iguy

30 ms·

241.
by iguy 6y ago
I guess that's it. Some other asocial animals are pretty smart, because they need it for hunting, or something. (Although even the most anti-social mammals still interact with their mom!)
242.
by iguy 6y ago
Yes. But I'd reverse these questions: why so much intelligence, with seemingly few opportunities to use it?
243.
by iguy 6y ago
Not mentioned on that list: It made the sort of stories that circulated in post-WWI Germany, about the old men selling out while they could still have kept fighting, much less plausible. If the war aim was the permanent political defeat of
244.
by iguy 6y ago
Every time I've looked into supposed lack of jet fuel taxes, it seems to come down to taxing the driving of cars on roads via taxes on fuel. Fuel for agricultural or industrial use also doesn't contain such taxes, most places. Whi
245.
by iguy 6y ago
I never knew the date, 1998 sounds super-recent. But digging a bit, it sounds like that's the last step of many, with the first bankruptcy restrictions in 1976 (when the only concern imagined was medical & law degrees!) https:&#x2
246.
by iguy 6y ago
10,15,20% all plausible figures, the point is just to ensure that it can't get so large that it gets in the way of living your life. > 10k graduating with a degree in a field with only 100 jobs/year needing that degree What I&#
247.
by iguy 6y ago
My suggestion to achieve this is to cap repayments (of non-dischargable loans), perhaps at 15% of taxable income, and written off 20 years after signing. That would make lenders very interested in the outcomes of various courses. And their
248.
by iguy 6y ago
I think it would be more accurate to say that a small urban class was fairly westernised. Sometimes, such a class starts a trend, and everyone follows. IMO it helps a lot if there's real economic growth, I mean from useful jobs not fro
249.
by iguy 6y ago
> Small sample size, but this is consistent with what I've observed in some specialized people The data from large samples points the other way here. Every measurable trait that you might describe as smart (like ability in math, or
250.
by iguy 6y ago
It seems entirely logical to me to first test on healthy young people. It's a big step forward from mice! You might learn a lot. But there are quite a few more steps from there to treating the population.
251.
by iguy 6y ago
> They just gave it to 1,077 people That's a good start. But for example, how many of them were pregnant, and at what stages? I would guess none. That would be the most famous way to get this wrong. I hope they are thinking hard abo
252.
by iguy 6y ago
Not an expert but I thought this one was actually hard to make. Or at least, sufficiently different that tooling up a production line would take time & money, so that the big generic guys couldn't just open the taps. (But I could b
253.
by iguy 6y ago
Especially a drug which is so supply-constrained, on the time-scale of the pandemic. Even if you ignore the research cost, what's the right price for the one large batch left over from Ebola, in the time until you cook up another large
254.
by iguy 6y ago
Besides the technology of weapons, a big change here is that the economics of running an empire was completely changed by industrialization. Every empire since the year dot captured land, with peasants farming it, who could be taxed, to pay
255.
by iguy 6y ago
> They could be one of the biggest solar players But what's their advantage in solar? Lots of countries have plenty of sunlight, and some are closer to big markets. The pipeline infrastructure is useless. They don't have a manu
256.
by iguy 6y ago
More non-Arab suppliers is one side. The other is that these petro-states today have much larger populations, with much higher expectations, than they did in the 70s. Saudi oil is still cheap to pump, but instead of 6M people, they now have
257.
by iguy 6y ago
Not sure how you would quantify this, but enough? Inventing detonators that worked fast enough (i.e. small enough error in firing time) was one of the challenges. They did a lot of tests of those explosive lenses. (32, not 9, of course.) Th
258.
by iguy 6y ago
This really wasn't a plausible failure mode. They had many (9?) detonators which had to be very precisely simultaneous, and had done a lot of tests of those alone (this was cheap & easy). As long as just one of them worked, you wou
259.
by iguy 6y ago
Yes this is true. But it doesn't seem that big to me: 10% extra budget isn't nothing, but it's at a few schools which are competing with private schools, which (I think) charge more like 2-3 times as much. And this is the top
260.
by iguy 6y ago
The rule of law is a nice aspiration, but it has limits on large-scale cases. For instance I'm sure these laws about illegal state aid could logically imply a conclusion that would result in (say) Airbus going bust. And if the judges e
261.
by iguy 6y ago
Thanks! So for these top-50 schools, it comes out to about 10% extra budget. And there are about 100_000 public schools in the USA.
262.
by iguy 6y ago
But nobody in Nevada thinks that it is a country. And there is no pretence that its government is free to negotiate international matters (let alone run an army, have its own language, or even hold a referendum on abortion). > hard to gr
263.
by iguy 6y ago
> it is the highest court in Ireland's legal system. And not just Ireland's. And that's what I'm saying. If your legal system is united to this degree into a larger framework, then that new thing is the locus of sover
264.
by iguy 6y ago
> Ireland signed ... trade agreements ... is subject to their rules Sure. If your employment contract prevents you from taking other work, you may be fired if you break this. You may also have signed up to binding arbitration by some wei
265.
by iguy 6y ago
This sounds like a way to tax corporate profits in proportion to the amount of VAT, property tax, employment taxes, etc. already paid in each country. Wouldn't it be simpler just to tax those things? We already collect those taxes, and
266.
by iguy 6y ago
Seems like there's a sovereignty issue here. If you negotiate a deal with the highest authority in Ireland, and they sign off on it, are you done? Why do you have to care what other deals they have made with other parties? Or is nothin
267.
by iguy 6y ago
Right, this sort of scheme is a great way to get things done without a lot of formal banking & legal machinery. And it's pretty resilient: if building is interrupted by (say) political unrest, or there's an episode of hyperinf
268.
by iguy 6y ago
Thanks. Those are huge numbers, 40% of teaching staff who (it seems) don't count as teachers. Presumably these totals include richer & poorer parts of the city, and if it's skewed then the proportion may be even higher in the
269.
by iguy 6y ago
Seems like a puzzle worth understanding. If the budgets & class sizes are similar, and the teacher salaries are lower in tough schools, then what is the rest spent on? In some countries I would guess that the budget is being pocketed al
270.
by iguy 6y ago
Thanks. If I was going to pick the location for the craziest such local contrast, I would for sure pick NYC. But it would be interesting to know if there are more systematic figures anywhere, that apply to cities not containing Wall Street.

More ›