effectively rigged the market in their favor: If the government declares that it will not allow a company to fail, the company’s borrowing costs are reduced and it now has a competitive advantage over companies that do not qualify for government intervention.

Of course the qualifications for this special treatment were: being very big, being politically well-connected, and having taken stupid risks. So every well-run, medium sized bank that didn’t have an army of lobbyists got screwed. And now we see that our favorites have prospered and declare “profit!” while ignoring the red ink for everyone else in the economy.

"Unfortunately, as a result of my work, several more Linux storage developers came out publicly in favor of harassment and assault."

I really would like links to these public statements. I'm not a fan of shaming, but if people are advocating violence, some finger-pointing would be entirely appropriate.

It seems like you are also selling something. And the price, which you do not mention, is the curtailment of free speech, a steep price to pay for the privilege of having my delicate eyes protected from what those bad salesmen are selling.

"Well, you are aware that the roads were built for cars right?"

Unless you're referring only to freeways, that's a nice bit of revisionism. Especially in any city older than 100 years, the streets were built to carry trolleys, horses, carriages, omnibuses, and a variety of vehicles just as slow as bicycles. And cycles continue to be legal to ride on those roads. So you're managing to be both historically and legally wrong.

"I'm going to go out to my local bike trails and ... throw handfuls of thumbtacks in front of all the bikers"

I'd like to see how that works out for you.

The horror - horror! - of rich people having more stuff than poor people is not alleviated by preventing prices from rising in times of scarcity - rich people can just pay others to stand in line for them.

Equity of distribution doesn't strike me a particularly good metric for dealing with emergencies anyway since it's easily maximized by not letting anyone have anything, which is essentially what 'gouging' bans achieve.

The more positions are elected, the more power the majority have to impose upon minorities.

It is well known that pure democracy does not invariably promote liberal society, which is why the Founders of the US Constitution specifically rejected majoritarianism.

Speaking without specific knowledge of the junction you mention, but with 20 years' experience of urban cycling, my observation is that this type of accident is usually a function of cycling too close to the curb. I've learned to move a foot or two further out into the street when approaching an intersection where cars are likely to turn right, and the effect is that drivers will tuck in behind me to turn rather than overtaking.

This might be of interest to you:

https://github.com/gilesjb/copalis.sql

In the modern American cultural context, monkeys are associated with bananas.

Actually, code monkeys are associated with Fritos.

A nitpick about terms, but not all discrimination against women is 'institutional' sexism. Institutional prejudice may be sufficient but is definitely not necessary for acts of sexism to occur. People are quite capable of acting on innate or pre-learned biases.

The article is a little unfair to Seattle. Note the alacrity with which the city clamped down on Lyft and Uber - clearly you can get some things done here if you know the right people.

It should be abundantly clear at this point that the established media is antipathetic to the tech sector. Part of this is economic - journalists (with some justification) blame the web for undermining their economic security. Another part is cultural, underpinned by the incomprehension and condescension of humanities majors towards technologists.

Quite. I am puzzled by the article. As even the author points out, binary search is tail-recursive, and therefore trivially transformed to an iterative form. So why on earth profile a recursive implementation?

Appeal to authority and all that, but..

"the pressure on the legislature to license an occupation rarely comes from the members of the public . . . On the contrary, the pressure invariably comes from the occupation itself."

Milton Friedman

"…as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefits."

George Stigler

It is not just that large companies are more efficient at dealing with regulation; Large companies actively lobby for regulation as a way of protecting themselves from (smaller) potential competitors.

It may be that regulation for the public good is inevitable and desirable, but one cannot assume a priori than any particular regulation exists for that reason.

The self-regard of journalists never ceases to impress me. What other profession would believe that they have priveliged claim to the most fundamental of the rights enumerated in the Bill or Rights?

The difference between disability and a stipend is that you lose disability benefits the minute you engage in any productive activity, whereas the stipend dispersed by the Cherokee tribe came with no such conditions.

Unsurprisingly, people who are not prohibited from improving their lives tend to live better.

I hate hipster hackers as much as anyone, but what we have here is a case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

The arts and culture establishment, with their refined humanities backgrounds, and accustomed to being the social elite, are disturbed to see that not only are vulgar techies making lots of money, but that nerds are now being seen as cool. This is simply too much to bear.

The Dymaxion car had three wheels, two at the front, with rear-wheel steering and the engine mounted at the back.

Imagine a car with the dynamic qualities of a Reliant Robin. Driven backwards.

Unsurprisingly, the car rolled over at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, killing the driver and severely injuring two passengers.

I initially read the title as "Drawing fractals with PostScript," which is also fun. Here's a fractal fern in ps:

/t0 [ .85 -.04 .04 .85 0 1.6 ] def /t1 [ .2 .23 -.26 .22 0 1.24] def /t2 [-.15 .26 .28 .24 0 0.44] def /t3 [0 0 0 .16 0 0 ] def

/rmax 2 31 exp def

/map {rand rmax div dup .81 lt {pop t0} {dup .90 lt {pop t1} {.99 lt {t2} {t3} ifelse} ifelse} ifelse} def

/plot {2 copy .001 dup rectfill} def

290 50 translate 70 dup scale 0 0 2000000 {plot map transform} bind repeat showpage

My only objection to Hyperloop is that it's so damned ugly. What ought to be an inspirational feat of engineering looks, under the proposed pillar design, like an elevated oil pipeline. I can't imagine anyone wanting to look at it, let alone having it blight their property.

It's a shame they haven't proposed a graceful cable-stayed structure.

Quoting from the Hyperloop alpha paper: "To further reduce the inertial acceleration experienced by passengers, the capsule and/or tube will incorporate a mechanism that will allow a degree of ‘banking’."

A banked turn transforms lateral acceleration into vertical within the passengers' frame of reference.

I share some of your puzzlement. Fuller's reputation seems to far exceed his actual accomplishments: Most of his inventions were never put into practical use, and some such as the Dymaxion car were actively lethal.

It appears Fuller was very good at self-promotion, sounding inspirational, and occasionally appropriating others' ideas and attaching his own catchy name to them (see 'tensegrity'.)

You may believe that you have taken a principled stand on these issues, but unless your psychology is different from everyone else it's probable that your elevation of these specific issues, and the solutions you advocate, owes more to your social environment and the opinions which are considered acceptable within that milieu.

These are good examples of information that you rationally choose not to learn. The second part of my question was whether you believe some third party should be able to require that the information be withheld from you even if you want to learn it.

I find this perspective interesting. What information about yourself do you think you would act badly on if it were made available to you? And who would you trust to make the decision about withholding information, and to not abuse their authority?