I have never seen or met a straight man attracted to a woman because of her handbag. As for shoes, well, apparently 20% of men have a foot fetish, so maybe, but they don't care about the brand name.
Fashion isn't driven by what women buy, it's driven by designers and brands deciding what they are doing this season and then marketing the hell out of it.
Almost every fashion designer goes bankrupt. The ones who succeed are the ones who successfully guess what women want, and market the crap out of it. Getting out in front of fashion changes is quite hard, but possible.
As an interesting aside: the stock market works the same way, as stock prices are 80% fashion, 20% fundamentals. Those who can stay out in front of fashion changes do quite well. It's no coincidence 2 of the 10 richest people in the world are fashion designers.
You do know that what people say they want, and what people want, have little in common? What people say (or believe) they want has little predictive power about their actions. What people actually do is what's important.
Uh, how about the fact that they started "Amazon Essentials" to make products that compete with small businesses whose products they were selling for quite some time
If they put Monster Cables out of business, it's a win for humanity.
How about the fact that they leveraged UPS/Fedex/USPS to make their business function, until they decided they were going to take over the shipping market by creating their own shipping company?
"Leveraged"? You mean "paid more than anyone else"? This is bad why again? Thus far they've shown no ambition for shipping beyond their own packages, AFAIK.
So, does *nobody* really care that one giant MegaCorp is trying to own everything?
What are they trying to "own"? In retail, they're the second largest player, with less than 10% market share. Definitely not the biggest in movie streaming. The only thing I can think of where they're the biggest player is "cloud", and better them than Microsoft!
Me and my family are the only people that I know that don't give any money to Amazon. What happened to everybody else?
We enjoy convenience and low prices more then pointless self-flagellation?
The UI and hardware quality (at the price) of Windows Phone was far above its competitors. None of that matters without apps (including, critically, apps to replace the keyboard).
Has MS made an android phone with the same hardware and UI, it would have been a contender. Sadly, easy C# on Android didn't occur to them until far too late.
1. They are not too many driving simulators out there that are accurate like a flight simulator.
There are plenty, but they're not easily available like X-Plane. They're more like real training simulators, and just as out of reach. A good Formula 1 simulator costs more than a nice sports car.
Driving is 2d movement. There is extra thought on the third dimension.
Never seen rally, then. Though, if your yump lasts more than about half a second, you will not be finishing the race today. Even when not airborn, tough, rallt driving is very 3D, as everything changes when cresting or bottoming a hill, turning into a road with bad camber, and so on. Even the simcade games have to think about the third diminsion to be at all realistic.
Does not apply to racing that merely involves turning left for 2 hours, of course.
Driving failures can normally be corrected with hitting the break petal. During flight you need to keep moving.
See above re rally driving. There are a lot of situations where hitting the brakes means you will not be finishing the race today.
You also learn that the pedals control yaw, while the wheel just gives sideslip unless you balance both controls, and that turning your vehicle doesn't automatically mean changing your course, though it does let you apply thrust in a new direction.
But sadly there are no rally driving simulators anywhere near the quality of X-Plane. Unlike Formula-1, it's actually cheaper to practice with an actual car than build an accurate sim.
At best you might argue that there is some training in maneuvers and teamwork,
The US Army evaluated first-person shooter games for any real-life skills they might teach, as part of making their own game. They found that the only useful skill learned was to be mindful of ammo remaining, and reload as soon as practical.
The America's Army game was designed to emphasize teamwork and communication, hoping that could be helped as well. You do see that in normal games as well, but it's pretty rare. Competitive play in CS was all about teamwork and communication, as least when I used to follow it, but competitive CS play looks nothing like normal CS play. Even in those two, though, they miss just how hard it is for the human voice to be heard over gunshots.
QR code? Why did you just insert a non human-readable step?
What we want is computer-assisted voting. You go to the big touch-screen voting machine with pictures of the candidates faces and whatnot, and when you're done it prints a clearly market ballot. You then review the ballot and cast it into the ballot box.
This is so freaking obvious that I can't ascribe good motives to politicians imposing any other system.
This will just become the next attack vector hackers use to compromise the systems.
Attackers? Compromise?
How about this way of describing the system: "Republicans install software on all voting machines in Republican-controlled state to ensure that the election results are correct". Or Democrats, of course, if they've caught up.
Paper voting has its flaws, but even in famously corrupt counties I'm familiar with (cough) Cuyahoga (cough), there's so many bipartisan sign-offs that it'd take quite a conspiracy to throw an election. (They just buy them, instead)
It's notoriously frequent in tight races for new boxes of ballots to be "discovered in the trunk of a car" after counting begins in a tight race. You'd almost expect "trunk-mounted ballot printers" to be on sale on Amazon.
Sure, we don't see people getting re-elected with "100% of the vote, and 100% voter turnout" Saddam Hussein style (though IIRC Obama got 105% of the vote in Detroit), or other corruption on that scale, but in tight races where you only need a few hundred ballots to be "discovered"? Paper ballots are far from perfect.
Charile Stross once wrote about the rise of strong AI from weak AI systems designed to hide finances from the taxman, and the governments AIs that hunted them. I could see the same from an complex AI ecosystem in trading.
Early program trading (the term predates the use of computers for it) was already a complex ecosystem, with programs designed to identify and profit from certain market behaviors, programs designed to fake out and exploit those programs, programs designed to fool those programs, and so on - turtles all the way up, so to speak. And that was before machine learning.
Yup - there's a reason they're called "brokers" not "richers". Thanks goodness for E*Trade and the wave of other discount brokers that followed the rise of the Internet. Don't need your financial "advice", just access to the markets.
I don't see how you keep missing my point. It works like this.
Monday: Dan deposits 10 BTC in Bank A, lets call them B00 through B09. Eve deposits 10 BTC in Bank B, lets call them B10 through B19.
Monday EOD: Bank A has B00-B09 Bank B has B10-B19
Tuesday: I borrow 10 BTC from Bank A (B00-B09) and buy a car. The dealer deposits the day's receipts in Bank B. Bank B now has B00-B09. Meanwhile, You borrow 10 BTC from Bank B (B10-B19) and remodel your house, The contractor deposits the money with Bank A
Tuesday EOD: Bank A has B10-B19 Bank B has B00-B09
Wednesday: Fred borrows 10 BTC from Bank A, and does some commerce. B10-B19 Move to Bank B. George 10 BTC from Bank b, and does some commerce. B00-B09 Move to Bank A.
Wednesday EOD: Bank A has B00-B09 Bank B has B10-B19
So, we're back where we started, and we've had 40 BTC of economic activity from 20 BTC in deposits that have never been withdrawn. 6 people or companies now have a balance of 10 BTC, so 60 BTC total on account ledgers. And the banks still have the BTC loan out.
I don't get why that is confusing? And the government still gets its share of monetary expansion by strongly suggesting to those banks that they should lend it 20 BTC, then spending it (where it still eventually ends up back in the banks), in addition to spending all its taxes.
All valuation is the result of negotiation, from the explicit negotiation over the price of a house to the simple decision whether an item on a store shelf is worth it at the price. Property tax assessment also a negotiation - the government pulls a number out of its ass, and you complain it's too high. For most of us the negotiation is fairly one-sided, and we have to do a lot of work to get a marginal reduction. Apple has more laywers than most of us, and power implicit in the percentage of property value in the city that they control, so they can negotiate more equitably.
I know many people have some naive idea of "objective economic value", but the only objective measure of value is sale price (which is a negotiation).
. You do realize if you put $200 in savings, the bank can loan out $2,000, right? They don't have to find $2,000 on-hand.
Banks can't print money these days. The bank must first have $2000 in deposits before it can loan out $2000. (As an aside, the bank can write an insurance policy for $2000 without the full amount on hand, but we don't need to consider that form of increasing the money supply to see that it increases.)
I'm saying that's $1,000 spent plus $1,000 spent, out of a total $2,000 in existence. You're saying that doesn't work that way, because that $1,000 isn't idle in savings--so you suggest $3,000 has been spent.
Consider this example. Banks A and B have chunks of gold in their vaults, thanks to savings accounts. I want to buy a car, so I borrow 10 chunks of gold from Bank A, and give it to the car dealer, who deposits it in Bank B. Except, to deter mishap, what Bank A really gives me is a note that says "Bank A owes Bank B 10 gold".
Meanwhile, you want to add a room to your house, and on the same day you borrow 10 chunks of gold from Bank B. You give it to your contractor, who deposits at Bank A a note that says "Bank B owes Bank A 10 gold".
So, 20 gold in savings, and we've spent 20 gold today. At the end of the day the banks settle up and no physical gold actually changes hands. Both banks have the same gold in their vaults they had yesterday. Tomorrow this happens again, with 2 new people. Now there are 20 gold in savings, and 40 has been spent. The next day there are 20 gold in savings, and 60 has been spent. At that point there are 80 chunks of gold on ledgers in the banks, but only 20 actual chunks of gold.
If everyone wants their gold on the same day, you get economic collapse, in what is known as a "run on the banks". But that only happens if there's a panic, and the reason the FDIC exists is to prevent that panic. In practice, banks keep a small amount around based on statistics, and it all works out. If everyone actually wanted to withdraw into physical currency, maybe 5% what would be needed actually exists.
Also, if there is a mass default on these loans, the banks are in real trouble, because they need that inflow to replenish that small amount as people withdraw it. That's sort of what happened in 2008, in a very hand-wavy way.
With fiat, we just print more money and pretend there are 1,500 chunks of gold
Historically, the US has done very little of that. Even in WW2 we sold war bonds like crazy, to limit money creation. There wasn't even really a mechanism for it - actually printing money doesn't accomplish much at this scale (though enough that we abandoned the gold standard ~20 years before we officially did). For the past 30 years we've looted the social security trust fund dry instead, but that ran out. Post 2008, for the first time really, the Fed found a clever way to generate trillions from nothing. Time will tell how clever they actually were.
But my point is, the government can do plenty to manipulate the money supply without printing money, through regulation of bank lending practices. And that's the norm in the US, until recently. And the trick the Fed came up with to "print money" would work fine with BTC too, sadly.
Slashdot Mirror
What is "occasionally shopping"? I don't think that translated properly.
I have never seen or met a straight man attracted to a woman because of her handbag. As for shoes, well, apparently 20% of men have a foot fetish, so maybe, but they don't care about the brand name.
Fashion isn't driven by what women buy, it's driven by designers and brands deciding what they are doing this season and then marketing the hell out of it.
Almost every fashion designer goes bankrupt. The ones who succeed are the ones who successfully guess what women want, and market the crap out of it. Getting out in front of fashion changes is quite hard, but possible.
As an interesting aside: the stock market works the same way, as stock prices are 80% fashion, 20% fundamentals. Those who can stay out in front of fashion changes do quite well. It's no coincidence 2 of the 10 richest people in the world are fashion designers.
You do know that what people say they want, and what people want, have little in common? What people say (or believe) they want has little predictive power about their actions. What people actually do is what's important.
Then they should buy different clothing. If women only bought clothes with large pockets, manufacturers would only make clothes with large pockets.
There's is a little-know skill called "sewing" that allows one to turn small pockets into big pockets. True story.
Man, I'm so old I remember when MTV only played music videos.
Uh, how about the fact that they started "Amazon Essentials" to make products that compete with small businesses whose products they were selling for quite some time
If they put Monster Cables out of business, it's a win for humanity.
How about the fact that they leveraged UPS/Fedex/USPS to make their business function, until they decided they were going to take over the shipping market by creating their own shipping company?
"Leveraged"? You mean "paid more than anyone else"? This is bad why again? Thus far they've shown no ambition for shipping beyond their own packages, AFAIK.
So, does *nobody* really care that one giant MegaCorp is trying to own everything?
What are they trying to "own"? In retail, they're the second largest player, with less than 10% market share. Definitely not the biggest in movie streaming. The only thing I can think of where they're the biggest player is "cloud", and better them than Microsoft!
Me and my family are the only people that I know that don't give any money to Amazon. What happened to everybody else?
We enjoy convenience and low prices more then pointless self-flagellation?
If the maker had a clue, online use would have been a "third-party mod" to the tool, easily googlable but totally not the maker's fault.
Yuppies? If your bag phone is ringing, it's the 80s calling.
The Yuppies are still around, they've just grown up and are Muppies now.
Apple copied everything good from Xerox Parc.
What's that? You're breaking up again. Are you on Bluetooth?
Man, I freaking hate it when people call me using a bluetooth earpiece.
The UI and hardware quality (at the price) of Windows Phone was far above its competitors. None of that matters without apps (including, critically, apps to replace the keyboard).
Has MS made an android phone with the same hardware and UI, it would have been a contender. Sadly, easy C# on Android didn't occur to them until far too late.
1. They are not too many driving simulators out there that are accurate like a flight simulator.
There are plenty, but they're not easily available like X-Plane. They're more like real training simulators, and just as out of reach. A good Formula 1 simulator costs more than a nice sports car.
Driving is 2d movement. There is extra thought on the third dimension.
Never seen rally, then. Though, if your yump lasts more than about half a second, you will not be finishing the race today. Even when not airborn, tough, rallt driving is very 3D, as everything changes when cresting or bottoming a hill, turning into a road with bad camber, and so on. Even the simcade games have to think about the third diminsion to be at all realistic.
Does not apply to racing that merely involves turning left for 2 hours, of course.
Driving failures can normally be corrected with hitting the break petal. During flight you need to keep moving.
See above re rally driving. There are a lot of situations where hitting the brakes means you will not be finishing the race today.
You also learn that the pedals control yaw, while the wheel just gives sideslip unless you balance both controls, and that turning your vehicle doesn't automatically mean changing your course, though it does let you apply thrust in a new direction.
But sadly there are no rally driving simulators anywhere near the quality of X-Plane. Unlike Formula-1, it's actually cheaper to practice with an actual car than build an accurate sim.
At best you might argue that there is some training in maneuvers and teamwork,
The US Army evaluated first-person shooter games for any real-life skills they might teach, as part of making their own game. They found that the only useful skill learned was to be mindful of ammo remaining, and reload as soon as practical.
The America's Army game was designed to emphasize teamwork and communication, hoping that could be helped as well. You do see that in normal games as well, but it's pretty rare. Competitive play in CS was all about teamwork and communication, as least when I used to follow it, but competitive CS play looks nothing like normal CS play. Even in those two, though, they miss just how hard it is for the human voice to be heard over gunshots.
Are you paid by the comma?
*marked
QR code? Why did you just insert a non human-readable step?
What we want is computer-assisted voting. You go to the big touch-screen voting machine with pictures of the candidates faces and whatnot, and when you're done it prints a clearly market ballot. You then review the ballot and cast it into the ballot box.
This is so freaking obvious that I can't ascribe good motives to politicians imposing any other system.
This will just become the next attack vector hackers use to compromise the systems.
Attackers? Compromise?
How about this way of describing the system: "Republicans install software on all voting machines in Republican-controlled state to ensure that the election results are correct". Or Democrats, of course, if they've caught up.
Paper voting has its flaws, but even in famously corrupt counties I'm familiar with (cough) Cuyahoga (cough), there's so many bipartisan sign-offs that it'd take quite a conspiracy to throw an election. (They just buy them, instead)
It's notoriously frequent in tight races for new boxes of ballots to be "discovered in the trunk of a car" after counting begins in a tight race. You'd almost expect "trunk-mounted ballot printers" to be on sale on Amazon.
Sure, we don't see people getting re-elected with "100% of the vote, and 100% voter turnout" Saddam Hussein style (though IIRC Obama got 105% of the vote in Detroit), or other corruption on that scale, but in tight races where you only need a few hundred ballots to be "discovered"? Paper ballots are far from perfect.
Charile Stross once wrote about the rise of strong AI from weak AI systems designed to hide finances from the taxman, and the governments AIs that hunted them. I could see the same from an complex AI ecosystem in trading.
Early program trading (the term predates the use of computers for it) was already a complex ecosystem, with programs designed to identify and profit from certain market behaviors, programs designed to fake out and exploit those programs, programs designed to fool those programs, and so on - turtles all the way up, so to speak. And that was before machine learning.
Yup - there's a reason they're called "brokers" not "richers". Thanks goodness for E*Trade and the wave of other discount brokers that followed the rise of the Internet. Don't need your financial "advice", just access to the markets.
I don't see how you keep missing my point. It works like this.
Monday:
Dan deposits 10 BTC in Bank A, lets call them B00 through B09. Eve deposits 10 BTC in Bank B, lets call them B10 through B19.
Monday EOD:
Bank A has B00-B09
Bank B has B10-B19
Tuesday:
I borrow 10 BTC from Bank A (B00-B09) and buy a car. The dealer deposits the day's receipts in Bank B. Bank B now has B00-B09. Meanwhile, You borrow 10 BTC from Bank B (B10-B19) and remodel your house, The contractor deposits the money with Bank A
Tuesday EOD:
Bank A has B10-B19
Bank B has B00-B09
Wednesday:
Fred borrows 10 BTC from Bank A, and does some commerce. B10-B19 Move to Bank B. George 10 BTC from Bank b, and does some commerce. B00-B09 Move to Bank A.
Wednesday EOD:
Bank A has B00-B09
Bank B has B10-B19
So, we're back where we started, and we've had 40 BTC of economic activity from 20 BTC in deposits that have never been withdrawn. 6 people or companies now have a balance of 10 BTC, so 60 BTC total on account ledgers. And the banks still have the BTC loan out.
I don't get why that is confusing? And the government still gets its share of monetary expansion by strongly suggesting to those banks that they should lend it 20 BTC, then spending it (where it still eventually ends up back in the banks), in addition to spending all its taxes.
All valuation is the result of negotiation, from the explicit negotiation over the price of a house to the simple decision whether an item on a store shelf is worth it at the price. Property tax assessment also a negotiation - the government pulls a number out of its ass, and you complain it's too high. For most of us the negotiation is fairly one-sided, and we have to do a lot of work to get a marginal reduction. Apple has more laywers than most of us, and power implicit in the percentage of property value in the city that they control, so they can negotiate more equitably.
I know many people have some naive idea of "objective economic value", but the only objective measure of value is sale price (which is a negotiation).
. You do realize if you put $200 in savings, the bank can loan out $2,000, right? They don't have to find $2,000 on-hand.
Banks can't print money these days. The bank must first have $2000 in deposits before it can loan out $2000. (As an aside, the bank can write an insurance policy for $2000 without the full amount on hand, but we don't need to consider that form of increasing the money supply to see that it increases.)
I'm saying that's $1,000 spent plus $1,000 spent, out of a total $2,000 in existence. You're saying that doesn't work that way, because that $1,000 isn't idle in savings--so you suggest $3,000 has been spent.
Consider this example. Banks A and B have chunks of gold in their vaults, thanks to savings accounts. I want to buy a car, so I borrow 10 chunks of gold from Bank A, and give it to the car dealer, who deposits it in Bank B. Except, to deter mishap, what Bank A really gives me is a note that says "Bank A owes Bank B 10 gold".
Meanwhile, you want to add a room to your house, and on the same day you borrow 10 chunks of gold from Bank B. You give it to your contractor, who deposits at Bank A a note that says "Bank B owes Bank A 10 gold".
So, 20 gold in savings, and we've spent 20 gold today. At the end of the day the banks settle up and no physical gold actually changes hands. Both banks have the same gold in their vaults they had yesterday. Tomorrow this happens again, with 2 new people. Now there are 20 gold in savings, and 40 has been spent. The next day there are 20 gold in savings, and 60 has been spent. At that point there are 80 chunks of gold on ledgers in the banks, but only 20 actual chunks of gold.
If everyone wants their gold on the same day, you get economic collapse, in what is known as a "run on the banks". But that only happens if there's a panic, and the reason the FDIC exists is to prevent that panic. In practice, banks keep a small amount around based on statistics, and it all works out. If everyone actually wanted to withdraw into physical currency, maybe 5% what would be needed actually exists.
Also, if there is a mass default on these loans, the banks are in real trouble, because they need that inflow to replenish that small amount as people withdraw it. That's sort of what happened in 2008, in a very hand-wavy way.
With fiat, we just print more money and pretend there are 1,500 chunks of gold
Historically, the US has done very little of that. Even in WW2 we sold war bonds like crazy, to limit money creation. There wasn't even really a mechanism for it - actually printing money doesn't accomplish much at this scale (though enough that we abandoned the gold standard ~20 years before we officially did). For the past 30 years we've looted the social security trust fund dry instead, but that ran out. Post 2008, for the first time really, the Fed found a clever way to generate trillions from nothing. Time will tell how clever they actually were.
But my point is, the government can do plenty to manipulate the money supply without printing money, through regulation of bank lending practices. And that's the norm in the US, until recently. And the trick the Fed came up with to "print money" would work fine with BTC too, sadly.
When you buy a house, please remember that the price is, in fact, negotiable, and you don't have to take the first offer.