I am practicing what I preach, you stupid 20%-er troll.
That's why the whole blog post is full of measurements, testing hypotheses, and the assumption that I might be wrong.
Because unlike you, I actually go do shit rather than spout off in a comment thread.
How does crazy paranoid stuff get up-voted here? Very Sad.
Cheaper countries can be fun, but there's lots of downsides as well. If you are asocial, it could be your dream to live there. I'll always want a vacation there, but not to live there.
It is a bit paranoid, but then again, you've never been in a country that locks down money transfers, right? You still believe you can emigrate anywhere.
It's currently unlikely, but I suspect the U.S. could implement that much faster than you think if it keeps going downhill. It already implemented a ban on holding gold in the past, for example ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 in place until 1974 ). It's not the scenario I envision, but thinking "The U.S. would never do that!" is naive.
By the way, I believe the original post had a reasonable suggestion... you could live like a king for your lifetime in, say, Uruguay or Costa Rica with 5 million (and those are reasonably safe countries). Yes, emigrating is a quite hard decision, but it is a possibility.
Keep in mind that 1974 was 36 years ago. I am working with a very different model of the world than you are I think. Capital controls exist in the world and some are quite harsh. However, no serious person is even close to advocating them (for wealth nations like the US). What problem do you imagine they would solve?
Actually it is. During the cold war it was split between East and West, and when it got reunited there was a lot of cheap condos, stores, etc. in the East, and lots of entrepreneurial Germans in the West.
The combination is a cheap city full of life. If you have the chance you should definitely go check it out.
Not sure where you are getting your information from. Travel isn't cheap, food isn't cheap, and rent isn't cheap, if you want to live anywhere near town.
Yes, great place to live or visit, full of life, great people, but not cheap.
I have found Germany to be one of the most expensive places in Europe, certainly much more expensive than the US. It seems the further south you head, and the further east you head, Europe gets cheaper, with a few exceptions.
Curious to know what is cheaper in Berlin compared with Copenhagen, I am surprised there is much difference. Did not find much difference in Denmark when I passed through, and spent quite a bit of time in Stockholm, avoided light beers. Did not find much that was more expensive.
The Nordic countries are quite a bit more expensive than Germany (and have worse bread). Which stems from the slightly lower VAT in Germany, less regulations and taxes on the sale of alcoholic beverages and the fact that Germany has Aldi, Lidl, Penny, Plus, Netto, etc. (all of them competing discount stores).
ffs man, I'm with you on the US not being the place to be at the moment but Romania??? If you're going to call someone out for not being traveled you should at least avoid listing places you clearly haven't been to yourself (if you have been there and still recommend it then you have some pretty low standards. Don't expect anyone else to adopt them on purpose).
Meta: I say something else. You retort something unrelated to your absurd initial declaration about the soon to disappear money order (I assume that wire transfers will have to go to).
I'm going to try to give you something totally off the wall. Don't forget that mathematicians were people. Here's three biographies of some of my favorite mathematicians:
Also, please check out some of the giants on that site and wikipedia: Gauss, Laplace, Euler. Why were they interested in what they were? What techniques did they develop? A very crucial question that very few ever ask: Would they have done much differently had they had access to a computer? (Of course).
Focusing on proofs to learn math is very perverse. A proof in a textbook is a proof that has been refined an almost ludicrous number of times. Definitions and axioms have even been optimized for the sake of elegance of said proofs. Don't get me wrong, a connoisseur appreciates what has been done. However, removed from the problem that motivated this way of thinking, mathematical techniques can often confuse more than enlighten.
In this thread I realize that I have been a bit vague. I want to develop the skills of visualization and in depth understanding of math for a reason. I want to learn how to make systems that exploit machine learning and use statistical techniques to infer patterns from data.
In the future some day I want to work in A.I. and create something beautiful with the knowledge I have gained. This is why I want to lay down the foundations to understand the beautiful advances in it I see around me.
Cool, although I'd suggest not getting to excited about AI itself. It's cool your already focusing on machine learning.
A great way to get going in that direction is to check out the state of the art as expressed by AT&T labs Netflix Prize solution. To get very far you'll want to have some background in linear algebra. However, theory isn't the way to go (although you'll probably need it eventually). Do a little digging and you'll find code for svds, the simplex method and all sorts of super important algorithms that are used all over the place.
You'll find if you ask questions like: How does x work in y algorithm? people will have a better idea of where to start. When you actually are coding and able to see numbers for a particular problem, you'll be able to wrap your mind around what's going on.
A bunch of uninformed whining is hardly in-depth. You'd think you couldn't file these electronically or that people have to create, gasp, invoices for the vast majority of such transactions.
Cool so where do I send the 1099 for SAMs club, Office Depot, and the restaurant down the street to? Will you come deal with the reporting discrepancies for me. I'll be getting at least 1000 1099's a year, will you deal with those for me? This is needless bueracratic bullshit to the maximum.
This is at least a full time job, probably two, and maybe three depending on how many of our clients get the reporting wrong. That's a cost of $100k - $300k each year just for the accountants. Let's not forget that some clients will misreport, so we will need to chase them down and deal with their accountants and lawyers.
And remember, if the numbers don't match you'll also need a tax lawyer, because you'll be getting audited. Off by more than 25%, have fun in prison. This is a major, onerous reporting process. If you have a $50/month service with 1000 clients, you're doing $600k. This will eat at leSt half of your gross.
I hate to break it to you, but a whole lot of people in the US don't have accountants and yet still spend more than $600 at various stores over the course of a year.
As the article notes, this doesn't apply to individuals, no matter how much money they spend at a store per year; it only applies to businesses, who are already required to keep track of their business expenses.
Individuals are small businesses too. Consultants, contractors, lots of people. More people, yes people, file a Schedule C than you might be aware of. Hell, someone who does a lot of business selling stuff on eBay or Craigslist is subject to this I they're reporting their income from that activity. Many do.
Sure, I file a Schedule C myself (for a pretty tiny side business). But I also keep track of all the expenses for that, since I have to to report on the Schedule C, so it's trivial for me to determine if I paid anyone more than $600 this year (just export my expenses from Gnucash, grouped by payee). And yes, it'd be an added hassle to file 1099s, and I don't really support it.
My main point is that, contrary to the impression some people here seem to have, non-business expenses won't require 1099s. The discussion here (in particular the thread I was replying to) seemed to think that the law would require their grandmother to send Best Buy a 1099 if she spent more than $600 on her new computer, or that you'd have to add up all your Home Depot receipts to see if you spent more than $600 on home-improvement this year, which isn't the case.
Yeah, I've considered picking it up. Glancing at Fortran code is a bit off-putting though.
You aren't going to beat my code by much, much less by double. I did want to see what was possible by doing everything on the cpu. Your point about portability stands, but of course assembler is perfectly portable (you'd just have to adjust the initial moves according to abi differences). However, if Fortran does come close to my code's performance, there would be a huge time savings in coding time.
So you are correct about the original contribution thing. There is also an option to start early withdraws on investment appreciations as well. It gets complicated, but basically you can start making regular withdraws (once a month I think, always of the same amount) penalty free.
One of the best pieces of advice I can give you is to not obsess over the college catalog. Freshmen year is about making friends and enjoying your new found freedom.
If you want to learn more the best thing you can do is be a good student. If a topic interests you, stay after class and discuss it with a professor, or visit them at office hours. Opportunities abound for this sort of thing, usually in smaller classes though. I'd recommend getting used to college in your first year and then hitting up professors more when you have found your place at school.
Yeah but that's part of the problem. They released it, it was slow and clunky, and that turned everyone off. OK so they made some improvements, but they probably should have done that before releasing it and turning people off :)
Sadly, this is pretty much done by the citation count bit. People that write quality papers were either scooped up by a quality institution, or could move to one. Good work is done at a lot of places, but its more visible when done at a famous place.
