leot

51 ms·

481.
A Megaquake becomes a Megapuzzle(seismo.berkeley.edu)
28 points by leot 15y ago|0 comments
482.
by leot 15y ago
You know what we're sure will ruin your future chances of holding down a job, will stunt your development, and might well lead to severe harm or even death? Going to prison. Putting people in prison for harming themselves is the height of
483.
by leot 15y ago
Please don't presume that I'm confused. I've worked to develop a fairly good sense for when I don't understand, and I believe (even if I'm not completely certain) that Thiel, here, is conveniently ignoring the most important counter-argumen
484.
by leot 15y ago
First impressions can make a huge difference. Especially in the case of the spatial organization of things, they set the frame we use orient ourselves in a broader context. I should have mentioned that I'd noticed the inclusion of scale-cha
485.
by leot 15y ago
I've enjoyed everything up to where he starts bad-mouthing the benefits of competition, where he claims that if there's perfect competition "nobody makes any money". That's about as sensible as Yogi Berra's "Nobody goes there any more -- it
486.
by leot 15y ago
rs10784502 "In addition, the C allele of rs10784502 is associated, on average, with 9,006.7 mm3 larger intracranial volume, or 0.58% of intracranial volume per risk allele and is weakly associated with increased general intelligence by appr
487.
by leot 15y ago
Awesome One thing I really want to see get out of a universe/solar system app, though, is a better sense of scale -- to me, having enlarged planets makes it difficult for me to understand the strength and range of gravity, or the challeng
488.
by leot 15y ago
By that reasoning, HN was best when it was just pg.
489.
by leot 15y ago
Just because a piece of legislation has a nice feature doesn't mean it can't be horrible for its other properties.
490.
by leot 15y ago
AFAIK, the reason why entanglement doesn't permit instantaneous information transfer is that, by definition, the quantum state is unknown before you observe it. While, by observing it you instantly know both sides of the entangled pair, thi
491.
World's first global happiness report released(earth.columbia.edu)
9 points by leot 15y ago|0 comments
492.
by leot 15y ago
So long as there is no reasonable welfare system in place, coercion is entirely possible at the bottom end of society.
493.
by leot 15y ago
Find me one, just one , stateless region in which there is peace, a multitude of safe food, and an educated public.
494.
by leot 15y ago
Except, historically $1 billion for tanks today meant $1+ billion for tanks for the foreseeable future. The actual long-term costs of $1 billion military spending are far more than those of $1 billion of NASA spending (and let's not even ge
495.
by leot 15y ago
You must have missed Fox's mea culpa during the 2008 election season. I believe it began: "Today on Fox we are devoting an entire hour to the retraction of our story regarding Candidate Barack Obama's attendance at an extremist muslim schoo
496.
Using Google Ngrams to examine "voter fraud"(dailykos.com)
1 points by leot 15y ago|0 comments
497.
by leot 15y ago
The question a country needs to face before deciding to go to war is, "is it worth it?" The draft, and taxation, help to provide the needed reckoning. There is no comparison, here, to the provision of social services. Or to debt-financed in
498.
by leot 15y ago
Can you imagine yourself paying someone to smear others on a forum? What if you really believed in your own cause? What if it cost you a trivial proportion of your buckets of money, and if you had legions of lawyers able to write terrifyi
499.
by leot 15y ago
I'm most excited to see them iterate on the videos themselves. The videos are already excellent, of course, but there's incredible potential to increase their production value. By combining a director's ability to grab and hold on to viewer
500.
by leot 15y ago
First off, I'm going to call "straw man". No one is forced to clean old people's bedpans. They all do it for money, or because of a sense of obligation/love. But, there are a few other big differences between waging war and providing soci
501.
by leot 15y ago
In my opinion, it's unlikely that a war is just if the citizenry is unwilling to submit to a draft. In the same way, if an administration can't convince everyone in the population to pay for a war with tax increases, then the war either isn
502.
by leot 15y ago
The cost might not be that much, especially if we use analytic "closed-form" models of the universe's behavior. ... but then we'd get strange effects (you know, perhaps things like wave-particle duality, quantum measurement, ...)
503.
by leot 15y ago
From Nick Bostrom: "A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: 1) The fraction
504.
by leot 15y ago
Government economic policy is currently directed, in large part, toward making sure that there are regular increases in GDP. I get that. I'm trying to figure out what government policy might look like if it was directed toward increasing
505.
by leot 15y ago
That's not what I was asking. Net wealth doesn't have nearly the same status as GDP. I sometimes wonder what policy would look like if the dominant economic priority was the increase total wealth, rather than economic activity.
506.
by leot 15y ago
Anyone know why net household wealth isn't more commonly used as metric for, uh, wealth?
507.
by leot 15y ago
Every day an industry lobbyist succeeds in delaying the release of inconvenient information is a quantifiable victory. It doesn't matter if "the truth will out" eventually -- all industry cares about is the area under the profit curve.
508.
by leot 15y ago
Philosophers use evidence all the time in support of their arguments, especially when they are making empirical claims (as you are: you are claiming that the costs of government outweigh the benefits when it comes to the provision of public
509.
by leot 15y ago
Any evidence that this solves it?
510.
by leot 15y ago
As a Canadian in the U.S., believe me when I say that in America you would be paying more to get even less. The amount of inefficiency, conflicts of interest, hypocrisy, bureaucracy, and redundancy in the U.S. system beggars belief.

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