Nothing. Economics is a science, and economists are only concerned with things that are measurable and observable. What you're talking about is your own personal, subjective response to some major events. This has nothing to do with economics, and isn't even really a good proxy for what other people felt at the time.
For what it's worth, maybe you didn't care about 9/11 but I remember that I did, and so did everyone around me. Challenger wasn't a small thing, but it wasn't even close to 9/11. In the immediate aftermath, messages of condolences and support for the United States came from all around the globe, including from people like Fidel Castro, Vladamir Putin, and the North Koreans.
If we do go to Mars, I hope we don't do it for stupid, nationalistic dick-waving reasons. Space exploration has economic benefits, it's just that they're long-term ones. We should go and explore space because it's in our long-term interests to do so. We shouldn't forget about short-term things like infrastructure either, but they're not mutually exclusive.
And also, accomplishing exceptional things does not give a country free pass to mess with other countries and bully them.
We already city-level air quality indicies that let us do comparisons between cities - http://www.airnow.gov/
Anyway, it's not a hard problem to solve. Street View cars already revisit the same streets they've been to before, so eventually they'd collect enough data to be able to average out those sources of variability.
This looks more like it would be useful for comparing neighborhoods within a city. How much worse is the air in the industrial districts compared to the residential ones? What is the difference in air quality in each of San Francisco's microclimates?
But traffic is a large source of solution, so that would bias their data. It would be cool if they strapped these sensors onto the Street View backpacks that they use to map hiking trails, and get data on the air quality along walking paths in parks and other areas that can't be driven to.
Not my car. I pay the extra money to have my own seats that no one else's bum touches, my own cup holders that never hold alcohol or drippy milkshakes, and my own seat fabrics that only my kids drop their toys onto.
Serious question: do you avoid taxis for the same reason?
I'm not so keen on being sedated, but I'd pay extra to be stacked horizontally!
A few years ago Lufthansa had a concept where they would have triple-decker bunk beds in their planes. Read more about it here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Long haul business class (which is currently the cheapest way to get a lie-flat bed) costs about 3x as much as economy class. But having 3 levels would probably bring this price back down to only slightly above economy class prices, and would be much better than flying DVT class. I'd also happily give up meal services and carry-on baggage (I'd just check everythign in) to be able to lie down and sleep properly.
Not sure what happened though. Maybe it's against some safety regulation, or maybe they thought it'd cannibalize their current business class offering.
On the surface these regulations sound useful, but I've still had a lot of bad experiences in taxis. Not every time I get into a cab, but it's happened a not-insignificant number of times. I've had multiple taxi drivers pretend that the meter is broken, and then try to charge me a ridiculously overpriced fare (which I refused to pay). I've been verbally abused because a driver didn't feel I was travelling far enough to be worth his while. Many drivers smell bad, and have dirty cabs. Female friends have been sexually propositioned, and drunk friends have been taken advantage of.
Since I've started using Uber and Lyft, I've never had any reason to complain. Never mind the lower price; the quality of the service is simply better. Drivers are friendly, and since the payment goes through the app, it's hard to get cheated.
Say what you want about the importance of safety and accountability, and the regulations needed to ensure this. But in my experience, the regulations around taxis don't work as well as whatever Uber/Lyft are doing. I'm guessing that the ratings systems in Uber/Lyft quickly flush out asshole drivers, whereas in the taxi industry you have to go to the effort to file an official complaint. In some cities you need to show up in court to argue your case, which is especially hard when you're using a taxi in a city that you're just visiting, as was the case for me in Sydney.
If the existing regulations don't work, then they're not worth defending. Good luck to Uber.
A city of 4 storey buildings sprawls more than a city of 40 storey buildings. So maybe the roads would need to be widened but they would also be shortened, and this would allow people to find other methods of transport that are more efficient than hauling a 1.5 tonne steel cage with you everywhere you go. The costs get socialized either way, but the higher density layout is less socialized.
Why do you think a numeric priority system gives "freedom" to the end user? To me, having to manually mess around with numbers is an annoyance, and it means that the init system is getting in the way.
Having numbers means that some dependency info gets lost. If you have an S10 and S20 script, is there any dependency between them, or were they just arbitrarily numbered? It's impossible to tell unless you go and read through the script and figure out for yourself. This makes it hard to debug when things go wrong. You also just end up with a bunch of scripts that all start with S99 or K99.
The NetBSD init system (which was introduced way back in 2001, and I think ended up being adopted by the other BSDs) has a simple way of solving this. There's a tool called rcorder that parses REQUIRE and PROVIDE lines in each startup script (it's tsort, essentially) and determines the order to run each script. If you wanted to debug something, you could run this yourself and check the output. "Runlevels" were implemented with dummy scripts (i.e. scripts that just had dependency information in them, and didn't perform any actions).
Other than that, it's as simple as the traditional sysvinit, but without meaningless numbers everywhere. You can read more about it here: http://www.mewburn.net/luke/pa...
It's 2015, we should be naming things not numbering them.
Great! Since you seem to think my logic is unsound, you will demonstrate its failings for us by naming a single successful, low-crime majority-black area that has no local warlords and no "thug gangsta" culture destroying its own people. That would make me shut up, fast.
Most of the crappy battery life of smartphone is due to constant network polling by apps. If you just get a smartphone and use it as a dumb phone, then turning off cellular data will give you many days of battery life. Try it, you might be surprised.
Right now a lot of it is paid for from the general fund. But if we do move to a pure user-pays system, indirect users would still be paying for what they indirectly use, because businesses would pass on transport costs to consumers. This would actually create economic incentives for people to buy local goods, like what the "locavore" movement is trying (but failing) to encourage. This is how the free market is supposed to work, and it's ironic that the private car has become a symbol of the free market even though so much of the infrastructure it relies on is socialized.
Schools are a little bit different because children shouldn't be punished for the mistakes of their parents. If you want a society with any sort of social mobility you need to have equal access to education for everyone.
I don't particularly like advertising, but I do see it as a necessary evil on today's web. Obviously people dislike ads, but they dislike paywalls even more. I suspect that far more than 50-60% of sites would die without ads - I'd say it's more like 80-90%. When I look at the sites that I visit (including Slashdot) nearly everything is supported by ads, with only a few exceptions like Amazon and Netflix.
One solution might be Google Contributor, which lets you buy ads from the pages you visit. The ads get removed from the page and the site owner gets money from you, rather than from an advertiser.
This happens a lot on IMDB. The first people to see a movie are usually hardcore fans who have been anticipating it for a long time, and will enjoy it no matter what. So there's a sampling bias at the start, then normal people start watching the movie and the average rating goes down.
You could halve your costs and lower your taxes by moving to Texas or North Dakota, but you'd also find it significantly harder to raise invement capital there. The big draw of the Bay Area for startups is the amount of VC money flowing around, and for some reason Silicon Valley VC firms have a strong preference for investing locally. Until this changes, or until people in other areas start investing heavily in tech, startups will continue to start primarily in Silicon Valley. And once established, it's hard for a company to move to a cheaper location, as it is extremely disruptive to its employees' lives.
Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. This means it measures user market share. If you prefer usage market share, you’ll want to get your data from StatCounter, which looks at 15 billion page views.
So Net Applications counts the number of users who use it, whereas StatCounter counts the number of uses (i.e. page hits). The difference you see with Internet Explorer being "overcounted" shows that it occupies a long tail of many users who don't browse the web very often, whereas heavy web users prefer Chrome so it gets "undercounted".
StatCounter stats are below, for desktop and combined (desktop+phone+tablet+console):
If anything, being an advertising company provides an incentive to downrank ad-like results. Why would anyone buy an ad if their shopping site already appears at the top of the organic results?
The problem with pedophilia in the Catholic Church isn't just the prevalence of it, or the fact that the clergy are in a position of power. The problem is the way that they covered up the cases and protected the abusers. The right thing to do when discovering a pedophile priest would be to hand him over to the police, but the church would often keep things secret and move the priest to another location, to try to make the problem go away. This culture of secrecy went all the way up to the pope, and when an organization as large as the Catholic Church has systemic problems like this, it completely justifies the amount of media attention that they received.
Not enough time spent distance focusing is possibly a cause of myopia, but the article presents an alternative hypothesis: that it is the reduced level of light indoors that is the problem.
That seems a bit extreme. I don't know about you but if I drink a small amount of alcohol it won't impair my ability to react to an emergency in any meaningful way.
One of the big problems with the legal system is how inefficient and time consuming it is. We live in a world where just threatening legal action can put a big question mark over someone's financial future. To do anything, you need to pay for the services of expensive lawyers and paralegals. So this naturally puts the wealthy, big corporations and big government agencies at an advantage.
You can see how inefficient the judicial system is just by looking at how much paper they produce. They literally have to wheel boxes of documents into court with carts. Armies of paralegals have to manually sift through the documents by hand. It's really one of the most conservative and backwards industries out there.
The most obvious way that technology can help is by increasing efficiency and leveling the playing field. The ideas are not new (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/dp/01995...) and I think eventually law firms and courts will learn to leverage technology and make their services more accessible. Making information more accessible will also help shoot down abusers of the legal system (e.g. in invaliding bad patents - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/...).
Imagine how many more programmers would be needed if we didn't have compilers. Or automatic code generators. And the whole point of machine learning is that you write software that teaches itself how to do something, rather than program it directly.
Software developers have been quite good at moving up into higher levels of abstraction each time we multiply our productivity. There's so much work to do that I doubt our tools will ever "displace" us.
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What does basic economics say about that?
Nothing. Economics is a science, and economists are only concerned with things that are measurable and observable. What you're talking about is your own personal, subjective response to some major events. This has nothing to do with economics, and isn't even really a good proxy for what other people felt at the time.
For what it's worth, maybe you didn't care about 9/11 but I remember that I did, and so did everyone around me. Challenger wasn't a small thing, but it wasn't even close to 9/11. In the immediate aftermath, messages of condolences and support for the United States came from all around the globe, including from people like Fidel Castro, Vladamir Putin, and the North Koreans.
If we do go to Mars, I hope we don't do it for stupid, nationalistic dick-waving reasons. Space exploration has economic benefits, it's just that they're long-term ones. We should go and explore space because it's in our long-term interests to do so. We shouldn't forget about short-term things like infrastructure either, but they're not mutually exclusive.
And also, accomplishing exceptional things does not give a country free pass to mess with other countries and bully them.
There's already plenty of info that websitse can use to identify you - https://panopticlick.eff.org/
We already city-level air quality indicies that let us do comparisons between cities - http://www.airnow.gov/
Anyway, it's not a hard problem to solve. Street View cars already revisit the same streets they've been to before, so eventually they'd collect enough data to be able to average out those sources of variability.
This looks more like it would be useful for comparing neighborhoods within a city. How much worse is the air in the industrial districts compared to the residential ones? What is the difference in air quality in each of San Francisco's microclimates?
But traffic is a large source of solution, so that would bias their data. It would be cool if they strapped these sensors onto the Street View backpacks that they use to map hiking trails, and get data on the air quality along walking paths in parks and other areas that can't be driven to.
Not my car. I pay the extra money to have my own seats that no one else's bum touches, my own cup holders that never hold alcohol or drippy milkshakes, and my own seat fabrics that only my kids drop their toys onto.
Serious question: do you avoid taxis for the same reason?
You should see how much time drivers spend circling the block looking for free parking around my apartment.
I'm not so keen on being sedated, but I'd pay extra to be stacked horizontally!
A few years ago Lufthansa had a concept where they would have triple-decker bunk beds in their planes. Read more about it here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Long haul business class (which is currently the cheapest way to get a lie-flat bed) costs about 3x as much as economy class. But having 3 levels would probably bring this price back down to only slightly above economy class prices, and would be much better than flying DVT class. I'd also happily give up meal services and carry-on baggage (I'd just check everythign in) to be able to lie down and sleep properly.
Not sure what happened though. Maybe it's against some safety regulation, or maybe they thought it'd cannibalize their current business class offering.
On the surface these regulations sound useful, but I've still had a lot of bad experiences in taxis. Not every time I get into a cab, but it's happened a not-insignificant number of times. I've had multiple taxi drivers pretend that the meter is broken, and then try to charge me a ridiculously overpriced fare (which I refused to pay). I've been verbally abused because a driver didn't feel I was travelling far enough to be worth his while. Many drivers smell bad, and have dirty cabs. Female friends have been sexually propositioned, and drunk friends have been taken advantage of.
Since I've started using Uber and Lyft, I've never had any reason to complain. Never mind the lower price; the quality of the service is simply better. Drivers are friendly, and since the payment goes through the app, it's hard to get cheated.
Say what you want about the importance of safety and accountability, and the regulations needed to ensure this. But in my experience, the regulations around taxis don't work as well as whatever Uber/Lyft are doing. I'm guessing that the ratings systems in Uber/Lyft quickly flush out asshole drivers, whereas in the taxi industry you have to go to the effort to file an official complaint. In some cities you need to show up in court to argue your case, which is especially hard when you're using a taxi in a city that you're just visiting, as was the case for me in Sydney.
If the existing regulations don't work, then they're not worth defending. Good luck to Uber.
A city of 4 storey buildings sprawls more than a city of 40 storey buildings. So maybe the roads would need to be widened but they would also be shortened, and this would allow people to find other methods of transport that are more efficient than hauling a 1.5 tonne steel cage with you everywhere you go. The costs get socialized either way, but the higher density layout is less socialized.
Why do you think a numeric priority system gives "freedom" to the end user? To me, having to manually mess around with numbers is an annoyance, and it means that the init system is getting in the way.
Having numbers means that some dependency info gets lost. If you have an S10 and S20 script, is there any dependency between them, or were they just arbitrarily numbered? It's impossible to tell unless you go and read through the script and figure out for yourself. This makes it hard to debug when things go wrong. You also just end up with a bunch of scripts that all start with S99 or K99.
The NetBSD init system (which was introduced way back in 2001, and I think ended up being adopted by the other BSDs) has a simple way of solving this. There's a tool called rcorder that parses REQUIRE and PROVIDE lines in each startup script (it's tsort, essentially) and determines the order to run each script. If you wanted to debug something, you could run this yourself and check the output. "Runlevels" were implemented with dummy scripts (i.e. scripts that just had dependency information in them, and didn't perform any actions).
Other than that, it's as simple as the traditional sysvinit, but without meaningless numbers everywhere. You can read more about it here: http://www.mewburn.net/luke/pa...
It's 2015, we should be naming things not numbering them.
Great! Since you seem to think my logic is unsound, you will demonstrate its failings for us by naming a single successful, low-crime majority-black area that has no local warlords and no "thug gangsta" culture destroying its own people. That would make me shut up, fast.
5 seconds of Googling came up with this: http://atlantablackstar.com/20...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Among the changes are bug fixes and improved battery life, which are immediately useful to anyone who installs M, regardless of how many others don't.
They did "exclude that shit". That's what chromium is.
Most of the crappy battery life of smartphone is due to constant network polling by apps. If you just get a smartphone and use it as a dumb phone, then turning off cellular data will give you many days of battery life. Try it, you might be surprised.
Right now a lot of it is paid for from the general fund. But if we do move to a pure user-pays system, indirect users would still be paying for what they indirectly use, because businesses would pass on transport costs to consumers. This would actually create economic incentives for people to buy local goods, like what the "locavore" movement is trying (but failing) to encourage. This is how the free market is supposed to work, and it's ironic that the private car has become a symbol of the free market even though so much of the infrastructure it relies on is socialized.
Schools are a little bit different because children shouldn't be punished for the mistakes of their parents. If you want a society with any sort of social mobility you need to have equal access to education for everyone.
I don't particularly like advertising, but I do see it as a necessary evil on today's web. Obviously people dislike ads, but they dislike paywalls even more. I suspect that far more than 50-60% of sites would die without ads - I'd say it's more like 80-90%. When I look at the sites that I visit (including Slashdot) nearly everything is supported by ads, with only a few exceptions like Amazon and Netflix.
One solution might be Google Contributor, which lets you buy ads from the pages you visit. The ads get removed from the page and the site owner gets money from you, rather than from an advertiser.
This happens a lot on IMDB. The first people to see a movie are usually hardcore fans who have been anticipating it for a long time, and will enjoy it no matter what. So there's a sampling bias at the start, then normal people start watching the movie and the average rating goes down.
You could halve your costs and lower your taxes by moving to Texas or North Dakota, but you'd also find it significantly harder to raise invement capital there. The big draw of the Bay Area for startups is the amount of VC money flowing around, and for some reason Silicon Valley VC firms have a strong preference for investing locally. Until this changes, or until people in other areas start investing heavily in tech, startups will continue to start primarily in Silicon Valley. And once established, it's hard for a company to move to a cheaper location, as it is extremely disruptive to its employees' lives.
FTFA:
Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. This means it measures user market share. If you prefer usage market share, you’ll want to get your data from StatCounter, which looks at 15 billion page views.
So Net Applications counts the number of users who use it, whereas StatCounter counts the number of uses (i.e. page hits). The difference you see with Internet Explorer being "overcounted" shows that it occupies a long tail of many users who don't browse the web very often, whereas heavy web users prefer Chrome so it gets "undercounted".
StatCounter stats are below, for desktop and combined (desktop+phone+tablet+console):
http://gs.statcounter.com/#des...
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mob...
If anything, being an advertising company provides an incentive to downrank ad-like results. Why would anyone buy an ad if their shopping site already appears at the top of the organic results?
The problem with pedophilia in the Catholic Church isn't just the prevalence of it, or the fact that the clergy are in a position of power. The problem is the way that they covered up the cases and protected the abusers. The right thing to do when discovering a pedophile priest would be to hand him over to the police, but the church would often keep things secret and move the priest to another location, to try to make the problem go away. This culture of secrecy went all the way up to the pope, and when an organization as large as the Catholic Church has systemic problems like this, it completely justifies the amount of media attention that they received.
Not enough time spent distance focusing is possibly a cause of myopia, but the article presents an alternative hypothesis: that it is the reduced level of light indoors that is the problem.
That seems a bit extreme. I don't know about you but if I drink a small amount of alcohol it won't impair my ability to react to an emergency in any meaningful way.
One of the big problems with the legal system is how inefficient and time consuming it is. We live in a world where just threatening legal action can put a big question mark over someone's financial future. To do anything, you need to pay for the services of expensive lawyers and paralegals. So this naturally puts the wealthy, big corporations and big government agencies at an advantage.
You can see how inefficient the judicial system is just by looking at how much paper they produce. They literally have to wheel boxes of documents into court with carts. Armies of paralegals have to manually sift through the documents by hand. It's really one of the most conservative and backwards industries out there.
The most obvious way that technology can help is by increasing efficiency and leveling the playing field. The ideas are not new (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/dp/01995...) and I think eventually law firms and courts will learn to leverage technology and make their services more accessible. Making information more accessible will also help shoot down abusers of the legal system (e.g. in invaliding bad patents - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/...).
Imagine how many more programmers would be needed if we didn't have compilers. Or automatic code generators. And the whole point of machine learning is that you write software that teaches itself how to do something, rather than program it directly.
Software developers have been quite good at moving up into higher levels of abstraction each time we multiply our productivity. There's so much work to do that I doubt our tools will ever "displace" us.