My dream is that the San Francisco Centre mall would be transformed into a huge place dedicated to having fun: restaurants, bars, gaming centers, roller skating, play spaces, live music and so on.
558 karma · joined November 23, 2008
[1] https://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2013/12/the-single-gr...
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Wc2g
My own theory is that at present inflation makes bonds unattractive. At some point a recession will kill inflation (and profits) and make bonds look better relative to stocks.
And, if Google can't pay to be the default any more, and given that users are the product, maybe the solution is for the search engines to somehow pay us to select them as the default.
If there were, as you say, it still might not work. But there were a lot of pictures of empty buildings with lots of lights on, etc. so there are inefficiencies. And if customers were automatically switching off (or simply reducing their own usage) as prices went up maybe prices would never have gotten so high. Ideally it would sort of be a fine-grained "rolling blackout" where priority is determined by what a customer chooses to purchase given all the variables that only the customer is aware of. That's a functioning market.
I agree that it may be completely impractical to make it work for electricity.
Make it live but with a time delay (say 1 hour). Allow .1% of all users to see it immediately. Add a Flag This Content button. Depending on how many people flag it, triage as safe to show/don't show/ask a human to decide.
I'm sure this could be refined. Maybe an hour is too much or too little. Maybe .1% is to many or too few. Also, over time you should be able to recognize groups of users that are better at recognizing different problems based on the fact that they agree with the human review done by fb or whoever.
IMO prop 13 worked out really badly but it isn't the main cause of the problem, just one more giant expense for the new homeowner on top of everything else.
What would you like it to do, what can be done, how to do it, how to organize a group of people to do it, how to make sure it works and stays working, it's all creative work and it takes time to do it well.
The weight of the shell depends on the area (goes up as the square of the radius). The lift depends on the volume (goes up as the cube). Seems like for a large enough size you might be able to get positive lift.
The inward pressure per square inch of shell is constant (14.7 lbs. per sq. in. at sea level with a total vacuum inside), so as long as the inward pressure is distributed evenly it doesn't seem like it has to be stronger just because it is larger.
Inside would only have to be a partial vacuum. You can heat the gas inside to reduce the pressure differential, which might not be too costly if the shell is fairly thick and provides thermal insulation. Here again the volume vs. area works in your favor.
Conclusion: Probably Buckminster Fuller could come up with something.
The Citizens United decision means the money you spend is used to influence the political process. It's part of what you're buying, so why not factor it in to your purchasing decision?
You might start with ninjatrader, which you can get for free. They can connect to yahoo for free price quotes (daily only), and also to some brokers for real time quotes during the day, if you have an account (I use TDAmeritrade and have been pretty happy with it).
ninjatrader has a (wacky) programming language and you can code up the conditions for buying and selling. The really neat thing is that you can run your "strategy" against historical data to see how it would have worked, and tweak it, etc.
Overall it is really painful to work with (if you are a programmer). But it does allow you to learn a lot without spending or risking any money until you think you are ready.
I believe TDAmeritrade has some kind of API you can call directly, but you have to contact them about it. Another one that I have looked at is Interactive Brokers. I haven't used them but I think they are well regarded. They are really aiming at professionals ("industrial" vs. "retail"). Possibly more what you're looking for, since they have a download page.
I would hold my nose and spend some time with ninjatrader (or something like it) just to see what's involved. You can code up your strategy and see on a chart where it would have you buy and sell, and how much you would gain or lose.
It's really pretty tricky and you should have some feel for what works and what doesn't (and when it works and when it doesn't) before you go all in.
You already wrote off the summer and the paycheck. Do what you can and see how it plays out. You could be pleasantly surprised. The probability of that certainly goes up when you do something of value.
Suppose you start a small company to sell earthquake insurance to people in California. You make a lot of money, more and more as the years go by with no earthquake. When the earthquake comes, you can't pay the policy holders. Should the government bail you out? Is it just too bad for the policy holders? Or did you commit fraud?
I don't like regulation but fraudulent activity should be illegal. You certainly can't get away with this with earthquake insurance because the insurance industry is "regulated". The financial industry needs the same kind of regulation. Right now there are huge holes.
1) negotiated noncompete 2) noncompete is a given 3) noncompete forbidden
We now have (2). In theory (1) would be better. (3) is bad for the same reasons that (2) is. But more people benefit from (3), so this legislation could be an improvement.
Re. (1), if a company had to pay me to not compete in the future, I wonder what it would really be worth to them? I bet it's worth more to the individual.
Many years ago I saw the managers at a former employer prevent an ex-employee from taking a new job based on one of these agreements. They were not really concerned about the competition. They wanted to teach him, and the rest of us, a lesson.