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I've heard about failed city planning a lot, and I wonder is there a good example somewhere? like a booming city with more than 5 million population that have "good" city plan? which city is best in this regard?

This is exactly what I thought. Think about the organizational challenge and the bureaucracy involved, there's no way for a "secret" spy unit's head to evaluate the economic value of all those targets, select for the ones needed, carry out the operation and distribute gained information to the corresponding domestic parties. It must work in the opposite way: the military set up the unit and recruited/trained the people for strategic missions like hacking through US military and private contractors. In the process of doing this, these people came across many other stuff, which they sell to other players through black market or backroom dealings to compensate themselves over the laughable salary they receive from the government. And I guess that's also how they got caught in the first place.

Bottom line is this, for your Particular corporation to be really helped by your government, there must be some corruption involved. I think this is true everywhere, but especially true in China.

People always underestimate how valuable information is. When you short a stock or a currency, you are not "screwing" someone, but providing information to others saying "this thing is screwed". If you believe something is wrong, you should announce that to everybody, loud and clear. In a marketplace this "announcement" is carried out by a big short, because that's the only kind of message people are able to hear.

And borrowing from your example, if there is a big group of drunk men marching to an abyss and no one would listen to a word you say ( well they are drunk), then maybe the moral thing to do is punch them in the face and run the other way.

My experience: using paypal is so confusing for me, compared to alipay. And ebay makes you uncomfortable and doubting your purchase decision more than taobao.

I think it partially explains Alibaba's success in China. how you do shopping and paying is very much dependent on the "tradition" and regulation environment, and a local company can optimize that better than a global one.

Aliexpress is a mess though, i agree with that. But I think the language barrier faced by the shop owners there may be the biggest problem.

Why is greater than one second is a problem? You can chain many predictor together using robots that when seeing a flash from one predictor presses another predictor. That way you can move the message back in time many seconds.

Wallet is not a good testing device. It's a common sense in a lot of people that if you see a wallet lying around on the ground, you should never pick that up. If you do, there will be a bunch of thugs showing up from nowhere, claiming it's their wallet (it is) and there used to be 1000 dollars in that wallet (there's not). It's one of the oldest tricks.

This is the most important reason why Chinese family members don't love each other that much. You never know if your relatives are just nice to you or they are after your money. It complicates everything and when things go bad they go really bad.

If managed well it can be great though. My college roommate has a "college sponsorship" program within his extended family which helps pay his tuition.

I take it back. Just found four of them.

I'm surprised by the lack of penis drawing. Is there a review process or do people just suddenly decide to behave better?

No, because people are not money earning machines. People earn money to satisfy their needs, and the ability of earning money doesn't always sync with their needs timely. A loan will help that. So you can take your children to Disney world when they are 8, instead of saving till they are 18 to make the first trip to Orlando.

Well, you maybe willing to pay $1000 to settle the debt when the nice lady from the bank called you, but chances are you will be willing to pay more if a debt collector shows up at your door.

The story is sadly true, and in some places it's the only information the family gets on when the execution is/was performed.

> It also means that over time, the Darwinian pressure is for us to become ever more good, as that is what gets rewarded. Therefore, if one day we meet powerful aliens, they are likely ethical aliens.

I can't agree with this kind of reasoning. Evolution doesn't have direction, there's no such thing as "good" in this process. Even historically some factors made certain level of cooperation better for survival it doesn't mean it'll be true forever and the balance is always shifting even in recent history. And aliens is guaranteed to have a vastly different "evolution" history than us, using the word "ethical" is nonsense.

"He taught her how to scramble eggs." Can somebody tell me what exactly is that? Urban dictionary didn't help much. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=scrambled%20e...

It's mostly a marketing hype. Xiaomi is known for it's style for "releasing" a phone that's really cheap for the specs, but limiting the supply until when the price for the hardware drops. Hardcore fans who closely follow the company may get the phone early and brags to their friends about how good the phone is compared to the price thus driving up the hype, but when average consumer can actually get the device it'll not be so impressive anymore. Now with this reputation more widely known then before, they may be trying to lessen the doubt by promising "weekly" update of the hardware. Thus when they finally have a big enough margin to supply at scale, people won't think the phone is "old".

Which award is more depressing? "expert in slacking off", "expert in staying poor", "expert in getting wealthy". Also note that it's not an award for "wealthy" but "expert in getting wealthy", and later in the article the award winner is also helping others to do what she does.

This got me thinking. If you keep running into people "bad" at a job, there's usually something else in the play. If you found a restaurant has very rude waiters, but manage to keep open for quite a while, it usually means it have really good food or really cheap price. Same goes here. The "badness" of the "Indian programmers" is only a indication of their other "goodness", including cheap, responsive and maybe on schedule.

Although I agree that "There are plenty of fields where "it won't work" if you lie." But Law? Surgery? are not the examples you should choose, both had plenty of cases where lying did work.

It's not that hard to imagine what will be like if there's no financial institution and corporate lawyers. The first is that the dollar you own will not be real money -- we have to go back to gold standard (even this requires certain level of financial institution to support). Also, say good by to bond and stock, or mortgage or student loan. or cheap airline tickets. I always find it like magic that you can just give somebody some money and then receive some bits of information that claims you own X% of certain company, without the need to actually know anything about said company(although it's not recommended to do so). Just think about if you have to design a system that can align other people's interest so they work for you WITHOUT you actively managing anything. How can it be possible?

Then let's suppose there's a study that shows children who grow up in a rich family grow up healthier and happier and have better education and better jobs. Don't we owe it to those children to make sure that as many as possible are born into rich families? Raising children as single parents is already hard enough, a financial disincentive for them will only make matters worse.