Hopefully Interesting

To grossly simplify policymaking, when there's a problem there are usually three options available to the government.  You can always ignore the problem.  You can raise money and pay someone to deal with the problem.  Or you can pass laws to force some third party to deal with the problem.  When phrased that way the last often sounds like a bad idea, but if pick a third party that is unpopular or that seems like maybe they ought to be helping with the problem anyway then the specific plans can sound quite appealing.  But I'd argue that there are a couple of reasons to resist the urge to do this even when it sounds like a good idea at first. The first is that by putting a burden on a specific group, you're creating an incentive for people not to join that group.  If you'd prefer that people didn't join that group then this is a pretty good deal.  But often you have a group like, say the people who employ poor people which you don't want to shrink....

Previously I've talked about RRAM, and how non-volatile memory is going to come in and cause lots disruption in computing.  The non-volatile part still looks to be happening but it appears I might be wrong about it being RRAM that does it, though, since now samples of the first standard memory sticks of non-volatile RAM are actually being sent out (PDF), and it's not RRAM like I expected. Rather, its MRAM or magnetic RAM.  That stuff has actually been around for a while, I used some back in '08 when I needed a bit of non-volatile memory I could write to very fast but didn't need a large amount of storage.  That last was the reason it wasn't in wide use, though.  MRAM was fast, and low power, and many other wonderful things.  But each individual MRAM cell was also very big, which meant that you couldn't fit very many of them on a chip.  And that meant that on a bit-by-bit basis it was very expensive.  But recently people have figured out a way to m...