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.

Partially.

Tesla costs too much because the tech is new and somewhat experimental, but if rich people keep buying them the tech will mature and costs will come down until it's mass market.

Ferrari is different in that it's a luxury brand, so it will always be good quality but more expensive. I'm sure it drives technology forward as well, particularly is design and manufacturing, but maybe not to the extent of a Tesla.

So it goes for virtually any new product.

That's one thing the rich are actually good for, buying the sometimes dubious new inventions and supporting product development until things are mature enough for mass market.

I think it's a bit of both.

There are wildly delusional advocates for almost any position, I don't see why Russian foreign policy would be any different. Especially when you consider that Russia does have some legitimate grievances against the West (I get why people wanted the NATO expansion, but expanding an anti-Russia alliance into the former USSR was more than a bit provocative).

At the end of the day Russians are just like anyone else, and they'll be willing to swallow a boat-load of BS so they can cheer for Russia. Some of them will go online and undergo crazy rationalizations on comment boards to convince people why Russia is in the right. They're largely following the same pool of newspapers, blogs, and pundits, so they'll all repeat the same arguments and crazy theories.

I have no idea how to differentiate these people from the actual trolls.

Maybe, though I'm guessing a lot of people only watch shows from 3-4 channels on a regular basis and watch only a very small amount of programming for the rest. HBO is a very exclusive channel, but even if you did that for all those 3-4 channels you'd pay $45-$60 for almost all the programming you get currently, but commercial free and on-demand with a back catalog.

I happened to be in Ireland the day before the vote and asked several of the No campaigners why they thought gay marriage should be banned. They ranged from adoption scenarios that already existed, a weird insistence that equality meant two things were IDENTICAL making gay marriage a contradiction, and the innovative approach of comparing gay marriage to global warming (because even though no one has had any problems so far that doesn't mean things won't go bad in the future for unknown reasons).

In short every argument was absolutely terrible and I had an absolute blast listening to them.

They were idiots if they acted on those suspicions and started spying on Comic Con or individual geeks, but to have never researched them at all would have been stupider by far.

Geeks are a major cultural force and a lot of those shows have their own utopian ideology mixed in, the 20th century is basically a story of different ideologies fighting it out, Democracy, Communism, Fascism, etc. Almost certainly nothing sinister would ever emerge from Trekkies, but when you have a national law enforcement agency those threats that almost certainly won't happen can be worth checking out.

So sex differences only exist when they benefit men?

That mothers would be more invested in their offspring is easily predicted by that fact that they have a massive biological investments in their offspring that men lack, it's one of those things that I'll simply cite as obvious.

Unless you bring a weapon into the equation strength becomes relevant because it creates a power imbalance. I don't deny that female physical abuse exists, it might even be at similar levels to male abuse, but I'm very skeptical that it's as harmful.