Becoming rich is a worthwhile accomplishment because (barring negative externalities imposed by you on others) it means you've contributed significantly more to society in the form of goods and services than you've taken for yourself. Wealth is accumulated by doing things for others which they consider useful enough to pay for, and then saving the surplus rather than spending it on goods and services for your own consumption.

A negative net worth is just the opposite, of course—it means you've consumed more goods and services than you've contributed (again, barring negative externalities imposed on you by others).

Inherited wealth isn't an accomplishment, of course—it's a gift, and an opportunity. It's up to the recipient to do something worthwhile with the inheritance.

None of this is meant to imply that your financial net worth is equivalent to your overall value as a person. A number of important forms of value are not readily quantifiable. It is, however, an important aspect to consider along with other, less objective, factors.

True, but it is important to keep in mind that not all consequences are compatible with freedom of speech. A "freedom of speech" where you could say whatever you wanted in theory, but could be fined or imprisoned for it after the fact, would be meaningless. In particular, freedom of speech means that you can speak without placing your natural rights in jeopardy. On the other hand, your freedom of speech does not overrule others' freedom of association or property rights—total ostracism, where no one is willing to trade with you or otherwise interact with you in any way, is well within the scope of permissible consequences, much less the loss of a job or future prospects.

Absolute rights don't collide. They can't, because the only absolute rights are the negative ones, which compose perfectly. If you have a situation where it seems that "absolute rights collide", at least one of them isn't actually absolute, or a right. In this case, that would be the so-called "right to be forgotten".

The system Disqus recently adopted represents a reasonable compromise. While logged-in users can still upvote and downvote, only the upvotes are shown publicly. Downvotes still affect the placement of the comment on the page, but since you can't see whether your comment has been downvoted the negative feedback effect described in the article is probably averted.

Another option might be to limit negative moderation to well-moderated replies. When replying to another comment, you could check a box to say that the parent is misinformation, based on a logical fallacy, etc. As your comment is moderated up, the parent comment is automatically docked a corresponding number of points. (It would probably be best to take the maximum of the contrary replies here, rather than the sum.)

As for spam, off-topic comments, and other items which don't merit a response, it would probably be sufficient to give a small temporary boost to recently posted comments, or simply mix some recent comments in with the rest regardless of their score. The comments which don't attract any moderators will thus eventually fall to the bottom of the heap with any further intervention, while those which are worth reading get a chance for some upvotes.

Sure there's a cost: both the capacity of the local link and the ISP's upstream links can only support so much total bandwidth, significantly less than the peak for all their customers at once. If you're using it, that reduces the amount available to serve other customers.

Think of it like renting a car or condominium; as the owner, my costs are the roughly same whether the good is rented out or not, but I'm still not going to rent it out for unlimited use at a flat rate. The amount renters pay depends on the opportunity cost—how much their use prevents the owner from renting the same resource out to others.

The Square payment service isn't going away. Neither is Square Cash, the person-to-person money transfer service. Only Square Wallet is being discontinued. Square Wallet was an app for buyers to use in lieu of a credit card at Square point-of-sale terminals; it wasn't related to accepting credit card transactions.

You can get a good approximation using the Monte Carlo method. Pick N points uniformly in the square between (0,0) and (1,1). Count how many are inside a circle centered at (0,0) with radius equal to one unit ($x^2 + y^2 <= 1^2$) and divide the result by N. As N increases, the result approaches the area of the upper-right quadrant of the circle. Since the area of the full unit circle is $Pi * 1^2 = Pi$, multiplying the area of the quadrant by four gives you Pi.

One benefit of taking this approach in an interview would be that it leverages an otherwise rather boring question to demonstrate knowledge of the Monte Carlo method, which is applicable to far more interesting problems than just calculating an approximation for Pi.

I believe the "Fair Tax" proponents mean "fair" in the "equality under the law" sense. Instead of the current system with its varying rates and myriad special taxes and special exceptions and special rebates affecting different classes of people differently, you have, at least in theory, just two aspects applied universally to everyone: a flat tax on the consumption of new goods, and a relatively flat rebate based on standardized poverty level figures for the size of the household.

Regarding being "regressive on income", a progressive consumption tax than a progressive income tax. If they must exist at all, taxes should compensate for external costs, not penalize the production of external benefits. Income which is profitably invested is a net positive for society; it means you're helping to put the available goods and services to their best possible use, curtailing waste. Even income which is simply "hoarded" still represents a surplus of productivity over consumption and isn't actively competing for goods and services, leaving more for others to enjoy. Consumption, on the other hand, means that there's less available for others.

That's a problem to be solved with education and support. I'm not saying that everyone who happens to consider suicide should die, I'm saying that if they choose to make the attempt it's not anyone else's place to prevent it by force—even if it's not the best decision and they would later end up regretting it (if unsuccessful). People have the right to make the wrong decisions regarding their own lives, even fatal ones. The place to interfere is before they choose to make the attempt.

I didn't ignore that case at all. That was the part about "to have it on hand in case of an emergency". The purpose there is to acquire the ability to defend yourself with lethal force if necessary, which is nothing like buying a gun with the specific intent of using it on a person.

For those rare cases where the use of a gun in legitimate self-defense does result in a "gun death", see my previous remarks regarding suicide.

That may be the primary cause of "gun deaths", but it isn't the primary purpose of owning a gun. You're ignoring all the guns that aren't ever involved in a "gun death". People rarely buy a gun with the specific intent of using it on a person (for suicide or otherwise). They buy one to have it on hand in case of an emergency, and/or for hunting or target shooting.

If someone does go out and buy a gun specifically for the purpose of committing suicide, I would hope that it does the job it was purchased for with a minimum of trouble. I have zero interest in cruelly prolonging someone else's life against their expressed will.

I don't believe that for a moment. "Too many addresses" is only an issue if you're trying to store reputation for every individual /128. To begin with, you can ignore everything below /64. A /64 is the minimum ISPs are supposed to allocate to individual customers, much like a /32 address in IPv4. The remaining 64 bits still leave a lot of space to map out, to be sure, but there aren't significantly more end-users than there were before—they just get larger ranges each. If you store reputation by network, with variable prefix lengths, you should be able to compress the results quite nicely.

If anything, IPv6 should lead to more (mostly-)static address assignments and thus less headaches when it comes to tracking reputations, compared to dynamic IPv4 addresses which are frequently repurposed.

In the first scenario you're trying to dictate the relative values of two different free-floating goods. Your dictates can't overrule the law of supply and demand, and the attempt to deny reality leads to chaos. In the second case you have gold, and claims for gold (a.k.a. dollars), and the prices of both—relative to each other and to everything else—are determined by the market.

You have it backward. A gold standard doesn't "regulate the price" of anything. Instead, it defines each unit of the currency a claim to a specific amount of gold. That's what it means for a currency to be "backed" by something. The issuer incurs a fixed liability for every note it issues. The price of the currency then floats depending the relative value (purchasing power) of a claim to gold vs. the actual gold. If the issuer later refuses to redeem its notes for the amount of gold they were issued for, as the U.S. did when it first redefined the exchange rate and later went off the gold standard entirely, it is repudiating its debts.

Obviously, to have a currency backed by gold, you have to actually have the gold. The exchange rate wouldn't be $1300/oz., however; it would be based on how much gold is actually available to back the currency in circulation. Given approximately 250 million troy ounces of official U.S. government gold reserves and a $3 trillion monetary base, the exchange rate would be more like $12,000/oz. Maintaining that rate once on the gold standard would simply be a matter of refraining from issuing more currency unless the gold reserves are increased by the same amount.

The term "arms" at the time the amendment was written was a bit narrower than the modern term "armaments", referring to the sorts of weapons which would traditionally be carried and used by an individual soldier. I don't know of any army that would issue WMDs or artillery to individuals. However, that would certainly include rocket launchers, RPGs, and C4.

(For that matter, C4 isn't necessarily a weapon. It has industrial uses in mining, demolition, etc.)

First, to the GP: "for self-defense" does not appear anywhere in the 2nd Amendment. It's the right to keep and bear arms, period. There's no need to justify why you want to keep and/or bear arms; for hunting, sport shooting, whatever.

Second, while there is language about a "well regulated militia", it's not qualifying the right—it's providing the justification for it (one of many). It is the right of the people to keep and bear arms, not the right of the militia. At the time these were essentially the same thing, but the right was never limited to the militia. How could it be? Rights are universal, not restricted to certain groups.

If you read the amendment from a neutral point of view and not as someone who wants to find a justification for banning firearms, it's really pretty obvious. More so if you read contemporary commentaries on the subject. The only "debate" on this issue is due to a number of people, including some judges, who want to simply ban firearms but (fortunately) lack the support to repeal the amendment outright. Since they can't change the text they try to sow confusion and twist its meaning instead.