tdees40

16 ms·

121.
by tdees40 12y ago
You're eliding two very dissimilar things. I'm not saying you can't group people and say quantitative things about them (like GDP). That would be stupid. I'm saying I have no idea what a statement like "the Chines
122.
by tdees40 12y ago
I once had a friend say something about how the Chinese valued hard work. Then I asked him what cultures don't value hard work. He squirmed as he started ticking off a list of countries whose populations are predominantly black/La
123.
by tdees40 12y ago
There's a billion people! You can't make any generalizations about "hard work". It's just overly broad stereotyping at that point. Do Uighurs value hard work? Tibetans? Subsistence farmers? City-dwellers? I do
124.
by tdees40 12y ago
The US economy did hit a major recession, and Chinese growth slowed marginally, but generally did okay.
125.
by tdees40 12y ago
I don't mean to eye-roll, but Sam on economics tends to be, well, meh. The thing I always remind people when they say that China will take over the world is that everyone said the same thing about Japan in the 1980s (remember the movi
126.
by tdees40 12y ago
I'd make the argument that Rust is making many of the same mistakes as C++. It's got a kitchen-sink approach that has already accumulated some barnacles, and that ownership system is a mess.
127.
by tdees40 12y ago
BTW - as someone who's in the financial industry (i.e. not software development), it's shocking to me that companies ask for references from prior employers. Positive feedback is obviously helpful, but there's a huge incentiv
128.
by tdees40 12y ago
This is my primary beef with this post. Keeping silent could punish the people left behind. I've had some bad work scenarios, and the people who said nothing in their exit interview did a great disservice to those who stayed. YMMV, th
129.
by tdees40 12y ago
I get all this, but I really think the only way to sort this out will be to heavily stigmatize it. It needs to be shameful not to vaccinate your child. I think satire plays into that.
130.
by tdees40 12y ago
If the Fed were lending gold on a fractional reserve basis, a huge number of people would know about it: employees of the Fed, bankers, counter-parties. Why are all of them keeping silent? Why does the Fed endear such intense (some would
131.
by tdees40 12y ago
Sure. Just like "mainstream climate scientists", or "mainstream doctors", amirite?
132.
by tdees40 12y ago
I think a dinosaur lives in the subways under Manhattan. I would be convinced otherwise only by a full audit of all subway tunnels conducted using a dinosaur scanner (which someone will need to invent). But seriously, there are lots of thi
133.
by tdees40 12y ago
So here's how this works. Gold bugs are big fans of buying gold. They have lots of gold. Their narrative of the financial system is that gold is the uber-asset that all other assets must be denominated in, and that fiat currency is
134.
by tdees40 12y ago
> "Second, it did so just as the housing fraud and financial insanity which characterized the late 1990s and early 2000s nearly destroyed the U.S. dollar and left us with martial law." Er, what? Martial law? I guess I wasn&#x
135.
by tdees40 12y ago
It's really not. Most people would put "Great (father|mother)", "Wonderful Friend", but I suppose that's a value judgment and each has his or her own opinion.
136.
by tdees40 12y ago
I work in finance, and the process by which senior executives are selected literally screens to ensure assholery. It's like a job requirement.
137.
by tdees40 12y ago
So there is a basic introduction to generating LLVM in Haskell there, but what's so great about it is that generating a lexer/parser/(interpreter|compiler) is almost magic in Haskell. The total code of that project is remarka
138.
by tdees40 12y ago
If you haven't spent time with this, you need to stop everything and look at it. It's wonderful.
139.
by tdees40 12y ago
"There are natural things that will help you get rid of heavy metals. One great one is cilantro (which I personally hate the taste of :P) So add a little more cilantro to your diet, but be careful when you do to also stay well hydrated
140.
by tdees40 12y ago
Well yes, and I'm no gun-rights advocate (quite the opposite), but approximately 0% of guns (in the US at least) are actually used to kill people, and this is telling me that 80% of dark web activity is used for pedophilia. That seems
141.
by tdees40 12y ago
Who has said sorry? Cheney? Bush? Rice? The people who put this system into place continue to defend it and have suffered no consequences.
142.
by tdees40 12y ago
Note also that pure derivatives quants like (1) are disappearing, and (3) is ascendant due to regulatory concerns (Dodd-Frank, et al).
143.
by tdees40 12y ago
I'd just point out that Suki Kim's book is really an ethical morass, as you can certainly make the argument that she put the people she used to work with in a terrible position. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11&
144.
by tdees40 12y ago
That statement assumes interest rates are irrelevant. Sure, if you have a 4% interest rate (the going rate these days), you'll pay 72% more than the value of your house, but that completely ignores the time value of money. A 4% inter
145.
by tdees40 12y ago
There's a reasonable argument that the entire industrial revolution was just the result of cheap carbon, and we've been running on that ever since. The Haber Process allowed us to get out of agriculture (and thus have time to mak
146.
by tdees40 12y ago
I talked to a guy who toured SpaceX not too long ago, and he said that Elon Musk had a staff of designers making spacesuits that were more comfortable and stylish. He said that putting on a spacesuit should be as easy as putting on a tuxed
147.
by tdees40 12y ago
When I see things like that, I can't help but think that if you want performance, you've gotta go C. Otherwise, you get stuff like this, that's just impossible to reason about.
148.
by tdees40 12y ago
The real question is if buyers will stick around once prices go up. I remember, during the bubble, buy.com's strategy was to sell at a loss, grow customer base and then raise prices. The first two parts worked reasonably well, but on
149.
by tdees40 12y ago
Equally interesting is that they tend to pay them back by hitting up their relatives for cash (which would have probably been a better idea in the first place!). http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/why-b
150.
by tdees40 12y ago
Credit isn't for everyone! This is why there are ancient provisions in most religions against lending to the poor. It rarely helps them and often makes their lives much worse. If they need something so desperately (food, shelter, etc

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