Viewing profile — gridaphobe

You rightly point out that income disparity metrics can be manipulated, but changing the calculation (eg by ignoring Bezos) does nothing to change the actual disparity, it just mak…

> sensible reforms to tenancy laws that protect the vulnerable while not making it impossible to build new housing. The author also addresses this point, or rather exposes it as a …

Or it could be the causation is correct, but for a rather unsavory reason, the wealth came from economic rents due to IP protections. The argument that IP defenders need to make is…

Can you point to where the author recommended that Google and co. be forced to hire black women (or any identity group for that matter)? What she did say is that it's not surprisin…

Why should it be YouTube’s responsibility to enforce copyright? Shouldn’t the beneficiaries of copyright be the ones to pay for its enforcement? If that were the case we might see …

I see your point, but it seems to rest on the rest on the way we determine when capital gains are realized. Capital gains accumulate regularly just like other sources of income; in…

Why are you singling out capital gains? Your argument works equally well for labor-based income, but capital gains are already taxed much less than labor.

You seem to be implying that morality is subjective, which I think is a dangerous belief. People may believe their actions are ethical, but that doesn’t necessarily make them corre…

It’s standard to use the capital city to refer to the actions of a state. Tel Aviv is the internationally accepted capital of Israel, not Jerusalem.

One of my favorite quotes about Haskell is "We cannot afford QA teams, so we use a sadistic compiler".

That seems like more of an argument in favor of having all source code available (i.e. not using closed-source libraries) than an argument against OOP. The question of what code ex…

Chicago's problem is that their guns laws only affect the city itself. If a criminal wants a gun he need only drive out of Chicago, buy the gun, and drive back home. In fact, a rec…

Where are you studying? My undergrad (City College of New York) was mostly C++/Java with the exception of the PL course, which used Scheme. We also had an elective that taught x86 …

C is a language I'd like to see make a reappearance in CS curricula. It's great that most programmers today don't have to deal with memory management and pointers, but I think a CS…

Learn You A Haskell is a really great book for newcomers to functional programming, I can't recommend it enough.

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Cider is, IIRC, regularly used to port games to OSX, but the results are pretty poor in my experience. The winelib/cider method of porting raises an interesting question, should I …

I don't think the concern is that the next generation of doctors will be incompetent, but perhaps they won't be as quick as their elders. There are times where you can't wait 30 se…

A policeman's job is to enforce the law, not kill criminals. In this case that means arresting the bank robber so he can be brought to trial. If the bank robber comes out of the ba…

Interesting point about motorcycles. I wonder though, would motorcycles actually benefit from seatbelts? In an accident a car will provide a substantial amount of protection to the…

If the FBI supplied this guy with a fake bomb, what crime did the guy commit? He obviously didn't commit an act of terrorism. I don't even think you can claim he /attempted/ to com…

The type of map is `(a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]`, which means that map takes a function from any type `a` to any type `b` and a list of `a`s, and returns a list of `b`s. Generics, aka p…

Why is it so hard for people to conceive of the possibility that there may be multiple issues contributing to tragedies like Friday's? Mental illness is certainly an issue that doe…

Thanks for the link, sounds really cool!