bgilroy26

A friend of mine from High School who has totally devoted her life to bottom-up organizing for social change made a FB post of these organizations which she recommends because she says that's where your money goes the furthest.

--- Lawyers for Good Government[0], which sends human rights lawyers to the parts of mexico where migrants are stuck because of this whole Fortress America thing Trump's doing

--all the groups in the community justice exchange[1], which pay people's bonds/bail to get them out of prison/detention, for example Chicago Community Bond Fund.

---Upavim Community DVLPT Foundation[2] (indigenous Guatemalan community organizing and Mayan language interpretation)

---No More Deaths/No Más Muertes[3] (every dollar = a gallon of water in the desert where migrants die of thirst, plus abuse documentation and help finding missing people)

---Uprooted & Rising[4] -organizing to change food systems for the better

[0] https://www.lawyersforgoodgovernment.org/

[1] https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory

[2] https://www.facebook.com/pages/Upavim-Community-DVLPT-Founda...

[3] https://nomoredeaths.org/

[4] http://uprootedandrising.org/

The internet is so great

What is your favorite historical Czech movie? Which one do you think was the best executed?

>Anyone ever seen a repository of tasks? I’m imagining finding something I’m interested in and subscribing to the daily tasks for that topic?

This is such a cool idea!

I think things like Awesome X lists for X technology to learn[0] or Fullstack Python are examples of this, and obviously for cooking/recipes this is a solved problem, but the idea of a github-like fork/clone system for general public todo lists is really motivating

[0]. e.g. https://github.com/onlurking/awesome-infosec

He has a lambda calculus talk in python[0] that is just as good. Just a great educator.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCLMl0e_0k

This is great, thank you for sharing!

Thank you!

This is awesome

What was last decade's big vqporware?

It seems from your description that it would be possible to capture the teenage market with artists who are independent from any existing label and own the music rights and thus run a streaming service with greater than 26% gross margin.

Thank you for the link, it's very helpful in understanding the business side of these things.

It seems like ASCAP and RIAA are the power players in the arena rather than BMG/Universal and all of them?

I was surprised that Spotify had such a low profit margin -- 26% -- and I found an article[1] that explains that royalties are the biggest factor. They go on to explain that Netflix's solution to the royalties squeeze has been to launch original content.

I wonder why Spotify and Tidal don't have recording studios launching new music? Do they figure the library of existing music is so massive that they can't ever get ahead of it with original content? It can't be that existing music studios have been running so efficiently that they can't be successfully undercut by one or two companies who have a grip on most music listening behavior.

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/13406/gross-margin-of-spotify...

Stephen Strogatz's lectures are good for dynamical systems.

https://youtu.be/ycJEoqmQvwg

A union is different from a church, club, or being a consumer some place because it is at your job and is part of how you generate income.

Non-union employees get the same pay raises union employees do, a rational actor in a non-compulsory union shop would not join the union because they don't want to pay dues. That is why joining a union is compulsory.

In 2017, Fenty Beauty found an underserved market (dark-skinned women and high-quality makeup) and made a killing selling them what they wanted. If you relied solely on history and stereotypes, you would believe nobody could make $500 million dollars that way.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/05/15/rihannas-fenty-is-...

Most stereotypes are lagging indicators that do not tell us about the future, as the history of Fenty Beauty makes clear.

Border security, policing, military spending

https://www.ft.com/content/9ce05a54-c424-11e9-a8e9-296ca6651...

>Unions are a layer of bureaucracy, red tape and an entity that cares more about the Union than anything else.

These descriptors cover most human organizations. Churches, clubs, businesses.

It is a sleeping giant of a problem. I share your issue. In college, friends would end my stories with "...and then you found 5 dollars?" because after a series of digressions, I had never arrived at the point.

I think practice with public speaking is the best way to improve. Look for meetups or toastmasters near you.

The core skill is guessing what your audience cares about. Once you master concision, you can play with dramatic structures that hint at the point, but hide it until the right moment, but first you need to figure out what people want to hear and get right to it.

One problem I can see in your statement is that you need to recognize the language people usually use when they are saying what you are trying to say. When you say "VR simulations for First Responders, focused on low-cost for high training value", you are missing that 'value' in marketing-speak already means low cost.

If patio11 were here, he would probably say not to market your product as low-cost in the first place. While it's true that nobody likes to spend money, in marketing, the goal is to provide something people do want rather than to tell them you can help them avoid something they don't want. Practice taking off your engineering hat and putting on your marketing hat. They are different roles with different languages and values. When you put down Powerpoint and marketing speak, it seems like you haven't spent enough time trying to understand sales people and what they do. Don't underestimate the value of marketing.

When you have your marketing hat on, your goal should be to figure out what your customers want and tell them that you have it.

I think we will look back on this period of American universities (between say the 1980s and whenever the NFL gets a basic minor league) as a great aberration. College sports were meant to be clubs of enthusiasts from the student body, not a parallel big business.

Maybe as an intermediate step, you could have schools that sponsor the teams and offer scholarships for when the players leave professional sports. That would be nice for the players involved because they would be a bit older and better able to take advantage of their studies.

Math contests feature prominently in the Cardano-Tartaglia dispute, an important chapter in the history of the discovery of the cubic equation.

http://brain.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/Cardano-Tartaglia_Dis...

A car service app that the public uses has a large surface for regulatory enforcement. When NYC wants to catch illegal car service activity they have police or the taxi commission post people at the airport.

Incorporation somewhere without rules only works if the space your enterprise operates in is outside the reach of the gov't as well.

I wonder what you think of Brick (2005)

That was a great read, thank you!

It was a lagging effect of the bubble. The 'build anything, people will buy it' approach resulted from people's excessive faith in housing and the widespread idea that prices could only appreciate, which I take to be the true cause of the housing bubble.

The movie Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, Jimmy Stewart, 1959) attempted to publicize the "irresistible impulse" factor of the insanity defense

Raymond Hettinger has a great video introduction to SAT solvers in python [47m]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GP9OpZPUYc

I think the big moment, if it comes, is when you can envision the difference between how people value the asset in question and how that asset is actually valued. In the case of the housing market, most people in 2003 pictured suburbification and the generation of baby boomer retirement communities as inevitable economic engines. But in the same era, Arrested Development the TV show was skewering over-production of prefab houses and they were closer to the truth.

If you could make an analogous case today that the majority of the companies that make up the S&P 500 are over-valued then you could presage the popping of the ETF bubble. In this case, however, the population size of the S&P 500 is much easier to monitor than the population of houses in the US Housing Market, which in 2003 were being built far from Wall Street in pockets of Arizona, Nevada, and Florida. In addition, companies can be subbed in and out of the index with ease in a way that houses cannot pop in and out of the market.

That is why I think the housing bubble pop in 06/07 is not analogous to the current era with ETFs

Roomi is a business centered around connecting roommates

https://roomiapp.com/

Taking the example of games like chess and Go, where AlphaZero dominates, wouldn't we have to fear people misusing AI by setting up specific arenas and applying AI there long before AI misuses itself?

" Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-utan [orangutan] for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?"

-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia[1]

He was a disgusting person who should be relegated to the annals of history, not celebrated with a birthday party like a blood relative.

[1] https://www.stolaf.edu//people/fitz/COURSES/Jefferson--Notes...