bokonist

47 ms·

331.
by bokonist 17y ago
Very true. Of course, the cost of building public infrastructure has also dramatically increased due to the various unions of government workers.
332.
by bokonist 17y ago
Commute times have also risen greatly, that's a negative change in quality.
333.
by bokonist 17y ago
In the Boston area, where I live, the central city and inner suburbs have bans on how high a building can go and generally make it extremely difficult to get building permits. I've heard it takes up to 10 years and millions in lawyer fees
334.
by bokonist 17y ago
If you break out the numbers further, it's land prices that have been responsible for the housing price increases, not the cost of construction. The main culprits are zoning laws. It's simply not possible to build duplexes or more densely
335.
by bokonist 17y ago
I am hacker who had made a fair amount or progress in learning graphic design. Here are the things that helped me: a) read as much as possible on graphic design. The non-designers design book is a great choice. But there are tons of artic
336.
by bokonist 17y ago
But corporations do not speak, people do. The management are all people, and the owners are all people. These people can and have been drafted into the military or arrested for illegal conduct. Congress can make no law abridging any pers
337.
by bokonist 17y ago
Getting good grades is only worth it if the professors judgement of what you need to learn is more accurate than your own. Considering that a) your professor probably has likely very little real world experience and b) your professor has n
338.
by bokonist 17y ago
Somebody forgot to factor in the effect of an 8000-mile supply line, or the reluctance of a people to give up deeply-entrenched customs. That's not the problem. Britain ruled Egypt for many decades using only 5,000 soldiers and actually
339.
by bokonist 17y ago
You were reading the NY Times before 1935? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hays_Sulzberger Jokes aside, NY Times has never been unbiased. Try reading the Power Broker.
340.
by bokonist 17y ago
This only a guess, but your comment may have been picked up by pg's bayesian spam filter. It seems like a word based spam filter may have mistaken your comment for some sort of scam telling people to "send payment" to a "business account"
341.
by bokonist 17y ago
Compared to a very shy guy, the self-aggrandizing guy might do better. Compared to a confident, outgoing guy, he'll probably do worse.
342.
by bokonist 17y ago
That's not true. Being overtly self-aggrandizing to women is a turn off. It makes sound like you are trying too hard to impress her. (Cockiness works, but not overt boasts). Men do need to be more aggrandizing in professional life. Men d
343.
Intake of saturated fat not associated with an increased risk of heart disease(ajcn.org)
35 points by bokonist 17y ago|16 comments
344.
by bokonist 17y ago
I'm not an expert on energy. But my impression is that Thorium is the current front runner for a) being able to meet our energy needs and b) having enough to last hundreds or thousands of years. Using the sun cannot be plan A, because as f
345.
by bokonist 17y ago
Many natives were farmers, but those farmers were also hunters and gatherers. Hunting provided essential proteins. Europeans evolved to get a lot of proteins from cows milk, but natives are lactose intolerant and so would not have been ab
346.
by bokonist 17y ago
Probably about a third of the population of England at the time faced constant poverty and hunger due to there simply not being enough land to support the population. To the west is this wide open, un-farmed continent, with enough land to
347.
by bokonist 17y ago
No, because the invasion would fail. A good leader does not lead his troops on suicidal missions. But the oil example actually did happen in real life. You're the ruler of Japan in 1941. The U.S. has just cut off your oil supply. You ha
348.
by bokonist 17y ago
Americans have no goods that are as valuable to them as oil.
349.
by bokonist 17y ago
Let's try a similar, more realistic question. It's 2050. The U.S. has run out of oil, it only has enough to run farm equipment and food shipment trucks for another year. There is hope of converting everything to nuclear/electric power, b
350.
by bokonist 17y ago
I have to believe that somewhere in the parameter space of human diplomacy and relationships there is the possibility for expansion and coexistence without utter annihilation of one side. I always thought that the Romans empire expanded s
351.
by bokonist 17y ago
I used to think the same thing, but I now believe that is wishful thinking. The Europeans had 10,000 of cultural and genetic adaptation to high density, agricultural based living. The natives lived a fundamentally different way of life th
352.
by bokonist 17y ago
What's your answer to my question?
353.
by bokonist 17y ago
Question to HN readers who are sympathetic with this article: If you could wave a magic wand and "undo" all that was done, would you do so? So imagine all those who perished in the 1500's would be revived from the dead and restored to the
354.
by bokonist 17y ago
PG and idlewords had it out in the comment section here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984475 PG definitely gets the best of the argument, IMO.
355.
The Three Horsemen of the VC Apocalypse(billburnham.blogs.com)
4 points by bokonist 17y ago|0 comments
356.
by bokonist 17y ago
As I've asked for twice already, give me an example.
357.
by bokonist 17y ago
Almost every legal adult who lives in a city chose to live there. Yeah, choices have practical constraints, and yeah, it can be difficult to change once you've committed. But that's true of almost any complex product available on the free
358.
by bokonist 17y ago
Yes, that's what I mean by advanced statistics. I've read many papers in economics using such techniques. They are 99.9% utter garbage. The issues I mentioned above (data quality, data coding, issues with choosing the right controls, too
359.
by bokonist 17y ago
For a long time, I wanted to teach myself statistics for the social sciences too. I decided the best way to do this was to find an interesting social science issue, and then learn statistics as part of tackling the issue. But there was on
360.
by bokonist 17y ago
I agree. The tagline is "Backups for the truly paranoid". Yet the site looks like it was built by one person as a hobby. Why would the truly paranoid trust this web site to store his files? Tarsnap requires the user to be a unix-geek that

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