Unseelie

Insurance Company A has mercenary company B and diplomat C on retainer in case of conflict with foreign nations.

Really, we pay taxes, and taxes cover things like the aforementioned ambassadorial services. It is arguably doable that we could pay some other organization to do the same thing.

Well, I don't want to come off as libertarian, but presumably you could buy insurance against this in an environment where there's a bunch of people who need such a service.

There's more such arguments, like suggestions that you need a nation to subsidize your health care or protect you from every day crime, but all of those are reasonably privatize-able as well.

Vocal pauses are natural, and they happen. Our brains can handle them. Why is it even considered personal betterment to expend energy replacing them with whitespace?

Clearly, if there was fuel left that you could derive motion from the thing, it wasn't quite empty...

I think the whole point of the involvement of computers and the internet as fair godmother in their scenario was to handwave away problem 2 through someone else's very hard work at making a very, very good process for automatically vetting potential employees.

I love the applications of the luddite fallacy to IT..the treatments of code as looms or steel mills hit hard on the fact that economists are historians, and prone to assumptions that past performance will indicate future performance.

Granted that's what games are about. But gamification is about using game mechanics (mechanics being things like -scores- which let you understand your position against that position of other people, and rules, which keep you from doing whatever you like, as something completely aside from the point of the 'fun' of the game) to do something much more functional than make things fun: to make things addictive or otherwise drive the user to pursue things outside of their standard pattern.

Stack overflow's design isn't about making it fun, its about making the users collaborate into something that is easy and valuable to the population. The rules of a game in general aren't about making the games fun, they're about providing a framework for competition.

Yes they do. First of all, saving energy is in itself a reward. Moreover, that's easily gameable by simply comparing yourself to a group of strangers at their energy efficiency house. Airline miles is kinda a hard one, except for the people in that group, competing there (and I'm sure there is), and as far a s random stuff...I'm here in large part because every once in a while I wonder if I can't get a few upvotes on hacker news, hopefully by saying something helpful or insightful, of course.

Devil's advocate for a moment, but every way that I'm aware of Monsanto letting people die is essentially an economical one: They ruin people's ability to buy or labor for food...which makes the comparison to the RIAA just one of a different scale. If the RIAA were even better at taking money from people, people would starve.

Of course, it makes no sense for the RIAA to starve its working musicians, but the ones who have stopped selling above margin?

I do love Avatars for these reasons, and having a signature as an entirely vain engagement. But quite often, I find myself removing the signature because...as shown on that site, they're quite large, gaudy, and bloody repetitive.

Saying that 'engage your users' is a better terminoligy for what's going on here than 'gamification' basically ignores the whole point of the idea, which is that people like to be making progress towards goals..not 'engaged', but metrically shown as advancing.

That is, at the very basic level, what gamification is, its making an activity into an activity with specific measures of progress toward a goal, such that people can rank themselves (and we do).

This isn't a new or faddish idea, its an insight into how people act, and an attempt to use that bit of new understanding, as Atwood did, before being aware of the term, to engage users using what are called 'game mechanics' which are basically motivations outside of the actual reward structures of the activity. I suspect "engage your users" is moving into the much more targeted and practicable mode of "gamify your interface" rather than vice versa.

I don't want to simply reply to a comment, there's a theme flowing through this thread, that capitalism makes everyone better off in a society, that our choices lead to where we are. I think you're ignoring a fundamental truth. There aren't unlimited opportunities for every person who works hard...just opportunities for those who work harder, on the margin, than others. Capitalism isn't about working hard and getting rewards, its about being better on the margins and getting rewards.

You're connecting the two examples too much. While releasing this information may well have malicious intent, robbing a bank to give away money (as this information was hacked -to leak-) isn't exactly malicious. Leaking information that can be a warning or making an example of, now that can be. Intent depends on intent, and the intent of the example bank robbers was to hand out free cash. (and banks are insured...)

Doesn't this UX guy know what he's worth? Isn't it on his head to decide where he's going to work, at what pay? Of course his belief in this founder's dedication plays into that, he's trying to find a job that'll last. But let the UX guy decide what he needs to take, from whom. You don't know him, what motivates him. If he's even -interested- in work at such a startup, money likely isn't what he's running for.

Frictional unemployment is a good way to handwave away the discovery, or not, of new jobs. You just wiped out that whole -type- of job, replaced it with (much lower employment) error checking.

If you assume that for a portion of the people in the transcribing job, that the transcribing job was the best marginal fit, then some of them don't re-enter the job market. Others have to take a worse job. If they could have been in a better job, they likely would have been. So their employment has gotten worse. May be quality, may be compensation, may be available time. Something's worse for them.

Is this an argument claiming something can't ever happen, not because its impossible, but because its -bloody hard-?

That's a ridiculous argument...and remember, the example was ridiculous, talking about a world where only 10% of people had jobs: People would build -very difficult- things to find employment. (incidentally, we're all of us doing harder(cognitively) things than our ancestors to find employment today.)

Some people may, but especially in this specific example, there's a large societal force that would positivley squash such behavior. We call it 'fashion' (which is actually quite often linked to inbuilt, brain-hardware based ideas about aesthetics that we can't change)

To talk about jobs lost, there were 4 million farm horses in Briton before the industrial revolution, and then over a period of 25 years in the nineteenth century, that population dropped to under a million.

Ford, and every other company, ran a 48 hour work week in the united states until Ford decided his factories were efficient enough that he could hire more people, pay everyone the same for 8 hours less labor, and thus sell more cars. Most every industry followed.

Now we've nearly a tenth of the workforce unemployed, but the story people tend to ignore is the actual hours of employment demanded per capita. The far scarier story than the United states unemployment is its underemployment, where people are willing to work but only get a few hours. Employers want to employ more people...but they can't fill more labor-hours. They can split those hours up, and because of that, a lot of the job loss is hidden.

Does anyone know of any other animals losing their jobs to robots?

Many, many people use tax-deductable donations to do just this. Soo...this is already done. To make it done more, there should be non-profits. Non-profit insurance organizations, non-profit post, mail, private schools. Seriously, just encourage more people to donate, rather than be taxed. Of course, this won't solve the government's problem, because the government is intentionally expansionary.

The argument is much that you can't just socialize the health care, you have to tear it to shreds and then paper-mache it back into a more serviceable shape. This is a process that takes time, and would leave people scrambling all over the place. Trying to do it while reducing damage results in monstrosities like Obamacare, and the current situation.

They've gotten past lobbying Nevada. Nevada's building the regulations for it, which counts as "google has gotten Nevada to allow driver less cars"

The issue isn't so much the distance from the train, so much as once you take it off the train, you split it up into much smaller loads....with different owners and destinations, and those loads probably change hands, and are pretty hard to put -back- onto trains.

Well, Rail is efficient in that it ships huge quantities...fifty, or a hundred standardized containers. Trucks do a bit less than one of those, and so are -amazing- if you only have to ship that much between points C and W (point A being a manufacturer in Asia, b being a port, and C being a major freight station)

Rail is a great solution for a specific portion of that network, but it becomes very, very inefficient if you're only moving one box of goods to a town, and in a nation this size, with as dispersed a population as ours, you simply cannot manage the outlay of hundreds of thousands of railway spikes...and taken to the smaller position, you'd still need trucks unless the railways went to each and every department store.

Well, to take another example, we don't use horses for labor anymore...Some part of the labor force -has- been replaced.

I rather think that it has nothing to do with either. Comp engineers may be creative, but they're not in a creative field. They're in a field of artisanry, where they produce specialized, more or less hand made goods. Some of those people become famous for doing incredibly detailed work, but many just build chairs. Just because you come up with a creative solution does not make what you're doing art.

Creativity is not art.

I can't argue on any point except your money point, given my own experiences. (except for the fact that as netflix and TPB are sources for simmilar goods, then yes, they are competitors)

My peers are generally not computer programmers, no, nor do they have much disposable income. They do live in the the united states, which means realtive certian other populations, they are insanely wealthy. We scrape by in the lower end of cost of living in this nation with large student debts, and housing costs in the range of $400 a month...from that, it isn't hard to split a netflix bill two or three ways. It costs, effectively, spare change to buy a netflix account between three people. Seriously on the margin of 80% of the people I know have a netflix account, with far fewer understanding the mechanics of bootlegging movies. We have netflix before we have a tv subscription.

I'm not sure this article is worthy of hacker news. It doesn't cite any new information about De-Grey, just rehashes the same arguments he's been making (but not testing) for the last decade at least. In such, its really not news to anyone but those who've never heard of De-Grey.

Are there addresses that no country can't claim as in their jurisdiction?

Seems to me that you have to be in jurisdiction somewhere. Not to argue that American jurisdiction is necessarily the best..

I'm going to assume you're not in the 15-25 set, by even claiming there's wide commonality between people 15 and 25 years old. 18-25, perhaps.

The first major difference is that people approaching 25 have a great deal more money than people at 15.

All that aside, I for one notice a huge predilection in my peers (of the 19-22 set)to buy into services such as hulu and netxflix, and to look there first for their media. Why? Because the services are instant, cheap, and of much better than most pirated media.

FYI, netflix charges $8 a month...significantly less than the 20 you site.

No, "Just Lie" is not the correct choice.

The properly examined overprotective option is to use a service that doesn't require such age restrictions.

And I fail to see any situation where teaching a 9 year old that its sometimes ok to lie won't be incredibly confusing to the child: the child cannot differentiate between lieing here, and lieing about homework, or cheating on a test. Their brains can't do that yet. To tell them to lie here, but no where else, is confusing, and in an extension, is cruel.