jrock08

This appears to be from 2014. Prior to 2014, using GMO seeds "required" farmers to plant an in-field refuge of non-resistant crops. Since farmers could, short term, get better yields if they didn't plant these refuge plants, they often chose not to. In 2014 companies started mixing in non-resistant seeds, known as "refuge in bag". It's seen some mixed results, but for the most part, it looks like it has helped.

REITs are traded on the market, (pretty much) just like a stock. So you don't have to worry about liquidity being too much of a problem. One example of a REIT is [1].

However, if you really just want to park money for 20 years, you probably want a target year fund like [2] which will have higher risk now (stocks, REITs, etc), and rebalance to lower risk (Bonds) as it gets closer to 2040. It's literally the definition of set it and forget it.

[1] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0123&...

[2] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0696&...

edit: I should add, I'm not your financial advisor, and I don't have a fiduciary duty. You should consult with a financial advisor (who has a fiduciary duty) before making any decisions about investments. However, target year funds are frequently (one of) the best decisions for many people.

There's a lot of space between the conflict of interest that arises when you lobby congress for a change that would help the company you are the CEO of while your father is a senator and not working.

Examples of some obvious things that really shouldn't be too controversial:

Showing pictures of a massacre

Showing pictures or video from a war

Reading a graphic account of a soldier from war

Showing pictures of mass graves (esp where body parts are identifiable)

Showing pictures or video of a rape (even if a scene from a movie)

Showing pictures of the evidence from a rape

Reading a graphic account of a rape victim

Set up a distribution center on I90 30 miles outside Chicago (e.g. Gary Indiana) set up a distribution center on I80 30 miles outside New York (e.g. Paterson NJ). Use human drivers for the last 30 miles, and automation to drive the rest. The route doesn't go through any heavily trafficked areas except Gary and Cleveland, which you could avoid by starting the route at 9pm for a 9am arrival with travel through Cleveland occurring at 2am. I'd say that with current technology we could probably do this in less than a year. Since trucks cost about 150k new and truck drivers can't drive 12 hours straight, the economics of full automation are much easier to justify.

More good examples of variance in the artistic style and implied meaning are the various non-people emojis. In general, google has "cuter", "friendlier", and more anthropomorphized versions.

http://emojipedia.org/octopus/ http://emojipedia.org/ghost/ http://emojipedia.org/monkey/

Because voter impersonation (which is the only thing voter id laws catch) is incredibly rare. [1]

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/voter-fraud-real-rare/st...

I think the video and website are pretty obviously parody. But, if you are having a hard time discerning it as parody, don't you think that's the NRA's fault?

Poverty in parents is highly predictive of poverty in children. Single motherhood is also correlated with poverty. It's possible that single motherhood increases the chance that a child will also live in poverty as an adult, but the vast majority of the effect is probably explained by generational poverty.

> Consider African Americans: 73% of kids born to single mothers

Why the value judgement on single mothers? Also, the 73% is out of wedlock, not necessarily single mothers. Single mother numbers are actually 67%.

>and huge level of incarceration.

Incarceration policies put in place by republicans and democrats.

>How is it not a failure of political science and Democrats that represent African Americans on all levels of government?

It is a failure of American political policy. However, the answer isn't to build a wall or stop immigration. The answer is to improve education, train people for the jobs that actually exist in our economy, and if all else fails, figure out what we do when there just aren't enough jobs, not just pretend like manufacturing is going to come back. American manufacturing has never produced more goods than the present, but it also employees almost no one, because automation is amazing [1].

[1] Page 4 and 5: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~vardi/workawesome16.pdf

If only home ownership weren't correlated with generational wealth. Then we'd have a meritocracy, and you could dismiss people renting as bad decision makers. In the real world, people rent because they can't afford to buy a home.

> Any policy that would cause people to be forced from their homes just because should be viewed as a failure.

I have a really really hard time feeling bad for people who bought homes in the bay area in ~1980. They won the lottery. Their home grew 10% y/y for 30 years outpacing inflation by a significant margin. They got a 30 year tax break while their income likely outpaced inflation as well because they live in an extremely good job market. That house they bought for 100k is now worth 1.7 Million. They can sell the home, move basically anywhere else in the country, and retire on the remaining gain. Yeah, I'm having a hard time feeling too bad for them.

On the other hand, the person who moved to SF in 1980 and decided to rent, I feel bad for them. Unless they found a rent controlled apartment, they've seen their rents grow 10% y/y, and if they found a rent controlled apartment they probably got evicted when the owners of the property sold it, and the new owners decided they wanted to redo the property as condos.

Lets just call it what it is, rent control for rich people. Then maybe we'll talk about it sensibly and realize that it's a horribly thought out plan.

> Maybe these landlords have historically had issues with [black people] and prefer not to rent to them.

Yeah... that's called racism: the belief that all members of a race possess characteristics specific to that race.

> They own the property and ultimately it's their choice.

Yes it is their choice to either accept candidates regardless of race or delist their property and cease renting if they wish to be discriminatory in their rental practices.

Except that consumption based taxes encourage wealth hoarding, and are extremely regressive for families that spend most or all of their income. A better format would be a "average middle class household cost of living" adjustment.

If any part of the site is meant to assassinate my character, I could sue you for defamation in the necessary jurisdiction. Alternatively, I could work to improve the SEO scores of my personal and professional pages, acknowledge that you are attempting to character assassinate me in my pages, and move on with my life. The problem is that in reality what's happening is that people who made stupid mistakes as teenagers are now realizing that their arrest record is searchable, and I feel terrible for them, but wouldn't it be better dealt with by passing laws to thwart the arrest record sites rather than forcing every site that indexes content to delist on a case-by-case basis.

I'll copy-paste my reply to every comment you make, since you seem to really like making this non argument.

Gawker could chose to relocate it's business outside the US, but as long as they are a US corporation, they are bound by US laws and rulings handed down by US courts. Furthermore, defamation laws for publishing content are very different than the right to be forgotten laws which apply to indexing content. No one is arguing that the content is defamation, since it is true and reasonable, the argument is that the content is no longer relevant to a person's character (eg shoplifting arrest as a teenager that made local news).

Gawker could chose to relocate it's business outside the US, but as long as they are a US corporation, they are bound by US laws and rulings handed down by US courts. Furthermore, defamation laws for publishing content are very different than the right to be forgotten laws which apply to indexing content. No one is arguing that the content is defamation, since it is true and reasonable, the argument is that the content is no longer relevant to a person's character (eg shoplifting arrest as a teenager that made local news).

While I understand what you are getting at here, basically, this is still just a complete information game, and didn't solve AI. You are drastically understating the complexity of Go. It isn't actually possible to evaluate a significant fraction of the state tree in the early mid game because the branching factor is roughly 300. The major advance of AlphaGo is a reasonable state scoring function using deep nets.

Unless you have or are a PhD student in AI who has kept up with the current deep net literature I assure you that the whole of Alphago will be unintuitive to you. However, if you were an AI PhD student, you likely wouldn't be so dismissive about this achievement.

Except that we are talking about why women on average don't make as much during their careers. You are punting and saying, well men have pressure to work more. You are absolutely right, and it should be part of the conversation, but you've not somehow proved that the women being encouraged to prioritize family isn't a problem.

Tram lines are expensive, and require that the city (population, economic, and social centers) remain largely static. If you predict wrong, you can end up spending millions on a tram line that doesn't get used.

Which actually says....

Women aren't paid less because they take jobs for less money, women are paid less because men are promoted more, men dictate the location of families more, and women are encouraged to take on more of the homemaking as compared to their husbands.

Oh good, we've moved past the idea that a woman doing a specific job should earn less into a much harder problem of how do we convince society that women's careers are as important as mens.

edit: clarification: men dictate location of families.

So, I'll admit that I don't understand the details of how vanguard is paying employees or the external people that actually manage the money, but presumably, they pay a fixed fee to someone to manage the money, and that fee is significant (but not a significant fraction of the money under investment). The fact that "normal" in investment funds is percentage of money under investment plus percentage of the profit shouldn't matter since they've found a way to run a company that doesn't need to pay those fees to get the money invested.

edit: I should add, that I'm fairly certain that the employees at vanguard are in fact getting paid.

edit2: So the question is should we look at whether the employees/contractors at vanguard are getting paid market rate, or whether vanguard as a whole is charging market rate to the investors. My comparison to the hospital co-op was that it's unfair to compare apples-to-orangutans.

I'm not sure if this is a valid comparison, but imagine that a group of doctors got together and founded a hospital, and decided that they would run the hospital as a co-op, where employees would buy into the co-op rather than receiving a normal salary. However, as they grow they realize that they actually need some corporate guidance, so they find a management company. The management company doesn't want an ownership stake in the co-op, and the co-op doesn't want to dilute it's members, so instead they mutually agree to pay the management company a fixed X million dollars for it's contracting services. In the meantime, the co-op grows 10-fold, but the contract with the management company doesn't change (somehow, let's just assume the co-op doesn't require active management, they just need guidance occasionally or something). Now, someone looks at this and says, hey, if you had the normal management structure you'd be paying 10 times what you pay for your current management since they would take home y% of the profit and that would be taxed, but instead your co-op gets better tax treatment.

This would clearly be absurd, the management company is happy with their fee, and the co-op members are happy. The fact that "normal" corporate structure would pay more in tax shouldn't really factor into the decision since the question should be, given your corporate structure, are you paying taxes.

Lets, be honest, it's not like academics is the only place this happens. CS labs are essentially small companies (1 CEO, 2-3 senior members, and 5-10 junior members). The only difference is that the company produces papers, producing usable code that you support is actually very hard and takes away from the work that actually matters. I'm actually much less worried about being scooped by releasing my code, and much more worried about having to answer emails asking me how to get the hacked together code to run on their machine or their dataset.

If you live in a suburb you have far bigger problems. It's no way to live.

(see, I can say the same low quality thing you did and replace city with suburb)

Living in a large city has many huge benefits. Density of people leads to diversity and density in entertainment and food. Density means that you will find large groups of people that engage in the same esoteric hobbies.

The interned Japanese received 1.6 BILLION in reparations after WW2. Try again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

You mean, except for Marco Rubio who was the 3rd largest spend per vote, and a total spend of 11.8 million to Bush's 14.9 [1], and likely placed 3rd at least partially because of his ad spend. Bush is ultimately just not well liked by the new Republican base, and yes, no amount of money will change that. But among the candidates that resonate with that base, money has power.

[1] http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/and-the-total-amount-spent-campai...

Let me try to explain with a very very simple example why the average person might pay less, even though the average tax might be higher.

Person 1-10 make $10. Person 11 makes $100

Case 1, a flat tax of 30%

Person 1-10 pay $3, person 11 pays $30, for a total tax of $60 on $200 total income, that is 30%.

Case 2, a progressive tax of 1% on income up to $10, and a tax of 80% above that.

Person 1-10 pay $1, Person 11 pays 1% on $10 and pays 80% on $90 which is $72, a total tax of $82 on $200 income, a 41% tax!!!

If you can't hold a company liable for the behavior of their employees, the company, in lieu of liability, could easily decide that it's too expensive to do things like background checks or training.

Could you please respond to my whole comment rather than cherry picking one thing I said.

> wealth doesn't beget wealth

The return on an investment in the S&P 500 over the past 50 years undermines this.

> absence of it does not prevent one from generating wealth.

Prevent is such a strong word. I'm not technically prevented from breaking the longest free-fall record. However, I do not have 1000s of skydives under my belt or connections in the community of record breaking skydiving. While I'm not technically prevented from getting those things, I'm behind the curve compared to someone that has those things.

> the manner in which it produce income inequality is not harmful

But he doesn't really present any real evidence that this is the case. Now, I agree, that some startups produce new wealth as some percentage of the wealth that their founders, investors, and employees reap. But it's obviously always more complicated than that. Take, for example, the Microsoft office suite, which by almost any measure created an immense amount of wealth. However, it also made a large number of jobs obsolete, and thus "redistributed" the wealth from people working typist style jobs. Take for example, smartphones, which again, have created an immense amount of wealth. However, they also allow smaller independent contractors who would otherwise have rented an office space, and hired a secretary, to simply use their smartphone to manage their day, thus "redistributing" some amount of wealth from a lower-middle class job to an upper-middle class job. Now, obviously, I've ignored that maybe, the loss of these jobs created new jobs that the workers who were displaced could do, but given that PGs argument was basically just "We make the pie bigger" with almost no evidence, my argument of "It's really not that simple" with some examples should be at least equally convincing to you.