ataggart

41 ms·

331.
by ataggart 16y ago
> ...ZestCash’s own rates, which run between 242% and 462% APR (not a typo)... Yeah, and a 5% APR on a 30 year mortgage would look ridiculously large if you quoted it as an MPR (Millenium Percentage Rate). The only utility of using a s
332.
by ataggart 16y ago
Given that the structure of Social Security does conform to a ponzi scheme, it's a smear only insofar as ponzi schemes are "bad".
333.
by ataggart 16y ago
You're being overly narrow in your definition of a ponzi scheme. It's simply a scheme whereby, for an individual, the amount of money they receive will exceed the money they spend only so long as the ratio of new members to old members exce
334.
by ataggart 16y ago
"This sort of viewpoint" is fundamentally different from the luddite fallacy. The crux of the fallacy is misapprehending the results of productive increase, thus mistaking a Good Thing for a Bad Thing. That's not what's going on in the ar
335.
by ataggart 16y ago
As my dad said: "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
336.
by ataggart 16y ago
Three words: Pepsi Gravitational Field
337.
by ataggart 16y ago
I'm always wary when articles refer (either positively or negatively) to "capitalism", more so when they ascribe actions to it. Depending on what one means by the term, and ones preconceptions, the response to the notion that the poor are
338.
A Solipsist's Guide to Comparative Advantage(econlog.econlib.org)
2 points by ataggart 16y ago|0 comments
339.
by ataggart 16y ago
One way to have long, but memorable passwords is to construct them using the first letter of each word a rather long, but memorable quote/phrase. E.g., The opening of the Gettysburg Address yields: fsasyaofbfutcannciladttptamwce. And if y
340.
by ataggart 16y ago
During the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, grocers dealt with this by changing the organization of their stores. Instead of grouping like-kind items together, they grouped like-priced items, then they would just bump the prices for
341.
by ataggart 16y ago
And we've had over two centuries of feature creep, while only rarely going back and formally updating the design docs.
342.
by ataggart 16y ago
True, but there's an easy solution: take out a loan in your yet-to-be-born grandkids' name.
343.
by ataggart 16y ago
Perhaps you have not noticed the shape of the national debt, but yes, there is quite a bit of scrambling to pay the IOUs for past workers, both by taxing current workers, and by taking out loans (thereby taxing future workers).
344.
by ataggart 16y ago
>His idea was that if people never saw what was in there... The problem of course is there's no "there" there. Any funds collected today by payroll taxes, and not used for today's benefits, are lent to the general fund and spent. Ther
345.
by ataggart 16y ago
The performance alternative was dipping into java. It's sexy enough.
346.
by ataggart 16y ago
The changes are pretty substantial when you need them. I wrote a clojure implementation of Base64 that's faster than apache's commons-codec. In 1.2 it was about 5x slower.
347.
by ataggart 16y ago
Wouldn't the trade-off be between an extra 1KB on every page vs. a single extra HTTP request per user?
348.
by ataggart 16y ago
I'm not proposing to shutter the public schools. This type of beneficence isn't really useful for any substantive, long-term change. It's a PR stunt. My point is only that this $100M would, on the margins, help far more kids if it were d
349.
by ataggart 16y ago
This is a district with 40,500 students in K-12, spending $27,961 per student[1]. Compare that "free" education to the cost of tuition of any of the private schools in Newark. A quick googling revealed rates varying from $4000 to $17,000.
350.
by ataggart 16y ago
Not really. The Weimar Republic's hyperinflation preceded (and contributed to) the rise of the Nazis.
351.
by ataggart 16y ago
Of course the solution to the predicament is simple: contracts. Alas, as with so many things, a well-armed third-party is getting in the way.
352.
by ataggart 16y ago
>Does a human being have the right to contract with whomever he wants to sell his labor to? Yes, but it's a negative right, not a positive one. There needs to be a willing purchaser of his labor, and they have the same negative rights.
353.
by ataggart 16y ago
"Code doesn't exist if it is not checked in Version Control System." What if it's "checked in" to just another part of the same harddrive (e.g., git)?
354.
by ataggart 16y ago
I found it interesting that the pundits on NPR are claiming that this change may be intended to blunt competition from Android by keeping developers on iOS, as well as suggesting that this change may have been in response to FTC concerns.
355.
by ataggart 16y ago
It's not clear to me what calculus one should use when ranking dystopias, nor the point of such rankings. At least Pinochet is dead.
356.
by ataggart 16y ago
>"The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore." Anymore?! What, it was working sometime during the past half-century of murders, starvation, political imprisonment, destruction of wealth and civil liberties, poverty, de facto slav
357.
by ataggart 16y ago
Does anyone have a link to statistical documentation of the efficacy of these "SEO" guys? And further, distinguishing the results of their black magic from simply improving the inherent meaningfulness of the site in question and letting th
358.
by ataggart 16y ago
It's 2010; is there any valid reason why a web page announcing a change to another document doesn't link to that document? Assuming this[1] is it, what exactly counts as a "private API" per section 3.3.1. Isn't any code I write a private A
359.
by ataggart 16y ago
>it means something more than just prostitution And the prohibitionists love to use this type of package-deal language. That one can oppose criminalizing sex for money between two consenting adults, but still support criminalizing sex s
360.
by ataggart 16y ago
>How do we fix things? Simple, stop doing the things that result in misallocating capital into the higher education market, the boom half of the boom-bust cycle. For example, ending government guaranteed college loans would instantly m

More ›