The thing here is that you're not just paying for going to the cinema, you're paying for the option of going to the cinema.
Sure, maybe you only go to the cinema once per year (that's probably on the high end for me personally). But look at it the other way. Suppose I offered you the price of a ticket in cash - in return, you would be unable to watch any films for the next year, no matter how much you wanted. Would you take me up on that offer? I wouldn't think that was a good deal.
This is really the alternative you get, since if you're not interested, it's quite likely that there will be no cinema to go to.
The business world has long recognized that having options can be valuable in itself, even if the options are not exercised. When regular people start getting their eyes opened for it, schemes like this (and kickstarter, which is more related than you might think) are going to have a field day.
It's no coincidence that the Nazis bought eugenics into disrepute. If they hadn't done it, someone else would have done it. Because eugenics is inherently corrupt.
The thing is, the presumption with eugenics is that you know which genes are good or bad. But owing to our nature, as big selfish sacks of genes, there is no decision we are less objective about. Me setting myself up as judge about which of other people's genes are good and bad is simply corrupt, nepotism of the worst sort (and a literal sort, too: the word came from a pope who gave favors to his nephews, possibly illegitimate sons).
There's no getting away from it, either. Even if there should come an alien race or an AI or something, which for some reason had no personal stake in which genes survived, why should we listen to them? They would still make a value judgement in deciding what traits are desirable or not, and there's no plausible reason we should defer to that.
If you let yourself do transparently selfish and hypocritical stuff like making value judgments on other people's genes, of course it becomes easier to do it in other ways too. Once you've elevated yourself to judge and jury of humanity already, what's stopping you from making a few other horrible decisions? Eugenics and nazism are fundamentally related. You have to be evil to justify eugenics, and if you justify eugenics you turn evil. Your alternate history world with eugenics but no nazism is a self-contradicting pipe dream.
Yes, there is. If an entrepreneur tries and fails (goes bankrupt) that is not illegal, but if he plans to fail, or not even try, that is fraud and illegal. Maybe you think that because Kickstarter itself assumes no liability it's different there? But that is wrong. Fraudulent project starters are still liable, and even Kickstarter itself will be in trouble if they host a project they know to be fraudulent,
We all have strategies we approach problems with, in maths and puzzles as in life. Some strategies are better fits for certain sorts of problems than others. To some degree you can change your mental strategies, but once you're set in them, it becomes an expensive proposition. Like assumptions, methods are hard to change once you've built a lot of genuinely useful stuff on them. Maybe we have different aptitude for certain strategies, but it may also be affected by e.g. which strategies we happened to adopt when we learned our first words.
That's the important question. And I got to say, the more I hear of his antics (dopplegangers changing their name to his?) and novelty drug habits, the less inclined I am to give him the benefit of doubt on this one.
First lesson to do well on an IQ test is not to be intimidated. They count a lot more on intimidation than making original puzzles. Most puzzles don't state explicitly what you should do, thus understanding what's expected of you is the real challenge, and that is notoriously hard if you feel out of your element.
(It's a good proxy for success and academic achievement, because if you're easily intellectually intimidated you'll have a hard time in future education, and may well have had a hard time already. But intellectual confidence isn't really the same as intelligence, so the test inventors took a short cut here.)
To get better at them, it's really about recognizing the way the kind of people who make IQ tests think. They're pretty predictable, so effort needed quickly goes down once you've seen a few.
Ideally no one would be discriminated by these tests. (And ideally, no one would be so stupid as to send money to Mensa). But as long as it happens, it's good to know a bit about them, at least so the intimidation component isn't as effective.
There are also studies indicating that this - testing kids and telling them that they are smart for scoring high on an IQ test - can be counterproductive. If kids feel that achievement comes as a result of an inborn quality rather than effort, guess what, they don't make the same effort.
4 lessons per week for 10 years is approximately how long it took me to learn English at the level I use it now. And I was comparatively talented, always getting top marks in in (technically, that's supposed to mean I was in the top 5% of students). I come from one of the nations with the highest levels of EFL skill, we have a comparatively easy time learning it due to similarities and exposure. Still, it took a lot of work.
Sure, there exist language supertalents, but it's very unlikely that you are one. I'm not one either.
The header for this article says that "Sixteen haven't even shipped yet", without mentioning how late they are (I know plenty of the top 50 most funded Kickstarter projects aren't scheduled to ship this year, and one is even scheduled for 2014 as I recall). They're really trying to force the conclusion "OMG Kickstarter is such a scam!!1!!" down our throats.
Yeah yeah clever guy, I'm sure you could be a successful fraudster if you wanted to - although quite possibly, you'd fail to reach your target like most Kickstarter projects. I bet you and I both could steal credit cards too if we wanted to, it doesn't take much skill to be criminal jackasses.
Most Kickstarter projects deliver. A little late, most likely, but experienced backers count on that (and we also develop an idea about which projects are likely to be very late). It shouldn't happen with your economic model, yet it does! Clearly, something is wrong with reality... or your model.
Most successful kickstarter project starters say they'd do it again - and those that do, tend to hold their schedules better. Who would have though it - maybe the opportunity to keep making money is an incentive as well!
Hardly. Very few projects on Kickstarter are solely dependent on funds raised there. What is demanded is that the funds raised, along with other funds they have, should be enough to make the project happen. Almost always, they will have to sell the product to non-backers afterwards to recoup their costs.
They don't have to be totally verifiable. They just have to be as verifiable as conventional college education, which isn't really an all that high bar.
And if it turns out people won't put any faith in the Scala course certificate I have from Coursera, I could take a proctored exam, offered at a lot less than the debt-pushing colleges. Though it'd be both cheaper and more reliable to just do some basic sanity checks (e.g. asking me to read or write some Scala code) in the interview.
That there is such a market for sleazy colleges at all should be a wake up call. I hope MOOCs will kill off all these "colleges" that are more reliable producers of debt than education.
True, but there is effort in getting there. Grossly underestimated effort. I'm guessing > 90% of people who set their mind to learning a new language fail miserably.
If you learn Chinese, do it because you are interested in learning Chinese because the ROI is pretty lousy.
This. It doesn't just apply to Chinese. The problem is people grossly underestimate the effort needed to learn a language. Even English - sure, it's valuable to be able to access the English part of the web, and lots of English books, documentation etc. But you have to compare it with what else 4 lessons per week for 10 years could earn you.
The simple fact is that no one on Kickstarter is there for any reason other than "we want your money because no one else would give us any."
Totally wrong. If you could get the same amount of capital from
1. a bank 2. an angel investor, or 3. kickstarter backers,...then in most cases the third would be better for you in every respect.
Another reason is market research. Companies like Queen games produce plenty of games funded in the normal way, but pitch more risky games on Kickstarter, to gauge whether there is an enthusiast market for it.
I hate that wiki page, it's bad (but I also hate wikipedia culture, so I'm not going to endure the frustration of trying to fix it). Artistshare was a simple fundraising site, it did not have the threshold pledge mechanism. As such, every charity in the world has prior art.
The first website which offered threshold pledge financing was Fundable.org by John Pratt. No relation to the fundraising site which is at that address today. Kickstarter (which knew about Fundable) improved on Pratt's model by strictly allowing creative projects - Fundable allowed anything, and thus was 99% begging - and having far better connections, marketing skills and programming skills as Ivy league graduates. They also added rewards a la Artistshare, thus bridging the gap between purchasing and threshold pledge funding in people's minds, something Fundable never succeeded at.
It's hard, wrapping people's minds around threshold pledge funding. Most of Kickstarter's clones failed to clone this aspect of the business - they thought giving project owners everything no matter how much was raised, was just good business sense to attract more projects. The wiki page on crowdfunding has still not grasped the concept, and ArtistShare's lawyers are willfully obtuse about it since they're trying to sue Kickstarter for stealing their model.
Wasting my mod points, but by the time you proposed it in 2008, fundable.org had been running for two years with the same threshold pledge system. (They were hit bad by credit card scammers, accidentally axed a legit project thinking it was CC fraud, this happened to be Mary Robinette Kowal, SF author and friends with Cory Doctorow, at the time the most popular blogger in the world. End of story).
I had idly shipped the idea to Global Ideas Bank (aka ideas dustbin) many years before that again. And I wasn't the first either, among others Bruce Schneier beat me to it.
And no, Xenna below, it was good there never was a patent registered. It's great evidence that ideas are cheap but realisations are valuable - and good ideas tend to be rediscovered if they are forgotten.
See squiggleslash's comment below. Simply because you have a badge and someone don't do as you say doesn't mean you're entitled to use electrotorture weapons on someone. No, not even if your department policy says so.
It's alarming that, like prison rape, use of these weapons have become something Americans just snigger at.
That is totally irrelevant here. Only a few nations are on the list of "rogue states" that you can't export cryptography tools to, and China is obviously not one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing here is that you're not just paying for going to the cinema, you're paying for the option of going to the cinema.
Sure, maybe you only go to the cinema once per year (that's probably on the high end for me personally). But look at it the other way. Suppose I offered you the price of a ticket in cash - in return, you would be unable to watch any films for the next year, no matter how much you wanted. Would you take me up on that offer? I wouldn't think that was a good deal.
This is really the alternative you get, since if you're not interested, it's quite likely that there will be no cinema to go to.
The business world has long recognized that having options can be valuable in itself, even if the options are not exercised. When regular people start getting their eyes opened for it, schemes like this (and kickstarter, which is more related than you might think) are going to have a field day.
It's no coincidence that the Nazis bought eugenics into disrepute. If they hadn't done it, someone else would have done it. Because eugenics is inherently corrupt.
The thing is, the presumption with eugenics is that you know which genes are good or bad. But owing to our nature, as big selfish sacks of genes, there is no decision we are less objective about. Me setting myself up as judge about which of other people's genes are good and bad is simply corrupt, nepotism of the worst sort (and a literal sort, too: the word came from a pope who gave favors to his nephews, possibly illegitimate sons).
There's no getting away from it, either. Even if there should come an alien race or an AI or something, which for some reason had no personal stake in which genes survived, why should we listen to them? They would still make a value judgement in deciding what traits are desirable or not, and there's no plausible reason we should defer to that.
If you let yourself do transparently selfish and hypocritical stuff like making value judgments on other people's genes, of course it becomes easier to do it in other ways too. Once you've elevated yourself to judge and jury of humanity already, what's stopping you from making a few other horrible decisions? Eugenics and nazism are fundamentally related. You have to be evil to justify eugenics, and if you justify eugenics you turn evil. Your alternate history world with eugenics but no nazism is a self-contradicting pipe dream.
Yes, there is. If an entrepreneur tries and fails (goes bankrupt) that is not illegal, but if he plans to fail, or not even try, that is fraud and illegal. Maybe you think that because Kickstarter itself assumes no liability it's different there? But that is wrong. Fraudulent project starters are still liable, and even Kickstarter itself will be in trouble if they host a project they know to be fraudulent,
Well, maybe it's luck. Much of it could be.
We all have strategies we approach problems with, in maths and puzzles as in life. Some strategies are better fits for certain sorts of problems than others. To some degree you can change your mental strategies, but once you're set in them, it becomes an expensive proposition. Like assumptions, methods are hard to change once you've built a lot of genuinely useful stuff on them. Maybe we have different aptitude for certain strategies, but it may also be affected by e.g. which strategies we happened to adopt when we learned our first words.
That's the important question. And I got to say, the more I hear of his antics (dopplegangers changing their name to his?) and novelty drug habits, the less inclined I am to give him the benefit of doubt on this one.
First lesson to do well on an IQ test is not to be intimidated. They count a lot more on intimidation than making original puzzles. Most puzzles don't state explicitly what you should do, thus understanding what's expected of you is the real challenge, and that is notoriously hard if you feel out of your element.
(It's a good proxy for success and academic achievement, because if you're easily intellectually intimidated you'll have a hard time in future education, and may well have had a hard time already. But intellectual confidence isn't really the same as intelligence, so the test inventors took a short cut here.)
To get better at them, it's really about recognizing the way the kind of people who make IQ tests think. They're pretty predictable, so effort needed quickly goes down once you've seen a few.
Ideally no one would be discriminated by these tests. (And ideally, no one would be so stupid as to send money to Mensa). But as long as it happens, it's good to know a bit about them, at least so the intimidation component isn't as effective.
There are also studies indicating that this - testing kids and telling them that they are smart for scoring high on an IQ test - can be counterproductive. If kids feel that achievement comes as a result of an inborn quality rather than effort, guess what, they don't make the same effort.
4 lessons per week for 10 years is approximately how long it took me to learn English at the level I use it now. And I was comparatively talented, always getting top marks in in (technically, that's supposed to mean I was in the top 5% of students). I come from one of the nations with the highest levels of EFL skill, we have a comparatively easy time learning it due to similarities and exposure. Still, it took a lot of work.
Sure, there exist language supertalents, but it's very unlikely that you are one. I'm not one either.
The header for this article says that "Sixteen haven't even shipped yet", without mentioning how late they are (I know plenty of the top 50 most funded Kickstarter projects aren't scheduled to ship this year, and one is even scheduled for 2014 as I recall). They're really trying to force the conclusion "OMG Kickstarter is such a scam!!1!!" down our throats.
Yeah yeah clever guy, I'm sure you could be a successful fraudster if you wanted to - although quite possibly, you'd fail to reach your target like most Kickstarter projects. I bet you and I both could steal credit cards too if we wanted to, it doesn't take much skill to be criminal jackasses.
Most Kickstarter projects deliver. A little late, most likely, but experienced backers count on that (and we also develop an idea about which projects are likely to be very late). It shouldn't happen with your economic model, yet it does! Clearly, something is wrong with reality... or your model.
Most successful kickstarter project starters say they'd do it again - and those that do, tend to hold their schedules better. Who would have though it - maybe the opportunity to keep making money is an incentive as well!
Hardly. Very few projects on Kickstarter are solely dependent on funds raised there. What is demanded is that the funds raised, along with other funds they have, should be enough to make the project happen. Almost always, they will have to sell the product to non-backers afterwards to recoup their costs.
Because Kickstarter backers will fund anything, am I right? Huh? Huh?
Dropping features isn't really an option for Kickstarter projects, it's going to be much more unpopular than a little late delivery.
They don't have to be totally verifiable. They just have to be as verifiable as conventional college education, which isn't really an all that high bar.
And if it turns out people won't put any faith in the Scala course certificate I have from Coursera, I could take a proctored exam, offered at a lot less than the debt-pushing colleges. Though it'd be both cheaper and more reliable to just do some basic sanity checks (e.g. asking me to read or write some Scala code) in the interview.
That there is such a market for sleazy colleges at all should be a wake up call. I hope MOOCs will kill off all these "colleges" that are more reliable producers of debt than education.
True, but there is effort in getting there. Grossly underestimated effort. I'm guessing > 90% of people who set their mind to learning a new language fail miserably.
This. It doesn't just apply to Chinese. The problem is people grossly underestimate the effort needed to learn a language. Even English - sure, it's valuable to be able to access the English part of the web, and lots of English books, documentation etc. But you have to compare it with what else 4 lessons per week for 10 years could earn you.
Also, wayback'd for you.
Yup, it's a really old site, pretty unmaintained. But you can see the headline.
Totally wrong. If you could get the same amount of capital from
1. a bank ...then in most cases the third would be better for you in every respect.
2. an angel investor, or
3. kickstarter backers,
Another reason is market research. Companies like Queen games produce plenty of games funded in the normal way, but pitch more risky games on Kickstarter, to gauge whether there is an enthusiast market for it.
I hate that wiki page, it's bad (but I also hate wikipedia culture, so I'm not going to endure the frustration of trying to fix it). Artistshare was a simple fundraising site, it did not have the threshold pledge mechanism. As such, every charity in the world has prior art.
The first website which offered threshold pledge financing was Fundable.org by John Pratt. No relation to the fundraising site which is at that address today. Kickstarter (which knew about Fundable) improved on Pratt's model by strictly allowing creative projects - Fundable allowed anything, and thus was 99% begging - and having far better connections, marketing skills and programming skills as Ivy league graduates. They also added rewards a la Artistshare, thus bridging the gap between purchasing and threshold pledge funding in people's minds, something Fundable never succeeded at.
It's hard, wrapping people's minds around threshold pledge funding. Most of Kickstarter's clones failed to clone this aspect of the business - they thought giving project owners everything no matter how much was raised, was just good business sense to attract more projects. The wiki page on crowdfunding has still not grasped the concept, and ArtistShare's lawyers are willfully obtuse about it since they're trying to sue Kickstarter for stealing their model.
Wasting my mod points, but by the time you proposed it in 2008, fundable.org had been running for two years with the same threshold pledge system. (They were hit bad by credit card scammers, accidentally axed a legit project thinking it was CC fraud, this happened to be Mary Robinette Kowal, SF author and friends with Cory Doctorow, at the time the most popular blogger in the world. End of story).
I had idly shipped the idea to Global Ideas Bank (aka ideas dustbin) many years before that again. And I wasn't the first either, among others Bruce Schneier beat me to it.
And no, Xenna below, it was good there never was a patent registered. It's great evidence that ideas are cheap but realisations are valuable - and good ideas tend to be rediscovered if they are forgotten.
See squiggleslash's comment below. Simply because you have a badge and someone don't do as you say doesn't mean you're entitled to use electrotorture weapons on someone. No, not even if your department policy says so.
It's alarming that, like prison rape, use of these weapons have become something Americans just snigger at.
That is totally irrelevant here. Only a few nations are on the list of "rogue states" that you can't export cryptography tools to, and China is obviously not one of them.
Features are often disabled for non-extortive reasons too.The hidden LTE support in a recent Google phone comes to mind.