rdmcfee

>Yet they're faced with ~2.5-4x higher costs for essentials like healthcare, education and housing.

Good point. Interestingly education is one of the industries that seems to be least disrupted by technology.

The authors point somewhat still stands for healthcare, though. He uses 1939 as a benchmark. Penicillin was first manufactured in 1942. Today a generic antibiotic is just a few cents a pill. Some of the most essential healthcare that would have been just a dream in '39 is nearly free today.

Healthcare costs may be drastically increased in the US (although just $60/mo here in Canada) compared to what they used to be but the offering has changed completely as well.

It seems that we need to map and better understand the relationship between innovation and demand. If our basic needs (food, housing etc) can be satisfied for a fraction of what they used to cost due to innovation, where will the excess demand come from? We're left with population growth as our only growth factor.

If our basic needs as a society can be met by a small fraction of the working force due to innovation then we're left trying to expand the definition of what our "needs" are to create demand for the remainder of society.

As the author mentions, even the poorer echelons of society now have technology that didn't even exist a decade or two ago. It's the relationship between innovation, needs and demand that I find most intriguing.

It's not about velocity it's about rate of cars through a point per hour. If you have a mergepoint with 10 lanes. Each lane can support say 20 cars per minute. If you have 200 cars approaching the merge-point per minute the cars can travel effectively at the speed of their choice.

If you close one lane, reducing the capacity of the mergepoint to 180 cars per minute while 200 cars are approaching a queue will build. The speed with which the cars mass the mergepoint is not relevant because the rate of cars per lane per minute will stay basically at 20 cars/lane/min.

As to your point about all lanes slowing down - cars will always redistribute as you can imagine. People tend to merge left as there's an additional traffic stream merging on their right. The writer made points about the capacity of the mergepoint vs. the cars approaching- not individual lanes and speeds.

I think you're may be thinking of this as one mechanism instead of two separate mechanisms.

You are dealing with a queue as well as a through-rate at the merge-point. The through-rate with one lane can still be 1/2 of the through-rate with two lanes, but because you have a queue waiting to reach the merge-point you can end up waiting much longer. More spacious merging will not change this because of the principle stated in the first paragraph of the article.

Increasing the speed at the merge-point will not decrease the queue. It will only decrease the density of the queue but move it back further in traffic. Your time to cross the merge-point will be basically the same.

The initial point about rate of vehicles through a specific point per lane per hour couldn't be more simple and valid.

The gulf islands in BC are beautiful and much nicer in terms of climate. The San Juan islands are the southern tip of the gulf islands. Similar prices.

Not so much. It's more analogous to surfing on a wave.

Any object with mass warps spacetime towards itself. This doesn't cause an infinite buildup of 'spacetime' on the object's surface.

There are concerns with built up energy in front of the spaceship but not being sent back to your origin.

I wonder if the civilization creating the simulation would have motivations beyond just doing this because they can. Perhaps with the benefits of a vastly accelerated timescale a simulation could be used for predictive purposes.

As for simulations within simulations. If we are in a simulation and our "program" is permitted to run long enough by it's creators we will most certainly find out :)

Canada has long had great incentives for firms seeking to employ engineering talent (as long as your firm is already in Canada). It's about time we reduced boundaries for founders to come here and take advantage of the inexpensive engineering talent.

Haha! Good comparison of a company who considers their use cases vs. one who doesn't.

This is a statistical correlation. You might as well say that eating ice cream causes drowning. Why? People eat more ice cream on hot days. People swim more on hot days. Increase in swimming means increase in drowning, therefore when people eat ice cream they are more likely to drown.

When old people drive cars they are more likely to crash therefore when old people drive a Prius they are more likely to crash.

If I'm not mistaken, Gladwell uses the term "Expert" when referring to specific skills. I like to think of Entrepreneurship as a conglomerate of opportunity and many skills. Perhaps if a startup was solely dependent on a single(ish) skill like Web Application Development then this would be more applicable but that's obviously not the case.

I agree with persistence but it seems to me that versatility, self awareness and team Chemistry would be more beneficial that attempting to "become an expert"

Also note that 1074 hours per year is just shy of 3 hours per day, seven days per week. Unbelievable!

Beside the point of this article I'm amazed by the following: "The average person spends 1704 hours a year watching TV".

From my understanding an average work year is around 2000 hours. If 'the average person' worked in an enjoyable environment that was as pleasant as watching television or reading a book they could easily almost double their input at the workplace by cutting out television.

Whether that would double their output is a different question all together.

Would be interesting to see a breakdown of time spent watching television vs. per capita productivity for different first world countries.