"Slope" implies that the denominator is a distance. In the context of a graph on paper or screen, it is clear how rise and run are mapped to distances. It's a totally sensible definition: slope only makes sense given a choice of axes.
"Rate" implies that the denominator is a timespan. This does not make sense, as there are many slopes which are not rates and which are not presented as rates.
It's kind of a silly thing to worry about, but Khan's answer is unequivocally better.
There are gaps in there for airflow around the ports and through the case over the chip and power. We've run it for 24 hours and it the result was it got warm on the bottom, so we've added bottom vents to the design which exhaust around the SD Card. We're happy the Pi won't choke.
"Shift" is a big omission, though you can guess at it from the emphasis on certain numeric keys.
One of the great things about Python is that there are fewer chorded characters. It's also one of the worst things about Lisp on a standard keyboard.
Hi, I added shift counting to Mahdi's code a while ago: (https://github.com/zaki/Keyboard-Heatmap-1), so it should be easy to generate more correct heatmaps (in multiple keyboard layouts too) if you are interested.
you're free to replace one by a facade around a remote service.
RPC rarely lives up to this promise. Starting simple is certainly a good approach, but don't fool yourself about how hard it's going to be when you need to deal with latency and partial failure later.
Trust me, I'm fully aware of all of the trouble with getting RPCs to work properly. I still think that it is easier to do that work after you have the original non-rpc version as a reference.
Yes, but making those module boundaries loosely coupled and sharing information only through their interfaces will go a LONG way towards enabling you to remote the call at a later date. The biggest mistakes that prevent remoting a module have to do with requiring context that is not part of the interface of the method call (or having a very chatty back-and-forth, but that is less common.)
How is demurrage different from inflation? Isn't the financial system already set up to encourage savers to invest their assets rather than storing value as bills under mattresses?
This is what I thought of too when I read the wikipedia page for "Demurrage". Here's what's referenced there:
> The major central banks' post-WWII policy of steady monetary inflation as proposed by Keynes was influenced by Gesell's idea of demurrage on currency,[2] but used inflation of the money supply rather than fees to effect the goal of increasing the velocity of money and expanding the economy.
The rate of inflation has other effects. Prices tend to move upwards more easily than downwards; the most basic reason for this is that when you have a choice between reducing your real income via a general across-the-board inflation, or reducing your real income by cutting your nominal income, you should almost always choose the inflation (because spending is typically dominated by contracts, i.e. fixed cash flows like mortgage payments and utilities bills).
So if you have a choice between (1) x% demurrage and 0% inflation, or (2) 0% demurrage and x% inflation, you should always prefer option (2). This allows prices to adjust faster, which is generally a good thing.
Demurrage drives the velocity of money up, and the interest rates down. These have other beneficial effects, such as easy access to credit (as long as you're creditworthy).
More noteworthy, demurrage is assessed immediately whereas inflation is delayed. Under a demurrage system, this places an incentive to invest in assets which lead to longer-term sustainable growth. Inflation can instead incentise nearsighted short-term growth (and all the ramifications that has).
This is irrelevant if people don't want to use your currency. When you invent a currency, you can't just think about monetary policies but also incentives for using it.
Some groups have had success in introducing local currencies with similar features. One path we've looked at is getting communities of people (perhaps starting with some #occupy groups and their supporters) to use it and convince local businesses to accept it, hence the subtitle of being the worlds first “global-community currency”.
Indeed. And how does a currency with demurrage prevent users from investing in gold and storing it in a vault instead of investing in something that provides "longer-term sustainable growth [of the economy]"?
Inflation also drives the velocity of money up, and the interest rate down. And both inflation and demurrage are "continuously assessed," it's just that losses to inflation aren't immediately measurable.
Even if the timing of inflation/demurrage costs were different, could you explain more about the link between the timing of fees and the sustainability of investments? I don't see how the two are related.
> Inflation also drives the velocity of money up, and the interest rate down. And both inflation and demurrage are "continuously assessed," it's just that losses to inflation aren't immediately measurable.
No, inflation is measurably delayed and hurts the poor and middle class more than it does the wealthy because insiders have preferential access to credit, allowing them to benefit from inflation. Instantly and continuously assessed demurrage would remove that preferential treatment.
> Even if the timing of inflation/demurrage costs were different, could you explain more about the link between the timing of fees and the sustainability of investments? I don't see how the two are related.
Demurrage reduces interest, where interest can have negative/short-sighted effects. As the value of an investment is calculated by discounting future cash flows by the expected interest rate, a lower interest rate means investments generating sustainable cash flow are more likely to be preferred than a one-time ROI.
The classic example being clear-cutting a forest vs. sustainably harvesting it. The incentive is to clear-cut the forest when there are high interest rates, as the cash can be re-invested, whereas a sustainable logging model makes more sense as the long-term interest rate approaches zero.
No, inflation is measurably delayed and hurts the poor and middle class more than it does the wealthy because insiders have preferential access to credit, allowing them to benefit from inflation.
The same applies under demurrage. You're just shifting the loss of value form the real variables to the nominal variables.
I've read a lot of advocacy for demurrage, but somehow nobody is ever able to put a finger onto where the difference is supposed to be exactly.
Demurrage reduces interest, where interest can have negative/short-sighted effects.
Perhaps it reduces the nominal interest rate. Why should it reduce the real interest rate? (Unless you suppose that after introducing demurrage inflation stays the same; but then you might as well go ahead and increase inflation to achieve the same effect)
Can you provide that measurement, then? How long is the period between the moment I pick up a dollar bill and the moment inflation starts to reduce its value? A month? A week? A day? If I pick up two dollar bills, 24 hours apart, is the former bill worth more than the second bill, since inflation hasn't reduced its value since I picked it up?
Inflation in the US has been pretty low lately, which does not really encourage investment (relative to hoarding). That's at least partially because huge banks control the interest rates. If someone other than huge banks could control the rate, they could make investment more enticing compared to hoarding.
The primary lever the Fed has to influence inflation is interest rates. Low interest rates tend to increase actual investment, in factories new businesses, etc, and eventually drive inflation up. Increasing interest rates now would most likely trigger a deflationary spiral.
To further this logic, demurrage allows the effects of inflation but with naturally low interest rates, reducing the probability of a positive-feedback spiral.
This works by sampling a static scene a very large number of times with a laser flash and a "streak tube" camera that records a picosecond-long movie of the light arriving at a single scanline.
A normal video camera records a frame at a time, this one records a scanline-sized movie at a time. The raw data is noisy but the scene is static so they can sample the same line over many flashes.
After a few minutes of scanning they have a trillion fps video where you can see a wavefront propagate at the speed of light. Amazing.
"Rate" implies that the denominator is a timespan. This does not make sense, as there are many slopes which are not rates and which are not presented as rates.
It's kind of a silly thing to worry about, but Khan's answer is unequivocally better.