Viewing profile — Discombulator

From my understanding, Taleb criticizes the native use of synthetic quantitative models with strong assumptions like VaR because they give a wrong picture of the real risks. But I …

On the other hand, employers are also barred from colluding to keep wages artificially low, which arguably would be considered a “negotiation strategy” if one follows your interpre…

All disciplines studying complex systems like societies down to something like the human body, simply do not have the luxury of absolute truths like in mathematics or even the abil…

Good advice, thanks for sharing. I’d just keep in mind that there are no guarantees that kids will share our passions, even with the best approach. Humans are complex systems - it …

I’m not doubting the facts you mention and the amount of the hypothetical subsidy might be on average in the low two digit dollar range. The overall point is however that the App S…

My last course in competition law was a while ago, but I remember this: while there are many differences in detail between the US and the EU approach, the broad strokes are the sam…

But when you bought it, you knew of those restrictions, right? A fully unrestricted phone might have cost more (because it is not cross subsidized by App Store profit), so it is un…

Whatever the true cost is, the argument is spurious: Apple is not forced to provide this service at cost (or with a “reasonable” markup), they can charge in any case what they want…

Replying to myself to correct my comment: the pension benefits funding appears to be in general - and differently from what I stated - not much different to the private sector. The…

I am at this point not convinced that you are actually trying to understand, but if you read the text you linked, it says: > If a plan is fully funded, the minimum required contrib…

> If you're talking about the requirement to pre-fund their pension fund, my understanding is that UPS and FedEx (and all private corporations) were already required to do so. It s…

That is a comforting thought, but the “tough / law and order / war on drugs” response has already been tried extensively under president Calderón, and the result was an explosion i…

What you are considering a disadvantage is seen as a strength by others (myself included): you pay only for what you use. No cross-subsidization to services you don’t need!

While the topic is interesting, I don’t think the analysis presented in the article series (at least in the first two articles) is particularly compelling. For one, it relies much …

Very similar story here; I barely write any Perl nowadays but am still very fond of it. I especially like the sigils - they serve in a way as a primitive type system and actually c…

Great! Now everyone who already has an NFC U2F/WebAuthn key (e.g. YubiKey with NFC) can use it for the “advanced protection” program (which increases security on your Google accoun…

Security is about trade offs. Talking about absolutes makes barely sense in this context, because any perfectly secure system is also perfectly useless. Despite the chosen solution…

Without going into detail on the actual debate, I just want to make a meta point here: If you are writing an article and the following > [All] technical challenges [...] will not b…

IANAL, but the difference is that in this case, QI came into being as a (very narrow) reading of federal law (§1983), which congress can amend easily. The Loving case was decided o…

Nowhere, because sensible people understand that (given anonymity of participants) active moderation is necessary so low effort slogans don’t drown out interesting conversation. An…

I do not have answers or facts to offer, but I suspect they are similar in nature to those for the question of “why haven’t we solved security critical bugs? Why haven’t we just he…

>Everything is political! Everything. If you see something like science, religion, art, anything as apolitical, that probably means its just reinforcing prevailing politics. Let's …

Paraphrasing the "Fundamental theorem of software engineering", Every problem can be solved with enough levels of indirection. Every level of indirection adds complexity, so the qu…

The article focuses on an issue that is very widespread on technical forums, and one that I find irritating. (It is a bit better here thanks to the good moderation, but you can sti…

Not familiar with the author, but good on him for admitting he was wrong. I find that most people are not able to admit their faults (without endless hedging), and those who can de…