iguy

78 ms·

811.
by iguy 8y ago
Indeed "organized work by the world" has little to do with it. The aid industry may sometimes do good in a crisis, but has nothing to do with the overall trajectory. But while China is the poster-child for this (in the last 30 yea
812.
by iguy 8y ago
I think it's well beyond "disrespects the actual data", more into science denial territory. We have had decent data about this for a long time. It's a lot easier to gather than climate data, on which the same people will
813.
by iguy 8y ago
Right! Not to mention erasing the pre-colonial civilisations of half the world. Delhi is what, the 9th city on that site? The Guardian believes that none of those palace builders employed tax-collectors?
814.
by iguy 8y ago
Absolutely, and I pulled 5% out of thin air, too. Here's a graph with the famous Arab spring 2011 drought... about 10%, for one year. You can debate how much of that you wish to attribute to what cause. But note that this is also the p
815.
by iguy 8y ago
But the resources in question here (for stability of mid-east countries) are local: there's only so much land along the Nile, and only so much oil in the Saudi wells. Quadrupling the population makes every fight over slices of the pie
816.
by iguy 8y ago
I don't doubt that you can find something statistically significant (once you control for everything else) but every time this comes up, the relative sizes of things seem vastly under-emphasized. If 5% less rain does bad things for sta
817.
by iguy 8y ago
I wonder how far we are from this being a populist position worth taking. If you proposed a law that getting hacked results in an automatic duty to hand-deliver $1000 in cash to every single person whose detail was leaked... I think voters
818.
by iguy 8y ago
Yes, this is true. But there was also a business model in providing facts, when facts were hard to get. Now that they are a commodity, the business model seems to be in providing opinions.
819.
by iguy 8y ago
Indeed, there was a lot of bias in the past which was harder to see, because getting alternative sources was hard. Only a few NYT-size organisations could have a foreign correspondent & foot his telegram bills. But I think there's
820.
by iguy 8y ago
Could be, I was trying to be cautious! But many, many, people are extremely surprised to think that survival of the fittest has any relevance within historical time. Let alone between us and Dante.
821.
by iguy 8y ago
These points are true. And note that 2^24 is larger than the population of Italy at that time. But you should be extremely cautious about presuming that these 2^24-minus-duplications ancestors were anything like uniformly distributed. Top-1
822.
by iguy 8y ago
I totally agree that there are plausible mechanisms by which wealth today might help your grandkids stay wealthy. But the empirical question is whether these actually explain much of what we see. Many things which sound plausible to novelis
823.
by iguy 8y ago
> So inheritance tax?. Or is there an argument that this is good for society? Why is this binary? It could be terrible for society, and something which an inheritance tax cannot cure. Or something awful for which cures would be worse. We
824.
by iguy 8y ago
I don't doubt that the rich own nice things (and that their rich ancestors did too) but the question is whether this is causal, and I'm highly dubious, over these long time-scales. Clark has evidence from lots of countries, and I&
825.
by iguy 8y ago
> family holdings, individual wealth management, sons of well-to-dos becoming proverbial doctors and lawyers The last. The article wants to make it sound like this is inherited wealth (alla Picketty) but this isn't really supported.
826.
by iguy 8y ago
> 2.6 deaths per million child-years at risk Thinking aloud: that's about 1/7 of Canada's murder rate, and if I guess that under-5 children are 7% of population, such things would make up 1% of all murders, which does not
827.
by iguy 8y ago
Indeed the Sykes data is long-term history, and I think of a middle-class sample. But it does teach us that received wisdom was badly wrong there, which should make us less confident of the same wisdom elsewhere. The bone marrow study was 2
828.
by iguy 8y ago
I agree that once this is possible, and advantageous, it will happen. Flying out to Thailand or wherever is already cheap compared to any serious medical procedure. Would we arrest people if they come home pregnant? But before we see this f
829.
by iguy 8y ago
No way, 1-2% is more like the range. For the western world, for serious studies e.g. tracking surnames vs Y chromosomes. Most much higher figures come from counting only disputed cases, which are obviously going to be skewed. Edit, some lin
830.
by iguy 8y ago
Nobody is starving who is able to buy food on the world market. People starve in Yemen because there are guys with AK47s between them and the nearest functional port.
831.
by iguy 8y ago
I hope you made a point of asking for two hours off that day, to sit in the waiting room for a note to make HR happy.
832.
by iguy 8y ago
Thanks, I didn't realise this. Maybe one more sign that sexual fetish has largely stopped being taboo.
833.
by iguy 8y ago
Yea it's not wrong to dump them. But it does I think create a bit of a precedent that you should care at all. I'd worry, as CEO, that pretty soon you'll find yourself having to hire a team of people to manage content complain
834.
by iguy 8y ago
Do you hold that people earning (say) 30k actually spend more dollars on clothing than people earning 50k, per annum? (In similar job types, similar area, etc.) This is the claim of the boot story, and I don't buy it. Although it would
835.
by iguy 8y ago
Thanks, I didn't know that about the DS/Cloudflare case, what a dumb move. Still think the right move for the CEO would have been to rise above it.
836.
by iguy 8y ago
This is true, but these were side services. The core service of having a phone number was, I think, universal the way having a street address is. I mean not so much legally as in popular imagination. Like you can write fan letters to serial
837.
by iguy 8y ago
Part of this is that we haven't quite figured out what "publishing platform" means. It's not like a printing press (renting time on machine which applies ink) but also not like a magazine (with an editor pushing a view,
838.
by iguy 8y ago
Thanks, I heard about this gun case & forgot. So this points out that it's not only about new kinds business, but about a changing mood in general, even in old businesses. By new kinds business I mean that lots of internet companie
839.
by iguy 8y ago
I don't know if it's centralisation so much as personification. Patreon wants to be a a friendly brand, part of people's self-image. And having chosen this, perhaps they can't afford to live and let live. It's very
840.
by iguy 8y ago
No, the 1st Amendment attempts to protect this valuable thing in the same way that the 21st Amendment protects your booze supply. Free speech is a much bigger, and older, idea. And can be seriously threatened by many small changes in our pu

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