152 karma · joined August 28, 2015
1. Their magazine: Almost all magazines have been replaced with websites. Their website dramatically undersells their content. Look at it, really. It's basically like clickhole, but with stories of climate change. The dramatic photography of the magazine is only coming across in about 50% of the photos and the headlines are all clickbait format.
2. Their television presence includes shows like "Drugs, Inc." whose primarily job is to scare old people with re-enactments of drug crimes. Who would pay for that "value"? (I guess people who watch police shows? but what does that saturated market have to do with their brand?)
3. Their youtube stream is a massive quantity of short, low-quality videos. I subscribe and only watch about 1 in 50 of them. Another problem with their videos is so few have narration which I feel is a key feature of travel and wildlife shows.
4. They haven't handled outreach to a younger generation. With all the urban young people (esp. women IMO) who love to travel the world with disposable income (no families, marrying late), NG has no selling relationship with them.
5. The global geopolitical situation is more interesting than ever with worldwide communication, but I don't see NG addressing that. Maybe they are - somewhere? - but their marketing isn't penetrating.
I feel like they could turn it around if they primarily address the youngest generation - perhaps get more involved in the travel and outdoor supplies markets.
People are delirious about self-driving cars, but even the simplest automatable task of stopping when something is in front of you is not only an option, but an expensive one.
If CAS is a pricey option, how much more will full driverless cost? How prevalent will it be? How likely is it that only the top 1% will have it? How long until it trickles down into middle-class? How much longer will it take to trickle down than CAS?
[ 1 ] Another driver and myself were rear-ended hard in a senseless accident that would have been avoided if "car 3" had had CAS (or was driverless or if the driver had been paying attention, not speeding, not following too close). My last 6 weeks have been paperwork, doctor's appointments, painkillers, ice packs, phone calls and soon physical therapy appointments. All cutting into my productivity and good mood.
That is to say, there may be applications of sensing that benefit corporations financially, but don't help their users... Imagine an automaton that provokes couples into divorce though advertising, using sensed data (Instead of "You've got mail!" "you're having less sex!") as evidence.
Give me a few 1980s-vintage robot arms and I will outperform this system in any category except entertainment value. Robot arms once held great entertainment value and this system will become old media some day, too. Semiologically speaking, this system represents a silo of sublime resources from dopaminergics to labor and cash, but when the zombies come, I'll bet people will still run to the shed full of AK-47s.
Go driverless cars!
Microsoft Bad! Google Good!
Javascript Javascript Rah Rah Rah!
It's ironic b/c he begins the discussion invalidating the idea that art is an "industry," in order to enable it to merit value under contemporary economic systems, but then spends his time constructing an alternate view in which art has value as "play." And this definition of culture as a collection of rituals has already been thought by people hundreds of years ago. Rituals are a subset of culture, not an ersatz.
I'm only halfway in so far...
Your allusion to a market that would correct the price doesn't account for a market which no tenants can enter because none of them can afford the entrance (a 20% down payment).
They'll get the benefit of housing no matter how much I would charge, but if I charge more than the value of the maintenance and accounting them I would be exploiting them, taking advantage of their inability to produce capital in the time it's taken me to produce it. And everyone else who is in the position I am could exploit them just as easily so the market doesn't help there.
It's like gas prices: if so many gas stations can compete, how come they prices aren't driven down to nothing? Because of the entrance cost to the market. You can't start a well and refinery, so you have to go to one of the established ones.
For luxury items like phones, art, fancy cars, etc., I don't care about charging people a lot of money. But for water, air, food, medical and housing, which people have no choice to acquire or consume I'm not going to gouge them.
This is not some rational choice about what a person or market theory can or should do, this is my personal code of ethics.
I've been considering buying rental properties to supplement my income, but something deep inside somewhere, based on living close to people well below my income level as one of a 4-unit building, prevented me from doing it.
When I tried to compute how much rent I would charge, I realized I would be profiting simply by taking money from them because they have been unable to accumulate capital at the pace I have been. While that does indicate some skill on my part - hey, I scrimp and shop wisely - I don't feel it morally qualifies me to skim from others. That would be paying myself twice. When I scrimp and shop wisely, I benefit from having extra savings, but using that savings to get more from others without adding more value is something I don't feel right doing.
I could morally accept money as a landlord based on my labor doing maintenance and time spent bookkeeping, I suppose. That - speaking as a current tenant - does have some value, but I just don't think it would be much, approximately that of a day laborer or accountant for several hours a week. So screw it, i'll make a lot more money creating something of real value.
Thank you for helping me recognize and articulate this, branchless.
"I don't want to show up to work sweaty. And I want the utility of a vehicle if my plans change. So I'll drive regardless."
Did this offend anyone? Please explain how. Otherwise I would perceive the downvotes to be the work of trolls.
Yes, that's a move toward integrity and away from endangerment and excess income.
If "some higher up in marketing" doesn't understand their users, the problem is they're out-of-touch and that should be corrected, as opposed to endangering user's privacy.
Currently, my tiny site operates this way, with hand-chosen Amazon ads and no google Adwords.
As an embedded firmware developer for 18 years, I've seen every project has its own constraints, just like most engineering. Design constraints on microcontrollers include: power, clock speed, FPU, number of digital GPIO, number of analog GPIO, quality of IDE and debugger, price, package size, available operating systems, longevity of part, volatile and non-volatile memory, quality of compilers, peripherals and so on.
IME, Atmel had a great 8-bit series with good documentation and few bugs that scaled from 8-pins to 40 very well. With analog inputs and PWM output, they were well-equiped to do analog input->processing->output tasks. They really blew it when they moved to 32-bit as others have said. They weren't very fast, changed all the peripherals around and didn't improve on the clumsy fuse system. ARM M ("M"->embedded) Cores like stm32f4, Freescale Kinetix, etc. have all but obliterated Atmel.
Finally differentiation in the Cortex family includes ethernet (F27/F29), Front-side Memory Controller, FPU, low-power (STM32L0), extreme low power (MSP432), low-price (STM32F0) and so on.
The aggressive people I encounter outside the bars in my town seem to be sports fans and weightlifters, not video game players.
Are you one of those people who insists that everyone say "he/she" every single time they don't know? If so, then why don't you also demand that the person say "she/he" 50% of the time? With no more than a specified number of imbalances per time interval and instance interval? And no more than a specified change in number of imbalances per same?
I only bring this up b/c you seem to grant yourself the title of auditor, so out of curiosity, I'd like to see if you can stand up to auditing yourself, or if you simply expect more out of others than you're able to give. My hypothesis is that you have no grounding or ability to generate introspective thought, just a little provocative scheme to grant yourself power opportunistically.
Excellent observation. It's really about people conditioned to follow scripts.
These people were missing the "de-escalation script" in which a teacher laughs, puts their hand on their forehead and says,
"Wow, That scared the shit out of me for a minute there. Now let's show you how to make a tidy wooden box for your amazing clock project."Basically, anything anyone says is a mere model. Saying we think in graphs is...great... in as far as it helps us to use graphs as a model for thought. And it may help us get far, or help us accomplish someone else's agenda, but the way we think is much, much more than merely "in graphs." And people have been researching it for thousands of years.
The fact that the Volvo hit someone is not because it was programmed incorrectly. It was because it was responding correctly to its configuration as its producers envisioned it:
It ignores and runs over pedestrians unless the owner pays Volvo extra.
In the future everyone's dreaming of, cars won't hit people, but they will continue to hit people unless owners pay extra to corporations. That's not progress, that's extortion.
What about the recent self-parking Volvo that didn't include a pedestrian avoidance system [1] and clobbered a pedestrian? It could have just as easily mauled that kid on his scooter in your apartment complex if the owner didn't pay for the "kid on a scooter avoidance system" and how would there by justice?
People forget that civic leadership is a requirement for running a country. Just like managers have to "herd cats," politicians have to herd a more diverse group of roles. I'm not trying to garnish sympathy for politicians, I just want to point out that their requirements are not easily translated from any one field, such as real estate, engineering, business leadership, chemistry, etc.
Also, their decisions are constantly compromises. Most people cringe when they have to compromise b/t two things such as cost and quality. Politicians typically compromise b/t about ten things like: legacy, human rights, quality of life, cost, reputation, longevity, state of relationships at local, county, state, region, national and international level, etc, etc. They even have to compromise against themselves in order to stay in power. It would make me completely ill to have nearly all of my decisions play out with a near 10% net efficiency :)
I would have thought write performance would be faster than SSD, though? are SSD rates really that fast? wow...