Empact

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Rational Ignorance: The Most Powerful Force on the Web(empact.tumblr.com)
1 points by Empact 17y ago|0 comments
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by Empact 17y ago
For every student of New Trier (which I've never heard of) there are 1000 in DC or New Jersey, where charter school spend fully half that of the "fully public" i.e. "monopoly" schools.
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by Empact 17y ago
Take a look at Redfin trends for San Fran: http://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco Specifically, # Sold, # For Sale. If I'm reading this right, seems the market peaked in mid-December, has dropped 25% in the past 1.5 months and
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by Empact 17y ago
> So what's your solution? To repeat myself from the other thread ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102381 ): The natural counterforce to corrupting influences, all of them rather than just campaign finance, is robust citizen accou
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by Empact 17y ago
It's a loaded question. What's high-functioning about persistent high unemployment, for example?: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05... And how do you intend to do objective comparison on standard of living? Ho
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by Empact 17y ago
As I've said elsewhere, there's a third way, and it's perhaps the most general and closest to realization: The natural counterforce to corrupting influences, all of them rather than just campaign finance, is robust citizen accountability.
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by Empact 17y ago
Perhaps, but consider: * Agile practice indicates that experience with users is the best way to keep project on a useful path. Research groups necessarily act without such input, which leaves them prone to going off into the weeds, includi
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by Empact 17y ago
When did pointlessly mocking Rand become hacker news? By my count, there are 3 jokes in this post, all juvenile: * Atlas Shrugged is long. No really, it's a long book! Long books are stupid. * Rand articulates questionable views on romant
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by Empact 17y ago
Put simply: On the job means on the record.
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by Empact 17y ago
We're just as well without it. Absent accountability via serious attention from higher-ups or the constituents themselves, bureaucracies tend to devolve into inefficient, unproductive jobs programs, and NASA is no exception: http://news.yc
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by Empact 17y ago
I didn't throw a launch party, but I have been incrementally building my latest project ( http://votereports.org/ ) completely in the open, starting from the first weekend it was started and launched (which happened to be a Startup Weekend
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by Empact 17y ago
Seems there's more than one way. The other is the inefficiency of the air traffic control system: http://reason.tv/video/show/951.html
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by Empact 17y ago
I think you're understating the difficulty. No amount of math can tease apart the indiscernibly complex. We observe correlations naturally. Assumed relationships. The sort which suggested God wanted us to dance to bring on rain. But witho
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by Empact 17y ago
Just to emphasize: incredibly difficult is an understatement. We're talking hundreds of millions of actors, making an uncountably large number of independent decisions from moment to moment, in constantly shifting circumstances. There is n
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by Empact 17y ago
So, would you say that "protectionist trade restrictions, massive stimulus spending and bailouts of financial and automotive firms deemed 'too big to fail.'" from the past year are positive, or have increased economic freedom? If so, why no
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by Empact 17y ago
See also, the State of World Liberty index: http://stateofworldliberty.org/report/results.html http://stateofworldliberty.org/report/rankings.html They attempt to get a broader view of freedom by including other indices. Their tops, fro
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by Empact 17y ago
Back in 2006, someone ( http://stateofworldliberty.org/ ) integrated the then-current Heritage index with the following others: * The Frasier Institute/Cato Institute "2005 Economic Freedom of the World" * Freedom House "2005 Freedom in the
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by Empact 17y ago
And the most important of these? Accountability. It happens that the Amtrak Downeaster line ( http://amtrakdowneaster.com/ ) is unique in having WIFI, but it wasn't Amtrak that set up the service, rather it was the Northern New England Pa
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by Empact 17y ago
This is what happens when you work at a company which doesn't have the sense and engineering leadership to arrive at a single core set of collections and such ala CoreFoundation: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/CoreFou
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by Empact 17y ago
> Finally, most people who cite these experiments simply assume that it’s better to take a bigger pay-off later than a smaller pay-off now. But is that always true? I've always thought that this was the key element of the research: tha
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by Empact 17y ago
Some further evidence: over the past 30 years, concealed carry laws have loosened dramatically ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rtc.gif ), while crime has consistently declined, including year over year in the states at the time they loo
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by Empact 17y ago
Re. sub-stories, have you checked out the "tasks" feature, which is disabled by default? http://pivotallabs.com/users/dan/blog/articles/965-story-tas...
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by Empact 17y ago
Agreed on the intro: Does TED have 5 minutes of intro discussing TED before each talk? No, because that would suck.
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by Empact 17y ago
They do cover 80-90% of the visits you'd normally pull out your insurance card for; including perhaps 1/2 of your emergency room visits, as they're available 24/7 for urgent care. And considering that dealing with insurance paperwork causes
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by Empact 17y ago
This model of care is called "Direct Primary Care," and IMO it's a big part of the real answer to high medical costs. You can find more doctors like this at http://dpcare.org/practices They've got listings for practices in quite a few sta
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by Empact 17y ago
In this case, he's emulating the effect of an exception in a language which doesn't support them particularly well[1]: logging the exception message and then moving to a "rescue" or "catch" block which does necessary cleanup. This is one of
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by Empact 17y ago
One approach I've been long-interested in is cooperative ownership of local infrastructure and private ownership of inter-city infrastructure. This would mean that, rather than infrastructure representing a single-provider monopoly in a gi
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by Empact 17y ago
This list is terrible for its omissions. The most important: * Local bank branches, thanks to Direct Banking (e.g. HSBC Direct, ING Direct) * Local realtors, thanks to the likes of http://redfin.com * Local and Community colleges, thanks
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by Empact 17y ago
While the author mentions "a communist utopia," minimum income programs have often come from market-oriented economists, such as with Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax, which he proposed as an alternative to a host of disruptive policie
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by Empact 17y ago
It's actually quite common for High-Deductible plans to include payment for standard preventative care (e.g. annual physical). After all the costs covered are predictable and well-contained anyway (typically a few hundred a year). Beyond t

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