The US is in second place emitting 5,300 gigatons of CO2, China is the top emitter with 10,330 gigatons. On a per capita basis they're doing better than us, but the article's claim that "Even China, “the world’s factory,” has nothing on the US’s past penchant for whipping up carbon pollution." is just wrong.
I think it depends on how close the "best available" theory is to being fact. One of my friends also works in medicine and has to deal with a lot of patients who believe every disease, condition, or injury can basically be cured with a pill (or a single surgey if it's really bad) and some rest. An illusion born out of tv shows and high school text books. The real world is a rude awakening and most of the time they'd rather sue than accept that people still can die or suffer permanent injury while in the care of competent physicians.
I've heard some horror stories from Uber drivers. If someone feels like the pricing is unfair, they might pay it, but be looking for any excuse at all to give the driver a poor rating to get back at them for "price gouging".
If you know where you're going the price can be computed, but you can ask your driver to go anywhere once they pick you up. Like someone's heading home, gets a call, and decides to pick up some friends first from a bar in the other direction, the driver will be happy to oblige but it's going to be a hefty bill especially at peak time.
The private equity fund is being paid for a service, they're not employees and it's not an optional rate. If the fees are too expensive, Yale can always choose different managers, but they might perform worse and end up costing the university money overall. 21% return, minus 6% performance fee (what Yale got) is better than an 8% return with a 1% performance fee, but there would be less snarky articles about it.
Banning them makes it harder to get and reduces the number of people that will have access to it.
Like hand grenades are banned and hard to get, they're extremely effective and someone can still make them, but it's not the sort of thing that some street gang can just get half a dozen to take down people getting in there way (I'm sure they'd love too).
"Armed remote controlled helicopters" are tactically superior enough in their own right (for example I could shoot someone through their 5th story apartment window, from the driver seat of my car half a block away) that I think they should be in a similar category. Sure someone can still make them, or get access, but not the average person with a grudge or whatever.
I don't think he should be arrested, since he's bringing the issue to the public's attention, I do think it should be illegal (or heavily regulated) to arm drones. It's not that it would prevent a determined person from building one, but if it's legal it encourages development in the area. For example someone could build and sell drones that can be trivially armed, then anyone with a bit of money can get one to go.. hunting with? Like bombs are illegal, determined people can still build them, but it's not like you can have a shed full of bombs and have a legal right to keep them when people complain.
Surely SpaceX would pass the cost on to it's customers if has to insure, I don't think they're making a profit on launches as-is. If ~10% is accurate NASA would be paying for the an extra payload every year or two, so it might actually be cheaper to have an occasional failure (this was their 7th supply mission), in particular since there's a risk the insurance company will find a way not to pay after an accident.
That's true, not many people are going to get arrested and then give a 5-star review for the officer's professional conduct;) Especially in Seattle where suing people is pretty much what we do when we don't like something.
Learning the odds is an early step in any serious player's journey, it's pretty straight forward with some effort, and mostly memorization not calculation. There's tons of people that play in a "perfect" manner, as a decent human can, based on the actual value/odds of their hand winning, but it's pretty weak against expert players. It's relatively easy to know what the person has (within a narrow range of hands), and then play around that manipulating the pot size to induce a fold (because it no longer would be rational to stay in the hand), induce a bet, or check/fold without incurring real losses.
Poker as a game has dramatically evolved in the last 15 years and there's a huge amount of theory around it. Which is why I'm skeptical that simply brute forcing iterations of the cards themselves would be effective (or "unbeatable"). It ignores all the data outside the cards. If they produced a bot that was based on machine learning and a large number of hands/players I'd be more receptive.
There is a lot of luck involved of course, and the "champion" is almost always someone different, but the top players are consistently successful. Phil Hellmuth for example has won 13 World Series of Poker events
I tried to take you up on your offer, but apparently it's down for maintenance, so it will be a while..
Playing mathematically perfect making rational decisions based on the value of the cards is very beatable, I'd like to see this actually win in a large number of games against skilled players. The claim that if the system played itself "the instance with the better cards would win" is pretty telling that they have a long way to go in understanding how poker is played in the real world.
I think the 100,000 lives comes from "I'm sick with X and have these 20 unusual things about me" and then a machine can look through data and see what worked and didn't work for everyone else that had X and shared those 20 unusual things, giving doctors more information about how to treat that patient. Versus right now where a doctor will understand X and make an educated decision about how my quirks will effect my treatment.
Why not? If I wanted to smuggle something or someone into the US, I'd route them through friendly looking countries to lower scrutiny. It's probably way easier to get fake Bahamian papers and sneak into the US, then sneaking in directly from Syria or someplace.
Why would you imagine a libertarian thought this up? It sounds like the opposite of what free markets are about (caring about your behavior, instead of results).
If I went back to the 1850's with today's technology I wouldn't send prescient telegraphs to my fellow time travelers, I'd use modern methods of communcations. It seems unlikely they'd turn to twitter or the internet if they are here.
I agree there's a greater capacity for suffering the longer you live, but most people in bad situations don't want to die, they just want to get out of their predicament. For example with slavery, a person's circumstances will likely change dramatically from year to year, criminal organizations aren't known for their stability and centuries long dynasties, more like months long dynasties, and you have lots of non-profits working to free those people too. So I wouldn't be so hasty in deciding that death is the preferable route.
If someone claims an out-of-pocket expense, you have to evaluate that it's not fradulent, while respecting al lthe privacy laws, and regulations, and working across dozens of systems which is actually pretty hard. If you could take people's word for it and just reimburse for whatever they claimed then it's pretty easy, but I'm pretty sure nobody could stay in business doing that.
It's an interesting approach but it seems like an EEG, that monitors brainwaves and allows control through that would be better, the article touches on that briefly and rules it out as too expensinve/time intensive to setup. But modern EEG's don't really take that much setup and are cheap (you can buy one from NeuroSky for $79 that has one sensor that goes across your forehead and connects through wireless usb for example) I'd much rather see research going on there than pupil dilation.
You won't get past the jobs screening process cold calling companies, as you've already experienced. Instead you have to find ways to get out there and meet people without interviewing, like at industry meet ups, learn how to sell yourself, accomplish things on your own that you can talk about (they don't have to make money, just be cool enough to show off), and build a network of people that respect your ability and get work through that.
Contract work is a great way to get your foot in the door.
When you first start be willing to work for less / do less interesting work, do a great job at that, and you'll find yourself in demand, then you can start being more particular about what you work on and making more. It takes a lot of work, of course, and more work than if you had a formal education.
I talked to a lot of people who use rent-a-coders (not this site exactly) to build systems at super low cost. Like ~$10/hour per engineer, at the end of six months they have a barely functioning mess of spaghetti code that's basically worthless, and a service provider threatening to sue them if they don't pay for their hard work. Or even small tasks like "build a cron job that will...." and then like three hours before the deadline they get an email from the winning bidder "what's cron?" And they give people hell if they give them a negative review.
I imagine it's the same for any task, the majority of people willing to accept $5 to design a "professional looking business card" or $20 to "paint a room" will end up producing something you won't want.
Greenpeace gets $270 million a year in funding from Europe alone (in 2008), for example, and they're just 1 organization. This is a polarized issue, reasonable opinions get run roughshod by groups on both sides. If the far right had their way we'd be completely unregulated and polluting like crazy and destroy normal/habitable life for the 99%, if the far left had their way, everyone would become subsistence farmers and die at 40 (normal lifespan without industrialized benefits) and things like an unexpected month without rain would be the difference between life and death for folks.
I don't like either of those choices, so I think we need both sides fighting to have a good balance come out of it.
A ballistic missile is going to cost a ton of resources to launch, and if the counter measure are relatively cheap I don't think numbers will win. Kind of like saying you can beat guns by throwing wave after of wave of people at them until the enemy runs out of bullets.
Unless you're development team is one stand alone developer, using practices like code reviews from peers, a strong source control system, and so forth should make it difficult for the employee to check in broken / malicious code. Also you should remind the employee when they're leaving that if they did leave backdoors open they're subject to legal action, arrest, and other bad things that shouldn't make it worthwhile.
On the flip side of this article - I worked with start-ups that followed the same pattern of growing the business to ~50 people then deciding it was because of genius management that they were successful and they didn't need their star engineers (plural) anymore. So they use the profits to give all the executive big bonuses, hire middle managers to effectively demote engineers and make it clear they're expendable. The star engineers get disgusted and leave the company, in the short term everything's fine and management congratulates themselves for removing the "egomaniacs" from the team that they clearly didn't need.
Then, inexplicably, growth starts to decline; tasks that used to take weeks are now lagging for months. New features are buggy, unreliable, and unpolished. The company's no longer getting rave reviews.
The executives decide it's because there's not enough process governing how software is developed, the company "has been lucky, but we need to grow up", so they hire a consultant to impose best practices on how features are developed and releases are handled. Involving lots of documentation, committees, and approval chains. Productivity drops further, there's a disaster or two, and investors start getting antsy.
Management will remind them of earlier successes, that it's the same management team so there's no need to worry, but to hedge their bets they have a round of layoffs to focus the team and reduce costs. They outsource the "grunt work" of software engineering to cheaper suppliers. Things get worse, and a long and painful failure ensues.
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What's so disappointing? What were you hoping for? A crashed alien spaceship? Cthulhu?
An alien mining operation of course, I'd expect running into aliens doing something mundane is more likely than some epic first contact.
The US is in second place emitting 5,300 gigatons of CO2, China is the top emitter with 10,330 gigatons. On a per capita basis they're doing better than us, but the article's claim that "Even China, “the world’s factory,” has nothing on the US’s past penchant for whipping up carbon pollution." is just wrong.
I think it depends on how close the "best available" theory is to being fact. One of my friends also works in medicine and has to deal with a lot of patients who believe every disease, condition, or injury can basically be cured with a pill (or a single surgey if it's really bad) and some rest. An illusion born out of tv shows and high school text books. The real world is a rude awakening and most of the time they'd rather sue than accept that people still can die or suffer permanent injury while in the care of competent physicians.
I've heard some horror stories from Uber drivers. If someone feels like the pricing is unfair, they might pay it, but be looking for any excuse at all to give the driver a poor rating to get back at them for "price gouging".
If you know where you're going the price can be computed, but you can ask your driver to go anywhere once they pick you up. Like someone's heading home, gets a call, and decides to pick up some friends first from a bar in the other direction, the driver will be happy to oblige but it's going to be a hefty bill especially at peak time.
The private equity fund is being paid for a service, they're not employees and it's not an optional rate. If the fees are too expensive, Yale can always choose different managers, but they might perform worse and end up costing the university money overall. 21% return, minus 6% performance fee (what Yale got) is better than an 8% return with a 1% performance fee, but there would be less snarky articles about it.
Banning them makes it harder to get and reduces the number of people that will have access to it.
Like hand grenades are banned and hard to get, they're extremely effective and someone can still make them, but it's not the sort of thing that some street gang can just get half a dozen to take down people getting in there way (I'm sure they'd love too).
"Armed remote controlled helicopters" are tactically superior enough in their own right (for example I could shoot someone through their 5th story apartment window, from the driver seat of my car half a block away) that I think they should be in a similar category. Sure someone can still make them, or get access, but not the average person with a grudge or whatever.
I don't think he should be arrested, since he's bringing the issue to the public's attention, I do think it should be illegal (or heavily regulated) to arm drones. It's not that it would prevent a determined person from building one, but if it's legal it encourages development in the area. For example someone could build and sell drones that can be trivially armed, then anyone with a bit of money can get one to go.. hunting with? Like bombs are illegal, determined people can still build them, but it's not like you can have a shed full of bombs and have a legal right to keep them when people complain.
Surely SpaceX would pass the cost on to it's customers if has to insure, I don't think they're making a profit on launches as-is. If ~10% is accurate NASA would be paying for the an extra payload every year or two, so it might actually be cheaper to have an occasional failure (this was their 7th supply mission), in particular since there's a risk the insurance company will find a way not to pay after an accident.
That's true, not many people are going to get arrested and then give a 5-star review for the officer's professional conduct ;) Especially in Seattle where suing people is pretty much what we do when we don't like something.
Learning the odds is an early step in any serious player's journey, it's pretty straight forward with some effort, and mostly memorization not calculation. There's tons of people that play in a "perfect" manner, as a decent human can, based on the actual value/odds of their hand winning, but it's pretty weak against expert players. It's relatively easy to know what the person has (within a narrow range of hands), and then play around that manipulating the pot size to induce a fold (because it no longer would be rational to stay in the hand), induce a bet, or check/fold without incurring real losses.
Poker as a game has dramatically evolved in the last 15 years and there's a huge amount of theory around it. Which is why I'm skeptical that simply brute forcing iterations of the cards themselves would be effective (or "unbeatable"). It ignores all the data outside the cards. If they produced a bot that was based on machine learning and a large number of hands/players I'd be more receptive.
There is a lot of luck involved of course, and the "champion" is almost always someone different, but the top players are consistently successful. Phil Hellmuth for example has won 13 World Series of Poker events
I tried to take you up on your offer, but apparently it's down for maintenance, so it will be a while..
Playing mathematically perfect making rational decisions based on the value of the cards is very beatable, I'd like to see this actually win in a large number of games against skilled players. The claim that if the system played itself "the instance with the better cards would win" is pretty telling that they have a long way to go in understanding how poker is played in the real world.
I think the 100,000 lives comes from "I'm sick with X and have these 20 unusual things about me" and then a machine can look through data and see what worked and didn't work for everyone else that had X and shared those 20 unusual things, giving doctors more information about how to treat that patient. Versus right now where a doctor will understand X and make an educated decision about how my quirks will effect my treatment.
Why not? If I wanted to smuggle something or someone into the US, I'd route them through friendly looking countries to lower scrutiny. It's probably way easier to get fake Bahamian papers and sneak into the US, then sneaking in directly from Syria or someplace.
Why would you imagine a libertarian thought this up? It sounds like the opposite of what free markets are about (caring about your behavior, instead of results).
If I went back to the 1850's with today's technology I wouldn't send prescient telegraphs to my fellow time travelers, I'd use modern methods of communcations. It seems unlikely they'd turn to twitter or the internet if they are here.
I agree there's a greater capacity for suffering the longer you live, but most people in bad situations don't want to die, they just want to get out of their predicament. For example with slavery, a person's circumstances will likely change dramatically from year to year, criminal organizations aren't known for their stability and centuries long dynasties, more like months long dynasties, and you have lots of non-profits working to free those people too. So I wouldn't be so hasty in deciding that death is the preferable route.
If someone claims an out-of-pocket expense, you have to evaluate that it's not fradulent, while respecting al lthe privacy laws, and regulations, and working across dozens of systems which is actually pretty hard. If you could take people's word for it and just reimburse for whatever they claimed then it's pretty easy, but I'm pretty sure nobody could stay in business doing that.
It's an interesting approach but it seems like an EEG, that monitors brainwaves and allows control through that would be better, the article touches on that briefly and rules it out as too expensinve/time intensive to setup. But modern EEG's don't really take that much setup and are cheap (you can buy one from NeuroSky for $79 that has one sensor that goes across your forehead and connects through wireless usb for example) I'd much rather see research going on there than pupil dilation.
You won't get past the jobs screening process cold calling companies, as you've already experienced. Instead you have to find ways to get out there and meet people without interviewing, like at industry meet ups, learn how to sell yourself, accomplish things on your own that you can talk about (they don't have to make money, just be cool enough to show off), and build a network of people that respect your ability and get work through that.
Contract work is a great way to get your foot in the door.
When you first start be willing to work for less / do less interesting work, do a great job at that, and you'll find yourself in demand, then you can start being more particular about what you work on and making more. It takes a lot of work, of course, and more work than if you had a formal education.
I talked to a lot of people who use rent-a-coders (not this site exactly) to build systems at super low cost. Like ~$10/hour per engineer, at the end of six months they have a barely functioning mess of spaghetti code that's basically worthless, and a service provider threatening to sue them if they don't pay for their hard work. Or even small tasks like "build a cron job that will ...." and then like three hours before the deadline they get an email from the winning bidder "what's cron?" And they give people hell if they give them a negative review.
I imagine it's the same for any task, the majority of people willing to accept $5 to design a "professional looking business card" or $20 to "paint a room" will end up producing something you won't want.
Greenpeace gets $270 million a year in funding from Europe alone (in 2008), for example, and they're just 1 organization. This is a polarized issue, reasonable opinions get run roughshod by groups on both sides. If the far right had their way we'd be completely unregulated and polluting like crazy and destroy normal/habitable life for the 99%, if the far left had their way, everyone would become subsistence farmers and die at 40 (normal lifespan without industrialized benefits) and things like an unexpected month without rain would be the difference between life and death for folks.
I don't like either of those choices, so I think we need both sides fighting to have a good balance come out of it.
A ballistic missile is going to cost a ton of resources to launch, and if the counter measure are relatively cheap I don't think numbers will win. Kind of like saying you can beat guns by throwing wave after of wave of people at them until the enemy runs out of bullets.
We can make killing people a war crime, and battles can be fought entirely with machines.
Unless you're development team is one stand alone developer, using practices like code reviews from peers, a strong source control system, and so forth should make it difficult for the employee to check in broken / malicious code. Also you should remind the employee when they're leaving that if they did leave backdoors open they're subject to legal action, arrest, and other bad things that shouldn't make it worthwhile.
On the flip side of this article - I worked with start-ups that followed the same pattern of growing the business to ~50 people then deciding it was because of genius management that they were successful and they didn't need their star engineers (plural) anymore. So they use the profits to give all the executive big bonuses, hire middle managers to effectively demote engineers and make it clear they're expendable. The star engineers get disgusted and leave the company, in the short term everything's fine and management congratulates themselves for removing the "egomaniacs" from the team that they clearly didn't need.
Then, inexplicably, growth starts to decline; tasks that used to take weeks are now lagging for months. New features are buggy, unreliable, and unpolished. The company's no longer getting rave reviews.
The executives decide it's because there's not enough process governing how software is developed, the company "has been lucky, but we need to grow up", so they hire a consultant to impose best practices on how features are developed and releases are handled. Involving lots of documentation, committees, and approval chains. Productivity drops further, there's a disaster or two, and investors start getting antsy.
Management will remind them of earlier successes, that it's the same management team so there's no need to worry, but to hedge their bets they have a round of layoffs to focus the team and reduce costs. They outsource the "grunt work" of software engineering to cheaper suppliers. Things get worse, and a long and painful failure ensues.