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User: gordo3000

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  1. Re:name and location tweeted... on Man Booted From Southwest Flight and Threatened With Arrest After Critical Tweet · · Score: 1

    so what you are saying is millions and millions of years of evolution have conditioned us to be a male dominated society, and in fact evolutionary forces have probably perfected the social structure that best secures our species' future, and women's rights is basically unnatural.

    got it. at least now I can reply the reason I'm against equal rights is it is unnatural and has no basis on a fundamental level....

  2. Re: name and location tweeted... on Man Booted From Southwest Flight and Threatened With Arrest After Critical Tweet · · Score: 1

    the wage gap is almost completely gone, and most economics research puts it around 95 cents on the dollar for women today. Sure, we need to close those last 5 cents, but there are bigger gaps that are far more important to deal with right now (especially when it comes to minorities). I"m not saying you ignore women's rights, but in the realm of pay, it is far far less meaningful than it was 20 years ago.

    Walking safely at night is not a women's rights issue.

  3. Re: name and location tweeted... on Man Booted From Southwest Flight and Threatened With Arrest After Critical Tweet · · Score: 1

    unfenced front yards are not public spaces the way all the other ones are. you don't have a right to expect privacy (telescopic lenses, etc) but people can't come on your yard freely in many places. There is no implied invitation to the public to my front yard just because I don't have a fence on it (at least in the states I grew up in).

  4. Re: Local testing works? on States That Raised Minimum Wage See No Slow-Down In Job Growth · · Score: 1

    Really? Florida and Texas have quite low minimum wages across the US and very large illegal populations. Is there any evidence for this?

  5. Re: Local testing works? on States That Raised Minimum Wage See No Slow-Down In Job Growth · · Score: 1

    Anyone who has studied the labor market knows there are tons of studies showing that minimum wage increases in the amounts being considered are basically irrelevant to job growth or economic growth.

    But a non-rigorous thought experiment is this : go look up how many jobs are minimum wage and then go look up the total wages earned at that level. The first is small, the second is miniscule relative to total income in the US. Slightly altering the second will not markedly modify overall income distributions (ie how much less will a rich person earn in real terms vs total earnings). Now go look at work hours reported at higher income groups after taxes went up a small amount. You'll find a change ~0. If that had no effect, there is no reason a much smaller change will someone have a larger effect.

    Now you can at least say you have thought a bit about the issue as compared to offloading the thinking to your favorite talking head.

    There are also rigorous studies done by many academics that agree the effect if existant, is tiny. If I was still in college with lexis Nexis I'd just post those.

  6. Re: Local testing works? on States That Raised Minimum Wage See No Slow-Down In Job Growth · · Score: 1

    Can you define a living wage? we would all do good to know what hurdle we are trying to surmount.

    For example, given tax policy, a single adult on minimum wage at 40 hours a week earns about 1200 a month. Assuming medical for 100 a month(8% is a trigger under the ACA I think but I don't live in the US right now), is 1100 survivable with a small pot saved for emergencies?

    The answer if it is just a single person is yes. My last year in college house sharing I paid 300 in rent, running costs of 300 in food, 100 in utilities, and 40 for a phone. That is well within those bounds. Its not a great life, but I had enough to go for a beer or a movie from time to time.

    But this was suburban NC, not NYC. Should the federal minimum wage guarantee my ability to live in any city in the US? Then it needs to be 20 bucks an hour (Manhattan).

    We need to decide if this is actually a federal minimum that caters to the 20th percentile or a number that must function for every American.

    But this study is not adding anything new. It is long been studied and proven raises in the minimum wage are basically irrelevant to job growth or economic growth. I'm just asking if the number should support a single adult, a family of 4, and in what way.

  7. Re:Free market economy on US Senator Blasts Microsoft's H-1B Push As It Lays 18,000 Off Workers · · Score: 1

    absolutely untrue. his only signature achievement to go to the supreme court was upheld, and he had 2 years of an foolproof majority in congress. His policies not working is a complete measure of how poorly he constructed (or more realistically, allowed congress to construct with no input or leadership) them, not an inability to get them passed. The last president to pass this much legislation, especially major, economy impacting legislation, was FDR. His policies have had far reaching consequences in many areas, but he continues to complain that the lack of results is the "other side's fault". It's pitiful.

    and just to be precise, I voted for him the first time around. His first 4 years were such a travesty I sat out the second one.

  8. Re:Did he just notice that? on US Senator Blasts Microsoft's H-1B Push As It Lays 18,000 Off Workers · · Score: 1

    I'd bet you dollars to dimes if it wasn't so much cheaper to the employee and employer to have employer provided health insurance, it wouldn't happen. For me, the cost of employer provided health insurance is about 60-70% cheaper than getting it privately (at least when I was working for a large employer). Why? My marginal tax rate was right around 50% and they got insurance at a better rate than I could secure. So while it may have been a cost of about 8k to my employer, it was worth a solid 25k in pretax income to me.

    Guess what, an f'ed up tax regime creates weird incentives. I'm not even getting into their incentives of giving you health insurance vs income (less severe, but still another added savings).

  9. Re:Already happened? on The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test At Detecting AI · · Score: 1

    don't try to argue with a humanities major. all they have is the belief they can pull rank in some theoretical world. Leave them that, it's all they will ever have while scientists are actually out there contributing to the body of human knowledge.

  10. Re:Turing test not passed. on The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test At Detecting AI · · Score: 1

    where are the mod points when you need them....

    I never cared much about the Turing test, but this explanation makes me want to go read his original papers on it.

  11. he's an amazing guy on The Billionaire Mathematician · · Score: 3, Insightful

    but trying to play the slow kid isn't exactly working. He finished a PhD at 23! that, if nothing else, tells you just how fast he is. He may not be able to do long division in his head quicker than some, but in his areas of competence, he is an intellectual giant who ALSO happens to work harder than you.

  12. Re: Only 5000 bucks? on A Seriously High Speed Video Camera (Video) · · Score: 1

    Golf swing analysis. Good players would love this to check ball impact angles if the resolution was high enough.

  13. Re: Not exactly needed on A Seriously High Speed Video Camera (Video) · · Score: 1

    I can't believe the first comment realizing sports applications are awesome was bowling!! What about baseball and golf? Those are much higher speed motions where people already pay obscene amounts for high frame rate video to fix swing mechanics.

  14. Re: Battery Life on Theater Chain Bans Google Glass · · Score: -1

    Spoken like someone who either has never had a kid (might go into labor spanned 9 weeks for us, you'd know this if you were educated about it), is a ridiculous tight ass, or maybe has a wife who is a ridiculous bitch and is too whipped to realize how much his life sucks.

  15. Re:Battery Life on Theater Chain Bans Google Glass · · Score: 3, Interesting

    for pretty good reason. unlike a cell phone there isn't a brightly backlit screen but I can still get texts/updates/emails that may signal I should quietly excuse myself from the theater to take care of some personal business. It's even less invasive than a pager.

    There are huge ways this can (and probably will at some point) be used to make technology less invasive to those around you and your life. I'd love to not interrupt a conversation to check if my wife just went into labor or needs me home ASAP while out having a beer with a friend. Or my friends who are doctors can get a low profile pop up that they are needed at the hospital rather than having to have their phone out.

  16. Re:Mistake to go in with the Ruskies on Getting the Most Out of the Space Station (Before It's Too Late) · · Score: 1

    we got involved in the ISS ages ago. First plans were in the 80s and Russia got involved in 1993 (first piece went up in 1998). And frankly, we are only not seriously talking about decommissioning the ISS because it ran so far over schedule. It should have been at end life before the shuttles.

  17. Re:Whoa 1.3x on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    just wondering, what in the world could you possibly be doing that was originally designed at 1/100,000th of optimal and relevant?

    I mean, I've done this before. I had to generate all the legit ticker symbols for derivatives on futures, and just to understand the rules I wrote code for that. Now, I could have built a config file from that code that would have sped up the "generation" portion by 10,000x I'm sure. But the thing is, all it cost me was about 3 seconds on initialization of a process that required about 10 minutes to run. So for me, I didn't care as optimization in the guts of the calculations I was doing were far more important (i.e. at one point I was able to take the run time down from 20 minutes to 15 minutes earn on in dev, which was only a 50% speed increase on the relevant section, but far more important than a 10000x speed up on the ticker generation).

  18. Re:A Formula only an Actuary could Love on Why You Shouldn't Use Spreadsheets For Important Work · · Score: 1

    any half decent coder would have broken it up into 20 different cells, probably something like DA-->DT with meaningful column names and a comment in each one and then combine it together way over on the left for whatever you want to see........

    But you can do the exact same thing in python and I see it all the time, where people get lazy (oh wait, there is some minuscule savings of milliseconds, so it's worth it....) and put into one line what would be a lot more nicely done across several.

    Luckily excel makes it nice and easy to segment the nested code as it highlights which parens tie out to other parens. So I can fix the crappy nesting that my juniors would write for me and then tell them if they want to keep their job they won't make me waste time making their tools readable and maintainable.

  19. Re:Piketty's work will be done for him on Why You Shouldn't Use Spreadsheets For Important Work · · Score: 1

    best example is middle eastern money actually. I have a good friend from college who for years I never had any idea of the wealth and power of his family, and then I find out they were deep into oil money but you couldn't trace it at all. There was no listing of the potential wealth this family had, in fact the people weren't even mentioned. And you are talking about families (and because this money is new, the patriarch is still alive) that control billions and no one even lists on a world billionaire list.

    Forbes lists the richest people whose wealth can be measured because primary asset ownership is known. This is easiest if you hold a large portion of a publicly traded company, and hence, they are all scions of people who build such companies. I would be amazed if the head of the Sauds is worth anything less than the combination of Buffet, Slim, and Gates; the king gives his wife an art budget of supposedly, 2 billion dollars a year. This is the kind of money even Buffet can't come up with as a side expense.

    Undocumented wealth in this world is unbelievable in its scope. But its funny the GP actually thinks rich people just hand over their personal financial accounts to Forbes.

  20. Re:Spreadsheets - best and worst thing there is on Why You Shouldn't Use Spreadsheets For Important Work · · Score: 1

    doesn't always work. I spent years in Finance, and my first 2 were primarily writing and building spreadsheets to monitor risk, pnl, track drift in pnl, simulate portfolios, etc.

    A couple years back my firm put into place a dev environment driven by python, and this was the first time since I was in middle school that I was programming withs something other than VBA or excel. After about 2 months, the same sheets I had been writing for years could be translated into massively simpler and easier to read (and follow, modify, extend) python.

    Our problem was primarily driven by the need to keep all the information on one screen (in trading, you usually abhor having to scroll back and forth, as it takes time, and can lead to you searching for something rather than focusing on meaningful information). Of course, I could do all the calculations far to the right, and just do references that would be a mess on the dependency tree, but things seem to break just often enough to where you need to balance debugging on the fly (i.e. making it not impossible to see where your inputs are flowing to and which step they are breaking on). I never found a perfect balance.

    Some folks decided to use VBA, but then I have never found it easy to read someone's hacked together VBA code. Python I find much easier, and this probably has to do with the weird inconsistent syntax in VBA.

    And I'm well aware we were probably banging with a hammer to chop down a california redwood, but sometimes there is so much momentum in a firm you can't change how things are done (interoperability).

  21. Re:Would You Leave This Child At Home Alone? on Kids With Wheels: Should the Unlicensed Be Allowed To 'Drive' Autonomous Cars? · · Score: 1

    so not a single news article. in fact, the first link is a blog with an axe to grind (this is like going to the huffington post to get accurate information on poverty or healthcare) and the next 3 are in general, you could be found liable for child endangerment if the courts find the child was in danger. But funny enough, if you read your own links, you'd see that they specifically state that in some states there is a law, but in other states it is discretionary and the onus is on the parent to not fuck it up.

    But you are right, I did some some stunning nanny state articles. For example a 2 year old and 4 year old were left home alone, locked in, while the parent was out at work. The parent was arrested for child endangerment.

    The closest I saw that was borderline was a parent leaving a 13 year old in charge of 3 younger siblings (including a baby and a preschool age child) and one child got out and was wandering around the neighborhood. That parent was arrested though I could find nothing about charges being filed or punishment. But then if you had taken the time to read the comments and dig, you'd find out this wasn't the first time this had happened, there was a drowning hazard on the property (a proper lake supposedly), and other extenuating circumstances. Sounds like a not unreasonable arrest, and of course there is no follow up of the mother actually being punished, the children being taken away, or any of the fear mongering your original post implied. But good try.......

  22. Re: GADS on Chelsea Clinton At NCWIT: More PE, Less Zuckerberg · · Score: 1

    I actually went and dug and could find only one comparison internationally for 4th graders, and we don't look that bad till you see that Japan, Korea, Singapore, and a whole host of other countries don't participate in those studies. On the other hand by 8th grade we are comfortably behind, so much so that only 7% of our students score at the highest level! while in the best countries that number is around 47%.

    This was the study: http://nces.ed.gov/TIMSS/

    Are there others? I couldn't find any.

  23. Re: Would You Leave This Child At Home Alone? on Kids With Wheels: Should the Unlicensed Be Allowed To 'Drive' Autonomous Cars? · · Score: 1

    Thanks for confirming my suspicion it has never happened and you are baiting with a straw man. Glad to know the law is still reasonable. Because if it has happened, it would require minimal effort to show such a case, especially if you actually cared enough to follow these things.

  24. Re:2 basic issues on Kids With Wheels: Should the Unlicensed Be Allowed To 'Drive' Autonomous Cars? · · Score: 1

    if the DARPA challenge can get autonomous vehicles to move effectively around an urban zone, what makes you think an accident is all that complex?

    http://archive.darpa.mil/grand...

    This was 7 years ago, done by groups on relatively low budgets. Where do you think the tech has gone since then?

  25. Re:Would You Leave This Child At Home Alone? on Kids With Wheels: Should the Unlicensed Be Allowed To 'Drive' Autonomous Cars? · · Score: 1

    do you have any citation for a parent being arrested for leaving an 8 year old at home alone (without extenuating circumstances like the child being mentally handicap or being left for unreasonable lengths without food)?

    I Have never once heard of such an arrest. But then I haven't lived in the US for quite a number of years besides a short stint. Maybe something radical has shifted in the last 8 years.