C/C++ easily let you develop applications that violate memory safety.
The modern C++ idiom easily lets you develop applications where you barely touch memory safety yourself, and competent libraries (such as the STL) do all the hard lifting.
Its pretty common to put your life savings with one bank or brokerage firm.
When you buy a share through a brokerage account, do you own the underlying share, or does your broker own the underlying share, upon said institution you lay claim to your just portion as some kind of common creditor?
I suspect that's a distinction with a difference.
Also, in a conventional bank, the cash portion is often highly insured by the Great Revenue Service of the Public Good (precisely the institution this clown was attempting to shirk by hopping aboard an underground railway through the Great Digital Wild West).
Basically, if you don't use a matched control group, you're shooting causality duds. Matching control groups is an art form, so even there you're not out of the weeds.
Children who grow up in homes with fewer books eat more ketchup, both of which correlate with poverty and low scholastic attainment.
* poverty causes ketchup * ketchup causes poverty * poverty causes book burning * book burning causes poverty * low attainment causes ketchup * ketchup causes low attainment * low attainment causes book burning * book burning causes low attainment
Several of these have been seriously advanced in the academic literature.
[*] There are other ways to dispossess books other than burning books as cheap coal, but taking that into account would have made my list very long.
So in depth or more advanced explanations are often over most of the population's heads (even those with a PhD, because they will probably have a PhD in a different area of study).
I assure you that none of the advanced sketch is over the head of any STEM PhD who has managed to look up from a self-imposed exile amid a daunting tower of books and pre-prints for more than five minutes at any time over the past six months.
This criteria, of course, narrows the field considerably.
But don't blame this on specialization. 90% of this is a treadmill effect, not a specialization effect.
As such, some people are beginning to discover that their lives are better without these parasites invading their lives and stealing their time.
The parasite pendulum is not new.
11-year-old boy to friend: What happened to your uncle Jack? He's awfully weird.
Friend: Mom won't say, but I once heard Dad whispering something about "too many apps".
And so the deep generational learning continues.
———
I listened to a disappointing podcast this week about the Kibbutz Movement.
It mostly dealt with the economic incentives to stay or leave. It constantly commented on how the second and third generations never had quite the same ideological purity as the founding generation (among other things, this is simple regression to the mean).
What they never once commented upon in this podcast is that children learn from their parents, and I'm guessing there were many heartaches and stresses involved in dealing with the collective order. (In the first generations, the children only had contact with their parents for a few hours in the evening, and were housed and educated separately the rest of the time, but that doesn't lessen perception or the gossip vector.)
Exhibits A-D of inter-generational instruction: carrots, sticks, fables, and sad uncles—shabby discarded derelicts of dysregulation.
Sooner or later, the attention economy is going to barf up 10% of the population onto the shoals of rusty shopping carts. And then we'll finally learn.
Quite often I've seen an ad in a trade magazine and thought, oh that looks like a very good idea that could really benefit me.
Ads in trade magazines are not push. They're mostly pull. Anyone who buys a trade magazine thinking it's clock-a-block with articles is a royal fool.
Scanning ads in trade magazines is a perfectly fine way to pinch a loaf: cooling your jets on the hinged horseshoe, the ads don't randomly impinge on your attention span during maximum cognitive load.
You've also engaged in a classic fallacy.
The value of advertising is the expense of consuming every ad rejected, plus the gain of every ad pursued. If the ads arrive asynchronously to your cognitive focus, each ad must also be penalized with a context switch.
Contrary to the multitasking canard, context switches are immensely expensive, as all the neurological literature demonstrates (an add for a new chip when I'm designing a circuit board is only demands a partial context switch, unless the ad also includes giant boobs, which do not merely amount to a context switch, but are positively an invasive species when other work remains to be done; work hard, play hard—in single file).
Nobody ever argued that ads can't deliver compelling value to exactly the right person, in exactly the right place. But some people do, however, suspect that mentally registering 1000 ads for every winning ticket redeemed is bad commerce all around.
One can choose to view small patches as extremely crisp bug reports. Governments don't charge the private sector for bug reports (governments generate bug reports by the thousand almost entirely at their own expense).
And what about the case where government contracts out to the private sector to have a new module developed for a large, open-source framework, with the bidders informed in advance that the source code will be contributed back to open source so as to protect the government's future interests?
That's not unfair competition. That's merely a diverse and effective ecosystem, in which the government is free to control public expense by any means available.
I neglected to write "subsidized internship programs" believing that was implicit, but then my spider sense stubbed its toe on the upturned corner of a small throw rug.
You do know that this drives people who can't deliver enough value to deserve minimum wage out of the (legal) workforce, altogether?
Of course, the corporation (which might be a Mom and Pop shop) can always jack up the prices across the board on their lunch menu, but then who is going to steer Joe or Jane Schmoe with a cattle prod to pay two or three dollars extra for lunch every day on a daily basis?
What actually ends up happening is that marginal kiosks fold, and more people start to pack a bag lunch from home.
And now someone who doesn't have an employment track record to justify $15/hour can't get any kind of recognized entry-level position at all, and this helps to turn the bottom of the underclass into permanent denizens of the economic underworld, where they don't even have the power to enforce contracts (because those contracts don't officially exist), or labour rights (because those activities don't officially exist), etc.
* MW is a winning lottery ticket for the least employable person who manages to land such a job * MW is a big fat indelible L on the forehead of the most employable person who does not manage to land such a job. * the typical difference between epsilon+ and epsilon- is one wild throw of a 1d20
Maybe the net benefit exceeds the net cost in some civic contexts, but it's definitely no free lunch.
[*] Yes, it is possible to bridge minimum wage with internship programs, etc., but I sure didn't get the feeling that you're the type of person to sweat the details. You wave the magic wand, you collect the karmic glory, leaving people with an actual clue to roll up their sleeves and devise a sane implementation.
Things like internship programs aren't free either, the private sector isn't all that keen to invest in this kind of thing, nor even to collect the benefits if there are too many strings attached—somehow society needs to monitor for abuse, because these things do get abused—so it usually falls to local government, and the expense, naturally, gets rolled into the tax base.
Act III in the grand opera of free-lunch musical chairs: Joe and Jane Schmoe grudgingly pack a bag lunch to their next municipal council meeting to go red in the face over confiscatory tax policy.
And if they're too g.d. lazy to do even that much to involve themselves in civic affairs, they lean back in their plush chairs posting shallowly reasoned drivel on Slashdot.
Your point about the sample size is trickier, though.
No, the problem is not sample size.
The problem with this study design is that they never exposed the bees to a number/combination they had never seen before, to see whether the inductive gaps were filled in, or 404 in the memory table.
And there are other possible controls for memory effects, such as whether this numerically consistent pattern is easy to learn than purely random patterns.
Stress about money can be a useful driver to get off your fat backside and go get a job.
Stress about unemployment can be a harmful driver of keeping your fragile backside in a toxic job in which you deliver far less value to yourself/family/industry/society (and consume more medical support) than if your career was managed proactively with less fear.
But many just inherently love the genre of pointy stick incentive porn, especially when when discussing a group of presumptively characterized as even more fat and lazy than yours truly.
Psychology 101: That's how we generally deal with our own self-loathing: by projecting it onto a group even less deserving. Go into any prison. You'll never find anyone tougher on crime than the white collar criminal who defrauded little old ladies into destitution seething with vanity twenty paces farther up the corridor from the filthy puke who stalked underage girls.
These small trials are just the tip of the iceberg.
Check out Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong (2017) about how Hong Kong established a unique cultural heritage of low-taxation social safety nets.
This took a very smart man twenty years to accomplish (circa 1950 to 1970). He had scored several firsts back in the homeland in Latin and Greek, and thoroughly believed that excess government spending drained venture capital away from projects that drive the long-term growth rate.
But then when the private sector borked things over (far too many people were dying in preventable housing fires) he waded into the mess and established a government program in low-cost housing that didn't kill people for no good reason.
I was watching Erik Weinstein the other day, explaining the IDW (which began as an in-joke BTW). He sensibly explained that no intelligent person believes in completely open borders; and conversely, that no intelligent person believes in completely closed borders (these being memes that society's elite institutions—operating on both the left and right—above the MSM layer, use to keep the masses uselessly preoccupied with ridiculously polarized bun fights).
A complex world always has two sides.
UBI is not a panacea, but it could turn out as well as Hong Kong, depending on how we move forward.
Throughout his time in government, Cowperthwaite refused to compile and distribute official data for economic output. For most of his tenure as Financial Secretary, he simply batted away requests for the data. When Milton Friedman visited Hong Kong in the early 1960s, he asked Cowperthwaite why there was such limited information on national income.
The text continues, quoting from Milton Friedman:
Cowperthwaite explained that he had resisted requests from civil servants to provide such data because he was convinced that once the data was published there would be pressure to use them for government intervention in the economy.
He was very clear in his own mind about what the second order impact was of collecting the data. And so he said, "Well, I simply won't collect it. It doesn't affect anything. We will have the same policy whether it's a thousand dollars higher or lower. So it won't affect what we do as government, so therefore there's no point collecting it."
Of course, once he'd gone, his successor gave way a little bit on that and started collecting the data, and that's what we end up with today.
It's a fascinating point, and I think he was probably proved right, actually.
Of course, leaving people to burn to death in substandard housing does indeed motivate them to get off their fat asses and move up in the class structu
Are you seriously suggesting that if it had been an opt-out rather than an opt-in, advertisers would have obeyed it?
You can tell if someone really believes in the free market by how they position the apathy signal.
Apathy and free markets simply don't go together: the underlying principle of a free market is that the invisible hand surveys expressed intent, and allocates resources accordingly. When the expressed intent signal goes mute, the invisible hand becomes a hard of hearing invisible hand, with few of its vaunted virtues.
Apathy is the founding principle of dog-eat-dog commercialism: rubes must be fleeced. Your apathy is my profit opportunity. This is a local greed signal with no redeeming qualities in driving the greater wealth of society. It's a purely small-pie expropriative component of the free-enterprise signal.
And it's really a testament to the power of the invisible hand that it works as well as it does, side by jowl with dog-eat-dog predatory commercialism.
Free market: apathy is a bug; everyone rushes to help clue the apathetic into the wealth-multiplication effect of self-interest, universally and diligently expressed.
Commercialism: apathy is a feature; in fact, you can readily fund a shit IPO that returns no net value to society so long as it corrals enough apathy from the great unwashed masses.
The worse problem is power can be easily turned into money. Clintons are a perfect example. Neither ever held an honest job.
Compared to Trump, Bill worked his ass off (but only if you count the many hours of the day and night he was wearing his reading glasses). Whatever the honesty of being POTUS then, it hasn't gotten better since.
A true social order where all the top jobs are honest jobs is called "socialism" (but only when armed with a large can of DDT++ to prevent outbreaks of Stalin or Mao fever, and an eternal regimen of diligent application which so far seems to exceed human capacity).
So we're left with leaders doing hard jobs, if not honest jobs.
This is like saying that someone who got in a car and was then killed when a semi-truck had a blow out right next to him and pushed him into a ditch didn't have an accident because it was his choice to get in the car.
More like getting into a Prius in Fort McMurray during a blizzard warning at forty degrees below zero with no snow tires to contend against all the heavy trucks exiting town for an extra-long weekend, but I take your point.
If I'm reading this right, an AI model of the male brain is being asked to interpret a female brain as a male brain, and then to predict the age of such a male brain, which comes out lower than the age of the female brain masquerading as a male brain.
AI algorithms are notorious for finding any manner of correlation. How do you correct for brain size differences (or anything else) in such a study?
However, I wouldn't discard this study outright if I were planning to undergo a cross-sex brain transplant sometime soon.
No, that is a myth. From Wikipedia, in Classical Greece, "Based on Athens Agora and Corinth data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 37–41 years"
But that's not the statistic of interest. If we had the all the data available, the statistic of interest is the life expectancy at birth, split for only those people who bring a child into this world who also brings a child into this world.
In other words, grandparent-caliber people, with some staying power in the gene pool, who put in the long hearth years.
That group of people could quite easily have a life expectancy at birth of 50 or more years, even with the number you've quoted above.
Especially considering that it wasn't uncommon for a male child to reach adulthood, join an army, and not survive to start any family, whatsoever (who's tragic death at age 18 or 22 would be excluded from my split above).
So, they buy Flickr, then intentionally take away what they themselves say was attracting new users.
It's a simple phase change. For a while the company thinks it can make all the relationships work by selling a growth story. Then one day, the senior management look around the room and decide they need to transition to a revenue story (target subgenre: revenue exceeds expense).
Popularity might get you a hot ticket on prom night, but it won't ultimately fuel the band.
That's also a common phase change: one minute you're leasing an awesome car you can't really afford and driving around town like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; the next minute you're furtively consulting a debt consolidation service, and feeding your much-abused credit cards into the Jaws of Life by the handful.
One way to potentially spin this awkward life transition is to emerge with a #1 buzz cut, a saffron robe, and sudden profound respect for traditional values so extreme that western culture can't even begin to describe them.
Since that BTC is now lost forever, this means the remaining pool of accessible BTC is even more valuable. Oh, the joys of a deflationary currency!
Nice whoosh porn: the inscrutable superposition of a bag of hammers with an gloating, goateed hipster.
Interestingly, it made think just enough to realize that the limited supply of gold is not nearly a sufficient condition: gold must itself be limited, but also gold-like things must also be limited. What cryptocurrencies have done is to make the category of gold-like things inexhaustible. Want a new limited-supply currency? Not a problem: there's an IPO at every Starbucks (or there was, until IPO exhaustion).
We're presently living through a gold-like-thing rush.
I think what we're looking at here is Marx's vaunted network effect: those who hold power and wealth are automatically a shrinking group. So the real reason crytocurrency is conceptually in short supply is because ultimately only one crytocurrency can rule the roost (the impostor half-calf almond-milk latte-coin is sure to finally fade away). When there remains One True Coin of finite supply, we will truly have our limited gold replacement (now tradable anonymously over a wire).
Meanwhile, some people seem to (wishfully) believe that any finite number k of finite crytocurrencies are conceptually still a finite supply (yet also somehow an unlimited finite supply). We await the exponential network-effect event horizon to somehow permanently constrain k to a value ranging from 1 to 3 (the network, plus the alternative network, plus an optional the wannabe network—which sometimes merges into #1 or #2 and then sprouts a new head).
How one conceptualizes the disappearance of a hundred million dollars of BTC entirely depends on how one conceptualizes the future boundary condition: will coinspace become functionally finite, and if it does, will BTC be one of the surviving coins, and does this kind of nasty story about BTC value destruction (for the actually coin holders) have anything to say about the probability that BTC itself survives???
A 1% decline in the perceived BTC endgame survivorship function could wipe out $100 million of perceived equity all by itself (much the way the general relativity is entirely defined by differential quantities under coordinate transformation—deriving non-differential quantities from the finished theory is mainly left as an exercise for the motivated reader—perceived value rules cybermath).
One thing about gold: you couldn't just pick up and squeeze another isotope or another isomer into the periodic table, and then the next day open up a new mine in South Africa to mint this isomer in droves (until the carefully architected day comes to pass where your mine runs dry and there's no more— which was your main story about why anyone should have desired to possess your half-calf almond-milk isogold in the first place).
People LIKE the process of making children and most of us like raising children, but it is very expensive: 233k in 2015, excluding college education.
Yeah, but consider why evolution has made the procreative inducement precisely so strong as it has: almost certainly because other factors would discourage us from making babies otherwise.
Given the size of the inducement, one suspects that those other factors must be one hell of a hump to overcome.
Slashdot Mirror
The modern C++ idiom easily lets you develop applications where you barely touch memory safety yourself, and competent libraries (such as the STL) do all the hard lifting.
C does not let you do this in any natural way.
If you wish to write your own RAII-compliant classes, you do need to book off half a day to watch (and digest) this series of three videos: CppCon 2014: Jon Kalb "Exception-Safe Code, Part I"
Outrageous investment? Well, it's your life.
More popular than Apple, Nike, pornography, snow closure days, and Facebook's latest nightmare loss vector?
When you buy a share through a brokerage account, do you own the underlying share, or does your broker own the underlying share, upon said institution you lay claim to your just portion as some kind of common creditor?
I suspect that's a distinction with a difference.
Also, in a conventional bank, the cash portion is often highly insured by the Great Revenue Service of the Public Good (precisely the institution this clown was attempting to shirk by hopping aboard an underground railway through the Great Digital Wild West).
Obviously, I missed some.
The way I would properly model this is as follows:
num_hypothesis_sets = 3^choose(k,2) for k correlates.
In this model, I've allowed A to cause B to cause C to cause A, but not A to directly cause B and B to directly cause A.
So for each pair (u,v) you get { u causes v, v cause u, no relationship } and each pair can be selected from that set of three items independently.
Basically, if you don't use a matched control group, you're shooting causality duds. Matching control groups is an art form, so even there you're not out of the weeds.
Children who grow up in homes with fewer books eat more ketchup, both of which correlate with poverty and low scholastic attainment.
* poverty causes ketchup
* ketchup causes poverty
* poverty causes book burning
* book burning causes poverty
* low attainment causes ketchup
* ketchup causes low attainment
* low attainment causes book burning
* book burning causes low attainment
Several of these have been seriously advanced in the academic literature.
[*] There are other ways to dispossess books other than burning books as cheap coal, but taking that into account would have made my list very long.
I assure you that none of the advanced sketch is over the head of any STEM PhD who has managed to look up from a self-imposed exile amid a daunting tower of books and pre-prints for more than five minutes at any time over the past six months.
This criteria, of course, narrows the field considerably.
But don't blame this on specialization. 90% of this is a treadmill effect, not a specialization effect.
I don't know if artificial insemination would lead to fewer clandestine arrangements with David Pecker or not.
Sure hope the president was fully apprised, or he might discover to his chagrin that AI is not the end all it's cracked up to be.
The parasite pendulum is not new.
11-year-old boy to friend: What happened to your uncle Jack? He's awfully weird.
Friend: Mom won't say, but I once heard Dad whispering something about "too many apps".
And so the deep generational learning continues.
———
I listened to a disappointing podcast this week about the Kibbutz Movement.
It mostly dealt with the economic incentives to stay or leave. It constantly commented on how the second and third generations never had quite the same ideological purity as the founding generation (among other things, this is simple regression to the mean).
What they never once commented upon in this podcast is that children learn from their parents, and I'm guessing there were many heartaches and stresses involved in dealing with the collective order. (In the first generations, the children only had contact with their parents for a few hours in the evening, and were housed and educated separately the rest of the time, but that doesn't lessen perception or the gossip vector.)
Exhibits A-D of inter-generational instruction: carrots, sticks, fables, and sad uncles—shabby discarded derelicts of dysregulation.
Sooner or later, the attention economy is going to barf up 10% of the population onto the shoals of rusty shopping carts. And then we'll finally learn.
Ads in trade magazines are not push. They're mostly pull. Anyone who buys a trade magazine thinking it's clock-a-block with articles is a royal fool.
Scanning ads in trade magazines is a perfectly fine way to pinch a loaf: cooling your jets on the hinged horseshoe, the ads don't randomly impinge on your attention span during maximum cognitive load.
You've also engaged in a classic fallacy.
The value of advertising is the expense of consuming every ad rejected, plus the gain of every ad pursued. If the ads arrive asynchronously to your cognitive focus, each ad must also be penalized with a context switch.
Contrary to the multitasking canard, context switches are immensely expensive, as all the neurological literature demonstrates (an add for a new chip when I'm designing a circuit board is only demands a partial context switch, unless the ad also includes giant boobs, which do not merely amount to a context switch, but are positively an invasive species when other work remains to be done; work hard, play hard—in single file).
Nobody ever argued that ads can't deliver compelling value to exactly the right person, in exactly the right place. But some people do, however, suspect that mentally registering 1000 ads for every winning ticket redeemed is bad commerce all around.
One can choose to view small patches as extremely crisp bug reports. Governments don't charge the private sector for bug reports (governments generate bug reports by the thousand almost entirely at their own expense).
And what about the case where government contracts out to the private sector to have a new module developed for a large, open-source framework, with the bidders informed in advance that the source code will be contributed back to open source so as to protect the government's future interests?
That's not unfair competition. That's merely a diverse and effective ecosystem, in which the government is free to control public expense by any means available.
Some of Srinivasa Ramanujan's beautiful conjectures were mangled in transmission from Mahalakshmi of Namakkal and were neither true, nor salvageable.
Perhaps he misspelled her name on the Ouija board one night and dialed a wrong number (it's awfully easy to do, even for a genius of his magnitude).
As smart as Telsa was, I don't think he was immune to dropping a stitch, either.
Word to the wise: he also stole your lightening, which is a fine mode of atmospheric power transmission if you can buffer the surge.
One way or another, the solution to all plastic waste is to blow it out of tail pipes hither and yon.
I neglected to write "subsidized internship programs" believing that was implicit, but then my spider sense stubbed its toe on the upturned corner of a small throw rug.
You do know that this drives people who can't deliver enough value to deserve minimum wage out of the (legal) workforce, altogether?
Of course, the corporation (which might be a Mom and Pop shop) can always jack up the prices across the board on their lunch menu, but then who is going to steer Joe or Jane Schmoe with a cattle prod to pay two or three dollars extra for lunch every day on a daily basis?
What actually ends up happening is that marginal kiosks fold, and more people start to pack a bag lunch from home.
And now someone who doesn't have an employment track record to justify $15/hour can't get any kind of recognized entry-level position at all, and this helps to turn the bottom of the underclass into permanent denizens of the economic underworld, where they don't even have the power to enforce contracts (because those contracts don't officially exist), or labour rights (because those activities don't officially exist), etc.
* MW is a winning lottery ticket for the least employable person who manages to land such a job
* MW is a big fat indelible L on the forehead of the most employable person who does not manage to land such a job.
* the typical difference between epsilon+ and epsilon- is one wild throw of a 1d20
Maybe the net benefit exceeds the net cost in some civic contexts, but it's definitely no free lunch.
[*] Yes, it is possible to bridge minimum wage with internship programs, etc., but I sure didn't get the feeling that you're the type of person to sweat the details. You wave the magic wand, you collect the karmic glory, leaving people with an actual clue to roll up their sleeves and devise a sane implementation.
Things like internship programs aren't free either, the private sector isn't all that keen to invest in this kind of thing, nor even to collect the benefits if there are too many strings attached—somehow society needs to monitor for abuse, because these things do get abused—so it usually falls to local government, and the expense, naturally, gets rolled into the tax base.
Act III in the grand opera of free-lunch musical chairs: Joe and Jane Schmoe grudgingly pack a bag lunch to their next municipal council meeting to go red in the face over confiscatory tax policy.
And if they're too g.d. lazy to do even that much to involve themselves in civic affairs, they lean back in their plush chairs posting shallowly reasoned drivel on Slashdot.
No, the problem is not sample size.
The problem with this study design is that they never exposed the bees to a number/combination they had never seen before, to see whether the inductive gaps were filled in, or 404 in the memory table.
And there are other possible controls for memory effects, such as whether this numerically consistent pattern is easy to learn than purely random patterns.
Stress about unemployment can be a harmful driver of keeping your fragile backside in a toxic job in which you deliver far less value to yourself/family/industry/society (and consume more medical support) than if your career was managed proactively with less fear.
But many just inherently love the genre of pointy stick incentive porn, especially when when discussing a group of presumptively characterized as even more fat and lazy than yours truly.
Psychology 101: That's how we generally deal with our own self-loathing: by projecting it onto a group even less deserving. Go into any prison. You'll never find anyone tougher on crime than the white collar criminal who defrauded little old ladies into destitution seething with vanity twenty paces farther up the corridor from the filthy puke who stalked underage girls.
These small trials are just the tip of the iceberg.
Check out Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong (2017) about how Hong Kong established a unique cultural heritage of low-taxation social safety nets.
This took a very smart man twenty years to accomplish (circa 1950 to 1970). He had scored several firsts back in the homeland in Latin and Greek, and thoroughly believed that excess government spending drained venture capital away from projects that drive the long-term growth rate.
But then when the private sector borked things over (far too many people were dying in preventable housing fires) he waded into the mess and established a government program in low-cost housing that didn't kill people for no good reason.
I was watching Erik Weinstein the other day, explaining the IDW (which began as an in-joke BTW). He sensibly explained that no intelligent person believes in completely open borders; and conversely, that no intelligent person believes in completely closed borders (these being memes that society's elite institutions—operating on both the left and right—above the MSM layer, use to keep the masses uselessly preoccupied with ridiculously polarized bun fights).
A complex world always has two sides.
UBI is not a panacea, but it could turn out as well as Hong Kong, depending on how we move forward.
The text continues, quoting from Milton Friedman:
Neil Monnery on Hong Kong and the Architect of Prosperity — 8 October 2018
Of course, leaving people to burn to death in substandard housing does indeed motivate them to get off their fat asses and move up in the class structu
You can tell if someone really believes in the free market by how they position the apathy signal.
Apathy and free markets simply don't go together: the underlying principle of a free market is that the invisible hand surveys expressed intent, and allocates resources accordingly. When the expressed intent signal goes mute, the invisible hand becomes a hard of hearing invisible hand, with few of its vaunted virtues.
Apathy is the founding principle of dog-eat-dog commercialism: rubes must be fleeced. Your apathy is my profit opportunity. This is a local greed signal with no redeeming qualities in driving the greater wealth of society. It's a purely small-pie expropriative component of the free-enterprise signal.
And it's really a testament to the power of the invisible hand that it works as well as it does, side by jowl with dog-eat-dog predatory commercialism.
Free market: apathy is a bug; everyone rushes to help clue the apathetic into the wealth-multiplication effect of self-interest, universally and diligently expressed.
Commercialism: apathy is a feature; in fact, you can readily fund a shit IPO that returns no net value to society so long as it corrals enough apathy from the great unwashed masses.
Progressive libertarians regard apathy as a bug.
Compared to Trump, Bill worked his ass off (but only if you count the many hours of the day and night he was wearing his reading glasses). Whatever the honesty of being POTUS then, it hasn't gotten better since.
Trump's daily schedule v Obama and Bush
A true social order where all the top jobs are honest jobs is called "socialism" (but only when armed with a large can of DDT++ to prevent outbreaks of Stalin or Mao fever, and an eternal regimen of diligent application which so far seems to exceed human capacity).
So we're left with leaders doing hard jobs, if not honest jobs.
More like getting into a Prius in Fort McMurray during a blizzard warning at forty degrees below zero with no snow tires to contend against all the heavy trucks exiting town for an extra-long weekend, but I take your point.
If I'm reading this right, an AI model of the male brain is being asked to interpret a female brain as a male brain, and then to predict the age of such a male brain, which comes out lower than the age of the female brain masquerading as a male brain.
AI algorithms are notorious for finding any manner of correlation. How do you correct for brain size differences (or anything else) in such a study?
However, I wouldn't discard this study outright if I were planning to undergo a cross-sex brain transplant sometime soon.
But that's not the statistic of interest. If we had the all the data available, the statistic of interest is the life expectancy at birth, split for only those people who bring a child into this world who also brings a child into this world.
In other words, grandparent-caliber people, with some staying power in the gene pool, who put in the long hearth years.
That group of people could quite easily have a life expectancy at birth of 50 or more years, even with the number you've quoted above.
Especially considering that it wasn't uncommon for a male child to reach adulthood, join an army, and not survive to start any family, whatsoever (who's tragic death at age 18 or 22 would be excluded from my split above).
It's a simple phase change. For a while the company thinks it can make all the relationships work by selling a growth story. Then one day, the senior management look around the room and decide they need to transition to a revenue story (target subgenre: revenue exceeds expense).
Popularity might get you a hot ticket on prom night, but it won't ultimately fuel the band.
That's also a common phase change: one minute you're leasing an awesome car you can't really afford and driving around town like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; the next minute you're furtively consulting a debt consolidation service, and feeding your much-abused credit cards into the Jaws of Life by the handful.
One way to potentially spin this awkward life transition is to emerge with a #1 buzz cut, a saffron robe, and sudden profound respect for traditional values so extreme that western culture can't even begin to describe them.
No problemo: you're still #1.
Nice whoosh porn: the inscrutable superposition of a bag of hammers with an gloating, goateed hipster.
Interestingly, it made think just enough to realize that the limited supply of gold is not nearly a sufficient condition: gold must itself be limited, but also gold-like things must also be limited. What cryptocurrencies have done is to make the category of gold-like things inexhaustible. Want a new limited-supply currency? Not a problem: there's an IPO at every Starbucks (or there was, until IPO exhaustion).
We're presently living through a gold-like-thing rush.
I think what we're looking at here is Marx's vaunted network effect: those who hold power and wealth are automatically a shrinking group. So the real reason crytocurrency is conceptually in short supply is because ultimately only one crytocurrency can rule the roost (the impostor half-calf almond-milk latte-coin is sure to finally fade away). When there remains One True Coin of finite supply, we will truly have our limited gold replacement (now tradable anonymously over a wire).
Meanwhile, some people seem to (wishfully) believe that any finite number k of finite crytocurrencies are conceptually still a finite supply (yet also somehow an unlimited finite supply). We await the exponential network-effect event horizon to somehow permanently constrain k to a value ranging from 1 to 3 (the network, plus the alternative network, plus an optional the wannabe network—which sometimes merges into #1 or #2 and then sprouts a new head).
How one conceptualizes the disappearance of a hundred million dollars of BTC entirely depends on how one conceptualizes the future boundary condition: will coinspace become functionally finite, and if it does, will BTC be one of the surviving coins, and does this kind of nasty story about BTC value destruction (for the actually coin holders) have anything to say about the probability that BTC itself survives???
A 1% decline in the perceived BTC endgame survivorship function could wipe out $100 million of perceived equity all by itself (much the way the general relativity is entirely defined by differential quantities under coordinate transformation—deriving non-differential quantities from the finished theory is mainly left as an exercise for the motivated reader—perceived value rules cybermath).
One thing about gold: you couldn't just pick up and squeeze another isotope or another isomer into the periodic table, and then the next day open up a new mine in South Africa to mint this isomer in droves (until the carefully architected day comes to pass where your mine runs dry and there's no more— which was your main story about why anyone should have desired to possess your half-calf almond-milk isogold in the first place).
Yeah, but consider why evolution has made the procreative inducement precisely so strong as it has: almost certainly because other factors would discourage us from making babies otherwise.
Given the size of the inducement, one suspects that those other factors must be one hell of a hump to overcome.