kingkongrevenge

That's winning at the special olympics. They are both so slow you'd never use either for cpu constrained tasks.

> the ones he needs already exist for python but not for perl

Rather unlikely.

I'm always a bit puzzled by these claims of unreadable perl. Go find me perl I can't read: http://search.cpan.org/ . Where is it?

My roommate did this and got a large line of one year 0% interest credit, which he immediately maxed out on 4.5% one year CDs. Free money.

> There haven't been the large public works project perscribed by keneysian economics in japan.

At one point Japan was the single largest concrete importer in the world. They were building roads and bridges and train lines like crazy. It temporarily juiced the markets but did nothing to sustainably restart the economy.

Japan didn't so much subsidize the zombie banks as simply allow them to float along insolvent forever. They never forced bankruptcy or write-downs.

> The internet stocks bubble of the late 90s also was largely unrelated to government manipulation.

The NASDAQ went parabolic in 1999 just after Greenspan cut interest rates as a precautionary measure to juice the economy in preparation for Y2K.

Tulips are addressed elsewhere. I don't know anything about Eastern European housing, but I'll bet its riddled with subsidies and tax advantages just like it is here.

Yeah, the main point of the efficient market hypothesis is that high alpha (CAPM) is very, very hard to achieve, not that markets are steady and only react to new information.

I know it's not practical at the moment due to lack of deployment, but how does flex compare and contrast with silverlight/moonlight?

He seems kinda clueless to me. A whole article on the economic theory of recessions with no mention of malinvestment? He goes on at length about the efficient market hypothesis and bubbles yet never acknowledges that nobody can identify a bubble that has happened without government manipulation of the market. He goes on at length about Keynesian stimulus with no mention of its dismal failures, most notably in Japan.

There are always these rather ridiculous omissions and oversimplifications with krugman.

Large profits, duh.

People don't have straight forward mathematically rational utility curves. High risk returns are over priced in all markets. High beta stocks are overvalued relative to low beta stocks, for example. Security is also "irrationally" over valued (treasuries, put options).

You could say this is irrational, or you could just say it's the way people are.

Many working poor have an effectively zero probability of dramatically improving their financial situation. The odds of winning the lottery are higher than zero. Therefore, there is a sort of rationality to playing if you have correctly self assessed that you're stuck in near poverty.

That said, it's deplorable government is running these programs. Only 40 years ago this was the illegal domain of mobsters and sleazeballs. Now the state has muscled in on the action is legitimizing the moral message that you can get something for nothing.

Yes, exactly. That is the problem. Capital destroying companies are attracting capital due to government interference, when really they should be liquidated and bought up by competent managers.

> opertunity cost

The opportunity cost was enormous. The bailouts were a disaster for American capitalism. We now have a huge tattoo that reads "WARNING: Crony Capitalist Country. Proceed with caution".

Don't ignore the very difficult to quantify effects of the bailouts on the credit markets. The whole lesson will surely make the US a less credit worthy market and raise more questions about the dollar.

The real cost is the near certainty we'll get an even bigger blow up five to ten years down the road. Thousands of people who should now be looking for a new career are still in finance. Moral hazard's a bitch. The system NEEDED many jaw dropping bankruptcies and liquidations.

There's a lot of rather convincing literature out there on the potential of tidal power. The energies are enormous and the technology is straightforward. It's not like photovoltaics where we're waiting on improvements in cost. It's simple turbines.

Tidal power ends up attracting a lot of conspiracy theories. Why are we bombarded with news and policies about wind and solar when on paper huge tidal generation capacity is probably viable right now? There could be something there, I don't know.

> require a lot of R&D which will both create jobs and lead to additional discoveries

If it's government funded/subsidized it's more likely to divert capital from more productive R&D and uses in the economy.

> first one to see that this domain is somewhere C++ will excel in

C++ is used a lot in the big sites like Amazon and Yahoo and Google. The frameworks just aren't open sourced.

C++ remains a lot faster and a lot less memory intensive than Java/C#. It would make sense to use it any time load is pushing the hardware.

> It doesn't even have automated patch management

That's not true. You can automatically keep synced up.

Economics is inherently political. Please drop the pretense that there can ever be economic study not deeply interwoven with politics.

So Counter Intelligence was weak in that case. It's an anecdote, and there are plenty of anecdotes about well kept secrets throughout history.

> the idea that you can keep a secret that 100,000+ people are in on is just silly

100,000 would be hard, but 10,000 vetted employees threatened with the power of the state for the rest of their lives is definitely done in militaries all over the world.

Look at the never ending revelations about the early Soviet era. Many aspects of the GULAG system are only becoming clear now.

I do not find the argument that governments can't keep secrets convincing at all. Even if the seal isn't airtight there is often such a highly effective ability to muddy the waters the truth becomes impossible to see through the disinformation.

People say there is no law authorizing the income tax. I don't remember the arguments nullifying the 16th amendment, but they have them.

> found that there are.

I can't see that.

> equal or greater benefit in any of the health indicators

Insulin resistance, for sure.

> strength training induces neurogenesis

What google informs me about neurogenesis is that it's tied to VOmax training, which long distance running is not especially good for. Interval training, a la tabata intervals, is best for that.

I very much suspect the mental benefits from actual sports exceed running. The stimulation from tennis or basketball would surely do your mind more good than pounding pavement.

I am not aware of any bubbles that happened without government policy. There is always a state driven monetary or fiscal component.

> maintaining a stable currency - notably 1935-1970 and 1980-1990.

By stable you mean inexorably lose value through inflation? The dollar in real terms is down something like 98% since the establishment of the Fed. Flat or falling prices was the pre-Fed norm.

Abuses and deficiencies of any one currency would be kept in check by competition, even if one currency dominated. An issuing authority couldn't abuse their position because everyone would just flee the currency.

This is all about runners vs non-exercisers. Again, the literature on strength training and sprint work indicates major benefits not gained from long distance running. I doubt there are any distance running health benefits compared to benefits from short distance running and/or walking.

Comparing non-exercisers to marathon runners is irrelevant. I repeat: marathons inflict measurable physiological damage. A fit person who got fit by means other than long distance running would not have this damage.

There is a much greater volume of clinical research oriented around treadmills and distance running in general because it is very easy to quantify and study. This does not by consequence recommend distance running.

I think it's pretty true. That list is heavy on "plumbing" modules that are pulled in as dependencies. I don't know a good one that's more indicative of what programmers deliberately pull of the shelf for a project, which is what I was talking about.

Let's remember Greenspun used TCL for his commercial work.

That doesn't even mention running or endurance training. It's about fit vs non-fit people, which isn't relevant. I'm talking about a fit person who runs a couple 60s 400s and goes home vs a fit person who heads out to run three miles.

There are two points here. 1) There is a lot of evidence that marathon type running is BAD for you. Not running period, just heavy long distance running. 2) Strength training and sprints have better health benefits, with the added bonus they take a small fraction of the time of distance running.

Any sufficiently complicated Lisp program contains ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of the top 100 perl modules.

Conventional wisdom is that long slow jogs are a good way to get healthier. The clinical evidence indicates most people would do better with some sub mile sprinting.

Does the book address the physiological damage documented in my link?