shingen

That last paragraph is a doozy.

Completely addresses privacy concerns; is completely safe; oh and hey, it's completely optional, assuming you don't prefer molestation and possibly randomly missing your flight.

I knew Rob back when he was running BusinessPundit. He's a great guy, classic entrepreneur. He was about ready to give up on starting businesses - penning a sad blog entry about failing and not being sure where he was going next - when he came together with some other founders to do Backupify. I've never liked the cliche about success being closest when you're just about to give up, but it seems to ring true an awful lot.

A lot of this comes down to how badly the Feds want you. Another domain might buy you a thin buffer of protection, but if you're doing anything that really irks the US Government they'll go to great lengths to get you. They got the Swiss to burn a lot of their treasured banking privacy customs just to flush out off shore accounts. If you can get the Swiss to do that, you can get most any country to seize a local domain with a fraction of the pressure.

I'm always fascinated by the extremely long term horizon concerns that people bring up in discussions about the future of humanity.

200 to 300 years out there is no humanity as we know it today. Whatever we are at that juncture, it won't be "human" as we now define it. Our self directed evolution has long since taken over, and it's accelerating at an extraordinary clip. You can debate the merits of that, the details of it, but it's happening either way.

In the next two or three decades we'll have begun to completely take over genetic alteration / evolution / improvement / etc, of our species. Within a few decades after that, we'll be severely altering what we are. Within 150 or 200 years, it'll be very hard for modern humans to relate to the ancestor humans from 2012.

Concerns about asteroids or global warming and so on are moot. We won't be here as a species pumping CO2 into the atmosphere or waiting around helplessly for a rock to crash into the surface. It's not an issue of if, it's just an issue of how long it takes and how many competing models of our self directed evolution become options.

The sole threat to that future is super virus / disease, most likely man-made. It's the only thing that could stop our evolution and wipe out our species in that couple hundred year time frame. Even nuclear war isn't a threat to species survival, you could detonate thousands of nukes simultaneously and it wouldn't come close to killing us off.

Short answer: provide both, user choice

The endless parade of fragmentation discussions regarding Android all prove one thing: a lot of people don't understand what wins a market. Customers lacking in technological savvy make up the radical majority of Android owners, they are never going to care about this issue so long as their smart phone functions at 85% good enough.

85% good enough, is more than enough to win a market if you have substantial other advantages in your favor.

Windows has always suffered fragmentation, and has rarely been better than 85% good enough. Circa 2002 they had '95, 98, ME, and XP spread across over half a billion units. With further varied patch configurations and service packs. The total global varied combinations are in the hundreds in that context.

But, you say, that's just so horrible! Welcome to reality, where markets are never dominated by perfection and fairy tales. You don't have to like it, you can rail against it the rest of your life, and fight the good fight; and Android will continue to dominate, and it will have absolutely nothing to do with issues related to fragmentation.

You mean a country with 100 billionaires, the second largest economy, and 500 million people (40%) living on less than $2 per day? 130x million people living on $1 per day (both courtesy of the world bank)? 50% of the population without indoor plumbing (cia factbook)?

Not hard to source the extremely dire statistics. They're plentiful.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8668086.stm

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_06/b42140136...

Don't be ridiculous.

Billion is the new million.

It's why Legalzoom is doing so well.

Per capita GDP is one thing, a lot more important is per capita income. Those are two very different things, particularly when you're talking about China - a country with a billion extremely poor people, and a lot of mega corporations that the state has blessed with near monopolies. What you want to know, is: how much money are the people of China keeping out of that huge economy.

Per capita income in the US is closer to $40k, and in China it's closer to $3,600 to $4k. In 1990, it was closer to $350 to $450 range (IMF).

The focus always goes to China's per capita GDP, but it's a very misleading way to measure economic parity. People get upset about America's wealth inequality - China's wealth inequality is several orders of magnitude worse.

He's describing the euphoria that always accompanies a bubble atmosphere. In this case, it's a start-up bubble. The same exact atmosphere went on in the late 1990s, just with bigger rounds and fewer micro companies.

Money is sloshing around, and nobody wants to earn 2% on long term junk government paper.

$500,000 isn't what it used to be, literally, but it buys a lot in the way of a web start-up now. If that $500k is now really $250k in 1999 terms, it's buying more like $5 or 10 million in 1999 terms (when it comes to the infrastructure needed to get a web start-up off the ground).

I'd normally say the start-up bubble would continue until the next economic melt down dries up the funding, but the funding levels driving the start-up bubble are so low, it's hard to see what will slow it down short of government regulations (they're working on that).

Here's what's logically wrong with that line of argument:

Smart / dumb are relative scales, so there will always be smarter, and dumber, no matter what you do. If you filled a society with what we currently define as genius level intellects, there would be the equivalent to dumb people amongst them - the dumb people would have 145 IQ's and the smart people would have 180 IQ's --- you get the idea.

Majority rules will always allow one group to optionally eat the other, and violate the rights of the minority. Whether that minority is the dumber 49% or the smarter 49%, either scenario is equally morally reprehensible.

Peikoff would say: think in extrapolated principles. Look up the first serious conversations Peikoff had with Rand (she couldn't get him to think in principles). Whether you're dealing with smart people with 250 IQ's, and 'dumb' people with 160 IQ's, the smart people might decide they know what's best for the 'dumb' people (and proceed to violate their liberty). The principle remains whether you're dealing with 70 IQ's and 160 IQ's or much higher scales of intellect.

Anytime someone lays out an argument by stating that some other group of people isn't intelligent enough to self govern, you should be suspicious of the character and intentions of the person making that argument.

Whether that applies to Thiel or not I have no clue, I haven't seen all his statement on the libertarian colony proposal (I've just seen brief discussions on it).

Che? He was a genocidal psychopath that hated gays and people that were religious. He personally oversaw the execution - murder - of thousands of innocent people that he regarded as undesirable or conflicting with his beliefs. Bloodthirsty, is the description he gave himself. He didn't start with democratic means, he started with sheer extreme violence.

Che is one of the greatest villains of the last century.

Constitutional Republic yes, Democracy no.

Democracy isn't desirable. Mob rule is a terrible system of government. Democracy != voting; Democracy != freedom.

America and many other systems have long since proven that freedom through constitutional protections with representative government does flourish. Those systems specifically flourish by protecting the weak from the powerful, the minority from the majority. The 'people aren't smart enough' is a fascist, asinine argument. The only time I see that used, is when someone has a complex to dominate others.

Myhrvold is basically an arms dealer, more than happy to kill both sides. The guy couldn't create anything useful by himself, so he put his intellect to use as a merchant of destruction.

I like how Python is considered a 'next new thing'. It merely predates the web.

It's a profit center whether you like it or not, with or without the government. With the government the profit goes into the bureaucracy.

The medicare + medicaid system has shown itself to be an extreme profit center for government employees and the bureaucracy. They take home massive sums in profit: wages and pensions.

The government doesn't make the system more efficient by reducing profit from the equation. They reduce cost by reducing care options, reducing salaries for healthcare workers, and rationing. For example, nurses in America make 50% more than nurses in Germany. Socialized medicine will decimate that pay variance.

http://www.worldsalaries.org/professionalnurse.shtml

There's nothing on earth more wasteful than government when it comes to spending money. Just ask the US government system (fed+state+local), it's a $7 trillion per year profit system, that flows directly into the hands of millions of employees that make on average $100k per year in wages + benefits, with that pay package doubling in size in just the last ten years, while the economy flat lined.

Because we're also the fattest and least healthy (diet & exercise) of the nations with high per capita income and moderately high life expectancy.

It wasn't meant to be flippant (or insensitive), just matter of fact.

My grandmother extended her life by about eight months by having breast cancer surgery at 87 or so. Was that ok? Personally I loved my grandmother. However, it was paid for by taxpayers. Her quality of life was terrible in those last eight months, but she did want to keep fighting to live. It's an extremely sensitive issue to debate on either side. The obvious bottom line is that we can't keep having our cake and eating it too.

Your 50 years is a radical exaggeration. America had a budget surplus and stable dollar 12 / 13 years ago. Which is why gold was $270x / ounce, and oil was $12 to $20 and gasoline was still $1.

Trade deficits are mostly irrelevant so long as you aren't accumulating debt, and your domestic economy is highly productive.

I run a huge trade deficit with Amazon.com for example, as do all of their customers. That's ok because I'm being productive elsewhere, and the profits I'm generating through work make it possible to run that deficit. The same concept works at a macro economic level.

America ran trade deficits during almost the entire 19th century. There was more money (eg British investment) and goods flowing in, than out. The huge profits being generated domestically by the productivity gains, made it possible to finance that deficit without debt accumulation.

http://www.cato.org/publications/trade-policy-analysis/ameri...

Want to get our costs down to competitive levels?

85% of all healthcare costs in America are for those over the age of 65. America has the leading health care system for the elderly. We pay for 80 year olds to have surgeries that they can't get in Canada or France.

Nobody wants to talk about it though, because it's not a nice thing to say, that grandma is buying six extra months at a price of a million in treatment.

Socialized medicine will slice the most money out of treatment for people in that demographic. It's by far the largest savings spot. Good or bad, you can debate that endlessly; but that's exactly what will happen.

Americans have known for a very long time that we were getting ripped off in the health care system. It has been a growing problem for decades.

I don't think there is any assumption at all that our health care system works as it stands today.

It's not difficult to figure out what happens to a marketplace when you remove the competition with government mandate. America's health care system has been hyper regulated for decades. You can't even shop across state lines effectively.

We have the worst of both systems. We have enough government interference to drive up prices through restriction of competition, bad regulation, bad mandates; and we have government sponsored 'private' entities there to capture the high prices from the stagnant and controlled markets.

Same reason why lasik became so cheap so quickly. The free market actually at work. Especially effective on technological product based innovation and pricing.

If they'd really get out of the way, MRIs could perhaps cost $200 in the USA due to the volume that could be absorbed by clinics.

Google does a stellar job correlating click through and click back actions + times to determine what people were most likely looking for with each query, and then raising or lowering results accordingly (Panda amplified this metric in their scoring system). I suspect they stomp Bing in that department.

No such thing as a random result when you have static selection boxes defining specific input. The results are obviously restrained by what letter combinations you pick (ie finite).

You could make an argument that caching all the possible combinations would be unreasonable for what's likely a low cost setup. However, I'd argue in favor of caching with both a popular and a simple reduction scheme.

Could speed it up radically by just caching on the first letter / number.

I agree. A quick glance at the top 5,000 domains in terms of traffic more than demonstrates the sheer dominance of the .com brand for domains. It's beyond overwhelming.

There are very few relevant .me or .io (etc) domains. That will continue to be the case for years to come.

It's not Twitter.me or TwitPic.me or yfrog.me, it's not Tumblr.me, it's not Pinterest.me, it's not Groupon.me, it's not homeaway.me, it's not yelp.me. All the major success stories online will continue to be branded primarily through .com - and those that start out as .me or .io will move to .com as they can afford to purchase the prime domain.

I don't mean to be speculative, but I think it's always the "but" in the opening sentence that is really interesting.

In my late teens and early 20's I had a lot of book & observation based business information contained in my brain. The most jarring thing about running a real business early on was all the ... bullshit. Most of which is unavoidable. The myriad of issues and red tape, that have nothing to directly do with creating or selling or product or marketing or managing.

The best thing to come out of those early experiences in my opinion, is the automation you properly build up that makes it possible to fly a lot faster through it all with each iteration. That part of experience is priceless. I waste a lot less time now, and know a lot better what to focus on.

I don't think any business school can teach you the kind of fast reflex adaption you acquire with experience. No two scenarios are ever the same, but with enough experience you'll find a lot of cross over similarities, things you learned over there that apply well over here. It becomes personal data that you can call upon instantly, bend, manipulate, adjust to solve new problems fast.

Data from experience is more easily available for manipulation to new problems than mentally distant 'book based' knowledge.