tthomas48

Good point. If you think about it, due to the distribution of guns and the fact that the majority of gun deaths are suicides, accidents, or domestic violence - living in a gun-free household should reduce your risk even more dramatically than these statistics might suggest.

I think that's built into this, though. People don't have to "believe" if it's cheaper.

I think if you read the article more closely using those examples was supposed to be pointing out lazy thinking, not actually advocating those as legitimate answers.

The way you check Google, before you look like an ass on Hacker News.

Yes I suppose it is. I guess I should say it the other way. I'm impressed with the long-botheredness of people in power regardless of the intent of the people wearing the fashion. Most of the time parents, clergy, etc give up after a decade or two and accept something as normal.

This is pretty much the longest ongoing trolling effort in existence.

Have we considered there's actually a hiring and management problem? That we have organizations ill equipped to find and train new employees and thus they only go with proven candidates?

It also includes far more writing and communication than it does mathematics, and yet we don't tend to talk about it as a part of Liberal Arts (or specifically Philosophy) much at all.

I feel like the biases come from the origin of programming. But to suggest that it is somehow exclusively mathematics because of its origin is puzzling. It is quite clearly mostly words, many of which are arranged into sentences based upon a strict grammar.

It's also odd in that the reason the original article was written was to suggest that it wasn't an insurmountable field, and that many more people could probably learn it if they were not intimated. It's odd that the response seems to be "FEEL INTIMIDATED MORTAL!". I feel like we're seeing gatekeepers feeling threatened rather than a particularly logical argument.

Another way to phrase it is libertarians should focus on the heavy lifting of reforming small pieces of government where they are likely to have success rather than focusing so single-mindedly on issues they are unlikely to have much impact on.

Actually one of the things that gives me the most hope is the fact that Godwin's law is so much less frequently invoked. I think after a couple decades of being able to vomit up the first thing on our minds, many people are learning to take a more measured approach online.

Interesting I wouldn't have counted them twice, as my instinct is that we're talking about an adjective and an adverb - BUT - flouncing is also a noun that is the material that is used to make a dress flouncy.

Sewing definitely has at least as many technical terms as comp-sci.

This is one of the frightening thing about ADHD prescriptions. With children with ADHD the amphetamines are supposed to work as a depressant. If your kid is getting focus from the drugs they don't have ADHD. You have a kid on speed.

Do you realize that by excluding someone who considers themselves a white male from being a "white male" you're proving that the construct is entirely about privilege and discrimination?

This isn't "American Schools" these are the ultra-competitive "good schools". Put your kid in a normal school that has experienced teachers and is closer to the average for output and you'll probably find all these problems go away.

It just means that they don't include buildings that are falling apart, nor do they include penthouse flats. Texas and Louisiana both have lots of dark purple and have the very worst public schools in the nation. It's really just a pretty good indication of where the jobs are.

There are a lot of us with kids in the cities, though. Many of us think the schools are good enough and don't want the super-stressful "good" schools of the suburbs for our kids. If my kid can read, write, and get into a good college, plus have the varied experiences of living in a city that's the best of all worlds.

In the US voting is not guaranteed to be anonymous. It's protected and (mostly) un-traced to prevent coercion. But the fact you voted is recorded. If you live in a district with few enough voters (or voters who all vote the same way) your voting record could be used to tell who you voted for.

I don't think the other ones you mentioned are particularly compelling, no. There are ways to protect the names of people who report crimes without guaranteeing absolute anonymity.

Do we though? I think we need to fight to keep speech in the open. There's no constitutional right to free speech that can't be traced back to you.

If we're going to equate money and speech then we have to equate the fact that speech is audible. Money masquerading as speech needs to be as well.

If you're not willing to stand up for what you believe then you have no business saying it.

By participating in test prep isn't the College Board basically saying their test has no value? It's supposed to test if your education has prepared you for college. They're now basically saying the SAT is a test of how well you've prepared for the SAT.

I plan to organize with my neighbors and cooperate to survive doomsday. It has been a proven effective method in the aggregate for the history of the world. Lone survivalists have a pretty dismal survival rate.

Right, and when you make $10k per year a hamburger costs $1, and when you make $50k per year a hamburger costs $5, and when you make $100k per year a hamburger costs $10.

In the real world everyone pays the same $5 for a hamburger,

A single person making $10k has money left over to buy a little less than 5 hamburgers a day. A single person making $100k has enough money left over to buy a little more than 43 hamburgers a day. 10 people who make $10k can still only afford 50 hamburgers a day between them after tax, only a little bit more than the guy making $100k.

That's why we have a progressive tax system. We think the guys making $10k should be able to eat and the guy making $100k probably shouldn't eat 8 times as many hamburgers as the guy who makes $10k.

C'mon. I know you're aware that the rates for the tax brackets have changed over time. Surely you know that the top tax bracket was well over 50% for most of the 20th century, and is now lower than that.

Those historically low tax rates really show the muscle of the poor.

Sure, I was trying to create a simplistic system here though. Clearly if we spent years we might come up with something sort of elegant and sort of fair, just like our tax code.

The point is it's easier to figure out what you're contributing to the economy via sales tax than it is via investment. It's difficult to tell the difference between the guy who has invested $2 billion in 10,000 different startups, and the guy who is generating no revenue sitting on $2 billion in non-productive land in the middle of nowhere. Clearly we don't want to tax investment in startups just so we can see who's investing.

Because consumption drives the economy at its most basic level. You can have the rich invest in companies they like or you can have consumers "invest" in companies they like through consumption. Clearly the consumers are going to be a more accurate reflection of what the market wants, and the long term viability of the company. Investment from the wealthy is indicative of what a tiny number of lucky people want. And many companies have billions of dollars they're sitting on, so clearly the market does not allocate dollars in the most efficient way possible.

Basically sales tax is the best way to know that your dollar is doing something of value.

Clearly it's a thought experiment and you can't actually include real details in this example though. It pretty much falls apart from 1000 different directions.

Funny how people always use this example as the poor voting themselves largess out of the treasury. The rich do this too in the form of ridiculously low taxes relative to the amount of money they have. Just because the number on your tax bill is super large, doesn't mean you have a super-large tax bill relative to the amount of money you have.

Nice he's buying into the stupid "people who don't pay income tax in our progressive tax scheme don't pay tax" narrative.

I don't like this idea, but it would be interesting if the tax we're talking about is sales tax. Everyone would get some votes and there would be financial incentives for millionaires to actually spend their money and juice the economy so that they could have more votes.

Does the phrase "bank grade security" actually inspire confidence in anyone? My bank still doesn't have 2-factor auth.

This also doesn't get into the fact that transportation is a huge part of this. If you can't get to your job then you can't work it. Many minimum wage jobs are in strip malls with no public transportation. You can't afford to own a car on a minimum wage salary, so if you can't live close enough to a minimum wage employment center to walk, you may not even have the option to work.

And since most businesses and neighborhoods see apartments as undesirable in their vicinity, they're frequently not within an appropriate range of employment centers.

Actually UT heavily distorts the rental market, since while the students are poor, their housing is being paid for via loans or parents. So rents usually run higher than market rates near universities. This is why Universities frequently have expensive housing, but are unable to keep nearby stores in business.