sethg

64 ms·

541.
by sethg 17y ago
The whole point of advertising something as an investment opportunity is to say that it’s offering better odds than roulette.
542.
by sethg 17y ago
Maybe some formula along the lines of “no more than X% of the investor’s net assets or Y% of the investor’s annual income”, and a footnote saying that for the purpose of computing the X%, your primary residence is not considered an asset an
543.
by sethg 17y ago
In fact, what we need is to eliminate all accredited investor requirements for small investments of up to $25k. Why does someone have to be a millionaire to invest in a friend's startup? I understand that we don't want someone mortgaging t
544.
by sethg 17y ago
Does it make sense, analytically, to say that there was a healthy railway boom in the 1830s and a bubble in the 1840s? It seems to me that most bubbles grow from a legitimate investment idea; the problem is that as more and more people bid
545.
by sethg 17y ago
IIRC Boston recently passed an ordinance forbidding landlords to rent a unit to (IIRC) groups of more than 4 unmarried persons living together. The intent was to deal with absentee landlords who rented houses to large groups of students, s
546.
by sethg 17y ago
I don’t see how this could work. In a society with a developing technology and economy, new situations come up (e.g., how to allocate spectrum for these cool new cellular telephone thingies) where one could reasonably argue that new govern
547.
by sethg 17y ago
I’m a little worried about this opening up new opportunities for political brinksmanship. “If the Majority Leader wants my vote to renew the law against dumping toxic waste into the harbor, he’d better let me get my way on the farm bill.”
548.
How Somali pirate crews are financed(lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)
1 points by sethg 17y ago|0 comments
549.
by sethg 17y ago
I find it interesting that in the majority of examples given in this article, the alleged honey trap didn’t actually gather any intelligence.
550.
by sethg 17y ago
The argument I’ve heard¹ is that industrial-scale farming is very labor -efficient and organic permaculture techniques are very acreage -efficient. The techniques I’ve read about are a little more involved than “take the existing garden
551.
by sethg 17y ago
The author argues that “Fully 1% of the population has celiac disease, with 97% of these currently undiagnosed” as one of his arguments against eating gluten-containing cereal grains, but he is much less concerned about dairy products, even
552.
by sethg 17y ago
I’m really not enough of a politics junkie to know when this maneuver was used for the final language of a bill and when it was used for something else. It seems clear to me, however, that if the maneuver is constitutionally OK for one k
553.
by sethg 17y ago
To be more precise: if it weren’t for the filibuster, the House and Senate could have just reconciled the differences between their health-care reform bills in a conference committee, and the whole thing could have been passed the way we le
554.
by sethg 17y ago
Look at the quote from the CRS report: This means that when the House adopts a rule it also simultaneously agrees to dispose of a separate matter, which is specified in the rule itself. For instance, self-executing rules may stipulate that
555.
by sethg 17y ago
If you don’t remember it happening before, it’s because nobody has made this much noise about it before. When Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, for example, this very process was used 90 times. See the link I posted in my other comm
556.
by sethg 17y ago
The Constitution states (Article I, Section 5) that “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings”, and even though the self-executing rule strikes me as a way to hack parliamentary procedure, every member who votes for that bill w
557.
by sethg 17y ago
It took me approximately sixty seconds on Google to bring up a page from the Census Bureau, breaking down income according to education level: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032009/perinc/new03... The median earnings of an Ameri
558.
by sethg 17y ago
Bidi support! Yesssss!
559.
by sethg 17y ago
Isn’t this basically what FDR did with the Works Progress Administration?
560.
by sethg 17y ago
Her assumption that one out of four GMail ads gets clicked on seems wildly off-base; I thought that these days, a click-through rate of one percent is considered a smashing success. But of course if you know that every GMail page has four
561.
by sethg 17y ago
IIUC one of the key acronyms in the advertising world is “CPM”, the cost of an ad per thousand people in its audience. That word “per” is division.
562.
by sethg 17y ago
IIRC the Swiss government requires all insurers to offer plans with a certain baseline level of coverage, and the insurers aren’t allowed to make a profit on those plans . The profit comes from plans that offer goodies above and beyond th
563.
by sethg 17y ago
People complain about the you-must-buy-insurance provisions of the of the proposed health insurance reform, but there’s no way around it. The vast majority of Americans seem to agree that it’s morally obnoxious to charge people higher premi
564.
by sethg 17y ago
A friend of mine once remarked that what consumers really want is health maintenance , not health insurance . With my car insurance policy, if, say, someone dings my bumper, I can decide whether it’s really worth pursuing a claim throug
565.
by sethg 17y ago
The original purpose of IQ tests was not to predict who would go on to the most brilliant career, but to help teachers recognize who would need special help in classes. In that context I think the distinction between 120, 150, and 180 IQ
566.
by sethg 17y ago
Assuming that the IQ test that Kim took was the kind that uses 16 points per standard deviation (some, IIRC, use 15), that puts him almost seven standard deviations above the mean. It seems to me that once you get above five standard devia
567.
by sethg 17y ago
My wife, a chemistry Ph.D. turned stay-at-home-mom, loves the “Things I Won’t Work With” series. It brings back fond memories of all the bench-top fires she was responsible for as a grad student.
568.
by sethg 17y ago
You can at least do this: > let x = 10 ; y = 5 ; in x + y => 15 :: (Num t) => t
569.
by sethg 17y ago
How long does it take to pay back the construction of a conventional power plant?
570.
by sethg 17y ago
If you use a solar energy to turn carbon dioxide and water into methane, bottle the methane, and later run the methane through this fuel cell to generate electricity, how much energy is lost in the round trip? (Compared with just using sol

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