>exercise bike that you have to peddle to run the computer.
It's *hard* *work* to generate power by selling exercise bikes. Especially door-to-door: lugging three or four of those puppies around in a suitcase will buff you right up.
I was a bike racer for a long time. At my best I could generate about 350 watts continuously for an hour. A decent computer would suck that dry. I think I'll stick with my Qube-2, which only draws about 35 watts. It's challenging to hook a keyboard or a monitor to it, but at least it's low-power!
I was on MySpace before it was cool with the kids, when it was a place like Friendster where middle-aged geeks hung out and got together to ride bikes or get drunk together. Then all the kids found out about it, then the newspapers published about MySpace crises and problems, then all the rest of the population showed up, and the kids moved on, and pretty soon it'll be boring and old again and all that'll be left are the people who actually find some use in it. Myspace is like a fancy telephone: it's another way of communicating. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it other than having Tom as your friend and making it way too easy to design really tacky-looking pages. One of my friends uses it for hooking up with cute 19-year-olds. Another uses it for announcing his wine-and-cheese parties and hiking schedules. It's neither good nor bad: it simply is.
>I've wondered, in fact, if this might become a new business model in the new internet economy. A "hit of the moment with planned obsolescence". It seems to me that everything cool dies off, and internet fads spike quickly and then degrade.
Both of them were only children with domineering, abusive fathers. Eerily alike, as it so happens. The 23 year old, the ultrasupergenius, was a sometime bike racer and had "Who Is John Galt" handpainted all over her bike. Really nice person when she wasn't angry, and obviously really smart.
I think the key part is 'admittedly flawed' -- your analysis is dead on, if the person recognizes that the model isn't perfect and the results should be taken advisedly. There's good stuff in Rand's work, but it's not perfect and people don't all think that way and if you want to actually get along with people you have to take that into account.
A minor quibble to your minor improvements list: windows typically represent between 10 and 25% of the entire price of a house, at least where I live. It's very hard to recover the price of new windows. Most major improvements have a negative return, particularly bathrooms and kitchens, from what I've read, while minor improvements do have a small positive return, although it's likely that they make the house sell faster, which is in itself a (difficult-to-measure) value-added result.
For comparison, my personal experiences with cars:
1949 willys CJ2: needed brake system replaced, new starter, engine rebuilt, fuel pump replaced, at 40,000 miles. Had extensive work before that, but that's when I gave up and sold it.
1967 Olds Cutlass: Clutch replaced at 25,000, front brake rotors at 40,000, clutch again at 50,000, needed engine rebuild at 90,000, when I gave up and sold it. Went through three water pumps, two fuel pumps, one transmission rebuild, two timing belts, and a lot more, that I remember.
1981 Chevy Chevette: starter replaced at 80,000 miles. Timing belt broke at 90,000 miles, was still running fine at 120,000 when it got hit.
1992 Chevy Nova/Toyota Corolla: 185,000 miles or thereabouts. I don't remember doing anything, at all, except a timing belt, and having to put a helicoil in for a trashed spark plug thread. Original clutch, water pump, fuel pump when it got traded in on a Saturn (that got mooshed within 50,000 miles so it doesn't count.)
1995 Toyota Camry: 285,000 miles, still running. Replaced timing belt twice. Still on original clutch, water pump, fuel pump, everything but the radiator because of a problem involving a pickup truck. A quarter million miles, original engine, still passing fairly tight emissions.
I also had a Subaru Loyale that I bought at 130,000 and drove to 190,000 without ever doing a bit of maintenance other than oil and spark plugs, but it got crushed by a semi just before 200,000 miles.
My mom's Subaru Forester is at 185,000 and had to have the catalytic converter and timing belt replaced. My Soob Legacy is at 165,000 and just had the timing belt replaced and a hole welded up in the exhaust pipe where I hit it on a rock but that's the only work it's had done aside from windshield replacements.
I'd claim that in 50 years, cars have improved 10x in durability and well more than 10x in reliability.
I don't find it funny, I find it weird and sad. It's the opposite of altruism and it confuses me. I've dated two unbelievably smart (perfect SAT, one got her PhD at 23) women who were both libertarians and both felt actually *offended* and angry when someone did good deeds, especially if someone gave strangers gifts. Hell, didn't even have to be strangers: my grandmother willed something really expensive to me, my brother, my (then) girlfriend, and my brother's wife. My girlfriend loathed my sis-in-law and was furious that sis-in-law had gotten something for doing nothing, even though my girlfriend had also gotten something for doing nothing. It made her so mad she couldn't sleep, because she didn't think that my sis-in-law deserved it. I completely don't understand that -- how could you ever be upset at someone being nice to someone else? Both of my ex-gf's that thought this way kept saying "nobody ever gave ME anything" (which was, of course, completely false.) That's how they justified being angry when people gave stuff to someone else: if I didn't get free stuff, nobody else should, either. Neglecting the fact that they did, in fact, get lots of free stuff -- air, water, shelter, health, and most of all intelligence -- it shows a smallness of spirit, a meanness, to begrudge other people getting aid.
The woman I'm dating now, I'm dating mostly because she struck me as being a truly generous person when I first got to know her.
There's an interesting psych experiment about this. I can't remember the name. The general idea is: you walk up to two random strangers (don't know each other) and say "here's (a *lot* of money, like 1/4 annual salary) for the two of you. One of you gets to divide the money between you, and the other gets to say whether the deal goes through or not." What they found -- I'm remembering this from Science News from about five years ago -- is that in primitive societies whatever the first person chose, even if it's taking 80% and leaving 20% for the other person, the other person would accept, coz, hey, it's free money, right? But as the education and lifestyle of the people involved improved, the refusal number crept steadily towards 50-60%: people were turning down getting $5000 if that meant someone else got $15,000, because they felt it was unfair. That's like retributive anti-altruism, and apparently it's really widespread. Weird, huh?
One benefit to this would be that it doesn't dump 3.5 million pounds of burned fuel into the atmosphere, although apparently that's not much of a problem since the waste byproducs seem to be pretty innocuous.
I've read a fair bit about reducing visibility since it's something some friends work on. Your comment is funny but a big underestimate. Some of the first attempts to make stealth planes ran into horrible difficulties because the hardware they used to hold the plane model in place had 1000 times the radar signature of the plane itself, and in one case a fastener that was sticking out a very small distance from the surface of the plane made its radar visiblity increase 10x. Invisibility is difficult.
(Steven Wright: "I went out to buy some camo pants, but I couldn't find any...")
>But what I'm wondering is why people think it's a good idea to go out of your way to be rude or insulting.
Probably for the same reason Rosa Parks decided to not get up from her bus seat: not because she went out that day intending to start a revolution, but because she was tired of all the crap she'd had to put up with for so long.
A: I have roughly the same number of memories as Oprah and Bill G -- and, for that matter, the homeless guy who lives under a bridge across the street from my house. Clearly, just having lots of memories has loose correlation with what defines a person. Hell, I probably remember a lot more, and with much higher quality, than Keith Richards does.
B: My mom is a weird Christian. It's her belief that when the bible talks about life after death, it doesn't mean a separate existence ("heaven") but in the memory people have of you, and if you did good, their memory of you will be good, and that's as close as anyone gets to heaven. By her definition, it's not your memory that defines you, but the memories of those who know you -- which I think correlates much better with defining a person (as per point A) than personal memories.
C: Not to get all postmodern here, but people's memories are unreliable: they color what they remember by what they expect to remember, what their society has conditioned them to regard as important. Their memories are contextual. The Chabris/Simons Gorilla Experiment is a beautiful demonstration of an extreme example of selective attention and the unreliability of memory.
Getting a (so-called) neutral-point-of-view copy of someone's life, a la Being John Malkovich, would remove a lot of subjectivity, in one way, but someone else viewing it would see entirely different things and come away with a completely separate experience. (Read about eye tracking in autism, for instance: non-autistic people pay attention to wholly different parts of pictures than autistic people do.)
If you have a problem that lots of people are working on, and nobody is making consistent progress solving, and then someone does, that person has broken through a developmental bottleneck. That's a breakthrough. But, like the evolution/creation fight over what 'theory' means, there's a popular-advertising/research fight over what a 'breakthrough' is, insofar as they happen all the time, at an increasing rate, as technology advances, but the word is still regarded by the public as being something monumental. It IS monumental, to the people in that very specific field of study, but since there are so many more areas of active research these days, it is much less monumental to the world as a whole than a breakthrough was 50 years ago, or 100. Languages change, culture changes, connotations of individual words change. Otherwise I would have to drive a chariot -- sorry, coegi plaustrum -- to work every day.
I wonder if this will die as quickly as Walmart's effort seems to have. Probably not: the people going to this will be as dumb but have more money available.
If you were to blow sterile air (or argon or whatever) onto the area and remove the air through filters -- essentially establish something like a laminar flow fume hood across the site of operation -- you'd help reduce risk of contamination.
Well, you know the sexist old joke about ugly women. This is just the opposite side of the coin: when you deliver quality goods, you don't have to include the latest aesthetic fads.
Does "the only inch of that casino not covered" include bathrooms? coz that could make for some interesting lawsuits, especially when someone leaks the video of a celebrity taking a piss.
Gee, just inject 5 MILLION TONS of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, where it will promptly turn into sulfuric acid and rain back down on the world, making it look like a disaster area. Good thinking!
That's *funny*. I'd heard that one as "how much can you rent pirates for?" "Two dollars: one buck an ear." Yours adds in the child-saying-bad-words thing, which makes it much better. Hee hee: I'm going to remember that.
1. Pirate walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder. The bartender says, "hey, that's really cool: where did you get it?" The parrot says, "from a pirate ship, of course."
2. Pirate walks into a bar with a hook hand and an eyepatch. Bartender says "that's rough, man: what happened?" Pirate holds up his arm and says "arrr, swordfight." The bartender nods and asks about the eyepatch. Pirate says, "a gull shat in it." The bartender blinks and says "you wouldn't lose an eye from that, would you?" The pirate sighs and says "you would if it's your first day with a hook hand."
3. Pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel sticking out of his shorts, and says, "arr, bartender, bring me a flagion of rum!" The bartender says, "sure, pal, but what's with the steering wheel?" The pirate growls, "I don't know, but it's driving me nuts."
But the point is to transmit information. You don't need gain, you just need signal. RAM already includes digital amplifiers -- many of the interconnect busses do. But these are at the receiver, not at the sender. Gain, by itself, is usually a bad thing unless you specifically need it, because it's all too easy to get into oscillation, just like marching your soldiers over a bridge in unison, and oscillation will screw bigly with the signal you actually want.
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>exercise bike that you have to peddle to run the computer.
It's *hard* *work* to generate power by selling exercise bikes. Especially door-to-door: lugging three or four of those puppies around in a suitcase will buff you right up.
I was a bike racer for a long time. At my best I could generate about 350 watts continuously for an hour. A decent computer would suck that dry. I think I'll stick with my Qube-2, which only draws about 35 watts. It's challenging to hook a keyboard or a monitor to it, but at least it's low-power!
I was on MySpace before it was cool with the kids, when it was a place like Friendster where middle-aged geeks hung out and got together to ride bikes or get drunk together. Then all the kids found out about it, then the newspapers published about MySpace crises and problems, then all the rest of the population showed up, and the kids moved on, and pretty soon it'll be boring and old again and all that'll be left are the people who actually find some use in it.
Myspace is like a fancy telephone: it's another way of communicating. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it other than having Tom as your friend and making it way too easy to design really tacky-looking pages. One of my friends uses it for hooking up with cute 19-year-olds. Another uses it for announcing his wine-and-cheese parties and hiking schedules. It's neither good nor bad: it simply is.
>I've wondered, in fact, if this might become a new business model in the new internet economy. A "hit of the moment with planned obsolescence". It seems to me that everything cool dies off, and internet fads spike quickly and then degrade.
In about 1890, Oscar Wilde said:
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
I bet he's no longer one of Tom's friends...
Both of them were only children with domineering, abusive fathers. Eerily alike, as it so happens. The 23 year old, the ultrasupergenius, was a sometime bike racer and had "Who Is John Galt" handpainted all over her bike. Really nice person when she wasn't angry, and obviously really smart.
I think the key part is 'admittedly flawed' -- your analysis is dead on, if the person recognizes that the model isn't perfect and the results should be taken advisedly. There's good stuff in Rand's work, but it's not perfect and people don't all think that way and if you want to actually get along with people you have to take that into account.
A minor quibble to your minor improvements list: windows typically represent between 10 and 25% of the entire price of a house, at least where I live. It's very hard to recover the price of new windows. Most major improvements have a negative return, particularly bathrooms and kitchens, from what I've read, while minor improvements do have a small positive return, although it's likely that they make the house sell faster, which is in itself a (difficult-to-measure) value-added result.
For comparison, my personal experiences with cars:
1949 willys CJ2: needed brake system replaced, new starter, engine rebuilt, fuel pump replaced, at 40,000 miles. Had extensive work before that, but that's when I gave up and sold it.
1967 Olds Cutlass: Clutch replaced at 25,000, front brake rotors at 40,000, clutch again at 50,000, needed engine rebuild at 90,000, when I gave up and sold it. Went through three water pumps, two fuel pumps, one transmission rebuild, two timing belts, and a lot more, that I remember.
1981 Chevy Chevette: starter replaced at 80,000 miles. Timing belt broke at 90,000 miles, was still running fine at 120,000 when it got hit.
1992 Chevy Nova/Toyota Corolla: 185,000 miles or thereabouts. I don't remember doing anything, at all, except a timing belt, and having to put a helicoil in for a trashed spark plug thread. Original clutch, water pump, fuel pump when it got traded in on a Saturn (that got mooshed within 50,000 miles so it doesn't count.)
1995 Toyota Camry: 285,000 miles, still running. Replaced timing belt twice. Still on original clutch, water pump, fuel pump, everything but the radiator because of a problem involving a pickup truck. A quarter million miles, original engine, still passing fairly tight emissions.
I also had a Subaru Loyale that I bought at 130,000 and drove to 190,000 without ever doing a bit of maintenance other than oil and spark plugs, but it got crushed by a semi just before 200,000 miles.
My mom's Subaru Forester is at 185,000 and had to have the catalytic converter and timing belt replaced. My Soob Legacy is at 165,000 and just had the timing belt replaced and a hole welded up in the exhaust pipe where I hit it on a rock but that's the only work it's had done aside from windshield replacements.
I'd claim that in 50 years, cars have improved 10x in durability and well more than 10x in reliability.
I don't find it funny, I find it weird and sad. It's the opposite of altruism and it confuses me. I've dated two unbelievably smart (perfect SAT, one got her PhD at 23) women who were both libertarians and both felt actually *offended* and angry when someone did good deeds, especially if someone gave strangers gifts. Hell, didn't even have to be strangers: my grandmother willed something really expensive to me, my brother, my (then) girlfriend, and my brother's wife. My girlfriend loathed my sis-in-law and was furious that sis-in-law had gotten something for doing nothing, even though my girlfriend had also gotten something for doing nothing. It made her so mad she couldn't sleep, because she didn't think that my sis-in-law deserved it. I completely don't understand that -- how could you ever be upset at someone being nice to someone else? Both of my ex-gf's that thought this way kept saying "nobody ever gave ME anything" (which was, of course, completely false.) That's how they justified being angry when people gave stuff to someone else: if I didn't get free stuff, nobody else should, either. Neglecting the fact that they did, in fact, get lots of free stuff -- air, water, shelter, health, and most of all intelligence -- it shows a smallness of spirit, a meanness, to begrudge other people getting aid.
The woman I'm dating now, I'm dating mostly because she struck me as being a truly generous person when I first got to know her.
There's an interesting psych experiment about this. I can't remember the name. The general idea is: you walk up to two random strangers (don't know each other) and say "here's (a *lot* of money, like 1/4 annual salary) for the two of you. One of you gets to divide the money between you, and the other gets to say whether the deal goes through or not." What they found -- I'm remembering this from Science News from about five years ago -- is that in primitive societies whatever the first person chose, even if it's taking 80% and leaving 20% for the other person, the other person would accept, coz, hey, it's free money, right? But as the education and lifestyle of the people involved improved, the refusal number crept steadily towards 50-60%: people were turning down getting $5000 if that meant someone else got $15,000, because they felt it was unfair. That's like retributive anti-altruism, and apparently it's really widespread. Weird, huh?
One benefit to this would be that it doesn't dump 3.5 million pounds of burned fuel into the atmosphere, although apparently that's not much of a problem since the waste byproducs seem to be pretty innocuous.
I've read a fair bit about reducing visibility since it's something some friends work on. Your comment is funny but a big underestimate. Some of the first attempts to make stealth planes ran into horrible difficulties because the hardware they used to hold the plane model in place had 1000 times the radar signature of the plane itself, and in one case a fastener that was sticking out a very small distance from the surface of the plane made its radar visiblity increase 10x. Invisibility is difficult.
(Steven Wright: "I went out to buy some camo pants, but I couldn't find any...")
>But what I'm wondering is why people think it's a good idea to go out of your way to be rude or insulting.
Probably for the same reason Rosa Parks decided to not get up from her bus seat: not because she went out that day intending to start a revolution, but because she was tired of all the crap she'd had to put up with for so long.
A: I have roughly the same number of memories as Oprah and Bill G -- and, for that matter, the homeless guy who lives under a bridge across the street from my house. Clearly, just having lots of memories has loose correlation with what defines a person. Hell, I probably remember a lot more, and with much higher quality, than Keith Richards does.
B: My mom is a weird Christian. It's her belief that when the bible talks about life after death, it doesn't mean a separate existence ("heaven") but in the memory people have of you, and if you did good, their memory of you will be good, and that's as close as anyone gets to heaven. By her definition, it's not your memory that defines you, but the memories of those who know you -- which I think correlates much better with defining a person (as per point A) than personal memories.
C: Not to get all postmodern here, but people's memories are unreliable: they color what they remember by what they expect to remember, what their society has conditioned them to regard as important. Their memories are contextual. The Chabris/Simons Gorilla Experiment is a beautiful demonstration of an extreme example of selective attention and the unreliability of memory.
Getting a (so-called) neutral-point-of-view copy of someone's life, a la Being John Malkovich, would remove a lot of subjectivity, in one way, but someone else viewing it would see entirely different things and come away with a completely separate experience. (Read about eye tracking in autism, for instance: non-autistic people pay attention to wholly different parts of pictures than autistic people do.)
If you have a problem that lots of people are working on, and nobody is making consistent progress solving, and then someone does, that person has broken through a developmental bottleneck. That's a breakthrough. But, like the evolution/creation fight over what 'theory' means, there's a popular-advertising/research fight over what a 'breakthrough' is, insofar as they happen all the time, at an increasing rate, as technology advances, but the word is still regarded by the public as being something monumental. It IS monumental, to the people in that very specific field of study, but since there are so many more areas of active research these days, it is much less monumental to the world as a whole than a breakthrough was 50 years ago, or 100.
Languages change, culture changes, connotations of individual words change. Otherwise I would have to drive a chariot -- sorry, coegi plaustrum -- to work every day.
Like a hooker needs another dose of clap.
I wonder if this will die as quickly as Walmart's effort seems to have. Probably not: the people going to this will be as dumb but have more money available.
If you were to blow sterile air (or argon or whatever) onto the area and remove the air through filters -- essentially establish something like a laminar flow fume hood across the site of operation -- you'd help reduce risk of contamination.
>you box is getting trojaned?
That sounds like a line from a really bad movie, one of those where all the male actors have moustaches.
Well, you know the sexist old joke about ugly women. This is just the opposite side of the coin: when you deliver quality goods, you don't have to include the latest aesthetic fads.
Does "the only inch of that casino not covered" include bathrooms? coz that could make for some interesting lawsuits, especially when someone leaks the video of a celebrity taking a piss.
That joke serves as the central point in an otherwise depressing (but fantastic) movie called "Blue". It always makes me grin.
Gee, just inject 5 MILLION TONS of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, where it will promptly turn into sulfuric acid and rain back down on the world, making it look like a disaster area. Good thinking!
The whooshing sound you just heard was the meta-joke flying over your head, but thanks anyway.
There's a whole CLASS of those, and they make me laugh and laugh.
What does a pirate study in college? ARRRRchitecture!
What's a pirate's favorite country? ARRRRgentina!
What do pirates get locked up for? ARRRRRson!
it's funniest if you end with:
What sort of socks do pirates wear? Wool. It's better for use on ships.
(meta-joke there...)
That's *funny*. I'd heard that one as "how much can you rent pirates for?" "Two dollars: one buck an ear." Yours adds in the child-saying-bad-words thing, which makes it much better. Hee hee: I'm going to remember that.
1. Pirate walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder. The bartender says, "hey, that's really cool: where did you get it?" The parrot says, "from a pirate ship, of course."
2. Pirate walks into a bar with a hook hand and an eyepatch. Bartender says "that's rough, man: what happened?" Pirate holds up his arm and says "arrr, swordfight." The bartender nods and asks about the eyepatch. Pirate says, "a gull shat in it." The bartender blinks and says "you wouldn't lose an eye from that, would you?" The pirate sighs and says "you would if it's your first day with a hook hand."
3. Pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel sticking out of his shorts, and says, "arr, bartender, bring me a flagion of rum!" The bartender says, "sure, pal, but what's with the steering wheel?" The pirate growls, "I don't know, but it's driving me nuts."
But the point is to transmit information. You don't need gain, you just need signal. RAM already includes digital amplifiers -- many of the interconnect busses do. But these are at the receiver, not at the sender. Gain, by itself, is usually a bad thing unless you specifically need it, because it's all too easy to get into oscillation, just like marching your soldiers over a bridge in unison, and oscillation will screw bigly with the signal you actually want.