altoz

I think statistically, if you punt from the 9 yard line, the other team is going to get excellent field position (around the 50 yard line). The difference between failing on 4th and 1 from your own 9 and the other team getting the ball around the 50 yard line is 41 yards of field position.

That may sound like a lot, but I'd imagine the actual point difference is on the order of 2 points.

The more interesting thing to consider would be whether taking a safety there is ever a positive.

> They should be easy to create (bitcoins are) BUT ALSO easy to destroy if demand declines;

You can provably destroy bitcoins by sending them to an address with no private key (this is provable). Believe it or not, this is actually useful for stuff like http://www.proofofexistence.com/

Hence the premise of this article, even if you take the underlying economic theory at face-value, is flawed.

could have used http://www.proofofexistence.com/

I can't help but think a lot of these "experts" can ONLY see from their narrow perspective. Bitcoin the protocol is just scratching the surface.

tl;dr author compares bitcoin to tulips, argues it's all mass emotion or something.

> a lot of energy is going to waste now.

Is it? How much does Bank of America spend in energy to keep up its servers? Backups? disaster-recovery setups? That's a significant energy cost, too.

tl;dr silicon valley isn't the liberal utopia and therefore not a meritocracy.

Someone wanted to be on the bitcoin 100 richest list.

You learn more about yourself going alone.

This seems a great way to steal other people's credit cards. You can literally duplicate someone's card on your "coin".

Now there's a super easy way for someone working in a restaurant to get your credit card information and sell it.

There's another part of the article where this vendor is required to open their network to competitors.

> LA expects the fiber buildout to cost $3 billion to $5 billion, but the cost would be borne by the vendor.

> The new fiber network would offer free Internet access of 2Mbps to 5Mbps (possibly subsidized by advertising) and paid tiers of up to a gigabit.

Am I missing something? If the vendor is paying for the network and they're offering free internet, is the only source of revenue advertising and tiers above 2-5 Mbps? Seems like a money-losing proposition to me.

Article strikes me as too much rationalization and not enough reflection. To one person, a $2500 bag may signal that you're middle class. To another, it may signal you're really bad with financial decisions. I don't think that argument that it's a survival mechanism really holds as it's really speculative and not supported by any data.

Hopefully, they get these things all over the place. The feature that interests me a lot more is being able to WITHDRAW money from the ATM. This can replace your regular ATM card.

> Correct me if I'm mistaken

Some corrections about the US:

- Abortion is legal as is birth control.

- A very few crazy people blame gay people for earthquakes but I'm sure such people exist everywhere.

- Very few people carry assault rifles around in public.

- Very few people believe the world is 6000 years old. Again, I'm sure such people exist everywhere.

Please, stop caricaturing.

Bitcoins are reaching lottery-level payoffs. In 5 years, will be see a lot more of these stories?

$30/month for cell phone? If you go pre-paid with a provider like ptel, you can easily spend less than that if you're not using too much data or using too many minutes.

This is an example of policy devoid of cultural context. East Asian societies, and Korean societies specifically have a history of examination as the main way to move up in class. During many dynasties of the past, if you could do well enough on various exams, you could potentially go from being low-born to serving in the court of a king. It is in this context that the current system developed. Thus, a simple policy change will very likely not work. It's a cultural shift that needs to take place.

Interesting you would say this. The other major paradigm to dating is, of course, arranged marriage. The main advantage that arranged marriage brings is that third parties are involved in price discovery, hence setting much more realistic expectations.

One of the most interesting things I found when discussing this topic with people of my parents and grandparents generation who dealt with this is that the first question for the parents or representatives of the female were always "How much money does he make?" and for the male were always "How pretty is she?". To this day, matchmaking services essentially ask the same questions.

Dating is supposed to be about everything else other than these two factors, but is it really?

"criticism is not tolerated"

These are the people doing research and peer-reviewing? No wonder the quality of research is so bad. Criticism should be encouraged, not suppressed.

Marissa Mayer's going to be on this list shortly.

I's like to point out that this article is from March.

more important than "where do we put our carbon". that's an engineering problem, at best.

> The problem I have with best-seller pseudoscience is that it gets used by people to justify assinine decisions in the workplace and even worse, in public policy.

He, like many writers, has a very clear agenda and influencing things like workplace hiring practices or public policy is EXACTLY what he's aiming to do. No doubt, he's sincere in thinking what he's ultimately doing is good, but it's very often insincere in picking or even manipulating data to fits his beliefs rather than letting the evidence speak for itself.

I have respect for him as a writer, I have very little respect for him as a truth teller.

There's Goldman Sachs, the Sugar Cane Lobby, non-profits that raise money against childhood obesity. It'll really be voting with wallets.

> The purpose of the shutdown is not just to save money

You write like there's some grand unified purpose to this whole thing. There isn't. This is the natural consequence of not setting a budget, which many different sides had different purposes to not set.

Ostensibly, the consequences of a government shutdown are, supposedly, lower FUNDING to pay for some government service. Given this, it would seem that HIGHER spending would seem ridiculous. Financial motivations in cases like this are supposed to override anything else. The motivations are clearly NOT financial.

So the belly-aching about how A and B are suffering because of a lack of funding is not necessarily true. It could also be to make this situation seem worse than it is. In public discourse, the squeaky wheel gets the funding.

yep. another person that's completely bought into the media narrative of they're not playing nice, therefore it must be bad. I happen to think the popular narrative that this will end in financial disaster to be wrong. I think previous government shutdowns clearly show this narrative to be untrue. your certainty that I'm ignorant or that this is a certain disaster shows precisely how you don't get my point.

why is this a bad thing? less spending on something pretty much everyone agrees is bloated is bad? it's like saying morbidly obese person has slightly less access to food. every person in the media seems to assume this is a bad thing. i say this is a good thing. if we can't agree on how money should be spent, it's better that it not get spent at all.

I hate when people say stuff like X should get paid more or Y should get paid less. You can't say that without explaining your moral system. You can't go from is to ought.

this is the equivalent of waiting for the second and third albums of a one-hit wonder. and even that one hit is strikingly overrated and immature.