leot

69 ms·

631.
by leot 15y ago
Because it bears repeating, at issue is your original claim that money(/power/influence) was not the "most influential" source of corruption, and that the impulse to "do good" was "far more effective than money". > All of the "I know wh
632.
by leot 15y ago
Really? I had heard that because streets are regularly dug up (well, every 5-15 years or so), and because the cost of doing so is almost always _way_ more than the cost of what goes in there, that for this reason there's already tons of cap
633.
by leot 15y ago
When we look at poor societies, or even much of Western Europe >100 years ago, we see vast swaths of the population with stunted physical growth suffering from preventable and treatable nutrient deficiencies. E.g., currently around 50-7
634.
by leot 15y ago
> And you know that they were lying because you read their minds.... No, I infer it from their actions. > Surely you don't believe that people who want to do good have no interest in power and influence. This is a straw man. I'm dis
635.
by leot 15y ago
Surely you're joking. This has to be the most odious of the objectivists' canards. Just because "doing good" was used as a pretense or excuse doesn't mean it was the perpetrator's actual motive. I suppose you also believe that most violent
636.
by leot 15y ago
This can be compared to the basic distinction between precision and bias. While noisy and variegated individual biases pitted against each other in good-faith debate can have low "precision", the more pernicious problem is bias, which is wh
637.
by leot 15y ago
We can't really be upset or surprised that U.S. officials are being targeted by foreign espionage efforts. Every major country (with a foreign intelligence service) is spying on every other major country. That's how it works. What we can be
638.
by leot 15y ago
You're under the impression that the wealthy are looking to increase their absolute, rather than their relative, wealth. But much of what I've seen in the U.S. are policies focused on preserving or increasing relative wealth at the expense
639.
by leot 15y ago
There's an excellent This American Life programme that addresses these kinds of issues in post-earthquake Haiti: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/408/i...
640.
by leot 15y ago
The pattern looks more interesting than simply that. Multiple semantically related terms are correlated with "accident". And, strangely, "fatal accident" is not correlated very much with any of those other semantically related terms. Furthe
641.
by leot 15y ago
Methods section of their whitepaper: In our Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) system, we achieve a good balance of precision and speed by using a two-pass hash-based system. In the first pass, we compute an approximate distance from the ta
642.
by leot 15y ago
... ultra-cool would be rankings by mutual information ...
643.
by leot 15y ago
What many here seem to miss is that this looks at coincidences in the timing of searches. This is not "within-subject": it's not that people-who-search-for-x-also-search-for-y. Rather, it's WHEN-people-search-x-other-people-are-also-likely-
644.
by leot 15y ago
It appears you may have been misinformed. Kin selection: organism X helps organism Y because it improves the prospects for the part of X's DNA that Y also has. The more related X is to something, the more willing X is to sacrifice itself fo
645.
by leot 15y ago
Doesn't even need to be an iv. A spray will do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin#Drug_forms (in fact, I'm guessing that oxytocin is what this guy is spraying around so that the lions he's playing with don't decide to eat him: http:/
646.
by leot 15y ago
Don't get me wrong -- I'm definitely concerned about the suffering that happens in foreign countries, and I think that people should be aware of it. Say every American was upset at N.K.'s horrible treatment of prisoners. So what? What's goi
647.
by leot 15y ago
Saying that we're better than most but not as great as we could be is a cop out. The implication of your comment appears to be "let's be upset about N.K., but you're holding the U.S. to too high a standard. The institutions of the U.S. are
648.
by leot 15y ago
There are lots of different kinds of people.
649.
by leot 15y ago
To be honest, I think it's perfectly fine for the FBI to do this if there's judicial oversight. The problem is there ain't.
650.
by leot 15y ago
I'd be surprised if they _didn't_ make one for honeypot bicycles.
651.
by leot 15y ago
Their website says nothing, but they link ( http://green-energy-reviews.com/zenith-turns-an-israeli-kibb... ) to a video that shows a presentation with a slide of their technology with the text: 5 kWh PV + Thermal -- 30,000 Euros ... and th
652.
by leot 15y ago
Hopefully they are not IPO'ing because of a negative long-term outlook ... ... among those I know, trust in Yelp has fallen a fair bit. Writing fake reviews seems to have become a standard business practice. And whereas in the past Yelp se
653.
by leot 15y ago
A particularly problematic aspect of this system is that, in close elections, it provides little incentive to the elected representative to do a particularly good job once they get there. If the pol won with 51% of the vote, then perhaps if
654.
by leot 15y ago
Every voter only gets one vote. Extra parties would change nothing.
655.
by leot 16y ago
Not that I'm condoning this behavior, but it's especially unfortunate that the target here is relatively benign when there are so many more deserving targets.
656.
(Oxford philosophy prof.) Gerald Cohen on Rescuing Conservatism(tvo.org)
2 points by leot 16y ago|0 comments
657.
by leot 16y ago
The argument that there is some steady march toward tyranny and erosion in our freedoms would make sense if it weren't for the fact that these programs have existed in one form or another since WWII (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echel
658.
by leot 16y ago
If any of the major webmail providers, with millions of active users, offered "brain dead" PGP (i.e., PGP signatures by default, and automatic PGP encryption and decryption whenever possible), many of the others would follow suit and a lot
659.
by leot 16y ago
Why can't a group of people decide what they want for themselves democratically? Why not let municipalities be free to provide internet as a utility (like roads, electricity, etc.)? After all, this doesn't mean they all have to do so.
660.
by leot 16y ago
Yes, because it worked out so well when governments divested themselves of their local transit systems to private businesses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scanda...

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