johnvschmitt

To clarify: No. A businesses costs shouldn't become our costs.

I'm just saying that it's a fallacy to think that an online sale is wholly responsible for the sale. They do rely on those huge investments by showrooms/dealers.

So, in a "right evolution", I envision smaller showrooms, wide variety + low inventory per unit. (Yes, like an Apple store).

Similarly, if stores like Best Buy died, Amazon sales of consumer electronics would fall. So, Amazon would likely buy up 1/2 the brick & mortars, to create showrooms. But, until Best Buy dies, Amazon is happy that they provide free showrooms that everyone hates, but still uses & abuses.

You are correct, of course.

My point was more about how journalists too often spout "PRICES DOUBLED!" to get attention like blood in the water, including here. And, in too many cases, it's over a time period that's 10+ years, so it's not really doubling, but 6%/year.

And, yes, leverage can profit, but it can bite hard too. Plenty of people bought at $500k with $100k down, then saw the value drop to $300k, meaning they lost 200+100 = $300k if they had to sell.

All fun math, with, yes, GROSS simplifications here.

Calling it a "Magna Carta" is very appropriate from a historical perspective.

That said, because of the perverse corruption in each country, I'm afraid it'd look like this:

USA Version: People (=companies) have the right to protect their interests by suing/banning anyone who makes copies of any data. People (=companies) have the right to innovate by throttling, or inspecting packets, to extort or ban competitors.

Other countries might have better versions, but the USA, through TPP, World Bank, Aid packages & other secret trade pacts will assert their version to be dominant.

We really need election finance reform before we can take actions. Until then, I'm kind of fine with gridlock, to slow the corruption down a bit.

Here's how we got here:

1) Money buys political influence (duh!)

2) Most cities have small tax bases, where car dealerships are a very large part of the tax base. City managers want a larger tax base to help fund their plans.

3) Thus, car dealerships & local politicians have aligned incentives.

4) So, local laws (zoning, advertising, etc) favor car dealerships.

5) Higher offices are filled from the pool of local politicians, as they move up the food chain.

6) Those politicians remember their contacts @ the dealers, who helped fund/launch their careers, & they remain aligned with them in passing laws empathetic to dealer's interests.

Of course, legitimately, car dealerships have HUGE capital investments (fast aging inventory, large chunks of prime real-estate, staffing costs). Would YC ever want to get into the traditional dealer space? No friggen way. Too risky & doesn't scale.

And, nobody really buys a car without a test drive/showroom. So, nearly any "online" sale is cannibalizing the dealer's investments.

So, we need to have some kind of online buying system where you MUST enter in a dealer showroom code before buying, & they get some commission, as they DO offer real value here folks.

IMO, the whole consumer retail system is going to evolve into "showroom + online buying" in a fair system soon.

Correct!

But, more fun math:

Stocks don't have maintenance costs like houses/rental units. The property tax alone per year on a ~$500k place is ~$8k. (You'd need to get $700/month in rent JUST to cover property tax.) (The next buyer, at 1.4M valuation, would need to charge ~$2k/month JUST to cover the prop tax, nothing else!)

Add in ~$2k/year in regular maintenance, + ~$30k of maintenance every ~5-10 years (roofs, flooring, bathroom fixtures, appliances all die someday), and renting not so profitable. Reliable capital appreciation is the bigger, pure profit here.

People just don't understand inflation/math:

"...$1.4 million; it’s a good time to sell, considering he bought the place for $627,000 in 2002."

Wow! Sounds huge right? Well, 12 years to double? That means it's a ~6% yearly increase. That's LOWER than medial bills, college education, & almost exactly what you'd get from any stock index (S&P 500) for that time period.

Exactly. Chomsky also pointed this out well many times, that anyone with an agenda for, say, "7 out of 10" on a scale (like, "should we go to war, & if so, how?", can simply present "both sides" as a 5 & 9, so viewers, most of whom would have chosen "3" would think they were very much outliers to the social norm, & picked something between between 5 & 9. They can frame an issue in such a way that looks like they are considering "all points", so that the viewers must identify within that limited range or feel very alone.

The way it should (& DID) work:

1) First ammendment: Anyone can lie, ok? And, any speech has consequences.

2) THE "COMMONS" / spectrum / FCC: Anyone that uses part of the shared spectrum (broadcasters) & when calling a program "news"1, must be unbiased, factful, truthful, or at least show "both sides2" to issues*

1Fox News, in Florida, in court, proved that they were in fact entertainment, NOT news, so they could feel free to broadcast outright lies, factual untruths.

But of course, "both sides" is a fallacy to most real issues that have many more sides.

Those wiggle room *'s proved wide enough over time to lead to where we are today.

And, older founders* spend vastly less time & energy chasing tail / finding a mate.

*(generally speaking, & speaking of myself)

That really blows my mind. I mean, how can they say that's any kind of "agreement"?

I someone writes a curl/wget script wrapper & points it to the top 10 websites, they don't enter into any kind of written contract or agreement.

Yes, this is a much better description of the problem.

FB is a really bad ad platform. Yes, you can use it & get good results, but that takes more luck & skill than other platforms.

From the article: "FB estimates that ~1% of their users are fake generating fake likes". But, if those accounts have 10-100 times more likes than real accounts, you can see that the polluting effect can dominate the overall activity.

Nope. Not at all.

It was about buying USERS, not an app or feature.

This looks to be fraud & lies (not just a business failing amidst unrealistic hope.) And, huge waste (not ramen).

It's good to see justice to help keep the investment environment clean.

ENVIRONMENT

He touched on this, but I want to let you know, after 4 years working from home, how important this is.

The environment gives you unconscious cues on how to behave. If you goof off (surf the web, stream, eat, play, etc) where you work, you are "poisoning" that environment, & make it very hard to focus on work next time there.

After "poisoning" several places in my house, I've setup a workbench in the garage, & ONLY work there. Meaning, if I'm working there & need a break, I LEAVE that environment, so as to keep it clean. Then, when I return to the environment, it's easier to focus & get things done.

I really like that:

"don't allow likes from someone with more than 5+ likes in their account""

The # of likes by the user is a good proxy for how diluted the quality of the "like" is.

Probability_to_show_ad = constant * num_other_likes

That said, as long as Facebook has a counter-incentive to cleaning it up, we shouldn't expect this change. We need advertisers to revolt in large #'s before the financial incentives make this a priority for FB.

If you're running the pipes:

1) Charging more/less by VOLUME? = OK.

2) Charging more/less by CONTENT? = NOT OK.

The article misses that critical point.

And, yes, an even better solution is competition in ISP space.

But, we need to get money out of politics for that to happen, so we can't hold our breath!

(For example, big ISP's have bought senators to block cities from running their own free wifi networks, passing state laws prohibiting municipal ISP's!)

True, but there will always be tons of "inherently bad" jobs (smelly, sweaty, monotonous).

It is unnecessary to make these jobs MORE shitty by bad management.

For example, the worst thing IMO that Walmart does (IDK about Amazon), is to mandate that employees be on call 24x7 to be ready to come in for a shift on short notice (3 hours). This cripples the worker from taking on a 2nd job, school, or anything else. This traps them into the Walmart job & makes this not an entry level job.

Pure novelty.

Subs are not energy efficient. Water is 1,000x more dense than air, & moving through it takes far more energy.

And, hybrid (land+water) is going to require far more hardware, driving up the price & weight (& thus efficiency) of a vehicle.

But, it's cool & he has the budget & gumption for it, so THANKS Elon, for keeping us entertained!

This is why I'm really hesitant to use popular libraries like Flurry.

I'm making a kids game & really want to respect the kids' privacy. I can't hand the keys to all that data & possible backdoors to some "free" third party library & just trust they will play nice.

You & the parent comment both offer great points. When looking at them together, along with the OP's article & many others on the "sharing economy", you see there still remains great opportunity & challenges in the almost inevitable "Sharing Economy"

And, they are so cute, busily working to help us. (Maxwell's demons were likely inspired by bees).

Anyway, I have a big organic wildish garden, & I notice a big variety of pollinators (as large as my thumb almost, in orange or black, to as small as grain-of-rice size, banded & hovering). Yes, commercially, we rely too much on one species, but at least in Silicon Valley, I do notice we have a diversity of pollinators healthy & thriving, just as we have a diversity of smart people from around the world doing the same. If only those engineers could make honey. (Actually, never mind about that. I do NOT want your honey, only the bees please)

Great points. Yes, Maslow's Pyramid explains why different rational people will have different priorities.

But, we are not all rational all the time. And, studying emotions & psychology are indeed full of answers & puzzles as well.

It's good to see the discussions on HN diverge to an even more interesting point than the OP.

Yes, "Facebook for All" is not the same as "Internet for All".

But, it certainly won't end there. I'm sure that many people who are users of any tech, will someday become makers in tech.

I was a user first, before I was a builder, in any platform. First you use it. Then, you figure it out. You take it apart & study it, see similar things all around you now. Then, you repurpose it, combine it, fix it, build something better than it, etc.

It's not a bad thing to get corporate sponsors underwriting basic connectivity to those who don't have any.

The sooner the printer dies, the better.

Every company or process that makes me print something in 2013 makes me barf. Ever heard of web forms? Docusign? Email?

So, as beautiful as this is, it's solving a problem for 1960-1995.

Now, all I want to see in the printer innovation is some way to kill it off faster.

Craigslist & Reddit are WORKSAFE. Yes, really.

Most internet use is during business hours. Craigslist & Reddit look, from ~10 feet away (by passing coworkers) to look closer to "work", as it's text-based, with very few graphics. It doesn't look like the Huffington Post, ESPN, Netflix, or Facebook.

So, coworkers or bosses passing by either don't register it as "goofing off", or, if they do recognize it, they are "in the club" & not going to call you on it.

And, by having a minimalist UI (compact, informational), they know they MUST focus on content to succeed. This makes content king, like it should be, for user-generated content sites like this.

Seems fair. It's not because of "tweets" but because of evidence of intentional recklessness that resulted in the death of an innocent.

As a society, we tend to lack accountability when a car is involved. If he, for instance, killed someone by swinging an axe around a playground for fun, there'd be no question about murder charges.

There is no such thing as "Photographic Memory", as we do not even have "Photographic site"

All we have for sight is: A few degrees of focus (~3-5) that we quickly jump around to get an idea of a scene, & then we (very importantly) MAP this data to an internal model.

So, when someone says, they can fill in all the details, they are doing that from an internal model, which was only partially supported by earlier sight. Much of their memory can be wrong.

More importantly, it's a huge misrepresentation to think that the human eye works like a CCD array/sensor/camera.

As a father, when I had my first kid, & read a few "Parents" magazines, I was so disheartened to see 99% of the references in articles referring to the parent as the "mom" or "She/her". I said, "WTF! Are fathers not parents!?"

Then, it hit me. As a male engineer, manager, etc... I just got a very small taste of the less than subtle gender biases that exist all around us. That made me appreciate my wife more (who is also an engineer), and all the others who put up with that crap even in this modern day.

This is the only forum I've complained about "Parent's Magazine"'s female gender bias. And, I only do so within a context that shows it's just a lesson in empathy for a much more severe bias in the other direction.

Nice.

Along similar lines, I believe that individuals can make decisions that go counter to the incentives provided to them.

But, when you take an aggregate of thousands or more of individuals, you can often predict accurately that the aggregate behaviors will align with the incentives in the system.

You'll find where there is accountability & consequences & FEEDBACK, then things improve.

This article is just one dimension of that larger concept on feedback & incentives.

<s>I'm sure Yahoo will become the true market leader of the internet by simply buying a few startups every month</s>

I mean, it reminds me so much of "trophy wives".

One does not simply BUY one's way into Mordor.