They're really not that good. While his personal beliefs are way way more conservative than his novels, he does keep a pretty good separation.

He really hasn't written anything that good since the late 90s.

The Red v Blue wars in America? Weird. The latter Enderverse novels could have been cranked out by current AI. Treasure Box? Enchantment? Snoozers.

You can actually see the progression in the original Ender quartet, since it spanned pretty much his entire career as a good writer.

"Ender's Game" in '85 and "Speaker for the Dead" in '86 — It's hard to decide which one was more awesome. They're very different, but both are really gripping and create two fascinating worlds. When I read those two books, I thought I had found my favorite author of all time.

"Xenocide" in '91 — Sadly, not as good as the first two, but still a pretty compelling book. Veers a little too close to becoming a paean to the wonders of marriage and fatherhood, but constantly course-corrects and is pretty successful overall.

"Children of the Mind" in '96 — It's a readable novel, but as the conclusion to the previous three books, I couldn't help but ask, "WTF?" It's way too involved in its own ideas to bother with compelling characterization, and it has this weird tunnel vision that essentially reduces all human interaction to marriage, divorce or some analogue for the two.

Just wondering, I've been able to down vote for a few months, but recently, my karma hasn't gone down, but I can no longer down vote comments.

Why would that be?

The karma needed to downvote moved from 200 to 500.

There's an enforced ratio of downvotes to upvotes that you may have hit. Also: comment more.

Hmm, encouraging commenting as a means, not as an end, is engendering a culture of under valued contributions...

I've been a member since late 2009, but I've made 2 or 3 comments so far. My case is not atypical. Maybe there's a better way?

It means its okay to go into debt for a few years, as long as we pay it back when the going gets good.

A business cycle doesn't have a defined length, which is one of the problems of the approach. I think 3-7 years is a decent range.

1) Getting answers to collide when there's only two choices, Agree or Disagree, is simple, absurdly simple.

50% represents maximum dissension.

How many other questions were there? How did they coincide with the presented questions? What is the expected distribution if answers were assigned randomly?

2) A question that deals with global or national finance often can't be accurately stated in a single sentence. I look at, say, the minimum wage, or the sports franchise question, and I think, "It depends."

3) There's an assumption in the questions that contain "should". That assumption is that economists all share the same goals. They don't. The ones who do may agree about the methods to achieve it.

Agree. It's positively dangerous to assume a simple, selectively chosen set of questions are a basis for public policy recommendations.

Take the argument about minimum wages increasing unemployment amongst the unskilled and the young, for example. It's not too difficult to infer an implicit policy recommendation from the answer to that question...

If, however, you had asked the question "minimum wages increase unemployment overall" you would find a much lower level of agreement (not least empirical observations of the introduction of minimum wages in many jurisdictions have contradicted that claim). There's no inconsistency here since there are plenty of plausible economic mechanisms for believing that imposing a minimum wage leads to a countervailing increase in older, more skilled labourers, but even amongst the subset of economists that believe the actual effect of a minimum wage is to concentrate unemployment amongst the young and unskilled you'll find a large degree of dissent over whether this has good or bad implications for society and the economy as a whole.

It's possible to agree wholeheartedly with Mankiw's simple observation of minimum wages => youth unemployment whilst disagreeing passionately with any policy recommendation against imposing a wage floor, even using narrow economic efficiency criteria.

A few days into it and I've decided Eric Butler made a mistake in releasing Firesheep.

Security is about battling a combination of Time + Talents/Tools + Determination + Opportunity.

Firesheep greatly increases the Tools someone has to hack an account. Eric has made browsing much less secure.

The intended result is to bring the security issue to people's awareness, which he has done. But the result should have been to increase security. That will only happen if the the change in required Tools is balanced by a decrease in Opportunity (free wifi becoming simple password wifi at a minimum).

I doubt that will happen. Releasing Firesheep was a mistake.

This is a good place to post and critique these sorts of ideas: http://www.halfbakery.com/

And posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051809

1) Who searches on "sausage" or "Sausalito"? I might search for 'sausage making quote' or 'Sausalito italian restaurant'. And while I type that I get faded type ahead in my search box and results popping up on the screen. Annoying.

2) As long as I'm criticizing, I also use quotes in about half my searches, but Google's type ahead feature strips them out rendering the function useless.

3) OK, a rave about Google's search tools...being able to search in past 24 hours, week, month, year, etc is wonderful when trying to find an answer to a specific technical problem.

But Instand? I turned it off within a couple hours. It's too distracting.

I think you're jumping the gun by using a loaded term like stealing. It may be restaurant policy to allow servers that discretion.

Especially if that "discount" is appearing on the bill.