nwj

It's really crazy how all these people overlap at Gottingen in the 1920s.

Take Oppenheimer, for instance. He transfers to Göttingen from Cambridge in 1926 (after a relatively miserable time at the Cavendish labs studying under J.J. Thompson). He earns his PhD at Göttingen quickly. By September 1927, he's back in the USA on a teaching fellowship with Caltech.

So, Oppenheimer isn't at Göttingen for very long - not even 2 years! But in that brief time, he meet Max Born, James Franck, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Eugene Wigner who are also all there.

Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi had moved to other institutions by 1926, and Edward Teller doesn't get there until 1930 - but it's plausible that the Göttingen connection (and their relationship to Max Born) are how Oppenheimer meets them.

I think I've heard this option called a Pigovian tax before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax.

My understanding is that in Japan zoning restrictions are controlled at a federal rather than local level. I've read that this helps prevent local incumbents using the zoning system to exclude new construction.

In other words, Japan lacks the regulatory environment (common in all these other countries) that depresses supply.

I've written a (somewhat) similar CLI in rust: https://github.com/nwj/zeke/

These threads are great for collecting a bunch of different implementations and looking at the various design decisions people have made. There's really a surprising amount of variety out there.

You are confusing "12% more than the prior 5 year average" with "12% of the overall population".

Nevertheless, I agree it's a catastrophe.

Your landing page has a typo: "Be more productive by organizing your work in a fun, transparent, and unceremoniously."

I think that's intended to be: "Be more productive by organizing your work in a fun, transparent, and unceremonious way."

Progressiveness is a function of both taxes and benefits. A consumption tax scheme can be made more progressive by paying benefits in a more progressive manner.

For example, Exampleville institutes a consumption tax of 15%. Such a tax is regressive because consumption is usually a smaller proportion of a wealthy person's income than a poor person's income. To counteract this, Exampleville pays a monthly cash grant to all citizens and adjusts the payment level so that the cash grant is larger for the poor and smaller (or non-existent) for the wealthy.

See https://tax.purpleplans.org for an example of a real proposal that mimics this scheme.

If you had asked me 5 minutes prior to reading about this, who was the earlier writer - Milton or Shakespeare? - I would have said Milton. I now know that it's the opposite. Shakespeare preceded Milton.

There's something about Shakespeare's writing that feels closer to modernity though. Milton seems sort of medieval, perhaps because of the religious themes (and the fact that I've only read a small portion of Paradise Lost...).

From paragraph 60 in the filing (emphasis is mine):

"As explained to OAG attorneys by Respondents' counsel. Bitfinex and Tether have also used a number of other third party payment processors to handle client withdrawal requests, including various companies owned by Bitfinex/Tether executives, as well as other 'friends' of Bitfinex - meaning, human being friends of Bitfinex employees that were willing to use their bank accounts to transfer money to Bitfinex clients who had requested withdrawals."

I agree that the central point of the article is on target.

The notion that this is somehow a "Victorian" thing, though - that the Victorians have some special responsibility in history for inventing this strategy of social dominance - that's an error.

Humans have been doing this for much longer than that.

If you read this article and found yourself wishing there was more detail about the writing routine of each author, then you might like "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work" [1]. It's a really great small book that goes in detail through the daily routines of many authors and artists.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/030...

Completely agree with you about "Finite and Infinite Games".

Also read it recently and was disappointed. It's written in a style that I associate with continental philosophy. Obtuse language that can be difficult to follow.

That wouldn't be the end of the world if the underlying ideas were really brilliant, but I wasn't convinced.

Has anyone tried running linux on one of these? How'd it go? It's not currently in any of the hardware compatibility lists that I am aware of.

Inflation just hasn't been that high lately. $400 in 2013 dollars is $428.50 in 2018 dollars.

For those on Firefox, NeatURL[1] does this too.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/neat-url/

Just adding a +1 for http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/. It is really excellent. Clear, but mathematically rigorous. Highly recommended.

One thing that was helpful to me in making sense of this post was to understand that Quadratic Voting is trying to solve the problem of the "tyranny of the majority." It's a voting scheme that gives greater weight to minority preferences than the one-person-one-vote schemes we are mostly familiar with.

(Please note that this is "minority" in the "!majority" sense of the word, and not merely "!caucasians.")

Tyler's contribution here is to push back a little against the idea that we should be favoring minority preferences more than we do currently. He thinks this is too indiscriminate. Some minority preferences are quite good and others are pernicious. Favoring all minority preferences empowers the good and the bad.

I was also struck by the last paragraph: > "In any case the relevant question is what kinds of preference formation, and which kinds of groups, we should allow voting mechanisms to encourage."

In other words, all voting schemes favor certain preferences and groups over others. There is no perfectly objective voting scheme that would let us avoid this. We as a polity have no choice but to grapple with what and who to favor.

The implicit criticism in that final paragraph is that Quadratic Voting is leaping over the "what/who should we favor" question and optimizing for a particular answer. Tyler is saying "wait a minute, we haven't even agreed on the fundamental questions. So why are we already optimizing for a particular solution?"

Your comment is baseless speculation and only serves to spread fear.

There hasn't been a new reported case in Nigeria in 30 days. That data is coming from the WHO, which is not under the control of the Nigerian government.

Scott Sumner over at http://www.themoneyillusion.com/ has played a big part in changing peoples's views on this.

He is definitely worth reading regularly if you are interested in or want to learn more about monetary policy.

There are command-line options that exist today. ncmpcpp and mocp are both popular options.

We've also been using Ansible where I work and it's great. Chef/Puppet are probably more powerful, but I also found them more complicated to setup and use.

Ansible seems to hit this sweet spot between easy of use, flexibility, and functionality that is really great for people or organizations that are managing modest numbers of servers. Cases where Chef/Puppet would be overkill.

Many (my self included) agree it was not a war we should have fought.

But implying that the reason we went to war was primarily because "oil companies and Israeli interests" wanted us to -- that's just intellectually dishonest. The path into Iraq was so much more complicated than that and simplifying it in such a crude way makes it more likely that we will repeat those past mistakes again in the future.

I disagree. Yes, this record is out of date and that limits its utility today as a decoding tool. However, its historical value is high because it is out of date.

I found it interesting to go through it and look at which usages had survived and which hadn't.

Reminds me of the scramble suits from A Scanner Darkly.

As government surveillance technologies improve, the anonymity (and accompanying privacy) that once accompanied some areas of public life is at risk.

Public opposition to that trend has largely come in the form of calls for better legal protections. However, my suspicion is that ultimately it will be the arms race between surveillance technologies and technologies like this product that determine what happens to public anonymity.

Don't know where you are getting the idea that half the US budget is spent on defense.

Estimates I've seen range from 20-40% depending on what you count as "defense". See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S...

Is it possible that the opportunities to make quality edits has decreased as wikipedia has matured?

What I have in mind is the possibility that topics that haven't been well written out are like low-hanging fruit and are easy to positively contribute to. As wikipedia has expanded, that low hanging fruit has disappeared to some extent, and thus new editors have fewer opportunities to actually provide quality edits.

This explanation does not place blame on either newbies or pre-existing users who are "content cops". Instead, it proposes that the difficulty of providing a "golden" edit increases as we move forward in time. If that's a problem (debatable, since it means wikipedia as a product is better than it was previously) then it strikes me as a difficult one to solve.

Here's the link to the original article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/mar/14/us-pr...

Tyler Cowen has an interesting comment on this [0]. Generally, it's good policy to interpret these studies cautiously.

[0] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how...

Not knowing what to do next =/= confused.

The article makes it sound as if Wall Street is preying on or exploiting hapless, vulnerable graduates. Isn't it possible though that many Ivy Leaguers take these jobs because they pay well, are high status, and don't foreclose future career options. And if that's true, it sounds more like a reasonable exchange rather than a predatory relationship.

Sarcasm or not, it's a good point. It's hard to see a viable endgame for the MPAA/RIAA if newer file sharing technology simply routes around the obstacles they through up.

The broad trend has been toward easier, faster, more secure file sharing. Does anyone really believe that trend is going to reverse course?