wmgries

It feels more likely they'd shut down DARPA without realizing what it is than try to rename it.

Some Americans clearly must do this, but personally, I've never heard this in my life until I saw it on a YouTube video of a British person complaining how Americans pronounce words. Obviously, your experience may vary - it's a big country.

A different version of this argument is: why should it matter if I'm querying the content using the API directly versus by using the HTML web interface? If it's the case that different consumers of the API might put different load on the system than the web page that the provider can't/doesn't want to support, why isn't rate limiting the solution?

This also provides providers a way to fairly monetize their API: we're giving you some basic level of access that matches what you get through the website for free, but if your access pattern is such that you put a load on our system that we can't tolerate, then we'll charge you (by providing a paid tier).

This is a fantastic point. The commentary about the passports is really a sideshow: if other nations that are part of a larger state are allowed to participate, so should the Iroquois.

What if Congress revoked all (or nearly all) implicitly and explicitly delegated powers to the Executive? The jockeying over who runs for President and how we elect them always seems to miss the point that the modern Executive is much too powerful.

Make the Presidency weaker, and then let's have this discussion about how we elect them.

This isn't a spatial metaphor any more than "upperclassmen" and "underclassmen" are for high schools or "left" and "right" are for politics. We call it the "upper" chamber because it's supposed to be the higher status, more "dignified" chamber.

Words have histories of course, and probably at one point this was a spatial metaphor - maybe some bicameral legislature literally did have one of their higher status body on a different floor than their lower status body. But the words upper and lower when applied to the legislative branch have evolved since then.

The blockchain part of the voting app provides a buzzword.

Better yet, Windows Subsystem for Linux: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

This is critically important. As a PM, I view it as one of our responsibilities to keep pushing to address the problems - even as we focus on external facing features.

You understand that The Post is about the Pentagon Papers, and takes place in the 1970s, when Jeff Bezos was like 10 right?

@jakebasile clearly a legitimate problem to be solved. The Xbox reference is merely to show that virtualized solutions can be very high performance. I've never had my Xbox drop frames or anything that would indicate it's not running with the full power of the machine.

Security. I believe Centennial apps don't have the ability to actually modify the system - they just think they can via the container interface.

Worth noting: the Xbox One has used virtualization since day one for video games. Done right, gamers shouldn't even have to know that this is what's happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One_system_software#Syste...

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee, not working on Windows 10 (aka I have no idea how accurate this is).

Rules against insider trading do not prevent executives from trading the company's stock. They can set rules with their financial advisors like "sell x amount of stock every y weeks" which will be executed regardless of insider knowledge the executive has.

Have I? If a White House official finds their personal device has been hacked or isn't working properly, what is the right next step?

As an important government official, would you rather he gone to the Verizon store when his phone stopped working?

California laws cannot violate the California constitution or the US constitution. Presumably, the land owner believes the law in question violates his rights as a citizen of the state of California and/or the United States. And when you're worth $1.5 billion, you can have these sorts of fights with the government.

I passionately disagree with the concept of a wealth tax, unless it's only on new wealth (also known as income), because otherwise you're taxing money that has already been taxed. Money should only be taxed once.

All of that said, I strongly agree with your first point. People pay corporate taxes through: 1) higher prices for products and services, 2) less employment, 3) lower returns on investments (a lot of people have 401Ks). Corporate taxes just obscure a person's tax burden.

They have a blood test...

Thanks for the links!

I'm no expert and I'm just as frightened by the spread of this disease as everyone else, but I think people in this thread, and the media in general, are being a tad "end-of-the-world"-y about this without looking at some of the important facts. Namely:

1) The article mentions the R0 of Ebola and claims it is between 1-2 in the current outbreak. Previous outbreaks of Ebola have been as high as 2.7. But this is relatively low compared to other diseases... the R0 of the Measles for instance is 12-18 (and nobody is really talking about the recent outbreaks in the US due to parents not vaccinating their children). Chances are, this rate would even be lower in the West because conditions in African slums and even hospitals are downright deplorable. Doctors aren't using suits or even gloves to examine patients, medical staff are reusing disposable needles, hospitals rely on family members to wash soiled linens because they don't have in-house cleaning services like western hospitals, etc. And don't forget that cultural norms are feeding the spread of the disease: well family members are observed to be sharing beds with sick loved ones in hospitals, people are practicing cultural burial routines of washing and in some cases kissing deceased loved ones, people are still eating the meat of things like bats and gorillas that are sick with the virus (and even found dead), etc. These are all things that just wouldn't happen in the West. People also do much better here at heeding the advice of the medical professionals - for instance, bodies of people who had died of Ebola would like be burned without concern for any regular traditions, without much complaint.

2) Part of the reason Ebola is so scary is the high fatality rate cited in articles: 50-90%. If you extrapolate to the entire planet, this sounds like it would be devastating to the human race. But is this the actual fatality rate? Western hospitals do a much better job of carefully monitoring patients and tending to every minor development. The main problem with Ebola isn't that the body can't fight it, it's that it kills you before your body can recover - the drastic difference in care between the West and Africa would likely make a huge difference in mortality. Make no mistake, this is a deadly disease, but probably not quite as bad as 50-90% in the West.

3) This article and others like it have shared the concern that Ebola could mutate into something transmissible by air. This would make the R0 of the disease skyrocket up into something that could quickly overwhelm Western medicine and very rapidly turn into something perhaps even more devastating than the plague. It's possible of course the virus could mutate in this way, of course, it's already believed that it can spread like this in pigs. One important thing to recognize is that Ebola in humans affects the liver not the lungs, which poses a barrier to being airborne. In addition, to become truly airborne, the virus would have to mutate it's outer coating to resist the drying effect of the air. So in order to become transmissible by air, it would have to mutate 2 different major adaptations and completely change everything about itself. The example I've read is that we don't worry about HIV becoming transmissible by air, and it is thought to mutate more quickly than Ebola. We've never observed any deadly virus change it's method of delivery, although of course airborne diseases evolved that adaptation in the first place.

None of these points mean we should sit back and do nothing. We need to help at minimum because of the following reasons:

1) People are dying and we can help them. With effective medical care, the mortality rate as mentioned in point 2 above should go down.

2) Ebola is destabilizing the region. This is already a region prone to state failure, corrupt and ruthless governments, etc. This disease could well cause wars in Africa, which in turn would make conditions worse and likely increase the fatality rate and the infection rate.

3) While there is a reasonable scientific case to be made against the unlikelihood of the mutation of the virus into airborne transmissible, it's possible and very scary. When considering the risks, we need to multiply the rather small chance against the rather large negative effect of such a change. We need to stop this to avoid this thing from becoming more deadly.

Not only are these file formats not binary (they are zipped XML), they are standardized and their standards are known and maintained. No issue here.

Anecdotally, I have seen ACT scores improve with work and time. Most people at my high school took the ACT not the SAT, so possibly the effect is not the same. But, as I'm sure you would agree, it's a terrible argument to say a given study must be wrong because I observed differently in a unscientific sample from my own personal life. I will concede that changing your score is difficult, and possibly much more so than my experience shows.

That still does not change my central assertion that the ACT or the SAT are not good tests of intelligence. Or that IQ tests are not good tests of intelligence. I don't deny that high scoring test takers of such tests are usually intelligent but as the famous line goes, correlation does not imply causation.

Intelligence is a very tricky thing to define. People typically try to quantify intelligence as one's ability to solve tricky problems, solve problems quickly, retain hordes of knowledge, etc; but these things leave out rather important aspects of intelligence such as creativity, so-called "emotional intelligence", and the value of personal experiences. This is not an exhaustive list of things that are missed by these tests. Suggested reading here is Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book Outliers.

I'm moving the goal posts a bit on this conversation, but an even broader point to make about intelligence is that if you have a certain amount (what ever that means, again I'm not claiming that you can measure this), magically gaining more intelligence would have relatively little impact on your ability to have a successful life. It is my opinion that hard work, social connections, and even luck are more important than intelligence. Again, anecdotally, I have seen brilliant friends struggle to gain any sort of measure of success in life while the friends I judged as less intelligent are blowing them out of the water. Successful people are intelligent people, but they are rarely geniuses.

And this is where my argument begins to loop back around to the point the original article makes: Outcomes improve for people from poor and underprivileged backgrounds when they are integrated into a social groups with people who make them feel like they belong in higher education and encourage them to learn from bad test scores or rough semesters. So what does it matter if this girl has only slightly above average intelligence (as measured by tests that are flawed indicators of intelligence anyway)? If participating in these programs helps her become a productive member of society and become successful against her personal goals, isn't that a huge win?

That's the idea, but the idea that it's even possible to test intelligence with a multiple choice test is fallacious. Intelligence is simply too difficult to define. The fine tuning on these sorts of tests simply betrays a false sense of confidence of their usefulness in measuring intelligence.

I will concede that scores on the ACT or SAT are correlated with intelligence. But like most tests, you can improve your score with practice and study. If I can get a better score after preparing for the test, it doesn't measure intelligence, at least not directly.

You can learn a lot by writing your own code to solve problems solved by existing libraries. I always used to do these kind of things when I was in high school; just because I was bored and wanted to code. Plus, there are many reasons you might need to write your own library to replicate functions of an existing library. A great example is when you can't use an available library because of its license (closed source and you're an open sourced project, or open source and you're a closed source project).

So apparently getting a certain grade on a standardized test makes you smart? Having never met this girl, none of us have any idea if she's smart, but she's certainly not dumb for a score she got on a standardized test when she was like 16...

Agreed. And we need to agree to make words like "data" and "media" group nouns?

This is a ridiculous statement. Only around 15% of the country is uninsured and only a small percentage of that number would be "dying" at any given time. Most people in that number are young and relatively healthy. There aren't huge masses of people dying in the streets from treatable diseases and if that's what you believe, you ought to go outside more often.

Regardless, as I've repeatedly said, I'm not arguing for the status quo. The status quo is bad. We do not have a free market currently. If we decoupled health insurance from employers, provided subsidies to the poor, elderly, and our veterans, and removed ridiculous restrictions that prohibit purchase of insurance across state lines we would be well along the way to having a system with universal coverage without the drawbacks of central planning.

This isn't "ignorant Fox News bullshit". Central planning has been repeatedly tried and proven to be less successful than the market mechanism we trust with every other sector of our economy. We simply can't anticipate supply and demand as efficiently as humans as the market (as a force of interacting people) can. I'm not trying to spew some reactionary propaganda - for Christ's sake, I'm advocating the government give people subsidies to help them get insurance in this proposed truly free market. Free market doesn't mean no government or even no government regulation.

The claim that I'm brainwashed carries significantly less weight when you've ignored my comments up and down this thread.

I don't think that you understand "econ 101" as well as you think you do. If markets worked like you described, nobody would be able to afford to buy anything. Yes, suppliers try to maximize the price they get for what they're selling but somebody has to pay for it. That's what drives the price down - if almost all the doctors charge $x for something and one guy charges $x-1, all the sudden people start flocking to him and he makes more money. In a truly competitive market, long term profits are zero (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition) because everybody sells their goods at exactly what it costs to manufacture them because that's the only way to sell any units at all. Of course I'm not claiming that health care can be perfectly competitive - there are many reasons why it can't be. But there's no reason why the current market needs to be noncompetitive.

Furthermore, as I've said up and down this thread, I'm not opposed to funding poor people's private care through government subsidy. The important piece is that the people participate in the free market and can choose how to use the money - not where the money comes from. This is how this discussion started in the first place - I believe the government should just give veterans money for health care instead of trying to actually provide it.

Having one central administration for a whole sector of the economy is inefficient. The Soviets thoroughly proved this with their (mis)adventures in central planning. Fostering free markets aren't just good morally, they promote better outcomes for patients and more innovation in the sector.

So poor people can suffer in the public hospitals and rich people can buy the very best care their money can provide? How is that a good thing?

I seriously don't understand what's wrong with a system where the government gives people money to participate in a truly free market (see comment in a sibling reply about how the US market is not currently free). This is the best system: everybody is covered and there's no big, lumbering, inefficient government running the show.

I never said the current US system is efficient. Go back and check. In the current system, people don't chose their own medical plans - their employer does. If you lose (or leave your job), it's hard to get good, affordable health care. Further, each state has their own laws about what health care providers must provide - and people can't buy across state lines. Also, many people are on Medicare, in which the government essentially dictates that price to the hospitals/doctors that it will pay for things.

What I favor is a free market system, where everything is run privately. This can be funded through taxation and income redistribution if needed, as long as people are free to choose their hospitals, their doctors, their treatments, etc. The government shouldn't make any demands on what people need to buy for health care coverage.

Of course, contract law and medical safety standards still need to be enforced.