arglebarnacle

9 ms·

31.
by arglebarnacle 8y ago
This is a fascinating and illuminating piece of history, but I have a hard time believing that these cartographic mistakes are the reason for China's posture in the South China Sea. The first part of the article mentions the strategic
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by arglebarnacle 8y ago
The age discrepancy in phone addiction probably has a lot to do with younger folks getting more value of social media on average, though I don't want to discount the idea that older people have more self mastery. Brain development is p
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by arglebarnacle 8y ago
I'd second this. It really is a phenomenal book. For me, the most interesting thing about it is it would probably be a terrible meditation guide for a lot of people I know. But if you have the approach/learning style that's t
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by arglebarnacle 8y ago
This is completely untrue. Vipassana, which means "insight meditation," is a core Buddhist practice which is far broader than this one teacher and his course. If you read the wikipedia article [0] on the branches of Buddhism that
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
With respect to education, that limit is definitely intentional for Marx, and the same goes for other forms of so-called "human capital" like job experience and connections. They definitely help you make money, but they don't
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
Well sure, but nobody benefits financially or reputationally from an undergraduate student's homework. There's clearly some proportion of having an academic's PhD students do this type of work for them which would stop being
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
I was the victim of a relatively sophisticated attack that took advantage of the weakness of SMS-based 2FA. The attacker cracked the relatively weak password on my Verizon web login and enabled a "feature" that synced all my SMS t
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
According to the wikipedia page about this rule/game, over 97% of pages have this property. Interestingly, "Mathematics" seems to be a rare exception. You get stuck in a loop: Mathematics -> Quantity -> Multitude ->
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
I guess you could argue it's ironic or hypocritical in some way to squander electricity in the era of climate change, but it's completely wrong to identify cryptocurrency as a serious contributor to climate change. We can even set
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
Foundations are supposed to be self sustaining without actually selling anything, so they require large endowments to endure. That $50M could sustainably spit off as much as $2.5M/year, funding ongoing development indefinitely.
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
Yes that's right, but you've got the terms reversed. Defined contribution is the one where you bear the risk, and defined benefit is where the government bears the risk.
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
That's certainly true about total war where the nation's survival is threatened by defeat, but it's not true about the kind of limited wars was have seen since world war 2. In fact, because these wars are limited wars for the
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
It's not hypocrisy, just evidence that the bitcoin community isn't homogeneous. There's always been a set of people who viewed it as a radical political project to unseat central banks and democratize money, but I'm not
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
We're great at mining but bad at putting things in space. The main virtue of mining things in space is that the materials are already in space, sparing the vast expense of launching them up there. I guess I partially agree that having
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
The courses are being offered online--it's a shame grad classes are too expensive to just take for fun! Looks like $6,800 or so to take one of the two they're offering next semester, or about $12,700 for both. The Masters degree w
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
I'm inclined to agree that bitcoin markets are far less robust than gold markets on the whole because of the long history and entrenched social position of gold. I do think you underestimate the effect on gold markets if they were floo
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
Seems like it's having the opposite effect though--the throwaway is causing people to think they've been scammed and makes them no longer on the lookout for the real package.
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
This comment seems to conflate resistance to mass surveillance with resistance to targeted surveillance. It's almost as if the fact that I'll never be able to resist a targeted attack means that I shouldn't attempt to have an
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
I think it's time to stop fighting this fight--nobody I know, even among the security/tech literate, uses the word cracker. We may just have to live with the fact that "hacker" means two easily conflatable things, at lea
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
No doubt many people here are already aware of Richard Stallman and his views about open source software, but needless to say his perspective is the beginning, not the end, of a discussion. It's just wrong to say that that "there
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
For what it's worth, I think games which portray men as unemotional automatons who are only capable of the grunt work, or portray men as mostly machismo-fueled bro types who constantly degrade women, also reflect sexist attitudes. Sexi
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
I don't think any serious person is arguing that sexist games are making people sexist who wouldn't be otherwise. Certainly nobody is arguing that sexism is mostly caused by video games. Sexist games are a problem because they are
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
Nobody put a gun to Benchmark's head and forced them to take a deal that left so much control in Kalanick's hands. It was a reflection of the relative strengths of their negotiating position at the time. Kalanick is owed control b
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
The obvious solution would be for foreigners to co-invest with local VCs/Angels. I think if investors have an eye toward making these kinds of investments in a sustainable and ethical way, it is definitely possible.
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
To be fair, if bitcoin had improving institutional support, adoption, technology, etc., you would observe the same trend in HN discussion about it. That would seem to make it a problematic indicator of a bubble, at least on its own. Of cour
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
It only counts if it's something that's riskier than it seems . Everyone knows cryptocurrency is extremely risky, the problem in 2008 was that these packaged mortgage products were far riskier than they appeared, far riskier than
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
Yes! Think about it this way--the smallest height someone could be is zero. So imagine that 90% of the people are zero height, and 10% are exactly 60ft tall. What's the average height?
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
Yeah, but "people of color" doesn't only refer to black people--the other 20% are also people of color. So 60-40, and it's true that US prisons are predominantly populated with people of color.
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
Next time summon the courage to express your moral nihilism on your real account. It almost feels like a mistake to dignify this with the obvious response: might is might, but might is not right. Moral criticism like that of the GP is subje
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by arglebarnacle 9y ago
If you publish an unedited photograph, you could reasonably say that your photograph contains only the truth, and you can't be criticized for it. But if all of your photographs are of immigrants committing crimes, the fact that you&#x2

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