hexhex

It depends on the size of cooperative how much you have to be involved --- if it's only one house, you'll surely have to be involved. Other coops have thousands of members, in these you can choose to just be a renter (in fact most people do that in my parents coop, less than 10% go to the annual meetings etc.).

It's certainly true that individual landlords have some trouble with renting out their property. The majority of homes however is held by companies, whose administration deals with renters. Maintenance costs of a single home can be uncertain, but of a number of homes it's very predictable. So the risks of big companies holding properties is manageable, and in no proportion to the profits that big conglomerates such as Deutsche Wohnen make.

There is a solution to the housing problem besides home ownership and renting: Housing cooperatives. These are still relatively common in Germany, my parents live in a flat owned by a cooperative and are consistently paying less rent than I pay for my college dorms, despite living in the center of a major city.

The cooperative was founded by workers in the 19th century and has a single purpose: To provide affordable housing, satisfying the needs of their members. It isn't subsidized by the state, its business model is simply to distribute the expenses for building and maintaining the flats to their members.

Home ownership has the disadvantage of being too inelastic and imposing the risks of owning a house to individuals. Renting from a private company on the other hand means you constantly have to give up a significant portion of your income so someone else makes profit from basically doing nothing.

Cooperatives strike me as the best solution to this dilemma. It's of course not surprising that the Economist doesn't mention this at all, the flaws of their argument have been sufficiently demonstrated by other commenters. The basic recognition that home ownership is flawed is an important point though IMO.

I was more referring to the fact that EA promotes philanthropy instead of asking why we have inequalities in the first place. So it evades questions of redistribution or fairness in a similar fashion as PG.

I'm not quite sure how strong the analogy is though.

My two cents on why his writings are popular: - He uses anecdotal evidence which appears to be sound at first. Looking at the top 100 billionaires seems to give a good idea on how wealth is created and distributed, but really it is only a glimpse at a much bigger phenomenon (especially since the data only comes from two years). - His style of writing is very accessible and natural. He wrote an article on his style (http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html), and it seems to strike a chord with technicians who prefer this over more complicated prose.

I feel these are the same reasons for why effective altruism is so popular among technicians. It offers clear cut answers, and avoids uncomfortable questions.

The author puts Gödel's Incompleteness and the Continuum hypothesis on the same level, which is misleading. The continuum hypothesis is unprovable in our current mathematical foundation ZFC, but there are extensions to ZFC that either make the continuum hypothesis true or false.

Incompleteness is a property of every sufficiently complex formal system and thus poses a general constraint in logic.

That a particular learning problem is not provable in ZFC is not that surprising. Connections between learning and Incompleteness are way more interesting (and there is a lot of pseudo-research going on, "proving" that humans are not simulatable by computer etc.)

Which is mostly due to safety concerns, the fire regulations are not met by BER due to a complete chaos in planning the construction.

Nowadays, big projects in the West are far more complex since have to meet more demands and more stakeholders are involved. In authoritarian countries, this is not so much a problem, the new airport in Istanbul is built very fast, but concerns from citizens are not respected etc.

I would hardly say it shows the effectiveness of philanthropy - this is just one college and has very limited effects on the healthcare system as a whole. In Germany for instance higher education is free everywhere, I don't see how this could work with private fundraising.

As an European I always find the dichotomy "government vs people" strange. If the state pays for something, it's solidarity, not communism.

You are right, they solved the particular problem I highlighted with Modifiers.

But the main question remains: Why don't they utilize the progess we made in decades of research for better programming languages?

The argument that Solidity should be useable by the average programmer doesn't hold, in fact, typing makes programming easier since it clarifies data structures that are implicit in languages like JS.

I didn't have high expectations for Solidity considering the recent vulnerabilities, but even these were disappointed. If some guy writes this kind of code at home, alright, but this as the alleged foundation for our future financial system? Frightening.

Just one example: "Our function EndLottery() must be only accessible by the owner of the lottery." [0]

function EndLottery() public { if (msg.sender == owner) { ... } }

What about code guards? Not to speak of decent typing, etc. etc.

[0] https://ethereumdev.io/managing-multiple-users-a-simple-lott...

The CCC used an old digicam at medium distance. It is quite likely that such a photo is on FB, Instagram etc.

Side note: The CCC even recovered the fingerprint of the Germany's defense minister from a photo: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/30/hacker-fa...

I can obtain an image of you online, while I need to be on-site to spot you typing your pin. So if I have your phone, I can do research at home to break in.

Additionally, you cannot change your iris once it's compromised. This is an absolute no-no for secure systems! Changing your pin is easy.

This is definitely not a huge step forward. And, as already mentioned, the average user gets misguided by exaggerated marketing promises.

For me it was the finding that mathematics is quite arbitrary. There is no deeper meaning in using functions, sets or logic, it just seems to work. These still are just models of the world for us.

Yeah the load balancer was just intended for the application servers. Running a hot DB secondary with just read accesses is possible by setting up manually, but tends to require a lot of maintenance work during updates in our experience.

To be honest, we have not figured out how to connect the DO servers to AWS yet. Do you have experience with that?

We have such an application running on DO, 100k visitors users a month. We have a big application server running and other servers for DB (postgres and redis) and static files (which is basically a nginx mirror).

So far, we are satisfied. Over the last year, there were 4 out times which lasted 30min to 1h caused by DO, which is alright I guess.

Since we experience more traffic peaks in the last time, we may use their load balancers in the future. The application servers are not the problem though, more the DB server. This is more a pain, since setting up and maintaining a DB cluster is quite a lot of work. We might go to AWS for this.

TL;DR DO works for larger projects, databases are bit of a pain though

> trying to address what we can is a better option than throwing up our hands and saying it's a social problem

I totally agree that we shouldn't throw our hands up. However, the consequence is not to do just some stuff just because you know web development, but to think on a larger scale.

It seems like a big trend of our time that no one wants to do politics. With politics I don't mean being a bureaucrat, but to express your opinions and trying to change something on a normative level. Effective Altruism, tackling injustice by consuming "fair" products, social entrepreneurship: All these things seem to be just for soothing our consciences.

What we miss is to actually change something. The current political situation is the product of this individual politicising.

This requires that you actually want to lose weight and do something about it.

Obese people often have a low socio-economic status [1]. If you are marginalized, eating may be an outlet for frustration. You won't buy special stuff to lose weight.

Everyone here was surprised when Trump got elected (except Peter Thiel). "Nerd nation" [2] is a huge bubble -- the majority of our society is different. The won't buy any drugs or apps.

[1] http://www.noo.org.uk/uploads/doc/vid_7929_Adult%20Socioeco%... [2] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advan...

I don't think that's a problem that is solvable with technology. It's a social problem. Less social inequality and better education, taxes on unhealthy food, less working hours. That would be necessary to tackle the problem. Obesity is just a symptom.

I love the SV mindset: Let's not get to the reasons of something, let's just build an app and everything will be good.