ewood

Boostnote (https://boostnote.io) with notes stored in the relevant repos.

Its not perfect (Boostnote really only supports local files) but it does mean our shared body of knowledge is versioned to what is in our repos. If someone makes large changes they can work on documentation while they are developing the change knowing that their docs are only released when their change is merged.

If Boostnote was aware of this workflow or allowed editing directly to remote repos it would be pretty much perfect.

True. I think that if Buffett wanted to address this problem his best option would be to fund an entity that could lobby on this issue and match dollar-for-dollar pharmaceutical company donations for house reps and senators that were willing to push to reduce the cost of healthcare.

Tackling healthcare is one 'big issue' that could have a huge effect on the US economy and living standards. Seems a worthy 'legacy' project for Buffett to finance.

Good points but important to point out that driving down costs may not be a net negative. From Buffett's comments in the video he seems to be indicating that business are more likely to make investment and hiring decisions on the basis of high and ever-increasing health coverage costs than a change in corporate tax.

Capping or reducing healthcare cost as a % of GDP may help many other sectors to expand. On this basis politicians should first try to get the support of corporations to reduce their insurance costs, and try to change the argument - sustainable healthcare for all. This kind of corporate backing would counter the inevitable lobbying of pharma/medical corporations who will put their resources into countering any legislation that reduces their profit margins.

Why the U.S. pays more for health care than the rest of the world

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXBPKE28UF0

Anyone here have deep insight on this? I thought a large part of the problem is the way that the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) is operating the market? Their mandate seems to be to prioritise price over reliability causing artificial shortages when there are not enough bids to form a market for excess load.

It appears that there is sufficient capacity in SA but providers are holding out for higher prices or not wanting to meet demand because they are providing higher priced capacity from their operations in other states.

In many cases it is not Bloomberg's monopoly but the data provider's. The licensing and royalty agreements between Bloomberg and the data provider have very onerous terms including restricting how many screens the data can be displayed on, what mediums the data can be transferred to, and where and for what purpose the data can be used. The terminal restrictions and API limitations that Bloomberg imposes are usually driven by these concerns.

Bloomberg offers less restrictive APIs but they are even more costly than a terminal license and often require the end user to sign agreements with the data providers directly and pay additional royalties.

A investigative authority like the NTSB is a really interesting idea. If it had the authority to level fines against companies that have been negligent or acted without due care it might have a real effect on behavior.

The only current recourse for those affected by these sorts of incidents is class action suits or public outrage/reputation damage. Both of these seem limited and put the onus on those who are impacted to fight for recompense.

Interesting summary of the process - http://thednetworks.com/2012/03/21/how-are-undersea-cables-l...

Before you get angry, you probably need to read the other 404 pages of the essay.

Many areas in London breach EU NOx limits hundreds of times each year - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/06/london-b...

The US has higher absolute and effective corporate tax rates than EU countries and almost every country in the OECD.

Tax treatment of equity compensation varies among European nations though.

Well, they're not "Wallstreet's dollars", it is international capital and it is happy to invest anywhere so long as it believes it will get a return. Possibly even happier to invest in an independent California if the government is likely to be beholden to its needs.

Can you expand on having to walk an hour to the 'voting dropoff location'? Firstly, do you mean where you actually vote and secondly is this an urban location?

I'm interested as having lived in two countries with different electoral systems (UK and Australia) and in urban and rural locations I never had to walk more than a few hundred yards to a polling booth (urban) or I could park pretty close (rural).

I also noticed that news coverage of the election was showing very long lines, is this a typical experience for voters in US?

I live close to a UK Premier League football stadium. Every match day requires a police riot squad being deployed for crowd control. Given that these teams are privately owned I do wonder about who should ultimately pay the bill for what are public events held for profit.

London Met police costs - http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_201...

I find the '5th largest economy' argument vacuous. When the UK joined the EU in 1973 it was the world's 5th largest economy and represented a much larger portion of European GDP. In spite of that they were forced to accept the terms of the EEC and the terms of the French President Pompidou. Why would being the '5th largest economy' have a bearing this time?

I honestly clicked on this expecting to see a device that gave TED speakers a shock if they stopped talking for a few seconds.

Cool product. Sadly I don't think it would make a huge difference in London, as even the examples shown in their video suggest that the driver saw the cyclist but crossed their path anyway. I find London drivers (and pedestrians) see cyclists ok but are very poor at judging a cyclist's speed and stopping distance. Also a big part of getting around in London is about aggressively claiming space and navigating obstacles, drivers are far more concerned about collisions with other cars and large vehicles and are quite ok with pulling into the path of smaller vehicles and assuming they will stop.

I think this is about the third time this story has got to the front page and I find it interesting that most comments seem to focus on the personal responsibility angle rather than the duty of care. The question is whether AirBnB and the homeowner can be seen to be providing a service much like a hotel. You have a reasonable expectation that hotels have procedures and systems in place to ensure the accommodation they provide is safe.

There was a recent inquest in the UK (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/corfu-carbon-...) where the liability of a package holiday company in the deaths of children caused by a faulty boiler was examined, and where the hotel may have taken shortcuts in repairing the boiler. If this was an AirBnB property would we put the blame for the faulty boiler on the customer or the service provider?

I hope "embuggerance" is accepted as an new word this year, in honour of one of the greatest English writers.

There are secondary markets for most bonds so yes, you can short them. However most traders would do this through derivatives such as bond futures or ETFs.

Certainly it seems impossible to construct a device that could capture the state of a system of which it was a part, to me that's the paradox of the watching TV/listening to the radio prediction - it transfers information from the model into the system it models.

However perhaps a device which could capture the state of a defined system, model it and monitor its boundary as a means of prediction would be possible? The question is could it be possible to capture the state of a system at a single instant and without altering the system?

I think the most important question this raises is will Smart Pipe executives protect our sensitive 'topographical' data and only use it for 'legitimate business purposes'?

s/corrupted/alternate/

I favour (!) British spelling too but 'organization' is more correct in the etymological sense as it derives from the latin 'organizo'. The British form is in a way a corruption itself because it favours 'ise' as it is easier than learning the etymology. 'Oxford Spelling' is an etymologically correct variant of British spelling.

I also thought the title was pretty much click bait. The FT, WSJ and others have more nuanced articles on the event. Most of the evidence seems to point to falling liquidity setting up the conditions and the jitters around the end of QE3 being the trigger. As for why there is falling liquidity it seems to be multiple reasons including dealer banks rising aversion to risk, the fact that market makers on private platforms aren't obligated to take volume, and investors may be allocating away from fixed-income hedge funds. None of those reasons point to some sort of "Flash Boys" HFT conspiracy, just the normal ebb and flow of global markets.

The main page is mostly marketing no-speak apart from mentioning Google Apps implementations. This article (http://www.techrepublic.com/article/pwc-partners-with-google...) has more info. tl;dr - PwC are implementing Apps for 45k of their 195k workforce. Partnership to give Google Apps legitimacy for large enterprises.

Good work, this looks like a great resource. I've always found your hansard alerts incredibly useful. Another interesting resource for Australian politics is the ABC's (relatively) new FactCheck service (http://www.abc.net.au/news/factcheck).

Bundaberg sarsaparilla is the same formulation as the root beer, not the ginger beer (http://www.bundaberg.com/info/product_range/sarsaparilla)

I think the 19th century story of The Strand Magazine almost being bankrupted by the 'death' of Sherlock Holmes and the subsequent outrage of their readers is a close approximation (http://sherlockholmes.stanford.edu/print_issue12.html). When people believe they have buy-in to an idea (even a virtual idea) they become very protective of that, which should be a good thing for a game developer but obviously it is a two edged sword.

The hearing was dealing with the wider topic of whistle blowing both in relation to governments and multi-national corporations. Snowden was offering testimony on his specific circumstances and on what protections should be offered to whistle blowers. The committee memo is here http://whistlenetwork.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/as-jur-201...

Interesting that Pieter Omtzigt, the Dutch committee member, seemed to suggest in his comments at the end that technical problems with the video link to Snowden might be related to interference by an outside party. He also commented that the committee had tried to facilitate Snowden's attendance in person but seemed to imply that the UK and Germany had blocked the attempt.

There was also a member of a whistle blower's support organisation (I forget the name) who had some interesting comments at the end about the challenge of protecting whistleblowers at multinationals who may not have protection in their own country but who may be releasing information of importance to another country's citizens eg: say a German company poisoning a river in South America but the German employee does not have whistleblower protection in their own country.

This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4tGaoSz14g) at 3:20 has a good summary of how the concept works in cricket. With a ball that is equally worn on both sides it is the seam (like the latex band) breaking up the air flow that causes the ball to curve the wrong way ('reverse swing' in cricket).

edit: and the position of the seam is obviously important in directing the force, which is why you will see this more often in football free kicks when the player can position the ball before taking the shot.