That's why the next disruptors will be entirely distributed. Google, FB, Amazon and Co. are todays AOL and CompuServe, plain and simple. They bascially own the web. Cracking that stronghold will likely only happen with fully distributed services. I expect something like this to show up with the next 5 years or so.
In a way I'm looking forward to that.
Although a fully distributed facebook would be better for the internet, it would have a hard time competing with facebook. The reason facebook is so successful is because it has all the people and all the advertisers. Ideally, a distributed facebook would allow third party clients to connect to the distributed backend. This would be hard to monetize so the distributed system would always be at a huge disadvantage to the highly profitable walled garden.
You don't have to buy it. That's the interesting thing about facts. You don't have to believe them for them to be true. My daughter has a sweet tooth. She loves dessert. My son usually skips ice cream and dessert and instead gets a second or third helping of the main dish. Many countries the children eat stuff spicier than adults in other countries and just google delicacies around the world. I promise you that there are plenty of stuff on that list that the majority of the rest of the world would find disgusting.
if the _ONLY_ thing you feed a child is porridge and beans, and then later in life introduce the person to chocolate ice cream? the person will preference to sweet foods, despite never having them previously.
That's not as true as you think. It's also interesting that you mention beans. In Taiwan, their ice cream is bean based and not near as sweet as in America. Most of their sweets are also not near as sweet and many Asians do not like the sweet candies in America. People raised in one country tend to prefer the foods and tastes they were raised on and delicacies in one country are sometimes disliked in another country. Humans don't have a universal set of tastes that they prefer over the others. Even inside a single culture, if you cut out sweets for a while then something extra sweet will taste disgusting to you after a while. You can train yourself to like stuff less sweet or more sweet. There are many things in many countries that are "acquired tastes" and don't come naturally.
Basically for consumer liability you can shoot at anyone left standing until there's no one to shoot at.
And you consider this a good thing? I'm perfectly fine with certain things like UL listing and other fire safety standards but if a company creates a product, properly tests a product, and then sells the product and a defect is found, then it shouldn't be liable for mistakes it didn't know about. An example I like to use is someone who goes under for surgery and is conscience the whole time. This happens to about 1/100000 people and is a very traumatic experience for the patient but there is no way for the anesthesiologist to know about or prevent this. Yes, it sucks if it happens to you but how does suing the doctor prevent it from happening again? Laws and lawsuits should primarily be for prevention and deterrent. Currently, the only way to prevent this would likely be to put someone under, do a small test incision, wake them up, ask them if they feel it, and then put them under again. Not only would this dramatically increase the cost of surgery, it would likely increase the death rate too so you've traded one problem for a worse problem. Live is messy, there are no guarantees. The goal of government should be to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of other people but if amazon is just the middle man and acted with due diligence and good intention then it shouldn't be liable. A good rule of thumb should be if you are not giving a suggestion of what they could have done differently to prevent it then you shouldn't be able to sue them. I guess Amazon could have put a disclaimer saying "warning: this is a cheap chinese knockoff use at your own risk" but do we really need 15 million disclaimers on everything for stuff people already know.
Seems like if they don't recycle in your area, it's time for some agitation and representation.
They recycle in my town but recycling is still a very expensive operation. In some cases cleaning and processing recycled material is actually more expensive than using virgin materials. Reusing would be much better than recycling as it should require significantly less energy but the trend seems to be more and more single use instead of expanding reusable products.
To go order from real restaurants usually don't include any utensils because they assume you are taking it home to eat. It's rare for people to need utensils for to go orders.
You can't turn everyone into middle class anymore than you can make everyone above average. The best you can do is decrease the spread between the rich and the poor but unless everyone is equal, there will always be rich, poor, and the people in the middle.
Strangely most places have been moving the other direction. It used to be common to have reusable glass milk and soda bottles. Now, even if they are glass, they are not usually reused. The problem is that single use is cheaper and more convenient than reusable.
I don't mind the plastic utensils when needed but I wish they wouldn't provide stuff that is not needed. When you order dine in pancakes at mcdonalds they deliver it with a giant plastic lid that is immediately thrown away. This seems extremely wasteful. Also, I never use a straw but always receive several at every restaurant I go to. There are plenty of other practices that needlessly waste stuff that people don't even want.
Interestingly, my wife has the exact same reactions; can't eat American wheat but can scarf down German butter pretzels all day long. No idea why, but a physician friend of ours thinks it might have something to do with the number of proteins in modern wheat. 50 years ago, there were less than ten but now, in our effort to feed the world, there's more than 40. (I'm in the middle of a term paper, so you smug "citation needed" types can sod off.)
Are you sure it's even the food? I discovered something similar myself. I first noticed that my digestive issues always disappeared on vacation. While on vacation, I'm more active, eat more regularly, less stressed, and probably a bunch of other variables change. Most people don't have equal access to German and American food in the same environment. I've discovered that as long as I stay relatively active then I can eat wheat of any variety with no problem but as soon as I sit all day and start neglecting my health that certain high carb foods start making me ill.
If Hilton Hotel heirs can live off their hotels' income for a thousand years, why can't Elvis' heirs do the same?
That shouldnâ(TM)t be allowed either. Perpetual wealth will eventually destroy the USA. We need to bring back the estate tax and not allow perpetual corporations to gobble up the world.
The 4400 tv show did an interesting take on this. You had a 50/50 chance of either dying or getting a super power. Lots of people were signing up. I'm assuming in real life, the results would be similar. A drug company could never take that liability but there are plenty of people with terminal and/or debilitating illnesses that would take a 50/50 shot at being cured or dying.
The most common rat poison is warfarin which is also used in humans as a blood thinner to prevent blood clots. Iâ(TM)m not saying there are no unknown negatives but rat poison is relatively safe at low doses and pretty well understood.
Pretty much everything a computer does we can do. We program them to do it. There are plenty of things that computers can do faster and better though. Hopefully self driving cars becomes on of those. If you donâ(TM)t think self driving cars are worth it, you arenâ(TM)t thinking big enough. Imagine taking a cross country road trip where each morning you wake up at a different national park. Thatâ(TM)s the type of thing that is possible once we have self driving cars. Not to mention the price of a taxi drops considerably as does the cost of shipped goods. There are likely tons of spin off technologies we havenâ(TM)t even imagined yet that will become possible and cost effective once we have self driving vehicles.
Itâ(TM)s more like expecting a heroine user to quit after finding out his money is used by the drug cartel to buy guns. People already assume that facebook is selling their data. They likely assume that it is worse than it really is. They donâ(TM)t care. Given the option to pay $5/month for private data, very few would sign up. They might pay for less ads but privacy isnâ(TM)t something people care about. This was only a scandal for the media. Everyone else assumed it was already happening.
There are many edits with predictable consequences.
Sure we might have a good idea that a certain gene controls X but we don't necessarily know other things it might control. For instance viagra dialates blood vessels in the eyes and cancer drugs kill all fast growing cells including hair. Gene editing could be 10 times more unpredictable. Some snippet of dna might do one thing in muscle cells and something completely different in brain cells. Even animal testing isn't a sure thing because we still don't really know what is unique about humans that makes us smarter than other animals.
The world is "rather darwinian" just as the world is somewhat just. Sure there is a huge spectrum there. People can do stupid stuff and/or immoral stuff (especially the rich and powerful) and get away with it for a long time but there is a pendulum there and for the majority of people karma eventually catches up. Sure bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people but on average more bad things happen to bad people. And that's not even counting the having to look yourself in the mirror and the constantly looking over your shoulder that comes with being immortal. Justice mostly gets served most of the time to the criminals and the innocents are mostly left alone.
But most real estate agents don't do most of that even for the seller. Most just want to sell your house as quickly as possible. It's common for real estate agents to brag about selling a house in under a week. Some even brag about selling it over the asking price. If you get multiple offers in under a week and sell it for more than the asking price then your real estate agent conpletely failed at his job because it means you could probably have asked for a lot more.
Where does this plastic come from? Petroleum distillates. Which, as we all know includes fossil fuels that no reasonable profit oriented person would put back in the ground.
I would mostly agree except that recycling plastic is not really that efficient or cost effective. Neither is recycling paper. We actually might be better off burying the plastic and paper instead of recycling it. If we stopped recycling all the plastic/paper or converted it into logs and buried it that would be a significant carbon sink that is actually feasible and scalable now. It would also be easy to implement and cost very little. Not recycling sounds strange but if CO2 is the biggest problem it's probably the simplest solution to the problen.
Hence the approach should have been on the bacteria level --- Put a stop to the bacteria which decompose carbon-based carcasses (animal and plants), or at the very least, SLOW THEM DOWN so that the carbon deposit inside the carcasses don't get to be release so fast into the air.
We already know something that captures carbon better than rocks and takes an extremely long time to biodegrade: plastic. Non-biodegradable plastic is an excellent carbon sink whether buried or used to build roads or buildings but suggesting plastic as a solution to global warming sounds nonsensical even though it would likely work better than this.
I call bullshit - many many breakthroughs were made by scientists doing 'pure' science. We would NEVER have had, for one random example, lasers, if there had been a profit requirement behind the scientists doing the fundamental science that made it possible.
Yes, many breakthroughs happen with ah-ha moments and pure science happens at many non-profits. The problem is going from the fundamental science to something you can actually sell. Most of the cost in developing the drugs is not the pure science, it's the clinical trials, safety tests, etc... that have to be done before you can legally sell it. It's the same thing with programming or engineering. Creating a prototype usually takes less time than going from a prototype to a finished product. Drug testing is 10 times worse. You could probably argue that we could streamline that process but even with the current drawn out process we still end up having to pull drugs all the time that had some unknown side effect that didn't show up during trials.
Roku is what I use and at least the amazon app I have mixes them all together and I haven't been able to figure out how to hide the paid content from my kids. There is also a ton of overlap between prime/netflix/hulu so it seems like a waste of money to subscribe to more than one at a time.
Back then cable TV premium package meant a handful of movie channels, a couple sports and news, etc. Now it gets you several dozen movie, a dozen sports or more, and Video On Demand. Back in 2000 people still paid Blockbuster to rent movies. And back then it was glorious standard def.
Yes, prices have gone up. But cord cutting only saves you money if you only consume one or two services.
Why would VOD cost you more per month. VOD is a pay per view type service that should lower your monthly fee and most cable VOD that I've seen is more expensive that amazon, redbox, vudu, or any other VOD service. I'm amazed that they can get anyone to pay for their VOD service when there are so many cheaper alternatives. I definitely wouldn't want to pay extra each month for the privilege of overpriced VOD.
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That's why the next disruptors will be entirely distributed. Google, FB, Amazon and Co. are todays AOL and CompuServe, plain and simple. They bascially own the web. Cracking that stronghold will likely only happen with fully distributed services. I expect something like this to show up with the next 5 years or so.
In a way I'm looking forward to that.
Although a fully distributed facebook would be better for the internet, it would have a hard time competing with facebook. The reason facebook is so successful is because it has all the people and all the advertisers. Ideally, a distributed facebook would allow third party clients to connect to the distributed backend. This would be hard to monetize so the distributed system would always be at a huge disadvantage to the highly profitable walled garden.
You don't have to buy it. That's the interesting thing about facts. You don't have to believe them for them to be true.
My daughter has a sweet tooth. She loves dessert. My son usually skips ice cream and dessert and instead gets a second or third helping of the main dish.
Many countries the children eat stuff spicier than adults in other countries and just google delicacies around the world.
I promise you that there are plenty of stuff on that list that the majority of the rest of the world would find disgusting.
No.
if the _ONLY_ thing you feed a child is porridge and beans, and then later in life introduce the person to chocolate ice cream? the person will preference to sweet foods, despite never having them previously.
That's not as true as you think. It's also interesting that you mention beans. In Taiwan, their ice cream is bean based and not near as sweet as in America. Most of their sweets are also not near as sweet and many Asians do not like the sweet candies in America. People raised in one country tend to prefer the foods and tastes they were raised on and delicacies in one country are sometimes disliked in another country. Humans don't have a universal set of tastes that they prefer over the others. Even inside a single culture, if you cut out sweets for a while then something extra sweet will taste disgusting to you after a while. You can train yourself to like stuff less sweet or more sweet. There are many things in many countries that are "acquired tastes" and don't come naturally.
Basically for consumer liability you can shoot at anyone left standing until there's no one to shoot at.
And you consider this a good thing? I'm perfectly fine with certain things like UL listing and other fire safety standards but if a company creates a product, properly tests a product, and then sells the product and a defect is found, then it shouldn't be liable for mistakes it didn't know about.
An example I like to use is someone who goes under for surgery and is conscience the whole time. This happens to about 1/100000 people and is a very traumatic experience for the patient but there is no way for the anesthesiologist to know about or prevent this. Yes, it sucks if it happens to you but how does suing the doctor prevent it from happening again? Laws and lawsuits should primarily be for prevention and deterrent. Currently, the only way to prevent this would likely be to put someone under, do a small test incision, wake them up, ask them if they feel it, and then put them under again. Not only would this dramatically increase the cost of surgery, it would likely increase the death rate too so you've traded one problem for a worse problem. Live is messy, there are no guarantees. The goal of government should be to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of other people but if amazon is just the middle man and acted with due diligence and good intention then it shouldn't be liable. A good rule of thumb should be if you are not giving a suggestion of what they could have done differently to prevent it then you shouldn't be able to sue them. I guess Amazon could have put a disclaimer saying "warning: this is a cheap chinese knockoff use at your own risk" but do we really need 15 million disclaimers on everything for stuff people already know.
Seems like if they don't recycle in your area, it's time for some agitation and representation.
They recycle in my town but recycling is still a very expensive operation. In some cases cleaning and processing recycled material is actually more expensive than using virgin materials. Reusing would be much better than recycling as it should require significantly less energy but the trend seems to be more and more single use instead of expanding reusable products.
To go order from real restaurants usually don't include any utensils because they assume you are taking it home to eat. It's rare for people to need utensils for to go orders.
You can't turn everyone into middle class anymore than you can make everyone above average. The best you can do is decrease the spread between the rich and the poor but unless everyone is equal, there will always be rich, poor, and the people in the middle.
Strangely most places have been moving the other direction. It used to be common to have reusable glass milk and soda bottles. Now, even if they are glass, they are not usually reused. The problem is that single use is cheaper and more convenient than reusable.
I don't mind the plastic utensils when needed but I wish they wouldn't provide stuff that is not needed. When you order dine in pancakes at mcdonalds they deliver it with a giant plastic lid that is immediately thrown away. This seems extremely wasteful. Also, I never use a straw but always receive several at every restaurant I go to. There are plenty of other practices that needlessly waste stuff that people don't even want.
Interestingly, my wife has the exact same reactions; can't eat American wheat but can scarf down German butter pretzels all day long. No idea why, but a physician friend of ours thinks it might have something to do with the number of proteins in modern wheat. 50 years ago, there were less than ten but now, in our effort to feed the world, there's more than 40. (I'm in the middle of a term paper, so you smug "citation needed" types can sod off.)
Are you sure it's even the food? I discovered something similar myself. I first noticed that my digestive issues always disappeared on vacation. While on vacation, I'm more active, eat more regularly, less stressed, and probably a bunch of other variables change. Most people don't have equal access to German and American food in the same environment. I've discovered that as long as I stay relatively active then I can eat wheat of any variety with no problem but as soon as I sit all day and start neglecting my health that certain high carb foods start making me ill.
If Hilton Hotel heirs can live off their hotels' income for a thousand years, why can't Elvis' heirs do the same?
That shouldnâ(TM)t be allowed either. Perpetual wealth will eventually destroy the USA. We need to bring back the estate tax and not allow perpetual corporations to gobble up the world.
The 4400 tv show did an interesting take on this. You had a 50/50 chance of either dying or getting a super power. Lots of people were signing up. I'm assuming in real life, the results would be similar. A drug company could never take that liability but there are plenty of people with terminal and/or debilitating illnesses that would take a 50/50 shot at being cured or dying.
Not if your goal is to save birds. Cats would just as soon eat a bird as a rat.
The most common rat poison is warfarin which is also used in humans as a blood thinner to prevent blood clots. Iâ(TM)m not saying there are no unknown negatives but rat poison is relatively safe at low doses and pretty well understood.
Pretty much everything a computer does we can do. We program them to do it. There are plenty of things that computers can do faster and better though. Hopefully self driving cars becomes on of those. If you donâ(TM)t think self driving cars are worth it, you arenâ(TM)t thinking big enough. Imagine taking a cross country road trip where each morning you wake up at a different national park. Thatâ(TM)s the type of thing that is possible once we have self driving cars. Not to mention the price of a taxi drops considerably as does the cost of shipped goods. There are likely tons of spin off technologies we havenâ(TM)t even imagined yet that will become possible and cost effective once we have self driving vehicles.
Itâ(TM)s more like expecting a heroine user to quit after finding out his money is used by the drug cartel to buy guns. People already assume that facebook is selling their data. They likely assume that it is worse than it really is. They donâ(TM)t care. Given the option to pay $5/month for private data, very few would sign up. They might pay for less ads but privacy isnâ(TM)t something people care about. This was only a scandal for the media. Everyone else assumed it was already happening.
There are many edits with predictable consequences.
Sure we might have a good idea that a certain gene controls X but we don't necessarily know other things it might control. For instance viagra dialates blood vessels in the eyes and cancer drugs kill all fast growing cells including hair. Gene editing could be 10 times more unpredictable. Some snippet of dna might do one thing in muscle cells and something completely different in brain cells. Even animal testing isn't a sure thing because we still don't really know what is unique about humans that makes us smarter than other animals.
The world is "rather darwinian" just as the world is somewhat just. Sure there is a huge spectrum there. People can do stupid stuff and/or immoral stuff (especially the rich and powerful) and get away with it for a long time but there is a pendulum there and for the majority of people karma eventually catches up. Sure bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people but on average more bad things happen to bad people. And that's not even counting the having to look yourself in the mirror and the constantly looking over your shoulder that comes with being immortal. Justice mostly gets served most of the time to the criminals and the innocents are mostly left alone.
But most real estate agents don't do most of that even for the seller. Most just want to sell your house as quickly as possible. It's common for real estate agents to brag about selling a house in under a week. Some even brag about selling it over the asking price. If you get multiple offers in under a week and sell it for more than the asking price then your real estate agent conpletely failed at his job because it means you could probably have asked for a lot more.
making new plastic is cheaper than recycling: http://www.businessinsider.com...
And according to this article, paper is actually more cost effective and reduces CO2 more than recycling plastic: https://www.bustle.com/article...
Where does this plastic come from?
Petroleum distillates. Which, as we all know includes fossil fuels that no reasonable profit oriented person would put back in the ground.
I would mostly agree except that recycling plastic is not really that efficient or cost effective. Neither is recycling paper. We actually might be better off burying the plastic and paper instead of recycling it. If we stopped recycling all the plastic/paper or converted it into logs and buried it that would be a significant carbon sink that is actually feasible and scalable now. It would also be easy to implement and cost very little. Not recycling sounds strange but if CO2 is the biggest problem it's probably the simplest solution to the problen.
Hence the approach should have been on the bacteria level --- Put a stop to the bacteria which decompose carbon-based carcasses (animal and plants), or at the very least, SLOW THEM DOWN so that the carbon deposit inside the carcasses don't get to be release so fast into the air.
We already know something that captures carbon better than rocks and takes an extremely long time to biodegrade: plastic. Non-biodegradable plastic is an excellent carbon sink whether buried or used to build roads or buildings but suggesting plastic as a solution to global warming sounds nonsensical even though it would likely work better than this.
I call bullshit - many many breakthroughs were made by scientists doing 'pure' science. We would NEVER have had, for one random example, lasers, if there had been a profit requirement behind the scientists doing the fundamental science that made it possible.
Yes, many breakthroughs happen with ah-ha moments and pure science happens at many non-profits. The problem is going from the fundamental science to something you can actually sell. Most of the cost in developing the drugs is not the pure science, it's the clinical trials, safety tests, etc... that have to be done before you can legally sell it. It's the same thing with programming or engineering. Creating a prototype usually takes less time than going from a prototype to a finished product. Drug testing is 10 times worse. You could probably argue that we could streamline that process but even with the current drawn out process we still end up having to pull drugs all the time that had some unknown side effect that didn't show up during trials.
Roku is what I use and at least the amazon app I have mixes them all together and I haven't been able to figure out how to hide the paid content from my kids.
There is also a ton of overlap between prime/netflix/hulu so it seems like a waste of money to subscribe to more than one at a time.
Back then cable TV premium package meant a handful of movie channels, a couple sports and news, etc.
Now it gets you several dozen movie, a dozen sports or more, and Video On Demand. Back in 2000 people still paid Blockbuster to rent movies. And back then it was glorious standard def.
Yes, prices have gone up. But cord cutting only saves you money if you only consume one or two services.
Why would VOD cost you more per month. VOD is a pay per view type service that should lower your monthly fee and most cable VOD that I've seen is more expensive that amazon, redbox, vudu, or any other VOD service. I'm amazed that they can get anyone to pay for their VOD service when there are so many cheaper alternatives. I definitely wouldn't want to pay extra each month for the privilege of overpriced VOD.