lukasb

While you're correct, the fact that someone can define an IQ test as the test that most strongly correlates with the g-factor (itself merely a composite factor from a number of different measures) doesn't mean that IQ, or the g-factor, or "general cognitive ability", corresponds to any physical causative factor: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.htm...

You realize that makes it sound more likely that your workers (sorry, contractors, whatever) are poorly paid, right?

I really wish there was a way to say "I want to see less from this person" that would just surface their most popular content.

Why they push for five stars: apparently you get fired if your star rating falls below 4.6 or 4.7 (can't remember which.)

Source: Uber drivers, so biased, but have you ever seen a driver with a 4.5 rating?

The effect that you're ignoring is that insurance premiums have a hefty amount of margin built into them, and the ACA produces a collective bargaining effect that gives insurers an incentive to offer a competitive price on the exchange.

Assuming something like this actually works some day, I wonder if you could avoid it by having your secret be something that can't be encoded visually - eg haptic feedback/gesture rather than passwords.

Crazy. Why would they prevent Adult-flagged Tumblrs from being indexed by 3rd-party search engines?

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

Large-scale industrial farming operations. That was the case in Kenya, anyway.

They don't have access to other, cheaper staples. These are geographically isolated farmers in countries with poor infrastructure.

Well, in western Kenya anyway:

1. Farmers used to have 100-200 acres apiece. At that point you can feed a family even with very low yields. There were few (if any) large-scale farming operations for them to buy from, anyway.

2. Each generation, the farmer would divide the land up amongst his sons.

3. Fast-forward to today, farmers have more like 2 acres, and with traditional farming techniques don't have enough yield to feed their families.

4. They make up the difference with cattle, chickens, beans, odd jobs - or don't make up the difference, as malnutrition and starvation are a constant problem. But if they make enough money, there is a national maize market to buy from, which previously there wasn't. Hence, they're net maize consumers.

More typically, farmers produce 10 units, sell 3, and buy another 10 later in the year. Hence any rise in price is a net loss for them.

"If they are net consumers of the staple, they must be net producers of some other crops."

Again, those other crops are likely more expensive per calorie. That means there is no mix of consumption that will get them the same amount of calories they previously consumed, which for subsistence farmers will often mean malnutrition if not starvation.

The reason staples are staples is because they're cheapest per calorie. There probably are not replacements that are as cheap per calorie. Remember that subsistence farmers tend to be geographically isolated so you can't assume they have access to the same food products you do.

I remember seeing a headline in Thailand "rise in rice prices hits small farmers hard". I've seen similar things in Kenya: "high maize prices devastate small farmers."

It turns out many subsistence farmers (of which there are roughly a billion) are net consumers of their staple crop. In order to survive, the poor diversify across a variety of agricultural products. Large industrial farming operations are growing the rest of the rice/maize ... and I'm guessing quinoa.

So, if the same pattern holds here, farmers consume more quinoa than they sell, and suffer when prices go up.

"Ignore today; just think about it in terms of his goals."

reminds me of

"Do not follow in the footsteps of the masters; seek what they sought."

In my dreams, there's an organization pushing for interoperability, open standards, data freedom etc over the long term. If there were such an organization, this would make an excellent case study in failure. Are there any strategic interventions that could have rescued XMPP federation?

What you say about rent control is true - if there are not restrictions on building new housing. This is almost never true.

Can you say more about what frustrated you about Evernote and Notational Velocity?

Anonymity isn't the only value of Bitcoin. There's also the matter of exchanging money electronically without paying fees to banks, Visa, or Mastercard. Regulation might make transacting Bitcoin more expensive but still leave it cheaper than traditional approaches.

I'm not a fan of Bitcoin personally (too much speculation for me to be comfortable using it as a medium of exchange, much less a store of value) but I think people underestimate how badly we're getting screwed by the current payment oligopoly.

Set caps on spam and auction the space, then. If the price of getting to your inbox is $10 people will have to have a really good reason for getting in touch.

I'm usually anti-FB but I'm curious to see where this goes.

congratulations (no snark) - you're Clay Christensen

http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chang...

My reading is that those restrictions are only for games off Facebook, not all applications. Interesting that they would make that distinction.

"Not looking dumb is not an option."

I'm going to be quoting you forever, thanks.

Those seem valid though, no? The intent of the RT is to say "I voted for Obama"

We use emotions to help us pick the ends to which logical effort should be directed. Try as you might, you will not be able to logically select the axioms by which you reason.

This is why app developers need really well-thought out sharing features - preferably based on URIs.

Also, even if it's safe for human use, there will be problems with diagnosing early enough and making sure vulnerable populations have access to the drug at a price they can afford. Still, I hope the drug proves out as safe and effective.

Can't native apps be smarter about caching assets than UIWebViews?

I had a summer internship in high school that foundered when we realized that we needed a grid tool to display and edit data in a web browser. The rest of the summer was spent trying to build this tool in Java.

Where were you guys 16 years ago?

I brought this up with a couple Facebook PMs last week; they seemed nonplussed. One of them brought up the fact that the average user has fewer than 150 friends; he gently suggested that I was an edge case.

I disagree, even someone with 10 friends will show one face to five and another face to the other five (if those five are a separate group.)

Zuckerberg's comments about "integrity" suppose that we have an atomic identity that we sometimes modify out of weakness of character. Nonsense. Our identities emerge out of interactions (the linked essay makes the same point without sounding like an undergrad who just read some critical theory.)

The unfortunate thing for Facebook (and Google+) is that no one has made a successful feature set around different friend groups in the same service. Facebook might have to resign itself to being people's public face.