Why on earth is Prof McGonagall announcing in public that a bunch of children's parents are dead and were evil? That seems a really, really terrible way to break the news to them.

I'd expect at the very least she'd tell them privately in advance, and probably wouldn't say it in public at all, except in very general terms.

Sublinear pricing.

Many products are being sold that have substantial total production costs but very small marginal production costs, e.g. virtually all forms of digital entertainment, software, books (especially digital ones) etc.

Sellers of these products could set the product price such that the price for the (n+1)th instance of the product sold is cheaper than the price for the (n)th instance of the product sold.

They could choose a convergent series such that the total gains converge as the number of products sold grows large (e.g. price for nth item = exp(-n) + marginal costs )

They could choose a divergent series such that the total gains diverge (sublinearly) as the number of products sold grows large (e.g. price for nth item = 1/n + marginal costs )

Certainly, this reduces the total gains, but any seller who does it would outcompete sellers who don't. And yet, it doesn't seem to exist.

True, many sellers do reduce prices after a certain amount of time has passed, and the product is no longer as new or as popular as it once was, but that is a function of time passed, not of items sold.

No, no way.

The doctor knew; I emphasized to him that I wanted to.

If the IDF won't take me, do you really think a volunteer army would? Maybe they'd be more understanding of how diagnoses are made in the US, but I'm not too hopeful.

If my karma takes a hit is there an easy way that I can find out what is being downvoted? I can't self correct if I don't know what is disliked.

I think the anagram-of-your-name thing works better if you're called Scott Alexander than if you're called Viliam Bur.

It also helps if you're willing to drop an 'n'.

There's definitely some risk here, but if you invested $3000 in buying ASIC bitcoin miners and joined a mining pool right now, you'd make returns of at least $10/day. That's about 10% return / month. You can even do this entirely on the cloud without having to set up or host any hardware yourself. The main risk is your hardware becoming obsolete and losing value before you can sell it. But if the value of your miner holds constant for 3 months, you'll have picked up a cool thousand. (This option warrants active management of the bitcoin mining market).

Believe it or not, there's actually a full-on market (order book and everything) for cloud mining hardware at that you can use to track the value of cloud mining hardware and buy/sell them. I'm not sure I'd recommend hosting with them, but you can use the market to track the value over time of active mining hardware. I have about $400 worth of cloud miners going on cex.io as a test and it earns about $2/day at the current (low) bitcoin price, but their maintenance fees eat up almost half of that (I'm not sure how that compares to the cost of running one yourself). It's nice to know that I can sell at any time though.

The other option is, of course, just buying 3k worth of bitcoin and waiting for it to appreciate. (Price was down to ~$375 as of yesterday from its previous average of around $450, so could be a good time to buy. I bought $1k worth of BTC yesterday)

Here's a prediction about the future, that I will make because am going to help to build it. People are going to automatically construct world knowledge databases about things like people, events, companies and so on by hooking up NLP systems to large text corpora like Google Books and newspapers, and extracting/inferring information about the entities directly from the text. This will take the place of manually curated knowledge bases like Freebase.

Maybe. Can you provide an argument for that?

As stated, that wouldn't maximize g, since applying the hash function once and tiling would cap the universe at finite depth. Tiling doesn't make any sense.