Viewing profile — Cowen

> We have at least one data point that says that Signal stores exactly two integers about you For people wondering what they are: > "The only information responsive to the subpoena…

I'm not sure if this is an official list. But for those interested, the top offices of the military do pretty regularly publish reading lists. National Defense University (an actua…

As far as votes of confidence go, Julia landing successfully at any of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks is a strong one. They all do a whole mess of complex modeling. The NY Fed in par…

If you'd asked me a few years ago, I never would've thought I would be interested in a financial newsletter. But Matt Levine's really are the best. Hilarious and insightful five da…

Evolution doesn't "require" anything except breeding.

I forgot who exactly put it this way, but I like the idea of thinking of direct cash transfers as the "index investing" of poverty interventions. It won't guarantee the absolute be…

> Political fallout would be huge if this thing doesn't go through, right? All players in the game are heavily invested in this passing because without it, years are wasted, so I'm…

The way I've always put it: Diablo 2 was a better game, but Diablo 1 was a better experience.

Nonsense. I'm saying that people live in the real world with real contexts, not in Context-Free-Abstraction-Land. Real contexts, where abstract concepts have been concrete realitie…

> it's very human and natural for people to deliberately misunderstand things so they can work themselves into a rage over things. Kind of like what you're doing right now?

Concepts are understood in contexts. Everyone involved in this context is American, so it's natural for slavery here to be viewed through an American context. In that context, slav…

> unless the very concept of slavery is supposed to be considered racist I've never read a word of Moldybug or whatever, but in the American context, the very concept of slavery is…

According to some napkin math with these figures[0], the three metro areas combined account for 11.7% of US GDP in 2012. So yeah, I'm not sure what estimate they're using for the g…

Vox did something a while back that's more along those lines.[1] The cost of care in the US is much higher than in other countries. There are a bunch of reasons for this, and every…

Food suppliers, possibly restaurants.

I've never cared for a lawn in my life, so purely out of curiosity, why should a sprinkler system be on in the early morning? Wouldn't morning dew take care of watering grass aroun…

> For the most part, this seems like a great initiative for adding transparency but ultimately highlights a non-issue (assuming further analysis doesn't change the story). But of c…

Not that this is what you were saying, but that criticism applies to almost everyone in almost every legal system. "If only Legal System X had more People Similar To Me That Agree …

> Maybe they counted all dependencies or libraries. This is really the only way I can imagine they got to that number. Spring, a beastly enterprise Java codebase if ever there was …

If there's one situation where you definitely want to apply the rule "if it's not broke, don't fix it", it's probably nuclear missile silos.

Not without refueling somewhere. They didn't have enough gas to make it too far past Beijing. [0] [0]- http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/interactive/2014/03/world/malays...

I prefer the second one. Explicit is better than implicit.