waqf

In the glorious future when we can synthesize all the delicious cruelty-free artificial meat we desire, should we nevertheless, on ethical grounds, farm chickens so that we can strap them into VR sims of a life of chicken-luxury?

So what you're saying is that a pattern of printed symbols that you looked at once in the past has permanently affected your response to stimuli?

I think you mean that paywalls are rent-seeking on those who lack time (or some other resource) to go to a public library.

Yeah, because the people who would have wanted to put healthy food before profit have either overcome that desire or gone out of business. Just as GP's model predicts. The corporations you get are the ones you regulate for.

The tech industry is the same: we'd love to protect users' data better than regulation demands, but it's hard to make the business case because you just do a lot of work to put yourself at a competitive disadvantage while the users don't notice or don't believe the difference. If data protection were effectively regulated then compliance woudn't be a competitive disadvantage, and then we might have a hope in hell of shipping a good product.

I believe what you're implying is correct. The original mental model of television was that it's live by definition (otherwise it's just an inferior and unduly complex substitute for ciné film, which was well established technology).

So telerecording was just a weird hack, and for a repeat performance you would expect to bring the actors into the studio again.

Context that's often forgotten here is that the BBC typically didn't even have the contractual right to rebroadcast these programmes (the actors' union would have stipulated a maximum number of broadcasts, for example two within 7 days).

And video releases weren't yet a thing even if the rights could have been secured, so the apparent value of these archives was minimal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiping#Rights

That's cheapest compared to median income, which is a valid thing to measure but probably not what GP meant.

And also it's only comparing very large cities in ~8 selected countries (no Paris or Rhine–Ruhr, for example).

(Source of your data, 2019 edition since I couldn't find 2017: http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf)

Yeah, same in Boston. We definitely have homeless people but they are usually polite-to-the-point-of-deferential to passers by — the complete opposite of SF.

If only Google could invent a discussion site with rich text and threaded discussions … they could call it "Google Wave" …

Having too many races on the same ballot already compromises ballot secrecy, to an extent.

"We want you to vote for Jim Totes-Legitimate for President. But so that we can recognize your ballot paper and we can verify that you voted for him and we don't have to break your kneecaps, please also mark your other ballot races as follows: Fred Also-Ran for First Assistant Flangedoodle, Sheila Plausible for Second Assistant Flangedoodle, Hazel Placeholder for Junior Hog Counsellor."

You're here attacking something which in no way resembles what I was saying. After puzzling over your comment for a few minutes, my best guess is that you are unfamiliar with the expression "market failure" and badly misinterpreted it. But maybe it's not that, and something else went wrong.

I agree you can't be insured against conditions you already know you have. But I think that means that at the moment you are diagnosed with the condition, your current insurer should be liable for future costs that arise from that condition. Because your future expected healthcare costs, and hence also your future expected free-market-priced premiums, went up at that moment — that's a loss you incurred, and you should have been able to (choose to) insure against the risk of incurring that loss.

The problem is that insurance products you can buy don't cover that risk (and people have to rely on other dodges to keep their premiums reasonable, like insurance pooling) — and that's market failure.

Pre-existing conditions is another market failure. Not being in a position to shop around when you need emergency treatment is another. And the cartel activity whereby hospitals charge one price to insurers and a different, much higher, price to individuals is one too.

Yes — but all "intelligence" is an emergent property of systems. And because the system in this instance is not a human brain, it's non-human intelligence.

Imagine the lawsuits when someone relies on what they saw on the panel and an accident ensues.

This is why we can't have nice things.

> How do people trust experts? That's a fundamental problem.

Yes, this! I've often thought that a lot of hereditary socioeconomic underperformance may be in some sense attributable to a self-reinforcing information deficit where people don't figure out which experts to trust, which life advice to take, which friends to make and keep. If your parents don't start you right it must be a helluva job to figure it out later.

Also, it's not envy-free. Say n=3: A might accept (in their opinion) 1/3 of the cake, but then watch as B and C divide the cake (in A's opinion) unevenly, so that (in A's opinion) either B or C has taken more than 1/3 and A is envious.

> In contrast to this cake division algorithm, it leaves awkward leftovers.

An important difference is that your rule only ensures that each person feels that they received at least 1/n of the total. This article is about the "envy-free" criterion, which is stronger: each person feels that nobody received more than they did. That's what makes the algorithm in the article so much more complicated.

(In particular, with the envy-free criterion it's very difficult to reduce the problem with a step like "That person is now out; they have their fair share", because the remaining people might subsequently divide the remaining cake in some bizarre way which makes one of the other divisions look enviable. Towards the end of the article it touches on how the new algorithm solves this: search for "domination relationships".)

Thanks for this! I've been wondering for many years why "lamb" in the US is so tough. Wikipedia citation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_and_mutton#United_States

Nevertheless, s0rce is correct on the original linguistic point: that the Norman food-word is "mutton", whereas "lamb" is the Germanic word for the young animal.

So under your system, big blockbuster productions would have the longest copyright term.

I'd like to try exactly the opposite: when a work has been seen by a million people, it becomes public domain — whether that takes one year or 100 years.

Why? Because when you make a derivative work of Harry Potter or Star Wars you are not thinking that you can hoodwink your audience into believing that yours is the original, rather you're writing for a cultural context that assumes that people know the original. And to me that's exactly the underlying idea behind fair use.

Similarly, I have noticed that a difference between American subways and European subways is that when you stop at a station in Europe, the interlocks allow the automatic doors to open as soon as the train is slower than maybe 1–2 km/h. Whereas in America they don't open until a couple seconds after the train has come to a dead stop.

I keep wondering how many wasted man-hours this adds up to over the course of a day — especially on a line that's running at capacity, so if one train is 4 seconds later then the next train will be 8 seconds later and so on.

(The same seems to be true of elevators.)

The big one that nobody's mentioned is that the airline will cancel any remaining flight segments on that ticket, without recourse unless you are very good at begging favors from customer service.

So don't book a round trip SFO-NYC-BTV-NYC-SFO on one ticket and skip the NYC-BTV segment, because you won't be able to rejoin either for BTV-NYC or NYC-SFO.

That's the conventional wisdom in America, certainly. And yet my undergraduate degree (maths at Cambridge) was 100% assessed by end-of-year exams and it worked fine.^

Did I stay up with the classes? Well, not always — some of them I caught up during breaks. (That's the advantage of end-of-year not end-of-semester exams, too.) But did I know the material by exam time? Yes.

But look, more generally, you say you have to "incentivize" students to keep up but I think we agree that it's in their long-term interest to keep up with or without graded homework, so we're talking about behaviourist incentives not rationalist incentives here. And with that admitted you have to consider that there's broad scope for other ways to incentivize than through GPA consequences. (I mean, hand out candy, or pizza, or Pokémon, or porn, or whatever this year's students are into, you can probably think of a much better ideas than these.)

^Unless you were that one kid who had mono during finals week. But that's a different issue.

Sure! But the method of learning doesn't have to be the method of assessment. In fact, as pointed out upthread, it shouldn't be.

When students are doing homework you want them to form collaborative study groups or freely consult any other source, if it helps them learn. Fear of plagiarism is antithetical to that.

As you know, such students are paying for the piece of paper which certifies that they learned something. Who's to say it doesn't work?

The article doesn't seem to even consider the possibility of assessing students in some other way than through standardized homeworks which are easily copied.

For example, individual projects where everyone in the class is working on something different; or at the other extreme, proctored exams.

(Of course, neither of these systems is entirely free from cheating, but the barrier is higher.)

Not only are car crashes less salient than train crashes, but also the converse effect: the inconvenience of car speed limits is more salient than the inconvenience of train speed limits, because you're the one driving.

I live in Boston (42°N) having grown up at 52°N, which may sound extreme to East-Coasters but is hardly exceptional by West-Coast or European standards.

I can assure you there's plenty of sunlight here at midwinter, it's just poorly utilized.

Not as big a problem as it sounds. "System time" used for scientific and engineering purposes should continue to use UTC and should ignore changes to civil time statutes.

It becomes more complicated to translate between system time and civil time, but there are relatively few applications for which you really need to be able to do that conversion — and libraries that handle those cases are complicated already.

Kaliningrad oblast is clearly labelled "Russia" on the map so it seems unlikely that anybody would make the mistake you're implying.

Looking at the map it's clear that OP means Białystok.