Hopefully Interesting

Many people (myself included) tend to do charitable giving at the end of the year.  If you're ever wondered "Gosh, I want do to as much good as possible with my money but how do I figure out which cause gives the best result?" then I have some good news for you. The good folks at Givewell have recently re-analyzed  this very topic with a good amount of rigor and I'll be going with their recommendations this year.  Except I'm trying to be a bit more clever tax-wise this year so I'll be donating January 1st and December 31st of 2015, then those same dates on 2017, etc.  That should interact better with the US tax system since there's a standard deduction and I don't have a mortgage or anything like that.  Oh, and I took the Giving What We Can  pledge to donate 10% of my income to charity each year.  You could too! Scott Alexander wrote a very good post on why outrage feeds on itself so well in online discussions.  Earlier this year I was pretty o...

It occurred to a little while ago that a lot of the problems some people have with drones would more or less go away if drones were less anonymous.  Like perhaps the FAA wouldn't be  so restrictive  if it were easier to determine who the owner or operator of a drone was.  It's hard to imagine how our traffic systems would work if it weren't for licence plates.  I'm not sure, as a practical matter, what form identification for drones would take.  A drone already has to have a wireless connection to it's operator so some sort of challenge/response could be workable if there were some way to direct the request easily.  Nothing says that a drone would necessarily answer, but nothing says that a car has to have a licence plate either. Is this really practical?  I can't say but it seems like drones are going to be accepted more slowly if it isn't.