rkbabang

Apparently digg is working on a google reader replacement. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/06/inside_digg_reader/all/ http://digg.com/reader

"According to a recent tweet from the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company’s founder and chief executive, Elon Musk, there will be no initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX stock before humans have begun to settle Mars. " Musk: Humans on Mars Before SpaceX Goes Public

What non-essential item do people continue to buy right up to their last nickel? That isn't a rhetorical question, because I don't know. Basically anything that causes additions? Sex?

I don't know many people who love a certain brand of toilet paper over all others. I've never seen someone with a toilet paper branded t-shirt or hat, or toilet paper memorabilia as decoration in their homes. It would be hard to compare any toilet paper company to what Coke once was.

Maybe beer, but (at least with the people I know) Coke and cigarettes seem to be a necessity for an ever shrinking percentage of the population. I suspect in 20 or 30 years saying Coca-Cola will be like saying "Tang" or "Ovaltine" today. It may bring back a feeling of nostalgia, but it will not be on anyone's list of things people spend their last nickel on. Coffee might be another one, but it is a highly fragmented market, and the big players do not have even close to the best coffee, in fact you can make much better coffee yourself at home. That leaves beer I guess. I shouldn't have sold my SAM stock.

What non-essential item do people continue to buy right up to their last nickel? That isn't a rhetorical question, because I don't know.

I'm still using feedly as well. It's ok, I've gotten used to it.

+1 Thanks for posting the article. Even if it was more of a rant than an article, there wasn't much of anything in it that I wouldn't agree with. If you want a more detailed and thoughtful analysis of political authority check out "The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey" by Michael Huemer" http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41SUpgBS5VL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg I just finished it last night and I highly recommend it. It is just starting to become a must read book in the libertarian/anarcho-capitalist circles. Unlike many others who start out with a controversial premiss (such as "selfishness is a virtue" or "charity is destructive" or "property rights are absolute", etc), he starts with some pretty non-controversial premises which most civilized humans with liberal values would agree with and goes from there. One of his comments toward the end of the book after coming to the conclusion that state power if it exists will almost always be used aggressively against foreigners he makes the analogy to defending your home. You have a right to defend your home from invaders, but you do not have a right to do something likely to kill innocent children who don't live with you (such as burying landmines in your front yard). You have an obligation not to cause unnecessary harm on others. For this reason alone you have an obligation to find some other way of protecting yourself other than an aggressive state. I'm probably not wording it very well, and this is just one small part of an entire book. The first half of the book he goes over every possible justification of state power and why it is not valid. Then the second half of the book explores how a liberal modern society could function without giving aggressive power to a central authority.

I've read almost everything Dawkins has written. You can't go wrong with any of his books.

Just finished: (re-read for the 3rd time in the last 10-12 years) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Cryptonomicon%281stEd%29.jpg Currently in the middle of: (excellent so far) http://resources.macmillanusa.com/jackets/500H/9781137281654.jpg

I'm not sure if Sanjeev can change that or not, but it is how the simple machines message board software works by default. Post-Count based membergroup

I don't know which browser you use, but if it is Firefox get the "Nuke Anything Enhanced" add-on. . I use this whenever I want to print portions of a page on the web. It allows you to remove anything from a webpage. You can click on an object, right click and select "Remove this object", and it will be gone until you hit reload. What is nice is that if you remove stuff you can then print the page without the stuff you don't want. To print a single post from this board you could 1) Select the entire post that you want to print 2) Right click and you will see two options: "Remove Selection" and "Remove Everything Else". Hit Remove Everything Else and you will have just that post in your browser window with everything else gone. 3) Then you can print it as you normally would. 4) After you can hit refresh and the page goes back to normal.

Ouch. He uses almost the same words.

"We continue to expect strong overall equity returns throughout 2013 led by the world's largest stocks, i.e. mega-cap stocks. Further, we believe the bull market is likely far from over with the sweet spot for mega-cap stocks still ahead and though its peak... The mix of optimism and skepticism is consistent with our view we're at the bull market's midpoint, with much more bull market yet to come. As legendary investor Sir John Templeton said, "Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria." In our view, investors still have one foot in skepticism and one in optimism." "Fisher Investments - Stock Market Outlook"

Now I get it, he's into penny stocks! I always wondered where his name came from.

Fusion is one of those technologies that we have known in theory how to do for a long time, but we don't yet have the enabling technology to actually do it. Just as we knew how to build a computer for hundreds of years before the vacuum tubes (and later transistors) existed enabling us to actually build one. One day this is just going to happen and it will seem to most people like a giant leap forward in short order, even though it will have been based on a century or more of research and development. Here is a good synopsis of the current state of the technology. There is a lot of good info in the links. Nuclear Fusion Summary - Prospects for breakthrough commercial reactors 2018-2025

I introduced no straw into the argument. What you said was ridiculous and indefensible. Which is why your only defense was an ad hominem. OK, show some data or evidence that demonstrates the economic impact of the printing press since its invention in 1454 and let's say 1700. I've been alone here putting evidence on the table, while most dismisse it with a sleight of hand. My only defense is that evidence: * Agriculture was 99.9% of the world output until the industrial revolution * The printing press does not show in the slow advances of agriculture, detailed in 1493. * There is no evidence in output per capita growth in history until the industrial revolution. * The gap of the richest countries compared the poorest countries until the industrial revolution were minor compared to today's standards. * Check the graph of historic GDP per capita. You can't see the printing press, you can see the steam engine. Now, if you think that the printing press was an enabling technology for the industrial revolution 300 years later, that only reinforces the point of that post: a technology is a tool, and its worth only depends on its use. You use it for art you get Gutenberg's bible, you use it for science you get Principia Mathematica, you use it for political theory you get The Prince, you use it for religion you get Luther and the King James' bible. Why wasn't it used for agricultural innovation? The industrial revolution is one of the most mysterious events in human history. What was stopping the invention of the steam engine or the cotton gin for centuries? The technologies are not that complicated. I doubt that it was the printing press but I concede that an argument can be made on it importance disseminating the steam experiments in France from the late 1600s … but letters worked well for Kepler and Brahe. I was reading today about the semaphore, the predecessor of the telegraph, that was introduced during the French Revolution and latter perfected by Napoleon. The technology is so ridiculously simple that it is not easy to understand why it wasn't introduced thousands of years before. No need of a printing press for that. The industrial revolution origins are not that clear even today after dozens of books and hundreds of years of accumulated investigation. Almost every year there is a new book (irony) that fails to solve that puzzle. Economic output was handicapped by the church and the feudal system. These were systematic, crippling handicaps which needed to be broken and it took centuries. The printing press is what got the ball rolling and enabled these systems to be eventually destroyed. Look at the computer. You don't see an immediate impact in 1946 after the first computer. You don't see a major economic impact for another 40 years, at least. Tt is safe to say that innovation makes an impact 10 times quicker now than it did in the 15th century, so 40 years now = 400 years then. Not to mention the computer didn't have to re-organize the way society worked before making an impact, the printing press did. The internet is a better analogy to the printing press, in that it will eventually completely change the way society works. Destroying old systems, building new ones, destroying them and building still newer systems. This will be a process that will take a long time. You can see the realization beginning to dawn on some people already that business can be done between any two people on Earth as easily as it can be done locally, but all of these physical political boundaries unnecessarily complicate things and get in the way. Look at Apple trying to figure out what to do with its cash. Where the most difficult part wasn't how to create excellent devices or how to best benefit shareholders, but rather how to make sure the parasites don't steal an excessive amount of it. People have a resistance to changing how they view the world. Things will stay the same until the cognitive dissonance required to fool oneself becomes unbearable. That is when (like serfdom, slavery, women's rights, or gay rights) the generally accepted way that things "have always been done", becomes generally accepted to be immoral and is changed.

A dangerous market to be in, because it is ripe for nationalization. The currently accepted theory is that people have a right to free healthcare and most pet owners I know think that pets are people too.

I introduced no straw into the argument. What you said was ridiculous and indefensible. Which is why your only defense was an ad hominem. Yes the printing press caused wars, but it didn't just cause wars. And saying it had no effect on the economy is completely false. Almost all of the growth in the worlds economy since its invention is directly attributable to it. Every improvement in your life over that of a medieval serf is directly attributable to it. It is like saying "the invention of fire added nothing to the economy it just caused a lot of burns". Asinine. Also I am not a "confessed" anarchist. You only need to confess something for which you are not proud of, like the commission or support of a crime. With all of the murder (hundreds of millions in the 20th century alone) committed by governments, wars, massive theft from almost everyone on the planet (anyone with anything to steal anyway), I can see why someone would be a "confessed statist", but there is no need to confess to being apposed to the legitimization of violence on a massive scale. You smell logical fallacies where there are none, yet are quite proficient in their application.

I disagree, they are probably both right, but they just have their time scales all wrong. Peter Thiel is more correct the shorter the timescale you look at (for instance, nothing life changing has happened this week as far as I know), he's just wrong saying that it has been 30 years. Where Kurzweil probably will be right eventually, he just may be off by a hundred years or three.

No argument there, knowledge and technology can be beautiful and so can be art. But technology can also have bad effects. For example, the invention of the printing press had no economic impact at all, and instead was a trigger of religious wars. Yes we should never have allowed the serfs to read the Bible, the church should have retained all of its power and we'd still be living peaceably in the dark ages. Wow. The internet is going to cause more war, death and destruction than the printing press did as people eventually realize that government itself is no more necessary than religion was (this will take centuries, just as it has taken centuries for religion to fall, a still on-going process in itself), but it is a necessary step in the evolution of our society, just as the printing press was. Just because it subjects us to the death throes of a dieing beast losing its grip on its power, doesn't mean that it wasn't a good thing. The beast was the problem to begin with, not the process of ridding society of its control.

moon landing: 1969 the first flight: 1903 the creation of the internal combustion engine: early to mid 19th century. the development of the first electronic computers: 1946 (ENIAC) with the first microprosesors not arriving until the early 1970s. It doesn't seem like major completely new innovations happened all that frequently in the past either. The thing is none of the above happened out of the blue. The internal combustion engine was built up from innovations starting as far back as the Romans in the 3rd century using crankshafts and connecting rods in saw mills. (Hierapolis_sawmill) The digital computer was built on mathmatics done in previous centuries. And the hardware itself is simply built upon the same principles of mechanical computing machines, which have been envisioned as far back as Liebniz. Vacuum tubes (and later transistors) serve as the valves in the machine. Nothing ever springs forth from nowhere. Technology builds upon itself in small steps (and sometimes leaps or bounds), but always built upon what comes before. Sometimes a purely theoretical idea can sit around for centuries before we are ready to put it to practical use. Right now we are in the process of connecting everyone and everything together. This will lead to things we can't yet imagine when the process is finished. Thiel is a smart guy, but that is an asinine statement if I ever heard one.

Glad to hear that you are OK. I had a similar accident when I was a teenager in the 80's. I was on a moped in a school parking lot and I had it going as fast as it could go (maybe 30mph) and I went around the corner of the building head on into a Mazda RX7 that was being driven by a guy in his 20's also faster than he should have been going around the corner. I flew over the car, bounced once on his roof (my body made a dent in it) and landed on the pavement behind the car getting some minor road rash on my arms and legs. The moped was completely totaled and the front end of his new RX-7 was a mess. It's a scary feeling in that fraction of a second when you first realize the collision is going to happen.

You said yourself that these things can't be answered with precision and I agree. Any answer is nothing but fortune telling and/or opinionated guess work. But I will make my guess. 85%: This isn't a high-hyper-inflation scenario and with all the money printing going on I think it is safe to assume that 5% is likely to be reached in at least one year out of the next 20. 50%: 20 years is a long time and the rate of change is picking up. I think we are likely to see more change in the next 20 years to our society and our way of life than we've had in the last 60. I'd say it is as likely as not that the position of the US, in general, and the US dollar, specifically, in the world will be one of those major changes.

It's "Sell in May and buy a Tesla".