troyastorino

Wouldn't this be illegal under the 13th Amendment? Isn't it equivalent to partial slavery?

While the article starts out very interesting, towards the end the author starts to sound almost delusional. He implies that although the introduction of capitalist reforms seemed to help the Chinese at first, it has ultimately been an instrument of oppression. In reality, the market-based reforms in China are a classic case of the introduction of some capitalist principles massively increasing overall quality of life. An article telling how factory workers in China are offensively demanding better wages and better treatment is fascinating, but the author's militant Marxist worldview made the whole article a little less believable.

Ultimately there are going to have to be shifts in what skills people learn. There will be high unemployment during the adjustment period, but as long as demand for low-skill jobs shrinks, people will adjust and learn new skills. You don't have to go back to school to learn how to be a programmer :)

I'm somewhat confused about B. The monetary base is indeed expanded through the issuance of debt in fractional reserve banking, but when the Fed pursues expansionary monetary policies to keep the interest rates low doesn't that increase the money supply without the creation of debt? Or is the effect on the money supply of the expansionary policies of centrals bank small in comparison to the effect of leverage ratios of fractional reserve banks?

Additionally, I think Bitcoin advocates argue that since the money growth rate of Bitcoin is subject to a open and known process, deflationary trends will be known and expected as well. Because the deflation will be expected, there won't be the traditional negative effects associated with deflation.

I think the idea behind this is to make people think the total amount of water on Earth is scarce.

There are also only 26 likes on the video; if someone was motivated enough by the video to go vote, there's at least a decent chance that he would like the video as well.

If you just type in the expression as Mathematica code, doesn't Wolfram Alpha evaluate it just as Mathematica would?

Studies published in Nature typically don't have bad science...

The laser can't be aimed at an individual neuron; it is aimed at a cluster of neurons. Besides, activating a single neuron will strongly activate the neurons it has strong synaptic connections to. The key here is that an individual cluster of neurons is directly correlated with an individual memory.

General sales taxes are state taxes, not federal taxes. Changing the incentive structure to any extent will change behavior.

Agreed. Although there are many videos online of using the device successfully, the people who tried it in our lab found it/themselves very difficult to train. And it was due to lack of trying...we very much wanted to control things with our minds.

It's hard to argue that they've forgone more profitable business models, as they are in the top 10 most profitable companies in the US, and are the most valuable company.

Hypothesizing that a trend could be explained by cultural differences is different than discriminating on race.

> Yeah online privacy is nearly non existent. Especially so when you are reckless and use connected identity systems. That doesn't mean the message should be "give up."

I don't think the question is over whether it is worth it to fight for online privacy, but rather if online privacy is the right end goal to begin with.

People are very uncomfortable with radical openness and transparency of their personal lives because it is a radical departure from the way life used to operate. People have always been uncomfortable with technologically driven cultural changes (easy examples would be the original Luddite movement or luddites today), and probably always will be. Online privacy gives an ironic twist on the situation since many hackers, the people who should be pushing the world forward, are disturbed by this change and want to hold it back.

Facebook, and more recently Google (with their real name push), have moved to envision this different mode of human interaction. In its extreme incarnation, your digital and 'physical' lives are inextricably merged. I don't think this is a trend that can or should be fought: it would mean fighting the integration of technology with day to day life, and so would eventually be analagous to fighting the benefits technology can bring to human life. With this integration, though, your personal life accessible to those who want it. Yes, having everything be open is very different and uncomfortable. But look at the environment created by allowing total anonymity: 4chan /b/. I feel comfortable saying that I would rather see human interaction move in a direction where you are responsible for all of your actions, rather than one where you can avoid all responsibility.

While I think her comparison of the hobbyist nature of early computing to the current state of energy technologies ignores the massive amounts of research and money poured into energy, her assertion that personal computing is "solved" is interesting, to say the least. My inclination is to think that this is a short sighted and foolish perspective, given the youth of the computing industry, the plethora of nascent technologies, and the fact that personal computing has never remained settled for an extended period of time. That being said, there are decent points in there about the emerging dominance of intuitive design, embodied in the success of products that value simplicity over versatility.

What do you think?

>The main reason people want to pay is portability. ... With social, when people interact, the more music they share, the bigger library they build, and the bigger value Spotify becomes. The music service that is the simplest, fastest, and most social -- that's the one that will win.

Although mobile and social are tossed around so much they have almost become buzzwords, this is the most simple and direct explanation I have read that shows how these technologies integrate into a path for profitability.

> To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It’s a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible.

Just because the day to day work of traders on Wall Street has been abstracted away from it's original intention doesn't mean that it doesn't continue to serve that function. When working in any large system, your focus can be absorbed by whatever smaller task you are working on, and you can loose sight of what your piece of the puzzle does. When working on a software team of many hundreds of developers, it's easily possible that the code you are working on is not at all specific to the problem you're solving. That doesn't mean that your work isn't helping to solve the problem.

The financial system is very complex, and I won't pretend to have the expertise or knowledge to explicitly explain the service that high frequency traders, for example, are providing. The way Wall Street currently operates might not be the most efficient system for allocating capital. But I don't think that you can immediately write off modern trading on the basis that it doesn't directly deal with the original purpose of Wall Street.

Awesome! The library looks great, I'll be using it in my next Clojure program.

If software patents were abolished, companies could still have protection for their software on the basis of copyright law. Copyright owners have the right to control distribution and adaptation, which would cover the legitimate intellectual property rights that companies should have over their software, and could eliminate the frivolous patent suits that are such a waste of resources. This of course would depend on what early cases would establish as a basis for what counts as copyright infringement, but hopefully it could be interpreted in a narrow enough fashion to provide protection for people's software while eliminating the threat of baseless suits.