czr80

So, the textbook answer people will give you is risk diversification - even if you believe in the company, why keep all your eggs in one basket?

While there is some truth to this, there is also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Basically, the risk is that people most likely to want to sell are those with some suspicion that there is a problem, buyers are therefore suspicious and demand a discount, this in turn drives out people with stock in good companies since they don't want to sell at a big discount, and the market collapses...

Loss leaders are sources of revenue, but not sources of profit.

Sweden vs United states?

Your examples are talking about something quite different - they would be relevant if we were talking about Apple and Samsung and Nokia sitting down and agreeing to set prices together. But we're not.

Let me say that I think we largely agree, and that I'm deeply sympathetic to your immune system analogy. The US over-reacted, badly, and many, many innocent people were killed because of that. And arguably we are all less safe now, precisely because of that over-reaction.

I have been extremely critical of that reaction in the past, along much of the same lines you state. I haven't changed my mind on that, but I have also come to realise that it's actually really hard to calibrate risk in this situation - in the case of car accidents or lightning strikes, say, we can forecast expected outcomes very accurately, and the variance of those outcomes is relatively low. The threat model for an intelligent opponent is very different - history is a poor guide and the variance of potential outcomes is very high.

Before 9/11 the idea that terrorists could destroy two skyscrapers by simultaneously coordinating multiple hijackings was ridiculous - a B-movie plot or paranoid fantasy. Today, not so much. What ridiculous fantasy will be true in 10 years time?

Again, none of this means that the reactions were smart - but the idea that there needs to be some reaction is not a priori stupid, and to try to characterize it as such weakens your argument (imho).

The US reaction was not smart, but in fairness 9/11 was a big deal because it forced a recalibration of the tail risk from a terrorist attack - a whole bunch of scenarios (dirty bomb, chem or bio attack) that require complex planning and resources are much easier to believe post-911.

Probably selection bias.

This is an interesting article, thanks for sharing. Your summary does not quite reflect the article though. You say "In fact, it's been known for months that the DEA receives intercepts from the NSA in such volume that they have an office devoted to handling them (the DEA's "Special Operations Division")", which to me created the impression that the NSA was funneling large amounts of information about US citizens to the DEA.

However, the article actually says: "...two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.", and later that "the Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden." [emphasis mine]

It's quite possible that the NSA passed only occasional information about non-US citizens - it's impossible to tell from that article - if that's the case, then to many people they're acting within their mandate.

I'm not trying to defend the NSA, and I'm deeply troubled by the implications of mass surveillance. But it's important I think to be clear about the claims we're making since otherwise it's easy for people to dismiss us.

It's fascinating how successful Google has been at marketing itself to geeks - it doesn't matter that none of the really cool stuff has actually shipped (and perhaps will never ship). The dream is there, and that's enough to get the kids in to work on improving advertising (while dreaming of changing the world).

Is that cynical? Probably, don't mind me. It's just reading these comments you'd think self-driving cars, say, were a done deal, and yet when I read things like this they seem an awfully long way away:

>The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident—about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing. Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. “The risk is too high,” Thrun says. “You would never accept it.” The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces. (The first drops call forth a small icon of a cloud onscreen and a voice warning that auto-drive will soon disengage.) It can’t tell wet concrete from dry or fresh asphalt from firm. It can’t hear a traffic cop’s whistle or follow hand signals.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/25/131125fa_fact_...

I'm not sure why you're quoting standard boilerplate at me (as if any site with UGC would say the opposite of what you quoted), but I was just going by their official statement, which is rather hostile.

It's probably irrational, but Academia.edu's domain really annoys me - I dislike a company using a .edu domain. It feels deceptive, in some way.

Come to think of it, implicitly calling for a boycott of another company while simultaneously trying to bootstrap a business based on violating that company's license terms feels pretty slimy too.

The price of food will rise only if demand for food increases or supply falls, it won't change just because people have more money.

Why that probably doesn't mean what you think it means: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/07/android-ma...

Responsibility is not zero-sum - it's perfectly possible for multiple people to share different degrees of responsibility for an outcome.

Interesting you make the same mistake. Actually, woman magazines are bought by women interested in woman's magazines - this is a subset of all women, and may or may not be particularly representative of women as a whole.

An example of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Your analogy to IE6 isn't clear, because Apple has a clear incentive to keep its browser competitive with browsers on Android.

What's your evidence for that claim?

Modular in this sense I can completely see, but this is different from having them designed to physically interlock.

Still think this makes no sense at all, though I'm happy to be proved wrong. I think the endgame for personal devices is making the electronics invisibly small, which requires more integration, not less.

The S-class is famously the test bed for new technologies - they start at the high end and then slowly migrate downrange.

How casually you throw away the institutions you were very fortunate to inherit, with no understanding of what you're doing.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/10/14/the-default...

Let me guess: Suppliers of commodity hardware have an incentive to make that hardware look as attractive as possible, suppliers competing on other dimensions lie about other things ("We're open!, "It's magical")

Or did you mean something else?

Debugging.

Can you share any insight into what went wrong?

How would feel about the data being shared with a prospective employer, perhaps sold to them as part of a recruitment service?

Congress is perfectly free to pass laws overturning previous laws, get them through the Senate and have the President sign them into law. That's how the system works.

Congress should not be free to demand arbitrary changes to laws as a condition of funding unrelated activities or as a condition of not blowing up the world's financial system (the debt ceiling, in two weeks).

Do you really see these two options as equivalent?

The NSA probably is building profiles on many people. But so are Google, Facebook, etc. The real problem is not the NSA (well, not just the NSA) - it's the inherent design of the internet. We're trying to live private lives on public networks, and we're going to have to go through some serious growing pains before that is resolved.

Why is it emotionally easier to spend $5 on a coffee vs spending $5 on an app?

I have a theory on this - I think we price experiences differently from objects, and have a much higher bar for buying an object vs buying an experience. And I think the reason for that is ultimately loss aversion - if we buy a bad coffee it's gone and we can forget about it, whereas if we buy an object we're stuck with it, a constant reminder of how we made a bad choice and lost money.