jwarden

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181.
by jwarden 4y ago
I have always wondered my community (Park City, UT) is spending money to build affordable housing rather then just paying subsidies to make existing housing more affordable. The estimated cost for the last development under consideration wa
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by jwarden 4y ago
Mark Twain wrote a lot about the Army Corps of Engineering’s work on the Mississippi, as well as many other wonderful facts about this river and his experience as a steam boat pilot, in Life on the Mississippi , a uniquely informative and
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by jwarden 4y ago
To offer a simple answer: because gardening is an investment, and people prefer to make investments in things they own. To make a broader observation: arguably one of the keys to a wealthy society is strong laws that protect private propert
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by jwarden 4y ago
Heh, somehow once you have kids, keeping all the cheerios in the box becomes very challenging. - When I had the first kid, when they would drop a cheerio on the floor, I would pick it up. - When I had the second kid, when they would drop a
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by jwarden 4y ago
The author of the article asks "Does it make sense from either an equity or revenue standpoint to focus IRS’s limited firepower on the poorest taxpayers among us?" But he has only established that the IRS sends more of these lette
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by jwarden 4y ago
I think this statistic may be misleading. The article states that most of these are "correspondence audits", described as "essentially a letter from the IRS asking for documentation on a specific line item on a return."
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by jwarden 4y ago
I don’t know where exactly the line should be drawn. My comment was simply an answer to the question “Why should speech which calls for the death or other specific violence against anyone be allowed?”
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by jwarden 4y ago
First because sometimes violence can be used towards a good cause, for example Ukrainians killing Russian invaders to defend their lives and freedom. Second because even if a thing is wrong it does not follow that it should be forbidden.
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by jwarden 4y ago
This is the theme of Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now. It compiles a tremendous amount of data and research on progress in health, wealth. justice, equality, and happiness. It is a great antidote to the distorted pessimistic view of r
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by jwarden 4y ago
The idea seems good. But after GDPR my confidence in EU lawmakers ability to craft truly well-thought-out tech legislation is low.
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by jwarden 4y ago
The advantages of a land-value tax is the central idea of Georgism/Distributism. There have been some interesting discussions about this on HN. Recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29493005
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by jwarden 4y ago
Well, for example, the view that gay marriage should be legal. Until very recently this view was judged very harshly by society. Many people who had this view were afraid to express it. Of those people who today complain about not feeling s
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by jwarden 4y ago
This seems like an example of judging somebody based on a trope.
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by jwarden 4y ago
Forgetting to include the lifecycle column in your query may mean not understanding what question you are trying to answer with your query.
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by jwarden 4y ago
I think there is a systematic bias in our perception of ancient peoples that is influenced by the scarcity of archeological evidence, combined with a common logical fallacy. Until we have evidence that people did X before year Y, we are bia
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by jwarden 4y ago
This reminds me of an idea I wrote about years ago called Pass-Through Lists, where every assignment is implicitly a destructuring assignment: https://jonathanwarden.com/2014/06/19/pass-through-lists/
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Pass-Through Lists(jonathanwarden.com)
3 points by jwarden 4y ago|0 comments
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by jwarden 4y ago
To summarize the argument: EA says that we should give money to the most effective causes, which implies that certain less effective but still very good causes should not be supported, so EA is harmful.
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by jwarden 4y ago
I think there are people who understand economics who think that inflation is often a good thing. Here for example is a quote from Investopedia’s article on Inflation: “Most of the time, deflation is unambiguously a positive trend for the e
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by jwarden 4y ago
This might help. If Twitter for some reason decided to migrate to the Fediverse, then you could login to their mastodon.social account, follow @elonmusk@twitter.com, and reply to Elon's tweets, all without having a Twitter account. And
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by jwarden 4y ago
I find this paragraph in the article to be, ironically, a straw man. > But it’s not “extremely plausible” that there’s a vast conspiracy among medical researchers (many of whom stated open to the view that ivermectin has some benefit) an
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by jwarden 4y ago
Fascinating discussion. I see some parallel here to the Bayesian vs Frequentist view of probability. They are perhaps both valid points of view depending on the situation. If you take a frequentist view of an unbiased coin, then the probabi
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by jwarden 4y ago
But priors are not *just* numbers between 0 and 1, as GP claimed. It is true that in your example, the outcome is binary: there is only a single proposition (the coin landed heads). And so the prior distribution is a Bernoulli distribution,
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by jwarden 4y ago
Priors are not just numbers between 0 and 1. They are probability distributions. If they were not, it would be impossible to update beliefs based on evidence. My prior beliefs about the coin include the possibility that the coin has a bias
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by jwarden 4y ago
I read that as a joke, even if not a very clever one.
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by jwarden 5y ago
Oh, but it is so much more than “X did Y”. The choice of which facts to report, when, and how, has huge impact on what people come to believe. There are a thousand ways to deceive while uttering nothing but true statements. The question to
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by jwarden 5y ago
They just finished rebuilding SLC. It was a huge project. It is spacious and bright and modern. It reminds me some of the newer airports in Asia.
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by jwarden 5y ago
“Eat like a king in the morning, a prince at noon, and a peasant at dinner” (Moses ben Maimon or Maimonides. 1135-1404)
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by jwarden 5y ago
I read a lot of history, a lot of old books, and travel a lot, and I think that makes me more resistant to the frequent claim that “such and such is a recent invention of (oppressive, capitalistic) contemporary society.” Throughout the worl
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by jwarden 5y ago
I have learned to expect almost any mainstream media headline with the word “after” to be misleading. “After” does not literally mean “because”, so it’s not a lie. But people read it that way. “Putin condemned by west after attending anti-N

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