Hopefully Interesting

You might have heard of a company named vGo .  They make telepresence robots and have had some success selling them, though they haven't grown much recently.  Well, we (Vecna) bought them . So, the Tories have announced some new economic policies including replacing assistance to the poor with a higher minimum wage.  That's sort of odd for a conservative government.  The general consensus among economists is that raising the minimum wage within reasonable bounds tends to help poor people overall at the expense of a modest increase in unemployment.  Policies with drawbacks are always uncomfortable  and some on the left have argued that there isn't actually any disemployment effect.  But some on the right have argued that a loss of jobs is actually a good thing because it disproportionately affects foreigners.  That view was not uncommon when minimum wage laws were first being proposed but I can only find one person baldly advocating that view ...

Birthplace of democracy: • Voters overwhelmingly say NO • Legislators do opposite • Voters overwhelmingly approve https://t.co/ySvRiV6bsa — Daniel Lin (@DLin71) July 14, 2015 In my  recent post on Greece  I was a bit cynical about the idea of public opinion but evidently I wasn't cynical enough.  But maybe cynical is the wrong word because democracy is hard.  How on earth are the Greek voters supposed to understand all the issues surrounding the acceptance of the EU deal?  I certainly don't.  I suspect that nobody actually has a good idea about it. So Greeks just saw they that in retrospect their lives hadn't gone very well under the previous administration and so voted in someone else.  And if you're facing potential leaders whose performance you can't judge in detail then replacing them when things go badly is the only sure way to make sure they'll be interested in things going well for you.  That might not be fair to politicians who pres...

Thinking Out Aloud is a blog I've subscribed to for a while and they recently summed up the whole reason I read them in an utterly excellent post .  Seriously, go read it! Now that you're finished I'd only add that perhaps a lower number of officials per capita in places like China or Russia can actually encourage vesting those officials with more arbitrary power.  If you're going to force your officials to operate within the narrow confines of written law it seems like you're going to need more review and with few officials that becomes harder to afford.

So Greece voted "no" last Sunday.  It's not really clear what this means other than that Greece will not be agreeing to the terms of its creditors.  Terms' whose deadline had actually expire before the vote was held. It's easy to understand the Greek position.   Syriza didn't do anything, as far as I can tell, to cause the huge debt that Greece had racked up - that was all the fault of previous governments.  There's also the issue of aggregate demand .  When the government stops demanding as many goods and services then a smaller number of goods and services get made, at least in the short term.  In other works the Greek economy would shrink.  And of course a shrinking economy would make it even harder for the Greeks to repay their debts.  If Greece had its own currency then they could offset this as most countries outside the Eurozone which have engaged in austerity have done but sadly Greece is not in that position. Way back when the Euro wa...

I work with robots professionally and a lot of what we do at Vecna is trying to make robots harmless.   Noticing obstacles and avoiding them.  Not running into people and not even letting them think we might be about to run into them.  That sort of thing. But other people have robots that behave differently and there's been a bit of activity recently.  It's been sort of cool.  BattleBots, a TV show about robots fighting in an arena, has recently come onto the air and you can see all the fights here .  The actual shows have a bit more team background which is sort of filler but also makes the fights a bit more dramatic. However, the drama on BattleBots is nothing compared to the gauntlet that was thrown down recently.   Megabots is a group that's sort of trying to start something like BattleBots but instead of 250 pound remote controlled hunks of metal with buzz saws they're imagining 9000 pound piloted paintball wielding robots.  To drum u...

I guess  this  is a pretty good description of why I signed the  giving what we can  pledge The active ingredient in effective altruism was always supposed to be making it harder to trick yourself into feeling like you’re helping unless you actually are. - this was part of how I interpreted Eliezer’s post  The Unit Of Caring . Money is something that definitely helps a quantifiable amount, and giving away money isn’t much fun, so by limiting your contributions to money you have sort of a commitment mechanism so that you know you’re actually helping instead of just signaling helping. A very good data visualization of the cost of World War II. There was this big competition for robots trying to complete an obstacle course and do various tasks.  But what people were really interested in was all the  robots falling down  trying to complete it. Remember how I was  all excited  about HP using  memristors  for their big new p...