dmitriy_ko

Why Amazon didn't choose Dallas or Houston?

I lost cards many times. Never been asked to pay a fee to get new card. No forms to fill out either. You just call them, tell them you need new card and they send it.

All your fraudulent credit card transactions will be cancelled if this happens. Not so with cash.

you are right. I'm sure Bender has always on internet connection, so he doesn't need a phone to make phone calls:)

That reminds me of Futurama episode where Bender finds a phone booth: "Now I don't need to carry my phone with me all the time!"

Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.

China is doing it at MUCH larger scale and a lot more intrusive. Everything on the internet is tracked and filtered, cameras everywhere. Chinese government can pinpoint location of any of it's 1.3 bln citizens.

"Talent" is now used in the context of recruitment for almost any job that requires some level of skill. E.g. I heard it being used for police officers ("law enforcement talent").

Android didn't commodify phone hardware. There are Android phones in different price ranges, from $1000 ones like Galaxy Note 9 and Pixel to $100 ones.

"all the school districts were better than average"

That might be a statistical impossibility:-)

Amazon accepts returns for 30 days and pays for shipping if you select "Item defective or doesn't work" for your return reason. However, that kind of con may still be very profitable for merchant since many buyers won't bother returning. 1. Pay for couple hundred 5-star reviews before Christmas 2. Get tens of thousands of orders 3. Send people cheap defective items that costs 1/10 of price to manufacture 4. Profit! Even if 80% of buyers return, it could still be profitable.

Uber/Lyft use limited road space more efficiently vs traditional cabs due to 1. Shared rides (Uber Pool and Lyft Line) 2. Lower deadheading factor, as Uber and Lyft work on larger scale and use better dispatching algorithms, so they need to drive less to pickup next passenger

Stack them vertically to save space?

When you buy a can of diced tomatoes, how do you think were they diced? Do you think it was done manually? I'm pretty sure slicing and dicing vegetables is a problem that has been solved at industrial scale a long time ago.

Capitalism is so ingrained now, nobody can even imagine that alternative system could exist. In the minds of most, communism is a synonym of authoritarianism. Communist governments tended to be authoritarian, but it's not clear to me if it's a natural consequence of communism. It's more likely that authoritarianism is a consequence of violent revolutions. Is it possible to combine communism with democracy?

With gradient descent you are walking in the direction of negative gradient. Stirring the pile implies that you are walking randomly from point to point.

> So long as all the various agencies still demand paper documents, nobody can ever claim to be "turbotax" for immigration. This is slightly faster/cheaper, but is nowhere near the speed to justify that analogy.

TurboTax is useful because it provides an easy interface for doing your taxes -- electronic filing is just a bonus. Say IRS only accepted paper forms. It just means that you would have to print your return documents from TurboTax and mail them (an option that is still available in TurboTax). Mailing in IRS forms is not the hard part, it's filling them out. TurboTax was able to replace tax agents for most people because it guides you through the process and does all calculations for you. eFiling is just icing on the cake.

I don't work in this field but here is answer to your question: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1162

This 10% figure seems to originate on this blog post: http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19848/musks-hyperlo...

The guy makes assumption of single 28 person pod leaving every 30 second to get 3360 passengers/hour throughput. But these parameters are not set in stone. Pods could be joined into platoons that move together to form "trains". With 10 pod platoon you get 33600 passenger/hour -- neary 3x throughput of California High Speed rail when it's built. Pods could also be made wider to accommodate multiple people along cross-section.

> government programs with benefits- like welfare- blow %75 of their budget on overhead and only pay out %25

That's hard to believe. Source?

I like that idea -- for less time-sensetive deliveries you could have a "mothership" truck loaded with mini-vehicles drive to a neighborhood center and then release them. However, for things like food delivery where you want to deliver in under an hour, it will be better to just use mini-vehicles.

Yes, and package delivery autonomous car can be made very small -- just big enough to carry the package. In fact, a ground-based autonomous delivery vehicle doesn't have to look anything like a car. Imaging an autonomous Segway-like 2-wheel cart. Segway is 4.5 times more efficient that Toyota Prius and 11 times more efficient than average American passenger vehicle.[1] Something like that would allow delivering packages very cheaply.

[1] http://www.segway.com/downloads/pdfs/energy_efficient_segway...

Where and at what speed do you usually drive? I don't get more than 35 miles on battery on my 2015 Volt, but most of my driving is on freeways in off-traffic hours.

That's only true for rooftop installations. For utility-scale installations (solar farms) panels is still most of the cost. Solar farms will benefit the most from further drop in panel costs.

On moving walkway, you can still walk so you speed is moving_walkway_speed + your_speed. Here it's just walkcar_speed.

>If there does end up being some sort of HUGE central energy storage happening, I doubt it would be in batteries. Talk about being difficult/expensive to scale...

Why would it be difficult/expensive to scale? As long as battery costs go down, there's absolutely no issue scaling. You just put as many of them as you want together.

Wind farm would have to be about 30 times bigger than area taken by nuclear plant. Solar farm -- about 15 times [1]. Renewables definitely take more land. But there's no shortage of land in most places in the world. Shortage of arable land? Sure. But not land in general. E.g. all US energy demand could be met by covering a small fraction of Arizona deserts with solar panels. Solar and wind could also be located offshore.

[1] http://wilderness.org/sites/default/files/legacy/Website-Lan...

Evolutionary phycologist Malcolm Potts explains this phenomenon as an evolutionary adaptation developed in some species of primates. In particular, we share this behavior, "the war instinct" with our close relative chimpanzee. The behavior is the following: identify your "ingroup", the social group where you live, and then attack an "outgroup", a competing social group. This is an evolutionary-beneficial behavior because it allows a group to gain additional resources: land and females. According to this theory human predisposition for war is innate rather than cultural.

If you are interesting in learning more about this theory, here's the book:

Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World by Malcolm Potts ISBN 978-1935251705

> It's unfortunate that many companies thrive despite situations like this, but it happens all the time.

Would you prefer successful company run by incompetent people or unsuccessful company run by competent people?

What about women who work 60 hours a week?

13% ANNUALLY. If their margin is 6.5% they will still make profit as long as they keep their stock less than half a year on average.