programminggeek

A PhD is about getting paid, like any other job. This should be pretty obvious.

$1 says they give out IBM branded USB keys at trade shows ;-)

The problem with UBI is not the idea itself. It's the unintended consequences and edge cases.

For example, it might be that UBI causes people to work MORE and die sooner at riskier jobs (like working oil fields). What is the net effect of that?

Also, what if it doesn't do much more than inflate prices to the point that people still have to work just as much? Could it just reset the sort of "zero point" higher?

What if people have an in-built need to work to have value in life? Would paying them not to work cause their life to lose its value and increase suicides or other negative behavior?

Also, will people start having more kids to somehow get more UBI benefits?

Large system changes mean serious consequences that go beyond the obvious. Anyone who has ever worked on a large software system surely have experienced this.

I don't expect failure, but I do expect some seriously weird and unintended outcomes that are non-obvious.

I'm still waiting for researchers to find a Time Cube.

It's worth noting that The Profit picks companies that are inherently dramatic because it's a TV show.

The goal of a TV show is to get you to watch. Thus, the more of a train wreck, the more likely you watch.

If Marcus was trying to maximize his ROI on the business investments, he would start with different businesses and more reasonable owners.

Instead, he is maximizing the ROI on his TV show and his Brand (ugh, I hate that word).

So, by losing a small amount of money on some ridiculous businesses, he makes a whole lot more on the back end of being on TV, selling business books, giving speeches, and in general looking like a business hero.

The long play here is very, very smart and has obviously paid off already.

Fiction has always existed in a "post-fact age" (whatever that is). Nothing has changed but our awareness of our own absurdity.

Ironically, if they charged more, the odds are there would be scores of articles about how they are making TOO MUCH profit and should give the money away to worthy causes instead of being "greedy" and keeping the money for themselves.

In truth, people will always complain about something when you are successful. This probably means Amazon is doing something right.

This is about tribes, not races. Midwest is very much a rural vs. urban notion more than a racial one.

The math on UBI doesn't work. It simply resets $0 to some higher amount set by UBI. It's a means of inflation and hilariously, it will make the rich even richer, because it will remove some incentives to do what it takes to get rich - learn skills and information that make you wealthy.

The story that comes after UBI and other forms of socialism is that humans are greedy and terrible to each other and institutionalized theft only makes greed and corruption worse.

Oh, and the funniest part is it will look initially like a good idea because it will probably improve the lives of those who are given money in small and rare cases, and the positive effect will dwindle the more universal it becomes.

A wiser move would be to teach others how to compete more effectively, but that doesn't sell as well as free money. The people doing these programs aren't stupid and I think it is our generation's "Let them eat cake!" moment. It's certainly good marketing to do so, and I think they believe it will truly make a difference.

One last thought on my silly little rant, "Do you think Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet should get UBI paid out to him?"

The irony is that React was supposed to make everything faster...

Someday, people will realize that diversity on its own doesn't solve anything and that people are people. Some are capable problem solvers and some aren't. Some have great technical or leadership skills and some don't.

Hitting some kind of magic ratio won't on its own create better outcomes. If it did, you could just fire your entire company, hire based on gender and ethnicity ratios and performance would improve.

It turns out that companies aren't taking that approach...

Wages aren't growing because people don't ask for more money. It's not any more complicated than that.

Go to a store - there is a price on the product. That is not the real price. You can negotiate a different deal, but almost nobody does.

So you have a society of price takers, not price makers.

In that society, the people who set the price are people with the money - business owners/managers and they will set the price as low as they can get.

People need to ask for more money. Then they will get more money. It's not much more complicated than that at the core.

Someday, people will wise up to the fact that success has more to do with psychological programming than resources. Actually they won't because they won't ever get enough of the programming themselves to realize it.

I don't think Apple's customers are clamoring for Progressive Web App support as much as they are wanting other features.

The average customer (of which Apple has millions worldwide) wants a device that solves some basic desires like taking pictures, making phone calls, texting, email, etc.

I don't see how this feature serves enough of those customers for Apple to care more about it than something that will sell computers (in some form or another).

This is why TDD failed...

People don't like doing it.

So they don't.

The end.

If you redesign the districts to be purely on population you'll skew policy so hard towards urban life that you destroy the rural, agricultural base of the country.

If you care at all about being provided with food, it is unwise to ignore those who live outside of a city or you cut your own throat.

Democrats don't seem to get this because they care too much about their social issues, and Republicans aren't much better about this for the last decade.

Only Trump seems to have figured this out and smartly got rural America on his side.

Howard Hughes.

This is odd. I find myself moving to Assembly nowadays.

If it makes you feel any better millennials haven't adapted well either.

Here is the funny part. This article is a bad idea and it now can't be killed.

Turtles all the way down.

P.S. If you believe you are the rational one and that other people are irrational, you are acting irrationally.

http://retromocha.com/obvious/ is an implementation of these ideas.

Any time you have something talking to a database, cache, or pretty much anything else you have a distributed system, you just don't know it yet.

That's a useless idea. It's not a contest and fairness isn't the goal.

You are talking about PEOPLE whose job is to MAKE MONEY and they do it through IRRATIONALLY picking companies to invest in based on their FEELINGS about the deal.

If VC's picked based on numbers, they would invest using software and metrics only. But since they invest based on feelings about people, double blind pitches are an impossible and useless idea.

VC is people selling to people. Learn that game and the whole thing makes more sense.

Sometimes the real customer is investors willing to give millions to an idea and the real product is a company that looks investable.

Another brilliant Trump move.

Pay for traffic and make it profitable. It's a more useful skill long term than playing the Google Black Box SEO Game.

I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm a techie, but my house isn't.

I watch your video and don't identify with any of it. I don't have smart lights, a sonos, or any of the things you would use your remote for.

Here is the other thing. I would lose your remote about 100x a day if I had one. I live with 3 agents of chaos known as children and they would put it places I'd never find.

Last, it's $50, which as silly as this sounds... IS TOO MUCH. I balked at buying a $30 replacement remote for my Roku. It feels like as a user I'd just use a phone app for all of this or at some point tell my phone or some smart connectected Google/Apple/Amazon device like Alexa to do these things.

Worst of all, my tech friends look a lot like me and my less tech friends are even less likely than I am to want a 4 button wood remote for $50.

You built a beautiful product that is really neat, but it's really niche. Too niche for me to imagine it making more than $100k on Kickstarter.

In 5 or 10 years smart house tech might be more common, but I've been saying that for a while and it isn't there yet. I was thinking smart house startups a decade ago, so smart houses might be "the year of the linux desktop" problem...

Do yourself a favor, buy a copy of Gary Halbert's The Boron Letters on Amazon. Read it cover to cover, pay attention to his advice on selling hamburgers and your next product will sell 10x as much.

Good luck! -Brian

Focusing inward on problems and negativity is a great way to increase the feelings of negativity and hopelessness.

Instead, ignoring the how and why of a crap situation and simply working to improve your situation will improve your outlook on it.

Do stuff to make life better and you will feel better as if by magic. Just ignore the problems until they manage to disappear on their own.

One step in front of the other.

1 > 0.

Why is this not a user preference? Double why can't I color it to the color theme that I would enjoy?

If you think that this is something limited to what evil Trump is doing, you are a fool and you don't understand yourself or the world around you at all.