pessimizer

The numbers are the only thing that's quoted. The conclusion is that if they paid lower wages, the amount of government support to employed people would rise unless those policies were changed also. G…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_bond A lot of government debt is held by private entities. You're thinking about the national debt, and here is a long detailed explanation: http://internati…

"In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer's California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of Calif…

We can scarcely predict the average of three dice rolls, but over a series the average becomes trivial.

Then I guess I have to trash my series of studies on coughing, lying in bed, and depression shaving years off your life. Getting grants is hard! /annoyance

That sounds super complicated and like an opening for somebody to write some software.

I feel like this is the attitude that drives good designers away from open source projects - the attitude that they are swooping in after the fact to destroy the hard work of intelligent programmers. …

Here's another whimsy: instead of (necessarily) a poor country, how about any country that relies exclusively on land/property taxes, VATs, and tariffs? Are there any? As far as I can tell, those taxe…

Many people wouldn't stay interested; I'd say the vast majority wouldn't. But, after explaining those things to the extent that you thought was worthwhile, you ended up with 100 long term readers out …

I agree with the obligation theory, because if the N9 looks really good to reviewers (whether it sells or not), it will be used as a counterpoint in any future bad or even neutral reviews of their fir…

"[...]the blog will have to explain what a field is, what a cubic field is, and what a discriminant (of a field) is, in every post." At most once. Links are what the internet is for:)

That this is true is a bit of a tautology. Assuming the graph is monotonically decreasing sounds unlikely to me, though; I think there's likely to be multiple peaks - like the proverbial "7-year itch"…

Noticed from the Kickstarter page: "Such boxes exist in the form of plug computers and mesh routers, tiny, inexpensive machines that can take the place of other electronics in your life, that draw so …

If all of that facebook-page-type-stuff was saved on the wart, then we wouldn't be prevented from browsing through it while they were personally offline with their computer powered down. I assume that…

As far as I can tell, the Freedom Box is the server, so you would only go offline if you unplugged the wall wart containing the software. It also seems like there's a chance that you wouldn't go dow…

It's become more and more important for me personally to be google free over the last couple years, and I largely am, but DuckDuckGo only gets me about 80% on getting free of relying on their search, …

I had this same feeling about Avatar. It was a halfway decent little distraction, but nowhere near as good as 100 * 4 million dollar movies. 8500 startups could have an internal shared service ecosyst…

To impress your peers, which is often the same reason you would buy the real item. That is why manufacturers of luxury and designer products try to conflate knockoffs and counterfeits in legislation.

subtitle: "Market share dwindling, stock cratering, persistent takeover talk. How the CEO is trying to lead Nokia past its epic fail" "Epic fail"? Is this really English to the the demographic that re…

Thinking there is a difference between believing that a computer can simulate a brain and believing that a windmill can do so doesn't depend at all on what you think a brain is, or on what a brain act…

It's enlightening to notice, though I'm not sure it's much of a curiosity - IIRC the Latin comes from Norman French, and they ruled English speakers for a while, so everything Frenchy was marked as mo…

Society evolves. Society is often engineered. The attempts often turn out badly, or well. Many societies are engineered to reduce poverty, and many societies have.

I totally understood your intention and agree. I didn't mean to recharacterize your comment as saying that college and internships were just a place to meet people with money; I meant to add that th…

Society has been re-engineered any number of times, to good and bad effect. If you think that how it is where you are right now is how it is, has been, and always will be everywhere, you're wrong. Soc…

Agree completely. Also, college and internships are the best places to create social relationships with people with money. Remember that even though you may be intimidated by all of the fanciness and …

I think I'm going to be the only person commenting here who's going to cop to getting jobs all the time based on nothing but middle class social connections. I've gotten jobs through uncle's girlfrien…