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winstonsmith | 3 years ago | on: To Ruby from Python

>[In Ruby] There is good support for functional programming with first-class functions, anonymous functions, and closures.

This seems like a blatantly false claim to me since as a Python programmer forced to use Ruby for Sketchup, I have been frustrated by the lack of first-class functions in Ruby.

winstonsmith | 7 years ago | on: Firefox 65.0 released

My experience has been very positive. I recently noticed that Firefox had become slightly slow to recover my session at start-up. I investigated and found I had over 1800 tabs open. With a few hundred tabs open start-up is amazingly fast. I never even think about performance otherwise because it has ceased to be an issue.

winstonsmith | 8 years ago | on: Equifax Lobbied to Kill Rule Protecting Victims of Data Breaches

When the creation and representation of crappy products entails fraud or other crimes the result would actually include criminal prosecutions by the DOJ (in a world where the DOJ weren't captured by party A's industry). Tying the two scandals together is the influence of the finance industry on regulation and enforcement through the revolving door, in both cases to the same law firm representing financial institutions.

winstonsmith | 8 years ago | on: Equifax Lobbied to Kill Rule Protecting Victims of Data Breaches

I'll take a wild guess that he is alleging that Eric Holder's failure to prosecute any of the CEOs of the financial institutions that played a critical role in the financial crisis (by, e.g., making loans to people without incomes, packaging the loans into mortgage backed securities, and passing the resulting time bombs off to other parties) was appreciated by his former and future colleagues at Covington and Burling and their clients in the finance industry. That Eric Holder was very aware of that appreciation and anticipated that he would be rewarded for it.

winstonsmith | 8 years ago | on: TIO: Try it online

I really look forward to using this. It would be a great help to mobile users if uneeded options, e.g., 'header', could be made to disappear to save screen real estate.

winstonsmith | 9 years ago | on: Why regulators should focus on bankers’ incentives

> If the insurance is correctly priced then the banks that don't pass the cost of risk on to customers should be able to compete nicely against the ones that try to.

This theory breaks down if you distinguish between banker and bank as per the article.

In the short term, the crooked banker with insurance can out-compete the honest uninsured banker by making high risk loans, not caring if the loans are paid back. In the short term the crooked banker can accumulate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and happily retire when in the long term the loans fail and the bank goes bankrupt.

The honest banker has to explain to his share holders etc. why crooked banker's bank is growing so much faster than his bank. His borrowers have to compete for houses against borrowers from crooked bank who can borrow more and therefor pay more for houses. His "under-performing" bank may become an acquisition target of crooked bank.

The requisites for this dynamic are the absence of fear of criminal prosecution and perverse incentives via excessive CEO compensation.

winstonsmith | 9 years ago | on: I Won $104M for Blowing the Whistle But Was the Only One Who Went to Jail

The narrowness of career paths for highly specialized attorneys combined with the possibility of entering an altogether different remuneration universe at the law firms the DOJ is theoretically adversarial to is what makes the revolving door spin, and the spinning of the door is what turns "adversarial" into "theoretically adversarial". That is the problem. I didn't say there was an easy solution.

The generalization of this principal to other government institutions (agencies, departments, offices including even the presidency) is one of the great problems of governance of our time. You can take the remuneration discrepancy as the "0=1" conclusion of a reductio ad absurdum argument against unfettered capitalism or as an argument that resistance is futile.

winstonsmith | 11 years ago | on: Writing Off the Warhol Next Door

In case anyone doesn't know what you're talking about:

http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-15-16

A small number of taxpayers has accumulated larger IRA balances, likely by investing in assets unavailable to most investors—initially valued very low and offering disproportionately high potential investment returns if successful. Individuals who invest in these assets using certain types of IRAs can escape taxation on investment gains. For example, founders of companies who use IRAs to invest in nonpublicly traded shares of their newly formed companies can realize many millions of dollars in tax-favored gains on their investment if the company is successful. With no total limit on IRA accumulations, the government forgoes millions in tax revenue. The accumulation of these large IRA balances by a small number of investors stands in contrast to Congress's aim to prevent the tax-favored accumulation of balances exceeding what is needed for retirement.

winstonsmith | 11 years ago | on: How My Mom Got Hacked

> Pre-Bitcoin, the scammer would have her call an expensive foreign premium-rate phone number or mail cash to a foreign address.

A foreign address is still an address, which if used to perpetrate crime on a large scale, would represent a point of vulnerability for the criminals even in a somewhat lawless country. Bitcoin's role in these crimes is analogous to an alternate universe, lawless by design, where criminals can retrieve ransoms anonymously and with impunity.

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