fishcolorbrick

I guess I get it - but how do you measure when the toxicity level falls low enough?

What is the LD50 of a social network?

I'm surprised that State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) is being eliminated; it reimburses states for the money spent housing unauthorized immigrants pending deportation.

Isn't the administration's plan to deport a bunch of people? This shifts the burden of deportation costs from a federal level (where all states share it equally) to a local level, where states that have more deported people pay directly.

So if you're Texas, Arizona[0], or other states with high percentages of unauthorized immigrants, you're going to lose a federal subsidy of hundreds of millions, and either lay off a lot of corrections workers or pay that cost yourselves through increased tax revenue?

[0]: http://www.pewhispanic.org/interactives/unauthorized-immigra...

Page 2 (PDF pg 12) of this document includes detail on how much money would be saved by these changes: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/msar-f...

For example, ARPA's budget would be cut from $305 million per year to $0 per year, saving every US citizen $0.93.

Per the given document, the total reductions and eliminations would save $48,397,000,000 saving US citizens $147.92 per year.

I'm editorializing, but I think that, given the size of the budgets we're talking about, I am getting a good return on my investment, and would rather have these programs than an extra couple hundred bucks.

Tangential, but I thought HN might find it interesting...

The article quotes the director of the Human Rights Campaign (who you may know from their bumper stickers, a blue square with a yellow equality symbol in it), who is named Ty Cobb.

There are at least two lawyers named Ty Cobb; one represents Donald Trump [0], the other is the director [1] of the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group.

[0]: https://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/24/trumps-denver-lawyer-t...

[1]: http://blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/bhp-news/2014/03/24/alumni-s...

This is what I use at work. :) It can make the code difficult to read and update later though.

...or, they'll be a momentary novelty that Generation Z will view as the 21st century equivalent of sticking your head through a cardboard cutout to pretend you're Dale Earnhardt or Santa Claus or whatever.

https://img.etsystatic.com/il/c435d0/942014524/il_570xN.9420...

I'd support a constitutional amendment to guarantee 'no first use', regardless of who is in office.

If verifiable global nuclear disarmament was possible, I'd support that as well.

As a citizen of the USA, I don't want to share the ethical responsibility for starting a nuclear war.

Here's another one: https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/12/microsoft-calibri-pakist...

The difference between 3.1B and 1300B dollars is significant and it is bizarre that you cite a source and then say "the number doesn't really matter". The number definitely does matter...

The number you initially claimed in spite of your own source contravening it would support your argument... if one was moving 1300B from a 18620B economy to a 317B economy... that is to say, providing support equal to 400% of the recipient's GDP, that would be significant.

The actual numbers given in the source you provided are insignificant and don't support your argument.

>US is planning to spend 1.3 trillion in Israel in FY18

That isn't what your source says... where'd you get that number?

[0]: https://www.foreignassistance.gov/explore/country/Israel

Someone will surely try your suggestion at some point, and I hope we don't get to find out what the Enron of water supply looks like.

"Newly discovered tapes have revealed how the energy corporation Enron shut down at least one power plant on false pretences, deliberately aggravating California's crippling 2001 blackouts with the aim of raising prices."

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2005/feb/05/enron.usnew...

The argument I've heard to counter this is the idea that economic markets are efficient even when many participants are irrational because the irrational participants cancel each other out, amounting to random noise.

A market can find efficiency even when there are a significant number of irrational participants because the rational minority are in agreement, and the irrational minority step on each other's toes.

Similarly, if 44% of a democracy has an irrational preference to always vote for Team Blue, and 44% of a democracy has an irrational preference to always votes for Team Red, then the remaining 12% actually decide which team wins.

@PeopleOfFinland, one of those Twitter accounts that is run by a different person every week, was ran by a Saami indigenous person native to Lapland last week and they had some criticism of this style of article where Lapland is portrayed as wilderness without reference to the Saami, who've lived there for 10k years.

https://twitter.com/PeopleOfFinland/status/95006224332396954...

The problem is that mixing business and law enforcement, so that quotidian commercial transactions become opportunities for criminal investigation, can and historically has lead to unintended consequences.

Quoting from a below comment:

> Replacing "undocumented immigrant" with "jew" or "same-sex couple" or "interracial couple" or "movie torrent pirate"... surely one of those substitutions triggers a reaction in even the most law-and-order out there.

> And most of those categories have been illegal in some states in the US's history.

> Exactly same what facebook does also.

My google-fu is weak - I can't find any source for Facebook providing information to ICE. Would you please help me out with some more information on this?

"Apple's mound of cash and cash equivalents continued to scrape the cloudline..."

Cloudline is being modest... a stack of a trillion dollars in singles will take you 25% of the way to the Earth's moon.

https://www.wired.com/2011/09/stacking-one-trillion-dollars/

> These are some of the highest values for aluminium in human brain tissue yet recorded and one has to question why, for example, the aluminium content of the occipital lobe of a 15 year old boy would be 8.74 (11.59) μg/g dry wt.?

The phrase, "one has to question" in the abstract jumps out at me as unusual in science writing.

Same - I supported Obama for years, and yet my favorite bar trivia anecdote is "Name all the Nobel Peace Prize winners who have killed other Nobel Peace Prize winners" [0].

[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-apology-dwb-1.3261009

Non-paywall link: http://archive.is/sw1K9

In Portland, we just removed 2.4 million pounds of grease from our sewer system.

http://www.kptv.com/story/36854903/crews-removed-nearly-24-m...

Non-paywall link: http://archive.is/jhLZg

Non-paywall link: http://archive.is/rM0du

I don't. I use a mix of Google services and non-Google services, and I've never had a hard time finding a good competitor for a Google tool.

Posting this in antique article in context of the new Facebook 'intimate images' tool because it talks about an academic study of the false positive rate in a similar tool:

" In the latest announcement, a large scale test of the PhotoDNA tool found that less than one false positive occurred in every billion images scanned, said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth and co-developer of PhotoDNA. In addition, the software recognizes about 98 percent of images derived from those in its database.

"We tested it over billions and billions of images," he said. "We tried very hard to make it very efficient ... and to minimize the false alarm rate.""

I don't think it is an instance of "No True Scotsman" to say that there are situations that self-driving cars may never be as good as humans at, but that those situations only occur because of the unpredictability of human drivers.

Self-driving cars don't have to be better than humans at everything in order to be objectively better drivers than humans. In 2010, 32,999 people died in car crashes in the US [0]. If self-driving cars are on-balance 1% better than human beings at driving, then 329 lives are saved.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

Alternatively - these are just growing pains until the human driving the truck is replaced by an algorithm.

To be clear, the crash was caused by a truck driven by a human backing up into the driverless shuttle.

I set up an OLAP cube for the biggest charity for the homeless in Portland, OR and in my experience no-one locally has good data on the homeless. It is a demographic which is difficult to survey.

I'll second that anecdote... among my peer group in Portland, OR, Uber is deprecated for ethical reasons.

I can't find information on likely Republican candidates for the TX-21 seat, but the Austin Chronicle has an article on Democratic candidates [0], one of whom is a 'tech entrepreneur':

Joseph Kopser (www.kopserforcongress.com), founder and president of Grayline (tech consultants), earlier established the RideScout transportation app, and continues to work as a tech entrepreneur. He emphasized this experience as well as his 20 years as an Army Ranger. He said his campaign will "avoid ideological extremes": "It's in the middle that we can find the progress to move our country forward."

[0]: https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2017-06-09/campaign-201...