natnat

11 ms·

61.
by natnat 16y ago
I worked as a manager in the USCB for a few months last year, so I think I can give a little insight as to why the Census is so expensive, and why we didn't use an online form. Virtually all of the money spent taking the Census was on enume
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by natnat 16y ago
Doesn't burning nuclear waste just turn it into a gas or a pile of ash with the same radioactive elements? Burning is a chemical reaction, so the actual nuclei of the atoms shouldn't be changed at all.
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by natnat 16y ago
The "funeral excuse" section of the website has a logo for "Fisher & Sons Funeral Home" that's appropriated directly from the HBO show Six Feet Under.
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by natnat 16y ago
The headline, perhaps, but the article itself is a very good read. It's more about what made Buffett successful and what makes a good business a good business than about plutocracy. The plutocracy bit was a sort of throwaway line in the mid
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by natnat 16y ago
Airlines may have pretty big revenues, but their profit margins are tiny, and at the end of the day, net profit is what matters to investors. In 2010, Google only made $30 billion in revenue, which is only a tiny bit more than Delta airline
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by natnat 16y ago
Groupon is worth a whole lot more than Twitter because it has a realistic way to make boatloads of money. Twitter is influential, but that doesn't mean its stock is worth a lot of money. As far as I can tell, Twitter's business plan is some
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by natnat 16y ago
Most physical infrastructure is insanely costly to create in the first place. If a utility charges too much money for your liking and you don't have a couple billion to compete with them, tough shit. The infrastructure of Facebook and YouTu
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by natnat 16y ago
Risk-taking isn't one of those things that's universally bad or universally good. For entrepreneurs, who have little to lose and a lot to gain, most risk-taking is good. For established companies, which have a lot to lose and a lot to gain,
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by natnat 16y ago
Whoops, I totally misread that.
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by natnat 16y ago
>"Many people can work after one beer, but I doubt many people can do serious knowledge work very productively after four or five." This might just be because I'm a student, but I can't remember the last time I got any serious coding do
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by natnat 16y ago
Anti-trust laws are enforced when and only when the political pressure from people who feel like they're being abused by a monopoly exceeds the political pressure from that monopoly's lobbyists.
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by natnat 16y ago
First of all, it's the Federal Reserve, not congress, who is limiting transaction fees. Second of all, 12 cents is not an unreasonably low cost for a transaction. The payment networks cost virtually nothing to operate, and this becomes abun
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by natnat 16y ago
You can require anyone trying to sign up to complete a reasonably difficult programming problem. It could either be sandboxed on the server, like Facebook's engineering puzzles, or require a short output like Project Euler. This would drive
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by natnat 16y ago
I think it's something like saying, "I'm not a feminist, but I think women are people too.". Environmentalism, like feminism, tends to be associated with a lot of fringe people who believe crazy things, even if the mainstream of the movemen
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by natnat 16y ago
Before saying that nuclear power isn't safe enough, consider where we get most of our electricity from today: coal. Coal may have been around a long time, but it is far more dangerous than nuclear power. The fly ash produced by coal burning
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by natnat 16y ago
Demand for grains is actually quite elastic. When the price of things like corn and wheat is low, farmers feed them to animals and people consume more meat. When the price increases, people consume less meat and more grain, and in doing so,
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by natnat 16y ago
OPEC also has an interest in keeping oil prices low over time. When oil prices are higher, people start investing in more efficient technology, reducing their overall need for oil, and consequently, OPEC's potential for political pressure.
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by natnat 16y ago
I think poverty may have a bigger effect on test scores than race. If you break down the PISA scores by state, the three lowest performing states are Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia. While Mississippi has a huge black population,
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by natnat 16y ago
A lot of grocery stores get charge money for shelf space, though, which brings in guaranteed revenue in exchange for more expensive products. Oh wait, you were agreeing with me. Sorry.
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by natnat 16y ago
Apple and Google may mark their apps up less than the average department store or grocery store, but it marks them up a hell of a lot more than most highly-efficient retail operations. Walmart marks up around 20%, and Costco never marks its
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by natnat 16y ago
I don't see what's wrong with congresspeople being wealthy. In fact, I'd rather see congresspeople be richer than they currently are. When a congressperson has more money, it becomes much more expensive to buy their favor with campaign cont
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by natnat 16y ago
Google takes all of AdWords, since it's on their own site. They take a 32% cut of AdSense. The thing is, advertisers could use other channels to put ads up on the web. They can advertise with Chitika or whatever and get a bigger cut than th
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by natnat 16y ago
I don't really see how much damage hackers could do with quant code if they don't have the capital to execute significant trades. If they're working independently, there is no way they could have anywhere near the amount of capital as Morga
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by natnat 16y ago
I wasn't really referring to the article in particular; I was more just ranting about something that I was thinking about before that the article reminded me of. I think the problem runs a bit deeper than people thinking they're experts whe
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by natnat 16y ago
I've become really disillusioned with clinical psychology because of things like this. There are certainly people with specific personality types. In this instance, we have brilliant people who don't like to follow other people's arbitrary
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by natnat 16y ago
>But consider: even a mildly avid Library Guy might visit once a week. Add a couple of thousand of that type, and we've covered 25% of the visits with 6000 people. 25% are using the internet. The other half? Declining. >Sorry, that
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by natnat 16y ago
I was up until recently a bus-riding apartment-dweller, and my driver's license is from out of state. I was able to get a library card with my voter registration card, which I got with my electricity bill. In Boston, you can get it with jus
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by natnat 16y ago
You really seem to hate libraries. In a thread with thirteen comments (as of now), you've posted seven of them, mostly in response to your own posts. Do you think you could constrain everything to one main post and responses to what other p
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by natnat 16y ago
I don't know about your community, but in everywhere I've lived, library cards are free. I'm pretty sure anywhere they aren't free, the fees are pretty nominal (i.e. $2-$10 every few years or if you lose your card). Anyone can look at books
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by natnat 16y ago
It's often more helpful to explain why things work in terms of the physics we understand right now that not at all. Sure, it's dissatisfying to hear "the arrows can't stretch because that's the way it is", but it's a useful metaphor that ca

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