mbar84

Fascinating. I wonder where he finds his volunteers. :-)

The only thing to which I will object here is the use of the word "only" from "not different in kind, only in degree".

There is a substantial difference in degree when dealing with atoms, molecules, homogenous materials vs. people who think, face incentives and understand game theory.

UBI cannot be implemented unless somebody pays for it. It's necessarily redistributive. All existing experiments only look at one half of the equation. I think it's a fair question to ask what the effect will be on people who on net will pay more than before this system was introduced. Breaking peoples legs is not a prerequisite for others to run faster.

> Are you going to start by examining distributive effects? Really?

Fair point. I guess you could run an experiment where money is simply taken away from people, destroyed and then look at the effect of that in isolation.

I understand the argument and I accept the idea of natural experiments in principle. The most difficult thing with all of these is the ceteris paribus (holding all else constant), or as a second best, correcting for known confounding factors. This is in such stark contrast to a lab setting, where an adversarial scientist can regard a hypothesis as wrong and construct an experiment to prove it so, only to find out that the hypothesis isn't falsified. With statistics and models on the other hand it always devolves into discussions about variables, confounding factors and there's never a satisfying resolution, especially on controversial results.

The number of places for bias to creep in are way to many. I think the econometrics people have gone down a hopeless path, guided by wishful thinking and demand from people who want us to be able to make statements about things which we just cannot do.

The parts of economics that are valuable are not based on econometrics, but upon reasoning from first principles: Incentives, supply and demand, game theory etc. under which I would argue all of your examples fall.

Because people aren't lab mice. My favourite example are claims wrt. experiments for the Universal basic income. These experiments always pertain to people who receive more money than previously, but somehow never include a proportional group of people from whom the money is taken away. To do this experiment correctly, you would have to pick a random sample of the population and do the redistribution regardless of what any of the participants want.

Economics is not a science like physics. We can't do controlled experiments, we can't falsify hypothesis. This leads to very muddy waters and what you are left with are two kinds of economists: Those who tell people what they want to hear and those nobody listens to.

Econometrics gives people everything they want to hear, and with a scientific veneer as a bonus. The HN crowd should however appreciate how susceptible this is to the tyranny of metrics. Claude-Frédéric Bastiat warned of this over a century ago with his parable of the broken window: Think not only of what you can see (the glazier who is employed to repair the window), but also of what you cannot see (the alternative purchase of a suit) had the window not been broken.

I would argue, that a more narrow font gives you more bang for the buck in terms of information per area of foveal vision. Even if something looks aesthetically more pleasing, if it serves is purpose better, you'll get used to everything else.

My history is: Monoid -> Iosevka SS05 -> Essential PragmataPro

I just compared the latter two to JetBrains Mono, and at least on my settings, doing a blink comparison, they both look more clear to me.

I think it has to do with rendering. Have a spin with iosevka-term-ss05.

> lack of willingness on the side of companies to actually develop talent.

Do you have any ideas about how to match the kind of compensation so that it is aligned with that investment. If I employ somebody and build up their skills, what's to stop them from just jumping ship and capturing the payoff for my investment all for themselves?

Exactly correct. If you want to get anywhere, the correct thing to advocate for is complete abolition of copyright.

https://questioncopyright.org/ http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

The vaccine is intended to be an intramuscular injection. The risk of myocarditis is possibly linked to an accidental intravenous injection. With aspiration, the person performing the injection has a chance to detect that they hit a blood vessel instead of the muscle and try again.

The term "trickle-down" was a pejorative from the start, so if you ever have the intent to convince somebody, then you're going to have to start by not using pejoratives as if that's what the opposing side is advocating for. It's like you started calling people f*ktards with a f*ktard-theory and have done so for so long that you've forgotten, that's not how they see themselves. Now you're confused that nobody on the side you call f*ktards is listening to you or taking your arguments seriously.

It's important to remember that the direction of the causal link is from the value of each satoshi to the cost of electricity use by miners, not the other way around. People value sats, for whatever their reasons. Because they value sats, the mining costs can be financed. If people had no reason to value sats, there would be no mining. The best way to undermine Bitcoin energy use, would be to talk to your local central bank.

> So, architects, be bold. Go crazy. Gothic futurism. Do it.

All other things being equal, yes please. My bias is to think that all other things are not equal. In particular:

1. The price of creating beautiful unique pieces is probably higher and more uncertain. It's probably cheaper to churn out boxes using prefab components and so the dominant architecture will follow that constraint.

2. It's not the architects that are too timid, it's committees that must be convinced and they are biased toward conservative designs.

The more productive call to action would be something like: Look at new fabrication methods, materials, workflows on the building site and ask how the envelope of design can be expanded without introducing cost and risk.

I have been using cuelang.org now for half a year and have nothing but praise to give.

No Iosevka?

I hope Apple will make a 25th anniversary edition of the iPod, with modern connectors and internals but a physically clicky wheel like the original.

More and smaller companies. More labour mobility. If companies are in competition and people can move, then wages will be bid up close to their level of productivity.

No shit. Bitcoin is both a technological, economic and a political project. Nobody who understands this would mistake Schneier for a likely candidate to be the creator of Bitcoin.

Who knows about correlation or causation, but programming and humility go together. Training people to always ask the questions:

  - How do I know that this is true?
  - What would otherwise have to be true for this conclusion to follow? 
  - How can I bisect this process to test a hypothesis?

So much wishful thinking and jumping to conclusions could be avoided if programming (and debugging more specifically) is a training to viscerally understand the scientific method.

Why is "even" in the title? People can't give them money fast enough and it is somehow mysterious that they're earning a profit?

The balance of cost and benefits is not as clear as you may think.

https://questioncopyright.org/ http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

I wrote a criminally underused library that does much the same kind of transformations: https://github.com/mbarkhau/lib3to6/tree/master/src/lib3to6

The main issue with such a test is that it doesn't test the effect on those who would be footing the higher tax bill.

Since scale and locality is such an issue here, I wonder if there are any concepts for integrating such a system in new mid-rise buildings. Similar to an elevator shaft, but with a weight of depleted uranium instead of the passenger car.

You're digging for the foundation anyway, maybe maybe the marginal cost to dig a few meters deeper is worth it. You're building with a crane anyway, maybe the marginal cost to build a steel frame tower on the roof is worth it. It's certainly not a mine shaft, but perhaps better than nothing.

Cmd+K menus are amazing. I would love to see adoption in Gimp or Inkskape instead of having 90s style dropdown menus.