kingkongreveng_

> it keeps my house value up

On a regular working man's salary my grandfather could rent a house on a pristine, practically undeveloped beach for a month a summer a short drive from a major east coast city. You are arguing it's a good thing that population growth has made this no longer possible.

> opening the immigration floodgates would be no bad thing

Easily another hundred million people would move here if they could. That would be disastrous.

When is the country full? The US is arguably overpopulated by 100 million. It is not possible to be an environmentalist and favor continued high immigration rates.

All this talk about importing "talent" is highly disingenuous. The bulk of current immigration is low skill and puts pressure on low-end wages, and many government services budgets.

The history of immigration in America is a handful of waves interspersed by much longer periods of assimilation with close to zero immigration. The current wave, beginning in 1968, is absolutely unprecedented in volume and length.

Is it really going over your head that the issue here is the fishing rights are public? Tragedy of the commons, all that?

I get a kick out of these consecutive sentences:

> the company’s ... continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year. ... this egregious privatization of what is essentially a public resource is shocking.

The whole issue is that public federal waters and fishing rights are being abused but this guy complains the problem is privatization.

I don't think the actual government improved. The city turned around, but that's just because loads of crack heads finally died off, many gangsters are permanently incarcerated, and then yuppies moved in and pushed up property values.

Atlanta is a reasonably well run city. It gets cited a lot as a black city run by blacks that's a good place to do business.

NYC government is high cost and plagued by unionization.

My experience as an urban cyclist is that close calls are inevitable, cyclist never at fault or otherwise.

> cycling is fine in the US

My ER doctor friend says urban cycling is idiotic.

I do it all the time but you're kidding yourself if you don't realize it is extremely dangerous.

The more important issue in the US regarding bikes is the lack of density. It's simply not feasible to bike the kinds of distances most people need to go.

Other way around. Darker skin in North America is correlated to more cancer, due to the consequent vitamin D deficiency.

Most of the population is now vitamin D deficient because people don't spend much time outside.

I'd say it takes just a year of solid effort to get good at cranking out quality code on a platform. What takes years is learning how to quickly diagnose and attack bugs, develop instincts for what tools will be appropriate or suck, smell when a subsystem should just be scrapped and rewritten, etc.

> the genes typically do not replicate across studies. Even when they do replicate, they never explain more than a tiny fraction of any interesting trait.

Epigenetics. Diet and lifestyle have large effects on how a genome is expressed. And even on how the genome is expressed in future generations.

I thought this was well understood? Why no mention of it in the article?

You didn't explain anything. Why would the value of a constant amount of money increasing in proportion to productivity growth lead to "wild fluctuations"?

It has a cutesy Japanese style mascot. Also, they love robots.

Perl is perfectly readable. Go find me perl I can't read on CPAN.

Like C++, perl greatly rewards expertise and experience. If you want to be able to read everything inside two months, well, go elsewhere. But I'd say you're missing out.

Yes, gold money would result in steady deflation as the economy grows. We have wild price swings now. Look at chart of any major commodity over the last 10 years. Gold would stabilize it as there would be no hot money flows on a gold standard.

Steady deflation is natural and good. As technology and business grow more productive prices generally fall. Prices fell for most of the 1800s (pre central bank).

The problematic deflation associated with depressions is simply the consequence of fiat money credit bubbles collapsing. That deflation is an indictment of artificial interest rates and fiat money.

Interest rates are zero but global credit outstanding is still crashing. Monetarism is dead. Mises has been proved right. "There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion".

We are in for a period of deflation despite the central banks' best efforts. After the deflation, hyperinflation isn't out of the question if governments give up on credit money and just start spending freshly printed cash.

The supply of gold is irrelevant as long as the above ground gold stores dwarf what is mined every year. A single ounce of gold is theoretically sufficient to run the entire economy. The value of that ounce would just shoot up as the economy grew more productive.

What exactly do you mean by "liquidity needs"? If people need cash they earn it or save it. That cash is supposed to represent real wealth someone saved. If it's printed out of thin air it just represents a theft from people who have actually produced and saved.

The argument is that if it's a strict commodity currency, there's no Great Depression. No cheap money boom, no depressions. Free market interest rates naturally rise and fall to control the extremes of the business cycle.

Sarbox is bad, but I think a lot of the reduction in IPOs is just a reversion to historical norms.

Enough with the scientific exceptionalism. There is only rigorous reasoning and solid evidence, and flawed reasoning. It's the same in any human endeavor, whether we're talking phds or plumbers.

Any time people start throwing around the words "science" and "scientists" a lot I get increasingly skeptical. They don't add much to any discussion that isn't centered on appeals to authority.

The meat we have now is rather unhealthy and unnatural. Cows are built to eat grass and chickens are built to eat mostly bugs. Instead we stuff them all with corn and soy. This makes the omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratios very wrong. This imbalance is strongly implicated in many human diseases, heart disease in particular. The only truly healthy meat is grass fed.

I'm very skeptical, but it seems at least possible to me that test tube meat could be formulated to better approximate "natural" grass fed meat than the mass produced feedlot stuff we have now. They could fix the fatty acid ratios by "feeding" the meat with algae secretions. The only way to find out will be with experimentation.

Of course this brings us back to the question of what our food market would look like if all grain subsidies were removed. It's quite likely the vast corn fields would be converted to pasture and healthy meat would get cheap. And it's quite likely that proper pastured meat production is more efficient than all the test tube processes.

The thing is he's strictly a popularizer of flattering stuff. It's all designed to make his bourgeois readership feel like they have special insights, or feel good about themselves. One would think a lot of uncomfortable truths or null results (common sense or the experts are actually right) would come up, but they never do.

Gold's relatively low practical demand makes the price stable, and that's the point. The alternatives you mention have volatile demand and are impacted by technological change. The prices aren't stable.

Your fingernail clippings will turn to dust in fifty years. Refined gold is eternal, and universally valued.

> people get really hungry if they don't eat for long stretches between meals

If you follow garbage diet advice and eat a bran muffin, banana, and skim milk, yeah, you'll be starving two hours after eating. For breakfast I had four eggs scrambled in butter and full fat yogurt with blueberries. I'm just getting hungry now, 12 hours later.

> the hunter-gatherer duo usually do not have to search far for food

Are you kidding? They walk miles and miles.

> !kung san

I don't think the san illustrate your point, but in any case they are a bad model. They are stunted and generally unhealthy, scraping by on marginal desert land. They were forced off the good land. There really aren't any representative modern day hunter gatherers. There are only historical accounts.

Strong correlations are very interesting very often. And this particular hypothesis is interesting well beyond correlation if you care to read into it.

Be honest, the downvote was a close-minded reactionary impulse.

> eat frequently

The human body is made to run off a gas tank of fat reserves, not to be tethered to an extension cord of continuous eating. Eating every couple hours is historically impossible, and just on that basis one can reason it's likely maladaptive. You eat a proper meal, insulin levels spike to put the energy in fat and glycogen, insulin levels drop, then you switch over to running on the fat and glycogen. You are not built to always stay in the "post-meal" state of elevated insulin and fat storage.

There is no basis to the idea that eating frequently boosts metabolism. I think the practice really has origins in the body building community where they want somewhat elevated insulin levels in order to pack on mass. Body builders pack on fat along with muscle and then shed the fat later for competition.

Some recent studies indicate that the same life extending benefits of calorie restriction can be had by eating only every other day. The point is to spend much time with low insulin levels.

> I've lost 25 pounds of body fat and gained 7 pounds of muscle mass in the last 14 weeks using this approach.

Notice how you never hear from people who have stayed thin for years by counting calories. The research indicates it just doesn't work. Even in the short term we only get these anecdotes of success and the data indicates it's not very effective.