These statistics favor monocultural societies and collectivist societies over individualist ones.
eyeroll. You know what's typically American? This kind of masturbatory pop sociology bullshit. Something in US culture makes its citizens specially prone to this kind of hasty over-generalization: a Blue/Red outlook on civilization, the globe neatly divided on the Entrepreneurial City on the Hill (i. e. the United States) and Conformist Worker Bee cultures (i. e. everyone else). You have no idea of how condescending this particular national meme comes across to the rest of the world -- specially when talking about primary education test scores, of all things. History seen as nothing but war between economic classes indeed, it's just we're taking the side of capitalists.
Of course, mention to this kind of americano that the most vibrant economy in the world is Japan, and they'll blush. As they should. Or that Germany's much praised labour reform in the Schroeder era actually gave to unions seats in the management board. Not easy to frame in Reaganite shades of grey. Or the economic status of Sweden, and its leadership in many industries. Try to think about that, next time you find yourself saluting the flag or something.
If I hire someone I want them to have a good attention to detail and not just do whatever works.
Crazy-person level of attention to detail. Not good. Not adequate. It asks for perfection, or lunacy: both of which are abusive to ask for. [1]
They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. [...] How do you mitigate that?
Try hiring four people to do the job of four people. If they fucked up the wifi because their intern-slave is busy updating the site's CSS, managing the databases, backing up the file server, fixing the wifi, carrying down the booths, making coffee, cleaning the toilets, and has to catch a plane for Kuala Lumpur tomorrow at 6 a. m., guess who's failing at his job. And it's not the guy making the coffee.
'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal.
Maybe it's normal, but that doesn't mean those who accept it for a pittance are not suckers.
[1] "Oh, but they're joking, it's hyperbole". I presume the salary is a joke too?
Because this is a common misconception about economics that drives me nut. On second thought, I'm definitely too trigger happy. Let me explain:
Inflation has never been a problem since Paul Volcker in 1982. In fact, the moniker Great Moderation should be more properly called Great Moderation of Inflation -- since not much was moderate apart from that, as exemplified by the crashes of 1987 and 2008, and the bubbles; but I digress.
We had about 10, 20 years of the lowest level of inflation in history across the board, maybe 2% per annum or so. Everyone nowadays is obsessed with Zimbabwe, or the ex-Soviet Unions, or the Diocletian Roman Empire, but those are red herrings, minor blips in a sea of (excessive) financial restraint. Inflation is not a problem today.
In fact, deflation is a problem today. Large part of the German restructuring, so lauded everywhere, was helped by inflation in Spain and Italy. (Granted, it wasn't much, maybe 4% per year, but even so.) Now the ECB refuses to return the favor: the ECB won't let inflation go above 2%, twisting the knife in Southern Europe's rib-cage and pissing everyone off. Meanwhile, the US, as most of the West and Japan, remains eyeballs deep in a liquidity trap: you could print the equivalent of the Michigan Lake in one dollar bills, and the Consumer Price Index wouldn't register a blip.
If your start-up were a big bank, you could tomorrow borrow money from the government at a real negative rate. You could borrow a billion dollars, store it in a bank account, pay in 10 years the principal and profit handsomely with the interest. For nothing. That's how low inflation is, today. The Fed is (used to be) desperately trying to increase it, as we speak, with not much effect.
In economic terms, a moderate (actually very low, in historical terms) 4% rate across the board would in fact benefit the system. If you can profit decently by storing money, nobody wants to get their lazy asses from the couch and invest. And the guys who have money don't want to spend it, either -- they're winning money, why spend? Thus a crisis. You have to whip their asses with the printing press, so that they don't get cozy.
Meh. This is legalization of use. I mean, yeah, it's a nice step, specially for the US -- a country which still has in its legislation, though void by the constitutional court, the death penalty for possession of fairly big amounts. Shows that the mentality has changed, and that's great.
The world should still move towards full legalization: use and trade.
Here's my proposal: let's forget exchange rates. Let's not confuse them with inflation[0]. That's a red herring. Exchange rates are important for BTC's legal users now because there's not (yet) production in BitCoin's economy. Apart from drugs[1], BTC is pure store of value, and it should be analyzed as such.
This is important for this discussion, because exchange rates ultimately won't matter that much. By "ultimately", I mean that phase of development when (if) BitCoin becomes a full currency, that is, when there's somebody, some corporation, operating and trading significantly in the currency. I won't lend the status of currency to any commodity which is not used this way.
And what's clear is that both BitCoin and gold are shit currencies. Even conceding the exchange rate could stabilize enough for a modern day Rockefeller[2] to pull it to a success, you still would have to contend with the deflation inherent in this "currency".
There's a reason why gold is traded in commodities markets -- and not as a currency. There's a reason why banks and states trade and store USD, instead of gold. You simply can't grow an economy like it's the 20th century with gold, or BitCoin. In fact, BitCoin is even more ruthless than gold. 19th century economies could at least pray for the discovery of a gold vein, to alleviate their deflationary comedowns. BitCoin denies even this possibility with the cold, germanic efficiency of a mathematical proof.
[0] The exchange rate we run against our future selves, if you will.
[1] Which doesn't count anyhow, since you would agree there's a risk markup on them for their illegal status, which makes dubious extrapolating any analysis from them.
[2] An improbably apt group of entrepreneurs, who even more improbably would decide to bet their future fortunes on a currency designed by computer geeks with a penchant for goldbuggering.
High Frequency trading is at the for front of alot of technology such as ASIC's, Infiniband networking gear,and low latency OS and networking stacks.
That's not an argument for HFT. If HFT is useless, then it has divested a great amount of research into technologies that no one really wanted otherwise, i. e., that the social cost of HFT is greater. Standard microeconomics.
The question is, what's HFT good for? Do its benefits outweigh its costs? I believe they don't. Low-quality liquidity under the 1s frame is not only useless for traders, it has a great social cost, in the form of research diverted to this inane game. The only plausible arguments I've found for HFT claim that HF traders wouldn't profit if it wasn't useful -- which is really just begging the question; a circular argument.
I recommend you to read again the article. Newell here makes some interesting points that directly address your concerns. Briefly:
(a) Games of tomorrow will be made to host creative communities, which almost mandate those games to be for desktops. It's just too awkward to do serious modding work in a tablet.
(b) What is really worrying about the PC is not the format being outdated -- Minecraft, LoL, TF2 and WoW attest to its potential. What's wrong is Microsoft awkwardly replicating mobile ecosystems. Creating videogames now is all about novelty, taking ideas to market fast, and growing cool communities around these games. This just can't happen, when your platform maker is Big Brother's whiny, lazy cousin.
All in all, I just don't get why the Droid Brigade is so enthused about mobile gaming. It's probably an USian localism. The cons: Android smartphones are slow and jerky and shit; the iPhone is like Manhattan if it were a North Korean gulag; fat-fingering your way around is the shittiest of input methods; and most of the games are preheated gimmicks, tastelessly exploited before the camera until boredom strikes.
Sports are democratic and egalitarian? Tell that to Messi or Lebron James ;)
Anyway, that sports and education are so tangled is purely a national oddity of the US, maybe stemming from its tradition of great, and expensive, private universities. During the 19th century, if I recall correctly, it was a sign of distinction and wealth to practice sports; I conjecture that's what got it started in the universities, and then it spread in the early 20th century, when those colleges started courting new talent, intellectual or otherwise, from the up and coming middle classes, helped by the New Deal and the GI Bill.
That could also be why Oxford and Cambridge are relatively so keen on sports, i.e. rowing, as compared to other European universities. Sports were quite the posh thing back then. But, of course, I'm just guessing.
If I were an investor, and Nintendo's CEO came by and told me they wanted to make games for smartphones or, god forbid, sell to Apple, I'd sell so fast, and with so much energy, CERN physicists would confirm the Higgs boson from my clicking.
I think I already posted here about this, some eons ago. To recap: this strategy is bad. It's let's take Nintendo from a powerful stance as both platform maker and virtuoso first party developer, to Oversized Third Party Developer in a market notorious for:
(a) Low quality and extremely low fidelity demand, which prizes being cheap and having a gimmick over everything.
(b) Notoriously capricious primma donnas such as Apple and Samsung as platform makers, which take insane cuts from developers.
(c) Being an extremely fragmented market, with thousands of devices with very different characteristics and software which Nintendo would have to support.
Selling Nintendo to Apple is the business equivalent of folding a royal flush. Yeah, so the iPad sold 100 million units. The DS sold 154 million. For a single purpose device. The 3DS might be 20% behind its predecessor's curve -- a ridiculously successful curve, if I might say -- but that's still a cold 124 million units. The Wii was a fad, true... and it redefined the meaning of fad itself, selling 100 million units; a one model, single-purpose device. When factored into this that Nintendo profits from third party software -- unlike Rovio, which has to pay its dutiful tides to petulant lovers by excellance Apple and Samsung -- one starts clearly seeing how Nintendo is pulling ass like Brad Pitt at a wet t-shirt contest. Absolutely insane. Not even Steve Jobs could dream of selling a gadget so well as the 3DS does.
Not to mention that, again, in this business if you're a third party developer, either your name is Activision, or you're into masochism. Lose power, lose the platform, and you lose everything that makes you strong.
Which is a much easier problem to solve. I suppose this web server is in the same LAN, or at least whitelisted, so send the email directly to the institution's SMTP server, which is presumably not an open relay.
What I find really interesting about the NSA is their Suite A: classified algorithms (!) used to protect the most sensitive documents (!!) with hilariously bad security records (!!!).
Take for instance the Skipjack cipher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skipjack_(cipher)), a Type I cipher ("endorsed by the NSA for securing classified and sensitive U.S. Government information") which was evaluated, for the purpose of security, by "some of the world's most accomplished and famous experts in combinatorics and abstract algebra", and finally declassified due to concerns expressed by other cryptographers about its security.
Biham and Shamir broke it the day after it was declassified.
It could, in mental work. You could forget things.
Also, in my experience, real understanding of mathematical concepts comes to me after I've studied it, when I'm thinking about the matter in the background while doing other things. It's plausible that, if I were to overextend myself, I'd lose focus and not assimilate that much later.
Hum. I got a different impression with regards to the FEM graphs of the beams' stresses. Dr. Drang seemed more bothered by the fact that they were there because it was too amateur, and too much pretty graphs for their own sake, since any civil engineer could do the calculations in their sleep. Not because of technical problems, per se. (Honestly, that might be a social faux pas among physical engineers, and a noob move from Musk, but I'm not a civil engineer nor Musk so I don't give a shit.)
Apart from that, it seems, as I gathered from comments here, that there was a solution to thermal expansion, and that's both not fixing the tube to the pylons, and having the trajectory curve so they can bend safely under expansion. This confusion rose from the ambiguous meaning of "nearly straight tube". The Hyperloop seems to have decent tolerances for turning, so maybe that could work.
But the most solid arguments against Hyperloop, I think, come from the economics side. It's less efficient than a good HSR, like the French or the Japanese ones. It's not SF to LA, it's "somewhere near SF" to "somewhere near LA". Its cost is probably wildly underestimated. It looks as if the only failure modes are either "tubes explode causing chaos", or "crash and die horribly"; not necessarily an exclusive choice.
Yeah, but this population prone to schizophrenia would have: a) to know they're predisposed to this condition; b) to know that weed would worsen it; c) to believe that this effect on schizophrenia would be bad enough to outweigh smoking a joint. Or have another factor linked to schizophrenia that makes them avoid weed. It's possible, in principle, but I think you're stretching it too far.
And it's assumed the distribution of smoking per capita didn't change by much. I think that's a good assumption; again, it's possible that what you suggested happened, but it's a bit sketchy.
> They are dealing with the impoverished young men of today, high on pot and trolling for snacks. That is, they would be trolling for snacks if the munchies are ever able to override their desire to keep playing whatever video game.
Downvoted for being hilarious while talking out of your ass. FYI, pot has a (very) mellowing and relaxing effect. The idea of the munchies as some sort of dangerous rampage in search of food is hilarious; it usually involves more sitting on the couch and putting some Pink Floyd on (or Flying Lotus if you like rap, whatever), than presenting menaces to racially prejudiced vigilantes.
PCP is a dissociative anaesthetic. You aren't going to be very dangerous on it. More like dizzy, and confused, and very clumsy. Hardly killer stuff, for others at least.
Now, what's funny is the drugs you don't mention. Some people on cocaine, or alcohol, usually white Wall Street guys and other posh denizens, can behave like assholes. The kind of people who'll be self-aggrandizing, selfish douches, and hit you on the neck from behind if they get angry. But, since neighborhood watchers don't kill white drunkards, there's no need to rationalize retroactively our racism with those drugs.
Which is annoying and self-righteous, and laughably wrong, and charmingly unaware that it has exactly zero arguments to support its position -- apart from tone trolling, of course. I facepalmed on just about every paragraph, and I'm not even a graduate student. Just a taste:
> Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
... because there's no significant "skeptic" communities for relativity or geocentrism. Nobody has any vested interest in claiming those theories are false. Theoretical physicists and astronomers aren't constantly asked to defend their positions against fallacious argument after argument, nor have they to fight against a minor but very influential political minority which is on faith completely against them. No Secretary of Interior ever said: "If the troubles from theoretical physicists and geocentrists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used." If you can't see even that, there's no point in arguing.
And then the completely bullshit tangent about how the Nuclear Winter equation is just as goofy as the Drake equation, which just is... just... facepalm. Quick, Crichton, tell me the probability that life on a planet evolves to intelligence. Since, you know, you just argued that it's as well understood and measurable as the reflectivity of dust.
In regards to its line, that scientific knowledge is being perverted by politics... you know that psychological projection thing, when someone sees in others what they can't bear to see in themselves? I'm not usually someone that whips The Freud out that quickly but, damn, Crichton is really in contest for some psychoanalyzing. I mean, he's just argued that climate scientists are wrong, on purely political terms. Literally, he doesn't like the politics they do. Mind numbing.
Soul, noun: social construct developed over millenia for purposes of group identification, specifically religious; sometimes used for political (crusades, justification of kings), even economical (selling of indulgences' scandal, the Protestant Ethic) purposes. This project didn't at the end obtain as much credibility as other (better built, with more interesting purposes) social constructs such as physics or mathematics; though not for lack of trying, from Plato to Kant and similar scholastics.
Now seriously, some terms are very ridiculously loaded, and IMO should be avoided in science. If you want to talk about a "feedback loop" that generates consciousness, go on, be my guest. Now, calling it "soul"... that's just openly inviting every faith in the world to, at best, hijack your theory with pious, well-meaning BS.
eyeroll. You know what's typically American? This kind of masturbatory pop sociology bullshit. Something in US culture makes its citizens specially prone to this kind of hasty over-generalization: a Blue/Red outlook on civilization, the globe neatly divided on the Entrepreneurial City on the Hill (i. e. the United States) and Conformist Worker Bee cultures (i. e. everyone else). You have no idea of how condescending this particular national meme comes across to the rest of the world -- specially when talking about primary education test scores, of all things. History seen as nothing but war between economic classes indeed, it's just we're taking the side of capitalists.
Of course, mention to this kind of americano that the most vibrant economy in the world is Japan, and they'll blush. As they should. Or that Germany's much praised labour reform in the Schroeder era actually gave to unions seats in the management board. Not easy to frame in Reaganite shades of grey. Or the economic status of Sweden, and its leadership in many industries. Try to think about that, next time you find yourself saluting the flag or something.