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Umm...what? The first person just picks a number, there's no RNG involved, no need to tell anyone a range. I know we're taught to plan for edge cases, but I find this pretty silly.

edit: Nevermind the second point, I basically echoed what run4yourlives said - I think the averaging somewhat defeats the purpose. "Political stability" is the whole reason they ask not to disclose salaries in the first place.


I'd be more comfortable with a real random (at least pseudorandom) number. Humans are terrible at generating random numbers and information could be given away on account of this. For example, people tend to favor 5s and 6s when generating "random" large numbers.


Ok, I picked a fake random number with my terrible human random number generator. I added my salary and got 65419563.

It's easier to guess someones salary than it is to guess the random number they generated (in order to figure out their salary).


I'm probably a "fecking eejit," but what exactly is so stupid and ridiculous about the quote "Who are the [Twitter] investors? Probably some of the wealthiest people in this country. And we are giving them more wealth."?

I mean, would the tax really hurt Twitter or Zynga? This stuff is just kind of disheartening. Oh no, your multi-billion dollar massive success of a company might lose a couple mil to taxes, better throw a fit or pack up and move to a new city.


Maybe i am too, but I can't figure out how SF is "giving" [the companies] wealth? Said companies are earning their own wealth. SF is not "giving" it to them, I'm sure.

Let's say you were going to lease storage (physical) and outfit A had a flat fee of 50/mo. Outfit B had a flat fee of 70/mo plus appreciation on the goods you stored. Let's say 20/mo difference had negligible impact on your disposable income. Who would you choose?

If you have a choice, why choose the costliest one?


I might choose the one that is closer to me, or closer to where I would want to use the stored items. I might choose the one that also offers a parcel reception service. I might choose the one that has better security - some storage outfits are just a single room separated into lots by loose cardboard. I might choose the one with greater hours of access.

One day people will get that there is far more to 'value' than 'money'. SF is a nice place. People want to be there. Why shouldn't they capitalise on it? Boo-hoo, stupidly wealthy company can't take the heat, so go move to Idaho and see if that tax is really the kind of thing that cripples your tech company.

Rah, rah, private companies should be allowed to accrete wealth for their superior products because that's The American Way. But should a city offer a superior product, suddenly we're all supposed to be communist equalists when it comes to the public life?


> SF is a nice place. People want to be there.

Exactly. I could count on two hands the number of places I'd be willing to live (unless you were paying me truly obscene amounts of money and doing incredibly interesting work). Proper cities with good public transport and fun things going on. In a country where I speak at least a bit of the language.

Quality of life is not something to be ignored; requiring employees to live elsewhere or make long commutes is a big deal. When you're a startup looking for younger employees and fostering that kind of culture, location is vitally important.


If only businesses were as simple to manage as leasing physical storage space.

It's not just City versus Company. Your employees are a factor in this, and employee decisions are based on lots of different variables.

Employees are the most perishable resource a company has. If my company told me they were moving my downtown Chicago office to the suburbs, I would start looking for a new job. I'd wager that half to 2/3rds of my office would not like an office move either, primarily because of the increase in commuting time and cost. (Hell, I would have to buy a car!)

Twitter and Zygna have an enormous investment in the talent of their employees. Many of them are likely to prefer working in SF rather than Brisbane. So they may play hardball with the City, but I'll bet they ultimately do what their employees want them to do.


Cutting straight to the chase, there may be hidden opportunity costs as well. You might attract better engineers if your company were in San Francisco rather than Brisbane.

Just sayin; ain't sayin it's so.


Why are you sperging about this so much? It's just a cutesy geeky reference. I don't think anyone is under the impression that it actually leverages the layout of the periodic table in a useful way. What a curmudgeon.


Because it's cargo culting. The periodic table looks the way it does because it's about the relationships between the different elements organized spatially on the page. Because of that, it also lets us predict elements we haven't discovered yet! Amazing!

There's really no reason that the relationship between typography, dessert, vegetables, google apis look anything like the relationship between the elements. If it did, we'd really be on to something!

But! If the relationships between google apis isn't at all like the elements, what would it look like? And even more interesting, if there are missing spaces, that means there are google apis not yet written that we can look forward to!

http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/

Is an example where someone did a periodic table that tried to use space as a way to convey information about the relationship between the perl operators. Notice how it looks nothing like the PTofE. It has its own structure because the relationship between perl operators is different than the relationship between the elements.

Those of us that are sticklers about this feel so, probably because we find the beauty of the actual meaning behind the structure of the periodic table much much more interesting and beautiful than any joke you can make from it.

Sometimes, jokes are funny because they're the truth that no one wants to say. Like when Chris Rock says, "[When listening to your woman], you've always got to throw in 'told you that bitch crazy', because every woman has another woman at their work, that they can't stand"

Other times, jokes are funny because one doesn't know any better. Like when Chris Rock says, "If they can send a space shuttle to the moon, why can't they make an El Dorado with a bumper that doesn't fall off?"


That might just be your computer (or Vista?). On my netbook, on Win7, none of that happens. The only thing I noticed was a slight delay when the Start menu closed and I saw an empty desktop for a split-second before the Computer window Aero'd into existence. The filling of the window was also slightly asynchronous. No progress bar, cursor change, or icon flicker though.


That's what pains me the most. Anyone with half a brain can see that these people provide nothing of value and should be laughed out of court and punished for wasting everyone's time, yet that will never happen and they will continue to clog up the system with their BS.



The problem with compiling an overall $/oz. amount is that, generally, prices go down as quantity goes up. The data will be skewed if a lot of people are reporting $50 eighths (400/oz.) and the price for an ounce from the same dealer is, say, $300. Maybe track the different amounts separately?


Exactly, we aren't incorporating the volume discount when we scale up smaller quantities of weed. This is because we really just don't know what the average margins of sales between different quantities.

We could display the averages in each quantity, but it would lack enough sample size. Plus having one nice round number is easier to visualize. I think the final .oz average probably within +/-10% accuracy.


publishing the standard deviation on the normalized price would go a long way towards making the numbers more useful. If you get enough samples you can do a simple fit to attempt to quantify the discount rate.


If you're totally on the fence and any modern smartphone would suit your needs, I would (and did) go with the iPhone 4 (caveat: having mac/pc access would make it much easier). It's sleek, it's smooth, it's got the X-factor and you'll probably have a lot of fun with it. The screen is stunning, the video and still cameras are great (I've officially retired my digital point-and-shoot), FaceTime is a fun gimmick, iOS is incredibly smooth and responsive, and then there's the app store. You can also sync the calendar to your google account, just to clarify, since old_gregg implied that you couldn't. And yes, it also automatically identifies phone numbers and email addresses in text. In fact, it picked up "wednesday at noon" in an email and gave an option to make a calendar event out of it.


"In many cases, Karelis says, diminishing marginal utility certainly does apply:"

Either way, I'd like to know why exactly he and the article are crap. I'm not completely sold on it myself, but you've really only managed to appeal to authority so far.


The main reason his theory is crap is it just doesn't agree with experiment. The article mentions several, all of which tend to encompass the income regime Karelis is presumably talking about. One example is the negative income tax experiment of the 70's, another is welfare to work.

If Karelis has evidence of his theory, he should present it. But as it stands, he is pushing thought experiments and analogies, and telling us to ignore the empirical evidence when it disagrees with his theory.


Which they have done before now, and will continue to do after. You seem to assume that these are brand new games being rolled out with this pricing scheme - all of them are over a year old, some 3 or 4 years. Do you really believe that they would make the same amount by continuing to sell old indie games at their own prices and without a buzz-generating promotion?


Also, on the Binary Fractions page, in the last cell of the first table, the last term is "1x0," which should be "1x1."

Nice, informative site though.


Thanks - will fix that tonight.


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