Viewing profile — bmcleod

We've been looking at the payments infrastructure in New Zealand recently and have discovered that, unless you find whoever wrote something 30 years ago, most of the senior payment…

In general international agreements don't override national law, they just oblige the countries in question to pass laws that bring them in line with the agreement. Which they comm…

I suspect what's happening with all the people who this works for is that given there are some people who have a psychological component to their pain and some who have a mostly ph…

This is really the kind of thing where A/B testing is both necessary and straightforward. Decently intuitive arguments can be made for both sides and there isn't really overwhelmin…

This is the point where it's worth pointing out that the portion of the population involved in food production has collapsed massively over the last couple of centuries. People gen…

Philosophy of Science is an extremely broad field. And like any academic field it's easy enough to find crazy stuff at the edges. I do think far more scientists would benefit from …

It's a reasonably sensible point being made when I expected the title to mean I was about to be subjected to yet another rant about editors. Improving the interactivity of wikipedi…

Poor Economics - Changed my views on some areas of how to combat poverty and poor education. As well as relating a huge amount a detail regarding the unexpected ways people with di…

There is an interesting issue in the philosophy of science regarding the "hard center" of theories. Basically any prediction about a reasonably complicated situation will rely on a…

It seems to me that people that don't read self-help books lump a lot more books into the genre and that causes them to miss a number of books they should read. Earlier this year I…

Unless the thing I "should" be doing is immediately necessary or massively more important than the secondary thing I end up doing I'm generally pretty happy to follow my motivation…

If you want to seriously consider this kind of cash back deal then you should look at the amount of money you're giving up as an exceptionally high risk investment. What kind of a …

A terrible deal, you're seeing a bunch of downsides and no upsides. Unless the work is absolutely fascinating to you then you shouldn't even be considering this. I'm impressed that…

Beef is a case where there are some very obvious things(texture, fattyness, chewyness etc) that make eye fillet a much more pleasant eating experience than other cuts of meat and t…

I've been adding a state machine whenever I find myself adding a state column for a couple of years now. I have always found this streamlining at least one change in the couple of …

The level of security knowledge required to do decent penetration testing is a relatively rare skill and therefore often necessitates bringing in a third party which can skew the c…

One of the things people talking about reputation seem to miss is how easy it is to establish that base level of reputation. A couple of decent talks at local user groups will be e…

Unfortunately it's likely the spammers are simply going with whichever bank is easiest to work through. Any changes will just cause them to move to the next easiest option.

The problem with "teh womenz" is that up until that point I was thinking of adding that list to a set of programming resources I'm sending to a friend of mine who's been learning p…