kingkongrevenge

> score the same on standardized tests

Statistically that's not true. I don't understand what you're trying to say.

The typical black American is 85%+ genetically "African". A tiny slice of people misreporting race wouldn't impact things much.

And I don't follow your premise that inherent differences wouldn't be quantitatively consistent. That's how it is with all the other measurable differences between races.

I've seen the claim that black academic test scores are consistently one standard deviation below the norm regardless of the test: sat, gre, lsat, mcat, erb, afqt, whatever. Always one standard deviation. Unfortunately, that lends weight to the genetic argument.

Are you people freakishly proportioned? Affordable well cut brands abound. I think you're really just justifying your foppish clothing budgets.

The problem with fit is only that mass market clothing is cut for fat asses, as the mass market is now obese. But it's not like you have to go for some high-end brand to get properly sized clothing not cut for fat asses. I mean, LL Bean sells reasonable quality "trim fit" stuff cheaply.

Pink dress shirts have been "in" for 30 years. 100 years for all I know. It's not exactly a fashion statement.

Marathons ARE damaging. Often permanently to some degree. Very long distance running is fairly stupid from a health perspective.

Top ten reasons not to run marathons: http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons.html

> that doesn't mean you pass on traits like demographic fertility, or intelligence.

IQ is well known to be highly heritable. I would be very surprised if proper research came up with a null result on fertility heritability.

This appears applicable to whites in the west and Asians in east Asia. I'm not so sure this is universally true. You see big differences in fertility rates in different ethnic groups in the US.

And it may not even generally be true. It might just be how things appear right now given current circumstances. If you cut off immigration to the US, which is driving growth, I doubt the white fertility rate would stay at or below replacement. Wages for low skill labor would rise and fertility would go up. Who knows what the birth rate in Japan would be if their economic policy were not so incompetent.

They're also highly dependent on imports of US produced food, and so probably not a great example of something to emulate.

The estimate is nonsense. Africa's population has trebled (or whatever) yet the green revolution never happened in Africa. The continent is overwhelmingly fed on pre-green revolution crops grown in pre-green revolution ways with low fossil fuel inputs. The old ways scaled up. (Though arguably at great cost to natural habitat.)

Certainly there would be many more farmers (less efficient) without this gent's green revolution advancements and the food would be more expensive, but it's baseless to assert everyone would have starved otherwise.

> Jen says researchers suspect that treadmill running is more intense and leads to improvements in muscle aerobic capacity, and this increased aerobic capacity, in turn, affects the brain more than the wheel jogging.

So the subjects didn't know how to lift and the researchers didn't know how to instruct the subjects to lift. The suggestion that a proper 20 minute lifting session would be less intense than 20 minutes on a treadmill is ridiculous. Done correctly lifting will leave you gasping for air.

> the perfect way of representing the syntax trees

Humans don't think in syntax trees.

Perl 5.10 and up has a pluggable regex engine interface.

This just isn't a substantial cost any more. With the latest kernels, thread per connection servers are competitive with event driven servers. This was not true a few years ago.

I think Harry Browne's "permanent portfolio" deserves a lot more popular attention than it gets.

In Fail-Safe Investing Harry said to allocate your wealth equally between: stocks (broad market index), bonds, gold, and cash (CDs, money market). Rebalance back to equal allocations roughly once a year. Try not only to diversify a fraction of this internationally, but make sure to have some wealth entirely outside your home country out of reach of your government.

This portfolio has the critical property of stability, which is very important yet underrated for most personal investors, who are told to go heavy on equities. It captures inverse correlations so that it tends to grow steadily, rather than shoot up and down along a growth trend as equity markets do. It underperformed equities during the late 90s, but never nosedived in the early 2000s and actually continued to grow.

It has done very well historically. It grows steadily in each of an inflationary, deflationary, or high growth macro environment.

It's kinda ridiculous to try and extract personal investing lessons from Buffett. He cultivates this image of some grandpa who is just good at picking stocks, but it's baloney. He has always operated with an edge. Information advantages or super cheap capital from insurance companies.

I don't think threads are slower or less scalable anymore. The OS threading systems have improved a lot over the last four years.

The roads are certainly built and maintained with capital diverted from more productive uses. Even if the postal service didn't lose money hand over fist I'd still call it subsidized, as it wouldn't exist without its legal monopoly.

One can argue whether road costs are covered by user fees or not. The subsidized policing and EMS costs are typically ignored, for example. You might want to include some of the military and intel budgets related to oil security.

Google "street car conspiracy". The evidence is that car ownership rates had pretty much leveled off. Everyone who wanted a car had one. Most people were pretty happy with street cars. There was an active campaign from moneyed interests to use government to build highways and rip up street cars.

Every day car accidents kill a jet liner worth of Americans, and maim many more. Driving is arguably more dangerous than moderate smoking. Yet unlike smoking driving is subsidized and encouraged.

The orange line train he's talking about runs down the middle of I-66, a major highway. There are dense, high price walkable areas all along the orange line corridor. They sprang up out of car dealerships and strip malls in the 25 years since the line was built.

Cars were widespread and affordable in the 20s and 30s. Car dependent suburbs without street cars didn't happen until the 40s and 50s. It's not as simple as just cars. It was the confluence of Eisenhower's interstate program and white flight from blacks as well as a crescendo of corruption and incompetence in the governance of the urban cores.

I think a major piece of the puzzle is that living in a car dependent area has been an effective way for the middle class to segregate from poor people. If you're not rich enough for the well policed part of the city, you can still get a car and live somewhere poor people have difficulty getting getting to.

Hadoop is not "for CPU bound problems." It's for huge data. There are much better frameworks for the problem of splitting a parallelizable computation across machines. Nobody would use Hadoop just for that.

Why would Java be the fastest way to do computations with Hadoop? You can use many languages for the map/reduce pieces. The fastest language would be fastest language, not necessarily Java.

Hadoop is a platform for traversing very large data sets. It is not really for "number crunching." One can use any language for the map/reduce pieces of Hadoop.

You have a simulation that will take either four days to run or five. That's not tiny. And that's not so rare a problem. Not everyone is doing web apps.

I remain skeptical of these micro benchmarks. Almost every time I've messed around with porting pieces of C++ to Java or C# and benchmarking it I get a large difference in favor of C++.

It certainly does. Anal sex is far more dangerous.

Joe doing it up the butt created the AIDS epidemic. Seems publicly relevant to me. Not that I personally care much about Joe doing it up the butt, but once you think government has a role in sculpting society there is no distinction between personal social issues and personal business issues.

Women choosing to have children out of wedlock has a huge effect on everyone. Much more than some guy offering unpaid internships.

Procreation and norms of marriage and family have enormous social ramifications. There is no distinction.

Perl has all these same libraries and more. We were talking about code in the actual language.