stryker's comments

That's precisely why Einstein's theory of relativity was so groundbreaking. It stipulates that the speed of light must be the same relative to every frame.

Let's say you're moving nearly as fast as the speed of light. Are you flying side by side with light particles? No, because if they were, you would measure their speed as being close to zero relative to you. The theory says you will STILL measure the beams of light as flying away from you at the speed of light relative to you.

Imagine how the universe must conform to make that the case! The universe essentially makes your time tick slower in order for light to still travel that much faster relative to you.

This phenomenon has been confirmed (along with basically every other prediction that Einstein has made). There are some subatomic particles that we know has a half-life of X seconds. However, when they're traveling quickly, they actually end up living orders of magnitude longer because of time dilation.

In every day life, if you throw a ball at 70 mph on top of a car that's going 30 mph, the ball moves at 100 mph. You can't do the same math once you start reaching the speed of light.

Can I talk to you offline? How can I message you on this forum?

I feel like I'm missing something. The FAQ defines FTL as "getting to a location faster than light" but what if light is taking a suboptimal path? Assuming wormholes exist, depending on your frame of reference, it would take light different times to get to the destination.

The FAQ says to consider the case of someone shooting a bullet through a wormhole and killing someone faster than light could have transmitted that information through the long way. I don't see how it's a problem. The light would have also traveled through the wormhole and it would have been possible to know that information. I guess my point is, with the wormhole, the "correct" distance between A and B is no longer the long way.

The way it sounds to me, it's as if I shot a bullet straight at someone at 0.99999c and it killed him, but now you're saying that violates causality because of this star that is between you and the victim and it would have taken light longer to traverse around the star than my bullet.

I agree with your assessment, but you're still missing my point. Following your analogy, what I'm saying is not that 1+1=3, but that we're not really using the plus operator here.

I think we both agree that wormholes do not violate causality. By creating a wormhole, you are connecting two points in space with a shortcut. As a result, traveling through a wormhole is not even FTL -- there are two paths to the destination and the shorter path is so much shorter that you can beat light that goes on the longer path. You would still lose to light if light also took the shortcut.

That's essentially what I'm arguing -- that the Alcubierre drive somehow warps space so that if you're traveling in one, you're not actually going faster than light, but through a makeshift wormhole. It isn't FTL.

Highly unlikely to be realistic, but the premise still obeys causality.

I'm going to ignore your condescension. I'm also going to assume you didn't read the rest of my post, because you presented no arguments to counter my points.

I'd like to point out that the wikipedia article on the Alcubierre drive writes at length to show how this warping process does not violate causality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive. I know you feel strongly about people not understanding special relativity and I actually agree with you on that point, but you're not addressing any of the valid counterpoints that people are making. You're simply closing your ears and exclaiming "special relativity" which only applies locally (if you want an appeal to authority, I talked about this with a former physicist who worked with Stephen Hawking).

1) The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. In other words, galaxies are moving away from us faster than c (evidenced by the growing redshift of light emitted by galaxies when they were NOT traveling away from us faster than c). That does not violate causality (as I mentioned in my post) because the topology of space itself is changing. Locally, everything still obeys special relativity.

2) Virtual particles, EPR Paradox (I know it's not actually a paradox). (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/virtual_partic...) My point with these phenomena is that locality and the speed of light are not very intuitive concepts. You can still have "spooky action at a distance" without violating causality.

I feel like a lot of people here misunderstand the speed of light as a cosmic speed limit. The speed of light as a speed limit is a local constraint. On a larger scale there is no such speed limit. Just because you travel faster than light on a non-local scale does not mean you break causality.

For example, light "travels" more slowly through water than vacuum. Well, actually, photons travel at c always -- it's just that light gets bounced around by water molecules, getting absorbed and reabsorbed many many times before arriving at the destination. It's like driving to a destination as opposed to running to it. If the roads are curvy enough, the runner will win because he is not constrained by roads. Could it be that the Alcubierre drive gets past the roads of empty space in a way light cannot?

For a better example, consider the expansion of the universe. Link: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=575. I quote:

The fact that galaxies we see now are moving away from us faster than the speed of light has some bleak consequences, however. Astronomers now have strong evidence that we live in an "accelerating universe," which means that the speed of each individual galaxy with respect to us will increase as time goes on. If we assume that this acceleration continues indefinitely, then galaxies which are currently moving away from us faster than the speed of light will always be moving away from us faster than the speed of light and will eventually reach a point where the space between us and them is stretching so rapidly that any light they emit after that point will never be able to reach us.

In other words, vacuum fills in between us and far away galaxies faster than light can traverse it. Again, locally, the derivative of position with respect to time is c, but the universe is able to "cheat" by messing around with the definition of position. If the Alcubierre drive messes with the fabric of the universe in a similar way, I don't see any reason why it cannot succeed.

Here's a related link: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=56. I quote:

Technically speaking, the speed of light limit only applies when you are in an "inertial frame" -- that is, sitting where you are, without any forces acting on you, and measuring the speed of an object that moves past a ruler and clock that you are holding in your hand. Across the large distances in the universe, however, we have a very different set of circumstances. No one is in an inertial frame, because everyone is being accelerated with respect to everyone else, due to the universe's gravitational field and the fact that the universe is expanding. In effect, the universe's expansion isn't really due to galaxies moving "through space" away from each other, but rather due to the stretching of space itself, which isn't governed by the same limits that we are.

I'm not sure whether the Alcubierre drive contradicts causality, but if it does, I highly doubt that it is because of the arguments presented on this forum.

It's the only manipulative practice allowed by the SEC because of the need to "maintain a fair and orderly market". This article describes it fairly well in its abstract: http://economics.ouls.ox.ac.uk/10713/1/IPOstabilization.pdf.

"Stabilization is the bidding for and purchase of securities by an underwriter immediately after an offering for the purpose of preventing or retarding a fall in price. Stabilization is price manipulation, but regulators allow it within strict limits - notably that stabilization may not occur above the offer price. For legislators and market authorities, a false market is a price worth paying for an orderly market."

EDIT: Just included the full description.

Just semantics. The writer presumably is considering only even numbers, for which it is generally true that you get more solutions as you increase the number. You are right in that it is worded non-rigorously, but in my opinion it is implied from the context.

I too am more interested in the bytecode hackery that's going on here than the fact that it is a goto implementation. You might be interested in byteplay (http://code.google.com/p/byteplay/), which is a module that tries to simplify this kind of process.

Two points: 1) Do not take the presented code as evidence that arbitrarily new syntax can be created. Any code that raises a SyntaxError will still be invalid.

2) I believe there is a legitimate reason to use bytecode hackery -- I've come across it many times: the slowness of Python.

For example, let's say I have three functions as follows.

def f(a): return a + 1

def g(a): return 2a

def h(a): return 2a + 1

It's clear that f(g(x)) == h(x) for all values of x. But h will run faster (marginally in this case, but try to imagine more complicated cases) because the Python interpreter will never make such an optimization. Function calls will be made, frames generated, etc. -- and that's where bytecode hackery comes in! Imagine pasting f and g together so that I never have to write h but still get the benefit of speed.

I do recognize that in many cases, it may be preferable to just use a more low-level language to optimize away such functions, but I always like to envision a pure Python solution first.

Four years of signing up for pistols, never once got in (I signed up fairly early too. Guess I shoulda automated it). This new degree will now make it even harder to get in! Maybe as a result they will look into expanding the class.

There's a saying: plans are useless but planning is essential.

I think generally it's good to think about these things because the process is more valuable than the plan itself.

>> Predatory pricing, according to the linked wikipedia article, occurs when the price is set below the cost of production. I have nothing against profits, but exuberant profit which I think is the product of exploitation.

Yes, strictly speaking, predatory pricing is when products are priced below cost. My point was that in the absence of competition, artificial price cutting makes it more difficult for newcomers to setup shop, and in the presence of competition, is a natural result.

>> No one forces anyone to buy electricity.

Actually, if you look at the law, it specifically lists certain types of public utilities, such as electricity, that must be regulated because the providers are what are called "natural monopolies". You basically are forced to buy electricity from one company (or two) and electricity is nowadays considered a necessity. But I digress.

>> one person or one company making such person or company richer, while everyone else poorer.

You can't look at every transaction as simply an exchange of money. By that metric, every time I buy some food, I'm becoming poorer. True, but pretty meaningless, because I would have not spent it any other way. Now are you claiming that an IPad is a "basic necessity"? People chose the IPad, even among similar knock-offs, if they chose to buy one at all. I, for one, have chosen not to buy any tablet. In any case, these buyers are basically saying, "I'm happier with an IPad than $600".

Perhaps there's an externality here, where people end up wasting more time and reducing their productivity as a result of buying up IPads, and so Apple should be forced to pay that cost to society. But that's still a different issue than your claim, which is that they're priced "too high".

>> thus perhaps a middle ground would be best.

Note that our current economic system is not so extremely capitalist. It's capitalism + externality pricing + taxes + (other stuff that I frankly think is government mandating inefficiencies to support special interests, like subsidies).

>> Which is that society should have a say on the maximum profit and remuneration of an individual and company so that society as a whole can benefit at an optimal level.

I can think of another way to phrase this claim -- most people will not live any happier with $1 billion than $1 million. All that extra money could be used to increase the utility of other people by a much higher margin.

But I must note: people already do donate. I'm sure you've heard of the billionaire's pledge. It's happening TODAY, in our capitalist society. Like my example with Bob and Jake, in our society, people have a choice. They have a choice to donate their billions to the plights of the world. In your world, all citizens will be forced to.

So I guess to summarize: 1) I like giving people choice. 2) I think if you give government an inch, they'll take a mile. Even if capitalism and communism were identically effective theories, a government in a communist economy by definition is so much more powerful than a government in a capitalist economy... I think the corruption would be difficult to battle.

EDIT: By the way, it sounds like you are pretty reasonable. However, your initial tone of "profits are evil" and that false economic policy statement "companies should price just above cost" probably pissed a lot of people off. You probably shouldn't say those things because they're not your main point anyway and they just close off people unnecessarily. As I've seen, you clearly have a more reasonable way to express your arguments anyway!

You are being downvoted not only because a large portion of HN believes that adding huge amounts of value to society should pay off handsomely, but also because a lot of your points are easily falsified.

Changing the example from Apple to Microsoft does not make my point any less true. In any market, the most efficient player, if he chooses to cut prices drastically, will make it tougher for other players, even if he's not actually that efficient. Through competition, this process weeds out the less efficient companies and ends up lowering prices. Microsoft was one of the only producers of a decent operating system. You can argue that Microsoft was a bloated bureaucracy, but they were surely the most efficient player of their time. They would have dearly hurt competition if they lowered prices.

In fact, many today argue that students who pirated Microsoft software cemented Microsoft's monopoly. Generations of youngsters too poor to afford Windows somehow got their hands on it and trained themselves so that when they got old, they were already equipped to use Word, Excel, etc.

If the observation "Microsoft makes too much money" led to the policy "make them cut their prices" I would bet that the exact opposite of what you intended would occur. They would have cut their prices by half for about a year, driven out their competition, gotten every cat, dog, and donkey on their OS, and cemented their monopoly status.

This phenomenon is not rocket science or new... it's called predatory pricing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing.

As for distribution of wealth... I was able to think a little bit more about it, and I have been able to pinpoint some cons with your idea. Basically, your idea is closer to communism than capitalism, so my rebuttal is basically a rebuttal against communism. I do not attach any a priori negativity against communism. I like to argue ideas on their merits, so hear me out.

As I mentioned before, you might think a cap of 1 million per year per person is reasonable, but someone else might think the cap should be 100,000. "There's too many starving kids in the world", he might say. In fact, if members of the government aren't so well paid, they will probably take an existing precedent of 1 million and abuse it to grab more and more cuts from successful businesses. "If you give an inch, they'll take a mile." But let's say your government is corruption-free for the sake of argument. Is it still a good idea?

Allow me to tell a story. WIDCO is a company that makes widgets. These widgets are very complicated and so require manual labor. Meet employees Bob and Jake. They're both exceptional widget makers, but Jake is above and beyond the better one. He might possibly be the best in the world. A normal employee averages 50 widgets a day; Bob averages 100; Jake averages 300. It's clear that Jake is providing quite a lot more value to WIDCO than any other employee. But because of regulation, WIDCO can pay at most $100,000 to Jake. Jake understands. He is a humble man and understands that $100,000 is enough for him and his family. But day after day, he gets demoralized because he realizes that his hard work and skill is being used to subsidize the pensions of employees who just can't do the work as well. Eventually, Jake realizes that he'd rather leave early to his family than work his ass off for no additional benefit. He figures that making about 150 widgets or so a day is enough to keep his salary constant. So he works just 4 hours a day and goes home soon after. Bob never feels this as he's getting paid $85,000, which he can still increase by getting better at producing widgets. He still believes in hard work and produces more and more. Until he reaches the cap, of course.

You might think, oh well Jake goes home! Better welfare! But whereas today, Jake actually has a choice between working more + get paid more vs. stop working + go home, in this world the government's basically removing that choice. Now, if that choice is absent in today's world, yes that is a problem that points to human rights abuses like I mentioned in my first post.

Do you want to discourage employees like Jake? You can imagine employees like Jake in the real world, who really aren't greedy, but who also aren't gonna just work for free when they have alternatives like going home.

You can see that the artificial salary cap has DECREASED the production rate of WIDCO.

Above all, I think you have a deep-seated belief that consumers need protection from themselves. It's not a black-and-white issue, of course, but you're strongly putting words in their mouths by claiming that they're being "ripped off". When millions of people can't wait long enough to hand money to Apple, are they really being ripped off? On what basis do you get to decide how they should spend their money? What if they're actually getting a DISCOUNT for the happiness they derive from the IPad? Before, they had to spend a weekend in Tahoe to get X units of happiness. Now, they just need to spend $600 on an IPad for the same X. In that case, they're not being ripped off at all right?

My advice to your future theorycrafting: think through the consequences of policies, not just the immediate and close ones, but also the long term and global ones.

I will concede that there are many reasonable social frameworks designed to maximize societal wealth in the long run. You are simply describing your own version.

After all, capitalism is one solution to this very complex problem of resource allocation. It's not without flaws, of course: e.g. externalities. That's where regulation steps in. It's possible to get companies to pay for the negative externalities they are creating or even stop altogether (see: pollution). A theme in my post will be: let's not throw the baby (capitalism) out with the bath water (negative externalities).

Here are some points I came across reading your post.

1) You say that products should be priced close to their cost, that they should not charge "the highest possible price". Why? If Apple forcefully lowered their prices you could actually argue that Apple is trying to squeeze competitors out. Apple is hugely efficient. If they charge slightly above cost, do you think any other company would be able to sell anything remotely similar for a reasonable price?

I know you're going to say that Apple uses underhanded means to be so efficient. I agree with that. By abusing human rights, Apple is getting a cheaper deal unfairly.

But your claim that "products should be priced near cost" is flat out wrong. If the observation "Apple unfairly gets highly efficient" led to a policy "let's force all companies to sell at slightly above cost" to "benefit consumers", that would actually exacerbate the issue, with everyone rushing to abuse human rights in order to compete with Apple's efficiency. Profits are not evil. If you're going to target Apple's ethics, by all means do so, but do not use false economic arguments to support that claim.

2) You want geniuses and great inventions to come about, but then once they do (e.g. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates) you don't want them to make too much money. How much is too much? For you, billions. For others, millions. Maybe even just thousands. Where do you draw the line between "too much" and "enough"? Do you think it would be a good precedent to force all companies making over a million dollars a year to donate half of it to some charity? I think this is yet another slightly irrelevant argument you make to support your main point, which is that Apple shouldn't be able to get away abusing human rights. To verify this, imagine: suppose Apple makes billions but also supports human rights everywhere by only working with legitimate companies. Do you now have respect for Apple? Or do you think they should still do more things for society? If the latter is the case, you're basically saying that all wealth should be redistributed by law, to some arbitrary degree (maybe the voters decide?). Hmm... not exactly communism, but not capitalism either. I have no additional points here, I haven't had time to imagine such a world in detail. I won't dismiss it outright, though.

3) Patent monopolies. I do agree that patents are tricky. On one hand, you want society to benefit as soon and as much as possible from new stuff. On the other hand, you want to encourage inventors to spend lots of money on research with the promise that they will be rewarded handsomely with patent monopolies. If you remove patents, you risk a world where no one will ever sink mounds of money and time into research (I would even contend that this world wouldn't be quite so bad, seeing projects like Wikipedia, as long as theft is not tolerated). If you support patents too strongly, you risk a world where society is squeezed dry even after the original inventor passes away (I believe the incumbents want this way, and it's bad). There is a middle ground here...

Indeed, your last statement really is the heart of your argument, which is what you should really focus on instead of spurious economic arguments: neglecting human rights is a negative externality. We as a society should pay to uphold human rights and punish those who do not.

EDIT: Some grammar issues.

Right. The market price of a good is governed only by supply and demand. Sure, the cost it takes to produce the good influences its supply and demand, but in a capitalist society, only the market determines its price at the end of the day.

Let's forget the sunk cost for a minute. What happens if the price per item is less than the variable cost per item? Is that "unfair"? No, that's precisely how firms go out of business, when no one wants to pay (i.e. there is no demand) for the products they sell.

This is not an argument for plagiarism / piracy. Capitalist markets do need strong property ownership laws and enforcement.

His story is a bit hyperbolic. Not sure which bank he worked at, but any business sector can have bad/incompetent companies where consumer / investor ignorance and asymmetric information allows them to add minimal value for high fees.

He also recommends passive investing, but a lot of indexes like the SPY and DIA are managed and correctly priced thanks to a lot of firms (probably including some big banks!) at Wall Street.

I'm going to assume that you're not talking about the secondary market for used goods, because that can most definitely be a business. See: ebay.com.

About arbitrage: I agree with you, to some extent. By definition, as more people notice the price differences and take advantage of them, the arbitrage will become less and less profitable. If you intend to build a business that will scale and prosper in the long term, you need to provide value to people and not tie yourself to short-lived arbitrage opportunities. I work in finance and that fact is plainly obvious to a lot of us.

However, there is value added when you give people information. Information isn't free. Someone has to go out there and find all the prices, organize them, and show them to people. The arbitrage differential will grow smaller and smaller as competition grows, but at no point will this information be free. Given the possibility to find cheaper prices, people will pay if it's worth their while. If it's not money, at least page views.

It's not so surprising if you consider that humans are much better at pattern recognition in general, where the space of possibilities is too large for a brute force search (even with clever optimizations, such as minimax, alpha-beta pruning, and hard-coded openings/endings).

Here is a specific example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)#Computers_and_Go

They've made a bit of progress with Go, putting in heuristics and strategies specific to Go. But it basically amounts to translating human intelligence into code, or what researchers refer to as "domain knowledge".

Surely, machines are orders of magnitude faster than humans, for certain things. Just not all.

Looks pretty cool :D Keep me updated!