And this complexity doesn't end there because, in order to deal with these heavy employee taxes, it's not uncommon for IT companies to ask employees to open their own one-man companies to avoid these taxes. Now having a B2B relation, the company is free from these taxes and mandatory benefits, and the employee now deals with it declaring himself as the only employee and paying himself minimum wage on paper, receiving the rest of his salary as company's profit. Or the scheme they call flex, which is to pay a great deal of the salary as extras (even up to 80%) because these do not get taxed. The employee, in turn, needs to declare expenditures to his contractor in order to receive this extra share.
The real meaning of "being smart enough with your accounting" seems to me mostly finding these loopholes in the tax structure to avoid leaking money to the government.
Different schools of thought. Some say software should be able to handle all your data without having to ask you everytime it shifts a bit around — convenient, but with the implicit cost of needing to trust said software with all your info. Others say that software shouldn't grab any of your info without your consent, which gives you control over your data but is terribly inconvenient.
I put myself on the latter group, but I confess being called paranoid. In my defense, G+ grabbed my profile pic from an old blogspot I had about monkeys back when the apps weren't a single profile. It took me a while to find out it was more of an accident than a bad joke, but by then it was too late to recover my trust.
Another big factor for the communities' explosion was their misuse. The way communities were displayed in your profile page leaked enough metadata that people started using them as badges instead. Some time around 2006 people started creating communities with nonsense names, and it was not unusual to see people with hundreds of them on their profile. Things like "I cry everytime I see Mufasa die" or "Nobody expects the spanish inquisition" were the kinds of titles used in order to display your sense of humor.
In some sense this is akin to Tumblr's hashtags we see today, in which people abused the metadata channel to convey real meaning.
I usually say that I don't have trouble sleeping, my trouble is with changing states :)
I seldom go to bed in time because I hate to lay there trying to get asleep. Wanting to make more use of my day also doesn't help; I don't get home before 7:30pm, and I don't want to just dine and go to bed...
Then comes the morning and I just can't wake up, even after 9, 10hs. I put my alarm clock far away from my bed because I used to just turn it off and keep sleeping. It doesn't help that much though: I "wake up", walk to it, turn it off and go back to under my sheets. "Wake up" as in I'm walking but I'm not totally conscious. It's like I'm drunk, I'll always find a nonsense reason to justify going back to bed, like "hell, I need to go back to my bed now, or it will get too light and float away"
Lately the only thing I've been feeling ashamed of is the amount of code I DIDN'T write. I think this is mostly because I fear feeling ashamed of my code after it's running or, even worse, after it's public. I don't know...
I'm the epithome of analysis paralysis. Being ashamed of my own code is my next milestone. :)
That's not an uncommon question at all. This is a single instance of a set of philosophical questions related to qualia[1], i.e., the question of subjectivity and conscious experience. Richard Dawkins stretches the question a little more by taking into consideration the experiences of other species, such as bats [2] —spatial sense through audition—, and it's not hard to find more[3][4][5]
Fun questions to ask (and hard to put into words indeed, I had my share of trouble trying this exact same thing), but I don't think we're anywhere close to answer them. At least not until we really understand what consciousness is.
I'm especially fond of game #1. It reminded me of an old html game I played in which I had to use the mouse to drag a rectagle around, avoiding collisions with other rectangles that bounced around. I remember receiving this in an email that said if I were able to stand for X seconds (I can't remember how many) then it meant that my reflexes were above the threshold required for jet pilots — and obviously, as every boy, I wanted to fly a jet.
The only critique I have for you is to have posted it during my work hours.
You missed what I think is baklava's main point: "The only things that have changed are access to such ideas and the volume of our records." Your argument that "The essay reflected that something has gone wrong in our culture" is a pretty bold statement that doesn't take into consideration the volume of and access to information we have today.
To me it seems you're contradicting yourself. What does this bold statement of yours tells you about trying to contribute to a problem one does not understand?
The quote you're giving me leads my response and I describe it as "not ridiculous".
"The essay reflected that ______" reports someone else's point of view, not my own. I agree that something is wrong in our culture; it cannot be shown that this represents a change from that of Classical Greece, but it can be supposed to varying levels of certainty. But if I exhort people to stop contributing to a problem of today, whether that problem originated in the recent past or the ancient past is of no relevance. We should still stop it today.
I understand the induction steps, but what I don't get is why the foreigner's statement triggers the logic induction. This quote from your first link sums it well:
What's most interesting about this scenario is that, for k > 1, the outsider
is only telling the island citizens what they already know: that there
are blue-eyed people among them. However, before this fact is announced,
the fact is not common knowledge.
It seems natural to me why they didn't commit the suicide before the statement (somehow induction doesn't work here), and why they did it after the statement, but I don't understand why. Isn't the fact that there are k > 1 islanders with blue eyes common knowledge too?
What's added is the common knowledge that everyone else knows that Blue > 1 (including the foreigner), and that everyone else knows that everyone else knows that Blue > 1, etc.
Consider two blue-eyed people, Alice and Bob. Alice sees Bob's blue eyes and knows that Blue ≥ 1, and vice-versa. But Alice thinks, "What if I have brown eyes? In that case, Bob wouldn't know that Blue ≥ 1." So, everyone knows that Blue ≥ 1, but nobody knows that everyone knows that. Then the foreigner comes along and tells them that, between Alice and Bob, Blue ≥ 1. Now Alice knows that Bob knows that Blue ≥ 1, and realizes that, if Alice has non-blue eyes, Bob will use the new information that Blue ≥ 1 to conclude that he has blue eyes, and therefore commit suicide on the next day. When he doesn't, she concludes that she must have blue eyes, and commits suicide. Bob goes through the exact same logic as Alice.
Though the foreigner's statement did not tell Alice anything new about eye color distribution, it did tell her something about Bob's knowledge. The same goes for Bob, who learns about Alice's knowledge.
The logic is a bit more difficult to talk through with three people, so generalizing it further is left as an exercise ;P It comes down to "everyone knows that everyone knows that Blue ≥ 1", which the foreigner also contributes as common knowledge by making his announcement. For more blue-eyed people, recur on that statement as many times as necessary.
Small clarification: For the two-person case, it's important that everyone knows that everyone knows that Blue ≥ 1. For the three-person case, it's important that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows that Blue ≥ 1. (The last paragraph is a bit unclear and/or wrong.)
No information is added, it just gives all islanders a synchronized reference point to sort themselves into groups. It's the synchronization that matters, not the info itself, per se. Once they all start sorting themselves on the same day (and KNOW that all other residents are doing the same) they start the countdown to day 100.
The information that is added is that the knowledge is made common or infinite degree (ie. everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows......that there is someone with blue eyes)
The time which everyone made an accurate count was the new common knowledge. I believe the traveler's words added no new information, or even his presence (other than bringing everyone together). It was the gathering together, where everyone could see everyone else, and know that counts were synchronized.
I think if there were an earlier all-hands-meeting without the traveler, the counts would have been synchronized then.
So, the faux pas had no effect, but he still "caused" it by accident. So, to combine the two arguments from the main link:
The foreigner's words have no effect, because his comments do not tell the tribe anything that they do not already know. On the 100th day, the blue eyed people commit suicide, unless they die/leave/disappear first.
You are wrong. The traveler's words are necessary, and you can easily see that by considering the case where the blue-eyed group consists of one person. Even when the entire island population is collected into a meeting, there is no reason for the unique blue-eyed person to suddenly intuit that he has blue eyes.
Not sure what you're refering to by "count" here. There's nothing to count. What matters is everybody coming into the knowledge that everybody knows at least one person has blue eyes. This takes a prompt about that, which is the foreigner's speech. If the foreigner doesn't cause them to start sorting themselves into blue eyes/not blue eyes groups, there's no basis for them to start deducing anything.
Counting is how they measure the days passed versus how many blue-eyed people they see. I'm sure you're right, but I have to check the assumption that seeing everyone is the same as hearing a fact about everyone.
Yes, it's still the same coin, but you don't know which coin you got. You know that you got 10 consecutive heads though. How improbable this is if you got a fair coin? How probable this is with the double-head coin? This is the data you can use to update the probability.
The real meaning of "being smart enough with your accounting" seems to me mostly finding these loopholes in the tax structure to avoid leaking money to the government.