>chances are that your subconscious is telling you to leave them the hell alone
The funny thing is, what is really happening is that it is hard to differentiate between reality (where there is no real evidence that strangers want to be comforted by us, and 9/10 times if you say "are you ok" and they will sniff and say "yes" then go on crying) and the feel-good stories we read about where a brave soul breaks through stifling conventions to reach out to another human being in need.
Which is ironic given that the author is complaining about how technology stops us connecting from one another, while the original technology that started this trend was the written word:
>So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground."
In most cases, crying or bleeding strangers will use a handkerchief I give them. Bottles of water are also a hit with bleeding or sick people. It also gives them a chance to talk to me if they want. Sometimes they do, most of the time they don't, that's ok.
(I wanted to cite your post, but the relevant part is too long. HN could use citation boxes, I guess.)
A dollar spent on the mars rover is a dollar not spent on poverty reduction. I do think that in the long run, spending on science and tech in general does prevent poverty, but it's not clear that the mars rover does so.
It's very hard for people to face that in our global economy, it's very easy to save lives at very low (relative) cost and yet people and Western government choose not to by spending money on other things. But it's the truth.
The cartoon you linked to is not logical. If I want to advocate spending on a particular thing, I have to at least be willing to hear counter-arguments so that I can actually convince people to spend money on it.
I don't see how you can base a long term business model on a technology that can easily be broken (i.e. cracking the app so that photos aren't deleted after some time like the sender intended).
I guess in the short term they can make some money and transition to some other business model, but I feel like "SnapchatKeep" is just around the corner if it doesn't exist already.
if they had a feature to upload saved snapchats online, I would do it and share it through facebook and twitter, in fact I already do http://olaji.de/snapchat a lot of my friends find it hilarious and I have almost double the amount of snaps saved on my phone right now, than on the site... I plan to upload more and more while snapchat value goes up and up, I am a 20 year old college student, a lot of you older guys have trouble understanding...
sorry "understand snapchat", ojr is my snapchat, I should give you my password, you'll see a few of my college girl friends send you snaps and maybe you will be closer to undertanding...
It's not based on a technology. It's based on this sort of idea of transient photography- compare it to Instagram where everyone carefully curates every photo and ensures it has the right filter, etc. etc.- people Snapchat photos of themselves making stupid faces to each other.
I'm not saying that makes it worth $1bn, but I think the criteria is different than you make out.
The implication that the powerpoint slides were concocted by China in order to discredit and weaken US internet based companies is absolutely ridiculous.
It puts any conspiracies I've heard involving the US government to shame. You may not like the Chinese governments, but you need to look at the facts here: the slides were released by the Western media, the US has not denied their legitimacy or the existence of PRISM, and there is zero evidence for Chinese involvement.
That's my hypothesis for why logic-programming's popularity faded somewhat from its initial promise. When it was new, it was one of the few widely available ways of doing declarative programming, and contrasted strongly with procedural programming. But in the years since, lots of other declarative approaches have chipped away at the monopoly of logic programming proper over declarative approaches to programming.
>Am I the only programmer who doesn't like being economically exploited (in the formal microeconomic sense)? For me, it's demotivating to know I'm putting forth effort for which someone else is reaping huge value.
There is no formal micro-economic sense of exploitation, except perhaps not getting the competitive wage, which is not what you are describing.
Not getting a wage equal to your productivity at the margin may be considered exploitation in several schools of microeconomics. If an employee provides value X and receives wages X-10, the amount of exploitation is 10.
However, depending on who you talk to, workers are not 'exploited' in a loose sense because they can move to another organization that pays the prevailing wage. But the fact remains that the prevailing wage may be below the worker's contribution to organizational productivity at the margin. Thus, my econ professor still taught that exploitation, in a formal sense, occurs whenever wage(worker) < marginal_productivity(worker).
>Not getting a wage equal to your productivity at the margin may be considered exploitation in several schools of microeconomics. If an employee provides value X and receives wages X-10, the amount of exploitation is 10.
And this is, by definition, the competitive wage in neoclassical theory. Suppose there is a group of employers, and a group of employees, and each employee adds value X to any of the employers. Then any employer will want to hire all the workers for themselves, if the prevailing wage is X - 10. So competition ensures that there is no exploitation in that sense.
So while neoclassical theory does allow for "exploitation", it also predicts that it is very unlikely to actually occur.
You seem to be reinterpreting neoclassical theory where "marginal value" is decided according to your accounting rules, rather than the competitive market.
So if an employee produces 0 or negative (as happens in several organizations) but receives wage X, are they exploiting their employer?
Microeconomic models that assume the marginal productivity of a worker can be calculated in advance are drastically at odds with the reality I see, where employers are terrified of a bad hire and even if they get a good hire, they may still end up with zero to show for it because of bad management or simply market conditions.
You could argue that the reason we have corporations at all is to spread the risk of unknowables across many people, so that it becomes bearable and not everyone is exposed to ruin if luck doesn't turn their way.
>Microeconomic models that assume the marginal productivity of a worker can be calculated in advance are drastically at odds with the reality I see
Micro theory is very general, and almost tautological. For example, you can re-interpret "marginal value" to mean "marginal expected value conditional on what the employer knows about you" and then everything you said fits neatly into the usual framework again.
Hence my comment below about the market deciding what a worker's marginal value is. Micro theory makes no claims that the "true economic" (and unobservable) marginal value of a worker is equal to their marginal value measured by some accounting system. Hence why micro theory is to a large extent irrefutable and makes few predictions about the world: if people eat big macs, we assume that increases their utility more than eating kale, and if the market doesn't pay a worker well, we assume that person contributes little marginal value.
Corporations do certainly help spread risk, that just happens to fall slightly outside of the usual micro framework.
>The main issue as I see it is that as we use money as a proxy for value, we disproportionately weight the desires of the rich over those of the poor. A service for rich people (e.g. an online photo sharing website) doesn't need to produce much utility to be worth a lot of money, whereas a service for poor people (e.g. clean water for poor villages) can produce a lot of utility and still be worth little money.
That is the essence of free markets. If you look up the "welfare theorem's" you will see that the free market promises to do precisely what you describe: maximize the weighted sum of individual utilities, where the wealthier individuals generally have higher weights.
Ultimately, it is in human nature to care more about oneself and one's family (and possibly other people who you consider to be part of your in-group) than others. The free market just happens to make this fact very stark. Each time I buy a coffee for myself instead of donating to a poor village, I cannot avoid the conclusion that I care more about my momentary happiness than whether someone in that village gets some avoidable disease.
This is a good question. In financial models, one common approach is the "noise trader" theory where some people make random trades. These are the people who lose out to the informed traders.
As to not creating wealth, it is possible that HFT adds value by seeing where the market is going (slowly) and putting the price there right now. Also, it may be able to extract more information from the truly informed traders, so that the market as able to have more information given less informed traders.
That said, I doubt HFT adds much positive value, but as the rules of the game evolve, ultimately the will favor people who add value.
I wouldn't be so cynical, but I agree with
>chances are that your subconscious is telling you to leave them the hell alone
The funny thing is, what is really happening is that it is hard to differentiate between reality (where there is no real evidence that strangers want to be comforted by us, and 9/10 times if you say "are you ok" and they will sniff and say "yes" then go on crying) and the feel-good stories we read about where a brave soul breaks through stifling conventions to reach out to another human being in need.
Which is ironic given that the author is complaining about how technology stops us connecting from one another, while the original technology that started this trend was the written word:
>So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground."