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  • Commented on I had a blog entry for you, but it eated me
    Money has the ability to extinguish a tax obligation. In many places, it also extinguishes private debts; if repayment is proffered in legal tender and the creditor refuses it, courts will consider the debt repaid....
  • Commented on I had a blog entry for you, but it eated me
    Money is one thing trying to fill at least three or four different functions with conflicting requirements. As a result, it doesn't do a good job of any of them... It's a means of exchange, but in some communities there's...
  • Commented on Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed
    tidy-bot ... Designing such robot would be immensely easier if shelves ... were designed synergistically with the robot, instead of trying to match it to myriad existing devices. Of course, if we have a tidy-bot, we may not even have...
  • Commented on Blank slate: politics and context in the 21st century
    My link specifically relates to ways of managing guage breaks. Ah, right. Obviously you can do that, but all of them are going to be somewhat more difficult at 65° latitude. @bellinghman If you want high-speed rail across Russia, then...
  • Commented on Blank slate: politics and context in the 21st century
    Well, yes. US, China, Iran, Turkey and (most of the) EU are all already on standard gauge and the northern corridor in Afghanistan currently planned is also standard gauge. If you can get Russia to be OK with foreign (that...
  • Commented on Blank slate: politics and context in the 21st century
    Bitcoin is not fundamentally anything new. It's an electronic emulation of commodity money. This makes it different among other electronic currencies (which tend to be emulations of paper money), but at the fundamental level it works like commodity money, which...
  • Commented on Blank slate: politics and context in the 21st century
    The railway bridge from Siberia to Alaska (and the Gibraltar Straits bridge, allowing rail traffic from Europe down into Africa) are going to happen, though. Hmm, the problem with a Bering Strait bridge is that the nearest railheads (a) are...
  • Commented on #shitsiskosays
    Yes - B5 was far superior in terms of political structures etc We have, for instance, the military governor setting himself up as dictator and the theocrat with her personal paramilitary elite unit disbanding the ruling council. "A religious zealot...
  • Commented on Head crash
    For a more whimsical blog post idea, consider the hypothetical of running a foreign-gauge railway line across Tajikistan, thus joining the Chinese and European networks with no break-of-gauge... via Iran and circumventing Russia... The Silk Railroad....
  • Commented on Head crash
    If your 5 million chunk of population can supply its own needs with its own tax base...it might grumble about having to chip in dough for the impoverished 5 million chunk next door. Have you noticed Norway subsidizing Sweden, or...
  • Commented on Today's chewy reading
    Would we notice an SRP making an orbital insertion burn near Neptune with a fusion drive? Almost certainly. I'm not so sure. Which of our existing projects would (a) detect this at all, and (b) detect it in a way...
  • Commented on Today's chewy reading
    Is getting into position without being spotted difficult? Of course, but assuming a civilization with much higher tech than ours I'd guess it was possible up to about 1970 or so. I suspect it's still pretty easy even now. We...
  • Commented on More news from our Martian Invaders
    "Part of it appears to be because a lot of people in OWS are politically naive; they believe something is wrong but they don't know what; they know that they're suffering and, hey, Wall Street is a nice "fat cat"...
  • Commented on More news from our Martian Invaders
    Basically, what we're seeing is the Vile Offspring from Accelerando showing up a few decades early. No, those would be the derivatives market. Some substantial fraction of a quadrillion (billiard) and rising....
  • Commented on Thanksgiving on Mars
    "Energy loss" has been mentioned in context of going from plants to meat. I'm not sure I understand what that means in context. [...] you probably brought a nuclear power plant along to provide heat and electricity. In context, that...
  • Commented on Evil social networks
    If my chocolate consumption figures are (erroneously) high, the dangers for Google are misadvertising, no big deal. If the medical insurer denies me insurance, it might even be fatal. And I would not know where the error is, or have...
  • Commented on Evil social networks
    Not only does being observed change/limit your behaviour; so does being pinned down to only one identity. Hmm, I've recently heard the claim that it's very very easy to merge multiple identities... and that that's why the "multiple accounts" thing...
  • Commented on Another trick question ...
    1) That politicians will not attempt to use the tax system for social engineering. That seems rather limiting... A progressive tax system seems like a fairly reasonable arrangement, particularly in view of increasing or maintaining equality (see also #ows)... yet...
  • Commented on Design changes
    What Eloise and Graham Rule said... hierarchical is impractical when checking for new comments, so at least an option to view chronologically would be good. As Janne suggested in passing, different layouts (nested vs flat) will shape discussion differently. If...
  • Commented on Gadget patrol: Bigger is better?
    Well, printers and scanners seem to have settled on 600dpi as the normal resolution, and I can't see any reason why the screen would be any different. Of course, as you write, that means making things scalable, not fixed 32x32...
  • Commented on Are Professors Obsolete?
    "One memory trick"... not really. Ah, that was a bit ambiguous of me — the "one" in that sentence referred not to the number of tricks, but to the number of skills — namely, rote memorisation. There may well be...
  • Commented on Are Professors Obsolete?
    Since so much of how classes and learning are evaluated are tied to rote memorization, why are not more folks teaching memory tricks to kids? We like to think that children learn more than one thing in school. Teaching kids...
  • Commented on Are Professors Obsolete?
    If memorization is what you're doing in University, you're doing it wrong. This. For that matter, the same probably applies to all education... There's just a set of perverse incentives that tends to gradually turn a useful, important goal like...
  • Commented on Why I'm not on Google Plus
    Technically I'm in violation of the name policy, which requires a first and last name in the same language. "Avram" is Hebrew; "Grumer" is, well, we're not certain, but probably Germanic in origin. Not exactly a rare combination. Nice pick......
  • Commented on Why I'm not on Google Plus
    As Violet Blue has noted - they have the teething problems of a startup, but with the consequences of a public utility failure. So, are they, in fact, a common carrier? Aaron: There's no reason to isolate the two unless...
  • Commented on Why I'm not on Google Plus
    For some reason, I feel the need to point out that my last name begins with O' and Google Plus doesn't seem to have any problem with it. Which is actually much more than I can say about a great...
  • Commented on What am I missing?
    You're missing bitcoin, Charlie. I don't think bitcoin is weird enough in itself to make any real change to anything. It's just old-fashioned currency. Ripple might have been more interesting, but it's sadly crippled by using the word "dollars" throughout...
  • Commented on Beyond Prediction
    I may be a bit late here, but... As far as aspirational futures are concerned, I find "gapminder" to be really good - how the world has substantially improved in the last fifty or two hundred years (depending on which...
  • Commented on Crime and Punishment
    1. Fine revenue should not go to the general fund of the police department, or even to the overseers of the police. Bad perverse incentive. I suggest it be added to the foreign aid budget. Perhaps a similar treatment should...
  • Commented on Federov's Rapture
    Acceptance of science is NOT axiomatic. We accept it because it works. But how do you know that it works? By observation? If you know that it works by observation, there's your axiom — "observation is the ultimate source of...
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