469 karma · joined September 29, 2008
It's quite hard. Yes, true health care should be preventive, but this also means money is paid before any health problem occurs. Yet the general public are reactionary consumers. Why would they pay when they are still healthy?
Perhaps you have a better suggestion.
When a business's profit is proportional to the well being of the mass, then capitalism is great.
Problem arise when profit is proportional the degradation of the public health, the number of wars being waged, and the amount of people being imprisoned.
Then of course we have to "regulate" it.
Some may say capitalism is "in-efficient" when it's regulated. I completely agree, in the sense that any algorithm is in-efficient when there is more over heard.
It may be easier to think of the task of improving the state of the world as a global optimization problem in computation. Experienced computer scientists will tell you that the hardest part of an optimization problem is defining exactly what is to be optimized - Think fitness measure in a genetic algorithm.
This make sense. We can make an algorithm as efficient as possible, but if we are optimizing the wrong thing then all the work are pointless.
As complex as the world is, I can't bring myself to believe that profit alone is enough as the fitness measure. That's why people have proposed adding other measures such as carbon emission credit to be traded in a capitalistic algorithm. (Maybe we should even add more measures such as health and education credit.)
Some may call this "regulating" capitalism. I personally think it's just redefining the fitness function, which is a very sensible thing to do in terms of computation.
Combined with San Francisco, Berkeley, there are far more things to do than I can make it to.
Ultimately, of course, being content is not about finding more fun things. It's about finding more things fun.
For that matter, mainstream popularity of anything has always had a good dose of randomness in it (I bet you can model it with some sort of free energy / entropy equation). For example, it's hard to break down exactly why the No.1 hit song is No.1, or that No.7 song is permanently No.7. Usually it has more to do with the politics of the record company than the quality of the song itself.
We are also being a bit pessimistic here. Lisp is not un-popular. It just hasn't reach the critical mass yet. And it seems to be going to that direction with unraveling of Clojure.
If Mint is doing well, Yodlee is too. If Mint fails, Yodless will still have a diverse client base to support its business.
If the effectiveness of learning is in question here then we would have already seen a decline in college attendance.
Yet college degree has only become more obligatory over the years for even the most mediocre jobs, despite the fact that employers know whatever students learn in college rarely contributes to real world job skills.
Online college will only take over if it becomes more prestigious than traditional college. However, currently they seems to be on the same status bracket as community college.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all about changing the broken education system. In fact, I have a hybrid distributive model of education, but it will take too long to explain here. An article is due.
Ultimately, customer satisfaction comes from getting the greatest value/deal in the least amount of time. No body actually enjoys the act of shopping. Just ask your mom or girlfriend how they feel when they spend hours shopping and come back empty handed.
Perhaps the author redesign could enable faster transaction. It doesn't sound like he's going for that direction though.
Good customer service has to be experienced, or shared by the word of mouth, not told by the vendor. Zappos already did well in that department, don't ruin it.
Inspirational.
He was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.
In 1991, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement, titled I Quit, I Think, to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living".
I'd been happy if the education system pick a side and either focus on career preparation or humanity enrichment. But nowadays it pretends to do both and failed at them miserably.
Thus I can't help but think that the system is just a giant marketing scheme to make $140 off a hardworking family.
I imagine this isn't too hard. You probably need to design a clever light-intensity-test to determine the range your cam can detect.
It's tough however. If your target audience is the main stream public, which it seems like it, then there will always be a mental barrier of learning how to operate yet another machine. Most of this audience don't even know what a server is.
Aside from that, you will be competing with every cloud-base service out there, even the ones that are not on the radar yet. You end up spreading your resource to develop interfaces for music, photo, documents, etc, while sites like flikr only need to worry about photo.
Personally I'd pick an easier battle field, but then again, what's an entrepreneur but someone who innovates and fights hard battles.
But then, why don't we just stop using emails, just do video conference, or better yet face-to-face meetings?
Because there are other limiting factors. For example, no one has the time to have real-time conversation all the time. Real-time also limits the amount of people you can effectively communicate with.
That's why we have email/forum/tweet, because they serve different functionality.
Thus, real-time communication will never replace static communication as long as such intrinsic logistic limits exist.
Traffic bottle neck, prone to accident. A horrible idea probably as a result of laziness.
- Plan out your daily deadlines the day before and stick with it.
- Do NOT extend a deadline. If you go over a deadline, stop the activity and move on to the next one on the schedule. This will condition you to prioritize more effectively next time. (e.g. Knowing that you only have two hours to code something really boost up your code productivity.)
It's just unfortunate, because they could easily be just as successful via a more honest strategy. Costumers need however much support they can get, official or not. Many times I prefer official forums for support, because I get faster response.
I guess greed gets the best of us. But it does make more money. At what cost though.
1. Nutritional needs depend on age, time, body, activities, etc.
2. The desire for tasty food often greatly out-weights the desire for nutritional food.
3. Evolutionarily, we were designed to want more than what we need.
We were evolved to be rational, but only in the environment that we evolved from. The environment we have now is far from small hunter-gatherer tribes, yet we are still equipped with the same rationale mechanisms. Hence, it's not working out perfectly.
Maybe if we restructure our society to simulate what it once was or at least some parts of it, we can better utilize our rationale mechanisms.
But I also think it is possible to train yourself to manage your emotions better despite how strong our instinctual wiring is. This is evident in the long history of meditation practices.
So, it's good that the government is nursing us. And it will be even better if, in addition to that, they integrate meditation, behavior economics, entrepreneurial training courses, etc, into our education system. However, the current education system is far from that.
Still, I'd rather see these resource being spent on educating the public on behavioral economics as suppose to using the knowledge to manipulate the public.
It's true that in most situations, indirect persuasion is more effective at influencing someone's behavior than direct preaching. However, at some point, the public needs "grow up" too, and always treating us like five year olds certainly won't stimulate this process.
I hope these guys see that.
Great idea nevertheless.
He would get way better results by looking for co-founders as suppose to employees.
Better developers and a lot more work done for $0.
FYI, both had advance tool making, and neanderthals had bigger brains too.
However, I do plan to have a tribe of smart, fun, and motivated friends.
Have a billion, you can do a lot.
Have a tribe, you can do anything (including making a billion.)
Just focus on K-12, heck, just focus on high school, and make it really good. One thing at a time.
Plus, when it comes time to network for your start-up, old-timers tend to have a lot more connections and resources too.