jakobsen

> the efficient market hypothesis assumes that emotion, mass psychology, etc. don't enter into stock markets

Isn't mass psychology part of "public information"?? I know little about stock markets, but from the outside I would say that "how I think people will feel about a company" is pretty much what I would base my "bet" on whether a stock will go up or down.

I understand your point, but why even mention Uber when the parent specifically said "car sharing"? Likewise, why does the parent bring the topic of "house sharing" when Airbnb is clearly renting, and not sharing?

I just feel that too often we are putting professional services and sharing on the same bag, which I find a bit alarming.

But then driving for hire is not the same as car sharing.

As for scalability... I was thinking that for sure free access to internet would be very hard to monitor, but say you limit it to email: That would be certainly much, much easier (hence cheaper) to monitor than what we currently have.

Every written letter must be opened and read, possibly with an horrible script which takes time to "decipher". Besides, I don't know if they keep copies of all the mail in case something happens, but it would be orders of magnitude harder to index and search than email anyway. Phone calls are even worse, since you need at least as much time to monitor the conversation as the conversation lasts.

Maybe introducing email would shift some of the friends and family to use this cheaper means of communication, reducing costs. Or maybe Jevons paradox applies here and the number of emails would go up to such an extent that the improved efficiency would not make up for the increased traffic.

P.S.: just to make it clear, I'm not advocating for the inmates to have their phone calls replaced for emails.

Not knowing anything about squatter's rights (or law in general), shouldn't it be possible to just create a law putting whatever limits we want on camping WITHOUT the need for it to be completely forbidden?

I am just now in a place where free camping is not allowed, but the local authorities interpret the law as: "no tents between dawn and dusk". I wish that was put into a written law.

Only 7% of the land in Finland and Sweden is Agricultural land, compared to 70% in the UK, so it's no wonder that the countryside is much more inaccessible.

That being said, there's a lot more that could be done, such as allowing kayaks into rivers and lakes without so many unreasonable limitations and/or paperwork.

I think it's better if nobody benefits from there being scammers. Otherwise those under pay via mehanical turk may be tempted to pose as (or become) scammers themselves

> Spain is just wanted due to the proximity to Africa and a lot of African immigrants/refugees using this vector.

I hear this from time to time, but data paints a radically different picture. What you describe is only the case for sub-Saharan immigrants who are just a tiny, tiny minority of the inmigrants coming to Spain. Most inmigrants come from:

1-Romania (for which Spain is obviously not in the path to any other country)

2-Morocco (the vast majority of whom arrive legally since the late 90s)

3-UK (and contrary to popular belief, only 21% of them are over 65 years old)

Then, the largest component of immigration is from the former colonies, due to the shared language (so, again, not being used as a vector)

All of this data is available online on the INE (national institute of statistics)

Why would it? The vast majority of people with whom I interact in OS projects have no clue what my gender (or ethnicity for that matter) is.

Weight does change around the world, mostly because at the equator you are farther away from the centre of mass of the earth than you are at the poles, but also because of local gravity anomalies. It's mass that never changes, so maybe we should all get an inertial balance for our kitchen!

Aren't you are proving the parent's point there? You say that only articles depicting their own culture are seem as relevant to the american reader, which is what he claims.

That's absolutely not the case in other places of the world. In some cases, even the opposite problem arises (that is, discriminating against your own country/culture and favouring a foreign one)

I started working out 2 years ago and it changed my life for the better, but it most definitively didn't improve my productivity at work. Why would it?

But isn't the definition of the imaginary unit axiomatic? If so it's indeed true that there is no logical reason why it exists other than it being useful.