Viewing profile — sethg

It would be perfectly logical for Nokia to have an alternative OS waiting in the wings, in case Windows stops being useful for them, or even as an incentive to discourage Microsoft…

“I’ve been seeing spots in front of my eyes.” “Have you seen a doctor?” “No, just spots.”

As I understand it, psychopathic traits are very good for getting what you want in the short term . If this author’s interview subjects had appreciated the long-term consequences o…

Genius!

Or, as others here have suggested, simply give public defenders’ offices a budget comparable to the prosecutors’ offices. If the interests of justice make it worth spending $100K o…

The government doesn’t charge anything for GPS: http://www.gps.gov/policy/funding/

Why did you not realize that “this guy is worth it” until he already has one foot out the door? If his only reason for being dissatisfied with his current job was the money, why di…

Expedia is (allegedly) lying about one of their “partner” hotels in a way that drives customers away from the hotel. Isn’t this the kind of thing that a lawyer would call “tortious…

I once suggested to my wife that we use the RT bug-tracking system to keep track of household chores. And then, I said, we could create an RT account for each of the kids, and buy …

In the US, your employer can forbid you from revealing your pay to outsiders , but the National Labor Relations Act guarantees that employees have the right to discuss their pay wi…

A lot of Russians still view Americans as self-indulgent, somewhat retarded know-it-alls, bathing in life's luxuries that make no sense. And they’re right! We are!

In Boston, if you put too much money into the bus farebox, you get back a coupon that you can use to pay for another bus. The transit authority also sells one-day and one-week pass…

they've apparently deliberately designated a large number of shipment delivery locations as residential delivery More likely: they have a database or some other kind of service tha…

If X is some investment (gold, real estate, Apple Inc. stock, whatever), and I have structured my portfolio so that I would benefit from the price of X going down, then I am “short…

There is a case to be made for having precious metals as part of a diversified investment portfolio. (IIRC Burton Malkiel, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, suggests that it be a…

In California, under Proposition 13, it takes a two-thirds majority vote to raise either local or state taxes.

On a national level, yes. But on a district level, what proportion of the children who were educated in a given school district end up working there and paying taxes after they gro…

http://seekingalpha.com/article/49701-subprime-mortgages-cro... It doesn’t have exact numbers, but the tl;dr is that people from every income bracket were taking out subprime mortg…

You don’t need to live in the “ghetto parts” to be seduced by a long-term loan that has easy terms up front. The subprime mortgage crisis was built on respectable hard-working midd…

What I’d really like to know is: which countries have significantly increased their scores over the past five years or so, and how did they do it?

I suspect that when people encounter government corruption in the US, it’s usually at the city or state level, in jurisdictions where a political machine controls important purchas…

The Republican Study Committee was founded by Republicans who thought the mainstream of their party was too moderate. Proposals that go beyond what is politically feasible is part …

According to the exit polls, voters aged 18–29 favored the Democratic candidate by 9 percentage points in 2004, 34 points in 2008, and 23 points in 2012. In 2016, is the Republican…

It could be worse. I used to work at a hospital with an automatic elliptical revolving door (I assume it was designed that way so you could push a gurney through it). On the one ha…

For the things I actually use a personal server for, $150/month is overkill. A server that used to handle my family’s email\* and runs my personal Web site runs just fine on my Lin…