leot

45 ms·

421.
by leot 14y ago
I know that as a kid I was all too sensitive to things in math "making sense" in a deep way. Any semi-arbitrary conventions that made my understanding less elegant, or which obscured the beauty of a concept, were fiercely protested. So, up
422.
by leot 14y ago
"It's just semantics" is a horrible, useless phrase. The difference between "robot" and "postlapsarian" is "just semantics", after all.
423.
God, Approximately (Brian Cantwell Smith, 1998, MIT)(ageofsignificance.org)
2 points by leot 14y ago|0 comments
424.
by leot 14y ago
"Your assumption is that it won't hurt them in the long run." The entire notion of "the long run" has implicit in it various " ceteris paribus " assumptions that are very frequently false. In particular, the "long run" makes little sense in
425.
by leot 14y ago
In other words: imagine a baby. She sees 100k "images" of faces. Thanks to the statistical regularity of the world, she now has a "subsystem" that recognizes a face in the absence of her knowing what it's called . Then, when she is told "t
426.
by leot 14y ago
Perhaps most amazing is many people's apparent assumption that banks would never engage in this kind of behavior. It seems the most cynical predictions and explanations of large bank behavior are likely to be the ones closest to the truth
427.
by leot 14y ago
Perhaps because every person who makes up a corporation enjoys full freedom of speech.
428.
by leot 14y ago
... and they can be removed from these positions every two or six years. And they have to glad-hand and defend their positions and votes regularly. And even if you contend that they might be bribed or engage in dubious deals, their compensa
429.
by leot 14y ago
Oh, look how counter-intuitive this reasoning is! It must therefore be deeply insightful. Except it requires throwing out most normal definitions of "concentration" and "wealth", and requires the belief that government is the "other" rather
430.
by leot 14y ago
Twitter is a protocol masquerading as an app.
431.
by leot 14y ago
"Concentration of wealth" has nothing to do with government projects.
432.
by leot 14y ago
Isn't this more an indictment of the U.S. social safety net than it is of the economics of music performance? And, am I to conclude from your statement that, in fact, all artists who are as good as Sparklehorse are entitled to sufficiently
433.
by leot 14y ago
Let's say that a musician goes $50k in debt making an album. They are now given a choice: would you rather be listened to by 50 million people and get no immediate money, or by 10k people and be quickly made whole? Which do you suppose they
434.
by leot 14y ago
It matters when you start the clock. At the beginning of the design stage? When the first prefab wall panel starts being built at their factory? When you break ground?
435.
by leot 14y ago
Another (less lyrical) way of phrasing it might be: "P1: There exists X in the set of (ideas, notions, feelings, etc.) s.t. X cannot be expressed as a combination of statements. Humans get around P1 by using more than mere statements to exp
436.
by leot 14y ago
There are ideas, notions, feelings, etc. that cannot be adequately expressed through statements alone. Hence, art.
437.
by leot 14y ago
The debate here seems to be about whether patents are good or bad, when the problem seems to be more about their implementation. It's possible to imagine a patent system that has far fewer problems (though no doubt massive armies will form
438.
by leot 14y ago
All ownership is, at base, socially constructed legal artifice.
439.
by leot 14y ago
You seem to be saying that, with VAT, the devil is in the details, not that it is necessarily bad. The fact that many countries use a VAT, and it works fine (with much higher compliance than income taxes, e.g.), suggests that it's possible
440.
by leot 14y ago
Welfare is important, but I'm treating it as a separate issue here. Beyond the issue of privileging corporations, a 100% inheritance tax leads to a bunch of strange behavior (with trusts, etc.), and doesn't handle well the possibility of pe
441.
by leot 14y ago
Perhaps the simplest and fairest tax scheme is: 1) a VAT (10-25%). Mandate that it be built-in to prices (c.f. pre-deduction of income taxes) 2) an annual wealth tax (1-3% of household net worth) (note: total federal US tax receipts are ~$2
442.
by leot 14y ago
Given a passphrase dictionary attack, the passphrase would be discovered in less than a minute. Wait, what? 2,048^4 == 2^44 == 17,592,186,044,416 At 2 million hashes/second it would still take 101 [edit: actually, on average, 50] days t
443.
by leot 14y ago
That's not obviously true. That one worm was discovered does not mean that every state-designed worm will be (or has been).
444.
by leot 14y ago
It seems this has been disappeared from HN. Was it flagged too many times, or something?
445.
by leot 14y ago
Mine is there. (email me if you need proof)
446.
by leot 14y ago
It's interesting that, today, it seems most ignored creative people would be content with merely getting and, for a spell, keeping some small part of the world's attention. To be richly compensated is really just a bonus. That said, I suppo
447.
by leot 14y ago
Perhaps an important detail, then: Thatcher's quote was actually "And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." ... as if families, themselves, weren't each a kind of small so
448.
by leot 14y ago
Generalizations have their place. A big problem many have with right-wing libertarians is that, unlike other political philosophies, libertarianism seems more like an elaborate, and status-reinforcing, justification for one's own socioecono
449.
by leot 14y ago
When people or organizations get together and lobby the government so that their business or industry makes more money as a consequence of the changes they're lobbying for, then yes, that's bad. Sure, corporations should be able to influenc
450.
by leot 14y ago
Well, then, I meant non-profits -- my mistake. That is, all this "good" lobbying was by organizations operating on behalf of a large group of individuals who don't have the same shared profit-driven interest.

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