guimarin

This really isn't rocket science or difficult. Everyone thinks this is a hard-complex problem, it is not. This is a hard simple problem. (easy-hard; simple-complex)

1. Upzone SOMA district to 12 stories.

2. Remove requirement that buildings over 50yrs old in SOMA need to pass the historic building committee.

I think you mean soft contacts. You can buy hard contacts that last a year right now.

I'm just going to file this one away for 20 years from now when electricity is 10-100x cheaper than today and indoor/underground farming is the most economical due to pest, density, and environmental concerns. Could you also say this technology will never make sense? That would be very helpful.

this is how short-term -> long-term memory works. You build up 'competence; in the hippocampus during waking hours, and then when you sleep 'a part' of those memories are shifted into other areas of the brain so the hippo can be fresh for the next day. Caveats apply to things sometime take days, don't move, get erased etc. hippo is very capable so people can operate without sleep for quite a while but eventually overflowing this buffer/registry causes insanity/death. hilariously, your long-term appreciation of time is just the working set in hippo divided by the stored area in long term memory. thus as you get older time appears to go by faster in the aggregate. experience of simple in the moment phenomena is controlled elsewhere.

when trying to learn something, engage with it repeatedly on exponential decay. IE. Index cards. Go through them as many times as it take to learn whatever you are learning. Then perform a 20-30 minute context switch. do again. Now wait 1 hour. Do the cards again. Wait 2 hours. Again. Do this until you review those cards at the week level. You can learn almost anything with very high recall 6-9 months later with this method.

edit: Sleep is an extremely important component of this. You must be well rested, and preferably do not ingest significant amounts of alcohol before sleeping as that will mess up short term to long term memory mapping from hippo to pfc.

You could imagine a kind of curated UGC for Netflix, where they take News personalities that are already well developed on YouTube and give them a platform to really go global. I for one cannot wait until this happens. The programming they've been putting out lately has been amazing for me.

Software is leading to much more leverage in capital efficiency. This is driving a reduction in CapEx spending in the US despite low interest rates. It's driving a reduced cost in exploration and extraction, which is in turn increasing supply for commodities and energy. We do more today with almost every conceivable good than we ever have before. More with less is the theme and it's getting much more powerful with software. IBM: $100bn, VMWare: $10bn, Docker/Containers: $1bn. All the same stuff. Our efficiency is increasing rapidly, and it's very difficult to predict with historical figures where this goes.

While I agree with you, your point is ultimately a semantic difference and not related to the parent discussion on how to fix education. Certainly 'status' defined this way is a necessity of being rich but not sufficient. Being an autodidact is both necessary and sufficient for long-term multi-generational success. eg. 2 generations can live off the fruits of one, but then you're out. whereas if you teach your kids how to learn on their own, you can sustain quite easily for many.

A conspiracy seems overly suspicious. It's more likely that the people putting in place standardized testing believe that data should drive compensation and results. They don't seem to be understanding the implication of such a garbage in garbage out policy though. In private schools there is also standardization and testing, and the data is often good HS and thereby good colleges.

And just to be clear. The answer for children is to make learning to love learning play. And the way to do that in a way that scales is through a video game. That is the future of education. Games for children that teach them how to learn, that they then use to set their own educational path. With teachers, schools, mentors, and advisors helping along the way.

I disagree with your comment about better teachers. Teachers are simply a conduit for learning. They don't scale, which is why there is still a power-law distribution in educational outcomes despite tons or research and data and training and testing that should combat that. Basically rich people get richer because all rich people who are generationally consistently rich have one thing in common. They are autodidacts. If you can learn on your own, and have the capacity to recognize when the assumptions underpinning the status-quo are no longer correct, you can consistently remain wealthy relative to everyone else. True rich families understand this and teach it implicitly/explicitly to their children. Who end up being the fertile ground on which 'good teachers' have a multiplicative effect. This does not work for the poor as they lack the necessary base skills and knowledge to benefit from good teaching. Poor people still break through because circumstance often teaches people, like everyone who came from nothing on this message board, how to learn on their own without help or assistance from others. Advocating more assistance from others is not the solution. And for the same reason that sending $1T in aid to Africa has had mixed results.

Knowledge cannot be taught it must be learned.

I think it's a stretch to ever think there was practical development for energy occurring at those facilities. When you think for 10s about the efficacy of dropping a deuterium pellet every 100ms into a laser chamber that literally needs the lasers to fire 3X orders of magnitude faster than currently possible to sustain a fusion reaction you come to the realization that this was always and only about weapons research.

and yet the US has defunded and underfunded new Fusion research related to power generation at every turn for the past 20 years. Pinning our hopes on the ITER boondoggle.

The problem with Fusion has always been that R&D associated with it has no bearing on any first order weapons technology. Sure you might be able to put a reactor on an aircraft carrier, but studying powergeneration from fusion reactions does not yield higher yield!

You're right, AWS just breaks even with their pricing.

This is awesome! We always seem to get tremendous bang for our buck in building ever larger and more precise tools.

Question though, is there a realistic timeline or project for building a similar telescope as this, but in Space?

For anyone who reads this comment and is confused about what we are talking about.

On page 17, Fusion research for the NIF of ~480M is outlined. We could debate for a long time about how this is more of PR move, and not realistic. In the parent, this is where I talk about Nuclear Weapons research. For this to make power you literally need to drop millions of pellets of gold plated deuterium one after the other to create 'power', all the while firing the lasers like 100X faster than they can currently be fired. You decide if that's attainable.

On page 44, the supposed ~400M a year is outlined and in the discussion notes. "The FY 2014 Budget Request funds U.S. contributions to the ITER project for long-lead procurements required in construction of the facility; the majority of these contributions will be spent on in-kind hardware sourced from U.S. industries, national laboratories, and universities" Which is basically a retelling of my comment about the ITER 'boondoggle'. There is also a gov't sentence on how they money will go to existing projects, which is really lip service to Fusion research and mostly used for Public Education (very good!)

General research on the 'sun' is very far afield to say that it applies to harnessing fusion to create electricity.

Most of the funding I've seen has gone into maintenance for existing projects, nuclear weapons research, and the ITER boondoggle. But if you have any sources of projects that have received billions of dollars that have been about power creation, I'm 100% open to changing my tune.

Fusion is one of those areas that would benefit greatly from Public R&D. It's really sad that we've spent almost nothing on fusion research for the purposes of producing affordable electricity in the last 20 years.[1][2][3]

1. The NIF is and always has been a sideshow for the Nuclear Weapons development research that goes on there.

2. US last serious investment was the TFTR back in the 90s. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/fusion-energy-react...

3. IMO ITER is a joke, too large scale.

how does the bitcoin system handles 10k+ transactions an hour?

As someone who derives most of his income from the value created by start-ups disrupting incumbents, I'm all in favor of index funds making firms anti-competitive in their own industries.

Back when I was a kid, Enemy of the State was not a documentary.

But really, if you cared about Privacy/Security at all since the 80's you'd've known about Echelon, Echelon II, etc. You've also read up on ThinThread and Trailblazer.

My favorite is the No Such Agency adjunct that pulled like $200m a year in funding with 3 people in the division. Well and this patch: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Logo_of_... quite literally the greatest US Gov't Patch of all time.

Saying it's branding is a little disingenuous. I like to joke that NYC is just a brand describing a truly shitty city, but that's not really the case. What I've noticed about the WSJ is that a lot of the commentary is primarily business focused. There is very little mainstream media that focuses on business with the quality of the WSJ. It's also sort of like the National Enquirer of the business world; so highly niche entertainment as well.

There are some realities of actually owning/running a business that are hard to understand if you have not done it before. Realities like how cumbersome and obnoxious most government attempts at regulation are, including and especially taxation. I have yet to meet a person, including prominent SV billionaires, who wouldn't give 100% of their money to the gov't if they thought it was spent well and transparently. The reality is that it is not, and these people feel rightly that they are better allocators of capital than the government, and so oppose taxation. In the Hard Thing About Hard things, Horowitz writes that most management books are written by people who have never even managed a hot dog stand. I think that a publication that is so overwhelming supported and favored by business owners even despite it's obnoxiousness at times must have some underlying value. It's probably best not to dismiss it as 'simple branding' just because you can't wrap your head around that position.

I find myself thinking that the existance of Dark Energy/Dark Matter is the solution to the fermi paradox. there is some kind of energy creating system which creates dark matter. This matter is no good for normal matter so it is transported far away from stars/galaxies and dumped. This would probably be true if we could create a physics model that can explain like 1% of Dark Matter occurring naturaly. Then we just assume that other species have discovered how to create a ton of energy with Dark Matter as the by-product. We haven't been able to observe them for the same reasons our telescopes can't see the New Horizons spacecraft out by Pluto, just too small. And as far as observing communications. It's likely that all true interstellar communication on frequencies we could understand are sent with a targeted focus, like a laser, rather than a blast. Think of all our deep space equipment which has their uplink bits pointed toward earth.

This issue with cars, is what scares me the most. We'll be able to have 'classic cars' -> cars made up until about 1980s. then there will be this huge period of cars that have to be destroyed because their onboard computers are totally ancient and not accessible. That or we'll have the ability to 3D print circuit/boards chips very easily from an old archive of designs. sigh

It happens all the time. More often than not the C-level will get a bonus on employee retention and tie the new stock vesting schedule up with that retention period. They in the meantime are able to immediately get bought out.

I think Michael has a very legitimate position here, and one that is not well understood at all.

As a side note, I think Netflix' strategy of paying people a lot of money with no stock/rsu's/options is the right one.

IMO the real breakthrough here was the density of Carbon Nanotubes they are claiming.

I met with one of the Coin founders and he had something really interesting to say on this topic. If apple-pay is successful it will disintermediate the banks from the money process/transaction. They are clearly not wanting this to happen and so are happy with things like plstc and coin.

You don't think they 'actually spend $20k on a hammer, $30k on a toilet seat, do you'[1]? If this is not an error, I think we just found the best justification I've seen for making all budgets/purchases etc. in government publicly available via API, as this and the ones below are amazing finds.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629/quotes?item=qt1534129

This is a great idea. I wish that it was free, but I don't have FU money to fund my own version, so I can't complain too loudly. Hopefully if they become successful or fold they make their basic data public and in the former charge for analysis or similar.

This along with a few other projects (unified math language; vertical robotic greenhouses; acquoponics; lightscribe DVD player laser on a 3D printer graphene... ) are really worth investing money in long-term. Wish the government still did blue-sky research. sigh