Things I still can't do in November 2014
facebook.com
facebook.com
13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now. I don't want to work with you, ever. 40 hours a week are for the team, sure, but during the remaining 128 you don't have any business in my life. What you propose is creepy.
25. Be able to take a course online and get graded -- and get a diploma that means something. Education is really ripe for disruption: Coursera is OK, but we need to invent Stanford 2.0 For a diploma to mean something, what you need is not to make the courses better, or harder to pass, or whatever you're thinking; what you need is to convince your employer that you have the required skills for your job. The diploma may or may not have something to do with it, but in any case it's your employer's criterion. What you want may happen over time, but it's definitely not a matter of technology.
26. Be able to sell my advice online. It's worth something and I should have some way to monetize it. Again, it's other people, not you, who will judge whether your advice is valuable. Aside from that, it's not like it's difficult to become some kind of consultant.
30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers. What.
31. Be able to get a $100 MRI. It can be done for this price. There are a LOT of things that will cost you far, far, far more than what they cost [EDIT: to clarify, that I mean is: far than what they cost to your provider]. This is pretty basic economy, IMHO. Also you may get it for free when you actually need it, if you live in a place with a sane health system (i.e., not the USA).
But yeah, as jokoon said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8648325, most of those "problems" arise from politics and economy. I suspect that a few of them have actually been tried, and either they're doing fine but in a local scale, or they failed.
I don't even understand why this list is being taken seriously. The guy basically just said:
I want to have GPS for my dog, be able to buy nice art and, ya know, just live in a society governed by regulated physical fitness like some sort of Nazi.
This is only true if you have high taxes on tobacco products. Those high taxes introduce other distortions -- smuggling of tobacco and increased use of counterfeit product. Smuggling is sometimes done by criminal gangs. Counterfeit product is considerably more harmful than actual products.
The reason we want to stop people from smoking has little to do with the fact that they die earlier, but that they live for years with reduced quality of life and that they harm the health of their children.
It also introduces other "distortions", like fewer people smoking, especially kids.
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/research/factsheets/pdf/0146....
But, y'know. Free market uber alles.
But the UK spends about £8bn treating smoking related illness and gets £12bn from excise duties and we have much higher rates on tobacco products. The UK taxes on cigarettes are high. About 77% of the price of a pack of 20 is tax.
> This is, according to the Treasury, equivalent to more than 2 pence on the basic rate of income tax or over 11 pence on the top rate of income tax. On a typical pack of 20 premium cigarettes the total tax burden of £6.17 ($9.66) ccounts for 77% of the recommended retail price (RRP) of £7.98 ($12.50)
http://www.the-tma.org.uk/policy-legislation/taxation/
The highest rate in the US is $6.16 (£3.19) (although most places in US have much lower tax rates).
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/research/factsheets/pdf/0097....
When people smuggle cigarettes to sell illegally they don't care about minimum age laws, so you get children smoking counterfeit product:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2123054.stm
> Many are being bought by schoolchildren, according to trading standards officers in the borough of Camden, north London.
Counterfeit tobacco is a recurring problem in the UK.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-16786358
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
>Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers.
As someone who lives in Germany where people pay almost 20% of their salary for non-opt-out health insurance, I'm astonished by people that think a state-forced health insurance gets you free MRIs.
I'd also point out that the insurance rate is actually 15.5%, that people with low incomes are exempt, that the total payment is capped, and that employers contribute around half of this payment.
Under the ER one it even specifies "the system" as who its currently costing $1000.
I guess that it's a matter of opinion, but personally, looking at the state of healthcare in the USA, I'm quite glad I live in Europe.
It is called Google Helpouts[0], and it isn't going very well. Reason why - almost everybody overvalues what their advice is actually worth. People who can provide value usually already are through their usual economic activity - be it a job or entrepreneurialism (ie. If your advice was worth something, you'd already be monetizing it).
Websites that create Shingy[1] As A Service type markets around paid advice often just become cesspools of psychics and webcam sex operators.
[0] https://helpouts.google.com/home
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3
The problem is the difficulty in actually figuring out who's advice is worth what & where. But, in many cases 30 minutes with the right person could be incredibly valuable.
Technical/scientific/engineering expertise is one are, industry knowledge is another one. I think the second might be the most important.
Say you have some sort of awesome technology that you want to market to the hotel industry. You need to understand how that industry works. What software they use & how. What they pay for various things. The right person could get you months ahead in 30 minutes.
People who have valuable advice worth paying for are usually already being paid by their employer.
> 13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now.
I think we can kill two birds with one stone here. Your team is collared, right?
For instance, if everyone on his team carries a smartphone (iOS or Android) they can all install google+ and turn on background location sharing so he can see them on a map.
https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3302509?hl=en
There's also Apple's "Find My Friends" cloud feature, and a bunch of 3rd-party apps that do the same.
If they don't carry a cellphone then...um...give them one and tell them to carry it. :-)
...okay bud.
This argument seems to be pretty common among the glitterati from Wall Street.
I wonder why they don't see the incredible irony.
My 2 previous jobs offered health coverage that included gym membership discounts.
This is a proper motivator [for me]. If I want to maintain and improve my health, I'm offered the benefit of doing so with perks.
But what advantage does it give to those who have something such as a heart condition that won't allow them to participate in the same exercises?
In this case, diet could be the helping factor. Then do these people get a refund on part of their grocery bill?
The problem is trying to create cookie cutter solutions to people that are diverse and have complex issues.
I'm not sure what fat people cost the taxpayer. Given that they typically pay their own medical expenses, I would guess not a lot.
Also, clearly their sad state of affairs is due to the quirky American agricultural and food processing industries. France doesn't have this problem with obesity and neither did the US in 1970.
I don't see him crying out for a special tax on Monsanto. Maybe because his portfolio would take a hit.
Either way, this facebook post is pretty representative of the inhuman views that American neo-royalty holds.
sorry but most of those things either stems from politics or lack of market development.
> 11. Get a quick, binding divorce online.
This makes absolutely no sense to me, in so many ways. Presumably a divorce should be a rare enough occurrence that doing it in person is not a burden?
Lawyers tend to make divorces harder for everybody and seem to be very good at lining their own pockets so I'm sure there is room for improvement but 'quick and binding online divorces' seem to me to be a dangerous road to go down on.
Just like you can't quickly and easily marry online.
> 32. Be able to get into an ER for under $100. It's ridicoulous that a mere 15 min consultation can cost somebody (the system) $1000+.
A good number are Silicon Valley (or US) problems, the $100 MRI is pretty much the cost of an MRI in Europe, but then, it's free for the patient. Same goes for the ER.
FWIW, while the patient-facing cost is about that, I think the actual cost (after accounting for taxes, charitable donations, the radiographer's time, etc) is quite a bit higher.
Just to check we're on the same page: I was talking about taxes and donations that are used to fund the purchase and maintenance of the scanner, radiographers, etc. That is, the patient-facing cost (or consultant-facing cost, or researcher-facing cost, or whatever) might be $100, but how much more expensive would it have been if taxes etc hadn't gone some way towards funding it?
I don't know the answer, but I suspect it comes out to be a fair bit. I do academic research using MRI, and (from what I've heard) we see significant price differences according to where a researcher's funding came from, and whether the scan counts as being "on the NHS" or not.
Call the police from an app? Your phone is still a phone ...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.com.ceiba.c...
We're talking about AS/400 mainframes here with software written in COBOL and RPG (which actually was created for use with punch cards but still is actively used today). The preferred mode of inter-systems communication on these platforms is exchanging fixed-width files via FTP or socket services.
Not only are these systems difficult to maintain or update, connecting modern systems isn't exactly easy either.
That said, there's a whole lot of money to be made in this area in the next 10 years or so because everyone who still knows COBOL, RPG and AS/400 stuff in general is likely 50 years or older, which means there won't hardly be anyone to maintain those monstrosities any more 15 years from now.
Many banks are currently migrating these systems to modern languages and frameworks, which for banks and finance in general mostly means Java. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily mean things will get better. There are many stakeholders in this game and their interests don't always align with the customers'.
If banks were only allowed to subtract the amount from the sending account as soon as they got confirmation from the receiving party that the money arrived and was added to the receiving account this would incentivize them to make this process as fast as technically possible.
In other industries competition clears some of the cobwebs, but the banking industry is oligopolistic.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/overnightrate.asp
I'm not saying this is the reason why you can't instantly transfer money around, as there could possibly be a better implementation of such a system that allows consumers to do that. I'm just saying what I know.
Of course, their batches only run on business days. Because there's no-one around at the weekend to crank the handles on the machines...?
I'd expect to see Faster Payments rolled out in the US in the next 5-7 years.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VocaLink
The USA flew men to the moon, built the bomb and invented the internet. Their principal form of funds transfer is still with pieces of paper. Pieces of actual paper.
Perpetuating the myth that unhealthy people are a financial and social burden. That's wrong because....
* MIND QUAKE: Fat people are 'on average' healthier!! *
Why? Because they clutch their heart and die in an instant. 'Healthy people' drag their boney carcasses from care home to care home for decades. Do the world a favour - grab yourself a beer, a burger and some cigarettes. Knock yourself out; literally.
My biggests problem with this point are not related with the veracity of his implied statement, but rather, with the slippery slope of making people pay more because of health problems (that are actually less in their control than we may believe), which is anyway happening already in an indirect way; and also, that it would constitute another form of poverty tax, considering that obesity is often caused by the poor quality food that people with little to no money can afford.
> Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on. The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000. And as Kip Viscusi has pointed out, when you add in the costs of the state pensions that those who die young don’t get, smoking and gorging save the government vast sums of money.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.97488...
I love to tease the public health nazis with... "On average, fat people are healthier".
Funny because it's true.
Edit: The people I've watched die had one regret only: Waiting until retirement to do what they wanted at which point they can't. Perfect cogs with pensions and private healthcare paid up through slavery for 40+ years. Nothing to show other than some bricks and a hip replacement and a nice plot in the graveyard.
Isn't this what HomeJoy is doing? If not, I have a friend who tried that, but failed. I'd be happy to forward his details.
> 9. Send $10,000 to my caretaker in France and have her get the cash and withdraw it from an ATM that same day.
Within Europe, you can.
> 10. Get investors for my startup by advertising the stock offering on the web and selling shares directly.
Isn't that what KickStarter does?
> 11. Get a quick, binding divorce online.
I think it's better that you can't divorce that way.
No you can't offer a % of your company as a reward on Kickstarter. I think AngelList is probably closest with syndicated deals.
Some banks actually decline large withdrawals (but not transfers) if you have a weak/suspicious reason ("I want to buy five 3D LED TVs today" :-)).
However actually getting those money out of the bank or PayPal as banknotes is more difficult. The times when banks and states where letting go the money in their vaults are long gone. Larger greeds and larger debts mean that there are de facto limits to how much you can cash out per day. I don't even want to think about what I should go through to get 10,000 EUR in cash at my bank.
And a whole bunch of other crowdfunding sites in the UK - Crowdcube, Seedrs, etc. I don't know what the equivalents are in the US, but I'm sure they exist...
Of course, there needs to be an analogous scale for controlling the outcomes of developing anything that ambitious.
And a choir that you can hire to follow you around singing the necessary Ominous Latin Chanting while you announce your ambition levels.
Ideas, products, inventions and such are surprisingly (very surprisingly, to me) hard to place on that Yudkowski Ambition Scale. The line between trivial and revolutionary is surprisingly blurry.
I think one could argue or tweak several of these to be in the 2-5/6 range. At least they could to the extent that they can be argue to be a 1.
1. Get a blood test simply, myself, without going to a lab, and get the results overnight.
If you extend this past just bloods, combine this with DIY diagnostics tools, 23andme, items 5, 16, 31... I'm sure you can arrive at a sort of preventative medicine something something new paradigm. A Yudkowski 3?
2. Build a house myself using standard small interchangeable parts like legos.
Revolutionize town and cityscapes, quarter the cost of our single biggest purchase.... Yudkowski 3, I think.
Even Yudkowski's 1 & 2 could arguably be 3-5s.
Hospitals are particularly embarrassing- even just moving to electronic records is taking them over a decade and ~100 billion dollars to do. Many hospitals are still fighting the transition heavily despite every estimate I can find pointing to massive cost savings several times the initial expense. Unfortunately I suspect we'll all be waiting a long time for even basic conveniences like home blood drawings, let alone cheap MRI's.
Am I the only one finding this insulting, disgusting and backwards? People can be overweight for a multitude of reasons, some of which are:
* Genetics
* Medication
* Health conditions
* Smoking
* Enviromental reasons
* Lack of sleep
* Age
* Pregnancy
* An inactive lifestyle coupled with high consumtion of lipids
Some people have reasons other than stuffing their faces for being fat. It'd be impolite of me to say what I think of this person for implying there aren't.
A "fat tax" could very well hit some of the most vulnerable citizens. People with severe, long-term psychotic illnesses who are prescribed neuroleptics long-term and are unable to work comes to mind.
Perhaps making healthy foods more accessible than unhealthy foods is a better place to start. In the UK, for example, I could buy much more processed food stocked full with sugar than I can fresh vegetables for the same price.
I can pick an obese individual out of a crowd and go "That guy is fat because he eats too much. Dude... have some self control, stop eating so much, buy healthy food, do some exercise, learn to cook for yourself."
Focusing on an individual, all these things may be true, and one may seek to place all the blame on that individual. However, take a step back and look at the cohort of obese people. When entire swathes of society are suffering from these problems, I don't think you can point your finger and blame every obese person for "stuffing their faces."
What collective forces are acting on the majority of the population that results in them eating poorly, not exercising, putting on weight year after year, etc?
The more and more I've read about psychology, self-awareness, political science, etc, and observed how the media and business interests clearly influence behavior, the less and less I feel it's a viable position to attribute individual blame to "fat people" "poor people" "homeless people" for what are society wide issues.
Now lets suppose we do want to work on the societal abstraction level. The problem is that the proportion of people making a certain individual choice has gone up. One solution is a pigouvian tax to disincentivize this choice.
I agree you can't blame every single obese person for eating too much. You can only blame the vast majority of them - a small fraction really do have thyroid issues (and could potentially be excused from said tax).
2) taxing obese people would (beyond all the moral and ethical questions that arise) disproportionately affect people that already screwed by the status quo, people of lower income that cannot afford to eat better.
Obesity is a symptom, in the same way that homelessness is a symptom of a failed policy towards mental disorders. Just as some people treat depression and PTSD though alcoholism, some people consume unhealthy food that is cheap and keeps them going. The same reason that demographic also disproportionately smokes, it's a cheap chemical hit that keeps them awake while working two jobs.
This reeks of "Fuck you, I've got mine".
People of lower income can't afford to spend less money on food?
...keeps them awake while working two jobs.
Please familiarize yourself with even the basic statistics on poverty in the west before discussing this topic further (hint: google the fraction of poor people who work).
The US also has a lot of "off label" prescribing of other anti psychotic meds. This includes risperidone - which again promotes weight gain. The rate of prescribing mental health meds has increased dramatically since the 1990s.
The mechanism of weight gain for some mental health meds is not just "increased appetite, eats more" either. Part of it is the sedating effect so people need less calories, and there might be some changes to gut flora.
Gut flora to lose weight: http://bbc.co.uk/news/health-22458428
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...
http://rt.com/usa/children-antipsychotic-taking-us-187/
[1] are you aware how you come across and just don't care?
I'm aware you don't like me. I make no effort to signal loyalty to the American "blue tribe" (c.f. Scott Alexander [1]). Further, I am willing to discuss inconvenient facts/questions and I oppose the fashionable anti-intellectualism that's pushing into the tech world. This angers people.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
I know it's a phony signal yet I haven't correctly dismissed it. Please tell me what I'm doing wrong.
I don't think you really appreciate what it's like to be fat and hungry and how that affects the ability to make good long term eating habits. Blaming somebody for being fat when they eat when hungry seems to make as much sense to me as blaming a fat cat for eating all the food their owner gives them. Imagine living life following the rule that whenever you have to pee, you've got to wait 3 hours before peeing. It's something like that. If you want to recommend a successful strategy I recommend recommending one where you avoid the signal altogether. Suggesting that people try to directly ignore their primitive biological urges is simply ridiculous, that's like thinking you can hire somebody with poor conscientiousness but make up for it by telling them, "Be more conscientious!"
This is purely anecdotal and YMMV but I used to be ravenous by dinner time inspite of eating breakfast and a large lunch. Completely eliminating sugar from my diet helped a lot. Drinking green tea and other NON SUGARY liquids throughout the day also helps.
By definition, "I'll eat" is not the same strategy as "not eating".
I don't think you really appreciate what it's like to be fat and hungry...
I assure you I do - I was a very fat teenager, and suffered a lot of hunger to cut down. Earlier this year I cut from 245 (the result of a dirty bulk) to 195 (cruiserweight, rockin a 6 pack).
If you want strategies to mitigate the unpleasant feelings of hunger, I suggest liquids (often thirst feels like hunger) and flavorful low calorie foods. Pani puri (no sev!!!) is one of my goto's - flavorful, but it's just water. I've also taught myself to enjoy the feeling of hunger - when I feel it, I tell myself that it's the feeling of weight loss.
If you want to view yourself as having no more agency than a cat or a separate person in order to deflect blame for your own choices, I can't stop you.
Agency is not separate from biology; Social pressure is also not agency.
You can. It's called 'living in Europe.'
He's talking about total costs, including to the government.
Rightly or wrongly, he believes there's room to dramatically lower actual health care costs.
We do exactly that :) http://temizlikyolda.com/
Works brilliantly.
You know what I miss most? While there are plenty of online courses, some even for particular specializations, noone offers "synthesizable" courses targeted at arbitrary special fields with arbitrary preexisting skills. For example, I want to learn everything about state-of-the-art battery production (e.g. how factories operate, what the scaling issues are etc.). I have a background mostly in IT, physics from school, strong in mathematics. I should be able to choose this specialized topic and then "add" prerequisite courses until I'm confident that I can build on my existing knowledge and get exactly what I need to know to become proficient in battery production.
My current choices are either to study physics at a major university and try to find courses that cover my target topic to specialize towards the end (realistically, I'd have to read 100+ publications to cover recent advances), or to find books on the topic and whenever I feel I lack knowledge to understand a book, other books to cover these holes. Very difficult, trial-and-error and slow. Or I could hire a personal trainer(?) proficient in the field (how to find?) to get me there.
Neither of these seem very attractive and efficient and having a flexible online course system for this purpose would really help. Any takers? Don't you want a simple, effective way to become proficient in a particular field without wading knee-deep through useless material for years?
Some random thoughts on some points that stand out more for me.
There are tools for 4, but non barely noticeable. There are problems with batteries too.
13 is disturbing. I won't work with him and he probably won't be willing to hire me.
14 would be great but I'm afraid paper and pencil are still the best tools if we want to trust the results of an election and keep ballots anonymous, notwithstanding a lot or research on the subject. I won't trust any solution with an IP header that can be traced to me or with a database that could receive fake votes. At least in physical elections parties can send their representatives to polling stations and check if anything strange is going on.
29. Indoor Maps from Google is tackling that problem. Probably they are not the only ones working on that.
Getting 31 for free is pretty common in Europe and probably in other areas of the world. That's not a matter of being in 2014 but of where one lives.
In UK that's done by Crunch (http://www.crunch.co.uk/)
[1] "27. Be able to see a list of all single people in LA right now and efficiently sort through this data, with two way opt-in, to find an ideal match"
ER problem is US specific. Scandinavian countries don't have that problem (to name 1st world countries that have "solved" HC).
What does he want to test via blood? There are a lot of specific solutions available.
Some would argue he should buy a Tesla and that's that on the car front.
And then there's just the stupid stuff like "call FD with an app"..... cuz 911 is soo hard to remember. And the gross misunderstanding of Bitcoin. The value fluctuates. That's any currency, not just Bitcoin. Even the value of the dollar is volatile (inflation).
He couldn't find a physicist to teach him GR? That's so amusing it brought me to tears. Did he try .... a local university?
The invasion of privacy he calls for is .... disturbing.
If he can get MRI's done @ 100$ per pop, he's got a business to run and money to make. Go do it!
I could go on tearing that list to shreds.
6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon "Clean").
There's actually a new Swedish startup (I'm not a part of it) that does exactly this! https://twitter.com/LaundryOnlineSE
"LaundryOnline is a swedish startup created to make ur day more awesome by taking care of ur laundry. We pick up and deliver ur laundry fast and easy." Seems cool!
12. Get a qualified guitar / piano / cello teacher to come to my house without randomly calling people on craigslist or doing general google searches.
13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now.
Both of these are possible with the right apps~
There are a lot of worthy problems on this list, but #7 has been completely solved by the current connected car devices like Zubie (http://zubie.co/) or Automatic (https://www.automatic.com/).
If this one gets solved, it would be weirdly ironic. That's supposedly what public markets are for. This BTW, is one an entrepreneurial government could tackle.
Is this all that technology is good for?
I think this app is called telephone. You use it by typing an identifier of the service you want to reach (e.g. 911) and a call is dispatched.
Thought this was basically urgent care.
If you google "divorce online" you get a shitload of links for existing services.
This is exactly what TrainingPeaks does.
Like Amazon Firefly.
But it sounds like this person is incredibly self entitled and wouldn't pay for that.
Umm... really???