It's a joke that the media has continued to dig and dig on as a serious consideration.
Google X's Chief of Moonshots (effectively the CEO), Astro Teller, alludes to the space elevator being a fun joke in his SXSW 2013 speech [1], including confirmation of it never being taken seriously by the team.
He's not presuming the PIN is ON the card, but that the transaction was the point of compromise (i.e. you punching in your PIN and the software running a verification of if that PIN is correct).
For perspective - let's make them pay it all back, retroactively, from the year 2000 as the article suggest. Now we will have (roughly due to compounding) tackled 0.0058% of the current US deficit leaving us with $17,133,947,996,837 or 99.994%.
That would make sense if this were something that was intended to be useful and meaningful. I think this is just supposed to remind you that Google is a thing.
Taleb concedes that Dobelli's work references Taleb 23 + 12 times. The examples I didn't recognize as being specifically Taleb's (and I have read all his books). These popular science examples get regurgitated over and over on websites, blogs and so on. Perhaps Taleb was the first to think of these examples, perhaps he was not.
For example the comparison between wall street investors and monkeys and the subsequent selection bias was featured in A Random Walk Down Wall Street - 1973.
So I'm not convinced there was malice involved here.
No problem, we'll make it happen! For anyone that wants to, order on the site, and afterwards send an email to daniel at watsi.org with the following info for each package: 1) recipient's name, 2) recipient's shipping address, and 3) gift card message, and we'll deliver the gift(s) by 12/16/2013.
A budget was leaked in the 1990s that showed the NSA receiving more dollars and the CIA having a 3 billion dollar budget. I don't understand you guys saying this reversal was in any way obvious. Not only that but the leak indicates that the budgets are in flux now. It's also long been assumed that the NSA isn't running just some "big ass data center", but rather expensive cutting edge technology.
I understand you might be implying the relative size or budgets of the organizations may have been obvious. But, how are/were their actual budget's obvious?
Which is essentially his first point of inequitable distribution >> "Some servers may decide to withhold a tipout, in a sense cheating the system, and the employers is precluded from redressing this"
The article made a distinction between tip out and tip pool. Tip out was made to sound entirely voluntary, presumably on credit tips too. My post was meant to refer to an involuntary tip pool policy restaurant. The cash tip gives the waiter the ability to tip out 10% and keep the rest. Im not saying this is good practice on the waiter's part, but it is a reality.
From real world experience - the argument is just semantics, whether it's a forced tip-out or a voluntary tip-out, in practice, the result is usually the same with cash tips.
Google X's Chief of Moonshots (effectively the CEO), Astro Teller, alludes to the space elevator being a fun joke in his SXSW 2013 speech [1], including confirmation of it never being taken seriously by the team.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8mTHgaLQ7w