pfedor

1. If the USA bombs China, and China fights back, that means a global war and global wars accelerate the progress of science and technology, therefore in the long run people in Wisconsin will be better off just like quite possibly they are better off now than they'd be in the alternative universe where World War II never happened (where they might not have satellite TV, GPS navigation, nuclear energy, computers etc.)

2. If the USA continues to trade with China, in a number of years China may become equally as powerful as USA or more and then China may choose to go to war with America and win.

Did you mean any of the two? I'm assuming the long run part is critical since in the short term it's fairly obvious that people in Wisconsin and everywhere would be worse off if the US bombed China.

You'd be right about Brazil.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...

The people in Wisconsin will be better off if they produce something at which their comparative advantage is the highest. You'd harm them, as well yourself and the Chinese people, by shifting the allocation of resources slightly away from optimal for all these parties.

So unless you're going to insist that the word "happiness" only pertains to temporary feelings, as opposed to how you feel about your life overall in the long-term, the claim about $75k and happiness never had any basis in data.

Not sure whether 4x should qualify as "rich", but more importantly, being underweight is pretty low bar. For example, I am underweight.

The actual number as reported by USDA is 1%. The keyword to look for is "very low food security", formerly known as "food insecurity with hunger", which is the lowest range of food security measured by USDA. (The second lowest range, "low food security", formerly "food security without hunger", means poor diet but no reduction in food intake. Note that even among the "very low food security" households less than half reported "lost weight" and less than a third reported "did not eat the whole day".)

One interesting observation: "Typically, households classified as having very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months of the year, for a few days in each of those months." I'll go out on a limb and hypothesize that these few days are the last few days of each month. So one thing to try to reduce that number would be making welfare payments daily, instead of monthly. (I read that welfare these is delivered electronically, you carry a special card which looks like a credit card and a certain amount appears on it the first day of each month. So it shouldn't add any overhead to switch to daily installments.)

Sources:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo... for the definition of food insecurity levels.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r... for the 1% number.

So, have they fixed this bug in Alchemy: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/487570

It's kind of hard to use C++ when you're not allowed to make a copy of std::string. Last I looked into this in May 2012 this was still not fixed (reported in 2009.) There is a page on stackoverflow where someone explains how to work around this problem by rebuilding a patched version of libstdc++. But after applying that fix you hit other similar problems.

Also, the sztrace() function exists and is documented, but they forgot to add it to the .h file, so if you want to log anything, you have to write:

  extern "C" {
  void sztrace(char*);
  }

Also note that regardless of what you think in general about the impact the growing number of humans has on the economic growth, it's hardly debatable that if Richard Stallman specifically had decided to have children, his children would have very likely contributed much more than an average human, just like RMS himself has.

So in reality his decision was exactly counterproductive providing parts of humanity with water or food.

To all the parents out there (I am not one): Thank you. You don't know me, but your decision to have a child is as good as if you donated maybe $1e-4 to my 401(k). And everyone else's. If you live in the US, more. If you are a very smart and hard working person, even more. By caring for your own child, you're also feeding some hungry child in Africa 25 years from now. Richard Stallman should be grateful to you.

Isn't that rather like saying that there wouldn't have been a strictly monotonic route from the pre-industrial society maximum to the industrial society maximum? There might have been, or might have not been, but a priori it's not absurd to postulate that with coal tax from day 1 the road to a more efficient final state wouldn't have been blocked.

"Corporate and big business interests", i.e., publicly traded companies, are responsible for the majority of wealth creation (source: well it's obvious, but see for example William Bernstein, "The Birth of Plenty".) So what you said can be rephrased as, "The US system works to enable wealth creation", or in other words, "The US system is optimized for providing the best standard of living for its citizens." Which is exactly the case.

Which alone should be reason enough to declare anyone a Saint and then give them the Nobel Peace Prize for twenty years in a row.

Easy. The coal mining industry could have continued existing for another thirty years, bringing huge losses each year, subsidized by the taxpayer. Like, say, in Poland, which is where you get your cheap labor from, and not the other way around, and the two facts are not entirely unrelated.

The difference is, of course, that writing code is joy so no wonder people will gladly do it and give the results away, whereas creating art is unpleasant, tiresome work, so it's an insult to suggest anyone would do it for reasons other than money.

The two kinds of PhD students may look the same but they're very different. If you belong to the first category, even if you realize you won't get that Nobel Prize, I doubt you're going to regret trying. If you're of the second kind, why yes, you have wasted five years of your life, which is exactly what you signed up for so why do you complain?

Which is irrelevant since the $2 a day figure is adjusted for purchasing power parity.

The survival rates are:

CPR by a bystander: 4%

Cardiocerebral Resuscitation (i.e., chest compressions only without artificial respiration): 6%

No bystander CPR: 2%

So attempting CPR results on average in doubling the survival rate as opposed to just waiting for an ambulance, and chest compressions only are 50% better than chest compressions plus mouth-to-mouth.

That is what happens when only one landowner chooses "defect". If all of them do it, then 20 people times the number of lots might find a place to live, except it's no longer the kind of place where they want to live.

Or put another way, there is already a lot of places where you can live cheaply, it's just that a lot of people would rather live in Palo Alto than in those places. But if you turn Palo Alto into a housing project, then the reason why they want to live there might stop existing, because all the rich people, who are the reason the rest of us want to be in the Silicon Valley, likely prefer not to live in close vicinity to "bigger buildings filled with tinier apartments."

Of course I don't have a glass ball and cannot know for a fact that's what would happen, but it doesn't seem far fetched and at least personally I find it no less believable than many other tragedy of the commons situations which are posited to justify this regulation or that.

This is neither the law nor the actual practice in the US. It is just something crazy that DHS once said. If they ever actually searched someone 100 miles away from the border, that person could sue and there is no reason to believe that the verdict would be different from Almeida-Sanchez v. United States.

Such serious claim requires some serious citation. It is certainly not true as stated, since all original works produced by the government are in the public domain regardless of when they were created (e.g., NASA images and many US coins designs.) The first Google result for [public domain existence debate] is your comment. I haven't come across any evidence that any such debate exists, and plenty of sources to support the fact of the existence of public domain (some given by others in this thread.)