The people smuggling the horns aren't exactly the most ethical businessmen. If you can sell them a fake horn for half the price they'll keep the profit, pass it on as real to the consumer, and the poachers might not be able to compete.

There will still be a few "legitimate" supply chains making sure they're getting the real deal, but it could put a lot of poachers out of business.

Basically this. I feel like it's basically meant to help supporters when defending their positions. Putin's supporters basically claim a) Russia isn't really doing anything in Ukraine, b) even if they are it's justified since the West started it.

Instead of jumping right to "b" opponents need to get past "a" and actually get the Putin supporter to admit Russia is even involved. It just puts another layer of BS that needs to be dispelled before you can debate Russia's actions directly.

My first thought is this looks like it's going to be one of those threads where people with progressively lower UIDs start posting.

My second thought is how sad it is that I'm able to participate with a UID over 500k

My understanding is that Linus is still very much the head of the Linux kernel as a project, so what happens to the project management after he's gone? Greg Kroah-Hartman might be a great right hand man but I don't know if he has the political standing or history to step in as the benevolent dictator of a project critical to multiple multi-billion dollar companies.

Do they put in place a Debian-like foundation, or something like Eclipse.org where it's essentially directed by the major distributions.

Maybe there's a succession plan in place already but this strikes me as a major question that needs to be addressed.

One could, but one could also argue that HFCS isn't any different than regular sugar, the difference with Trans Fat is there's a scientific consensus around one view.

The FDA shouldn't be banning things just because a few researchers and journalists have started thinking it's bad, if they'd have banned butter a long time ago and we'd all be eating margarine.

Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, because the main guys on the team were big C++ fans who found a way to justify their preference.

Not saying it was the wrong choice, particularly for the team in question, but I'm betting if you hand the project to another team you come up with a different language.

Also interesting is it sounds like they're using an automatic code generator to translate some of the stuff from C++ to Java to run on android, maybe it will work seamlessly but that extra layer always makes me nervous.

"If 13% of iOS device users in the world paid $9.99-per-month for Apple Music, it would generate more cash each year than the entire recorded music biz manages right now."

I sure as hell don't purchase $120 in music per year, even when the CD was king I doubt many ever did.

So why do they suddenly expect us all to start spending as much on music as the most vociferous consumers?

$3-5 monthly, $36-60 per year, that's a price point where subscription services start making sense to me.

Think of it as a Prisoners Dilemma applied to a market economy. The Prisoners Dilemma generally means people cooperate within their group (optimal with repeated interactions) but defect with outsiders (optimal for 1-off interactions).

The West has had market economies for a very long time, we've figured that cooperating even with strangers is the best strategy at a cultural level so as a culture we've put in a lot of effort into telling people they should conduct business honestly even with strangers and not defect.

In China this kind of economy is a lot newer so people are following the default rule, cooperate in your group and defect outside. They'll change over eventually but I think it is a true phenomena that the Chinese won't feel the same pressure to cooperate with strangers.

More to the point do the comments represent his views in a meaningful way or are they just the result of some random speculation he had during the talk and decided to blurt out?

If he's made this his thing then sure, talk about it, but in general my issue with articles like is is that people say some random thing, it goes viral, and suddenly that is how they're defined to the world.

How many things do you say in a day? How many of those things, if they went viral, would accurately represent your views?

True, I think I got 1/2 in my head at some point.

0.2% is still pretty brutal though.

I didn't actually realize it was that bad, from one of the articles:

Mary Scollay, an associate veterinarian at Gulfstream Park Racing & Casino and at Calder Race Course, both in south Florida, who coordinates the on-track project, reported at the March 17 Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit that dirt tracks such as Churchill Downs had seen 2.03 fatal injuries per 1,000 starts compared with 1.47 per 1,000 on synthetic tracks. Scollay cautions that the number reflects less than a year's worth of data so it should not be taken as definitive.

So with every race the horse has a 0.5% chance of dying, that's a horrifically high probability.

Actually that is a big advantage. It means a ridiculous amount of resources being spent supporting and converting between two measurement systems. Industrial scenarios might be a legitimate worry but for everyday usage people would be just as happy with it within a year.

I'm curious to see if any economists have done an analysis on how long it would take for a conversion to pay off.

That's due to matching industry standards, I'm not sure how that stuff gets switched over.

I don't know about Britain but for Canada I think it's due to sports. That's one place we're regularly exposed to height and weight measurements and virtually all the major sports here are big in the US, and the size of the US media market means we're going to be flooded with whatever measurements they use to measure athletes.

But if you start talking about smaller items like things from the grocery store I think we're a lot more comfortable thinking in grams.

Depends on your definition of market value. If they went to multiple companies I'd say CMU was paying below, but the fact they all went to Uber suggests that Uber paid well above market value to make sure they accepted the offers.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing but it's different from how we usually evaluate market value for employees.

The fact they were working at CMU suggests they were already paying them market value.

What I think actually happened is that Uber treated the Robotics Engineering Center as a startup with a set of internal working relationships and expertise that they wanted. Since they couldn't actually buy the Center they just hired away all the researchers.