ftlio

Who pays out the .1?

What is the cost of time-shifting usage versus paying peak pricing versus buying some storage to charge at lower rates? At the industrial scale this becomes a game of capital expenditures versus cash flow. At the consumer scale it's a game of convenience and cost. If energy can be made cheaper at the cost of informational overhead (or less convenience), then what is the role of storage (as it itself becomes cheaper) in managing that overhead? It doesn't seem far fetched that it will play a role.

Also, at some point, can I get a discounted rate on my hyperloop ticket if I sell it energy during peak demand at an under-market rate?

That's one name for it. 'I still won't vote for taxes or meaningful legislation on the issue because they're just going to get it wrong anyway.' is the phase's actual name.

That makes much more sense.

> I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on how companies should do it because it's good for them financially

1) Why on Earth would a company spend a considerable amount of resources on doing something that isn't good for them financially? That's their thing, and in the whole scheme of things seems like good separation of concerns. Companies make profits. Other things do other things.

2) Figuring out how to measure the productivity of an open source project from a single perspective is a positive thing. We know that the externalities of the large profile, well-funded, open source projects feed back into their participating parties positively, from those funding them to those participating out of pure interest. Some of the big companies can even account for this in some way, but we also know that it's hard to fully account for the benefit.

One explanation for why a company might fund open source, given to me by someone working for Microsoft to the end of funding open source projects, is that open source generates the highest degree of reusable code. My guess is that allowing disparate interests to define a thing will net you a more nuanced definition than otherwise. Time preference will always be a thing though. Often you need to be fast more than you need to be correct.

'We' could roll our own Linux distro, work out deals with manufacturers to provide some form factor useable by children to run our distro on, set up a massive cloud to orchestrate all these devices in such a way that they are useful to children and teachers without being a huge pain in the ass.

But I don't feel like it.

The income of your average Costco shopper is massive compared to your average Walmart shopper as well.

They can't eliminate the annual fee either because it's literally less than their annual profit (well maybe not in this market but it was a few years ago). Their demographic is people with the financial 'ability' to think $100 ahead for a year, to whom they deliver goods at basically cost.

Walmart vs Costco is a complete myth. Costco operates where Walmart does very poorly.

A good answer to a good question!

I like the sentiment, but the actual thing used to cut people into the value of that economy has utility that can be priced in terms of that actual thing.

Imagine you lived in an economy where all you had to do was pay robots in the required electricity to gather the requisite resources (from somehow politically uncontested, infinite stores), assemble them, and deliver the product to you (or you to your destination, etc). The cost of storing that electricity, and transferring it to them would be accountable in electricity (the purchase of the manufacture of batteries in electricity, the electricity losses due to transformation and heat loss on the wires, etc).

Humans have thus far been really bad at amortizing the costs of the actual things they're transacting with. It may be impossible, but Bitcoin is the first system that seems to have attempted a solution.

Does it jump your cursor around? I'd be interested in your config if it doesn't.

The N^2 problem of Bitcoin and Ethereum is solvable through sharding. I agree that on-chain scaling is impossible (and the two projects differ in their taste for decentralization vs scalability at their core), but the build out of workable sharding solutions with reasonable trade-offs and a workable topology are underway by both camps. It's just going to take longer than I think a lot of people who bought in with the pay-per-service use case would prefer.

In the case of chat, I'm convinced that the ability to register data in a shared, immutable store like a blockchain with many stakeholders of disparate interests will be valuable to that end even before microtransactions start being sent with every packet on the internet.

I took my SAT scores from 90th percentile to 98th percentile by buying a book, doing a few sample problems every night for a couple of weeks, and reading the test taking tips in the back. Probably the most helpful tip was that all the math diagrams were drawn to scale.

The bigger benefit of all of this to me was the SATs as another example of how truly arbitrary the world seems to be, and how little extra effort is actually required to curb that arbitrariness towards your goals.

You realize a lot of people pushing the supposedly nefarious agenda you're saying here own a lot of bitcoins, and even belong to companies where timelocked bitcoins act as an incentive program, right? The conspiracy theories surrounding Core's agenda never have sensical incentive structures. This is why nobody listens to the conspiracy theorists when it comes to designing a protocol that relies entirely on incentives adding up.

I think a lot of this stuff will rely on a more formal spec like https://github.com/solid/solid-spec to be useful.

For identity, there's https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/blob/master/solid-webid-...

Right now I'm particularly interested in https://github.com/solid/web-access-control-spec although I think it's incomplete when it comes to data portability and access control. From what I've seen on re-decentralizing the internet, access control is either non-existent, or relies on a server hosting your data to implement access control correctly.

What if, in the WAC protocol linked above, instead of ACL resources informing the server, we could have ACL resources providing clients with keys to the encrypted resource (presumably wrapped in each authorized agent's pub key). Host proof data is a necessity for decentralized social networking IMO, even if the majority of agents would happily hand their keys over to their host.

Less leverage for Google, more consumer lock in.

My mother used to be a scan coordinator at a grocery store. We have been talking about this eventually happening for over a decade. Although based on her experience, the infrastructure for even letting her know what pricing should be requires a major IT overhaul as well.

Timothy Leary is a double entendre here...

Term projects. Those are what prepared me for getting paid to apply my academic knowledge more than anything. All the better when it was left up to me to create the spec. Most of the time I had to abide by some requirements, like 'Must use SPI for communication between two or more microcontrollers', but it was pretty obvious in these classes if you were actually applying what you were learning or not.

How many drivers a month avoid losses thanks to this traffic light? I'm gonna guess the ROI is positive overall on traffic lights.

*Sent from my iPhone while driving 75 on the freeway, eating fast food listening to a book on tape, navigating with Google Maps

(Not really, but people do this)

Sensors with Bluetooth / low power wifi. Lithium Ion batteries work for 5 years for our use case. If this improves that, that's less replacement.

Costco's profits are less their subscription revenue. That tells me the space for bulk retailers in middle class areas with the type of consumers that can shell out a yearly subscription fee isn't a whole lot bigger than Costco already occupies. Costco shoppers have more money, so they can buy more economically at Costco quantities, and they have a higher expectation of service which requires a higher paid employee. Costco has effectively packaged that arrangement in a $50 fee and keeps prices competitive by selling mostly bulk quantities compared to grocery stores. Good luck trying to compete at scale while holding on to costly values that your competitors don't. Your choices are fail entirely or carve out a niche that you can keep almost exclusively.

In my mind, the mental ceiling keeping us from understanding 'Why more companies can't be like Costco' and 'What's the real value of an Uber ride sans venture capital subsidies' is a lack of understanding of the extensive properties of capital that automation is going to either push us through or bring down on us in a rain of deadly glass shards. I'm not going to wait around for the market to 'get real' and 'focus on companies with actual viable business models' though. 1) The bulk of your portfolio should already be occupied by companies that fit that mold, but 2) The practice of leveraging profitability today for gains in equity tomorrow is going to push through a few big winners consistently enough that it's not going away regardless of the overall consequences. Meanwhile we'll keep asking the same questions that ultimately amount to 'Why does capital beget capital?'

This stratfor article discusses the natural capital afforded to the US: https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-... both in terms of transportation networks and being removed by an ocean from the costly power struggles of Europe (which I'll add can be seen in the numbers of casualties for Americans in the first and second world war relative to our European counterparts and realized gains from those wars).

There is also an interesting observation by Nick Szabo about the value of a transportation network: ' Combine this with Metcalfe's Law and we reach a dramatic but solid mathematical conclusion: the potential value of a land transportation network is the inverse fourth power of the cost of that transportation. A reduction in transportation costs in a trade network by a factor of two increases the potential value of that network by a factor of sixteen.'

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/10/transportation-dive...

So yes, the actual land we occupy is worth booku bucks.

He doesn't think America is great, aye? Hence the imperative that it must be made great... again.

You just described my life and why Amazon gets all my grocery and household goods money now.

Run your business like an unsigned int. There are no negatives!

The first 5000 years I can't recommend enough.

As far as how abstract money and society get, I think a decent counterpoint exists in Nick Szabo's Shelling Out: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/

Money is useful because it allows for delayed reciprocity. Delayed reciprocity can help overcome environmental uncertainty for the individual human that next to zero other animals can benefit from. From there you get the productivity of networks.

Windows 10 isn't too bad OS wise either though. I don't know, maybe I'm just too old now because I'm already tired typing about it. I still scratch my head when I see people developing non Windows apps on Windows. And I run Nix on everything. But I'd accept 'I like Windows more even if I could run my expensive industry specific software on Linux' without feeling the need to explain why they're wrong.

An enemy combatants gets no such treatment. Since we're in a war against terrorism (the state's words, not mine), the legalese has mainly been argued from that distinction.

In an ideal world, it takes a crime to make a criminal. The consequences of commiting a crime are enough to keep most people from committing them. But if your crime involves suicide, what earthly consequence can we invent to reduce the numbers? I'm sure it would be helpful if whatever factors that are developing the perceived rewards of killing a bunch of people could be routed, but other than that, our thinking on the justice system doesn't really net a solution to politically motivated murder suicide. I.e. is this precrime? Under the western ideal of innocent until proven guilty, yes. Do the incentives of that system overcome terrorism? No.

Food Inc. discusses the practice of bussing people into the US from central / south America on legal visas. After the visas expire, the sponsors make deals with the INS to slow feed migrants back to them for deportation. Even the people who are against high immigration / illegal immigration aren't going to go after the work visas though. Nobody is going to vote to make food more expensive by forcing what is essentially subsidized labor out of the market. Most of the anti immigration push in the US is about beating the second stage of processes like these - the people that stay and attempt to build political economy for themselves.

When I propose ending the work visa program to 'conservatives', I am laughed at. Maybe there's a better solution, but it's at least a more direct solution to their stated woes than I've heard. Not to put liberals on a pedestal either though - the left in this country basically ignores AG labor entirely.

Yeah I think all of the subsidies are justified by the whole 'non starving populus' externalities even if it isn't an optimal solution.