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It was depressing, but the way that Howard Shulman overcame his pain, his disfigurement, and his abandonment was sublime, and that is uplifting.

edit:

FREAK THE BOOK: Howard Shulman on KUSI 10.27.13

Previous Book (Freak) on Amazon

This emphasizes different points from those made in Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281

Texas is the most populous state to approve textbooks at the state level. That means textbook publishers cater to Texas or their books fail, and schools elsewhere are often stuck with whatever Texas approved.

Texas is a Red state still deeply in denial about slavery and racism. Last I checked, kids in Texas public schools are still taught that the Civil War started for a "variety" of reasons, only one of which was slavery.

Publishers who want a successful textbook must therefore cater to Texas by downplaying the viciousness and significance of slavery. This is a primary reason why teachers have a hard time finding the materials they need.

It's crazy how expensive it is, and even crazier that people will actually pay those high prices for it. Saffron is a crocus, a simple bulb flower. It's perennial, meaning it keeps coming back year after year.

You can buy ten bulbs for less than ten bucks on amazon. Each bulb gives one flower per year, which gives you three strand per flower. I've got them in two flower pots on a windowsill.

I stopped smoking using bupoprion, which I chose because the side effects sounded so much less severe/milder than chantix. The funny thing was that bupoprion IS an anti-depressant as well as a stop smoking aid and was originally intended as an anti-depressant until they found it helped people stop smoking as well. Go figure. Still don't smoke 4 years later.

Actually, the side effects were pretty awesome: increased energy, weight loss, euphoria, increased libido (oh man, that was crazy). Although I did notice I was also a little more nervous/irritable than usual and I started sleeping only 4 hours a night. I was also more impulsive, I made several life decisions that would have consequences for years while I was taking it, good decisions for the most part but it was funny that it happened that way and certainly the drug influenced my decisions. Some people end up shopping or gambling compulsively.

> Indeed, there's a common joke that there are three genders in China: men, women, and women with Ph.D.s. Men marry women, and women with Ph.D.s don't marry.

You find the same change going on in Arabic countries. For example, my wife and her friends are all masters students in Algeria and I see the same pattern of change. My wife's mother had an arranged marriage at 18 (both her father and mother were 18 when matched up)... and now she was not married until nearly 30. A drastic change.

Completely different religion (Islam), culture, etc... but the same basic trend.

Reference this 2007 New York Times story https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/world/africa/26algeria.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

If you are interested this, you may be enjoy my over engineered Prezi on Plato's Cave.

Most dystopia's connect with this idea in some kind of way. If you want a cheap/entertaining movie version of the cave that's not "The Matrix", roll back to the movie "The Island" by Michael Bay--starring Ewan McGregor and Scar Jo.

​

Plato's Cave Explained - Prezi with visuals and video

> The article fails to mention the fact that there is a trend in colleges now to allow black only and other minority specific housing where students can live with all black people, all latino people etc.

It failed to mention it because it's a lie.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/us/california-today-colleges-segregated-housing.html?_r=0

>"You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even when the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gang-banger would get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics. Because it's all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everybody loses their minds!" > >-the Joker

>It isn’t the nature of a death that upsets people, it’s how expected it is. Gangsters and soldiers are expected to die early deaths, so threatening to kill one of these people wouldn’t draw any reaction. But no one expects a mayor’s line of work to put them into mortal danger, which is why Joker’s attempted assassination of Mayor Garcia put the city into a frenzy. Joker believes people can accept tragedy, so long as it’s expected. Source

Sad, but true.

Well written: pulls together a couple different well known ideas in statistics and psychology and examples.

Will we stop interviewing people? Of course not, as the author undoubtedly knows, people think they will make the right decision and will refuse to give up control. Aside from regression towards the mean, in general, we almost always overestimate our ability to regress and compare / rank complex models.

As I am sure he will allude to in his next post, using models is a great way to improve the decisions we make. By explicitly stating the factors that matter to us, we will be much better at making a decision as we won't be jumbling around a bunch of random unorganized information in our mind. The example in the post was a little extreme, though.

However, should we stop interviewing people? No. When using a model as I described, including subjective information (shyness, assertiveness, tidiness, timeliness, etc.) is perfectly fine. By explicitly stating it and giving it a weighting, it will simplify your thought significantly. By not interviewing people, you lose the ability to ascertain one of the most important parts: how well you enjoy working with them (and potentially how well everyone else does and how well they work with the team).

Of course, one could potentially just put that as the most important thing in the model, but generally that never happens. Our gut feeling is mostly defined by the subjective observations, but when we are forced to rank them, usually we get more level headed.

I haven't dove into this shitstorm in like four years, so I'm not sure about what's come out in the meantime. But this is my understanding:

The journalist Zoe Quinn dated was Nathan Grayson, who wrote this article for Kotaku that mentioned her in connection with some proposed reality show about a game jam that went awry. It's not a review of her work, nor is anything about Depression Quest really mentioned except that she developed it, and they were apparently not dating at the time the article was written.

That she was mentioned in an article by someone she (later?) dated is the shred of truth, but it's a pretty far cry from saying she slept with people for exposure or reviews. It's really important to remember that regardless of what happened next, the initial "Zoe post" was written by a pissed off ex with an axe to grind. It never should've gotten the exposure that it did, and people latched on to it for all the wrong reasons.

Depression Quest was a super minor, super short text-based indie game that afaik was always completely free (I played it in its online version, but later on it went through Greenlight). There was probably a real conversation to be had about ethics in game journalism at the time - like studios paying for positive reviews and coverage of AAA games and other issues surrounding sponsored content - but Quinn never should've been a player in it, and the fact that she was will always make me suspicious that many people that hopped on the Gamergate bandwagon weren't really in it for "ethics in game journalism" reasons at all.

My partner wrote a very similar piece about how unscientifically most people (and many scientists) think about animal intelligence. I also recommend the book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? to anyone interested in this topic.

It's also a little dismissive to say that MLK and the gay rights movement weren't also backed with a tinge of violence. Stonewall started as a series of riots against the police, after all. MLK's prominence is partially the fault of more violent black liberation groups, which made MLK's (at the time) unacceptable rhetoric about integration and equality much more moderate in comparison. "Riot is the language of the unheard," indeed.

It's trite to say that gay rights and civil rights were peaceful concessions to obvious historical wisdom. People died to get those rights for their loved ones. They fought, hard, and sometimes had to fight dirty, and sometimes used weapons other than words. And it wasn't always enough, because everyone wanted it done later, or at another time, or through their preferred, subverted channel of the organs of state and public opinion. Even today, significant numbers of Americans would prefer to roll back those civil liberties - not just Darth Pence, but large numbers of people in Mississippi and other states where miscegenation would be illegal if not for Loving v. Virginia. Those changes didn't come easy, and saying so erases the legacy of a great many brave men and women who deserve better.

The bottom line is make sure you're using LastPass or Password Safe or some similar program to generate and store unique complex passwords for every website.

I started using LastPass about a year ago, and not only are my passwords far, far safer, but it also makes logging into websites so much faster (much more reliable than the remember password feature built into web browsers).

Yup. Modern education is a cargo cult. Especially when you consider robust analyses of educational outcomes in separately adopted twins demonstrating that ~50% of the difference in educational outcomes is predictable and genetic and the other ~50% isn’t predictable based on anything that people think makes a difference (ie school quality, income, parenting style etc are all confounders and not causal). Citation

The GoogleMaps view is a beautiful example of wave interference.

The New Makerbot Replicator is a closed-source design. No-one I know in the diy-fabricator market will touch it with a 10 foot pole. It's an entry-point for suckers.

Also: Makerbot is in hot water with the open-source reprap community at the moment, over this. 3.2:User Content:License:You hereby grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Company and its affiliates and partners, an irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free and fully paid, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, publicly display and perform, prepare derivative works of, incorporate into other works, and otherwise use your User Content, and to grant sublicenses of the foregoing, solely for the purposes of including your User Content in the Site and Services. You agree to irrevocably waive (and cause to be waived) any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to your User Content.

Open source protects inventors through share and share alike with guaranteed attribution. This is straight-up IP theft, of the kind facebook and their ilk employ.

You're making an awful lot of assumptions. You're assuming that everybody online only ever interacts with each other once; that somebody's screenname isn't susceptible to the same repeated attacks that somebody's real identity is; that people online don't hold their online personae as dear as their real-world social personae. And most importantly, you're assuming that "free speech" and its use on the anonymous internet is limited to just verbal insult rather than, say, the dissemination of personal information (including financial, geographical, social, psychological, etc.), the widespread and easily-publicized dissemination of somebody's pictures, the release of passwords, the sharing of intellectual property. There are so many new and wonderful ways to hurt somebody in front of large audiences- all made possible by modern technology.

But if I take all of your premises at face value, I'd still disagree. I think it depends on the person. On either end. If somebody is good enough with words, or suggests something damaging in a way that tricks a stranger into taking their advice, that's incredibly dangerous. If somebody on the receiving end is particularly vulnerable, either emotionally or intellectually, they can take the same damage from words from a stranger online as they would in real life. Words are really, really powerful.

You make a fair point, but you are also making assumptions. Pet cats do have some instinct to hunt, but it is accepted that most house cats will starve if you abandon them in the wild unless they had that training. So it stands to reason that kittens have something to learn from their parents, which indicates that cats may also be equipped with an instinct to teach their young. Under your reasoning, why do cats bring still-living animals to you?

It is true that cats impulsively hunt and hide excess food, but it is also true that mother cats bring their kittens dead and living animals. It is not anthropomorphism to assume your cat is engaging in the latter behavior because it is a documented behavior that cats engage in. But it is a good point that this behavior is hard to interpret, so I'll edit in a different one to my original comment. Thanks a lot for the input!

edit: I accidentally edited over this comment when I was trying to edit my original, so I had to rewrite it. Sorry about any confusion! I cannot reddit.

Every war is a PR war. Seriously, go read Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Whomever cannot hold the moral high ground usually loses before the fighting even starts.

In this case, the terrorist vs. citizen divide is to convince the army and the middle-of-the-road populace, as well as other forces like foreign countries and the UN, to fight on your side... whichever side that is. it's never just populace vs. government/cops, it's two (or more) ideological factions within those groups fighting for supremacy. Not all government workers are oppressors, and not all civilians are freedom fighters.

I've never seen, ever, someone who makes the former argument also make the second, and I doubt I ever will. I have seen the argument to defer to Parliament (I agree) but never to a set of specific politicians. Also, it's absolutely feasible that the EU restricts their "evil plans" yet they still benefit overall from remaining.

> http://www.ted.com As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

Tsk. Not this bullshit again.

The consensus definition of the word "democracy" includes both direct and indirect democracies.

The US is a democratic republic, a form of indirect democracy. Similarly, for reasons of scalability or stability indirect democracies are also the type of democracy enjoyed by every single other democratic system in the world.

Some ignorant people or True Believers of one stripe or another arbitrarily try to redefine "democracy" to only mean "direct democracy" and try to establish an opposition between "democracies" and "republics", but this is dumb for the following reasons:

1. It relies upon an arbitrary, minority, non-consensus redefinition of a perfectly well-understood consensus term.
2. It's usually only done through ignorance or for politically-motivated reasons.
3. If we subscribe to this definition then there isn't a single democracy on the face of the earth.

Don't be one of those people - use the same definitions as the rest of the English-speaking world does, and let this stupid meme that "the USA isn't a democracy it's a republic" die like the demonstrable nonsense it is.

I find the life of an artist a bit of an interesting one. This guy is far more skilled than Warhol, yet his copy sells for much less than Warhol's copy. An artist basically learns from copying. The ones who become good artists excels at copying everything. From copying the illusion of life to copying something so real, they become counterfeit. But then again, everything is a remix.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to raise is how hard it is to get by as an artist. The reddit stereotype is that they could graduate from college and become a barista. But is it really that bad/hard to make it as an artist?

I work at a laboratory now but last summer I spent three months working for Domino's Pizza. It's amazing talking to individuals with degrees applying for these jobs because the market is so overpopulated with qualified individuals.

The solution isn't to go get an education because that doesn't even help. More and more people are going to college which drives up the cost of tuition. Now most of us coming out of undergraduate university have a few options to pay off our debts: - Work at a minimum wage job - Go to graduate school and incur more debt on the hopeful promise of being more qualified for a job, despite that being far from the truth - Work for teach for america and help destroy teachers' benefits and unions - Move in with parents and look for a job

As you said with minimum requirements being raised, I wasn't able to get most of the jobs I applied to (even minimum wage jobs at entertainment or food chains) without a bachelor's degree.

Ironic that you presented no evidence yourself.

Here's a very well-sourced Quora post on why most of the "Monsanto is evil" arguments are straight-up wrong

Reddit isn't exactly some super secret club. It is currently ranked as the 10^th most popular website in the USA, so it makes sense for mainstream news venues to cover a website that is even more popular than Netflix.

The fact that you're totally incredulous is what makes it awesome!

This is one of the most well-replicated (and easiest to replicate) psychology findings out there. Every time I show this video in a lecture, half the rooms misses the gorilla.

It's called "inattentional blindness". It's wild.

Concepts like this are crucial to democracy. There are many existing things like this already, the tor network (torproject.org), PGP email encryption, and the all private tails project (the link will give you issues about security, because they dont purchase corporate certificates). But all of these solutions still rely on a corporate controlled network.

The ideas discussed in this article could build a completely free and independent network that would be very hard to shut down by the powers that be.

As the internet becomes more and more commercialized and corporate controlled these projects become more and more important. As the article says, look at what has happened in the middle east. But many of those revolutions were fueled by facebook. If something similar were to happen in the US facebook would be taken over by the government immediately. An alternative network and ways to communicate over it would be invaluable to democracy.

If you liked this article you might be interested in the TED talk that Steven Pinker has presented. He offers more evidence (in the form of statistics) to support his argument as well as what are the most likely causes of this decrease in violence in recent times.

It's actually not too metaphysical. It's more about some simple science of your brain (see these links), even if usually served in a relatively esoteric pill. It is more of a psychological / physiological practice than of a religious rite.

That's not a real quote. The real one said: >I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.

He's talking about Communists in America during that time not being real communists.

>"Thujone, a chemical in absinthe, does cause hallucinations"

No it doesn't. The exact article they cited even says so:

>"And there is no evidence at all that thujone can cause hallucinations, even in high doses."

More evidence

But we're talking roughly 0.02% black. In other words, for every group of 10,000 people, only about 2 were black.

Yes, there is an economic disparity (and that's a problem too), and black people are a smaller percentage of the general US population, and 1/3 are imprisoned at some point in their life (another problem; see Ava Duvernay's documentary 13th) during which time they'd obviously be unable to attend a conference. There also may have been lighter-skinned black people that would've been harder to pick out from such a large crowd (edit: also, bathrooms, concessions stands, smoke breaks, late arrivals, early leavers, and shorter people hidden behind taller people). I still don't think those factors would be enough to account for that kind of difference in NRA attendance. There's probably a way to statistically account for some of those factors and compare the adjusted numbers, but that's beyond my statistics skills at this time.

Even if Ector had missed a lot of black people, say a total of 500 attending, that would still be less than 1% black. And if he only counted 12, then 500 is probably quite generous.

An obvious issue is this is all based on one guy's estimate from one conference in St. Louis five years ago, but even so it's still a huge disparity.

Disabling for an hour works for me most of the time, it also has a "movie mode" which adjusts the colours but keeps the brightness lower (I think, I'm not 100% sure exactly what its mechanism is) ~~indefinitely until you flip it off~~ for 2.5 hours. It relatively recently (I think a year or so ago) got a "disable until sunrise" option which is handy, but even before then it wasn't too difficult to just close the program and reopen it when you want the orange back.

It's going to be fun when the neuroscience of the hypothalamus finally enters mainstream knowledge and people start to realize just how much of animal behavior (including humans) is instinct-driven.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hypothalamus

> Google doesn't really like revealing that kind of stuff

Google loves revealing user numbers. They just haven't had a ton of victories in the last several years.

I remember making fun of him back in the 80s and in the 90s the cartoon series "The Critic" regularly poked fun at him. I feel genuinely bad for the guy now. He did a great TED talk earlier this year; I defy you not to be moved by it.

Is John Oliver's Show Journalism? He Says The Answer Is Simple: 'No'

Seriously. If you care about being informed, please seek independent, accredited sources- preferably multiple sources from different views- not comedians.

>Lack of critical thinking is the problem, and it's been here long before 2020.

Isaac Asimov was railing against "A Cult of Ignorance" in the 1980's and Richard Hofstadter wrote a whole, very dense book about the "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" in 1966! So, the seeds for disinformation to cripple America campaign have long been sown and awaiting germination.

You should read Kauffman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. He touches on marriage and relationships briefly, and shows how these things have been quantified in reasonable ways. And how there is actual psychology -- and a lot of it, much of it good -- done on this, and not just some 'intellectual' saying things that sound good. A lot of these questions are empirically, even if not all of them are.

There isn't more information on it. It's just a trend in the data: CEO pay growth increased around the time compensation disclosure was required -- it was discussed in a book called Predictably Irrational. There's no evidence I'm aware of that directly supports the disclosure ==> pay growth causal mechanism, however. Consider that plenty of other things were changing in the economy at the time.

The data certainly does seem to suggest, though, that society in a broader sense didn't react to the release of information. (Perhaps that actually could provide another causal explanation -- by proving definitely that shareholders didn't care about CEO compensation, fear of a potential reaction ceased to keep it down. But again, all speculation.)

When in doubt, there's Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent#Land_rent

> In political economy including physiocracy, classical economics, and other schools of economic thought excepting neoclassical economics, land is recognized as an inelastic factor of production. Rent is the distribution paid to freeholders for "allowing" production on the land they control.

> "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land ...." — Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations

> Observing that a tax on the unearned rent of land would not distort economic activities, Henry George proposed that publicly collected land rents (land value taxation) should be the primary (or only) source of public revenue; though he also advocated public ownership, taxation and regulation of natural monopolies and monopolies of scale that cannot be eliminated by regulation.

Still not sure I understand. I guess I'll have to give it some more thought. So that makes it an excellent post for /r/FoodForThought!

> considering that American schools tend to spend about as much money per student as counterparts in countries with better results

This is misleading though, as the local focus means there are huge disparities between school districts. This report from NPR not only shows average spending per pupil in each district, but also illustrates how a "long tail" of districts with very high spending (including some with over $40K/pupil) skews the overall average higher.

> I have a hypothesis, which is based on widely reported claims that school administrator pay is too high and growing too fast

The disparity in funding is also shown here, which helpfully breaks down the major expenditures by class, with administrative costs accounting for a distinct minority of the budget (7% nationally). Administrative costs do not appear to be a problem, particularly not when compared to the gross disparities in spending between districts.

Intelligence is a heritable trait.

This article indicates that educational achievement is influenced by ancestral educational achievement.

How are they teasing out the known correlations between educational achievement and income, and between intelligence and income? The article does not suggest any sort of controls for these factors.
In fact, the study of the Swedes that they discuss explicitly examines an educated elite and then tracks their descendants.

Moving away from an argument that I fully realize reeks of social Darwinism (an ideology I do not embrace), the article states:
>Mr Clark’s conclusion is that the underlying rate of social mobility is both low and surprisingly constant across countries and eras....

This is buried in the middle of the article, while in headline position at the top of the article is the polarizing and sensational claim that certain societies are significantly better than others in terms of social mobility. The study which supports that claim is the most limited one of the bunch, relying on the smallest data set.

This is an interesting article, but its structure seems clearly designed to support conclusions out of line with what the studies actually indicate.

It is the stuff that makes it "slimy". Hagfish also exude microfibres in their slime but I don't think anyone has tried making a thread from it, but they are researching it.

I've been writing fiction and essays for well over 20 years. I make, on average, about 10 bucks a month from this. According to Stephen King, this makes me a writer (I have paid a portion of my light bill with the proceeds). But I certainly don't make a living from the hobby.

Part of it is my own damn fault, I give the stuff away usually. I don't like to advertise (stupid punk ethos). But, I sell some despite myself. But my passion, like a musician or other artist, is not necessarily a thing that will, de facto, make money in a quantity that will support my family.

I recently wrote a thing (here if you're interested) about how some things simply cannot sustain economically the number of people that do them.

"Fuck you; pay me," as an idea works in skilled trades (in freelance editing or technical writing work it is a great motto). But there are plenty of people who do what I do (the fiction and essay thing) and do it as well if not better than me. They also give it away for free. Sure, there are exceptions (see a bestseller list), but even people I admire as writers often took other jobs.

You might have a problem like me, where everyone has a cousin that's got this really awesome story. Or you might do stand-up and are hil-ar-i-ous and why did that guy get a sitcom and not me?! Or you might be really interested in pottery with clay taken from the shores of Lake Wobegon and using it to recreate sets from the movie Clueless.

Your passion is what you live for, not for a living; that other thing is your job. If you're lucky, they're the same. But sometimes one cannot be the other and that's OK too. And sometimes it takes a long time to be good enough to make that living.

Have fun with the pottery.

There's this documentary out there made by the BBC called Hugh's war on waste (it's pretty hard to find on the internet and I was only able to find some torrents of it and no legitimate places to watch it) where they show how much food and resources our western society casually throws away daily and how much money all of it is worth. IT's all backed by studies and science of course.

The conclusion of it is that at least 1/3rd of all food farmed doesn't leave the farm and is either put back into the earth to rot or thrown away just because it's not pretty enough for the standards of supermarkets. That 1/4th of all food in a supermarket ends up expiring on the shelf and thrown away even though it's still perfectly safe to eat and only a small percentage of that is donated. And that each of us throw away 1/4th of all the food we buy because we over buy and it spoils, we forget about it and goes bad, it looks bad to us and gets thrown away even though it's still fine and so on. And then they show the same thing going on in our homes with clothes and furniture and similar stuff which is literally us throwing money away at the end of the day.

You can also look into how much waste and pollution the meat industry produces in documentaries on the matter, or the clothing industry (I personally recommend The True Cost on netflix).

My point was that there is so much waste done by our society that could easily be repurposed and reused by others but the only reason it's not being done is that nobody wants to pay for the transport and distribution of it as nothing that doesn't bring a profit makes sense in our current world.

No joke. It's almost as if the Times is priming us for a PR shill article in a month on somebody's book on exactly this topic.

Edit: I didn't even have to wait that long.

>Charles Duhigg is a staff writer for The Times and author of "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business," which will be published on Feb. 28. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.

I got about 3 paragraphs into this article before thinking, "This sounds really familiar..." Then I checked the author: Dan Ariely. Years ago I read his first book, Predictably Irrational, and he discusses some of these things. His new book does so even further (where this article comes from).

If you liked the article, I do highly suggest Predictably Irrational. It's quite fascinating.

That relatively small group of people is pretty relevant for the comparison being made in that source, though.

They're defining poverty using UNICEF's 60% of median income, which works out to about $34,500 for a household. That's a higher income than the US federal poverty level unless you're a family of seven. So, depending on family size and whether the state in question has participated in medicaid expansion, the poor Americans in that comparison might very well be one of the households that earns just enough to not qualify for medicaid.

Health insurance purchased on the market, meanwhile, (or even an employee based plan if you turned down a job with higher pay for one with better benefits) is a cost that someone receiving free healthcare as a social benefit isn't paying. Which is exactly the point of contention with the original source. It claims to compare poor Americans to median income Europeans factoring in the costs of social benefits, when that hasn't actually been done for major benefits like healthcare and education that are received in-kind.

Because of my personal past my arguments might of course be biased, so I might not be the most objective person debating over this.

However, there are different ways for dealing with cleaning up the streets and/or the countryside. I'm not quire sure whether this approach could be scaled without problems, though, but the streets have indeed been quite clean since 2008. :)

> are themselves so accustomed to coding their language in dogwhistles and veiling their contempt that they assume others are doing it too.

Eh, I'm not convinced of this. Granted, my experience is more with libertarians and foreign policy hawks than religious conservatives or reactionaries who worry deeply about Mexicans and the Blacks, but this hasn't been my experience (even at the Orthodox synagogues I've been part of in the Northeast, religious conservatives are a minority, though there are several libertarians and foreign policy hawks). Contempt, sure, Libertarians can be very contemptuous, but in my experience, while Libertarians are people are certainly paranoid about dogwhistles, they don't tend to use them that much. At least in my experience, they have a tendency to be very forthright (sometimes to a fault).

But the point I think is that privilege is so easy to read as contemptuous because it so often used contemptuously ("check your privilege"). I think one of the reasons I think things should shift from from "your privilege is the problem" back to "the problem is that some people are strongly disadvantaged in the system" (cf. William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged), besides that it just makes more sense in framing (after all, in public policy we don't generally want to take away good things, "privilege"; we want to take away bad things, "disadvantage", and give more good things, "advantages"), is that it's much, much harder to make that point contemptuously.

Ever tried to actually attend a TED conference?

You need to prove you are worthy of attending by proving links to your CV, listing references, etc. And in the event that you are invited (no idea what the average odds are for that), you have to pay at least $7500 (excluding flight and hotel, obviously).

Also, they sell ebooks with <100 pages for $3. If their primary aim is sharing ideas, why charge for the ebooks? It's not like it costs that much to produce or host those files.

Here is additional information on the find which includes links to The History Blog with an in depth description of the translation and a scholarly article on the importance of the new lines

I never said it's not doing well. I was implying that it might not be doing as well for everyone. Here's what I mean.

If you look into their methodology (particularly the researcher's comments) you will find that they do account for this nuance you speak of.

Your comment actually brightened my night. Irony amuses me and your comment is quite ironic. It made me chuckle that missing a nuance of the research has led you to call out the article for not being nuanced enough. Thanks for that :)

Wow talk about hogwash!

"Anyone born between 1965 and 1980 is a member of Generation X, a term that was popularised by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which revolves around a group of young outsiders critically examining consumer society and Western culture."

Really? Well if it is taken from Wikipedia it must be true.

Except...Google Ngram tells a different tale.

I mean we can't even agree on who is in Generation X. Back when the term was originally used it covered birth years up to 76 now it goes all the way to 80 or even 82. If we don't have common terms there is no way we can make any large scale generalization on entire generations.

A quick Google search brought me this: https://player.fm/series/dan-carlins-classic-hardcore-history-86394

But honestly, this guy deserves the patronage if you can afford it. He puts out great material and is doing the human race some good by making in-depth history lectures enticing.

This isn't a solution to the problem of passwords in general... but on the subject of passwords, whenever I get a chance I always like to bring up the suggestion that everyone should be using a good password manager with strong encryption. (I prefer LastPass, but there are other ones including 1Password.)

These programs let you have long, complex passwords that are unique to each website, and stored with strong encryption in a database encrypted with just one good master password. They also make using the web so much more convenient since programs like LastPass will fill forms and log you in with just a click.

There is no requirement that I know of that all trials be submitted. If you do 10 trials and two show results you want and seem good enough, there is no crime in submitting just those two to the FDA.

It was interesting to me to read a pharma researcher's reply to this article on Metafilter.

I agree with the idea of a travel lock, but that looks a bit flimsy. This guy demos a strap for the deadbolt and door handle that probably would work better.

Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" covers both and is free. It's as old as America (first published 1776) so its not the most clear writing, but if you enjoyed reading the Federalist papers you might like it too.

It's not a hard concept. Literally it's the idea that if there's a good (say oil) that a bunch of people produce and a bunch more people consume, competition, supply, demand, and decision making will cause the price to be set to its most natural level without government interference.

Externalities are just things that affect you that you have no control over. If you have a house, and I start playing late night concerts next to you (and selling tickets to them) then I make a profit but you bear the cost of the noise pollution, and have no say into it. That's an externality. That's why we have noise ordinance laws, because the supply and demand of the concert tickets does not control for that stuff.

It also assumes fully informed people. If I enter a market of people selling medicine, and I sell snake oil that looks like the medicine, I can sell at a larger profit so long as my customers are not informed that what I am selling is not the same.

The citizens of Flint, MI, did not have any say in their water supply. They were not initially informed the water had lead, and once they were informed, it was up to the government to respond to fix it. The failures happened because the city got to save money on water, and the citizens bore the cost of it, which is an externality.

So no, the invisible hand does not apply to Flint, MI. No economist has ever assumed it's the solution to every problem.

Readers may enjoy the book &quot;Predictably Irrational by Dan Airley&quot; which covers a lot of this kind of thing.

Whether or not the Goenka-style retreats are "true" Vipassana or not, I think they are extremely helpful and they've brought meditation to a lot of people.

I read the Eckhart Tolle books prior to going to the retreat. And what the retreat did for me was help me put into practice what I thought I had learned from the books. I have a copy of Mindfulness in Plain English. Shamefully, I cannot remember if I've read it or not.

Regardless, I am somewhat ignorant of what "true" Vipassana is, so I would be grateful if you could let me know what it is about Goenka that is incorrect.

The discussion regarding the motivating effect of money reminds me of a chapter in Predictably Irrational in which the author describes social norms versus market norms and a couple of investigations.

The experiments were a little contrived and similar to the one in this article, as people have already pointed out in this thread, don't accurately represent real work problems but I think the theory is sound. Basically he had students click on a circle and move it into a box (a menial repetitive task on a computer) and tracked the number of times they were able to do this in five minutes. He ran one group without financial incentive, paid one group 99 cents each and one group 5 bucks each (if I remember correctly), with the unpaid group "working" the hardest.

It is hard to draw meaningful conclusions between these tasks and real world employment and monetary incentive as they were designed to compare paid to unpaid work effort. However it is an interesting point to consider, especially in light of some examples he brings up, for example the AARP refusing to discount services for retirees instead (it is implied at a later date) agreeing to do the work for free.

Isn't capacity utilization in Japan very high? Aren't there forecasts of inflation due to economic growth and Abe's inflationary policies?

not kidding

You might like this PDF report from Consumer Reports about pesitcides

> But I cannot find good sources one way or other that is false or true.

It is true. A 5 second google search on the very day that the zoepost was uploaded to 4chan would have shown as much. The journalist she was accused of sleeping with is Kotaku's Nathan Grayson. Grayson never reviewed her game, nor did her name come up in anything but a list of steam green-light entries, a regular feature maintained by the site, and even that was prior to the two apparently having had a relationship.

It is sad that mid-way into 2018 this still is a point of confusion for so many. None of this nonsense ever had a factual basis.

https://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-times-about-a-pos-1624707346

There is nothing intrinsically beautiful about items, our brain wiring is what makes us see things as beautiful as described in this video:

Dan Dennet: Cute, sexy, sweet, funny

This reads more like a sales pitch than an actual essay. The author seems to make a lot of unsubstantiated claims (e.g. Young people are creating a new social order with new institutions? What institutions did young people create and what does this new social order look like?). He seems to make claims that do not hold up under scrutiny (e.g. Uber is not causing millennials to avoid buying cars; the trend away from millennials buying cars began several years before Uber was created.) The fact that the introduction seems to imply that the author wrote this book to further a specific viewpoint is enough to set off some red flags ("In particular, we set out to answer the question: Between both the breathless and despairing extremes of viewing the future, could an intellectually rigorous case be made for pragmatic optimism?"). Also, I can't figure out if he likes democracy or not.

It's interesting to compare this collection of essays to the other stuff the author has written. The writing style of these essays is much more straightforward than what he has written for Ribbonfarm and some of the points he brings up seems to contradict the things he wrote previously (e.g. His essays here seem to criticize a singular vision by an authoritarian architect, but in this Ribbonfarm article he seems to argue that said authoritarian is necessary for any company to flourish).

Here is a Hacker News discussion of these articles, which bring up many more criticisms than the ones I have listed here.

>a typical McDonald’s franchise restaurant earns around six cents on the dollar before taxes, according to an analysis from Janney Capital Markets.

Interestingly, McDonald's Corporation currently has an almost 20% profit margin. Perhaps the franchise owners should ask why corporate is allowing them to keep so little of what they make.

I suspect that Istanbul’s hilly topography plays a role in its irregularity as well.

Edit: It turns out the source of those irregular blocks is one of the newer parts of the city. Many U.S. subdivisions would look similar.

Is this for real? Did anyone notice where that game was hosted? Fucking Newgrounds. Yes, the same site that hosted an FPS about school shootings in the wake of Columbine. These people are trolls, and so is everyone else telling her to get back to the kitchen. By responding to their bullshit, they're just making sure they'll be targeted again in the future.

It's crazy that there are bloggers who are this internet-unsavvy.

>I'm worried about her education.

>tl:dr: I'm not sure she knows how selection works.

She is pretty well published and understands selection.

Arbitration clauses are not always enforceable either, see Sanchez v. Valencia Holding Co., LLC. A court can strike down any part of a contract deemed "oppressive and unconscionable".

Agreed, which is why you have to get past these articles that reference the study and actually read the study itself. In there the author talks about doing analysis to see whether this may be related to income levels (it isn't) or authoritarian governments (it isn't).

Someone with a better background in statistics than I have (and a little more time) can check to see whether he does these analyses correctly. Assuming he does, then we can read through Fish's many pages of discussion to see why he thinks this is happening. From what I can gather through a skim of the text, is that he feels it might have something to do with the way Shariah law underpins Muslim moral thought, or it might have something to do with lower levels of social inequality (an odd assertion, when applied to a country like Saudi Arabia). But he himself admits all this is mostly speculative.

One thing he fails to consider is climate. I know this might sound odd, but consider that countries that are primarily Muslim (or the countries with the highest Muslim population) are all relatively close to the Equator, and the difference in temperature, rainfall, etc. might have an effect on how frequently people want to kill each other (or, at least, how often they choose to act on the impulse).

Gamification (i.e. using Skinner boxes everywhere) is something that's being overused because it gives clear benefits. It bolsters the apps' user attach rate, meaning it can be used to generate more ad revenue (many "free" apps), make people talk about how many steps they do to get more customers (the fitness apps); or end up knowing some language so they help translate webpages (she didn't say what app, but it's clear that it's Duolingo).

Unfortunately users need to be aware of these traps that have cancerously grown in the apps. They must to learn to uninstall the apps that overuse them immediately, or at the very least disable their notifications.

Personally I only use a store with free software, which means I'm mostly free of this crap as nobody is trying to sell anything or make a profit out of me.

I thought this was common knowledge. The label or word changes with the times, 'anarchist' became 'communist' became 'terrorist', etc..

Being slightly older (54) there have been terrorists factions all through my life; Irish, Japanese, Palestinian, German, Egyptian, Iranian, even American... after the fall of Soviet Union the Cold War thawed and the void needed to be filled - after 9|11, after the US was attacked, it all became the 'terror' that needed to be eradicated.

Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares documentary series is a good observation of this current progression.

> America is polite?

I have no idea where that follows from. I was correcting the phrase I believed the parent commenter to be referencing, which they confirmed. The actual origin of the phrase appears to be from a Robert Heinlein book from 1942.

I forgive you, but you found it about 4 years after the rest of us.

While we're in the time machine, have you heard of Khan Academy? It's full of great tutorials and tools to learn mathematics, science, and even a bit of finance.

Exactly. These nigiri basami can be purchased from places like Deal Xtreme for next to nothing ($1.47). Are they handmade? No. Are they the highest in quality? No. Can they do the job and cut paper, thread, feathers, what have you other artisanal craft product? Absolutely. (I own a pair)

Is it a shame to lose this handcrafted knowledge? Absolutely. I hope the techniques can at least be preserved for the future via video, etc. You won't have every subtle detail, but you will have the bones for the future...

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if it's all going to plan... Disrupt, discredit, and destroy.

Edit: the new version: Deny, discredit, downgrade, and deceive.

Lastpass

It's not computer-specific, you can log into their site from anywhere and use it, but they have Chrome, FF, and IE plugins that make it easier. That's all free. For $12/year, they let you use the Android/iPhone app, and use two-factor login for your password vault to make it more secure.

They only store the encrypted copy of your database - decryption is done client-side, so even if they're hacked, the data's pretty useless. Oh, and at any time, you can export everything to a CSV file so you're not "locked in" if you start using it.

I've been very happy with it. Got a couple of friends and coworkers to start using it too.

If you use firefox, you can install leechblock to block access to reddit during the work day. Chrome has Stayfocusd which isn't as good.

When Milton Friedman proclaims to Phil Donahue that the "world runs on greed", then I disagree with Friedman. He is incorrect. When Milton Friedman proclaims that “The great advances of civilization...have never come from centralized government", has he did in his book, Capitalism and Freedom, then I disagree with Friedman. He is incorrect.

I certainly don't disagree on every particular economic opinion that Friedman holds, but sometimes it is clear that what he offers isn't sound economics, but ideologically-driven sound bites.

Hi funobtanium. Actually I wrote this and now that I read your comment, I totally agree with your points on the bad design of the Loop Chair. I did not take into consideration the possible difficulty people could experience lowering themselves and that is definitely a point to consider, since it's also mentioned in The 7 Universal Principles of Design. Do you mind if I make some revisions on my post based on your insight? I would like to credit you of course. Let me know!

This would have a pull effect.

"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups." Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt a

NPR's on the media did a piece on this called Your Morals Depend on Language. They interviewed two researchers (one from Spain and one from America) and the researchers included examples from their experiments. They were the same examples from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (which I recommend reading).

The takeaway for me was that thinking in your non-native language results in a more logic (rather than emotional)-driven processing of the given scenarios.

Again the subtleties of punctuation and paragraph placement are lost on you.

When I asked, 'How did 'Muricans become such wusses?' you will notice that it was a separate paragraph than the H1N1 anecdote. The question I asked was a conclusion based on gluten intolerances, allergies, and the general fear of getting sick and whatnot.

The point of my anecdote was to show that getting sick was not only not so bad, but welcome in my house. I wasn't criticizing flu shots, I was celebrating whiskey.

William Strunk and E.B. White wrote a wonderful book on grammar and writing called, 'The Elements of Style' which is typically handed out to any 7th grader in English class. I suggest you peruse it.

True that, but Calvinism is about making money, not spending it. The whole Puritan ethic is about making money and reinvesting it in business, and then living a mostly spartan lifestyle. You can see this in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations - basically he is all like the invisible hand will provide the necessities for everybody, and as for the luxuries ("superfluities") - why would a good Protestant Scotsman care about those? And early Americans came from the same culture.

Yeah! But literally the business is being set up this week. So I won't know if this was a wise move for a while.... I do have a first paying customer though! Used something like the "Concierge Model" from "The Lean Startup" ... Worked with a company pro bono for several months (in spare time) to create product/intellectual property/etc. They are the first paying customer. Company focuses on improving customer experience in a way that proves ROI to the business. It was very useful to have a real goal while developing the "products" - much less theoretical. But will reply to your question again in 6 months when I have something more than hope/dreams...

As a backup plan, doing some more conventional freelancing to cover for lost income from the cushy corporate job I'm leaving.

If I had a company I would ask any would-be manager if s/he had read either one of "The Art of War" [Sun Tzu] and/or "On War" [Carl von Clausewitz]. If the answer to that question is no, they won't be a manager in my company.

Excellent excellent book. Also, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath really nails this subject. Excellent book as well.

There's 3 kinds of incomes: A, B, and C income:

C - A job, the worst way to make a living. Working for another man trading dollars for hours. Slogan: "I'll learn to love (tolerate) what I do and live with what it gives me, at least until I save up enough money to strike out on my own."

B - Contracting work, a business you work. Trading dollars for hours still, but you work for yourself and set your own price. Example, creating and selling products or providing a service. Slogan: "I get paid what I'm worth because I work hard, make my own hours and prices"

A - Passive income streams, AKA residual income, a business that runs itself. Acquire a system of assets. Assets vary greatly and are generally built over time. Examples: Owning a rental unit, owning rental boats, owning a storage facility, really anything you can rent out is an asset, owning an online business that generates enough money for you to pay a manager to run it for you, investments in an institution that pays off high-yields, a copyright that leads to royalty payments, Or setting something up so others can make money, and take a small percentage (Facebook & twitter). Slogan: "Key word: Ownership. I've worked hard, sacrificed for the future, and made tough decisions most people don't. So now I don't have to work for money anymore... my money works for me now!"

Some books on how to get to Level A: 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad', 'The Richest Man in Babylon' Good luck out there :)

There are two sides to this story. I suggest Woke Fascism by John Tarr.

https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Fascism-Real-Threat-Democracy/dp/B0BQ9KS4CB

He's a progressive liberal, sympathetic to people of color, LGBTQ, critical of income inequality, and so on. Nevertheless, he documents the toxicity and narrow-mindedness of the left. He shows how they attack and harm other progressives who maintain independent views.

Sure, I've written an earlier article about that too if you'd like to read about that next.

Fair enough. The source data linked in the article said median.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/republic

>Republic: >A state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an electedor nominated president rather than a monarch.

How is that in anyway different to democracy:

>Democracy: A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives

There is a singular difference, the existence of an elected head of state.

And no, I am not american, I don't know about its early history in great detail but that is irrelevant. I am not arguing politics, I am arguing semantics.

There's a decent literature on this from Ezrachi & Stucke, pretty well summed up in their book Virutal Competition