Viewing profile — Unseelie

Insurance Company A has mercenary company B and diplomat C on retainer in case of conflict with foreign nations. Really, we pay taxes, and taxes cover things like the aforementione…

Well, I don't want to come off as libertarian, but presumably you could buy insurance against this in an environment where there's a bunch of people who need such a service. There'…

Vocal pauses are natural, and they happen. Our brains can handle them. Why is it even considered personal betterment to expend energy replacing them with whitespace?

Clearly, if there was fuel left that you could derive motion from the thing, it wasn't quite empty...

I think the whole point of the involvement of computers and the internet as fair godmother in their scenario was to handwave away problem 2 through someone else's very hard work at…

I love the applications of the luddite fallacy to IT..the treatments of code as looms or steel mills hit hard on the fact that economists are historians, and prone to assumptions t…

Granted that's what games are about. But gamification is about using game mechanics (mechanics being things like -scores- which let you understand your position against that positi…

Yes they do. First of all, saving energy is in itself a reward. Moreover, that's easily gameable by simply comparing yourself to a group of strangers at their energy efficiency hou…

Devil's advocate for a moment, but every way that I'm aware of Monsanto letting people die is essentially an economical one: They ruin people's ability to buy or labor for food...w…

I do love Avatars for these reasons, and having a signature as an entirely vain engagement. But quite often, I find myself removing the signature because...as shown on that site, t…

Saying that 'engage your users' is a better terminoligy for what's going on here than 'gamification' basically ignores the whole point of the idea, which is that people like to be …

I don't want to simply reply to a comment, there's a theme flowing through this thread, that capitalism makes everyone better off in a society, that our choices lead to where we ar…

You're connecting the two examples too much. While releasing this information may well have malicious intent, robbing a bank to give away money (as this information was hacked -to …

Doesn't this UX guy know what he's worth? Isn't it on his head to decide where he's going to work, at what pay? Of course his belief in this founder's dedication plays into that, h…

Frictional unemployment is a good way to handwave away the discovery, or not, of new jobs. You just wiped out that whole -type- of job, replaced it with (much lower employment) err…

Is this an argument claiming something can't ever happen, not because its impossible, but because its -bloody hard-? That's a ridiculous argument...and remember, the example was ri…

Some people may, but especially in this specific example, there's a large societal force that would positivley squash such behavior. We call it 'fashion' (which is actually quite o…

To talk about jobs lost, there were 4 million farm horses in Briton before the industrial revolution, and then over a period of 25 years in the nineteenth century, that population …

Many, many people use tax-deductable donations to do just this. Soo...this is already done. To make it done more, there should be non-profits. Non-profit insurance organizations, n…

The argument is much that you can't just socialize the health care, you have to tear it to shreds and then paper-mache it back into a more serviceable shape. This is a process that…

They've gotten past lobbying Nevada. Nevada's building the regulations for it, which counts as "google has gotten Nevada to allow driver less cars"

The issue isn't so much the distance from the train, so much as once you take it off the train, you split it up into much smaller loads....with different owners and destinations, a…

Well, Rail is efficient in that it ships huge quantities...fifty, or a hundred standardized containers. Trucks do a bit less than one of those, and so are -amazing- if you only hav…

Well, to take another example, we don't use horses for labor anymore...Some part of the labor force -has- been replaced.

I rather think that it has nothing to do with either. Comp engineers may be creative, but they're not in a creative field. They're in a field of artisanry, where they produce speci…