starbeast

He became a project manager when he found he wasn't good at writing code after becoming a coder when he found he wasn't a good physics researcher.

Japan throughout the '80s (and still today, though maybe a little less so) has been practicing something fairly close to what I am suggesting, by having a non-job role for the "madogiwa zoku", the window seat tribe.

They may not be paid to stay home, but they are paid to stay the hell out of the way of anything that could affect the smooth running of the business.

I made the mistake of showing the 'hammock driven development' talk to an employer of mine. He got annoyed by it and said he thought that it was just providing programmers with an excuse for staying away from the computer when they should be writing code.

One of the best arguments against full employment that I have ever encountered was made by the German general Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, who fought in both of the world wars and died in 1943. His argument was regarding his officers, but it can be readily applied to the population as a whole.

>"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."

Keeping diligent idiots out of the economy by paying them to stay at home would be far more economically beneficial than a drive to bring about full employment.

The situation regarding Joseph Chancellor suggests they have plenty of backwards looking responsibility.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/07/technology/facebook-cambrid...

>it seems evident that Facebook is the biggest victim in all of this.

Looking at all the fallout from this, I'd love to know how you reached that conclusion. Even if Facebook was an entirely innocent victim of this (seemingly highly successful) attempt to sabotage and seed mistrust in US elections, then any effect on Facebook would be minor collateral damage at most.

But the article itself is a critique of modern capitalism in general. Yes it was using watches to make the point, but it wasn't about watches.

Right from the outset this is made clear. The watch being talked about hasn't been donated to a museum of watches, it has been donated to a museum of capitalism. Even the title was chosen to make it entirely explicit where they were going with the article.

To then say that people shouldn't comment generically about capitalism regarding an article that is explicitly about capitalism, would seem a stretch too far in trying to keep this place neat and tidy.

I felt it was a bit like if everyone were to be restricted to discussing pencil manufacture, should Leonard Read's 'I, Pencil' be the topic of discussion. Yes, the text describes making pencils, but it isn't about pencils.

How is that a generic ideological tangent, given the article?

Was also true for musicians. Recording and distribution killed off a hell of a lot of the music industry.

>People who don't trust each other don't engage in trade.

You are going to need one hell of a citation for that claim, or you are using some new definition of 'trust' that I have not previously encountered.

>No market is 100% efficient

Anyone who has ever bothered to watch an ad break will be less than surprised by this.

Given that we actually have markets where people deceive each other pretty much all of the time and justify the lying as a matter of business principle, perhaps we should study those instead.

Don't get me wrong, these fictional markets are interesting, but a lot of time seems to have been wasted looking at them instead of looking at the actual economy.

>Participants are assumed to share equal information.

So any form of arbitrage is therefore impossible. Hang on a minute...

I've been wondering for a while if you could overwrite the signal on the vestibular nerve. This just drowns it in noise, but presumably it should be possible to electrically excite the same fibers with a signal that matches what you are seeing. I have heard that they do something similar already in medicine for helping people with balance problems caused by the inner ear, though I gather it has to be tweaked patient by patient.

Micropayments ideally need some kind of prepay token system similar to phone credit, so you can buy a certain amount to then spend in small increments.

Alternatively a lever system or non-circular gear arrangement could convert the force from fixed magnets into a linear response entirely mechanically.

...edited for sense

Reading the NYT obituary. It includes this gem;

>Mr. Blum repeatedly challenged the idealistic premise of American exceptionalism and argued instead that world hegemony was Washington’s covert goal, for economic, nationalistic, ideological and religious reasons.

You shouldn't try and parse meaning from that sentence without a respirator, goggles and a crochet needle.

The puzzle is called MU for a reason. 'Mu' is the valid solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#The_Mu-koan

'The Multiscale Law of Requisite Variety' may be my new favourite piece of science terminology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_R...

Would also make a good band name.

>in general, any system without structure above a certain scale is unable to withstand structure arising above that scale

The political implications of this are interesting, in this paper they look at anarchic systems ceding to structure, but it also helps illuminate some of the inherent difficulties in current events such as brexit.

Probably first heard from a parrot.

See also Rich Hickey's, 'Hammock Driven Development' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

I'm talking about fully reversible fuel cells for grid storage, not a hydrogen fuels economy. So this kind of thing - https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/03/f11/rev_fc_w...

I wonder if working fusion utility power generation, by the time it is working fusion utility power generation, might end up being more expensive than putting solar in space and beaming the power, given the potential for launch costs to drop and the possibility of even doing the panel manufacturing up there using asteroids as raw materials in the long run, so avoiding the gravity well cost. Economies of scale can get very big in space and if we are comparing to fusion research we should look at the medium to long run.

Funny comparison. If you like batteries, fuel cell tech would be one of the places you would want to be putting some of your primary research money.

There's some vegetable broths that are solid enough to make the attempt, especially if you toast a bap and hollow the middle out a little.

Very slowly through the postal system.

Clearly there are some differences of opinion, given the context.

The definition of theft of IP is entirely a product of local jurisdiction though, given we are talking about temporary monopolies on ephemera and not physical protection of personal claims on objects or spaces.

I cycle past a large and growing encampent of shanty buildings, tent and caravans out the back of Bristol Temple Meads train station every day. Is right on the canal, across the water from a large nightclub and next to a yacht.

I use Inkscape on my mac all the time, though I have to build it with homebrew to make it work nicely.

edit - though it did get borked by a brew update and I had to add a different source to brew to get it back up, so is not that sane admittedly.

Reminds me of here in Bristol. The amount of people I know in caravans and tents in cities here in the UK is fucking depressing. Nearly all of them have jobs.