riggins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_C...

Criminal penalties for violating the embargo range up to ten years in prison, $1 million in corporate fines, and $250,000 in individual fines; civil penalties up to $55,000 per violation.

this has been claimed for a couple of years now. It hasn't played out that way so far. I haven't looked closely in 6 months but generally their content costs have been flattish rather than a sharp escalation (this is after the ramp up to make their initial content acquisitions).

Furthermore, I think there are 2 reasons why content providers won't be in a great bargaining position.

1. Part of what makes a show a success is the built in audience. Think Friends or Seinfeld ... Thursday night prime time slot used to guarantee an audience in the millions. The networks don't have that advantage anymore. It's Netflix that has a guaranteed audience of millions.

2. If content providers push for major price increases, Netflix has the option of producing their own content, which they've shown they are capable of.

Netflix has been disciplined in their content spending. I don't think content providers will be in a position to change that.

I immediately thought 'google will tie this into your google phone for you. That could be pretty nice.'

Same comment as michaelo.

why does the completion rate matter? If 100,000 people sign up, and 5% complete the course, that's 5k people.

The US is graduating around 12k CS majors per year, so 5k seems like a material number of students to educate.

Maybe this is a case were law enforcement hasn't caught up with technology.

I was responding to a particular part of the comment, hence why I highlighted that, but obviously the whole comment is right there!

My opinion, and what I was articulating is that saying

this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line

is a flippant dismissal of a serious issue.

Its like saying 'it will suck if you're a Syrian whose family gets wiped out in the civil war ... but hey we've been having wars in the Middle East for 100 years and its not particularly terrifying.'

here's the spirit. Often people will dismiss the human consequences of innovation with the logic that it hasn't been all that bad in the past. But the reality is that for effected people it really has been all that bad.

Take the Luddites. They seem kinda silly ... going around breaking mechanical looms ... until you put yourself in their shoes. These weren't the poorest of the poor, unskilled laborers. They were skilled laborers who put effort into learning a craft whose skills were suddenly devalued by automation. And that was bad enough for them that they were willing to risk death to destroy mechanical looms.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htm

well that's not quite true. For mankind as a whole, no. For people who's livelihood has been automated ... its been pretty terrifying.

I agree. It seems to me that robots have the potential to have a greater impact than the internet, social, mobile. And that's not to diminish the profound change those innovations have brought about.

It just seems that the ability to act in the physical world will bring incredible, profound changes.

it just seemed like the 'income inequality' is an orthogonal issue.

A headline of 'Fix fundamentals first' or 'You need fundamentals before you can teach coding' would have made more sense to me.

with that said, for me, coding is actually a huge motivator for learning. You can actually see why you need to linear algebra, calculus, statistics, trigonometry, etcc. Instead of some abstract purpose you can very concretely that you need to master all those topics if you want to make a robot function ... for example.

Allocating resources to teach coding will take away from teaching the fundamentals ... hence leading to worse outcomes and greater inequality.

Something about that argument doesn't sit right with me. It doesn't seem like the answer is to say 'we can't teach literacy well, therefore we shouldn't teach coding'. Seems like a better answer is 'fix how we teach literacy'.

In the actual world we live in I agree with you.

However, in a thoughtful world, we would get everyone started coding at 5 and have many many classes devoted to it from K-12 ... because computers really are incredible force multipliers. If you know how to code, you can be much better at whatever you do.

But back to the real world, it's going to be much more like your trigonometry ... where kids fight it and forget it when they graduate HS.

I feel like saying everyone should learn to code is in the same spirit as saying everyone should get a stronger math education and everyone should learn statistics. Sure, everyone should get a better math education and learn statistics ... but that's easier said than done.

I live in NYC. I was thinking specifically of the air quality in NYC which its almost sure to improve, rather than total pollution.

However, I think it will improve total pollution as well. I'm fairly certain that natural gas fired combined cycle generation (which is most of the new generation being added) is both more efficient and lower polluting than the internal combustion engine, so total pollution should decrease.

By what measure. He's better than every teacher I had from K-12. Better than most of the Profs I had at uni as well.

What was your experience?

only if there's no demand. And I think there's a floor on how low demand can go that comes from the black market.

So I don't think its doomed to fail.

I think that depends on the type of weapon.

Part of the issue with airlines is how highly valued human life is.

If for example all we were trying to do is have an acceptable level of losses on drone aircraft we'd probably accept a much lower level of protection (and correspondingly lower costs)>

In fact, to be fair to Africa and Brazil, I think that exists to a large extent in America. Lots of people couldn't care less what happens in poor parts of the country.

I'm fascinated to see how philanthropic society will choose to be. Here's why. With the advent of robots I believe that something fundamental has changed. Elites, if they so choose, will not need to accommodate lower classes.

Previously, there had to be some sharing because elites still had to rely on other humans for policing and military. However, it seems like robots might cut that connection. What will happen when elites feel like they don't need a large part of the population? Will they be altruistic?

I don't know. Personally I'm pretty cynical and think we're heading for a future that's both more egalitarian and dystopian. The internet will give people a similar opportunity to succeed but those who do succeed won't be charitable to those who don't.

sadly, in this world 3 strikes laws aren't meant just for murderers.

The story of the forceps is both extraordinary and disturbing, because it is the story of a life-saving idea that was kept secret for more than a century. The instrument was developed in the seventeenth century by Peter Chamberlen (1560-1631), the first of a long line of French Huguenots who delivered babies in London. It looked like a pair of big metal salad tongs, with two blades shaped to fit snugly around a baby’s head and handles that locked together with a single screw in the middle. It let doctors more or less yank stuck babies out and, carefully applied, was the first technique that could save both the baby and the mother. The Chamberlens knew that they were onto something, and they resolved to keep the device a family secret. Whenever they were called in to help a mother in obstructed labor, they ushered everyone else out of the room and covered the mother’s lower half with a sheet or a blanket so that even she couldn’t see what was going on. They kept the secret of the forceps for three generations. In 1670, Hugh Chamberlen, in the third generation, tried and failed to sell it to the French government. Late in his life, he divulged it to an Amsterdam-based surgeon, Roger van Roonhuysen, who kept the technique within his own family for sixty more years. The secret did not get out until the mid-eighteenth century.

How many years did the Chamberlen family keep the invention of the forceps secret so they could enjoy monopoly profits?

I'm struggling to follow how a union could help this situation. What would happen? Workers would go on strike if their firms use robots? Seems like that would just push the owner to accelerate robot orders. My guess is that unions are pretty useless in the face of automation. Does anyone know any precedents?

I agree in spirit though. What I think is likely is the rise of populism. I think the battle will have to be waged in the political arena.

Consider another interpretation. I don't think Shiller is saying that finance acts altruistically. I think that Shiller is claiming that finance does add intrinsic value to world.

personally, I think that most banking professionals can't clearly articulate the value of finance. But there is clearly huge value to society of having skilled financial professionals.

The trouble is its usually intangible. The invisible hand and all.

To think up one hypothetical example ... say we had ethical and talented bankers who foresaw the housing bubble and therefore steered their banks away from financing home development in the Nevada desert. That could be immensely valuable and could have saved society billions of dollars that was wasted on homes no one wants.

In NYC there's an enormous arbitrage. The cheapest hotel room in the city is $300/night. Meanwhile, you can rent a 1BR apt for $2,500 / month.

So you rent an apt for $2,500 / month and book it out on AirBnB for $200 / night ... and you're looking at a monthly arbitrage of $3,500.

The guy I know heard about it from a friend who's already doing this with 6 apartments ... so he was making something like $18K / month (less the cleaning expenses).