monkeypizza

Huh, I imagine that internally nobody notices this type of problem because they all use keyboard shortcuts and hit 'f' to forward.

Zenni, eyebuydirect, goggle4u are all in this space and provide cheaper glasses. It seems like new ones keep starting, then slowly raise prices, leaving a gap for a new minimum cost provider.

Eyeglasses are an interesting example of a market failure - customers have been paying 10x the actual price for an important item, for 20+ years, and the market hasn't fixed it.

In Beijing I used to just head down to Panjiayuan Zhaojia Glasses City and get pairs for ~15 bucks. Rest your head on a machine that reads your prescription, pick out frames, bargain, 30 minutes later you have your glasses.

In the US glasses are medicalized, which hides the reality that glasses are really cheap and simple to make; for people without money this causes real harm.

A feature I want on goodreads is "for me and a friend, show me the rarest book we have read in common". It would be great to find connections between people that would be hard to discover otherwise.

Same thing for groups - it's fun to try to find the "rarest common denominator" in the books, movies, or places visited domain.

Gwern has a discussion of Nicotine, and basically concludes it's safe:

https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

The newlines are baked into the rss feed too, which breaks my newsreader. I've talked to the maintainer but they didn't want to change the stack they use to produce it.

I love this newsletter but they switched to sending out content wrapped in pre tags with baked-in newlines a few years ago and the value of fighting through wasn't worth it.

The book "How to Change your Mind" by Michael Pollan has a good profile of him (and several other people and groups mentioned in this thread).

If you don't give him credit for that, what would you give him credit for? If he stopped Carreyrou, you'd obviously blame him. Therefore in order for your judgement to be meaningful, you have to admit that him allowing Carreyrou to go ahead and topple the house of cards was a good action. Otherwise no matter what he does you judge him negatively - and in that case, your decision is predetermined and not of informational value for anyone.

"it's" ALWAYS means "it is" or "it has". Therefore, the title should be "its", which surprisingly is a word.

There's also a similar problem in this case:

When we start in this state:

rich pay 10% on the margin poor pay 2%

And then cut all tax brackets by 1% absolute (to 9% and 1%)

This can be portrayed as both "most gains from the cuts go to the rich (because we were super progressive initially!)", and "poor get relative 50% cut, rich 10% (at the margin)". Anyway, I just am trying to guard against future misinterpretation and mixing up of absolute/relative terms.

I don't feel that he has guaranteed that all readers of the article will come to the conclusion you have reached. Here is how I could interpret his brief quote:

1. more in absolute terms (which they already pay due to higher income) 2. more in relative terms (progressive taxes) 3. more than now (what you claim).

I don't that it's clear what he means in in the story, though. It could easily be taken to mean "yes, we pay more, and we should pay more (than others) so I don't support the republican plan!". Your interpretation is also valid - "the rich should pay more (than we do now)".

Not distinguishing between additive and multiplicative "more" makes this an unclear message. People constantly mix up rates (*) with absolutes (+), and reinterpret statements made referring to one as referring to the other.

"More people use the internet in China than in the US" - whether that's true depends on the interpretation of "more". This is intolerable and everyone with a mathematical background should strive to be clear on which "more" they are using.

The people at promethease monitor new studies for information on new variants & results of studies.

You upload your dna from 23andme to them and they give you a full report without government interference.

https://promethease.com/

Check out this video explaining why you can buy new detached homes in Tokyo for about 300k usd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w

* Land owners have an absolute right to develop their own land - neighbors can't block you. * You can build a 60 m^2 x 3 floor house on 100m^2 of land, or more.

So basically they build way denser, and reduce opportunities to block/rentseek.

To evaluate that I'd look at the effect on the kids of the 99%. If it enables their parents to drink a bunch more than they would have otherwise, it might not be a net positive, even including the 1% who use the money wisely.

I'm slightly suspicious of the self-reported drinking levels. I'd be afraid that the aid recipients might fear having the money taken away from them (no matter how much they're assured otherwise) if they report their true amounts of drinking or other behavior they assume the study organizers don't approve of. Do surveys of people who drink typically reveal true results, when further investigation is done?

The incentives here are so painfully slanted. Is there a B Team investigating this adversarially? Ideally this study would be done by researchers who aren't true believers in basic income. If it really works, it works when those carrying it out don't believe in it.

Especially considering that if this does get implemented globally, a big percent of those running the show will be bored bureaucrats, not people passionate about the fate of the impoverished.

Yes, all "X is less than Y" statistics are meaningless unless there the convention you mention is strongly held by journalists when they interpret studies - which is unlikely.

i.e. it'd be very easy for a study to say "we have shown that it's likely that the effect size is less than 1%" and then a journalist to interpret that as <1%, and then for a reader to incorrectly think "they wouldn't have said this if it were actually 0.1% or lower".

Numbers like 0.5% or 0.01% qualify as "Less than 1%", so this thread is invalid.

Sorry, it actually covers Hokkaido.

Spike Japan is another well-written blog covering poverty & decay in Japan, specifically Tokyo. It also has nice photos of things rusting. https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/

This is the same topic of Eliezer Yudkowsky's recent book "Inadequate Equilibria" [0], reviewed by Scott Aaronson here [1]. That book does a good job explaining why not every inefficiency can be eliminated - because getting out of a bad nash equilibrium requires coordinated changes, and for large enough groups you can't convince enough people to make a change at the same time.

0: https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ 1: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3535

I wish they'd take Craigslist's path - simple, small, and providing amazing value.

Generally, doing business of any kind requires a license. At small scale, the rules aren't enforced very much, but when you get big or someone doesn't like you, they are. Since everything you do can be interpreted as illegal in some way, there's no defense, and there's no recourse, since the courts aren't independent.

About embedding of workers: local employees who are party members will organize a party branch inside the company. The more powerful internal party members you have, the easier it will be to be given permission to do things, get licenses, etc, so they'll gain committee seats and power. So you end up with an internal organization with power in your company whose allegiances are to an outside agency.

Roblox | San Mateo CA | Onsite, Full Time

We're building what I'd have loved at 12 when I wanted to automate my Legos and Construx. It's a scriptable, distributed physics engine with networking support and a social network overlaid on top. Clients run on PC, mobile, and console. Devs publish their game and we spin up servers for them, make physics and networking work, support in-game currency, advertising, etc. Top games have 30k+ simul players, but the tail is very long.

We have over 40m monthly active users, and some devs on the platform are making 100k USD/month (and are still in high school, and have hired their friends to form studios).

We're hiring physics/rendering/networking C++ engineers, windows devops engineers (big scale), C# (or willing to learn) full stack engineers, and data scientists. Check it out at http://roblox.com - it's a downloadable client (to support native 60fps graphics). Make sure to try "Natural Disaster Survival".

Here's the job list: https://angel.co/roblox

Roblox | San Mateo CA | Onsite, Full Time

We're building what I'd have loved at 12 when I wanted to automate my Legos and Construx. It's a scriptable, distributed physics engine, which expands to support games of any size on PC, mobile, and console. Devs publish their game and we spin up servers for them, make physics and networking work, and overlay a friends graph / social network to connect them to players. Top games have 30k+ simul players, but the tail is very long.

We have over 40m monthly active users, and some devs on the platform are making 100k USD/month (and are still in high school, and have hired their friends to form studios).

We're hiring physics/rendering/networking C++ engineers, windows devops engineers (massive scale), C# (or willing to learn) full stack engineers, and data scientists. Check it out at http://roblox.com - it's a downloadable client (to support native 60fps graphics). Make sure to try "Natural Disaster Survival"!

Here's the job list: https://angel.co/roblox

There is tons of research on this. Higher IQ at young ages, independent of social class, strongly predicts health outcomes. Since it also predicts income, and since a big part of IQ can be predicted before birth, IQ seems to be the real driver here.

From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_epidemiology

A strong inverse correlation between early life intelligence and mortality has been shown across different populations, in different countries, and in different epochs."[3][4][5]

A study of one million Swedish men found showed "a strong link between cognitive ability and the risk of death."[6][7][8][9]

A similar study of 4,289 former US soldiers showed a similar relationship between IQ and mortality.[7][8][10]

The strong correlation between intelligence and mortality has raised questions as to how better public education could delay mortality.[11]

There is a known inverse correlation between socioeconomic position and health. A 2006 study found that controlling for IQ caused a marked reduction in this association.[12]

Research in Scotland has shown that a 15-point lower IQ meant people had a fifth less chance of seeing their 76th birthday, while those with a 30-point disadvantage were 37% less likely than those with a higher IQ to live that long.[13]

I can appreciate the story - it's a paean to a lost world when we didn't need to be competitive. The thing is, money provides more power for the fisherman, which he would need if his environment changed:

-rebuilding after an earthquake -fleeing if the local government goes bad -dealing with a crash in tuna price

We all still live in a competitive environment. Hunter-gatherers were replaced by massively-reproducing (but probably unhappy & unhealthy) farmers. In the example, fishing represents pure surplus value, produced from nothing - and in economic situations like that, producing less than others means you'll eventually be out-competed and replaced.

In reality the same tragedy of the commons applies to fishing, and we haven't solved it there either.

Until competition is restrained, we've gotta compete. Individuals can opt out but they're just removing their traces from the future - those left will still be struggling until we have a way to globally eliminate environments which force people to be maximizers. And in a big universe, it's uncertain whether we can ever really control enough to be able to relax. It may even be computationally impossible to really stop the continuous evolution of competition in how we live life

This site also has some nice info on Mercury colonization. http://einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html

What precisely is the proper level of inequality? i.e. what is the Gini coefficient of an equal society? I've never seen it calculated. (It's not 1.0 since there are age effects, plus it's expected that immigrants will be poorer than well-established people, etc.)

If you judge countries externally by their Gini coefficient, countries which blow up the richest people's resources (or just stifle innovation (The USSR, 60s China)) will have a "better" number. So it's a really bad number to use, since there are evil ways to maximize it.

I'm suggesting we should use numbers like the absolute # of people in poverty, or national health, or access to education - those numbers aren't gameable and allow better solutions to rise to the top naturally (and we don't care how they go up, as long as they go up)

At the margin, I think we both mainly want to help poor people, right? I'm just pointing out that using measures like the Gini coefficient can inadvertently reward bad behavior. Of course neither side directly wants to destroy resources, but if we're comparing national Gini numbers & policies, there's no good way to distinguish between good vs bad ways to lower it. i.e. China's Gini has been going up, but they also are pulling tons of people out of poverty - is it bad or not? I'm not in favor of inequality, but just pointing out that historically the things that have moved people out of poverty have been market based innovation (the world since 1800), not direct assaults on inequality (USSR, Chinese revolutions, cuba etc.)