pjmorris

83 ms·

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by pjmorris 8y ago
'Privileged' is very much a matter of what you're comparing against. In the 90's, about 25% of the world's population didn't have electricity [0], let alone game consoles. [0] https://data.worldbank.
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by pjmorris 8y ago
I agree, and I'd go further: A Job Guarantee type program would work better than UBI. Have the government provide a 'minimum standard job', available to any worker who wants one. Beyond economic benefits similar to UBI (but p
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by pjmorris 8y ago
"An athlete goes professional at twenty. At thirty, he is slower but more canny. At forty, he leaves behind the identity that he was born to and that sustained him. He diminishes into fifty, sixty, seventy. Anyone ambitious who lives t
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by pjmorris 8y ago
> Hand counting is another source of error or corruption though. Hand counting, in public, at the voting site, puts the count in view of all interested parties. Any errors or corruption are the results of the collected views of those pre
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by pjmorris 8y ago
Read up on how the WW2 US Army was recruited, trained, and sent into battle. To the degree possible, squads were kept together from boot camp to build up 'unit cohesion' based on sticking up for each other. Most people don't
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by pjmorris 8y ago
> Can anyone give me an idea of how valuable a person's personal information really is? Rough lower bound: Alphabet's market cap is around 900 Billion, FB's market cap is around 500 Billion. Both of their businesses are dr
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by pjmorris 8y ago
In the book [0], he adds the observation that sometimes something does happen. My inference of the point of the incomplete story told above is to reassure people when their efforts don't seem to take hold. Some can begin to blame thems
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by pjmorris 8y ago
I was lucky enough to have met him in person several times, and to have corresponded with him in various online venues. He was generous with his time, and he both taught and practiced only giving advice when asked. His books are among my mo
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by pjmorris 8y ago
QE 'printed' roughly 3 Trillion dollars out of nothing, including at least 1.7T that went to buying Mortgage Backed Securities from banks whose original mortgage borrowers were never going to be able to pay off those mortgages. Th
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by pjmorris 8y ago
One more thing: It's worth a pass over the next-level article [0] summarizing the findings of the RAND corporation study, notably this cherry-pick of my own: > A near-exclusive focus on TE might be insufficient to dramatically impro
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by pjmorris 8y ago
I did overstate my case. I think you are also overstating yours. > rating without the ability to fire is pointless A fair point. > whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous. All measurement systems come at a cost. Picki
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by pjmorris 8y ago
> the harder it is to isolate individual teachers as the cause of children not learning on pace and then fire them The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching init
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by pjmorris 8y ago
Have a look at 'On Food and Cooking', Harold McGee. It isn't a cookbook, but McGee talks extensively about ingredients, process, and their interactions.
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by pjmorris 8y ago
In 2005 I received a postcard from my former next door neighbor, a realtor, offering a townhouse in our old neighborhood in South Florida for $300,000. I couldn't believe it: they'd been $100,000 when they were built, six years be
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by pjmorris 8y ago
I found them about a year before she passed. Great writer and educator, much appreciated and much missed. RIP Tanta.
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by pjmorris 8y ago
“Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” - Warren Buffett I'm a bit more sanguine than the article (No one wants another GFC, and governments will go to ludicrous measures to avoid same), but it does seem
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by pjmorris 8y ago
Stephen King is a huge Ramones fan.
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by pjmorris 8y ago
I am interested in the views of those who downvote this comment. My facts are conventional, I'm guessing that my perspective is controversial.
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by pjmorris 8y ago
The Fed is responsible for QE, including about two Trillion in purchases of Mortgage-Backed Securities [0], which has the effect of making housing more expensive than it would otherwise be. If you're a home owner or debt owner, that&#x
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by pjmorris 8y ago
What if two of the 12 statues are also part of the 8 statues (or vice-versa?) There'd be 18 statues, making a guess of 20 statues incorrect. I don't see how that's ruled out here.
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by pjmorris 8y ago
After reading GTD, I came up with the way-oversimplified system I've been using the last decade: One text file, 'CurrentTasks', where I keep my To Do list, writing down notes on everything that I need to do or remember, sorte
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by pjmorris 8y ago
After much experimentation (e.g. Freemind), I wound up using a text editor and Dropbox.
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by pjmorris 8y ago
I once spent nine months in what seemed like a losing battle with AT&T for them to correctly account for two checks I wrote that they credited to my old phone number rather than my new phone number. I had to write a letter to my state&#
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by pjmorris 8y ago
> any normal person with any financial savvy knows that market returns are much better than deposit returns And, if I understand the arguments, that's confirmed by Piketty's r (return on capital) > g (economic growth rate).
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by pjmorris 8y ago
You raise fair points about the spending of money on physical assets/consumption. Can you elaborate similarly on the potential problems with how saved/invested money is allocated?
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by pjmorris 8y ago
It seems to me that the burger Bob bought (and the check the restaurant wrote to its supplier for the ground beef, and the check the supplier wrote the farmer for the cow) is a direct payment into the food production system, while 'mak
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by pjmorris 8y ago
There are certainly bad ways to move toward wealth equality. In terms of implementation, I was actually thinking more of either a George-ian land tax [0], or through some form of encouragement for the wealthy to spend their money into the p
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by pjmorris 8y ago
> I definitely think that the rich (broadly defined -- both via high income or high wealth) need to be contributing more back to society than we are. If the goal is to spread wealth more evenly, wouldn't it make sense to tax wealth
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by pjmorris 8y ago
> we are also the collective shareholders (obviously not majority) It's that 'not the majority' thing that's the fly in the ointment. I owe this claim a link, but most shareholders are part of the wealthy and/or
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by pjmorris 8y ago
My first CC programming course (early 80's) was in Fortran (probably because of that mainframe they had chilling in the server room,) but I had several others on micros (TRS-80!) I have found being exposed to multiple environments help

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