slurry

4000 years old and it's already the Fifth Dynasty. In another professional life I was a classicist, and I thought I dealt with old stuff there, but Egypt is just so impossibly ancient it makes the Greeks look like a bunch of Johnny Come Latelies. Deep time...

Except when it wasn't for a few notable decades.

That's simplified history at best. Greek texts were much (much) better preserved in the Byzantine empire, and were lost to the West mostly because people forgot Greek and copies decayed.

Read Coase's book on the theory of the firm. The short answer is yes, firms are just like gosplan. We put up with them because they reduced transaction costs.

>the corporation has no way to compel me

What? A big corp can't hire a couple of goons?

Your comment assumes that Trump/Brexit/Le Pen voters are trying to "do something" with their votes. What if they're just trying to do as much damage as possible, knowing the system has it out for them?

Maybe the first time I've ever agreed with valuearb.

> The greatest scientific creative genius of recent memory, Richard Feynman

I was going to pick apart the whole comment, but then this stuck out at me. WTF? The Feynman cult truly knows no shame or rational bounds.

It was 3/5, not 2/3, to break a filibuster, and the use of filibusters had been getting to unprecedented levels. The argument above was that constitutional change should be hard I.e. require a supermajority. The Senate rules as followed recently have been requiring a supermajority for ANY change. That is unhealthy.

> Don't corporations have growth targets and multi-year plans? Don't they (mostly) have a top-down management structure, where freedom of action and collective intelligence are constrained the further you get from the Central Committee (also known as the C-suite)?

Yes. IDK if Hayek addresses this or not, but Coase has a very good (and short) little book on the theory of the firm where he goes into exactly that. Basically, there are transaction costs to going to the market. So sometimes it's worthwhile to lose market feedback and centrally plan things.

The occult writer Arthur Edward Waite - of Rider-Waite-Smith tarot fame - used to work for Horlick's, a fact for which he was much mocked by Aleister Crowley.

Local people's congresses are directly elected. Higher levels up to the National People's Congress, are indirectly elected by the level below.

So imagine you vote for town council. The town councils in your county elect a county council, the county councils elect a state legislature, and the state legislatures elect Congress.

Elections for local people's congress are - for China - fairly open. There are 50-100% more candidates than seats. But candidates are in practice only nominated by the CP and related organizations. But the point is, you can choose between a couple of alternative CP picks, rather than having a single CP pick imposed upon you. A little bit like elections in Iran, I guess. That's not wide open elections like in the West, but it's not nothing.

Elections are more centrally controlled the higher up in the hierarchy you go, but there is always some wiggle room.

>Is Finno-Ugric a magnet for this kind of speculation?

Oh my yes.

Depends on the crop.

I don't know, I was able to understand the initial problem statements, and even a bit of the numbered sub-problems, and I'm a trained classicist pig-ignorant in math.

Name an animal that uses grammar, or something like it.

I have been an emacs user for 16 years now, and I have come to this conclusion as well. I don't - like 99% of emacs users - use advance scripting capabilities. But even if I did, it would still be less efficient at the core task of text editing. I'm stuck on emacs, because old habits die hard. But I'll teach my son to use vi.

Are Africans smoking more because they have more disposable income? If so, this may be an encouraging trend, in a way.

Before about 1932, karate was written with the characters 唐手 (Tang/China hand). Then it was written with 空手 (open hand) - same sound, different characters.

Awk for a web server? It's been done.

http://awk.info/?tools/server

Geniuses come and go, but being able to show up and execute still counts for a lot - in math as elsewhere.

Directory yes, search no.

Buried lede is how far India is lagging.

Rural wages "[d]oubling in China in the last decade, tripling or quadrupling in Vietnam. A bit slower in Bangladesh, but still up by half."

And yet the chart at the bottom shows India up by only 35%.

It's on the WIkipedia page.

Vivekananda also lives on as an icon for the RSS and other extreme right wing Hindu groups.

Here for example is RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat speaking in front of a big Vivekananda picture:

http://samvada.org/files/Independence-Day-Bangalore-Aug-15-2...

Maybe they claim him wrongly? IDK.

The certification model can work for lower level math and some social science or humanities subjects. But how do you certify in subjects like abstract algebra or Byzantine paleography or chemical engineering? A multiple choice test is not going to cut it. The subjects either take place at too high a degree of abstraction or require access to materials to do properly, or both. What you describe could work for a community college level education but not for a real university education.

> The thing is I'd rather take a course from a top instructor even at a massive scale, than to take a poor course made by a guy who doesn't have any real business teaching the class.

There's an excluded middle here.

The Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department still puts out some fine work.

Life, uh, finds a way.

That's like saying if housing is effectively free (because buildings don't get paid).