- parrotdoxicalTL;DR: Grad student naval gazes about + waxes philosophical on occupation he feels predestined towards but actually has no real world experience with
- Yeah, my thoughts exactly. It looks like the problem and solution don't exactly agree -- if your problem is someone having access to wire details for your bank account who should not, the solution should be fixing that compromise ASAP. Sure, moving your servers could help fix another problem, but it doesn't solve THIS one.
- "Not a single breakthrough product was unveiled"
Probably the most damning line in the piece. It was indeed a year marked by cryptocurrency mania, NSA scandals, and worst of all, mediocre tech. Anyone think 2014 is going to be any different?
- When I see a hypothesis which is THAT sweeping, there's no reason to waste the time of trying to find data to support the hypothesis or a refutation of it. I mean quite literally it is so sweeping as to be meaningless. The more broad you make a hypothesis, the more difficult it is to find evidence to support it. This is especially evident in economics, which is not nearly as hermeneutic and self-sufficient as, say, physics or mathematics.
You may be right that I'm espousing a lack of a certain kind of imagination, but I don't want to adopt the kind of imagination that tacitly accepts the validity of a hypothesis to be explored. The willingness to accept THAT kind of a hypothesis to me, in fact, belies a different kind of lack of a imagination. I am critical of the value structure that would create the assumptions that would lead to the OP's hypothesis, and my prescription is simple: pare down the scope of the hypothesis. Be specific. It's not that the debate between capitalism and socialism has never been purely economic, but in fact has mostly been ideology driven. Statistics are contextualized in rhetoric by ideological worldviews, and I've never been a fan of arguing/accepting arguments by leaps of faith. Skepticism of the law of excluded middle and all that.
- Nah, I understand all of what you've written, I just find it sophomoric and pretty poorly thought out. I'll be glad to engage you in discussion once YOU mentally mature past the age of fourteen.
- I'd argue that a such a sweeping hypothesis as one made by the "paper" is so broad so as to be meaningless, and that you couldn't actually come up with enough facts to prove it one way or another. Just seems like troll bait, honestly.
- Someone REALLY likes the sound of their own empty rhetoric. While that's all fine and dandy, you should probably be aware that you don't necessarily get a choice as to "subsidize" people who contribute nothing to society because it is possible for people to actually negate things from society, all the way down from petty thugs all the way up to crooked, lawyered-up execs and/or politicians. The difference is that the latter gets to pay their way out of their transgressions to society (often times at a rate that still makes it profitable to rob society) while the former get the societal brunt and blame for society's ills.
That's not to say that the former group are saints, but 1) they have systematic disadvantages that actually prevent any current legal implementations of a free market from providing for them and 2) once incarcerated, they actually end up costing society in a far more permanent way (up to $167k/yr in NYC).
So, even if you disregarded how totally wrongheaded your argument on a sociopolitical level, it also shows a pretty flimsy lack of substance on a quantitative level. You WILL pay for poverty one way or another. You can't magically incentivize it out of existence with a free market, so don't whine about it by thinking about it as subsidization. Think of it more as insurance, at the very least.
- Uhh..not always. The work is balanced out, but often, there is a net loss of jobs. There may always be a need for mundane labor, but that doesn't mean it will be priced at a point that makes living very sustainable. And no, technology doesn't necessarily make sustenance cheaper -- perhaps in theory but not in practice. Technology, like any other kind of a driver of industrial development, frequently concentrates power in the hands of those who can take it. Sometimes, that happens in a way that does make it such that more people can live better on less. It also sometimes happens in a way that blots out much of China's skyline with dangerous smog.
The ability for people to be able to live well, on the whole, is something that depends on society. Technology is merely a lever, not an autonomous agent or operator.
- This is awesome. While it's great how performant the approach is, I also really dig how elegant the whole solution is -- using Postgres FDW with Numba is very pragmatic and clean, while at the same time potentially extensible to GPGPU. I might try and give this a go for some DSP stuff at some point.
- I'm not sure -- OP mentions the guy is a musician and specifically a pianist, so perhaps he just intrinsically has developed great spatial reasoning from learning and practicing with his piano for so long -- that along with him being from another country makes this make a lot more sense for me, although it's all still impressive.