The biggest impact we can have as individuals isn't customizing our activities, it's in pressuring our politicians and elected leaders to adopt better policies and regulations. This is a societal problem, and the solution will require collective action.

Before limits, drivers couldn't earn a living. Not legally at any rate. And once some people started to cut corners and break laws, everyone had to or they would go out of business.

Some scarcity meant that the cab drivers could comfortable follow the law, comply with regulations and have a reasonable expectation that they would earn a living income. Net result: safer streets, safer passengers, safer drivers.

You might plausibly have an argument that cabs are too scarce, but I think that anyone who understand the 'before' and the motivations behind the allocations will see that it's the least bad option.

This style of story-telling is ubiquitous in how the stock market is reported. Every day there's a ton of news and the market either goes up, goes sideways or goes down. Reporters see what happened then pick a sample of news and say "The market rallied on news X & Y". Barry Ritholtz had a great example of a day when the market opened low and then rallied and a newspaper published a morning edition saying the market was selling off because of A and an afternoon edition where it said the market was rallying on the same piece of news.

Fact is that we generally don't know why some things happen, real-life doesn't make for simple stories and people that lose or do bad things are also capable of being kind and charming at other times. We're all heroes of our own stories.

There are many channels that have virtually no viewers and only exist because of bundles so they'll likely be the first to be cut. But with no viewers, no one will care and it will mean less waste. There's certainly the potential for savings for everyone.

Sure, if you really watch 50-100 channels regularly then you could certainly end up paying more. However I'd guess that the majority of people will only care about a small fraction of the channels so even if the per-channel price is raised, the total package price will be lower.

People who find they like premium channels like sports that were heavily subsidized by others may find their prices go up, possibly a lot. So what? Why should millions of people be forced to pay so that some people can get a discount on college football channels?

Yeah, but that's natural and hence totally risk-free. It's only the plants that get their genes from evil technology which threaten to end human civilization.

No disrespect to Taleb's economic expertise but clearly he doesn't know jack about biology.

Whatever risks exist with GMOs are present in all other crops, but other crops don't undergo the same level of testing and we don't know the details of the mutations that are present. Occasionally this has led to issues (eg: toxic potatoes and celery) but the fact that we've taken something that looks like scrub grass and turned it into the towering, productive monster that is modern corn without having a global apocalypse should tell us that there's resiliency and harmful mutations get identified and eliminated before they cause significant harm.

Taleb should have consulted experts in the relevant fields instead of thinking that he could just step across and master a new domain. It's the superfreakonomics curse.

Even assuming they solve the problem of driving in rain, fog or snow I would have a few concerns about usability if there wasn't a steering wheel and pedals.

Is there a way to go to some general area and hunt for street parking or a parking lot?
How would I tell it to use the secured underground parking lot behind a shop or business? How would I tell it to use stall #123?
How do I quickly pull over, perhaps because there's a shop or bank I see that I remembered I needed to visit?

I'm skeptical that a GPS nav-style interface could allow for these sorts of fine-grained requests, yet these are things that occur regularly.

That said, as a concept it's pretty wild. I love the space it frees up. It is thought provoking even if it doesn't become a reality.

This is so ignorant you must be living in a bubble.

There are a huge number of barriers against girls and women. Men are more likely to get interviews, once interviewed they're more likely to get hired. Once hired, they're more likely to get good positions and promotions, not to mention higher pay. In the workplace, women face discrimination, sexist comments, and slurs. They are still a small minority of coders.

Most males are totally blind to the obstacles women face and take the status quo as akin to the "natural" state. They conclude women are just inferior. But they aren't.

Calling this plan "the politically correct form of sexism" is classic doublespeak. If you had a shred of awareness, you'd understand this was the opposite, it's a tiny attempt to *correct* institutionalized sexism.

I give my work a solid 30%, sometimes up to 40% and for rare days up to 50%, but those levels aren't sustainable. Plus I freaking hate it. I'm not going to apologize for failing to devote all of my waking (and sleeping) hours to my job. You'll get a highly qualified, skilled coder for about 8 hours and after that, I'm on my own. It's none of my client's damn business what I do, but I'll guarantee that it's not going to be related to whatever project they hired me for.

I've tried public ebook libraries and the UI & selection have typically been dreadful. I would happily pay $10/month for something better.

Unfortunately, for me something better has to include some eink reader.

Yes, the principle reason that I play console games is they are easy to rent or buy used.

All of the other features might be nice to have, but I don't see many people buying an XBox to get them since there are perfectly good media streamers for a fraction of the price. It's games first and foremost.

Echo that emotion.

I worked on a web-app that was done in Groovy and Grails. First release was fast and fun, we got lots of functionality out quickly and it was a delight to work with. Fast forward a year to when we had to maintain the code. Every little thing took a lot more work than it should have. Reading code to discover interfaces, scanning backwards to see what types we were working with, dozens of open source files which we'd always have to check because Intellisense wouldn't help with simple function/variable naming. It was a nightmare.

In the end we scrapped it all and rewrote it in Scala. It's not quite as fun at first but it's quite nice and maintenance is a delight. That one experience totally soured me on dynamic languages for any serious applications.

If the vaccines aren't 100% effective and an area has a high vaccination ratio, we would expect that a high percentage of the infected have also been vaccinated. After all, they are the majority. Imagine if one kid in a million isn't vaccinated - we'd expect that virtually all kids in the hospital would be vaccinated since the unvaccinated are so damn hard to find.

Before saying there's something wrong with the vaccine we have to know how the percentage of infected who have been vaccinated compares to the percentage of the population that has been vaccinated.