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Glance at the study? 90k 63+ yr olds over 4.4 years followed where 700+ developed dementia.

Great story. I am a bit further along on the learning curve. Know and can do all those steps. And still, I have both an "appliance man" (actually a repair guy who also delivers and installs) and a plumber in my phone. The appliance man is the one most people fail to send money to. Why is the appliance man great? He knows, being the repair guy, which brands and models are sh*t and which are not. And that for less than a 10% premium on the online price of appliances. That's just so much value for money.

(Point in case to the story, estimation is important. Knowing what jobs to buy externally can be even more worthwhile.)

Then 'art' is soul!

Most 70s-80s advanced typewriter were just not regular household material. Even among white collar jobs. My parents (and mini me) worked on very mediocre type writers, until my dad got a PC from work with WordPerfect. Interesting from an economical perspective is that the 'top' typewriters were a lot more affordable than early pc's. People just didn't buy them. What they had was good enough, regardless of features. My dad ended up so enthusiastic for PC's to later spend more than a monthly wage on a PC for the family (actually: me). Every two years. Incredible, especially compared to the afforability of digital devices nowadays.

Word processing software was to writing as smartphones were to photography, or as the book press was to writing. Perhaps not transformational on a per feature basis, but transformational on grounds of the possibilities and market it unlocked.

A legitimate question for me would be is documentation made to be read or to be written and what is the appropriate trade-off in energy invested? I might write a one off email to an individual, a email to a big audience or a presentation to the board. All three get different levels of attention. From little, to there are layers to this text nobody would expect (perhaps mostly for my enjoyment).

I enjoy this train of thought a lot. Capturing shareholder value by just creating it yourself. The destruction of a moat I fear is worth less than the existence of a moat a competitor has successfully built. So don’t forget to buying puts Nvidia.

The logic is that the current possessor might have acquired the product bona fide and is not necessarily the thief. In order to assess this, you cannot repurpose the product yourself, but need the cops and court involved. It's the oppossite of anarcho-tyranny, it's a law favoring orderly and non-violent solutions of real world capitalist conundrums. Private repossession of stolen property in a 'bear arms' society... are accidents waiting to happen.

In reality things are not so stiff. My dads bag was stolen from the train. The thief was apprehended on the station. He got his bag back from the cops because it had identifiable information in it. Perhaps a bit light on evidence that the thief was not the owner, but it's not always overly complicated. I think the thief got the right nudge.

I know nothing about working in small firms. So that is probably very true. The smaller the firm, the more you do yourself. But ... if a company can save $ 10 mln. ... it can afford a set of financials.

If you’d just had a business controller, you’d have x*$10M saved and have more time for your PM-role.

Yes, calling BS on leadership running their own SQL. Bring strategy and tactics, find good people, create clear roles and expectations and sure don’t get lost in running naive scripts you’ve written because you can do all roles better than the people actually occupying those roles.

I was working under the hypothesis that my fitness would generally predict my performance when compared to the world record. Turns out for +50% of the worlds top speeds, this works pretty well. New hypothesis would be that specialization occurs way below +50% of the worlds speediest.

Back in the day I had my running PB’s and current times in an Excel (financial ey) comparing them with the line of the world records. Worked pretty spot on. Better 5k leads to a proportional gain on the longer runs. Never beat the 50% slower mark on any of my times. Nowadays with VO2-max, HRV and other measures personal predictions must be getting easier. Although my Garmin watch thinks I’m world class VO2-max, which is a joke.

1. Go to LinkedIn. Find a mid to high level finance executive at the firm. Add. Explain. They know some of their processes are somewhat shitty and might have the grace to pull some strings / sent some internal cold mails (in ultra large firms, mailing far outside your sphere feels like cold sales) to get things resolved.

2. Sent a snail letter to the CEO. The CEO gets little post that isn’t outright spam. This gets read by an assistant and passed down the chain. Down the chain gives very large urgency. The assistant to the CEO doesn’t know anyone five steps down. So you are coming in like a champ.

Both tips would work in my firm. It’s what I’ve use once or twice to get proper service without lawyering up. The best response was when the premier customer oriented person (director of operations) of a very large firm called me to pretty much complain that the CEO tasked her with resolving my issue. I had to refrain from laughing. (It was a big problem for me but quite a delicate matter for them I explained in kind writing.) She was telling me how happy I should be that she called me. I told here thanks for calling but you should be happy this isn’t in the papers. End of kind call, start of solution.

Sorry, this was the time of “new economics” where serious economists were talking about unlimited and endless growth thanks to computers and the internet. Had to sit in class after class where professors were telling me that with IT this time it was different (they had exposure to pMail and Stata). I love to hate on Krugman for his turn from serious economist to political pundit, but here he was wildly more on mark than the opposite side of the debate.

The one who really got it early on was Hal Varian. In his microeconomic analysis there are many parts where he seems to be like explaining markets that didn’t exist yet, but came to be massive. Google didn’t pick him up for nothing. What Ben Thompson calls aggregators was in his book, well was sketched there in principles. A 1987 book! (I worked through a 90s revision and that’s where my memories come from.)

The focus on kg/m2 (BMI) I cannot understand. Surely the lowly “body fat percentage” should be a better variable than kg/m2? Bodies are three dimensional you know!

Well here’s a story that easy to hate on. 15 kids, child support, divorced, pregnant 23 year old daughter. Let’s all go crazy.

She spent more time with here children than many will in their children’s entire childhood. They’ve experienced something than will bring a moment of silence and respect to everyone considering the feat. Being proud of yourself and your accomplishments, regardless of what life throws you. Even the 4 year old has a life story now.

Oh, and about as American as it gets. This story should make for great, interesting comments.

Wait you are missing an instrumental point.

The “razor and blades” pricing is (as the market demonstrates) a dominant strategy. The other pricing strategy (cost-plus) is preferable for the customers printing a lot, not for customers who print little. Then add some customer myopia: I need a cheap printer, where cheap is initial out of pocket, not total cost of ownership. And there you have it: all suppliers ‘must’ follow the dominant pricing strategy because the myopic customer demands it. The twice as expensive printer up front just won’t get store space.

Brother might be (or, was?) somewhat of an outlier for the informed consumer. But who buys a Brother right? HP and Canon dominate the market.

General point is that individual suppliers in a multi supplier market have to take the dominant pricing strategy as a given, or differentiate along other axis.

Ankersteine is very beautiful. Thanks for the tip. I think I would enjoy that myself. The bigger boxes are 16+ in age! I would probably struggle. And this on the day that 'Sinterklaas' leaves.

I read this theory on 4chan that Master of Puppets is secretly a piece of software, if you get the tuning right?

This. I had to get a little used to not fluffing around my feedback. One of our managers just asked me to give it to him straight, directly and 1-on-1 and we’d get along fine. So we did. I still am having trouble with how little, what I see as fact based, feedback is needed before the average person has had enough.

Example: I like to point out shitty work processes (one needs a hobby). Anything with a few loops and some rework goes for me to start my first time right story. People take offense. No stop, you are not the process. You didn’t design it, you merely took part because we asked you to. Now stop and consider whether you think it is shitty and if so, what can we do? Can you do it? Do you need help? When? Organizationally, it’s a good riff. For me, it’s strange to do and see it help. It feels like delivering snake oil. (I rationalize this as delivering Lean in thirty minutes.)

My communication plan is facts >> options >> opinions >> advice. This way I help people mentally separate “what is” from whatever opinion I’m holding. This works for both verbal and written communication. It’s a coping strategy for being outlier direct.

I’ve got a high performer on my team and I do think (okay, wouldn’t I ;) that in managing speed vs quality and explicit attention to the learning curve of others I’ve managed to create a few more golden nuggets. No high performer (perhaps: nobody, ever) has all professional skills in the same measure.

If it read the CLI docs it might just make the right calls (x —-ELO:1400).

Somebody else posted Henry Molaison [1] and there is a link to Repetition priming [2]. Seems some memories are stored in other locations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_priming

I guess I agree with you? A mandatory insurance is a socialized solution.

But I think the market for a mandatory insurance can still have mostly capitalist intent. Competition, private ownership of capital, the functioning of a market.

Health care is the harder example. No perfect system exists AFAIK. Although I do believe that the real socialist Or capitalist solutions fail a lot sooner than the somewhat mixed approaches in this world. That’s also why I keep looking for other insurance markets as examples. The easy examples of functioning markets tell us that something can work. The hard problems are left for humans to solve.

People pay for each other all the time? The old pay the tuition of the young. (Well, not in the US.) Older people pay way more income and wealth tax. Via that logic any re-distribution leads to the conclusion of socialization? I cannot argue pro insurance with Milton Freedman or proper libertarians. (And even have my share of attraction to that part of the spectrum of political philosophy.)

I can point out that insurance that works is a staple in large parts of the capitalist world, and has been for some 4 centuries.

I disagree. Insurance isn’t a bet. Bets are zero sum (or worse). Insurance isn’t zero sum. It’s a structured redistribution of risk bringing both an improved expected utility (if we assume risk aversion) And expected profits to the risk takers. (The funny economist would argue that a casino is the same if we assume the opposite of risk aversion (tolerance / seeking)).

I agree with the point that for high chance, low impact events insurance is less efficient. Follows from the same basic utility theory. Insurance is not costless and costs will start to dominate benefits.

The intergenerational aspects of health insurance are a good point. Inflation and medical-technological progress still make insurance a good solution in my book. You can save for a pension (still looking at most of the Western world for saving too little); it’s harder to save for unknown future costs whose height is dependent on where the medical risk falls.

From the perspective of "European" insurance... this is what you get if you let unbridled adverse selection into your market(s). Health insurance is perfectly manageable (if and only?) if you accept (some) mandatory coverage. Otherwise the market will unravel. Same for other types of coverage with medical acceptance (life, disability). Once you start on that treadmill, you will lose large parts of the market where the product / coverage would actually be most benificial in terms of utility. You do need some way of making the product work both ways (could be long term contracts, prohibition on using certain types of information, ...).

Example: My firms has a niche. It turns what usually is an individual disability product (where you have to have extensive medical checks up front to deal with adverse selection), into a product sold to employers for most or all employees at once (that is the key). Yes, in my country disability is a subject that employers and unions actually talk about in collective bargaining. That pretty small change takes away the adverse selection. It makes the average claim manageable, it shares burdens and keeps pricing acceptable. We are even experimenting with blank acceptance for employees who opted-out earlier. That's tricky since that brings back the adverse selection on the individual level. Still learning about how to reduce that effect, while keeping our product affordable and manageable.

Well more than obviously yes and scandalized by the HN-ers above. Never considered people not making their bed. Grandfather was in the Navy, mother ran and wife runs a tight ship. Me I’m along for the ride. I could expand a few hundred words about the enjoyment an acquired skill like keeping your house tidy can bring.

This hits home. We upgraded a very massive Excel-based model to the peak of our best practice. Proper split in requirements vs. implementation, a separate data quality layer, model validation on the model, Ze Kloud, etc. Turns out accountants don’t grok model validation and I am still explaining imputation on individual data fields to auditors expecting each individual value to be user inputted somewhere. Waving IAS8 in front of your auditor doesn’t help since you are threading on their expertise and that gets messy. Excel models turn out to be multi headed dragons, but you can mail a spreadsheet with five example cases and get by.

I reconstruct it as: [Did you know of] the sad tale [where] hype [was] fanning fears [that] modern cryptography was slain [but it wasn’t]

Thanks to not feeling alone in the world (thanks u/oorza). I mentioned this story at work today. Is autonomy a necessary part of work happiness? I don’t think so.

Being part of a staff that manages successful delivery (in this case of food items) where at peak moments you deliver in concerto 10x average throughout, time after time was just good for morale. Plus the general goofing of teens. I don’t remember the things that I currently associate with cogs in the machine (say, scripted unpaid toilet breaks for call centers, or a lack of ownership). You owned your tiny part of the customer experience and was near all other parts.

The cogs in the machine part is imho unsuccessfully scripted work. You can’t live up to your own expectations of proper customer service because you are forced in a mold that doesn’t fit, but can’t fix the mold.

Then comes the part that I’m still thinking about. What’s easier to achieve? Great processes and happiness via lean / kaizen that treat autonomy as foundational or great scripted processes that deliver satisfaction without autonomy.

Complexity and autonomy are probably related. Higher complexity makes scripted processes that fit all exceptions a lot harder. On the other hand my experience is that so-called experts frown upon standardization and quality suffers. I’ve done standardization for professionals and have hoped to find a sweet spot between autonomy and scripted work (The Checklist Manifesto comes to mind). But I must admit those sweet spots are harder to find the less I’m intimately aware of what people do from minute to minute.