thisuser

Dereferencing a pointer to 0 seemed to work fine?

Because it is lip service only. This plan will be muddled by congress as to benefit primarily the large institutions that are their donors, rather than the intended swath of USians. When that happens, don't expect Obama to be outraged. The exact same thing happened with health care, tax rates, debt cap, etc.

Exactly. Texas called Amazon's bluff. Amazon folded.

Medical and voting records generally ask for sex, not gender. It would be nice if the two concepts would stop being confused.

How well does IQ correlate with intelligence?

Am I the only one yearning for the convex optimization I & II classes to be offered in the new style?

I wish this distinction was so hard and true. It has unfortunately been my experience that to address the assumptions of most economic thinkers, political engagement is required. Bringing up heterodox or marxist _economic_ arguments tends to be met with political resistance. I will redouble my efforts to keep the distinction alive.

Where's the difference?

Oh Graeber's book is out! Lovely! I have been passing around his essay by the same name for some time now. Should be a good intro to the book http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/22/debt-the-first-five-thous...

I would also recommend anything by David Harvey. Start out with this animated version of one of his talks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0 Then move on to his Capital vol. 1 lecture series. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk There is also a book format of his reading guide

There is no evidence that lowering tax rates creates jobs.

Capital Vol. 1 by Marx is classic and still more applicable than anyone wants to admit. Ease into the terminology over the first few chapters, things are defined carefully.

You would think that at least a few of these Laureates would entertain the possibility that under the right conditions a community of technocratic professionals freely debating the merits of various policies could have a better answer than any single individual picked by a committee of Norwegians. It's almost like this is a free market of ideas, and you being downvoted is an invisible hand telling you to have better ideas if you want to make it.

I have serious problems with the policies that CATO advocates. I expect them to explain and justify their policies, not appeal to a committee of Norwegians for authority. I expect the same of you.

Allowed by the commenting community.

There's a difference between simple and simplistic. Simplistic is pretending the only incentive force at work in a national scale institution is the profit incentive.

Simple is acknowledging that a small institution with the mission statement to advocate for profit incentive as the singular organizing principle of our economy probably believes in its mission statement and operates for the purpose of the private profit of its owners.

I've seen a few _interesting_ notes from CATO, but nothing I would call subtle or anything but free market fundamentalism. They tend to pick up every single news story and view it through a free market, shrink govt, give an individual the profit lens. Which is why they can only write a short, generic paragraph of comment on an interesting story about Khan Academy. OP should have been a link to Wired.

Everything is politics. But reactionary free-market worship is too simplistic to be allowed here. Cato only exists because advocating private ownership of profit turns out to be profitable, not because they have any insightful analysis.

Unfortunately law seems to be one of the most conservative institutions (i.e. slow to change) in existence. It it set up to be an adversarial system between two parties, and most of the institutional structure depends upon that. Between the desire for an adversarial system and constitutional right to trial by jury, I'm not sure how you can really move away from my expert witness vs your expert witness when examining evidence for a jury. Any ideas? A "technical judge" that adjudicates evidence into more explainable forms to be explained to the jury?

Oh well we can't be upsetting the government. Carry on.

He is accused of stealing bandwidth from JSTOR, not the documents. "Theft of services" not theft of property. Theft of bandwidth is almost as absurd as theft via copying. JSTOR apparently isn't interested in free transmission of knowledge

There's also no evidence that keeping taxes low (the opportunity cost) creates jobs. Just look at our employment performance over the last decade

Agreed. Lets also make sure that these new businesses stay employee owned. If newly created small businesses find success -- only to be bought out by the paragons of the current economic model -- we will end up cycling back into the same negative externalities of the current economic model. If they are bought out we will be back to the same unemployment level, with more public debt that was transferred to the largest corporations and their shareholders.

Capital Vol. 1 has a pretty good explanation for this phenomenon

I'm not asking you to continue to defend the Empire. I'm asking you to analyze the multitude of institutional forces that contributed to the structure Empire in a way that lets you causally analyze which forces produced which outcomes. This is a discussion of what the structure of our institutions ought to be. To answer that we need to be a little more subtle than evaluating the Empire as a singular, whole unit.

Thanks for jumping in to pointlessly defend some giant institution. "they did good things too!" is so simplistic it makes me want to tear my hair out. Why spend time defending the Empire as some unquestionable whole? The point is to analyze institutional structure so you can tease out the rules that have positive consequences from the ones that have negative consequences.

Having a desire to spread sanitation and education: good. Binding the possibility of sanitation and education to an economic mode of production that leaves the newly sanitized and educated with underdeveloped infrastructure and in debt cycles: bad. I'm not interested in the illusion that they are inherently paired operations.

Oh, and we still have slave trade and the cult of england today, so your starry eyed tone is quite unearned.

Keeping things just good enough that search users return is not the same set of incentives as delivering search that meets the comprehensive set of user wants.

Your instinctual reaction to frame this in the context of a market is faulty. ALL of the major search players operate under the conceptual mode of users as product, advertisers as customers. The same is true with other media companies (TV, newspaper, etc). That seems to be the only model the market will currently bear, as the existence of media giants is predicated on their ability to accelerate consumption

In this case perhaps the audience should grow up and learn about the side of the world that doesn't follow strict formal logic. Hackers shouldn't be afraid of aesthetic arguments, with all of the desire for elegant solutions they profess.

The logical conclusion of the intuition to save this restaurant from rentiers is that all of the FIRE industries should be owned by the community that enables them, not private hands of a few psychopaths.

Hahaha yeah man, the energy crisis of the 70s was because Big Gov broke up Standard Oil!! Totally.

I'm SO SAD Alcoa can't continue to grow :( :( http://www.ncconservationnetwork.org/mainblog/alcoa-worldwid... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eGLnvta... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lnXnXtr...

Article claims: - Google should canonized (stock market as implied canon?) - Anti-trust legislation is merely political whimsy - Corporations don't have inherent structural problems, all problems are caused by individuals

Can we keep this shallow business major ideology crap off of HN? It is simplistic corporate knob slobbing. I expect a more empirical stance in this community.

Go talk to someone at the uni who who cares about enthusiasm. Simply filling out a boilerplate form deliver great results unless you are boilerplate too. Engage some social hacking.

but does it tether?