Go itself is... diverting. I usually make statements about Go when solving universal problems like poverty or education because it's a good frame-of-reference for literally everything.
There are more variations on the opening in Go than there are possible parallel universes, so even a quantum computer can't select between all possible outcomes and find the best. Note that "variations" doesn't mean just what move you play, but what the eventual result is; and the third move in the game can have a major impact on a play made 120 moves later. The number of legal, reasonable outcomes from any early move quickly exceeds the number of quantum states in the universe raised to itself as a power. There are 10^70 protons in the universe, and somewhere in the ballpark of 10^(10^70) possible outcomes from an early-game move.
Li got slightly better against it; I'd wager a 10 or 20 game match would see him immediately competitive. The machine will eventually behave like an AI, and human go players will essentially learn how you think and counteract your particular behaviors. Li will eventually learn to manipulate the machine; it's *very* intelligent, but not creative or insightful.
Solar generation isn't worth it if you can only install 2 panels; if you can install a 7kW array, it's well worth it.
People talk a lot about having no maintenance or whatever, but you still have to go up there from time to time to mop them off. That's the problem with distributed solar: too much cost with management spread over a huge, complex area; it's only acceptable at a mid-scale (a few kW, not half a kW) with the resident handling the maintenance, since otherwise the transit time to get workers between sites to do sparse maintenance gets you shit like Solarcity where they charge you 95% of what solar should save you and give you a 2 cent/kWh discount. Some of us don't like going up on the roof to do maintenance once a month when the seagulls decide to paint our panels (and half the panel goes dark if you cover 10% of it--a single maple leaf can shut off half of an entire array if it's run by a string inverter).
I want panels, but only if I can put them on 80% of my roof area. I have a thin attic (rafters, not space) and can make the argument that firefighters can cut open the rear and front wall and avoid the panels; as well, the line is 240VAC center tap, and the power cuts off if you cut line power (the microinverters are on the panels, and they shut down if they don't have mains power to sync to). That gets around the nightmare of navigating a 600VDC circuit trying to find an entry point for a roof vent to let smoke and heat out; regulations in many states require a 3 foot setback for such breaches during fire.
EIGHT CENTS!? I pay 9.8/kWh for coal-oil, 10.2/kWh for solar (hence why I bought into pure solar); plus transmission fees takes it to some 15 cents, and taxes raises it to 18 cents per kWh. Natural gas was 58 cents per therm, but is now down to 50 cents here; I can get a 2-year contract for 52 cents.
This is why I never use the term "value" in economics. I've written full macroeconomic theories and a decent amount of market economics without talking about anything called "value".
Of course, theories of value are so broken they eventually concluded that things have value for magical reasons.
I have people telling me their power costs 1/5 what mine costs, so my bubble sucks.
I've been paying for delivered generated solar power, which comes at a slightly-higher premium than my local coal and gas power. I also buy carbon-offset gas power, again at a premium. My heating bills have not increased by very much at all in 5 years.
My house has 66% of its wall-area exposed; 87% of that is un-insulated. I'm looking into adding rigid foam insulation to 25% of the exposed wall area in the short term and 75% in the long term, plus insulative batting to 50% of the exposed wall area. The ceiling has 50% of the exposure area of the wall area, and will get insulative batting and a radiant barrier (this is extremely effective for summer overhead sun, and somewhat less effective for winter rising heat: almost all downward-moving heat is radiant heat).
I expect the addition of insulation to cost $1,000 on 25% of the area and $4,000 on 50% of the exposed area. I expect ceiling and in-wall insulation to cost under $1,000 in total. A corresponding 95% drop in heating and AC costs should lower my bills from around $280 in winter to around $70, and from $150 in summer to around $40. This is to heat a house with 1350 square feet plus 600sqft basement.
While the cost of $6,000 seems steep for a $2,250 annual savings, it gives me an opportunity to add double-thick drywall with Green Glue for noise isolation, and stabilizes my monthly expenses to 29% of my income from 34% of my income. My eventual target is 11% of my income: each month of employment should allow me to save for 9 months of expenses.
"Very soon flash will become cheaper than rotating media." In which case you don't buy rotating media anymore. SSD commands a premium because it's got advantages over HDD, so much so that many modern data center SAN racks are going all-SSD despite it costing 4 times as much.
Geeze man, I'm buying pure solar power and I don't have that kind of problem; and my bill is still trending toward a smaller percentage of the per-capita GDP and the median income, much less my own income.
Inflation means your bills keep getting higher as a general rule. Typically, your income increases faster; the GDP-per-capita and the median incomes both increase faster than CPI or any other price inflation measure. That's why people spend a smaller percentage of their income on things like food, clothing, and housing today (caveat: they spend 18% more on housing in 2003 than in 1950, but bought a 2,300sqft house instead of a 983sqft house), and more on cell phones, streaming media, and other new consumer goods.
It's John McAfee. Okay, so maybe it was believable; but if you're honestly surprised by the follow-up, you haven't been paying attention. This is a guy who posted a video on Youtube where he talked about banging underaged girls and smoked a bunch of meth.
McAfee isn't out to defraud people; he's just out to be a loud caricature. I'm sure some day he'll say something serious in a sensational and ridiculous way; I'm equally sure he'll keep saying things that sound serious and then turn out to be just noise, because that's what he does now. He doesn't get attention because people believe him; he gets attention because he's interposed himself into a situation and drawn attention to himself, and we all recognize the act. You *can* play off that act honestly, but it's not a requirement.
Most of what I've learned came from exploration not unlike something completely different from whatever John C. Lily did. Seriously, ketamine is not the way.
The sad fact is my brain is filled with a wide stretch of domain knowledge. Moonwalking with Einstein made a good inspirational piece for all the mnemonics stuff; and I've since learned things like Kepner-Tregoe problem solving and decision analysis, hierarchical decomposition from project management, SQ3R and derived study methods, Cornell and other note-taking systems, and so forth. Some of what Kenneth Higbee wrote about memory--that it's associative, that it works by association, that organization sharply improves it, and so forth--has allowed me to recognize how and why some of these systems help with memory, with studying, and with analysis.
For the most part, I have a pile of unsorted information my brain can command. Learning and teaching are different things, and I do not have a prepared presentation of any use to anyone. Some things I can't even explain properly, such as my model of thinking by which I break things down into abstract models and then associate them with anything else having a similar abstract model--I'll treat any mechanism as a set of subsets of other mechanisms, all cobbled together into one big machine. If I had a well-organized presentation, I'd have an educational plan instead of a vague ideal and a pile of tools I've already described.
I can say this, however: people don't do enough reflection. Modern study methods include a step in which you think about what you just learned and how it relates to everything else--I do this in the extreme--and so come to more firmly understand the topic and those related topics, while also solidifying the new knowledge within the framework of your memory. People like to throw around words like "critical thinking" the same way teachers throw around words like "study" and "take notes": they don't have any meaning in mind, and are only voicing a complaint that you're not taking an abstract and ill-defined action. Reflection is the basis of critical thinking: you will frequently find disturbing mismatches, which only proves either your knowledge is incomplete or something you've learned is incorrect.
Why can't we encrypt everything except To and mail transit control headers? You can't hide encryption, so a "Subject: PGP Encrypted Message" and possibly "X-Header-Transit: PGP" would make sense. You could even include an X-Recipient-Key-Print to tell the MTA to add additional client-targeted headers (X-Mailing-List, etc.) as separate PGP-encrypted blocks, possibly encapsulated (encrypt the original PGP-encrypted message prepended with a MIME segment containing a header block), so the message always ships with exactly one PGP encrypted message and the mail client may need to decrypt through several layers to get all data.
Memory is the foundation of knowledge: you cannot know what you do not remember.
People spend a lot of time flipping back through the book to find things they recognize but can't recall. It's a waste of time. A firm understanding of human memory allows you to avoid this: you organize the information to store better, whether by taking specific action such as visualization (making images) and reflection (thinking about how that information relates to what you already know) or implementing highly-structured systems such as acrostics and the method of loci. Doing these things maximizes the impact of your study time: you might remember the mnemonic device, or you might tie the information to other information and remember it in its own right; you'll cover more ground in less time in any case, and more firmly store that information as you revisit it during further study.
Learning is an enormous, complex process. It is, at its heart, memory; but memory is a tool, and tools produce differing results based on how they're used. Skillful use of a tool accomplishes greater things; blunt use of a tool has limits.
Minimum wage is a band aid measure, a rather crude one at that, to create a society where everybody is doing $something 39.5 hours per week
Minimum wage and public aid were a great system for the 1900s. I don't call out minimum wage and public aid as bad because they're outdated; I call them out as bad because we have new factors. The new factor approaching us looks a lot like the Industrial Revolution, and I know how to navigate that safely. I also know my solutions would have been inappropriate until very recently.
As we know, unions never work in the real world.
Trade unions were an excellent device in a world where labor laws were weak and the economy was too volatile and too poor to sustain sweeping policy changes. Today, they're sort of a wash: unions are hateful, spiteful, ineffective things come to distort our economy and slow progress; they also *sometimes* help the worker.
The United Auto Workers union kept many Ford factories open when Ford had no demand for cars, and so Ford paid lots of money to literally tens of thousands of benched workers sitting around doing nothing. That cost amortizes across the cost basis of each vehicle--their wage costs become part of the basic labor cost of making a car, even though they're not physically involved--and so the price of vehicles must increase, and the consumer buying power decreases. This impact, across all American auto makers, was a huge driving force for the early 2000s auto manufacturer bail-outs.
We see that the unions kept some people in jobs, but we ignore that the general increase in goods and the tax cost (which comes out of consumer pockets eventually, somehow) reduced the ability of the consumer to *create* other jobs: we experienced a recession, and many of those jobs were lost because others kept their jobs and produced nothing. It's not one-to-one: we paid people (buying power) and they produced nothing (non-productive labor time), so less stuff was made per dollar spent and less stuff was made per person in population, thus dollars bought less and people had less. That means we were poorer, which means we had less ability to sustain jobs, which means more unemployed. 50,000 benched workers drawing a paycheck means 60,000 unemployed somewhere else.
Again: it's sort of a wash. I don't know if the unions absolutely must go because they're toxic, or if they're still a benefit to the population as a whole (not just the rich or the poor). I want to move power into the hands of the individual. I don't want to discourage work; I want economic freedom. I want the ability to not work and to survive--miserably, maybe, but with a roof over your head and good food in your stomach--without penalizing everyone else for a bleeding-heart utopian fantasy. No massive taxes, no taxing the rich to death because "they don't need all that money"; just the power to walk away if your employer is an asshole. I firmly believe that will outweigh the power of trade unions, and that any remaining need we have for them will evaporate immediately.
I've heard a number of curious stories through the years about friends of co-workers who live entirely off government benefits already. Usually the story goes that they get bored and want to do something, so they apply for some jobs, do a few interviews, and ultimately walk away from the employment market for one simple reason: if they were to take any jobs that had been offered to them, their benefits would evaporate.
It's called a welfare trap.
A citizen's dividend or universal guaranteed income seems like the perfect answer to both problems.
That's the point. I saw the UBI thing and wrote a competent plan, instead of an ideal. I drew up goals, risks, and strategies. I dug into the Federal Government's spending and finances. I invented new
Mnemonics are tricks for party games. A few are helpful, but you can't base your mind on them.
Mnemonics methods such as the Method of Loci or "Mind Palace" allow you to remember lists of things and associate groups of useful information. They're useful for party tricks like memorizing decks of cards and large numbers (all digits of pi); and they're also useful for increasing mid-term memory during learning.
Consider a strategy by which you store important redox chemistry facts in several rooms on a large oil rig while studying. The mind palace itself reminds you that Oxidization Is Loss; Reduction Is Gain. You also exercise your recall facilities, which are part of remembering: Recording, Retaining, and Recalling; or the three failures of forgetting: Fixating, Filing, and Finding. The mind palace itself is a filing system, and the exercise of encoding to visual imagery improves fixation.
The most obvious advantage here is the long-term memory benefit of having all this stuff in a mind palace; that's also the least-important advantage, as the mind palace needs constant maintenance or it will decay. The mind palace itself provides the immediate medium-term advantage of recognition and recall: you don't have to flip back through the book constantly as you study, and so you more clearly understand new information hinging on what you've recently read.
That's as far as most people get with mnemonics.
Human memory is more complex than that. Beside the three process components of Recording/Fixating, Retaining/Filing, and Recalling/Finding, your memory has the three major operations of Recalling, Recognizing, and Relearning. Memory is associative: the more organized the information, the easier it is to recall. Memory decays: you're essentially guaranteed to lose 20% of what you learned in the first week, and around 60% in the first month. Mnemonics systems leverage these properties.
A deeper study of mnemonics teaches you to enhance the recording process by fixing on information you need to remember. It teaches you to enhance filing not by the magic of the mind palace and the linked list and all the other mnemonics systems, but by the simple and important acts of visualization (converting and integrating information into images) and reflection (directly associating new information with already-known information). You use acrostics and acronyms, rhythm and rhyme, and pegs and mind palaces as needed; and you carry out the long-term operation of moving your memories from those temporary containers into the natural storage system of your brain in the most efficient and effective manner.
People don't have bad memories, and people with good memories aren't just using parlor tricks; everyone has the same sort of memories, and some of us learn how to operate them effectively.
Mental mathematics are traditional, and need to replace the garbage that's being taught in US public school math classes today.
Tradition isn't a good argument, but the premise is correct.
Modern U.S. schools rely heavily on a sort of Friendly Numbers System approach for arithmetic, breaking operations into more manageable sets of operations with simple strategies to compute common patterns. This is a great way to approach calculus--see Chain Rule and Integration by Parts, as well as the general derivative rule of multiplying by the post-decremented exponent--but we have *better* systems for arithmetic.
We mostly eliminated memorization of the multiplication table because we found out faculty education doesn't work. The brain isn't a muscle, and you don't make it stronger by flexing it: learning a language doesn't make your language-learning center more efficient at learning a language. We sort of ignored that learning *anything* gives you a bigger associative pool upon which to attach new memories and from which to devise new techniques, e.g. learning Esperanto will drive you nuts as you realize speaking th
Basically, yes. It takes power out of the hands of employees by allowing employers to dictate salaries in an environment which appears more fair.
Negotiations are complex. One tool in negotiation is a standard of fairness.
I argue for the elimination of minimum wage when implementing a Citizen's Dividend for several reasons. On one hand, the Dividend accomplishes an establishment of a minimum standard of living: you don't need a minimum wage. Some of the secondary economic effects lower the cost of goods. Lowering wages also lowers the cost of goods, and a low wage is more acceptable when you already have a second income source that doesn't involve doing any work. These are all reasonable economic arguments.
The last argument is the negotiation argument: a minimum wage is a standard of fairness published by an authority. If you interview for a job shoveling rocks 12 hours per day in the hot sun for $8.50/hr, you'll probably tell the employer to pound sand; that's at least a $10, if not a $12, position. When we have the narrative of a "Minimum Wage Job" and the published standard of $8.50/hr for basic labor, you're naturally more inclined to accept that as a fair wage--and to accept the job.
In other words: higher minimum wages have negative economic consequences, and their benefits are obviated by a non-revocable income independent of employment; lower minimum wages encourage people to accept salaries below what they would normally view as fair, and so advantage employers in negotiation.
No-negotiation salaries create an established measure of fairness. Your salary isn't any lower than anyone else's; it's the going rate; it's the right salary, and it's fair. If it's less than what you'd normally accept, well... that's okay, because it's fair, and obviously there's something wrong with *you* for trying to demand more.
People are predisposed to respond emotionally to this sense of fairness. They become more accepting, and will do things they wouldn't normally do. They'll listen to others, they'll take command, they'll take blame, and they'll accept lower wages and longer hours because it feels right. It feels like they're integrated with the social group and thus stronger.
My aims are a more optimized system by putting more power in the hands of individuals. I want to reduce government oversight by moving the power to push back against employers into the hand of employees--not unions, but the guy at the table telling you his pay is too low and the 5 cent raise this year is not enough to keep him working here. I want employers to have the same problem with one guy as the next, and so to be forced to negotiate objectively-fair market prices, good benefits, and a supportive working environment. Non-negotiated salaries carry their benefits, and they also place power in employer hands; they don't place enough power to completely quash wages, but they do place some downward pressure and eliminate all employee recourse. They bug me.
Tell me how that dam was ever profitable in the first place. That's a lot of energy going into rebuilding the dam; does it really generate more than it takes to constantly repair its own structural erosion?
If we had competing mass transit companies, they'd have repeating expenses and edge loss. They need 60 buses and 90 at peak; two companies need 34 buses each and 49 at peak, because the buses aren't always full and they aren't always taking everyone at the stops, so having a few additional means you can compete better.
This is the nature of competition: it raises costs, but improves market conditions. For a government-run service, prices are usually closer to costs, so competition doesn't provide a market control; for a private industry like oil manufacture or steel production, competition means one firm can't overcharge their customers without another firm undercutting them to reap profits from all the new business they're getting. For extremely *large* industries, the edge loss in having multiple firms is minimal; it can even be more efficient to manage them as individual firms, and so a holding company or a bunch of unrelated businesses are both equally as efficient and both more efficient than one giant monopoly.
Mass transit is a government-run service with a minimally-competitive market. It's lossy: a lot of seats are unfilled; you necessarily have to provide transit in a schedule-driven manner; and large buses or trains are more efficient than small buses or trains with the same total seating. In a world where individual transit is common, mass-transit is best as a government service; you don't need to legislate competition away because no business would survive supplying mass-transit in a fair market.
I've been working on education in my spare time (my major hobby is poverty), and the best way to improve education is via intellect training. Mnemonics, mental mathematics, executive functions, study skills; the things people think of largely as toys are key. We need to generalize from "use an imaging system to memorize the order of a deck of cards" to "integrate visualization, reflection, and mnemonization into study to maximize the rate and success of retention while minimizing the time and mental effort put forth in studying."
In short: there are techniques we can learn which allow us to learn newer things to greater effect with less time and less effort. My two hours of study per day will teach me math or history or Japanese in a year; your two hours of study per day will teach you the same information in three years, and likely with less of a firm grasp on the topic. We should fix that.
That's what I was thinking. Statistics without Calculus would be a major advancement. It's the kind of things the Muslims would come up with in the dark ages, or the Europeans in the few hundred years following--you know, when we marked major eras of human societal advancement by what new math we invented and what kind of engineering that allowed us to accomplish.
More clearly: LibreSSL is immune to DROWN because they removed--not improved--the SSLv2 protocol handling code.
Wikipedia says LibreSSL's "better SSL code" is mostly code pruning, with a close second being breaking and then fixing OpenSSL cross-platform portability. If you check the actual LibreSSL repositories, you'll notice an extreme minority of LibreSSL changes--by code volume and by actual commits--are code clean-up, and an even smaller minority are actual defect repair. Mostly, it's gutting.
More clearly: In this case, it doesn't have the DROWN vulnerability because they deleted the SSLv2 protocol code. They did *not* improve the SSLv2 protocol code.
Slashdot Mirror
Go itself is... diverting. I usually make statements about Go when solving universal problems like poverty or education because it's a good frame-of-reference for literally everything.
There are more variations on the opening in Go than there are possible parallel universes, so even a quantum computer can't select between all possible outcomes and find the best. Note that "variations" doesn't mean just what move you play, but what the eventual result is; and the third move in the game can have a major impact on a play made 120 moves later. The number of legal, reasonable outcomes from any early move quickly exceeds the number of quantum states in the universe raised to itself as a power. There are 10^70 protons in the universe, and somewhere in the ballpark of 10^(10^70) possible outcomes from an early-game move.
Li got slightly better against it; I'd wager a 10 or 20 game match would see him immediately competitive. The machine will eventually behave like an AI, and human go players will essentially learn how you think and counteract your particular behaviors. Li will eventually learn to manipulate the machine; it's *very* intelligent, but not creative or insightful.
Solar generation isn't worth it if you can only install 2 panels; if you can install a 7kW array, it's well worth it.
People talk a lot about having no maintenance or whatever, but you still have to go up there from time to time to mop them off. That's the problem with distributed solar: too much cost with management spread over a huge, complex area; it's only acceptable at a mid-scale (a few kW, not half a kW) with the resident handling the maintenance, since otherwise the transit time to get workers between sites to do sparse maintenance gets you shit like Solarcity where they charge you 95% of what solar should save you and give you a 2 cent/kWh discount. Some of us don't like going up on the roof to do maintenance once a month when the seagulls decide to paint our panels (and half the panel goes dark if you cover 10% of it--a single maple leaf can shut off half of an entire array if it's run by a string inverter).
I want panels, but only if I can put them on 80% of my roof area. I have a thin attic (rafters, not space) and can make the argument that firefighters can cut open the rear and front wall and avoid the panels; as well, the line is 240VAC center tap, and the power cuts off if you cut line power (the microinverters are on the panels, and they shut down if they don't have mains power to sync to). That gets around the nightmare of navigating a 600VDC circuit trying to find an entry point for a roof vent to let smoke and heat out; regulations in many states require a 3 foot setback for such breaches during fire.
EIGHT CENTS!? I pay 9.8/kWh for coal-oil, 10.2/kWh for solar (hence why I bought into pure solar); plus transmission fees takes it to some 15 cents, and taxes raises it to 18 cents per kWh. Natural gas was 58 cents per therm, but is now down to 50 cents here; I can get a 2-year contract for 52 cents.
This is why I never use the term "value" in economics. I've written full macroeconomic theories and a decent amount of market economics without talking about anything called "value".
Of course, theories of value are so broken they eventually concluded that things have value for magical reasons.
I have people telling me their power costs 1/5 what mine costs, so my bubble sucks.
I've been paying for delivered generated solar power, which comes at a slightly-higher premium than my local coal and gas power. I also buy carbon-offset gas power, again at a premium. My heating bills have not increased by very much at all in 5 years.
My house has 66% of its wall-area exposed; 87% of that is un-insulated. I'm looking into adding rigid foam insulation to 25% of the exposed wall area in the short term and 75% in the long term, plus insulative batting to 50% of the exposed wall area. The ceiling has 50% of the exposure area of the wall area, and will get insulative batting and a radiant barrier (this is extremely effective for summer overhead sun, and somewhat less effective for winter rising heat: almost all downward-moving heat is radiant heat).
I expect the addition of insulation to cost $1,000 on 25% of the area and $4,000 on 50% of the exposed area. I expect ceiling and in-wall insulation to cost under $1,000 in total. A corresponding 95% drop in heating and AC costs should lower my bills from around $280 in winter to around $70, and from $150 in summer to around $40. This is to heat a house with 1350 square feet plus 600sqft basement.
While the cost of $6,000 seems steep for a $2,250 annual savings, it gives me an opportunity to add double-thick drywall with Green Glue for noise isolation, and stabilizes my monthly expenses to 29% of my income from 34% of my income. My eventual target is 11% of my income: each month of employment should allow me to save for 9 months of expenses.
"Very soon flash will become cheaper than rotating media." In which case you don't buy rotating media anymore. SSD commands a premium because it's got advantages over HDD, so much so that many modern data center SAN racks are going all-SSD despite it costing 4 times as much.
Geeze man, I'm buying pure solar power and I don't have that kind of problem; and my bill is still trending toward a smaller percentage of the per-capita GDP and the median income, much less my own income.
Inflation means your bills keep getting higher as a general rule. Typically, your income increases faster; the GDP-per-capita and the median incomes both increase faster than CPI or any other price inflation measure. That's why people spend a smaller percentage of their income on things like food, clothing, and housing today (caveat: they spend 18% more on housing in 2003 than in 1950, but bought a 2,300sqft house instead of a 983sqft house), and more on cell phones, streaming media, and other new consumer goods.
It's John McAfee. Okay, so maybe it was believable; but if you're honestly surprised by the follow-up, you haven't been paying attention. This is a guy who posted a video on Youtube where he talked about banging underaged girls and smoked a bunch of meth.
McAfee isn't out to defraud people; he's just out to be a loud caricature. I'm sure some day he'll say something serious in a sensational and ridiculous way; I'm equally sure he'll keep saying things that sound serious and then turn out to be just noise, because that's what he does now. He doesn't get attention because people believe him; he gets attention because he's interposed himself into a situation and drawn attention to himself, and we all recognize the act. You *can* play off that act honestly, but it's not a requirement.
Most of what I've learned came from exploration not unlike something completely different from whatever John C. Lily did. Seriously, ketamine is not the way.
The sad fact is my brain is filled with a wide stretch of domain knowledge. Moonwalking with Einstein made a good inspirational piece for all the mnemonics stuff; and I've since learned things like Kepner-Tregoe problem solving and decision analysis, hierarchical decomposition from project management, SQ3R and derived study methods, Cornell and other note-taking systems, and so forth. Some of what Kenneth Higbee wrote about memory--that it's associative, that it works by association, that organization sharply improves it, and so forth--has allowed me to recognize how and why some of these systems help with memory, with studying, and with analysis.
For the most part, I have a pile of unsorted information my brain can command. Learning and teaching are different things, and I do not have a prepared presentation of any use to anyone. Some things I can't even explain properly, such as my model of thinking by which I break things down into abstract models and then associate them with anything else having a similar abstract model--I'll treat any mechanism as a set of subsets of other mechanisms, all cobbled together into one big machine. If I had a well-organized presentation, I'd have an educational plan instead of a vague ideal and a pile of tools I've already described.
I can say this, however: people don't do enough reflection. Modern study methods include a step in which you think about what you just learned and how it relates to everything else--I do this in the extreme--and so come to more firmly understand the topic and those related topics, while also solidifying the new knowledge within the framework of your memory. People like to throw around words like "critical thinking" the same way teachers throw around words like "study" and "take notes": they don't have any meaning in mind, and are only voicing a complaint that you're not taking an abstract and ill-defined action. Reflection is the basis of critical thinking: you will frequently find disturbing mismatches, which only proves either your knowledge is incomplete or something you've learned is incorrect.
Telemetry just means long-distance measuring.
Why can't we encrypt everything except To and mail transit control headers? You can't hide encryption, so a "Subject: PGP Encrypted Message" and possibly "X-Header-Transit: PGP" would make sense. You could even include an X-Recipient-Key-Print to tell the MTA to add additional client-targeted headers (X-Mailing-List, etc.) as separate PGP-encrypted blocks, possibly encapsulated (encrypt the original PGP-encrypted message prepended with a MIME segment containing a header block), so the message always ships with exactly one PGP encrypted message and the mail client may need to decrypt through several layers to get all data.
Memory is the foundation of knowledge: you cannot know what you do not remember.
People spend a lot of time flipping back through the book to find things they recognize but can't recall. It's a waste of time. A firm understanding of human memory allows you to avoid this: you organize the information to store better, whether by taking specific action such as visualization (making images) and reflection (thinking about how that information relates to what you already know) or implementing highly-structured systems such as acrostics and the method of loci. Doing these things maximizes the impact of your study time: you might remember the mnemonic device, or you might tie the information to other information and remember it in its own right; you'll cover more ground in less time in any case, and more firmly store that information as you revisit it during further study.
Learning is an enormous, complex process. It is, at its heart, memory; but memory is a tool, and tools produce differing results based on how they're used. Skillful use of a tool accomplishes greater things; blunt use of a tool has limits.
Minimum wage is a band aid measure, a rather crude one at that, to create a society where everybody is doing $something 39.5 hours per week
Minimum wage and public aid were a great system for the 1900s. I don't call out minimum wage and public aid as bad because they're outdated; I call them out as bad because we have new factors. The new factor approaching us looks a lot like the Industrial Revolution, and I know how to navigate that safely. I also know my solutions would have been inappropriate until very recently.
As we know, unions never work in the real world.
Trade unions were an excellent device in a world where labor laws were weak and the economy was too volatile and too poor to sustain sweeping policy changes. Today, they're sort of a wash: unions are hateful, spiteful, ineffective things come to distort our economy and slow progress; they also *sometimes* help the worker.
The United Auto Workers union kept many Ford factories open when Ford had no demand for cars, and so Ford paid lots of money to literally tens of thousands of benched workers sitting around doing nothing. That cost amortizes across the cost basis of each vehicle--their wage costs become part of the basic labor cost of making a car, even though they're not physically involved--and so the price of vehicles must increase, and the consumer buying power decreases. This impact, across all American auto makers, was a huge driving force for the early 2000s auto manufacturer bail-outs.
We see that the unions kept some people in jobs, but we ignore that the general increase in goods and the tax cost (which comes out of consumer pockets eventually, somehow) reduced the ability of the consumer to *create* other jobs: we experienced a recession, and many of those jobs were lost because others kept their jobs and produced nothing. It's not one-to-one: we paid people (buying power) and they produced nothing (non-productive labor time), so less stuff was made per dollar spent and less stuff was made per person in population, thus dollars bought less and people had less. That means we were poorer, which means we had less ability to sustain jobs, which means more unemployed. 50,000 benched workers drawing a paycheck means 60,000 unemployed somewhere else.
Again: it's sort of a wash. I don't know if the unions absolutely must go because they're toxic, or if they're still a benefit to the population as a whole (not just the rich or the poor). I want to move power into the hands of the individual. I don't want to discourage work; I want economic freedom. I want the ability to not work and to survive--miserably, maybe, but with a roof over your head and good food in your stomach--without penalizing everyone else for a bleeding-heart utopian fantasy. No massive taxes, no taxing the rich to death because "they don't need all that money"; just the power to walk away if your employer is an asshole. I firmly believe that will outweigh the power of trade unions, and that any remaining need we have for them will evaporate immediately.
I've heard a number of curious stories through the years about friends of co-workers who live entirely off government benefits already. Usually the story goes that they get bored and want to do something, so they apply for some jobs, do a few interviews, and ultimately walk away from the employment market for one simple reason: if they were to take any jobs that had been offered to them, their benefits would evaporate.
It's called a welfare trap.
A citizen's dividend or universal guaranteed income seems like the perfect answer to both problems.
That's the point. I saw the UBI thing and wrote a competent plan, instead of an ideal. I drew up goals, risks, and strategies. I dug into the Federal Government's spending and finances. I invented new
Mnemonics are tricks for party games. A few are helpful, but you can't base your mind on them.
Mnemonics methods such as the Method of Loci or "Mind Palace" allow you to remember lists of things and associate groups of useful information. They're useful for party tricks like memorizing decks of cards and large numbers (all digits of pi); and they're also useful for increasing mid-term memory during learning.
Consider a strategy by which you store important redox chemistry facts in several rooms on a large oil rig while studying. The mind palace itself reminds you that Oxidization Is Loss; Reduction Is Gain. You also exercise your recall facilities, which are part of remembering: Recording, Retaining, and Recalling; or the three failures of forgetting: Fixating, Filing, and Finding. The mind palace itself is a filing system, and the exercise of encoding to visual imagery improves fixation.
The most obvious advantage here is the long-term memory benefit of having all this stuff in a mind palace; that's also the least-important advantage, as the mind palace needs constant maintenance or it will decay. The mind palace itself provides the immediate medium-term advantage of recognition and recall: you don't have to flip back through the book constantly as you study, and so you more clearly understand new information hinging on what you've recently read.
That's as far as most people get with mnemonics.
Human memory is more complex than that. Beside the three process components of Recording/Fixating, Retaining/Filing, and Recalling/Finding, your memory has the three major operations of Recalling, Recognizing, and Relearning. Memory is associative: the more organized the information, the easier it is to recall. Memory decays: you're essentially guaranteed to lose 20% of what you learned in the first week, and around 60% in the first month. Mnemonics systems leverage these properties.
A deeper study of mnemonics teaches you to enhance the recording process by fixing on information you need to remember. It teaches you to enhance filing not by the magic of the mind palace and the linked list and all the other mnemonics systems, but by the simple and important acts of visualization (converting and integrating information into images) and reflection (directly associating new information with already-known information). You use acrostics and acronyms, rhythm and rhyme, and pegs and mind palaces as needed; and you carry out the long-term operation of moving your memories from those temporary containers into the natural storage system of your brain in the most efficient and effective manner.
People don't have bad memories, and people with good memories aren't just using parlor tricks; everyone has the same sort of memories, and some of us learn how to operate them effectively.
Mental mathematics are traditional, and need to replace the garbage that's being taught in US public school math classes today.
Tradition isn't a good argument, but the premise is correct.
Modern U.S. schools rely heavily on a sort of Friendly Numbers System approach for arithmetic, breaking operations into more manageable sets of operations with simple strategies to compute common patterns. This is a great way to approach calculus--see Chain Rule and Integration by Parts, as well as the general derivative rule of multiplying by the post-decremented exponent--but we have *better* systems for arithmetic.
We mostly eliminated memorization of the multiplication table because we found out faculty education doesn't work. The brain isn't a muscle, and you don't make it stronger by flexing it: learning a language doesn't make your language-learning center more efficient at learning a language. We sort of ignored that learning *anything* gives you a bigger associative pool upon which to attach new memories and from which to devise new techniques, e.g. learning Esperanto will drive you nuts as you realize speaking th
Basically, yes. It takes power out of the hands of employees by allowing employers to dictate salaries in an environment which appears more fair.
Negotiations are complex. One tool in negotiation is a standard of fairness.
I argue for the elimination of minimum wage when implementing a Citizen's Dividend for several reasons. On one hand, the Dividend accomplishes an establishment of a minimum standard of living: you don't need a minimum wage. Some of the secondary economic effects lower the cost of goods. Lowering wages also lowers the cost of goods, and a low wage is more acceptable when you already have a second income source that doesn't involve doing any work. These are all reasonable economic arguments.
The last argument is the negotiation argument: a minimum wage is a standard of fairness published by an authority. If you interview for a job shoveling rocks 12 hours per day in the hot sun for $8.50/hr, you'll probably tell the employer to pound sand; that's at least a $10, if not a $12, position. When we have the narrative of a "Minimum Wage Job" and the published standard of $8.50/hr for basic labor, you're naturally more inclined to accept that as a fair wage--and to accept the job.
In other words: higher minimum wages have negative economic consequences, and their benefits are obviated by a non-revocable income independent of employment; lower minimum wages encourage people to accept salaries below what they would normally view as fair, and so advantage employers in negotiation.
No-negotiation salaries create an established measure of fairness. Your salary isn't any lower than anyone else's; it's the going rate; it's the right salary, and it's fair. If it's less than what you'd normally accept, well... that's okay, because it's fair, and obviously there's something wrong with *you* for trying to demand more.
People are predisposed to respond emotionally to this sense of fairness. They become more accepting, and will do things they wouldn't normally do. They'll listen to others, they'll take command, they'll take blame, and they'll accept lower wages and longer hours because it feels right. It feels like they're integrated with the social group and thus stronger.
My aims are a more optimized system by putting more power in the hands of individuals. I want to reduce government oversight by moving the power to push back against employers into the hand of employees--not unions, but the guy at the table telling you his pay is too low and the 5 cent raise this year is not enough to keep him working here. I want employers to have the same problem with one guy as the next, and so to be forced to negotiate objectively-fair market prices, good benefits, and a supportive working environment. Non-negotiated salaries carry their benefits, and they also place power in employer hands; they don't place enough power to completely quash wages, but they do place some downward pressure and eliminate all employee recourse. They bug me.
Tell me how that dam was ever profitable in the first place. That's a lot of energy going into rebuilding the dam; does it really generate more than it takes to constantly repair its own structural erosion?
If we had competing mass transit companies, they'd have repeating expenses and edge loss. They need 60 buses and 90 at peak; two companies need 34 buses each and 49 at peak, because the buses aren't always full and they aren't always taking everyone at the stops, so having a few additional means you can compete better.
This is the nature of competition: it raises costs, but improves market conditions. For a government-run service, prices are usually closer to costs, so competition doesn't provide a market control; for a private industry like oil manufacture or steel production, competition means one firm can't overcharge their customers without another firm undercutting them to reap profits from all the new business they're getting. For extremely *large* industries, the edge loss in having multiple firms is minimal; it can even be more efficient to manage them as individual firms, and so a holding company or a bunch of unrelated businesses are both equally as efficient and both more efficient than one giant monopoly.
Mass transit is a government-run service with a minimally-competitive market. It's lossy: a lot of seats are unfilled; you necessarily have to provide transit in a schedule-driven manner; and large buses or trains are more efficient than small buses or trains with the same total seating. In a world where individual transit is common, mass-transit is best as a government service; you don't need to legislate competition away because no business would survive supplying mass-transit in a fair market.
Only one party has to be aware of the recording in MD. The MTA makes announcements regularly over the PA, so is a party to the recording.
Ditching Algebra isn't the answer.
I've been working on education in my spare time (my major hobby is poverty), and the best way to improve education is via intellect training. Mnemonics, mental mathematics, executive functions, study skills; the things people think of largely as toys are key. We need to generalize from "use an imaging system to memorize the order of a deck of cards" to "integrate visualization, reflection, and mnemonization into study to maximize the rate and success of retention while minimizing the time and mental effort put forth in studying."
In short: there are techniques we can learn which allow us to learn newer things to greater effect with less time and less effort. My two hours of study per day will teach me math or history or Japanese in a year; your two hours of study per day will teach you the same information in three years, and likely with less of a firm grasp on the topic. We should fix that.
That's what I was thinking. Statistics without Calculus would be a major advancement. It's the kind of things the Muslims would come up with in the dark ages, or the Europeans in the few hundred years following--you know, when we marked major eras of human societal advancement by what new math we invented and what kind of engineering that allowed us to accomplish.
More clearly: LibreSSL is immune to DROWN because they removed--not improved--the SSLv2 protocol handling code.
Wikipedia says LibreSSL's "better SSL code" is mostly code pruning, with a close second being breaking and then fixing OpenSSL cross-platform portability. If you check the actual LibreSSL repositories, you'll notice an extreme minority of LibreSSL changes--by code volume and by actual commits--are code clean-up, and an even smaller minority are actual defect repair. Mostly, it's gutting.
More clearly: In this case, it doesn't have the DROWN vulnerability because they deleted the SSLv2 protocol code. They did *not* improve the SSLv2 protocol code.