jswinghammer

The US banned using foreign coins in the mid 19th century as a misguided attempt to bolster patriotism. Americans routinely used Spanish coins in private transactions up until this point. I think (don't entirely remember if) part of the reason was to encourage the use of US silver coins which had been driven out of circulation due to the US government overvaluing gold relative to silver. The basic problem was that by having the US dollar fixed to two exchange rates that one was always being driven out of circulation as the exchange rate changed. This lead to the free silver movement and the Populists getting excited about seeing only silver used to back dollars.

This is a misguided attempt to trap people into their own crappy currency. The US currency isn't any better fundamentally but as of now we don't force citizens to hold dollars for savings.

Typically you buy a tech stock for growth since they rarely pay dividends. When you see that the growth is negative and potentially accelerating there is probably little reason to hold the stock-particularly when they have no earnings.

I find things that work for every meal and try new recipes. Bread tastes great but I avoid it because if I eat it then I will pay a heavy price. Try the primal blueprint for 60 days and see what happens. I noticed a huge change in 24 hours but my results are not typical.

Yeah calories matter but processed foods seem to be the real culprit. They make it easy to eat too much and get addicted to the fat salt sugar combo that leads to problems.

I hate how grains make me feel so I am not going back. Losing weight is a side effect of having more energy via cutting out food that was toxic for me to be eating. This isn't religion but just empirical testing on my part. If it didn't work I wouldn't do it.

I avoid processed foods as a rule so it's hard for me to get a lot of salt anyway. I really don't worry about it one way or the other.

Yeah I haven't touched a chip in 6 months maybe.

I believe it. For me wheat really messes me up but white rice is fine. I eat it now and then because I like it so much. Whatever works.

The Primal Blueprint is the best source of information on this approach. It's less of a diet and more of a lifestyle change. It was a great read.

As someone who has lost around 40 pounds of fat switching to the high fat paleo diet I'm not at all surprised that the current state of the conventional wisdom on food is wrong in any number of ways. It is funny that we really have no idea what we should be eating naturally at all.

Grains were making me sick and I didn't notice for years. It wasn't until I read a book listing side effects of grain consumption that I considered that the grains were the cause of my problems.

This is a lot like CSS expressions right?

If they weren't horrible for performance and not standard they'd probably be fairly cool:

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2007/07/high_perf...

Well in terms of economics what you're talking about is more specialization and niche audiences being served. HBO made itself into the network to watch smart television during the last decade. Right now that's less true as other networks figured out that people like smart things.

I'd say if you were not watching "The Wire" or "Six Feet Under" that you're missing out on something rather interesting. "The Wire" was unique partially because it was like a very long, very good movie in terms of quality and respect for the audience.

There's so much good television now that I don't have patience for the argument that TV is worthless. I don't turn on the television except to watch something specific but when I do I find the quality seems to get better year after year even with my favorite shows ending. More shows are willing to experiment and try to reach new audiences.

I won't speak to the shows on Discovery or whatever since they sound dumb to me but the shows with actual plot and characters are better than ever.

That's basically what I'm referring to. There is clearly a difference between someone suffering from schizophrenia and a person who tries to hear from God. The person I'm referring to in my post asked me how I knew I wasn't a schizophrenic. I asked him if he thought I was and of course he did not. That's sort of where that ended.

I mean just consider the comparison you just made. How many schizophrenics have you heard of who can even keep their lives together without medication? It's a very serious condition. Compare their lives to that of the average churchgoer. It's not even debatable which you'd prefer to have.

You may have the good sense to keep those thoughts to yourself but don't be surprised if you share that no one really thinks highly of you for it.

I live in Boston and I'm a Christian and it's a little weird because most of the people I meet are not interested in things of faith at all. Some people I work with tried to guess my upbringing and guessed raised Catholic and now never goes to church. I told them that I was raised atheist and now you'll find me at church every Sunday. People were fairly surprised. I don't meet too many people who go to church around here so it's rare and I understand their reaction. They were all nice to me about it though.

All that said I think atheists run into the problem of not their behavior but rather the behavior of "that guy". You know him. Maybe you are him. It's "that guy who can't shut up and says insulting things about people who believe in anything spiritual at all" But "that guy" is a pain to be around. I worked with "that guy" once and hearing him compare my beliefs to the flying spaghetti monster was pretty ignorant and if I valued his opinion more than I do would have been insulting. He would repeat this week after week seemingly escalating his rhetoric to upset me. I have long since worked out how I feel about all this so I held my own just fine. My only point in mentioning him is that for another person this might have been pretty annoying and upsetting.

I've run into "that guy" on multiple occasions-enough to notice who he is and steer clear at parties and at work. The only advice I have for you is if you are that guy or find yourself being that guy just stop. You're giving all reasonable, just don't believe in God but don't want to hassle you non-believers a really bad name. Though so do Sam Harris and Dawkins so maybe you should avoid them too.

Yes I believe that because as a libertarian he would oppose using state power to give one group an advantage over another.

A libertarian is happy to allow any two or more adults to marry should they wish to do so. A libertarian just asks that no one's marriage is recognized by the state because it's not a matter that the state should be involved in. Can you really say that after gay marriage is legal everywhere (which will never happen) that marriage is actually equal? What about polygamists? I'm perfectly happy to allow them to obtain licenses to get married but it seems easier to just say government has no proper role in what is a private affair. This seems to make your case even better because it just removes from politics what is not a political issue.

On what basis do you say he's against gay rights? He has the most progressive opinion on marriage of any candidate. Which is to say abolish marriage licenses entirely. It's only very recently (in the history of marriage) that marriage became an issue to the state anyway.

The band "Cults" debut album is pretty good. The fast paced tempo is good for getting me to get started working instead of reading logs or email.

For me they were:

"An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought" by Murray Rothbard

This was great because of the history lesson packed into a book that's mostly about economics. I didn't realize how libertarian the economic thought of the east was until I read this book. I also appreciated the focus on economics before Adam Smith since I knew only about Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas's contributions prior to reading the book. Rothbard's take-down of Marx was both thorough and satisfying.

"City of God" by Augustine of Hippo

The history lesson here was helpful as was the perspective on how the church should view the state though I should have invested more money in a better version for Kindle. The version I had was filled with grammatical mistakes due to the poor translation to the Kindle format.

We can agree that traffic rarely comes in at an average rate.

Is your name a wire reference? If so well done.

This is changing because MyISAM is not really a true database (in the ACID compliant sense of the term). I guess I would have assumed they were MyISAM too but they don't perform differently enough at low usage levels that you would notice it right? How big was this was application?

They were disinterested. Under normal conditions you are correct and most people would be interested but they were not.

The & and | operators weren't good enough for him?

That stuff ends up in databases because on your average team the knowledge of databases drops dramatically when you get past selects and maybe left joins. I worked with a few developers who wrote and lived with queries that were taking 30 seconds each to run on their local machines because they couldn't imagine how to fix them and just waited for me to get assigned to the project in a week or two so I would fix it. They just kept raising the timeout values until the pages rendered. The problem was simple in that they were accessing a table with 30 million rows without using any index at all so changing it to use the clustered index made the query return almost instantly.

I've seen similar things where people come up with crazy ways of doing your most basic database tasks.

I've seen and had to debug longer stored procedures for sure but never a single query. I can't see the last page so maybe this is a stored procedure. It's hard to tell.

I usually take a much different approach with this issue. I had to support IE 6 for years after anyone could reasonably have been asked to do that. I did it because our customers used it a lot and asking them to upgrade wasn't in the cards for us. We could have lost 30% of our business or just not do all the cool things we wanted to do.

I realize it's not cool but we chose to just not do all those things. IE 6 does support a lot of what you need to do and once you figure that out it becomes easier to make it work without having to go back and fix it later. I'm pretty good at it now so I don't really complain if someone asks me to make something work in IE 6. It's not a huge deal if you know what the issues are.

I agree that it's been oversold. I met many people in school who couldn't compare and contrast essays that were in direct opposition to one another. They shouldn't have been in school to begin with. I'm not sure I agree about the science part though. Isn't the pay for scientists rather low for the most part? Seems like my scientist friends are always poor.

Seems like we could use more engineers though.

Has this book always been so expensive? I don't remember paying that much for my copy. That was ten years ago though so maybe I'm just getting old :)

Is any textbook or mainstream economist any different?

Hazlitt is responding to other people's economic claims and refuting them with his own reasoning from an Austrian perspective. Chances are the reader already believes a lot of the errors pointed out by Hazlitt in the book so Hazlitt doesn't really need to get lip service to ideas that politicians and mainstream economists promote without a second thought about it.

I would find a show about start-ups without drama interesting. There are reality shows that seem to be fairly drama free like "19 and counting" (so I'm told anyway). I honestly feel like the producers of the show weren't giving the audience enough credit and just made up normal reality show nonsense.

This doesn't surprise me considering how it's clear they were trying to play up the drama angle in some of the other startups on the show. I honestly thought after seeing it that she was starting a Groupon like thing for fashion and found that it didn't work. That LinkedIn thing was particularly weird too. It's good that she wrote this because the show sort of made her look foolish.

That's a very compelling feature. When having to read mail comes up it's usually out of the ordinary from whatever I'm doing but if I could just make a page to process what's in it then that would be interesting.