richmarr

74 ms·

631.
by richmarr 11y ago
Happy to debate it rationally if you want to make a serious point
632.
by richmarr 11y ago
"Cost" and "efficiency" make sense in terms of your personal budget but using them in relation to a government budget is both naive & misleading.
633.
by richmarr 11y ago
> Many "asylum" seekers reach Greece, Hungary, France, even Germany (!) and declare "this isn't good enough, we want asylum in the UK!". Illegal immigrants drive down unskilled labour costs, which is beneficial t
634.
by richmarr 11y ago
> So sorry, there is no problem cause by austerity here The UK goverment are the ones who kept pushing the term 'austerity', which is why the article is using that word in relation to welfare cuts. If you want to argue terminol
635.
by richmarr 11y ago
Agreed. Not least because you're more than likely going to want to pull CMS data into an existing site, or push it into Solr/elasticsearch, or customise the site in ways the CMS authors haven't allowed for. I think I'd b
636.
by richmarr 11y ago
> Without the safe harbor agreement you can no longer avoid EU privacy regulations by storing the data in the US. Maybe I'm missing something here. My understanding is that the Safe Harbour agreement wasn't a mechanism for US c
637.
by richmarr 11y ago
kylebgorman posted that comment 2 hours ago, he must be half way done building his Twitter-but-better by now. I'm on the edge of my seat, I can tell you.
638.
by richmarr 11y ago
> It doesn't seem to me that customers would see full value of their "purchase" if they have never had a claim. If you think about Guevara's insurance as capital expenditure (by describing it as a purchase) then, sure
639.
by richmarr 11y ago
> Allowing "non-payment of claims" to become profit is a huge moral hazard Totally, it's EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, moral hazard. The hazardiest of hazards. It's toxic; all of the mistrust and information asymmetry flows out i
640.
by richmarr 11y ago
Unfortunately I can't think of one. Aside from a high regulatory barrier and the significant capital investment required, another reason the insurance industry has resisted serious disruption for so long is that a lot of the way things
641.
by richmarr 11y ago
Yeah, good comment. I had a few of these thoughts myself in the early days but I think you're missing the main value of it. Apologies for the over-wordy reply. > leveraging the fact that good drivers tend to know good drivers I thin
642.
by richmarr 11y ago
As a founder of a "peer-to-peer" insurance business I'm not a huge fan of this wiki article as it makes a lot of incorrect generalisations. > In today's peer-to-peer models, insurance policyholders form small groups o
643.
by richmarr 11y ago
Well at least we shit on everyone's privacy equally. So that's a nice silver lining.
644.
by richmarr 11y ago
> a test update that was pushed to production unintentionally rather than malware This position seems to be based on the assumption that malware is less likely to be subject to mistakes than MSFT. Want to check with the PR dept? ;)
645.
by richmarr 11y ago
I think Just Eat are going to have trouble competing with Deliveroo, who are in a position to offer a far better customer experience. That's going to drive their margin (and share price) downwards, nullifying this critic's argumen
646.
by richmarr 11y ago
For anyone who hasn't come across Lee Smolin, he's one of the most articulate critics of String Theory (or the family of theories that fit vaguely under that banner). I thoroughly recommend reading his book "The Trouble With
647.
by richmarr 11y ago
I don't know; there are comparisons you could draw between a telecoms company and a supermassive black hole.
648.
by richmarr 11y ago
Totally, or maybe SEP could just contribute to Wikipedia
649.
by richmarr 11y ago
It's fair for SEP to be described as comprehensive because it's an encyclopedia of philosophy ... which leads me on to my main point. What's not fair is comparing SEP to Wikipedia, which is a different thing. SEP and Wikip
650.
by richmarr 11y ago
Really interesting, thanks for sharing. I guess my reluctance to raise any hopes here is caused by two things; a) Unless I'm missing a trick this is a legislative issue, and fighting for privacy isn't on the political agenda (exce
651.
by richmarr 11y ago
In the case of Chernobyl the accident wasn't attributed to a human operator. The safeguards built into the reactor had been disabled to perform an experiment to test a potential new safety feature.
652.
by richmarr 11y ago
Sure, I admit I mainly took exception to the wording, not the actual points raised. I disagree with you that RAF bombing achieved nothing though. Plenty of industrial facilities were destroyed, major dams, V2 rocket facilities, etc. If you
653.
by richmarr 11y ago
> ... obsessed with nighttime raids that just carpet bombed cities The US and Britain agreement was to divide sorties in Europe into daytime (US) and nighttime (Britain), and pre-GPS accuracy at night pretty-much dictates aiming for vary
654.
by richmarr 11y ago
I'm always intrigued by what motivates someone to write a piece like this, and I always read them on a knife edge, trying to unpick why they would: Are they some eloquent academic trying to break new ground in terms of our understandin
655.
by richmarr 11y ago
> The OPs clearly don't apply to the UK at all. Bingo. The actual article is about a UK agency making a statement about terrorism, and the parent commenter, danlindley, quoted a statistic implying police killings are what MI5 should
656.
by richmarr 11y ago
Uh huh. (1) I already made that point, and linked to data on the UK including Scotland and Northern Ireland. But, it broadly matches up. If you have better data please share it. (2) The full-UK list I linked to is "people who died dire
657.
by richmarr 11y ago
I agree, more people should be talking about that, but... (a) MI5's budget isn't based on how well it supervises the police, because it doesn't, and (b) MI5 is based in a country where that "8 times more likely" sta
658.
by richmarr 11y ago
Ban encryption without back doors. Some companies would withraw products, others would comply, maybe some others would protest for a while. After a while the only option left would be steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/w
659.
by richmarr 11y ago
> handed a pile of ashes... you have zero chance... I think I may disagree with you on the parchment, and think I agree with you on the singularity... but it's hard to tell for sure because we're all throwing half-cooked analog
660.
by richmarr 11y ago
While from a human perspective information seems to be being destroyed, really it's just being obfuscated beyond our means of recovery. If you were to pause time, with enough analysis and knowledge of the present state of your burnin

More ›