hapless

36 ms·

361.
by hapless 11y ago
I am not opposed to the tax rises needed to make social security more effective, but if benefits won't be tied to wages, why should funding come out of special surcharges on wages? If we're going to break the logical connection be
362.
by hapless 11y ago
The whole point of social security is that it is a social insurance program. It's funded out of workers wages, and paid back to workers in proportion to what they paid in. If you remove the cap on social security contributions without
363.
by hapless 11y ago
Well that explains a lot. It makes the celebration less inappropriate. I've deleted my original comment.
364.
by hapless 11y ago
No, drug bans have not been outstanding successes, but they've gone very well compared to prohibition of alcohol. It is at least physically possible to control the distribution of methamphetamine and heroin precursors. The same is n
365.
by hapless 11y ago
Diet is still, in 2016, poorly understood. Taxing all food choices in a way that successfully reduced negative externalities would be quite a challenge. For one thing, taxing your grocery cart will not powerfully alter the behavior of peop
366.
by hapless 11y ago
Alcohol is a highly addictive drug that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. The reason it's not banned is that we can't control the precursors. Alcohol can be made in almost any conditions from pretty much any food.
367.
by hapless 11y ago
Cigarette taxes are powerfully regressive. It's completely true. But when cigarette taxes go up, youth smoking goes down. Reductions in youth smoking mean permanent, ongoing reductions in overall cigarette consumption, as young peopl
368.
by hapless 11y ago
The therapeutic index is the ratio between the necessary dose to achieve desired effects, and the dose that incurs dangerous side effects. Both doses rise with tolerance, but the ratio between them narrows. That opiate-tolerant fellow on
369.
by hapless 11y ago
It sounds like their plan is to block all ads, then sell the new ad inventory created by all the blank space on pages. Why on earth would users want this browser?
370.
by hapless 11y ago
The therapeutic index of opiates narrows continuously as addiction proceeds. Users have to skate closer and closer to dangerous levels to reach the same level of intoxication. While dosage, purity, etc may possibly make the drug more predi
371.
by hapless 11y ago
I wonder less about the product and more about the investment in this field. You can found your own drop-shipped mattress company with less startup capital than a Subway franchise. So why does Casper have $70MM in funding? What does that $7
372.
by hapless 11y ago
The indictment makes it clear he's been under SEC investigation for six years. Meanwhile, his former firm is suing him for stealing shareholder's money. Both matters pre-date Skreli's national notoriety, because it was his n
373.
by hapless 11y ago
The problem is that they refuse to build out fiber in areas where they are unlikely to sell a lot of high-dollar, high-margin TV packages. In rural and low-income areas, Verizon wants to let the old copper infrastructure rot, but they are u
374.
by hapless 11y ago
You're free to do exactly that. Nothing stops you from publishing a web browser that renders static HTML. But the only way to include a JS interpreter is to use the Apple-provided WebKit. Language interpreters are forbidden to downloa
375.
by hapless 11y ago
Emacs provides really a very nice UI for working with email.
376.
by hapless 11y ago
I actually looked this up. The mishandled baggage rate is now 7.3 bags per thousand passengers. (It has fallen considerably in recent years, since baggage fees reduce the amount of baggage carried per passenger) I have had snafus often en
377.
by hapless 11y ago
Air shippers offer a money-back guarantee on timely delivery of the baggage. If an express cargo package is bumped from a plane, the very next plane will take it to its destination, because failure is expensive. My checked baggage, on th
378.
by hapless 11y ago
Here is the original paper, un-mediated by wikipedia. http://www.biu.ac.il/soc/ec/d_levy/publications/jmcb4.pdf
379.
by hapless 11y ago
Reuters cites no sources for the "little or no value." It could be made up from whole cloth. "Some people say" isn't journalism. Starboard's own analysts assign a value around $2 billion.
380.
by hapless 11y ago
The original spec, "Anything that fits into a refrigerator," is a pretty darn good one. It conforms to Postel's law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". We can develop a spec
381.
by hapless 11y ago
640x480 @ 14" is 57 dpi, but Windows, back then, was commonly configured for 96 dpi. Making fonts tiny was the only way for them not to render huge on the typical end-user device.
382.
by hapless 11y ago
He mentions the c&d in passing, but blames "gentrification" and "failing to win fans," as if failing to obey the law is a branding problem. I would say it is the primary cause of failure. The founders did not both
383.
by hapless 11y ago
Leap never bothered to secure a license to operate a transit service. They were illegal from day one, they were issued a cease and desist in May of 2015, and they started auctioning off the buses in June. For-profit city bus services were
384.
by hapless 11y ago
The SPECint and SPECfp benchmark suites were never very tightly connected to real-world performance, but I wonder what these figures look like for SPECjbb, the java benchmark. (If I recall correctly, SPECjbb spins up an app that looks a lot
385.
by hapless 11y ago
The prosecution was outstandingly successful in demonstrating that Ross Ulbricht is a violent, dangerous criminal. It is not surprising he was sentenced as such. This is what it looks like when the system works. Society is safer with Ross b
386.
by hapless 11y ago
SMS at $0.10 per text is an excellent example: it was total a failure as a business model. Every provider in north america, even prepaid, now offers SMS services on a monthly basis. It was critical to uptake. A $0.99 song from itunes isn&
387.
by hapless 11y ago
I think proposition #2, ala flattr, is the only viable one out of this lot. The other three all fall on the sword of "should I pay $0.05 for this mouse click?". If the user ever has to ask himself that question, the game is up.
388.
by hapless 11y ago
In-app-purchasing in games relies on conditioning the user across many hours of gameplay. 98% of users never take the bait. Roughly 0.15% of users make up 50% of the revenue. In short: I don't think the "skinner box" model i
389.
by hapless 11y ago
No "micropayment" system has ever succeeded, and no such system will succeed in the future. This is not a technology problem. It's a matter of human psychology. Every single example provided by the author takes one of two f
390.
by hapless 11y ago
It takes courage to speak at all.

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