sethg
Joined 19 years ago
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Recent submissions
Comment · 14 years ago
Comment · 14 years ago
“I’ve been seeing spots in front of my eyes.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“No, just spots.”
Comment · 14 years ago
As I understand it, psychopathic traits are very good for getting what you want in the short term. If this author’s interview subjects had appreciated the long-term consequences of their antisocial behavior, they wouldn’t be behind bars.
Comment · 14 years ago
Genius!
Comment · 14 years ago
Or, as others here have suggested, simply give public defenders’ offices a budget comparable to the prosecutors’ offices.
If the interests of justice make it worth spending $100K of taxpayer money to prosecute someone charged with a relatively simple crime, then it’s also worth giving that person access to $100K worth of defense lawyering. If the government wants to spend $5M to prosecute an alleged mobster, that alleged mobster should have access to $5M worth of defense.
If the mobster has allegedly ill-gotten gains and the government wants to freeze them, then $5M of those gains would be placed in escrow; if the defendant is acquitted or later proves that the money was earned legitimately, then it would be deposited back into the public defenders’ fund.
Comment · 14 years ago
The government doesn’t charge anything for GPS: http://www.gps.gov/policy/funding/
Comment · 14 years ago
Why did you not realize that “this guy is worth it” until he already has one foot out the door?
If his only reason for being dissatisfied with his current job was the money, why didn’t he just go to his manager and say “hello, I was looking at salary surveys and other information about the job market, and reviewing all the ways that I have made money for you guys over the past year, and I think I deserve such-and-such more than I’m getting right now”? Why is he finding staying in the familiar environment of your company less attractive than job-hunting in his spare time, possibly even burning vacation time for interviews, and then going out to work with a bunch of strangers?
Comment · 14 years ago
Expedia is (allegedly) lying about one of their “partner” hotels in a way that drives customers away from the hotel. Isn’t this the kind of thing that a lawyer would call “tortious interference with business relationships”?
Comment · 14 years ago
I once suggested to my wife that we use the RT bug-tracking system to keep track of household chores. And then, I said, we could create an RT account for each of the kids, and buy each of the kids an iPad Mini, with the Safari homepage set to the RT page, so that as soon as they opened their browsers, they could see what chores they had to do, and easily report on their progress!
For some reason, she was not convinced.
Comment · 14 years ago
In the US, your employer can forbid you from revealing your pay to outsiders, but the National Labor Relations Act guarantees that employees have the right to discuss their pay with one another. (I believe this falls under the heading “you have the right to discuss with your co-workers whether or not your job sucks so much that you should try to organize a union.”)
Comment · 14 years ago
A lot of Russians still view Americans as self-indulgent, somewhat retarded know-it-alls, bathing in life's luxuries that make no sense.
And they’re right! We are!
Comment · 14 years ago
In Boston, if you put too much money into the bus farebox, you get back a coupon that you can use to pay for another bus. The transit authority also sells one-day and one-week passes for the convenience of tourists. I don’t know how other cities do it. (Mass transit is good in Boston, superb in NYC, and mediocre-to-nonexistent everywhere else.)
I think attitudes to being approached by strangers on the street vary by region. People in California and the South are chattier than people here in the frozen Northeast.
Comment · 14 years ago
they've apparently deliberately designated a large number of shipment delivery locations as residential delivery
More likely: they have a database or some other kind of service that maps addresses onto “residential” or “not residential”, and either they put off upgrading the database or have some flakiness in their code, so that a lot of addresses get incorrectly marked “residential”, and, well, when you’re prioritizing which bugs you need to fix, the bugs that make your company more money than it deserves usually don’t end up at the top of the list.
Comment · 14 years ago
If X is some investment (gold, real estate, Apple Inc. stock, whatever), and I have structured my portfolio so that I would benefit from the price of X going down, then I am “short X”. If I would benefit from the price of X going up, then I am “long X”.
“You are naturally short housing.” = “If the price of housing goes down, you will be naturally be better off.”
Comment · 14 years ago
There is a case to be made for having precious metals as part of a diversified investment portfolio. (IIRC Burton Malkiel, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, suggests that it be about 1% of your holdings.) But the “gold bugs” are the people who treat gold as the measure of value.
Paul Krugman wrote an excellent critique of the gold bugs in 1996: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
The price of gold has had a nice run since Krugman wrote that column, but if you look at the longer-run historical data, you can see that it’s gone down before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_Spot_Price_per_Gram_f...
Of course, once upon a time, (Linux-based) Maemo/Meego was the OS waiting in the wings, which they were going to migrate to after Symbian stopped being useful to them, and look how well that worked out.