Viewing profile — thesteamboat

Your link doesn't exactly mean what you think --- they're giving a combination of economic growth and population growth. When looking at just the GDP growth, your link suggests tha…

Sorry to nitpick, but I assume you mean EU houses are better insulated than those in the US, rather than isolated.

But crucially, the incentives are different than those people have in the middle of their lives. Most people's usual incentives lead to them optimizing for the short-to-medium term…

Presumably they (scalpers and miners) are not buying in large enough bulk orders, far enough in advance.

I too wish to add this to my repertoire. I don't think it will replace :s, but occasionally I find myself copying a line to use as a template. When I go to change each line I'm cha…

I don't think the parent was talking about JIT power generation but rather using JIT (in other industries) as a comparison to to talk about the efficiency-reliability tradeoff. The…

I have seen you and others make this point in the past, it and always seems equivalent to creationists shouting "Scientists who believe in evolution are the REAL dogmatists who don…

Comments are probably have positive usefulness expected value in a probabilistic sense. Unfortunately extracting that value, separating the insights from the dross, is work and req…

Both sides are guilty to some degree, but, and this is the crucial point, not to the SAME degree.

I think I'd rather have a comment "this site might be helpful" on the page than not. It doesn't take long to classify a link as either potentially helpful or useless, and I'm usual…

If you hold that all governments are unethical do you pay taxes, get mail, stop driving if pulled over by a policeman, etc.? Is it equally unethical for a government to provide for…

> his incentives are still infinitely better than those of any government because Facebook's status is built on consent rather than coercion. Is your position that all governance i…

Zuckerberg controls a majority of Facebook's voting stock. While Facebook the platform may have grown in unforeseen ways, Facebook the company remains ultimately (legally) under th…

I largely agree with you and think that my views fall closer to yours than the GPs. I'd endorse free speech absolutism as probably the best system in the vein of "Democracy is the …

> Big mistake, but she owned it. Just a tonal note. Saying 'Big mistake' implies to me that it's meant sarcastically in the sense of 'Big deal' or 'Big whoop', which I gather from …

I think this is missing the point of the no-longer-free-speach-absolutist sentiment (henceforth NLFSA). You note, correctly I think, that > we've seen a lot of egregious, potent, a…

You are substituting "the West" for rgbrenner's "those on the side of human rights", and in doing so are missing the point of his argument. "The West" as a term is very broad and s…

I think you're out of luck simply because Americans dominate the English speaking internet. According to loosely eyeballed data [0], Americans account for over 20% of English speak…

> Rent-seeking by itself is morally neutral, like guns. Like a gun, it's how you use it that determines if you're contributing positive value to overall society. This strikes me as…

Invoking parallel universes was solely for ease of explaining/emphasizing the math, not because I think it's a realistic model. Talking about the Hubble Deep Field kind of misses t…

From a previous discussion of this paper I took away the following clarifying insight: The Drake equation is usually turned into the Fermi paradox via some estimations that show th…

> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a s…

Presumably a single person or small group attempting such would be engaged in market manipulation as traditionally understood, and the SEC would try to charge them. (But I am neith…

> The SWP's standing among young, idealistic socialists exploded after it emerged that ... Not to take away from your otherwise excellent post, but your use of the word 'exploded' …