leot

65 ms·

541.
by leot 15y ago
Sounds like a problem of the selection of legal representation. It seems there needs to be some, ah, website that helps to put together groups of plaintiffs and organizes the process of selecting a good legal team to represent them ... ...
542.
by leot 15y ago
I thought the uptake was going to be that the whole concept of a gift card is ludicrous. Instead I'm sold on using a different kind of gift card. Don't get me wrong -- I often prefer getting gift cards to getting something useless, but th
543.
by leot 15y ago
It's amazing that so many entrepreneurs seem to hate the large payments that class action lawyers are awarded. Class action lawyers perform the same kind of high-risk high-reward gamble that startups engage in. While tech startups create va
544.
by leot 15y ago
or depression
545.
by leot 15y ago
Capitalism forces people to try to be rational. To claim that humans are inherently rational is to deny the widespread existence of psychological pathologies.
546.
by leot 15y ago
One nice property of tablets is they don't need to go obsolete like laptops or desktop computers. They can be turned in to picture frames, home automation interfaces, cookbooks, mini-TVs, combined into larger interfaces, (if only they had n
547.
by leot 15y ago
Per others' comments: adopting a "game" frame of mind can be a useful way of adopting the patience (etc.) required for learning math (and, indeed, accomplishing any number of difficult tasks).
548.
by leot 15y ago
The process of learning a math concept is often a step-like function. Unlike in other subjects, it can be hard to learn math concepts in small useful steps, and when it comes time to solve a problem, it's hard to fool oneself into believing
549.
by leot 15y ago
The royalties oil companies pay are a form of tribute that's been formalized into law. Further, oil companies and cruise lines benefit from the protection of nearby navies as well as deterrence via international law enforcement. Would a sea
550.
by leot 15y ago
No doubt in part because they benefit from the protection afforded by nation-states. Cruise ships tend to be filled with the citizens of powerful countries (or countries allied to powerful ones).
551.
by leot 15y ago
Defense (see also: "divide and conquer")
552.
by leot 15y ago
Presumably any pirates need only make a credible threat of doing costly damage to or destroying the seastead in order to extort payment. Damaging a seastead seems easier to do than damaging a city-state atop a hill.
553.
by leot 15y ago
One advantage of a walled garden is less diffusion of responsibility.
554.
by leot 15y ago
What would Rand say about taxing wealth instead of income, keeping everything else the same?
555.
by leot 15y ago
It seems that wealth taxes are a far more sensible kind of taxation. But, strangely, there is little serious discussion of them. I sometimes wonder what it would look like if there were just two kinds of taxes responsible for most governmen
556.
by leot 15y ago
That's strange, because whenever I propose wealth taxes to self-identified libertarians they complain about "double taxation" or somesuch. This is probably why my answer gets voted up by neither libertarians nor, uh, non-libertarians. The p
557.
by leot 15y ago
It's definitely possible to "hoard" cash without putting it in a mattress. Just make extremely conservative investments.
558.
by leot 15y ago
Well, then just Tax Wealth (and set cap gains rates to 0% while you're at it). If the limos and G5 jet that your company bought were inefficient assets, then as an owner of the company you would still have to pay for them but your return on
559.
by leot 15y ago
So? What are you going to do with that information? What's a better way of figuring out if someone is good at math: give them a math test? Or look up their ancestry?
560.
by leot 15y ago
Agree. Long run behavior is mostly useful when deciding between two competing alternatives in which the short-term consequences are unimportant. I'd assert that the widely-accepted "in the end" kinds notions are noxious, and speak to a "hap
561.
Historical data on the term "voter fraud", as compared with related concepts(books.google.com)
1 points by leot 15y ago|0 comments
562.
by leot 15y ago
Or: "it seemed like you left your private diary out, so I photocopied every page to make sure before telling you." That said, I can see the temptation to want an answer to the question "did the really leave every account open?"
563.
by leot 15y ago
> I feel like the traders on Wall Street would be the first people to want an economic bounce back. This lies near the crux of the widespread belief that wealth merely lets you buy more stuff. Currency is the formalization of power, wh
564.
by leot 15y ago
it would just do a,b,c,d -- the rest was meta
565.
by leot 15y ago
No, I haven't used PGP extensively, but my reasons for not doing so (as probably with everyone else) have had to do with the fact that no one else uses it and it hasn't been cleanly incorporated into existing online identity frameworks. I'm
566.
by leot 15y ago
Your mom couldn't recognize that a message was "verified" as having come from her Doctor? Or click the "encrypt" box (which causes Gmail to determine whether it knows the public key of every one of an email's recipients). Or click the "sign
567.
by leot 15y ago
It's so trivial for Gmail to do PGP that it was testing email signatures two years ago ( http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/02/gmail-tests-pgp-sig... ) Indeed, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail could get the ball rolling here completely transpar
568.
by leot 15y ago
> but you still need someone to consume your product Do we? We're not trying to make a lot of money, just enough to get by. And we're talking about an entire economy here, not about the profitability of an individual business. The whole
569.
by leot 15y ago
I'm intrigued by your comment that you have an advanced degree in economics. I don't, but it seems obvious to me that you're missing something (I'm happy to be corrected here!): the problem isn't the lack of consumers so much as a lack of i
570.
by leot 15y ago
You're not taxed on work you do for yourself (, yet).

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