The problem with this approach is it removes incentives to work.
It doesn't remove the incentive to work nearly as much as contingent unemployment benefits, which any competent neoliberal economist is quick to point out.
The minimum wage is also problematic, for the the incentive purist.
Or, for that matter, a food bank.
If you eliminate contingent unemployment benefits, minimum wage, and food banks the most likely outcome is that UBI improves the incentive to work.
And another thing: it would discourage abusive labour practices, where people making low wages are treated like the desperate dirt they truly are (how motivating is that in the long run?)
What you would get instead, is a viable market in piece-work paying hardly anything (it's pure marginal income) where the people taking this work aren't treated like scum, because they really can decide to not turn up again the next day (and maybe learn a new skill instead, in their divey but peaceful UBI hovel).
Once these people gain a habit and reputation for being good workers a $2/hour (on top of their UBI), many will probably elect to progress up the ladder to $3/hour. And so on.
Back to the reality of human psychology (which doesn't truck much in incentive porn), people tend to lift themselves up by slow, habituated, sustained increments. Cattle prods, electric fences, and gang planks don't tend to lead to a long term, productive work force. (It's been tried, and still exists in North Korea, surely the world capital of The Economic Productivity Index.)
At the end of the day, having a ravenous lion six inches behind your desk who gains an inch every time you cease to type fast enough merely serves to wear out your adrenal system, which isn't intended to function from a state of desperation 24/7.
"But derf derf the incentive!" will never rest, who's job is apparently never done, for the wages received must be fine, fine, fine.
There are many other memorable passages. One that particularly stands out is where Peterson describes a period of soul searching 30 years ago when looking for something in which to believe — anything of certainty. And he started to reflect on a practice at Auschwitz about which he had read. : "A guard would force an inmate to carry a 100-lb sack of wet salt from one side of the large compound to the other and then to carry it back. It was "an act of pointless torment... a piece of malevolent art. "
Serenity doesn't pay the bills. Meanwhile, lugging a 100-lb sack of wet salt back and forth across the Auschwitz quadrangle keeps you out of the furnace for another day.
If your child required you to lug a 100-lb sack of wet salt for miles and miles in order to be spared from a cruel disease, the situation would be (A) in no wise different, (B) meaningful, rather than cruel and pointless.
I'm really wondering why he chose to spend over $500k on lawyers, for a defamation and business interference case.
Probably because deterrence, on general principles. It's far less insane for Bruce to do this than nearly anyone else (given his prominence, and his Rolodex, he might have had some support footing this bill, too). Plus for $500k, you want to run the deterrence (it can bite back) up the largest available flag pole, and with the most credibility.
Plus I'm pretty sure you missed the essential circularity here.
That Perens has the stature to take this on as he has, means his bar for defamation is that much higher than everyone else's.
Yes, it sure would be a strange world if the judge slapped defamation onto every obscure, opinionated, know-nothing screed.
Sometimes the law is dumb, but it's not usually that dumb.
Things become a little different, though, if you start slagging people's character and private lives. That's a bad line to cross, and probably more people overtaken by the heat of the moment should pause to consider the potential legal ramifications of going down this path than actually do.
* Ben Blum was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. * He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California Berkeley. * He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. * He received an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was awarded the New York Times Foundation Fellowship.
The author did mundo research, which including, near the end, an interview with Zimbardo himself, which included the following Frost–Nixon interaction:
"If [prisoners] said, 'I want to get out,' and you said, 'Okay,' then as soon as they left, the experiment would be over," Zimbardo explained. "All the prisoners would say, 'I want to get out.' There has to be a good reason now for them to get out.... That's the whole point of the Pirandellian prison [Ed. note: Pirandello was an Italian playwright whose plays blended fiction and reality].... "
Zimbardo confirmed that David Jaffe had devised the rules with the guards, but tried to argue that he hadn't been lying when he told Congress [and others] that the guards had devised the rules themselves, on the grounds that Zimbardo himself had not been present at the time.
He at first denied that the experiment had had any political motive, but after I read him an excerpt from a press release disseminated on the experiment's second day explicitly stating that it aimed to bring awareness to the need for reform, he admitted that he had probably written it himself under pressure from Carlo Prescott, with whom he had co-taught a summer school class on the psychology of imprisonment.
The entire article is awesome. Read it now.
In summary, the entire experiment was conducted on the basis of publish or perish, and Zimbardo left few stones unturned—acting mainly through compliant Lieutenant Jaffe—to ensure that the end result was "publish".
Here's another link I dropped into a Slashdot thread a few days ago, of an academic whose pursuit of his local career incentive crossed more than a few lines:
Plus, Orwellian popcorn swells enrollment and sells textbooks:
For psychology professors, the Stanford prison experiment is a reliable crowd-pleaser, typically presented with lots of vividly disturbing video footage. In introductory psychology lecture halls, often filled with students from other majors, the counterintuitive assertion that students' own belief in their inherent goodness is flatly wrong offers dramatic proof of psychology's ability to teach them new and surprising things about themselves.
On the other hand, there's a responsible, modern literature, such as Robert Sapolsky's Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017).
There are specific passages in there about the neurobiology of bad cops (under stress, unreliable neural pathways become faster and stronger than reliable neural pathways, operating entirely beneath the level of executive self-control).
Another recent book, Matthew P. Walker's Why We Sleep (2017) explains why—in modern society—operating at far less than our best has become de rigueur.
At the center of this book, with more laboratory studies than you can shake a stick at (many of these conducted until the cold, impartial eye of clinical fMRI scans),
[*] fMRI scans are cold and impartial when applied to slow, global brain phenomena such as sleep; for the fast and small, this, too, can be Wansinked.
Yes, from what I remember from university, the biggest cause of failing and dropping out was not lack of ability to pass beginning college courses but rather lack of discipline in getting up early and going to classes instead of partying and skipping classes once on your own and away from mommy and daddy.
Have you ever checked out the test score differences between owls and larks when both are forced into the "discipline" of waking up early? It's about a full letter grade to the disadvantage of the owls, when the test is taken early in the day (the effect lessons as the day continues, because the owls do finally stop yawning in mid-afternoon).
Owl performance recovers in full when allowed to sleep until their natural wake time. Check out Why We Sleep (2017) by Matthew P. Walker. It's the most authoritative general account of sleep presently available.
In most high schools (those which have stuck with traditional start times), because of age-related changes in circadian rhythm, almost all the students are owls, but some are more owls than others, and their grades all suffer (but the owl owls suffer more than the lark owls).
But sure, make rise time your go-to proxy for having the right stuff.
Ancient Chinese didn't cut their hair after their teenage years. They were too lazy to clean their hair, so they always managed their hair once and didn't touch it again for a few days. A hard pillow would have helped them to keep the shape of the hair. And the long hair would have helped them to sleep comfortable as well.
Also, by counterfactual in nature, I mean that estimating out-of-pocket damages requires manufacturing a hypothesis about how someone might have behaved differently, leading to a different remunerative outcome, had the "theft" not occurred.
s/someone/world and dog/ if you've got Hollywood balls (and then collect a government tariff attached to blank media just in case).
If I could have a dollar for every time an "insightful" post on Slashdot — since the times of Napster — lectured the audience, that it is not theft, if the victim still has his copy of whatever is allegedly "stolen"...
This happens to be roughly the same distinction as the one between murder and attempted murder.
An industrious 12-year-old with a nickel-a-week allowance can easily "steal" $500,000 in a year, as the aggrieved prefer to frame it. And then they try to collect on the counterfactual $500,000, just to keep it real.
Actual outcomes:
(A) Minor engages in data hoarding hobby — minor deflection of revenue opportunity curve.
(B) White collar professional "boosts" his copy of AutoCAD or Final Cut Pro — non-trivial deflection of revenue opportunity curve.
(C) Bootlegger uploads a protection-neutered AutoCAD or FCP to a darknet warez server — potentially a substantial deflection of revenue opportunity curve.
Here's the thing. You can have any deterrent you want, so long as the colour is black. This is why the theft is theft is theft crowd is so quick to postulate 12-year-olds with $500,000 endowment accounts using magic bean, counterfactual arithmetic.
Case (C) degenerates in case (B), where the actual willingness-to-pay resides. However, it also decreases the opportunity cost for (B) to engage in skinflint behaviour, and since middlemen are a pox on humanity anyway—ask Bezos—this group gets the biggest boot up their ass, at the end of the day, once identified and apprehended (if ever).
Looking past the black-only theft is theft is theft deterrence field, all the losses in simple copyright IP theft are counterfactual in nature. Loss of life is not counterfactual. Loss of your car is not counterfactual.
Anyone determined to pack counterfactual theft and non-counterfactual theft into the same word is doomed never to think clearly ever again. Anyone determined to segregate these two cases 100% is also doomed never to think clearly ever again.
Now, if some 12-year-old Ferris Bueller trashes your tricked-out 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder, what you have is a factual $10 million hole (after applying a 33% hyperbole deflation field).
And once again we're right back at some giant number you can't feasibly collect, so what's the different, anyway? Answer, for the straight thinkers: one sad Ferrari corpse, made of actual metal and paint.
You don't get a $15 million car without an extremely rigid supply and demand curve.
For our 12-year-old data hoarder (with the putative $500,000 hoard), if you increase his direct marginal cost by $10 hard cash, he could well have a different hobby by tomorrow afternoon. How's that for a featherweight demand curve, floating along a passing breeze?
That may be true this time, however, the same thing has been said for every previous technological advance.
You're doing inference from stupid. It's like wisdom of the crowds in reverse: round up all the people who've been gloriously wrong (over and over again) into a small pen, and then go opposite George.
News flash: you can't squeeze a correct prediction out of a teapot of stupid people.
The fall of Rome was predicted many times. These predictions were wrong every time—until it actually happened (only some historians dispute that this did ever happen; it kind of depends on how you choose to view Byzantium). Either way, the heyday years of the Roman empire did, indeed, come to an abrupt end (only historians dispute this too: some claim the end arrived in gradual stages).
One of the rationales floating around before the crash of 2008 was "well, the housing market has never gone done, everywhere, all at once." Until it did.
Let's just look at this from the point of view of sampling bias.
Get a large group of people, have them all make predictions about some future bright line, sort those predictions into time sequence.
Here's something that's guaranteed: if you get to the median prediction without it having come true (yet), half of all of the people can be entirely written off as Chicken Littles, while the other half can not (yet) be written off as Chicken Lates. Interesting asymmetry, isn't it?
False positive, false negative; Chicken Little, Chicken Latte (as in, Nero cozied up to an espresso bar while Rome burned).
And here your are trumpeting navigating through the rear-view mirror as some kind of great, refined wisdom.
———
Last night I was reading Sapiens (2014) by Yuval Noah Harari. I was really looking forward to this book, but to be honest, halfway into the second chapter, I'm pretty bummed out by his cavalier roll-ups. Such an enormous step down after Sapolsky's Behave (2017).
In any case, Sapiens is nothing but a litany of enduring, world-redefining change.
It's one of the main reasons people tend to predict alarming change Real Soon Now: because that's what history is actually made from. (Only people tend to forget that history is denominated on a log scale, while the future is usually denominated on a linear scale, which goes a long way toward accounting for the tragic surplus on the Chicken Little side of the fence; that, and thrill-seeking eschatology boners.)
———
I generally try to root my predictions about the future in the perceptions of people who can successfully translate from a log to a linear scale. Try it sometime. You might discover that No Change Ever is not the Bayesian all-world prior you imagine it to be.
Over the last century or so, the number of borderline unemployable males in Western democracy has gone from about 5% to about 15% due to the relentless inflation in the norms of educational attainment.
But a man could get by without an education, if he had physical competence and a work ethic, because there was always roofing to fall back on.
Made with tempered glass, Solar Roof tiles are more than three times stronger than standard roofing tiles. That's why we offer the best warranty in the industry — the lifetime of your house, or infinity, whichever comes first. Watch our hail test video to see how we take durability to a whole new level.
Society is already failing to manufacture enough meaningful work to employ industrious, boisterous males who don't finish school.
I suspect we're more likely to address this problem in future by changing the broken educational system (broken for those whom it least serves) than by making the demands of the modern workforce less cognitively arduous.
Attempting to overthrow the President of the United States by members of federal law enforcement is more important. And it's ongoing.
The other name for this is calling Trump to account for his past actions. Under rule of law, these investigations are slow and deliberate. This would also be true for any common criminal, when the law is working as the constitution intends.
Furthermore, investigations into wealthy criminals is almost always a slow process, because they can afford to erect so many barriers of due process, launching one appeal after another. This is ongoing.
I have no issue with weaponizing due process (tax avoidance v. tax evasion), but only a world-class idiot (or brazen hypocrite) thinks you can weaponize due process to a quick conclusion.
It's basically arguing that the technology is undergoing path dependence, which is no big surprise as it happens all the time in lots of areas.
Want an interesting path dependence?
Science, as an industry, is so busy defending themselves from climate science denialism (in the extreme case: even that it could, in principle, be right) that science tends to hold up peer review as an exalted process of cognitive righteousness (which it is, over a time base of 50-year internal feedback cycles).
However, at the same time, peer review is also a political mechanism to enforce path dependence, which systematically biases trivial incrementalism (insignificant career fodder is fine, so long as it knows its tiny, tiny place), over profound and potentially game-changing speculation (the proper onus here should be that any definite, predictive theory which can not be presently disproved is by default considered publishable, but that's not how it works—not if it runs against the grain of the endowed, old-timer consensus worldview). To some degree this is a budgetary bun fight, because without publication, no grants; so the gate-keepers of publication are implicitly also the gate keepers of funding opportunity.
Society pays a steep price for the 50-year bullshit-rejection convergence window of peer review (though it sure beats languishing in 3000-year traditions of metaphysical naval gazing).
To some degree, science kind of likes being marginalized by the climate science deniers, because it distracts from asking legitimate questions about just how broken some of these internal political processes really are (who can patiently pose these questions when you're shouting down accusations 24/7 that you're ten or a hundred times less competent than you actually are?)
———
Did I mention p-hacking? What an ultimate crock. Easily predictable 50-years ago, and now we're just getting to it.
Preregistration of study designs: This is a huge safeguard against p-hacking. Preregistration means that scientists publicly commit to experimental design before they start collecting data. This makes it much harder to cherry-pick results.
What an amazing innovation. Someone hand the guy or gal who proposed that idea the Fields Medal.
———
Yes, all those virtuous climate scientists vigorously defending the ultimate truth machine of peer review sat around for decades barely lifting a finger to institute pre-registation of study design.
And these are the people who are going to save the planet from the greenhouse gas godzilla? Good luck with that. (My most cynical internal voice assigns a p_success_STP_G3_1v0 somewhere in the vicinity of Reagan's nakedly preposterous space laser (Strategic Defense Initiative).
"But boss, the stakes! But boss, the stakes!" cries the white-tuxedoed midget from Fantasy Island.
This is what Terry Pratchett calls narrativium: the iron law that a million-to-one long shot happens nine time out of ten (precondition: all the stakes having arrived just in the nick of time at a synchronous planetary-alignment cross-road of dire urgency).
Narrative Causality was also the stock in trade enabling Reagan to float the SDI concept to the receipt of Educated Snickers Only: the stakes were sufficiently sky high to trigger narrativium normalization of million-to-one odds. (Education, by some magic power, is a potent form of narrativium kryptonite.)
The original TOS had terrible numbers, except among the demographic advertisers would later cherish above all others. (Advertisers are slow on the uptake.) So there it was, TOS hanging by a budgetary thread throughout its lame third season.
NBC at first planned to move Star Trek to Mondays for the show's third season, likely in hopes of increasing its audience after the enormous letter campaign that surprised the network.
But in March 1968, NBC instead moved the show to 10:00 pm Friday night, an hour undesirable for its younger audience, so as not to conflict with the highly successful Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In on Monday evenings, from whose time slot Laugh-In producer George Schlatter had angrily demanded it not be rescheduled. In addition to the undesirable time slot, Star Trek was now being seen on only 181 of NBC's 210 affiliates.
Roddenberry was frustrated, and complained, "If the network wants to kill us, it couldn't make a better move."
He attempted to persuade NBC to give Star Trek a better day and hour, but was not successful. As a result of this and his own growing exhaustion, he chose to withdraw from the stress of the daily production of Star Trek, though he remained nominally in charge as its "executive producer".
This is what you get when you grant an implied equivalency to exhausted eyeballs playing out the string to the tune of Maury Povich or Kim Kardashian to a smart-ass teenager with a working brain binge-watching Crash Course History.
This particular "more than" bucket (Internet v. television) is fit to make a clueless Mad Man weep a saline river for the lost marketing paradise of Atlantis—where all eyeballs were equal unto the market, as stipulated by the Nielson Ratings Equivalency Act of 1951 BCE.
[*] Altanteans routinely over-simplified their public sphere by decree, all the better to free up more time for "doing it" in such an immense variety of non-procreative ways (nascent gills add so many buoyancy options) that finally God was forced to summon up a wet, wet, wet collective express train to hell. Turns out, there are some cultural channels that even God can not bear to watch, day in and day out. Povich apparently makes the grade, where Atlantis didn't. These Altanteans, so much skin, and their guts don't even churn—simply unbearable. Be gone, channel, be gone.
Good grief, spare a clue for what you're lumping together.
Is English considered to be the pivot language, or do all of these models product the same intermediate representation?
Rather useless article, with no shred of a deep understanding, whatsoever.
I'm guessing you run the input model from language to IR, and the output model from IR back to language, so you need to have at least two models to use this app. (I suppose you could translate from English to IR and back to English again, for perverse joy.)
Only I haven't read anything about training multiple machine translation models with a shared IR. That strikes me as technically difficult, and I would have thought I'd have seen some loud crowing out there, had it been achieved (it's now been a couple of months since I gave the Internet a good shake on machine learning, and things move fast).
Currently Intel's 10 nm process is denser than TSMC's 7 nm process and available in limited quantities, but volume production is delayed until 2019. However, TSMC's 7 nm process [in name only] is planned to be soon available in high volume shipments or mass produced devices.
After you've been the 800-lb gorilla for four decades, death's door is merely running abreast, because gorilla's don't historically adapt well to sustained sprints.
But in this case, everyone on the track must soon round the corner onto the EUV obstacle course.
This 10 nm design rule is considered likely to be realized by multiple patterning, given the difficulty of implementing EUV lithography.
TSMC is surely feeling their oats these days, but tackling EUV from the vanguard position has to practically scare them pantsless, if they've got any sense; they'll probably concede half a step to the once-tireless vanguard gorilla.
I imagine this will only be temporary, though. EUV from the vanguard might just be Intel's last gorilla glory. But it buys them time, so they're definitely not 800-lb shaggy deadman running abreast, just yet.
There's a lesson here. If you have a good idea, don't fucking tell Google about it! Don't put it on your android phone, don't discuss it in email, don't type more than you have to in the search bar.
Classic example of availability bias.
The vast majority of inventions are lost to the world because the person who thought it up (in a form that was by no means complete and practicable unto itself) failed to solicit enough outside involvement to fully move the idea forward.
It's simply human nature that ideas die when not shared around and chewed collectively.
This has a lot to do with fueling the lone genius myth, because only weirdos like Tesla (and he was very weird) have what it takes mentally and emotionally to go it alone.
Most clever monkeys who select your recommended door #A seriously overestimate their intestinal fortitude, wherewithal, and life course. Then we tremendously celebrate the few who prevail over these dim prospects. Probably in most cases, clever monkey is far better served by selecting door #B: ensconce the idea into the public domain as quickly, and vigorously, and thoroughly as possible. Definitely mention all the ways the idea might play out or become applied in a practical scenario.
If the idea seems to gain any kind of social or economic traction, patent some lucrative corner case. I don't counsel against withholding some narrow, special tricks. If you've invented anything substantial enough to be worth this conversation, you've probably accumulated in your (years worth of) preliminary thrashing more than few exceedingly narrow, special tricks.
First off, you're in for a lot of work ⦠years of work ⦠most of which will be wandering in the desert. The odds of success are heavily stacked against you. If you are not strongly self-motivated to do this, it isn't going to happen. If you need validation and encouragement from others, it isn't going to happen.
No, I didn't look that up before writing the above. And it was on the first page of links that came up in a Google search "inventing a computer language difficulty".
Over the years, as the world has become ever more social, I've become increasingly convinced that this antisocial stiff-upper-lip door #A is tragic advice, 99 times out of 100.
If you're Walter Bright, YMMV. But Walter certainly wasn't reading Slashdot for prudent counsel. He was entirely of his own mind from the get go. The bright solitary lights tend to come fully equipped with a blanket-armour disdain for the rubes around them (sometimes graceful, sometimes polite, sometimes neither).
Moral of the story: if you need to ask, you can't afford it.
... originally only expected to survive for a few months...
I think you're abusing the word "expected".
There was a high-likelihood failure mode (involving dust accumulation) which was baked into the mission parameters, whose budgetary concerns centered around achieving a minimum sufficient return on investment (the worst outcome of all in space exploration is no learning).
But if you'd asked anyone involved with a clue, they'd have said that the uncertainty around the dust accumulation model was high, and that most of the engineering had been done to a standard where a decade of nearly fault-free operation would be considered normal (otherwise the sum of parts wouldn't outlast xmas morning).
In NASA planning culture, the word "unexpected" doesn't convey the sad punter baggage you're implying out of context. In NASA planning culture, foreseeable adverse events get all the hasty index cards. They don't tend to invest up front in thick mission planning binders for unexpected (meaning: pleasant surprise) thin-atmosphere windfall. NASA doesn't plan for the worst, and hope for the best. 99% of the time, NASA plans for the worst, and then re-plans for the worst.
And then when the day comes and there's an eerie adversity absence, and everyone is standing around with not much to do and a blank look, it's not so much a mental surprise (unexpected) as an emotional shock.
Dance with the one that brung ya is strangely discomfiting on emotional terms when the one that brung ya is total institutional paranoia, with thick binders devoted to taking a single careful step.
Unexpected dance floor vacancy rate? Hardly at all.
It's amazing because even humans living in Rome thousands of years ago created a way to write numbers but no way to write "none".
They had a way to write nothing: by writing nothing.
The Romans were pragmatists. This saves paper. Imagine the cost of inscribing "zero Bugblatter Beasts" on every urn, vase, and ceramic dufflebag?
Turns out, some nebbish recruit did invent zero, but the squadron leader spotted the unfamiliar symbol one day and then he said "what the fuck is this?" and somebody said "it means we didn't get any X in our rations this month" and then the squadron leader's veins bulged out of his neck while he barked "who's the jackass wasting a perfectly good resource to record what he didn't get?" and then the jackass had to run 100 laps around the Colosseum draped with a heavy marble placard reading "lion food / reward offered"—this while the people inside were cheering the lions (more than once he panted out excitedly "look, an elephant!" pointing at some unlikely bush when people got too close for comfort, while summoning yet another painful micro-sprint, and through this device he did avoid detection in the end).
Never made that mistake again. Not ever. Neither did anyone else, which, of course, also means that no-one was foolish enough to write a line itemizing the empty set of damn fools (many of whom invented zero, but knew better than to write it down).
It isn't a charity; you are paying for that money.
No, you're not paying for that money. You're promising to pay for that money at a future date. And if the bank fails to collect at the future date, the "money" wasn't exactly "paid for" was it?
Explain to me how the weird fucking language of even putting that into words doesn't give this whole ridiculous pretense away?
He who has the gold, makes the rules. This could have been one of the original commandments, but stone is expensive and carving is hard on the wrists, and Moses was going "God, everyone already knows that, or finds out real quick" and God was going "ah, I suppose so, I guess you're right."
The film opens with a Soviet-made Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane landing on Mwanza airfield in Mwanza, Tanzania, near Lake Victoria. The plane came from Europe to ship back processed fillets of Nile Perch, a species of fish introduced into Lake Victoria that has caused the extinction of hundreds of endemic species.
Through interviews with the Russian and Ukrainian plane crew, local factory owners, guards, prostitutes, fishermen and other villagers, the film discusses the effects of the introduction of the Nile perch to Lake Victoria, how it has affected the ecosystem and economy of the region.
The film also dwells at length on the dichotomy between European aid which is being funneled into Africa on the one hand, and the unending flow of munitions and weapons from European arms dealers on the other. Arms and munitions are often flown in on the same planes which transport the Nile perch fillets to European consumers, feeding the very conflicts which the aid was sent to remedy. As Dima, the radio engineer of the plane crew, says later on in the film: the children of Angola receive guns for Christmas, the children of Europe receive grapes.
The appalling living and working conditions of the indigenous people, in which basic sanitation is completely absent and many children turn to drugs and prostitution, is covered in great depth; because the Nile perch is fished and processed for export, all the prime fillets are sold to European supermarkets, leaving the local people to survive on the festering carcasses of the gutted fish.
As to why the local fish can't be sold to the domestic market to counter the impending famine (local news reports relayed in the film indicated Northern and Central Tanzania were facing famine), one fish processing factory manager says "it is too expensive".
God, what a depressing film.
For the full effect, watch it back-to-back-to-back with Bus 174 and Spirited Away. That's got to be the (self) slasher trifecta of all time.
The slicker City of God (2002 film) is a reasonable substitute for Bus 174, but I preferred the grittier precincts. And don't be fooled by the heavenly animation of Spirited Away, that's a full-on PTSD psychological distance fugue.
While that's true, if Excel's RNG results in a pattern (e.g. cell A2534 is always assigned a low number and thus selected), it could result in immigration employees who know of this gaming the system, to do an immigrant friend a favor or even auctioning the spot to the highest bidder.
In a perfect world, perhaps we'd worry about something like this.
... could result in immigration employees...
You can always count on the government to be too stupid for words, until there's profit involved.
Immigration Canada: a real hotbed of mathematical sharps.
Seriously, if they really were sharps, Excel would have been deported as undesirable long ago. (And don't come back until you clean up your act.)
If it costs them extra to de-louse everything and do a factory reset on every returned smartphone then that's too bad.
It's not good for the planet to artificially inflate the cost of doing business. It might sound good on the surface, but doesn't survive careful analysis. Price is almost always the best proxy available (in a woefully complex world) for planetary resources consumed, when one includes resources consumed directly, as well as those consumed via opportunity-cost displacement.
Nor is it good to offer libertarian fundamentalists a convenient platform from which to save the world (correctly), because they also tend to mix in canards like trickle down (ideologically).
Blackberry: "We have the most secure Android smartphone." Hackers: "Challenge accepted"
Well, yes, adenoidal teenagers think this whole thing is a giant game of capture the flag FTW!
But real security is a complex economic trade-off between the cost of the attack, the value of the attack, and the law of supply and demand (one corner of which concerns the long-term warehousing of former teenagers who outlived their long-arm-of-the-law immortality halo).
Challenge accepted by the Red Bull movable feast of the socially naive with mad hacking skilz and dark horse omenz to parlay into the Forty Year Old Virgin's tragically unhip middle-aged, free-society business acumen.
But is "retirement" at 65 a realistic goal for most people?
It was certainly a realistic goal for the political class to promote during an extremely unusual period in economic history: the glorious middle class years between 1950 and 1980.
Plus with the boomer bulge, this core demographic was due to control society at the polling stations until right about now. When these industrious, retirement-fund beavers had happy thoughts (whether naive or not) politicians could plan on a second term.
Reagan was the beginning of the end, though the most effective horseman of the middle-class apocalypse was probably Bill Clinton (his very capable fingerprints all over the knife handle of Greenspan's "hands free" insouciance–compatible banking-oversight reform acts).
———
Why did so many economically secure red state boomers vote for the Rage Fantasy Falsehood Twitter Storm of 2016?
Not for their own sake, but for the sake of their children—I heard them admit in somber post-election PTSD journalism—few of whom regarded their children as having any hope at all of cashing the same golden boomer ticket in their own lives.
This was how we got the wealth inversion: where the Trump voters were putatively wealthier than the Hilary voters. But many of the aging wealthy weren't voting on behalf of their own secure economic margins, but rather on behalf of the insecure margins of the next generation of kin coming up behind them. Grandpa thought he was throwing his grandson a political bone. Grandma through she was throwing her granddaughter a political bone. People in the red states are family firsters.
The logic might be flawed, but there's still a lot to be said for having your heart in the right place—especially when you're closing in on punching your own ticket for the great eternal retirement home in the clouds; and God will handle the rest, rest assured, what with the giant NPV rapture discount, that isn't even a long horizon, before Jesus returns, with a Christian version of Sharia law so inflexible and unforgiving as to make even your average soft-hearted militant Muslim weep with bliss.
———
What is a poll, anyway, but a giant statistical exercise in Family Feud talk radio?
Turn on your radio any day. Everything I've said here is out there, and pretty much in their own words, though not necessarily with the lines drawn quite so straight.
———
Here's a skill testing question for a real survey of PPE acumen on the ground: What the Greenspan singularity of 2008 shockingly unforeseeable, or a nearly forgone conclusion, like a pot of starchy potatoes left on boil, with nobody home in the kitchen, and froth spilling everywhere for at least five years prior to the actual kitchen fire alerted the emergency TARP paramedics—from the Goldman Sachs retirement home in the sky known as the Fed and the US Treasury?
———
Note: When retiring from Goldman into a high government post, you can't take it with you (your Goldman shares) but you can still do a solid for your tribal Wall Street next of kin.
Note: In the current administration, you can take it with you, disclosure be damned. If you connect too straight line a mental line, this apparently flies under the patriotic flag of "draining the swamp".
Because rules, you know, have too many teeth—which is just Clintonism by another name, under his pecker-fueled misdeed clone, though their personalities, otherwise, couldn't be more different: Clinton's bonfire was carefully piled high to the sky before it finally erupted into uncontrollable flame; Trump's bonfire is more like fork lightning rattling the heavens over a bone-dry prairie. Are thousands of small fires better than one big fire? I guess we'll find out. Unless, that is, Trump covers his tracks with
The Microsoft of today is not the same Microsoft as in the days of Ballmer and Gates.
Sure. And the Microsoft of tomorrow is not necessarily the Microsoft of today. Easy come, easy go.
Which is why Microsoft should get busy providing an explicit list of intentions concerning their operation of GitHub, providing as many bullets as possible about things that define their tenure as the presumptive "good" Microsoft: will dos and won't dos.
If the list doesn't allow one to finish the sentence "you'll know we've gone back to our old tricks when..." it isn't an adequate prospective disclosure.
To reiterate: I'm not increasing my present reliance on GitHub in any meaningful way until I have a really solid completion to the sentence "you'll know we've gone back to our old tricks when..." completed in Microsoft's own words.
I don't hold modern Germans responsible for what happened once upon a time. Nevertheless, I do expect some extremely cautious and historically informed navel-gazing on their part when their will to power swells.
My position will be much the same concerning the half of America that voted for Donald Trump if his rough and tumble "diplomacy" escalates into an exchange. Should that terrible day come to pass, "oh, well, the South Korean position was untenable, anyway (may you rest in peace)" is not going to fly in my airspace.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't remove the incentive to work nearly as much as contingent unemployment benefits, which any competent neoliberal economist is quick to point out.
The minimum wage is also problematic, for the the incentive purist.
Or, for that matter, a food bank.
If you eliminate contingent unemployment benefits, minimum wage, and food banks the most likely outcome is that UBI improves the incentive to work.
And another thing: it would discourage abusive labour practices, where people making low wages are treated like the desperate dirt they truly are (how motivating is that in the long run?)
What you would get instead, is a viable market in piece-work paying hardly anything (it's pure marginal income) where the people taking this work aren't treated like scum, because they really can decide to not turn up again the next day (and maybe learn a new skill instead, in their divey but peaceful UBI hovel).
Once these people gain a habit and reputation for being good workers a $2/hour (on top of their UBI), many will probably elect to progress up the ladder to $3/hour. And so on.
Back to the reality of human psychology (which doesn't truck much in incentive porn), people tend to lift themselves up by slow, habituated, sustained increments. Cattle prods, electric fences, and gang planks don't tend to lead to a long term, productive work force. (It's been tried, and still exists in North Korea, surely the world capital of The Economic Productivity Index.)
At the end of the day, having a ravenous lion six inches behind your desk who gains an inch every time you cease to type fast enough merely serves to wear out your adrenal system, which isn't intended to function from a state of desperation 24/7.
"But derf derf the incentive!" will never rest, who's job is apparently never done, for the wages received must be fine, fine, fine.
The gospel according to Jordan B Peterson — 21 April 2018
Serenity doesn't pay the bills. Meanwhile, lugging a 100-lb sack of wet salt back and forth across the Auschwitz quadrangle keeps you out of the furnace for another day.
If your child required you to lug a 100-lb sack of wet salt for miles and miles in order to be spared from a cruel disease, the situation would be (A) in no wise different, (B) meaningful, rather than cruel and pointless.
Probably because deterrence, on general principles. It's far less insane for Bruce to do this than nearly anyone else (given his prominence, and his Rolodex, he might have had some support footing this bill, too). Plus for $500k, you want to run the deterrence (it can bite back) up the largest available flag pole, and with the most credibility.
Plus I'm pretty sure you missed the essential circularity here.
That Perens has the stature to take this on as he has, means his bar for defamation is that much higher than everyone else's.
Yes, it sure would be a strange world if the judge slapped defamation onto every obscure, opinionated, know-nothing screed.
Sometimes the law is dumb, but it's not usually that dumb.
Things become a little different, though, if you start slagging people's character and private lives. That's a bad line to cross, and probably more people overtaken by the heat of the moment should pause to consider the potential legal ramifications of going down this path than actually do.
Psychology Today is the best you can do? Whose side are you on, anyway?
The Lifespan of a Lie — 7 June 2018
About the author:
* Ben Blum was born and raised in Denver, Colorado.
* He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California Berkeley.
* He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
* He received an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was awarded the New York Times Foundation Fellowship.
The author did mundo research, which including, near the end, an interview with Zimbardo himself, which included the following Frost–Nixon interaction:
The entire article is awesome. Read it now.
In summary, the entire experiment was conducted on the basis of publish or perish, and Zimbardo left few stones unturned—acting mainly through compliant Lieutenant Jaffe—to ensure that the end result was "publish".
Here's another link I dropped into a Slashdot thread a few days ago, of an academic whose pursuit of his local career incentive crossed more than a few lines:
Why the Joy of Cooking is going after a Cornell researcher — 28 February 2018
Plus, Orwellian popcorn swells enrollment and sells textbooks:
On the other hand, there's a responsible, modern literature, such as Robert Sapolsky's Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017).
There are specific passages in there about the neurobiology of bad cops (under stress, unreliable neural pathways become faster and stronger than reliable neural pathways, operating entirely beneath the level of executive self-control).
Another recent book, Matthew P. Walker's Why We Sleep (2017) explains why—in modern society—operating at far less than our best has become de rigueur.
At the center of this book, with more laboratory studies than you can shake a stick at (many of these conducted until the cold, impartial eye of clinical fMRI scans),
[*] fMRI scans are cold and impartial when applied to slow, global brain phenomena such as sleep; for the fast and small, this, too, can be Wansinked.
I colourful
Have you ever checked out the test score differences between owls and larks when both are forced into the "discipline" of waking up early? It's about a full letter grade to the disadvantage of the owls, when the test is taken early in the day (the effect lessons as the day continues, because the owls do finally stop yawning in mid-afternoon).
Owl performance recovers in full when allowed to sleep until their natural wake time. Check out Why We Sleep (2017) by Matthew P. Walker. It's the most authoritative general account of sleep presently available.
In most high schools (those which have stuck with traditional start times), because of age-related changes in circadian rhythm, almost all the students are owls, but some are more owls than others, and their grades all suffer (but the owl owls suffer more than the lark owls).
But sure, make rise time your go-to proxy for having the right stuff.
Why did they use ceramic pillows in Ancient China and as recently as the Ming Dynasty? — August 2017
s/degenerates to/degenerates into/
Also, by counterfactual in nature, I mean that estimating out-of-pocket damages requires manufacturing a hypothesis about how someone might have behaved differently, leading to a different remunerative outcome, had the "theft" not occurred.
s/someone/world and dog/ if you've got Hollywood balls (and then collect a government tariff attached to blank media just in case).
This happens to be roughly the same distinction as the one between murder and attempted murder.
An industrious 12-year-old with a nickel-a-week allowance can easily "steal" $500,000 in a year, as the aggrieved prefer to frame it. And then they try to collect on the counterfactual $500,000, just to keep it real.
Actual outcomes:
(A) Minor engages in data hoarding hobby — minor deflection of revenue opportunity curve.
(B) White collar professional "boosts" his copy of AutoCAD or Final Cut Pro — non-trivial deflection of revenue opportunity curve.
(C) Bootlegger uploads a protection-neutered AutoCAD or FCP to a darknet warez server — potentially a substantial deflection of revenue opportunity curve.
Here's the thing. You can have any deterrent you want, so long as the colour is black. This is why the theft is theft is theft crowd is so quick to postulate 12-year-olds with $500,000 endowment accounts using magic bean, counterfactual arithmetic.
Case (C) degenerates in case (B), where the actual willingness-to-pay resides. However, it also decreases the opportunity cost for (B) to engage in skinflint behaviour, and since middlemen are a pox on humanity anyway—ask Bezos—this group gets the biggest boot up their ass, at the end of the day, once identified and apprehended (if ever).
Looking past the black-only theft is theft is theft deterrence field, all the losses in simple copyright IP theft are counterfactual in nature. Loss of life is not counterfactual. Loss of your car is not counterfactual.
Anyone determined to pack counterfactual theft and non-counterfactual theft into the same word is doomed never to think clearly ever again. Anyone determined to segregate these two cases 100% is also doomed never to think clearly ever again.
Now, if some 12-year-old Ferris Bueller trashes your tricked-out 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder, what you have is a factual $10 million hole (after applying a 33% hyperbole deflation field).
Ferrari identical to model driven in hit film 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' expected to sell for $15.1 million
And once again we're right back at some giant number you can't feasibly collect, so what's the different, anyway? Answer, for the straight thinkers: one sad Ferrari corpse, made of actual metal and paint.
You don't get a $15 million car without an extremely rigid supply and demand curve.
For our 12-year-old data hoarder (with the putative $500,000 hoard), if you increase his direct marginal cost by $10 hard cash, he could well have a different hobby by tomorrow afternoon. How's that for a featherweight demand curve, floating along a passing breeze?
Lump or split, lump or split?
God, isn't it just such a tough call.
You're doing inference from stupid. It's like wisdom of the crowds in reverse: round up all the people who've been gloriously wrong (over and over again) into a small pen, and then go opposite George.
News flash: you can't squeeze a correct prediction out of a teapot of stupid people.
The fall of Rome was predicted many times. These predictions were wrong every time—until it actually happened (only some historians dispute that this did ever happen; it kind of depends on how you choose to view Byzantium). Either way, the heyday years of the Roman empire did, indeed, come to an abrupt end (only historians dispute this too: some claim the end arrived in gradual stages).
One of the rationales floating around before the crash of 2008 was "well, the housing market has never gone done, everywhere, all at once." Until it did.
Let's just look at this from the point of view of sampling bias.
Get a large group of people, have them all make predictions about some future bright line, sort those predictions into time sequence.
Here's something that's guaranteed: if you get to the median prediction without it having come true (yet), half of all of the people can be entirely written off as Chicken Littles, while the other half can not (yet) be written off as Chicken Lates. Interesting asymmetry, isn't it?
False positive, false negative; Chicken Little, Chicken Latte (as in, Nero cozied up to an espresso bar while Rome burned).
And here your are trumpeting navigating through the rear-view mirror as some kind of great, refined wisdom.
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Last night I was reading Sapiens (2014) by Yuval Noah Harari. I was really looking forward to this book, but to be honest, halfway into the second chapter, I'm pretty bummed out by his cavalier roll-ups. Such an enormous step down after Sapolsky's Behave (2017).
In any case, Sapiens is nothing but a litany of enduring, world-redefining change.
It's one of the main reasons people tend to predict alarming change Real Soon Now: because that's what history is actually made from. (Only people tend to forget that history is denominated on a log scale, while the future is usually denominated on a linear scale, which goes a long way toward accounting for the tragic surplus on the Chicken Little side of the fence; that, and thrill-seeking eschatology boners.)
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I generally try to root my predictions about the future in the perceptions of people who can successfully translate from a log to a linear scale. Try it sometime. You might discover that No Change Ever is not the Bayesian all-world prior you imagine it to be.
Over the last century or so, the number of borderline unemployable males in Western democracy has gone from about 5% to about 15% due to the relentless inflation in the norms of educational attainment.
But a man could get by without an education, if he had physical competence and a work ethic, because there was always roofing to fall back on.
Power your Home with Beautiful Solar
Society is already failing to manufacture enough meaningful work to employ industrious, boisterous males who don't finish school.
I suspect we're more likely to address this problem in future by changing the broken educational system (broken for those whom it least serves) than by making the demands of the modern workforce less cognitively arduous.
The other name for this is calling Trump to account for his past actions. Under rule of law, these investigations are slow and deliberate. This would also be true for any common criminal, when the law is working as the constitution intends.
Furthermore, investigations into wealthy criminals is almost always a slow process, because they can afford to erect so many barriers of due process, launching one appeal after another. This is ongoing.
I have no issue with weaponizing due process (tax avoidance v. tax evasion), but only a world-class idiot (or brazen hypocrite) thinks you can weaponize due process to a quick conclusion.
Want an interesting path dependence?
Science, as an industry, is so busy defending themselves from climate science denialism (in the extreme case: even that it could, in principle, be right) that science tends to hold up peer review as an exalted process of cognitive righteousness (which it is, over a time base of 50-year internal feedback cycles).
However, at the same time, peer review is also a political mechanism to enforce path dependence, which systematically biases trivial incrementalism (insignificant career fodder is fine, so long as it knows its tiny, tiny place), over profound and potentially game-changing speculation (the proper onus here should be that any definite, predictive theory which can not be presently disproved is by default considered publishable, but that's not how it works—not if it runs against the grain of the endowed, old-timer consensus worldview). To some degree this is a budgetary bun fight, because without publication, no grants; so the gate-keepers of publication are implicitly also the gate keepers of funding opportunity.
Society pays a steep price for the 50-year bullshit-rejection convergence window of peer review (though it sure beats languishing in 3000-year traditions of metaphysical naval gazing).
To some degree, science kind of likes being marginalized by the climate science deniers, because it distracts from asking legitimate questions about just how broken some of these internal political processes really are (who can patiently pose these questions when you're shouting down accusations 24/7 that you're ten or a hundred times less competent than you actually are?)
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Did I mention p-hacking? What an ultimate crock. Easily predictable 50-years ago, and now we're just getting to it.
Why the Joy of Cooking is going after Cornell's Brian Wansink — 28 February 2018
What an amazing innovation. Someone hand the guy or gal who proposed that idea the Fields Medal.
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Yes, all those virtuous climate scientists vigorously defending the ultimate truth machine of peer review sat around for decades barely lifting a finger to institute pre-registation of study design.
And these are the people who are going to save the planet from the greenhouse gas godzilla? Good luck with that. (My most cynical internal voice assigns a p_success_STP_G3_1v0 somewhere in the vicinity of Reagan's nakedly preposterous space laser (Strategic Defense Initiative).
"But boss, the stakes! But boss, the stakes!" cries the white-tuxedoed midget from Fantasy Island.
This is naked appeal to the Theory of Narrative Causality. If it must happen, it will happen.
This is what Terry Pratchett calls narrativium: the iron law that a million-to-one long shot happens nine time out of ten (precondition: all the stakes having arrived just in the nick of time at a synchronous planetary-alignment cross-road of dire urgency).
Narrative Causality was also the stock in trade enabling Reagan to float the SDI concept to the receipt of Educated Snickers Only: the stakes were sufficiently sky high to trigger narrativium normalization of million-to-one odds. (Education, by some magic power, is a potent form of narrativium kryptonite.)
The original TOS had terrible numbers, except among the demographic advertisers would later cherish above all others. (Advertisers are slow on the uptake.) So there it was, TOS hanging by a budgetary thread throughout its lame third season.
This is what you get when you grant an implied equivalency to exhausted eyeballs playing out the string to the tune of Maury Povich or Kim Kardashian to a smart-ass teenager with a working brain binge-watching Crash Course History.
This particular "more than" bucket (Internet v. television) is fit to make a clueless Mad Man weep a saline river for the lost marketing paradise of Atlantis—where all eyeballs were equal unto the market, as stipulated by the Nielson Ratings Equivalency Act of 1951 BCE.
[*] Altanteans routinely over-simplified their public sphere by decree, all the better to free up more time for "doing it" in such an immense variety of non-procreative ways (nascent gills add so many buoyancy options) that finally God was forced to summon up a wet, wet, wet collective express train to hell. Turns out, there are some cultural channels that even God can not bear to watch, day in and day out. Povich apparently makes the grade, where Atlantis didn't. These Altanteans, so much skin, and their guts don't even churn—simply unbearable. Be gone, channel, be gone.
Good grief, spare a clue for what you're lumping together.
Is English considered to be the pivot language, or do all of these models product the same intermediate representation?
Rather useless article, with no shred of a deep understanding, whatsoever.
I'm guessing you run the input model from language to IR, and the output model from IR back to language, so you need to have at least two models to use this app. (I suppose you could translate from English to IR and back to English again, for perverse joy.)
Only I haven't read anything about training multiple machine translation models with a shared IR. That strikes me as technically difficult, and I would have thought I'd have seen some loud crowing out there, had it been achieved (it's now been a couple of months since I gave the Internet a good shake on machine learning, and things move fast).
10 nanometer
After you've been the 800-lb gorilla for four decades, death's door is merely running abreast, because gorilla's don't historically adapt well to sustained sprints.
But in this case, everyone on the track must soon round the corner onto the EUV obstacle course.
TSMC is surely feeling their oats these days, but tackling EUV from the vanguard position has to practically scare them pantsless, if they've got any sense; they'll probably concede half a step to the once-tireless vanguard gorilla.
I imagine this will only be temporary, though. EUV from the vanguard might just be Intel's last gorilla glory. But it buys them time, so they're definitely not 800-lb shaggy deadman running abreast, just yet.
Classic example of availability bias.
The vast majority of inventions are lost to the world because the person who thought it up (in a form that was by no means complete and practicable unto itself) failed to solicit enough outside involvement to fully move the idea forward.
It's simply human nature that ideas die when not shared around and chewed collectively.
This has a lot to do with fueling the lone genius myth, because only weirdos like Tesla (and he was very weird) have what it takes mentally and emotionally to go it alone.
Most clever monkeys who select your recommended door #A seriously overestimate their intestinal fortitude, wherewithal, and life course. Then we tremendously celebrate the few who prevail over these dim prospects. Probably in most cases, clever monkey is far better served by selecting door #B: ensconce the idea into the public domain as quickly, and vigorously, and thoroughly as possible. Definitely mention all the ways the idea might play out or become applied in a practical scenario.
If the idea seems to gain any kind of social or economic traction, patent some lucrative corner case. I don't counsel against withholding some narrow, special tricks. If you've invented anything substantial enough to be worth this conversation, you've probably accumulated in your (years worth of) preliminary thrashing more than few exceedingly narrow, special tricks.
So You Want To Write Your Own Language? — January 2014 by Walter Bright
No, I didn't look that up before writing the above. And it was on the first page of links that came up in a Google search "inventing a computer language difficulty".
Over the years, as the world has become ever more social, I've become increasingly convinced that this antisocial stiff-upper-lip door #A is tragic advice, 99 times out of 100.
If you're Walter Bright, YMMV. But Walter certainly wasn't reading Slashdot for prudent counsel. He was entirely of his own mind from the get go. The bright solitary lights tend to come fully equipped with a blanket-armour disdain for the rubes around them (sometimes graceful, sometimes polite, sometimes neither).
Moral of the story: if you need to ask, you can't afford it.
I think you're abusing the word "expected".
There was a high-likelihood failure mode (involving dust accumulation) which was baked into the mission parameters, whose budgetary concerns centered around achieving a minimum sufficient return on investment (the worst outcome of all in space exploration is no learning).
But if you'd asked anyone involved with a clue, they'd have said that the uncertainty around the dust accumulation model was high, and that most of the engineering had been done to a standard where a decade of nearly fault-free operation would be considered normal (otherwise the sum of parts wouldn't outlast xmas morning).
In NASA planning culture, the word "unexpected" doesn't convey the sad punter baggage you're implying out of context. In NASA planning culture, foreseeable adverse events get all the hasty index cards. They don't tend to invest up front in thick mission planning binders for unexpected (meaning: pleasant surprise) thin-atmosphere windfall. NASA doesn't plan for the worst, and hope for the best. 99% of the time, NASA plans for the worst, and then re-plans for the worst.
And then when the day comes and there's an eerie adversity absence, and everyone is standing around with not much to do and a blank look, it's not so much a mental surprise (unexpected) as an emotional shock.
Dance with the one that brung ya is strangely discomfiting on emotional terms when the one that brung ya is total institutional paranoia, with thick binders devoted to taking a single careful step.
Unexpected dance floor vacancy rate? Hardly at all.
They had a way to write nothing: by writing nothing.
The Romans were pragmatists. This saves paper. Imagine the cost of inscribing "zero Bugblatter Beasts" on every urn, vase, and ceramic dufflebag?
Turns out, some nebbish recruit did invent zero, but the squadron leader spotted the unfamiliar symbol one day and then he said "what the fuck is this?" and somebody said "it means we didn't get any X in our rations this month" and then the squadron leader's veins bulged out of his neck while he barked "who's the jackass wasting a perfectly good resource to record what he didn't get?" and then the jackass had to run 100 laps around the Colosseum draped with a heavy marble placard reading "lion food / reward offered"—this while the people inside were cheering the lions (more than once he panted out excitedly "look, an elephant!" pointing at some unlikely bush when people got too close for comfort, while summoning yet another painful micro-sprint, and through this device he did avoid detection in the end).
Never made that mistake again. Not ever. Neither did anyone else, which, of course, also means that no-one was foolish enough to write a line itemizing the empty set of damn fools (many of whom invented zero, but knew better than to write it down).
No, you're not paying for that money. You're promising to pay for that money at a future date. And if the bank fails to collect at the future date, the "money" wasn't exactly "paid for" was it?
Explain to me how the weird fucking language of even putting that into words doesn't give this whole ridiculous pretense away?
He who has the gold, makes the rules. This could have been one of the original commandments, but stone is expensive and carving is hard on the wrists, and Moses was going "God, everyone already knows that, or finds out real quick" and God was going "ah, I suppose so, I guess you're right."
Yes, it's a beautiful country, with some horrific problems, many that go back more than a few years.
Darwin's Nightmare — 2004
God, what a depressing film.
For the full effect, watch it back-to-back-to-back with Bus 174 and Spirited Away. That's got to be the (self) slasher trifecta of all time.
The slicker City of God (2002 film) is a reasonable substitute for Bus 174, but I preferred the grittier precincts. And don't be fooled by the heavenly animation of Spirited Away, that's a full-on PTSD psychological distance fugue.
In a perfect world, perhaps we'd worry about something like this.
You can always count on the government to be too stupid for words, until there's profit involved.
Immigration Canada: a real hotbed of mathematical sharps.
Seriously, if they really were sharps, Excel would have been deported as undesirable long ago. (And don't come back until you clean up your act.)
It's not good for the planet to artificially inflate the cost of doing business. It might sound good on the surface, but doesn't survive careful analysis. Price is almost always the best proxy available (in a woefully complex world) for planetary resources consumed, when one includes resources consumed directly, as well as those consumed via opportunity-cost displacement.
Nor is it good to offer libertarian fundamentalists a convenient platform from which to save the world (correctly), because they also tend to mix in canards like trickle down (ideologically).
Well, yes, adenoidal teenagers think this whole thing is a giant game of capture the flag FTW!
But real security is a complex economic trade-off between the cost of the attack, the value of the attack, and the law of supply and demand (one corner of which concerns the long-term warehousing of former teenagers who outlived their long-arm-of-the-law immortality halo).
Challenge accepted by the Red Bull movable feast of the socially naive with mad hacking skilz and dark horse omenz to parlay into the Forty Year Old Virgin's tragically unhip middle-aged, free-society business acumen.
It was certainly a realistic goal for the political class to promote during an extremely unusual period in economic history: the glorious middle class years between 1950 and 1980.
Plus with the boomer bulge, this core demographic was due to control society at the polling stations until right about now. When these industrious, retirement-fund beavers had happy thoughts (whether naive or not) politicians could plan on a second term.
Reagan was the beginning of the end, though the most effective horseman of the middle-class apocalypse was probably Bill Clinton (his very capable fingerprints all over the knife handle of Greenspan's "hands free" insouciance–compatible banking-oversight reform acts).
———
Why did so many economically secure red state boomers vote for the Rage Fantasy Falsehood Twitter Storm of 2016?
Not for their own sake, but for the sake of their children—I heard them admit in somber post-election PTSD journalism—few of whom regarded their children as having any hope at all of cashing the same golden boomer ticket in their own lives.
This was how we got the wealth inversion: where the Trump voters were putatively wealthier than the Hilary voters. But many of the aging wealthy weren't voting on behalf of their own secure economic margins, but rather on behalf of the insecure margins of the next generation of kin coming up behind them. Grandpa thought he was throwing his grandson a political bone. Grandma through she was throwing her granddaughter a political bone. People in the red states are family firsters.
The logic might be flawed, but there's still a lot to be said for having your heart in the right place—especially when you're closing in on punching your own ticket for the great eternal retirement home in the clouds; and God will handle the rest, rest assured, what with the giant NPV rapture discount, that isn't even a long horizon, before Jesus returns, with a Christian version of Sharia law so inflexible and unforgiving as to make even your average soft-hearted militant Muslim weep with bliss.
———
What is a poll, anyway, but a giant statistical exercise in Family Feud talk radio?
Turn on your radio any day. Everything I've said here is out there, and pretty much in their own words, though not necessarily with the lines drawn quite so straight.
———
Here's a skill testing question for a real survey of PPE acumen on the ground: What the Greenspan singularity of 2008 shockingly unforeseeable, or a nearly forgone conclusion, like a pot of starchy potatoes left on boil, with nobody home in the kitchen, and froth spilling everywhere for at least five years prior to the actual kitchen fire alerted the emergency TARP paramedics—from the Goldman Sachs retirement home in the sky known as the Fed and the US Treasury?
———
Note: When retiring from Goldman into a high government post, you can't take it with you (your Goldman shares) but you can still do a solid for your tribal Wall Street next of kin.
Note: In the current administration, you can take it with you, disclosure be damned. If you connect too straight line a mental line, this apparently flies under the patriotic flag of "draining the swamp".
Because rules, you know, have too many teeth—which is just Clintonism by another name, under his pecker-fueled misdeed clone, though their personalities, otherwise, couldn't be more different: Clinton's bonfire was carefully piled high to the sky before it finally erupted into uncontrollable flame; Trump's bonfire is more like fork lightning rattling the heavens over a bone-dry prairie. Are thousands of small fires better than one big fire? I guess we'll find out. Unless, that is, Trump covers his tracks with
That error should be fixed.
It strikes me that the manager's head should roll, too, and possibly the manager's manager, as well.
Well managed organizations catch failure on the front lines, and generally sooner rather than later.
Sure. And the Microsoft of tomorrow is not necessarily the Microsoft of today. Easy come, easy go.
Which is why Microsoft should get busy providing an explicit list of intentions concerning their operation of GitHub, providing as many bullets as possible about things that define their tenure as the presumptive "good" Microsoft: will dos and won't dos.
If the list doesn't allow one to finish the sentence "you'll know we've gone back to our old tricks when ..." it isn't an adequate prospective disclosure.
To reiterate: I'm not increasing my present reliance on GitHub in any meaningful way until I have a really solid completion to the sentence "you'll know we've gone back to our old tricks when ..." completed in Microsoft's own words.
I don't hold modern Germans responsible for what happened once upon a time. Nevertheless, I do expect some extremely cautious and historically informed navel-gazing on their part when their will to power swells.
My position will be much the same concerning the half of America that voted for Donald Trump if his rough and tumble "diplomacy" escalates into an exchange. Should that terrible day come to pass, "oh, well, the South Korean position was untenable, anyway (may you rest in peace)" is not going to fly in my airspace.
Explicit circumspection. It's a thing.