justin_vanw

I disagree, you will find better administration.

Imagine you are a great principle/counselor/teacher. You can work anywhere, because you are great at your job. Do you choose to go to the school with the superintendent that is nearly illiterate and completely incompetent at the district where the kids regularly assault each other and the staff? Or do you choose to go to the school where the kids love to learn, love to read, love to study, and respect their teachers and their school?

> Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good.

Yes, that is exactly what it means. It means that I can ignore your theory about what is 'collective good' because it is stupid and will do me and my family irreparable harm, and I can substitute my own theory of what is actually going to move us towards more 'collective good' and act according to that. That is what being free means.

I never said 'better' vs 'none'. I said should you give some resource to someone who could benefit from it when there are other people who also would benefit that you will fail to identify.

Presumably even in my analogy the people not given food had some food, since they were merely weak and not starved to death.

But that ignores my argument anyway! My point is that you should do what you can do, even if it's imperfect. The food analogy was to show that the argument 'don't help some people because it's unfair to the people you don't help' is extremely stupid.

1. Who cares? This is not an argument for or against this. It's totally inappropriate to decide the best way to educate a child based on your personal theories about how wealth should be distributed, and your untested wild ass guess about what effect some educational policy would have on that theory.

2. You get better teachers and a stimulating environment that is challenging.

- Small classes: maybe, it's not necessary at all.

- better curriculum: well, yes, smarter kids can cover a topic more quickly and in more depth. The less smart kids can't keep up, so they have to skim less deeply and/or cover less material.

- more practical: ??? did you feel like you needed 3 bullets or something?

You should have separate schools because there aren't enough gifted kids in one regular school to even fill one class. This comes directly from the definition of gifted, if gifted is say the top 1% of students, a large high-school with 1500 kids would only have 15 of them across 4 grades. You have to do something like a magnet school to have enough kids at the same level in the same room for it to work at all.

1. This is a Harrison Bergeron argument. "We can't let people move quickly, because it might be unfair to other people." Effectively this means denying the people you can identify because there are going to be other 'deserving' people you don't identify. Replace 'education' with 'food' and see if this logic holds up: "We shouldn't feed the people we know are hungry, because other people might be hungry and now they would be disadvantaged because they would be more sickly and weak compared to the people we fed."

2. This is an argument that basically 'every kind of diversity is automatically good' or something. Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can as soon as they can no matter what you do.

3. Smart people do well and often have smart children. They understand education because they have greater than average experience with education and a better ability to apply that knowledge. They will not stick around 'the worst schools' no matter how much you try to force them by handicapping smart kids. It's a free country, they will pull their kids out of bad schools. I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering and much more interested in making sure their kids are given everything they need.

Yea probably. There's no reason to hold them back or subject them to peer abuse, or condition them to hide their gift.

Very gifted students will start knowing more about what they are studying than the teacher between 3rd and 5th grades. They will be completely bored throughout high school if held back to the speed of even above average students. This teaches them that they can coast.

It's a huge disservice to our society that our smartest kids are hobbled and quite often exposed to abuse from peers, leading them to be isolated and preventing them from learning appropriate social skills. Certainly this isn't always what happens, but it very often is exactly what happens.

You're acting like 'housing them' isn't something people have tried over and over. It's super obvious. It doesn't work.

Well, it does work, I mean it does provide protection from the weather. However, you can't trust random people with access to something without supervision, because many will completely destroy it. You can't provide personal supervision to each person so that they can have a private space, because that would cost an incredible amount of money. Finally you can offer some kind of barracks/homeless shelter environment where you have an open space that is easy to supervise to the level of preventing arson and other overt destructive acts. HOWEVER, this means bringing together a bunch of homeless people in one space, and you can't provide enough supervision to prevent them from victimizing each other. Read up on the topic, time and time again homeless people will say that the most dangerous thing about being homeless is you have no protection from the other homeless people.

So on a more personal level, do you really think that super, super obvious ideas haven't been thought of before, and the world just needs someone like you to swoop in and say 'give them shelter!'?

Just to be clear, if there is any effective thing we can do, we should do it, even if the cost is extremely high.

However, if there is nothing effective we can do to help, we should accept that and move on to a strategy of preventing homeless people from making all the rest of our lives worse.

I would further argue that making something easier will lead to more of it, and making it harder will lead to less of it. However, even if displacing or containing homelessness away from the rest of us doesn't reduce it, it will improve the quality of life for everyone in the city.

It's not a 'minor inconvenience' to have random mentally ill people constantly near my children and to have to be hyper vigilant all the time.

I'm not suggesting anyone be murdered. I'm suggesting that if someone is given $5 and they haven't eaten in 3 days, and they choose to buy heroin or gin with it, they are going to die pretty soon. The alternative world where you stop that death, fix them up and send them right back out to destroy themselves just the same, with the same conclusion, but with a much longer timeline, isn't a better or more compassionate world, it's a morally lazy world where people make believe that they are doing something 'good' by delaying a death while doing nothing to improve that very life, and simply prolong a horrible life. In the meantime that miserable existence makes everyone else worse off, and the city unlivable.

I'm certainly not calling for anyone to be murdered or anyone's rights to be violated in any way, I am very much for not subsidizing the behavior by delivering sandwiches to people so they don't have to take a break from their drinking.

You visited a bunch of the 'clean' tourist neighborhoods. How can you actually think you are qualified to have an opinion here after visiting part of a city one time?

I'm not as positive about it. I think volunteering is often subsidizing something that we should be fighting against. Most of the people in line for free soup can be found just hours later purchasing alcohol or drugs.

If you have a famine or a war or serious poverty, or it is effecting young children, then I think we should put everything else aside and give and volunteer until it hurts.

If on the other hand we have some nasty person who lives on your front porch drinking himself unconscious every afternoon, I don't want them to be fed or clothed. I want life to be as painful as we can make it for them so that they either change their behavior or die more quickly. It's harsh, but I don't see why someone has the right to degrade the lives of everyone around them and have those very people feed and clothe them. If we can offer people help that is effective, we should offer it, even if it is expensive, but otherwise we shouldn't feel guilty about trying to keep nasty people away from our families and ourselves.

So as a veteran I can certainly remember the annoying kids in basic training that couldn't really keep up. I think every veteran can remember some folks they went to training with that could barely hack it.

But what's the point of harping on it years later? I don't think anyone would be surprised that Manning was a 'bad soldier'.

Then there is a bunch totally unrelated stuff that happened much later, took a huge amount of courage, and led to arrest and imprisonment.

The article is discussing how we 'whether we will be able to make enough food if we try to grow everything locally', which I am saying is silly since we aren't really headed in that direction outside of high end niche markets.

You are saying the other way around, 'we have to go local because we can't make enough food', which is great, and I believe something people should be more prepared to do just in case, but it has nothing to do with the article.

Yea I agree, the article largely conflated them and I was arguing with the article.

I think this is just an example of 'elitism' on the part of the author. It is ludicrous to think that there is a chance that the 'local/organic' movement will ever capture more than 1%-2% of food production. Most people don't care, and some fraction of people that do care are intelligent enough to decide that additional cost for no increase in quality is not worth it.

So this is 'elitism' because people think that a very high-cost, niche, atypical behavior is in some way a 'threat' because 'everyone will do it'. Maybe everyone the author knows, but only a tiny percentage of people overall.

I'm curious why LEDs used in light bulbs could cause eye damage, but not for backlights in computer monitors or other common uses? I kindof get the impression that the blue-tinted led's are being considered 'evil' and studies are 'showing' that they are 'harmful'. Certainly these blue led's have far far far less of any wavelength at all of output than say the sun at noon...

I wouldn't be surprised to see that this study is never reproduced.

Maybe, I think I know what it means but I'm not an accountant.

I know that revenue is often quoted as some kind of measure of the success of a business, when in reality it's extremely easy to run up revenues if you are running at a loss. In the most trivial case, you can pay $1.10 for $1 bills, for example.

Ok, so shopify isn't doing that, but it's hardly different, just a more complex situation. They pay $50 for advertising to get $75 in revenue, which they immediately pay $55 for. That's $105 paid out to buy $75 in revenue.

It would certainly be cheaper to just pay $1.10 for each $1 in revenue. I'm sure the folks at shopify don't think of it this way, and I'm sure they genuinely believe that they will someday change the economics of this and become profitable. However, the balance sheet doesn't support that belief, for me at least, and it sure looks like every customer they maintain leads to more money they are losing.

Perhaps they can become profitable with enough economies of scale. Again, I would question how much larger they would have to get to hit the inflection point, which they haven't done, at least in the financials reported, so far losses are scaling up linearly with revenues (which is to say operating margins are a steady negative % against increasing revenues).

Since they have been around for a long time (12 years) and those same 12 years have seen an absolutely huge increase in ecommerce, it seems like they have failed to hit the required scale despite the most favorable conditions you might hope for. That doesn't make me very optimistic.

Hey, you're right!

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ASHOP&fstype=ii&ei=IE...

Revenue growth with corresponding increases in costs and expenses. NOT getting closer to profitability, in fact operating losses are increasing in proportion to revenue (almost a linear relationship in every quarter and year in the reports).

Again, this is a failing business. 12 years in and no profit, profit not within reach, costs growing in lockstep with revenues.

EDIT:

So I was curious how they had such high revenues when clearly subscription fees can't account for it. Found this in the financial statement:

"We principally generate merchant solutions revenues from payment processing fees from Shopify Payments. Shopify Payments is a fully integrated payment processing service that allows our merchants to accept and process payment cards online and offline. As a result of the launch of Shopify Payments in August 2013, we have seen significant growth in the revenues generated from our merchant solutions. In addition to payment processing fees from Shopify Payments, we also generate merchant solutions revenue from transaction fees, Shopify Shipping, Shopify Capital, referral fees from partners, and sales of point-of-sale ("POS") hardware. Our merchant solutions revenues are directionally correlated with the level of GMV that our merchants process through our platform. Merchant solutions revenues increased from $34.5 million in the six months ended June 30, 2015 , to $77.0 million in the six months ended June 30, 2016 , representing an increase of 123.4%"

So they are counting CC processing fees towards revenues. I suspect that CC payment processing fees shopify pays are approximately equal to what they are charging, so this is just a revenue game where they charge 3% to customers, pay almost 3% to the CC companies, and book revenue that can never be profitable.

EDIT2: So found the cashflow in the statement. They charged $76M for these fees, and paid out $56M. Not bad actually! However, that $20M in net is still much lower than the costs to generate the business, $56M just in marketing.

Hate to rain on this (TBH I don't):

Shopify has raised (per Crunchbase) about $122M in funding.

At the current rate, they will see $374M in GMV on their best day of the year.

Shopify has between 1K and 5K employees (again Crunchbase). Let's make the most conservative analysis and assume 1K. If they are paid $20 per hour (low estimate I think), that is $41M in employment costs per year. With taxes, office rent, healthcare, etc, lets just lowball again and call it $50M/yr for all the people costs. Again I think this is a huge underestimate if the crunchbase number is accurate.

Lets assume no marketing, hosting or other costs of any kind.

The internet claims 100k stores use shopify. Lets assume they all pay for the standard tier plan, and pay month to month. That is $79 * 100k = 7.9M per month in revenue. Again, huge over estimate, since I would guess 95% of the customers use the cheapest tier, and the largest companies most likely negotiate better than advertised fees.

Finally lets assume their BEST day is only about twice as good as their average day. This is probably overestimating their revenue by about 10x, at least.

That would mean they are bringing in well under $47.4M in gross revenue, on over $50M in fixed costs.

So in other words, even if black friday were half the days in the year, they still would lose substantial money. This is after 12 years of business.

It's unlikely they will ever turn a profit. If they were going to experience some kind of exponential growth to defeat this analysis, 12 years of the fastest growth in the internet have already gone by, so it seems unlikely going forward.

I mean, if everyone preferred to leave anyway, then it would be an empty gesture to shut it down.

I wonder how dramatic this really is? There must be a hundred forums to discuss go, people aren't so helpless they can't find their way off of reddit.

I'm not a /r/golang user, but I think this is a political statement of 'we will not tolerate the abuse of users by people entrusted with their data', which I think is fair.

Maybe they should just call for the CEO to leave or something.

Absolutely, some politicians are more honest than others.

How can we discover it? Well that's pretty much impossible to do perfectly. There is a whole industry that for a long time has owned the mechanism by which the world is revealed to us, and if nothing else positive comes from this election, they have been exposed as being a very broken filter that is using their position to intentionally push their own agenda.

My hope is that the new forms of media that are developing step in to fill the void, and that a new kind of journalism comes about that grows beyond the irresponsible and incompetent 'traditional media'. That hasn't happened yet, and it seems like the democratization of news has actually led to more polarized outlets and given people the ability to tune into 'news' that just reinforces their beliefs.

At least with the 'mainstream media' there was some corrective pressure since there were only a few outlets and they were at least slightly sensitive to criticism, so they had to maintain at least the appearance of balance. They've completely thrown away that appearance now, and sadly the alternatives are insane.

I don't think things are going to go back to where they were, where the newspapers and other sources of reporting saw themselves as 'up against the system'. Traditional media depended on a lack of alternatives as part of their business model, and that model is dying very rapidly. Traditional news is rapidly going bankrupt, and as a result our 'best' newspapers have been sold at bargain basement prices to people who want to own that influence while it lasts. This isn't new either, but you used to have to be a massive industrial conglomerate to 'buy the news', like GE or Westinghouse. Now we have Bezos and Carlos Slim able to personally buy that influence very cheaply (while it lasts).

No, that is just not what happened.

Do you actually believe that the 'traditional media' just reports 'facts' as they are? Do you have no historical perspective whatsoever?? Because if they were just 'reporting factual truths' in this election cycle, that would literally be the first time they've ever done it.

In every election since I can remember, both sides have claimed, and many have believed, that the person on the other side was literally going to ruin the country and should they win the country was going to fall apart.

You happen to feel that way about Donald Trump. You're just as wrong as the people who thought that Hillary was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bush was going to try to become a dictator, and the people that thought Reagan was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bill Clinton was literally a murderer who killed state troopers and who killed Vince Foster, and the people that thought Obama was a Muslim 5th columnist, and on and on.

So there have always been crazies, getting obsessed with them or paying attention to them is pointless.

This time we have the 'alt-right', whatever that is, some make believe group created by being named in the media. I'm not sure where they are or who they are, but if you listen to the media they're 'out there' and they are rising.

So my advice is read some history, get some perspective, and move on as though nothing is really different than it ever has been, because it isn't.

EDIT: here is a video of the media 'just reporting facts': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NVVwZVd6ZM Look how stunned the 'reporter' is when they mess up and don't manage to cherry pick the clip to support the false narrative they are trying to reinforce..

If reddit is trying to find investors and funding after 10 years of being one of the top traffic sites on the internet, well, that might be a pretty big red flag right there.

This is just a tautology, since by the same logic every activity that requires any kind of thought is just 'applied philosophy'.

So just to be clear, I think they are fundamentally motivated by a dislike of the users in that sub and they want to quash their views.

It seems like the sensible thing would be to change the /r/all algorithm to prevent a single sub from dominating?

I mean is reddit going to start deleting every sub that becomes popular because it will have too much stuff on /r/all? What kind of reasoning is that?

I think the media went out of their way to slant things towards Hillary in this election. I suspect they consensus in the media was something like "we created this monster, now we have to kill it" regarding Trump.

To me this was both wrong, since it basically ignored the basic responsibility of the media in our civilization, and counter productive, since it was so obvious that they were 'in the bag' that people stopped trusting the major news outlets entirely and started getting their 'information' from non-traditional sources, like the alt-media, social networks, etc.

So you can say that everyone is a bunch of 'whack jobs', but it seems like we have a competition here between the 'traditional media' who are being incredibly dishonest and more or less repeating talking points from the DNC, the 'marginally traditional' media like fox news, which is just as much in the bag for the right and so also not really a trustworthy source of information, and the 'other stuff' people are now getting information from, which is just a total mess of false information and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories mixed into all the actual things going on in the world.

So if you want to blame someone, blame the traditional media, of all the things that happened they were the only ones who abandoned their responsibility, and everything else followed from that.

Who said or implied that?