fcbrooklyn

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I promise you, there's at least one animal sitting right at this keyboard who rarely, if ever, shits on the ground.

Genius. And a startup idea to boot. Let's build the mobile app: "Uber for passive aggression."

Outstanding. Now if they can just get behind the burning at the stake part of my idea we'll be in business.

I propose that we collect this data on dogs when people register them, so that when the owners leave shit on the sidewalk they can be identified and burned at the stake.

"One of the most significant findings is that low doses can be more harmful than larger ones."

Wait, what? This jumped out at me, but the article doesn't really elaborate on the surprising claim.

I agree, the analogy is imperfect, because you don't pay interest unless you need to extend or maintain the code. It's only useful in a world where the codebase in question is under ongoing development, but those are the situations where I've used it. Naked calls work fine as an analogy in the case you describe.

Technical debt is actually a really good analogy, precisely because non-technical finance people understand the tradeoff pretty intuitively. Sometimes incurring debt is the right thing to do, but you'll want to pay it down or you'll have to live with the interest. This is true of both monetary and technical debt. For extra credit, you might assign notional interest rates to your technical debt... if they're in the double digits I promise you they'll scare the finance guy.

I'm a dev who has spent many years closing largish deals, and the best thing I've ever read on the subject is "Spin Selling" by Neil Rackham. The focus is on the difference between closing 6 figure deals vs smaller deals and closing deals within organisations as opposed to selling to individuals. http://www.amazon.com/SPIN-Selling-Neil-Rackham/dp/007051113...

It's also the only sales book I've read that actually measures the results of its advice, which might make it especially relevant to technical people.

I live in NYC. It wouldn't surprise me if these machines require direct access for an update, however these machines are serviced >all the time<. Apart from anything else, they need to collect the cash from the ones that accept it, so it's likely that on a given day you'll see a couple of armed MTA employees with a machine open messing with it.

Yep, makes sense. Would be great to know if we could skip the test for people over age X, but maybe just making it expensive for people under that age is a good idea.

I'm not saying it isn't a win, necessarily. I'm saying we don't know if the training is what's causing the win, or if it's just the different demographic. Maybe you could get the exact same effect by either raising the driving age to 21, or keeping the driving age the same but otherwise (through fees and other burdens) discouraging people under 21 from driving. If that were the case (and I have no idea if it is or not), then you'd be unnecessarily costing people time and money, to no good effect.

So my supposition is that although you're allowed to drive at 18 in France, the burden they place on licensing reduces the number of 18 year olds who actually do so, which has the effect of artificially aging their population of drivers. If you want to know how effective the training is, then you might need to normalize for age to eliminate that effect. If the discussion were about differences in how old you need to be to drive, then I'd agree with you, but the article is about the burdensome regulation around driver training.

I think you'd really also need to normalize by age of the driver. I suspect that younger (under 21, say) drivers are more dangerous in both countries, but that in places where it's expensive and time consuming the licensed drivers will tend to be older.

Heh, the first foldable prototypes were made by cutting these things out with an exacto knife. If you ever saw someone do that, you'd know why we're confident that the die-cutting is valuable.