America needs to forgive itself for its original sins of slavery and ghettoization of native Americans. To claim that was a different time and a different set of people is disingenuous. The government aided and abetted these travesties and they need to help alleviate them. So the question is how to do this fairly? Here’s a simple proposal. First we must make some observations: with DNA tracking, we know exactly who your ancestors were. They were either discriminated against or not. And we know the proportions, so we can base the reparations on a standard legal ground. The idea is to take each grouping of families and compare their wealth to the average. We can figure out what the growth rate would need to be to match the wealth of the groups at any time in the future. Pick a time frame to eliminate this systemic racism. Maybe as long as it was in place? About 350 years? So say we plan to be an egalitarian society at that point? That seems ridiculous! How about reversing the last 55 ye
Hacks of System Engineering to Understand Exponential Growth and Vaccine Panic. Okay! Today I get to play armchair epidemiologist! But first, let's all learn the Rule of 72! The Rule of 72 is a way to understand exponential growth. Exponential growth is something we see all the time in information technologies. Moore's law [1] is an example. It says that every two years the number of transistors you can fit into a fixed area doubles. This picture is updated from one of Kurzweill's books: [2] The Singularity is Near. It shows several things that will become very useful to be able to predict exponential growth rates. There's a linear X-axis that goes in terms of years (it could be any standard increment of time, days, hours, weeks, months, etc. Then there is a Y-axis that is given in powers of 10. Each tick represents 10 times the tick below it. Thus a straight line in this graph is actually an exponential growth curve. For every increment of time you get a multiplicati