joeclark77

It is an homage to a 1994 "Contract with America" offered by the Republican Party's campaign for Congress. At that time they had been out of power for 40 years. They knew voters didn't like them, so instead of saying "Like us!", they said, "here, in writing, is what we'll do if you give us your vote". It was a good idea, and they won a major election which permanently changed the balance of power.

Trump similarly faced an electorate that didn't like him or his opponent. She said "Like me!" and he said "Here's what I'll do for you." It was a smart thing to do. A much lower hurdle to have to jump.

Well, if any President would ever propose a Dyson Sphere, it would be Trump.

No, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. The pollutants from coal burning are waste products like CO and NO2. If you can capture those, or find ways to burn the coal "cleaner" to only produce beneficial CO2 and heat, the problem is solved.

The other appeal (aside from what has already been stated) is that it would eliminate the problem of Congressmen obsessing about the next election as soon as they arrive. Lots of problems in our government are due to legislators wanting to avoid accountability, avoid having to take a position, or kicking the can down the road. But imagine if you only have two years and then go home! You'd be willing to really do something.

Obviously I can't speak for Trump, but I think it's accurate to say that the criticism of H1B visas is that they've been abused by tech companies wanting to hire foreign workers for entry-level jobs at low wages. The intent of the H1B was originally to attract real talent that we couldn't produce locally, such as specialists, PhDs, and experts with proven talent. The implication for you might be that, if H1B visas are reformed, you'll be less likely to get an entry level job after the masters degree, but should be better able to get a visa and a job in the USA as you advance in your career.

The snarky reply to the "moving to Canada" thing is: why don't all these California liberals want move to Mexico? It's closer, isn't it?

Yeah, I'm really addressing the hypothetical 26-year-old me. The OP is 26 and he thinks he's at "mid-life" and is worried about not having a career. I'm nearly 40 now and am only now starting to find out what I want to be when I grow up. And I don't feel very handicapped by that! My past "careers" have all given me a lot of value and learning.

The message I'd like to convey to the OP is that he could have an adventure for 4-5 years, or even 10 years, and then worry about what career he wants to go into.

The media think they influence the election results, but in this case it didn't really happen. Both parties' nominees won their nominations by significant margins. Trump won the general election despite the media being united against him. The media are now asking themselves "What could we have done to prevent this?" (See for example Chuck Todd's article at NBCnews.com yesterday, appointing partial "blame" for the outcome to the media.) This misses the point. The media shouldn't be trying to influence the outcome, except in a couple of ways: they should make it their mission that people be as informed as possible, and that that information be true. Their loyalty to a left-wing political ideology has come before both of those things, which is why their credibility is in the dumps.

The current political crisis has been a productivity drain for me since 2008, with Tea Parties to attend, three grueling Presidential campaigns, two midterms, and all the primaries. And the shooting hasn't even started yet! I'm afraid all we'll be able to say at the end of today is "it's the end of the beginning".

Can you join the military with a DUI? Man, if I were 26 again and single, I'd go for being a fighter pilot or maybe a submariner. Put off the "mid-life crisis" until you're actually middle aged!

"Deep learning" and virtually any other kind of "data science". I teach classes in analytics and I think ninety percent of what people really need is better understanding and visualization of the simplest statistics: sums, averages, counts, time series. Fancy statistical algorithms have some applications for example in fraud detection, but for most business people I think a great dashboard that lets them visualize patterns with their own two eyes is much more robust and useful.

Live completely off-grid for a year (or at least for a summer). I understand there are so many lakes in Canada that you can get flown to one and have it all to yourself for an entire summer of camping, fishing, whatever.

As a non-Brit, it seems to me that it's high time for Queen Elizabeth to ride in on a white horse and start swinging a sword around the halls of her corrupt government.

Hey, at least this election year isn't boring! With a Cubs-Indians World Series on top of this crazy election, I'm more and more ready to believe that the end of the world is nigh...

Subsidiarity.

Subdsidiarity is the principle that decisions should be made locally as much as possible. In government it's what we call "federalism": most decisions are made by individuals; those that cannot are made by local government answerable to the people; those that cannot be made locally may be made by the county or state; only those very few decisions that cannot be made by states are the purview of the federal government. The US was supposed to operate this way. It hasn't since before World War I.

Why is subsidiarity connected to rational decision making? Simply, because the world is too complex for any one person or group to understand, model, predict, and control it. Most decisions can be made best by the individuals concerned, who have the relevant knowledge. This also reduces the cognitive burden on everyone else. Since higher authorities have few powers, their impacts are minimal. Citizens who do not have the time or information to follow those high level decisions may rationally ignore and trust the system, because it has little impact on them. Those who do have the inclination to pay attention to politics can make a fair evaluation of their leaders because the leaders are only involved in a few things.

One of the reasons you see people acting in such an emotional and heuristic way, nowadays, is that the central governments and even transnational organizations are at the same time manifestly incompetent and incredibly impactful. All citizens must be concerned with who wins the federal offices, because the federal government seizes half of every dollar they earn, and imposes itself into every intimate choice they make. So no one can afford to ignore it. At the same time, government is so complex and makes so many decisions that no citizen has the time or information to study it thoroughly. So what can a rational person do? They must seek shortcuts, such as finding trusted personalities to follow, or making judgments based on rules of thumb, slogans, and so forth.

In sum, because rational choice is only possible when we have the time and the information needed to make choices, neither the citizen nor the central authority can make rational choices in a centralized superstate. Decentralizing decision making spreads the work out to more minds, and places less burden on each individual.

I bet there's a way to make it work though. Somebody amongst HN's readers has got to have an ingenious work-around.

Pizzaware. Order a large Hawaiian pizza and a 2-liter diet coke delivered to the following address, and we'll unlock your computer.

I just have to recommend this (humor) video by JP Sears: https://youtu.be/Kvdf6e8birI

He's got a whole series like this. Hope it entertains.

I was thinking the same thing!

I get the impression that he feels very strongly about the cloud, cloud, cloud.

Something interesting on the radio, maybe? Or perhaps it's cold outside and he likes having the heater on?

Good point. In this case I think he's confident that he'll get a job somewhere, and therefore he's willing to do this as a way of eliminating potential employers from contention based on whether they do or don't value the kinds of contributions he's making. It's a good strategy unless he's wrong about how desirable he is.

What worked for me is, this fall I canceled my smartphone service and bought a flip phone from Walmart. Saves a ton of money, but more importantly, I hardly even look at the Internet on weekends and evenings now.

Failing that, have you considered getting a cabin in the woods? Or maybe a boat? Get as far as you can from an internet connection, as often as you can.

Not necessarily a learning resource, but I'd like to plug the Anaconda distribution of Python. https://www.continuum.io/ It includes most of the commonly-used libraries/packages in data analytics, so at ASU I made all my students download it just to start from. Three things it gives you right out of the box are iPython (a better Python shell), Spyder (the Python version of RStudio), and Jupyter Notebooks.

For learning, I'd recommend taking something like Janert's "Data Analysis with Open Source Tools" and go through chapter-by-chapter trying to figure out how to implement the various analyses in Python. That book in particular uses a different technology every chapter for its tutorial exercises, so ignore those. But the exposition of the concepts is fantastic.

Academic job markets get started around this time of year, depending on the discipline and affected by the dates of their big conferences, for jobs to begin in fall of the following year. So by giving him the decision now, he has enough advance notice to prepare his CV and apply for jobs.

Yes, but he's now trying to take his show on the road and get a job at another university. The reason this "parting shot" is risky is that it may get him pre-emptively ruled out by a lot of other hiring committees.

Looks cute, but (just take this as feedback for your "onboarding" process) I don't like to sign up for things without being able to test them. Like GoDaddy, you should allow a user to search for a domain name, see the price, and then sign up. At least, that's what you'd have to do to get business from a curmudgeon like me.

This could lead somewhere, but I think he's shooting himself in the foot by dissing vi and emacs. That's like telling a developer his girlfriend is ugly and then trying to sell him something.

I'm afraid there's no simple shortcut to knowing what the future will bring. The study of history and politics is a lifelong endeavor. Start perhaps with the Old Testament and then Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.

If you want a shortcut, the only one that works is to find someone whose knowledge and judgment you can trust. That could be a celebrity commentator, or it could be your father. Plumb the depths of their knowledge by asking questions, and challenging the answers, and (here's the hard part) if they prove themselves worthy, make the decision to trust their recommendation even if your emotions tell you to vote the other way.

That would be some curve.