HillRat

66 ms·

631.
by HillRat 10y ago
Median farm income in the United States is -$930. Yes, negative dollars. Almost every farmer -- basically the bottom 95% at least -- relies on off-farm household income, and just hopes to make enough farming to keep up with debt service a
632.
by HillRat 11y ago
I think Mouffe's "agonistic democracy" to be provocative and maybe even a more powerful description of politics than, say, Habermas (I retain affection for Rawls) but, like you, I don't think I can buy her efforts to cla
633.
by HillRat 11y ago
That's interesting -- I generally think of Schmitt as constructing a theory of dictatorship, but you're right: he's also black-hat hacking the constitutional order at the same time. That's a fantastic insight, I think, b
634.
by HillRat 11y ago
When I read Schmitt (and it's been many years!), I can't disentangle the concept of the state of exception from his insistence that politics are fundamentally about the friend-enemy distinction, and that, as he says, the qualitati
635.
by HillRat 11y ago
The German jurist Carl Schmitt essentially made the same argument: the power of the executive is the power to divide the world into enemies, and to declare a "state of exception" that allows the unfettered pursuit of those enemies
636.
by HillRat 11y ago
Or Fowler's "Strangler Pattern," a similar approach.
637.
by HillRat 11y ago
Obviously the gender assumption is pretty cringeworthy in and of itself, but what I find particularly strange is how he advocates this but then turns around and complains that developers don't want to do 80-hour weeks as a regular requ
638.
by HillRat 11y ago
Personal experience dealing with a team that reverse-engineered industrial hardware. They would acquire competitors' products and hand them off to teardown teams who weren't allowed direct communications with the rest of engineeri
639.
by HillRat 11y ago
It's not the act of disassembling that's important, it's what you do with the knowledge afterwards. For example, the team doing the Tesla teardown is now poisoned; they can write up their findings from the clean room and prov
640.
by HillRat 11y ago
Yeah, I deliberated on that, knowing that the victims who survived can never be made whole, let alone those who died beneath a shroud of official silence. I suppose I should have said "the ROK will never bring the guilty to justice,&qu
641.
by HillRat 11y ago
"[A former principal] said severe violence and military-style discipline were the only ways to run a place filled with thousands of unruly people who didn't want to be there." And the lessons of Nuremberg go unheeded again. D
642.
by HillRat 11y ago
So this is really just a stalking-horse for AT&T to run up the acquisition price for Verizon, right?
643.
by HillRat 11y ago
Well, if it can be shown that they lied or omitted material information in the course of soliciting equity investments, that's a Rule 10b-5 violation, the SEC's big club. The fact that Theranos is a private company is immaterial,
644.
by HillRat 11y ago
Well, OFAC seeks to regulate transactions with proscribed groups and individuals. Normal banking covers this in part with "know your customer" (KYC) rules and processes, but I guess Venmo decided it needs to cast a wider net. In t
645.
by HillRat 11y ago
It's more like a private company has bought the only access road to a public park and is now charging you to get there.
646.
by HillRat 11y ago
The idea appears to be that gov't funds cannot be used to lobby for political or policy changes, so that, for example, funds given to Greenpeace would have to be spent on non-political activities. But the rule is so broadly written tha
647.
by HillRat 11y ago
Well, the bilateral US-Afghan security treaty would bar filing in an Afghan court; in the US realm, you would have standing problems, the Baker bar, and sovereign immunity. If I recall -- and IANAL, let alone a nat-sec attorney -- there&#
648.
by HillRat 11y ago
If I read it right, the Act actually establishes a cause of action in any act of "international terrorism" in which "any national of the United States suffers injury in his or her person, property, or business." While th
649.
by HillRat 11y ago
Good question! Calder v Bull held that the ex post facto prohibition does not apply in the civil context, so this can apply retroactively. But you can see why in some legal philosophy quarters Calder is controversial.
650.
by HillRat 11y ago
Nope, wrong direction; the defendant has to be a non-US sovereign, and the conduct has to cause loss of life or property to a US resident or on US soil. On the other hand, it may open the door for suits against Israel by US-resident Palesti
651.
by HillRat 11y ago
It amends the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to allow the bringing of suits against foreign states for terrorist-related claims where the entirety of the alleged activity did not take place on American soil. Basically, KSA had gotten some
652.
by HillRat 11y ago
You aren't! This is just a hard design problem -- mesh topologies degrade rapidly beyond two-party communications, mixer topologies introduce lag and quality issues during the compositing phase, and router topologies are still being pr
653.
by HillRat 11y ago
No one is forcing these property owners to "rent units below cost;" they set the rents on their houses and apartments. The issue is that many of these people buy properties that are out of code with no intent to improve them, and
654.
by HillRat 11y ago
For some reason I'm reminded of the old joke: a Keynesian and a rat-ex theorist are walking down the street. "Look," says the Keynesian, "A twenty dollar bill!" "Can't be," says the other economist. &
655.
by HillRat 11y ago
On the other hand, what you're saying is that the tests showed you what areas you were weak in, and prompted you to go back and study until your knowledge improved in those areas. Put that way, it sounds more like a feature than a bug,
656.
by HillRat 11y ago
Many of those tests are actually more likely to generate false positives than false negatives; I had our home tested by a professional with XRF gear, and his tests indicated much lower levels of lead (late Victorian house, so we knew we had
657.
by HillRat 11y ago
Prior review is a tool that's a lot less critical when you have an Official Secrets Act; in the US, it's illegal to divulge classified information, and you are contractually-bound to seek review of anything you publish, but it&#x2
658.
by HillRat 11y ago
Less than you'd think; it was a non-standard gauge railroad that didn't go anywhere the Sa'udis cared about -- they needed railways connecting their ports to the interior, so spending the money on a Madinah to Jordan line did
659.
by HillRat 11y ago
CrowdFlower does AI and ML-focused microtasking, though I have no experience with them. Even large companies need plenty of preprocessing done on their datasets, so it's common to use offshored services companies or divisions to do ann
660.
by HillRat 11y ago
If you think of it strictly as a (non-medical) medical device, the wastage isn't terrible, at least compared to permanent epithelial damage. But for every celiac patient using this I guarantee you there will be a hundred paelovore Cros

More ›