throwaway080383

Are the upper class not simply the descendants of those who were once the upper echelon?

Fair enough. I guess I presumed the preference since he uses an iPhone.

I'm surprised that despite being able to concisely explain why Apple is preferable to Google due to the privacy implications of their respective business models, they're perfectly content with a Google Home in their kitchen!

Maybe I'm paranoid, but isn't it obvious how the whole Home Speaker story ends? "We're not spying on you, we're learning your behaviors to offer a better experience!"

I disagree. It's a cliche at this point that when Wal-Mart enters a town, all the mom and pop stores close up. The profit margins from distributing these goods now contributes to $WMT rather than staying in the local economy.

I'm curious how much it would cost to say double the worker's salaries (or halve their hours at the same pay).

How many Foxconn man-hours does it take to produce an iPhone, and what is the average hourly wage?

Ship it and sell it for $15!

I never say anything about d being even. Rather, as soon as d > 0, x{d} is even, so "almost all" x{d} are even. As you vary x and d, you cover all integers exactly once, so from this perspective, "almost all" integers are even.

My point is that this is very similar to how elliptic curves are being counted here.

The twist x{d} is even as soon as d>0.

Even the phrase almost all is a bit misleading here, since there is no canonical choice of measure on the set of elliptic curves in question.

To back up my last claim, let me prove that 100% of positive integers are even in the same spirit:

Fix any odd positive integer x, and consider its "twists" x{d}, which for positive d I define to be x*2^d. Every integer is of the form x{d} for a unique choice of x and d. Now, for fixed N, if I consider all "twists" for which d<N, the proportion which are even is (N-1)/N. Thus, as N tends to infinity, the proportion tends to 1.

More severe than death?

Pretty sure books are going to be around for a while.

That website doesn't call it crazy, it just points out many of the difficulties, and the comments refute many of them.

I do have to admit, it did not occur to me that the work week would still effectively enforce an "ordering" on longitudes which somehow takes the beauty out of it.

I'm not sure if you were serious, but I actually think completely getting rid of timezones is not that crazy of an idea. It would take some getting used to, but naively I don't think it'd be any harder than say, switching to metric in the US.

That is, I like the idea in principle, but I know it'll never happen.