Yes, thank you. Words do have meaning, especially words that imply criminal activity.

I finally setting my comment thread to filter out most ACs, and set the threshold at just below +1, and it's a lot more like old /. For instance, this thread now has 12 posts with 40 hidden, so it's almost civil.

A cryptocurrency could go up a lot again if one becomes commonly used.

Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds any cryptocurrency, and a tiny percentage of worldwide financial transactions are conducted in cryptocurrency.

If this changed - if one became popular for financial transactions, where a lot of the population carried some device that could complete cryptocurrency transactions as easily as a credit card, and many or most businesses accepted cryptocurrency, than whatever currency wins that "common usage" battle still has a long way up. The price is just supply and demand, and large numbers of people acquiring some currency to use as currency = demand and would drive up the price further.

I don't know when or if that would happen, but it's conceivable that a cryptocurrency could, at some point, become very easy to use and offer some advantage(s) over other currencies such that it was widely adopted for use as a general currency, which would cause at least one more run up in price for any currency that does that.

You obviously haven't driven in really big cities - New York, DC, LA, Chicago...

I completely agree with you that that's how everyone should drive. That's how I drive whenever I'm anywhere where it's possible to do so (moderate sized cities, small towns, rural areas, roads without multiple lanes).

But in the really big cities, if you leave a safe gap such that you could stop in time if there were an accident in front of you, then another car changes lanes to get in that gap. Slow down to make another gap, another car instantly fills it to where you're tailgating them. Keep doing that, and you slow down and down to where you're going an unsafe speed and everyone is swerving around you like a stopped car - and as they swerve around you, they're still cutting over in front of you so fast that you're overdriving your stopping distance. The only speed at which you're not overdriving your stopping distance is under about 10 MPH, which is both illegal on most major arteries and insanely unsafe.

The only thing to do if you have to drive in these places is leaves the biggest gap you can that will usually stop another car from darting in front of you, which still means you are not guaranteed safe stopping distance. Or just don't drive there. There is no way to drive there and avoid tailgating, because someone else will change lanes to make it so you're tailgating regardless of your speed. There is no way to drive safely.

I think it's bursting now. As an honors graduate of a top 10-university, I feel confident in saying: most college graduates would acquire skills more useful to employers spending 4 years working than 4 years in college. Plus they financial difference for the prospective students of spending 4 years making money rather than 4 years hemorrhaging money is enormous. Aside from certain professional fields that truly require a lot of very specific knowledge it takes years to learn (doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc), schooling is a signaling function, not an actual value-add proposition. Bran Caplan's Take on Education But it's value as a signaling function falls apart when supply outstrips demand for a significant category of degree recipients - which is middle-quality school liberal arts majors now, and that's pulling back the veil on the myth of education adding employer-relevant value to students.

If the occupants have reasonable assessments, then the only way for the offers to have any effect on the occupants is for the evil actors to offer everybody twice the market value of their house. And it's easy to buy up whole neighborhoods right now by offering everybody twice the value of their house.

Right now, the evil actors don't want to actually cough up as much money as people want in exchange for moving. They try to buy up homes by offering 10% above market value. When the people refuse, they just bribe government to use eminent domain to kick the people out and let them buy the land at below market value.

If my proposal could somehow help change the evil company's strategy to instead offer everybody 200% of the value of their house, that would be great. But unfortunately, I think the evil people would still rather use eminent domain than actually pay the money. Houses are expensive - it's cheaper to bribe government than pay what it takes to make people move voluntarily.

If it was a real offer to buy, then the "ludicrous tax bill" is just what you should have paid already, that you've been dodging by lying about the value of your property.

That's right. This kind of rule, in effect, would force everyone to grossly overstate the value of everything and pay ludicrous taxes to avoid unnecessary risk of a sudden forced move. However, there may still be a better way to handle this that preserves the idea. For example, if someone makes an offer to buy at twice your valuation or more, you must either sell, or change your valuation to the new offer and pay a few years of back taxes at the new valuation. This would make forced moves always avoidable, but would still provide a reality check between claimed value and market value. In this case, if the real value of a building is $1B and Apple's claiming $200, someone would surely make an offer at $700M or so and then Apple would have to either sell or change the evaluation to $700M and pay several years of back taxes at the $700M price.

That's right. My wife is a scientist, she has a PhD in pharmacology.

Talking to her through her undergrad, PhD, and Postdoc, I identified what I believe are three separate problems in science that each exacerbate the others and collectively are having a devastating effect on the field:

1. Publish or perish.

2. Nobody reports negative results

3. Most scientists who are below the level of Principle Investigator for a lab are being assigned their projects.

So it used to be, back when my parents got their doctorates, that a new scientist joined a lab, proposed their own research, conducted the research, wrote a thesis, and then defended it before committee. If the committee was decent, it didn't matter if the results were positive or negative. They grilled the candidate on how they generated their hypothesis, why the implications would be important whether positive or negative, how they set up the experiments and conducted them, how they analyzed and presented the results - basically, the candidate had to prove they knew everything it takes to operate effectively as a scientist.

Maybe if the research was exceptional, the thesis advisor would also be recommended that it be submitted to a journal, but most of the theses just went to the institution's library. The point was to prove the candidate understood and could perform science as an academic exercise, not to contribute usefully to the field. Today that is completely different. Most PhD candidates are assigned a project by the PI of the lab they join. So right off the bat, you aren't differentiating people by the quality of their ideas, which is probably the most important trait for a scientist. Instead, the quality of the idea assigned to them is likely to have a huge impact on how their career goes. It's like randomly handing out career potential without regard for ability. And there is no point in a committee grilling them about the formation of the hypothesis or what positive or negative results would contribute to understanding, because they never came up with the hypothesis in the first place.

Hence got your bad project."

Then they have to have one or more papers accepted by peer reviewed journals to get their PhD. The papers are their thesis, and as long as they were accepted for publication, defending them is perfunctory now. Their acceptance is the only real test to get the PhD.

Which means nobody is trying to make sure the candidate actually understands and can perform science; supposedly the papers evidence that, but we all know that isn't really true now; the peer reviewers do not attempt to replicate the study or dig in deep enough to see if any of it is actually high quality work.

Not being able to publish negative results means that if you are assigned a project that ends up indistinguishable from the null hypothesis, you can waste years of your life based on a luck-of-the-draw assignment, with no regard to your ability. Or... you can fudge the data.

"Fudging the data" here doesn't even necessarily imply anything overtly malicious. Talking to people in the lab who'd discuss how experiment after experiment had failed to show the desired effect, and what experiment they were planning next to try to demonstrate it, my standard comment was "we need to pass a 95% confidence test, so we'd better plan about 20 experiments to prove it."

A possible 4th thing to list here is that the system now takes so long to get through, from undergrad to PhD to a Post Doc or two or three, that by the time anybody gets to be a PI and actually start pursuing their own research ideas, they're past the age past scientists were when they achieved approximately every major breakthrough in the history of science.

Thank you.

This "news story" reads like one of the Dilbert comics where someone with no understanding of the meaning of the words mashes a bunch of buzzwords together.

"They're betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language."

None of these companies are looking at biology as a computing platform.

While they aren't trying to use biology to perform computation, there are a number of ways computers are good parallels for biology. But even then, they get that wrong. DNA is a storage medium - it's like a hard drive, not software code. The DNA stores the software code. Genes are like code. CRISPR is nothing remotely like a programming language - it's like the combination of firmware and physical write mechanisms in a drive that allow the drive to actually go write values to the right places.

I don't see why this comment is modded funny! Seamonkey still works great, and the web works with it just fine. It is the real mozilla.

I agree the shifts are a disaster. We're not really saving energy anymore with DST, and it's killing people, causing depression and economic losses, etc.

But... I'm near the eastern end of EST. Near the summer solstice, with DST in effect, it's light out from about 4:30 AM to 9 pm. Honestly, I'd be better off if there were a 2-hr DST shift - I don't get up before 5:30 AM, 5:30 to 10 pm would be much better, which is what they get at the western end of EST and what I grew up with.

WIthout DST, we're looking at it being light out from 3:30 AM to 8 PM. To me, a 3:30 AM sunrise with the modern fixed work/school/daycare schedule is just inhumane. And what a waste having all that daylight waaay before time to get up, and then get dark at 8 PM.

OK, so getting rid of DST makes summer suck. So we could just do DST all year like Florida wants to?

Well, Russia tried permanent DST, and depression and morning traffic accidents is winter went up. Near the western edge of EST, winter solstice sunrise is already 8:20 AM. Permanent DST would make the sun come up at 9:20 AM - about two and a half hours after most people get up for work/school. That is depressing. I remember waiting for the school bus on frozen, dark snowy days well before civil twilight even began, but with permanent DST, we'd be talking about getting to school and classes starting way before civil twilight. So people get depressed and have accidents now for a week on either side of the time change... but if we get rid of it, I'm not sure we aren't just trading it for another set of problems - insomnia in summer, less summer sports and exercise, and trading two weeks of depression and accidents in the spring/fall for three months of depression and accidents in winter.

A single world time zone doesn't help with any of this. It's not like everyone will just run a nocturnal schedule in the part of the earth that gets midnight at what's now noon and vice/versa. If you have to call someone around the world, the question would just shift in semantics from "what time is it there" to "what time do people get up there?" And having a single time zone with no DST doesn't help with it being light too early in summer or too late in winter. Companies, schools, etc could be free to shift the time on their own, but for anyone with complicated schedules, having different organizations make different decisions about whether to shift or not just makes everything worse.

Ah, interesting! I confess to thinking only of N. America and not considering the other fine continents!

It's hilarious that all of China is one time zone.

I'm not sure what time zones could move closer to solar noon on DST, I thought the eastern edge of the time zones is usually closest to solar noon. For example, in western Ohio we're on the western edge of EST, and our solar noon doesn't come until about 12:50 on normal time. Hell, in the summer we don't hit solar noon until around 2 in the afternoon, it's almost arbitrary. That's my only argument against DST, it just makes the clock time so far off "natural" solar time. Noon should be noon.

Well hell, I just wasted a good half-hour (re)reading a few of those posts, thanks for the link.