Or they think that consumers are fucking stupid, which is a pretty safe bet. The tricky thing is to find a way in which people will be predictably stupid which nobody has thought of exploiting before.
This thing is pretty much in the right ballpark; it's an attempt to exploit a cultural weakness: people want to add things to their lives that have the same effect as taking things out of their lives -- e.g. they want to eat something that will make them lose weight. Among the few things that actually fits that bill are vegetables. But if you're drinking vegetable juice you aren't eating vegetables any longer; you're eating pre-digested vegetable concentrate.
Trying to get the benefits of vegetables by reducing them to a convenient candy slurry you can slurp down quickly is futile, because many of the key benefits of vegetables that people are pursing are entailed in the fact that they take time to eat and are difficult to digest. But this does't make selling that proposition to consumers a bad idea. Setting consumer off on a futile quest can be profitable, which is why the cosmetic industry doesn't just pitch looking good -- it tells women they need to pursue eternal youth.
The trick is to package futility so it's convenient and price it/pitch it so that it is either an impulse buy or an object of intense longing. That's not easy. Keurig got all the parameters right, starting with the story they tell you about how your life will be different with their product. You get up in the morning in a caffeine-withdrawal fog, you pop the pod into the machine and your coffee comes out. Then you toss the pod in the trash. What they are selling is the will-o-the-wisp of convenience, and they've managed to sell it at a staggering markup. The truth is that it's just as easy to make that cup of coffee with an Aeropress, especially if you have an electric tea kettle, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
Well, things sold rally ought to be what they're represented as. If someone sells you a 14 kt gold ring, it ought to be exactly that, not gold-plated silver, even if the plating job is really good. Now I, as a smart consumer, might decide that a gold ring with a good enough plating job is good enough because it will be indistinguishable over the lifetime of the intended user, but it's my choice, not the vendor's.
Now foods especially should be what they say they are. Now I agree, there is no reason at all for most people to prefer sandwich with pure chicken filler to a sandwich. In fact there's some reasonable basis for preferring soy, e.g. environmental impact and animal welfare. But it should say soy on the ingredients. There are people with severe enough soy allergies to cause anaphylaxis. Soy also interacts with certain medications. People affected by this kind of thing check labels because soy is so ubiquitous, so those labels ought to be accurate.
Actually, that makes it weird. You see, the default animal taste is chicken. But any forager or naturalist will tell you the default plant taste is asparagus.
If you eat rattlesnake, it "tastes like chicken" because it's lean and most of the distinctive flavor of a meat is in the fat (and bone -- it's always better to cook a steak or a pork chop bone in). If it's not fatty or bony or gamey or bloody, what you've got left is chicken flavor.
It's a mystery to me though why so many plants taste like asparagus. I've heard the 17 year cicada tastes like asparagus though so that's a kingdom-bender too.
Yes, but he had all the undersecretary positions filled at Justice by early March, and these are the people who do the legwork in finding and vetting the US attorney candidates. They're not going to find themselves.
I have a dream that we can discuss that topic from the point of view of actual experience... maybe even data, not wishful thinking.
Now I once had to step in and take over a failing team that was mostly Indian H1bs. The team lead could have been the illustrating case for this story. On paper he looked good, and he talked a good game, but couldn't code for real... not at all. And yet further down on that team there was some outstanding talent. There were a couple of kids in particular who were as good as anyone I've ever met in decades of working with programmers.
Here's what's racist: assuming everybody in a large group exactly conforms to the stereotype of the group you superficially perceive them to be in. Let's say Alice and Bob are white Americans. Alice is an artist, and Bob is a math geek. Now let's say you meet Vijay and Padme, and the first thing you notice about them is that they're Indian. But Padme is also a math geek and Vijay, an artist. While they have some things in common with each other, they also have things in common with Alice and Bob, and if you can't see that because your perception of them is overwhelmed by Indian, that's racist. It's also stupid, but I repeat myself.
Even if you can show that stereotypical people exist in a group, you have to allow for human variation within that group. India is a country with 1.2 billion people; over forty major indigenous languages and a half dozen major religious groups. It covers 1.2 million square miles, ranging from steamy tropical rainforest, to scorching sand sea deserts, to frigid alpine villages that are among the coldest inhabited places on Earth. The overwhelming fact of India is diversity.
Now the other overwhelming fact of India is that no matter where you start, there's an unfathomable distance that you can fall. For that reason I'd say the average level of hustle is higher for Indians than Americans -- although individuals vary. So I'm thinking (and I have seen) some people whose ambition to has hustled them beyond where their talent would have taken them. But it's not really any different in America. When I started nearly everyone else I knew who programmed was a math geek -- although some women COBOL programmers started out as keypunchers and figured it out by osmosis, which means they were the ones with the best brains. While the field knows a lot more about constructing software than it did in the 1970s, from the standpoint of averages the current talent pool is unimpressive. As with India, there are a lot of Americans who are trying to be programmers who just don't have the gift. But the best of the American talent pool is better than ever, and they matter more, just as the best of the (huge) Indian talent pool matter more.
More like news for people who aren't paying attention.
The administration is way behind on filling much more important positions than this. Last month suddenly reversed themselves on the US attorneys staying on until there are replacements... fine, but as of today there aren't any nominees for any of the 93 prosecutor positions, because they haven't filled the undersecretary level positions that do that. Justice is also missing a number of key appointees for national security positions.
There's the same story at state, where over half of the high level appointees have yet to be named, including officials to oversee the Middle East or nuclear anti-proliferation.
The confusing situation with the USS Vinson might well have something to do with the fact that a number of important second and third tier DoD positions haven't been filled, and the same at the Executive Office of the President. A lot of what those people a teir or two below the top do is make sure the right hand knows what the left is doing.
Cybersecurity is an important issue, but the administration doesn't have the people in place to set up and run such a team yet.
It's not a special expectation of privacy; these are just examples of why the blanket expectations of privacy. The same applies to alt-right podcasts, or Christian Identity music.
You might not like these people, but they've got just as much right to privacy as you do, and possibly a lot more at stake.
Yeah. Don't you wished politicians answered questions this way:
What has changed is the ability to plate dendrite-free lithium from a non-flammable solid electrolyte that has a cation conductivity nearly as high as that of the flammable liquid electrolyte of the lithium-ion battery.
Perhaps because despite its sensational title, cheesy special effects, and the fact that it's a low-budget rehash of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it's actually quite thoughtful and intelligently executed. The monsters of the title aren't monsters at all, but aliens with understandable if scientifically preposterous motivations. Yet it doesn't fall into the modern who's-the-real-monster-here pitfall: the humans have legitimate reason to fear and even kill the aliens.
One of the reasons I like this movie is that it shows that low budget and vulgar popular tastes are no excuse for making a stupid, boring movie. If you don't have enough money for color film, use black and white to create atmosphere. If you don't have the money for special effects, use storytelling to engage the audience with suspense.
They can get pretty close by simply putting it onto a boat and sailing it in the any US port. For that matter the 9700 pound Hiroshima Bomb could be built into a modest sized cabin cruiser and sailed up to the Potomac to within about a mile of the White House.
It's really hard to protect a large modern state from a rogue nation with nuclear capabilities, which is why non-proliferation is so important. It's one of those problems that are so hard, people just ignore it and focus instead on ones that seem more accomplishable, like establishing democracy in countries that have never had one.
It's funny that you mention that, because I was going to say that Javascript is a lot better if you program in it as if it were Scheme than if you try to program in it as if it were Java.
The inconsistent naming of functions makes the same point I was making: that's not a language problem, it's an API problem. If you take Javascript out of the browser and put it into a freshly designed runtime environment (e.g., Node) that aspect of the language experience goes away.
Another language that "has" this problem is R. R is peculiar enough anyway -- it doesn't seem to have any scalar types. If you assign 3 to X ("X <- 3"), it creates X as a vector of length 1 and puts 3 in X[1]. If you say "X + 1", it's the equivalent to the Python "map(lambda n: N+1,X)". That's surprisingly easy to get used to, because it works in the problem domain the language targets (statistics). What's harder to get used to are the libraries, which are magnificent in their comprehensiveness but are obscure, inconsistent, and poorly documented.
Those libraries are a major reason to use R -- much like CPAN is a major reason to use PERL. This makes those libraries' irregular design and stunningly half-assed documentation an inextricable part of the experience of being an R user. The closest thing I can compare it to is learning a natural language like French. You need books with titles "100 Irregular French Verbs Conjugated" because when the conventions aren't uniformly applied you have no choice but to drill until you have the specifics memorized.
Title seems to be perfectly accurate to me. This is a "non-practicing entity" -- a piece of legal jargon referring to what is known in the vernacular as a "patent troll". This troll is suing EFF because EFF called one of its patents "stupid" -- and in fact the title duly quotes the term "stupid patent". In logic this is called "reification" -- in essence talking about a statement without necessarily accepting or rejecting its content. You may agree with the statement "Alice called Bob a 'bastard'," without asserting that Bob is a bastard yourself.
Over the years I've come to realize that programming languages aren't standalone beasts. When you pick one, you get a lot of other stuff along with it: common libraries and frameworks, runtime systems, problem domains, communities of programmers who do things a certain way, and the sources where most people learn them. That last bit is not to be overlooked, one of the best features of C is The C Programming Language.
As for pitfalls for newbies -- I think that's the browser, not Javascript. Javascript seems pretty straightforward in Node.
It's the Gorean part I think that's the problem. What it means to be a "Gorean" is vague enough that the range of possibilities straddle the line between what is acceptable even in a place like the Bay Area.
It seems likely that most self-described Goreans are irony-mongers and play-actors -- as harmless as baseball card traders. There are a few crackpot cultists who genuinely believe a society organized around slavery would be a good thing, but opinions per se can't really hurt anyone. And if there's a large enough number of Goreans, they're bound to have their share of genuinely twisted people, but their numbers are so low in the first place they hardly present any kind of risk to the general public; they're mainly going to be a problem for other Goreans who want to play act.
So it seems to me you could handle it like anything else. It's OK for people on the team to be militant Christians or atheists, but if that difference of opinion is hindering work then they should keep those opinions out of the work (including volunteer work) or leave the team. It's not a judgment of who's right or wrong, it's a judgment of who's helping or hurting the work. People in leadership positions you might hold to more arbitrary standards because their public persona reflects on the project.
Well, sustainability is always the key, but it's not simple: there's more than one way to do it, there's also more than one way to screw it up. Losing control of expenses is a sure way to sink your company, but unwise penny pinching can also sink your business.
Presumably Lyft has a business plan which envisions when and how its investors get their money back. The static numbers may look bad, but they may be supposed to look bad at this point. The key point is that revenue is still increasing rapidly; if they were losing that much money and revenue was flattening, that'd be an unequivocal crisis, but so far as we know they are on track.
Certainly Uber's reputational problems are a bigger concern. For drivers and riders, shifting from Uber to Lyft is simply a matter of downloading an app, and the massively greater revenue of Uber proves there's a lot of revenue out there to be captured simply by taking it away from an increasingly loathed competitor. Under the circumstances a hundred million dollars a year to establish a "we're the ones who aren't bastards" might not be such a bad investment.
Of course you could lose your shirt despite an absolutely convincing argument that this was a good idea; it's all about predicting the future. Certainly if you're taking side bets it's usually safer to bet against a startup. The only certain thing about a company like this is that it loses a lot of money for a long time before it has any chance of paying investors back.
I'd think tortious interference is a slam dunk, but don't forget the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Case law is apparently mixed on this; simply creating phony accounts isn't sufficient, but there have been convictions under CFAA for obtaining information about a company's network and operations through a web server (e.g. the AT&T iPad email leak).
Well, it didn't actually say the two events were related. You could just as well have written the title as "Dozens of Canonical Employees Missing in Aftermath of April Fool's Day."
Son, back in my day we had computers... and they had lights on the front panel that showed you the CPU register contents and switches for loading values into those registers. It was awesome.
EEs back in the day had a straightforward default approach to controlling current: you make or break a mechanical contact. None of this monitor the input and switch the machine between a low and high power state nonsense. They were mad for switches, so this is what the front panel of a computer looked like.
And every one of those switches was an individually crafted mechanical masterpiece. They might have been forged in the deeps of time by the dwarves of Tumunzahar. If you flipped one it would emit a mighty clack that would cause a weak millennial, raised on insipid, wishy-washy membrane switches, to curl up into a foetal position. This was electronics for real men who unwound from a day of defeating communism and sending men to the Moon with a martini -- a proper gin martini not a vodka martini (for kids who learned to drink from the movies), or for God's sake an Appletini.
You have to condition your results based on the circumstances of your study. If you do a study where you put a bunch of strangers together in a situation where they have to pick a leaders, of course the results will be biased in certain ways -- toward extroverts, narcissists and sociopaths. People who, for better or worse provide information (or misinformation) about themselves to strangers.
But think about how unnatural such a situation would have been through greater than 95% of the evolutionary history of our species. Over most of that time you would most likely have lived in a small family group or tribe where you knew nearly everyone you'd ever meet in your lifetime intimately. Probably closer than you as a modern person know anyone else, because back then you would have done everything with everyone you knew, from hunting and gathering, to building shelters, to taking a dump.
We are very well equipped to select which of our brothers and sisters are the best candidate to lead the clan, but we're not so well-prepared for choosing a CEO or president from mob of candidates we don't actually know.
I did a little literature search a few months ago on the emergence of narcissistic leaders, and it works exactly as you'd expect: narcissistic leaders emerge in a power and information vacuum. But the few studies that looked at longer term dynamics show a dramatic decline in the group opinion of narcissistic leaders over time. This makes perfect sense. People don't actually want toxic leaders, they're just bad at spotting them.
The problem is timescale. It's really hard for political systems to react to things that are more than a decade away. In democracies it's a challenge to react to things that are going to happen after the next election.
Things that don't happen quickly, and when once they happen can't be fixed quickly, are almost always ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, VCs can be fucking stupid.
Or they think that consumers are fucking stupid, which is a pretty safe bet. The tricky thing is to find a way in which people will be predictably stupid which nobody has thought of exploiting before.
This thing is pretty much in the right ballpark; it's an attempt to exploit a cultural weakness: people want to add things to their lives that have the same effect as taking things out of their lives -- e.g. they want to eat something that will make them lose weight. Among the few things that actually fits that bill are vegetables. But if you're drinking vegetable juice you aren't eating vegetables any longer; you're eating pre-digested vegetable concentrate.
Trying to get the benefits of vegetables by reducing them to a convenient candy slurry you can slurp down quickly is futile, because many of the key benefits of vegetables that people are pursing are entailed in the fact that they take time to eat and are difficult to digest. But this does't make selling that proposition to consumers a bad idea. Setting consumer off on a futile quest can be profitable, which is why the cosmetic industry doesn't just pitch looking good -- it tells women they need to pursue eternal youth.
The trick is to package futility so it's convenient and price it/pitch it so that it is either an impulse buy or an object of intense longing. That's not easy. Keurig got all the parameters right, starting with the story they tell you about how your life will be different with their product. You get up in the morning in a caffeine-withdrawal fog, you pop the pod into the machine and your coffee comes out. Then you toss the pod in the trash. What they are selling is the will-o-the-wisp of convenience, and they've managed to sell it at a staggering markup. The truth is that it's just as easy to make that cup of coffee with an Aeropress, especially if you have an electric tea kettle, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
Well, things sold rally ought to be what they're represented as. If someone sells you a 14 kt gold ring, it ought to be exactly that, not gold-plated silver, even if the plating job is really good. Now I, as a smart consumer, might decide that a gold ring with a good enough plating job is good enough because it will be indistinguishable over the lifetime of the intended user, but it's my choice, not the vendor's.
Now foods especially should be what they say they are. Now I agree, there is no reason at all for most people to prefer sandwich with pure chicken filler to a sandwich. In fact there's some reasonable basis for preferring soy, e.g. environmental impact and animal welfare. But it should say soy on the ingredients. There are people with severe enough soy allergies to cause anaphylaxis. Soy also interacts with certain medications. People affected by this kind of thing check labels because soy is so ubiquitous, so those labels ought to be accurate.
Actually, that makes it weird. You see, the default animal taste is chicken. But any forager or naturalist will tell you the default plant taste is asparagus.
If you eat rattlesnake, it "tastes like chicken" because it's lean and most of the distinctive flavor of a meat is in the fat (and bone -- it's always better to cook a steak or a pork chop bone in). If it's not fatty or bony or gamey or bloody, what you've got left is chicken flavor.
It's a mystery to me though why so many plants taste like asparagus. I've heard the 17 year cicada tastes like asparagus though so that's a kingdom-bender too.
Yes, but he had all the undersecretary positions filled at Justice by early March, and these are the people who do the legwork in finding and vetting the US attorney candidates. They're not going to find themselves.
Give the fact that 600 million Indians shit in the streets(I shit you not), it's a pretty good indicator of their code quality.
Out of 1.2 billion people. Looked at another way: there are numerically more middle class Indians than there are middle class Americans.
I have a dream that we can discuss that topic from the point of view of actual experience... maybe even data, not wishful thinking.
Now I once had to step in and take over a failing team that was mostly Indian H1bs. The team lead could have been the illustrating case for this story. On paper he looked good, and he talked a good game, but couldn't code for real... not at all. And yet further down on that team there was some outstanding talent. There were a couple of kids in particular who were as good as anyone I've ever met in decades of working with programmers.
Here's what's racist: assuming everybody in a large group exactly conforms to the stereotype of the group you superficially perceive them to be in. Let's say Alice and Bob are white Americans. Alice is an artist, and Bob is a math geek. Now let's say you meet Vijay and Padme, and the first thing you notice about them is that they're Indian. But Padme is also a math geek and Vijay, an artist. While they have some things in common with each other, they also have things in common with Alice and Bob, and if you can't see that because your perception of them is overwhelmed by Indian, that's racist. It's also stupid, but I repeat myself.
Even if you can show that stereotypical people exist in a group, you have to allow for human variation within that group. India is a country with 1.2 billion people; over forty major indigenous languages and a half dozen major religious groups. It covers 1.2 million square miles, ranging from steamy tropical rainforest, to scorching sand sea deserts, to frigid alpine villages that are among the coldest inhabited places on Earth. The overwhelming fact of India is diversity.
Now the other overwhelming fact of India is that no matter where you start, there's an unfathomable distance that you can fall. For that reason I'd say the average level of hustle is higher for Indians than Americans -- although individuals vary. So I'm thinking (and I have seen) some people whose ambition to has hustled them beyond where their talent would have taken them. But it's not really any different in America. When I started nearly everyone else I knew who programmed was a math geek -- although some women COBOL programmers started out as keypunchers and figured it out by osmosis, which means they were the ones with the best brains. While the field knows a lot more about constructing software than it did in the 1970s, from the standpoint of averages the current talent pool is unimpressive. As with India, there are a lot of Americans who are trying to be programmers who just don't have the gift. But the best of the American talent pool is better than ever, and they matter more, just as the best of the (huge) Indian talent pool matter more.
More like news for people who aren't paying attention.
The administration is way behind on filling much more important positions than this. Last month suddenly reversed themselves on the US attorneys staying on until there are replacements... fine, but as of today there aren't any nominees for any of the 93 prosecutor positions, because they haven't filled the undersecretary level positions that do that. Justice is also missing a number of key appointees for national security positions.
There's the same story at state, where over half of the high level appointees have yet to be named, including officials to oversee the Middle East or nuclear anti-proliferation.
The confusing situation with the USS Vinson might well have something to do with the fact that a number of important second and third tier DoD positions haven't been filled, and the same at the Executive Office of the President. A lot of what those people a teir or two below the top do is make sure the right hand knows what the left is doing.
Cybersecurity is an important issue, but the administration doesn't have the people in place to set up and run such a team yet.
It's not a special expectation of privacy; these are just examples of why the blanket expectations of privacy. The same applies to alt-right podcasts, or Christian Identity music.
You might not like these people, but they've got just as much right to privacy as you do, and possibly a lot more at stake.
Well, how long do you think it would take to get a development from laboratory prototype to sitting in a blister pack at the hardware store?
Yeah. Don't you wished politicians answered questions this way:
What has changed is the ability to plate dendrite-free lithium from a non-flammable solid electrolyte that has a cation conductivity nearly as high as that of the flammable liquid electrolyte of the lithium-ion battery.
Perhaps because despite its sensational title, cheesy special effects, and the fact that it's a low-budget rehash of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it's actually quite thoughtful and intelligently executed. The monsters of the title aren't monsters at all, but aliens with understandable if scientifically preposterous motivations. Yet it doesn't fall into the modern who's-the-real-monster-here pitfall: the humans have legitimate reason to fear and even kill the aliens.
One of the reasons I like this movie is that it shows that low budget and vulgar popular tastes are no excuse for making a stupid, boring movie. If you don't have enough money for color film, use black and white to create atmosphere. If you don't have the money for special effects, use storytelling to engage the audience with suspense.
They can get pretty close by simply putting it onto a boat and sailing it in the any US port. For that matter the 9700 pound Hiroshima Bomb could be built into a modest sized cabin cruiser and sailed up to the Potomac to within about a mile of the White House.
It's really hard to protect a large modern state from a rogue nation with nuclear capabilities, which is why non-proliferation is so important. It's one of those problems that are so hard, people just ignore it and focus instead on ones that seem more accomplishable, like establishing democracy in countries that have never had one.
It's funny that you mention that, because I was going to say that Javascript is a lot better if you program in it as if it were Scheme than if you try to program in it as if it were Java.
The inconsistent naming of functions makes the same point I was making: that's not a language problem, it's an API problem. If you take Javascript out of the browser and put it into a freshly designed runtime environment (e.g., Node) that aspect of the language experience goes away.
Another language that "has" this problem is R. R is peculiar enough anyway -- it doesn't seem to have any scalar types. If you assign 3 to X ("X <- 3"), it creates X as a vector of length 1 and puts 3 in X[1]. If you say "X + 1", it's the equivalent to the Python "map(lambda n: N+1,X)". That's surprisingly easy to get used to, because it works in the problem domain the language targets (statistics). What's harder to get used to are the libraries, which are magnificent in their comprehensiveness but are obscure, inconsistent, and poorly documented.
Those libraries are a major reason to use R -- much like CPAN is a major reason to use PERL. This makes those libraries' irregular design and stunningly half-assed documentation an inextricable part of the experience of being an R user. The closest thing I can compare it to is learning a natural language like French. You need books with titles "100 Irregular French Verbs Conjugated" because when the conventions aren't uniformly applied you have no choice but to drill until you have the specifics memorized.
Title seems to be perfectly accurate to me. This is a "non-practicing entity" -- a piece of legal jargon referring to what is known in the vernacular as a "patent troll". This troll is suing EFF because EFF called one of its patents "stupid" -- and in fact the title duly quotes the term "stupid patent". In logic this is called "reification" -- in essence talking about a statement without necessarily accepting or rejecting its content. You may agree with the statement "Alice called Bob a 'bastard'," without asserting that Bob is a bastard yourself.
Over the years I've come to realize that programming languages aren't standalone beasts. When you pick one, you get a lot of other stuff along with it: common libraries and frameworks, runtime systems, problem domains, communities of programmers who do things a certain way, and the sources where most people learn them. That last bit is not to be overlooked, one of the best features of C is The C Programming Language.
As for pitfalls for newbies -- I think that's the browser, not Javascript. Javascript seems pretty straightforward in Node.
It's the Gorean part I think that's the problem. What it means to be a "Gorean" is vague enough that the range of possibilities straddle the line between what is acceptable even in a place like the Bay Area.
It seems likely that most self-described Goreans are irony-mongers and play-actors -- as harmless as baseball card traders. There are a few crackpot cultists who genuinely believe a society organized around slavery would be a good thing, but opinions per se can't really hurt anyone. And if there's a large enough number of Goreans, they're bound to have their share of genuinely twisted people, but their numbers are so low in the first place they hardly present any kind of risk to the general public; they're mainly going to be a problem for other Goreans who want to play act.
So it seems to me you could handle it like anything else. It's OK for people on the team to be militant Christians or atheists, but if that difference of opinion is hindering work then they should keep those opinions out of the work (including volunteer work) or leave the team. It's not a judgment of who's right or wrong, it's a judgment of who's helping or hurting the work. People in leadership positions you might hold to more arbitrary standards because their public persona reflects on the project.
Well, sustainability is always the key, but it's not simple: there's more than one way to do it, there's also more than one way to screw it up. Losing control of expenses is a sure way to sink your company, but unwise penny pinching can also sink your business.
Presumably Lyft has a business plan which envisions when and how its investors get their money back. The static numbers may look bad, but they may be supposed to look bad at this point. The key point is that revenue is still increasing rapidly; if they were losing that much money and revenue was flattening, that'd be an unequivocal crisis, but so far as we know they are on track.
Certainly Uber's reputational problems are a bigger concern. For drivers and riders, shifting from Uber to Lyft is simply a matter of downloading an app, and the massively greater revenue of Uber proves there's a lot of revenue out there to be captured simply by taking it away from an increasingly loathed competitor. Under the circumstances a hundred million dollars a year to establish a "we're the ones who aren't bastards" might not be such a bad investment.
Of course you could lose your shirt despite an absolutely convincing argument that this was a good idea; it's all about predicting the future. Certainly if you're taking side bets it's usually safer to bet against a startup. The only certain thing about a company like this is that it loses a lot of money for a long time before it has any chance of paying investors back.
I'd think tortious interference is a slam dunk, but don't forget the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Case law is apparently mixed on this; simply creating phony accounts isn't sufficient, but there have been convictions under CFAA for obtaining information about a company's network and operations through a web server (e.g. the AT&T iPad email leak).
Well, it didn't actually say the two events were related. You could just as well have written the title as "Dozens of Canonical Employees Missing in Aftermath of April Fool's Day."
Son, back in my day we had computers... and they had lights on the front panel that showed you the CPU register contents and switches for loading values into those registers. It was awesome.
EEs back in the day had a straightforward default approach to controlling current: you make or break a mechanical contact. None of this monitor the input and switch the machine between a low and high power state nonsense. They were mad for switches, so this is what the front panel of a computer looked like.
And every one of those switches was an individually crafted mechanical masterpiece. They might have been forged in the deeps of time by the dwarves of Tumunzahar. If you flipped one it would emit a mighty clack that would cause a weak millennial, raised on insipid, wishy-washy membrane switches, to curl up into a foetal position. This was electronics for real men who unwound from a day of defeating communism and sending men to the Moon with a martini -- a proper gin martini not a vodka martini (for kids who learned to drink from the movies), or for God's sake an Appletini.
You know, it is physically possible to *find out* what a program *actually does*.
In this case your post is ironic because we're talking about a program which debunks faith in stuff just because it's called "science".
Makes for more efficient markets
Sure, but since this is economics you have to add the proviso: except when it doesn't.
You have to condition your results based on the circumstances of your study. If you do a study where you put a bunch of strangers together in a situation where they have to pick a leaders, of course the results will be biased in certain ways -- toward extroverts, narcissists and sociopaths. People who, for better or worse provide information (or misinformation) about themselves to strangers.
But think about how unnatural such a situation would have been through greater than 95% of the evolutionary history of our species. Over most of that time you would most likely have lived in a small family group or tribe where you knew nearly everyone you'd ever meet in your lifetime intimately. Probably closer than you as a modern person know anyone else, because back then you would have done everything with everyone you knew, from hunting and gathering, to building shelters, to taking a dump.
We are very well equipped to select which of our brothers and sisters are the best candidate to lead the clan, but we're not so well-prepared for choosing a CEO or president from mob of candidates we don't actually know.
I did a little literature search a few months ago on the emergence of narcissistic leaders, and it works exactly as you'd expect: narcissistic leaders emerge in a power and information vacuum. But the few studies that looked at longer term dynamics show a dramatic decline in the group opinion of narcissistic leaders over time. This makes perfect sense. People don't actually want toxic leaders, they're just bad at spotting them.
It's really faith in Musk as a visionary, not numbers, that drives this.
If Musk got hit by a bus the market value of the company would evaporate.
The problem is timescale. It's really hard for political systems to react to things that are more than a decade away. In democracies it's a challenge to react to things that are going to happen after the next election.
Things that don't happen quickly, and when once they happen can't be fixed quickly, are almost always ignored.