duckingtest

I think you're ignoring the possibility of technical progress. Who says we will even need food in 100 years? Eating dying plants and dead animal bodies is, on the whole, a very, very inefficient way of getting energy from the sun.

I think you should try medical tourism. The price of travel and accomodation is insignificant compared to the savings.

Also, don't put it off. You can literally die from ignoring cavities.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/06/09/318212444/a-reaso...

They don't. Germany's GDP per hour worked as % of USA = 90.9%.

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL

What wrong with caning? It's a much more effective punishment than a jail term. Pain is a strong negative reinforcement, while prison for career criminals feels more like home than freedom. It's drastically cheaper than a prison term. It prevents the contact with prison subculture/gangs. Additionally, it provides some restitution to victims, in the case of violent crimes.

I see no downsides.

Probably the only developers that your company would hire are those that managed to market themselves as equal to Western ones, which are definitely far from average freelancers.

Also, due to enormous cost of living and tax differences (~0 income tax in Ukraine) the same gross pay resulted in 2-3x times higher disposable income, so effectively the Americans were relatively underpaid, which is kind of funny.

Because customers aren't usually capable of assessing the technical capabilities. All they see is self-confidence, personal charm (English and accent is very important in this category) and past experience. So what happens is that a guy with these qualities, along with enough technical knowledge to asses the skills, resells the work of cheap foreign developers for enormous profit, probably as a consulting company. People with powerful personalities can get out of that, but those introverted or with some form of Asperger's won't. I know of several instances like that personally. They just accept that they're worth $20k/year as a fact, even though if they were more assertive and extraverted that could eventually turn into $200k.

If they try to start out on their own, they start with low confidence, which means low prices. Which leads to people thinking they aren't capable of anything complicated, so they get only shitty jobs. Which reinforces their low confidence in their skills and they don't try much.

Steve Jobs of the world will always earn more than Wozniaks.

So Western centric. Now imagine you're a brilliant 2x year old guy in Ukraine, Belarus or Vietnam. That $30/hour would put you in the upper 1% of income in your country.

Cybernetics were wrong because they began as efficiency optimization in the economy. It was wrong because it necessarily assumed shadow prices, which is incompatible with labor theory of value. The upper echelons were really that dumb.

There's a book about the whole optimization debacle, "The Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford.

Its probably fast enough for its purpose. If it isn't, making it faster is way easier than changing existing abstraction layers. In the extreme, it can ever be an asic.

My SSD has a three core cpu dedicated to it. Removing the layer of indirection isn't going to make it faster. At best it's going to make the ssd cheaper by a minuscule amount due to a simpler controller.

>Due to excessive spam certain IP ranges, referrers and languages had to be banned from accessing the site. The most likely reason for you seeing this page is that your language is set to 'ru', sorry if that is the case for you.

>I am not sure I understand. The property tax in the US is the tax on land + additions, both subjects to appraised value, so yes, the rates listed do include both.

Land tax is a tax on a value of unimproved land only [0]

>How would this be sustainable for farmers or ranchers? If they have to radically increase their prices to account for new 30% land value tax, does the society benefit or lose?

Why would it change anything? The land prices would just fall so that the net result would be neutral for average farmer.

>He provided liquidity to the market when somebody was willing to sell that piece of land

Land tax increases liquidity drastically by making it much more expensive to hoard it.

>and then you're back to square one - low tax revenues collected from land owners.

It's not back to square one - it's a situation in which people with more productive use of land can get it much more cheaply. Think of a situation in which a prime residential city land costs one average annual wage.

>People do invest in gold and silver.

People do many weird things. https://images.angelpub.com/2014/17/24245/returns-on-stocks-...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

>the states with highest property taxes (New Jersey, New Hampshire) don't seem to be the economic powerhouses compared to the states with ultra-low property rates as the theory would imply

These are property taxes, not land taxes, unless the article is lumping them. A property tax doesn't provide incentives for more efficient use of land, on the contrary actually.

Even if they were land taxes, they would be way too small for a meaningful difference. Also the biggest effect would come from replacing income tax with land tax, as the most productive people would gain the most, and presumably invest the gain in whatever productive thing they're doing.

>For one, he took the opportunity risk of locking his liquid capital into a piece of land

>For two, he took on the appreciation risk

There's nothing valuable in risk. Your argument works even better for buying a piece of a rock for a million dollars and expecting profits, as the opportunity risk and appreciation risk are way higher than buying a piece of land.

I think he should start a US nonprofit, or even better start cooperating with an international one, as that would allow people to deduct donations from their income. It's a lot easier to donate if you know that otherwise 30%-50% of that would go to the ever hungry state...

edit: It turns out every EU citizen can deduct a donation to GnuPG from their incomes!

https://www.wauland.de/en/donation.html#61

Real estate is so expensive around the world now because of unfair tax policies. True wealth creation is taxed mercilessly via a multitude of income taxes, while gains from real estate are often not taxed at all, even though they're completely unproductive. A person holding a land in the city for 25 years didn't make anything new, their profit is a direct zero-sum transfer from someone else. How is that fair?

The net result is an enormous redistribution from productive young people to (mainly) older owners and inefficient land use, a growth-killing policy.

The solution is simple. Abolish all personal income taxes (or at least reduce their levels) and replace them with land value taxes (not property), something like 30% of value annually. Unproductive use of land would disappear. Retiring people with homes close to jobs would move out fast somewhere else, as short commute times have no value to them. Uneconomical building limits would disappear (more efficient use of land - multilevel housing - would have much smaller land tax per living surface area) which would reduce transport costs and time wasted. It's easy to imagine many more positive effects.

Sadly that's never going to happen.

edit: After some thought, never is too strong. If aging gets cured, something like that will be a certainty, because the alternative is the world in which - more numerous - generations after the invention don't own almost anything, which won't work for long.

>Local food types (rice, noodles, veg, SE Asian fruits) are ridiculously cheap in Cambodia

What's the price for 1kg of rice there?

It's not that they're exploited. Cambodia's economy is just really, really inefficient. Food prices in Cambodia are really high (ep 4), higher even than in Berlin [0] by 21%, not to mention Eastern Europe (2+ times Warsaw's prices, 4x if you shop around). The sad thing is, the wages in sweatshops won't go up much. Sooner or later automation will advance to the point where even $3/day for sewing garments will be too high and they will all be fired.

[0] http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

Modern GPUs have 32-64 independent cores, each can run different code path. Then each core runs the same code path on several different inputs in parallel. It's probably not possible with current tools, but architecture-wise completely dividing the cores between VMs should be doable.

>He had to pay, on average, $7 and some change to buy the mugs back from people. By contrast, he had to sell the mug for about $3 and change to get them to buy when they did not already own it. Kahneman’s conclusion was that people put a higher price on loss than they do gain.

That's a weird conclusion. Let's say I value the mug at $5. Obviously I'm not going to sell it for $5, because the transaction itself is an effort, so I would lose! The opposite for buying, obviously I'm not going to buy a mug for $5 if I think it's worth exactly $5.

The price a rational person is willing to accept for a thing he owns must always be higher than what he values it at.

In a general case, probability of gain is obviously worth less than the same probability of loss, because you need bigger relative return to make up for the loss.

>I'm counting the days until someone notices Phenylethylamine

You can't ban chocolate in the current world. Dark chocolate can contain up to 0.7% of PEA.

It sells in India for about one eighth of online's price. The price of ten 200mg Modalert pills is about $2.5. Counterfeiting simply doesn't pay, as it would kill any return business for minuscule one-time gain.

I would describe modafinil as an internal task-switcher disabler. For this reason, I don't use it often. For example, if I accidentally start reading reddit, on modafinil this will probably end in writing long, thoughtful comments for the whole day. The thought of stopping simply doesn't occur. My stomach will rumble, but I won't feel hunger. Conversely, changing tasks in response to external input becomes much easier.

This uncontrollable concentration applies to all levels on all tasks, which is why modafinil kills creativity, at least for me. If I have lot of grunt job that doesn't require creativity, sure, modafinil will make me plow through it. However, in today's world valuable grunt work is rare, so it's not that useful. It kills task-related mind wandering, it kills daydreaming, it kills original thought. Sort of a zombie state really.

Constant use would probably make me a top burger-flipper at McDonald's or similar, but that's it.

Another very big cons is its long half-life, which eventually results in sleep deprivation. Sleep at normal hours becomes next to impossible.

Good for emergency situations when I have to be able to function despite severe sleep deprivation (like not sleeping for one or two nights).

>An often reasonable way to ensure that you can mechanically apply a problem solving technique (which is related to, but absolutely not the same thing as understanding the maths) is to make a program that does it.

What "problem solving technique"? There's no algorithm you can mindlessly remember and use it to create algorithms. Making a program that solves the problem is the highest possible understanding.

>I don't even know what it would mean to write a program that "does" Riemann's geometry

That's because it's an abstraction, not a problem to be solved. In the same way you can't write a program that 'does' functional programming, you can only program in a functional way.

Well, I guess writing an AI which can solve problems in Haskell would be an exception. I bet you couldn't remember its code and execute it in your head, though.

If I were to design a school program from the ground up, I would teach programming just after reading & writing. The best way to learn math is to try to make a program that solves specific problems.

>Lamarckism is dead

Lamarckism is more alive than ever before, it's just called epigenetics now. Portia spiders can even transfer hunting behaviors to their progeny (although it's unclear how that happens).

>but in another country you can walk or take public transport to the restaurant or tailor without the fear of being the victim of a crime

That's unrelated to the prices. 3 relatively poor countries are in fact much safer than the US [0], and all safer ones are poorer than US.

>PPP is good to measure if people have 'enough' to live on in a particular location but for comparison between countries it's pretty meaningless.

The overwhelming majority of living costs are local (especially food production), so PPP is a very good measurement. Prices of electronics and oil aren't that important for day-to-day living.

You seem to ignore the fact that, even in PPP, the average Chinese is really poor. It's just that their standard of living is $12k poor, not $7k poor.

[0] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/safety/

CC billing address is the simplest one to falsify, just use an anonymous prepaid card (they accept all addresses).

Still, not many people will go out of their way to exploit this loophole.

Customer location vat seems to be really easy to abuse. Luxembourg VPN + Post Forwarding = 15% rate on everything that can be ordered online. Compared to maximum vat in EU (Hungary, 27%) that's an enormous difference.

Author's argument against using C++ isn't true. New/delete can be easily redefined to use malloc/free [0]. You can compile (a bit limited) C++ code without any special C++ dependencies.

[0] http://ptspts.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-write-c-program-wi...

Perhaps a better version of Colobot [0]? Ie. better graphics, more rewarding gameplay, some multiplayer. If someone who otherwise wouldn't even try, will find programming fun due to that, well, that's it, s/he will figure out the rest.

Maybe an mmorpg where some sort of botting is openly encouraged and made accessible?

I don't like hand-holding ideas: if someone is motivated it's not necessary, if not motivated, useless. There are tons of tutorials, forums and books already.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colobot