sethg-prime

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• Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
  Boston is putting forward a bid to host the 2024 Olympics. If, God forbid, they win, our family will be boarding up the house for the month and fleeing to some remote location. Scotland, perhaps....
• Commented on A nation of slaves
  I have long believed that unemployment insurance and similar benefit programs involve exchanges of self-abasement for money. Or, to put it another way, the caseworker with the power to authorize the aid plays the role of Compassionate But Frugal Steward...
• Commented on The cult of justice
  A state, in order to exercise (its model of) justice, needs to be viewed as legitimate. But its constituents don’t need to have faith, on the scale of religious faith, in order to believe in its legitimacy. It would be...
• Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  A few years back, the startup that I worked for was acquired by a cellphone manufacturer that I affectionately nicknamed “The Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic”. As part of our assimilation, the FSSR’s director of security for North America came to...
• Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
  Regarding the Oklahoma capitol: the Hindus have joined the Satanists: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/11/hindus-join-satanists-demanding-equal-placement-on-oklahoma-capitol-grounds/ Muslims, Druids, Zoroastrians, step right up.......
• Commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  At last night’s Purim seudah at our synagogue, I remarked to another guy at my table that there is a world of difference between Christian atheists and Jewish atheists....
• Commented on Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed
  Regarding the effect of birth control, mentioned way up at the beginning: once upon a time I came across various SF matriarchal-dystopian novels from the early 1970s. A couple of them depended on the premise that widespread access to safe...
• Commented on What is the next bubble?
  I nominate “green technology” for the next bubble, on the grounds that a bubble generally starts out as a family of genuinely promising investments....
• Commented on CMAP #8: Lifestyle or Job?
  I have read (perhaps in another CMAP?) that genre publishers prefer authors who can maintain a certain rate of output: i.e., if your first novel comes out in 2010, they'd really like to have a second novel queued up for...
• Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
  I agree that government subsidy is really the best long-run solution, even if the political climate makes it unthinkable today. The subsidy doesn’t have to be done through a censorious bureaucracy. You could have a periodic census, asking everyone what...