Are clothes the root of all evil?

How would today be different if humans rejected clothing and nudism prevailed?

Let's start by turning to Biblical scripture for help in answering the question. In Genesis, Adam and Eve ate an apple, i.e. fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, despite it being forbidden. (Blame the serpent.) Upon doing so, they felt shame at their nakedness, and covered themselves. In fact, that is how God immediately knew that Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.

naked = without wisdom gained from eating of Tree of Knowledge 




clothed = with wisdom gained from eating of Tree of Knowledge




evil = serpent

Adam and Eve each hold a golden apple.

Elisha of Ascoli's Ketubah: Mantua, Italy on 31 August 1629

Since this was a decoration for the upper right corner of a ketubah (a marriage certificate used mostly by Sephardic Jews from about 1400 to the 1950s), the Hebrew inscription (happily!) doesn't directly correspond with the image.

Many happy returns!

This is birthday girl

Deluxe version

Large, somewhat grainy animated GIF with music 

Днем Рождения! Happy Birthday! 

Low bandwidth silent version

Demise of the Navajo Generating Station

Here's the Quora question: How can California go completely to electric cars when we already experience brown-outs and other rolling blackouts due to not having enough electricity?

This answer by Quora user Edw says it all.

California is decommissioning its nuclear plants. Wind and solar won't be able to take up the slack so it will have to buy power from nuclear and coal plants in neighboring states.

That might not be as easy as it once was. More on that in a moment. I upvoted the answer and left a comment of agreement.

Yes, you are correct. California has been sucking all the electricity from Hoover Dam for decades. The Colorado River and Hoover Dam are on the border between Arizona (where I live) and Nevada. Yet my state only gets 10% of the electricity generated by the hydroelectric power from Hoover Dam. Nevada gets about the same. California takes over 50%.

There's more. Californian insanity has spread like a contagion to states north and east of California, and now they are decommissioning their nuclear power and coal plants too!

Let me tell you about another victim, not a nuclear plant, but important nonetheless

The Navajo Generating Station

The Navajo Nation operated a coal power plant on reservation land for DECADES. They were forced to shut it down in 2019. Green liberal Democrats and Republican renewable energy business didn’t care that the Navajo Generating Station had kept the reservation energy-independent. It is a tragedy how 700 Navajo people lost their good jobs, that were right there, on the reservation in northeast Arizona. The generating station produced more energy than needed locally, so the extra was sold through interties to the electric power grid. AND the coal was mined locally!

The Navajo nation protested regulatory demands for plant closure, instigated by California, to no avail. Although it was located on supposedly sovereign native American land, The State shut down their power plant. There is nothing to replace it. 

Google Maps retrospective

I was curious, and had a look at what Google Maps reviews had to say about the Navajo Generating Station, which was run with assistance from a Maricopa County public utility, the Salt River Project. I reproduced some of the reviews here. 

Wind and solar will never replace nuclear and coal, despite what John Kerry and other attendees at COP say. This first review describes solar only advocates as ignorami.

This guy HATED the Navajo Generating Station, as it detracted from his Lake Powell experience, OMG!

Why is working in pairs so rare at work?

I agree that on-the-job working in pairs is rare. There are some exceptions such as pair programming and law enforcement (police work in pairs usually) but not many others!

Why are pairs so rare?

I attribute it to the fact that some supervisors and project managers either:

1. don’t know what is technically involved in enough detail to think of a way to allocate work to teams of two. When they do, it usually isn’t two workers who are peers. Instead, one is experienced and the other is less so or maybe new to the company or project, and mostly “shadows” the experienced person. It is more like one person working, and the other person watching and learning!
2. are concerned that two people who are peers—and should contribute equally—will not. One person will do most or all of the work. Why does this happen, and why doesn’t the one who contributes say something about it to management or the team leader? Lots of reasons, some of which I couldn’t ever figure out! Even when I suspected this was going on, it wasn’t possible to prove without the cooperation of the person who was doing the bulk of the work.

People can work in pairs most effectively when there are not multiple dependencies in the workflow/ timing. For example, one person might write the code to do some analysis, after or maybe simultaneously with the other person who looks for a data source then tests/confirms its adequacy (e.g. quality, frequency, time span, availability/cost, has a data dictionary) for the analysis. Yet even this scenario is more accurately described as two people working on two different parts of a project (or assignment, or experiment) rather than working as a pair.

An eponymous example

The only example that quickly comes to my mind is pairs programming. I did that at work, briefly. It was fascinating and revealing!

What do Nick Szabo and Wei Dai do for a living?

What do secretive cryptography experts like Nick Szabo and Wei Dai do to earn a living? via Quora

Now with 2024 update

The most transparent cryptography experts are those that work in academia. Matthew D. Green is a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University. Others work in industry and have prominent public profiles like Bruce Schneier (British Telecom) and Burt Kaliski (Verisign now RSA). Craig Gentry works for IBM; he developed fully homomorphic encryption about 10 years ago.

Some cryptographers have sub rosa personal lives, yet maintain updated websites including disclosure of who and where they have worked in the recent and less-recent past. Their websites aren't just blogs. They have plenty of well-organized content. Good examples are the steganography guys, Neil F. Johnson and Gary Kessler, who work as consultants and sometimes as longer-term contractors.

Nick Szabo is very cryptic!

It isn't easy to discern what Nick did or does for a living, or anything else about him, even with with pro-level google-fu! Nick Szabo has an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Washington in Seattle and a professional degree in the law (Juris Doctor, which is different than a PhD in law) from George Washington University. In the United States, a law degree is a three-year program of study. In one of Nick Szabo's Unenumerated blog posts, he acknowledged being a law school student in 2006. Let's assume he graduated in 2008.

Given his law degree, I would suggest checking to see if Nick is a member of the bar in any state. He may not be, as plenty of people with law degrees don't practice law although they use their knowledge of it in their work, and are often hired because of it. Examples include legal departments of financial services firms (both fintech and traditional), manufacturing companies, and healthcare of all sorts.

If one were to want to develop a digital currency, a high level of competency in computer science as well as a law degree seem ideal, although some knowledge of economics would help too. Many patent attorneys have similar backgrounds, e.g. a physics or electrical engineering undergraduate degree, three years or more of working in the field, then law school.

Will the civil war in Syria begin a second Cold War?

One of the pre-conditions for the Cold War was the existence of nuclear weapons, and the knowledge of mutually assured destruction. Another of the pre-conditions for the Cold War was the resolute leadership (and populace) of the opposing post-World War 2 powers, the USSR and the USA.

In other words, the awareness of each other's nuclear capability acted as deterrent to outright hostilities, while each nation's depth of commitment to its political and social ideology meant that withdrawal or capitulation was not an option.

Is Syria the first proxy war of Cold War 2.0?

No, not really.

Nuclear weapons remain a potent deterrent, now and prior to 1991. Russia has replaced the USSR as one of the two powers, with greater strength than the USSR in some ways (no longer socialist, religiously tolerant), but less in others (equally or more authoritarian leader, loss of Soviet bloc nations in eastern Europe and central Asia). Russia certainly has resolute leadership. A cold war requires two antipodal powers though.

The USA's presidential leadership under the Obama administration is weaker than that of any president during the Cold War years. Putin is described in many unflattering ways--as a thug and a former KGB agent--but never as effete. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is intelligent and perceptive. He is a formidable counterpart to our recent secretaries of state, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

The Syrian Civil War and containment of ISIS cannot be a US versus Russia proxy war if US foreign policy is indecisive, slow-moving, and undermined by the belief that Russia's need to retain its sphere of influence (even though primarily for its own domestic security) is "on the wrong side of history" thus should be ignored.

Artistic rendering of Marie Harf

Another example of the Obama State Department cluelessness is provided by US State Department spokesperson Marie Harf: She said that unemployment was a primary motivation for the formation of ISIS. 

I found the not-so-nice drawing of her above.

Had a good job, still committed jihad

The BBC could not have phrased it better in this 19 February 2015 article, #BBC Trending: No jobs causes jihad

US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf, has been ridiculed for her comments about fighting Islamic State through employment... Harf told MSNBC that... jobs and opportunity would dissuade people from joining - and thus prevent terrorism.

The notion was met with derision by conservatives, and has led to a flood of online memes. Everything from mock hashtags like #jobsforISIS to pictures of known terrorists like Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, with captions like "had a good job, still committed jihad" to personal attacks against Harf herself, making jokes about her age, appearance and intellect.

A Populist Coalition: GOP ethnic minority voters support Trump

Why are minorities telling pollsters they support establishment status quo candidates in 2016? This was my answer on Quora.

Minorities are enthusiastic supporters of some very non-establishment candidates.

Donald Trump counts among his supporters more black and Hispanic people than ANY other Republican presidential candidate, see Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat via The New York Times and Trump winning over Latino Republicans, poll says via NY Post.

Recent surveys found that Muslim Republicans are supportive of Trump too, more so than all other Republican presidential candidates combined! Not many Muslims support Republicans, but those who do support Trump; CAIR did the study. If you don't like that link from Vox, here's one from Voice of America: Why Some US Muslims Still Plan to Vote for Donald Trump.

Minorities are often silenced in America

The RAND Corporation's 2016 election survey panel is notable for being longitudinal rather than cross-sectional. It shows that one particular non-establishment candidate is more popular among those who feel they have no say in government. This is true for that one candidate, more so than any other,  whether Republican or Democrat. 

See more here, RAND Kicks Off 2016 Presidential Election Panel Survey in the section titled, "Trump's Populist Coalition".

U.S. Presidential Election 2016: "People like me don't have any say..."

If one had a flair for the dramatic, one could say that the RAND Corporation has proven that support for Donald Trump transcends voters' gender, age, race/ethnicity, social status, and attitudes towards the disadvantaged.

R to SAS bait and switch?

How would you handle a scenario where the company may have altered the truth about a job?

Question details

"So here is a scenario. I accepted a job two months ago as an analyst where I'd be working primarily with two programming languages. Of the two, one I'm proficient in (R) and the other was brand new to me (SAS). I was going to be their in-house R expert. However, soon after starting, they said that I needed to focus just on SAS. 

Learning SAS isn't that hard and I can spend my evenings using R, however, that is not the arrangement that we agreed on. Therefore, I'm a little frustrated by this and considering whether I should jump ship. What would you do? 

For what it's worth, I've had a couple companies who I've talked with in the past reconnect with me and one even offered me a data scientist role. So I have something lined up if I want to jump ship." 

My answer

Too much cheap money and distorted market valuations

As of November 2015, what does "Finally, too much cheap money lets companies operate with bad unit economics and cover up all sorts of internal problems" mean in the case of distorted valuations? How does this make a startup less robust in the future?"

Let me tell you all about it! 

Interest rates are being held at zero by the Federal Reserve, using quantitative easing, in order to protect the economy from recession. Unfortunately, this has been necessary since 2008, and the Federal Reserve is continuing to postpone raising rates, i.e. monetary normalization, although it is increasingly difficult to justify.

...the entire public market is likely to go down—perhaps substantially—when interest rates materially move up, though that may be a long time away.

The Federal Reserve intended to keep interest rates low, in order to encourage businesses to invest in R&D, new ventures or make capital expenditures for plants, property, and equipment. The logic is that with interest rates so low, there is a strong disincentive to accumulate cash reserves, for both businesses and investors. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, businesses have not taken advantage of the ultra-low interest rate environment (the cheap money in your question) for building durable wealth, but instead, have been doing things like stock buybacks.

This recovery has been one of the weakest in U.S. economic history, and cannot seem to get past stagnant wages and persistently high unemployment.

In a world of 0 percent interest rates, people become pretty focused on finding new sources for fixed income.

Investors are chasing yield, which only drives speculative markets higher. Speculative markets include the stock market as well as venture capital. There are fewer sources of return on investment, despite easy credit for businesses due to extravagantly accommodating monetary policy.

Edward Snowden, Facebook, and maybe Quora

What does Edward Snowden think of Quora? Edward Snowden probably hasn't even heard of Quora! Most people haven't. It would be much more unlikely for him to not have heard of Facebook. 

Snowden's comment about Facebook doesn't reflect in any way on whether he has an opinion of Quora, or if he did, whether his opinion about Facebook would have any relevancy to what he thought of Quora. Facebook and Quora have founders (Adam D'Angelo) in common, but little else. Quora is a closely-held private company, with unknown revenue sources and no transparency policy.

Facebook is a free service like Quora, but Facebook makes extensive use of advertising in order to generate revenue. Facebook also generates revenue through other means, using its repository of user-contributed data. In contrast, Quora does not display any (overtly) user-targeted advertising. Facebook common equity is publicly traded on listed stock exchanges following its IPO in 2012. 

Given widespread knowledge of Facebook's business model, past privacy controversies covered in the press, and its relative transparency as a public company, I am surprised that Snowden would expect Facebook to make any sort of "commitment to the user". 

Facebook users pay nothing to use Facebook. Instead, and this is a cliche by now yet accurate, users ARE Facebook's product! Edward Snowden said this about Facebook:

They need to decide who they work for: the government or the people who use their services.

Users are not Facebook's customers. Facebook works for the businesses and organizations who pay for its services.

Does Facebook work for one or more governments in some capacity? 

Snowden suggests this in his comment. The answer is probably yes, although payment might be quid pro quo as well as cash. 

Facebook primarily works for the corporations and businesses that pay for user-targeted advertising on Facebook's platform. Edward Snowden, much like Glenn Greenwald, rarely portrays corporate invasion of privacy as a concern, preferring to focus on governments instead.