This is amazing. Reminds me of What if you lived at ikea? or IKEA Heights.
Month: November 2013
China economic reforms
Most notably, there is finally talk about reforming China’s dominant state-owned enterprises, or SOEs. These behemoths suck up the nation’s resources and crowd out the private sector, though they are bloated, inefficient and hamper the development of the economy.
i haven’t seen much discussion on this. also:
The Chinese government will ease its one-child family restrictions and abolish “re-education through labor” camps
Textbook fight
Bible belt influence on textbooks wanes. “last stand” for creationists in education might be putting it a bit too strongly (they are, after all, evolving their antics in response to what resonates with their idiot audience), but it is great news that the texas state board can no longer mandate textbooks. if we are lucky, the us will get pupils that are less of an embarrassment in the science rankings, and the bible belt will get employable citizens.
Avoid tweaking UBI
good followup. unless we resist the temptation to “tweak” things, we’ll end up in the same complicated mess we have today:
Whether on grounds of justice, practicality, or just public choice considerations, we should not expect everyone to be paid the same under a guaranteed annual income. And with enough tweaks, this version of the guaranteed income suddenly starts resembling…the welfare state, albeit the welfare state plus.
Tizen-who?
Companies from All Segments of the Mobile and Connected Device Ecosystems Become Tizen Association Partners to Collaborate on the Ongoing Development of the Tizen Project and Platform
OMG THEY GOT THE WEATHER CHANNEL. IT IS ALL OVER FOR OTHER MOBILE OS
2014-11-23: They’ve been failing for 3 years already, and are now competing with mozilla and ubuntu to see who can circle the drain faster.
Baseband exploits
we have a complete operating system with full access to the phone main memory, without any exploit mitigation, which automatically trusts every instruction it receives from the base station you’re connected to. What could possibly go wrong?
Inefficient forms of aid
A group of Occupy Wall Street activists has bought almost $15m of Americans’ personal debt. The low market value of the debt, of course, means these individuals (mostly) would not have paid anyway, so the leveraged return on this investment is not as high as is being claimed.
Low cost Ferrari
the solution for ballers who want to drive a ferrari but can’t afford it.
Polywater
spoiler: out of sweat actually. the story of Polywater (1969) mirrors the story of cold fusion (1989), or of FTL neutrinos (2011). these are pathological science, tiny sample sizes and a potentially revolutionary (and career-making) findings leading scientists astray.
In the 1960s, scientists discovered a new form of water. How did they get it so wrong?
UBI math
Conservatives think such a program could significantly reduce the size of our federal bureaucracy. The left is more concerned with basic income as an anti-poverty and pro-mobility tool.
it would be pretty amazing if you could just do a big TARP like program and go straight to this. afterwards you can restructure the economy to deal with the move to a mostly automated society, ala Erik Brynjolfsson.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 