That's a myth.

That, too.

There is a mountain of evidence from the various micro-credit and micro-lending programs in place around the world. While there are some effects of the kind you mention, they are easily guarded against by screening applicants. Not even very deeply.

That is one reason the 1% have so much and poverty even exists anymore: The income gap. There's an interesting project in Switzerland - not exactly a country you'd count as communist - to limit the income of CEOs to 12 times that of their lowest-paid employees. Of course, the real goal is not to make the CEOs richer, but to give them an incentive to pay their people better.

It asks some interesting questions, like: What exactly does the CEO of a company do that makes him worth more per hour than the people who actually manufacture the products earn in a week ?

However, the formula is actually the very same that I was getting at: Don't hand out money, stop taking it away in the first place.

There are two kinds of teaching - the one "by the letter" and the one by action.

On paper, the Hells Angels are a Harley Davidson fan club, you know?

Oh, please. Even addressing that point seriously is just stupid. Of course he's a fan of capitalism - it made him the richest man on the planet for many years.

People at the top are significantly more likely to be fans of the system than people at the bottom. What a surprise!

Well, Mr. Gates, here's how:

Don't take away their wealth in the first place.

It's well-established fact that the poor make the best use of money. There is less waste and more immediate progress than with any organisation or institute. Micro-credits are a blasting success wherever they are granted in the interest of helping people. (they fail when the same banks that caused the housing bubble/burst get in on the game hoping to make a quick buck, because they don't screen the applicants).

Monopoly rent is known to damage the economy disproportionately. For every $ you give to charity now, Mr. Gates, you've already taken two away.

"Don't be a greedy bastard." is a much, much better formula for helping other people than giving away even most of your money. Because it's not a zero-sum game, it's not just redistribution of wealth, the 1% gain most of their wealth not just by taking it from the rest, but by causing damage in excess of their profit.

I make money by pushing bits around; specifically, I write and maintain software for my company. The company has a general idea of what value I create, and pays me based on that. Sometimes I do better than they plan on and sometimes worse. It's a pretty sweet deal, but it doesn't transfer well to artistic endeavors.

Suppose I were able to write publishable-quality fiction. Suppose I then wanted to write a novel on speculation. How am I supposed to make money on it? I've written it, so under a no-copyright regime I can either sit on it, which does nobody any good, or release it freely, in which case I get no money for my work. Suppose I want to write another novel, despite not getting paid for the first. I have to go around fundraising as well as writing. People have to decide that they're willing to give me money, despite me not having much of a track record. And, of course, if I raise enough money (conditional on releasing the novel, I assume), that's an absolute upper limit on what I can make. It seems to me that I can put a heck of a lot of work in on fiction before I can start getting significant money from it.

In the current world, with copyright, I can write on spec, and if I can talk somebody into publishing it I can get financial rewards from it. They may not be much, but they can continue. I can strike it rich if I write something that really catches on. In the meantime, readers can decide if they want to pay me for my novel on a case-by-case basis. They don't have to commit to paying me sight unseen. If they come along and decide they like my work, they can reward me for the stuff I've already published. Under which regime can we expect more good fiction?

The difference is that your software is relatively easy to agree on a price for. You agree to provide good-quality software that does something specific. This is worth a good sum of money to somebody who pays you. Fine. A novel is not written for a particular need (aside from series and romance novels), and there is usually no one person who values the novel so highly as to pay what the author needs for a decent living. If some organization would guarantee a base amount of money for an original novel, there's be at least some reward for writing one, and we'd be paying endless amounts of money for crap.

And don't give me the line about how people will create because it's fun. Creating something is fun. Making it into a polished and entertaining product involves a lot of drudge work that nobody's going to do without being paid for it. Without copyright, people would still play the guitar and sing and tell stories, but that's where it stops.

I'm guessing this has given you a better informed perspective on the problems that Healthcare.gov has to solve. So what's your opinion on the struggles, do you feel like Healthcare.gov really screwed up a doable task or was the problem a lot more technically challenging than most people realize?

And do you think HealthSherpa or other 3rd party sites have the potential to eventually offer signups and fill the role of the Federal Exchange?

And people fall for this?

Yep, pretty much like how most of the people I know keep their wealth in USD in US banks.

Nobody said most people were bright.
 

Learn to write a clear, concise one-page business memo. Cover one subject clearly. Send it as an email only to the people who really need to know. Chat systems are too ephemeral.

For style guidance, read Churchill's memos from WWII. You don't have to be that good, but try.

"Take the money and disappear" is normal behavior for Bitcoin exchanges. Sometimes they just disappear, sometimes they get broken into and robbed, and sometimes you're not sure whether the robbery was an inside job.

The list of failed Bitcoin exchanges is long. Bitcash.cz just closed yesterday. There's an academic paper with a list. 18 of the 40 exchanges on the list had failed. But that was last January. Since then, Bitfloor and Bitme shut down, and Intersango and Mt. Gox stopped paying out customer funds on demand.

Not one Bitcoin exchange is a bank or a registered broker/dealer in its home jurisdiction. That's part of the problem.

This is why anarchy sucks. What anarchy looks like is Somalia, not L. Neil Smith fiction.

Scrum people are very strict about scrum.
Either you do it right, then it is scrum, or you do it wrong, then it is no scrum, pretty simple.
In other words: from a point of view of a scrummy person the word "scrummy" does not exist.
I mean: are you pregnant? Or not? There is n inbetween or half way.

Meh. I have several drives with no reallocations, but I also have several with many reallocations... and they've been ticking along that way for years.

My home file server has eight drives, half have reallocations, half don't. The drive that died a few months ago had no reallocations in daily SMART log when it failed.

Of my three desktop machines (between home and office), one has a drive with reallocations, one has a drive with none, and one has an SSD.

But this is all anecdotal. The 2007 Google study (covering hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of drives) found that there is a correlation between reallocations and failures, but it's only a predictor of moderately-increased likelihood of failure, not a guarantee. Given the direction of drive designs in the last few years, I'd expect that predictor to have weakened.

Well, what do you expect? The thing is a bloated mess.

maybe try to not be such a douche-bag about "having exponentially many needless conversations" with your co-workers

Seconded. Every math or computer geek I've ever known who employed snotty language like that ended up sleeping in a bed they made themselves.

All too often "needless" conversations involves a passive aggressive asshole on one side doing everything humanly possible to prove to the world at large just how futile this interaction/interruption really is.

In most complex projects, there are any number of needful conversations just dying for an opportunity to take place between team members who are attentive to the needs of the project as a whole, and able to identify the appropriate venue and opportunity.

Well, if daily scrums are a waste of time, you do them wrong.

And [favored banking companies] don't even have to pay large premiums upfront---dinners, jobs and lobbying is so much cheaper than premiums.

Don't forget major campaign contributions - to candidates and the party - and helping the campaign operations in other ways.