That's presumably because most people who frequent this forum don't fall into the same tax bracket as I do.
Ever read Les Miserables?
When it's the difference between making the car insurance payment and shopping at Wal-Mart, or not making it, and shopping at, say, Publix, the choice is less about ethics and more about practicality.
For what it's worth I do grow a garden, albeit a limited one due to the law restricting my garden to my backyard. I hope to plant fruit trees this Spring to offset more of my food costs and enjoy fresher, healthier fare.
While I applaud your efforts to eat well, I'd posit that with some attention, you could measurably decrease the expense if you factor in certain foods and factor out others.
For example, I enjoy tacos as lunch a few times a week. I make them from scratch, and while this doesn't adhere to your recommendation of no starches, I doubt they cost me $1.00 per taco, and that's with avocado, beans, onions, and peppers (plus the tortillas, of course). If I added meat, that would almost double the cost, so I don't.
Other foods are like that too, stir fry with veggies and shrimp, instead of beef saves me another 20-30% on cost.
I also shop at Aldi, or at Wal-Mart as often as befits what foods I'm eating, which knocks another 30-40% off of my food budget.
After reading a few paragraphs I realized it was going to be largely anecdotal, so I figured paring it down would save some people ten or twenty minutes. I agree, however, that the flow made it more manageable to enjoy.
Pretty long article that I doubt most will read in its entirety, if at all.
It was, however, a good read about social engineering, and I've summarized the points made and the solutions proposed below:
>Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy.
>The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.
>Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts.
>The Russians appear to have invested heavily in weakening the candidacy of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary by promoting emotionally charged content to supporters of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, as well as to likely Clinton supporters who might be discouraged from voting.
>We also have evidence now that Russia used its social media tactics to manipulate the Brexit vote.
>A team of researchers reported in November, for instance, that more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted pro-Leave messages in the run-up to the referendum.
>[B]ad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.
>Facebook and Google responded by reiterating their opposition to government regulation, insisting that it would kill innovation and hurt the country’s global competitiveness, and that self-regulation would produce better results.
>Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies.
Solutions proposed:
1) [I]t’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans
2) [T]he platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.
3) [T]he platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.
4) [T]he platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms.
5) [T]he platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users.
6) [W]e need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms.
7) [C]onsumers, not the platforms, should own their own data.
8) [F]inally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly.
The last sentence of the abstract does a good job of this:
>"Based on the present results, we propose that psilocybin with psychological support is a treatment approach that potentially revives emotional responsiveness in depression, enabling patients to reconnect with their emotions."
This hypothesis was borne out in the data produced by the experiment.
Essentially, they were able to increase empathy in their patients which enabled the patients to experience less isolation, thus relieving (some/most of) their depression.
As much of a pity that, 70 years later, we are still using transistor based computers originally derived from three wires stuck in a piece of rock[1] by some very innovative fellows at Bell Labs[2]?
Both of the instances you mention would almost certainly rely or result on, and from, what intelligence might be shared or derived from having that frantic phone call or backroom diplomacy.
It's not just who you know, but what intel you can share to strengthen an alliance that matters the most.
What troubles me about this article is the after effect on those who might be employed by nation states who seek to better understand our intelligence mechanism, and while I realize that every actor in the schema is a cog in a very complex machine, it stands to reason that if tons of people are leaving public service for the private sector, there is a vast amount of leaky intel out there for the having.
I don't think there is anything wrong with consolidation, necessarily, but we need to have stopgaps in place to quell the unwanted outflow of personnel from what is essentially a defense-centered brain trust because of how much we as a public have invested in their training and relied on them to help us stay out of harm's way. I'm especially worried about the younger set (not to foment discrimination, per se, but maturity does shape one's thinking) who may more easily be duped by some seemingly friendly industry that is a shell company for nefarious activity.
My only comment is to applaud an absolutely fantastic effort. Well done, and thank you for such a comprehensive yet accessible set of steps to become more well versed in deep learning.
I recall reading some article about how, when mining for bitcoin (for example), what was really being mined are progressively larger prime numbers, or scientific data, or some such data requiring lots of computation.
Isn't there something of real value being mined? If not, what is being done when people _mine_ bitcoins?
What I find interesting, in addition to your description of the price elasticity being at issue, is precisely _what_ a bitcoin represents.
In fact, what _all_ cryptocurrency represent, to my knowledge...and that is, some increasingly unbreakable cryptographical mechanism by which information may be passed at ever more secret rates.
The question I have is: precisely who is in the market for such things, and are they not, in fact, what is holding these currencies together?
It also begs the question: if the person who can afford to 'buy' the cryptographical information is the one "funding" the market, are we not at the beck and call of the deepest pockets in terms of securing what may ultimately be state-secret level data?
Not that this necessarily applies to your situation, but for those who might otherwise be dissuaded, it is very doable to install solar panels on the ground to accommodate what requirements exist regarding the incident angle of solar radiation/absorbtion.
I actually find it surprising that your utility finds that to be a deal breaker as it would only limit your ability to generate electricity by a few percent per skewed degree.
Every one of your statements is in some way a defense of the current mass media structure. Even your counterexamples of public news sources maintain a sufficiently small enough market share as would be counted as noise in a t-test.
Without sounding pedantic, I think it's fair to say that the mass media put out a LOT of material into the public domain merely to acquire the largest market share of attention.
It is very rare that I read a story in a newspaper or hear one on television that isn't some form of salacious gossip or eye catching spectacle.
Though I haven't read most of it, Chris Hedges' book: Empire of Illusion, speaks to this with much greater acuity than I can.
I wish we could all just take a breath of fresh air (whoops, there is an allusion to another, though admittedly fairly neutral, piece of media) and remember that we are often much better off without the media dictating what we think should be important. I fear that the fractionism that George Washington cautioned us against in his farewell address is driving most of what we consume from the mass media.
I hesitate even to post this for fear of sounding too alarmist, and for the possible repercussions on myself from the powers that be in their never ending fight to be 'right', but I do think that this is a subject that is important enough to stand up and say "enough is enough". I know I sound paranoid, but as we become ever more connected, it is not as far fetched as it might seem that such things transpire. It is imperative that the power remain in the purview of the public and not those with access to what information money can buy, or cookies can acquire.
Fair point, I didn't realize that the Philippines were predominantly Christian.
I really didn't want to go about defending Christianity necessarily, though I realize that is how the beginning of my comment turned out, but rather point to how we shouldn't generalize the problem into a certain religion being responsible for problem.
Thanks for helping me understand the punitive issue in more detail.
Not sure why you have to point at the members of the Christian religion as the culprit, when there are people of similarly zealous ilk in each and every religion besides Christianity. Certainly, Christianity has the majority stake of religion in the Western world, but this question is a global one, and I don't remember the last time a person was summarily executed for dealing drugs in a Christian country like one might find in Singapore, or their head cut off like one might find in certain Middle Eastern countries, or (again) killed, in certain African countries.
Pointing a finger at a single group is unproductive when the desired outcome is a more comprehensively understanding, less punitive, and essentially more humanitarian solution for what is at issue.
The real disconnect is that the people in power are not held to the same standard as those being sentenced. When was the last time you heard of a prosecuting attorney being drug tested before they could argue in court? What about a judge, or probation/parole/police officer? If there was some transparency in how ubiquitous drug use actually is, one might have some real leverage when seeking to implement more equitable (and therefore less punitive) legislation that provides fairer sentencing guidelines.
Thanks for the praise, and for the insight per your experience. Sounds like a great gig!
I looked you up, and see that you are likely working exclusively in Haskell, but thought you might derive some value from Carl Cook's presentation on optimizing HFT code at the most recent cpp convention. I recognize the languages are distinctly different, but he provides some interesting theoretical points along the way that might be advantageous to you.
Also, I can sympathize with your plight to run scalable sims. I've done some work in bioinformatics, and am building a small cluster at home so that I can learn to write code that'll scale to more massively parallel systems that are de rigueur in that domain.
I think it helps to understand that the financial sector provides capital that serves to energize virtually every other sector in every industry.
Without finance, there is no biomedical research (private especially). Without finance, there is no aerospace advancement. Without finance, there is no alternative energy. Being able to facilitate a more liquid, more transparent financial sector is, in my opinion, a calling worthy of any programmer who seeks to make the world a better place.
Your assignment of people as 'questionable' is likely an artifact of the 2007 recession, and that kind of thing is a personal choice. I can guarantee you that there are 'questionable' people in every sector and in virtually every company. Sometimes people are great, and sometimes they aren't. Their field of employment has very little to do with what makes them that way, and I think that it's a little ignorant to be so casual (and I say this because you are certainly not alone in your judgment) with how you view people.
Remember how, as children, we are taught to not judge books by their covers? Why do the same with a programmer who works in finance? Sure, some of the work may be a little pedantic, like squeezing an extra millisecond out of an algorithm, but hey, that's computer science in general, and I liken that to an F1 racing team spending hour upon hour sculpting the perfect frame for their car.
Sorry for the rant, I've spent a decent amount of time working on financial algorithms, and what you said touched a nerve.
They (Google) have a feature built-in to the search engine so that if you put all the terms you want to absolutely see in quotes, for example: "tomato seeds grow", it won't return results without any of those terms.
Note that it will only return results with pages that have those terms in that order.
> A local newspaper and a news channel picked up the story. The throng turned into a flood of visitors taking selfies with the plane. India's aviation minister came visiting, as did senior officials and a bevy of businessmen.
> Mr Yadav says he's now ready to commercially build India's first indigenous planes. Investors have shown interest. The local BJP-led government has promised him 157 acres of land to set up a factory to make 19-seater aeroplanes.
While your point is understood, he does seem to be being taken somewhat seriously.
Ever read Les Miserables?
When it's the difference between making the car insurance payment and shopping at Wal-Mart, or not making it, and shopping at, say, Publix, the choice is less about ethics and more about practicality.
For what it's worth I do grow a garden, albeit a limited one due to the law restricting my garden to my backyard. I hope to plant fruit trees this Spring to offset more of my food costs and enjoy fresher, healthier fare.