I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were unfamiliar with how barter works: you would barter with whatever the person with your desired commodity is willing to accept and you happen to have...

Example: I once got a PS2 in the college dorms by trading a guitar for it. I had a guitar I didn't want, they had a PS2 they didn't want... everyone walked away happy. Now imagine instead of PS2, the guy had an ASIC or some amount of BTC I wanted, and he was willing to part with it for a guitar...
or a few hours of labor...
or a few hours with your mom... ;)

And Neeva, also a for-profit company, wouldn't sell our data at the first hint of financial stress?

Or allow payment for listing priority?

One theory is spicy food stimulates saliva production. This aids in things like digestion, as well as lowering the PH and bacteria levels in the mouth. Anything that keeps the teeth from rotting out of your head, or helps you squeeze a few extra calories out of a meal, has an obvious evolutionary benefit...

The article you link to doesn't say anything about vaccination records being public health records or HIPPA. It appears to be about a wrongful termination case being dismissed due to the nature of at-will employment. The underlying court decision doesn't even mention HIPPA or public records...

Google Docs originated from two separate products that Google bought: Writely and XL2Web...

Google Maps was designed and sold to Google by 2 Danish brothers at a Sydney-based company called "Where 2 Technologies" Google then bought and added bits of Keyhole (geospatial data and sat imagery company), which is where the click-and-drag came from. Then they bought a company called ZipDash to provide the traffic analysis...

Like you said: they bought this one too

No, they don't. They own the OS for the low-end netbook ecosystem (since they're so low-end you can't call it a laptop). They don't make or design the hardware (except for a few "Pixel" books that went nowhere), and the only place this ecosystem seems to matter is the education ecosystem...

True enough for now. Worth noting: it built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox...

All they really did was write a web page that didn't have to reload the entire page and add a search bar. But I'm beginning to see a pattern of "they took the idea of...."

Labor unions should not be involved in politics for a variety of reasons, one of which is there is no such thing as the "union believing X." Unions aren't people, they're bundles of assets and people who have contractual (employment and otherwise) relationships with them...

I mean, I'm personally on board. What's good for the goose, and all that. But I know a lot of folks would get nervous about such restrictions if they were aimed at a labor union, yet I haven't heard a particularly compelling argument to treat unions and corporations differently (that don't rely on purely subjective arguments about what feels right). At their core, they seem like the same thing: essentially a group of people acting as a single entity to bring about a benefit to the group members.

It's usually not a question of how many teachers, but what kind of teachers. It's a combined school, so they're going to have everything from kindergarten to high school there. There might be a dozen teachers, but those dozen are necessarily qualified to teach everyone. How good of a job teaching a grader to read is a high school science teacher expected to provide? Is a 1st grade general-purpose teacher qualified to teach calculus?

Let's simplify the numbers and assume they have a really great student-teacher ratio, and say there's 5 teachers for 100 students. There simply isn't enough time to have a single person travel to 20 homes and give someone a meaningful lesson. So either everyone only gets a tiny slice of instruction, or you pick who gets instruction and who doesn't...

So how do you pick who gets an education and who has to fend for themselves?

Not a bad point, but it's usually pretty easy to avoid the Chinese fakes: just avoid the places with 1-3 month shipping...

The graphs seem to indicate if the curve has flattened, based strictly on confirmed case counts. No death information provided. So what does this show, exactly? That more Swedish folks caught and recovered from the virus than their locked down neighbors? That's expected...

They also don't seem to provide any information about who's healthcare systems were overwhelmed, which was the entire point of the lockdown. So again, unless we're expecting a miracle vaccine in the next month or two, what do these graphs actually show? That Sweden is dealing with sick people sooner rather than later?

Nothing here shows how it ends. That's sort of the point...

Fun article. I liked these bits:

So for one single week, Sweden had the worst death rate. But only for that week, not the entire outbreak. Interesting...

Of course, since the *entire point* of the lockdown is to "slow the spread" enough not to overwhelm the hospitals, and Sweden's hospital's weren't overwhelmed, I'm not sure what point this article is trying to make. Unless they expect a magic vaccine in the next few weeks/months...

I do kind of wonder how many things crop up every year that present us these "A vs B" dilemmas with limited evidence. Hell, I bet 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable searches was presented with a similarly dire "possible outcome" during the continental congress. So why is this particular "A vs B" dilemma worthy of a different response? Especially given what we know now as opposed to March?

That's a black-and-white logical fallacy. There was in fact at least one other option: we could have acted more like Sweden (and others), not clamped down on *everything*, and have a result that still wasn't all that bad. Outside of densely-populated regions like New York, we never appeared to be in real danger of a "mountain of corpses". How many temporary field hospitals were abandoned after the surge of cases never came, despite lockdown strategies?

And we're supposed to assume this *all* is an affect of COVID-19 as opposed to the lockdown? After all, science has shown the lockdown to cost lives. Increases suicides and preventable medical problems caused by people too scared to go to the doctor, for instance. It'll take months to years to get the true cost of the lockdown, as all the missed mammograms will take a while to turn into death statistics. So what's the spread for these discrete NG body cleanups? How many are COVID deaths, and how many not? Are we even trying to figure that out?

Sure it does. For about 1-2 weeks a year, Kohls will sell their crappy $25 shoes for about $50. Just so they can't get sued for false advertising for claiming it's discounted the other 50ish weeks a year...

To some extent. There comes a point where the predatory companies want regulation, because they can afford to implement it whereas the non-predatory competitors can't and get squeezed out.

Too high a minimum wage means only large companies like Amazon and Walmart can afford to hire all the labor they need. Too burdensome of environmental regulations means new competitors can't afford to start business because they can't afford to obtain permits and impact studies.

For example: Small businesses pay $2,830 more, per employee, than larger firms to comply with government regulations, according to a September 2010 report by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). This often happens because many government regulations carry fixed costs, so if all companies pay $1,000 to comply with a certain regulation, the costs per employee for a firm with 10 people is much higher than an organization with 1,000 people...

CO2 doesn't fog up your glasses. Moisture does....

What exactly did you think the fog was made?