afafsd

11 ms·

61.
by afafsd 12y ago
My response to wearable computers has always been "Why the hell would I want that?" But this gives me an idea that nobody will have to want them for them to become widespread. Instead, occupational health and safety bureaucrats
62.
by afafsd 12y ago
As a landlord (in a different city where things are sensible and I can raise my rent or evict my tenant any time I darn well like because it's my fricking property) this kind of thing makes me really angry.
63.
by afafsd 12y ago
Cryogenics is a bit like Pascal's Wager. A gamble with a low probability of success multiplied by a supposedly-infinite payoff ought to be worth buying into at any price, whether it's paying money to freeze your brain or just wors
64.
by afafsd 12y ago
>Alcor is a non-profit I'm not convinced that being a non-profit vs for-profit really changes the incentives for an organisation. No doubt the founder and CEO is paying himself a comfortable salary out of Alcor's money.
65.
by afafsd 12y ago
Under what circumstances is that the case? Let's suppose, for instance, that two roads diverge in a yellow wood and you have reliable information that road A is the correct path with 90% probability and road B is the correct path with
66.
by afafsd 12y ago
I'd like a reliably quantum source of random numbers to make certain decisions for me. That way, if the many-worlds model is true, I can console myself that even if my decision turns out to be a bad one, at least many of my parallel-un
67.
by afafsd 12y ago
We're already spending vast amounts of money on high-energy experiment, and building ever-larger particle smashers seems to have limited payoff from here on out. I don't know how to figure out quantum gravity. I don't even kn
68.
by afafsd 12y ago
I mean that those who have been living in the city for decades but didn't buy there may now find themselves pushed out. They could have bought twenty years ago for much less but they didn't. If they'd bought property they w
69.
by afafsd 12y ago
I've watched the evolution of a few of these things. My experience is that even if people aren't trying to be jerks then the quality of books inevitably goes down over time as people take the things they find interesting and rep
70.
by afafsd 12y ago
>While it's convenient to score people on intelligence, and nice to believe there's a simple scalar ranking, there's a growing body of research showing that it's just not the case. Did anybody ever really think it was
71.
by afafsd 12y ago
Most things have spoiled O Fortuna for me (though I've never watched the X Factor). When I listen to Carmina Burana I usually skip to track 2.
72.
by afafsd 12y ago
Sure, it's expensive to live in San Francisco, which is why only people who make a lot of money can or should live there. It's like Beverley Hills. Nobody complains (or at least if they do, they don't get publicity) that it&#
73.
by afafsd 12y ago
How much less could you care, exactly?
74.
by afafsd 12y ago
Unless they're going to start installing urinals in ladies' bathrooms I'm not sure I see the point.
75.
by afafsd 12y ago
If you work for decent money for decades and you retire into poverty, you have no-one to blame but yourself.
76.
by afafsd 12y ago
What's the advantage of having poor people living in the city? Is it advantageous to the rich, so they can get a minimum-wage cleaner who doesn't have to commute in from Oakland? Meh, I don't think it makes a big difference.
77.
by afafsd 12y ago
De-ghettofying Oakland would make a lot more sense than ruining Sausalito. Though it'll never happen, for the same reason -- local politicians depend for their livelihoods on keeping exactly the same class of people in there and voting
78.
by afafsd 12y ago
But that's part of the labour budget. It's like saying that small companies can't compete with big companies for employees, because they can't afford to pay them as much. If your small company wants to employ someone the
79.
by afafsd 12y ago
The word as used in the dictionary isn't religious, but 99% of the people are using with connotations of a sort of religious-mystical-woo. (I refer just to the noun-form "mindfullness" and not all forms of the word, e.g. &qu
80.
by afafsd 12y ago
>The 12,000 people dying per year from pollution in California costs the health system billions Even if that number were true, does the "billions" come from a proper study which takes into account the fact that they'll ine
81.
by afafsd 12y ago
It's interesting, actually. In some ways the US is actually the small-government low-regulation country that it likes to pretend to be, but in other areas it's just a labyrinth of aggresive mollases-paced bureaucracy. Examples: Ex
82.
by afafsd 12y ago
Why would that be?
83.
by afafsd 12y ago
>which by definition is everyone but the native Americans Uhh, you do know Native Americans aren't actually native, right? They're from Africa like the rest of us.
84.
by afafsd 12y ago
> I know plenty of talented Canadians and Europeans who don't want to live in the US due to the current political climate. Don't worry, Obama will be gone in '16!
85.
by afafsd 12y ago
Ah, y'see that's why we, in Australia, stick our asylum seekers in camps in different countries like Nauru and Papua New Guinea, where whatever problems they cause are safely out of sight. My opinion is that the world seriously ne
86.
by afafsd 12y ago
There was a proposal a couple of years ago to allow giant advertising signs somewhere in the most blighted part of Market St, San Francisco. I saw a talk by one of the proponents (who just happened to own one of the buildings there), and
87.
by afafsd 12y ago
The great Australian philosopher David Stove was of the opinion that the main function of philosophers is to save the rest of us the trouble of thinking about these sorts of things. When a useful professional in another field such as you or
88.
by afafsd 12y ago
Why should they succeed at making money by putting out high-quality journalism where others have failed? Quality journalism doesn't pay in a dollars in to dollars out basis. A carefully-researched article that takes a week-long trip to
89.
by afafsd 12y ago
I like to think that consumers will eventually develop a mental immunity to BuzzFeed-style headlines, and then they'll be a bit stuck. There's only so many times a human can click on "Ten Amazing Things About Something Or Oth
90.
by afafsd 12y ago
Uhhhhh, nobody mentioned race until you did. If you think "good genes" is correlated with race, then I'd suggest that you are the one who is racist.

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