poke111

9 ms·

31.
by poke111 9y ago
I didn't mean to trivialize it, and those are all valid questions - it's not a black and white issue. But the debate should be framed as one about civil liberties and how to balance them against safety. Making it all about what is
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by poke111 9y ago
I never thought more guns, less crime was a very solid argument for expanding gun rights. Should we predicate an argument for free speech on the fact that it makes us safer or better off in some objectively measurable way? Either you believ
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by poke111 10y ago
Everything looks good when you only count the benefits without considering the costs
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by poke111 10y ago
"Profits are evidence of the creation of social value, not deductions from the sum of the common good." http://www.nationalreview.com/article/256612/welcome-machine...
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by poke111 10y ago
Windows took out the time zone map feature because of this: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=...
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by poke111 10y ago
I find it useful to distinguish between moral responsibility and causal responsibility. One can bear some causal responsibility for acting recklessly and putting oneself in a dangerous situation without assigning moral responsibility to any
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by poke111 10y ago
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000000082 The NRA has power because people support their mission. They are not especially big political spenders.
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by poke111 10y ago
Our corporate taxes are the highest in the industrialized world, so yes, lowering them would lower the incentive to move.
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by poke111 11y ago
I don't mean that nobody can be harmed in the process of creating wealth - certainly they can. I mean that the process of accumulating wealth is not zero-sum: each dollar that I earn is not a dollar that somebody else lost. The economy
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by poke111 11y ago
Wealth is not distributed by some wealth fairy. It is created by productive activity. One person's wealth does not come at the expense of another's.
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by poke111 11y ago
One of the interesting explanations I've seen for income inequality is that globalization has massively increased the size of the market. So the top end for incomes has massively expanded along with it. But on the bottom end, the floor
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by poke111 11y ago
I like that he mentions the Ideological Turing Test, though not by name ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_Turing_Test ) "As any debate club veteran knows, if you can’t make your opponent’s point for them,
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by poke111 11y ago
This reminds me of the Milton Friedman story where he was visiting a work site in some Asian country where they were building a canal. He was shocked that they were using shovels instead of modern equipment. They told him it was a jobs prog
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by poke111 11y ago
Wealth != Income
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by poke111 11y ago
This is also a textbook case of what is seen vs. what is unseen. When someone dies from a treatment that the FDA has approved, that is a visible ("seen") tragedy. When people are suffering from ailments that could be treated more
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by poke111 11y ago
1) heritability of intelligence 2) Obamacare's coverage of quack therapies The Democrats aren't more pro-science in the abstract. Every politician is pro-science when it supports their agenda. Every politician is magically skeptic
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by poke111 11y ago
If only there were some science dedicated to the study of allocation of scarce resources, the practitioners of which may be able to offer some advice...
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by poke111 13y ago
Another data point that suggests that voter fraud is a real problem: The New York City Department of Investigation reported that their undercover agents were able to obtain fraudulent ballots with a 97% success rate. It's likely that f
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by poke111 13y ago
Why does everyone say that no large scale voter fraud ever happened in the US? What about the presidential election of 1960? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec... Even small scale fraud is eno
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by poke111 13y ago
AS others have pointed out, this glosses over the distinction between the decision version of the problem and the optimization version. But the reason that it often gets glossed over is that it doesn't make much of a difference when it
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by poke111 13y ago
I kept all grounds in a ziplock freezer bag in a dark room-temp cabinet. As I went from freshest to least-fresh I found that there were flavors missing and more bitterness and acidity. What I meant about wine is that there is a lot of stuff
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by poke111 13y ago
These things are detectable in blind taste tests, unlike wine. I did one myself to test how much the time-since-ground made a difference in flavor. I had 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, 2 days, and fresh grounds. In a blind test I correctly put t
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by poke111 13y ago
Any physical activity is obviously much better than living a sedentary lifestyle. If you only like running, that would be better than nothing (though your joints may not think so). But the argument here is that if you have limited time and