pithic

I'm surprised to hear YC courting would-be founders who are more interested in finishing college (grad school, even!). Affinity to the norms of academic institutions (not unlike large corporations) and to converging on their pre-formulated problems would seem incompatible with the traits of successful startup founders.

It's even more surprising given research correlating founder age and industry experience to the likelihood of big exits. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-vs-...

This solidifies the view that YC is modeled as a "founder college" for the young and cash-starved, weened as they are on ready-made social support systems, institutional authority, and formal rewards.

> He has suggested that America’s government was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1993 and the September 11th terrorist attacks. He says that vaccinating children will give them autism.

There is always a two-way relationship between the regulated and the regulator. Therefore, all regulated companies are, in a sense, merged with government. The greater the regulatory regime, the more deeply society becomes impressed with the features of fascism.

Do the stakeholders of the banking, pharmaceutical, media, and war cartels, forged in government agencies (whose charters they themselves drafted) and nurtured through regulation, hold sway over Alphabet and Facebook? It's a simple enough question to research and answer.

Sophisticated people understand that there are no actual conspiracies, only baseless conspiracy theories.

In terms of harmful ingredients, phospates (used to increase water content) might actualy be more dangerous than nitrates. Consumption of added phospates is linked to renal failure, CVD, and yes, bowel cancer.

It's thought that disruption of biophoton communication is the mechanism by which phosphates promote cell undifferentiation, proliferation, and, eventually, cancer.

What the law does is transfer the power to defraud the public from the common grifter to a central authority. In doing so, it adds another, more sinister tool to the ones you mention: forced participation.

> not knowing if they're trading digital dollar bills or monopoly money

Is there a difference?

>the solution is to invest more fully in the process, giving meaning to your life through activities that have no terminal point

Are there such activities? Even the more process-oriented ones, lacking final conclusions, have terminal milestones. The juggler will eventually master 4 balls; the violinist Paganini, etc.

Nutritional supplements compete with pharmaceuticals. Could there be a conflict of interest when an institution that is heavily influenced by big pharma puts out a study on their competition? http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2009/10/23/bitter-pills/

It might be worth exploring the reason why the "taboo" on this subject has recently been breached. Could it be that how we define life and our expectations of it have shifted? In a world where the goal in life is personal enjoyment, of which ease is a precondition, childbearing is more commonly regrettable.

Perhaps there never was a taboo, just a different conception of what a human life should aim for.

Economics as a discipline is fraught with normalcy bias. Macroeconomics assumes a government. Taxes are assumed. Deficits are a given. Central banks, fiat legal tender, and fractional reserve banking -- none of these existed 150 years ago, yet they are as foundational to modern economics as mass is to physics.

It's also a biased component. Patent-filing opportunities mostly go to senior or above engineers at larger firms.

First accept the fact that your team - despite their vaunted achievements in many areas - is not competent in ideation. Ideation is more than just pulling a rabbit (you've probably pulled one or two already, despite your collective lack of skill). It's akin to pulling a rabbit egg out of a hat, fertilizing it in a petri dish, and shepherding its development into a furry, scampering critter). It's a process of vision.

Your options are 1) develop this skill; 2) find someone who has. Weigh the effort and palatability of personal transformation vs setting aside the signal-detection machinery that has thus far excluded competent ideators from your circle.

> But the notion of JrGQL and GQL as query languages means that the servers handling these calls must be query resolvers. Unlike most restful interfaces which tend to devote a single uniform interface per endpoint with only minor modifications, a full query model of your domain means an explosive quantity of potential strategies piped through a single endpoint.

GQL does seem to encourage, if not assume, a type-theoretical graph datastore as the backend. (Who couldn't whip such a thing together, if it were lacking?)

But it does not require one. This point may be lost in the tutorial and examples shown on graphql.org. There is no reason one could not map a basic GQL service onto an existing set of REST endpoints, with each one a type, and the return of their fields controlled by the request.

Zuckerberg 2020

Trust Me, Dumb Fucks

Perhaps teaching isn't quite as valuable as you think. Has that ever occurred to you?

Or, perhaps unctuous grandstanding should supplant market forces.

Very true. Additionally, it's harmful to the cause of morality to equate illegality with immorality (as the term 'criminality' seems to imply).

A one-word rebuttal: weather

The problem with supra-nations is that, as bigger monopolies on government, they are much harder to vote against with your feet. You know, in case they become captured by special interests and impose burdensome taxes, oppressive laws, and smothering regulations.

> Guns are not part of the human condition, and we could do without them if we so chose.

Could we really do without them? No guns for madmen, sane people, kids, death squads, adults, spies, sportsmen, militia men, soldiers, police officers, swat teams, special forces, or concentration camp guards?

Not necessarily anarchy. When you join twitter, you agree to be bound by its terms. To envision competing twitters providing arbitration and security services does not take a heroic imagination.

If you are not jarred from exposure by this essay to the bone-chilling injustice of our current arrangements, you likely did not read it.

Or it could fall from the sky, or grow on trees...

I agree with one point: UBI will provide freedom -- the freedom of some fraction of society to live at a very low standard at the expense of the remainder.

Sure, a high-income family, burdened by UBI taxes and other monstrosities, could decide to leave their jobs, leave their home, schools, neighborhood, and live in a UBI ghetto. To pursue art...

>The Mafia loves to give us options that we can't refuse, to make us offers we can't refuse.

Send us a fat portion of your workers' pay to fund our Utopian vision. Or else.

Is the Basic Income concept (in its current formulation) a voluntary program? Or will it depend on violent coercion?

> Most often this comes from educated people who think that their education constitutes the whole of all knowledge about the universe and that there is nothing left to be discovered.

Such biologists may even believe they know how cells divide, because they've observed stages of cell division and given them fancy Latin names.

When a casual passer-by records, copies, and disseminates, no physical aggression is committed. The enforcement of copyright law depends on a third-party initiating a threat of force against property, freedom, and life to dissuade such actions.

Copying is non-violent, whereas preventing it requires violence. And where does copying end, and thought begin? If I examine source code, or lyrics, or a short story, reflect on them, talk about them, and use what I have gleaned, haven't I copied them to some degree?

Might Fred Ehrsam have some personal interest in Etherium, being a former Goldman Sachs trader (Etherium having been co-founded by Goldman Sachs alum Joseph Lubin)?

If the risk/reward calculus of nuclear power is really favorable, then the industry should accept full liability for damages. Repeal Price-Anderson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...). Let them bear the market price of insuring against civil liability.

As optimistic as they seem on the surface, calling for GBI is, in a way, a call for throwing in of the towel by the human race. It's a hasty concession that continued human well-being is no longer compatible with nature or morality. Oddly, such defeatist calls invariably ignore a raft of dreadful and immediate societal effects: the end of meaningful work and self-esteem as both an option and a goal for the masses; the justifiable resentment of productive people whose living standard will be forcibly degraded; and the institutional bifurcation of the human race into producers and parasites, with the reduction of the whole to a sort of government-managed bi-pedal livestock.

Along with inestimable human livelihood and wealth, the free market creates various possibilities to foolishly harm oneself. Some questions Sunstein does not raise are:

1. Does the option of self-harm have value? If such options are forcibly removed, is the human condition degraded? For example, if one is stripped of having the sense of self-ownership, is that person limited in their level of human development and functioning?

2. Can harmful products be forbidden without the threat and use of violence against their would-be producers and consumers?

3. How successful could we expect such efforts to be, based on similar past and current efforts? And how costly, monetarily, socially, and in human lives?

4. How likely are such efforts, and the institutions that exert them, to be corrupted and bent to the service of powerful interests?

I'm a bit surprised that 1.0 came before macro-awareness (i.e., knowing that symbols emanating from macros aren't "undefined").