December 2011
22 posts
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“The flip side of egalitarianism is envy and there’s plenty of that to go...”
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What's Unaffordable?
Annual world cost of preventing climate change : $630 Billion
US govt bailouts of banks since 2008: $7.7 Trillion
How is it that we can afford to bail out banks but not save the planet?
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Europes debt woes caused by....divorce
This just in - the cause of Europe’s economic woes is not lax fiscal policy, low productivity or debt fueled speculation as first thought. It turns out the real cause of the grave breakdown of the PIIGS economies is the decline of marriage.
But lets not let little annoying facts like that the PIIGS have significantly lower divorce rates than the rest of Europe interfere with our moralising...
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“One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority”
– Chris Hitchens
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“It is unwise to give people more powers than you would like them to use.”
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Joel seemed happily married. He killed his wife.
Which of these two statements is more likely?
Joel seemed happily married. He killed his wife. Joel seemed happily married. He killed his wife to get her inheritance.
Most people would choose the second but in his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb claims that this is a ‘pure mistake of logic’. His argument is simple enough:
Statement one is a superset of statement two as it...
“If your company lacks the tools to communicate remotely, it’s highly probable it...”
– http://www.garann.com/dev/2011/the-150k-solution/
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25 years too late
Why are all my best philosophical ideas 25 years too late? A typical scenario:
Me: “Utilitarianism is wrong because if total utility is all that matters, then we should be encouraging population growth until there are so many of us that our net utility is barely positive. If average utility is all that matters, then we should just execute everyone except the happiest individual”....
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