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What does “earned” mean when we are the inheritors of 100s of trillions of years of brutal, ruthless, evolutionary work done by those who came before us?

We are able to at best apply a light touch to the tiller of the massive, complex ship into which we were born that we cannot claim any credit for making. Indeed, no one can.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t credit people for making good choices, but the idea that every penny we get we completely deserve is certainly not an established fact. It is at best an opinion, and a poorly justified one at that.

You realize that the physician could have done both eyes in the same sitting, and then used the saved time to perform a procedure for someone else, right? Doing so would have been better for everyone, rather than riskier and much less convenient for the patient.

I have direct knowledge of an ophthalmologist splitting surgeries over two days that could have been done in one session, because it nearly doubles their billings.

They justify it by pointing at their less educated yet better-compensated college buddies working in finance. I've seen similar bad money-optimizing behavior from PCPs (e.g. it was insisted to me that I schedule an appt for lab results, which was justified by a lie about HIPAA preventing me from being able to get them over the phone).

The rot goes deep.

"Shareholder value" misses at least two critical bits of context:

1. over what timescale? 2. at what level of risk?

As soon as they are incorporated, it's obvious that firms have both more leeway and more responsibility to take care of a wider range of stakeholders.

This is exactly the approach we're using for hackerpet (hackerpet.com)

"Spark" the IoT company renamed itself to "Particle" and it seems to have gone ok.

Excellent example of strawman click-bait:

1 take a newsy subject involving something many people like 2 choose an aspect of it about which to adopt the "sober skeptic" stance 3 write the article as though this aspect is the only part of the newsy subject that's worth discussing

The move made in 3 is the trick. It's at least disingenuous, and may even be cynically mercenary.

One object lesson in how this can go wrong: REI

This "cooperative" ostensibly elects its board. In reality, nomination by existing members of the REI board is the only way to stand for election by the REI membership, and when you vote you only by marking "For" the nominated candidates (there's no information on how to vote against, though at another time they indicated that the alternative was "Withold vote"). While the board members don't earn much, there is a nice path from board member to REI executive ... which can pay as much as $2M/year for the CEO position.

The mode of the distribution in the video appears to be zero. How is that possible?

Utter hogwash. The author's mistake, often made by physicians when presented with technology that gives consumers more information, is that consumer knowledge and attitudes remain static.

In fact, while this may at first lead to a bunch of hypochondriac-like behaviors, people's fascination with themselves will quickly teach them to not be alarmed.

They weren't the kind of visionary founders that we know the names of.

Name a time when a genuinely ambitious and innovative company booted its visionary founders, and it went well.

The amount of skepticism here from those who otherwise have nothing to contribute to solving this problem is, at best, asinine.

Is there some kind of glut of initiative and capital being directed to genuinely ambitious "zero to one" projects? If not such harping is utterly pointless. Maybe this project will fail. Who cares? This has historically been a hard problem. Let 1000 flowers bloom.

Prior to the destruction of North American light rail systems, a process accelerated by US auto companies (which bought urban rail cos only to then neglect them) public transit companies were entirely private and often entirely capitalized with profits and private investment. Many streetcars used to profitably have two people working on them: one driver and one toll collector.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...]

Underground space is more expensive than above.

Netflix is an Amazon Prime video competitor.

Few things in American law are more reprehensible than the retroactive extension of rights that only exist as an incentive to create.

Infrastructure (ops, software, hiring, social) matters.

Hiring some dude won't give you that.

When a company is more vulnerable to short sellers and FUD it may make more sense for it to be private.

And there are reasons a company may be thus-vulnerable apart from mismanagement. E.g. if its success depends on fantastical sounding but trade-secret-constrained longer lead time tech.

Why not relay that, too?

Adding a bit of iron to the ocean -- the same as is released by a large volcanic eruption -- could do the trick.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/r...

Thank you!

Does anyone know of a pedagogically-minded quantum computer simulator?

There is no underlying platonic reality here to be discovered around the concept of a subsidy. It's not entirely unreasonable to be careful about allowing foreign governments to launch large rockets on domestic soil.

Certain treatments have outcomes with high variance even when practiced perfectly.

Combined with no clear way to evaluate whether the treatment is being applied well, this makes it difficult for practitioners and patients to evaluate treatment quality. Which discourages expertise development in the first place (why bother working really hard when the results are hard to pin down anyway?).

I would happily bet good money we will find strong evidence for life on Mars within 10 years of humans' landing (and staying) there.

No.

Check this out: http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html

That sounds amazing.

Approval voting wasn't considered in that article.

Base enthusiasm matters a lot, since it drives turnout.

And the only thing that matters in elections in the US is turnout and undecideds (of whom there are very few).