so different outcomes for different racial groups = racism?
have you taken a look at the competitors in the 100m sprint in the last 30 years?
801 karma · joined January 10, 2011
have you taken a look at the competitors in the 100m sprint in the last 30 years?
I was more thinking about how things worked from say 1500 to 1800 in the US. During that time, a lot of the things that originate with government in simcity would have been done independently. i.e. religious schools would be started by local enclaves (sometimes with organizational help of government, which they controlled due to being dominant in that area, but not originated from it). In the US at least, land use was pretty free for most of that time, no zoning. Look at the institutions within a gold rush town, for example - although there was a government, they couldn't control much, the people came first and built lots of infrastructure before there ever was a sheriff or mayor. Rollicking, fast-developing cities from that era weren't restrained by zoning laws, and they developed in interesting (not always good) ways. It is interesting to realize that most of the current buildings in the US major cities would actually be illegal under the current law for new buildings.
Rather than from libertarianism, my ideas for this came from a couple books about city planning I've read recently, "The Power Broker", and "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". Neither one is really libertarian, but rather look at how government power can be used or misused in cities. The latter one particularly is not at all libertarian, and is a strong advocate of government intervention into neighborhood design - but, lays out a smarter way it should be done, based on the author's understanding of the way cities work.
Simcity seems to be designed by someone influenced by the ideas criticized in "death and life" - i.e. very strong zoning laws, top-down control and predetermination for how things will work in every neighborhood, high value placed on "open space" without consideration of usage patterns etc.
The attitude towards development it has is very much like China - everything is controlled and all land is owned by the government, and the government's job is to manage zoning, roads, schools, education, in order to make people happy. Nobody actually has any property rights - even trees don't grow without government planting efforts. Farmers can't choose their own crops.
This is actually really different than what happens in the real world. Really, if a community doesn't have a school, people get together and start one. Small civic organizations evolve into permanent buildings, training schools, etc. Pickup sports leagues evolve into organizations that commission their own stadiums.
If there is no fire department, a volunteer one starts. People build churches, or start them at home, whenever they feel the need. But in simcity world, everything good comes from the government.
I love simcity, but I do think it's weird that there isn't a mode where you can just let people build whatever they want. I love the built-in, realistic needs people in it have - but where are the entrepreneurs who will actually start a society, or borrow money to build a building on their own? Where are the rebels who start a revolution if the government doesn't meet their needs?
Complaining is a valid response, too!
"Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, “exit,” is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other, “voice,” is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change “from within.”"
-Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
autossh -M 25841 -ND 127.0.0.1:8088 -i /home/.ssh/id_rsa user@host.com
and then tell your browser (or foxyproxy) to use it. one-line vpn that probably won't get blocked by china, ever.
Of course, this is the same government that forced taxi drivers to remove the handles from their taxis so passengers can't roll down their windows, because they were afraid someone would drive by Tiananmen square and drop a bunch of ping pong balls with political messages on them.
The whole world used to be that way, though - kings owned everything and if you didn't like it, die - but it pissed people off so bad, they took back the rights to what really was the king's property.
The real problem seems to be how easy it is to enter into extremely unjust agreements online.
In the real world, it's not easy to sign a contract giving up all your future rights - imagine if a car company tried to slip clauses into a car purchase agreement giving them the right to take back the car without explanation at any time. People would rebel. But online, people regularly click through things just as bad as this.
People act like reputation pressure is enough to stop this - but in the real world, not everyone is informed enough to keep up to date on every entity's reputation, and in many places, communities have just taken the shortcut of making certain types of deals illegal, at the expense of the freedom of the seller to make that type of contract.
It contained tons of original genealogical research, macro shots of plants, photographs of family-related newspaper stories... And possibly some videos with copyrighted music clips.
It's a shame how far we've fallen from traditional justice, which involves:
1. right to confront your accuser, 2. right to legal representation, 3. knowing the charges and evidence against you 4. right to call witnesses and present evidence 5. judgement by your peers
I know, flickr owns the servers, they make the rules etc.
But as human beings, and as a company, I think it's a mistake for them to behave this way.
The feeling of injustice is really powerful, and I think everyone would be better served if companies didn't disregard it.
That initial shock at the lack of deference allowed that person to have more of an interaction than most people got.
A scientist might make a hypothesis that suspect A is the murderer; the prediction would be that the murder weapon would be found in their house, the fingerprints match, blood types match. Upon search, the murder weapon was actually found, and fingerprints and blood types match.
A layman would say that finding the weapon converted the theory into a nearly certain fact.
A scientist would say that finding it pushed the hypothesis towards being a theory.
but the scientific usage includes the fact that lots of facts have already been evaluated, and even that the new predictions by the theory have already been evaluated and found to be true.
If the tests were structured so that the average score was 10 out of 100, one genius who scored 100 would be worth 9 people who scored zero.
I think this is a more realistic way to score education; would you rather have the median of the population go from grade level 7 algebra, to grade level 7.1? or would you rather have 20% more utter geniuses in your society? Both have value, obviously, but breakthroughs are made at the edges, and only need to be made once.
All this is to say that we should focus on where the returns are greatest.
It would be even better on smartphones; constantly having the new mail icon pop up on is so distracting that I have turned off automatic email checking on my phone, and just check manually every couple hours when not near a computer. This was after being surprised not to be able to find an option to control gmail's polling interval.
There'd be no better way to ensure that information would eventually be made public.
It's like saying: I can jump on the field at a Yankee game and "control" 50k spectators and 50m viewers. You may influence them for about a second, but the farther you try to bring the situation from the market's desire, the quicker you'll be corrected.
Sinking 1b into selling apple short would make a small, temporary dent in their market cap.
If you think something is overvalued, you should sell it short. If you think ycombinator companies are overvalued, you should contact the investors and give them odds against the ycombinator startups successes, and it would be in their best interest to take you up on it as a hedge.
In general terms, if you claim to have knowledge of a mispriced asset, there always is an implied economic action you should take to make money off of your unique knowledge.
So if 50 million people play basketball per week and 1 million people swim, and if there is 1 basketball medal and 10 swimming medals, then a basketball medal would be valued at 50*10 of a swimming medal.
This way, new events & sports could be added easily, without changing things much. This would also reduce the bickering that happens whenever someone proposes adding or removing an event.
i.e. just take a smart undergrad CS major and record their screen (& audio) while they try to figure out how to use it. I think this would definitely turn up some tasks within it that are way harder than they need to be. Do people really feel confident that learning git is a smooth process, not involving a lot of swearing?
The answer you mostly hear when complaining about programming tools is that you need to toughen up - yet startups are founded on the idea of not doing this to their clients. Making processes super easy for clients is a good thing, and we should gather information, find the common problem spots, and fix them for our own tools! We shouldn't just keep insisting that the customer (programmers) needs to toughen up and learn (as the default answer, anyway; some things really are hard)
Why isn't there user feedback tool for man pages, where it asks "Was this information helpful to you?" every time you use a man page? I bet the success rate would be pretty low.
In general why isn't there any information about which man pages are good and which are terrible? They just seem frozen in time. Compared to the analytics startups get about their customers, info about man pages is nonexistent. Yet there are probably ones out there which would be rated "useless" 99% of the time, and have been for 10+ years with no change.
But on the other hand, since valid human behavior includes much more senseless, random, and repetitive actions (compared to blogging), a well-done bot would be harder to detect.