bioh42_2

As someone who did not join live journal, friendster, orkut, myspace, etc, I too think Facebook is likely a fad.

However, these days even I am tempted to get a Facebook and/or twitter sock puppet account, if only because more and more of social interaction is moving to them. More and more of the "Hey we'll bet at X around Y" chatter is exclusively on Facebook.

And I am old enough to remember when only anti-social geeks made appointments on-line instead of IRL!

I don't recall myspace or anything ever reaching the scope and popularity Facebook has. And I am starting to wonder if Facebook is in fact NOT a fad?

There's also another story (google fails me) about a legendary IBM programmer around whom IBM built an entire team of testers, documenters, etc, all to keep this one guy's way above average productivity going. That story also makes me sad.

These stories make me sad because I know how huge a difference the environment makes to everyone's job.

The key points about the black team:

1. A few individuals that happen to be a bit above average at finding defects.

2. Bring them together, create a team.

3. Support them, but mostly just get out of their way and don't distract them with management B.S.

Very little change and support results in a huge jump in their productivity!

Same thing with the single legendary programmers, simply relive him of non-programming tedious tasks, give him enough support staff to keep up with his output and again HUGE productivity boost.

What's so sad about this is that is so rarely happens. I think most people are capable of having this productivity jump, if only they'd get the same support. OK, let me back of a bit from most and be more precise and say, you should be at least a bit above average.

But why does this so rarely happen? Sadly I think for most sizable companies minor process changes are a huge obstacle.

The bright side of this? Startups. Startups are like these kinds of teams within a behemoth like IBM, except without the behemoth. Or actually a startup up ought to be like that, because that is one of the key advantages a small business should have over the big ones.

This means I would not be surprised if we start using solar, wind, and nuclear power to generate gasoline, and most future cars become very clean running gasoline/electric hybrids.

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy): Liquefied hydrogen has lower energy density by volume than gasoline by approximately a factor of four, because of the low density of liquid hydrogen — there is actually more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline (116 grams) than there is in a liter of pure liquid hydrogen (71 grams).

But of computers enter the text and then the printing is still done by cast metal, you could have an interesting business.

I am sure that will be more expensive, but will people be willing to pay a premium?

It's very easy for kidnapping to be profitable.

All you need is a state with a pathetic justice system.

Start with a police force terrible at finding the real perpetrators of crime. This is very common in the world. It is often found in poor states, which don't have much money for any public spending including police and fire. Often the states are autocratic or formerly-autocratic, autocratic states don't really care who's actually guilty. Very often a state is both (ex-)autocratic and poor.

The next step you need is a bad judiciary and a pathetic set of laws. For example, even violent kidnapping which involved mailing fingers to the victim's family, could only earn the convicted two years in jail. I am not making this up, two years at the most, by law.

Then lastly, have incredibly messed up laws which actually make no claim on the ransom money even if you were found guilty. Thus you can do two years in jail, and they enjoy the ransom you extorted. Often the victim's families are not particularly wealthy, or if wealthy not really capable of exacting violent street style vengeance. So you can relax and enjoy your cash.

This is how kidnapping can become a real sector of the economy, look into Columbia in the 80s, and lots of other places.

The best I can do is think of Rome's slave based economy. Obviously slaves can do anything the free Romans could, and they did. The Romans were either plebes, dependent on government handouts like bread and circuses, or they were wealthy and then they mostly went into politics.

I agree with you, but I had to read that sentence three times to realize that.

I think what we agree on, is that a lot of white-collar jobs which often require higher education, are actually fairly easily automated.

A few white-collar jobs however would require strong AI to automate.

But perhaps we don't agree that the first one is "a lot" and the second relatively "few"?

No this is old big co. lobbying, nothing new under the sun.

Their arguments are particularly libertarian, or particularly anything, they are not intended to convince anyone, that's what the lobbying is for, and it is not aimed at the general public.

This is nuts. If say a kid spray paints a tiny bit on an abandoned building at night, and then gets caught, by your logic we should ruin his life. We must treat something like that like murder because the chances of getting caught are so low.

I think communism is chiefly defined by public ownership.

What I propose is an obviously crazy impractical outlawing of owning big houses with much better then average infrastructure. It would still be perfectly legal to have tons of money and lobby your politicians hard. So think of it as law against big, fancy houses, and gated communities.

And it is also true for many other countries, with a mostly poor population. All over the world, one of the big benefits of wealth is the ability to build your own "island" or castle.

But here's an interesting question. If we force everyone with wealth and power to live like the masses, then the only way to improve their lot would be to improve all of society or emigrate. Would we then see a much stronger push against corruption and bad economic policy?

This is obviously a purely intellectual exercise for fun. Some people believe that at some point a country's oligarchy will try to improve things for everyone at least a little bit. This is a very naive view of wealth and power in a chaotic country.

The only ones who can, and some times do, push for reform are the masses. But mobilized masses have short attention spans and can never push for important details. The details remain the devil's domain. This is why masses can get rid of dictators, but everything after the dictator is a painfully slow grind of minuscule improvements.

I believe a slow grind of minuscule improvements describes India's past 50 or so years quite well. Things are improving, just not nearly enough within any one human life time.

Why have the Norwegian dialects diverged so much

A rugged and wast geography tends to isolate people, this leads to greater drift between local dialects? Sweden is big too, but I think Norway is much more mountainous?

Why can Norwegians understand Swedish but Swedes have a hard time understanding Norwegian?

Norwegians are used to listening for a wide range of dialects, Swedes not so much?

Why has Norway stayed out of the European Union?

What's the point of joining for a small yet well of country? If you're big like France and Germany you can guide the EU your way, if you're small but less developed like Spain, Portugal, all the new members, you hope for increased wealth. But if you're Norway, why join?

Why is the English influence of the Norwegian language more noticeable in the capital than elsewhere?

The capital has a bigger economy, more trade, more people's work requires English, more tourists, even the non-UK and non-US tourists are more likely to communicate in English, more entertainment overall, and this means more foreign entrainment - music, movies - in English.

But catfish are fresh water and cod are salt water fish?!

Are you serious? Competition for donations between non-profits in my experience is often even more extreme then between for-profits. Do you have any evidence for softer competition among non-profits?

Besides some non-profits are really phenomenally well functioning for-profits, which happen to have chosen a non-profit tax status.

For example, in the US the non-profit AAA will quickly drop any pick-up truck company known not up to its standards. Mind you, all that's needed if for the truck to show up roughly on time and be reasonably courteous. Still that is quite something when you're in a bad spot and need those kind of services.

And the AAA is popular enough that being on their shit list will cause sever financial pain to any pick-up truck services provider.

But to join the AAA you have to pay a regular fee and they have all kinds of tie-ins with piles and piles of 3rd party service and goods providers.

I don't begrudge them their non-profit tax status, but they are a damn well run and huge business.

But I think the same principles would apply to for-profits. The only other examples I have are anecdotal.

Not always, some times a wild market eventually results in some of the strictest standards which also happen to be self enforced.

I say sometimes but some economists believe, in the long term, this will always happen. I think reality is a bit more complicated, and in the very long term we're all dead. So for the duration of any one human life time, amazing self enforced standards sometimes arise form chaos. Those send to be far superior to anything government can do. But government is often quicker to come up with enforced standards.

Not always intended as sarcastic, but:

The main body of the news report tends to use the renarrative correctly - but sometimes, again, it is intentionally avoided. (...) This is because, due to its ambiguity, the renarrative in such cases could be perceived as a passing of judgement or expression of doubt by the reporter...

What is very valuable is to describe them in terms of how they are different from your culture.

Thus compared to Asia they are very sarcastic, and compared to Britain hardly at all.

But both college and experience are no guarantee of anything. They are more like a faint hope. Hopefully someone with this resume will be as good as the resume suggests they might be!

Now on the other, if this hard crash course + hard working intelligent people results in true valuable skills, then is it fraud? Isn't who ever hires them getting exactly what they hoped they would get? It's like someone slips you Australian dollars instead of US dollars, but enough of them that even after exchange fees you're left with exactly the amount of money you wanted.

But recently there have been some ideas about redefining fiduciary duty:

http://www.lawforchange.org/lfc/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID...

Really, this is just Eliza with a slick new cloud API.

It is well established that certain work scales almost linearly with more people. But it is also well known that a lot of other types of work do not at all scale when you throw more people in. Usually it is intellectual tasks, like programming or turning a startup into a profitable business, that don't scale well.

Try reading the mythical man month.

Get personally involved with your representatives and senators. Write paper letters, call, and show up in person. Be friendly and talk with other voters at the events you show up to. Educate them on this issue. Abandon party affiliation, work with both Democrats and Republicans.