Viewing profile — durgiston

Also the followup podcast "The History of Byzantium" if you couldn't get enough of late antiquity and the middle ages!

This is what +/- and its variants are for. Especially useful for sports like hockey where scoring is rare. Of course, in a work environment this is even harder to try and measure, …

If a new investment firm took this long to have securities show up in your account, they'd be shut down faster than you can say SEC. Coinbase isn't exactly a new t-shirt company wo…

The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization. So that could also contribute …

The wages will never be high. Thats just the nature of the job. But unions can fight for things like working conditions for TAs and helping students deal with abusive advisers. Stu…

The president can’t spend money without authorization from congress (see Authorization for Use of Military Force congress keeps renewing) It doesn’t matter where the money comes fr…

counterpoint: nuclear-armed USSR, and since then nuclear armed former Soviet Republics with poor nuclear security, definitely including Russia in this. second-counterpoint: global …

This is a different issue. No reason we can't also fix gerrymandering. Also, while outside money certainly is an issue, there is still research showing the limited effectiveness of…

Actually, it is an act of Congress that mandates single-member geographical districts (1967 Single-Member District Mandate). Several states over the years have had at-large distric…

Several US states have in fact had a various times at-large representatives (most notably Hawaii and New Mexico since the time they were admitted into the Union). In 1967, the Sing…

One interesting thing about conspiracy theories that I've seen is that people with more education are more likely to believe them, and believe them strongly. One theory for why thi…

I read it as it was a lower cost to the courts, not the litigants.

Is it really that hard though? Being professional and polite is the LEAST that you can do. Just say hi to people, don't talk over them, make some small talk, shake their hands when…

I personally don't get the love for working at home/remote. I HATE working at home. To me, home is home and work is work. I don't want to mix them, and I feel awful when I have to …

Why is this nefarious? Nothing is forcing these allegedly top employees from staying at Google. They get to work on something cool and get paid presumably a disgusting amount of mo…

True, but when you are graduating, lots of companies are looking at you at you on their schedule, whereas later in your career, just the way schedules line up might make it hard to…

How can you learn anything in a chaotic and disorganized environment? Either nobody has time to teach you anything, because everything is chaotic and disorganized and they need to …

Yeah, but if the hardware store doesn't have screwdrivers anymore, you can see why people might be upset.

This basically boils down to 'bad code is bad'. DRY and short-functions are supposed to be guidelines, not rules, and when you find yourself violating them, you're supposed to ques…

While crime is certainly a possibility, rich people just have so much money and they don't have that many options for where to put it. This is part of the reason why the housing cr…

There's 168 million reasons to do the coin offering now. If someone was begging you to take that kind of money for a half-baked side project, would you say no? (to be fair, this is…

IANAL: Seems to me like EasyList would have a fair-use defense here, beyond the fact that I'm pretty sure you can't copyright a domain name (trademark is a different story). They c…

Nobody cares if you have sexist thoughts and opinions if you keep them to yourself and treat women with the respect and dignity they deserve. So I would say this is a step in the r…

Or maybe we could invest more in mental health care and public education and the like instead of shunting off the poors somewhere else so you don't have to see them.

You walk really fast! But seriously, revitalizing existing public transit and making it function properly should be a priority. No disagreements there. But we don't need to build n…