Although I am theoretically in favor of net neutrality, I am practically against it. The same economic factors and corporate powers exist at the national level as they do at the municipal level, and although we might be pleasantly surprised with the quality of the first generation of net neutrality, I am confident that it won't take long before the Federal rules devolve into exactly the same sort of monopoly-protection setup that exists at the municipal level.

And having that happen at the national level is even worse than what has happened at the municipal level, where, in theory, one can move across town, or across state, or hope that your town changes its mind. But once Comcast owns the Feds, there will be no escape.

It's not really a Deist argument, where God created the universe with its physical laws and man evolved as a result of molecules following those physical laws. Nor is it a "God of the gaps" argument where God is whatever is outside of our current ability to describe things using science. Rather, just as one can believe that the universe has an order to it that we can uncover through science (e.g., Newton's laws weren't any different 10 million years ago and will continue to hold 10 million years from now), one can choose to believe that there is a *reason why* the universe has such an order to it. The anthropic principle is one way to answer that reason why. And the Catholic Church would say that the reason is that there is a Creator who not only created an orderly universe at the time of the big bang, but also continues in the creation of each new moment, not at odds with physical laws, but with them, and through them.

I purposely ignored supply considerations because the source of the apparent paradox is all on the demand side. Of course one could "resolve" the paradox by saying that there is a greater supply of water in the market than supply of diamonds but that still doesn't address what makes people uneasy about it; namely, that people *want* diamonds but *need* water. So it's really the demand that calls for an explanation, even though you are correct that you also need to think about supply to get a price.

What is puzzling you is called the paradox of value. It can be described as the apparent paradox that water is necessary to life, while diamonds are not, but diamonds are much more expensive than water. The answer is that decisions to buy and sell are made at the margin, so the question isn't "How valuable is water to you?" but rather, "How valuable is the next gallon of water to you?" Since, in "our society", we have enough water to support life and agriculture, the marginal gallon of water is used, say, to water golf courses and wash cars. These low-value marginal uses means that the price of water is low, as is actually seen.

Similarly, with the average American's BMI pushing 30, the marginal value of the next strawberry isn't very big to the vast majority of Americans. So the price of strawberries is low, and there is little room to pay strawberry pickers a good wage. Also see Worth: Just because you're necessary doesn't mean you're important.

I once read a joke that if people were forced to spend 5 minutes a week, every week, staring at the price of yogurt in the supermarket, then we would all get upset when the price of yogurt went up. So it's not that gasoline is a huge part of the budget for a new car buyer, but it is an unavoidable reminder that gets thrown in their face each and every week that you are spending more and more money.

Oh come on. This post is so clearly wrong and makes me so upset that I just have to reply to it. I could show you a logical proof that refutes it, and based upon my vast experience I know that it surely isn't true. I await your reply so that I may provide a more detailed, point by point explanation that will convince you that my position is the correct one.

You are not even wrong. Measure-theoretic probability has proven itself as an exceptionally accurate model of highly complex, yet fully deterministic, phenomena that cannot be predicted well using other means. Such as the shuffling of a deck of cards, slightly different each time, but similar enough to be able to build a model of its behavior.

You called it "random," not me. I would call it "\underset {A\subset S_n} {sup} |Q^{*k}(A) - U(A)|" and then label it as "random" because that is what most laypeople would recognize as being like "randomness". If you have a different definition of "random" that's fine, but you can't argue against the proof that 7 shuffles is sufficient to reduce the total variation distance to stationarity from about 1.0 to about 0.33. If you disagree, please show your work.

I just bought a brand new car last month with 4 doors, performance, reliability, and reasonably priced. It has all sorts of driver aids like backup and blind spot cameras, hill assist, traction and stability control, and an emergency stop brake assist. But it has the best manual shifter I have ever had in 2 decades of driving, which includes everything from American muscle to a turbo import. There is nothing that says that a new automotive technology must necessarily diminish the fun of driving a stick shift, and I see no sign that manufacturers intend to eliminate a manual transmission as an option except in sofamobiles which you and I wouldn't want to buy anyways.

The Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model of shuffling is a textbook example precisely because it is both mathematically tractable and a pretty good model of how a riffle shuffle actually distributes cards. It is so good a model, that I would argue that if your shuffling technique isn't well-approximated by the model, then you aren't doing a riffle shuffle.

And his definition of "random" is not "outright blasphemy." To the contrary, the definition is basically "the greatest difference in probability of any particular subset of the universe of possible distributions between a perfectly uniform distribution (the distribution of an infinite number of shuffles) and the distribution you actually have after a finite number of shuffles." As the Wikipedia article mentions, another alternative would be to use a measure of entropy instead of the statistical distance, but nevertheless statistical distance is a pretty good way to do it.

Cats aren't taking pleasure in tormenting prey, or playing with the mouse, they are tiring out an animal that has teeth and claws and could potentially hurt the cat. In the wild, even if a predator manages to kill the prey, if that prey manages to wound the predator so that the next time it goes on the hunt, it is not so strong or sharp, the predator is in trouble.

Have you ever gone fishing? The best way to catch many kinds of fish is to fight it for a while and tire it out. That's the hunting methodology that cats have evolved to use.

Not exactly. There are rules about how big your expenses can be for things like executive compensation. For example, when a company pays for business lunches for its executives to dine out, it can't reduce income by the entire amount. And a firm can't deduct the entire amount of, say salary ($1,000,000 cap) or stock options (cap on deductible amount on incentive stock options, which is why they also offer "non-quals", i.e., non-qualified stock options).

In general, if the choice is between the firm paying a tax or an executive paying the tax, the firm will generally pay the tax (in the US), since corporate rates are lower than the highest personal income tax rate. But if they can defer taxes altogether, by giving the executive something that will appreciate in value (like equity) but avoids immediate income tax, they will do that.

After an apocalyptic event, the definition of "safe" would change. Unlimited energy for weapons production and agriculture versus the possibility of a meltdown? In a world where might makes right and food shortages are a major problem, nuclear power, no matter how unsafe, becomes incredibly safe relative to the alternative. If such an event ever happened, manhattan project level nuclear technology would be the the most valuable thing to salvage in terms of rebooting civilization.

I have kids and a cat and yes, mistakes have been made. But a dining room table? I guess it depends on the table. Mine doesn't have a good sealant so if you were to drop oil or food coloring on it it would definitely stain. And while I can live with a hairball stain on the carpet, I wouldn't want to live with a s#*! stain on the table where I eat.

I think you have the ordering wrong. If someone defecated on my dinner table I would never eat off that table again. He might as well have set fire to it. And since the table is worth more than the iPad, I think the first scenario is actually the worst.

It seems like a small thing, but it does highlight how something like theft is easy to judge the seriousness of; namely, stealing a $2 candy bar isn't as bad as stealing a $20 shirt, which isn't as bad as stealing a $20,000 car. But sometimes it can be difficult to judge the damage of vandalism, and the vandal almost always thinks it is a smaller deal than the vandalized. So let's say someone is going to slash somebody's tire. The vandal might think that it is no big deal, like a $50 tire that needs to be replaced. But the vandalized is thinking "I'm going to be late to work to deal with this, so I'm losing pay, and I have to make sure that the tire salesman gives me a good price on an equivalent tire, etc etc"

Having said all that, it certainly seems like calling the police for this particular incident of vandalism is way overkill, but (playing devil's advocate a little), what if the administration is totally technologically ignorant, and think that this kind of situation requires a $300/hour consultant to come in and "clean" the "infected" machine? Stupid people have all types of higher costs, and if you make them incur those costs, they will blame you, not themselves.

Not after he has already been convicted. "Criminal" is the right term for the appeals process that determines if there was unfairness in the trial here.