lsc

25 ms·

151.
by lsc 7y ago
>As long as your income is not at the lower end of the distribution I think this is key. If you make $200K/yr, saving 1/10th that means you drive a lexus and not a benz. The Lexus is not worse than the Benz in any objective
152.
by lsc 7y ago
so... I've never been really poor, but like most of us, I've had lower income and higher income. Everyone gets unexpected bills, but my experience has been that those bills don't get larger with your income (even though mo
153.
by lsc 7y ago
A mediocre engineer is worth on the order of a million bucks a year to one of these big companies... one engineer can create a reasonably large amount of 'capital' - that doesn't make it cheap. Yeah, you could build that ca
154.
by lsc 7y ago
haha. that's quite the math error on my part. somehow I was thinking we were talking 300sqft places, which seems reasonable to me. 1/3rd that is a lot less reasonable, for my preferences. I guess then we're talking a capsu
155.
by lsc 7y ago
I... think per-squarefootage costs right now fit my budget just fine? but only ifyou sell me a 300sqft place, like this describes. Most "middle class" owners bought in before prices came up; real-estate, like everything, is pric
156.
by lsc 7y ago
sure, but the things we're talking about are 10m^2, or a little more than 300sqft. If you are building for me, you have a water closet with toilet and shower, and then a sink, but no real kitchen. I eat out or at work anyhow; a desk
157.
by lsc 7y ago
>Perhaps, disintegration of middle-class is a root cause for people considering such living standards as 'convenient'. Effectively,you live in a tight dorm. so, uh, I didn't go to school, so maybe I'm missing somethin
158.
by lsc 7y ago
Ah, perhaps I misunderstood. I thought you meant availability to the general public; I mean, two archival copies of a work doesn't do a lot to ensure I can read it; as I understand, if you can't find the rightsholder, that stil
159.
by lsc 7y ago
eh, but copyright as it stands now, decreases the availability of literature (I mean, aside from how it encourages creating it, which is super important, of course.) so those things couldn't have been reasons for creating copyright l
160.
by lsc 7y ago
Yeah, the point is to encourage creation; I agree that there should be some requirement that you must distribute a work to keep that copyright.
161.
by lsc 7y ago
>The only way to keep the things you buy is to actually own them. Not continually rent them from one online service after another. Eh, as someone who has owned (and lost or destroyed) a bunch of physical things, my experience is that I
162.
by lsc 7y ago
"Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or mark-ups." that... I mean, if they automatically refund everyone? that sounds... really pretty good? I mean, I've go
163.
by lsc 7y ago
I think if you are going to seriously argue that the US net benefited from the Vietnam war... or that Vietnam itself would not have been better off if it wasn't attacked by the US, I just don't know what to say.
164.
by lsc 7y ago
Most of the world, I think, went to war against the axis powers because they were attacked by axis powers, so the question is "what did Germany and Japan think they could get out of starting this war?" and the best answer I can
165.
by lsc 7y ago
>And also, yes, some consider relative wealth more important than absolute wealth; "I'd rather have $100 and my neighbor $10, than I have $150 and my neighbor $140." I actually think that's a bad example, 'cause
166.
by lsc 7y ago
>Tens of thousands of people comprehend Einstein's work. It used to be hundreds. We're smart as shit these days. In some ways, I feel like this is the real singularity. This trend towards feeding and offering education to ev
167.
by lsc 7y ago
>Just like wars, in trade wars one side gets hit worse than the other, which is kinda the point I guess. but if both sides are worse off at the end than at the beginning... why do it? Are people really willing to immiserate themselves i
168.
by lsc 7y ago
>good at solving open problems by (apparently) intuiting connections and making inferences, probably with the appearance of creative operation and experimental learning, but lacking any genuine desire or personal agency. so, like a philo
169.
by lsc 7y ago
without creativity... I don't think it would make for a very effective slave in a world that is constantly changing. Is creativity possible without consciousness? I don't pretend to be an expert.
170.
by lsc 7y ago
I understand the mercantilist view, I just don't think it's credible.
171.
by lsc 7y ago
>Is consciousness a necessary component for AGI, though? I always thought so. Like, without volition, it's just a really good natural language tool, and not a general intelligence. What would an artificial general intelligence with
172.
by lsc 7y ago
>But this trade war is a bifurcation of the world that was going to happen sooner or later. why is it inevitable? What do trade wars get us? As I understand it, trade wars decrease the GDP of the world, decrease the total output and pro
173.
by lsc 7y ago
exactly... we don't even have a definition of consciousness that is better than Jacobellis v. Ohio - For that matter, I'm not sure we even have it that good. I'm not sure I'd recognize a non-human consciousness when I
174.
by lsc 7y ago
>Are you seriously saying that the children of the wealthiest families in China are "China's best minds"? Please, show me some evidence for this egregious claim. I've been in programming and systems administration my
175.
by lsc 7y ago
this is my understanding as well... but I wonder how much of that is that they just had more variable cement, and the stuff that wasn't incredibly great turned to dust long ago? Certainly, our modern processes are more repeatable an
176.
by lsc 7y ago
so, it's interesting. you can see it both ways. Money distills a certain kind of power; one of the sorts of power individuals can have within a lawful system; but... there are other kinds of power that money simply doesn't co
177.
by lsc 7y ago
Yeah, probably depends a lot on where. I'm just a sysadmin, the difference in pay between here in silicon valley and the cheaper parts of the US for my labor are extremely dramatic. I mean, it's dramatic for better educated pro
178.
by lsc 7y ago
What makes the whole thing super weird is that where I live, "software engineers" which is to say, javascript programmers, get paid a lot more, say, than civil engineers or aeronautical engineers... so it's weird that comput
179.
by lsc 7y ago
So, I mostly agree on the costs of the '08 bailout, there's a lot of cases where problems of too much leverage become easy to solve if you have enough reserves, and my understanding was that the fundamental problem of '08 was
180.
by lsc 7y ago
>First, you're ignoring the basic difference between expenditure and investment. When the government spends a dollar on healthcare, that may be an "investment" in an abstract sense, but the government is not directly getti

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