This is the thing for me. If your company has a fully-stocked kitchen, quality chairs, monitors, adjustable desk, and noise cancelling headphones, it might be a comparable to a good home office setup in terms of comfort. What kills me though is commuting. All told, I spend 3-4 extra hours on days I go to the office, and that time comes out of my free time, effectively turning a 40 hour job into a 60 hour job.
An under-represented argument for a carbon tax is the fact that it would encourage companies to innovate, both with respect to efficiency as well as using renewable energy.
I predict that industries in countries that adopt a carbon tax earlier will end up with a competitive advantage.
I don't think the comparison to cigarette taxes is completely fair. Cigarettes are relatively inelastic w.r.t. price as they are addictive, and have no real competing product.
Electricity and power generated from carbon emitting sources on the other hand have a much more elastic demand curve. E.g. if your energy bill is cheaper with renewables, no one would choose to go with fossil fuels. Likewise with electric vehicles. If the cost of tanking up an EV is significantly lower than an internal combustion vehicle, people will switch for purely economic reasons.
You can look at the lack of a carbon tax as an incentive on fossil fuels which socializes the externalities.
Science and technology are generally agnostic to their usage, and will be used to both positive and negative ends whose magnitude is proportional to the power of the underlying technology.*
AI has the potential for massive positive effects as well as massive negative effects.
What saddens me is that we have systems and incentives in place which encourage governments and corporations to use powerful technologies to negative ends.
* Obviously there is room to quibble about the positive/negative balance of individual technologies, e.g. gunpowder, bio-weapons, etc., however I am sure a circumspect analysis could find positives even in things developed primarily to improve the efficiency of war.
I had a number theory professor who said there are a number of deceptively promising avenues of attack using simpler methods than Wiles, but that end up being dead ends. He said mathematicians are now mostly of the opinion that Fermat was probably onto one of these.
I'm ever so slightly optimistic in this regard. As soon as we see a few GDPR-related penalties assessed, the risk-reward calculation will change drastically.
According to their 2017 annual report [1], Marriot had $22.9bn in worldwide revenue. A 4% penalty on that would be $900M.
$50bn/year would be more revenue than fb had in 2017, though of course the majority of their 2.23bn monthly users would disappear if asked for $.01/mo.
It is an interesting thought experiment, though, to consider what facebook would look like if its revenue was derived from convincing users that it was worth a monthly subscription.
Looks like a summer school program at University of Waterloo:
"The Quantum Cryptography School for Young Students (QCSYS) is a unique, eight-day enrichment program for students hosted by the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo. QCSYS will run August 10-17, 2018 with students arriving August 9 and departing August 18.
The school offers an interesting blend of lectures, hands-on experiments and group work focused on quantum cryptography"
I think an important aspect not mentioned in this article is the environment in which the computer and internet wunderkind founders got their starts.
You had a perfect storm of brand new, super powerful tools (the internet providing dirt-cheap distribution, cheap computation, beginner friendly programming languages -- php for facebook, java and python for google, etc.). There was so much low-hanging fruit with relatively little competition.
A very similar thing happened in physics in the early 20th century, and led to the same notion that genius is a fleeting trait concentrated in the young. To quote this BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899
It was like discovering a new toolkit which could quickly yield discoveries. Or, less charitably, as one scientist said: "mediocre physicists could discover great physics".
Zoning requirements and permits for operating hotels are not unreasonable.
Some people rent out a spare room now and again for extra cash, and some people have multiple properties that are occupied exclusively by Airbnb renters, essentially running an unlicensed hotel.
The latter can be extremely obnoxious if its your upstairs neighbor, not to mention the effects that being discovered by Airbnb real estate investors can have on a town or neighborhood.
I always feel like the right solution would be to have a significantly shorter copyright duration, but make it extendable for a large and increasing annual fee.
I don't care if Disney gets to keep the rights to Mickey Mouse. The real problem is all the other stuff that gets swept along in the bargain.
Since they're talking about small publishers having trouble keeping up with google SEO updates, is there a reasonable way to actually break up google search?
I used MiniZinc on the capacitated vehicle routing problem in a combinatorial optimization project course a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it.
The sweet spot for MiniZinc is in investigating a problem and prototyping a solution. I would say it takes 10-20 hours to get a workable understanding of the language and paradigm, plus or minus your previous experience.
However, MiniZinc is built on backtracking, which scales poorly to real world instances of np-hard problems.
Some of that has a "you get what you pay for" component.
My parents have a Frigidaire Flair double oven from the early 1960s. The thing is amazing, and still works perfectly. I think it cost something like $400 originally, which would be north of $3000 today, however in 1963 the median income was $6200 [1], so that would be closer to $4000 for the median person of today.
For that kind of money, you could definitely get some nicer appliances today. Although the switch from simple analog to complex digital electronics probably puts a more modest ceiling on the lifespan of anything made today.
On the other hand, there is also something to be said for being able to have an oven without taking out a loan!
Interesting that you bring up autonomy and the military. I wonder if this has anything to do with the US naval piloting incidents of late. Previous HN commentary suggested that the Navy has become a highly bureaucratic organization where all decision making and responsibility are deferred up the command chain as far as possible.
> What do we imagine will happen when everybody thinks of themselves as being victimised?
On an individual level, self-pity, even when justified, is not very helpful, and though the two are not exactly the same, one leads to the other pretty easily.
As you said, this is slowly happening to me. I love being able to prototype systems in languages like python and matlab, but at the same time it feels like building on sand, especially when other developers get involved.
Recently while writing some matlab found a great example of the sort of trouble a decent type checking system will save you. The predict method takes a machine learning model, and applies it to some data. The output however, is up to the model, and not all models return the same data type (e.g. column vector of doubles, or cell array of strings), making it a pain in the butt to do any abstraction over models.
I am excited for languages like lbstanza that let you have your cake and eat it too.