Inthehut

Trog’s vote-a-matic recommends I vote Socialist Alliance in the Australian election. Unfortunately, for the Socialist Alliance the vote-a-matic is slightly rigged. The vote-a-matic identifies each party as either supporting, opposing or being neutral towards a statement. If your response matches the parties response and is not neutral then this counts as a tick for that party. The party with the most ticks is the recommended party. However, this is biased towards the Socialist Alliance and the Greens because they have the lowest number of neutral responses (19/26) compared to the highest from the Australian Sex Party (67). Oppose or Support weakly dominates the neutral response. If you chose neutral you could always do the same or better by choosing oppose or supports. So a party that has a lot of Oppose/Support responses is most likely to come out on top.

That row of zeroes for neutral is not where you want to be

Self checkouts = optimal form of retail price discrimination. Surely, you can shave 5% by being dishonest. My future prediction: stores abandon loyalty cards when they realise self checkout performs the same function.

Edit: forgot to add my rant about how 90% of the time I have to pack my own bags in the uk compared to never in aus. Thank god for Australian checkout chicks ^w workers.

Linux lets you change the foreground and background colors of the terminal. You can use this to create QR codes.

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
require 'rubygems'
require 'rqrcode'

margin = 1
qr = RQRCode::QRCode.new(ARGV[0], :size => 4, :level => :h )
res = ""

size = qr.modules.size + margin * 2
white = "33[5;37;47m  "
black = "33[0;34;40m  "
size.times do |x|
  size.times do |y|
    if x < margin || y < margin || x >= size - margin || y >= size - margin
      res += white
    elsif qr.is_dark(x - margin,y - margin)
      res += black
    else
      res += white
    end
  end
  res += "33[0m\n"
end
puts res

I would prefer to know where I need to go rather than where I’m going

Why does google maps keep giving me us addresses. Eughhhhhhh!! Waterloo, uk should give me a uk address.

Quote from my new favourite law paper discussing ideas I raised in death penalty conspiracies and lotteries:

But, retributivists claim, whether or not this is a good idea does not depend on the balance of costs and benefits. It is simply wrong to kill someone for double parking. A related problem is that of punishing the innocent. It is possible that, under certain circumstances, falsely convicting an innocent person would have a salutary deterrent effect, enough to justify that person’s suffering, etc. Critics also note that, so far as deterrence is concerned, it is the threat of punishment that is justified and not the punishment itself. Thus, consequentialism might justify letting murderers and rapists off the hook so long as their punishment could be convincingly faked.

The standard consequentialist response to these charges is that such concerns have no place in the real world. They
say, for example, that the idea of imposing the death penalty for parking violations to make society an overall happier place is absurd. People everywhere would live in mortal fear of bureaucratic errors, and so on. Likewise, a legal system that deliberately convicted innocent people and/or secretly refrained from punishing guilty ones would require a kind of systematic deception that would lead inevitably to corruption and that could never survive in a free society.

Retributivist intituions are so strong that consequentialists have to make arguments as to why better social equilibriums are not possible. If we could have convincing fake punishment the world would be better off. However, unfortunately it is probably not possible.

And who would have thought Jesus or Buddah would have such a good  understanding of neurobiology and determinism:

Intuitively, we want to punish those people who truly deserve it, but whenever the causes of someone’s bad behaviour are made sufficiently vivid, we no longer see that person as truly deserving of punishment. This insight is expressed by the old French proverb: ‘to know all is to forgive all’. It is also expressed in the teachings of religious figures, such as Jesus and Buddha, who preach a message of universal compassion.

There is something beautiful about universal compassion and forgiveness being tied to materialistic determinism.

* checking the station signs is cheap compared to getting stuck in new eltham

* there is a plant similar to lantana in england and i’m now very itchy

* there is a road block around new eltham staffed by around 6 females. they charge 50p for passing. 50p is a fair price for passing.

This is a follow up to the post Recidivism and Expectations. I recently read a post on Modeled Behaviour about how a prisoner wanted to be executed by firing squad instead of lethal injection and this got me thinking. If people are risk adverse then optimal punishment should be random. If you commit a crime that imposes x harm on other people then maybe it is better that you are punished at 1/x probability with x^2 harm. In other words maybe all are criminal punishments should be the death penalty but we reduce the probability of carrying out the punishment in indirect proportion to the crime committed. also, if we are maximising utility we can claim to execute people but secretlly move them to prison camps. Ex-ante people will assume they are dead and suffer z harm but ex-post they will only suffer y harm where Y < Z.

Tapping your oyster at 11’00 is -ev. I should start writing  insurance policies,

[15:21:00] Ethel Johnson: How’s it going.. I was checking out the directory and i discovered your name.. and thought you seemed interesting..
[15:30:54] Ethel Johnson: I’m not crazy about Skype though … would you like to see my profile..?
[15:31:22] Ethel Johnson: Hellooo, u out there?