Really!? I feel like this would be scandalous if true
431 karma · joined March 21, 2012
http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange...
Co-sign every word of this. When I first started developing I hated JavaScript, but in the end it's fine if you have jQuery and some other libraries handy. CSS, however, is a cryptic alien language--translating layout ideas into it requires multiple PhD's.
> Over the past four years, Google’s annual revenue growth has plummeted from 30% to 10% while expenses have ballooned from 69% to 75% of sales. And 90% of its $66 billion in sales still come from online advertising. That dependence on ad revenue is becoming a real problem.
Of course Google needs to diversify. But Page and Brin don't know what business(es) it will diversify into because no one knows. That's as difficult to predict as the direction of technology itself. Google is pursuing the unique advantages it has at this moment: (1) an ability to attract top engineering talent and (2) a big ol' pile of cash. Unlike Apple, Google is actually plowing that cash into forward-thinking R&D beyond the next iteration of their existing product (no disrespect to Apple, I mean that more as a lament than a criticism).
Early results from the self-driving car and Project Loon have been very promising, to say the least. Android is one of the most popular operating systems in the world, and puts a Google search bar one tap away from hundreds of millions of people. Chrome OS laptops are among Amazon's best selling models, and they too drive search traffic. Microsoft has been emulating Google's online productivity app strategy for a few years now.
Seriously, what is the problem here? Since when does Amazon get a pass for diversifying and playing the long game, but not Google?
"McLuhan frequently punned on the word 'message', changing it to 'mass age', 'mess age", and 'massage'; a later book, The Medium Is the Massage was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title, which is said to have been a printing error."
You can't make claims like this without context. There's 85th-percentile health, and then there's 99th-percentile health. Plenty of foods, including Soylent, can help people attain or maintain that more modest level of health. Now, if you were an Olympic athlete requiring 99th-percentile health, I agree you'd be insane to make Soylent more than 30% of your daily calories. But if you're an average person eating the Standard American Diet, you are currently insane from a health standpoint, and switching to Soylent would make you a lot less so. And among all the options you might have for improving your diet, it is among the cheapest and lowest-effort.
It amazes me how people can fail to recognize that nutrition is a part of a larger economic problem of time and resource allocation. There are real tradeoffs to be made! Perfection is rarely attainable or even desirable except in special cases!
Rob Rhinehart, for his part, has always been honest about this. The Soylent team has looked at including things like antioxidants and digestive enzymes--things you'd get from whole foods but not from Soylent's processed ingredients--but they concluded that there's just not enough information to determine the types and quantities of these substances that are necessary to improve health. I think this lack of information is no accident. It's easier to research core nutrients whose deficiency will cause clear symptoms than it is to research nice-to-haves like antioxidants whose presence may cause slight performance improvements at the margin. Soylent is designed to reflect the state of nutritional knowledge. As that knowledge improves, so will Soylent. While I have bought MealSquares and enjoy their product, I prefer Soylent's approach to one that pretends our knowledge is more complete than it really is.
The image in my head (from movies and books and reading [about] Piketty) is that the wealthy in earlier eras were more idle, living off rents rather than incomes. I imagine servants would have been more of a status symbol for them, whereas today's upper-middle-class strivers see them as more of a necessity "to dedicate more time to working." I wonder, is that as close as we get to progress, under capitalism? I.e., if we're going to have servants, the people employing them today have a somewhat less dubious reason for doing so than their ancestors?
Here's a key passage: "Observational vocabulary is not a vocabulary one could use though one used no other. Non-inferential reports of the results of observation do not form an autonomous stratum of language. In particular, when we look at what one must do to count as making a non-inferential report, we see that that is not a practice one could engage in except in the context of inferential practices of using those observations as premises from which to draw inferential conclusions, as reasons for making judgments and undertaking commitments that are not themselves observations. The contribution to this argument of Sellars’s inferential functionalism about semantics lies in underwriting the claim that for any judgment, claim, or belief to be cognitively, conceptually, or epistemically significant, for it to be a potential bit of knowledge or evidence, to be a sapient state or status, it must be able to play a distinctive role in reasoning: it must be able to serve as a reason for further judgments, claims, or beliefs, hence as a premise from which they can be inferred. That role in reasoning, in particular, what those judgments, claims, or beliefs can serve as reasons or evidence for, is an essential, and not just an accidental component of their having the semantic content that they do."
EDIT2: This might be a more helpful explanation. Elsewhere, Brandom elaborates on this view by redefining beliefs as commitments. A commitment entails some other commitments, and is mutually incompatible with others. For example, if I believe that I'm eating an apple, this entails the belief that I'm eating a fruit. It's mutually incompatible with the belief that I'm eating a squid. It also entails that I believe things I might not even know about the apple, such as the chemical formulas for the various sugars I'm eating. The point is, if I play the game of reasoning correctly--mostly by dispensing with mutually incompatible commitments when they arise--others (e.g. botanists, chemists) can hold me accountable for all the correct beliefs about the apple. The "content" of the apple, for me, is nothing other than the series of moves I make in this game.
EDIT1: You should also read rpedroso's comment, which does a great job exploring the many alternatives that arose after empiricism reached its impasse.
1: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-444/paper01.pdf
2: Not only empiricists, but possibly Kant on a very straightforward reading--although Brandom has a very different reading of Kant.
I eat Soylent about 50% of the time, so I'm not surprised the data show others doing the same.
As a millenial, I have to say this statement could hardly be more misleading. Millenials I know may have DVD and even VHS collections, but that's only because these media are effectively "dead," so used items can be had for free or cheap via thrift stores. (Remember that we're young and (mostly) poor; these simple facts explain 99% of so-called "generational trends.")
Other physical media (viz., vinyl records) are typically kept around for nostalgia/display value. Someone who has a record on vinyl might listen to it more often as an MP3 or stream--but those things don't fulfill the universal human need to put all the stuff you like on a shelf.
> and even where they don't they accept only DRM'ed, thoroughly walled gardens where you can rent stuff for a limited time and those companies only allow you to consume things in a very restrictive manner.
Ah, so you're saying millenials don't use the kind of digital media that squares with your politics! Fascinating, tell me more. But this is the simplest thing in the world to explain: people don't actually want to own media. We want to (1) access it when we want to experience it, and (2) signal to others that we like it. Streaming solves the first problem easily and cheaply. Occasional physical purchases solve the second problem.
Regarding DRM'd streaming in particular, do you know how many hours of my life I sacrificed in the early 2000s hand-editing MP3 tags, copying files between devices, etc.? Neither do I, and I don't want to know because I'm sure it was obscenely high. I would gladly pay Google Play twice the $10/month I pay them so that I will never to have to return to those dark times. And I feel similarly about Netflix.
If for some reason my streaming services don't have a piece of media--or if I need something they do have in DRM-free form--I can torrent it or (vomit) purchase it from Amazon/iTunes. Honestly, it's a beautiful system--I get so much for so little. It feels like the exact opposite of a "loss of capability."
But this isn't an "I love Big Brother" moment. I accept the system only because I always have the option to pirate what I need. That's why I don't see DRM as the problem. DRM can never eliminate piracy due to the "analog hole." Law enforcement, the courts, and Big Content could do a lot more to crack down on it though. That's why, on the one hand, I really won't lift a finger to do anything about DRM, but on the other hand, I'd be willing to expend a lot of energy opposing any law that would further empower copyright owners. That's why I've donated to the Pirate Bay. Etc.
If you want to take the discussion in a more idealistic direction, I think reducing the copyright term to 15-20 years would be a much more important change than anything else I've discussed. And unlike anti-DRM activism, copyright term reform is something that almost anyone can understand and relate to.
> they mostly only read paper-based books
Did you RTFA? The whole thing is about why books are an exception. No one is concerned with "reading comprehension" when it comes to music or movies. Psychologists in TFA appear to be saying--and I agree--that our comprehension and retention of long-form printed material is facilitated in subtle ways by the physicality of books.
TL;DR if the system stays as open as it is today, I think digital media are clearly succeeding. In a context where Netflix is one option among several, it's a godsend. In a context where it's the only option, I think you have a better case--but we can prevent things from deteriorating to that point.