Viewing profile — jorleif

This is commercial enterprise, not regulation. Taxation could simply make driving them around too expensive.

That is a good point... So now I'm back to the giant slingshot idea.

Increased pageviews, yet many users also hate constant outrage and leave the platform entirely. It is not obvious that a platform with civil, high-quality discussion would lose in …

I wonder if gliders that are powered by electric motors only during takeoff and landing could be a solution here. It's not like we get very annoyed by eagles soaring in the sky.

Sure greed/profit motive, but it is accepted by the general public because it is local direct benefit (less crop failure) vs diffuse harm to a large area.

It is not necessary, but if society was good at assigning a price to the relative merits of informational resources vs physical goods it would result in a more efficient economy. Y…

These kinds of techniques are often claimed to be effective against flash floods, which makes sense since they slow down water transfer to rivers. Does anyone know any studies abou…

True, but from the car manufacturer's point of view, all of their customers buy new cars, so comparing what is low-range or high-range to other new cars makes sense.

The author does not articulate his critique very well beyond claiming that the VC get disproportionate return compared to land and labor. A much better critique is Jaron Lanier's W…

This seems closely related to PG's essay Black Swan farming: "there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the res…

Is it actually feasible to 3d print a realistic rhino horn from synthesized keratin? Googling keratin 3d printing mostly turns up Pembient itself. One would suspect that keratin pr…

I feel this solves a very small part of the problem. This is only about the morality of the individual scientist, while the problem is at the level of the collective process of sci…

Having done a little science myself, usually there both are small incremental improvements with small but predictable gains and large leaps with big potential gains but very unpred…

I don't disagree, but experimentation should still be on the table. Maybe a certain state or municipality should be sponsored to try policies more along the scandinavian kind. Of c…

This is a very interesting idea and has some good potential for social change. So much energy, so misplaced. As a scandinavian my first thought is: Don't Americans realize that the…

While you are of course right trivially about the sheer amount of information, I'm not so sure about the useless part. Right now a lot of consumer protection and activism is driven…

I have sometimes wondered if technology could be used to make some house-elves more visible. When I buy an apple or some meat in the grocery store they are simply opaque to me. The…

> People were incredibly indignant about who might receive some benefit from stuff that was often just a step above garbage. This is a quite fascinating phenomenon psychologically …

> College-educated white men can expect to live to age 80, while counterparts without a high-school diploma die by age 67. I wonder if reality is as bad as it sounds here. Factors …

Probability theory is great, but there are still environments that are unpredictable enough that experimentation is the only alternative. Think of science, for example; If probabil…

Excellent point, but would you care to explain how you would match subjects in this case? They should be comparable pre-something, but what would that something be?

As the author was speaking of his experience as a founder, I read his "logic does not always agree with reality" to mean that in an environment of sufficient uncertainty logic is n…

Yes, but you say that as if it was a bad thing. For me it was a really hard experience when doing science, that I could not "be smart about it", and do things "in smart ways", beca…

It may come as a surprise to people who read lots of startup news, because you tend to only hear about the successes, but generally it is not very easy to disrupt any business, or …

I find this idea of a cultural problem interesting, and in my opinion that we program with plain text is essentially a completely arbitrary choice. That said, in practice almost al…