frig

This cute legal theory hasn't been tested at web scale to my knowledge (closing down shop due to threat of lawsuit != the theory is tested, just that the depth of someone's wallet has been tested and found wanting).

What makes it curious in the web context is the following: say we can decompose the transmitted web page into the "content" and the "ads".

It is occasionally the case that the full ad content is directly embedded in the transmitted work but that is not the norm; far-and-away the most typical setup is:

- the content is transmitted as part of the page

- the ads are transmitted as scripts embedded in the page; the ads are thus not directly transmitted but if the receiving user's browser operates in a particular fashion than those scripts will execute and insert the actual ad-content into the page in a way the user can see it

If an ad-blocker works by stripping out javascript there is a smidgen of a derivative-work argument here.

If, instead, the ad-blocker works by altering the operation of the javascript interpreter (eg: leaving it unable to connect to the ad server) then nothing in the combined content+ads has been changed by the ad blocker.

If the ad-creating javascript were somehow involved in protecting the content (eg: the web page is transmitted "encrypted"; the page's javascript is waiting for a key to be transmitted in the ad content before decrypting the page content) then you might be able to work up a DMCA anti-circumvention claim, but your user experience would be so terrible it probably wouldn't make economic sense to do this.

All that said: an "ad-blocker" program is safe so long as it has substantial non-infringing uses.

Given the vast range of computers in use (in terms of cpu/ram/intended usage/etc) and given the vast range of hazards out on the internet (phishers/virii/etc.) a program that facilitates one or both of:

- "hostfile management" (blocking or restricting address to particular servers or ip ranges, etc.)

- "javascript management", adding additional checks or safety controls to how a browser interprets javascript

...is clearly going to have substantial non-infringing uses and should have a clean legal bill of health provided it is marketed as a generic security / performance solution and not an "ad-blocker".

Thus in the unlikely event that your legal theory vis-a-vis ad blocking is found to have teeth all that will be needed to continue ad blocking as before will be to rebrand the software as a more generic hostfile+javascript management with a way of sharing and importing configuration files from other users (allowing the users, then, to block ads themselves).

So as cute as it is this isn't a theory that will do much more than prevent any serious commercial ad-blocking venture from getting serious traction.

Eh, I don't think the reason you don't see 18 y/o people doing significant work in materials science isn't directly the lack of alternate funding; it's that there's no alternate funding for 18 y/o to do materials science b/c without proper background training they're unlikely to make any material progress in the field.

This is the same reason there's no "alternate funding" for bright but undistinguished 45-y/o people with no prior background in materials science to go and do materials science (short of education loans for late-life career changers); it's a field that requires lots of education (in the sense of learning) and specialized skills and someone without those skills isn't likely to accomplish anything on the investment.

Generally yes: advances come when you pair motivation to investigate topics of interest with freedom from more-mundane considerations and access to the necessary resources to make advances (idleness, if you will); as the frontiers of most applied sciences have gotten out of the reach of what wealthy dilettantes can easily afford you don't see them making many advances (but you do see plenty of advances in industry and academia, still, both of which allow their researchers enough of those things to make advances and both of which -- unlike most wealthy individuals -- can afford the tools many times over again).

Please note that I was careful to say that the prospective 18 y/o outsider materials scientist (or what have you) needed the training usually acquired in a university context; I deliberately did not say that they needed a university education.

It seems that for most bright-and-motivated types they could easily accelerate that training substantially if they had more freedom to choose courses a-la-carte; the loans-for-college approach currently doesn't allow for that kind of discretion, but a more financially-secure student would be better-placed to negotiate that.

All that being said: there's almost no way that someone without the equivalent of that kind of training in an applied science will make material contributions to that field; at present economic constraints make it very hard to obtain even the equivalent of that training short of actually going to school and getting a degree (at which entails putting up with all the bs and time-wasting stuff that that entails).

You're right, I didn't want to broach enforceability issues but you're right.

If true it'd only further contribute to the adverse selection effect: the ability to easily shuck the obligation will do more to draw out people you don't want to invest in than to ring in superstars who otherwise might say no.

This is a valid point, and a helpful one also.

Keep in mind that I'm already ruling out people with substantial established track records of prior accomplishment, leaving you with:

- people mid 30s or older without any kind of track record to speak of (UNLIKELY TO BE A GOOD INVESTMENT!)

- kids in the 18-25 y/o bracket, eg old enough to sign a contract but not-yet with a track record

So if we have someone 18-25 with a tangible track record (eg: successful software / website / invention / artistic performance record / etc.) they're out of the picture; we're left with 18-25 y/o's with promise but nothing else.

In most fields it's not impossible to pull off a huge success without the training acquired in at least an undergraduate program but it's very unlikely in most scientific fields (and if you were the type who could do it you'd probably also already have enough of a tangible track record that you'd not really be part of the group we're considering atm anyways).

EG: you're almost certainly not going to do anything significant in biology or medicine or chemistry or engineering or materials science or semiconductors or optoelectronics (and even football and basketball) without the training usually acquired as an undergrad (let alone in grad school).

So yeah: the money not being tied to college would have its appeal but putting on the investor's hat for a second someone without a plan for acquiring that level of training looks like a bad bet unless there are further mitigating factors.

Which is why I think the assumption is still mostly warranted, even if it shouldn't be taken for granted (as it was in my previous response).

But, what is helpful is this points in the direction of selecting candidates who would benefit from this program: musicians and other artists.

In many musical + artistic genres a couple hundred upfront in exchange for a cut of lifetime earnings is much better than the deal they typically get now. There's not necessarily a ton of fledgling artists out there who'd actually be good investments but it's a niche where the offer may make a fair amount of sense from both sides.

Essentially you should be asking: what potentially-highly-remunerative "career paths" are (a) open to people in their early-mid 20s and (b) such that star talents exist and (c) such that star talents would find this type of investing a better option than their existing funding options.

You might think so, but there's not an existing legal framework for receiving equity investment as an individual.

If it were that easy people would already be getting around gift tax and estate tax by investing $millions in their kids in exchange for .01% of future annual income, initial payments deferred 15 years (and transferring as part of the estate) and and so on.

Lessin's comments are the only smart ones.

At an abstract level there's some appeal to this notion.

At a practical level not so much, though, and that's even before you get into the nitty-gritty mechanics (like tax law here lol).

The adverse selection risk is huge, unless you go for very young people. What this means is that for people who're already "established" and/or have a track record:

- if they have a worthwhile idea they won't have trouble getting better, cheaper funding than this

- ergo if they're asking you for this kind of funding:

-- they either blew through their previous earnings and don't have a concrete idea to pursue next (NOT GOOD!)

-- or they aren't actually that "established" / lack a track record, and therefore are actually exactly the kind of people you don't want to invest in like this

...so pretty much investing in people proven-successful won't be happening.

We can roll back and consider younger people -- those too young to have any great success to there name yet -- and now there's some possibility here: catching brilliant people on the way up and giving them a further hand up.

Your problem here is that:

- you're competing with student loans as a choice of funding; for a student to pick your investment over a student loan it has to be a better offer. For any student that anticipates serious success you'll have a hard time being a better offer in terms of net payout; student loans are painful b/c their payback is frontloaded into the postgraduation years, which are at the point of the lowest lifetime earnings potential...but in net amount 3% of lifetime earnings will be much greater than the total amount of student loan payments.

- most of the really talented individuals won't even need your money, as there's an unbelievable wealth of grants and scholarships and fellowships for the truly exceptional in all walks of life (science, music, athletics, etc.) that they pretty much don't need funding until after they graduate. After graduation they might take you up on the offer but as time passes they become ever-more-likely to be able to raise cheaper funding for whatever they desire

...so even going after the young'ins leaves you unlikely to be attracting the people you'd want to invest in.

Which means good luck: even if you had the money together if you extend the offer at a price that'll leave you likely to turn a profit it's unlikely to be compelling to anyone you'd want to invest in.

And if that doesn't dissuade you think about the tax law implications: given how easy it would be to do an end-run around inheritance + gift-tax law with this type of "investment" -- and that that this end-run route isn't being taken 24/7, etc. -- I can guarantee you the recipient of this "investment" is going to be taxed on it as income (or at even worse rates, perhaps)...which means the math for the recipient is even worse:

- your investee now has to decide if, say, 125k or so (about what'll be left out of a 250k investment after taxes) is worth 3% a year

...which further contributes to the adverse selection issue as you're only really offering half as much as you think you are.

You may enjoy this article as it offers an interesting generalization of your thesis:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JK25Dj06.html

What you'll find if you get into more detailed discussion with public-utility internet before dropping the socialism bomb is that they're usually advocating a hybrid model: municipality builds out the pipes and then isps compete on actually providing internet service.

You're right about the loudmouths here, but it'd be a mistake to let your sense of public sentiment be overly colored just by volume.

Calling something socialism here is a pretty good debate hack, like calling someone racist or anti-semitic or whatnot; it's enough of a social taboo that the so-accused will usually feel compelled to defend themselves against it, thereby derailing the original course of discussion...this is a good strategy for winning unrefereed debates.

Post-WWII has trained dolphins, which're still used so far as I know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dolphin

It's google's success undermining the assumptions behind pagerank (!) leading it to perform less well.

Before google got so effective people put more work into maintaining collections of links to other sites; hand-curated omnibus directories like yahoo and dmoz or narrower fields.

As search became better this was increasingly a poor use of time; you could, after all, just go and google stuff to find it again, so why bother maintaining a hand-curated set of favorite links.

A consequence of this is that link-actions-taken-for-reasons-consistent-with-pagerank's-assumptions dropped, and reducing the signal-to-noise ratio insofar as pagerank is concerned; similarly link-actions-taken-for-reasons-contrary-to-pagerank's-assumptions increased (SEO), further dropping the signal-noise ratio.

Even extremely robust SEO-detection techniques can only cut away the increase in noise; now that people are less incentivized to publicly post high-quality hand-curated link collections there's less for the algorithm to go on.

This is why there's talk of twitter and fb vis-a-vis search; twitter and fb are where the info the search engines need currently lives.

(!) I know they use additional techniques these days but whatever they're throwing into the mix doesn't seem to be counteracting the overall utility decay.

No hard data on actual rates but you may find this interesting:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2108

You might find upper bounds by talking to people who build space-hardened systems.

Thank you for making my case more succinctly.

I'm intimately familiar with the specifics of medical education as a family member of mine is a high-up muckety-muck at one of the world's better academic hospitals (won't be more precise than that).

There's a perception amongst outsiders that medicine is unbelievably difficult that only a handful of people qualify for medical training on their merits; a more accurate assessment is that the # of slots is fixed and the admissions are as selective as they need to be to filter down the applicant pool to the # of available slots.

It'd take time to ramp up to being able to handle that many students -- medicine is mainly taught by working under the supervision of existing experts, and there's a finite supply of expert-hours at the moment -- but the present rate of doctor-production is far from what it could be without a material drop in applicant quality.

Yes all of this I know; you claimed common lisp has superior documentation to php and I've consistently shown you ways in which even php's documentation is superior to that possessed by common lisp at this time (at least in any sense that matters to me).

I should clarify: there certainly is documentation for common lisp, some of it quite good; the situation is that in many ways common lisp's documentation is outclassed by even php's documentation.

Let's turn this around: take a good look at php.net; put aside your disdain for the language (blech!) and just look at how the documentation is structured, in terms of organization (high level and low-level, like in what size chunks it's presented in).

Do you really think there is nothing to be learned from how the php people have assembled their official documentation?

I'd additionally argue that as nice as in-environment documentation is it's a sub-optimal approach to accessibility.

Part of the issue is for the abject beginner it multiplies the things to learn: everyone knows how to work firefox and google and can google something to see what turns up; having to learn how to work the in-environment documentation takes you from one problem ("how do i shot web?") to two problems ("how do i shot web?" and "how is docs found?"). A serious student will pick it up pretty quickly but .

The larger issue is that the lack of a central documentation + discussion hub means that there's no system taking the informal knowledge possessed by discrete practitioners -- stuff like what implementations of what functions on which platforms have unanticipated quirks, or what function non-newbies typically use instead of the function you're currently reading the docs for -- and capturing it for posterity in an easily-searchable format.

Some of that information can be gleaned from usenet and mailing list archives if you know to search there and have time to wade through flames and trolls and other gunk, but the rest of it is stuck in the minds of individuals and is therefore largely inaccessible.

The php approach (which is used by other projects, like eg mysql and pgsql) of having a central online documentation area with integrated user comments is that it provides a natural place for such informal knowledge to wind up; once it's there once it's there for everyone (and can be googled and so on).

You could create an in-environment system that had most of these advantages -- some "social" version of the docs, essentially a wiki-ish system -- but that's hypothetical, and I'm talking concretely, and concretely the available common lisp documentation is largely outclassed by the documentation available for php (and for python, and java, and c#, and many others).

As a parting note you really shouldn't underestimate the advantage of dumping more information into a single page.

Much of the useful knowledge about a language and its core libraries is knowing the logical structure of how everything fits together; much of this is never documented in any formal way, but can be inferred from an overview of the larger-scale organization.

When you present stuff all on one page it's pretty easy to take this in: notice how quickly you could tell the php strings api was poorly designed? That's b/c you could at a glance see everything that was relevant and infer the entire structure (or lack thereof).

When you present things in tiny little atomized chunks it requires much more effort for the reader to get the birds-eye view of the system, as the reader is not provided the convenience of seeing it all laid out in one place.

(1) is easily solvable given enough political will; a federal program funding medical loans in exchange for N years of post-education service in particular hospital systems.

There are successful models for this in use in the army (both at the level of things like ROTC and also at the level of becoming a doctor-for-the-army); if the federal government's role in healthcare expands a program like this producing physicians for "general service" is entirely reasonable.

(2) is correct in principle but without firmer #s it is hard to say if it's materially limiting.

A look at an actual chart is revealing:

http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/charts1982to2007.pdf

...page #3 (as printed on the page) has a matriculation chart:

- in the 1982-3 period 16,597 students matriculated

- in the 2006-7 period 17,759 students matriculated

...which is ~7% increase of 20 years.

The last page has a graduation chart which is similarly flat.

By comparison, the # of full-time fall enrollees at degree-granting institutions:

- in 1982: 7,220,618

- in 2007: 11,269,892

...which is a ~50% increase over 20 years ( cf http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_188.asp ). I've omitted part-timers as largely irrelevant wrt the # of future medical school students.

Now it's possible that:

- there's been a nearly-constant supply of students enrolled in college each year who are interested in and capable of becoming physicians

- ...almost the entire 50% increase in student enrollment has been in students uninterested in medicine and/or incapable of becoming competent physicians

...but that extreme of a shift seems rather unlikely.

What seems more likely is that medical schools have decided to hold class sizes mostly constant over the years, with a slight upward trend (which I'd wager is mostly accounted for by the opening of new medical schools over those decades, not by increased class size at existing institutions).

If that scenario pans out -- that the pool of qualified candidates is larger than the current matriculants -- than while your point (2) is a limit on how far the supply of physicians can be increased it wouldn't be the case that we're necessarily close to that limit..

What in what I suggested suggests that the quality of physicians would be materially watered-down.

It will be your word against mine but I assert that there are plenty of people fully capable of becoming competent physicians getting turned away from medical school each year.

They are turned away because the schools only have N slots per year and the turned-away applicants are not amongst the best N applicants that year.

It's unclear how far down the applicant pool you could go before you start allowing in the fundamentally incapable, but I have a hard time believing the current matriculating class size is anywhere near that threshold.

I don't disagree the world could clearly use more NPs.

The issue I can foresee though is that medicine is getting ever more complicated and specialized with time; there's an upper limit on what NPs are capable of covering after which point you need physicians.

If we're talking about mass-producing medicine you need more physicians at some point.

Your larger points may hold but I think you're underestimating the need for more physicians in the future.

There's firstly the obvious aging-population demographic; the older people get the more health care they'll want and thus if you hold the population of physicians constant (as a % of the overall populace) the demands upon the for physicians' attention will become greater as time moves forward; you might say "so hire more nurse practitioners!" but I suspect that won't be the answer, and I think that'll be clear after the next point.

The second point is that as medical knowledge has increased over the years medicine itself has gotten much more complicated. Problems that had no answer can now be examined and more-complicated disease mechanisms and cross-interactions (etc.) can be looked at. This is particularly true in gerontological settings -- old people have lots of problems mutually-compounding each other -- but it's complicated problems aren't the unique purview of the elderly.

To practice future medicine well will require more time and attention on the physician's part; getting that time back in the face of increasing demand for physician's time probably requires more physicians, doing more-thorough work on fewer patients.

And even in the present day most major teaching hospitals only really get by by slave-driving their residents; get rid of the residents and there's not enough doctors available at prices the institutions can afford to keep the hospitals working at full capacity.

Do you notice you just re-linked the hyperspec on Franz instead of Lispwork's site?

I thought you'd link to this, which is better:

http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.1/doc/contents....

...which I'd say is probably the best of the online manuals.

But more to the point:

There are minor issues with the formatting of the hyperspec no one's bothered fixing. Aside from the lack of a pretty stylesheet and the lack of wiki-style user comments

The most obvious is that if I eg go to the Strings or Array section it just gives me a page with a sub-table of contents; it'd be a lot friendlier to have all the Array or String docs on a single html page.

This wouldn't even be that hard to implement, and the "moar docs on one page" approach to online docs keeps winning out for a reason (it's easier to find what you're looking for if you only know approximately where it is if you can get everything that might be related on a single page and ctrl-f your way through it; having deeply-nested content is far unfriendlier).

I do think the hyperspec is not very well-thought-through as end-user documentation.

It mixes levels of concerns that ought to be separate; someone reading documentation with the goal of finding out if there's a built-in function for "split a string delimited by a particular character into a list of strings?" has very different requirements from someone who needs to know how strings are implemented, for example.

IMHO the hyperspec tries to do both; it's fine as a nitty-gritty reference but could be improved as a day-to-day programmer's reference.

Python's docs are a good example of end-user documentation done right. They have a clearly-delineated split between the language specification ( http://docs.python.org/reference/index.html ) and the standard library specification ( http://docs.python.org/library/index.html ) and additional, separate documentation over lower-level aspects of implementation.

Each body of documentation is organized for the convenience of its typical user.

I wasn't commenting pro-php; the php api design isn't going to win any awards other than popularity.

You're not really responding to the point I was raising: poorly-designed or not, php's official site has easily-findable and easily-accessible documentation (which it needs given the quality of the api design); its official central documentation site is well within the range of modern best practices.

There's not to my knowledge a comparable common lisp online reference (reference, not tutorial) that's anywhere near as accessible to the beginner or intermediate user (that nebulous phase between getting through a few tutorials and having deep knowledge).

These are all excellent resources:

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/

http://docs.python.org/

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/

http://www.php.net/manual/en/

http://clojure.org/Reference

...etc., where is the common lisp equivalent that won't look out of place (in terms of contents + organization)?

Stuff like this matters for accessibility and usability.

Easiest solution is to embark on a serious 10-year plan to double-and-then-triple the number of newly-created mds passing through the system.

This can't be done immediately -- it'd take time for institutions to ramp up their teaching staff and associated facilities -- but it could be done over time.

Some federal program that'd make funds available on condition of a particular school hitting a particular # of enrollments would the simplest solution; given a choice between mad money and placating the AMA boffins most administrators would take the money.

There's no real shortage of people capable of being decent physicians; most of the selectivity of medical school admissions is b/c the # of slots the schools allow is low.

PHP.net landing page for string documentation:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.strings.php

(also available in 7-8 other languages). Note all useful string concepts are one click away, and the documentation allows user commentary (much of which is quite helpful).

Common Lisp Hyperspec landing page for Strings:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/16_.ht...

CMUCL string documentation:

http://common-lisp.net/project/cmucl/doc/cmu-user/unicode.ht...

SBCL's manual has no "table of contents" item that even mentions strings.

Stuff like this matters if you care about accessibility.

It should be trivial to google yourself a well-documented list of a given language's standard string functions without a lot of work.

That's a funny site:

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly obvious that American men — particularly those of the post-boomer generations — have fallen into a cultural gap. Our voice is barely a whisper in the traditional media, we are consistently portrayed as worthless buffoons and advertisers ignore us.

(Any guess on whether the phallic-symbol logo was a deliberate selection or not?)

Can you imagine a masculine man, in any era, actually voicing such a complaint? "Mommy mommy everyone's ignoring me and calling me names! I hate the girly and faggy tv all these women and faggots make but I can't stop watching it!"

Usually I associate masculinity with stoicism, quiet resolve, and a brave git-er-done approach; the masculine man would do his thing and not really worry about what the natterers were nattering about.

I think the one-sentence rebuttal is "videogames": the male demographic interested in manly tales of derring-do is really interested in obtaining experiences that approximate the male desire to actually go and do-derring; videogames -- being interactive -- are such better approximations to that experience that the demand for lesser such stimuli -- action sci-fi, comic books, etc. -- has substantially diminished.

Think of the Hardy Boys: every novel has a mystery that the boys solve along with their dad, usually with some fisticuffs and other feats of masculinity tossed in (breaking stuff; escaping from bandits; etc).

Now compare with a videogame (say, Halo): you have a guy put into a difficult military situation and you have to fight your way out; success is not guaranteed, but you are given an obstacles to overcome and the tools to do so.

Which is a better simulacrum of adventure? Under what possible circumstances would a young boy trade a bunch of his adventure videogames for a cost-equivalent basket of books?

I'm pretty sure videogames have killed off an entire industry of young-male-fantasy; there are still huge nerds who read a lot and buy comic books and so on, but the much broader group of "casual readers" now play games instead of buy comics and so on (who might read a handful of non-assigned books between elementary school and high school graduation; think about the football and basketball teams).

For lightweight masculine entertainment sports of all kind fill out the rest of the gap.

The remainder has to do with differences in educational attainment and corresponding income differences; women on average have more education than men do on average, which translates into higher incomes (this isn't a claim about salary disparity for doing the same job -- it's that more women are now in higher-paying jobs than men).

There's a legitimate issue underneath, there -- it's not like men are (or ought to be) guaranteed by birthright forms of employment that enjoy superior compensation to the work women do, but the fact of the matter is that as present trends continue the "skills" undereducated males possess don't have lots of market value. Not being as well-positioned (vis-a-vis les femmes) as providers means the balance of power shifts, which no one likes when it goes against their favor.

I think the educational system could be improved in ways that'd stop wasting as much educational potential on the part of males, but that's neither here nor there.

A final curiousity here is that the author's sense of historical norms (in terms of media targeting) is pretty far off the historical fact, but it's not like an accurate knowledge of the publishing market in the early 20th century is commonly possessed; it might've behooved the author to do some research but this is an amateur publication on the internet trolling for readership, not a serious attempt at peeling back the veil to get a good look at truth.

EG: in earlier eras a common complaint amongst the middle-class on upwards was that the stay-at-home wives would sit around filling their heads with garbage ideas from too many novels. Men, being busy with work and other responsibilities, had far less free time to dedicate to reading fiction for entertainment.

There were reams and reams and reams of crap fiction cranked out aimed at stay-at-home wives to pass the time -- and they would have lots of time in that era; most of that fiction was utterly forgettable and is now mostly forgotten, out-of-print and only preserved in a handful of libraries for historians interested in the trash culture of the time.

As television became mainstreamed this industry died off a lot (less need for trash entertainment), and it died off further as women entered the workforce (less time spent at home).

The perceived more-masculine nature of historical media is thus a compounding of two bias-inducing dynamics:

- the rise of tv and women in the workforce mean that the recent-history media landscape was quite different from its early situation (it's fair to go way back, since he's bringing in Jules Verne)

- the fact that most trash culture isn't worth anyone's time to preserve leaves it mostly forgotten; a consequence of this is a historical filter that throws out most of what got made, leaving behind a biased sampling (eg: the average intellectual can maybe name <40 books from before 1800, most of which are classics; it's eminently not the case that all books published before 1800 were classics)

The most obvious change in mass-media content over the last 20 years has been moving away from explicit violence in tv and film (except in horror, which is actually a female-majority product these days, go figure!). If you watch an 80s era Arnold flick you'll see a lot more blood and dismemberment than is the norm today.

I see this as a shift in cultural mores and another case of videogames stealing the demand: cultural norms against explicit violence are if anything a positive development; once the tide has turned there's not much point putting it back in -- people will skip a movie if it's too violent but not that many people will skip a film b/c it lacks gore -- and for those who enjoy that kind of thing videos from Mortal Kombat onwards have catered to it.

If you want intelligent commentary on media and gender Camille Paglia should be your first stop; she's also a markedly better writer than whiskey, who writes as his nom de plume suggests he might.

Can't see why you're being downmodded as you're quite close to the nitty-gritty mechanics.

Like most financial systems there's how people think it works and then you look at the actual mechanics and it's quite different; this often leads to semi-informed people thinking they know more than they do.

Read here:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/8/

...section 5 (pretty accessible as legal codes go) for the basics.

Essentially the laws are structured so that when you buy securities through an intermediary:

- "purchasing" shares through an intermediary doesn't instantly give you the shares; it immediately gives you a legal claim against the intermediary to produce those shares

- the type of claim you get is very standardized (in terms of delivery times and rules around it, etc.)

This makes complete sense if you think about the early years of the stock market. If you went into a brokerage in Chicago in 1940 and bought shares in General Motors, would it really be reasonable to get an actual share certificate instantly? Within an hour? What if it's not Chicago but Poughkeepsie?

So the fraud-minimizing solution is that: "purchasing shares" from an intermediary grants you an enforceable claim for those shares that you purchased, but doesn't instantly give you actual shares (it couldn't then, economically).

(Needless to say this pushes some of the risk onto intermediaries: since you are buying at whatever price the agent quotes if the stock price were to change then the agent can't ransom "your" shares to you for the post-agreement price change.)

A consequence of combining this general setup with the modern electronic infrastructure is that what is essentially fractional-reserve stockbroking becomes possible (if enough brokerages are in on it and if the regulators aren't vigilant enough).

The current claims about naked short selling basically reduce to a claim that certain aspects of the order-clearing system are being exploited for fraudulent profit (essentially unregulated fractional-reserve lending, but the specific dynamics are a little different due to the nature of the assets involved).

Part of the issue is that if the scam works as the naked-short-selling people think it does then it works best when the naked-shorted company goes out of business within a reasonable time period from when the scam commenced (due to the specific mechanics of how the claimed scam is supposed to work); this makes it hard to accurately assess the merits of many of the claims, since the companies supposedly targeted are usually long-since gone and whenever a company goes out of business there's usually plenty of reasons why it failed that don't involve stock market shenanigans.

Economics as it is got going well before complexity theory was established.

There's an interesting difference between assuming perfect information and perfect rationality -- idealizations of existing scenarios -- and essentially assuming P=NP; the former makes the math easier at no real penalty (provided you remember not to confuse the map with the territory) but until P is proven to be equal to NP (which probably won't happen) the latter is more like sprinkling pixy dust to make it go.

The only school that really takes something like tractability seriously are the Austrians, but their math phobia leaves their approach unrigorous and not very useful outside of as an anti-central-planning argument.

The claim that a market will converge on an accurate price (!) for an "intractable" financial asset is pretty dubious; the price-discovery process is supposed to depend on lots of agents running their #s and taking positions depending on if they think current price is different than it ought to be...over time this process will push the market price toward an accurate price.

In the case of an intractable asset there'd be no reason to believe that any outside agents crunched accurate #s, which means that even if the price converged there'd be no reason to believe that the converged-to price had any accuracy, which isn't usually the case in most other classes of financial assets.

As noted towards the end they need to do some work about estimating "lemon cost" and otherwise establishing how close you can estimate with approximate methods.

(!) In general there's not much sense in talking about true or accurate prices for some good; price is what it gets, full stop.

In the case of most financial products the notion of accurate price is more justified: a product entitles the owner to some sequence of future cash flows, which can be assigned a value in some straightforward manner. When a financial asset's current price deviates from the value of the underlying sequence of payments in some substantial way it's usually due to some easily-understood dynamic (eg: inflation expectations, doubts about some of the payments coming through) which makes a minor correction to the price it fetches.

An "inaccurate price" would be one with no apparent relation to the underlying cash flows.

Pop quiz: what % of the first 10 amendments guarantee positive rights?

You're smarter than this site looks. Good luck.

Allow anonymous poll response but keep separate results tables for anon / logged in / everyone.

How are the follow-up steps created? If it's just some googly thing it won't be that compelling.

Homepage is extremely cluttered in a bad way for first-timers; this isn't always a big deal but it's good to be aware of.

Consider organizing it s.t. eg Olympia Snowe could have an official "polls" channel for polling her constituents; impact of poll results is more credible that way.

Have a "clone this poll" feature and follow-up / "poll response"; if some user dislikes a poll's phrasing or options they ought to be easily able to clone a poll and tweak it....keeping around that metadata so that people taking either poll can see other related polls. Similarly with response polls -- some way to post a counter-poll. Good for user engagement.

Settle on if your sideboxes have rounded or square corners plz.

I don't think you can make your proposal work in a way that's a good use of your time (and other resources) as you've originally proposed.

If I were you I'd tweak this around a bit.

There might be an interesting niche for apartment-complex/executive-suite hybrids.

Basically an apartment complex but with a reasonable # of "conference rooms" and/or mini-workspaces.

The ground floor would be given over to conference rooms / work cubbies / etc. and the upper floors mainly apartments (with perhaps some more workspace thrown in).

The appeal to young contractor / freelancer types would be pretty obvious, if the price is right: convenient to their needs and cheaper than renting a proper office + an apartment would be.

There's probably a bit of a trade-off -- every square foot given over to workspace is a square foot you're not renting out -- but with enough research and input from experts in this area you would be able to figure out if it worked.

I'm not sure Richmond is the right place for it but if there's enough in the vicinity you could possibly make it work.

If you got enough of a good thing going you might then branch out into letting tenants stay for free (or reduced rent, etc.) in exchange for equity if they were starting up their own thing.

This is the argument of the ages, no?

I would say moral codes are about trying to use your agency to do good, not bad; there's no obvious reason why "doing good" would always and everywhere equate with "easy to cope with".

You claim you're not doing a #s game but I think I can prove that you are, even if you're not yet aware of it.

Consider this alternative scenario: the trolley is hurtling towards the 5 men as before and you've got the option of throwing a switch; what's new is that this time the switch moves the train into an empty railyard, saving the five lives at no one's expense.

The #s game is removed and it's just a case of: do you think yourself morally obligated to throw the switch and save the lives, or not?

Careful here.

Involvement in the world isn't voluntary; actions have consequences, some people prefer some consequences to other consequences.

In your case you value maintaining an unsullied self-image over assisting 5 people in mortal peril, and would prefer if other people saw your choice the same way.

But you're right (I've met people who were familiar with the people involved here): the intuition is that the stronger the perceived interpersonal relationship between you and the unlucky bloke the less likely you are to flick the switch, but teasing out exactly how much relationship is needed to make the moral intuition flip is tricky business.

But why are thoughts jumbled, mostly?

Is there anything to be learned from the structure of the jumbling?

No answers, just getting it out there.

I wasn't clear or you're blurring information content and density and thereby missing my point (!). Consider:

- VERBOSE: “One of the best things you can do for yourself to improve your writing is to learn how to cut out words that are not necessary.”

- TAUT: “To improve your writing, cut out unnecessary words.”

In at least the senses I care about I don't see any information in TAUT absent from VERBOSE; if you see any such information TAUT please do point it out.

Which is what I was getting at: TAUT prose communicates identical thoughts with fewer words; why is it so difficult and unnatural to generate?

I find this curious. I now have some suspicions but nothing extremely well-formed.

(!) You'd be right that in the context of essays-for-school the target wordcount is predetermined and information is expensive so the lazy satisfy the requirement(s) with the verbal equivalent of double-spacing + jumbo font.