kylebrown

Not sure if paid shill or just biased?

The Bloomberg article was about the wealth amassed by Xi's extended family.[1] This New Yorker piece cites an article by Geremie Barme which points out that of the 48 highest-profile corruption cases, none were targeted at "second-generation reds" (aka princelings)[2]. Note that the very high profile case of corrupt princeling Bo Xilai was just prior to Xi's appointment. The ostensible anti-corruption crusade embarked on afterward was targeted at scapegoat officials "from ‘commoner’ 平民 families." Indeed, Barme's article quotes numerous princeling Party officials extolling the inherent virtue of "bureaucrats from the Red Second Generation" and their naturally-born resistance to vice and corruption (Bo Xilai is an exceedingly rare anomaly). Instead, the real danger is "Bureaucrats who come from extreme poverty in youth easily fall prey to vile excesses of corruption, whoring and gambling."

> It goes with saying that, in the murky corridors of Communist power, an impressive number of party gentry progeny, or the offspring of the Mao-era nomenclatura, have been implicated in corrupt practices, but word has it that, like the well-connected elites of other climes, they’ve enjoyed a ‘soft landing': being discretely relocated, shunted into delicate retirement or quietly ‘redeployed’. It’s all very comfy; and it’s all very much business as usual.

1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-29/xi-jinping...

2. https://www.thechinastory.org/2014/10/tyger-tyger-a-fearful-...

yup, this is the relevant paragraph:

> By the end of 2014, the Party had announced the punishment of more than a hundred thousand officials on corruption charges. Many foreign observers asked if Xi’s crusade was truly intended to stamp out corruption or if it was a tool to attack his enemies. It was not simply one or the other: corruption had become so threatening to the Party’s legitimacy that only the most isolated leader could have avoided forcing it back to a more manageable level, but railing against corruption was also a proven instrument for political consolidation, and at the highest levels Xi has deployed it largely against his opponents. Geremie Barme, the historian who heads the Australian Centre on China in the World, analyzed the forty-eight most high-profile arrests, and discovered that none of them were second-generation reds. “I don’t call it an anticorruption campaign,” a Western diplomat told me. “This is grinding trench warfare.”

One of the characteristics of bureaucracies is that laws are enforced arbitrarily.

One of the big pieces in React Native was reimplementing flexbox positioning (they did it using randomly generated test cases in a TDD-based process; described in the "diving deeper" video iirc). So as long as you use flexbox to position your html, it should be pretty portable to react native.

>Reimplementing controls with UIViews

If it's using UIViews, it isn't reimplementing native controls. It's using native controls, same as if it was implemented with (interface builder) .nib files. That's like saying "reimplementing html/css with html/css".

Haha, grow up. Useless to him !== useless to her. Marriage is dependent on compromise and negotiation, among other things. The world is chock-full of nonsense, and you will have to navigate it, whether you do so single or married.

Good grief, I don't think I've ever seen so much bad dating advice in one place as the comments in this thread, lol.

So then what is the cause?

Maybe because the demand for rings is not for their commodity value, but for their signaling value? So buying a ring from Tiffany's is worth a lot more than buying one off craiglist? And they aren't scarce so jewelers don't need to snatch them up off the "open market", but they need to make high margins to cover the overhead of their fancy stores.

Are you looking for a cause to the "absurdly large" degree? Or just pointing it out as some mysterious conspiracy?

Why would buying an expensive diamond be any different than buying a vintage car? Or really expensive speakers? Or any other toys the man will want?

I couldn't imagine being happy in a relationship without learning to compromise. Only the most important things should be considered "core principles", questions of religion, child-rearing, maybe hot-button political issues, and other moral litmus tests.

Whether or not she gets the ring she wants is a silly gender identity fixation, pretty harmless in comparison. If its a core principal, then so is whether or not he's allowed play video games, or buy a motorcycle, and so on. (Btw, I'm not engaged, married, nor ever bought a ring.)

> the problem here is literally that you will find that what you've bought can't be resold for anything like what you bought it for,

What does this have to do with an "open market price"? Most anything bought at retail price will not have the same resale value, that's just how resale markets work. They buy at wholesale and sell at retail. Pieces of jewelry and whatnot are not commodity bundles you can trade on a liquid market.

Retail art pieces aren't any different.. High dollar art trades at auctions (again, lots of liquidity), that's why they're easier to resell. But if you sink five grand into a piece from some gallery, good luck reselling it.

There are only a few outliers, by definition. So most people have to make the compromise. Coordination games work by punishing you when you don't follow the crowd.

When arbitrators/escrow-agents compete on fees, it drives fees lower as they attempt to undercut each other. That makes retirement attacks more likely (do a bunch of honest biz to get a good rating with the intention to get a big payoff from a final "score"). Its similar to the tragedy of the commons worries about miner revenue from transaction fees.

I think the better model is a more "decentralized oracle" design, perhaps something like TrustDavis or TruthCoin. With these "choose your arbitrator/oracle" market designs, it's a never ending game of distrust and whack-a-mole.

IME, IQ tests (like other standardized tests, SAT's, GRE's etc) are easily gamed. I did a couple practice ones and my score jumped up by 20+ points the second time. Where is the evidence that it measures some hidden factor? Seems to me that (like other standardized tests) it simply measures the subject's level of training and preparation.

> Honestly, after mind-taxing eight hour job, you want to go home, watch a movie, read a book or some other relaxing activity.

Then this person probably wouldn't find much time to do CTF challenges, either.

Cool, thanks for providing the option to change the board size. A good way to start is to play short games on a 9x9 board (19x19 is the official size, but games take a very long time to play out at that massive size). Just find a friend (or against yourself), and play out a bunch of games as quickly as you can, without overthinking every move. Doing this, you'll discover strategies much quicker on a small board than you could playing out games on large board.

The question isn't, "what's the cheapest fuel at the moment?" The question is what's the cheapest carbon-neutral power source that could scale up to meet future global demand?

Daniel Nocera has been arguing for years that using solar energy to split water into hydrogen (ie. the "artifical leaf") is the best strategy. Not even nuclear can scale to meet global demand[1]. But solar devices can be mass manufactured and distributed to the point-of-use (leap-frogging the need for massive infrastructure investment).[2]

1. http://web.mit.edu/professional/pdf/DGN_Daedalus.pdf > "Delivering this TW-value with nuclear energy would take the construction of eight thousand new nuclear-power plants. In other words, over the next forty-five years, we would have to construct one new nuclear-power plant every two days."

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12VPW-wS8yc

I think it is modeled in terms of endogenous vs exogenous entry. But I might be wrong, please correct me if I misunderstood.

The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response[1][2] is a must-read. The tldr; is that a continuous mechanism (sequential trade processing) only looks efficient in time-space, but is actually inefficient in volume-space (most of the volume trades at stale prices). The solution is discrete batch auctions (batch trade processing).

1. slides: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/HFT-Fre... 2. paper: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/HFT-Fre...

The 2nd-to-last slide[1] compares the IEX "speed bump" to other anti-HFT measures: "Ingenious, eliminates sniping. But, only works while IEX is small relative to the rest of the continuous market (free-rides off price discovery elsewhere)."

1. http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/HFT-Fre...

> doing otherwise would be an inefficiency in operations which would drive up the already high cost of education.

The biggest source of inefficiency is the bloated administration. In his most recent article, Accountability in the Ontario Ivory Towers, he does some estimates on how much the teaching budget (which is a tiny few percent of the total budget) would change if lecturers got fair pay.

The last paragraph from one of his follow-up articles, The Importance of Going Viral, is relevant:

"In fact the response has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone, except regular faculty. Not one message of support from anyone in a tenured position, in Physics or any other department. The status quo has considerable appeal when you are in the position of privilege."

Have any of the languages on this list been around for decades? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_programming_langu...

The current system is not the best of all possible worlds. There are better alternatives (eg. fair trade), ignoring them is just laziness.

Buying fair trade supports an alternative over the status quo.

> Imagine for example you could make $120,000 a year as a programmer, or $200,000 a year doing factory work. Do you think society will produce more programmers or more factory workers?

Say I can make $25k a year as a janitor, or $360k as an anesthesiologist. Is society producing more janitors, or more anesthesiologists?

TrustDavis is more like distributed escrow than reputation.

So if the baseline is 25% survive, then 75% fail, for a sum of 100%. How is it correct to compare that baseline to two numbers (66% and 88%) which don't sum to 100? Is failing different from not surviving?

That prediction doesn't improve over the prior. So its no better than the (biased) coin flip.

Its not clear from the article which factor the 50% figure applies. I doubt its the overall odds ratio, but rather the likelihood given some priors. For example, given a prior that 90% of startups fail, what is the likelihood that this particular startup will succeed? If the prior is already factored in, then the model predicts no better than a coin flip.

The point made in the article is that investing at the odds of a coin flip would be better than investing with incorrect risk assumptions (ie. buying into "particularly bad ideas").

Reflexive is the term used by George Soros: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)#In_...

Will augmented reality games (eg. Ingress) be more healthy activities than flat screen stay inside games?

Deep Mind Atari demo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ