ch00

I always see at least one ad hominem remark made in any thread that might relate to Krugman. I'm actually curious, as someone who is not embedded in finance or economics, what are people's detractions against this guy (who won a Nobel prize)?

What baffles me is that these accusations and the subsequent discussions of "[they]" all treat homelessness as a homogenous problem. If we, as self-proclaimed as hackers and problem-solvers or whatever, want to discuss problems and solutions we have to understand what we're talking about first.

Sure some subset of the homeless population spits, urinates, taunts, sells drugs and gets rowdy, but so do a lot of rowdy bar hoppers on Polk St every Saturday night.

Homelessness is a complex subject with many causes and effects -- I don't claim to understand it; in fact, I'd like to learn more, but episodes like this don't seem to engender that kind of discussion, unfortunately.

2nd Amendment is probably the check and balance with the least potential efficacy these days -- pro-gun supporters who tout right to bear arms to protect against government tyranny are living a fantasy. Realistically there is 0 chance an armed citizenry rising against the establishment would pose any threat to them -- the cards (and methods of control) are stacked wildly in their favor.

Cruises are priced such because cruise ship workers are paid incredibly low wages:

"The Cruise Lines International Association says its "crew members are provided wages that are competitive with international pay scales." But a cleaner aboard a Royal Caribbean ship, for example, will work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for as little as $156.25 a week with no tips. U.S. labor laws are not applicable to provide protection to crew members at sea, nor is there any real oversight of the cruise lines' operations."

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/13/opinion/walker-cruise-ships

I have also been following this course and am extremely disappointed in its quality -- not just in poor production, but also in the coverage of course material. I would not recommend this as a primer on investing.

I would be interested to know their reasons behind this as well.

Anecdotally, it was a bad design choice for me. I took a Udacity class in the first round after their launch and followed along with the due dates pretty well. The next round when due dates were dropped, I basically dropped as well. I found myself saying "I'll catch up on this week's unit next week" until after a few weeks I was too out of sync with the course to feel compelled to keep going.

On the flip side, I felt the one week/unit deadline was tough to work with at times given work and life, etc and wished it was two weeks/unit, or perhaps Udacity to even give you an option to choose a schedule: allow a) one week/unit, b) two weeks/unit, or c) whatever, etc. This way the course still has some structure and fixed deadlines, but it's a little more tailored to your lifestyle.

The geographic distortion is neat.

I don't like the bubble charts though -- when loading a new set of data the bubbles are completely rearranged making a quick glance comparison between two countries difficult.

Seems like the Ars headline is inaccurate. Inman posts in his blog that the money is still with IndieGoGo pending a restraining order to have it transferred.

"Once the money is moved, I still plan on withdrawing $211k in cash and taking a photo to send to Charles Carreon and FunnyJunk, along with the drawing of Funnyjunk's mother."

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/fundraiser_update

The data is from FF4 beta. So I think you're right, these are not your average users.

Good idea, but I think some sort of achievement test at the high school level would be even more effective at revealing the quality of preparation students have received for college.

Fortunately we already have tests like this and not surprisingly, they show that students are terribly underprepared for an undergraduate education in nearly every subject.

Clearly an undergraduate education received today is not commensurate with the costs to the student, especially when the student hasn't be rigorously prepared for a collegiate education in high school. But the problem is so much more than the price of tuition.

I'm interested in tossing my hat into the ring as well. I couldn't find a way to contact you in your profile or on github so here's me saying "me too!"

Comparing the returns of a basket of all mutual funds to the returns of one large-cap stock index over a highly volatile period isn't very meaningful. The mutual funds weren't even 100% equities, so you're partially comparing the returns of entirely different asset classes.

As the article mentions, it's impossible to invest in the total mutual fund market. There is no index fund of mutual funds, nor is there any need when you can diversify across the entire market through existing index funds.

See also The Arithmetic of Active Management: http://www.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

"It also isn't the best at preserving your data on Android, there have been a number of nights where I lost data due to bluetooth bugs, application crashes, accidentally running the device battery out, and so on."

Likewise, I gave up after a couple of weeks for the reasons mentioned in the article, especially re: saving my data on my Android/EVO. Perhaps some of the software updates have improved this, but mentally I'd already given up. It's an awesome idea. But once hardware is involved, the typical startup challenges seem to rise exponentially and WakeMate got more than their fair share.

29th has my vote, however for those of us still stuck at a 9-5, will the meetup still be going strong at 5:30 or 6?

Regardless of what the Reddit admins or Conde Nast are doing right or wrong to monetize their site, I think it's simply a matter of assessing the value of the information Reddit has exposed me to -- not just via the links but also the user comments. That aggregate value I've derived from their service over the past four years is still far more than what I just donated. (arguably it was more valuable a few years ago when there were fewer animated gifs linked on the homepage)

But that begs the question: if I'm paying reddit, why am I not giving back to the content authors that reddit linked to?

I'm getting an error message while attempting to register, too.

I think that's a compelling irony of the data if it can be taken as accurate. Perhaps material goals are the most efficient means of (material) progress, but is there psychological cost associated with that achievement? Reminds me of "Death of a Salesman" and the "illusion of the American dream" school of thought.