"Tower of Babylon" by Ted Chiang. It's a novelette that's part of his compilation "Stories of Your Life and Others". To quote Wikipedia, "the story follows a young miner from the town of Elam who ascends the tower of Babylon to help break through the vault of heaven. Along the way he sees many wonderous sights, uncovers mysteries of heaven and earth, and in the end finds them as inscrutable as ever."
The main flaw I can think of is that insurance is a money-loser on average - otherwise the people selling it wouldn't make any money, so they wouldn't offer it at that price. I can't immediately find average ratios for life insurance, but typical payouts for medical insurance are 80% of premiums while the figure for property insurance is more like 50%.
In other words, the expected net cost of taking out the insurance policy, if you never decide to redirect it to cryonics or loved ones, is going to be somewhere between 20% and 50% of the premiums. Is that worth it for the extra flexibility it gives you? That's something only you can decide.
Here's a quick-and-dirty batch file I made to add a reminder to the task scheduler. Copy it into Notepad and save it as something.bat , then make a link to it on your desktop or wherever.
@echo off
set /p MESSAGE=What do you want to be reminded of?^
^>
set /p ALERTTIME=When do you want to be reminded (hh:mm:ss)?^
^>
set TASKNAME=%DATE:/=_%_%TIME::=_%
set TASKNAME=%TASKNAME:.=_%
schtasks /create /sc once /tn %TASKNAME% /tr "msg * %MESSAGE%" /st %ALERTTIME%
pause
EDIT: I can't figure out how to make LessWrong put a blank line in a code bloc...
"Those who want to distinguish themselves from the masses - who want to consume conspiciously - will also be affected, since they will have to spend less to stand out from the crowd" - maybe I've misunderstood this, but surely it would have the opposite result? Let's say rents are ~$20/sqm (adjust for your own city; the principle stays the same). If I want my apartment to be 50 sqm rather than 40 sqm, that's an extra $200. But if 40 sqm apartments were free, the price difference would be the full $1000/month price of the bigger apartment. You've ...
This was Lukeprog's suggestion in the linked post, but they seem to have rejected it based on the difficulty of picking up motivated clients that way. Jonah phrased it as "teenagers and young adults are often rebellious and don't want to do what their parents tell them to". I think that this is something of an exaggeration - kids take test prep seriously after all - but it's true that the value of the service is more difficult for teenagers to see than something like exam tutoring.
Is it worth spending time mentoring kids that aren't interested a...
I saw the same error, but assumed it should have been "we can not hope" (as in, we can't just hope it works out, we have to do something about it).
Are you thinking of SwipeGood (http://swipegood.com/)? I don't know of any credit cards that do that, but several banks have a "save the change" option that rounds up purchases and puts the extra pennies into a nominated savings account. As far as I understand it (the "FAQ" link just sends me back to their homepage), SwipeGood links into those systems to donate the money to charities instead, minus a 5% commission.
It seems to be known under the name of the equal treatment fallacy in various blogs and articles, although none of them are from particularly respectable sources. Other examples are the right of homosexuals to marry a member of the opposite gender, the right of soviet citizens to criticize the president of the USA, and Anatole France's famous statement that "in its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread".
I agree to an extent, but if taken to the level described in the linked article I think it would have a net negative effect because it creates an incentive to conceal information. To take an example from the link, two friends are discussing whether a certain restaurant is/isn't open, and one (let's call him "A" and the other "B") has previously visited the same restaurant at the same time of day. "A" is better off not revealing that fact, so that "B" will give better odds (or agree to take the bet). An environment where you're betting against each other all the time could quickly change from "put your money where your mouth is" to "take advantage of inside information".
The "with family" option in the "living with" question is ambiguous for those of us with children. I suggest changing it to "with parents or guardians[1]", changing the partner/spouse option to "with partner/spouse (and children if applicable)", and adding an "other" option for less traditional living arrangements.
Questions in the mental health section are inconsistent about whether they're referring to whether you have ever suffered from a condition ("have you ever been diagnosed...") or whether ... (read more)