37 karma · joined August 7, 2020
Coincidentally, it also features the very lemming story that brought us here.
Lots of experimentation in the thread if you're interested in playing around with it.
They're small enough that you can store and use them in most rooms, and in my experience, the ease with which you can add and remove weight reduced the friction of deciding whether or not to work out, which helps a lot when trying to start a consistent habit.
They're not as versatile as an actual gym, but I got a pair of these when between gyms for a couple of years, and you can do a lot with them if you're creative. (For example--instead of squats and deadlifts, which would have required far more weight than I had available, I switched to lunges and one-legged squats).
[1] https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effect...
To be clear, I don't strictly disagree with your outsider interpretation, but...if it's recapitulating the history of finance at 100x speed, at a thousandth of the cost, with the end result of removing an aspect (centralization) that could plausibly considered an irreconcilable technical debt, then...I mean, I'm personally not in that world at all, but I think that smart contracts have a lot of potential, in the abstract, and I'm all for early adopters who aren't me volunteering as guinea pigs.
I genuinely think there's something novel here; I just don't know what form it will take, or how many millions of dollars we'll burn on shitcoins finding it. Like the first internet bubble--we'll have to shovel through a lot of pets.coms to find our proverbial Amazons.
[Tangentially, I'm reminded of something I read yesterday about the nonexistent technological breakthrough, Write-Only Memory:
"write-only memory: A form of computer memory into which information can be stored but never, ever retrieved, developed under government contract in 1975 by Professor Homberg T. Farnsfarfle. Farnsfarfle's original prototype, approximately one inch on each side, has so far been used to store more than 100 trillion words of surplus federal information. Farnsfarfle's critics have denounced his project as a six-million-dollar boondoggle, but his defenders point out that this excess information would have cost more than 250 billion dollars to store in conventional media."]
-set standards that all members abide by, potentially bypassing "tragedy of the commons'-style coordination problems
-share information which, in a more cutthroat environment, would be considered "trade secrets".
Not sure how these would apply to the dairy industry specifically; it just seems overly broad to say that price fixing is the only plausible form of cooperation.
Granted, the positioning is a bit annoying. If I did it more often, I'd get a tripod.
One thing of note: I lived in a semi-rural college town in the USA, with very few uber drivers but a fairly active "beeper" group organized on facebook--born of a designated driver system that expanded into general use--where people would manually post that they were available to drive or needed a driver.
The infrastructure wasn't very good, and there's no real reputation system aside from word of mouth, but it stands as a proof of concept. In theory, now that the idea's in the air, just about anyone could just slap a front-end on a routing system and cut Uber's take out entirely, as long as they're willing to deal with the responsibility (or absence) of things like payment processing and liability for things that transpire on their system.
42 million for the CEO strikes me as extravagant, but that alone is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount required to give every driver a noticeable boost in income.
Intuitively, it feels like the only sustainable way to do that is to raise the cost of every ride. Why they don't do that...probably comes down to a spreadsheet that tells them it will lose them money in the long term.
(Full disclosure, I haven't looked any further into it or even finished the podcast, so I'm not sure how much of that description is straight hype).
Episode: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/founders-fund/anatomy-of-ne...
Company in question: https://www.buildcover.com/